“I thought you were in there,” Jason W said when I emerged from the bar.
The ball bouncing echoed against the alley walls.
“Sad day,” I said.
“My parents bought his fish,” he said.
I never told my father about Jason W’s parents inviting me over to dinner so often. Or that we met in detention, because I was so often late. Or that Jason W got detention for bad things, like stealing. That he was known for giving hickeys in the woods of Ferry Lands. From the window, I saw my father slurp a forkful of lasagna right from the pan, and there was cheese stuck to his blotched, drunken face.
“You want to sneak onto Ferry Lands?” he asked.
“No.”
“Tin Pan Carnival?” he asked.
“K.”
But I knew it was closed for the season. We walked until I needed his sweater, and until we reached the empty Ferris wheel with an empty booth that we slouched in for a few hours. He talked about basketball and I talked about whale books, and we didn’t say all the things about darkness. Eventually, we decided that Jason W should be my first boyfriend and, eventually, one day, slip his fingers down my pants. He proved his devotion with one solid, quiet kiss, our lips cold. We were far away from my father. And mother. And still, there was a world out there.
My mother said orcas have the same eyes as humans, that if you look deep enough they seem endless. I asked her if she believed there were undiscovered things in the sea, and she said there were undiscovered things everywhere. She asked me to imagine the pit of the Mariana Trench, that place where even humans couldn’t reach, the center of the Earth, the darkness. The fish there have headlights, she said. There will be plenty of things I won’t understand, she said. But there must be paths to those places unknown, she said. Told me to keep searching. Searching in complete darkness.
Killer Whale
Orcinus orca
QUESTION: Why do orca pods (both aggressive and nonaggressive) hunt marine mammals by working together?
Because your father is charming, he will not say if he owns the boat. He will let you call him Captain, even when he’s only a deckhand, or a drug buddy of the boat’s owner. He will lead your entire sixth-grade class, and teacher, and teacher’s assistant, to believe that he owns the boat and the captain’s hat, and that he is a master seaman. He will say that despite their name, killer whales are social and they work together to get what they want. To hunt other mammals.
No one will say anything about the booze he is drinking out of a coffee cup, though the adults must know it’s booze. Instead, you will allow everyone to believe that your father is the type of father who owns a boat and a captain’s hat, one who has sailed the world ten times over. That would explain his tan. His worldly views. His reason for settling on this magnificent island, because, as he says, his ancestors were founders.
When the boat creeps out of a misty harbor, past a buoy of lazy sea lions, and picks up speed on top of all that open water, you won’t tell him to turn back. You won’t tell him to slow down. Though you know he’s going the wrong way, and that he’s going too fast, and that he’s talking to the class as if he is of scientist blood. You’ll believe he knows everything, too. This is why you’ll spend your life seeking so many answers.
In the winter, there will be orcas off the coast of Winter Island, he’ll say.
Will we see them today, Captain? a student will shout.
Your father will promise orcas, bottlenose dolphins, common dolphins, rays, clear water, and at least one fluke that will smash against the sea and splash your friends. He’ll say the whales know his boat. And as the boat moves faster, the horizon will become tangled with the sun shining in your eyes, and because of your father’s charm and his ability to just often enough keep his promises, there will be dolphins and whales. They’ll breach out of the water and slam so hard back into the sea. You’ll want to cheer, but your stomach will be sick. The rest of your class will clap and snap photos, and even your lady teachers will now be very interested in calling him Captain.
You’re the only one who will puke. You’ll hide in the cabin below, because you’ve been on this boat many times: for retirement soirees, for funerals, for weekend tiki-themed drug parties with Playmates and baseball players. Once there was Mick Jagger, although your father made you stay in the tiny cabin below for that party. You’ve always liked that boat, because you could get a lot of reading done when it was just circling, slowly, around Tin Pan Harbor. You’ve never felt the horror of open water until your father promises to show your sixth-grade class a pod of whales.
He’ll find you below—who fucking knows who is behind the wheel—and he’ll wipe your forehead with a cool rag. He’ll make a joke that you can’t be his daughter because you can’t live at sea, and you can’t really be related to him if you don’t got sea legs. He’ll say you are either born with these legs or you are not. You’ll hear the whales blowing air and the children screaming at the mist evaporating into the sky.
If you sit down here, it will make it worse, he’ll say. Look at the straight line of the horizon.
You’ll manage to climb up the twisted stairs to the bow, and you’ll lean over and throw up what feels like every single meal you’ve ever eaten in your life. Your dad will tell stories about the sea, and everyone will watch the horizon with wide eyes. You’ll think that now, while you are still dumping your insides into the Pacific, your teachers are drinking booze, too. You’ll think you hear the clink of their porcelain mugs.
He’ll pick up speed again; he knows how to drive the boat. Against the restless moving of the sea, you’ll be going so fast that the boat is smashing against whitecapped waves. You’ll have vomit on your windbreaker. You’ll keep throwing up as everything goes faster. Then there will be sea lions, and common dolphins, racing along the hull, and you’ll rest your head on your arms, which you glue to the side of the boat. You’ll miss the sea by a few feet by the time you are throwing up bile, and it’s everywhere.
Other children will crowd around you, some will run away at the sight and smell of you, and finally a teacher with beer breath brings you a towel. She’ll say she’s surprised it’s you, and that no one else got seasick; she’s also so surprised that your father is wonderful. Not the first time you have heard this. Not the first time he drove too fast and forgot that you were suffering alongside him.
Your father will insist that he’ll take your picture hanging over the bow of the boat with a disposable camera. As torture. As a memory. As a reminder that his charm will find you a pod of whales, or dolphins, or anything else that you’re looking for.
Rain
Everything was wet; our bathroom towels never dried, and pieces of my hair became a stranger’s ringlets. We had things shipped from the mainland because there wasn’t enough on the island to keep anyone dry: rain boots, tarps, ropes, umbrellas. We made ferry runs so often to get supplies. We’d return damp. Our bones must have been made of water.
Underneath the great statue of Francis of Paola lie the vast, fertile fields of grasses and the grove of citrus trees of Ferry Lands. Now abnormally green from the rains and the floods, it is a massive patch of land that stretches across the most crucial part of the island. Francis stands on a slab of granite that is the mouth of the harbor, where he is watchful of seamen who pass through our waters. He blesses the lost with one hand on his heart, and with the other, points to the wavering horizon. His closed eyes are made of shells, and his body built of rock that has survived all weather. Except his fingers have chipped, and sometimes we find shells to put him back together.
Mary was the groundskeeper of Ferry Lands, and possibly the only other woman my father loved as much as my mother. We stayed so many nights in her small bungalow near the lighthouse, my father telling jokes, and Mary making everything warm. During the rainy season, Mary spent her days packing sandbags. She lived by candlelight and foghorns, and concerned herself with the illumination of the lighthouse onto the nighttime sea. She l
istened. She traced the same lines back and forth from the mainland to Tin Pan Harbor each day as she drove the ferry for a little bit of money and that small, watchful house. Dad convinced her to let the Sea Institute run an oceanography summer camp, for kids to explore the tide pools. Nearly every child on the island enrolled that year. Some were shuttled from the mainland, and the swarm of yellow buses left tire marks on her soggy lawns. Later, Dad helped her lay gravel for a new driveway.
Sometimes, my father and Mary hiked up to the statue and ate a picnic dinner upon the oversized feet. They’d come back smelling like weed and wine. Sometimes, I went, too, and Dad told origin stories of California and the Channel Islands. Sometimes, we waited for great migrations of whales. On a blanket, we laughed together and let our food settle while we lay on our backs waiting for rain. And when it came, we ran down the hills, through the acres of pristine land, past the citrus trees and muddy ponds, to Mary’s home, which after a while felt like ours, too.
There was always ice cream. Mary and Dad danced to Fleetwood Mac in a living room made of tiny seashelled walls. Dad and I bunked on separate couches that faced each other, with our feet closest to the fire, and when I was pretending to be asleep, he’d sneak down the creaky hallway to be with Mary. Eventually, I slept so soundly.
“Maybe this is our home,” I said.
Dad squeezed my hand.
He said he’d never met a woman like her—not with wild gray hair and masculine hands and sun freckles and a strong back. He’d never met a woman who was healthy and sad, and happy and warm, too. He said she was unlike the others. Compared to his other women, her breasts were swollen in the wrong places and they hung low. She knew of all the living things in the warm waters and all the things lurking in the dark ones. She told stories of the moon, of the land, of the people who came to own this island when it sprouted up like a wild spring flower begging for sun. And she loved me.
But it was like my mother could smell our happiness from afar. When she came looking for us, we were sitting on Mary’s porch sipping coffee—mine decaf in a tin cup—and we must have looked like a family: Dad’s hand was on Mary’s knee while she read the paper’s travel section aloud. I examined migration charts and pretended to know the way of the whales by drawing lines with pencils on sprawled-out maps. The quietest we ever were.
“I’ve looked everywhere for you,” my mother said.
Dad stood and met her at the bottom of the steps, so as not to let her cross the threshold of contentedness, and she slipped slightly into the ground when her wedged shoe dug into the wet gravel.
“The house looks great,” she said.
“Took Evie and me a few good coats,” Dad said.
“You got running water here, Mary?” she shouted.
Mary smiled, kept reading the paper, and didn’t look up when she said, Of course, dear.
My mother said she’d been released from a three-month appointment in the Galápagos, where she’d been studying dying marine life, specifically, she said, the turtles. She pulled a hand-carved wooden turtle from her purse and dangled it in the light. She said she thought the turtles were coming back, that maybe the ocean wasn’t warming as fast as they’d once believed.
“Evie, do you still like sea turtles?” she asked.
But it was whales—it had always been whales—and it was Mary who spent hours telling me of the great migrations now, even if she didn’t tell me in her own whale voice.
I hung my hand out over the porch railing and took my mother’s turtle.
“A woman in town makes all kinds of carvings out of wood,” she said. “I’ll take you there someday, and you can pick out anything you want.”
The problem with the turtle: it was marvelously intricate and beautiful.
Then, Mary must have known that no matter what, I’d always love my mother more than I’d love her. Then, Mary knew my father was under the same spell. It was impossible to commit to Mary when we hadn’t finished uncommitting to my mother. Sometimes, that desperate hope of her coming back, or her wanting us again, was all we had. Some days, especially when she stood right in front of us, like she’d really come back for us, it was impossible to fight our demon of hope. And even though Mary was what we needed, it was my mother who needed so badly to be wanted.
“You want some coffee?” Mary said to my mother.
“I was hoping to take Evie to see a movie.”
Dad moved from the steps and let me pass. He said to be home before dark.
When my mother would return out of nowhere she would take me to the aquarium on Winter Island. Only open for summer. Everything was periwinkle and cracking, and the tanks were moldy and muddled. Smelled like a wet shoe/beard, and it really felt like living underwater. My mother would pretend to hold her breath, with puffed cheeks, and motion her arms like she was swimming, probably just to avoid the smell, and she shuffled her feet on the wet gray carpet. She’d let me press my face to the tank, and then she’d tell me to hold my breath. Our cheeks full of air. Like this, she’d say. My mother let me feed the seal a silvery fish. Each time, she’d buy me a jellyfish balloon animal, and by the time it deflated she was gone.
The aquarium closed every September. I would linger just for the smell. Blow up a balloon and spend hours making tentacles out of shells, string, glue, crepe paper, toilet paper, anything I could find to make a better, longer-lasting jellyfish. Dad would wake to the sound of the balloon squeaking against my hands. I’d add two tiny marker dots for eyes, so she could peer out the window and watch for fall or for my mother, until the sun wilted her body, but I imagined that my mother would have told me she was beautiful.
When I returned to Dad and Mary, my cheeks were rosy. My mother and I had been sitting at the outside café at the mainland mall for hours before Mom emptied a dollop of sunscreen into my palm. By then, it was too late. I was burned. I was full on unlimited fries and Mom’s secondhand smoke.
She dropped me at the bottom of the long driveway and said Dad probably didn’t want to see her anyway. And her shoes wouldn’t make that trek again. And she asked, Is he in love with her? and I kissed her on the cheek and trotted back to where the window was foggy and aglow. I traced the valleys and caverns on the wooden turtle’s back with my thumb the whole way up the driveway.
Dad was drunk on the steps. He’d been crying. Even in the barely light and the moving dense fog, I could see right into him, the heap of hotness that had overcome him. His face was pink.
“We can’t stay here anymore,” he said.
Our things were neatly packed into paper shopping bags on the porch, and there were a few wool blankets that weren’t even ours. Whiskey bottles. He said he’d come back for the books and the teakettle. And then he told me what he must have told Mary that same day: he had been given a boat, and there was space enough for only two people. Other things he must have said: I can’t do this anymore, because maybe I don’t know love. Or: I am afraid of this love, and the last, and all the others that might come after.
No one asked me if I wanted to live on a boat.
“Mary said you can come here anytime, Evie.”
The walk to the harbor wasn’t more than a few miles, but it felt like it took the entire night. When we stopped for Dad to take a few swigs, I looked for Mom’s car—if that was even her car—and it was impossible to see. Maybe she’d stayed. The more he drank, the less he made sense of things, and the more he apologized.
“How did you get a boat?” I asked.
“It’s for the best,” he said.
The boat was a gift, or a donation, from one of the rich summer families on the Western Shore. He said it was because he had worked so hard in the off-season watering their lawn, trimming their bonsais, and feeding their pet snake. And maybe Dad had been privy to the affair the wife was having with the off-season Jacuzzi installer from the mainland. Dad wouldn’t have told anyway, because he never gave a shit about that kind of pointless affair, but when she divided up the assets in the divorce, som
ehow my father got a boat.
“A pity boat?” I said.
“A free boat,” he said.
The paper bags were weakened by dampness by the time we found our slip. He was too drunk to do anything but unlock the cabin door and pass out on the padded dining room bench. Instead of looking for a light, I fell asleep in a chair. Didn’t unpack until morning, when Dad woke me to a cup of hot chocolate and a box of our books and trinkets. My wooden turtle was nestled on the ledge of the kitchen window that overlooked the harbor.
Dad boasted that we’d won our freedom, and I tried to make the best of our new home. He said I could have my own bunk and that I could put a keep out sign on the small sliding door. That we could get a bookshelf. That we could smell the glorious fresh fish hauls and the gull shit, and that we’d fall asleep to the sound of sea lions lingering loudly on a buoy. That sometimes, there were dolphins that had lost their way in the harbor, that were trapped for days, that jumped and squealed. But it wasn’t Mary’s house, and it wasn’t her kitchen in the morning with coffee, and Dad laughing and laughing. The ground beneath was no ground at all; we were always sinking.
“This is our place forever, or until you marry rich and buy me a mansion,” Dad said.
The first few months on the boat were spent reading, bathing in the vanishing sunshine, sleeping to the sound of rain falling on top of water, eating all the freshest seafood and Chinese takeout. But I missed my mother, and even more, I wondered how she’d ever find us on a boat. I missed Mary more. Dad drank less. He smoked more weed. He did push-ups on the bow. He put fresh flowers in a pitcher and left them on the table. I wasn’t sure if they were for me, or my mother, or Mary.
Every minute felt like we were just trying to keep busy, like we were missing something, and though we always blamed this feeling on my fleeting mother, it was really the new life we’d built at Ferry Lands that was missing. Maybe for once, we’d discovered what it meant to be a family, and it scared my father so much that he turned his back.
Creatures Page 3