The Salt God's Daughter

by Ilie Ruby

  This was a different life entirely than what I’d known, a lucky life. I had never had such fun with anyone. He was the second man I’d been with, but the first I’d made love to. I’d never imagined falling into bed with a man so accepting, who tickled and nuzzled me, rubbed my feet and hands, massaged my neck and thighs. These were the delicacies of the lovers’ table, one that by some stroke of good fortune, I was now sitting at. The fact that he expected nothing, and was never disappointed, didn’t alert me to the fact that he’d never think I’d be disappointed either.

  “Swim with me,” he said. My muscles tensed as he took my hand. Everyone I’d ever known was afraid of weakness. What would he think of me? I decided I’d have to be brave, no matter what.

  “I don’t swim. I don’t know how.” I ran back across the sand, back to the safety of my apartment. Graham followed.

  “Ruthie, don’t ever be embarrassed with me.”

  I buried my head in my hands. “What kind of person lives near the ocean and can’t swim?”

  He pulled me against him, kissing my forehead. “We need music. I miss that.”

  I felt my throat tighten and shook my head no.

  “But you have a beautiful voice.”

  My mother’s fat-bellied guitar was in my closet. A street musician had given it to her back before I was born. It had been a long time since I’d played. I kept the nylon strings a little loose, and I changed them when I thought of it. Graham’s eyes caught me, their green placidity. “If you don’t sing, I’m going to start. That won’t be pretty.”

  “The lesser of two evils,” I said. When I opened my closet where I kept my guitar, I sucked in my breath.

  Clusters of tall grasses, heaps of shells, and wildflowers still with their roots tumbled out of the closet. He was teasing me with the extraordinary.

  “Where did you find all these?” I asked, gathering the flowers, brushing the soil off. My fingers were clumsy. I put the flowers in a vase. Then I couldn’t find my old pick, but my mother’s capo was in the case. We sat on the porch and I managed something, Cat Stevens’s “Wild World.” My fingers remembered the progression: Am, D7, C, F, Dm, and E.

  The Shekhinah. Perhaps she had come back.

  I cleared my throat and started again. After a few rough starts, I found my voice. I played the song again, my voice fuller and my fingers finding the chords easily.

  “I was terrified. That’s the last thing I ever planned on doing,” I said, setting down the guitar.

  “You’re very brave. I didn’t realize until now.”

  I glanced down at the animals looking up from the waves, their dark eyes fixed on me. A few balconies away, Mr. Takahashi looked at me and clapped.

  THAT NIGHT, GRAHAM told me that some souls found each other life after life, like some sea animals would always return to the place of their birth. It was an instinct that called living things toward home. Sometimes home was a place. Sometimes home was a person. No one could explain what made it home to one and not to another. It was a combination of chemistry and memory that created resonance, that which allowed a thing to be recognized.

  Suddenly, I glanced at the window. She was coming to me again, from out of the blue, my child. I could feel her presence, her energy like the waves, pushing me toward him.

  She’d already captured me, my daughter.

  Graham pressed his forehead against mine. “I can’t believe I finally found you,” one of us said with relief.

  He carried me into the bath. “I can walk,” I laughed. He said he wanted to feel my whole body in his arms.

  I was taken with his precision, noticing how he tested the temperature of the water until it was perfect. We were the same in that way, our exacting need. Yet everything, for me, was good or bad. For him, a thing like temperature, hot and cold, was not good or bad. He unfolded the towels, waiting for the bath to fill. I imagined him caring for our children one day, how he’d let me sleep in on Sundays while he got them up and gave them breakfast. I let myself get lost in a life I imagined we’d have. I imagined who I’d be with him. I didn’t want to be lost in my own stories. But that’s what happened.

  Graham took my hand and led me into the tub. I reached up and turned the light off.

  He was different when he was in the water, more at ease, and he touched me gently, kissing the backs of my shoulders and the space behind my knees, the parts of my body that I never thought about. Baths became our ritual. How the water made his skin glisten. It made him lighter, happier almost. He smiled more, kissed me more, and drew me to him in a different way—a way that felt more like lovemaking than like a rough exchange between animals. Perhaps he was just trying to get me used to the water. Still, I was not a swimmer. Not yet. But I loved the water with him, and it was always while bathing that I felt closest to him, that I felt I knew him, and that I knew I was falling in love with him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I STARTED CALLING GRAHAM the Salt God because that is how I thought of him—both as otherworldly but as possessing the material qualities of the sea. Mostly, I thought of him as something not possible. Each time he came back I was surprised. From that first night on New Year’s Eve through the months that followed, I wanted the taste of salt he left on my skin, in my hair, that would take days to get out. He would always return on the full moon, staying only a few days, depending on his gauging of the weather conditions as he stood on the porch and looked across the ocean.

  I tracked storms. I checked the weather reports on the radio, tuning in to the coast guard channels, made nervous by the storms of El Niño, hurricanes and dangerous squalls, and the plumes of sulfurous soot that trailed after the massive cargo ships that motored into the busy port of Long Beach, with its oil rigs and breakwaters.

  I evaluated tide charts and the patterns of temperature and weather. I worried about whales flung onto land. Fish turned over on their bellies and floated up in the ripples of the red tide. Sea turtles struggled onto the beach, caught in fishermen’s nets. The Sisters came and went, their skin appearing battered, a lighter shade of brown, mottled with shadows.

  I told myself he was not coming back. I waited for him, poring over old almanacs on my porch. My new almanac didn’t comfort me as much as my mother’s old ones did. Hers was territory already crossed. I knew the ending.

  I found Mr. Takahashi crouched in the stairwell in the storage room. Mrs. Green spent more time at her husband’s bedside as he lost his strength, caught on the threshold of “any day now.”

  Things could be drawn not only by their energetic alignments but by their misalignments. It was difficult to hold the motions of forward and backward simultaneously, of love being given and then taken back, again and again. Everything alternated between periods of movement and rest, but the fact of another person leaving and then suddenly returning was not an easy one. As soon as my mother had pulled up in her car and let me in, I imagined climbing out of the car. I prayed for taillights to appear in the darkness, and when they did, I imagined them receding. This is how I prepared myself.

  “I don’t want to talk about him,” I told Dolly over the phone. Then I stopped answering her calls. She drove up from San Diego to confront me.

  “But I’m your sister. What are you hiding, did he leave you again?”

  “You already know he did,” I said.

  People could get caught in energetic whirlpools, losing themselves in the momentum of millions of molecules of swirling energy, as if in a school of fish. You’d find yourself being pulled into the darkest caves, going deeper in your search for light. To distract me, Dolly spoke of waterhorses, of fairies and water sprites. “Did I tell you? I bumped into the gnomes at the post office. They’ve just moved back to the 405 after summering on the East Coast. Damn snowbirds,” she laughed, meeting my eyes.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Never mind.”

  “You don’t have to try so hard to make me feel better,” I said.

  “I do, Moose. I always wi
ll.”

  ON THE NIGHT of the Worm Moon in March, lightning flashed, stirring the roots of the trees, awakening the new spring flowers and the souls of lost sailors. The Worm Moon would help the earth and all of its living things reclaim a life worth living.

  “I told you I’d come back,” Graham said, soaking wet at my door in a puddle of rain, his hair dripping. He was covered in bruises. I brought him towels and blankets and made him Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. After he ate, I crawled into bed with him, trying to still his shivers by laying my naked body over his. His cheeks were too pink, his eyes dim. “Just sleep,” I told him. He pulled me onto him. We made slow simple love that night.

  I flicked on the light. “Why do you come back?”

  “Happiness,” Graham said, looking straight at me. “I’m just as afraid of something going wrong as you are, Ruthie.”

  I wondered if that would always be true.

  “Ruthie, tell me what you have always wanted,” he said, drawing his finger up the spine of my stomach and letting it rest on my chin.

  “This,” I said.

  In the morning, he was gone.

  The taste of salt burned my lips.

  WHEN HE RETURNED on the night of the Pink Moon in April, the beach turned the color of phlox, one of the first spring flowers. Graham and I woke on the beach at dawn and then escaped back to my apartment before anyone saw us. I combed out our hair with my fingers, and he predicted the time of high tide, based on the direction of the clouds, the appearance of an oncoming storm, and the time of day the animals came back from the ocean and settled on the beach. We left things unsaid. We let our shoulders burn and our skin peel. We left our footprints in the sand, knowing that the sea could not stand an empty space and would fill them. My questions drummed back into the earth as we made love. I didn’t look back.

  There were more than seven thousand known languages spoken in the world. There were others that no one could chart because they included words you couldn’t conceive of. You could teach animals your language. Monkeys, dolphins, and gorillas could learn to sign. The northern mockingbird, the parakeet, and many others could imitate a plethora of sounds. Sea lions communicated through barks and trumpeting sounds. If you were diving, you might hear them, but the sound might just appear as bubbles floating off in the distance.

  You had to know when a thing, vast in intelligence, was using meaningful language, not just telling you what you wanted to hear. You would have to learn its language in order to figure this out. I would learn his.

  I imagined the Sisters, who could communicate both above and beneath water, calling each other in a language I could not understand. Dolly could find me in a crowded room. Even if she whispered, the recognition cut through all the background noise and made everything else just fade away, all the Right and Not Right. All the hope and hopelessness. I could capture the sound of my sister’s voice like a stone in my hands, and I’d find myself pulled out of the darkness. Dolly could remind me of who I was, where I’d been, my history.

  I had walked down a sea lion. I’d continued to love my mother. My third act: I would stop waiting for Graham.

  You could teach an animal to learn your language, but you’d be missing the point. The point was to learn its language. Only then would you understand.

  DURING GRAHAM’ S VISIT in April, I returned to Mrs. Green again and again, checking to see that she was still there. “Enjoy the time you have with each other,” she said. Her hair had whitened, and her fingers were covered with white paint. Her head was wrapped in a blue paisley scarf that drifted down around her shoulders as she painted the waves. The hem of her blue smock was torn open, and her pockets were overstuffed with paintbrushes. I told her I would sew the hem. Her lips parted just slightly, as if in a thank-you, as she focused back on her canvas. I noticed the Sisters, their slick broad backs glistening. In her painting, three women are sitting on the beach. They have soft brown eyes and long sleek brown hair and features that are somehow too heavy, animal.

  In the middle of the night, Graham sat up suddenly. “A bird just hit the window.” He got up, racing to the porch. I followed him, telling him that it wasn’t an omen, that we were safe. That nothing had happened. There was no bird lying in the sand and everybody was fine and he should go back to sleep. He shook his head. “Someone died.”

  When my beeper went off the next morning, I kissed him and rushed out of bed. “See you in a little bit,” I said, leaving him sleeping.

  Mr. Takahashi stood in the hallway, barefoot, his black pants rolled up to his knees. Dr. B. was behind him on her phone. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this with him. I just don’t know if he can stay,” she said, after hanging up. I didn’t want to let him go. I’d brought him back too many times, and he didn’t trust anyone but me.

  Mr. Takahashi’s eyes burned red. “My slippers. Diana, that thief.” He was time-traveling again, his slippers flung off the balcony in a fit of rage. He glanced at the door to the storage room.

  “I bet I know where they are,” I said. He followed me into the storage room. I noticed the boxes and suitcases had been rearranged. The room was toppled with abandoned chairs, upside down, piled onto one another, forts made from torn mattresses. The Easy-Bake Oven was dusted with fingerprints. Dolly and I had played with this oven as children. We’d acted out dinnertime scenarios that were not ours, but that we’d seen on television. We’d melted crayons in pie tins. We’d said, “Thank heavens” and, “Please pass the margarine.” Neither of which my mother ever said. Her almanacs were still in that box by the old card table.

  “Where are my strawberries?” Mr. Takahashi asked. “Diana. She’s the only one who remembers.”

  “You grow the best strawberries in California. In the world,” I said, handing him his slippers from atop my mother’s box. I pushed the box into the shadows. Back in his apartment, I fluffed his pillow and read him an article from The Wall Street Journal until he nodded off. I neatened up the newspapers on the black leather ottoman before I left.

  Walking back down the hallway toward my apartment, I focused on the blue rectangle I’d passed through, morning, noon, and night. What was the worst thing that could happen? No one had promised me anything.

  When I opened the door, I drew in my breath. I pulled off the tightly tucked blanket on the bed, as if I would find him. I rushed out onto the porch, hating the certainty of sunlight. He’d gone.

  All signs of water had been scraped away.

  In my mind, I made it halfway up the Jacob’s ladder before I heard the knock on my door. Graham walked in with a bag of groceries and flowers. Dirt fell across my carpet as I took the bouquet of yellow wildflowers from his hands, roots still weeping. I put the flowers in a tall silver vase, added some sugar to the water. I set it on the kitchen table. Graham took out the avocados, peaches, and oranges and lined them up on the counter, satisfied. “I know you like avocados,” he said.

  “If you’re going to disappear, would you leave me a note?” His expression fell as he put the fruit and avocados in the bowl.

  “I was trying to surprise you.” He poured a glass of whiskey and walked out onto the porch, closing the sliding glass door behind him. Turning on the faucet, I pushed my hands into cold water. I reached in further until I was wet up to my elbows. I leaned back against the refrigerator and shook off my hands.

  That night, I sat up in bed, stilled by the sight of him dreaming, the twitch of his closed eyelids, the strength of his hands folded on his bare chest, the rise and fall of his slightly bowed stomach, the dark line of hair curling beneath his navel. “I’ve never asked anything of you,” I said out loud. I said it again, this time louder. But he didn’t hear me.

  We woke at dawn, fingers twisted together; the walls that we’d created had come down. We held each other, arms and legs entwined as though having found, for a few minutes, that which got us through the separations and the loneliness. He faced me, staring through me in a way that had excited me at first, the
night I met him, but now seemed a replacement for the true bond I imagined. He kissed my forehead and lips and rubbed my shoulders and my hands and gazed into my eyes and told me I was the most wonderful woman in the world, and that he wanted nothing more than to make me happy. But I knew. I nodded and closed my eyes. With his heavy legs slung over mine, I let myself fall asleep. When I woke, I was alone in the bed. I ran to the balcony. I didn’t see him. It was pouring rain. I grabbed my raincoat and ran outside, looking for footprints. I waded into the gold-gray water, the bottom of my white nightgown soaked three inches from the hem. He hadn’t left a note.

  The beach was empty. There was no one here, not even the Sisters.

  DOLLY SAID I shouldn’t worry that she would say, “I told you so.” “I’ve got your back. But see, this is what happens when you walk among the regular people.”

  “Outlaws,” I said, without enthusiasm.

  It was a combination of chemistry and memory that created your tipping point. You would feel your heart racing, as if escaping from a lion in the jungle, or running behind a car that was driving away. That image of your sneakers in a midnight puddle on the side of the road would be forever etched in your memory. Dolly, who knew about the science of trauma because of her work, said that in the midst of a trauma, your brain would take in every detail: the smell of gasoline in the rain, the scrape of tree bark against your palm, a particular shade of lipstick. This was a survival mechanism, whether you were a caveman, a librarian, or a beauty queen. If you suddenly had to run, you could count on the fact that your body was prepared to defend your life.

  If you were raised in the back of a station wagon, the paths to excitement and fear were the same, becoming your one-way highway. It was not unusual to have trouble saying “stop.”