Liam finds me in the garden, pruning, tending with whatever care I have left in me. Tommy is nearby playing with the dogs, and Rook has gone again. We’ve spent days and weeks watching birds, and doing homework, and waiting. Tommy rushes to Liam first, and the dogs jump from their beds and race to him, too. There is the smell in his beard of sea, of past, of love, of hate, and the edges of his hands are cracked cold with rips and scabs. I tell him I missed him.
“There are orcas out there,” he says. “Might get a lot of them in the bay this year, because that water is so warm already.”
On the beach, we watch for whale spouts, but it’s just a long line of nothingness. All of the sea life is tucked below. Tommy runs up to the statue to sit at Francis’s feet while Liam and I sit on the porch with warm coffee and cold beers, and I confess that I think Tommy and his friends smoke cigarettes up there. Liam says he’s made enough money in fish to take us somewhere for the summer. I tell him a porpoise was born. He tells me the whales have scars this year. We mourn the living things to be eaten by whales and sharks. We say there is danger in warm waters.
“Did you stop in San Francisco?” I ask.
Liam looks at me. He puts his coffee and his beer on the table, and he gets into my chair, onto my lap, like a big dog, and makes me hold him. He tells me no, that I should never ask again, and he wonders if I got his letters. But I have avoided the post office, in case he didn’t write, in case I couldn’t deal with more hurt.
That night, Tommy and Liam fall asleep listening to my father’s records. I wonder if he kissed her again, though he promised he wouldn’t. And I try to explain that I love him more after this time has passed. But nothing is out loud.
• A sperm whale’s lungs will not rupture under pressure.
I rush to the post office the next day. I unlock the small PO box, and it’s packed full of postcards and letters, all smashed together like a small earthquake must have shaken them into one big mass. I can’t peel them apart fast enough—he’s written to me on pieces of scrap paper, postcards, takeout menus. He’s mailed them from cities in Mexico, and there are a thousand sorries, a thousand love letters, a thousand reasons to love him again.
There have been the times he tells me he loves me, but here is the proof that I can keep forever. I can highlight the lines and shout them at him during a fight, or sing the words to myself again and again. I try not to seep open and let it all out right there on the floor of the post office. I stuff the wad of paper into my bag.
“You hear about that storm, Evie?” an islander says.
“The warm water’s up from Mexico,” I say.
She points to the old television that’s mounted above the head of the postal worker, who is nearly asleep behind the counter. She begs him to turn up the volume.
“It’s coming fast,” she says.
It’s always faster than I think it will be. Suddenly, the things I couldn’t have imagined are here and then over before I can blink. I look to the sky, and it’s bright and clear. But the wind has picked up, the metal clasps are slamming against the flagpole, and as I make my way to the market, there’s no parking, and then the warning siren has sounded. Someone near the canned food says we might see a real tornado. I’m clutching the love letters inside my bag, as if they will float away.
The checker says that they will start boarding up. The man watering the produce says he hasn’t seen a storm so bad since that tsunami all those years ago. I carry the supplies to the car, and in the distance, the ferries have been halted. I catch Tommy and Liam on bikes heading west. I pull over and shout for them to get home. The rain has come. Everything happens so fast. Just everything.
“Tommy needs to board up Rook’s,” they say, and don’t even stop.
There is something out there, and it’s moving closer, and it’s dark. Because the water is so warm and the air is so cold, we won’t know how bad it will be. I sandbag the edges of the house, board up the lighthouse windows, prepare the flashlights and lanterns and candles. I keep the fire roaring, because it’s fast, but I’m ready.
Tommy and Liam appear, and they are drenched. They help tape the windows and latch the shutters, and Tommy unplugs the things in the garage, and he spends time making the dogs comfortable.
When we eat dinner, we still have light, but the wind is rattling everything, and we eat slowly, waiting for it to arrive. Before the phones go, my mother calls, and so does Rook, and neither Tommy nor I know, really, where our mothers are.
I have thought of hiding. I have thought of running away. The thing about this island, I tell them as we sit in the great room and eat cold popcorn, is that if you live here, you are living in constant fear of never knowing. Not knowing how your life is supposed to be. Living here, I say, is to die of exposure.
The lights have gone out.
Then, we wait together. Tommy jokes that we are going to die. He falls asleep just after dinner, because of the excitement. I pull the soggy pile of mail from my bag, and I unravel Liam’s love on the kitchen table. He helps drape some pages over the backs of the chairs.
When the lights go out, it’s dark enough for me then. I read each letter to him with a hoisted flashlight in my hands. I read them in his voice. I make the sounds of the ocean when he writes of a storm. I cry through the parts where he tells me that he loves me no matter what.
The storm outside is louder, Tommy sleeps, still, and Liam lets me cry to him. He asks, after all these years, Why do you love me? I spend the rest of the night risking any escape plan, writing letters back to him instead, saying it all out loud.
Our storm feels so fast, and like it lasted forever, too. The water damage isn’t so bad, because by now, we know how to wait it out, how to board it up, how to hunker down. We know what it means to be prepared. My roses are washed away, and Rook returns for Tommy—she says she feared we had all gone under—and Liam and I are wondering whether the thunderous, downpouring rains will stop, whether the humidity will ease, whether people can stay together forever.
Because now we fear the light.
• The surface layer of the ocean is the transparent one.
• The most vulnerable, too.
I have never known the kind of love that lasts forever. I’m always looking for a way out. I hope that, instead, someday a letter will arrive, or there will be writing in the sky, with all the answers. I say this to Liam, because he begs me to talk with words that make sounds from my lips, because as Liam always says, he cannot read my mind, and I wonder if I’m too sensitive or not sensitive enough. I wonder the same about him. He says that our betrayals don’t mean we don’t love one another. I ask him if we should go to counseling, and he laughs. He says he’ll do anything I want to do. But I’m still learning what I want to do. He says, Couple’s rock climbing. I say, Maybe.
Some nights, I sift through his letters, because there are more stashed away in old cigar boxes and tackle boxes, from nearly a decade ago, and I wonder if it’s possible to love someone with just your top layer. Or maybe Liam knows my depths, too; maybe there’s just no need to speak of the darkness. He is kissing my neck from behind in the kitchen, and we are looking at the sunshine poking through moving clouds. He asks me what I’m thinking, and I am trying to figure it out. I ask him what he’s thinking, and he says, I don’t know.
“What if I’m no good at this?” I say.
I am waiting for a reply, and the dogs are barking, and I guess I don’t need any answer.
We have mastered this: there are no answers. Instead of spending our hours finding the right things to say, we say nothing. This has been a joy of our marriage. This has been a wound of our marriage, too. He helps me pick up after the storm, and there are still clouds, but he sees me. He knows the ache. A lifetime of it, because he has it, too, in his own ways, and we lift torn sandbags into the back of the truck and drive around the property to assess damage. We stay busy, and the days of cleanup, the time found to work, the moments we eat at a table, I say out loud, I am a fo
ol, and Liam knows. I never say I’ve forgiven him, and he never says he’s forgiven me, but he’s right there while it’s all happening, right alongside everything else.
Sometimes I am going to burst. I sob into a bowl of carrot soup. I blame it all on Tommy; I say how much I miss him when Rook takes him away, that after a storm like that, I just want him close, that I’m afraid one day he’ll leave the island, then I’ll be alone. And Liam cries, too. He says it’s Tommy, too. And suddenly, the soup is cold and we are melting together, with tears, and our constant unspoken forgiveness and anger.
• Creatures can live for a very long time in absolute darkness.
• Some glow.
I have been saying sorry for weeks. He has been saying sorry for weeks. The sea is calm. We pick avocados. Tommy returns for Sunday-night dinners. I think of the way it’s all turning out, and of the way of all things, and how all things move.
Liam’s fishing buddy lets us take out his boat to look for whales, and Rook and Tommy fall asleep in the galley just as the sun appears. There is the horizon, and there are orcas in the distance, piercing through solid sea, and our island behind us, and all that infinity ahead. I say it out loud to Liam, and he smiles, like he knew what I was thinking. There is sun on his face, and he sings a poem he wrote in one of the letters. I sing mine back.
Summer
Unbearable heat. Nothing else to talk about but the sweat on the backs of necks and the uncertainty of weather. Winter Island dreads this kind of heat, the kind that breaks people. The kind that draws people into dark caves. The kind of heat from which even after a swim, there is no relief.
Me explaining the growing of roses is me explaining that it’s like the cycle of a woman—all her waiting, and watching, and sprouting, and dying. There’s an exact window of time to plant a rose bush. It comes with strict rules and science, and there are miracles involved. I say this to Liam. I say my window of time is now. I’m trying to say everything.
Tommy has gone back to Rook, this time farther, somewhere in San Diego County, to a small apartment with a pool. When he calls to tell me about the pool, I can think only that life must just be longing and longing. Maybe it’s my broken heart, the losing of so many things after all the years. What’s really on my mind: I may no longer be the person I once was. But I can muster up the courage only to say, Is it hot out there, too?
“Unbearable,” Tommy says.
The dogs have been slow. The cats, lazy. Our bodies not ready for the kind of mainland heat that has been desecrating our island. The Earth has been changing, the news tells us, and now, we are living in the extremes.
I ask myself, when Liam is away, or when he’s sweaty, or asleep with his full head of hair in my lap, whether I was ever not living in a moving sea of change. And sorrow. And joy. And whether I have been living too quietly. Or too loudly. I ask myself, while touching the earth that feels like fire, whether I have been forgiving. At least to myself. When this forgiveness finally happens, really happens, like a pop in the brain, everything after slows down. This evolution of us is slow. It lingers. This is what I say to Liam. And things about the unbearable heat, and our unbearable love.
• It has taken 25 million years for whales to learn to be whales.
• They have enormous hearts.
I agree that an air conditioner will save us. The final thing we will need to be our real selves. To find our truest love. We get the truck serviced before we take it to the ferry, then we sit on the ledge watching for seals as we pass through the channel, before driving off into the heated and congested streets of Los Angeles, to the hardware store that sells the discounted air-conditioning units. Liam drives on the way there, and I say I’ll drive on the way home. He wanders through the lighting, the plants, the sinks, the carpets, and then there are only a few air conditioners left.
“I think this one will work for the bedroom, at least,” he says.
The box has been damaged, and a receipt has been taped to its side, but we don’t care if it’s damaged. We buy it anyway, because we are suffering, and when the checker asks if we want a bag, the joke goes unnoticed, because we are hot, and worried that our island is no longer ours. Not in this heat.
Liam says we should explore the mainland, that we don’t need to be back soon, and I don’t say that I have plenty of work to distract me. The truck’s AC is working steady. I agree. Even in the traffic, the heat, the smog, it’s nice to be cool together. Though the small of my back is sweating against my shirt and the seat, we keep driving, with the nearly broken unit fastened in the back. I keep checking out the window, at the sun, the big box, everything.
“I tied it down pretty good,” he says.
The rest of the world exists outside this truck. There are so many streets, freeways, people. Sometimes, that’s everything I want. We take the coast north, through the loathsome Malibu traffic, and then we wind past the county line into Oxnard, then Ventura, then past my mother’s hill, all the way to Santa Barbara. Liam pumps gas, and I buy bags of bad snacks. From the gas station, we can see the rest of the Channel Islands. I point to the island where a woman was left behind, and I say her grave is nearby. I say she was dead in only a few weeks after the white men took her to the mainland and fed her things like wheat, and gave her diseases.
I don’t ask where we are going, or when we will stop, and as we inch alongside the uneven edges of California, I begin to calculate how long it will take to get back, until I don’t care anymore. Until the sun is not overhead and I’ve stopped counting the hours.
We stop at a diner, and we sit on the same side of a booth, our bare legs pressed against the seat. Our thighs meet. We acknowledge that we hate this kind of people, the kind of lovers who must always touch. We say we are not those kind of people, even when Liam feeds me bites from his fork. We share a slice of pie.
There is more driving, we trade off, and neither of us asks the other when to stop. We just keep going.
Once, Liam let me take a lick from his ice-cream cone. Knowing that his tongue had touched the ice cream first. It must have been the end of our first week. Our second date. It has been the most courageous thing I’ve done in my life. We’d spent so much time together in the beginning there was a quickness to our commitment, and we holed up in the lighthouse listening for rain. He said he loved me, underneath the blankets, and even if our love were to last forever, that he’d have to eat. That we’d have to go outside, and live like people, and go get things like food and toilet paper.
I liked us standing together, him so much taller than me, everything different than me: his sandy-blond hair and broad shoulders, blue eyes, freckles and sun damage, and bad hearing. His strength from pushing and lifting and swimming and moving. I was so drawn to him, his holding my hand even if I started to let go. I worried about having a man in my things, in my home, one who wanted to stay forever.
When I met Liam, I said something terrible and dramatic, something like, Hey, men always go to the sky or the sea. He told me something like, But I’m always going to be with you. I can’t remember if I told him I loved him, too, but our lives crashed together, and even when he was gone, I could feel him deep inside my bones. At first, it was so easy to be anyone we wanted to be. Then we had to learn to be ourselves. To say what we wanted. To decide what we wanted together, too.
A side-of-the-road woman asks if we want to pay the hourly rate for the room. Sure, we say, and Liam and I rinse off in the shower and I don’t wash my hair, and we collapse on a bed together because driving is tiring. It’s so late, we say. Running away is tiring. Evolving is exhausting. I have set an alarm to wake us in four hours, when there will be light, when we will check out of our hourly motel. We sleep tangled in the double bed closest to the air conditioner in the window. We play Twenty Questions until we’re almost asleep. I ask him if he remembers the ice-cream cone, and my tongue against it, but he’s already dreaming.
• Tympanic bulla: the part of the whale’s ear that hears echolocation
In the daylight, we stop at a zoo in Northern California and stare at the hippos. There’s a man with khaki pants and a khaki shirt standing on a rock, saying that this hippo, the big one he is pointing to below in a pool of water, is related to ancient whales. I roll my eyes, and Liam is proud that I know more than this khaki-colored man.
I follow Liam to the apes, and they are loud, banging on the glass, and he tells me that he wishes the animals were not in cages. He says he wishes they were free. But I explain how captivity works: They are bred into it. They cannot survive without the cage. He slumps onto a bench made of a massive slab of redwood and places his hand over his heart. He believes that they might make it on their own. Sometimes, things can overcome those kinds of pressures, he says.
We eat the zoo fast food. It’s still hot, even up north. We look at a map of California.
“I should call Tommy,” I say.
There is a standoff, and neither of us asks when we should go back. We keep the silence.
I have thought of other islands, the entireties of mainlands, the caverns to explore, and I tell Liam, as we keep driving, that if he wants, I’ll leave Winter Island. That maybe we should try fly-fishing in Montana. That I’m ready now, to be anything with him, anywhere, and that I’m sorry it took so long. I’ll need all of him from now on.
From a McDonald’s parking lot, we can see the faraway kind of mountains.
“I’d live anywhere with you,” I say.
Creatures Page 10