I loved my father so much then, without anyone else to make it better or worse—just him, and his jokes and his marinated steaks. There were hours of Uno and backgammon, and the fish were plentiful, and there was some money, too. Still, I needed Mary.
It took months for her to come see our boat. Even more time for her to forgive my father for not committing to her and us, but eventually she arrived on our dock with provisions to keep us fed and warm. Her hair was longer and wirier, but she wore the same fleece sweater, and she pointed to the edge of our small ship. evangeline the second, painted in blue. There were flowers on our kitchen table again.
I did all the talking at first, doing them both a favor, and I showed Mary my reading nook and my mother’s jewelry box perched in a built-in compartment in my bunk. We talked about a seal that was obnoxiously loud in the mornings—like a fucking rooster, Dad said—and she said the state of California was considering building a bridge to the mainland. We ate teriyaki chicken in the small booth on the stern, and I refilled Mary’s cup with iced tea we’d brewed in the last of the late-summer sun.
I said I had homework when I left them. I pressed my ear to my porthole to try to listen to every word they said.
At first, Mary said she understood. He could only love her so much. Dad liked to revel in his own damage, though, and started to sound like a fool. Evie comes first, he said. Then, it seemed like my mother was in the way, and that he couldn’t pass up the boat. He said it was his only chance to finally make it on his own, and maybe that was more important that making it with anyone else. She left shortly after a long wave of silence, during which I imagined they were kissing or he was holding her, and when my father returned inside, I pretended to read a book.
“You okay?” he asked.
“You okay?” I asked.
Somehow, they’d found some closure between them, and I managed to conceal a smile if I saw her at the butcher shop or the post office. Sometimes I’d miss her so much that I let Jason W give me hickeys in the thick trees of Ferry Lands, true to his reputation, hoping she’d catch me and yell at me and call my father, and we’d be invited to a real dinner in her kitchen. But for a while, we tried to unlearn the longing, until there were sirens warning of an incoming storm.
The August harbor was abandoned by most who tried to avoid the downpour. The winds kicked around hail, and little pieces of ice fired from the sky. The Coast Guard cruised through the harbor and barked over a loudspeaker that due to the impending high tide, severe wind, and rainstorm, we should evacuate. But on that day, there wasn’t anywhere to go. We’d exhausted all possible stays, Dad didn’t have any drug buddies left on the mainland who weren’t in jail, and, worse, he believed he was stronger than any storm.
“I won’t let anything happen to us,” Dad said.
The boat thrashed and thrust its hull against the dock as we scurried to secure buoys and stuff away trinkets and outdoor furniture. The water rose and covered the barnacles on the seawalls. We played cards inside, and Dad drank until he was drunk enough to give me a swig of whiskey. He said we would ride it out.
Night fell quickly, with dark clouds crowding in early, and eventually, it felt like we were forever on high seas. I was so nauseated when we started to take on water, when the patio chairs were floating freely in the harbor, when the wind bashed up the thick body of the boat. In the blanket of windy rain, we had to abandon ship.
I shoved my wooden turtle in my pocket and a few books down my pants as we escaped. Our hands were full of whatever we could carry, and we scurried 2.1 miles up that messy road to Ferry Lands.
Wordlessly, Mary opened the door and made us dry by the fire. With only the sound of pounding rain on her roof, she left us blankets and disappeared down the darkness of the hall.
In the morning, she left us hot coffee and her refolded newspaper, and there was a note for Dad. He never revealed the contents. We left at the first sign of midmorning light.
Evangeline the Second sank to the bottom of the sea, and we knew we’d never be able to pay to get her out. For a day, Dad let us be devastated that our last hope for a real life had been submerged by the Pacific and lurking like an ancient city below. For the next few weeks, Dad passed out after dinner and we lugged around shopping bags from couch to couch. We spent hours staring at the sea.
“I’m sorry I can’t give you anything,” Dad said.
We sat on a bench, watching clumsy waves crash on top of each other, and leftover storm-cleanup crews plucking unwanted mainland trash that had washed up on the sand. He put his hand on mine and apologized again.
“You can’t control the weather,” I said.
Because what else do you say to a father you are fathering?
When we stopped talking about that storm, the one that washed out half of our harbor, we spent our afternoons at Rocky’s Fish N Chips so Dad could drink frozen margaritas with salt, and charm his way back onto another fishing boat.
One day, a bartender handed us an envelope with Mary’s perfect penmanship scrawled across its white face. It was a thick wad of cash. No note. It was enough to get us into an apartment again, and we knew better than to ask any questions. That night, we ate double cheeseburgers with extra cheese, and the next day we took our shopping bags and our books and our collected things to a cheap bungalow that had a one-bedroom alcove that I covered with a sun-moon-stars curtain, and there was a splendid view of the ocean.
The next summer, there was our boat, dug out from the bottom of the sea, restored into an entirely new being. It was freshly painted and named Sound of a Woman That Loves You.
Heat
My father had never wanted me to do the adult things he did on the island—drink too much, fuck, do drugs, sell drugs, grow weed, pass out in jail cells—until I started bleeding. It was so hot that I didn’t know what was blood and what was sweat. My mother, and other women, had left remnants of tampons and pads, and Dad slipped them all under the slit of the door, one at a time. Two tampons and nine pads.
For July Fourth, mainlanders came down from their Los Angeles hills at a steady pace, leading up to the holiday weekend. Pickup trucks unloaded thousands of pristine beach cruisers that had lived a nice life year-round in a garage. Mounds of people—families, college kids, and plenty of old divorced moms—took shelter in the island’s overpriced weekend rentals. The rest of us rented out rooms and guesthouses for tons of cash, just for the holiday. There was enough money made that weekend to survive the rest of the summer, if you did it right. It was worth it to clean up the vomit and shit, blood and broken toilets, just for that tiny heartbeat in our pockets. Dad always came home with bags of cash. Sometimes, it was enough.
That year, I demanded that I wear my first two-piece in public. Dad agreed only if I promised to stay by his side. We must have both worried I would bleed right through. I didn’t tell him that the tampon hurt.
We set out on bikes, the only way to get around in that kind of crowd, and crawled past roadblocks. Local police were already in riot gear, and they waved to Dad, offering an extra nod, because his small daughter trailed behind, in no more than a white-and-pink bikini. Perhaps they’d all recognized my swimsuit from Island Love, the semipornographic series for very-late-night paid TV. No one told me Missy and Sissy left their costumes at our house for play. Dad never had the courage to tell me that the swimsuit came from a soft-porn set.
The tourists didn’t look like us, and they didn’t act like us, either. They treated Winter Island like a mythical place where they were excused for littering, double-parking, loitering, and any other sin that they could find for their holiday. They stepped on sea urchins and anemones, trashed our shore, and engaged in public sex for one weekend a year.
Heat radiated from parking lots, and the roads were a mess, with bikes, bells, and swarms of people carrying booze. We surveyed slowly, and Dad made his presence known. It was the first time I understood his livelihood. His absolute charm was our survival.
Winter Island is sh
aped like a fish—the open mouth is Tin Pan Harbor, and its very small tail is called Fish Tail—a tight woodsy end with a clump of abandoned research buildings known to locals as the Old Institute, because scientists left the facilities to form the new, fully funded, prestigious Sea Institute on the mainland after the Cold War. The empty classrooms and tanks remain. Between the long stretch of uninhabitable rocks and clusters of trees sit a few hidden neighborhoods. Dad and I lived there when Mom first left—when we really had no money and were trying to get on our feet. The old bald guy who worked for months as a fisherman out of Tin Pan Harbor grew up in the bunkers, too, back when they were painted bright white, with manicured lawns.
So we rode to a place in the woods nearly unknown to the rest of the islanders: that patch of trailers and abandoned bunkers where there were traces of basketball courts and a parking lot. You never went to the Old Institute unless you needed a fix, a cheap plumber, or an excuse to thank your lucky stars that you weren’t like all those sun-beaten leftovers. Or like us once, unless you were taking shelter in the dilapidated buildings of once-historical promise.
Billowing gray clouds gathered. Dad suggested I put on a shirt. I couldn’t argue, though I was still sticky with sweat, because I wasn’t sure what kind of monsters lingered in the woods or what kind of drunk men would notice my boobs.
Dad’s friends, crowded in front of the trailers, were all so wrinkled, as if they’d never had shelter, and they were frying fish on a tiny barbecue. A stout woman hung red, white, and blue paper banners from her trailer to the next.
They had a perfect view of the sea—a private beach, too—but they were subjected to stronger winds than the rest of us on Winter Island. They built large dunes out of trash to protect their homes from high tides. It was a nice enough place for something that had once been completely abandoned. There was the dried-up dolphin tank.
Someone made a joke about the money we’d make from holiday tourists, and Dad and his friends filled our bags full of marijuana. We called it Winter Wonderland. It was how Dad survived in the world. It was grown in our most desolate woods, tucked behind the Old Institute, brought up on the world’s crispest sea breeze and fertilized, we always said, by magical creatures that existed only on our island. It would turn out to be Winter Island’s most valuable export, and people came from far and wide to get it.
Dad told me to go for a swim while he finished up business. I wore my shirt over my bikini. But as I tried to figure out how to then dry myself under the looming clouds, Dad decided I would carry the weed.
“I won’t let anything happen to you, ever,” he said.
He unrolled my backpack and shoved it full of Winter Wonderland. There was nothing to do except to follow directions.
I put on dry shorts. A trailer lady let me borrow a dry shirt, to make sure I looked thirteen, not like a mangled version of a real woman, the kind who would have sex for fun, or the kind who would get caught up selling drugs. Strapped to my back was the weed that would pay for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next three months after we sold it all. I’d never seen so much cash or smelled so much marijuana. It smelled of skunky wet dog rolling around in the coolest of mud.
We crept along the bike path. Dad knew where to find people who begged for Winter Wonderland. He’d casually walk along the beach, like he was an old man digging for gold, and then he would sit down in pockets of eager people and introduce me as a speed-reader, which I was, and a spectacular high diver, which I was, too, and any other charming anecdote to get conversations with strangers going. Then, casually, as people began to hand wads of cash to Dad, I’d reach in my backpack for the little dime-sized bags we were selling.
Maybe it was a rush to be near all the mainlanders, and to be near Dad like that.
I told him the bag was getting lighter.
“They’ll be here all weekend,” Dad said.
The boardwalk was so crowded by late afternoon: half-naked women with red, white, and blue face paint and itty-bitty crop tops, college students from near and far wrestling with addiction and peekaboo-nipple dresses, locals enjoying smoked meats and their massive pools and patios, and the sailing elite drinking endless champagne on yachts moored in Tin Pan.
I followed behind Dad, diligently, watching the back of his bike tire, and swerving and braking at the massive crowd swarming on the path. They were just tourists—they didn’t know it was bikes-only—and Dad shouted at each one of them, Wrong way, motherfucker. Dad rang his bike bell to weave around the mess. He pedaled slowly, in case a summer tourist recognized him as the weed guy.
Then I screamed. Dad screeched his tires to a halt. The guys on all-black bikes, the ones who came every holiday season, crept too close while passing and smashed my finger when the ends of our handlebars hit. The blood dripped onto my shirt, onto Dad’s hands, and he jumped off his bike in anger.
“Go sit the fuck on that bench,” he told me.
Dad threw his bike to the sand and violently ripped the oily chain off the hearty metal. He charged the guys on the black bikes, specifically the one with a smug tourist face—threatening him with the chain, wrapping it around his neck, and telling them to get the fuck off the island. Everything was slipping with all the heat.
Dad’s locals were beating the entire group of bike guys within seconds. And within minutes, Winter Island Police had clubbed and pulled them apart. They were all whisked away in cop cars, and I sat on the bench, with a bleeding hand and a hot-pink flowered backpack half-full of weed.
I walked to the shore, now almost desolate, because everyone had retreated to house parties to avoid the chilly afternoon winds, and I dunked my bloody hand into the ocean. Then it was like a thousand jellyfish sucking the blood from my fingers. I shook my hand dry as I climbed on my bike, double-checking that my bag was zipped properly. Still all the weed. I kept going, slow like Dad, toward home, wheeling Dad’s broken bike alongside me.
The sun sank slowly over Winter Island, and a group of teenage boys stopped me.
“You the girl with Wonderland?” he said.
“Who’s asking?”
“I got ten bucks,” one said.
“Twenty,” I replied.
They whispered for a minute, and the ugliest one of the group produced a crisp twenty-dollar bill. I handed them a bag, like this was a chosen profession I had trained for at a top vocational school.
“You wanna smoke with us?” Ugly said.
“I’m making dinner for my dad,” I said.
There was a breeze, and I stood frozen. Beneath my bloodied shirt and tattered bikini were my nipples, cold and poking through. The boys stared. Hard. I stared back. My stomach knotted. They saw me and I saw them, and I wrapped myself with a towel like a cape and I mounted my bike. My tampon hurt.
I pedaled home faster, eager to take off the borrowed shirt and the itchy-as-shit bikini, and unwrapped a leftover sandwich in front of the TV. I pulled the plug of the tampon and flushed. Then I put on baggy sweats and Dad’s giant sweater. Even though I was hot. I felt safe with the extra weight. I sweated while I cleaned the house and washed the dishes, so that when Dad came home in the morning, he would be able to rest.
Humpback Whale
Megaptera novaeangliae
QUESTION: Why is it believed that, like humans, humpbacks can feel emotions?
You will spend your nights reading for truths in books about the sea while your father is at a bar telling drunk tales of schooners and sharks and the unrecognizable sounds of whales. Your head will ache and your eyes will squint while you search for the things that are real on these pages of overdue library books. You’ll read fast. You’ll wait for him to come home. You’ll shut off the light when you hear the door. You’ll dream of the mean things in the ocean, even though they never touch you.
When your father finds your hoards of books, he will want you to return them before you’ve found any real answers. He’ll say he can’t afford any more late fees. So he’ll share sweet kisses with Liz, the mid
dle-aged librarian with a cane who he’d never really love, just so that you can keep all the late books you want. So that you can get your answers, he’ll say.
When he’s drunk, he’ll read sections aloud, and he’ll tell you that you’ve chosen all the wrong books. He will select a new stack for you to read, his version of an education, and place books next to your bedroom door. He’ll ask you, Did you find what you are looking for?
He will quiz you about everything, and after reading enough, you’ll know that it’s possible that humans were whales and whales were humans, or something close to that idea. He will ask if you’ve ever been in love, to which you’ll reply: How should I know?
Your father knows nothing of love, but he’ll always say how much he loves you. Your father can love you and also love the tiny pebbles that roll onto the shore and cling to cold feet. There’s no telling where all his love goes. Sometimes, you’ll spend hours in encyclopedias asking: Can love evaporate? Once, you’ll accidentally say it aloud, and Liz will tap you on the shoulder to tell you to keep it down.
He will take a few weeks to explain grunion—the silver fish that run to the sea beneath a full moon. He’ll make you read the passages aloud. Until the words make a poem. He will wake you up in the middle of some night when there are sounds of whales breaching outside your window. He’ll rush you like he’s running from a tragedy, and you’ll make it to the beach, where you sit in the darkness on the coldest sand, wrapped in the same blanket, half-asleep and watching the grunion migrate away from you and him. So fast it’s as if the moonlit fish have legs. There will be light rain—he’s packed a poncho for you—and he’ll lure you closer to the sea. All of these field trips will be made in total silence, as if to hear the answers, and sometimes, after you find yourself home, with shelter, you’ll still be quiet and forget to talk about the glowing eyeballs that just flooded the shore.
Creatures Page 4