Creatures

by Crissy Van Meter

  We burdened ourselves with excursions full of busywork, she talked and I did the listening. We’d swim, visit the zoo, shop, run errands, plant flowers, clean tables at restaurants—anything to keep our hands busy and our thoughts quiet. Our meditative state had become something we did so well together—all the not saying of things—and it’d become a ritual for her to ask questions without wanting any answers.

  She is pacing around my kitchen now with her mouth full of my bread, and there’s yellow oil dripping from her chin. Like she’s sucked out the insides of something once living. We’ve agreed in our silence to forgive again, and I change the subject.

  “I’ve got to pick up my dress tomorrow,” I say.

  “Is it white?” she asks.

  I’m nodding, chewing.

  “Is that little Korean woman still at the tailor shop?” she asks.

  I’m face-full nodding.

  There’s a cool draft creeping through the ancient windows, and it’s this time of night when the winds change and everything blows onshore. The nighttime sea breeze rushes into my house, and then the dogs always know it’s dinnertime. Tonight, though, the whale stink is dreadful, and it’s like we’re sitting in a puddle of funk. The dogs rustle into the kitchen, their nails scratching against the wood floors. I give them leftover chicken, and as their tags clink against their metal bowls, my mother and I make our way back to the fire, to avoid the smell and all the other things. The dogs eat quickly, plagued by the rancid stench, and then they run into the back room to hide. Like it’s earthquake weather, like they know that something is coming.

  “That whale just might ruin this whole thing,” she says.

  “There are ways to get rid of whales.”

  “Can’t one of your sea friends blow it to pieces?” she asks.

  “We’d have sharks forever,” I say.

  “Kill them, too,” she says.

  “They’d just come back,” I say.

  I toss her blankets and pillows from the cedar chest that I keep next to the couch. Then I squeeze her hand.

  I say, “You’re going to help me drag that whale out to sea.”

  Tsunami

  We lied about many things, but we never lied about weather. The constant foreboding of eerily colored skies, the dry summer winds, and the densely fogged harbor mornings did not hide. Even the mainlanders saw weather hovering over Winter Island as if it were a wall of dry island that had erupted from the Pacific Ocean to protect Los Angeles from oncoming absurdities. It sprouted from the bottom of the sea, angry and no stranger to loneliness.

  That day, we thought the tsunami was just a hoax. A seaman rang the bell as he rounded the harbor. Preparations were made. Windows boarded. Evacuations planned. A deep chill lingered, and Dad had to hide his weed and coke. Just in case, he said. Just in case we made it out alive, he meant.

  We were renting a room in back, the only way we could live like that, from two baseball players who were Dodgers, or once-Dodgers, and who had invested their injury retirement money into a monstrous vacation home on the Western Shore of Winter Island. In the early mornings, the neatly packed mansions left a shadow upon the sea. My whole world was a pile of sparkly jewels, salty men who loved the bottle, and rich families who vacationed for sport.

  I don’t know how Dad met the twins—maybe through cocaine slanging, or jokes over beers, or friends of friends—but Dad loved living in that glass-walled-concrete monstrosity. It had a pool.

  Dad raised me like a boy, and with mostly no mother and many cardboard boxes of macaroni-and-cheese dinners. Sometimes we’d have hot dogs with fancy German names, and sometimes we’d eat a box of warm doughnuts with small cartons of chocolate milk. Sometimes we had money; sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes there were storms, and sometimes sunburns. We lived on fake money, famous money, and drug money, and always, it was just enough to never leave the island.

  It was my fifth-grade teacher who parted metal blinds and gulped at the darkness building over the Pacific and said it was coming. That we’d all have to go home quickly. Without lunch. I scrounged nickels from other people’s desks for a bag of Doritos and walked the shoreline home. The sea smelled saltier, and the air, thicker, and I shoved chips in my mouth, in case that was dinner.

  Dad heard it on the TV while he was railing lines with the twins in the kitchen. They said it was coming and nothing could stop it. We were all to leave Winter Island. Los Angeles sent its gratitude to the little island that protects it from the wrath of the ocean, the newswoman said.

  “You’re fucking welcome,” Dad said to the TV.

  Islanders started a steady evacuation, and then dark pillows of clouds came. Neighbors sandbagged their doors and taped up windows. Otto House pedaled its hotel guests to the ferry on surrey bikes, with luggage tied to the sagging canvas top. Dad and the twins moved the bikes and pool toys into the garage. The ferry would close by twilight, and then we’d be on our own.

  “We’re not fucking leaving,” he said.

  “Will it really wash us away?” I asked.

  Dad, who was born on Winter Island, said we’d stay, that we’d have a party to celebrate that monumental blessing from Mother Nature. No matter what could happen, he was not going to leave. He said we’d be just fine, like always, and that if the ship were motherfucking going down, we were going, too.

  We bought the last of the ground beef from the butcher, and enough other food for a few days. Just in case the island actually flooded and the ferries never came back, Dad said we’d need protein, and that he could cook anything by fire. Dad said we’d be okay until help came or, as the twins suggested, we’d be better yet if no one ever came back. We bought the last of the old Easter candy on the sale aisle, water balloons just in case there would be time for fun, all of the chips, and a bag of apples, because the twins liked to eat healthy. When we returned home, I broke into the chips like they were a cherished birthday present and ate them without caution. Perhaps we should have planned our rations better. Perhaps we should have considered leaving then, so we wouldn’t be stuck there forever. Alone.

  The OxyContin pill guy and Dad’s coke friend stopped in. They were preparing for the end of the world, with the amount of illegal treasures they stashed in our kitchen drawers.

  “You want cheese on your burger?” Dad asked.

  He was wearing his kiss the kook apron.

  “Let’s eat before this rain gets too heavy,” he said.

  Those who weren’t leaving—the other single dads, a few Playmates the twins had over often, and the other beach druggies—began to take shelter at our place. They jumped in the pool and screamed things about the end of days.

  By late afternoon, I could feel something was different. The color left. The clouds crept closer until they hung overhead. Dad and his buddies were so high they didn’t notice. I floated on a plastic raft and watched black clouds cover the sun, smashing potato chips into my mouth and slowly swaying to the sound of waves nearby. Light rain tickled my face and made tiny pops against the pink plastic inflatable. I called for Dad, but the music was too loud. It all reminded me of the last eclipse—the time we stayed out all night to watch the moon turn into a purple sore and then watched The Twilight Zone on our little TV until there was sun.

  The fake-boobied Playmates wore string bikinis before the real rain came. They draped the twins’ press-conference-suit jackets over their shoulders and dipped their feet in the pool. They brought a gallon of Neapolitan ice cream and begged to braid my hair. I liked their tight gold skin and their painted-on eyebrows. They were like Barbies but bigger. The women that came in and out of that place were pretty and tall, and probably so nice to me because they pitied us. One of them would always feel so bad for Dad, so single and abandoned by a wretched, unloving woman. Those nights, I slept in my bunk alone.

  The police were making their final rounds as the sun began to set. They begged people to leave. The lifeguards patrolled the dense, wet sand and boarded up their towers. They said there
was no protection anymore. An officer had a clear plastic poncho stretched over his uniform. He commented on the chocolate dried to my face while he stood under the soaked porch awning—a place he often stopped to be part of the party when he could.

  “You guys are on your own,” he said.

  The pill guy climbed to the roof, shirt off, and shouted at the sea. A dried nosebleed began to wash away from his face. He said that he could actually see the water receding. The news had said it would happen like that: We’d hit an all-time low tide, then an all-time high. There would be so much rising water that we’d flood and go under. If it hit us head-on, we might never see the mainland again. It wouldn’t be a big wave, but a slow parade of water. The cokeheads cheered in anticipation while Dad wrapped me in a towel.

  “Wash the chlorine out of your hair,” he said.

  We tossed water balloons in the rain, and the wild ones hollered at the clouds. At low tide, Dad bundled me in trash bags and a baseball cap and we followed his buddies to the shore. We stood like a wall, my hands protected by Dad’s, and the pretty Playmates guarded the house behind us. The wind seeped through every crevice of our trash-bag clothes, and we whistled and whined at the extreme darkness spread evenly across the horizon. Together, we walked to where the sea met our feet. Mounds of dead sand crabs looked as if they’d died trying to find water, and the shrunken trash, broken shells, and seaweed were no longer a mysterious part of the ocean’s floor.

  “The pier is swaying,” a twin said.

  The lights were out at Rocky’s Fish N Chips, and the rest of the old wooden pier stood like a bridge that had lost its way to land. Dad threw a piece of slimy seaweed at me. The twins found a wet tennis ball and traced the lines of a baseball diamond in the sand with their toes while the rowdy wind whipped around and we sounded like sails in a storm. The pill guy swung a big stick at the ball, and as he rounded the trash-pile bases, Dad tagged him out. The sea slowly devoured our playing field, and with absolutely frozen toes, we hurried back to the house. Then, hard rain.

  “Take a good look, Evie. It might be your last,” OxyContin said.

  Dad flicked him on the back.

  “I’d never let anything happen to you,” Dad said.

  He always said it.

  I ate the rest of the chips for dessert that night. Dad danced to records and spun me around in the office chair until I felt sick. Playmate Sasha taught me how to do the twist while rain pounded into the pool and a demonic wind rattled the windows.

  Once we lost power, we crouched around lighted bathroom candles, and Sasha sang old country songs. The kind that made Dad’s heart hurt. Then I was tucked in tightly on the top bunk for safekeeping.

  We didn’t hear all the water rising around us, or the sound of glass breaking, or the pool overflowing. We didn’t hear nearby windows shatter or smell salt leaking into our living room. Dad was passed out cold, and I, dreadfully exhausted from chips and anticipation, slept though the worst of it.

  In the morning, among the shadows made from partial sunshine, our house was flooded and smelled like a sunken ship. We had to paddle out in inner tubes and pool noodles to get anywhere on the bottom floor. Dad said not to swallow any of it. And when we recovered, red-eyed and lost, we began to clean up the mess. A cleanup that would take the actual rest of our lives. Still, we shouted wildly at the sea and called ourselves survivors.

  Fog

  For every funeral, I hoped my mother would return to me, wearing her jewelry and curled hair, and for every dead body, I’d send for her by letter to a hopeful address, only to have the letter returned. Even if just for one afternoon, I needed her. I never said it to Dad, but I know he wanted her back, too, because he shaved close to his face and wore cologne. He said it was to honor the dead, but I knew it was for my mother. When Old Tropez died, I secretly believed my mother would appear, in beautiful shell necklaces and turquoise earrings, sprinkling white petals on his grave. I waited.

  Dad and I collected unscathed shells and beach glass, carefully in silver pails. We walked along the windy stretch of the Western Shore, and the rich people had left their mansions and gone back to the mainland for the winter. Those hours were spent in silence. My arms were tired from the gathering, and I told my father I ached. The buckets were heavy the whole way home. Dad drilled holes into the shells, and while he sat in silence by the fire, I strung the pieces onto long strands of twine, complaining that my back and hands hurt, wanting to ask why we decorated coffins with shells. Soon, there were endless ringlets of glittering shells that glowed in the almost-darkness. Tropez was still dead. Still no mother.

  “Was it a heart attack?” I asked.

  “I think so,” Dad said.

  But I really wanted to know the how, what it looked like when someone leaves forever.

  “Better sleep—you’ll need your strength for tomorrow,” he said.

  I was always the only girl to carry the casket.

  “Did you get a good look at him?” I asked.

  “These aren’t questions for little girls.”

  But he told me the answers anyway, because whether we said it aloud or not, I was never a little girl. He said the old man dropped right at his feet, slammed his face against the dock, and, without me asking, Dad told me what I wanted to know: that his eyes were closed, and that sometimes, loneliness can make a heart stop.

  Once, my mother told me about the Mariana Trench. The deepest part of the sea, and the darkest. I knew about darkness before she spoke of the trench, but no book or visit to the Sea Institute had revealed just how deep and dark this trench was. The morning she told me, straight from her memory, I pretended to be a whale on the living room floor. I slithered and kicked my feet like they were a tail, and I made sounds of echolocation. She was in the kitchen, and there was coffee and toast.

  Sometimes she’d call me for breakfast in her own whale voice, which was shrill and terrifying, and I loved it. She used to open every window in that apartment, the one with the wraparound deck, and she’d prop me up on a chair and tell me to search for whale spouts. Some mornings, my mother read out loud about the Mariana Trench: More than one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. I repeated it back to her.

  The morning we were to bury Old Tropez’s body, my father swam in the sea. I could see his arms rhythmically digging in and out of the ocean for hours. A thick layer of fog coated everything. When he made his way back, he said, Salt cures everything. He made eggs. I listened for the door. He shaved close. His cologne. He said the fog brought death. Or the death brought the fog. Or it was just neither, or both. He said that I was twelve, and I should know about the dying things, and what they mean.

  “I want to be buried at sea,” I blurted out.

  “It’s too dark, and too big, and how will you know how to get back here?” he asked.

  Other days, we walked through the cemetery on top of the hill. We sat by his mother’s grave, or we traipsed around the damp lawn to stretch our legs and he’d point out where he wanted to sleep forever.

  Once, he pulled me close, our sides smashed together, and I could feel his bony shoulder pressed against my temple. Always: the smell of fish, salt, beer, and stale pretzels. He pointed to a grassy hill that bloomed with wildfire color after the rains. That was the place. I couldn’t help but think of all the times we had been lost, and how it might be easier without him if I really wanted to find the way.

  Atop the foggy, wild bluff, a captain read poetry to the men huddled around the coffin. We laid flowers and trailed shells on top, and Dad spoke, too. For the first time since my mother left, I saw him cry, and it must have been for a million things. He laid a piece of white sailcloth on top of the wood, and when he backed away, he looked like a child.

  I looked around for my mother. Only walls of gray.

  When the fog began to clear, there were traces of blue sky. Everyone talked quietly, and then men drank from the bottles they kept in their jacket pockets.

  “You�
�re quiet,” Dad said.

  I was really thinking of ways to leave my father. Passages to find my mother. I was daydreaming of Jason W from homeroom. The way his sweatshirt was always too big, and how it bounced every time he made a layup. I was tired, in fact, from staying up all night and forcing myself to think only of Jason W, just so I didn’t have to think about everything else. I was tired of feeling alone, even when my father was sleeping on the couch outside my bedroom door. I was tired.

  “Just sad,” I said.

  Once, my mother talked about atmospheric pressure. Said there was pressure all over, even in the deepest, darkest trench. My mother didn’t like this pressure, said it felt like she might explode. She closed the windows and used wooden dowels to lock them shut. I said something like, There’s so much pressure that your heart can explode.

  When she went away, I learned this pressure, the weight inside my chest. There was the pressure of missing things, the leaving of things, the invisible weight that felt so thick, even when everything was still moving. She taught me the constant foreboding of implosion.

  The funeral procession led the men to the bar, and Dad told me to walk faster. They drank. I read in my nook behind the bar, where I had learned to hide so as to let the drunken buzz of their voices lull me to sleep. Where I could imagine my life with Jason W—the kind of life where we’d have a boat in every size, and islands to match their splendor. I tried to think of Jason W’s bony knees and flashing green eyes. I replayed his hands dribbling a ball, to block out the grievers’ drunk wails. I tried to read. I read the same paragraph over and over. I pictured Jason W grabbing me by the hand and leading me past my father, to the parking lot, into a car, onto the ferry, over to the mainland, how we’d promise never to stop moving. His baggy sweatshirt.

  I drank last sips of beer from the drunken bereaved. My first real buzz. Women came with flowers. Dad stood on top of the bar for some drunken speech. Jason W’s mother brought lasagna.

  Then, I heard him dribbling the ball outside the back door.