Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “This is Megan,” said Jenny the unflappable.

  “She’ll help you. Megan, this is Adam I-didn’t-catch-your—”

  He held out his hand, the one without the box in it. “Fin.” His hand was broad, strong, gentle. “I’ve just come into town. I’ve been showing samples of my work at other shops. They all said I should talk to Jonah. You have some very nice pieces already. Are they local?”

  “Mostly,” Megan said. She had to clear her throat. “Jonah gets some things inland, when he goes fossil swapping. Where are you from?” In God’s name, she wanted to add, and what are you doing here?

  He waved a hand in the general direction of Hawaii. “East.” He smiled again, showing white teeth, and she laughed a little, because it was so rare, after a long winter, to see a face that wasn’t dour.

  “That’s west.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m a little turned around on land. The mainland.” He opened his box, a simple rosewood case, beautifully mitered and polished.

  He used opal and onyx, all colors of jade, aventurine with gold, amethyst with malachite, pearl and garnet and peridot. Some of the settings looked antique; others were richly barbaric, or as simple and elegant as his box. She lifted her eyes to his face after a while, astonished, and saw in the simple, elegant lines of it something that might, under a wash of gold light, or a subtle change of expression, turn as wild and exotic as his work could turn. She swallowed. “It’s beautiful.” His face changed slightly; she blinked. “Your work. Do you do your own carving?”

  He nodded. She noticed his earring then: an onyx rabbit sprinting, legs outstretched, back arched, a silver quarter moon curved over it, the moon’s horns rising out of the rabbit’s feet. “I see my own designs like dreams in my head,” he said. “I like to make them visible.”

  “So do I,” she said, surprised, and he looked at her. He was oddly pale for an islander, she thought suddenly. Maybe he had come even farther than she guessed: from some ancient, foreign seaport where every language in the world was spoken at once.

  “You’re an artist?”

  “Just pen and ink,” she said, suddenly shy, unused to discussing her work with strangers. She made a brief gesture at the far wall. “Just seascapes.”

  He walked through the shop to see them. People glanced twice at him, recognizing him, and then trying to figure out who they imagined he was. He seemed oblivious of the attention. He studied an anemone attached to a barnacle-covered rock. Its tendrils, open and flowing with the tide, were flushed with a faint green wash. Below it, a pale pink wash spilled out of a starfish’s arms, colored some algae, and drained into pearl-pale sand.

  “I like the colors,” he said, returning. He studied her again, as intently as he had studied the anemone. “Do you do only seascapes?”

  She nodded, forgetting her shyness then, under his calm gaze. “Always. I always have. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to draw. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s a world I can’t enter. I can’t belong in it, the way I can belong on land. This is the closest I can get—the only way I have of belonging. Of understanding.” She flushed a little. “I can’t explain. I can only draw it.”

  “Yes,” he said softly. His eyes held hers a moment longer; she became aware, in the brief silence, of the tide gathering and breaking and spilling across the sand, regathering itself, breaking again. She heard his breath gathering. Then she moved, touching her glasses straight, and his face turned from her as he closed his box.

  “I love your work.” Her voice sounded odd. “But you’ll have to talk to Jonah. It’s his shop.”

  “I see. Then I’ll leave this here for Jonah.”

  “You don’t want to take it with you?” she asked, amazed. He put the box into her hands and smiled again, lightly.

  “I’m sure it will be safe with you. Jonah has a good reputation. I’ll come back tomorrow; maybe he’ll see me then.”

  She watched him through the window as he crossed the street, turned a corner; the smooth satiny wood in her hands seemed still warm from his touch. Jenny, ever efficient, suggested briskly, “You’ll want to take that upstairs before someone buys it.”

  Megan turned her head, stared at Jenny. “What’s he doing here? He belongs south. Where everyone looks like that.”

  Jenny shrugged. “He washed ashore here. You did. Jonah did. Seemed nice, didn’t he? More like one of us than one of them.”

  Megan nodded, her face easing at the familiar division of Jenny’s world. “I’m just not used to one of us being one of them.”

  “Bet,” Jenny said, springing the cash register open for a customer, “he was born here. Right here on these cliffs. There you are, Mandy. Enjoy.”

  Jonah, annoyed by Megan’s insistence that he go upstairs and look at jewelry when the last thing the store needed was more, kept to his stool behind the register, answering questions about the fossils now and then when people interrupted his reading. He concluded, from Jenny’s sporadic comments, that Megan had been persuaded by some blond in tight black jeans; she had probably not noticed much beyond that. He avoided the back room, not wanting to pick another fight while she laid New Age colors on her perfect drawings. Going upstairs finally, after he closed the shop, he found the rosewood box on the table in the middle of his rocks.

  He ignored it, going to the stove where Megan was stirring dill seed into cabbage. The smell reminded him of low tide in mud flats. She wore long glittering strands of jet beads in her ears; he considered them, found them too formidable. His hands were closing in on her hips when she spoke.

  “Have you looked at Adam’s jewelry?”

  His hands curved on air, dropped. “Adam.” He wandered away, ate a piece of cabbage. “Jenny says he looks like a refugee from Beverly Hills.”

  “Jenny did not say that; you did.” She added kielbasa to the cabbage. “He can still make jewelry. Go look at it.”

  “Later.” He rummaged in the fridge: no beer. Lifting his head, he saw her New Age washes staining the horizon: pale crimson shading into lilac, where the sun was going down. The close smell of cabbage, the soft spring colors, made him suddenly restless. “Let’s go out.”

  “Now?”

  “After supper. There’s music at the Ancient Mariner.”

  “I was going to finish framing the drawings.”

  “Do it tomorrow.”

  “Adam’s coming back to talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Funny,” he said, munching more raw cabbage, “how irritating some names are. Adam. Nobody’s named Adam, except Batman.”

  She turned slowly, gave him that blank, blue-gray stare. “What are you talking about?”

  “You keep saying his name.”

  She rapped the spoon on the edge of the pan: maybe a comment, maybe just getting cabbage off the spoon. “What do you want me to call him?”

  “Bill. Joe. I don’t want you saying his name, this blond god from L.A. I want you to say my name.”

  Her eyes were still blank, cool, but her lips quirked suddenly. “He liked my washes.”

  “He would. He’s from the land that invented mango garbage-can liners. Apricot bomber jackets. They don’t even eat things that aren’t pastel.”

  She rapped the spoon again, but the corners of her mouth were still crooked. “He’s not from L.A. He’s from the east. I mean west.”

  “What?”

  “West. Like Hawaii. Or Fiji. Tokyo.”

  “That’s the Far East.”

  “Well, maybe that’s why he got confused.”

  “So am I. You’re still talking about him.”

  She sighed, put the spoon down. “Jonah. You’re driving me crazy.”

  “I know,” he said penitently. “I’m sorry. Let’s go out. I’ve got cabin fever. Turn off the cabbage. Let’s go for a walk. Please?”

  They went out the back door, walked until dark, picking up shells, agates, looking for glass floats. The beach was adrift with velella, tiny purple sailboats as delicate as butterfly wings that caught the wi
nd and sailed the surface of the sea. Some storm had tumbled them ashore; dried, light as leaves, they blew across the sand, minute ghost ships lost on land. Megan, digging in piles of kelp, kept mistaking kelp bladders for floats; Jonah walked head down, scrutinizing the tide line for jade, pearls, ambergris. They kissed finally, blown together by random currents, barely recognizing each other in the dark, the kiss cold as wind, salty from the sea.

  They drifted home, ate sausage and cabbage, then went down the street to the Ancient Mariner, where a band from up north called Hell-bent tried to prove it. Megan gave up on them early, blasted out the door by the harmonica player. But she held Jonah’s hand until then, and she kissed him before she left. Jonah ordered another beer, wanting mindless noise, movement, wanting, suddenly, to be hell-bent himself, as long as he could find his way home safely afterward.

  A woman appeared on the stage among the stocky, wild, bearded men. Jonah got a confused impression of her in the smoky light. A guest singer, he heard, from where-did-you-say-you-were-from? Her answer was lost in rowdy cheers. She wore something black, glittering, skintight. The sound system was poor; Jonah couldn’t understand her words. Her voice was clear, strong; it moved up and down an impossible range. Her black hair hung to her hips; her face appeared and vanished behind it. She pulled it straight back from her brow with one hand, revealing earrings of onyx and ivory, a fall of overlapping circles, each half-black, half-white, separated by a yin-yang curve of gold that continued around the circle. Jonah, gazing at them, tasted a cool, rich wafer on his tongue. I’m possessed, he thought. I want to eat jewels. Then the woman’s eyes caught his, glittering, sea green, and something snapped through him as if the air were charged.

  Odd things were happening inside the sound system. Tide flowed through her voice, drowned the music, dragged back into the system on a long, slow sigh. For an instant, before it built again, he heard her voice, high, sweet, elusive. And then he heard water again, gathering, gathering, pulling treasures out of the deep as it shaped and coiled and finally broke with a hollow, powerful moan against land, spilling stone, shell, pearl, spume across the sand. And then her voice came, low now, murmuring through the ebb.

  He swallowed dryly, and realized that he heard no other sounds in the world but the singer and the sea. He turned his head to see if the mysterious tide had entranced everyone; the movement brought the bar noises crashing around him: arguments, laughter, the drummer taking a final run down the drums, a cymbal, applause. The singer, her face half-lit, half-hidden under the dark wave of hair, gave them half a smile. Her single eye found Jonah again; she pulled her hair back withher hand and let him see her face, pale as foam, as finely sculpted as any shell shaped through the ages by water and danger and necessity. For a moment, as he stared back at her, he heard, beneath the human voices, the secret gathering of the tide.

  Then she stepped out of the light. He stood up, looking for her, not knowing what he was looking for. The bar was crowded; heads were every color but black. He reached the stage finally, saw only rowdy, bearded faces. There was an absence of her in the smoke-laced shadows, the flickering candlelit tables. He veered to the bar finally, ordered another beer, thinking if he waited a little, she might sing again. He downed the beer quickly, ordered another, trying to ignore the feeling that the night had suddenly split itself between the moment when he had not known of her existence and the moment when all he knew was her absence.

  He got home late; Megan was asleep. She had left a light on for him, over the table. He stood groggily, blinking at fossils, at the box on the table. Everything looked strange: He could barely remember why the table was littered with stones, what significance the box held. He flipped it open absently, still looking for something, for a meaning in what he felt.

  The box full of treasure dazzled his eyes. It must have come out of the sea, he thought crazily, and then saw, lying among the brilliant stones and crystals and metals, the onyx-and-ivory earrings.

  TWO

  Megan woke at sunrise. A line of gold ran around the curtains. In the distance she could hear the low, lazy tide stirring the sea mosses, sorting shells. She sat up. Beside her, Jonah lay so still he might have been some ship’s figurehead the sea had washed into her bed. He was breathing, though so evenly and quietly she had to untangle his breath from the sea. His skin smelled of beer and smoke. She reached for her glasses, slid out of bed; he didn’t stir. She pulled some clothes on, wandered with her drawing pad into spring.

  She walked a long way, in and out of dispersing mists, half dreaming, looking for a still life along the tide line. But her eye glossed over seaweed, velella, broken mussels, and sand dollars; they seemed an incoherent jumble. I need a bone, she thought. The moon. Something pure and simple. A seal surfaced in the waves to look at her, but did not stay to be drawn. She saw what she wanted then: a line, thin as spider web, cutting through a tendril of mist. She stopped. The line stretched into the tide, pulled earth and water together. A figure, shapeless in fishing boots and windbreaker, held the pole. Against the mist, the figure was a few bunchy lines, male or female, bulky, nearly colorless. Megan opened her drawing pad, pulled a pen out of her pocket. She rarely drew people; this was not a person, this was a sea species, a tide dweller, like the sandpipers and hermit crabs, sending a tentacle into the waves to see what there was to eat. Megan caught the angle of the body and the pole before the fisher reeled in to cast again. She looked seaward then, sketched a quick, feathery breaker. Something small and hard struck her shoulder, and she felt a claw in her hair.

  She shook her head wildly; it scratched her scalp. Then she stilled, thinking more calmly: the fishhook. The weight had hit her shoulder; it dangled in front of her, pulling at the hook tangled in her hair. She groped for it. The fisher was walking toward her, reeling in methodically. Megan felt the hook scrape behind her ear; she caught it finally, a clump of hook and hair in her fingers as the fisher reached her.

  It was a woman; Megan didn’t recognize her. She had long curly iron-gray hair flying out from a knitted cap; her eyes were the same oyster gray as the water. She had a lined, rugged, weathered face, about as graceless as a rockfish. Shorter than Megan, she looked hefty, shapeless under her jacket. She seemed annoyed, as if Megan’s hair had crossed her line on purpose.

  “Hold still,” she said brusquely, and put her pole down. She picked through Megan’s hair with stubby fingers. Her voice was a deep growl. “Lost the bait on that cast. At least you don’t have a worm in your hair.”

  “Thanks,” Megan muttered. Profuse apologies not being forthcoming, she added, aggrieved, “I think I’m bleeding. You could have cracked my glasses with that weight.”

  “I could have,” the woman agreed with daunting calmness.

  “Well, you should learn to cast. The ocean’s that way; if you look, you can’t miss it.”

  “I wasn’t looking at the ocean. I was looking at you. Why not? You were looking at me. You were putting me down on your paper.”

  “You could have asked me not to, if it bothered you. You didn’t have to throw things at me.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” the woman said, shrugging. “Draw me or not. You caught my attention, and so my hook followed. It happens. Hold still; it’s a triple hook.”

  “Great.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Megan. More to the point, what’s yours?”

  The woman gave the kind of fat, raspy chuckle Megan associated with chronic smoking. “You going to sue me? Over a scratch? Humans are so delicate. Who do the manatees sue when the speedboat propellers scar their backs for life?”

  “What?”

  “Who do the canned dolphins sue? Who do the little violet snails sue when, floating upside down on their bubble rafts on the surface of the sea, they run into an oil slick?”

  Brother, Megan thought. She said, “All right, all right, just get the damn hook out of my hair.”

  “Might have to cut it out. I have my fish knife.”

&nbs
p; “Oh, no. No knives. Just snap the line and I’ll cut it out at home.”

  The woman chuckled again. “Don’t be afraid. Anyway, I want my hook back. It’s mine, after all. And I want to see what I reeled in. Megan. What do you do with your drawings?”

  “I sell them. Ouch.”

  “One more prong. What else do you draw?”

  “Tide pools,” she muttered. “Birds. Kelp. Sea things.”

  “Then why me?”

  “I wasn’t drawing you. I was drawing a piece of sea life. Something attached to the sea, getting breakfast like an otter or a gull.”

  The woman gave a short seal’s bark. It might have been anger or amusement; there seemed both in her expression. The hook came free in her hand. She looked into Megan’s eyes then, her eyes wide, unblinking. “You must look closer,” she said. “You must look closer. You don’t see anything at all.”

  “People like my drawings,” Megan protested.

  “Of course they do. You show them what they expect to see. But you don’t see what’s really there. You couldn’t even see me.” She untangled the rest of the line from Megan’s hair, caught the weight before it dropped. Megan, irritated by the portentousness, answered, “Of course I see you. You’ve been in my hair for five minutes. You’re in my drawing.”

  The woman gave her raspy chuckle. She picked up her pole. A toad- woman, Megan thought darkly. Toadfish. And lunatic besides. “Look at your drawing. My name is Doris. Dory, you can call me next time.”

  “Next time what?”

  “Next time you want me.” She turned, wandered back along the tide line, pole over her shoulder. Megan watched her, at once cross and curious. She wasn’t local, she wasn’t a tourist. She was someone’s aging, eccentric sea wife, widow, maybe, living along the cliffs, her mind full of scars and barnacles, like an old whale’s back, from being too long in the sea. Someone else—husband, son, sister—kept her just human enough. She went behind one of the huge rocks scattered along the beach; she didn’t reappear. She must have stopped there to fish, well away from Megan’s hair. Megan stooped finally, picked up her drawing.