Refugees
The odor of the bundle laid out across the backseat comes in waves that wrap me like the scent of guilt. Time draws me ever closer to the inevitable. Tear streaks dry on my misshapen face, forming a thin film over the painful contortions of my flesh. I sigh, step out of the car, and open the back door. Sand crunches beneath my feet. The slick, dark crests of the ocean roll and bend a short distance away. Remembrance ebbs back to me with the ripple-veiled clarity of languid surf; possibility gapes ahead of me like the far horizon of the sea on that dry, cloudless day that I first met Lynna Marish more than two decades ago.
* * * * *
A full-grown horseshoe crab lay wedged in a tiny gully among the rocks. It bobbed in the lapping water.
I crept down the slick boulders, stretching across the last length of space to reach the crab, struggling to keep my feet dry. Today was the first day of school, and Mom would kill me if I came home for breakfast with my new shoes soaked. She hadn’t wanted me to go down to the beach, but I couldn’t resist on such a beautiful morning. I’d spent the whole summer combing the sand and rocks, tracing Bossoquogue Creek from its outlet by the bay into the woods, swimming and diving, catching frogs, fish, and crabs, while I explored the waters and wilderness around Knicksport. I wasn’t ready for it to end.
School meant classes and being indoors, riding the bus, and facing the dumb meanness of people like Lester Smart, the track team star, and Julie Farrell, the class president, and all their hurtful imitators. It brought a close to days filled with seemingly endless hours of solitary wandering. It took me away from the water. The only good thing about high school that year was that our science course was biology, and we would get to dissect a starfish.
Over the summer I’d made friends among the clammers and oystermen who kept their boats moored in the harbor, quiet men who knew the texture of pain and pitied me. Some of them gave me a day’s work here and there, puttering around the bay, raking the bottom for harvest, silent and steady, the two of us sharing the isolation of a lonely job. When I was younger I dreamed of owning my own clam boat, but Mom despaired at the idea, warning me not to waste my good grades and brains on such a hard living. Better I should be a lawyer.
I found an airy piece of driftwood, used it to drag the horseshoe crab within reach, and flipped it over.
Dead.
It was so hard to find them alive. Their desiccated shells, legs bundled up tight beneath, often littered the beach like discarded helmets, their bayonet tails protruding behind them. I tugged on the narrow blade, tested its sharp point with my finger.
“Limulus Polyphemus. Class Merostomata, Order Xiphosura,” a voice said.
I turned, startled, to see a teenage girl a few feet away from me standing on a high rock. She was oddly dressed for the warm weather in baggy jeans, a long-sleeve turtle neck shirt, a floppy hat, and oversized, dark sunglasses. All I could see of her face was her broad nose and her wide, alluring smile.
“Hi,” I said.
“They don’t use their tail as a weapon, you know,” said the strange girl.
“I know. They use it like a rudder and to move around the bottom.”
“Oh. You know about horseshoe crabs?”
“Lots,” I told her. “Like they’ve been around for 500 million years. And doctors use one of the chemicals in their bodies to make vaccines and stuff.”
“How do you know so much?”
“Books, mostly. And I spend a lot of time wandering around the beach.”
“I like this beach,” she said. “It’s calmer and sandier than the one where I used to live.”
“Where’d you used to live?”
“Up north,” she said. “But me and my Grandma couldn’t live at home anymore, so we came here to stay with cousins. You lived here all your life?”
“Yeah, over on Pequash Road.”
“My name is Lynna.”
“I’m Dennis. So, I guess I’ll see you in school?”
She nodded. “Is it a good school?”
“It’s all right, I guess. I’d rather be at the beach.”
“Yeah, who wouldn’t?” she said. “Well, gotta run. See you later.”
Lynna jogged up the beach to the edge of the woods where she turned down the trail that led to the south end of Knicksport near the power plant. Maybe the sunglasses had hidden her expression, but she hadn’t shown any reaction at all to my disfigured face. Almost everyone did. I’d been caught in a chemical explosion while visiting my father at work; it killed him and disfigured me so badly that even when people pretended they didn’t notice, I could tell they did. I could see it in their eyes. Especially when the girls at school looked at me. Maybe Lynna would be different. The way she was dressed maybe she had her own strangeness to live with.
I saw her in school, but two weeks passed before we did more than say hello passing each other in the hallway. Everyday Lynna wore the same odd, heavy clothing, hat, and glasses, and it didn’t take long for the other kids to start teasing her about it. That was what they did best, after all: lash out at anything different from them, anything that challenged the fragile identities they were shaping for themselves, the lives they were building up out of cruelty and selfishness. It took me a long time to figure that out, to understand that all the abuse they heaped on me, all the hatred and foul will they doled out, had been the product of their weakness and stupidity, not mine.
One afternoon Lynna found me by the Bossoquogue sifting through reeds in search of frog eggs.
She said, “You told me it was a good school. I don’t think it’s a good school. Everyone’s mean there.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Guess you’re not having a good time.”
“Neither are you. I see how they treat you.”
“I’m used to it. These kids around here, I’ve known them all my life, you know? Some of them aren’t so bad. Some of them leave me alone.”
“That’s not right, either. Some of them should be your friends. Everyone needs friends. Doesn’t matter what you look like or how you act. Doesn’t matter where you’re from or who your family is.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“How about you and me be friends?”
I looked up from the reeds and smiled.
“Yeah, okay! You want to help me look for frog eggs?”
Lynna climbed down beside me and pried apart the reeds. She slipped her hand beneath the swirling water and raised it a moment later, drawing a thin, dark branch above the surface. Clustered along its edge were the nacreous bubbles of frog eggs.
She flashed me a wide smile. “Beat ya!”
* * * * *
My Mom mustered a fair amount of happiness and pride the day I graduated college despite my refusal to attend law school. I had earned a degree in marine biology and planned to go to graduate school and become an ichthyologist. It wasn’t what she wanted, but doubtless she was pleased to see me using my intelligence rather than wasting away in a lonely clam boat. Instead, starting in the fall, I would spend most of the next year on a research voyage out of San Blas, studying under Dr. Dagmar Skarsgård.
I returned to Knicksport for one last restless summer and spent too much time walking the town at night, wandering the beach, drifting along the calm, dark roads, inevitably wending my way to the house where Lynna had lived. There I would stand across the street and stare up at the darkened gables in the cold moonlight, wishing over the weed-choked lawn that she would look down upon me once more from her bedroom window. But she and her grandmother were long gone. Even most of Lynna’s cousins had grown up and moved on, slipping away from Knicksport with the barest hint of their leaving. Only one or two still lived in the old house, though hardly anyone in town had seen more than a glimpse of them in years. The sickness that ran through Lynna’s family was said to be potent and debilitating.
What a waste of warm days and bright sun that summer was. Days I could have been far away, chasing the things that I loved, the living mysteries and cold m
iracles that existed underwater, the rare species and creatures of the ocean’s lowest depths that I planned to study. I could think of no better way of beginning my life than by breaking cleanly from society, leaving behind my dry memories of home, casting myself to the whim of the currents for as long as I desired.
What I found there with Dagmar was an unexpected thing born of circumstance and common experiences rather than romance. She was twenty years my senior and had lost her husband, an engineer, to an oil rig accident in the North Sea two years earlier. Her pain was still fresh and she sought solace in her work, much as I did, though my aches, unlike hers, were timeworn and calloused. Confined to the St. William for so many months, I suppose it was unavoidable that we would seek haven in each other’s loneliness.
Once Dagmar told me that my hideousness appealed to her because it meant she could never love me. There was no malice in her words, only honesty of the kind we valued in each other as close companions. Her husband had been a strong and handsome man where I was not, and that was, for her, eternally, the face and figure of love. I believed I could never love anyone because I had no desire to leave my secret pains and festering wounds and impractical yearnings. Still, there was the persistence of physical need, and we were well suited to satisfy each other in that regard.
My time at sea, my time with Dagmar brought me confidence of a kind I had never before known. Among the scientific team I earned a good reputation for my work, which often surpassed that of the other graduate students. Within a few weeks’ time, the others’ awareness of my misshapen face vanished and I became just another student among the group, judged on my contributions to our research. By the end of the second month I felt among friends, accepted as an equal, even, perhaps, admired by some. On the open sea, immersed in my work, surrounded by unexpected comrades, a sense of wholeness took root in me for the first time in my life.
It was then, too, that Dagmar found what she was looking for, the kind of discovery made perhaps once a generation. And soon, I hated her for it.
* * * * *
Our biology class started starfish before Thanksgiving, and Lynna and I managed to get assigned as lab partners. For our classmates the project meant doing research at the library, but we already knew just about all there was to know about starfish, so instead we gathered books for our bibliography and then spent the chilly afternoons walking the beach. That late in the year, with the weather turning toward winter, Lynna’s clothing seemed less out of place, and some of the other kids had become friendlier toward her. She still wore her hat and sunglasses most of the time, but that was because of the disease she had inherited from her grandmother that made her skin photosensitive and allergic to many ordinary things.
The week our report was due Lynna invited me over to finish it. I was terrified of meeting her family, because Lynna thought they were strange and didn’t much care for living with them, but curiosity outweighed fear and my desire to spend time with Lynna trumped all my anxieties. Mom seemed more than a little surprised when I told her I would be going to visit a friend, especially a girl, and she made cupcakes for me to bring. It had been a long time since Mom had been invited anywhere.
The plate of cupcakes clutched in my hands, I followed the directions to Lynna’s house and found it on the south end of town, a couple of blocks from the power plant and the industrial neighborhood around it. The house was old and poorly maintained, the kind of hulking, once beautiful place common in the oldest parts of Knicksport. A film of dust coated the windows. The peaks of the third floor gables sagged. An iron lobster poked askew from the tip of a broken weathervane jutting from one end of the roof. The front porch creaked as I climbed the stairs and rang the doorbell.
Lynna answered a moment later and swept me into the dim foyer. She greeted me with a wide smile and a quick hug before she took the plate of cupcakes and led me into the house. Drawn curtains obscured every window and low wattage bulbs burned in the lamps. Every room we entered felt tenebrous and distanced from the outside world. Floors creaked above us with the passage of shuffling footsteps, water ran in the upstairs bathroom, a television clicked and chirped.
At home, enmeshed in the safety of the tired, old place, Lynna dressed very differently, her hat and glasses cast aside, her bulky clothing replaced by jeans and a light T-shirt fringed with delicate flowers of sky blue and corn yellow thread. She wore flip flops on her wide feet and wriggled her broad toes when she walked. Lynna unveiled was beautiful. Her body was slender and firm, her skin dusky and smooth, and her eyes were expressive eddies that looked at me with warmth and brightness. If the boys in our school could have seen Lynna in her house free of layers of cotton and wool, they would have fought each other for her attention. Lynna noticed my reaction, and I could tell it pleased her.
She left the cupcakes on the kitchen counter, then took my hand and brought me upstairs. We passed down a corridor slanted with age, its floorboards soft and warped. The sounds of Lynna’s unseen cousins grew louder, but all the doors remained closed. I trailed Lynna up a second flight of stairs to the cold third floor, where she ushered me into a spacious, icy room tinged with a strange dampness. A humidifier hummed beside the door, emitting wet vapors. A lamp glowed on a desk in the far corner, throwing feeble light onto someone reclining in a rumpled bed.
“Grandma?” said Lynna. “Are you awake?”
A gargling sound replied, and Lynna stepped closer.
“This is the boy I told you about. His name is Dennis Framer. We’re working on a report for biology class. It’s on starfish,” said Lynna.
I couldn’t understand her grandmother’s low, garbled reply.
“Yes, Echinoderms. We know that, Grandma. Dennis knows all about the water and stuff that lives in the ocean.”
Mrs. Marish spoke again.
“Come closer,” Lynna said to me. “She wants to see you.”
I stepped nearer the bed and peered through the murk, searching for Lynna’s grandmother’s eyes. “Hi, Mrs. Marish,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you. I brought some cupcakes. My Mom made them. We left them in the kitchen.”
Again Mrs. Marish’s response eluded me, but Lynna’s harsh reaction was clear.
“Grandma, please!” she said. “What do you know about it, anyway?”
More inscrutable mumbling from Grandma.
Lynna softened.
“I’m sorry, Grandma. You’re right.”
Lynna took my hand again, pulled me deeper into the pale light. Mrs. Marish’s bulk shifted beneath her blankets and quilts. Her figure was an irregular shape that bulged and twisted and filled almost the full area of her queen-sized bed while her face remained hidden in shadow. She raised a hand, her gnarled, knobby fingers wriggling for me to take it, but it repulsed me. Her disease had turned her flesh squamous and gray, bent her joints into nearly solid masses, draped flaps of skin across her bones. A massive pearl set in a gold ring gleamed against her dark complexion like bioluminescence penetrating the lightlessness of an undersea cavern. For Lynna’s sake I clasped Mrs. Marish’s hand. Her clammy palm stuck to mine, and she squeezed back, crushing my fingers together.
Lynna interceded, pulling me free. “Okay, Grandma, that’s enough. Dennis and I have a lot of work to do.”
Mrs. Marish’s arm dropped and she rolled away from us.
“Bye, now, Mrs. Marish,” I said.
Lynna took me to her room down the hall and closed the door behind us.
“Lynna, do you have the same disease as your grandmother?” I asked, and right away regretted it as visions of Lynna suffering like that ruined, old woman flickered through my mind, visions of her living with certain knowledge of her painful future.
Lynna’s smile wavered for only a moment. “Yes,” she said, “but not exactly. It’s a very rare condition and it’s different for everybody. Faster for some, slower for others. Right now, I don’t want to think about it.”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” I said. “We have a report to write, anyway. Shouldn
’t be too hard for us. Let’s start with radial symmetry.”
Lynna shook her head, a mischievous expression on her face. “Actually, our report is all done,” she said, lifting a stack of typed papers from her desk. “I did it last night, so we wouldn’t have to waste our time on it.”
Lynna set the report on her desk. She crossed the room and threw her arms around me as she placed her lips on mine and kissed me. The sensation was moist and thrilling, warm and electrically intense. Stunned I returned the kiss as best I could, having never before done anything like it.
Lynna nuzzled the side of my neck. “We have more important things to do,” she whispered.
I placed my trembling arms around the small of her back as I pulled her closer to me. In response Lynna tugged me toward her bed, and unsure, frightened and amazed, I followed. Her lips gripped mine with their soft touch. Her warm fingers slid beneath my shirt, scraped at the coarse ridges of my chest. I inched my hand along the hot, satin plain of her belly, wedged it past the waistband of her jeans. Outside rain began to fall and the evening darkened until Lynna’s room diminished to a grotto of shadows and gentle shapes, entwined and swaying in rhythm to the steady downpour.
* * * * *
Some nights, as we lay in bed, sated, cradled in the rolling of the ship, Dagmar spoke to me of her dreams and theories, the two things inextricably intertwined around her conviction that a long extinct intelligent species had once populated every major body of water on the planet. She spoke of legends and folktales, of strange artifacts lost to contemporary knowledge, of whispers among isolated island tribes that suggested incredible powers beyond the scope of science. She told me of the discredited Orne account from Massachusetts and rumors of immortality granted to unknown beasts of the sea. That idea appealed to her the most, I think. Secretly she hoped for some way to be reunited with her husband. She never discussed these things in public, fearing the ridicule she knew the scientific community would heap upon her, and she had hesitated even to talk to me about them until I made it clear that I would not pass judgment on even the wildest of her pet notions.
Resurrection House Page 7