Creatures

by Crissy Van Meter

  You’ll keep dreaming of him each night after he’s gone. For a long time in those dreams, he hides from you—pretends you are not his—and then, finally, he appears from behind curtains, frightened to see you. Sometimes in your dreams, you’ll scream at him. Sometimes, you’ll wake to your own tears. You’ll replay your father walking in the night to the bow of that boat, until you fall asleep, and you dream again.

  There he is, in his loose-fitting clothes, and there’s a breeze and maybe some moonlight. And it’s not him pissing off the boat; it’s him waking to the sound of a whale calling to him. The sound of air pushing through water. You’ll dream he died chasing wonder. And eventually, he gracefully dives off the tip of the boat, and you can see him there floating on top of the Earth.

  In some of those dreams, you jump with him.

  Wildfire

  The late-summer wildfires had scorched all the way to the beach, and the Santa Monica Mountains were bleeding soot. Winter Island was the only place that wasn’t on fire. And on my trips back and forth, I checked in on my father, whose hair was thinning, whose skin was not so tight. I’d bring green juices from LA health-food stores, force him to drink them, bring him dates and salad. The doctors told him he’d have to give up the hard stuff if he wanted to last much longer. So he cut back on the coke and focused on whiskey and joints.

  Before I’d go back to my life on the mainland, he’d ask about my mother. He never stopped asking. There were postcards from Paris on his fridge.

  “She’s gone again,” I said.

  “I know it.”

  We had a routine: he’d put the weed into my bag, Mary let me on the ferry, and I’d sell it as fast as I could in LA. I’d wait until I got to my room at the Sea Institute to unravel the Winter Wonderland. Charge those LA fuckers extra, a note said. I spent my mornings working in the lab, and afternoons selling Baggies of weed to students, faculty, and nearby Starbucks employees for cash. Within a few weeks, I’d get back on the ferry, my bag full of twenties, and chat with Mary about stars, Ferry Lands, cats, cows, fathers, disappointments, dinosaurs, and anything else we could think up.

  What had my mother told me about forgiveness?

  I shouldn’t have been surprised when Rook suddenly appeared at my door, disheveled and sweaty, and demanding that she’d have to stay in my room for a while. Her marriage to some French guy hadn’t worked out, and she’d been hiding on Winter Island for months while I’d believed she was wearing berets in Paris. I tucked away this small betrayal, the one about her not telling me she was home, but knew that our friendship had suffered plenty of time and distance already. She said she was restless on the island, and that my father convinced her to bring over another full bag of Wonderland. She unzipped the bag from my father, just as neatly packed as always, took a green pinch for herself, and sprinkled it into a small rolling paper.

  I wanted to say: How is my father? I don’t want you to see him. I don’t want to see him, either. I don’t know why you came here.

  My mother said it was impossible to forgive people. Because a betrayal happens to you right in the gut. That you can’t just forget the jellyfish that stopped your heart.

  “You can’t smoke weed in here,” I said.

  “Is this a real college?” she asked.

  “I could really lose my job,” I said.

  She lay on my bed, her feet up the wall, messing up my blankets, and kept saying things like, You’re so borrrriing now and Let’s fucking go ouuut. She danced around in my white lab coat, and opened and closed the flaps like she was flashing her tits. She put on lipstick in the tiny mirror of my shower caddy. She said she knew some guys in Hollywood; she said she’d promised Dad to show me how to get more money for the weed. I wanted to know how much time she’d spent with my father, if she loved him, if she knew whether everything would be all right.

  Rook didn’t want to talk about her failed marriage. She didn’t want to talk about anything except how badly she needed a night out. How boring the island was.

  “How can anyone live there for so long?” she said.

  She looked young and beautiful, especially in lipstick, and it was so easy for me to love people who loved only themselves. She moved my things around and scribbled doodles on my lab worksheets. We sat on a bench in the courtyard and smoked cigarettes, and sipped whiskey from airplane bottles from her purse.

  We toured the dolphins, the sea otters, the jellyfish, the swarming schools of silver fish, the aviary. She leaked a few tears at the flapping of wings, and she said it was the fact that they were caged that made her so sad. But her tears became deep stains of mascara and I knew there was more.

  The thing about me and Rook was that we didn’t push each other to talk about the things we didn’t want to talk about, but in case we did, we knew we’d be there to listen. We pressed our backs into the great lawn of the Institute, and the sun was lost. It was dark enough, and I was buzzed enough, that I said we could smoke a J while we waited for the stars.

  “I think I’m pregnant,” she said.

  She said she wasn’t sure about the father, or whether she was keeping it, whether she was sure of anything. She still hadn’t decided, and she wanted to keep walking. She spoke as if she were consoling me.

  She kissed me on the forehead, and we locked pinkies as we climbed to the top of a lighthouse. There was the top of Winter Island, like a man dead on his back, lying right in the water. We could see the whole island from end to end. She screamed out, a wild and wicked squeal, and laughed at the rumble of her echo. We slumped our backs against the concrete walls and cool tile floor, and the wind whipped.

  She laughed until she cried again and put her head in her hands. I leaned my head against her shoulder. She took my hand to her belly and pressed it deep into her skin. We felt nothing.

  We talked about being alone, its glory and its darkness, and then she said she’d been in love with another man for a long time. I said we could make an appointment and get it all fixed, that we’d have enough weed money to get rid of the baby, or keep it—whatever Rook needed to be happy.

  “I just want to be here tonight,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  What had my mother told me about happiness?

  When we got to Hollywood, we were both all black-and-red lips, with clunky tall shoes and bare legs. Rook’s friends got us into the bar through a back door, and she drank like she never wanted to wake up.

  “Maybe I’ll move to the mountains,” she said.

  I hated her for saying it.

  Then there was broken glass and yelling, and it was Rook’s guys, and she pulled me out of that place so fast that it seemed the back of my neck was sore from being carried by a mother cat.

  We wandered around Hollywood Boulevard and pretended we were brave. We couldn’t be lonely when we were together, even if we were just drunkenly selling too-cheap weed to homeless people and tourists.

  A limo appeared in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and a drunk bachelor party filed out to take photos with fake celebrities and a less red, dingy version of Elmo. Soon, we were inside the limo, and a hand was up Rook’s skirt. Will it hurt the baby? I kept yelling in my head. I was asleep on a married man’s shoulder after I told him about intertidal ecology. When they dropped us off at the Institute, most of the weed was gone, and we couldn’t remember what we’d sold, given away, or smoked ourselves.

  Rook and I squeezed into my dorm bed, and it was the first time I’d gone to sleep without the blue light of the TV.

  In the morning, Rook was gone, and she’d left a note that said she’d taken the money back to Dad. I aimlessly wandered around the grounds that day—a Sunday, when most people were gone—and found myself following the sounds of birds singing mysteriously pleasant songs against netting woven together, which made an enormous cage.

  My mother said that happiness was like flying.

  Breeze

  I could see for miles. Gentle winds made a clear, sunshiny horizon. The whale b
reaths. Fish that flew. Sinking ships. I heard it might never be this clear again. I hiked to the top of the volcano, and up there was the rest of the world. Below, my father, his son, and perfectly manicured rows of marijuana. Everything was endless.

  He sat on Dad’s lap—the exact same back-of-the-head hair. They were fishing in the little pond in the middle of the weed field. When they turned to me, I wanted to yell, to scratch Dad’s eyes out for all the lies, but it was so quiet and cool, and the pond water erupted silent bubbles to the surface. Tommy roared with laughter at the deep voices of frogs hidden under tall grass and moss. They pushed their poles into the earth, and my father smiled.

  “You haven’t met Tommy yet,” Dad said.

  He was three. A perfect little face and a sweeter disposition than Dad or I ever had. I was a rough kid, quiet, alone, pondering and wondering. But Tommy was happy, loud, excited. All the things I wanted to be. We shook hands. Tommy’s palm was a tiny, greasy thing, covered in dried mud.

  “Top of the morning to you, Tom,” I said.

  “Tommy!” he shouted.

  He ran back to his pole and dunked his feet into the pond. Dad watched him out of the side of his eye. It smelled like weed, and my father smiled. It wasn’t the time to bring up the past, the deceit, the money he’d borrowed, the promises he’d broken.

  “Rook’s gone, then?” I asked.

  He nodded. Sad and old.

  He never told me that Tommy was his, but it seems like everyone knew, including him, so we never did have to talk about it. I didn’t want the details about how Rook had been sleeping with Dad the whole time I was gone—probably the whole time before that, too.

  I knew he’d gotten her a job waiting tables at Otto House. I knew he went there every night after Rocky’s. I knew these things but never found the right words to say anything. To ask him about it was to allow him to ask me how I felt about it. We were the kind of people who had to be quiet to move on with things. Talking it all out would have fractured us forever.

  “Ice cream,” Tommy yelled.

  In the distance, my father’s broken-down truck sat on the edge of what was left of the Old Institute. It was the last of any of the outside world that bothered to come anymore. Tommy clapped his hands and jumped—his feet squishing in and out of the mud. The guys with guns whistled to Dad.

  “Watch him, would you?” he said to me.

  I cupped a tiny frog in my hands and opened them slowly. Tommy giggled and reached.

  “Be gentle,” I said.

  He ripped it from my hands and squeezed hard, and the frog slipped out and into the green.

  “More,” he said.

  The top half of his face, and especially his wavy hair, looked just like Dad. And his smirk was all Rook. He didn’t get her ruby-colored lips, though.

  I wanted to dislike this little boy, but when he grabbed my hand and led me into a muggy sanctuary of frog noises and puddle smells, I knew that he was part of us. We had the same eyes, as if his were mine and mine were his, and I hoped I had once been so full of wonder as he was. And I’d been hoping for things to keep for so long, although I felt like everything was always cracking and sinking, that I had learned to love despair even in sunlight. When Tommy turned to me with his eyes wide, telling me about bugs, I kept asking the same question: What if I could love someone despite betrayal?

  After everything else we’d endured, it seemed useless to rage-scream at my father, or to scold Rook. And here was this new little body of a boy, with hope, stamping his feet into soft ground, asking me if I’d stay and pluck tadpoles out of still water. Maybe I needed him most.

  Tommy couldn’t spend any more time in those sweltering-by-day and freezing-by-night barracks. For the sake of myself, for Tommy, and Dad, and the miles of things we were finally able to see, I had to stay. Forever.

  Then Dad got an apartment big enough for three. Near the old butcher shop, so that sometimes smells of metallic meat and old, bloodied bones wafted through the living room. If I stood on a stool in the bathtub and stretched my neck out the window, I could see a tiny glimmer of the sea. That season, we could always see the foreverness of ocean. Depending on the time of day, it was an endless green or blue or purple. The plumbing was bad and the floors creaked, but that place was well worth the afternoon breeze. From the roof, we could see for miles.

  Dad said that Tommy wouldn’t remember the mainland or Rook or the rains or the heat, or anything else that happened before now. I think we were all ready to forget a few hundred of our mistakes by then and focus on what to eat for dinner. On raising a boy.

  “Fresh lobster,” Dad said.

  All the storms had left my father tired. There was a small patch of yard where we grew fresh herbs, radishes, carrots, and peppers. Dad also grew tomatoes and cared for them with a gentle hand. His expertise in weed farming had translated into an old-man hobby, and by then, he was growing most of our food himself.

  He’d lost the whole operation to crooks, and whatever was left, people came for it, and demanded he pay debts. He gambled anything else that was left at an Indian casino in the desert. The last few wads of cash were spent on quality steaks for the grill. People approached us about licensing the name, or making a movie about us, or asking us for the mother seed, but Dad never responded.

  Those days were quiet. Dad worked on the yard and on fixing our old garage door and splintery steps. He drank less and looked forward to watching Tommy play submarines in the bathtub. He followed new recipes. We walked for miles. Tommy fell asleep in a fancy stroller sent by Rook’s parents.

  Dad bundled Tommy in a snowsuit, a puffy onesie he’d received from Rook when she was waiting tables in Aspen. He appeared in the doorway, already sweaty, holding Dad’s hand.

  “Tin Pan is reporting a big lobster day,” Dad said.

  “Can Tommy swim?” I asked.

  There were still a few hours of warmth, and we could see on and on, and Dad said the Earth looked round. There was a most pleasant breeze and I grabbed a bag full of snacks and water, in case we’d be stuck out there forever and ever. Some kind of motherly instinct had taken over, though I’d never had a mother, or been a mother, or wanted to be one. But the small army of people and the endless loop of Winter Island seemed to have performed some kind of magic trick: I could love unconditionally. Even still. After hating my father. And my mother. And Rook. And sometimes myself.

  The fishing boat was the only thing that was really Dad’s, and it was tattered but functional, painted with a faded, horrific shade of coral that he said reminded him of the color of his mother’s apron.

  Tin Pan glowed in the late afternoon, and we quietly slipped out of the harbor’s mouth. Tommy clapped at the seagulls shouting, and I held him so close, nearly pressing his life vest into my skin. I wasn’t a mother, but I was a mother. I wasn’t a daughter, but I was a daughter.

  “You have to let him live a little,” Dad said.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t take parenting advice from you,” I said.

  Looking up from his rusted lobster pots, Dad scowled.

  “You don’t seem so miserable being back here,” he said.

  What if loving them didn’t make me miserable? What if I was happy even if nothing would be perfect.

  Tommy pointed to anything that moved, and on the horizon, the whale-watching boats, packed tightly with tourists, were coming in for the day. Then there was the buoy with shiny black sea lions yelping as we passed, the same buoy Dad said I screamed at, too. Tommy told us to look and look and look.

  “You can see the rest of the Channel Islands out there,” Dad said.

  “You remember when you told tourists that was Japan?” I asked.

  Dad anchored, and we dropped three pots, hoping for at least one lobster. But as we sat there waiting, Dad shuffling cards and Tommy watching, I think I must have forgotten why we were resting on top of the sea that afternoon. We ate crackers and all sipped water from Tommy’s baby cup. Tommy was loud, and obnoxious, and joyous
, and for a moment, there was hope.

  “I hope you’re not sad it ended up this way,” Dad said.

  “Which way?” I asked.

  “The way it was supposed to be,” he said.

  I couldn’t tell him, right on the boat, that, no, he shouldn’t have fucked my friend, and then betrayed me, and her, that then there was Tommy, and what? We would just endure another round of suffering? I couldn’t, because there was this: my father, happy, with peaceful eyes.

  We played War and enjoyed an eerily calm day at sea. When he pulled the lobster pots from the seafloor, Tommy squealed in excitement. We’d have enough for a week.

  “Look at this big guy!” Dad said.

  We coasted back to the dock, Dad pointing out new neighbors, new shops, new boats, and all the things he knew about the island’s future. His voice was older. The dock was decrepit and should have been torn down after the last hurricane, but Dad swore it would last another summer.

  Tommy helped Dad carry the cooler, stocked full of slow-moving lobster, and I packed up the life vests and tied the boat properly for the night.

  But that damn rickety dock was too unstable for Tommy, and within seconds, he tripped right into the sea. The sound of his body crashing into the dirty pool of shallow green water sent small pains to every sensor in my body. Like he was mine.

  Dad had him by the arm and out of the water, plopped down on the dock, was consoling Tommy’s screams, before I could even get out of the boat.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I screamed.

  I grabbed Tommy, covering him in all my dry coats and scarves and ran him back to the apartment. I never once looked back to see if Dad was behind me. Tommy’s lips were blue from the late-afternoon wind, and his screams—thank god for his screams—were hearty and real.