The Highest Tide

by Jim Lynch

  “We were just talking about you,” she chirped. “I’m delighted you’re here.”

  Florence was in her chair, forcing a smile, smelling like pee.

  Julie Winslow showed off the new equipment she’d brought: an elevated toilet seat, a walker, an aluminum shower seat and even new silverware with oversized handles.

  She also told me Florence’s “team” now included a nutritionist, an occupational therapist and an equipment specialist. The hardest part of it for me was watching Florence fake gratitude.

  “She seems nice,” I said, afler Julie Winslow left.

  “Exactly,” Florence said. “Seems.”

  “You still don’t trust her.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  So I talked about how I was dreading the dang “BioBlitz” that was supposedly coming to town in less than ten days. I couldn’t even stand the name of it.

  We kept hearing about what a huge deal it was going to be. Never before had more than seventy scientists agreed to assemble to survey the biology and botany of a public waterway on such short notice! And never before had the findings of one child galvanized such a grand response from the scientific community! That one killed me. What if they went to all this trouble and didn’t find anything the slightest bit unusual? What if I’d already found the few peculiarities in our bays? What if these superimportant scientists interrupted their mankind-saving work just because some stupid reporters wrote some ridiculous half-true stories about me?

  “Stop it!” Florence snarled. “Quit being so childish.”

  I would have rather been slapped.

  “You are not responsible for what happens on this bay, or for what people do based on what you find or what you say about what you saw. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t risk a response. I just waited for whatever else she had for me.

  “Julie Winslow is determined to put me in a home,” she announced.

  “She said that?” I whispered.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why’d she bring out all this stuff to make it easier for you here?”

  “To create a file. She can’t just send me to a home, thank God, but if I ever take a ride in an ambulance the hospital discharge officer will review her file on me and recommend assisted living. And you know what that is, don’t you? That’s a nice way of saying nursing home, which is a place where people sit in wheelchairs shitting themselves. You do realize I eventually won’t be able to talk, right?” Her voice strained. “How am I going to tell them what I need if I can’t talk?You’re smart, Miles. You know me. Don’t look away! You think I haven’t seen the way this ends? Eventually I won’t be able to swallow! You think I would allow that?” Her big eyes twitched. “Have you told anyone about my falls?”

  I was blown back by her question and frightened by her tone. “You told me—”

  “Yes, I know what I told you, but perhaps you asked your parents or Norman what to do, and one of them called the state.”

  I wanted to tell her what the judge had said about calling her neurologist, and remind her of the reporter who’d written about her living conditions. Most of all, I wanted to ask her how she could doubt me.

  Her glassy eyeballs reflected light from everywhere. “I’m sorry, Miles.” She reached for me, and I flinched. “The books will be yours,” she said calmly. “So will the cabin and the land.”

  I wasn’t about to argue with her or thank her.

  “There might be something to clean up,” she said after a sigh so long it made her slouch. “I’m sorry about that. I truly am. It’s unfair for me to burden you, but I already have and I’m not through yet.” She slowed her breathing and drifted into her half-lidded state.

  “Please don’t say anything,” she said. “’Just get me some water, and let’s enjoy some silence together. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  It sounded like the terms of our friendship had changed yet again.

  CHAPTER 26

  P HELPS TURNED UP his radio and shouted insights about the double meaning of the lyrics, all of which, of course, had to do with sex.

  “Turn that crap off,” I said after the second song.

  “Crap?”

  “It scares clams. They’re sensitive to vibrations.”

  Phelps snorted. “So what?”

  “SO they’ll dive down,” I lied, “and we won’t make any money.”

  “You don’t even give me regular smoke breaks, and now you want to turn off my lunch tunes? You know what the National Labor Relations Board would say about that? Music is my future.”

  “Yeah, I hear tons of guys make a good living playing air guitar.”

  “You’re a jealous fuck. And you know why? You have no musical talent.”

  That was true. I’d played the trumpet for three years, and all I was known for was getting a silver mute stuck on my left pinky. Try hiding that in your armpit during algebra whiie your finger swells. I eventually had to go to the fire department to get the dang thing sawed off.

  “Would you play Zeppelin in church?” I asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, this is my church.”

  Phelps glanced around at Chatham’s half-exposed flats. “I don’t see any crucifmes.”

  I started to tell him about that blue sea star I’d found, then fortunately caught myself. “You are one sorry . . .fuck,” I said.

  He told me that he should stomp my puny ass, but I could tell he was flattered that I’d used his lingo, and he turned down Zeppelin, then shut it off once the song ended.

  As we grabbed our shovels, I loosened him up with more stories about the mud healers, then got around to asking him how often he saw his real dad.

  Phelps gave me the only laugh I ever heard him fake. “Let’s see,” he said, pretending to count with his fingers, “the answer to that would be . . . never.” He dug harder than usual for the next couple hours, as if he were pissed at the clams, stabbing and scooping sand and mud with the intensity of a swordsman.

  There was an excited pop to Pansing’s voice later that aflernoon when he saw the two geoducks Phelps had unearthed. His restaurant was hosting something called a “trade delegation,” and the Chinese, he told me, couldn’t resist geoduck caught the same day.

  He packed the huge clams in a cooler along with a half-bucket of manilas and eighteen butters, then handed me two creased twenties and waved off my ten.

  I told him I’d take him fishing on Skookumchuck once I saved enough to buy a Lund. “The twelve-footers are perfect for fishing,” I explained. “They’re so sturdy you can stand up in them. And I bet I can get one for about five hundred, maybe four-fifty, if I wait until somebody gets tired of watching one rust in their yard.”

  “Okay.” He nodded. “I bring the rods.”

  He didn’t look at me when he said that, and no matter how much I stalled, he still only stayed long enough to roll and smoke one cigarette, which screwed me up because I’d hoped he’d still be there, puffing casually, when B.J. showed up.

  My problem was the aquariums wouldn’t send anyone down anymore. So unless I got a ride to Tacoma I couldn’t sell the white sea cucumber, the two sea lemons or the enormous Bering hermit I’d found. So I’d reluctantly called B.J.’s answering machine, laid out the prices and gave him a time to swing by if he was interested.

  I noticed the fresh dent in the driver’s door when he pulled up, then watched him crawl across his shifter so that he could shoulder his way out the passenger side. He wore oil-stained cowboy boots and a dirty tank top that showed off explosions of red armpit hair. “Let’s see “em,” he said, then burped.

  “You owe me five dollars.” I dragged my sneaker in the gravel like a bull preparing to charge.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll work it into the total.”

  “No, I want it now.” I was surprised by how firm I sounded.

  B.J. mock-laughed, as if I’d shared a bad joke. “Let’s see what you got.”

  “
You owe me five.”

  He narrowed his eyes, then started toward the garage door.

  I redesigned the gravel at my feet. “It’s locked,” I said.

  That turned him around and sent him back to me with long purposeful strides, squiggly veins bulging at his temples. “You playing hardball with me?”

  “I’m not getting ripped off anymore.” I hadn’t even practiced that line. My heart felt like a fan with something stuck in it.

  “You ungrateful little shit.” He smelled like old milk. “You’re lucky I even waste my time coming out here.”

  I didn’t risk trying to speak, but I didn’t look away either.

  Finally, he pulled out a fold of bills, found a five among the ones, wadded it up and flung it at my chest. I caught it on the bounce and stepped back.

  “Now open the goddamn door,” he hissed.

  Something in his tone stopped scaring me. “It’s twenty-five for what I got in there.”

  “You already told me that! Open the fucking door—now.”

  Nobody had ever ordered me to open a door before. “Not unless you give me the twenty-five up front.”

  B.J. spoke through his teeth. “I’m not buying a damn thing I haven’t seen.”

  “’I’ll give you your money back if you decide you don’t want “em,” I said. “But I’m getting paid up front from now on.”

  “Open the door.” There was a crazy light in his eyes, and his nickel-sized nostrils quivered like he was getting ready to do something that required a lot of air.

  I strolled head down toward the garage, surprised I could walk, surprised my hand was steady enough to insert the key and surprised how quickly I slipped inside, slammed the door and flipped the dead bolt.

  B.J. told me to open the motherfucking door. Then I heard his boot heel ram it. The whole garage shook. He did it again, the door rattling. Then he tried to reason with me in that teeth-clenched way before halfheartedly kicking the door one last time. After some muttering, he shouted that I now owed him twenty for wasting his fucking time. He laughed until he spat, then I heard him climbing into his car. Finally, he revved his engine so loud that I scampered to the far wall of the garage just in case he rammed that baby-blue El Camino right through it.

  I watched a whole Mariners game that night with my father. It was the first time I’d seen nine entire innings—all 238 pitches—of baseball. The game took three hours and eighteen minutes, or more than half the time it takes for the moon, the sun and the earth to perform an entire tidal shift.

  We watched from our couch with the sound loud, which was comforting because the house had turned into a library without my mother’s rants, impressions and one-sided debates with newscasters. Not even the phone was ringing. Nobody but Phelps, the three Dons and Mom knew our new number, and she hadn’t called or visited during the five days since I’d told her that I didn’t need her. My father added to the strangeness by pacing in his slippers and talking in a wet mumble that didn’t sound like anyone I knew. He’d picked up a cold that kept getting worse, which I considered further proof that my mother was already the doctor she’d wanted to be.

  Colds, flus, sprains, cuts and other illness or ailments were helpless against her. She killed viruses with garlic, grapefruits and her “fm-me-up” soup—some tasty mush of carrots, potatoes and onions. She second-guessed doctors, built her own splints and plucked our stitches herself. Our miseries brought out a side of her she rarely wasted on the healthy. More than once, I hoped my fever wouldn’t break because my mother only sang to me when I was burning up.

  I washed our clothes between innings, all my father’s first, then all mine. My mother would have flipped, but I never understood why whites had to be washed separately. How white do underpants really need to be? I waited until the seventh-inning stretch to ask if we could get a dog yet.

  Dad teared up at the question. Like I said, it didn’t take much. United Airlines commercials could break him. “You know your mother doesn’t want a dog, Sport.”

  I stared at him until he said, “What about when she comes back?”

  I stalled and waited and rehearsed, but I didn’t find a single moment in that marathon evening to ask him what to do about Florence.

  “Wake up, Angie.”

  She was facedown in her thick pink pillow, trylng to suffocate herself.

  I tapped the arch of her right foot dangling off the mattress and asked her again to get up.

  Then I tried once more, and she finally rolled onto a shoulder and slitted an eye.

  “Got something to show you,” I said.

  “Later, Miles,” she mumbled. “I’m crashed.”

  “It’s eleven forty-five.”

  “Why do people always tell me what time it is?” She rolled back into the pillow.

  “You’ve gotta come see this.”

  “Later.”

  “It won’t be there later. It’s a right-now thing. Might already be too late.”

  “What is it?”

  “That’ll ruin it.”

  She rolled her head to my side. “You’ve already ruined my sleep.”

  “Please.”

  “I’m not getting up to see some interesting starfish,” she whispered. “I don’t care if you found a sunken pirate ship. Got it?”

  “You’re awake now anyway.”

  Her entire right leg slipped out and my breath popped out of me. She then rolled onto her back beneath the sheets until her left leg swung over the side and hinged at the knee. Her hair was matted, curly and everywhere, like a drawing I’d seen of Medusa. She opened her eyes enough to squint all the way down to my dripping feet. “You dragged mud through the judge’s house?”

  “He’s not here,” I said. “Won’t you get up?”

  She stretched double-jointed arms toward the ceiling. “This is the only time of day I feel like me.” I could see all the way into the hollows of her armpits, and it occurred to me that she slept naked. “Those pills take the me out of me. And if I’m not me, I don’t even want to be around me. You know what I mean?”

  “I’ll wait outside until you get dressed, but hurry, okay?”

  “You’ve got your mother’s impatient eyebrow,” she said.

  She didn’t leave the house until she’d reheated coffee that the judge had left her before he’d gone to church. She poured it into a Styrofoam cup, but it was still too hot for her fingers, so she slid the first cup into a second one that took forever to find. By the time we finally got way out on the flats in front of Florence’s, the egg sacks were partially submerged, yet still clung together like the head of a huge daisy with see-through petals encasing what looked like lentils.

  “They’re butterfly squid eggs,” I said. “And they’re not eggs from just one little squid. That’s the crazy part. It probably took eight females to lay this out.”

  “No way.’’ She studied me. “How could they time their spawning together, and why would they bother to make it look pretty?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe their eggs have a better chance of surviving when they’re laid alongside others. Maybe it’s group art, like when the whole fifth grade painted that mural on the side of the Morningstar restaurant. Who knows? I just read about this tiny salt marsh snail that has to climb a tall blade of grass or drown every time the tide comes in. So what sort of alarm warns it to start climbing to safety every twelve hours?”

  I wasn’t sure if Angie was smiling with me, at me or at something completely unrelated. “Is this it? Is this what you woke me up to see?” She tried to sound pissed, but it was easy to see she was savoring her moment on the mud the way a deer savors daybreak in a field when it doesn’t know you’re watching. “Isn’t it late in the summer to be spawning?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “It’s a weird summer though.”

  I’d barely talked to her in the weeks since she’d almost OD’d, and the few times I had she’d seemed dazed or disinterested, as if she’d forgotten about the card she gave me, as if I’d lost whatever
pull I’d had on her.

  She’d been spending time with some “boring therapist” and sleeping most nights at her brother’s house in Tacoma because the judge was so busy campaigning and everybody insisted, for some reason, that she shouldn’t be alone at night. It was obvious she knew very little about the crazy articles on me, or anything about the Russians, Florence or my mother.

  “Get closer,” I said. “Down here.”

  She squatted until her eyebrow ring was near enough to kiss. “You can see them moving in there!”

  I felt her breath on my face. “Wich means?”

  “They’re about to hatch?”

  I rinsed her two cups, stuck brown kelp on the bottom of one, filled them both partway with bay water, then scooped the busiest pod into one cup and the second busiest into the other. Then I placed the cups back in her hands, and we watched the tiny gray squid twirl in their membranes. Within seconds, eggs in the white-bottomed cup started whitening while eggs in the other cup darkened.

  “Oh, my God!” Angie held the cups away from her as if they might explode.

  The dark ones started popping out first and miniature squid squirted around the cup. Angie stood speechless and calf deep in the incoming tide, her face brightening as the white eggs hatched in her other hand.

  “If even two of these survive to be adults that’s a success story,” I said. “Mostly, they’re protein for everyone else.” I reached into the kelp-bottomed cup, plucked an unhatched egg loose and dropped it onto my tongue.

  Angie laughed. “You’re crazy.”

  I swallowed. “Bipolar,” I said, then told her to let the squid go whenever she was ready.

  She didn’t do anything for a while, other than give me a glassy look. Everything had gone so well that I froze at the moment I’d intended to tell her that it was worth living just to be able to watch butterfly squid hatch. The words sounded so corny in my head that I waited a few beats and said: “I know it sounds ridiculous, but I can take care of you.”

  She squinted, as if attempting long division in her head, then looked away, bent over and freed every last one of those tiny squid.