by Ilie Ruby
Those stones in Orkney, the ones I read about so I’d know where my father came from, just confirmed what I knew to be true. Whispers were as dangerous as nasty nicknames, more so, for their energy would go unseen and therefore wouldn’t dissipate quickly, and could return years later, having been redirected to the future as if by Earth’s magnetic lines, causing things to catch up with you and one day explode. And yet I didn’t know that things returned in the way they did, that whispers would boomerang onto those whose lips they first escaped.
THE BOUGAINVILLEA WERE holding us all in place, rooting us to the earth, Dr. B. always said. Each year they grew more lush, capturing Wild Acres in a net of fuchsia petals, entangling us all. No one had ever seen vines as thick as these, which could become full with bees and butterflies.
I’d lived in the glass fishbowl of Wild Acres up until that day when I was six, my bare feet never to be worn outside again. More than what it did to me, I worried about my mother, her guilt. The Most Beautiful Lady in the World had been my universe—my first love. She vowed I’d never feel unwanted, and I hated to be away from her. Trying to pattern myself after her, an unattainable goal, I’d realize, I’d memorized the constellation of freckles across her face, the black beauty mark on her shoulder I once thought of as the earth, a planet around which all the stars revolved. She was a reflection of all that was right in the universe. The Big Dipper constellation on her chest was proof, for it mirrored the night sky, which I had traced from the time she kept me in an ERGO pressed to her skin. But that didn’t protect me, not from my own judgments and failings and my ever-shifting need to be distant and then suddenly close. We’d always told stories in my family like the ancients who tried to find reasons for the weather, who found reasons to create gods and goddesses. Somehow we had not been satisfied by thousands of years of revelations and inventions.
The world I now knew held no calm bed of pine needles beneath the trees, the place where the children in fairy tales always fell asleep when they wandered off lost, before they would wake up to a new day, having been found by fairies or by a compassionate woodsman or by a kind princess. No matter what stories my grandmother had told, they could not carry me away.
The world I now knew would be made up on my own. The fine line between a truth and a lie seemed only a matter of consensus, of how many people believed or did not, which seemed irrelevant to me, given the haphazard ways opinions were often drawn or judgments made with little evidence, like those who bullied me about my foot or drew their eyes away from me when they saw me being teased. It was just a hairline, barely visible. But when Aunt Dolly announced that breathing underwater was impossible, obliterating it from my life under the guise of something called common knowledge, a thing that could win you an argument without even trying, I thought she was playing a trick on me. I’d never questioned it or thought to tell anyone about it, for I assumed everyone did it.
“I’m not saying you’re lying, Naida. I’m only saying that it can’t happen.”
“But it does happen.”
“Must have been a dream, honey.”
“You can’t do it, so you think I can’t.”
“Come on, now. The truth of the matter is that you simply don’t have gills.”
Gills. I knew what gills were. What did that matter, though? Why couldn’t I breathe underwater? If I had a webbed foot, who said I couldn’t do other things, too? “I have gills inside my chest.”
“So do I. They’re called lungs,” she said, winning the argument and reducing me to just human. I’d let her believe that, at least. But in truth, I still didn’t buy it. It didn’t make sense to me that the body would stop doing something that worked on automatic pilot, just because of a thing like water. This would be the first of many things I’d mistake for normalcy, like eating cereal for dinner and staying up late in celebration of nothing in particular, when my mother was working and Aunt Dolly was staying with me, her unpredictability making her a favorite babysitter, letting me watch her make a Jell-O mold for a work picnic she was going to the next day, or playing checkers with her on the patio in the moonlight until she’d say she was tired and then dance me off to bed. Aunt Dolly’s stories were always good ones, always starring little girls who grew up in a world without adults and had adventures as they struggled to survive without grocery stores, policemen, hospitals, cars, bicycles, and other civilized things like bedrooms and furniture and dishware.
Her rogue honesty both enticed me and infuriated me.
I’d stared in disbelief after she broke the news of breathing underwater. How I wanted to curl up on the bottom of the ocean to prove her wrong. Distraught, I’d snuck into the hall closet to wait for my mother to get home. As soon as I heard the door open, I planned on rushing out like a butterfly, flitting around her, begging to be told I was right and it was true, making sense of all those times I’d taken my time to evaluate what I saw underwater, my sisters and their translucent arms. My mother had always maintained that I remembered everything, which I assumed included some things before my birth. That’s how I knew that my father’s voice in my head wasn’t a dream. The heavy sound waves once made by his words were stacked like bricks in my memory. On nights when sleep seemed impossible, when the sea switched places with the sky and turned quiet and thunder grew from the earth, shaking the ocean as if with knotted arthritic hands, I’d stand on my bed, feet planted squarely apart, and I’d hold my hand to my eyes as if from a glaring sun. I’d replay my father’s voice, showing the world and all its creatures that he would be supreme over all, including the planets, the animals, and the weather. All the things he would come back for.
I’d always remember breathing underwater like a fish, even years later when I no longer argued the fact and had switched camps, believing it a dream. That still didn’t erase the memory of it. There were many things that people told you never happened but that you still had memories of. I’d think of it every time I noticed my mother’s organza curtains billowing up through the swirling blue sky, amid all those invisible kicking legs of jellyfish I could envision on the window. There were times when I’d test it out, sinking down in the water and beginning to draw in air through my nose, and then with the slightest pressure of the oncoming water, I’d give up, renewing my doubt in myself. My father would understand, though. I was certain he could do it, too. I knew there was no point in trying to convince anyone else. As soon as they said it was impossible, my ability was lost.
“Moose, you should have a talk with her. She still thinks Graham’s coming back. I watched you wait, and now her,” Aunt Dolly told my mother later that night. I watched from the cracked door of the closet in the hallway, standing in my nightshirt, my knees shaking, positive they’d fling open the door and discover me here. I was becoming like Harriet the Spy, my heroine in books.
“Let me get my coat off, at least.” My mother untied her stained apron and sat on the couch, kicking off her black leather restaurant shoes as Aunt Dolly perched on the coffee table, facing her in a white baseball shirt with navy blue sleeves and faded jeans. She placed her hands on my mother’s shoulders, telling her all about me and what she’d better do to make sure to keep me on the planet.
My mother knew something had to be done, for my connection to my father and the ocean were primal and vital. It had been building for years, my need for him, stronger now after that moment on the beach when my foot had been discovered by others.
She pulled me gently out of the closet and sat me down on the bed. “He’d want you to have this,” my mother told me, reaching into her jewelry box, which was nothing more than an old rusted tin box that she’d picked up while trash picking many years ago during one of those times when they had no money and they had to sell garbage. My mother was fond of the box, which also held a miniature dagger and bible. She’d lined it with a gold quilted fabric and edged it in gold trim, which she super-glued and stuck her fingers to the fabric for a few minutes. Otherwise, it was perfect. Now, she took out a silver pendant
on a thick chain, which she said had been worn by my father, and which he’d given to her the first time he left. The swirling lines of the animal still glimmered. Its ornate body was made of shiny overlapping circles. She called it a dragon, but to me it looked like a horse. I never told her that, or took it off.
MY ESCAPE INTO the ocean always soothed me.
I’d hold up my arms, making myself heavy like a stone, sinking to the bottom. Pushing fast through the water, I’d imagine whales rising like mountains as their flukes carved the breeze. Then, I’d glide among the sea lions, rolling back and forth, looking up as if the sky were the mirror. In my dreams, the people who hid in animal skins could find me like this, at dawn or twilight on the beach. I imagined my own sisters, three of them. I’d come face-to-face with the eldest sister, her long black hair fanning across her breasts, her freckled cheeks and long straight nose like mine, as were her long fingers. She’d gaze at me, her black eyes flecked with silver. Behind her was a smaller girl with silver hair to her thighs, and behind her, a third sister who looked younger than the others, with straight red hair and olive skin like Aunt Dolly’s.
Bars of sunlight flashed across their skin as they all treaded water, their hands moving quickly in sync at their sides like fins. My mother’s three sea lions, which she called the Sisters, still remained on the beach most times, but never when my own sisters came to visit. Then they disappeared.
The smallest girl held up her hands, showing me empty glowing palms and splayed fingers, the translucent webbed skin tinged with tiny red capillaries like maps. I looked down at her feet, but she was kicking too fast.
All I knew was that her voice had the distancing feeling of an echo. Dipping her chin to her chest, she’d turn her back in a cloud of bubbles and dive into the darkness. Then the others retreated, too. My protectors. My sisters. These were my people, the ones who hid in the skins of animals. The ones who would risk everything for me. The ones who could swim across the ocean to find my father and bring him back.
MY MOTHER SAID the bougainvillea fed on love. But it wasn’t love. Something else, uncertainty. I’d see my sisters walking out of the shallow water, one by one, dropping their animal skins in a heap at their feet. They’d stand in thin white nightgowns, the fabric ripped in different spots, pulled apart like tissue paper. They’d encircle me, clasping hands. Then, kneeling in the sand, they’d untie the silvery thread around their necks, each of which held a small drum with the picture of a dragon etched on the skin. They’d tap their drums with fingertips, which made my heart beat fast. In their language, they told me how to tunnel through moonlight. They found me when I hid. They hid me when I wanted to disappear. But they wanted things, too. They wanted to take me away with them. But I couldn’t leave my mother, not at first.
In my dreams, I’d huddle with them for warmth. I imagined them tucked in bed beside me, as I used to do with my mother.
The girls could swim like dragons, and I could swim almost as fast.
“CURIOSITY IS NATURAL at her age. She’s got to find a way to deflect it,” Aunt Dolly said, to explain the incessant questions about my foot.
“But their comments are rude. Naida shouldn’t have to answer anything; she’s only six. Just tell them you have my permission to say they should mind their own business,” my mother said, fiercely protective. I felt as if the sun were searing the canvas of my sneakers, illuminating my stuck-together toes. My mother told me to say, if people asked, that being different made me special, which I knew it didn’t, and which of course I’d never say. When Irene and I met up on the beach the next day, we stood a few feet apart, facing each other as if in a standoff, my hands hanging at the sides of my ruffled pink bathing suit.
“Ready?” She nodded.
“Swim from there to there,” I said, pointing at the buoys, bobbing on the waves in the roped-off portion of the shallow beach. Irene kicked off her sandals and said she’d swum with sharks before. How I longed to be able to kick off my sea slippers, too, but I couldn’t again, even if she already knew what my foot looked like. When she said go, I folded my arms, watching her run off ahead of me, kicking sand, diving into the ocean, and then her arms furiously slicing through the water. I could see the splash made by her kick, all foam and angst. That was my signal. I raced into the waves and dove in. I let her think she could outswim me, but no one could. I dove underneath a wave, disappearing and swimming past Irene with all my strength, catching sight of her face only once, when I looked back as she opened her mouth to take a breath, and in that moment, when water rushed over her face, it was made clear to her that she had no chance, her expression one of panic, with snot running down her lips. When I surfaced, touching the buoy, she was still about three feet away.
“Cheater!” she called.
I started to swim, competitive as I was, back to shore. When I reached the sand, I fell onto the beach on my back, arms splayed out, trying to catch my breath. “Don’t think you won,” she called from the shallow area, choking back the salt water.
“I won fair and square.”
She pushed her brown bangs off her forehead and smiled as she walked by me in the sand. “I’m not the loser here.”
WHEN I WAS seven, I developed a habit of climbing into my window after school, my feet swung over the ledge, looping my toes in the vines, pulling the bougainvillea from their clawed place on the stucco, careful not to kick away my ladder. My mother’s smile always fell when she saw me, and I knew there’d be a small confrontation, which began with her demanding that I come down. “What are you looking for out there?”
“I don’t want to be a kid anymore,” I said. Second grade carried with it a sort of desperation, a time when cliques had started to form as if silent torrents over the waves and girls sought frenzied alliances, solidified with notes passed for playdates after school. I’d no longer be satisfied with my island of a desk, listening to other girls talk of their plans. They’d smirk when I tried to join in their conversations. Once in a while, they said, “We don’t have time for frogs” when I joined them on the playground. Then they’d ignore me. They put a sign on their desks that said “No Frogs Allowed.” For a time it was better to be alone, staying in my classroom while the other children were at lunch or on the playground. Teachers were paid to be patient with you.
“You don’t want to play hopscotch or jump rope? It looks like they’re having so much fun out there, doesn’t it?” my teacher would ask.
“No, I don’t like games so much. I’ll just stay in here and read,” I’d reply, and I’d lose myself in a book. Sometimes I’d ask for special assignments, like wiping down the blackboard and cleaning the erasers, things I could do competently.
“Only fly away with me,” my mother said, reaching for me in my bedroom window. She sailed me through the air, urging me to fling my wings out, making me laugh.
Then her eyes fell to the floor.
Sighing, she put me down on the bed and she knelt, her fingers drifting over the pictures I’d cut out from magazines. A hammock in the grass. A father riding on his lawn mower. A father reading a fairy tale to his daughter in his lap. A father building a tree house in the backyard. Grilling chicken. Holding a briefcase. Who tucked them in. Who took them swimming. Who walked them home from school to protect them from the bullies who would chase them. Who told them where they came from. Who called them by a secret name. Who stole them back. Who made them a foot just like his own.
“Fathers,” she said, almost hesitating to say the word aloud. Then, “This is only going to get worse,” my mother said, causing a meteor that had been racing through the atmosphere to suddenly halt and explode into sprays of rock, another canyon avoided on Earth.
Chapter Twenty-four
ON RAINY WEEKENDS when I could not find my sisters, my eyes would burn red and watery. I’d find myself drawn to shadows, and to the oncoming storms that billowed up in the corners of the vast morning sky. My mother would tell me to take a bath, hoping I’d be calmed by the sensa
tion of floating and the scented rose oil in the bathwater for a little while. I’d pile my hair up on top of my head and sink down beneath the bubbles, holding my breath, daring myself to breathe. With a mouthful of bubbles, I’d rise up, spitting the soap out, drawing a heavy terry-cloth towel across my tongue. I’d dress quickly, announcing it didn’t work. Then my mother would send me out back: “Naida, go get it off your chest.” I’d stand on the beach in my shiny red ladybug raincoat with my matching shiny red rain hat and boots, my hands balled into fists, and I’d scream so loud that the seagulls would lift off, as if a curtain of collective shock, blackening the sky. The horizon would light up with silver wire, and all the lavender and golden hues in the sky would slide into the waves as if melted from a wall of ice.
When I was eight, I began to dive off the pier and the rocks at the end of the peninsula. By nine, I secretly began imagining a dive off the rooftop of the Sands Restaurant, where my mother worked some nights as a cook. I’d been up there before, at one of my mother’s work parties, and I knew the cool scrape of those roof tiles on the soles of my feet, the roof gripped under me, and I’d dared myself to do it. I’d already checked out the rocks underneath and had found a safe spot.
Day after day, I ran home from school, chased by bullies who threw rocks at my back and called me names. My mother had written a note giving me permission to leave early on account of my violin lessons, which I took for a month and then dropped, when the screeching horsehair bow was just too much for the residents to take. Yet still, no one questioned it when I’d leave a few minutes early, just enough time to fly out the door and trample the football field, getting a head start on my bullies. This was the only thing that saved me.