The Ocean Inside

by Janna McMahan

  “Please join me.”

  He took the gin and tonics from her outstretched hands. She climbed up and slid onto the bench opposite him.

  “I assume Ainslie’s in the bath.” He sipped his drink, and the distinct taste of juniper and lime tingled his nose.

  “Sloan’s supposed to be helping her wash up, but I heard the TV on. I think they’re watching Titanic for the forty-fifth time,” she said and sighed dramatically. “It’s pretty up here tonight.”

  “We always have the best sunsets in the fall.”

  “Have you heard when they’re going to start dredging the creek?”

  “Spring, I hope. The channel has to be opened up again or we won’t be able to get the boat out.”

  “Mom?” Sloan’s frustrated voice floated up to them.

  “What now?” Lauren leaned over the opening and yelled, “I’ll be down in a minute.” Then to Emmett she said, “Well, I guess I need to go stir the soup anyway.”

  “What are we having?”

  “She crab.”

  “My favorite.”

  Lauren backed down the ladder, grasping the rungs with one hand while she balanced her drink in the other.

  Emmett sucked down the rest of his cocktail and tossed the ice cubes onto the sharply pitched roof. He watched as they rolled down and bounced off where the curlicued façade poked above the gabled roofline of his funny house, the only Victorian on Pawleys. When his grandfather built it in the 1920s, locals had hated the giant burgundy, blue, and green house. Now it was considered a landmark, a house locals advised tourists not to miss.

  Emmett Layton Sullivan Sr. bought this northern part of the island as a family get-away and erected an exact replica of his house on Cape May. Shortly thereafter, Victorians started popping up in nearby Georgetown, but there was never another frosted cake house on the island. The houses served as the logo for his grandfather’s company, Painted Lady Greeting Cards. His brother Judd lived in the New Jersey house now and was CEO of the company. Rick was their lawyer and CFO. But Emmett Layton Sullivan III had stayed behind, married a Lowcountry girl, become a landscape architect. Along with his brothers, Emmett had inherited this house. His end of the deal was upkeep and taxes, both of which escalated each year. Lauren had been so enamored of the house that Emmett continued to tease her that she’d married him for real estate. They had both envisioned the many rooms overflowing with a large family. But now their home was a money pit, a hulking house of deterioration that would have served a larger family well, but which seemed empty with only their two children padding the halls.

  Emmett backed down the ladder and pulled the hatch closed with a final swish of air. Before he could get it latched Ainslie was calling for him, drawing her words out long and pleading. “Daaaadeeee. Daaaadeeee.”

  He pressed his palm against a bumper sticker on her bedroom door that read, Lights out! Turtles dig the dark.

  “Watch out. Here I come,” he said in a low growl. He pushed the door ajar and stomped into her room. Ainslie squealed and jerked away from Sloan, who was struggling to pull pajamas over her sister’s wet legs. Posters of frogs, snakes, and butterflies were stuck at odd angles along the walls. An entire bookcase was given over to prized seashells, contorted driftwood, and smelly bits of coral. Ocean musk came from the bank of aquariums housing the luckless creatures Ainslie plucked from the beach.

  “You do this, Dad. I can’t get her to sit still,” Sloan said. “She’s old enough to put on her own p.j.s anyway. Y’all just baby her.”

  “Go on. I’ll take care of her.” Emmett raised his arms over his head and swayed into the room like Frankenstein. “Get those pajamas on. I’m the daddy monster who gobbles up little girls who don’t have on pajamas. Aarrgghhh!”

  “Oh, no. Oh, no.” Ainslie jerked on the damp pajama bottoms. “I’m done! I’m good! You can’t eat me!”

  “No?” He stopped and turned his head as if thinking. “But I’m still hungry. Maybe I’ll just GOBBLE YOU UP ANYWAY!” He stomped to the bed, grabbed her ankles, and dragged her toward him.

  “No, Daddy! Don’t eat me.” She gasped around gulps of laughter. “Don’t!”

  He buried his face in her soft tummy. “Yum. Yum. Yum.”

  “I’m not sweet! I’m not!”

  “Yum. Yum. Yum.”

  Emmett stopped. Ainslie was still slick from her bath and Emmett’s fingers moved smoothly over her abdomen. He could discern a distinct mass below her ribcage.

  “Ainslie, does this hurt?”

  “Get me, Daddy!”

  “No. Stop a minute. This spot right here. Does it hurt?”

  She calmed and laid back. “No.”

  “How long has this been here?”

  “I don’t know. Get me, Daddy.”

  “Stay right there.” He walked to the top landing of the stairs and yelled down for Lauren.

  “What?” she called up.

  “I need you to look at something on Ainslie.”

  She came to the bottom of the stairs, a tea towel in her hands. “What is it?”

  “Did you know she has a lump in her stomach?”

  “No.” Lauren’s forehead wrinkled. She draped the towel over the banister and took the stairs two at a time. Ainslie lay still, her arms above her head, her top bunched up against her neck. Her innocent eyes moved from her mother’s face to her father’s and back as they poked her stomach.

  “Right here,” he said, moving his fingers over the firm lump.

  Lauren touched her gingerly. Her eyes focused on the spot. “Ainslie, how long has this been here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No.”

  Lauren pulled the pajama top down slowly and said in a forced, cheerful voice, “You hungry, baby?”

  “Yes! Yes!” Ainslie said. “I’m starving.”

  “Good. Go tell your sister it’s time to eat.”

  Ainslie bounced off the bed and ran into her sister’s room.

  “What is it?” Emmett whispered.

  “I don’t know. You get on the Internet and see what you can find. I’ll call the doctor’s office and leave a message. I’m taking her in first thing in the morning.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Taking a Ride

  Since she was twelve, LaShonda had known how to maneuver the school boat around the snaking river bends from the mainland to the Sandy Island dock. Older children were instructed each year how to guide the boat, cut the chugging diesel engine, throw a life preserver ring. All this was a safety precaution in case the captain, Mr. Heriott, ever fell overboard or had a heart attack.

  When she was younger, LaShonda frequently envisioned Mr. Heriott falling off the boat so she could jump to the wheel, cut the engine, and fling the orange donut into the Waccamaw’s gator-infested waters. But the old boat captain was as dependable as sunset and LaShonda had never seen him lose control of the watercraft or the children. When Mr. Heriott spoke, the children listened. They said, “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” LaShonda had always admired Mr. Heriott as having the same sort of self-control as her father. Both men were sweet-natured, but they saw the world in terms of the right choice and the wrong choice. Both men tended to say things like, “Now, just take a look at the choice you’re making and decide if that’s what you really want to do.”

  Low-lying trees trailed tangles of moss in the Waccamaw River. Sunlight scattered flashing patterns on the surface of the water downstream as the white, steel-hulled school boat made way toward Sandy Island. The boat slid smoothly parallel to the dock and a young man tied off the aft while Mr. Heriott stepped off the boat and tied down the fore. The children knew the rules, and they all stayed seated on the wooden benches that lined the hull inside the cabin.

  When all was secure, kids began to spill out of the boat, lugging heavy backpacks festooned with superheroes and filled with assignments for the weekend. LaShonda watched the children drift into the woods, disappearing into the underbrush as if they
had only been spirits. She threw her backpack on the floorboard of the school Jeep. Mr. Heriott always drove her the last mile to the center of the island, down a sandy, lumpy track where turkey oaks and long-leaf pines scrubbed the sides of the vehicle. The primitive road ended at LaShonda’s house, a place her father had inherited from his great-great-grandfather Philip Washington, a slave who had purchased the land from his former owner and established the Sandy Island community with thirty-two former slaves. Today, their numbers hovered around twelve dozen, depending on births and deaths.

  LaShonda saw her father’s legs sticking out from underneath his truck. Some days, if shrimping was bad, her father would be home when she got there, tinkering with his truck or fixing some old lamp or iron for a neighbor. He wriggled out from under the truck and wiped his hands on a cloth. LaShonda stopped for her father to kiss her forehead.

  “Welcome home, sweetheart,” he said.

  LaShonda went inside to see what she could cook for supper. Her father walked out to the Jeep to speak to Mr. Heriott. They often conferred on island events. While Mr. Heriott held control of the school-boat children, LaShonda had seen her father calm drunks, break up fights, and shame wife-beaters to tears. It was her father, Abraham Washington, the police came to when they had a problem with a Sandy Island resident. Plenty of times that problem had been her first cousin, Ronald, a drifter who always returned to his home community when money ran out, worming his way into an invitation to eat, waiting around afterward for a chance to sleep on couches and porch swings. Abraham Washington felt a responsibility to take in his sister’s son, lecturing him on life choices in return for a bite of food and a place to sack out.

  While LaShonda felt no such obligation to her slacker cousin, she was proud of her father, the unofficial leader of Sandy Island. There were no elections, but ask anyone and they would tell you Abraham Washington was their mayor. People came to him to settle disputes, whether over property or over love. He was the man the island turned to back in the 1990s when a development company planned a bridge so they could log Sandy Island. Her father had known it wasn’t just the lumber those people were after. He knew once the bridge was built and the timber cleared that it wouldn’t be too hard to justify throwing up a development. And sure enough, plans had been leaked for an “exclusive and elite” community with marina, golf course, riding stable, and hundreds of houses and condos.

  Sandy Island residents knew development companies had been eyeing their land, and they feared it would go the way of other islands where property values and taxes were driven up by unchecked development and poorer residents were quickly priced out of their own homes. LaShonda’s father worked with conservation people and their lawyers to fight the bridge. LaShonda clipped the newspaper articles describing her father’s presentation to legislators in Columbia at the statehouse. One of the tree-huggers on their team claimed Sandy Island was a pristine ecosystem, and that the island is “culturally, biologically, and geographically unique.” Eventually Sandy Island was declared a wildlife preserve under the jurisdiction of the state of South Carolina, the centerpiece of eighty thousand acres of the Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge. The citizens of Sandy Island were protected just like the red-cockaded woodpeckers and American alligators at least for a while, was what her father said.

  The screen door slapped shut behind LaShonda. Her cousin Ronald turned his gaze from the television to her. His budding Afro smashed flat in the back where his head rested against the couch.

  “Hey, Ronald,” she said deadpan.

  “Hey,” he replied. “What’s for supper?”

  LaShonda ignored him as she took stock of the refrigerator’s contents. Cars crashed and gunshots rang from the living room. She was pulling frozen peas from the icebox when Ronald stepped into the kitchen.

  “We need more beer,” he said. “I’ll be glad when you’re old enough to buy beer.”

  “Buy it yourself,” LaShonda snapped. “And while you’re at the store, feel free to buy some food, too.”

  “Whoa, who peed in your cornflakes?” Ronald grinned.

  “You’re lucky I don’t pee in your food. What’re you doing here?”

  Ronald continued to grin as he leaned against the door facing. “Nothing much.”

  “How’s your job with the state?” Ronald had lucked into a well-paying flagman job for road construction.

  “Too hot,” he said. “That job’s for suckers.”

  “God, Ronald. All you have to do is stand in place and turn a sign around. Why don’t you go out there and help Dad with the truck? Do something useful.”

  Ronald snorted. “He don’t need no help from me. Ain’t nothing wrong with that truck. He just likes to think he’s doing something, even when he’s not.”

  LaShonda propped her hand on her hip and said in an exasperated tone, “You got that right. The poor man can’t sit down for a minute. Always got to be doing something. He wears me out. Go out and crank up the grill. You can cook the hot dogs.”

  “Why, yes, ma’am,” he said, bending low. “I’s be happy to do that fo you, ma’am.”

  “Shut up! And pick out that nappy head of hair you got,” she yelled at him as he pushed through the screen door into the yard.

  “I wouldn’t be talking like that, Miss Freckle Face,” he said. Although LaShonda didn’t exactly love her coppery, speckled complexion, her cousin’s nickname for her always brought a slight smile to her lips. Ronald had a way of charming people. He was never mean. He was just one of those people who self-sabotaged—always making the wrong decision, bringing other people down with him.

  “No stick-with-it,” was what her father said. Growing up, LaShonda had watched Ronald drop out of school, pass on job opportunities, and blow off jobs he did get. The bosses were always too bossy, the work beneath him in some way. He was a get-rich-quick sort of fellow, always with the big idea.

  One summer during high school, her father had forced Ronald to take a job on the shrimp boat. Ronald spent one afternoon picking overcatch out of netting and tossing the undesirable sea animals back into the ocean. By afternoon, Ronald claimed he was seasick. When that got no sympathy from the crew, he said he was afraid since he didn’t know how to swim. The river, he said, was smooth water and the banks were close enough that he could make it out if he fell in, but open water was more than he could take, and wearing a life jacket was little comfort.

  This had been just another of Ronald’s excuses to get out of work, but there was some validity to his argument. While many Sandy Island natives made their living from fishing and shrimping, very few of them could swim. It was simply a skill not mastered nor passed down within the community. No family on the island had been spared the loss of a loved one to drowning. Every couple of years a child would wander into the water or someone would fall from a boat. Residents feared the gators that lurked the murky waters, but while dogs and chickens disappeared on a regular basis, people did not appear to be of great interest.

  LaShonda couldn’t swim. There had never been an opportunity, no public or school pool where she could learn. The ocean was definitely not the place to practice swimming, so on the rare occasions when she accompanied her father shrimping, he cinched her into a life vest so tightly she could barely draw breath. Even the mighty Abraham Washington was a marginal swimmer, a burden to him to know he would not be able to save anybody who fell over the side of his vessel.

  The tang of the ignited grill wafted into the kitchen. The door banged open and Ronald stepped inside.

  “Gas’s going. Give me the dogs.”

  LaShonda handed him a plate with five wieners rolling back and forth. Ronald stood mesmerized, staring down at the raw tubes of meat.

  “What?” LaShonda finally asked.

  “I was thinking a hot dog stand at Myrtle Beach might make some good money. Uncle Abe might invest in a hot dog stand with me.”

  “Only if you can make hot dogs out of shrimp.”

  “Shrimp dogs. That’s just w
rong.”

  “I tell you what’s wrong. You always trying to squeeze money out of my father.”

  Ronald stared at the hot dogs.

  “Hell, I’ll give you some money myself if you’ll just go away,” she added.

  The microwave beeper went off.

  “Why do you hate me?”

  LaShonda reached in and extracted a bowl of peas. “I don’t hate you, Ronald, it’s just you wear everybody out. When you come around it’s like you take all the oxygen; you need so much there isn’t any left for anybody else. You’ve always got some agenda. What’s your deal this time? Is it just money or are you in trouble? After everything he’s done for you, I’d think you’d be ashamed to ask for anything else. Why don’t you just take your unskilled labor ass out of here and leave us alone.”

  “I got skills,” he said, halfheartedly.

  “Skills at bullshit. If you spent half as much energy working as you spend trying to get out of working you’d be a millionaire. You looking for a place to sack out tonight?”

  “You couldn’t pay me to stay here. I know when I’m not wanted.”

  “Then why’d you show up in the first place?”

  He moved as if to walk out, but stopped. “I swear your old man’ll think a hot dog stand’s a great idea. After all, it’s perfect for unskilled labor.”

  She was glad her back was to him when a smile pulled at the corners of her mouth.

  “I bet you,” he continued, “he’d be glad not to haul stinky shrimp all day. He’d get to hang out at the beach, watch girls in bikinis, and get away from your holier-than-thou bitchy little ass.”

  “Oh, I know you ain’t talking to me that way!” she snapped, but he was already gone, the door raining its racket over her words.

  CHAPTER 4

  Preexisting Condition

  Emmett had hit his stride, his legs in perfect pace with his heart. The morning sand was hard packed and more responsive than it would be later in the day, after the sun sucked out moisture, and granules crumbled under his steps. He watched his path carefully, always alert to holes where sandcastles were mined. The wind was gentle, and even though he was finishing the seven-mile round-trip from the south end of the island, he had barely broken a sweat. He liked to run on Saturday mornings. He passed friends casting into the ocean. These neighbors usually drove sections of PVC pipe into the beach to hold their rods and reels while they swigged from thermal cups and threw driftwood to their Labs. Occasionally Emmett stopped to check out their coolers of sea bass or pet their dogs, but this morning the beach was empty.