The Highest Tide

by Jim Lynch

  After he finished the article, he swallowed three Motrin before saying anything. When he spoke, it was to gently scold me for visiting the cult without telling him. Then he twitched his head, blew his nose and asked, “Do you feel like maybe something supernatural is going on with you, Miles?”

  I gave that some thought. “I feel like I always feel.”

  “So then where is all this headed?”

  “What?”

  “Well, where do you come up with comments like the one about God being in nothing or everything?”

  “I was answering a question.”

  “Why are you telling a bunch of strangers some crazy prediction about the tide coming up too high in September?”

  “It just came out that way.”

  “But, I mean, what is your goal? Are you trying to scare people or change people—or change society?”

  He hadn’t raised his voice, but I was getting yelled at.

  “I don’t want to change anything,” I mumbled. “I like things the way they are—the way they were.”

  He stopped, pressed a finger against his temple, then said, “Your mother loves you, Miles.”

  I looked past him to the sparkling bay. “Can I go outside?”

  He held up the newspaper. “I’m uneasy about all this. Okay? And I don’t know if it’s because I don’t like it for you, or if I don’t like it for me, but I don’t like it. I’ve never wanted attention. Okay? The worst part of getting married was having everyone looking at me. And I can’t even eat before staff meetings because I’ve got to pretend I’ve got the answers. Okay? And I’m such a lousy reader I have a hard time reading a goddamn newspaper article. So I guess I’m uncomfortable being the Joe Blow father of some speed-reading genius or chiid prophet or whatever it is people are trying to turn you into.”

  It was more than I’d ever heard my father tell me about himself, so it took me a few breaths to respond. “You don’t have to talk to anyone,” I said. “And I don’t want to talk to anyone. And this should blow over pretty quick anyway, right?”

  He smiled for the first time that morning, rubbed my head too hard, gave me a clumsy half-hug and returned an urgent message from my mother.

  She kept asking if I needed help. Her voice was always louder on the phone, as if she barely trusted the technology. She said while it was flattering that so many people had said such nice and bizarre things about me, it had clearly gotten out of hand.

  Then she warned me to stay away from the cult. She tried to pick her words, but I knew her lips were bloodless before she sputtered to a stop, then asked to speak to Dad again.

  “Well, we are separated,” he whined. “Yes, I know I was quoted in the damn story, but I didn’t know.” Then he shouted: “How could I know?” He shoved the phone back at me.

  She asked again whether I needed her.

  The night she left she’d argued with my father for so long in the driveway that I’d had time to look for things she forgot. It wasn’t easy. She’d obviously packed for a long stay. Even her sweaters were gone. When I stepped outside and handed over her favorite pillow, she looked away and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. Then she just pushed meaningless words around until she kissed the top of my head and stranded us in gravel.

  I weighed her question. Did I need her? Whatever she wanted to hear I wanted to tell her the opposite. “No,” I said firmly. “I really don’t.”

  It sounded like a salmon bone caught in her throat, then she told me to remember to eat, and to tell any reporter who wanted to interview me that they needed to talk to my mother first. She gave me Aunt Janet’s number—even though I’d memorized it years ago—and made me repeat it. She said she’d try to make it down during the next couple days and hung up midway through her good-bye.

  Dad studied me. “What’d she want?”

  “Nothing.”

  Our house felt unbearably hot. He stared at me, waiting. “She wanted to know if I needed help.”

  He groaned. “Your mother has fallen out of love with me, not you. And I personally think she’s fallen out of love with herself. So telling her you don’t need her doesn’t help anything.”

  “I’m going outside.”

  Florence and Yvonne treated my breathless question like a punch line.

  After she stopped laughing, Florence assured me that auras can’t be photographed and that nobody’s was as prominent as my golden halo in the newspaper. Plus, the color was way off, a bright sunshiny gold, instead of my soft yellow.

  Yvonne visited so rarely and usually so late at night that I hadn’t seen her since spring, but a decade might as well have slipped past. She held a cane across her thighs and looked winded just sitting in the rocker.

  She asked me if I’d noticed the color of Mrs. Powers’s aura. “I haven’t seen anybody’s yet,” I said, “not even mine. And I don’t know how anyone could tell where that lady’s aura begins and her cotton-candy hair ends.”

  Yvonne’s laugh sounded so much like a duck it seemed strange to hear it indoors.

  “Attention changes people,” Florence said suddenly, “even strong, humble young people.”

  She offered more vague warnings that I ignored while I surveyed the fridge. I was relieved to see milk, bread, eggs, apples, cottage cheese and lots of almonds, but something about Yvonne’s ability to deliver groceries made me feel lazy and useless until I heard Florence telling her how great she’d been feeling, how well she’d been getting around, and how a pleasant state case worker by the name of Julie Winslow was outfitting her with all sorts of helpful items.

  Maybe I didn’t show up with magical bags of food, but I was the only person Florence Dalessandro trusted.

  Phelps swung by later with Blister, Bugeyes, and the Collins brothers, who were a year apart but still looked like twins or at least splices from the same plant.

  Phelps had them all bowing and addressing me as “your lordship.” It was ridiculous. I told them to knock it off, but I didn’t see the downside yet. I didn’t hear the avalanche coming.

  By Monday, variations of the same story were reprinted throughout the country, including a brief article on the front of USA Today with a headline that just said: KID MESSIAH? SO many people called—none of them paid attention to time zones—that my father had our number changed before he’d finished his second cup of coffee.

  See, it was late August, and there were no hurricanes or elections or wars or Olympics or little girls caught in wells to report. Amazingly enough, I was the story of the day. And it wasn’t just reporters wanting a slice of me. The Washington Environmental Council, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club all wanted me to praise their causes, which I usually didn’t understand even after they explained them. People for Puget Sound showed up to crown me as the state’s Environmentalist of the Year, which seemed odd seeing how the year still had four months to go. I held up that award and smiled, but didn’t know where to put it afterward and noticed their smirks when I folded it into a square small enough to cram into a pocket.

  Strangers clustered around the bridge and the tavern like fish around pilings by late afternoon. Some even ventured down our driveway, then returned to the tavern, the bridge or vacant beach lots when their knocks went unanswered. As the tide fell, people waded out toward where six of us were goofing on the mud bars. Most of them either cut their feet or retreated once the mud softened, but several eventually made it. They weren’t actually interrupting anythlng special, but it felt like an intrusion, and Phelps intercepted them with his fuck-you bangs to inform them I wasn’t doing any more interviews.

  They, of course, insisted they weren’t reporters—hree called themselves Eleusinians—but they repeated the same boring questions. And I said as little as possible until all of them lost interest except for the intense, long-necked, black-haired man who resembled a cormorant at feeding time.

  “Do you believe some higher force is guiding you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What about visions? Do you h
ave visions?”

  I shrugged.

  “Do you talk to God?” he pressed.

  “I talk to myself at times, and maybe He overhears some ofthat.” Phelps snorted behind me.

  “Then how did you hear about that extraordinary tide on September eighth?” He sounded urgent. “Who or what made you predict that?”

  “Someone I trust.”

  “A voice?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did it sound like?”

  “Like an old lady.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has that voice steered you right before?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He bent toward me, unblinking, his nose packed with so many black hairs I was surprised he could breathe. “Do you believe this bay has healing powers?”

  “I’m not a doctor.”

  “Are you a child of faith?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But—”

  “That’s enough.” Phelps stepped forward. “Sorry, but Mr. O’Malley is answering so many questions that he isn’t getting a chance to make new discoveries. You understand. Thank you for your interest.”

  Phelps ushered me away, carrying himself in a way that you didn’t notice he added up to just 118 pounds. “That fucker was freaking me out,” he said. “We’re charging for interviews fi-om now on. Ten bucks a pop. No discounts.”

  “We?” I said.

  “Everything’s fifty-fifty with us,” Phelps replied. “Deal’s a deal.” He lit a Kent and popped two smoke rings through a larger one over water so calm they hung in the air like thought bubbles.

  We waded farther out as the tide continued falling on its way to a minus-two-point-seven. There were far more people watching us than I’d realized. Spencer Spit twitched with spectators, and I counted three kayaks and two canoes gliding our way.

  “Keep the riffraff off our lordship here,” Phelps instructed Blister and the rest of our posse, then urged me to do something freaky. So I squatted, spread my arms out as if performing some martial arts warm-up and started slapping the smooth water top. I drummed hard. It made a more interesting sound than you might imagine. Once Phelps and the boys stopped laughing they mimicked my stance, and soon all six of us were splashing the same rhythm. “Skoo-kum-chuck!” I chanted. They joined me in their deepest cannibal voices. “Skoo-kum-chuck! Skoo-kum-chuck!” Binoculars and cameras popped out along the shore. Two canoes closed on us, and someone jogged out on the flats with a television camera. “Skoo-kum-chuck!”

  After our arms tired, I watched the water recover around us, waiting for it to clear and the sun’s reflection to settle until I realized it wasn’t the sun’s image at all. It was orange and shimmered on the surface, but its light came from below.

  The closer I got the brighter it looked. I assumed it was a sunken fluorescent buoy or a bottle of orange soda until I saw how it waved in the current like a giant foot-high feather.

  Bugeyes was the first to notice what I was marveling at. “What the fuck is that?”

  Two canoes unloaded and the jogging cameraman puffed to within fifteen yards of us. Others scampered—three limped—more easily across the mud now that it was less than an hour before low tide.

  “Here we go again, ladies and gentlemen,” Phelps said in his best circus voice. I looked up at an audience thick enough to block the sun. TV cameras rolled. I recognized some of the heart-attack faces as cult members.

  “What is it?” someone asked.

  “A Ptilosarcus gurneyi,” I said, and smiled.

  “Would you repeat that?”

  I did, and spelled it too.

  “So what exactly is that?”

  “It’s also called a sea pen, because, I guess, it looks like one of those old-fashioned pens.”

  “Tell us more,” someone with a microphone pleaded.

  “Well, for starters it’s an animal, not a plant.” People hummed and tittered. “And it’s actually dozens of animals in one. Each one of its little branches is an independent mouth. So it’s kinda like a bunch of sea anemones who got together and decided to dress up like a colorful plant so they could trick small fish and other sea life into swimming close enough to grab them. And all the mouths share one digestive system.” I smiled and heard camera shutters. “Weird, huh?”

  It was probably my speeding heart, or the way people blocked the glare, but the closer everyone huddled the brighter the sea pen looked. “And this is the biggest and orangest one I’ve seen,” I said, “although all the others have been at aquariums.”

  “What led you to it?” someone asked.

  “I thought it was the reflection of the sun.”

  “Is there a voice in your head telling you where to look?”

  I didn’t answer that.

  “How old are you?” someone else asked.

  I didn’t answer that either. I didn’t want to hear murmurs about how I looked younger than someone’s ten-year-old when I was a month and a half away fi-om fourteen.

  I waded to the far side of the sea pen so everyone could see it, then squatted behind it. I reached down slowly, stroked it gently and it gave off a green light, a sudden, unmistakable green flash.

  People swore, the cormorant crossed himself and my scalp tingled the way your foot does after you sit on it too long.

  “Why’d it turn green?” someone demanded.

  The sun sparkled through the crowd and blinded me, so I rested my eyes in the other direction long enough to make out the red sea star, poking three legs out from beneath sea lettuce fifteen feet from the sea pen. It wasn’t a big star, but big enough. I waded toward it, waved the lettuce aside and pointed it out to more gasps.

  “What kind of starfish is that?” someone demanded.

  “A Master aepualis,” I said. “It’s one of the few stars that eats sea pens.” I smiled again for the cameras. “They smell like firecrackers if you hold them up to your nose.”

  I handed it to some lady who looked like she had the chickenpox.

  “Why’d that plant turn green?” someone asked again. Others echoed the question.

  Through a gap in the mob, I saw Angie and the judge shufling along their waterfront, their somber gaits making them look like impostors. When Angie turned, I waved theatrically, but got nothing back and instantly felt ridiculous. And selfish. And motherless.

  It surprised me to already miss her, though not in the way I expected. It was more like the hollowness you feel when you’ve misplaced something important.

  I was so distracted I didn’t hear the questions other than what to do with the sea pen. “Leave it alone,” I said, “and keep that star away from it.”

  I strode, head down, toward Florence’s house, hating myself for not having checked on her all day, ignoring the pleas to coax me back, questions and demands flitting around me like bats.

  My eyes blurred counting shoeprints on the flats. People were everywhere. I didn’t recognize the bay or anyone on it, including myself.

  CHAPTER 25

  T HE BAY CONTINUED to attract strange crowds for days, so I either collected clams in Chatham Cove with Phelps or hid behind curtains with Florence to avoid the questions. My father got so fed up he chased a herd of reporters off our doorstep and shouted: “It’s over!” He also posted No Trespassing signs in the driveway, and one of the Dons staked a poster with a red slash through the word media. And the story finally eased away from me to the sudden pilgrimage of Russians to Skookumchuck Bay.

  There were still curious cult members and locals wandering about, but we increasingly saw old cars full of people who crawled out speaking some loud language with voices that could motivate sled dogs. The old ladies wore huge scarves on their heads, and the men were wide-boned with large faces. TV told us most of them were Russians and Ukrainians who’d settled south of Seattle and who routinely drove across the state to Soap Lake, where even some doctors claimed the lake’s silky mud and mineral-rich water healed certain skin conditions. AU
sorts of other people showed up on the bay too, including Canadians who’d heard things were happening here, that the mud or water had cured gout, and that people were seeing things. One of the most-repeated stories, unfortunately, was about a little boy who not only discovered a giant squid but turned a large underwater sea plant from orange to green just by touching it.

  The murmurs kept people coming, and no announcements or denials or TV reporters explaining the color-changing capabilities of sea pens discouraged them. Skookumchuck Bay turned into the last stop on the summer road trip for people hoping to see miracles or to find relief from psoriasis, arthritis and everything from cancer to diaper rash. Caravans of dusty cars filled the meadows and sandy lots around the tavern and packed the overgrown driveway leading to the cabin rented by Hal Clinton, better known as Hallelujah Hal because of the way he routinely prayed beneath a massive cross he’d built out of four-by-fours and hung from a cedar limb near the beach.

  It was obvious Hal had welcomed the visitors because whenever the wind and traffic died, we could hear Russian voices praying beneath his cross. We also saw the strangers in front of his cabin, splashing into our cold, muddy bay as if it were a community pool, swimming aimlessly or wading to their hips and dunking their heads and especially their babies until their cries blended with the whining gulls and the scolding herons.

  But that wasn’t the weirdest part.

  The Russians started it, but soon there were others wading to their knees, scooping up the slickest, stinkiest, blackest mud they could find, and rubbing it over themselves and each other as if it were sunscreen. Some covered their entire bodies, then baked in the sun along the scrubby lip of the shore. Once they were stiff and flaky dry, they waded back out, rinsed off, lathered up with a new batch and did it all over again—no matter how ridiculous it looked or how many television cameras watched.

  My reports on all that revived Florence, or perhaps her growing fear of nursing homes scared her body into improving. Regardless, she was a different lady for a few days: joking, shuMing with confidence and even eating more. But when I swung by that Thursday to make lunch, Julie Winslow opened the door as if she owned it.