Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  A nurse came by to urge Lidia and my father out to the waiting room. Before they left, Lidia handed Charlie a pair of brown leather loafers from her bag. They were my father’s; Charlie put them on. I saw this happening in my peripheral vision, realizing for the first time that we had both come to the hospital without shoes. Charlie must have mentioned it when he called. Then Lidia crouched beside me, and I looked away from Frankie long enough to watch her pull a pair of pink suede slippers onto my feet, one at a time.

  LATER, CHARLIE BROUGHT A CUP of coffee and pressed my hands around it. Lidia was in the waiting room and my father had left to take the Zodiac home. The curtain around Frankie’s bed slid noisily to one side, and there stood a thin black nurse in lilac scrubs. She spoke in a heavy, overarticulated Haitian accent. “We have to evacuate,” she said. “Your boy will go soon in the ambulance. You have a ride?”

  Charlie told her we did, but for a moment I didn’t understand. Then I remembered the hurricane, which—in my altered state, this seemed horribly unjust—hadn’t dissolved or even been delayed by Frankie’s fall. The nurse went on to explain that there was a bed at South Dade Memorial and Frankie would be transferred there with another patient; there would be no room in the ambulance for me. I asked for reassurance that Frankie would not wake up while he was alone with strangers, and she gave it. She said that he would be among the first to leave.

  There were 245 patients at Mercy that day. I would learn this later. And, because three other hospitals were also evacuating, and because the drop in barometric pressure and general anxiety would send many, many women into premature labor, there was a citywide shortage of ambulances and beds. This was the first time Mercy had ever evacuated, and in fact the chief of staff had lobbied against the hospital’s evacuation policy since it had been implemented years earlier. He’d thought evacuation would waste resources and cause unnecessary risks to patients. He was photographed, a day after the storm, standing in several inches of water in Mercy’s basement, a jagged hole at his back where a window had been, a stingray dead at his feet. He admitted readily, in the article I read, that he’d been wrong.

  I kissed Frankie and Charlie pulled me away. We waited in Lidia’s car just outside the ambulance bay, me in the passenger seat and Charlie in the backseat, and watched as Frankie was loaded in. We followed the ambulance onto the road. Outside the window, my hometown looked staged and unfamiliar, a replica of itself, as if someone had taken photographs and rebuilt the city to scale. About a mile from the hospital we started to lag, and the ambulance pulled farther and farther ahead.

  We came to a stop on the shoulder of the road, and then the ambulance was out of sight. “What’s going on?” I said.

  “We’re being pulled over, sweetheart,” said Lidia.

  She rolled down her window and spoke to the police officer. I turned in my seat and found Charlie watching me. “We have to go,” I said loudly.

  He leaned forward. “We will. Hold on.”

  The police officer walked back to his patrol car and Lidia turned to me. She spoke like my own mother would have, with a possessive firmness, the way I would have spoken to Frankie. She said, “Georgia, I want you to count to one hundred. Do it slowly. Go.”

  By the time I was at eighty-seven, the officer was back. He gave Lidia a ticket for following too closely behind an ambulance. Then Lidia started the engine, and we got back on the road.

  I LOCATED FRANKIE ON THE third floor of South Dade’s east wing, where an ad hoc ward had been set up in a wide hallway outside the pediatric care unit. Frankie’s bed was flush to the wall, and above it was a watercolor painting of a flock of flamingos standing along the rim of a green pond. At his feet was an empty bed, and in the bed at his head was a young girl, ten or so years old, sleeping with a thick wrap of gauze around her forehead. Charlie and Lidia had been stopped at the admitting desk and instructed to go home—whether they had, I didn’t know, as I’d left them behind as soon as I was told where Frankie had been taken. I leaned close to Frankie’s face. He smelled of sea salt. “You moved hospitals,” I told him. “You’ll be safe here.” I pulled his blanket tighter. Then I was hit by a wave of exhaustion, and because there was no place else, I sat on the floor beside his bed.

  The fact that I needed to let Graham know what had happened pecked at me. I wasn’t sure, exactly, how to go about it. Now that I knew where Frankie was, I could go downstairs and find a telephone—but who would I call? Finding a phone book and calling every hotel near Lidia’s house would require more energy than I could muster.

  A red-haired nurse with a hand tremor brought me a plastic chair. She said it had come from the cafeteria. “Guard it with your life,” she said, and rushed away.

  Charlie came up through a back staircase. He told me it was just after noon. There were no windows in that stretch of hallway, and time had become disordered and irrelevant, except that as the hours passed, it became more likely that Frankie would wake up. Charlie touched Frankie’s foot. “I saw that young doctor,” he said. “He’ll be by soon.”

  I wiped my face.

  “You should try to rest,” he said.

  “I keep hearing that sound.”

  He knew which one I meant. He closed his eyes, as if in prayer.

  It seemed I’d never before understood the meaning of the word regret. Now it seemed regret was the desperate desire to reverse a specific amount of time. It was the need to purge from one’s memory the sound of a boy’s head hitting wood. It didn’t seem to me that a tiny reversal of time was such a grand request to make of the universe. I would need only a few seconds changed, after all.

  Frankie’s expression remained empty and unfamiliar, and though I continued to feel physical pain when I looked at his broken face, I also started to feel a strange detachment from him, as if he were the sweet child of a neighbor or other acquaintance, and I was standing in until his real mother arrived. I’d felt the same curious detachment at my mother’s bedside, before her death. I’d looked at her parched lips as she slept, thinking it was fortunate that I’d inherited my father’s full ones instead of her thin, pale ones. Who thinks this in the hours before her own mother’s death? Who feels any removal at all from the inert, battered body of her young son?

  “Lie down,” Charlie said.

  The vinyl flooring smelled of cleanser. I forced myself to keep my eyes shut for what seemed like a long time, and when I opened them, a woman stood over me, casting a shadow in the fluorescence. She wore a blue silk blouse and a white coat and patent leather heels. It was Dr. Sonia.

  I got to my feet. “Who called you?” I said.

  “Dr. Lomano’s nurse.”

  I vaguely recalled giving Dr. Sonia’s name when asked about Frankie’s pediatrician hours earlier. It was incredible to me that the staff at Mercy, still embroiled in evacuation, was organized enough not only to alert Dr. Sonia to Frankie’s medical situation, but also to let her know that he’d been moved. This kind of efficiency would become less surprising in the days to come.

  She stood at the head of Frankie’s bed, reading through his chart. She pulled a penlight from her coat and thumbed open each of Frankie’s pupils. “Are you the father?” she said, glancing doubtfully at Charlie.

  “No,” I said.

  “Georgia.” Her darkly lined eyes met mine. “What happened?”

  She wrote in the file as I spoke. I started earlier than I needed to, with the phone call from Riggs, when I’d learned I was needed at Stiltsville. She didn’t hurry me. I felt as if I were narrating a story from a book, except that as I closed in on the end, my voice started to fail. When I described standing on the dock alone and hearing a sound upstairs, I had to work to catch my breath.

  “You heard him on the porch,” she said, prompting me.

  “I heard something. It was very dark. I assumed it was Charlie.”

  Dr. Sonia glanced over my shoulder at Charlie, her mouth a thin line. To her, I probably seemed like nothing more than your average cheating
wife. I supposed that wasn’t far from the truth.

  “I spent an afternoon there once, at Stiltsville,” she said. “I found it—how do I put it?—unsettling.”

  I said nothing.

  “How long had Frankie been asleep?” she said.

  “Hours. Five hours.”

  “Had he ever slept there before?”

  “Yes, for naps.”

  “How far was the bedroom from the porch?”

  “About twenty feet.”

  “Not far.”

  “No.”

  “Was the room locked?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Was there a light on in the living room?”

  “No.”

  “On the porch?”

  “There was no light.”

  “Was the door to the porch closed?”

  “No.”

  “How high was the porch?”

  “Fifteen feet or so.”

  “Oh, Georgia,” she said, touching the back of Frankie’s hand. “How could you?”

  I felt Charlie bracing me, his hands on my elbows. I heard him asking Dr. Sonia to leave, then insisting in a rising tone that she do so. She left. But it didn’t much matter to me that she’d said what she did. It was simply as if she’d spoken my own thoughts. How could I? All those afternoons, all those naps, all those hours I’d spent with my young child in a house surrounded on all sides by water. I’d been the reckless one, I saw, not just the night before but every minute we’d spent at Stiltsville. My error in judgment had been enormous and unforgivable.

  “Please find Graham,” I said to Charlie. If I could do nothing else to help Frankie, I hoped at least I could deliver his father.

  THE RED-HAIRED NURSE WITH THE tremor came down the hall at around 3:00 P.M., shooing all but a few visitors from around the beds. Charlie had yet to return. I sat stroking Frankie’s hand for a long time, wishing I hadn’t sent Charlie away—surely Lidia and my father were doing all anyone could to find Graham—but then I looked up to see a lean figure striding toward me, flopping white hair and jointed flamingo legs. He gripped my shoulder and studied Frankie’s face. His own face was drawn.

  “Where were you?” I said, my voice hoarse.

  “Hotel,” he said. “I called your father.”

  I gave him my chair. “How did you get here?”

  “Lidia. She’s in the waiting room—with your friend.” His jaw clenched. “Hospital’s trying to clear people out.”

  “They should go home. I’ll tell them.”

  “I’m staying.”

  I nodded but made no move to leave.

  “When will he wake up?” said Graham, his voice trickling to a whisper.

  “Soon,” I said.

  “But he will wake up?”

  On this point, I’d asked repeatedly for reassurance, and had received it. “Yes,” I said. “He will.”

  Graham bit his lip. “I hate that you were out there with him.”

  Whether he meant Frankie or Charlie, I wasn’t certain, and I didn’t ask him to clarify.

  I found Lidia and Charlie in one corner of the crowded waiting room. Nearby, a nurse was instructing a family to go home, and on a television screen above their heads a meteorologist explained that the hurricane was nearing Eleuthera, 180 miles southeast, bringing with it 150-mile-per-hour winds and twenty-foot surges. The meteorologist, Bryan Norcross, who would remain on air for two days straight, said the storm would reach South Florida in six hours, but the eye wouldn’t hit until dawn.

  Charlie made the slightest gesture in my direction, as if to embrace or at least touch me. I stepped back. “You should both go home,” I said.

  “I can’t stand it,” said Lidia.

  “He’ll be asleep for hours,” I said.

  Charlie’s hands worked at his sides. “Can’t I do something?”

  “Please go,” I said, backing away.

  Somehow Graham had procured another chair while I was gone. He was such a resourceful person, I thought. He could solve any problem except the ones that really needed solving. I sat at Frankie’s torso and Graham sat at his head. Graham’s hands stroked the bedspread. It seemed to me that every decision we’d made, up to and including the move to Miami and the job running out to Stiltsville, had been undeniably wrong. We were unfit to lead our own lives.

  “We should never have come here,” I said, meaning Miami. “We should never have bought that fucking boat.” I struggled to keep my voice under control. My hands flew about, and Graham raised his arms as if to protect himself. “You are a fool, buying that boat. You should go home.”

  I meant our other home, the cottage on Round Lake, which any day now would sit vacant. He might go back, I knew. Not because I was telling him to, but because there would not be enough to keep him here. I would be left behind in the town I’d fled years before, moored to my own bad choices.

  Graham gripped me by the shoulders. I struggled a little, then went limp. “Take a breath,” he said.

  I started to cry. My voice barely made it out of my throat. “I don’t want a divorce.”

  He exhaled. “Yes, you do.”

  Something in his tone grounded me, even as I recognized the sad and gentle anger in it, the enmity that had curdled between us. I wiped my face and took a deep breath. He let go of me and leaned forward to concentrate on the boy we’d made, who lay sleeping that unmuscular, invertebrate sleep.

  What I’d feared most about leaving him was what I would be taking from Frankie. What I forgot, in those moments when I was undone by self-doubt, was all that Frankie would gain: sleep, speech, security.

  Our red-haired nurse, whose name was Barb, stopped by every two hours. She checked Frankie’s pupils and administered more sedative through his IV. “Lucky to get to sleep through this storm,” she said in her hushed tone. I did my best to be polite, but what I was thinking was that it was not lucky at all, and I knew Frankie would agree with me. Later, when she was back again, Graham put a hand on her arm. “It’s his birthday tomorrow,” he said meaningfully. “He’ll be four years old.”

  “Well, then,” she said. “Let’s make it a good one.”

  Another hour passed, and a different nurse came to confiscate our chairs. She was almost as tall as Graham and a little older, with silver-streaked hair and heavily inked tattoos showing beneath the sleeves of her scrubs. There were multiple holes in her ears, but she wore no jewelry and no makeup. The chairs were needed in the maternity ward, she told us. She crossed her arms and steadied her voice. “They’re closing the streets. You have to leave.”

  “We’re staying,” I said.

  “That won’t be possible.”

  I realized that she’d been sent. Up and down the hall, the areas around patient beds had emptied of visitors. Graham and I were the problematic hangers-on, making difficult jobs more difficult.

  Graham realized it, too. He wiped his face and sighed. “I’ll go to your father’s,” he said to me. “I’ll be back as soon as it’s over.”

  “Your boy will sleep through it,” said the nurse to him. “You should, too.”

  He touched Frankie’s bruised cheek and leaned down to whisper into his ear and kiss his lips. As an afterthought, he kissed my forehead. Then he moved away slowly, as if fighting a tether.

  “I’m staying,” I said to the nurse after Graham was gone.

  “I’ll try to find a pillow,” she said roughly.

  Someone did bring a pillow and a blanket, but it wasn’t that same intimidating nurse, and I never saw her again. Fifty percent of the hospital staff lost their homes that night; she might have been one of them. I would think of her many times, about her final words to Graham, and how none of us, least of all her, could have known what her advice would mean.

  SOMEWHERE IN THE PEDIATRIC UNIT, there was a television tuned to the weather news. I heard snippets of storm-related talk from nurses who came and went, their voices agitated. I had no desire to learn more. Either the hurricane would hit furiously, po
ssibly endangering us even within the hospital’s walls, or it wouldn’t. The only way that I might have become interested in the workings of the storm, its wind speed and direction and exact location at any given moment, was if Frankie woke and we could watch the news reports—or even the weather itself through a window—together.

  I dozed on the floor as outside the winds rose and the rain started. The lights blinked out and then came back dimmer. I woke with a start to the sound of a metal tray rattling nearby; someone had dropped something in the pediatric unit, out of my sightline. It seemed that maybe Frankie reacted to the noise or my movement at his side with the slightest tremble of his head, but a moment later I decided it had been my imagination. The lights in the hallway cast shadows on his face. It seemed, if I wasn’t fooling myself, that the swelling had gone down a touch. His nose seemed to assert itself a little more prominently from the rest of his face.

  I pulled myself away, ostensibly to find coffee but really because I hoped to run into Nurse Barb and ask her to check on Frankie when she had a free moment. I clutched my precious blanket and pillow as I wandered down one hallway and another. The hospital, or at least that particular wing, was muffled in noise and movement. Even the workers who bustled past me seemed subdued and focused, as if they had no energy to spare. I found myself in a hallway that dead-ended. I kept going because at the very end was a large window. In late summer in Miami, the sun shone until eight-thirty or later, but that evening the sky was dark with cloud cover and thick with rain. Outside the window was the hospital’s circular driveway, and the royal palms dotting the too-green lawn bowed in the wind. The four-lane street was empty of cars, and the traffic lights swayed on their lines. I turned away from the window and hurried back to Frankie’s bed, intending to tell him, awake or not, what was happening outside. How the storm was rising. How he hadn’t missed it yet.

  It took me several seconds to locate him again, not because he had moved but because there was a man standing over his bed, which I hadn’t expected. He had his hands in the pockets of his faded blue jeans. His salt-and-pepper hair was wet and disheveled.