Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  I looked at him.

  “We should have stayed here,” he said. “We should have bought an apartment like this one. We never should have moved to the cottage.”

  “This apartment smells like old people,” I said.

  “You don’t miss it?”

  I shrugged. I had no desire to answer, to chase this line of thought to its unsettling conclusion. I did miss it, actually, but only a little. Chicago had always welcomed me—this was how I’d thought of it. It had been easy making a life there. But I’d been young. My concerns had been Laundromats and delis and bars. I had no experience being a grown-up, not to mention a mother, in Chicago. Besides, we’d moved to the cottage months before we were even married. Saying we shouldn’t have moved was like saying we shouldn’t have done everything else.

  I went back inside but he stayed out, the mist falling on his hair. Inside, Bob’s daughter, blond and largely pregnant, five or so years older than I, was straightening up in the kitchen. We greeted each other quietly. A couple of impeccably dressed women sat chatting in low voices at the breakfast table. Bob stood in front of a television set in the den, watching the Weather Channel. On the screen, a ferocious radar spiral moved haltingly across the southern Atlantic. The thing had yet to be declared a tropical depression, but it was intensifying just east of Bermuda, limping toward the Bahamas. I thought of Charlie and the stilt house, of wet winds lashing through the rooms, pulling the paintings off the walls and knocking the furniture around. I knew he followed weather events on the transistor radio in his kitchen. If this storm hit, would he go to shore?

  The program switched to a commercial. “Nasty stuff,” Bob said to me. I don’t think he knew, in that moment, who I was. “Good of you to come,” he said again.

  I busied myself helping Bob’s daughter in the kitchen. There was no ring on her finger, no sign of the baby’s father. She said she was always surprised, when she saw me—three times now, including Julia’s wedding—that I wasn’t a Jew. “Because of your hair,” she said in a sweet but spacey voice. I wondered if she was on something.

  That night at the hotel, Graham shared a memory of being at the zoo with his mother and sister. He remembered the otters playing in their truncated river, pushing their furry bellies against the glass. They’d made his mother laugh out loud. He remembered his sister in a pink scarf and a brown derby coat. She’d held his hand while they rode the merry-go-round. His mother held him on her hip so he could better see the polar bears, who skulked in the dark reaches of their manufactured caves.

  “My family is dead,” he said.

  “No, we’re not,” I said.

  I held him and he kissed me. His mouth, his taste, was familiar but renewed, like finding something I’d thought I’d misplaced. “What if I lost you?” he said. His hands found the clasp on my skirt, and then the buttons of my shirt. His fingernails raked through my hair. We didn’t make it to the bed. After, he held tight to me, tugging against my hand when I got up for water. I finally fell asleep under the heavy weight of his arm, and when I woke I lifted my head from the carpet to see him standing at the window without his clothes on, his palms pressed to the glass. I could tell from his breathing that he was awake. “Do not jump,” I said loudly, and he turned around and laughed so hard he had to bend over to steady himself. He was dressed and ready to go by the time I woke again.

  The funeral was in a Catholic church downtown. After the burial, we went back to Bob’s apartment for a couple of hours, then we dropped off the car at the airport. At my gate, Graham fidgeted a little, avoiding my eyes, running a hand through his hair.

  “You need a trim,” I said.

  He took a breath. “They moved me to my own bunk.”

  He tried to say it casually, like he was just making conversation, but he looked away after he spoke. I’m not proud of it, but in that instant, as I absorbed his words, I stepped away without moving a muscle. I told myself that if he’d wanted to talk about it, he would’ve mentioned it earlier. It’s not that I didn’t have the impulse to ask what had happened—but I fought it. Instead of pressing for information, I squeezed his hand, kissed him good-bye, and boarded my plane. He watched me go, the hurt plain on his face.

  THE NEXT WEEK AT STILTSVILLE, I asked Charlie how he’d fared during the storm that had hit while I’d been out of town. He didn’t answer right away. Frankie was on the sofa, facing the open window, watching a ship on the horizon, and for a moment we both watched him. He called out when anything interrupted the palette of sea and sky, combining the game of speaking with the game of spotting. “Air-peen! Moto-boat!”

  To me, Charlie said, “I stayed here.”

  I wasn’t surprised, but still I found myself suddenly, inexplicably frustrated with him.

  He went on. “It wasn’t much of anything. A little rain, a little wind.”

  “I can’t believe Riggs let you stay,” I said.

  “He’s not my father, Georgia.”

  I started to gather our things.

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  Frankie turned to watch us. I said, “You can’t stay here during a storm like that. It’s not safe.”

  “If they don’t evacuate on land, why evacuate out here?”

  I stepped out to the porch. The wind was kicking up sea spray. Charlie came to stand next to me, his hands on the railing. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “This house has survived half a dozen hurricanes, for Christ’s sake. It’ll be here long after I’m gone.”

  “You have a home there.” I gestured, and he glanced at the hazy skyline, as if the possibility of going to shore had never occurred to him.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “I need you to promise you won’t do that again.”

  This was a line I’d never crossed before, and he didn’t like it. He refused to meet my eyes, and his mouth tightened. The words were hard on his tongue. “You were in Chicago,” he said.

  “So what? You could’ve gotten a ride. Don’t blame—”

  “I’m not saying—” He stopped. A step would have consumed the distance between us. “You were in Chicago,” he said again, his voice softer. “You were in Chicago.”

  Maybe he’d thought that once I left, I wouldn’t come back. I understood this concern because I’d been harboring the same one regarding Graham, even as I feared equally the day when he would return. But Charlie’s voice broke a little as he spoke, and when he said it, the word Chicago brought Julia’s funeral to mind, and the light rain and antiseptic apartment and too-green river. And Graham’s haggard good-bye and our empty, cast-away cottage, and the feeling that something I’d loved deeply had moved on from me and no longer returned my love at all. It is possible to conjure an entire life from the ether, I thought, and lose it back to the ether again. It happens all the time. In Charlie’s voice, the word Chicago took on new meaning. Remote, it said. Lonely.

  “Next time, I won’t be,” I said.

  From the living room came Frankie’s pitchy voice. “Sailboat!”

  Charlie kept his eyes on mine for another moment, then went to share my son’s delight.

  15

  IT HAD BEEN FIVE WEEKS since Graham left, and Frankie was speaking more each day. First scattered, individual words—the reaches of his vocabulary stunned me—and then pairs and simple sentences. Once, when he was frustrated by the task of buckling the straps of his car seat, something he’d begun to insist on doing “by my own,” I told him to take his time, and he sighed, exasperated. “I have my time!” he said, finally clicking the clasp.

  The cotton-mouthiness of his speech remained, and his sentences lacked tense and flow; each word came out punctuated, as if read from individual cue cards. Emily Barrett-Strout wasn’t concerned. She stopped by every Wednesday morning. I’d told Charlie we’d be late on those days, and when I told him why, his frown faded and he said, “Just hurry up.”

  One morning, I asked Frankie what he wanted for breakfast—we usually ha
d either cereal or eggs—and he said, “Pancakes, please.” We went up to Lidia’s to raid the cabinets, and he learned quickly that talking would get him what he wanted: an extra book at bedtime, ice cream after dinner. Sometimes Frankie looked as surprised by his own voice as I was. One morning before dawn I woke to a warm hand on my arm. “Potty?” he said. Sometimes when it was dark he didn’t want to go alone. After I brought him back, he looked up at me and said, “Sorry I wake you, Mama.”

  Did every mother feel, each time the word was formed, a small, soft hand petting her heart?

  When I told Dr. Sonia what Emily had said—this was at a hasty follow-up appointment—she nodded and moved on, unimpressed. She was more interested in the fact that Frankie was sleeping less, going to bed later and waking earlier. She spent a long time recording this in his file. Frankie answered her questions in his mushy voice, his staccato diction, and she told him she expected to hear great things from him in the future.

  Emily continued to ask when Graham would be home, but I had no answer for her. The storm season that year had been unusually calm, which, as far as I could tell from Graham’s letters and the twice-weekly phone conversations we’d managed to schedule, meant more time offshore, adjusting and improving the equipment, but fewer chances to test it out. Emily might have sensed the quicksand that had become my immediate future, and she stepped delicately around it. Distantly, as if the entire notion were thickly swaddled, as if it were happening to someone else, I wondered if she might try to remove Frankie from my care if Graham did come home. This was as far ahead as I could see: when Graham came home, I would tell him about Emily’s diagnosis, and he would pack up for Detention without my asking it of him. When he came home we’d try again to make a better life. This seemed the kind of plan made by the spouses of alcoholics or drug addicts—which is to say that it seemed a long shot, but worth a try.

  I’d stopped taking my sleeping pills. Sometimes I slept anyway, with the hushed noise of the canal beneath the windows in my berth and the moonlight seeping across my sheets. If I couldn’t sleep, I sat on the deck and watched the water make its way to the ocean. In these quiet, starlit moments, I felt a surge of affection for our watery retreat. Every few days, the neighbor woman came down her back terrace—did she really tiptoe out of her house, or did I just imagine it?—and dove into the water.

  Sometimes I had a hard time staying awake through the day. Once at Stiltsville, during Frankie’s nap, Charlie caught me yawning and told me to go rest in his bed. I would have refused, but I could not keep my eyes open. He closed the door behind me and I lay down, thinking it would not be possible for me to actually fall sleep there in the stifling room. I looked over at Frankie, sleeping uncovered with his mouth open and his cheeks flushed so deeply that they might have been painted, and fell asleep. I didn’t wake until I felt Frankie tap my arm, then climb clumsily on top of me.

  I COULD HAVE GONE OUT to Stiltsville while Frankie was in preschool, but I knew Charlie wouldn’t like it—where his affection for Frankie stopped and his affection for me started, I could not have said—and for that matter, neither would Frankie. Instead, I went to Sally’s place or helped Lidia in the yard or busied myself on the Lullaby, cleaning and cooking. Frankie cried a little whenever he had to get dressed to go to school, which broke my heart, and that weighed on me through the long hours. Then one day I dropped by Riggs’s office to pick up my check, and on impulse asked him if he knew anyone who needed help two days a week.

  “Sure,” he said. “Me.”

  The following Tuesday, I sat compliantly as Riggs’s regular secretary, Angela, taught me how he liked his phone to be answered, his messages recorded, his coffee made, and his dictation transcribed. Compared to figuring out how to work Riggs’s office computer—there was a lost brief early on, which almost got me fired—learning to drive the Zodiac had been a breeze. Angela was going back to school to become a paralegal, and I’d fill in only for the rest of the summer semester; it was clear that Riggs didn’t think I’d last much beyond that. But the pay was fine and the work absorbed the empty hours. Sometimes Riggs left his office door open—it was stuffy, even with a noisy window air-conditioning unit—and I could hear the murmurs and sniffles and sometimes the sobs of his clients, all women in the process of divorcing. I quickly formed the understanding that although Riggs was generally an unpleasant man, he reserved compassion for his clients. He was straight with them, never rushed them, and gave practical advice: how to shore up their personal credit, how to lay low with an affair and for how long, what to give up so that the custody fight might go more smoothly. (I noticed that he always told wives to give their husbands the family boat, and surmised that he’d had personal experience with this form of mollification.) He was done with appointments by 3:30 P.M., and by 4:00, when I was gathering my things to leave to pick up Frankie, he was halfway through a tumbler of bourbon.

  A week or so after I started the job, Charlie asked how it was going. I said it was fine, which it was, except for the lost brief and also the fish in the saltwater tank in the waiting room, caught while Riggs was scuba diving in Aruba, which I’d overfed and killed. This had launched him into a red-faced tirade that ended with him wondering aloud why he had ever hired me and me leaving early. Two days later, when I’d stomped back in, he’d handed me two hundred dollars out of his wallet and called it a bonus.

  “I wouldn’t imagine it’s easy, working for a man like him,” said Charlie.

  “It’s really fine,” I said.

  “You must have some experience with difficult men. I guess I knew that.” He smiled, and I understood that he was referring to himself. This was the kind of thing he said every so often—comments about putting up with him, about his bad habits—that surprised me. Compared to my father and Riggs and even Graham, though for different reasons entirely, Charlie was a puppy dog. But I understood from these offhand comments, and from the little I knew of his marriage, that he had not always been so.

  So it wasn’t entirely shocking when one evening I found myself sharing a bottle of wine with Lidia and her friend Marse, whom I’d met two or three times by that point, and Marse started to gossip about the hermit in a way that revealed she knew nothing of my relationship to him. (It was just like Lidia to express herself voluminously on the subject of her own business while remaining tight-lipped on the business of others.) Marse wore diamond stud earrings and a large cocktail ring and a smart tailored suit the color of hibiscus blossoms. She was older than I and younger than Lidia, and she’d lived in Miami all of her life. She was a partner in a law firm downtown. She dressed sexily, with plunging necklines and bare upper arms, but she had a hard edge about her that kept her from being pretty. One would be more apt to describe her as handsome. Her name was short for Marilyn, and rhymed with arse.

  She said, “I hear he has a new whore. Small comfort that Viv is beyond caring, no?”

  From what little I knew of her, I didn’t think Marse was particularly insensitive. She spoke a little brazenly, but in the past I’d found it appealing; she had a lot of confidence. Normally, I could see why Lidia liked her.

  I took a breath. “What did you say?” I said.

  “I heard he has a new girl. This one has a kid, too.”

  Lidia sat back and crossed her legs. Her expression conveyed that she was going to let me handle this one, but she’d step in if I needed it.

  “Who said that?”

  “My friend Frances. She and her husband—I’ve known him forever—have the house next to his. Vivian didn’t want her business known—you know how she was, or is, or whatever—so I’ve never talked to Frances about him.” She looked at Lidia. “You’ve met her? They live down the waterway.”

  “Once or twice,” said Lidia. “Pretty.”

  The last time I’d caught sight of Charlie’s blond neighbor—Frances—she’d been in the rocking chair on her porch, wearing a wide-brimmed canvas hat, her bare feet propped on the railing. Her husband had sat down beside he
r and I’d thought they might have been holding hands, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

  Maybe Marse sensed that the air had grown hostile, because she said, “I really don’t know anything about it. But Vivian’s a friend, or she used to be. Someone says something about the hermit, and my ears perk up.”

  I stared at her.

  “Do you know him?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said, reaching to pour myself more wine. “I’m the whore.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, I CALLED Riggs and claimed I was sick, and as we were packing up for preschool, Frankie caught me throwing my sunhat into my tote. He told me to promise I would not go to Stiltsville without him.

  “Just this once,” I said cautiously. “I have something very important to talk to Charlie about.”

  At this, Frankie fell into hysterics. (There were times when it seemed that all that vocalizing I’d yearned for was overrated.) He refused to put on his shoes. He signed so frantically that I couldn’t understand him. We were running late, and I had no patience for the usual round of one-two-threes and time-outs. Not seeing Charlie that day was not an option.

  I sat down at the banquette and pretended to read Graham’s El Nuevo Herald, which still arrived every morning. I didn’t look up until Frankie’s wails quieted. “Are you ready?” I said.

  “Don’t go with no Frankie,” he said, jutting his chin.

  “Okay,” I said. I crossed the fingers of my left hand. “I won’t, but not because you got mad.”

  I asked him to apologize, which he reluctantly did, and then he went to the screen door, where his little sneakers lay on their sides. He carried them in one hand and his backpack in the other, then looked over his shoulder at me, as if I was holding everything up.

  The plan, which had formed over the past week, was that when the filing project was finished—it would take just one or two days more—we would get to work painting the stilt house, inside and out. As it was, all the walls were a smudged off-white. In the bathroom, the paint was peeling in long strips, and in the kitchen it was stained from cooking smoke and splatter. We would start with the office, then the main bedroom and living room and kitchen, then the bathroom. I was going to work on the interior and Charlie was going to use an extension ladder to paint the exterior. This had sounded risky when he’d first brought it up—alone in the middle of the bay, high on a ladder—but when I’d challenged him, Charlie just frowned at me and handed over a list of supplies. On the list, he’d written 4 GAL. INTERIOR PRIMER/PAINT and 4 GAL. EXTERIOR PRIMER/PAINT, but he hadn’t specified a color. When I asked about this, he said dryly, “Surprise me.”