The Salt God's Daughter

by Ilie Ruby

  Danger would always be danger.

  After I closed the door, I removed the dagger and the bible and put them in a box in the storage room with my mother’s almanacs. I would never take them out again. I would never take that same road again. Graham was now a part of my past, and so were my mother’s stories. I closed the cover of the box and taped it shut, beginning a new life.

  IN THE WEEKS and months that followed, my sheets would not unfold with sand. Staring out at the breakwater that abutted the waves, I thought about how the sea always knew where it stood.

  “The only way to get over him is to let yourself want him. Want him until you don’t want him anymore,” said Dolly over the phone. Her sensitivity surprised me.

  “We both wanted something.” I held the phone under my chin. “Do you think Mom was a liar?”

  “Why do you ask?” Dolly said.

  “She said I would be a better mother than she was.”

  “She wasn’t a liar about everything,” Dolly said.

  In my mind, I pictured Dolly as a child, straight red hair, sitting on the bathroom floor, pulling her hair out, leaving it across the tile, and then trying to hide it, kicking it under a towel. Now, here she was, my Rock of Gibraltar.

  “Do you want me to come there and bring you something? Do you need anything?” Dolly asked.

  I couldn’t let her come. I noticed the bougainvillea crawling over my porch railing. It fed on yearning. I had never wanted my mother more than I did now. “I’m fine. I’m going to bed now.”

  “You will do this. You will do this because doing this is who you are,” said Dolly. “I’ll help you. Ruthie, you’re not alone. I promise you that.” She meant it. Helping was her best intention.

  Grief could disguise itself as a lover, and before you knew it, you would only feel safe in its arms. That is what Sister Mary told me over the phone when I called to tell her the news of my pregnancy. I’m not sure why I thought she should know. We owed each other nothing, and I hadn’t talked to her in years. She’d been my keeper once. That was all. Maybe I had loved her. Maybe she had loved me. Yes, I was certain she had. Somehow I still thought of her as wanting something to do with me. I wanted her to say something loving. I wanted her to bless me, to tell me this would all be okay. She’d been there the first time. “God be with you, Ruth,” she said.

  “And also with you,” I said, after I hung up.

  DR. B. TOOK over my duties. For a brief time, I locked myself away in my apartment. One particularly bad night, I took Graham’s shells and spilled them out across the carpet. I wanted to see the size of my denial, to see it spread out before me. I needed to quantify it.

  Someone was at the door. “It’s us, Ruthie.”

  “I’m sick,” I called, looking at the broken shells everywhere. “Come back later.”

  “Fay made chicken soup. We have briscuit. Orange juice, fresh squeezed.” I sat there, knowing how this would look to them. Mrs. Green would hover over me and pretend there was nothing wrong with me. Dr. B. would fold her arms, staring me down. She would ask where I stood. What my plan was. What I’d decided. I would have to reveal how great my naiveté had been. They’d want to protect me. They’d say things. I’d have to defend Graham, which I didn’t want to do right now. “Ruthie, open the door.”

  I opened the door and sat down on the floor amid the broken shells.

  Mrs. Green spread her tallith across my couch, pretending not to notice the litter. It was a relief. I could count on her for always taking the road most generous.

  I pulled off the coral ring and put it in my pocket. I told them I was fine, that they could count on me to buck up. Mrs. Green warmed up some soup. I didn’t want prayer now. I just wanted to be left alone.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, after the air was cleared, to create some space for the new good things to come in, I walked out to the ocean toward the sudden piles of driftwood, chalky in the moonlight.

  The water was freezing.

  A wave splashed over me. I pushed up through it, trying to catch my breath.

  Someone was shouting my name. I looked back. Dr. B. was standing on the beach with a red towel in her arms. Her curly gray hair tufted in the wind as she kicked off her sandals. Her long black dress flounced up around her calves as she came toward me, meeting me halfway, waves sweeping her shins. She wrapped the towel around my shoulders and walked me back inside. She said that this would pass, my morning sickness and my feelings about Graham. “That little spirit is with you now. Motherhood is not about mothers. Now, you get yourself together.”

  INSIDE, SHE SMOOTHED the blanket over my legs.

  I pulled it up over my face. “I don’t know how to be a mother,” I whispered. How would I be a mother when I had no mother to show me how to do it?

  “You have us now. We’re your family now. So sit up. Sit yourself up,” she said, straightening my shoulders, her voice stiffening. “You need to choose this. You need to choose the life that has chosen you.”

  I looked into her eyes. Here, I read compassion. Here, I found more compassion than I’d ever seen, more understanding than I thought another person could offer. Perhaps it wasn’t there before. Or I didn’t need it as much. I felt her strength. Her belief in me. She knew me. She wasn’t just giving me lip service, telling me what I wanted to hear.

  “Promise me you won’t ever turn your back on yourself like this again,” she said.

  I promised.

  I got up. Running into the bathroom, I thought about my child. I splashed water across my face. I took a deep breath. Then another. Then my eyes focused forward again. The map. It was here.

  DAY AFTER DAY, the animals watched me as I passed by them on the beach. If I would always be scrutinized by the cashier at the grocery store, first eyeing my swollen belly and then directing her gaze to my naked ring finger, I had to become blind to it, to this continued examination of my motives, my choices. Some would feel sorry for me, which was almost as disappointing as being judged. Others would blame me. I’d be called irresponsible, irrepressible. Inexcusable. I would hear “out of wedlock.” I would hear “single mother.” I would put it all on pause, just as I’d learned to do. Dolly said not to trust anyone. I didn’t believe it.

  I read everything I could about childbirth. About what to expect. I would be the right kind of mother. I moved through my days, weeks, months, walking the hallways of Wild Acres, my growing belly leading the way. I’d like to say that I forgot Graham. I’d like to tell you about how my firm decision and absolute resolution and newfound strength changed me and made me into someone who had no memory of his voice. But each morning as I waited for the walls to stop spinning, I’d find myself going over every word we’d said to each other, as newly estranged lovers do.

  I taped a calendar to my refrigerator and started marking off the days. Then I attended to my people, to my animals. Mr. Takahashi’s son had arranged for someone from his farm to drop off fresh strawberries, handpicked, every few days. One night, when I was arranging his towels, he looked at me with a smile. “What is it?” I asked. He handed me an envelope. I opened it. Inside was a keychain. One that he’d given my mother when they first started dating so that she could drive his convertible. It still had the key on it. “This is your child’s car. Care of your mother. It’ll be waiting in my garage in Oxnard.” I hugged him, feeling his wooden ribs against mine, and I thanked him.

  Mrs. Green knit baby blankets and hats in a neutral beige yarn. I started to draw, temporarily forgoing my painting, as the fumes could be toxic to my baby. My drawings calmed me. I drew in another language, not blues and greens but reds. I created a series of sketches called The Red Tides. Telegraphing my emotions through the waxy pencils, I was determined to turn this all into something beautiful.

  I was drawn to those who played flutes, guitars, and drums on the boardwalks and pier. Mr. Takahashi and Mrs. Green continued to argue about slippers. A door was slammed shut. A curtain was pulled tight. A walk refused. Then, all was forgotten.r />
  The little being growing inside me would feel every thought, every whisper. It would absorb the molecules of my emotions in the same way it absorbed the nutrients in my blood. I had never been as careful with myself. Each morning, I sat in the courtyard, focusing on the resoluteness of the sentry palm. My child already wanted things, too. I knew what she wanted most, though. I could already feel it, that butterfly flutter whenever I walked near the ocean.

  My mother had ruled the universe with her stories. She had never told me about the Baby Moon. I was glad for that. Glad to be able to make it up all on my own.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I SWAM IN MY dreams.

  Swimming was all I thought of, kicking my feet and floating, letting the sun beat down on my cheeks.

  It was time to learn. Five months had passed since Graham left. My lingering fears of the water faded. Dr. B. agreed to teach me on one condition: I would not go further than I was prepared for. Although she was often shaky on land, she was graceful in the water, a sight to behold, a kind and good teacher with a pink plastic bathing cap and blue flippers. My big tummy constantly turned me on my back. I choked back seawater and tried again. I was determined.

  “Like this,” she instructed, demonstrating kicking her feet back as she floated. She took off her flippers and pushed them across the water toward me. “Good girl, Ruthie!” She clapped for me as I sputtered water. I had learned to float. And within a few weeks, I would learn to swim. Little did I know, my child was propelling me forward because she wanted so much to be in the ocean.

  Had I known that, I might never have learned to swim at all.

  The more time I spent in the water, the more I felt my child moving inside me. Day after day, Mrs. Green watched from under her beach umbrella, slathering her body with white streaks of sunscreen, as Dr. B. and I swam through the waves together, the Sisters watching. Mr. Takahashi stood on the beach and yelled at us. A pregnant woman learning to swim? How was it that a nice girl like Ruthie had gone and done this to begin with? Why, he’d ask, would I want to learn to swim now? Dr. B. swam back to the shore and splashed him. I had never seen him laugh like that, his white shirt soaked with water. It delighted me.

  I DECORATED THE nursery, formerly the walk-in closet. Dr. B. sewed gingham drapes. Mrs. Green and I found some old tossed out window frames. We tacked posters of the ocean behind them and hung them like faux windows. We covered a wall with navy blue felt, and cut palm trees out of green and brown felt, which we then stuck to the navy. We cut out other shapes—fish, sea lions, horses—which Naida would be able to play with, moving them around as she grew. Dr. B. gifted us with a new white crib—a convertible classic that could become a toddler bed, a daybed, and a full-size headboard as my baby grew. The headboard had wainscoting and fluted posts. Mr. Takahashi and I put it together using the tools from my mother’s old red tin toolbox.

  I didn’t know that the moon would make my child swim inside me. All I knew was that its waxing and waning made the baby roll around as though frolicking in the waves. At night, I’d lie awake staring at the moon through the window, letting the palm leaves cast shadows and patterns across my belly. My bedroom was bathed in light. I shuddered as I watched the moonlight escaping down the walls, carrying with it the force to move the tides, to stir my baby.

  I craved ice water. I emptied the ice tray and refilled it several times a day, noticing how it just made me more thirsty. My child was a fire burning inside me. My drawings were gold, red, orange. Everything was sharper, clearer.

  Mrs. Green left Wild Acres to go live with her son in Chicago. When she came to say goodbye, she told me I had made her feel as if she mattered. She tried to hold me, my belly between us, and she laughed and said this would be her granddaughter, and that she wanted photos sent every month. I promised her I would send them. There was hardly anything that had gone unspoken between us. We didn’t need to say goodbye. She was a person who had no regrets. I wanted to make her proud. I didn’t want to watch her go. But I did. She had met me in the place I was. A rare friend, she’d never demanded that I be more or less than who I was. I thought about my mother’s words, how you would always find truth in books. You could find it in certain people too. Despite all your hiding—your tough acts, your jokes, your makeup, and your remote, hard-to-reach, crumbling ways—you’d see that you could be found, too.

  ON NEW YEAR’ S Eve 1988, at four months pregnant, exactly one year after I met Graham, I set the table for my sister. Dolly arrived from San Diego with a bottle of sparkling cider, two plastic champagne glasses, a box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies, and a bag of balloons. Within minutes, there were balloons everywhere.

  Dolly peered into the courtyard at the sentry palm, which still hadn’t changed. “What am I going to do about that guy?” she said.

  I smiled up at her from the kitchen floor, where I sat folding laundry. “We are too wild and crazy. Look at us on New Year’s Eve,” I said.

  “Bad girls never make good, isn’t that what they say?”

  “I forgot that’s what we are.” Dolly said the term was a cliché perpetuated to scare girls onto the virginal path. “It just fosters bad blood between women.”

  “Remember the girls at the Home? You were so tough, Doll.”

  “Ruthie, I haven’t cried in five years. Nothing comes.”

  I tossed a pair of jeans at her. She caught them in her lap. “There’s nothing wrong with you. The only thing wrong with you is that you think something is wrong with you.”

  “I want to help you raise this baby. I’m the aunt.”

  “You’ll change your mind once the diapers get here. The midnight feedings? The temper tantrums? Besides, stop thinking you owe me anything.” As I reached for a glass of water, I glanced out the window. Dr. B. was walking through the courtyard, hanging colored streamers from the palm tree. “Only good thoughts. Babies can hear everything from the womb, by the way,” I said to Dolly.

  “You’re my little sister and you’ve got a big belly and you’ll need a lot of help. I have vacation time coming to me. I’ll sleep on the couch. I don’t care. They have me on the road too much anyway.”

  “No. Don’t get trapped by this. This is mine to deal with,” I said, facing her.

  I heard cheering from down the hall. People blew streamers and danced on the beach. Later, Dolly and I fell asleep on the couch, wrapped in each other’s arms.

  THE NEXT MORNING, on the first day of 1989, I sat on the beach with a book opened in my lap. I blinked into the sun, hoping love was a thread that never broke. The sky looked whiter than it often did. I sensed my child’s spirit reaching for the waves. Suddenly, I had more people in my life than I had ever imagined my life could hold.

  My child wouldn’t be a shame.

  Dolly came down to the beach. She pulled the blue afghan around my shoulders. Did I remember Dr. B.’s story about the people who hid in the skins of animals? She wanted to know. I listened to her retell it, warm and safe on my blanket, watching the sea lions dive into the waves and splash up, disappearing under the water.

  NAIDA DIANA GOLD was born on the night of the Blue Moon on May 31, 1989. She was the size of a doll, with thick dark lashes and bright green seaglass eyes. Awed, I gazed at my baby as she slept. Named after the naiads, those sprites that watched over the rivers and streams, she was perfect, a beautiful little fairy with rosebud lips and a headful of black curls they said would fall out but didn’t. The rush of love mixed with adrenaline was unlike anything I had ever felt. She was a person now, her cries like that of a lamb, but strong. I placed my hand over the back of her head, her body now unattached to my body. Dolly leaned over and kissed her. Naida latched on to my breast easily and suckled hungrily.

  My daughter gazed up at me and her fingers curled over mine, as if by reflex. Eyes that clear, I had never seen. These were brand-new eyes. I had a strange sort of knowing—as if Naida were that one lightbulb that made the whole string of lights work, that one tiny light. Hope. In
Russian, Naida means “hope.”

  AFTER HER BATH, my daughter’s hair was soft—not matted, caked, or threaded with blood—and her skin had that soft chalky feeling. I ran my hand along her shoulders and her back. This little being captivated me. As Naida suckled, I caressed her face. I whispered, “I’ll never let you go.” I asked her if she was mine over and over again, as though she would answer. I traced her perfect features, her nose, and her tiny seashell ears.

  I told my daughter that she would grow up to be elegant and smart. That she would always know where she stood with me, and when she didn’t know where she stood with the world, I would help her discover that. I told her she would be kind and careful with herself. I wondered if my own mother imagined my life the day she gave birth to me, if part of her distance came from her fear that I would be like her, or that she would somehow ruin me.

  And then I saw Naida’s foot.

  FINGERS AND TOES, I would learn, initially developed in the shape of paddles and then separated. At about sixteen weeks, an enzyme would dissolve the tissue in between the fingers and toes in a process known as apoptosis, a programmed death of certain cells. But sometimes this process wouldn’t occur completely, and the toes would remain joined.

  It could have occurred for any number of reasons. In many cases, it was genetic. The surgeon said that if you couldn’t find it in your immediate family, you could often find it if you went back through the generations. You just had to look far enough.