Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  A child’s plastic toy gun popped into my mind for no reason, I thought, until, examining the image idly, I remembered. I closed my eyes, saw Indiana’s small, worried face, Uncle Beau shooting the ray gun, how it wailed and spat its colored rings of light while the moth fluttered through them. How we had all stood on the porch, gripping the railing, staring into the stars, seized, shaken, possessed by the possibility of aliens.

  I opened my eyes again, saw my grandmother smiling faintly, reminiscently. I leaned over, kissed her cheek, and tried not to wonder if one day far into my future they might return to look for her, misinterpret my aged face for hers, and come for me instead.

  Something Rich and Strange

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  —The Tempest

  ONE

  megan dipped her hand into the tide pool, drew the shining out of the sea.

  It was the gold foil, wire, and cap from a champagne bottle someone had flicked into the water. She dropped it into the capacious pocket of her jacket, already jingling with beer caps, the plastic lid off a gallon of milk, a couple of sand dollars, blue and yellow sea glass, half of a Styrofoam float, a flattened Orange Crush can, and a three-quarter ounce weight knotted to a foot of fishing line. She waited for the water to still, then studied the pool again. A dozen sea urchins, a starfish, chitons, anemones. . . . She pulled the sand dollars out of her pocket, poised them in the sand beneath the starfish, waited for the ripples to subside. Something she had disturbed on the bottom rose to thesurface of the pool. She fished it out: foil from a cigarette pack. She rolled it into a ball between her fingers, dropped it into her pocket,her mind still absorbed by the pool, the line of rock that formed it, the bits of broken shell, sandstone, agate jumbled on the bottom. She eased into a smooth place among the barnacles beneath her, and began to draw rapidly, before the tide turned.

  She was a tall, lean, taciturn young woman, with long straight pale hair that she let grow past her waist. Her blue-gray eyes could be found, not easily, under the drift of her hair, or beneath the reflections in her glasses. She drew seascapes in ink and pencil and hung them in Jonah’s shop, among the jewelry and fossils and shells and other oddments he sold. Three years before, he had hired Megan to paint a shop sign. She had shown him her seascapes; he had hung a few; tourists had bought them. Somehow, despite his crotchety manner and her reticence, they had, in the sort of dart-and-dance courtship displayed by mute and easily startled fish, indicated an interest in one another. His eyes opened and glittered beneath his shaggy hair; she flashed her sudden, rare smile. So they lived together above Things Rich and Strange, the shop beside the sea, where changing tides of sound tumbled constantly about them as if they were creatures in some invisible tide pool.

  Something waved at Megan from a cleft in the stone: a tiny crab, venturing out. She waited for it, drew it as it picked its way across the bottom. She studied the drawing, added some graceful fronds of sea moss. Lately she had started experimenting with pale, delicate washes of color over black ink. Jonah, who thought pastel colors were trendy, commercial, and sentimental, disapproved. “Next thing,” he grumbled, “you’ll be making kittens out of cowrie shells.” But, as Megan pointed out, shoving massive oceanography books under his nose, the secret sea, beneath its bland surface, was garish with color.

  Wind rippled the water. Megan, waiting for the starfish to come into focus again, debated color. The starfish was crimson; she could try a light red wash. Something popped suddenly to the surface and floated: the champagne cork. She stared at it, and then at her drawing,wondering if she had absently sketched a cork in among the sea anemones. She picked it out, put it in her pocket. Gulls cried over head; pelicans flew low over the distant tide. She tasted salt on her lips. The water shivered again, wind-stroked; the wind was rising. She felt chilled suddenly, sitting on a cold gray rock under a gray sky. She leaned down to gather her sand dollars. The wind grabbed her hair out of her jacket, tossed it over her shoulder, into her mouth, into the water. She spat hair irritably, groping for the shells. An anemone sucked at her finger. A pen she had balanced among the barnacles rolled into the water. She groped for that, too, stirring sand into a roiling cloud. Her fingers hit something smooth, hard. She pulled it out: a beer bottle.

  She checked her drawing incredulously: no sign of a beer bottle. It must, she decided, have been buried in the sand; her groping had uncovered it. She stuffed it into her pocket, retrieved the shells and, finally, the pen. She gazed into the pool, thinking: now what? The champagne bottle? The pool, suddenly limpid, gave her back her face: great, square eyes, a little hard mouth, like a parrotfish’s mouth, fit for nibbling coral, long pale tentacles that searched the air for microscopic life. Entranced by the fishy vision, she no longer recognized herself.

  She pulled back, remembered her own face. She slid the drawing pad into its waterproof case and stood up slowly, cramped and weighted with flotsam and jetsam. “You can’t sweep the sea,” Jonah would say as she pulled garbage and treasure from her pockets. “No,” she would answer, “but I can tidy a tide pool.” Then she would show him her drawings.

  She had three that day: one a mound of sea urchins, one a carpet of anemones, and the last, which he lingered over longest, intent, musing, picking at his teeth with his thumb. He took his hand away from his mouth finally, pointed.

  “I don’t recognize this.”

  Megan looked over his shoulder; their heads touched. Sea lettuce, she was about to say, glancing at the shapeless, fluid lines. The word caught; her mouth stayed open. It wasn’t algae; it had an eye; it crawled across the bottom, small, rippling, horned. She took a breath, perplexed.

  “I don’t either.”

  Jonah watched her as she pored through her books. She sat on a stool beside the counter dividing the kitchen and dining room, drinking tea out of a clay mug, her head bent, her smooth, pale hair spilling over the book, her hands, her knees. He loved her hands: slender, long-boned, beautifully proportioned. She could moor a boat with those hands, hammer a nail, pitch a tent. She could fold origami paper into a bird; she could draw a spider web strung with dew. Now her hands were flicking pages as she searched through photographs of underwater life for the odd little animal wandering through her drawing. The wind was rattling the windows; the full tide sounded as if it were heaving great driftwood logs and old sunken ships across the beach to their doorway.

  He said, “What was that old tale about a ship? A flying ship?” He was sorting through rocks and fossils he had pulled from the cliffs that day: bits and pieces of sandstone, half a clam, a worm tube. They were scattered over the dining table; he was not particularly tidy. She tugged at her lip, studying something.

  “The USS Enterprise?”

  “No—you know. An old sailing ship. A ghost ship, wanders around scaring sailors on foggy nights.”

  “Oh. Flying Dutchman.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I think it’s at the door.”

  Her eyes lifted, regarded him vaguely behind her glasses. Had he, they wondered, said what he had said? They lost interest, dropped again, to what looked like a floating candy store. Tropical fish: he had a tank when he was a kid. The thermostat broke one day; the temperature plummeted and fish went belly up, floating like petals on top of the water.

  “One of those?” he asked, bored. She got obsessed, sometimes, working. She disappeared on him, the way an anemone did, drawing in tighter and tighter the more you prodded. But she heard him; she shook her head.

  “No. It’s not a fish. But look at those colors—lemon, turquoise, indigo—”

  “Pepto-Bismol.”

  “Orange sherbet.”

  “Pickled ginger.”

  “Puce.”

  “Lime,” he shot back, but weakly; she
had disarmed him with the puce. She had already submerged herself in the coral reef. He leaned over his collection: a tall, wiry man with long red-brown rippling hair, cobalt eyes, glasses in round black frames he aimed at customers like cannon muzzles if they annoyed him. He had hired Jenny Elwood to work the register for him, at Megan’s suggestion; he looked, she said, too pained when someone wanted him to handle money. Megan herself looked incredulous behind the register. She picked at it dubiously as if she didn’t trust it to do the same thing twice; she could barely find her mouth to answer a question.

  She found her mouth now. “Nudibranch.”

  “Nudiwho?”

  “Or worm, maybe. Or a mollusk without a shell.”

  “Banana slug.”

  She ignored his suggestion, but became suddenly articulate. “It’s so strange. I don’t remember drawing it at all, it just appeared, the way things kept popping up after I cleared the water, like the champagne cork and the beer bottle. I never even noticed the beer bottle.”

  “Beer,” he said, and went around her to the ancient refrigerator. “Want one?”

  “I don’t suppose the champagne bottle is in there.”

  “Dream on. This thing is making slime again.”

  “What thing?”

  “The refrigerator. It’s bleeding black slime out of this little pipe.”

  “Uh.”

  “The truck sounds like a motorcycle, the refrigerator’s falling apart, the rent on the store is going up next month, and you’re sitting there reading about naked slugs.”

  She lifted her head. One eye regarded him thoughtfully between strands of her hair. He saw her lips part, the beginning of her smile. He put the beer down. Her lips tasted of salt; her hair smelled of the sea; her ear was a pale, whorled thing that could only be understood by his tongue. Grazing, he loosened the jewel at her earlobe, swallowed it, and found out much later, as he lay in bed contemplating her other ear, that he had dined on opal and drunk gold.

  She was reading again, naked on her stomach, her chin on one hand, absently fingering the remaining earring. She made a sudden sound, a little hiccup of discovery.

  “They’re not horns.”

  “I can’t tell you how relieved I am.”

  “They’re ears.”

  “A worm with ears.”

  “A shell-less snail. Not real ears. Rabbit ears.”

  “A snail with rabbit ears.”

  “Little protrusions that look like ears. It’s called a sea hare.” She paused, reading, frowning. She changed hands under her chin, fingered the other ear. “It shoots purple ink when it’s disturbed, it can lay twenty million eggs, and it’s both male and female.”

  “Wow.”

  “Where’s my earring?”

  “I ate it.”

  “No, really,” she said, feeling around the sheets. He moved closer, pulled by some strange inner tide.

  “You’re obsessed by ears,” he breathed, feeling the cool drop of gold on his tongue. Then she turned under him, her arms around his back, her head on the open book. He saw the sea hare floating in and out of her hair before he closed his eyes and she pulled him with her long white arms down beneath the waves.

  Megan went back the next day to the tide pool. She recognized not so much the pool itself as the bare place among the barnacles where she had sat. The starfish had moved an inch or two; the anemones were closed. There was no sign of a sea hare.

  She stood after a while, her arms folded, gazing out past the great rocks strewn along the tide line, where the waves churned and broke, to the vast gray plane of water. She had been looking into tide pools all her life, having grown up in the northernmost coastal town in the state. Drawing the sea, she had slowly drifted south, through small fishing ports and smaller towns where travelers could buy a tank of gas, a hamburger, a coffee cup with the name of the town on it, a motel room that overlooked the sea. Fishers, loggers, retired people lived in those tiny towns; or like Jonah, people looking for a quiet spot to read or dig up fossils for the rest of their lives. Such people clung, barnacle-like, to the cliffs, in houses facing seaward. Others, like the sea hare, traveled through, vanished, having no real business in a tidepool. Some freaky wave had flipped it that far ashore, she guessed, even while a cold, clear voice in the back of her mind said: there was no sea hare in the tide pool. The sea hare crawled into the drawing.

  She didn’t draw that day; she walked back into town. Though it was still barely spring, the license plates on cars were already migratory: California, Nevada, Idaho, even an Arizona on a Winnebago parked near Jonah’s shop. They were wanderers, following the paths of birds and whales, wanting to bring home visions, landscapes, the echo of barking seals, the endless siren song of the waves at the edge of the world. Browsing along the street, they would buy strands of abalone beads, driftwood vases, shells for ashtrays. They would buy canned Chinook salmon at Ernie’s Fish and Bait. They would get lost, scowl over maps, throw caramel corn at seagulls, snap at one another and their children. They would eat clam fritters, oyster sandwiches, crab cocktail at Lindy’s Cafe. Then they would lean over the sea walls at lookout points, their faces wistful, slightly perplexed, as if they were trying to understand some lost language that they once knew, in a distant time when seals walked ashore like men, before all the mermaids changed to manatees.

  What, their faces would ask, do these barking seals, this smell of brine and guano, this vastness no Winnebago can cross have to do with me? Then they would get back into their cars so they could reach the next star on the map before dark. A wanderer herself, Megan knew the lure of the road, the peculiar quest for freedom that had the safe lights of home at the end. The journey was more important than the place; most important was to return home, with crumpled maps, salt and pepper shakers shaped like clamshells, a sweatshirt with whales on it, and to be able to say: I have been there, I have gone on a journey, I have come safely home. The world was a dangerous place for mollusks without their shells, and yet they ventured into it, restless, curious, or maybe following some ancient migratory instinct to return to the place where souls were spawned.

  Megan herself wandered into Mike’s Twice-Sold Tales, where she browsed among the marine-life books, hoping for some new insight into sea hares. But those she encountered led, it seemed, a life scarcely worth mentioning, tagged onto a paragraph or decorating an illustration of chains of species. Mike, a huge man with a nicotine-stained mustache, as chatty as a sea urchin, glanced up from his antique Moby-Dick and lifted a thumb. Translated, it was a greeting, discussion of health, the weather, business, and a general recognition of the species ResidentWho-Has-Shared-Winter-Storms-Love-Loneliness-Stir-Craziness-General-Inbred-Insanity-That-Comes-Before-the-First-Tourist. He was back in his book, dissecting whales, before she could respond.

  She went back to Jonah’s shop, where he was in much the same position, reading some antique geology book on a stool in a corner, while Jenny gave change and smiled at the customers. He grunted at her, a conversational gambit that said less than Mike’s thumb: I’m-Okay-You’re-Okay-I’m-Busy-You’ll-Be-Busy-Store’s-Okay-Okay? He turned a page; she went into the back room to put a pale wash of red across the starfish, and a wash of lavender so diluted it was barely visible across the sea hare.

  “God, you’ve ruined it,” Jonah commented later, on his way to the bathroom. She whirled at him, indignant.

  “Jonah!”

  “How about some tangerine while you’re at it?”

  She studied the drawing. It did need another color, something neutral. “I’m not one of your customers,” she said coldly. “Go crab at them.”

  “I’m sorry. It hurts my eyes.”

  “Thanks.” She lifted a shoulder as he kissed her ear. “And stay away from my ears.”

  “A trifle sensitive, aren’t we?”

  “I spent hours in the cold working on this sketch, and you just walk in and tell me I ruined it.”

  “It was a beautiful sketch. And then you put those Popsi
cle colors on it. It’s just a matter of taste, that’s all. I’m not trying to tell you how to paint.”

  “You are, too,” she said between her teeth. “You have no more sensitivity than a three-year-old.”

  “Well, maybe you should try some primary colors while you’re at it. If that’s what’s in the sea.”

  “Maybe you should go look for my earring.”

  “Excuse me,” Jenny said, parting the back curtains. “There’s someone here who makes jewelry.” She closed the curtains again briskly, leaving an impression on the eye of silver rinse, glittering glasses, pink lipstick, two rhinestone cats on a chain holding her sweater together, a fashion statement that Megan associated with fox heads dangling from your shoulders and circle skirts with poodles on them. Jenny, Jonah said once, was the kind of person who would crochet a Kleenex box holder. But he needed her: she was competent, she liked people, even Jonah, she was unflappable through all his moods, even when she stumbled into a squall.

  “That’s all I need,” Jonah said sourly. “More jewelry.” He disappeared into the bathroom and called, peremptorily, “You talk to him. Her. I can’t.”

  Megan stared icily at the curtain, wanting to toss the red wash over the top of it. A coffee wash, she thought suddenly, between the red and the lavender. Cafe au lait. A diagonal line down the rock, spilling into the sand.

  She parted the curtains. The jewelry maker stood at the counter, studying what Jonah had beneath the glass. She paused half a step, blinking. There was too much of him for the shop. Too much of him for the town, she thought. He didn’t belong in this tide pool. He was quite tall, dressed in black denim and leather; his short hair was whiter than Jenny’s. He wore an earring in one ear. He turned at her step and smiled. He smiles, she thought. His eyes were pale green, the misty color the sea got sometimes when the sun broke behind the clouds. She was too amazed to smile back.