by Joe Denham
Eventually he batted it from the table, set Emily down at his feet, and left the house cursing. He didn’t come back until well past dark, well past the time I’d put Emily down. I’d been sitting up waiting for him, worrying, for many hours when he finally came through the door. He was soaked right through, dripping a puddle on the old wood floor in the entranceway where he stood, shivering. I went to him and stood in front of him, saying nothing, looking for the look that had been there earlier. But he looked again as though he were staring out from inside a dream. All he said was, “It’s so cold this year, Jin Su. Why is it always so cold?”
It’s true, it’s been colder this fall than I have ever seen or thought was possible, but I knew then as I know now there is more in what he was asking than that. I have no answer for him. The truth is I don’t know Francis well enough to know what it is he needs from me or anyone else, so I keep most of my thoughts to myself and go through these days with him, caring for our daughter, trying to care for him, hoping something will change inside him so he will eventually come back to me, to us, fully himself and alive, instead of as this ghost that wanders through our home, sleeps beside me in this bed, and wakes from one dream into another, trying to take from me something I can’t give him, something no one can give him, because what has happened has happened and nothing can change that. Nothing can bring back what’s died from the world. Not any amount of wishing or hoping. Not the breaking of any magic antique fishing float. I have no way of explaining why it won’t break. But to take it as evidence of some mystical prophecy is a leap of faith, and it’s that faith that Francis is clinging to now; and it’s that faith that is keeping him locked away in the past, like he’s caught inside a globe of glass himself, and I fear sometimes that, as with the float, we’ll never find a way to break it.
•
This morning I decided to take the float from beneath the bed and let it loose. I thought while I lay awake after Francis fell back asleep last night that keeping the float hidden from view isn’t going to help. Treating the thing like some sacred object has only given it more power than it already has over Francis, and if I can’t break the thing the least I can do is try to break the spell it has him under. He has never explained to me why it was he was striking the float with Emily that day. He won’t discuss much of whatever it is he and Fairwin’ do, or what it is Fairwin’ has told him, during their visits. Aside from his middle-of-the-night recallings of what he remembers, Francis won’t discuss any of it with me. He won’t let it out into the light of day and I’ve realized this must end. Until now I haven’t challenged him on anything, but this way of being is killing him, slowly, and it has to stop. So I took the float from its box beneath the bed and gave it to Emily to play with. She’s been batting it around the house most of the day, crawling after it as it rolls across the kitchen floor, down the hallway, across the living room. I wish I could do the same with all of Francis’s grief. Just wrap it up into a ball and give it to our daughter for her to bash around the house.
With that in mind I’ve decided to tell Francis I want him to go back to being a fisherman. I’m sure this will upset him at first. But I also know that his decision to sell the boat was one made in grief and out of fear, and I know he’ll never emerge from either until he faces them. Until he faces the sea. He says he won’t go back out because he won’t give the sea a chance to take more than it already has from him. But what about all that it’s given? My family have been fishermen on both my mother’s and my father’s side for as long back as anyone can remember, and if I know one thing it’s that once a fisherman, always a fisherman. For those who come to love working on the sea, no job, no life, can ever compare. Even my uncle, as wealthy as he’s become since immigrating to this country and working in the city as a fish buyer, bought himself a salmon troller a few years ago so he could get back out onto the sea. He earns nothing fishing compared to what his business makes him, and some trips out he really does make nothing, but that’s not the point.
And it’s not the point for Francis either. This life we’re living isn’t his. He’s a fisherman, and the look I no longer see in his eyes is the look every lover of the sea gets from being out upon it. I want him to go and find that again, because I’ve come to realize this shroud of fear we’re living under is killing me, too, and I didn’t come to this country to live like this. People here don’t realize the opportunity for freedom they have. They seem to use whatever they can to make it so their lives are ones of suffering and loss. Francis, I’ve come to see, is no exception, and without the infusion of freedom he used to get from fishing he’s turned into another one of the hungry ghosts in this city, oppressed by his own fear and inertia.
I hear his footsteps coming up the front porch. I’ve thought all day of how I’ll get this through to him. How I’ll tell him without turning him further away from me, without presenting my thoughts as ultimatums. But as I hear him approaching the front door I act without thinking. I go to the entrance hallway so that I’m standing before him as he comes in, shivering again from the cold. “You should wear more layers,” I say, as he closes the door behind him. He hadn’t noticed I was here, and this is unlike the habit I have of giving him time to enter the house unaccosted. So my words startle him, which is what I want. I want him shaken.
“Jesus Jin Su,” he says as he takes off his jacket. “What’s going on?” he asks, a faint, forced smile on his face. I reach up and kiss that smile, and take him by the hand, pulling him into the house. “I’ve got to get out of these clothes. I’m freezing,” he protests, but I don’t care, I want this out of me right now. It’s been almost five months of this and enough is enough.
I lead him into the living room and sit him down on the sofa. It’s a long, narrow room that looks to the east, to the wall of our neighbour’s house, so close you can almost touch it. Emily is on the far end of the room opposite us and as I sit down beside her father I watch her look up with the joy she gets when she hears his voice for the first time at the end of the day. “Yiiiiieeeee!” she shrieks, and rolls the float toward us, crawling after it. It rolls quick and smooth across the floor and stops at my feet. I pick it up and hold it before Francis.
“This,” I say. “This thing may never break Francis. But I won’t live my life with it hidden like some sickness beneath our bed.” An anger rises to his eyes as I say this, which is what I want. Anger, hatred, joy, it doesn’t matter. I just want a reaction from him, some emotion, and as he reaches for the float I see the contempt in his eyes and I hold it away from him so more might come. I stand and walk across the room, pick up Emily, and hand her the float. “What’s the problem Francis?” I ask as he rises, too. “What the hell’s going to happen? It’s not like she’s going to wreck the thing. What the hell does keeping it hidden accomplish?”
Afraid to go himself, Francis sent Fairwin’ to Hawaii to retrieve the float. Ever since his return Francis has wished it was still there buried in the sand. He fears whoever it was that sunk the boat will come looking for it. But that hasn’t happened. “You’re not hiding it from anyone but yourself now, Francis,” I say.
“Give it to me,” he says. I turn to put myself between the float and him, holding Emily tight in my arms.
“I won’t do it anymore. I won’t live like this,” I say. I’ve not wanted to do this, to force him, to be the way he always told me Anna was. But I can see now it may be the only way he knows how to be, and it occurs to me that perhaps it’s as much my lack of engagement as anything else that has allowed him to sink further into his grief instead of emerging out of it. He spins me around violently so Emily is facing him again. It’s the first time I’ve felt him, really him, touching me since he came back, and I want more. I take the float from Emily’s hands and she starts to cry. She’s lived in a world of pain with us, but this is the first fight she’s seen. The mother in me flares for a moment and I consider letting it go, giving him the float and letting enough be enough for now.
But then Franci
s speaks. “You don’t have the first fucking clue of what you’re talking about, Jin Su. At least you’re alive.” This raises me back to it instead and I respond with an anger to equal his.
“And so are you Francis. But you walk around this house like the living dead. Look at your daughter. Look at me. Do you even see us here? Do you?”
“What kind of question is that?” he asks, and this sets me even further into it.
“You’re with Anna and Willow, Francis. You can’t let them go and you’ve got us around you like stray dogs waiting for scraps.”
“That’s not fair, Jin Su,” he yells at me over Emily’s wailing. “I’m not with Anna am I? No. I’m right here. Every day. In this stupid fucking house we live in, in this fucking hell-hole city. For Christ’s sake Jin Su, my son’s dead. My fucking son. Dead.” He’s crying too now. The first tears I’ve seen from him, ever. “I’m trying. Every day I’m trying. What the fuck more do you want from me?”
“You Francis. Like this. I want you here with us.”
“What the fuck does that mean? I am here. See.” He tugs at his shirt, then twists his hands together in front of my face as I back away.
“No you’re not. That’s the thing. You’re here. But you’re not here. You’re a ghost Francis, and you’re starting to scare me.” I’m crying now, with my daughter. We’re both bawling. I hold the float up in front of him. “This,” I say. “You’re lost inside this ball of glass Francis. And I suppose if that’s what you want, if that’s all you want is to be trapped with this thing, you might as well take it.” I want him to say something. Something we’re on the brink of now. Something of recognition. But it’s not in me to fight like this. If this is what he needs, for me to call him out of himself the way Anna did, screaming and yelling like this, he should go back to her. I can’t do it.
He reaches out to take the float from me. As he does Emily lunges at it with a burst of that fire she has in her and swats it out of my hand. It hits the floor and explodes between us, sending shards across the room, scattering flecks even into the hand-woven silk rug my father sent from China after my mother died. An heirloom passed down for generations in my family from mother to daughter, mother to daughter. The one Emily will leave to her daughter one day, long after I’m gone.
WHEN I AWOKE on the beach in Hawaii I had no idea where I was or what had happened. I don’t remember the boat going down, the helicopters, any of it. The last thing I recall before waking on the shore is the black eyes of the man whom I think tried to kill me. Everything I know now of what occurred on that boat I’ve learned since from Fairwin’ Verge. But when I woke up that day on the dark sand, the breaking waves rushing up and down my body, I knew nothing but fear and confusion. There I was, naked but for my underwear, wrapped foetal around the glass float, the one I’d lost, with no idea of how it had come back into my possession. I could recall only traces of Anna and Willow at my side, Anna singing, her warm hand on my heart. Willow with fear in his eyes.
I dragged myself up to the top of the beach, a small cove with high volcanic cliffs all around, and there, well above high water mark in the centre of the cove’s arc, I dug a deep hole in the sand, placed the float in, and buried it. I took dead reckoning off two points: a towering tree to my left that loomed its broad, splayed leaves over the beach, and a cave-like impression in the cliff to my right. Two hundred and thirty-one paces to the one, 418 paces to the other. I blazed those numbers into memory. Then I laboured across the clean beach and into the otherwise non-descript foliage, up a forested slope, till the land plateaued. For a distance I made my way over open fields of grass till I finally found a road. The first car that came by stopped.
“Where am I?” I asked the man at the wheel. I’d used what little energy I had burying the float, and by then it was all I could do to push the words from my mouth. “Can you tell me exactly where this is?” He looked at me as though I were some kind of freak show—I must have looked frightening, bearded and emaciated as I was—and very nearly drove off till I explained to him that I’d been at sea, had just now woken up on the shore, and that I had no idea what had happened to me, but thought it important to at least remember where it was I had washed up. We recorded the reading on his odometer, and when we got to the hospital in Kahului, we recorded it again. Then I had him draw a map for me of the route we’d taken to get to the hospital and I walked into the ER without him.
Eventually I was taken to the local police station, where I told them who I was and the story of Miriam and I, leaving out the float, the meeting with Sunimoto, and Miriam’s death. I told them I had no idea what had happened to her or the boat, which was in a sense true, or how I’d come to be back in Hawaii, which was also true. Then I was taken back to the hospital and kept there for what must have been over a week before they finally released me with a fresh change of clothes, a temporary passport and a ticket home.
I had a severe anxiety attack on the plane ride over the Pacific, and I was met at YVR by Jin Su, Emily and Jin Su’s uncle (who had covered the hospital bill as well as my airfare and other expenses), and by paramedics. I spent another night in hospital trying to catch my breath, basically, before finally going home to Jin Su and Emily at her uncle’s house. I still didn’t know what had happened to Anna or to Willow. And it wasn’t till I returned to Halfmoon Bay a few days later and found them gone that I started to understand my hazy memories and the hollow I felt at the centre of myself. The one I still feel now, and always will, now that Willow is dead and Anna is gone.
•
Anna survived the sinking by clinging to an insulated plastic tote for two days before the Coast Guard found her. By the time I arrived home she had already returned, taken some clothes, and left with her parents up to Sicamous. I’ve seen her only once since, at the lawyer’s office when the boat sold. She wouldn’t look me in the eye. Wouldn’t speak with me or open to me when I tried to take her in my arms. I’m not sure what’s worse, Willow’s death, or her scorn. I had Svend clean out our rental house for me once Anna’s father called to say they’d been back again to retrieve the few things she wanted. I couldn’t do it, so I told Svend to just empty it out and take it all to the thrift store or the landfill. I didn’t care. If I couldn’t have my old life back as it was, I wanted none of it.
Since then, Jin Su, Emily and I have settled into something comfortable, especially now that Fairwin’ Verge has come and taken the shards back to Hawaii. I keep waiting to hear word from him that it’s been done, that the pieces have been thrown into the Mauna Kea. I’m hopeful for some kind of release in that moment, but I know it’s a false hope. Maybe all hope is. I’m not sure. Any sense of certainty I had about such things drowned with my son. Now it’s enough to just get through the day, and when I say that I mean it not in the one day at a time kind of way. I mean it absolutely.
Each day is enough for me. It has to be. I don’t have any idea whether the shards of glass being cast into the Mauna Kea will bring about some sudden re-seeding of the sea, and I’m not sure that I even care. It was another lifetime, in another world, wherein such things seemed so important. Now I go to work, I do the job I’m given to do, and I come home grateful for the woman and the child I still have with me. And although the love we share is different than the love Anna and I had, and even the love I felt with Miriam, I’m a different man now without Miriam in the world or Anna in my life, and that different man that I am wants nothing more than what we have. The hollow at the centre of me is something I’m learning to live with, and I’ve come to understand it’s not just the loss of Anna and Willow that has left it in me, but it is also the shrinking of the mammoth desire I used to carry inside. The one that wanted more than what Anna and I had, that ultimately led to everything happening as it has. Now I carry it like a small chest of dark treasure locked and buried, and I allow myself to dig it up and admire its glittering fool’s gold only on the long walks I take through this city, alone inside this year’s cold that won’t seem to relent.
Jin Su says she wants me to go back to the sea, to being a fisherman, and I know it’s the desire in me she wants brought back. The thing is, she doesn’t see how dangerous it can be. Or she can and she doesn’t care perhaps, because she hasn’t lost to it what I’ve lost. To the contrary. Changed or not, she has gained me through all this. I’m now unquestionably hers, though she argues otherwise. That I still have my memories and my grief and my love for Anna is beside the point, ultimately, because I live with them tucked away inside me here, in this city, with her and our daughter, and those other things will diminish, as all things do, with time.
When Fairwin’ Verge told me everything he’d learned from Arnault Vericombe about the true meaning of the myth and about my role within it, we were both ecstatic at the possibility that Emily might be the one to break the float. He said he’d realized this potential long before the moment when Willow wasn’t able to break it, but he’d been caught between this awareness and the vow of secrecy he’d made to me. So he did what he felt was right and kept Emily’s existence to himself. Arnault had said so many times, Passed down through the generations, father to son. He’d given no indication that the curse might also include daughters, let alone that it might be strictly matrilineal, as it turns out is likely the case. When he saw that the float wouldn’t break, Arnault panicking, hollering at Willow, Fairwin’ realized the error in his secrecy, but by then it was too late, and the next thing he knew he was clinging to a piece of the destroyed boat, floating through the dark, watching the last of it burn and sink.