by Ilie Ruby
I bought furniture at a garage sale: a shabby-chic ivory couch with a tear in the back that I sewed up, and a small matching chaise. On either side, I placed a standing red lamp with beads. I had refurbished a wooden coffee table that Mrs. Green had kept in the storage room. Dr. B. had given me the one remaining plastic palm tree from the days of the Twin Palms Motel. I put it in the corner of Naida’s bedroom. All my books were shelved in white painted bookcases and baskets throughout the house, a few of which Dr. B. had given to me, too.
In the corner of the living room, next to the porch, Naida had an easel and art table positioned so she could paint the sea. Her markers and crayons were displayed in little cups along the sides. I now had two photographs on the wall. My mother’s and my daughter’s. In the photograph, Naida is standing on the beach, hands on her hips. She has sand covering her cheeks. Her long black hair hangs in salty clumps, falling across one pale eye. She is looking off to the right with the slightest smile, as if pressing a secret between her lips, just as the girl in the painting of the naiad had done.
I bought Naida an entire wardrobe, which included dresses, striped leggings, princess sneakers with a tread that lit up when she walked, sea slippers, and five pairs of ballet shoes, which were still the most comfortable thing for her feet. It would be another couple of years before she’d become embarrassed about her foot, when she saw the reactions of other children.
I had been walking around in the same gauze shirts, faded jeans, and worn leather clogs with busted buckles for years. Now I wanted to burn everything and start anew. I tried on a bright blue dress with heels, turning in the mirror. I had lost some weight over these last few months, and I was catching up on sleep. At twenty-seven, I peered at my face in the mirror, my fingers pressing the skin around my eyes. I’d begun to see the faintest wrinkles in the corners of my eyes and on the sides of my mouth, welcome signs of hard-won battles.
I ate avocados and sprinkled flax seeds over yogurt with honey, and in time my hair recovered its original fullness. Once in a while, I even put on lipstick, a pale peach color that brought out my freckles. I didn’t look terrible, I decided.
It was a second chance. Naida had a chance to be just a normal girl.
It was clear what she had inherited from my side, the dominant genes for rebellion, stubbornness, and creative rapid-fire swearing, which she demonstrated while at brunch on her fifth birthday, stunning Dolly and me with the mention of “damn-ass eggs.” This had all started with my mother.
I continued to watch Naida for any early signs of trouble.
I saw trouble all over the place.
Chapter Twenty-two
THE FOLLOWING YEAR, under the Lenten Moon in March, the last full moon of winter, a time when the past could return to meet you where you’d left it, I heard a knock on my door. I had been in bed, sick, for two days. I peered through the peephole and sucked in my breath as I stared at him.
Graham, as out of the blue as he’d come the first time.
He looked old, weary, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater, torn at the shoulder, and jeans. His brown beard had streaks of gray in it now, and his complexion was sallow. His pale green eyes were distant. He held out his palms, showing me he had nothing. I grabbed the cell phone and threatened to dial 911. “Ruthie, I have no one,” he said, through the door.
“I have company. There’s a man here,” I lied, hoping he’d go away.
“Ruthie. Nobody’s with you.”
“Go away,” I called.
“I need help.”
My fingers unbolted the locks I’d installed after Naida’s accident. I left the chain on and cracked open the door.
“I asked you not to come back,” I said quickly, noticing how weathered he looked. He was different, not the burly gentle giant of a man I remembered. He had wrinkles around his eyes and a deep groove between his eyebrows. His lips were badly chapped, and there was a gash on his forehead over his right eye.
I shut the door and pressed my back against it. Naida was asleep. That’s how I wanted it to stay.
“Ruthie,” he said.
Gathering my navy blue robe more tightly around my body, I opened the door. He said nothing. Not at first.
“Thank you,” he said, watching carefully. So carefully, in fact, that I was afraid he’d see that I sometimes remembered him. He was carrying his wetsuit, just like always. “I’ve been thinking about you both.”
“You missed your damn window of opportunity,” I said, as I watched him set his wetsuit over the chair on the porch, just as he always did. Some things never changed.
“I have a right to see her. She’s my child, too.”
“You’re too late.”
“You’ve gotten tough with age, Ruthie.”
In my mind, I slapped him. “What do you want, Graham? Why did you come back?” I smoothed my hair. It was long and curly. I hadn’t cut it in years. Now I wished I’d cut it short, that there was nothing about me that even hinted at femininity. But no, of course I would not hide in boys’ ripped clothing as I once had. I would not disguise myself. I would not be silenced, or become a watered-down version of myself. Not again.
“I just needed to see her, you,” he said.
“I will call the police. I mean it.” I stood with my hands on the back of Naida’s art chair. Her drawings were now of the beach, or the ocean, or just the Sisters. No longer of the green waterhorse.
My legs shook, and I hoped he wouldn’t notice. But of course he would. Graham noticed everything about me.
“You’ve done a nice job,” he said, looking around. “You’ve made a good home for the two of you. You have no idea how good it is to see you,” he said, reaching for me, his eyes hazy. I kept my distance and told him what had happened to her. He had a right to know. “I know you’re a good mother.”
“No, you don’t. I might be a shitty mother. I might be the shittiest mother there is. My daughter escaped into the ocean while I slept. She barely made it back.”
I noticed the blood on his knuckles. He had been in a fight. He walked toward me. My body was moving toward him, but my mind was working hard, searching for a concrete thought to anchor me. The table. The easel. The red sippy cup Naida still used and had left balancing on the arm of the couch, with its chewed spout. His fingers dusted my cheek. In my mind I was reaching for him, until I caught sight of the look in his eyes.
“She’s sleeping,” I said. Before I could get another word out, he put his arm around me. I twisted away. I had not been with a man in five years. It took everything I had not to be touched.
“No. No more. You have to go,” I told him. Then, Naida’s voice.
“Mama?”
I ran to Naida and picked her up, kissing her cheek.
“Who is he!” said Naida, struggling to see Graham over my shoulder. I couldn’t just spring this on her. Of course, it would take time to introduce the subject. I didn’t want to think of it. Not yet. Not until I had to.
I told her he was a friend of Mama’s from a long time ago. Graham gave Naida a little pinky wave before we disappeared.
I tucked her back into bed for the second time that night. “When did he come? Is he staying here? Where will he sleep? What will he eat? Will I see him tomorrow? Can I show him my tree in my bedroom?” I replaced the red bulb in her plastic horse-shaped nightlight, the reason she had gotten out of bed in the first place.
“That’s my daddy,” Naida said, as I was getting up to leave. I stared at the red hues spilling across her bed. Her hair fell across her eyes and she pursed her lips in disapproval, just like Dolly. “It is him,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “I know it is.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow, honey,” I said quickly, for Naida could pull me into a conversation too easily. Just as I was about to shut the door, I heard her.
“He wants me to go with him, Mama.”
I shut the door.
GRAHAM WAS GAZING at Naida’s photograph on the wall. He’d made himself at
home, his glass of whiskey on the counter.
“Go now, please,” I said.
“I remember,” he said, pointing to the wall. “Six years ago, the only photo you had—”
“I know, I know. Now I’ve got two.”
“I noticed her foot.”
Defensively, I told him that the surgery was painful. I told him all about the recovery time, and about the chance of infection and more surgeries. We’d already been to two surgeons who both said the same thing: If the benefits didn’t outweigh the costs, leave it alone. It appeared not to be a problem for her. She could decide when she was older what to do.
He looked at me with despair and then nodded in agreement. There was blood on his shirt. “The child shouldn’t suffer,” he said finally.
“The child has a name. Naida.”
“Naida, Naida,” he repeated. “What kind of name is Naida?”
“Water fairy,” I whispered. “Fresh water,” I said, in my best “fuck you” tone. “She is my everything, Graham.”
I told him to leave. He didn’t move. It was a condition that every cell in my body remembered. “Just go. Do you want her to remember this, our fighting? You shouldn’t be here.”
“Ruthie. There’s more to say. Did you keep them under the mattress, the dagger and the bible?” He grabbed my wrist.
“Let go of me!” I said. He did.
“I’m the child’s father,” he said.
Calm. Feel the ground beneath you. “You left your child and the mother of your child. What kind of father does that make you?”
At that, he hurled his glass at the wall. I watched the golden liquid spill across my beautiful wallpaper, and the broken crystal scatter across the carpet.
He stepped back. “Jesus, I’m sorry,” he whispered, his eyes pleading. “I don’t know how to do this with you,” he said, picking up the glass. He tossed the shards in the trash. I imagined little pieces of hiding in the shag rug, waiting for Naida’s bare feet to find them.
I cleaned off the wall and grabbed the DustBuster to vacuum up the rest of the mess. After, he stood in front of me, shoulders squared, feet planted apart, waiting for me to do something.
“Ruthie, I know I didn’t give you what you wanted.”
“No, neither of us got what we wanted,” I said, opening the door.
As he walked away down the hallway, his shadow dissolved into the light.
THE FIRST RAYS of dawn shone through the window. I was a person who had once been superstitious. I’d made meaning from things. I liked it that way, couldn’t help it. Somehow, none of it mattered because Naida was here. And like it or not, the threads of first love could never be broken. I had strengthened them with my fear and my hatred, and with my worry. The molecules that existed among those threads, incited by love and by fear, formed the bonds that connected one living thing to another. Peak emotion created waves of energy that remained long after an inciting event. Perhaps those molecules would spread out everywhere, could travel through all matter, carried on the waves of the oceans and in the breezes. They could never be destroyed, only changed. They could change and become forgiveness. I wondered. Had I really drawn him back to me? Stepping back from the mirror, I took off my glasses and set them on the vanity. Then I splashed my face with cold water.
I GAVE NAIDA a glass of milk and sent her back to bed. I put down my glass of whiskey, trying to still the occasional shivers. I heard a noise out on the beach. There, in the sand, a huge male sea lion waited, his eyes large and piercing, his ears pricked. Magnificent, his blue-black body was unmovable, his neck as thick as a tree trunk, his forehead formed of a bony crest. His long front flippers were winglike, made of bones similar to those of an arm and a hand. I turned off the porch light. I kept checking, though, well after I’d put her to bed. That animal, all eight hundred pounds of him, was a mirror image of the sea lion I’d once seen shot in this very parking lot.
He remained on the beach all night. I couldn’t stand it, his barking. Mr. Takahashi and Dr. B. stood on their porches, hands on their hips, complaining to each other through the wind. Dr. B. said she’d have someone come get him if he wasn’t gone by morning.
It sounded to me as though he was grieving.
By sunrise, he had disappeared.
PART THREE
Chapter Twenty-three
Naida, 1995
THE FIRST TIME anyone ever called me Frog Witch, I was six, with chapped red lips, as if my mouth held a small flame. The humidity was so thick, it coated me in sweat seconds after a shower, convincing me to finally forgo beach slippers. To go barefoot.
The heat wave sank the pink bougainvillea blossoms over Wild Acres, threatening to cave in the roof, causing the sea creatures to stare back with gold-flecked eyes, refusing to leave the ocean. Mr. Taki knelt beside me, scraping a moat around the sand castle we’d just built. My mother lay stretched out on a blue blanket a few feet away, holding a book over her face, her feet tipped in wet sand. Everywhere, people laid themselves out like downed trees on colorful patchworks across the beach. I pushed my wet hair from my eyes and drew a dragon on the side of the castle wall with a stick when Mr. Taki got up to go for a swim.
My hands were blanched by salt. My foot twitched in the heat.
A little girl in a gold bikini wandered up to me. She had short brown hair pushed back in a ribbon headband and a wide smile like her mother, who watched from her blanket a few feet away. The girl crouched beside me, lacing her plump fingers over her knees. She admired my castle and its adornment of white shells. Then her eyes grew wide.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at me.
“So the bad guys can’t get to the castle,” I explained, waving my hands over the moat. “Because of the alligators in there.”
“No, your foot. That frog foot.”
I heard the scrape of waves hitting the rocks as something hard and frozen shifted high inside my belly. It rose up in my throat, capturing my voice. Shadows of blue-black distilled into ivory and lavender hues, fading into the distant sky. I pushed my foot into the sand, burying it up to my ankle.
“Are you a frog?” Her blue eyes held mine, burning, before I could answer. “You’re a Frog Witch,” she said, matter-of-factly. She said the words over and over as Mr. Taki walked toward us from the water, dripping wet in his white button-down and cuffed jeans. “Frog Witch picks up sticks. Frog Witch has an itch. Frog Witch—”
I started flinging words right back at her in a louder rhyme, telling her she was a gold witch, and a rich witch, neither of which really sounded like an insult, mostly because in my heart, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, which I knew, even at six, didn’t make sense.
“I’ll beat you in swimming,” I said, to which she said we’d have a race, and yet what if I failed miserably? What if she left me even more embarrassed than before? “Over there to there,” I said, pointing from the lifeguard’s chair to the blue-striped buoy about ten feet away.
Then, suddenly, I was lifted out of there by my mother. “Why don’t we take a break from the castle and have a little lunch? You can come back and play later,” my mother suggested, more as a demand, as I buried my face against her freckled chest. The girl ran off with my secret, and my shells.
“What am I? Am I dangerous?”
“No, of course not.”
“What about poisonous?” My mother shook her head no and wrapped me up in a thick red towel. I was not beautiful and perfect the way God made me, as the residents of Wild Acres always insisted. That was a lie; I knew that now. The Wizard, who operated the fuse box that controlled the timing and installation of bodies, had ruined me, despite all his metallic circuitry, switches made of glass, and tangled nests of messed-up copper wiring. Why, if the Wizard could part the Red Sea, could part the heavens and make rain, could rip apart the continent with an earthquake, couldn’t he part the skin between my toes?
“Sometimes God decides things before we’re born, honey. Then she wants to see how we’ll do.�
�
“Like a test?”
“It’s no one’s fault. It makes you different. Special,” my mother said. But I just wanted to be like everybody else. She kissed the top of my head. A few feet away, the little girl’s mother waved apologetically. I reached my hands around the back of my mother’s neck, pulling her close to me. She carried me back inside, waving to Mr. Taki to follow us. “I know it’s hard, Naida, but you’re beautiful and perfect in my eyes, and you’ll always be.”
I could already sense that the little girl’s stories had begun careening through the ether, taking root like wild raucous flowers, spreading like wildfire. My green foot, scaled like a lizard’s. My hoof. My toes like claws. Like a bird’s foot. Like a paw. My foot that had a snake’s face with a forked tongue. My foot. My difference. The one that didn’t make me special. The one that made me the Frog Witch.
IT MIGHT HAVE been better to have just pounded my fists in the sand, or better yet to have run away—some moments are better marked in that way, recognized for their significance. Moments such as the one that had just transpired, when careless little hands tore your secret from the air, should not go unnoticed. They should not pass as silently as an eclipse, capable of tricking the birds into thinking it was twilight, or tricking you into thinking your life would continue to move along swimmingly, when in fact your whole life would never be the same. Not everything that had significance made a sound.
Little girls raced each other through the waves, swimming for their lives. Planets raced silently through the galaxy, scraping gaseous edges from the corners of the atmosphere as they halted like freight trains on rusted orbiting tracks, tumbling red velvet seats and twisted chrome bumpers through the air onto land, leaving dented chrome and smoky tunnels. There wouldn’t even be a ripple of noise. You might see the sparks fly as if stars and call it a meteor shower. Comets whisked across the night sky, carrying within them the molecules of noise from all those comets that had come before, but you never heard them hit the skin of Earth’s high atmosphere. Astral avalanches were somber, silent things, even when meteors left canyons in the earth. Dowsing rods quivered as soon as you stepped into a circle of neolithic stones, where whispers were amplified to the degree of screams.