Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  She gave it a cursory glance. The wave had gotten smudged, but the simple essential lines were unchanged. What she had wanted to say. . . . She gazed at it, pleased, despite the memory of the hook in her hair. The fisher, the line into the sea, the wave. . . .

  She looked more closely at the wave. She was aware of her heartbeat suddenly, a little private sound louder than the break and drag of tide. It wasn’t a smudge in the wave where the line broke the water and the fishhook disappeared. It was a graceful tangle of tide-tossed hair.

  Jonah, rapt, drowning at the bottom of a dream, down full fathom five among the dead men, the rotting spars and spilled treasure of sunken ships, was mildly annoyed when the white arm of a sea goddess reached endlessly and insistently down to pull him up into light. He hid in the coral where the butterflyfish slept, tried to burrow into the parrotfish’s nightly cocoon; the hand pursued him.

  “Jonah.”

  He tried to make himself invisible, one of the little ghoulish creatures living in the sea’s eternal night. The hand plunged after him, scattering schools of luminous fish.

  “Jonah! Wake up. You slept through the alarm.”

  No, I haven’t, he thought, hearing the alarm all around him in the sea. Then he opened one eye, found himself in bed, with Megan, dressed and smelling of tide, sitting beside him.

  He moved after a moment, dropped a hand over his eyes. “God,” he breathed. “I had the strangest dream. What time is it?”

  “Ten after eight. What did you dream?”

  “I dreamed I was searching for fossils on the bottom of the ocean. There was a great cliff; I could swim up and down it, picking fossils out. But they weren’t bivalves and trilobites—I was picking whales out of the cliff, walruses, seals, manatees, dolphins, sea turtles. Only they weren’t big; they were tiny, shrunken things, and in my dream I thought: they’ve been forgotten; that’s why they’re so tiny. I’m in the future, and they’re in the forgotten past.”

  “Well,” she said comfortingly after a moment, “they’re not all gone yet. I saw a seal in the tide watching me watch it.”

  “Did you go out drawing?” She nodded. “I didn’t even know you were gone.” He trailed a finger down her arm sleepily. “Did you draw?”

  “I did one.” Her eyes seemed opaque behind her glasses; they got that way sometimes when she didn’t like her work.

  “What?”

  “Just something. I’m not sure if I like it.”

  “Let me see.”

  She shook her head. “Later, maybe. Let me think about it. Do you want me to bring you some coffee?”

  “Coffee,” he said, as if he couldn’t remember what it was he drank a pot of every day. But a bit of his mind had darted off into deeper water, in pursuit of something.

  “You know. Black stuff, comes in a cup.”

  “Uh.” He sat up suddenly. “No, I’ll get up. I remember now.”

  “What?”

  “Where my dream came from.” He swung around, found the floor, and padded out to the dining room, where the box sat on the table among his rocks. He opened it.

  “There they are,” he said, and there they were: all the great sea animals, tiny carvings of jade, turquoise, malachite, silver, gold. “That’s what made me dream.” He was silent again, touching moons of black and white, rimmed with gold.

  “Do you like his work?” Megan asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he sighed. “Yes.”

  Reading on his stool behind the cash register later, while Jenny worked, he kept avoiding sea-green eyes. He studied the antique Compend of Geology stubbornly; thoughts crystallized between the lines. All I have to do is sit here until the jewelry maker comes in. . . . “Fossils . . . of extreme interest to geologists, because they reveal the nature of the former inhabitants of the earth.” Then I can ask him about the woman who bought the earrings. The woman who sings. “. . . may be defined as any evidence of the former existence of a living thing.” He would remember her.

  But how well do I remember her? “In some cases . . . even the organic matter . . . is preserved. . . .” Black, black hair, her hand pulling it back. Her voice like smoke, like fire, bright and dark. What she wore, night black, yet sparking light. “. . . more commonly . . . only the shells . . . and of these . . . sometimes both the form and structure and sometimes only the form.” Her face, pure and mysterious as a moon shell, turning and turning inward, outward . . . the color of her eyes. The blur of color coming at me across the room, into my eyes, into my blood. . . .

  “Jonah, do we have any little cards explaining this one?” Jenny asked, holding up an ammonite. He rocked a little on the stool, jarred by the force of his imaginings, the boundary to another world buckling against the insistence of the real. Jenny’s voice, the customer’s hopeful face, the preserved form and structure. . . .

  “Oh.” Both women looked strange, Jenny and the customer; there was only one face his eyes expected. He leaned forward, pulled at a drawer in the counter. “In here, somewhere. It’s an ammonite. Mesozoic Period.” He pulled out one of the cards, handwritten in Megan’s calligraphy. “Here.” Holding it across the counter, he looked up into sea-green eyes.

  The world stopped. Stopped moving, stopped making noise, twenty-seven billion forms of life stopped breathing air, drinking light. Then it started up again, with a lurch of sound like ground gears.

  “Are you Jonah? I’m Adam Fin.”

  He held out his hand. After a moment, Jonah shook it, wondering how he could have found any similarities at all between the darkly glittering singer and this fallen angel. The green eyes narrowed faintly, a smile glinting through them, contradicting the bland innocence in his face. Jonah half expected the clamshells to clatter together in horror, the Compend to disintegrate into a pile of ash, the name to etch itself into the plate-glass window. Then he thought: this is ridiculous, I’m having a bad case of spring fever, I’m hallucinating.

  “Fin?”

  “One n. Like a fish.” He smiled again, this time with teeth. There seemed a lot of them, white as fish bone and predatory. That, Jonah remembered, was the fashion in places where people paid attention to fashion. “So you like my work.” His voice seemed deceptively gentle, silky. Jonah expected to see brine running out of his smile, as if he had just taken a shark bite of something.

  “Yes.” He dared not ask, he decided, which of the three women had told him that. Then, abruptly, frowning, he did ask. “Did Megan tell you that? When? I only looked at it last—this morning.”

  “No.”

  “No.” He drew breath, his eyes sliding away from the chilly, smiling eyes. “Not Megan.”

  “I haven’t seen her yet this morning.”

  “She’s probably on the beach, drawing,” he said inanely, and then, too late, heard the undercurrent beneath Adam’s words. Adam simply nodded.

  “Then I’ll look there for her.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you want Megan?” Jenny turned to look at him, hearing the sharpness in his voice. Adam’s blank, surprised expression mirrored hers. Jonah shifted, feeling somehow foolish and threatened at the same time. He said, without waiting for an answer, “I’ll have to take your work on consignment.”

  “Fine with me,” Adam said mildly. “Which pieces do you want?”

  “I’ll have to go upstairs and get the box.”

  He found it where he had left it, closed among his fossils, and brought it down. He opened it on the counter. Jenny joined him, making vague, appreciative sounds, filling his own silence as his eyes, flicking across a pirate’s treasure of metal and jewels, found nothing. They must be there, he thought incredulously, the yin-and-yang wafers of onyx and ivory. They had to be there, hidden under a gold whale, under a polished black starfish. “I’ll take these,” he said, breaking his awkward silence, shifting jewels. “These.”

  “What about the black cats sitting on the fishhooks?” Jenny suggested. “I love those.”

  “Righ
t. And this.”

  “And the sea-otter pin, with the tiny abalone shell on its tummy.”

  “Fine.” He picked up a sea-turtle pin, its back malachite, its head and feet paler jade, jointed with silver. “This.”

  “And this little pink-jade octopus; it looks like a flower, the way its arms curve like petals.”

  “Fine.” He swallowed. “Jenny keeps the shop going; she knows our customers. There was—I thought I saw—”

  “Yes?”

  “We couldn’t possibly have lost them—if so I’ll pay for them—”

  “What,” Adam asked, “are you looking for?”

  The world seemed to quiet again. Jonah lifted his eyes, feeling naked, vulnerable, pleading silently for mercy. “I saw a pair of onyxand-ivory earrings. Overlapping circles, dark and light divided by gold. I don’t know what happened to them.”

  There was no mercy in the fine, dangerous face.

  “You only thought you saw them in the box,” Adam said gently. “But you recognized my work. I made them for my sister.”

  Upstairs, Megan laid two drawings on the floor and sat cross-legged, studying them.

  Sea hare, she thought.

  Sea hair.

  Something is happening. Something very strange is happening. Things are drawing themselves into my drawings. Or am I drawing them without realizing it? But that old woman caught my hair on her hook, and that’s my hair there, floating like a mermaid’s in the surf. How would I have known to draw it?

  She hugged her knees, staring at the drawings.

  “Well,” she said finally, a little wildly, “there’s only one thing to do. Go back and draw again, and see what else turns up.” She got up off the floor, leaving the drawings there, the beginning of some story without words that she had to pull in the shape of fish and shells and seaweed out of the sea.

  She went out again, feeling a touch lunatic herself. She hadn’t showered; breakfast had been a cup of coffee with Jonah before he went down to open the store. They hadn’t talked much; he seemed dream-fogged, and she was dumbfounded. She walked to the beach again, hair flying, pocket full of pens and pencils, her drawing pad under her arm, her eyes wide behind her salt-flecked glasses, determined to make the mystery reveal itself or vanish.

  The tide had turned; most of the tide pools were underwater. She sat on a wedge of boulder, watched the tide bubble around it. She drew the rocks in the distance, rising above the surf like the craggy towers of some forgotten kingdom. Sea palms on lower shelves of rock curled under the tide, then popped upright, shaking their fronds. She added a cluster of them, and three pelicans, time-warped from another era, that flew along the breakers. She studied her drawing. Nothing, she thought grimly, that shouldn’t be there. She added a fishing trawler crawling along the horizon, and a couple of men casting off the top of a rock. There was more impulse than art to her composition, but she began to enjoy the randomness. Everything about it was unexpected, so nothing could surprise her.

  “Megan?”

  She looked up, surprised. Adam Fin, looking more homogeneous in blue jeans and a windbreaker, smiled down at her, then glanced at her drawing. She, who hated people looking over her shoulder, shifted to reveal more of it to him. “Hi,” she said, and patted barnacles. “Sit down.”

  He did so, ignoring the hoary teeth pushing against his backside. He watched the water a moment, eyes narrowed against the wind, then said, “I talked to Jonah. He took some of my work.”

  “I knew he would.”

  “Is he always so intense?”

  “Pretty much. He says he likes rocks better than people.” She added a bit of cross-hatching to the rocks, then looked up again to find Adam’s profile, turned seaward, still as marble, hair pushed back by the wind, a quarter moon glinting in one ear. For just a moment, she envisioned that profile superimposed on her sketch, as if he were dreaming the rocks, the pelicans, the kelp and tide. Light sparked across the silver quarter moon in his ear; the onyx rabbit seemed to sprint across the wind toward the tide.

  “Does it mean something?” she asked curiously. “The black rabbit? Is it lucky?”

  His stillness broke; he touched it, smiling a little. “I don’t know. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In old tales, rabbit is a trickster. It changes sex, it changes shape; it lures you this way and that; it steals power and gives it away; it changes the path under your feet, and in the end, it changes what you think you want into what you are really looking for.”

  “All that,” she said, marveling.

  “Sometimes it just plays tricks.”

  She watched it rocking under his ear, the moon caught in its paws. Her eyes strayed again to his profile. “Jenny thinks you were born here.”

  “She does?” There was a touch of humor in his gentle voice. “Why?”

  “She says because you’re more like one of us than one of them.”

  He still looked seaward, but the shadow deepened under his cheekbone. “One of us,” he said, amused. “One of them.”

  “Were you?”

  “Born here?” He leaned gracefully, catching a trail of foam between his fingers. “Yes. Here. Jenny’s right.”

  “But you traveled.”

  “Now I’m back.” He flicked the foam into the water. “You weren’t born here.”

  “I was born—”

  “In Port Jameson. Jenny told me. Up north.”

  “You know it?”

  “I know all the towns along the coast. I’m part salesman, remember?”

  “But where do you live now?”

  “I’m staying with some people,” he said vaguely, “until I find a place.”

  “You’re going to stay?”

  “For a while. Maybe longer. Who knows? Long enough to make some things, sell some things, make a little money.”

  “That’s all there is around here,” she commented. “A little money.”

  “People bring it in from up north, down south. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles—”

  “Jonah thinks you’re from Beverly Hills.”

  He laughed at that, noiselessly, still watching the tide. “Jonah has too much imagination.”

  “I always thought he didn’t have enough.”

  He leaned back, hands splayed among the barnacles, his eyes on the water, but she felt his attention shift to her. “Why do you say that?”

  She shrugged. “He likes to classify things. He’s very cautious. He hates the color in my drawings; he thinks it’s commercial. He has good taste, but he can be rigid about some things. He didn’t even want to talk to you at first; he wouldn’t look at your jewelry, even when I told him how beautiful it is. I don’t know why he changed his mind. When he finally looked at it, he dreamed about it.”

  He was silent a moment, absolutely still, the way the waves were still sometimes, just before they began to gather and turn again. Then he said slowly, “He locks up imagination maybe, frees it by night. Some people do that. Their lives are rigid, but their dreams are full of poetry. Monsters. Things rich and strange. Imagination is dangerous. It changes things. You think you know what the world is and where you are in it, and then you walk out the door, and the storm clouds are a migration of great white whales, and the moonlight on the water is a stairway down into the sea.”

  “A stairway into the sea,” she repeated, and saw it suddenly, in her mind, moonlight and pearl, beginning just at the edge of the tide and running into the deep. She shook her head, laughing a little, and Adam’s eyes turned away from the sea to her.

  “What?” he asked, smiling.

  “Nothing. I just saw your stairway. I’ve never thought that way about the sea. I’ve always drawn what I saw, and I never imagined anything that wasn’t real.”

  “Pretend it’s real,” he suggested lazily. “What’s it made of? Your stairway?”

  “Moonlight. Pearl. Something dark, blue-black, like the underside of mussel shells.”

  “Where does it begin?”

  “Just there. Where the o
utgoing tide draws back the farthest from the land.”

  “If you could—” He looked at her again, still smiling faintly, his eyes seeming at once opaque and full of light. “Would you?”

  “Go down the stairs?” She nodded, pushing her hair out of her eyes to contemplate imaginary stairs. “Now I can only go as deep as a tide pool. If I could stand on the bottom of the sea and draw all the little luminous fish in the dark . . . draw kelp, looking up toward light . . . I could draw these things from photographs, but I never wanted to. Anyway, Jonah would hate that more than he hates the colors.”

  “He hates the sea?”

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “He loves it.”

  “And he loves you.”

  She glanced at him silently, saw only a waning quarter of his face. “He’s crotchety,” she said slowly. “Hard to please, sometimes. But then, so am I. We’re alike, in a lot of ways.” She paused again. “I’ve never—”

  “What?”

  “Talked like this to anyone. I don’t usually. About my drawings. About Jonah.”

  “Sometimes it’s easiest to talk to strangers.”

  “Do you love anyone?”

  His expression didn’t change, but she had surprised him: he stopped breathing; again his body grew still. “No,” he said at last. “Not for a long time. And even then, not for very long.”

  “It was like that for me,” she said with sympathy, “before I met Jonah. It seemed—just luck, that we met. An accident.”

  “Maybe,” he said gravely, “one of these days, I’ll have an accident.”

  She leaned against her drawing, studying him as she studied tide pools. “You’d more likely have a collision,” she said, and saw his teeth flash.

  “Why?”

  “Because you seem more dramatic. Exotic. Jonah and I belong in a tide pool. You belong in the great deep. Among the whales and dolphins—”