EARLY ON THE MORNING OF Frankie’s first day of kindergarten, we walked across the street to wait for the school bus. Barton Callaway was standing at the corner with his daughter, a fifth grader. I snapped photos and asked Barton to take one of Frankie and me together. Barton’s daughter helped Frankie take the first giant step onto the bus, and then Frankie sat alone at a window, clutching his backpack. After the bus turned the corner, I asked Barton to take a photo of me standing alone in the breaking light with the farmhouse in the background. He did. Then he gave me an encouraging shake of the shoulder and went inside. After the photos were processed, I dropped them at Riggs’s office, knowing they would find their way.
It has been eight years since Charlie left, and I haven’t seen or spoken to him since. Still, we haven’t really lost touch. Every six months or so, Riggs drops by with a box: a handmade sweater or a book or art supplies for Frankie. If there is a note—usually there isn’t one—it is brief. FOR THE BOY. –C.
Riggs passes on details about us. This was clear after I mentioned that I’d taken Frankie to his first baseball game, and there followed a new glove and season tickets. I mentioned Frankie’s obsession with all things prehistoric, and three months later there was a new show at the Abyss: “Sea Monsters,” featuring the extinct megalodon, a shark the size of a tanker. For Frankie’s seventh birthday a book arrived, a biography of Mary Anning, the twelve-year-old girl in nineteenth-century England who discovered fossils of a monstrous prehistoric dolphin called Ichthyosaurus. We spent hours on our hands and knees in the backyard, excavating with spades and paintbrushes.
I grew careful about what I shared. I didn’t tell Riggs about Frankie’s broken arm after climbing the live oak when he was eight. I didn’t mention when he was nine that he gave an older boy a bloody nose after the boy called him a bastard. I keep to myself the fact that he no longer swims.
Henry Gale and I closed in on each other over a span of years. As I remember it, one day I looked up and there he was, the dark beard and easy chuckle and ruddy cheeks, the two-handed handshake, the respectful affection for Frankie. He’d been waiting for me to notice him. He and Charlie were in contact for a time; they sent work back and forth. Then one day Henry received a note from Riggs—whether this had to do with our growing intimacy, I don’t know—explaining that Charlie had found an illustrator closer to home and thanking him for the years of partnership. Henry’s father still lives at the Palms at Park Place, though he’s lost his eyesight and doesn’t remember us when we visit. For the foreseeable future, Henry keeps his own house.
Frankie stopped sleeping through the night when he was ten years old. I put in a high, ugly pool fence with a locked gate and I keep the key hidden. I installed a house alarm. This will work until he’s old enough to come and go on his own, which is coming soon; I’ll need new strategies. He wanders the upstairs at all hours, reading books and playing, but I haven’t seen any evidence—knock on wood—that he has his father’s parasomnia rather than my run-of-the-mill insomnia. I pray that this continues to be the case.
For his eleventh birthday he asked for art lessons, and I enrolled him in drawing classes at the Lowe Art Museum on University of Miami’s campus. After dropping him off the first day, I wandered through the rooms and came upon a collection of paintings I recognized: the Florida scenes from Charlie’s stilt house, which he’d rescued on his trip to shore the night before Hurricane Andrew. A wall plaque noted that the works, all important pieces by artists known collectively as the Florida Highwaymen, had been donated in the name of Jennifer Elizabeth Hicks.
Today Frankie is tall for his age, talkative enough when he’s not in a mood, broad-shouldered and energetic, with his father’s stork legs and my woolly dark hair. When he isn’t drawing or painting, he’s playing baseball or guitar. He gets headaches from time to time, and every so often when you’re facing him straight-on you might perceive that slight angling of his left eye, as if its attention has wandered. Sometimes, after practice or a long session playing guitar with his grandfather, I catch him limping or rubbing his arm, and I wonder if the horrors that brushed past us that night have returned to take what is theirs.
This past spring, one of Frankie’s drawings was included in an art fair at his school. Henry and I went to see the piece framed on the wall, a blue ribbon hooked over one corner. The picture, which was done with a set of technical drawing pens sent by Charlie—the same brand I’d bought for Charlie so long before, which he’d never used—was of me sitting in the chaise lounge on the sleeping porch, a book open in my lap. I don’t want to overstate my son’s talent, but there is no question that he has an eye for proportions and light, and that he rendered me well, with my unruly hair and the way I cross my legs when I’m lost in thought. Studying it, I found myself distracted; not by what was on the page, exactly, but by the mood. It’s disconcerting to think of him catching me off guard, steeped in melancholy. Maybe he’d seen me sitting just so on my private porch, orange light gathering beyond the screens. Or maybe he’d seen me in my own world a hundred times, and drew from a composite of memories.
When the art fair was over, I asked Henry to make a color print and mailed the print to Riggs. I included a photograph of me and Frankie standing in front of the picture, my face lit up with pride.
Charlie’s work continues to hang in the Abyss and RZ galleries. One box of mermaids survived Andrew and these showed up shortly after he left. They sold quickly; I bought one of them myself. After the mermaids came the houseboats. Some were shabby like the Lullaby, some glass-walled or strung up with holiday lights, some shingled in cedar shake like the roof of the old stilt house. In a few, you could see the dark, still water where they rest, low hills in the background. I bought two, including one of a boat featured so frequently that I gleaned it was his own, though it just as well might be the one he sees most clearly from his desk.
Seven stilt houses survived Andrew. I’ve been on the bay with Marse and Lidia many times—Frankie refuses to go—but we haven’t visited Stiltsville since the day we went looking for the remains of Charlie’s house. In fact, it’s been so long since I’ve allowed myself to think of the place, of the way it was before Frankie’s accident, that when three months ago Riggs dropped off a box filled with drawings of the houses, I was shocked by the sight of them. There were dozens of each house, all drawn from the perspective of Charlie’s porch, rendered in noon sunlight and late sunset and stormy weather. Sorting through them was like sifting through his memories.
Riggs asked me to organize the drawings and choose two dozen for a show at the Abyss; he gave no explanation for why after all this time the task fell back to me. I worked every night for a week, and Frankie and I saw the show the day it opened. I’d assumed the portraits would inspire Frankie to ask questions about Stiltsville and the summer we’d spent there, and I was right. I told him about fishing and swimming and the jellyfish bloom. I told him about the time we caught a bull shark, about the sunken boat and flattened piano, about the lobsters who came to shed their shells. I said nothing about his language delay or about the accident, which he barely remembers, and very little about Charlie. I know from experience that children understand more than we intend for them to.
I make an effort to mention Graham often, and Frankie claims to remember him well, considering. I’ve told him time and again how much his father would have enjoyed watching him play baseball. I’ve told him that Graham would have been proud to know that Frankie was never afraid of the ball, though I don’t tell him why.
Graham is woven throughout our lives, yes, but so is Charlie. He is here in the house and yard and pool, in the English garden I’ve resurrected around the base of the live oak, and he is with Frankie every time Frankie picks up a pencil or paintbrush. He is even, somehow, in Frankie himself: every so often, when he is drawing or painting, Frankie stands with one foot balanced on top of the other, a stubborn and resolute expression on his face. I like to imagine that at that precise moment, three thous
and miles across the country, Charlie is standing the same way, wearing the same expression.
In that last box of Stiltsville portraits, there was only one lonely drawing of Charlie’s old house. It was at the very bottom of the box, so I came upon it last. In the drawing, the house is crowned by storm clouds and spotlighted by one wide ray of sunlight, surrounded by dark, choppy water. I didn’t send this one to the Abyss; I wasn’t meant to. I stowed it in the drawer where I keep my mermaids. I find that it doesn’t hurt to look at this picture, the way it would have years ago. At least it doesn’t hurt much. There’s the zigzagging dock and crooked staircase and imposing Mansard roof, the wavelets catching the last dregs of sunlight in their slopes. And if you look closely, you can just barely make out a pair of tiny figures holding hands on the porch, poised to leap.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK WAS IMPROVED IMMENSELY by my generous early readers: John Stewart, Miriam Gershow, Joseph O’Malley, and Curtis Sittenfeld. For not only reading but providing in-person encouragement and expertise, I’m so grateful to Jesse Lee Kercheval, Michelle Wildgen, Judith Claire Mitchell, and Jean Reynolds Page. For cheering me on piece by piece and being a steadfast partner in all publishing hijinks, I thank my agent, Emily Forland. Also, I’m so grateful to work again with my smart and tireless editor, Jennifer Barth.
In researching parasomnia, I’m indebted in particular to the short film Sleep Runners, by Carlos H. Schenck, M.D., and to comedian Mike Birbiglia’s hilarious monologue “Sleepwalk with Me,” which originally inspired me to ask the question: what would it be like to live with a parasomniac? I also want to thank Dr. Jeremy Peacock for clarifying details related to parasomnia and selective mutism.
I am so grateful for the generosity of the PEN/American Center and the Bingham family.
For taking the time to share the painful memory of his son’s terrible childhood accident, I thank my friend Rick Corey.
The inspiration for Charlie came from a hermit who lived alone at Stiltsville in the 1980s, whom I never met. I’ve always hoped that, like Charlie, he found a suitable alternative after his stilt house was destroyed in Hurricane Andrew.
For his unfailing support, bravery, and humor throughout our shared adventures, I thank John Stewart.
About the Author
SUSANNA DANIEL was born and raised in Miami, Florida. Her first novel, Stiltsville, was awarded the PEN/Bingham Prize for outstanding debut fiction. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband and two sons.
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Also by Susanna Daniel
Stiltsville
Credits
Cover design by Oliver Munday
Copyright
SEA CREATURES. Copyright © 2013 by Susanna Daniel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daniel, Susanna.
Sea creatures / Susanna Daniel. -- First edition.
p. cm
ISBN 978-0-06-221960-2
1. Families—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction. 3. Mutism--Fiction. 4. Houseboats--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.A5258S43 2013
813'.6—dc23
201203180913
Epub Edition © AUGUST 2013 ISBN: 9780062219626
13 14 15 16 17 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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