The Salt God's Daughter

by Ilie Ruby

  In the photograph, my father is thinner than my mother had described him, with long gray hair falling over his shoulders, and an almost all-white beard. What struck me more than his hair were his eyes, the way he seemed to measure my gaze, drawing back as if to both evaluate me and capture me. He looks old, close to fifty, I thought. So depleted and aged and utterly human. His navy blue trousers are covered with splotches of white paint. He is standing in front of a boat about to be christened, holding a champagne bottle of some sort, a look of pride on his tanned face. The boat’s name, painted in white, is Naida Hope.

  I imagined I could see the boat that night, out there in the distance. I imagined the blue-green lights of the aurora borealis falling in curtains across the deck, illuminating the faces of sailors, and then flickering red as the curtains billowed over the water, creating a sea of gold as the sea lions rose up, appearing as stones scattered across the skin of the waves. I knew it would never be over between us, my father and me. I had said goodbye once in San Clemente. When I cast him out of my heart back then, I imagined him lost.

  I sat on the couch and buried my face in my hands. My mother put her arms around me. “Did he love us?” I asked her, leaving her no choice.

  She nodded. “He was just a man,” she said. “The Shekhinah, she came to let us know.” She pulled me against her and rocked me there for a few minutes as the rain drummed against the porch window and the storm lifted the bougainvillea from their resting places.

  My father had been as close as the moon and as far.

  You could walk between two worlds, the desert and the ocean. Each would, at times, appear to be the other. You could love that which you didn’t understand, and you could hold that which no longer existed anymore. My mother offered me the photograph.

  THAT NIGHT, I dreamed of a bird fluttering against my window. In my state of half-wakefulness, I opened my window, but the bird remained hovering. I watched as he passed right through the glass. He flew over my head and dove across the room. A lightning rod of brilliant blue streaked across the air and then circled once as it made its way above our heads. When it fluttered down and perched on the top of the chair, I drew in my breath. I started to walk toward it, but it flew away then and escaped through my doorway into the hallway. I got up and ran into the living room, but it disappeared. I thought it might be the last bit of magic my father had to offer.

  MY HANDS SLIPPED from the rusty ladder as I climbed, my chin lifted toward the moon. My feet barely touched the rungs. My toes curved on the edge. I looked behind me, held by the shadows and the flickering lights from the string of Chinese lanterns.

  I extended my arms. I caught my breath, letting go of thoughts of my past. Then it all disappeared as I pushed off. I was flying, my body curved across the sea. Sea mist. Red moon. Bad man. Good man. All of it, swirling on Teutonic plates, amid my mother’s nighttime whispers of blistering deserts and of her young body stolen under confetti petals, of breezes laden with tears that swept across desert skies and into the wide arms of the roiling Pacific, and then north to another ocean. I kept my eyes open, knowing the waves were rising to meet me; I landed with a small splash, sinking down through the water. I opened my eyes underwater, glancing up at the seaweed canopy and the moonlight spilling through like a tunnel. Suddenly a huge cloud crossed over me, blackening out the moonlight. A floating island, I thought as I watched from underneath. Then, a flicker of light. Animal. A sea lion overhead. In its black eyes, I caught that ribbon of light, that spirit of a thing. Now a rippling image, the sea lion floated away above my head until it became a tiny ink spot in the night sky.

  A few minutes later, I woke up breathing underwater. I pushed back my blanket and walked out on the patio.

  “Can’t sleep,” I told my mother.

  All things could shift their shapes. Molecules of hate could become love. Animals from a far-off place could huddle like rocks against the cold night winds. The sea turned over from storms, and then the fish came back. Mothers survived their daughters. And daughters survived their mothers. All things moved on. Knowing you had a home changed everything. My mother and I walked down to the beach.

  There was something pulling at me, an echo—once filled with stories of rescues, of escapes, of dreams and wishes made on the full moon. Now there was something else. Something that reminded me remotely of me. I dug my heels into the wet sand as the first spray of sunlight splashed up across the rippling water, lifting the clouds.

  The assumption had always been flight.

  That canopy. That magic. That girl in the back of the room. That animal fading into the night sky. That girl in the miniskirt who got up and could fly. Just a girl. Who remembered that she was loved, and who would remember to love herself. In time.

  The blue light that was scattered throughout the ocean, not the atmosphere, gave the sky its color. Sunlight, which would wake you from a cold dark winter, could convince you that your life was something entirely different in a matter of hours, could find you curled up in the smallest, darkest part of yourself. Sunlight, which drew and reversed shadows, illuminated the moon. If you believed that the moon started and stopped all things, you might believe that its presence enabled the sun to begin with. This is something my grandmother Diana would probably have believed. This, what was called the Grandmother Theory of Creation.

  All this time. All those stories.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, instead of escaping into the waves, I crept down to the courtyard, carrying a brown paper bag. I knelt in the moon garden we’d made beneath the sentry palm, which looked quiet and peaceful in this light, not struggling, not appearing to have struggled. The sentry palm’s bark was still green, and it still grew only two palm fronds, the tips golden. We’d planted moonflowers, which bloomed only at night, which loved the humidity. We’d planted tall stakes in a circle around the tree, and the tendrils of each twining vine grew around them, each with seven six-inch blossoms. The blossoms opened so fast in the evening you could watch them, and they lasted through the night, closing with the slightest hint of morning. We planted the common white variation, starting them off as seeds, nicked with a file and soaked the day before. In time, a bright blue blossom would appear. Then another. I would learn that this was the rarest type—the blue moonflower, whose blossoms appeared a striking bright blue and, after closing, my mother’s favorite pale shade of lavender. Their fragrance was lush and sweet, filling the air each evening. One day, the vines would grow right along with the sentry palm, reaching up around the trunk of the tree to its full ten feet, petals splayed open at night, opening wider in times of harsh winds and rain.

  We hadn’t made the garden perfectly round. Not a complete circle. The moon was only ever full for just one night.

  I dug my fingers into the earth all around it. Aunt Dolly appeared next to me. “What am I going to do about this tree?” she asked.

  Without a word, she sank to her knees and pushed her fingers into the ground, scraping away the earth, clawing a deep trench around the trunk of the tree, careful not to disturb its roots. I turned the paper bag upside down, letting my grandmother’s 1966 almanac—from the year of my mother’s birth—fall into the mud—each page holding the promise of abundant stories. I had found it in the storage room behind a box of slippers. Across the top, she’d written: “The Wanderer” My mother had refused it when I offered it to her, saying that was no longer her life. My father’s death had ended her need for stories.

  Now the cells that made up the paper would be joined with those of the sentry palm and become a living, breathing part of it. Maybe seeing these stirrings, these stories of the moon, these words in the margins written by my grandmother, who believed, with every fiber, in the life she could create, would make the sentry palm grow.

  Perhaps all this gravity was unnatural. Maybe things were meant to exist in a permanent state of falling. Why else would people have so much trouble staying put? Perhaps some souls existed long before that thunderous boom of creation ever occurred. Perh
aps they’d waited patiently, floating like tiny jellyfish through the galaxy, waiting for the planets to just get on with things already and take form. When certain souls were drawn to Earth, some fell together. You would see it as a meteor shower, as a cluster of tiny stones with wings.

  Those people would be your family, those you were meant to come into this life with. Others would become your friends, people you traveled through this lifetime with.

  You would appear to be falling. At first, it would seem that way. But you would land gently on Earth as if on the waves. You would touch down only for a lifetime, just a millisecond. Not any longer. Then you would lift off.

  If you were a person who’d been left, you would always be surprised when the world rose up to meet you like all those crystalline molecules of water rushing in to fill an empty space. In time, you would thank your lucky stars that somehow, despite your trials, you felt mostly buoyed up, that you were driven by purpose, that somehow, despite the darkness, you could always pull light in, holding it with your fists.

  Years later, while walking to the boardwalk with my mother, my arm hooked in hers, I’d gasp at the empty outline of a man lying under a tree. In my mind, I’d picture an upturned baseball cap and soiled clothing. Once, Paulo walked by, holding his small granddaughter on his shoulders, dressed in the blue flannel shirt I’d once picked out for him. That little girl wore such a smile on her face, proud of her grandfather for any number of reasons I could think of. He was the universe.

  In time, I would learn about art. I would learn that a painter could capture a leaping trout with a single dash of red paint—a caster’s fly.

  And yet.

  Sometimes a caster’s fly was only just paint. Sometimes it did not illuminate everything else, creating a story. A thing, less important than its relativity, most importantly wanted to be seen just for what it was. It was almost impossible to do this. Sometimes if you closed your eyes you could do it. Or if you looked underwater, sometimes you could also do it.

  And yet.

  The disruptive and surprising placement of color, the place where value and form converged to place an entire ocean—you did not need to be godlike to capture it. You needed only to be an ordinary girl. You needed only to draw one blue line beneath each eye and go about living your life. The trick had always been in knowing when a dash was just a dash and when it was something more. Would it ever mean what you thought? You would make meaning from things, from symbols and signs. This form would be in languages. In sculptures. In brushstrokes. In words. If you were looking at a young girl especially, you needed to be most gentle about your calculations.

  Sometimes that girl with blue eyeliner was just a girl with a crayon, sitting in her bathroom one night, bored, playing with color. She simply liked the way it made the color of her eyes look. She simply thought it was pretty. Everything that tumbled into your mind, all the meaning you made from it, what you thought you knew about her because of it, would be a mistake. My mother had a right to be shocked by what happened to her when she was fifteen. I swore that would not happen to me. I was lucky.

  Because of this, my mother had endured too many judgments. Bullied, as I have been. Because of this people said it was fine that things were stolen from her. She was just a girl with a reputation like me. Reputation, the atmosphere around a thing. The ability to see it for what it was, not to derive meaning from it, was critical. It was easy for me to see why my father appealed to her. He didn’t judge her. For him that red dash in that painting would have meant only that. It was red. It was triangular. It was flat. Placed in the middle of brown. It meant nothing. Neither did a line of blue.

  WHAT I SOUGHT was what I was capable of. In time, I’d see that. Just as birds would learn that they would not remain in a permanent state of falling, you didn’t have to hide in the skins of animals. No one could steal you. Not you. No matter what you imagined they took. No matter what they had wanted, they wouldn’t have you. You were endless, could never be destroyed. You and the ocean, you were the same. This, what was called the Salt God Theory of Creation.

  The time you came here was the time you were meant to be here. My place, my time, was now, no matter what my bullies would want me to believe about how I was made, about skin, about what I would become.

  I REMEMBER STANDING outside Wild Acres a few nights after I’d found out about my father. Three women sat on a blanket by the sea. Dr. B. listened as my mother told a story, my aunt beside her, her legs tucked under her as the waves crashed and the meteor shower silently tore dreams across the night sky. My mother looked up as if she heard something, but it was only the wind spinning glimmers of the last light of day over the waves, taking the bougainvillea petals with it. I remember how the waves unfolded under the pull of the new moon. I remember the sound of her stories—the roar of the ocean, the collision of wind on waves, the hollow strum of a guitar.

  It was then I truly saw the future.

  The bougainvillea would always come back with abandon.

  Epilogue

  Diana

  I NEVER WANTED SECOND sight. It could make me chase my tail. Leave me blind to what was right in front of me. It could capture me. I tried to make sense of things that couldn’t be understood, as if trying to weave threads that could not be separated, as if my fingers had become the threads themselves. Never enough dexterity with my fingers. They were raw, clumsy. You can see I was good at saying what I didn’t want.

  Let me tell you what I did want. I wanted my daughters.

  I wanted their freedom.

  In the beginning there was music. Ruthie’s father taught me to play my first guitar—he gave me his. I called him The Wanderer because he came from a far-off place, a place I could never go. The dust he kicked up because he didn’t want to be tied down carried me back and forth across the night skies, across deserts and across the ocean. Certainly this clouded my own emotions, my own gifts, whether anybody saw them or not. That’s what I wanted. I was running from it, what stormed inside me like the ocean. Under that moon on the beach, where I first met him, the waves glowed as I took his guitar and felt my first note of peace. I peeled the peace sign from its belly and stuck it on his forehead. He laughed, though he’d meant I should keep it.

  If I told you I was not afraid of the quiet, I’d be lying. I was not used to it. But I wanted very much not to be caught in the storm. I was used to things much more ethereal than love. Love was not my first language. It wasn’t elusive, rather the opposite. It was something I didn’t see—a thing too tangible, concrete. But I learned it. A thing real, not imagined. Step by step. Bone by bone. Rock by rock. Ladder by ladder. Child by child. I learned its form.

  Dalia had come first, from a farmer, a man of the earth who could reach into the soil and grow fruit. Then Ruth, from this Wanderer, a creature of the sea. A man who’d always escape back into the ocean.

  And yet, not just a man.

  When I tired of running, when I was ready to face my mistakes, I went back there to the place on the beach, finally to see what was there. All I was. And all I was not. I had to recover what we’d left. Sticks, shells, bones to show where the path had been broken.

  And that is where The Wanderer found me again.

  I wanted to look him in the eye, to stare down his escapabil-ity. To walk it down, as if a curse, an illness, a rogue animal cast out. Begin again, Dagmar told me. Work. Eat. Sleep. I needed to build a life for my girls. A bed they could wake up in. A table they could sit down at. A window they could open. And close. Depending.

  We would make curtains. Bread. This, to me, felt like a miracle.

  Things would still carry me away. But not as much. No, not as much as they once had.

  The Wanderer climbed out of the water, pushing me aside for the last time, his eyes on the old motel covered in vines where I’d made our home. This time he’d brought a skin for my child, his child. He wanted to take her back to the place I could not go, back to his home in the sea. Over his shoulder I saw the bougai
nvillea wrestling the moon as the clouds and the sea mist flooded across the rooftops where my little girls slept safely.

  He didn’t stop. We fought out there in the sea. We fought with fists. With words. We fought with shouts, though no one heard us.

  If you ask why I didn’t see this coming, I will ask you to imagine looking up at the sky and not being able to see the moon because you are standing on it. I will tell you not to fear the silence—silence is not the absence of noise; it is simply the state of hearing too many stories at once. It must be waited out, so each story can be parceled out, heard. I didn’t see things on my own course. For a time I needed a map, books. I tried to make sense of what would always slip away.

  On that last night of my life, I wanted to see the flash of my own fire on the waves, to recapture myself from that ocean and its moon, to take back all of my stories and for it to leave me, for once, in peace. Nothing should be kept in cages, and yet people built their own. I had built mine, and it gave me something to put my hands on. Cages made you demand your freedom. Until you didn’t need that kind of thing anymore to be free.

  When the Salt God let go of me, the moonlight whipped back like a tail flashing against the night sky. It disappeared into the waves, taking the moon and all its stories with it.

  Back to the place of the animals. To the place before even them, when there were only stars.

  Dagmar and I had promised each other that my girls wouldn’t know about my mistakes, my choices, my gift, what I did for love. That was the pact we made. There is strength in numbers. If you are part of a tribe, you band together. My girls would stay together. I never wanted them to know my sacrifice. That was not theirs to carry. I didn’t want them to know their difference, either. I loved them the same.