In the mornings, he will want answers. What about whales, he’ll say. Can they feel?
You are just a daughter who wants to love him. But your life is all those lessons of his in nature: of calm and rough seas, of so many cryptic sea monsters, of things that live inside the Pacific. Some days, the metaphors are too messy and washed-out, and you’ll just want to be loved back. Like, with a hug. He won’t be the father you wanted, and he’ll never find the mother you need, but still, he’s yours and you are his, and you will have to navigate this together.
When your father holds court on the sand, in front of strangers, he’ll tell tall tales of winds and eruptions, and things that sound like a dream. Even as you grow, even as your heart evolves like the spindle cells of the humpback whales that have been evolving for years, you will wonder which things are true. The love, or the stories, or none, or both.
Your research is ongoing.
Snow
Rook was the opposite of me: blond hair, wild blue eyes, and a rich father. She ran around Otto House in skimpy shorts and a flat chest puffed up to the sky. She told everyone in the lobby, or at school, or on the beach, that her father was the famous Los Angeles architect who designed Otto House in the 1970s. She said he was so inspired by the mystery and beauty of Winter Island that he decided to live there full-time, with Rook and his new plastic wife. Her real mother had died, and though mine hadn’t, sometimes it felt the same. Their home on the Western Shore was featured in magazines from the mainland.
Rook hated to be disciplined, and she had a loud, dirty mouth. The only person who’d ever told her to shut up was Dad. And once, when we were kids at the Sea Institute oceanography summer camp, a camp leader told her if she didn’t shut the fuck up, she’d be sorry. But her father got that woman fired the next day, and she wasn’t sorry.
Once, she tried to sleep with a camp counselor, but he’d only give her tongue. She was the youngest girl I knew to talk about sex, because she was full of sex, and by the time I was old enough to tell her about Jason W fingering me on the beach, she was already getting fucked by college-boy tourists. We started smoking cigarettes behind the hotel.
“I know your dad sells weed,” she said.
“You say you know everything,” I said.
People came to Winter Island for my father. He knew how to tell the story of a land of wild forests covered in fog and trolls and gnomes. He grew the best weed in the world. He made it worldwide-famous. He told tales of wild deer effortlessly bouncing through rows of lush greens tucked away among the dark canyons of our island.
During the day, and for extra cash, my father drove tour groups in unmarked vans to the top of our dormant volcano, where each year, with the light dusting of mountaintop snow, he’d decorate a small tree with shells and lights. He worked part-time at Otto House as a concierge, as a quiet drug dealer, as a heart-of-gold dad who needed free rooms every once in a while because he often had nowhere else to stay. He diligently kept a notebook of guest nicknames, favorite drugs, restaurants, and beachside activities, because he believed in the value of customer service.
Did Rook know all that?
My run-ins with Rook as a child were limited; I had only heard rumors about her on playgrounds and, as we got older, from other jealous-type girls who said she stuffed her bra, or gave blow jobs for money. I heard she lived half the time in France. Sometimes, I’d see her jump from the pier and swim for hours, like a real sea thing, and she would emerge just as she went in: seemingly perfect. There was something about all her fucked-up-ness, always on display, that made me want to wear mine, too.
And then she was always around Otto House.
“Do you even smoke weed?” she asked.
“If I want to,” I said.
But that was a lie. I couldn’t smoke, and Dad wouldn’t allow me to ruin my life with drugs and booze. That’s what he told me in his drunkest hours.
“Can you get some?” she asked.
Rook could have collected anything for herself. She spent most of her time alone while her parents did artsy things around the world. She said she feared Dad, though, that he seemed right enough to tell her no, and to rat her out to her parents about smoking so much pot. She was right about that. Dad never let me actually handle any drugs unless it was required.
It was often required.
I knew that Dad kept his own stash in the top drawer of the dresser, under his socks, which were specked with traces of cocaine and smelled like weed. I rifled through his things while Rook peered over my shoulder, hot and breathing down my neck, and then giggling at his perfectly folded boxer shorts. I took a tiny green glob of grass out of a glass pipe, and Rook plucked it from my hand and squeezed it between her fingertips.
“My cousin calls them ‘nugs,’” she said.
The way she crushed the tiny nug into little pieces and into a rolling paper, she knew what she was doing. Maybe I did, too. We blew the smoke out the window. We smiled.
“Where’s your mom?” she asked.
“Vacation,” I said.
Then, on the beach, we made angels by digging our shoulders and the backs of our knees deep into the sand. She told me Dad was hot. That I was beautiful. I felt in love, and we laughed at nothing, and she said I should stay with her for the rest of the summer in her big house, not in a shitty hotel room, or at least until my mom came home. Or until my father came to his senses and fought for Mary. She told me about all her fucked-up-ness, and it was bad, but it wasn’t any worse than mine, and there was a sunset, and I told her I was all alone. She curled up next to me, she said she knew what it was like, and she said we’d never be alone again.
This bright shiny thing wanted me. She said it again, that she wanted me forever. That we’d just have to risk it all to belong to each other. She listened to me all night, our hoods wrapped around our heads, and when there was nothing more to say, we fell asleep, buzzed, and woke to the high tide drenching our feet. We carved our names in the sand.
After Dad and I were kicked out of Otto House for the season, we got a one-month rental close to Rook. My father stumbled home late at night, when the tourists were gone, when there wasn’t anybody around anymore to listen to his stories until dawn. Sometimes, they were eerily cool nights, when northern winds brought cold fronts. I could hear his feet fumbling before he found his keys, and that’s when I would make Rook leave out the back door. Though she’d often take her time, just to see what a man looked like when he was falling apart.
When he was gone, I sipped warm milk and sifted through piles of history homework, or I watched reruns of Jerry Springer, because he didn’t allow me to watch trash, or I smoked his weed with Rook on the patio, or I let Rook invite guys from school over to drink cans of his beer.
Dad never knew what time it was when he’d appear foggy-eyed and wasted.
“Why are you still up?” he always asked.
He hated when I saw him like that, and he never had to say it. The shame we both felt for letting all of that happen was a burden only when we admitted the problems. They’d always been right in front of us, but instead, we had to just keep living, because what else was there? His knuckles were often bruised, and a steady trail of blood leaked onto the carpet, the valleys of his knuckles always a bloody map of other men’s faces.
“Go to bed,” he said.
“You’re bleeding,” I said.
He squirmed under the crippling fluorescent kitchen light. I carefully bandaged his beaten hands. He whimpered and, through his one good eye, glared at me.
“I’m so sorry, Evie,” he said one night—many nights.
Sometimes, his shame felt unbearable.
“Sometimes, I think I’m ruining you,” he said.
Sometimes, he was ruining me.
He fell asleep in the chair, and I covered him with a blanket, left the Christmas tree lighted, the window open, because I knew he’d want to wake up to the smell of mainland winter fires. The sea. The island. Salt. I knew that the next mornin
g would be Dad vomiting and saying it was food poison or that he ate something real, real bad. That I’d have to make eggs and extrastrong coffee.
“I love you,” he whispered.
I never felt unloved, though he was not always capable of defining anything like love, especially during wintertime, when everything felt worse. There was never enough money from the drugs, because he gave them away, lost some, flushed some, or smoked and snorted it all himself.
I slept on the couch next to him, in case he stopped breathing or in case he choked on his own vomit. I wished Rook had stayed.
We ran out of time and money at our late-winter apartment. There was no more drug money to pay. He said it again: Christmastime is so sad. We’d speak of the dead dogs and cats, our sorrows, the famed once-snowcapped mountaintop from 1955’s winter storm, about our dead. Until we had nowhere to go.
Mary married a stout older man who seemed to love Ferry Lands as much as she did, as much as we once did. And the others who’d once let us give them drugs for a place to stay were with their own families on the mainland. Rook sent postcards of paintings from Paris to Otto House until I couldn’t collect them anymore when Otto House was boarded for the remainder of winter. No one ever wanted to kick us out, but they all did. Again and again.
Because there was nowhere to go, Dad suggested we camp at the snow peak.
“But we’ll freeze,” I said.
“But this weather is in your blood,” he always said.
I complained of the cold, the walk, the weight of the things we carried on our backs. The island slept, aglow with fires, with warm food and maybe warm hearts, and we climbed quietly up the side of a mountain. I said I wished we’d still had a Christmas tree, or presents, or a home, or another dog, but Dad reminded me that to know the stories of our land was to find the way to happiness. It was at least better than going back to the druggie bunks near the Old Institute.
“But we’re fucking homeless,” I said.
“It will be an adventure,” he said.
The climb took half the night, and when we summited the roundness of the extinct volcano head, we dug our feet into the ground and admired the view. There was the sprawling ocean and the sprawling land, and we were floating above it all. Everything up there soared. Our faces were rosy and chapped. I could feel my heart leaping through my shirt. The sea was thick in wavy blankets of deep greens, and suddenly, the sky looked like it would lick the top of our heads. There was mainland river runoff rushing to the ocean, ships inching along the horizon, the sound of hysterical seabirds. It was cold, but it was all ours, and for a moment, nothing else mattered.
We ate warm wieners and beans, and Dad called us hobos. We played cards again. Dad called us pirates. We drank swigs of whiskey out of paper cups. Dad called us explorers. I wasn’t a kid, but we both had to be kids to survive. Under a purple sky of tiny lights, I begged my father to tell me the ecology of our land and our sea and our lives.
Also: “Do you think Mom will ever come back?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
He took faster sips from the bottle.
We stuffed our sleeping bags with day-old newspapers, and Dad kept a fire going all night. I dreamed of urchins and flames. When the sun shone on the top of the island, we watched every minute of wild illumination, nearly frozen all the way to the pumping organs underneath our skin. Dad made hot tea over the fire. We ate peanuts. I played along with this childish adventure—like it was fun, like we weren’t really trapped again—because I didn’t want to be the one to kill him.
“Tell me about the time I drowned,” I said.
He said it happened when I was only three. Mom was already gone. The sun was low, and it had just rained. I was playing atop slippery rocks, covered in green and blue mosses. He said that in the distance there was a whale’s spout and a pod of orcas passing through. He told it like that, with a damp heart of mystery and a crack in his voice. Like it was all magic. I tiptoed on top of the rocks and pointed to the sea. He held my hand until the water erupted with a powerful set of waves, each one stronger than the next, with no time to return to shore. We slipped. We went under. He said it was cold and clear, and there were crisp views of the world beneath. He reached for me, petrified he’d lost the only thing that mattered. But I swam. He said it was as if it were instinct. As if I had been born swimming. My eyes were open, and I swam deeper. I touched the reef below and ran my fingers against pockets of dark weeds. I batted fishes. I twirled up to the surface and pumped my legs like I was a rocket ready to shoot to the moon. He pulled me close, and we rode the next wave in. He said he’d never seen a real smile before, not like the one I wore when I had almost drowned.
I only remember looking up for the light.
When it wasn’t bone-cold anymore, when people came out of their houses, we were somewhere again. We scrubbed the bottoms of ships for a boathouse with two beds, a sink, a toilet, a hot plate, and a garage door that opened to a quiet expanse of big blue bay.
“I know it’s not perfect,” Dad said.
“It’s fine,” I said.
But there was something perfect about a morning bay full of sleeping seabirds.
He’d make more when the tourists came. When the crop came back. When my mother returned.
I drew outlines of bird bodies with a dull-edged pencil on white sheets of paper and waited for something to happen. I drew the snow-covered volcano mouth.
Rook, back from France, came in the night, with warm food, and beers for dad. Said she’d looked everywhere for us, even asked Mary, wondered if we’d found my mother and run off with her to the mainland. She offered us her guesthouse, but my father refused: sometimes, he had pride. We sat around a fire and told ghost stories.
Sometimes, Dad passed out, and we’d take the long way to Rook’s place. She’d let me use her nice shower with her nice-smelling bath things, and then we’d stay up all night playing games, sometimes crying, sometimes prank-calling boys, sometimes boozing so hard that she had to hold my hair back. We spent our time doing nothing, but it meant everything. She always woke me before sunrise, and sent me back home, because we agreed it’s where I belonged.
Dad was always up early, cleaning things, and I sketched him hammering something into a wall.
“I’m not so good at drawing,” I said.
He spread out on the boathouse lawn next to me and half slept while I sketched.
“I guess we are doing our best, little creature,” he said.
Earthquake
There was a small tear near the Earth’s core, deep below the water that separates Los Angeles from Winter Island. Everything rattled. Things had fallen. My father, too drunk and too high to deal with the moving ground, said it was unlikely we’d get a big aftershock. Unlikely we’d get another big one, because that one had already formed our island. Despite the spooked cats that would not walk with their paws all the way to the ground, he said, we must celebrate my sixteenth birthday. With a limo. With Rook. With the shaken earth.
The limo driver sold weed and speed, but he also owned a furniture store piled high with bright-white lamps and shapely shades and a ceiling made of crystal chandeliers. Said that lighting was his real passion. Inside the limo’s hidden pockets were leftover party favors from island partiers: bar swag, a pizza crust, whale-watching ticket stubs, Tin Pan Carnival tokens, and tiny Baggies with traces of white powder.
Dad trusted the speed-lamp-limo guy, of course, through pills and weed buying and selling, as Richie was always one of his most loyal employees. Unlike the rest of the guys, who’d lost their kids to their ex-wives, Richie was just alone. But Richie’s druggie loyalty meant I’d be under the strictest supervision, so Dad agreed I could cruise around the island with Rook, drinking as much soda as we wanted, screaming out the windows at tourists, and winking at surfers in their rolled-down-window trucks.
Rook flashed guys as we lapped around the island. Dad often said Rook wasn’t welcome at the house, because she would sit in
appropriately on the knees and crotches of his friends, because she was always there when I was crying, because I liked her more than I liked him. Because with Rook, I was never alone.
When we stopped at Rocky’s Fish N Chips, there were baskets of fried fish and fries, and Dad and his buddies hovering nearby at the bar. Richie poured a Bud from a can into a soda cup and put a lid on it, with a plastic straw. My first full beer from a man, seamlessly passed to me under the table from the lamp-limo driver. Until then, I’d been sneaking sips only when Dad was too drunk to notice.
Dad was so red in the face, blotched and raised with alcoholic red, like a Santa Claus who’d been gulping schooners of cold beers. I must have been red, too. I felt like we were doing something bad being in a bar, and I stuck close to Rook. I watched underage Rook flirting like she knew how to grab a dick. She even rubbed up close on Dad until I dragged her away. We held our shoulders back properly with puffed-out chests, giggling at the late-twenties-to-midthirties druggies and drunks staggering around the bar.
Against the jukebox, and nestled between two smelly trash cans loaded with sauce-stained paper plates, was the youngest of the old-man-bar gang: Bunny. Not thirty yet with long, soft almost-white-blond hair. The tips were almost always crusted with salt after a surf, and he’d stand in the parking lot, wet suit half-off, combing his hair. He’d lie on the hood of his warm truck to dry off, smoking cigarettes for hours. Like it was one long drag.
It was really just the Bud, and his white hair, but I was sure then that I knew what real love was, and I whispered to Rook, Should I fuck Bunny? Like I knew how to fuck.
Dad weaseled his way to Bunny, handing him another beer and announcing that it was my sixteenth birthday.
“Get over here!” Dad shouted to me.
Then he did what he always did: explained how well I was doing in math, how my good looks came from my mother, how I was the fastest on the cross-country team at Winter Island High School, and how I loved animals—especially whales. Like I was always five. Bunny smiled and tapped my Styrofoam cup with his. I sank.
Creatures Page 5