by Tom Crockett
As the sun reached the water, somewhere far off in the distance, Marina sat up and touched the old Turtle Mother’s hand. The old woman opened her eyes slowly. The green of them glowed in the orange light.
“Thank you.” Marina wasn’t sure why she felt compelled to say this now. She had a sense that with the sun setting, some chapter was closing. She might not have the chance to say this again.
The Turtle Mother cocked her head to the side as she always did when Marina spoke to her.
“Thank you,” Marina said again and squeezed the woman’s hand.
This time she smiled at Marina and nodded her head.
Marina could not tell if the Turtle Mother understood her or not, but something passed between them.
The Turtle Mother reached across Marina to knead and pinch her right shoulder and arm. Then she repeated this with the left arm and shoulder. She poked and squeezed Marina in several places, all the time nodding her head. Marina felt as though she were getting a physical exam from a doctor. The Turtle Mother worked her way down Marina’s right thigh, calf, and ankle. She twisted Marina’s foot in her hand and seemed satisfied. Then she repeated her examination on Marina’s left leg.
When she came to the ankle she stopped. She lifted Marina’s ankle into her lap. Marina had almost forgotten about the bandage around her left ankle, but now the Turtle Mother unwrapped it. She carefully removed the outer leaf, then drew back the seaweed strips. She inspected the place for a long moment. She poked it gingerly and looked to see if Marina reacted, but Marina felt no pain, only the pressure of the woman’s finger.
Satisfied, the Turtle Mother patted the ankle and set the leg back down. Marina could see a tiny dark spot on her ankle, almost like a bad bruise, but before she could examine it more closely, the Turtle Mother had stood up. She walked around Marina then squatted beside her again. She took Marina’s face between her hands and looked into her eyes. Marina had the feeling that the woman was looking for something.
After what seemed like a long moment the Turtle Mother released her face and stood up again. She turned and walked out into the ocean. The water was shallow for some distance and what had once seemed to Marina like walking on water now seemed perfectly understandable. The old woman walked until she seemed quite tiny and the water was only up to her waist. Here she stopped, turned a complete circle, as if getting her bearings, and lowered herself into the water. The turtle tattoo on her back was visible for a few seconds, then it, too, disappeared.
Marina watched the water’s surface for several minutes, but nothing else broke or disturbed it. She looked down at the bruise on her ankle. She drew it close to her to see it better in the fading light. It was on the outside of her left ankle, just in the hollow behind her anklebone, but it wasn’t a bruise. It was a tattoo. A tiny sea turtle etched with black ink lay poised to swim up her calf. Delicate swirls of red and yellow ink marked the interlocking plates that formed its shell on a field of blue and green. Marina was astounded. The work was intricate and precise and beautiful. It also seemed alive, the way the Turtle Mother and the younger Turtle Woman’s backs were marked. Their tattoos were not just decoration, they seemed a part of them. Marina touched her own tattoo. It too seemed a part of her.
“So are you ready to walk now?”
The voice didn’t really startle her. The sun was now set and she had been expecting the young woman.
“Yes,” Marina said, looking up at her beautiful companion. “Do you think I am ready? I mean, I tried earlier, but it didn’t seem to work.”
The Turtle Woman extended her hands. “First stand.” Marina took the woman’s hands and let herself be pulled into a standing position. She bent her knees as she had been taught and found her center of gravity. She carefully aligned her vertebrae and balanced her head atop. She shifted her weight back and forth between each of her legs until she found the point at which an equal amount of weight was carried by both of them.
“Good!” the Turtle Woman laughed. Then she dropped to her knees beside Marina and put her hands on Marina’s hips. “Now shift all of your weight to one leg.” Marina tried to lean to the right, but the young woman held her hips in place. She said nothing but pushed Marina’s hips to a position roughly centered over her right foot. This was different than leaning. It was steadier, less precarious.
“Now step out with your left leg, but don’t put weight on it.” Marina tried this. “Now shift your weight over your left foot like this.” She gently but firmly directed Marina’s hips to slide out over her left foot. “Feel the point where half of you stands here,” she touched Marina’s right leg, “and half of you stands here.” She touched the left. Marina paused when she reached the halfway point, where weight was equally distributed between both of her legs, then she continued until all of her weight was carried by her left leg.
They repeated this process, slowly at first, with Marina’s hips under the careful guidance of the young woman, then facing each other. The Turtle Woman held her hands for steadiness and took every step Marina took, only backward. They might have been sisters, or witches, or lovers dancing on a moonlit beach, but Marina’s mind was absorbed by the subtle flow of her own weight shifting back and forth between her legs, and she could not fathom where the younger woman’s thoughts took her.
Eventually Marina walked on her own. She learned to walk with the slow graceful shifting of weight, then she leaned into her walk and trusted her stride and momentum to balance her. She ran, skipped, spun, fell, rose up, and ran some more. She was giddy with her new power of movement.
Breathless, Marina sprawled in the sand and panted. The Turtle Woman came and sat beside her.
“So now what?” Marina asked after she had recovered her breath.
“Now, you are not a baby, a little one, anymore.”
“But what does that mean? Where do I go?”
“When little turtles dig out of the sand they choose to go toward the sea. This is life for them and the urge to go there is very strong. It is not easy to take this path. Most . . . well, most will be caught up in the great current and return to be born again and again. Sometimes though, a little one will choose not to go to the sea. They will choose death. Maybe they are lost or frightened or sad, but still they choose death.” She paused for a moment and looked at Marina with eyes so green she could even see their color in the moonlight. “What would you do if you found such a turtle on your beach?”
“I’d take it to the water’s edge,” Marina answered without thinking.
“Yes, you would, but if that turtle was determined to die, then what?”
“I don’t know, what else could I do?” Marina was beginning to understand the direction of the story. “The turtle has a right to choose. I would just want to make sure that it was choosing and not simply lost.”
“And this is all I can do. In the morning, when you can find your way by the sun, you will not be lost, but you will have to choose.”
“But I did choose. I chose to die. It was hard enough to choose to do once. Are you saying I must choose to do it again?”
“The choosing may be hard, but the going will not be so hard. You are halfway there now. It will be harder to go back.”
“That’s fine because I don’t want to go back. I just want to get on with it.” Marina pushed sand around with her hands and looked out to sea.
The Turtle Woman said nothing.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’ve done for me. It’s just that living was too hard for me. I had no . . . place.” Marina could not recall ever having said this, ever having put it into words, but it felt true.
“Did you ever have a place?” the Turtle Woman asked.
Marina thought about this. Her family’s home had once been her place, then her apartment during college had been her place. In a larger sense the United States had been her place, but now it wasn’t. She made light of the fact that she lived like a gypsy, but even that was an unfair stereotype. She had photographed Hungari
an Gypsies. It wasn’t that they had no home; they took their homes with them. They made where they were their place. No, she couldn’t claim to be a gypsy.
“Do you remember when you lost your sense of place?”
Marina thought back. There was a time when she did not feel out of place, when she felt that she belonged. When she was younger, out on her first assignments, she felt grounded and connected. She knew there was always a home she could return to. It gave her strength.
She could not say what had happened to that sense of place. It had not gone all at once. She could not think of any moment or crisis that had precipitated its disappearance. It had left her gradually. As she returned home less and less frequently after longer and longer absences, her sense of home abandoned her through inattention, as if home was an act of will manifested only by the power of her imagination.
“No,” Marina paused, “I don’t remember when I lost it. After Baghdad I suppose, or perhaps before that.”
“What else happened, then?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean what else changed?”
“Well, I sold my apartment, broke off a relationship, stopped speaking to my family, but other than that . . .” She laughed, waited for the Turtle Woman to laugh, then sighed. “See what I mean. I’m clearly a failure at being alive.”
“But how did the light change for you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The light,” she fumbled for the right word, “these light drawings you do. Photography. When did they change?”
“After Baghdad? I don’t know—I guess color was a big change for me.”
“Color?”
“Yes, before Baghdad I photographed almost exclusively in black-and-white and after, I started working in color.”
The Turtle Woman seemed to deliberate over this for a moment. “And is color better or not better?”
“It’s complicated,” Marina replied, though the answer in her heart was not complicated. She had hated working in color. It had robbed her of her sense of the beauty of light. In black-and-white her images could be both powerful and moving as well as beautiful. In color her images could only be dramatic. She had to go to extremes to find the viscera that could replace the lost light.
Thinking about this reminded her of something the Turtle Woman had told her. “Light and darkness,” she said it out loud. “You said that I was here because of light and darkness. You said that is what I have to heal. Does this have something to do with my photography?”
“Perhaps.” Marina waited for the Turtle Woman to speak again, but she seemed to be having a difficult time finding words. “The photography is not what is wrong, but it is a mirror for you.”
“I still don’t think I understand.”
“Are you a good photographer?”
Marina had no false modesty about her skills as a photographer. She was good at what she did. She was technically and stylistically a perfectionist.
“Yes,” Marina answered. “I’m very good.”
But as she said this she hesitated. She had gotten better at certain aspects of her job as a photographer—her timing, her instincts for action, her ability to deliver good images under pressure. But she also felt that in some ways she was not as good as she once thought she would be. Her vision, her ability to see beauty in her subjects, had left her. Like her sense of place, she could not say when she had lost her ability to see beauty, but one day it was just gone. It had been like waking up to discover that a lover had left her in the night.
“What makes a good photographer?” The Turtle Woman interrupted Marina’s thoughts.
“A lot of things. A sense of composition, technical skill, reflexes.” Marina rambled on for a few moments, almost stalling for time until the real answer, the true answer, bubbled up from her heart. “A good photographer sees everything in terms of shadows and light.”
The Turtle Woman let Marina think about what she had said for a moment.
“Then a good photographer has balance?”
“Yes, I suppose so.” The Turtle Woman was silent, but she did not need to speak. Marina understood. “I have lost my balance. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“Of course. All I can see are the shadows. I can’t find the light anymore.”
“But isn’t the light everywhere the shadows are not?”
“That’s the problem. I just can’t find those places anymore. I am so good at finding the shadows, but the shadows don’t make me happy. Maybe I don’t even believe in the light anymore. Maybe that’s why I died.”
“Then maybe that is why you are here. Maybe you have a little time to try to find the light you lost.”
“I wouldn’t know where to look.”
“But will you look or will you continue dying?”
Marina thought about this. She didn’t understand what was expected of her. Was she being offered a second chance? Did she even want a second chance?
“Are you saying that if I find this light, if I regain some kind of balance that I won’t really be dead?”
“I think there must be several things for you to learn here, but you do not have much time to learn them. Follow the turtle’s mark.” She touched Marina’s tattooed ankle. “You must find the things you need while the turtle’s mark shines bright on you. As it fades, so the call of death will grow strong in your head again.”
The early morning sky was brightening.
“So am I dead or not dead?” Marina didn’t really expect an answer to this question. She had asked it before and gotten nowhere, but it was out of her mouth before she could stop herself.
The Turtle Woman just laughed at her and stood up. “Dead. Not dead.” She held her hands facing up as she had before and pretended to be weighing two things in her palms. “Come with me, or go your own way.”
The Turtle Woman began backing down the beach away from Marina and toward the water. Marina stood up, uncertain for a moment with her new sense of her body and its movement. She took a few tentative steps toward the Turtle Woman, then a few more. She felt water wash over her toes and soft sand beneath her feet. She took a few more steps out into the water. Waves lapped gently at her calves. She was choosing water. She was choosing to continue dying. A few more steps and the water was up to her knees. She looked into the Turtle Woman’s eyes. They were deep and beautiful. She felt a stirring, a kind of attraction. She wanted to be seduced.
Marina glanced back over her shoulder and was startled to see that she had walked more than a few steps out into the water. The beach was a long way off. She remembered how the sandbar seemed to stretch out so far into the water. She looked back at the Turtle Woman. It was almost imperceptible, but in the growing light she seemed not as young as she had before. Still Marina felt an attraction. She felt like she was truly walking the fine edge of two moments. She glanced back at the beach again.
“Go back.” Marina turned to the Turtle Woman again. She had heard her speak, but her lips were not moving. “Death is easy. It will be hard enough to resist my nightsong if you linger on this island too long, but for now you have the strength. Go, see what you will see.” The words went right inside Marina’s head. It was the same voice, the same singing cadence and odd pronunciation, but it was not carried on the air.
The Turtle Woman reached behind her neck and untied the necklace of black pearls and white coral. Then she lowered herself below the surface of the water. Marina realized that they had somehow moved further out into the ocean. The water was almost up to her waist. She felt the Turtle Woman tie the string of beads around her right ankle, then she stood up. The water matted her jet black hair and beaded on her skin.
“For balance,” she said, this time speaking the words, or at least mouthing them as she sent them into Marina’s mind. She took Marina’s face between her hands and kissed her softly on the lips. It was a strange experience, both gentle and friendly yet erotic at the same time.
The Turtle Woman turned her back to Marina and walked a few more steps before bending at the waist and lowering herself into the water. For a few moments all Marina could see was the turtle shell tattoo, mesmerizing in its detail, floating in the clear blue water.
The growing light told Marina that somewhere on the other side of the island the sun must have cleared the horizon. She looked back at the island and for the first time she could see that a lush, green mountain, most likely an ancient volcano, dominated its center. She wondered what was on the other side. In that moment of wondering she found herself in water only up to her knees, as though she had walked halfway back to the beach without being aware of it.
She looked for the Turtle Woman’s painted back floating in the water. She thought she could see it, floating in the distance, then it was gone. She stood there a moment longer, thinking about balance and light, living and dying, the salty kiss she still felt on her lips.
She had made a choice without wanting to, without intending to. She turned back and studied the place. Then, for the second time, she came out of the water and onto the beach. She still did not know where she was or what she was, or even if she was. The Turtle Woman had told Marina that she had come from death and Marina knew she had come from the sea. The sun set on this side of the island, so perhaps this side of the island was death. Maybe the other side of the island, around or over the mountain, was life.