The Salt God's Daughter

by Ilie Ruby

  She looked at me strangely and opened the note. She peered at me over the edge of the paper.

  “You think I’m wise?”

  I nodded. She smiled, wiping her eyes. Such was the magic of birthdays, a common language that everyone could understand. One of the high holidays that made strangers act like old friends and celebrate with you.

  “Well, happy birthday to you,” she said.

  Mr. Taki was crouched under the stairwell when I got home, talking of Pearl Harbor. I offered him my hand and led him back to his door. “Mr. Taki’s caught in the past again,” I told my mother.

  “That’s what happens. He’s old, and his memory is confused.” But she didn’t understand. He’d already left. He was like the stars now, just a memory of what had transpired miles and years ago.

  That night, as I sank beneath white sheets, I listened to my mother play the guitar, an old Irish folk song about a woman who lived by the sea. I thought about the surprise of an old strawberry farmer, who upon waking would find on his mat a note that said, “You were my true love. Yours, Diana.” And then another note, which said yes, the right thing to do was to leave your ship and meet that nice woman for a date on the island. He’d also find a snow globe that contained a strawberry, which my mother wouldn’t miss.

  THE FUTURE DOESN’T come to you in lightning-bolt flashes—that’s only in the movies. It comes to you as memories, made recognizable by a vague familiarity, of things you have already seen and done. It comes to you through the sound of your own voice echoing in a dark hallway. You wake up with the memory of that which has not yet occurred, sensing the comfort of a threadbare piece of clothing, a faded family photograph, or an old table scratched and worn by elbows. It comes to you in signs, like moonstones in your laundry basket. Or in flickers, in fleeting moments like feathers on the sidewalk. Sometimes it is so delicate it is barely recognizable, almost transparent, as if you were looking through tinted glasses at images superimposed on the present.

  My mother thought my gift of knowing things had been extinguished like a fire. That I had woken up in the hospital, at the age of four, no longer possessing any strange abilities. But that wasn’t true. My gift was not like fire—more like water, ebbing and flowing like the tide.

  It was easier for us not to talk about it. Julio’s mother had frightened me all those years ago when I’d said his blood had rocks. I’d seen the way she looked at me. I had then realized that my gift might not always been seen as good. So I’d tried to shut it down.

  I’d almost never been able to see my own future, at least not when I had strong feelings swirling around me. Feelings clouded my sight. Visions could sneak up on me, and I’d have a physical reaction. Like this morning, when I’d looked out my window and seen a vision of a metal horse rising from the ocean. The taste of a penny had filled my mouth, as sudden as cold water.

  I’d had that tinny taste on my tongue all day long.

  Lately, there had been more things—raindrops became seahorses flooding my dreams, piercing the ocean. When I turned on the shower, I’d hear hooves clomping across metal. The images were becoming clearer, or maybe I just noticed them more distinctly now that I was older.

  I didn’t always understand what I saw. I didn’t know that the future was coming for me now.

  Time and time again, I’d see an old woman with braids at the door, dripping wet in a raincoat.

  Until you could separate your wants from those of others, it was best to stay distant. Or you might get lost. Then your sight would fail and your hearing would become confused. You’d be vulnerable to different things. Other people’s futures were like entrances to a labyrinth you shouldn’t enter, like the chambers in the Maeshowe tomb in Orkney, where Viking warriors left inscriptions on the walls of underground mounds, scraping thirty runes into the tombs.

  At times you’d stumble toward the sea like a small child, too young to be so caught up in a world that wasn’t there, called into the waves at night, the night your mother referred to as “the accident,” and yet it seemed that it was not that at the time. You’d been drawn there by the horse, quite purposefully, and there had been nothing accidental about him or his wanting you to swim. Most of the people who needed to be saved began as rescuers.

  You had to be on guard against things that would steal you.

  Now, with the taste of metal on my tongue, I looked back through my books about Scotland, trying to keep myself from getting lost—in a world that had not yet occurred.

  MOONLIGHT SPILLED OVER the oil derricks, fake skyscrapers rising from imagined islands while giant machinelike white flamingos dipped their beaks into the earth. If only the stork could swoop down and lift me up and away, across the sea to Orkney, the place of nightless summers, where the aurora borealis performed a ballet of dancing lights. A true aurora was a collision of electrons from solar winds that hit atoms in the high atmosphere and made them explode and then sail down Earth’s magnetic lines, appearing as green or red curtains if they hit oxygen, and blue or purple if they hit nitrogen. From far away, they might look like a sun rising in the wrong place.

  My books about Scotland told of how Maeshowe held the spirit of a fourteen-foot man. In that tomb with its many chambers, a human skull and horse bones were found. Some said the structure was a calendar that marked the winter solstice, built in such a way as to allow a shaft of light to sneak through the tomb’s entrance in the weeks leading up to the darkest time of the year, the only time light would shine in the dark caves. Some said this marked the continuation of life for those who’d died, the entrance of the sun like rebirth. Still others said that the souls that were lost in the tomb could climb out on the shaft of light like a ladder to the heavens. Along with the runes, a fire-breathing dragon was etched in the wall. Some said it was a wolf. To me, with its tail like a sword, it looked like a horse, the same one that I wore on the pendent around my neck, which my father had once given to my mother when he’d promised her that he’d always come back.

  I read about the Festival of the Horse, an early-nineteenth-century annual tradition in which children competed in plowing matches on the beach. Boys would pull a miniature metal plow across a four-foot square in South Ronaldsay and be awarded prizes for the neatest and most careful job. Girls dressed in costumes representing the fancy decorations on harnesses worn by Clydesdale horses back in the days of the big plows. The costumes, adorned with medals, were handed down through families and consisted of a colorful headdress, collar, belt, hat, and ankle fringes representing the horses’ feathers. Young girls would gather in the square, their costumes jangling, medals glinting, dressed as working horses.

  But fairy tales weren’t the stories I wanted anymore.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  FIRE, UNLIKE WATER, liked to have a partner. It liked to conspire with wind, with air, with dry brush and trees, with human constructions, even with water. The strange orange cloud that crept across the sky could burn the tips of the trees, making them appear golden, never again to become green. Now, a black veil of smoke drifted through the air from miles away. When wildfires swept through Orange County, the winds suddenly switched directions, carrying the strange blanket of billowing smoke north to Belmont Shore. Plumes of ash were pulled all the way toward the ocean in a strange change of wind. The instructions would be to stay inside if possible, to close car windows. As I gazed out the window of my science class, I knew I had never before seen an orange sky like this, eerily dark and strangely tempting. My teacher said the particles that traveled all this way from the far-off fires were many times thinner than a human hair and could hang in the air for days. They could penetrate the lungs and enter the bloodstream and could do damage to people who had breathing and heart problems.

  I glanced around the room, wanting to see if anyone else felt the way I did. Julio, who liked to make fun of my foot, mouthed, “Blow me” from two rows away. I gave him the finger and quickly averted my eyes back to the window.

  He said my mother me
ant to name me nadie, which meant “nobody.” He said I was nothing, and that I’d never be anything.

  My teacher, Mr. DeFusto, explained a burning sea in different ways. Fuel spilled from a boat fire or a tanker could create flames on the waves. But this wouldn’t be the water burning. You could hold a match over salt water and watch it catch fire if you knew how to release hydrogen from oxygen using radio waves. As long as you kept hydrogen molecules at a certain radio frequency, they would burn, making salt water appear to be on fire. The whole thing was about assumptions and whether you were a person who was more apt to accept things that you saw with your own eyes. This proved that what you saw with your own eyes would sometimes fool you, too, Mr. DeFusto said. That, he explained, was the similarity between science and faith. Faith required a suspension of belief, he said. So did science, if you knew enough to question what you saw.

  If there were a lack of wind and humidity in the air, causing smoke to bank down, there would be toxicity. Storage tank fires produced clouds of thick smoke. There could be a small fire in the park, he said, making me imagine Paulo and his baseball hat. But the big wildfires always came from neighboring cities, where there were wide expanses of grasslands and trees, where the deer still disappeared in the smoky dawn, where mountain lions occasionally crept down from their beds and showed up with noses pressed to the window of restaurants. We had no wildfires in Long Beach, but we had wildflowers, and we had wilderness. An ocean wilderness, one in which castles grew from coral and waterhorses kicked holes in the walls of caves. That morning, I remembered, my mother had said to be careful coming and going, that the bougainvillea were suddenly thick with bees.

  JULIO WAS TRYING to get my attention. I could feel his eyes searing my back, cutting into me, causing me to shift in my seat and finally to turn around and glance back at him. I lifted my chin. This time, he gave me the finger. I gave it back to him again.

  “Rise above, Naida,” my mother always said. But I was not that godly. Not a saint and certainly not enough of a wallflower, though I wished to be. Lift off like a huge white bird. Float away like a feather, out of reach. Sometimes I forgot, after days of put-pocketing, that in school I was antimatter, a negatively charged space, a shadow. No matter how many times I changed my phone number, somebody would find it. I’d been stupid, gullible, easily tricked by the promise of friendship with Irene. There had been so many years of bad blood, I was eager to be done with it. She’d gone after me for no reason, so I didn’t know why exactly I was so willing to be her friend. She’d first stolen the secret of my foot when I was six and had authored a series of stories about my hoof and my claw, had pretended to like me in order to get my phone number. Now, she was almost as tall as our teachers, just a half year younger than I, with a gossiping mouth, a wide smile like her mother’s, and long legs. Her authoritative presence made everybody afraid of her, mostly of her meanness. When she saved me a seat at her lunch table, I felt a strange satisfaction at being noticed. Not long after I gave her my phone number, the obscene texts started. It was easier not to have a phone. I shoved it in the garbage and didn’t look back.

  The bully drills. Those torturous things. There were instructions to walk away, as if away were a better place. To ignore a bully. Not to give a bully attention.

  It gets better, they said, though it never did.

  I walked away. It didn’t help. My bullies followed me. My teachers, they could not help at all. Telling on the bullies made things worse. The bullies would come back angrier, or perhaps satisfied they were in trouble. “Back when you were bullied,” my mother would say, always using the past tense. Fourth grade had worried her to the point of insomnia. She had called Irene’s mother and other parents, trying to get at the root of things, trying to ferret out any festering insecurities as if they were lint from the dryer trap. People said their children were just curious about me, having heard the stories about my foot, their curiosity a ballooning thing that required answers. But now that I was older, all that was behind me. No more questions, my mother said. And she believed that because she’d said it, the universe would conspire. I couldn’t tell her the truth: that the bullying had come back like El Niño, changing every few months, as if I had a sign or a smoke signal over my head that would suddenly flash and alert everyone to gang up on me again.

  I tried to ignore Julio. As Mr. DeFusto talked about the distant smoke, I imagined the sea lions roaring, barking under our apartment window. I worried about my sisters, imagining them racing deep under the ocean, frightened by the strange smoke. The principal’s voice rang out over the PA system, announcing early dismissal. Mr. DeFusto clapped two erasers together, a plume of white smoke rising up, and told us all to be safe out there. Everyone would have to leave at the same time today, preventing me from getting away. My fear was like a room full of twisted metal. At once, something hit my foot. I grabbed the yellow paper and unfolded it in my lap.

  “Witch hunt today after school,” it said.

  THE HALLWAYS FILLED with thunderous voices, shouts of excitement fed by testosterone, freedom, and the clatter of backpacks slung into lockers. Metal lockers slapped open and closed, high fives were given, plans to meet up were shouted through the corridors. I made it to my locker unharmed but breathless. My pulse raced. I didn’t want anyone to look at me, to see how nervous I was. All I wanted was to get away. Today, all I had to do was run as fast as I could. Race across the football field and then dash through the streets.

  As I stood frozen in front of my locker, I felt my legs become light, quivering, and I imagined the sound of my boots crunching broken glass, pounding my fear like oyster shells into the parking lot of Wild Acres. I wondered if this would be the day I didn’t make it home. I tried to steady myself by imagining I was already home and sinking into the gray carpet. It didn’t work. I had to come up with something else, a better plan. Perhaps another door. Another route home. I hadn’t scouted any new ones lately. I’d been entirely too busy worrying about my father and my sisters, about my mother and my aunt, and the rest of the people who were somehow always there but never there at the right time, like now, for instance. Today, I needed to be careful. I didn’t know what they meant by “witch hunt,” but I knew it was not good. The air was unsafe. No one could get away unnoticed.

  Suddenly, I could hear the taunts of my bullies, and then a body knocked into me. “Frog Witch,” someone whispered, laughing. When something hit the back of my head, my stomach clenched. I reached back and felt the saliva in my hair. My cheeks flushed, and my eyes watered up.

  My hands shook too much to spin my locker combination: 25-right, 32-left, 15-right. Breathe. Focus on your sisters, I told myself. On the serenity of the ocean. On the fluidity of graceful arms carving through rippling water. Think of circles overlapping. Better. I could think. I tried again as the sweat slipped down my neck and made dark flowers under each arm.

  I wouldn’t show fear. They were only trying to get a piece of me. The boys, in their low-riding jeans, laughed into their shirts and high-fived each other. The girls, in their low-cut T-shirts, kept their heads tilted to one side, letting their hair fall forward, covering half their face, smiling coyly at each other. What I’d noticed was that you could never predict or explain your bullies. Some would interpret your shyness as trying to appear tough. Some would think you were tough and would want to take you down a notch. Others would be afraid you’d reveal them. Regardless of all that provoked them, they seemed to share an elevated sense of importance. Everyone knew that bullies were cowards in disguise, that as soon as you faced them and stood up to them, they’d back down. That’s what they’d said, at least. I’d tried everything. And I was still occasionally surprised that they continued. I was merely habit for them at this point—a predictable target.

  Now Irene brushed by me, her arm around Julio’s waist, her cold blue eyes tearing into me when she looked back, her frosted lipstick glimmering against her tanned skin. When I caught her eyes, she stopped for a moment, lips parted,
hesitating. Julio glanced back. “Like my boyfriend, Frog Witch?”

  That malformed strawberry. That girl with wings. The one you teased. The one you looked away from. The one who made you grateful for your perfection. That girl who was forced to hide. Who was different. Imperfect. Not you. The one who still believed, for no good reason, that she was a little unstoppable.

  I TORE THROUGH the hallway, racing against the tide, an animal trapped by fluorescent lights. My black boots pounded the cold floor as a crowd of students clamored for the door. I had tried to call my mother and my aunt to come and pick me up, but neither was home. Now I slammed the door to the girls’ bathroom and sat on the floor of a stall, refusing to cry, feeling the chill of the cold metal against my back. I drew my father’s name with my finger across the gritty hexagons, waiting. I’d stay in here all night if I had to, wishing and praying for him to come. I sat on the lid of the toilet, stretching my legs out so that my bootheels gripped the door. I was too scared to walk home now by myself, knowing that there was no chance to get away. My only shot was to wait until everyone had gone. Hopefully, they’d be too busy with their plans to worry about me. I saw my name and my cell phone number written in black marker on the wall. I kicked the door, my hands balling into fists. Ink came off on my fingers as I tried to scribble out my name. I wanted only to worry about other people, about put-pocketing, not about my own survival.

  My forehead against the bathroom mirror, I imagined myself doing impossible things. Breathing underwater. Jumping off rooftops. Finding possibility where no one else saw it. I imagined the sunlight creeping in through the entrance of Maeshowe. It was all a matter of timing for those souls to escape, just as it would be for me.

  Wait, I told myself. Just a little bit longer. Just a few more minutes, until I was sure everyone had gone.