Something Rich and Strange

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I haven’t seen her yet this morning.”

  “She’s probably on the beach, drawing,” he said inanely, and then, too late, heard the undercurrent beneath Adam’s words. Adam simply nodded.

  “Then I’ll look there for her.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you want Megan?” Jenny turned to look at him, hearing the sharpness in his voice.

  Adam’s blank, surprised expression mirrored hers. Jonah shifted, feeling somehow foolish and threatened at the same time. He said, without waiting for an answer, “I’ll have to take your work on consignment.”

  “Fine with me,” Adam said mildly. “Which pieces do you want?”

  “I’ll have to go upstairs and get the box.”

  He found it where he had left it, closed among his fossils, and brought it down. He opened it on the counter. Jenny joined him, making vague, appreciative sounds, filling his own silence as his eyes, flicking across a pirate’s treasure of metal and jewels, found nothing. They must be there, he thought incredulously, the yin-and-yang wafers of onyx and ivory. They had to be there, hidden under a gold whale, under a polished black starfish. “I’ll take these,” he said, breaking his awkward silence, shifting jewels. “These.”

  “What about the black cats sitting on the fishhooks?” Jenny suggested. “I love those.”

  “Right. And this.”

  “And the sea otter pin, with the tiny abalone shell on its tummy.”

  “Fine.” He picked up a sea turtle pin, its back malachite, its head and feet paler jade, jointed with silver. “This.”

  “And this little pink jade octopus; it looks like a flower, the way its arms curve like petals.”

  “Fine.” He swallowed. “Jenny keeps the shop going; she knows our customers. There was—I thought I saw—”

  “Yes?”

  “We couldn’t possibly have lost them—if so I’ll pay for them—”

  “What,” Adam asked, “are you looking for?”

  The world seemed to quiet again. Jonah lifted his eyes, feeling naked, vulnerable, pleading silently for mercy. “I saw a pair of onyx-and-ivory earrings. Overlapping circles, dark and light divided by gold. I don’t know what happened to them.”

  There was no mercy in the fine, dangerous face. “You only thought you saw them in the box,” Adam said gently. “But you recognized my work. I made them for my sister.”

  Upstairs, Megan laid two drawings on the floor and sat cross-legged, studying them.

  Sea hare, she thought.

  Sea hair.

  Something is happening. Something very strange is happening. Things are drawing themselves into my drawings. Or am I drawing them without realizing it? But that old woman caught my hair on her hook, and that’s my hair there, floating like a mermaid’s in the surf. How would I have known to draw it?

  She hugged her knees, staring at the drawings.

  “Well,” she said finally, a little wildly, “there’s only one thing to do. Go back and draw again, and see what else turns up.” She got up off the floor, leaving the drawings there, the beginning of some story without words that she had to pull in the shape of fish and shells and seaweed out of the sea.

  She went out again, feeling a touch lunatic herself. She hadn’t showered; breakfast had been a cup of coffee with Jonah before he went down to open the store. They hadn’t talked much; he seemed dream-fogged, and she was dumbfounded. She walked to the beach again, hair flying, pocket full of pens and pencils, her drawing pad under her arm, her eyes wide behind her salt-flecked glasses, determined to make the mystery reveal itself or vanish.

  The tide had turned; most of the tide pools were underwater. She sat on a wedge of boulder, watched the tide bubble around it. She drew the rocks in the distance, rising above the surf like the craggy towers of some forgotten kingdom. Sea palms on lower shelves of rock curled under the tide, then popped upright, shaking their fronds. She added a cluster of them, and three pelicans, time-warped from another era, that flew along the breakers. She studied her drawing. Nothing, she thought grimly, that shouldn’t be there. She added a fishing trawler crawling along the horizon, and a couple of men casting off the top of a rock. There was more impulse than art to her composition, but she began to enjoy the randomness. Everything about it was unexpected, so nothing could surprise her.

  “Megan?”

  She looked up, surprised. Adam Fin, looking more homogeneous in blue jeans and a windbreaker, smiled down at her, then glanced at her drawing. She, who hated people looking over her shoulder, shifted to reveal more of it to him. “Hi,” she said, and patted barnacles. “Sit down.”

  He did so, ignoring the hoary teeth pushing against his backside. He watched the water a moment, eyes narrowed against the wind, then said, “I talked to Jonah. He took some of my work.”

  “I knew he would.”

  “Is he always so intense?”

  “Pretty much. He says he likes rocks better than people.” She added a bit of cross-hatching to the rocks, then looked up again to find Adam’s profile, turned seaward, still as marble, hair pushed back by the wind, a quarter moon glinting in one ear. For just a moment, she envisioned that profile superimposed on her sketch, as if he were dreaming the rocks, the pelicans, the kelp and tide. Light sparked across the silver quarter moon in his ear; the onyx rabbit seemed to sprint across the wind toward the tide.

  “Does it mean something?” she asked curiously. “The black rabbit? Is it lucky?”

  His stillness broke; he touched it, smiling a little. “I don’t know. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In old tales, rabbit is a trickster. It changes sex, it changes shape; it lures you this way and that; it steals power and gives it away; it changes the path under your feet, and in the end, it changes what you think you want into what you are really looking for.”

  “All that,” she said, marveling.

  “Sometimes it just plays tricks.”

  She watched it rocking under his ear, the moon caught in its paws. Her eyes strayed again to his profile. “Jenny thinks you were born here.”

  “She does?” There was a touch of humor in his gentle voice. “Why?”

  “She says because you’re more like one of us than one of them.”

  He still looked seaward, but the shadow deepened under his cheekbone. “One of us,” he said, amused. “One of them.”

  “Were you?”

  “Born here?” He leaned gracefully, catching a trail of foam between his fingers. “Yes. Here. Jenny’s right.”

  “But you traveled.”

  “Now I’m back.” He flicked the foam into the water. “You weren’t born here.”

  “I was born—”

  “In Port Jameson. Jenny told me. Up north.”

  “You know it?”

  “I know all the towns along the coast. I’m part salesman, remember?”

  “But where do you live now?”

  “I’m staying with some people,” he said vaguely, “until I find a place.”

  “You’re going to stay?”

  “For a while. Maybe longer. Who knows? Long enough to make some things, sell some things, make a little money.”

  “That’s all there is around here,” she commented. “A little money.”

  “People bring it in from up north, down south. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles—”

  “Jonah thinks you’re from Beverly Hills.”

  He laughed at that, noiselessly, still watching the tide. “Jonah has too much imagination.”

  “I always thought he didn’t have enough.”

  He leaned back, hands splayed among the barnacles, his eyes on the water, but she felt his attention shift to her. “Why do you say that?”

  She shrugged. “He likes to classify things. He’s very cautious. He hates the color in my drawings; he thinks it’s commercial. He has good taste, but he can be rigid about some things. He didn’t even want to talk to you at first; he wouldn’t look at your jewelry, even when I told him
how beautiful it is. I don’t know why he changed his mind. When he finally looked at it, he dreamed about it.”

  He was silent a moment, absolutely still, the way the waves were still sometimes, just before they began to gather and turn again. Then he said slowly, “He locks up imagination maybe, frees it by night. Some people do that. Their lives are rigid, but their dreams are full of poetry. Monsters. Things rich and strange. Imagination is dangerous. It changes things You think you know what the world is and where you are in it, and then you walk out the door, and the storm clouds are a migration of great white whales, and the moonlight on the water is a stairway down into the sea.”

  “A stairway into the sea,” she repeated, and saw it suddenly, in her mind, moonlight and pearl, beginning just at the edge of the tide and running into the deep. She shook her head, laughing a little, and Adam’s eyes turned away from the sea to her.

  “What?” he asked, smiling.

  “Nothing. I just saw your stairway. I’ve never thought that way about the sea. I’ve always drawn what I saw, and I never imagined anything that wasn’t real.”

  “Pretend it’s real,” he suggested lazily. “What’s it made of? Your stairway?”

  “Moonlight. Pearl. Something dark, blue-black, like the underside of mussel shells.”

  “Where does it begin?”

  “Just there. Where the outgoing tide draws back the farthest from the land.”

  “If you could—” He looked at her again, still smiling faintly, his eyes seeming at once opaque and full of light. “Would you?”

  “Go down the stairs?” She nodded, pushing her hair out of her eyes to contemplate imaginary stairs. “Now I can only go as deep as a tide pool. If I could stand on the bottom of the sea and draw all the little luminous fish in the dark…draw kelp, looking up toward light… I could draw these things from photographs, but I never wanted to. Anyway, Jonah would hate that more than he hates the colors.”

  “He hates the sea?”

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “He loves it.”

  “And he loves you.”

  She glanced at him silently, saw only a waning quarter of his face. “He’s crotchety,” she said slowly. “Hard to please, sometimes. But then, so am I. We’re alike, in a lot of ways.” She paused again. “I’ve never—”

  “What?”

  “Talked like this to anyone. I don’t usually. About my drawings. About Jonah.”

  “Sometimes it’s easiest to talk to strangers.”

  “Do you love anyone?”

  His expression didn’t change, but she had surprised him: He stopped breathing; again his body grew still. “No,” he said at last. “Not for a long time. And even then, not for very long.”

  “It was like that for me,” she said with sympathy, “before I met Jonah. It seemed—just luck, that we met. An accident.”

  “Maybe,” he said gravely, “one of these days, I’ll have an accident.”

  She leaned against her drawing, studying him as she studied tide pools. “You’d more likely have a collision,” she said, and saw his teeth flash.

  “Why?”

  “Because you seem more dramatic. Exotic. Jonah and I belong in a tide pool. You belong in the great deep. Among the whales and dolphins—”

  “And sharks?”

  “No,” she said indignantly. “Of course not. A narwhal. That’s what you would be. Something real, but not quite believable.”

  He looked at her, the expression in his eyes unfathomable. She wondered suddenly if she had hurt him. But he only said lightly, “Jonah would put me among the sharks.”

  “Jonah would not. Barnacles don’t know sharks.”

  “And where would Jonah put you?”

  She chewed the end of her pen, studying the drawing for whales. “Jonah doesn’t think that way. He sees everything in black and white.”

  He chuckled, amused by something. “That’s a perilous way to think. One day color will wash across his eyes and he’ll be in a world where nothing is familiar anymore. Not even you.”

  She looked at him, blinking. “That’s an odd thing to say.”

  “I see odd things,” he said lightly, and leaned forward to study her drawing. “It moves,” he commented. “It’s hard to catch the sea moving, since the drawn line freezes it. But I can hear your sea.”

  She flushed, pleased. “I was just doodling. Just—something odd is happening to my work. It’s going through some kind of change. I don’t—I don’t quite know what to expect from it now.”

  “In what way?” he asked gravely. She was silent a long time, while he waited; she shook her head finally, pulling her hair tight with her hands.

  “It’s hard to describe. I just have to keep at it until I know what it wants—what it wants to tell me.”

  He made a soft sound. “You draw the sea. Maybe it’s the sea you’re trying to hear.”

  She looked at him again. “You sound like that old sea witch.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman I met this morning. She cast her hook in my hair and reeled me in like a fish. She’s rude and crazy and ugly, and she changed my drawing.”

  “How—”

  “She just did. She walked into it and changed it. Old barnacle.” She could feel her face frowning and smiling at the same time. His face changed slightly; a shadow passed over it, or light. She asked surprisedly, “You know her?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said softly. “Dory. The Old Woman of the Sea.” He stood up suddenly, as if he finally felt the barnacles. “That’s what we always called her.”

  “Is she crazy?”

  “No,” he said simply. “But sometimes her sanity is terrifying.” He stepped off the rock, into fingers of tide. He turned, gave her a smile. Tide washed away his footprints. She stopped watching him after a while and studied her sketch for changes. Boat. Rocks. Birds. Sea palm. Waves. Fishers. No mystery. Just land meeting sea. Birds diving out of air for food, plants growing up out of water for light. Humans hunting fish, eating from the sea.

  Normal. She closed her pad and leaped onto dry sand. She picked up half a Styrofoam float that had rolled in on the foam, and a small opaque bottle with something inside it. She stuffed them in her pocket and headed home.

  Jonah found them on the table among his rocks when he came upstairs after he closed the store. Megan’s drawing was propped against the toaster; he studied it a moment. Birds. Fishers. Rocks. Trawler. It lacked the precision of her underwater drawings, he decided, but the lines were good. He wondered where she was. He drifted over to the table, vaguely annoyed at her absence, as he would have been vaguely annoyed by her presence. He transferred his annoyance to the junk on the table that was littering his orderly mess. He tossed the float at the garbage can. Rim shot. It bounced to the floor and slid under a cupboard. He gazed at it, motionless, a glittering shadow, a smoky cadence trailing through his thoughts. He turned restively, picked up the bottle. Something shifted inside it. He held it up to the light, looked into it.

  He was standing with the bottle upraised, shaking it now and then to shift the flickering, unidentifiable lights in it, when Megan walked in. He grunted, too absorbed to speak. She set a bag of groceries on the cupboard, then turned. She pushed at her glasses hesitantly with her forefinger, her brows going up behind them.

  “What are you doing?”

  “There’s something in this bottle.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I can hardly see… Where’d you find it?”

  “It washed ashore in the tide. What is it? A message?” She reached for it. “Let me see.”

  “Wait—” He held it higher. “I’m looking.”

  “Is it treasure? I found it. It’s mine.”

  “Salvage belongs to the government, who shall apportion its value.” He turned the bottle; weight shifted; something rattled faintly.

  “In what country?”

  “Florida, I think.” He caught a reflection, a memory in the glass that might have been opales
cent walls, windows, a tower. “Can I break it?”

  “It’s probably sand.”

  He upended the bottle, shook it over the floor. A drop of water trembled on the lip. Megan watched it, as mesmerized as he was. “Not sand. I can’t tell what kind of bottle it is. Steak sauce, or something. It’s not antique, is it?”

  “Probably. It’s been floating around in the ocean for a hundred years, waiting for someone to find it and break into it. Now it’s more valuable than what’s inside.” She watched him patiently. “Can I see?”

  “Castles,” he murmured, watching the shifting lights. “Luminous fish. Reflections. Dream’s. Rhinestones from Woolworth’s.” He yielded the bottle finally. She held it to the light a moment or two, motionless, not breathing. Then, abruptly, she dropped it into the sink and tapped it once, twice, with the marble rolling pin.

  “Be careful,” he breathed. The glass shattered on the third tap.

  They gazed at the pieces. Megan stirred them with her finger. Jonah picked up a shard, held it to the light. She watched him. He shook his head finally. “Nothing.” He drew a long breath, looked at her. “But there was something.”

  “There was,” she said in a small voice, “until I broke it.” She stirred the pieces again, her eyes wide behind her glasses. Then she began to gather the shards methodically.

  “Wait,” Jonah said quickly, before she threw them out. “Save me a piece. I can look at it through my hand lens.”

  She gave him that flat, incredulous stare before her face loosened and broke into a smile. “Oh, Jonah. You can’t see it that way.”

  “Then what was it?” he demanded.

  “Something.” She tossed the pieces in the garbage, then removed her glasses and drew the back of her hand over her eyes wearily. She blinked at him, half-blind; he wondered suddenly what she was seeing. “It’s like the sea hare.”

  “What?”

  “I thought it was over, but I guess not.” She put her glasses back on, began to unpack groceries.

  “What’s not over?”

  She didn’t answer, just took eggs out of the bag, then an eggplant, which he hated and she loved, and chicken livers, which she hated and he loved. She wasn’t going to answer, he could tell. When she opened the refrigerator, she let her hair swing in front of her face to hide it. He opened his mouth, impatient, wanting answers. She straightened abruptly before he could speak, and pointed out the dining room window, where the lights of the town were streaking the twilight. “Look. That’s what you saw. You held it that direction. You said they looked like lights.”