Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  When I mentioned I’d been looking for a live-aboard slip at a marina close to Rosenstiel, Graham frowned. “Let’s just sell the damn thing,” he said. “We shouldn’t have bought it in the first place.”

  “I don’t know if we need to do that,” I said, and he gave me a look. I let it drop.

  We ate ice-cream cones that dripped aggressively in the heat, and Frankie ended up with a mess all over his face and hands and hair. Graham told him he looked like a chocolate monster, which Frankie found uproariously funny.

  “Chaw-cot monster!” he shouted, splaying his fingers. “Roar!”

  That night, Graham took his pills and I helped him fasten his cuff, then tiptoed out to check on Frankie, who had been in bed for three hours by that time. I was in the habit of checking on him almost every night, and typically I found him deeply asleep, face flushed and bedclothes bundled at his feet, pajama top bunched around his upper chest, showing the pooled flesh of his belly. I would whisper my love in his ear and tiptoe away.

  This night, however, I found him not sleeping but fully awake, staring calmly but wide-eyed at the ceiling of his berth, bedclothes tucked neatly around his still body.

  I knew then what had to happen. I shushed and sang to Frankie until his eyelids dropped. When Graham woke just after sunrise, he could tell from my demeanor that something was wrong. But he couldn’t talk until he’d crawled from the cave of medicated sleep. I made pancakes and scrambled eggs. Frankie ate and drank and smiled but didn’t speak. I fought the urge to shake the words out of him. For the first time I noticed something different—something I’d forgotten, maybe, or had never allowed myself to acknowledge—in his expression. It was a certain depth of consciousness, as if he’d shrunk a little inside his own skin, and now wore that skin like a costume. I could see my boy in there. I sat next to him at the table, powerless to stop myself from touching his hair, his shoulder, his warm back.

  After breakfast, I took Frankie up to Lidia’s, then came back to face Graham. I told him the facts: what Emily Barrett-Strout had said the first time she’d met Frankie, the progress he’d made while Graham had been away, and what I’d seen the night before. I willed myself to be steely, but my voice trembled. “There is no choice,” I said. “I love you. But you have to go.”

  “I’ll go to Detention,” Graham said, blinking back shocked tears. “I won’t come back until things are better.”

  This was exactly what I’d once imagined happening. But I saw now that it had been a threadbare plan at best, and had unraveled somewhere along the line.

  “You should go get better,” I said. “But you can’t come back to us.” The act of saying the words took my breath away.

  “I am so sorry,” he said, his face in his hands.

  I shook my head. He kept talking. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, he said. He hated himself, but he loved me and Frankie. He said it time and again, that he loved our boy. His usual reticence, his moodiness, was gone, replaced by a slavish need that reminded me that he had recently lost his mother. My resolve shook but didn’t crumble. I was surprised at the fervor with which he fought for us; I was touched by it. My urge to cower under Frankie, to push him forward as an excuse, was strong, so I quashed it, and by doing so was probably more tight-lipped than was fair. He offered to get his own apartment after coming back from Detention, until he could prove himself. He’d live apart from us for the rest of the marriage if it came to that, he said. These were desperate schemes, but he was completely serious, as if he believed our lives together made up a perfect puzzle with only one missing piece.

  It was hours before he exhausted of protesting. His hands shook and his eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. I put on an air of finality. As my mother would have said, you have to fake it until you make it. “You’ll be all right,” I said. I fought the urge to tell him I would miss him, to take him in my arms.

  “I can’t imagine that’s true,” he said, biting down on the words.

  I wanted to tell him I was sorry. Not for making him leave, but for the loss of all that we used to have together, which was now officially and irrevocably gone. I was sorry, too, that he’d lost his mother—this devastation had gotten buried under our own—and I was sorry because he was a loyal person, a person who held on even when things were not right. I understood that I had gone a long way toward ruining his life although he had not ruined mine. I wasn’t willing to say it all—that I wanted more for Frankie than Graham was able to give, parasomnia aside. That I had made a mistake, not in having Frankie but in having him with Graham. I thought if I held back, it would be a kindness, that I might stop short of breaking his heart. But I knew, too, that by asking him to leave, I was revealing that I no longer had faith in him, which was the ugliest bit of it all.

  He spent a long time dawdling over his bags. Meaning to help him, I went into the main berth and found him holding Charlie’s early mermaid sketch, the one I’d brought home. It was still in its plastic sleeve. Graham must have found it in the back of the storage trundle.

  In his expression there was anger, exhaustion, resignation. “Does this have anything to do with him?” he said.

  “This is about our family.”

  I had no doubt that he could see the full truth—that my fidelity had been compromised—on my face. His haggard, beautiful features turned to stone.

  He stopped at Lidia’s to say good-bye and call a taxi. He said he’d return for his bikes and anything else he’d forgotten. This was a last-ditch effort to allow me to soften the lines of demarcation. I steadied myself and said that was fine, but to please call first. He looked as if he didn’t recognize me. I stepped inside the house as he stepped out, and found Lidia standing in the kitchen with her hand on her hip, looking at me with what could only be described as pride.

  Did I betray my own son?

  I’d raised him, until that day, in a home I knew had the potential to be unsafe. I’d let him think each night when he went to bed that he might wake to some unimaginable chaos.

  I did betray him, yes. And the fact that I did, along with everything that happened after, remains with me still.

  FOUR

  17

  THE DAY GRAHAM LEFT WAS a Friday. Frankie and I spent the rest of that day at Lidia’s, treating her house like a recovery ward. She fussed over us, bringing cookies and milk on trays, asking hourly if we needed anything. Frankie requested animal crackers and she told him she’d run to get some. A minute later I heard her car start, and then she was back with two boxes and a bunch of fruit. I let Frankie watch cartoons until he crawled onto my lap and fell asleep. I moved him and covered him with a blanket, then went to the kitchen to call Dinner Key Marina. There was a slip for rent starting on the first of the month. The dockmaster required a deposit. I knew it would take more than I could muster to leave the house that day, so I promised to bring it the following morning, which he said would be fine. Then I called the Coral Gables Police Department and asked for the officer who had issued our most recent citation. I left a message promising to vacate the canal as soon as the slip was ready for us. I never heard back.

  My father and Lidia came and went; my father, passing through, paused to rub my shoulder and kiss the top of my head. Every time someone entered the room, I spooked like a skittish animal. My voice was tinny and strained. In the late afternoon, bleached sunlight blazed through the living room windows. When Lidia noticed me shielding my eyes, she pulled the curtains, and I felt again like I could breathe. In lieu of anything resembling an evening meal, she brought out an enormous bowl of fresh, cold strawberries, and I ate one after another until they were gone. She brought a second bowl. I felt as if without those strawberries and their bold flavor in my mouth, their firm flesh under my teeth, I might have floated away, as untethered physically as I felt otherwise.

  When I remember that day—oddly, the last day of relative peace for some time—I can vaguely recall the noise of the small television set Lidia kept in the kitchen, which my father w
atched while eating a meal. And I can recall a certain urgency in the voice of the meteorologist as he described what was happening eight hundred miles east of us, over the blue Atlantic. At some point, I fell asleep on the couch, the weather as distant as any other story writing itself outside the walls of that house.

  When I blinked awake, it was almost dark. Frankie was eating a sandwich in front of the television. Lidia sat cross-legged beside him. She heard me stir. “There’s a hurricane coming,” she said.

  “Really,” I said.

  Frankie twisted to face us. “For my birthday it coming?”

  “Birthday hurricane,” I said. “Exactly.”

  Like most South Floridians, I tended not to get worked up about weather events until they were nearly upon us. The system heading our way had been given a name forty-eight hours earlier, but I’d bet that most locals could not have said what that name was. I knew it, but only because Graham had brought it to my attention. He’d said that in a season full of dissolved weather events, this little storm might be the first thing with a bit of tooth to it.

  After I put Frankie down in the guest room, Lidia and I watched the Weather Channel until I fell asleep on the sofa. I woke in the night to a blue flickering light, and found my father standing in front of the kitchen television, which was turned very low. I joined him. “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Just thinking,” he said. “Remember at the old house, all those high windows? What a chore. Your mother would make sandwiches beforehand. We’d live off pimento cheese for a week.”

  Half a dozen times during my childhood, he’d climbed a ladder to tape up the roofline windows of the family room. He’d stocked the garage with bottled water and batteries and ice. We’d all huddled around the television with my mother’s sandwiches and homemade lemonade. Every hurricane in my lifetime had either dissolved or angled away before it could hit.

  I found it jarring when my father showed nostalgia for our old life. “I remember,” I said.

  EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, FRANKIE AND I sat at the kitchen table with Lidia, eating cereal and talking about our trip to the zoo. Frankie was mostly quiet but spoke in spurts, and each time he spoke, he mentioned Daddy, which hurt my heart. I had no idea where Graham had gone the day before—probably to a hotel. I’d asked him to call when he was settled, but there had been no word. When the phone rang, Lidia answered, then handed me the receiver.

  It was Riggs. “You’re needed,” he said.

  Gusts of wind muffled the sound on his end. He was probably at the marina, dry-docking his boat.

  “Where?” I said.

  “Where do you think? Get out there.”

  The notion of seeing Charlie was daunting, but not because of the weather. The hurricane wouldn’t make landfall until the following afternoon at the earliest, if it made landfall at all. The day was bright, blue, and cloudless.

  I asked Lidia if she could watch Frankie while I helped Charlie, but at the mention of Stiltsville, Frankie protested. “Don’t go without Frankie!” he said.

  Lidia smoothed his hair. “Maybe today you want to be with Mama?” She looked pointedly at me.

  “I’ll pack us up,” I said.

  “Your father’s gone for supplies. They’re saying shelves are clearing out.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” I said.

  “Big storm coming!” said Frankie.

  I went down to the Lullaby for my tote. This was the time of day when the boat’s northern windows were shaded by the tangled hammocks that separated Lidia’s dock from her neighbor’s. The houseboat was quiet and warm, with no sign of the turmoil that had taken place, save for the way it turned my stomach to be there. Graham’s cuff hung on its leash; his pills sat on the shelf above the bed. He had other bottles, I knew, but no other cuff. Maybe he didn’t believe that alone in a hotel room there was any reason to use it, though naturally I would disagree. I left the sliding door unlocked in case Graham needed to get in, for the cuff or pills or anything else.

  Months later, I would read an article—for a year, Andrew would be a household name—about a storm researcher named Frank Marks. (Marks was, incidentally, on faculty at Rosenstiel, and I would wonder if Graham had known him, if maybe Marks was the scientist in the office adjacent to Graham’s, the one who spent his days studying waves in a simulator.) In the article, Marks told how that Saturday, when the storm was still two days from land, he and some colleagues boarded a jet plane in Puerto Rico and spent ten hours penetrating the eye, probing every wind and pressure change, buffeted by violent drafts and blinded by rain and hail. By the time Marks had landed, he knew better than anyone what we were in for.

  On the ride to Stiltsville, Frankie, sitting beside me on the captain’s bench, pretended to watch for whales. He pointed excitedly every so often, saying, “I spot one! Never mind, just a dolphin.” And once, that’s exactly what it was. I cut the engine. A group of pale bottlenose dolphins dipped and rose at our starboard side, then darted into the deep green distance.

  Charlie met us on the dock. He lifted Frankie from the boat. “I didn’t think you’d come,” he said.

  “Riggs called.”

  “I see.”

  “I would have come anyway.”

  “I choose to believe you.”

  “It’s true.” In that moment, I realized that it was.

  He smiled, and something between us broke. We climbed the stairs. On the porch, file boxes—my boxes, as I thought of them—were stacked three-high.

  “Now I know this is serious,” I said.

  “If I make for shore, the storm won’t land. I guarantee it.”

  Frankie aimed for his usual spot beneath the picture window, but Charlie caught him by the shoulder, then pulled from his pocket a small black-and-white penguin.

  “Penguin!” said Frankie, racing away.

  “I appreciate you coming to the funeral,” Charlie said, avoiding my eyes. “I’m sorry I was disagreeable.”

  I was quiet.

  “And I’m sorry for—”

  “Don’t apologize.”

  “It was the timing, that’s all,” he said. “That awful place.” He was staring at me now, his eyes intent. I felt myself leaning toward him, my side meeting his side. Behind the wall of our bodies, out of Frankie’s sightline, our fingers touched.

  “Graham came home,” I said. “I asked him to move out.”

  He frowned and shook his head. “Poor fellow.”

  This irked me for some reason. Why wouldn’t he be relieved, after all? Why wouldn’t he reassure me that I’d done the right thing? But when I started to pull away, he tugged me back.

  “I don’t mean it that way,” he said. “I just feel for the guy.”

  “I feel for him, too,” I said.

  “I know.” He searched my eyes, his face inches from mine. I wanted to tell him he had nothing to do with me and Graham—was this purely true?—but then Frankie’s voice came from the living room. “Ship!” he said excitedly, as if it was the first time he’d seen one from that very spot.

  “We’d better get to it,” said Charlie, and slapped me firmly on the behind.

  FRANKIE AMUSED HIMSELF WITH A puzzle while Charlie and I made trip after trip to the Zodiac, filling the well of the little boat. By the time the space was full, it was so hot that Frankie was sweating through his shirt. We took a break to swim in the cloudy jade water off the dock. Frankie counted the sea urchins that littered the seabed, then the starfish. It seemed incredible that a storm might materialize from the empty sky. Charlie led us to the shallower water beneath the dock and pointed to a dark grouping in the shade, clumped around a piling.

  “Lobsters,” he said.

  “What they doing?” said Frankie.

  Charlie explained that they were molting. They did it at least once a year. “My house is their favorite place,” he said. “The trappers don’t know they come here.”

  “It’s secret,” said Frankie.

  “They eat their own shells,�
�� said Charlie, wrinkling his nose.

  “Yucky!” said Frankie.

  I put Frankie down for a nap and Charlie and I listened to the radio for updates. The storm was still tracking toward South Florida—there was a possibility that the Bahamas would break its stride—but if it hit, it would do so late Sunday or early Monday, which meant it was still more than twenty-four hours away.

  “It slowed down,” I said to Charlie. “Isn’t that good?”

  “Sometimes a thing needs time to grow.”

  I had a thought. “Can we stay over tonight? We’ll sleep in the office,” I said. “I think Frankie would enjoy it, just this once.” I didn’t say: In case the house is gone by Monday. This seemed far-fetched. I had the feeling that all of it—the packing up and shipping out—was a bit of elaborate theater, and we had no choice but to play our parts.

  His knee pressed against mine. “I’ll sleep in the office. You two take my room.”

  And then—I don’t know who started it—we were kissing softly, unhurriedly. This time, there was no reluctance. He was sure-handed and calm. I climbed onto his lap and his hands moved inside my shirt, his palms rough against my back. There was the feeling that life was speeding forward in an untenable way, that if I didn’t do something to slow it down, it would spiral out of control. The feeling was not unwelcome.

  Frankie called out for me when he woke. I pulled reluctantly away from Charlie, wiping my mouth. As I moved from the living room to the bedroom, I felt his gaze on my body.

  We worked until late afternoon, at which point Charlie declared that the Zodiac would stand no more weight, and he would make a run to shore. He radioed Riggs to meet him at the marina, and I wrote a note asking Riggs to call Lidia and my father, to tell them we would be out for the night. Off Charlie went with the oil paintings from his walls—the fact that they were valuable was clear from the way he wrapped each carefully in cardboard and twine—and about half of the boxes of portraits. Charlie didn’t want to bother with the furniture or his clothes or kitchen wares—whether this was because these items weren’t worth much to him, or he was still skeptical the house would sustain damage, I wasn’t sure—but I’d reminded him to at least pack a bag of essentials. He would spend the following night, Sunday, at Riggs’s condo, and I would spend it at Lidia’s. I knew my father would have taped all the windows and stocked a cooler with sandwiches and soda. He would have hauled the patio furniture inside and secured the rosebushes beneath a tarp. I knew, too, he would have lengthened the mooring lines on the Lullaby, so it could rise and fall with the surging canal without snapping loose. All along the canal, backyards would have been bared of decoration, windows mummified with tape or shutters. When I thought of that next night, the night of the still-theoretical storm, I pictured me and Frankie and Lidia and my father huddled together in the living room, lights flickering and trees thrashing, and I felt a delighted shiver. Then came a pang of guilt: Graham would be alone.