Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  “I’m an a-nem-o-ne,” said Frankie.

  This is something Charlie had told him, after Frankie had insisted we let him look at his face in a mirror. Because of all the colors.

  “You don’t need to be here,” I said.

  “I disagree,” she said.

  I came to her side and pulled the file from her hands. “You’re no longer his doctor.”

  She blinked at me. “You want an apology? I’m sorry. I’m a mother. I know these things can happen.”

  I glanced at Frankie, but at Charlie’s urging he’d gone back to working on the puzzle. I moved her into the hallway. “Thank you for coming,” I said, blocking the door.

  “Look,” she said, speaking through her teeth; it was satisfying to see her lose control a little bit. “It’s your choice, but I came because I wanted to see how Frankie’s recovering. I’d think you’d appreciate a second opinion.”

  This was a good point. “He’s doing well.”

  “Has he walked? He should be walking.”

  “Just once.”

  This was not strictly true. He’d gotten out of bed the day before with Nurse Barb’s help, but had been unable to make it as far as the doorway before crying out, whether from weakness or rib pain, we didn’t know. Dr. Lomano said his muscles were tired, and they’d try again when he had more energy.

  “Get him out of bed,” said Dr. Sonia. “Make him walk three times a day. You won’t know how his recovery is going until he’s moving around. The swelling is going down—that’s good. I’d like to get a look at his pupils, test his reflexes.”

  “They’re doing all of that.”

  “And I’m sure they’re doing a good job. But many hands, lighter work.”

  I didn’t think this was an apt aphorism but let it slide. I handed over Frankie’s file and she sat on the edge of his bed and started in with question after question. How much was he eating? What did he remember of the evening before he fell? How old was he? Who were his friends at preschool? Every three or four questions, his mind would wander and she’d ask him firmly to pay attention. Eventually she seemed satisfied, and had him lie down and follow her penlight with his eyes and wiggle his toes and reach out to slap her hand with each of his. She repeated the last exercise several times. Each time, his right hand slapped hers dead-on, but his left landed off-center.

  “Hmm,” she said, closing the file. “Let’s get you up.”

  “Right now?” I said.

  “Right now.” She pulled back Frankie’s blanket. He edged off the bed and my breath caught, but then he was standing with a firm hold on Dr. Sonia’s arm. They made it to the doorway. “Watch,” she said to me as they passed.

  It was not that he was having trouble walking, exactly, but that he was walking—I’m still not sure how to put it—differently. His right foot planted but his left foot dragged a little, toe-first, then pivoted and dragged a little along the heel. It took me several steps to even be able to tell what was strange, the difference was so minor.

  Halfway down the hallway, Frankie collapsed. I rushed forward, but by the time I’d gotten there, he was in Dr. Sonia’s arms, gripping her neck like a bride in the embrace of a tiny, immaculate groom. “His leg seized,” she said.

  “The left one,” I said, and she nodded.

  Frankie was crying and scared. I tucked him back in bed and Charlie comforted him while Dr. Sonia commanded me outside to talk.

  “I’m not sure what it is,” she said. “Some misfire in his brain. His memory is good, but his balance is off and this thing with the leg could be something. I’ll talk to Lomano.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It’s my job,” she said, and turned on a heel.

  Riggs left an hour or so later. The lights on Antoine’s side of the room went out and I watched his parents leave the room, raising a hand to them as they went. Charlie collapsed into the chair next to mine. I told Frankie it was time for bed and he said good night to each of his sea creatures individually. When he was done—he said good night to the shark twice—Charlie started reading him a book aloud. But it had been a long day and Frankie’s eyes were heavy by the second page. Charlie didn’t have the heart to finish with no audience. The overhead lights flickered and the sea animals swayed, as if settling in for the night.

  “When will you tell him?” said Charlie once Frankie was asleep.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “Do you want me to be with you?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “We could find a counselor. Or maybe Lidia—”

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “You don’t have to do it alone.”

  “It’s the only way I can do it.”

  His face was filled with shadows, long in the jawline and heavy under the eyes. It was impossible for me to think of sex, in those moments, or even of attraction. It was impossible to recollect the night we’d been together without feeling shame blunted by deeply suppressed joy. But the fact that he was there in that chair beside me was no small comfort. After a while, he moved to the floor cushion with a blanket and, confident that Frankie would sleep straight through, I grabbed a windbreaker Lidia had hung in the closet, slipped the stack of Polaroids Riggs had brought into my pocket, kissed sleeping Frankie, and left the room.

  In the hospital cafeteria there was a fairly raucous poker tournament going on, spanning several tables and peopled with a mix of EMTs and nurses and aides. I stood watching the games for a while, then walked through the hectic ER and into the night.

  I stood in the glow of a window and shuffled through the Polaroids. The first was of a sun-dappled blanket of green water, through which the outline of Charlie’s old stove top was visible, its four black burners distorted by wavelets. The second was of a piling lying in shallows. The last was of blue sky over emerald water, and in the corner a slanted white piling—not Charlie’s, but his neighbor’s. The empty swath of water and sky was, I understood, where Charlie’s house had stood. It hadn’t been decimated or, as with the neighbor’s house, plucked from its still-fixed pilings: it had been erased. There would come a time, years later, when I missed the stilt house, when I mourned its loss on Charlie’s behalf and even on Frankie’s. But that night it was as if I’d confirmed the death of a sworn enemy, and I felt only relief.

  I WOKE FRANKIE AT DAWN. I said his name quietly, so as not to disturb Charlie, and watched him wake without opening his eyes. He smiled a little in pretend sleep, and I continued to say his name in a singsong voice until he couldn’t resist anymore, and his eyes popped open. He looked at me with the delight of a person revealing a happy secret. It was enough to start me weeping right then.

  I’d begged for and received a wheelchair from the nurses’ station, along with caution not to have him gone for long. I put two cups and a carton of orange juice in his lap and wheeled him down the hall, shushing gently each time he asked where we were going, to a service elevator, which at the ground level opened onto a loading dock. I’d made this same trip the night before, alone. We wheeled through the warehouse and out into the citrus light of new morning, then across the back acre of the hospital property. There had been a man-made pond there, but now there was only a marshy dip in the earth. I muscled through a thicket of bromeliads, red blooms spilling lewdly from their centers, doing my best to not jostle Frankie too much. We crossed the street and ducked between houses until we reached the elbow of the canal. We were at the far corner of someone’s large backyard—there was a swing set, which Frankie eyed longingly—but I guessed that we were hidden from view by the mounds of fallen foliage.

  At the water’s edge, I helped Frankie from his chair and he sat down on the bank.

  “Picnic,” said Frankie. “The storm crashed the trees?”

  “Yes. But they’ll come back.”

  The sunlight was growing but still there was a slice of moon in the sky. There were bird sounds in the distance and water lapped the bank. “I have something important to tell you,” I sa
id.

  “What?” he said.

  I didn’t speak right away. I was choosing the words, or rehearsing the ones I’d chosen.

  He said, “Do we talk about Daddy?”

  I kept myself from pulling him to me, from stroking his cheek and kissing his hair. It was important, I felt, that we have this conversation eye to eye. I said, “Yes, honey. Daddy had an accident.”

  Frankie shook his head. “Frankie had accident.”

  “Yes, you had an accident, but you’re going to be okay. Dad had an accident, too, and his was very bad. He’s not going to be okay.”

  Frankie finished his juice and set the cup down on the grass. It tipped and he righted it, and it tipped again and he righted it again. If I’d been delivering a different talk—about remembering to pick up toys after playing or saying please and thank you—I would have been frustrated by his inattention. But I knew that this was only the first of many times this news would be delivered. If Frankie had been a year or two older, he might have been able to start the long dive into grief right away. But at barely four, he would have to ingest the information in morsels.

  “Daddy’s gone,” I said quietly. “He’s not coming home anymore.”

  He stared, as if waiting for me to finish.

  I said, “It’s very, very sad.”

  “Why he gone?”

  “Because in this bad accident, Daddy died. We’re not going to see him anymore.”

  “Daddy’s gone,” he said, nodding. Then something in the canal caught his eye. I couldn’t bear to look away from his face, which moved quickly from confusion to joy. When I did look, I saw that a white heron had taken flight from the brush and was heading away from us down the center of the canal. I watched it as long as I could make it out, but when I glanced at Frankie, he was looking straight up, at the brightening sky.

  “Sun coming up,” he said. He looked at me to share his delight. “Good morning!”

  He did his best to scramble to his feet—he wanted to climb into my lap, I believe—but something failed when he tried to make his legs work beneath him, and he toppled face-first onto the dewy lawn.

  I hunted down Nurse Barb before returning Frankie to his bed, and she promised to send Dr. Lomano as soon as he was free. This took close to an hour, during which I explained to Charlie what had happened. Frankie was restless, so Charlie distracted him by showing him the Polaroids, which Frankie found more fascinating than sad, it seemed. Charlie talked about how sometimes, in a bad storm, things sink, and this had happened not only to the stilt house but also to the Lullaby, which wouldn’t be his home anymore.

  I wondered how much bad news it was wise to dispense at one time. How do young children grieve? I didn’t have the language of the angels and heaven and eternal life at my disposal. These would have been useful tools. They would have been useful for my own grief, even.

  “But where the house go?” said Frankie.

  “Lots of places,” said Charlie. “Some of it probably ended up here on land. Maybe you’ll be at the beach one day and a piece of my house will wash up at your feet.”

  “You’re teasing,” said Frankie.

  “It’s mostly underwater, kiddo,” said Charlie. “On the ocean floor.”

  “House for fishes?” said Frankie.

  “Exactly.”

  They continued down this road of logic: if the house was now underwater, then surely it would be occupied by any number of affable sea animals. Frankie asked about the likelihood of each creature using the house: Did Charlie think an octopus would sleep in his—Frankie’s—bed? Would a jellyfish use the potty? Could a sea slug climb the swim ladder? I realized that Charlie understood as much about the toddler mind as anyone I’d known. He was helping Frankie not by creating a sea-themed fantasy, but by giving him exactly the information needed to transition from one reality—the stilt house, standing and true—to a new reality, wherein the house still existed (would it be possible, in Frankie’s mind, for a house to no longer exist?) but had been put to use in an entirely different way. I could think of no charming fiction to ease his other, more devastating transition.

  “Did the octopus need a new house, too?” said Frankie, discerning somehow that the hurricane had taken the octopus’s old house and this is why Charlie had given over his own, as an act of charity.

  “That’s right,” said Charlie.

  Frankie continued to connect his own scattered dots, and Charlie agreed again and again, with all of it.

  “Where my house going to be?” said Frankie.

  “At your Mimi’s house, at least for a while.”

  This notion—that we did not have a home—had not sunken in for me until this moment. I’d been feeling horrible for Sally’s family and for others like them, but I’d forgotten, maybe because the Lullaby had been our home so briefly, or because what we’d lost in its demise was so much greater, that when we were released from the hospital, not only would Graham be gone but so would everything else—clothes, beds, books, toys. We were among the displaced. Lidia’s house had, it seemed, played the role she’d always wanted it to play, the cushion to our fall. If not for the simple fact of its existence, I might have lost my mind.

  Dr. Lomano was concerned about Frankie’s legs. He’d spoken to Dr. Sonia the day before, had ordered tests. In bed, Frankie’s legs worked fine. Even the left one, which had failed with Dr. Sonia and with me, responded to each of Dr. Lomano’s commands without trouble. Before the doctor left the room, Frankie said to him, “My daddy had an accident tomorrow.”

  This was something Frankie did, confusing yesterday and tomorrow, using them interchangeably. Of course Dr. Lomano didn’t know that. He smiled gamely. “Tomorrow he did?” he said.

  “It’s sad. He not coming home.”

  The doctor’s smile faded. He looked at me.

  “That’s right, baby,” I said, smoothing Frankie’s hair. “That’s exactly right. Daddy had an accident, and we’re not going to see him anymore.”

  Frankie nodded. “See? Mommy talk about it, when the bird flied.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, Frankie,” said the doctor.

  “Me, too,” Frankie said. He pointed above the bed. “See my octopus friend right there? See my sea horse friend right there?”

  And the doctor, to his credit, stayed several minutes more, paying close attention as Frankie introduced each of his creatures. Frankie struggled to a kneeling position and Dr. Lomano helped him, and I watched Frankie’s little fingertips as he touched the animals, sending them swaying.

  21

  RIGGS RETURNED THE FOLLOWING EVENING with pizza for everyone. Lidia brought her rarely used knitting supplies, and Charlie set to examining them while we all ate. Usually when Lidia or my father were in the room, Charlie slipped out to attend to some errand or another, but this time he sat down in one of the lawn chairs, and after the pizza was finished, he and Lidia started knitting.

  I was reading to Frankie when Sally and Carson came in. The book blocked my view of the doorway, so it wasn’t until Carson jumped on the bed and was chastised by Sally that I even realized they were there. I threw myself into her arms and helped Carson stand at Frankie’s feet so he could see the floating animals up close. Sally took off her shoes and sat with Carson and Frankie on the bed, chatting and playing cat’s cradle with some of Lidia’s yarn. When I asked about rebuilding the house, she shrugged and said she figured they might as well. They didn’t rise to leave until bedtime.

  Sally pulled my hands to her chest before going out and asked quietly how Frankie was doing.

  “Ask again in a few days,” I said.

  “My Lord,” she said, her eyes dampening. “You’ve got quite a full plate, don’t you?”

  “I was thinking the same of you.”

  “Oh, I hated that house, anyway.” She tilted her head. “Except sometimes. It’s strange, all our stuff is gone, but I can’t bring myself to care very much. Stanley cried about his Porsche. ”

  “He�
��ll get another.”

  “Maybe we’ll live at the Hampton Suites for the rest of our lives. Free breakfast.”

  The next day, we woke to find phone service had been restored. I used a phone at the nurses’ station to call Graham’s mother’s husband, Bob Winters, and tell him what had happened to Graham. I spent a long time listening to his labored breathing and confused questions. He mentioned that his daughter and her new baby were living with him, and as if to prove it a baby cried out in the background.

  Next, I called Graham’s colleague Larry Birnbaum, who had read about Graham’s death in the newspaper. He’d been trying to get in touch with me to let me know I was welcome to pick up the few items left behind in Graham’s office. There was an old photo of me and Frankie, he said, a stack of weather maps Graham had collected over the years, and a few books. I declined. Larry mentioned, offhandedly, that he’d boxed the items up after Graham’s last day. After we hung up, the way he’d put it nagged at me, and I called back. After some misunderstanding, I finally wrangled from Larry this fact: Graham had been dismissed from his job with Rosenstiel at the same time that he’d left the Revelle. The details of his flight from the ship remained unclear, but Larry said something about keeping the whole thing private, out of respect for me and my son. He also mentioned pointedly, as if this were a detail prominent in my mind, that he knew Graham had bought supplementary insurance out of pocket, so although his work-subsidized plan was canceled when he was let go, the second plan would still pay out.

  This was the first I’d thought of insurance. Larry transferred me to a woman in human resources who gave me the number of the company representative who worked with Graham’s team, and from her I learned that Graham had bought a sizable plan just before he’d left for the Revelle. There were forms to fill out; she would send them.

  When I reentered the room, I found a kind of party in full swing: my father with his ukulele propped on one knee, Riggs nodding along in conversation with Lidia, and Frankie sitting up in bed playing a bumbling—but apparently hilarious—game of handball with Antoine, wherein if Antoine couldn’t swat back or catch the ball, Frankie ambled to get it while Antoine’s mother shadowed him in case he needed help. Charlie was not in the room. For a moment, I stood watching the scene from the doorway, thinking that Graham should have been there, too. But then I remembered something. It was something I would need to continue to remember, throughout those months after Graham’s death. I might have missed him, but Graham would not have wanted to be there, in the thick of any kind of domestic chaos. He would have been eyeing the door, as he’d done the evening we’d returned from the Dry Tortugas and he’d made origami for Frankie while I napped. And his own discomfort would have continued to hurt him as much as it hurt me.