The Highest Tide

by Jim Lynch

None of that made me doubt her. All I had to do was watch her eyes, which reflected light from so many angles it was impossible to tell whether she was looking at you, past you or into you. Plus, she read me better than anyone. I made a point of not thinking too loudly around Florence.

  “This is your summer, Miles. This is the summer that defines you.”

  That was the sort of thing she’d been saying ever since school got out, as if she were preparing me for something she knew was over my head. She also kept insisting that she didn’t want to burden me.

  It really didn’t strike me as a burden—at first-to wait on her and save her trips to the medicine cabinet. And in exchange, she increasingly gave me what she thought I needed, including lessons on how to meditate, how to “dream while awake” and how to see auras.

  I tried. I practiced kicking thoughts from my head until it was empty, but instead of leading to meditation it led to even crazier thoughts. And trying to dream while I was wide awake did nothing but make me feel psycho. As for auras, I stared at imaginary dots in the middle of people’s foreheads until my vision blurred, but during a whole week of that I still saw nothing more than confused people looking at me like I had something in my eye. Florence swore I had one of the brightest yellow auras she’d ever seen. I took it as a compliment, but I couldn’t see it no matter how many times I snuck up on myself in mirrors.

  “What did Norman say about it?” She often asked about the judge.

  “About what?”

  “About you rescuing that dog.”

  “He said, That’s my oyster man!”

  Florence grinned. “He adores you. You know that?”

  Sweat lathered my neck like it usually did when I sat in that rocker. Florence kept the thermostat at seventy-nine, and always said things that heated me up.

  “Are you sleeping at all?” She was the only one who knew much about my insomnia.

  “A little,” I explained. “Usually from three in the morning until around seven or eight. Didn’t sleep at all last night though.”

  “You staying up to read or explore?”

  “Both,” I said. “I’ve been reading about how scientists disagree like crazy when it comes to giant squid. Some think they’re probably among the fastest swimmers in the sea, that they’re these great sprinters who dart along at more than thirty miles an hour with their siphons giving them jet propulsion and their two hearts pumping like mad. Can you imagine having two hearts racing inside you? But see, nobody’s actually ever seen them swim, so other scientists insist they’re probably slow and weak for their size, that they just hover in deep water, then wait and watch with those huge eyes until something swims within their grasp. Then they pull their catch to their mouth, which is like aparrot’s beak, but ten times as big, and strong enough to break steel cables. The one thing we know for sure is that sperm whales swallow ‘em whole even though their arms are filled with ammonium chloride, which makes them buoyant, but also probably makes them taste like bleach. Yuck, huh?”

  I told her how Professor Kramer had called the day before to update me on what little they’d learned from studying the giant I’d found. “They were all excited to see what was in her belly because they still don’t know exactly what they eat. Guess what they found: nothing. Maybe she’d been fasting because she’d just spawned. Who knows? Squid were originally called ‘kraken,’ which means ‘uprooted tree,’ which makes perfect sense if you picture one.”

  Florence listened so intently she pulled words out of me, then digested them without those space fillers most grown-ups leaned on—I see . . . anyway. . . at any rate. . .all right then—or those hums, grunts and sighs that don’t mean anything other than perhaps that they weren’t listening at all. Finally, she sat up with a wince and told me to trust my intuition, then half-closed her bottomfish eyes and informed me that something big was going to happen during the next two weeks, something right there in the bay.

  “Bigger than the squid?” I asked, trying to sound captivated.

  “Different.”

  “What?”

  She hated to be pressed. “There also will be a freak tide this fall.”

  “When’s that?”

  “September eighth,” she confided. “It’ll come up higher than anyone expects.”

  I looked away. Maybe Florence used to be a bit psychic, I thought, at least as psychic as people usually ever get. But her gift had apparently exited without saying good-bye. There was no reason for me to think quietly around her anymore. Vague predictions were one thing, but once she crossed into Rachel Carson’s precise world of science she’d left her realm.

  Tide tables were remarkably accurate. Tides were no more likely to blindside us than the sun would rise an hour earlier than expected. Plus, September was known for mild tides.

  “Even science goes haywire sometimes, Miles.”

  I blushed, wishing she’d at least lower her eyelids.

  She caught me looking at her wound again. “Thanks for not telling anyone about this little cut.”

  That was pure Florence. Instead of asking you to keep a secret, she thanked you in advance for preserving it. She flattered instead of burdened.

  “If the state people learn that I occasionally have these little falls,” she said, “they’ll want to move me into a home.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was making a prediction or sharing a fact, but I knew her well enough to see fear.

  The odd thing was it scared me too. Not just because I couldn’t imagine losing her, but because it fit into my growing sensation that everything was shifting beneath me. It wasn’t just my folks’ divorce chitchat. There was the likelihood that Angie would go away to college in September, and maybe the judge would decide that he didn’t need such a big house anymore. Even the bay itself was seemingly shifting into something else-a trophy view for people rich enough to build houses in Sunset Estates.

  I didn’t have any terrific idea how to accomplish it, but my goal for the rest of the summer was to stop things from changing, to keep my bay, as I knew it, intact.

  Maybe Florence heard me thinking, or maybe she was confronting her own ghosts, because her eyes reddened and her swollen knuckles waved me toward her until I was close enough for her to kiss my forehead without getting up.

  CHAPTER 8

  A FTER SLEEPING HARD for a few hours I woke to an empty house and a note: “Dad’s going to the M’s game with the 3 Dons and I’m meeting Aunt Janet at a play in Seattle. Be home late. Leftover tuna loaf in fridge, ramen in cupboard. Love, Mom.”

  What read like a routine night out suddenly sounded ominous. The three Dons were no longer just my father’s festive buddies who called me their main man. They were three old divorced bachelors my mother called permanent teenagers. And Aunt Janet wasn’t just my mother’s wealthy sister anymore, but someone who never seemed to like my father, something he’d occasionally point out hours after she left with some glancing comment that my mother usually ignored. I ate two bowls of Cheerios staring at my parents’ wedding photo. It looked like a different couple. Time had erased their cheekbones and dulled their eyes and skin the way ocean surf rounds and fades rocks until they all look the same.

  I emptied and loaded the dishwasher before finding my mother’s to-do list atop an avalanche of unopened mail. The dusting and vacuuming was easy enough, as was weeding the roses. I tried cleaning the oven with dishwashing soap, but that was hopeless, and I couldn’t find the toilet scrubber so I poured a ton of Comet in the bowl and flushed. Then I turned the bathroom scale back three pounds and headed out to Chatham Cove feeling hopeful about everything.

  When I hooked up with Phelps, I could tell right off that something was different.

  He kept asking in his roundabout way about tidal life. I’d seen it creeping up on him. You can only keep your curiosity down for so long out there. Eventually you want to know.

  So I started at the top of the beach amid the jumble of logs, rocks and root wads. “mis is the roughest part of Tidal To
wn,” I said. “Basically only barnacles and mussels are tough enough to handle the waves, weather and birds. Mussels can hack it because they spin anchor lines that attach to anything. Barnacles are even tougher. Their conical shape fends off waves, and they secrete a natural glue that permanently fixes them to wherever they land as babies.” Phelps was obviously fading so I asked him how he figured they reproduce.

  “By getting girl barnacles drunk?”

  “Think about it,” I urged. “They can’t move. They’re stuck for life wherever they land. So how do they get pregnant?”

  He shrugged. “Immaculate conception?”

  “Nope. Their penises are rolled up like fire hoses inside their shells. When the time is right, they unfurl them and feel around outside their shells for willing mates to shoot their sperm inside.”

  Phelps laughed. “Come on. Fire hoses?”

  “That’s right. A barnacle’s penis can be four times as long as the diameter of its base. So, yeah, those four-inch-wide giant barnacles you see along the coast are packing sixteen-inch penises.”

  Phelps pointed at a log half-crusted with tiny barnacles. “These guys are the studs of the beach?”

  I showed him a hermit crab shopping for a larger shell, its antennae-ball eyes looking both ways before it dashed from its undersized shell into one left behind by a mudflat snail. The crab tried it on, but found it too heavy and hurried back into its old shell. “They’ve got little suction cups on their butts,” I said, “that help them secure themselves in there.”

  Phelps yawned.

  I pointed out striped, quarter-sized limpets that looked like Chinese coolie hats. I told him Aristotle himself marveled at their homing instinct that allows them to slide snail-like around the beach, scraping up food, before returning to the exact same spot. It struck me right then that I needed to alert somebody that old Florence was already a limpet and on her way to becoming as stuck as a barnacle.

  As we neared the tidal line I reminded Phelps that sea stars can regrow lost legs, and that severed legs can grow new mouths and bodies as well. Then I explained that there were millions of microscopic critters living on top of the water and in between grains of sand, and that someone recently counted two hundred different species in one square yard of gravel, sand and mud off Whiskey Point.

  I turned over rocks and found longer worms and more crabs than I expected, to the point I thought maybe it was time to coax Professor Kramer out on the flats to ask him about the changes. I showed Phelps how sand dollars travel by moving one grain of sand at a time with their tiny, glistening Velcro-like feet. “And do you realize that all sand comes from rock, and eventually all rock breaks down to sand and falls into the sea, which makes the ocean saltier?”

  Phelps groaned. “Except for that stuff about the barnacle peckers that was some of the boringest shit I’ve heard since school got out.”

  I couldn’t even look at him.

  “Cheer up,” he said. “I brought some real entertainment.” He pulled a brittle copy of The God father from his backpack and started reading some scene that began on page twenty-seven—he knew the sexy page numbers by heart—in which some imaginary woman described how big this imaginary Sonny was to her friends, then suddenly Huge Imaginary Sonny was having his way with one of those imaginary friends, fast and rough, with no more romantic conversation than strangers at a Laundromat.

  Something about it made me feel defensive, as did most of the crap I heard directly or indirectly about what girls wanted. Tall, dark and handsome? I was short, pink and ordinary. My size, I was beginning to fear, put me on the outside of romance, like a frog who couldn’t croak loud enough to attract a female.

  “How ‘bout them apples?” Phelps threw his entire face into a leer.

  “You would like that,” I muttered. “Bigger is better. Might is right. All that crap. That’s so you.”

  His mouth fell open. “Crap? Are you doubting Mario Puzo?”

  “You’re in love with Mario Puzo,” I snapped.

  “You’re ridiculous.”

  “Just because you read someone’s made-up sex lies doesn’t make you an expert on love.” I instantly regretted my choice of words.

  “Love?” Phelps cried. “Who’s talking love? What do you think love is anyway, Squid Boy?”

  “Love means you’d do almost anything for someone even if you knew you’d get nothing in return.” I couldn’t stop myself. I’d been thinking about rescuing Angie again, and for some reason I was furious. “You’d even do it anonymously!”

  Phelps looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “That is so fucked up.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Love isn’t charity. Love is doing fun stuff for each other. You bring her flowers and she takes off her shirt. Stuff like that.”

  “What’s the difference,” I demanded, “between that and going to Seattle and paying a prostitute to let you feel her up?’’

  That stopped him. “You’d be paying someone you don’t even know,” he said finally. “Plus, it would be more expensive and not as fun.”

  “So, love is affordable, fun sex with someone you know?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “Me? I’m not the one who was caught French-kissing chocolate Labs.”

  “You’re fired,” I said, walking away.

  He laughed. “On what grounds?”

  “Being a jerk,” I shouted over my shoulder.

  “You know that’s not a fireable ofense.”

  Phelps followed me into the water, chatting away, trying to reel me back. I wouldn’t give him anything, even though I was dying to ask him how much warning he’d had before his parents got divorced, and how long he’d lived in that apartment before his mother married his stepdad, and, most importantly, how much say he’d had in picking his stepdad or their next house.

  But I still couldn’t even look at him. It’s hard to see anything when you’re that angry, which is probably why it took a giant sea cucumber lounging in a foot of water to get my attention.

  It wasn’t fair to the cucumber or Phelps what happened next, but who’s any good at defending decisions they make when they’re pissed?

  “The hell is that?” he asked.

  It was at least sixteen inches long and red enough to sell to the aquariums. But I wasn’t thinking about money.

  I held it evenly and gently at my waist with both hands until Phelps reached for it. I handed it to him gingerly and stepped back.

  He studied it intently, trying to patch things up with me. When he turned it lengthwise and looked down into its flowering end it ejected its red, stringy innards with such force they splattered against the right side of his head.

  From where I stood it looked like half of Phelps’s face had been shot off. He didn’t make a sound. He just one-eyed me in total astonishment.

  I took the deflated animal from his long fingers and set it back into the bay to recuperate, then yanked off my shirt and handed it to him.

  “You knew that would happen.” He wiped his face and splashed it repeatedly.

  When frightened, sea cucumbers have this strange ability to vomit their organs, then amazingly and quickly regrow them once they’re out of danger. I’d never actually seen them do it, but I’d read about it and had my hopes.

  He continued splashing his face. As the water settled beneath him I felt relief at the sight of his reflected smile.

  Calm open water amplifies voices. Quiet conversations are overheard a hundred yards away. So it’s safe to say that you probably could have heard our laughter from a couple miles.

  CHAPTER 9

  T HE NIGHT OF July seventeenth was attached to one of those forgettable summer days when everyone is so slowed and dazed by heat it seems nothing memorable is capable of happening other than a sunset that turns as purple as the inside of a mussel shell.

  Shoreside temperatures along South Sound usually swing between forty and sixty degrees, with summer offering more of the same
until it suddenly broils into the eighties and nineties for a few weeks, the aggressive heat feeling like a fabulous mistake, as if tropical weather had been sent to the wrong zip code. When the sun sets, though, the temperature falls with it the way it does in the mountains, but in this case it’s the ocean, not the altitude, chilling the air. Any breeze blowing off the north Pacific is refrigerated by cold deep water unless the sun is around to bake it. So T-shirt nights are as novel as blizzards to kids growing up along the Sound. And this was one of those nights, with the added attraction that every paddle stroke lit up the water like a wet torch.

  Phosphorescent nights turn paddles into magic wands and children into wizards. I indulged the fantasy for years until Professor Kramer made it even richer by explaining what was really going on. During certain plankton blooms the bay gets so dense with luminescent plants and animals the size of dust motes and smaller that they slam into each other and light up whenever the water stirs. Such nights often go unnoticed in calm inland waters, but they’re hard to miss on the coast when waves light up as they crash ashore. The professor’s explanation helped me understand how much denser life is in the sea than the air, as did learning that hundred-foot blue whales survive on rice-sized shrimplike krill, which if you think about it, is like elephants living on gnats.

  So the heat wave and the phosphorescence pulled me onto the bay, and I didn’t bring bags or a shovel because I wasn’t looking for anything beyond my flashing paddle and whatever else flickered in the quietest hours. I sat too low to see much beyond the light I created and the flash of fish darting past like shooting stars, but the luminous thrashing off Penrose Point was dramatic enough to pull me off course.

  I assumed it was the work of a playful seal or wrestling birds, yet it seemed too intense for them to sustain. It went on for so long that I had time to paddle a quarter mile to take a look. I slowed as I neared, not wanting to get all the way up on something so frenzied before I knew what it was. When I got as close as I dared, I flicked on my headlamp—the batteries were fading—and felt as if I’d paddled into one of those old seafaring yarns in which captains swore they saw multiarmed monsters writhing on the surface.