Creatures

by Crissy Van Meter

  “Please take some eggs back to Liam,” she says.

  She scoots me to the rest of the lawn furniture, where I’m to take my pick of plastic chair to sink into. It’s sweltering, but there’s a view of the mountain, and a breeze coming in from the sea.

  “You moving in?” she asks.

  “I have some Institute stuff I have to do this week,” I say.

  “You usually stay there,” she says.

  She hands me a sip of her spiked iced tea and says she knows a face like mine, and that last night she had a dream of a hurricane and she knew there was trouble, because the air smelled like salt. She knows everything, is what she’s really saying, and there’s some perceived sick delight that I can’t help but hate her for. And still, I need her to tell me that everything will be okay.

  “Did you fuck someone else?” she says.

  A wave of red anger hits like fiery sun, and I rip my legs off the chair and stand, and I intend to leave and run off like a kid, and shout, scream in her face, but I don’t do anything but feel the heat inside.

  “He did,” I say.

  “Well, what did you expect?” she says.

  I start my fast stampede to the car, and I’m proud of the dust that’s trailing.

  “Evie, I’m sorry, but are you telling me you have never loved another person besides Liam?” she says.

  “He doesn’t love her,” I shout back.

  “Then why are you so angry?”

  “It’s selfish that he told me.”

  She peels up out of the chair, and the crooked back screen door squeaks and slams shut.

  I sit in my car, hands on the wheel, foot on the gas, but the engine is off. I stare at the dirt path that leads to the paved road that leads to the massive concrete freeway that divides the mountains and ocean. Then there is the Sea Institute and the ferry back to the small vastness of an island. And I don’t leave.

  She appears with a shorter glass with more booze and less tea, and slides into my front seat.

  “Does he know?”

  “Know what?” I ask.

  “How much he’s hurt you.”

  We sit in silence, windows down, and sip cocktails while a few scraggly chickens meander down the path ahead. We can smell them in this heat. She reclines her seat slightly and puts her feet on the dash and asks if I want to stay for dinner, and I make a rude remark that I have nowhere else to go, and she finally says something a mother should say, but it’s not enough:

  “But there are so many people who love you.”

  • The rates of ecosystem recoveries vary.

  • Recovery depends on severity.

  • Sometimes an organism must play a different ecological role under pressure.

  For a few days, I tend to the chickens and the kale, and we spend hours in the sun. When it cools at night, we wrap ourselves in scarves and lament this early December heat wave. The chores combat the loneliness. We spend hours drunk and high. We spend nights in town and order food in broken Spanish on the north side. Liam calls a million times. There are Christmas trees for sale in parking lots. My mother says her new boyfriend left her for another woman, and there were probably more. There are so many eggs: scrambled, boiled, poached with hollandaise. I enjoy the faking of happiness with her, because sometimes, I can be happy with her.

  When Liam calls my mother’s house again, she tells him I’m there, but I’m out, somewhere wandering the land or in town. More calls, and then she tells me this is no way to be a wife, and finally, after a few beers I tell her that she doesn’t have any idea how to be a wife or a mother or a woman. I even throw my glass against the concrete patio. It shatters, and she gets a broom and repeats herself: This is no way. She tells me to go home to my husband, to my life, to the things I love, because otherwise I’ll be an old woman alone on a chicken farm.

  In the morning, there’s a note, and Advil and Gatorade: I’m sorry that I’ve hurt you for so many years, but you aren’t me, and you are better. My mother is pulling greens from her garden boxes in the backyard, and the morning is mild but the sun is strong, and her floppy hat covers her face, and she waves.

  “There’s a few cartons of fresh eggs to take home,” she shouts.

  • Pieces of the Great Barrier Reef cannot be repaired.

  I get an hour and a half alone in my car on the way back to the Institute, and it is enough time to listen to enough weepy music to remember that I have the urge to keep driving. Always. To keep going away, alone, without anyone who can hurt and ruin and break and die. There are cars with Christmas trees tied to the roofs, and there is a crispness that comes with a warm California winter, though there’s no snow. People wear leather boots just in case. I drive. I think of repeating the same genetic mistakes: Run away. My father would say: Stay.

  Liam is half-asleep and propped up on my office door at the Institute. I nudge him gently.

  “Your mom said you were on your way back here.”

  But I’m not ready to talk about anything like that.

  “Where are the dogs?” I say.

  “Tommy.”

  “Do you need anything from the mainland while we are here?” I ask.

  Liam helps me carry a stack of books and papers to the car, and we drive to Target, where we take turns pushing a cart with a wonky wheel down slick floors and sipping Starbucks coffees. We buy in bulk: the fancy bodywash that smells like drinkable coconut, heavy-duty trash bags. And things we might not need: a new sweater and warm socks. The Christmas display shines, and beckons us to pick out an ornament, and we decide it’s only fair if we each pick one. I pick a glittery bulldog, and he picks a glittery golden retriever, and we laugh because we don’t have either of those dogs. We wonder if we should buy wrapping paper and bows, or if we should get Tommy the camping gear he wants, or if we should splurge on the two-for-one giant cartons of Goldfish crackers. He pulls me close to him by the pots and pans, and I’m not ready, and I’m reminded that I’m still angry, dog ornaments and all, and so he retreats and we pay for the stuff.

  We load it into the truck, and we play the radio loud enough, and we weave through the traffic and back to the ferry. He stays in the car while I get out and watch Winter Island emerge from a deep breath of fog. Then we unload in unison and put things where they should be, and we dunk our hands into the small open spout of crackers and continue on. The dogs are pesky and excited, and there’s no seeing past any of the fog for now.

  “Is your mom coming for Christmas?” he asks.

  “I think so,” I say.

  “What about spaghetti for dinner?” he asks.

  He opens the freezer door. In my weeklong absence, he’s made a lifetime supply of his famous spicy tomato sauce that we eat when we are sick, or sad, or grieving, or hungry after a day of fooling around.

  “Okay.”

  • Long-living loggerhead sea turtles often die before they recover from trauma.

  • Live long enough to fucking recover.

  It gets colder, the house creaks, and Tommy and Liam wrap white lights around the tree while Rook and I argue about how many chocolate chips belong in the cookie dough. Still, I haven’t begged for new rules, for all of him. My mother opens a bottle of wine and plants herself in the comfortable chair by the fire. There are presents and board games, and when Rook’s parents arrive and swaddle Tommy with gifts, and us with mainland food, we are momentarily grateful. We tell our ghost stories, and someone says they miss my father. I miss my father. I miss my mother. My husband. I miss all the ghosts of our pasts.

  The dogs can sleep in our bed on Christmas Eve, and Liam sleeps soundly next to me for the first time in weeks. Because it’s Christmas, and because I love him, and because I want to forgive him, I let him breathe on the back of my neck in the night. In the morning, there is food, so many eggs, and my mother insists that we wear matching pajamas, and instead we wear whatever the fuck we want. We open gifts, eat more, walk around Ferry Lands and throw the ball in the fields for the dogs. No one speaks
of Christ, and everyone dips their toes into the glacier-cold Pacific and then runs back to the house to find warmth.

  Liam finds a boat that needs men, and it will leave in February. He says he’ll finally be out of my hair. He says he can’t read my mind. That he’s sorry. That he doesn’t know what else to say or do. If I were better at being myself, I’d say something like, Will you meet another woman and kiss her on the mouth in another harbor, and will she call to you in your sleep and beg you to leave your wife and your life and your dogs and your pain to go back to her? Will you tell me?

  “We could use the money,” I say.

  Sometimes he wants to crack me open. I can tell by the desperation in his eyes during the days that are short and too-soon dark, and he wants me to just say it. Say anything. Say how hurt I am, how I’m not sure if I can move on, how I’m not sure I know how to love, if I’m sure of anything. He tries to bring it up: he tells me he loves me, he hides love notes all over the house, he does house chores, even does some of mine. We have mastered this torture.

  Sometimes, I want to crack him open. To know every part of him, even the dark parts, even when he’s most lonely, to understand why he loves me. To prove that I haven’t fooled myself into marrying a man just like me: so eager to forget things, so eager to forgive, so eager to avoid war. I want him to tell me he knows the difference between lonely and alone. I want to know which one he is with me right now. I need him to tell me that he’s sad about us, about everything that’s happened, and that somehow this will make the joy even brighter. I don’t want to talk about couple’s cooking classes, or whose turn it is to fill up the gas cans. I want him to tell me about us.

  “How about one wild night out before I go?” he says.

  But I have work. And a porpoise could be born.

  “You can’t live like this forever,” he says.

  “Live like what?”

  “Like it will all go away,” he says.

  So I agree to the night out, and I commit to lipstick, and we walk hand in hand, surrounded by silence, and then there’s the winter sea and we sit down to a plate of nachos and neon-green margaritas. There are a few locals and some European tourists, and I want to ask him if he thinks it’s okay to ask for a divorce in a place like this. But instead of leaving me, or me leaving him—the great fear I long for and expect—we talk about the two inches of snow on top of the volcano. And, how it feels a lot darker a lot earlier year after year. And then no one is leaving, not even me. Like he knows my plans to run, a woman from an island, who can’t go anywhere, lives her life running in circles. I want to say that I hate Winter Island, that I hate myself, our life, all of the spinning, but it’s not true. For a moment, he can see me, and I’m not so scared.

  We stroll along the sand, and I let him do all the talking, because he’s really talking. He asks if I still love him. And I say something like, Tell me first. And he does, and for the first time, it feels like the truth. He says sorry. Explains that until that woman, he’d never slept with anyone else; that he once saw me, years before, laughing with another man in front of Tin Pan Harbor, and instead of getting off the boat, he just got on another. And left. That maybe he’s been doing this for a long time. He’s tired. He wants to love me. I want to love him. So he asks if we can start over, as these new people, and he wants new rules. He promises to give me some of his pain, and I promise to give some back.

  I fall onto my knees, and they plunge into the cold sand, and I drag him down with me, and I violently cry—the sounds are unknown to me, to him, to the world, and he holds me, and I let him. I guide his arms around my body and force his hands on me. Because maybe I’m good enough to let him quietly love the way he does, with missteps and all, like the harp seals must still love their young after they leave them for the wild sea. In the play version, we grow fins and roll our bodies to the water and swim together, forever.

  “I’m no good at love,” I say.

  “Me neither,” he says.

  Our love is slow in the coming days, but the nights last longer, and I let him inside me. We watch old movies in bed, and laugh when the dog barks at the loud planes fluttering around the screen in Casablanca. My mother calls and calls, and asks if Tommy returned the too-big shoes yet or if he has had any time to play his new video game. Out the window, Tommy’s running fast with a string attached to his hand, the kite like a sail in the air, and we are inside recovering with all the good spaghetti sauce before Liam must leave with the coming high tide. I wipe the bathroom mirror after a shower, and mouth to myself: Don’t go.

  Whale Fall

  Carcass of a cetacean

  QUESTION: What happens when something dies?

  In the very beginning, when I’m showing him the island, I tell Liam I’m a mess. I tell him I don’t smoke, and then I smoke a cigarette, and later a joint right in front of him, and so he does, too. In that beginning, I do most of the talking, because I fear if there is any silence, any space between, he’ll leave. I tell him I have been abandoned. He says he has been left, too. I say that my father is dead. That my life isn’t complicated but it isn’t easy. He asks for another cigarette.

  I can’t remember if I was being myself, but then who else could I have been, because it all came out so fast and there was no turning back. I pretend that I am at ease, and I know I’m good at telling half-hearted jokes. I think that laying it all out—the markings on my heart—will make it easier for us later, if there will be a later. That if I say all the bad things up front, I won’t have to ever say them again.

  We are both silent even when I’m loud. Terrified to say things we don’t want to hear ourselves. Terrified that if we say it once, everything will open up, we’ll be cracked apart, and what if there is no way to seal it all back up? We say this without saying it. I say all the things that don’t matter: I tell the history of the sea.

  I take him to the lighthouse, because I imagine that is what a romantic person would do, but it’s cold and wet there, and he slips and smacks his tailbone at the top of the stone steps. I try to help him to his feet, and he lets me, and I pull him up with my hands, and I wonder if I have ever let anyone help me. We sit on a bench on the windy bluff, and we see whales migrating south, and in my entire life on that island, I had never seen a whale from there. I want to tell him that it’s a myth that it’s so easy to see whales passing here, even though that’s everything we tell the tourists.

  He finally starts talking, about nothing and everything, about the next boat, so that I can’t decide if the distant blowing of the whale matters like I thought it would.

  He asks if he can hold my hand, and when our fingers lock, there’s a rush, and I can’t tell what’s real. He tells me he wants to see me again. And again. I go home that night and cry and cry.

  So we are silent for most of our first year, talking only about paint colors, future vacations. I know of his mother’s broken heart, and his dad who left them for the South Seas and later, for death, and his brothers who fear the ocean. He knows of my mother, of Mary, then Tommy, and I try to tell him all about my father. But we never really say what any of it means to us. He’s easy to love, because he’s the kind of person who takes care of things, who doesn’t tell me to quit smoking, who will just do laundry if it needs to be done. Later, he reveals that before me, he felt alone. And so it’s enough for me to say I will marry him.

  He’s slow to tell me what he feels, but sometimes I know it when I look at the tops of his hands, because there is the regret, and the tinges of darkness. They are bruised, they are salt-crusted, they are always nicked. He won’t treat them, and instead his hands are covered in bubbles of brown scabs and he just lets them heal on their own. Then little skinless white scars appear until the sun has covered them again.

  I keep trying with all the talking at him, telling him the things I want, because for the first time, someone is asking. At first, it’s so easy to tell him I love him. At first, it’s never easy to tell him why. When he moves into my bungalow on Fe
rry Lands, I watch him sleep, and I make a list of the reasons I love him. And most of them are petty, but it’s that for once, I feel like I am alive to feel the extraordinary weight of joy.

  I’m too afraid to ask him if he feels this, too.

  Before we marry, we must talk about things like what kind of car we will buy, where we will live, if we should get a dog. But it must have been mostly me talking. We decide that he will take months-long charters out to sea, because it’s what he wants and knows, and we aren’t sure we could do this any other way. We don’t want to be alone. We say that if he meets a woman, or I find a man, it won’t mean anything. It won’t break us. But we promise to be loyal to us on the island, say that nothing will ruin us. At night I try to keep him awake until we are exhausted, and I ask him for a hundred ways to tell me we’ll do whatever it takes to stay in love. A scab tugs on the sheet.

  Before he leaves one last time before our wedding, we hike back up to the lighthouse to clean the thick lenses that protect the lamps. He reminds me of the time he slipped. He tells me he knew he already loved me then. Then the lights are brighter. Still, he tells me that when he’s away, he feels gone. The distance, he says, reminds him of the distance between all things, and he fears he will push me away. I tell him I fear the same thing.

  We wonder if our same fears will make us last forever. Wonder who will die first. Say, So if we die, maybe we are not really dead.

  He tells me he’ll be back again and again, and that the next time he returns, we’ll get married on the beach, even if we are different people by then, even if there is rain, or something worse. He says he’ll love every adaptation of me. We’ll build around us.

  The carcass of a whale falls slowly to the ocean floor and forms complex localized ecosystems after death. It will sustain deep-sea organisms for decades. Maybe forever. Scientists call this a whale fall.

  Spring

  For weeks, I have waited for blooming roses. I pick up fallen petals, the pieces that couldn’t hang on. I press the skin of them between my fingers. I rub their wetness around my hand until they dissolve into nothing. The afternoons are quiet, and the sun lingers. I devote my time to my desk and watch the sea and the sky, I research how things begin and end, focus on my work, and ignore things like the post office, the mainland, and even a few of Tommy’s soccer games. I wait for a full bloom until there’s an early morning when the stems have likely sneezed into flickers of pink and yellow and muted blood red.