Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “And sharks?”

  “No,” she said indignantly. “Of course not. A narwhal. That’s what you would be. Something real, but not quite believable.”

  He looked at her, the expression in his eyes unfathomable.

  She wondered suddenly if she had hurt him. But he only said lightly, “Jonah would put me among the sharks.”

  “Jonah would not. Barnacles don’t know sharks.”

  “And where would Jonah put you?”

  She chewed the end of her pen, studying the drawing for whales. “Jonah doesn’t think that way. He sees everything in black and white.”

  He chuckled, amused by something. “That’s a perilous way to think. One day color will wash across his eyes and he’ll be in a world where nothing is familiar anymore. Not even you.”

  She looked at him, blinking. “That’s an odd thing to say.”

  “I see odd things,” he said lightly, and leaned forward to study her drawing. “It moves,” he commented. “It’s hard to catch the sea moving, since the drawn line freezes it. But I can hear your sea.”

  She flushed, pleased. “I was just doodling. Just—something odd is happening to my work. It’s going through some kind of change. I don’t—I don’t quite know what to expect from it now.”

  “In what way?” he asked gravely. She was silent a long time, while he waited; she shook her head finally, pulling her hair tight with her hands.

  “It’s hard to describe. I just have to keep at it until I know what it wants—what it wants to tell me.”

  He made a soft sound. “You draw the sea. Maybe it’s the sea you’re trying to hear.”

  She looked at him again. “You sound like that old sea witch.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman I met this morning. She cast her hook in my hair and reeled me in like a fish. She’s rude and crazy and ugly, and she changed my drawing.”

  “How—”

  “She just did. She walked into it and changed it. Old barnacle.” She could feel her face frowning and smiling at the same time. His face changed slightly; a shadow passed over it, or light. She asked, surprised, “You know her?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said softly. “Dory. The Old Woman of the Sea.” He stood up suddenly, as if he finally felt the barnacles. “That’s what we always called her.”

  “Is she crazy?”

  “No,” he said simply. “But sometimes her sanity is terrifying.” He stepped off the rock, into fingers of tide. He turned, gave her a smile. Tide washed away his footprints. She stopped watching him after a while and studied her sketch for changes. Boat. Rocks. Birds. Sea palm. Waves. Fishers. No mystery. Just land meeting sea. Birds diving out of air for food, plants growing up out of water for light. Humans hunting fish, eating from the sea.

  Normal. She closed her pad and leaped onto dry sand. She picked up half a Styrofoam float that had rolled in on the foam, and a small opaque bottle with something inside it. She stuffed them in her pocket and headed home.

  Jonah found them on the table among his rocks when he came upstairs after he closed the store. Megan’s drawing was propped against the toaster; he studied it a moment. Birds. Fishers. Rocks. Trawler. It lacked the precision of her underwater drawings, he decided, but the lines were good. He wondered where she was. He drifted over to the table, vaguely annoyed at her absence, as he would have been vaguely annoyed by her presence. He transferred his annoyance to the junk on the table that was littering his orderly mess. He tossed the float at the garbage can. Rim shot. It bounced to the floor and slid under a cupboard. He gazed at it, motionless, a glittering shadow, a smoky cadence trailing through his thoughts. He turned restively, picked up the bottle. Something shifted inside it. He held it up to the light, looked into it.

  He was standing with the bottle upraised, shaking it now and then to shift the flickering, unidentifiable lights in it, when Megan walked in. He grunted, too absorbed to speak. She set a bag of groceries on the cupboard, then turned. She pushed at her glasses hesitantly with her forefinger, her brows going up behind them.

  “What are you doing?”

  “There’s something in this bottle.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I can hardly see. . . . Where’d you find it?”

  “It washed ashore in the tide. What is it? A message?” She reached for it. “Let me see.”

  “Wait—” He held it higher. “I’m looking.”

  “Is it treasure? I found it. It’s mine.”

  “Salvage belongs to the government, who shall apportion its value.” He turned the bottle; weight shifted; something rattled faintly.

  “In what country?”

  “Florida, I think.” He caught a reflection, a memory in the glass that might have been opalescent walls, windows, a tower. “Can I break it?”

  “It’s probably sand.”

  He upended the bottle, shook it over the floor. A drop of water trembled on the lip. Megan watched it, as mesmerized as he was. “Not sand. I can’t tell what kind of bottle it is. Steak sauce, or something. It’s not antique, is it?”

  “Probably. It’s been floating around in the ocean for a hundred years, waiting for someone to find it and break into it. Now it’s more valuable than what’s inside.” She watched him patiently. “Can I see?”

  “Castles,” he murmured, watching the shifting lights. “Luminous fish. Reflections. Dreams. Rhinestones from Woolworth’s.” He yielded the bottle finally. She held it to the light a moment or two, motionless, not breathing. Then, abruptly, she dropped it into the sink and tapped it once, twice, with the marble rolling pin.

  “Be careful,” he breathed. The glass shattered on the third tap.

  They gazed at the pieces. Megan stirred them with her finger. Jonah picked up a shard, held it to the light. She watched him. He shook his head finally. “Nothing.” He drew a long breath, looked at her. “But there was something.”

  “There was,” she said in a small voice, “until I broke it.” She stirred the pieces again, her eyes wide behind her glasses. Then she began to gather the shards methodically.

  “Wait,” Jonah said quickly, before she threw them out. “Save me a piece. I can look at it through my hand lens.”

  She gave him that flat, incredulous stare before her face loosened and broke into a smile. “Oh, Jonah. You can’t see it that way.”

  “Then what was it?” he demanded.

  “Something.” She tossed the pieces in the garbage, then removed her glasses and drew the back of her hand over her eyes wearily. She blinked at him, half-blind; he wondered suddenly what she was seeing. “It’s like the sea hare.”

  “What?”

  “I thought it was over, but I guess not.” She put her glasses back on, began to unpack groceries.

  “What’s not over?”

  She didn’t answer, just took eggs out of the bag, then an eggplant, which he hated and she loved, and chicken livers, which she hated and he loved. She wasn’t going to answer, he could tell. When she opened the refrigerator, she let her hair swing in front of her face to hide it. He opened his mouth, impatient, wanting answers. She straightened abruptly before he could speak, and pointed out the dining-room window, where the lights of the town were streaking the twilight. “Look. That’s what you saw. You held it that direction. You said they looked like lights.”

  “There was weight,” he insisted, astonished. “Something rattled.”

  “A broken shell. Something that went down the drain.”

  “Sure.”

  Her mouth tightened. She unpacked cereal, milk. He went to her, put his hands on her shoulders, felt the tension in her. “What about the sea hare? What does that have to do with a bottle?”

  She shrugged his hands away, swung the cupboard door open, narrowly missing his head. “Nothing, probably. I can’t explain. I saw Adam today. He said you liked his work.”

  He folded his arms, backed against the counter. “You saw him today where?”

  “At the beach. He stoppe
d to watch me work.”

  “You never let anyone watch you work.”

  She shrugged. “I let him. He’s an artist. He knows the sea.”

  “He’s a hustler.”

  She turned to stare at him, stunned. “He’s an artist. He’s nice.”

  “Nice.” He reached past her, pulled a box of crackers out of the bag. “Jenny is nice. Baby llamas are nice. Adam Fin is a barracuda.”

  “You are so critical.” She slammed the cupboard door so hard beer in the bottom of the bag clinked. “It’s a wonder you even like me. If you ever stopped, who would there be left in the world for you to like?” He stood still, blinking, hearing thoughts inside his head clink like the beer bottles. He wondered if he held one against the window, would it reflect another world, or would it simply gather into itself the lights of the world he knew?

  There was something in that bottle, he thought stubbornly. And there is something else in Adam Fin. But he didn’t speak. He moved into her silence, put the milk and the beer away, matching her mute arguments with his own.

  THREE

  Megan sat on the floor in Mike’s bookstore, her back against history, surrounded by ocean. It was a slow morning. The bell on the door had rung three times. Rain tapped against the windows, wandered off, came back, tapped again. She was aware of someone circling her now and then, but she refused to look up. No one came to Mike’s for history. The books she heaved onto her knees were massive, colorful, precise. They measured the mountains beneath the sea; they plumbed the abysmal waters. They told what the narwhal ate, how the male seahorse gave birth to its young, how the sea cucumber, which flung its inner organs at its enemies to confuse them, contained a chemical that might combat cancer, and that the homely hagfish had three hearts, and what orchestrated the beat of a hagfish’s hearts could also steady a human heart. They knew, from the great blue whales to the one-celled algae, who ate what. They had counted the millions of eggs an oyster might lay in a year, and the number of rhymes in the song of the humpback whale.

  But they hadn’t read the message in the bottle.

  Nor, she decided, surfacing to the gray light, did they know that a sea hare could crawl out of the water and turn itself into ink. Or that an old woman could cast a line into a drawing of the tide and catch a human on her hook.

  She leaned back against the shelves, drew her hair out of her face. She must have sighed: Mike, on his stool, lifted his unkempt head, to which air moss and air snails probably clung, and turned an eye in her direction.

  It was a question, his attention. He didn’t care that she was littering his floor with herself and his books, but that she hadn’t found what she wanted in them. No one turned a page or breathed among the stacks; the place was empty but for them.

  She said wearily, hardly expecting Mike to offer much more than a crooked smile, “I keep finding odd things in the tide. But those books don’t say anything about them.” He was motionless, still listening, one finger marking the line he had read. She went on, talking to herself more than to him. “Yesterday I found a bottle with something in it. Something that shifted, something shining. . . . When I broke it open, nothing was there. But there had been something. These books are full of such strange things. Did you know that they made cloth of gold out of a fiber secreted by sea pens, and that sea pens look like long, feathery underwater quills? Maybe you could write a message with them. But these books don’t say anything about what I need to know. They explain everything. They don’t see anything that’s maybe there and maybe not. It’s like Jonah wanting to look for a mystery under his hand lens. It won’t be there. But it was there.”

  She stopped talking. Mike was looking at her with as much expression as an oyster, waiting patiently for her to quit making conversation so that he could get back to his book. Then his backbone straightened a little. He drew in air, a long tidal gathering through his nose. Expression, subtle as color in a kelp leaf, passed through his eyes. “Yeah,” he said, and Megan stared at him in astonishment. “I know.” He set his book down carefully and collapsed a little into his bulk to rummage under the counter. “I found one, too.”

  “One what?” she whispered.

  “One of those things. One of those things that don’t fit.” He lifted it gently off a shelf, set it on the counter, then stilled again, gazing at it, unblinking.

  Megan got to her feet, not easy after being weighted with the cumulative knowledge of the sea. The thing on Mike’s counter looked like a broken roof tile. It was flat, black, square but for a corner bitten off. As she looked more closely, she saw it was latticed with fine and intricate lines that revolved, at the corners, around tiny scallop shells. Latticed, it wasn’t black, she realized, but blue so dark it melted toward black. Then all the lines flowed together; it was flat, black, solid. And then latticed again, the scallop shells a faintly paler blue. And then flat. A piece of black tile.

  “What on earth—”

  “Nothing,” Mike said simply. “That’s what I figure. Nothing on earth.” He touched it gently; lines flowed under his fingers. “I found it washed up in a pile of kelp. Moves like water. Like something opening and closing to water.”

  “Yes,” she said, entranced. “It would, I guess, being underwater.”

  “You figure—” He hesitated, then became expansive. “You look at it maybe from their point of view. For millions of years, the sea was like those books to them. Everything’s explicable, expected. Fish bones, kelp leaves, pearls, whatnot. Then odd things start drifting down. They’ve seen wood floating, so they’re not surprised by ships, cloth of gold they can guess at, and pearls they know, and the little octopus can live in porcelain teacups. So they think: this is how humans live, floating on the water, coming apart now and then, and they learn to recognize clothes, and flesh, and then, after the fish feed, they recognize bone. But now . . . think if you were living down there, finding beer cans. Barrels of chemicals. Styrofoam coolers. Flashlight batteries. Plastic baggies. Maybe TV sets off sunken fiberglass boats. Refrigerators. Old socks. Tangled-up fishing line. If you didn’t know, if you lived maybe inside a glint of light, what kind of bizarre world would you guess was falling apart and drifting out of the air down into the sea?” He turned his finding; the other side was pale and luminous as pearl. Megan stared at him, mute. “So I look at this and wonder what’s down there, breaking up, washing ashore.” He looked at Megan, shrugged his bulky shoulders a little. “Makes you wonder. At least it does me.” Someone pushed the door open; the bell rang. He slid the finding back under the counter. Megan opened her mouth, closed it. Mike gave her his crooked, one-sided smile, then went back to being a walrus on a stool reading a book.

  Jonah, taking a day off, had driven the truck to a cove north of town, to putter along the cliffs. Worm tubes and the occasional crumbling fossil clam were all he expected to find, though that morning he thought vaguely of shark teeth, or the ancient tracks of rain. Except for a couple from a camper picking through the treasures along the tide line, the cove was empty. He walked around the south arm of the cove, close to the water, where tide pools formed in the sandstone, and the cliffs were sliding shard by shard into the sand. There he picked among the broken pieces, occasionally helping the cliff down by poking into its side. The sandstone yielded easily, revealed little except the unmistakable tracks of other fossil hunters. Still, he was content in the gray, damp winds, with the roiling sea at his back, and the seagulls crying overhead.

  He and Megan had mumbled back into one another’s good graces; by midnight he had forgotten the color of the sea and remembered only Megan’s eyes, their intentness, their sudden smile. He had been cured of earrings; Adam Fin, from wherever, was not a barracuda but harmless as a harp seal. He crumbled mud around what looked like a brachiopod, whistling. The ghost of the brachiopod itself crumbled away, left him a handful of nothing. He let it fall, still whistling, and eyed the tide. It had moved farther out, giving him a chance to clamber along the edge of the cliff out where it dipped down
into deep water, and then over to the other side, which was usually tide-bound. He dropped his finds into his windbreaker pocket and began to climb.

  Fifteen minutes later he was picking his way across what looked like giant ribs or backbones, partially submerged in sand, polished by the waves. There was a cave on this side of the cliff, with nothing much in it but the usual barnacles, starfish, anemones, hanging like some kind of weird living wallpaper down from where the tide stopped rising. But farther back from the water, around the outside of the cave, he had once found a perfect bivalve half the size of his palm. He went back there.

  He heard the whales sing then.

  He recognized them from some old record of Megan’s: a flute player jamming with whales. It sounded more like whooping jungles to him, creaking timbers, demonic foghorns, than song. There were vast, deep notes that blew through him like breath trembling through a reed. I shouldn’t be hearing those notes, he thought, shaken. They move through the deep sea, the leviathan call across hundreds of miles.

  His eyes fell on the backbones and ribs of rock he had walked across. They seemed to be arched in a dive through time, a sea mammoth caught and frozen like a little trilobite in the floor of the ocean. But this isn’t the floor, he thought, then: it was underwater once. I’m at the bottom of a fossil sea, hearing the ghosts of whales. They were all around him, the voices of the sea, whistling, scraping, ratcheting, whooping, booming. He stood stunned by noise, trembling in currents of sound. What is happening? he thought. Something is happening.

  Then there was only one sound: a song so faint he could barely separate it from the gentle splash and sigh of water within the cave.

  It was a human voice; it was the sea’s voice. It flicked away foam, wandered over stones, lingered in the anemone’s tendrils. It turned over a shell, scattered agates. For a moment, as the sea idled, it ranged free, sweet, deep, then impossibly clear and high. He recognized it.

  He took a step toward the cave, feeling his heart beat in his throat, his lips. The cave emitted a breath of brine and guano, then cool, rainy wind. He took another step, another. A wave rolled over his footprint. The voice grew louder. His eyes stung with salt, with sweat. There was no language in his head, only the tide and the voice and the wind. He reached the mouth of the cave.