Sea Creatures (12 page)

The fort closed to visitors at dusk, but we sneaked in under a metal chain. The starlight cast leaden shadows. I wanted to stick to the perimeter—there were park rangers on the site, as well as a crew of masons and engineers—but Graham walked straight into the open-air courtyard and I followed him. There was the feeling, with Graham, that no situation was too hairy to escape unscathed. There was the feeling that his largess—physical and psychological—sheltered me, as if my participation in any scheme was incidental. It was liberating.

The rampart walls rose around us, blocking all sight of the sea, though we could hear the push and pull of the tide. A black lighthouse squatted above us, catching the moonlight in its curves. There was the scattered noise of conversation coming from the barracks. From a powder magazine nearby came the low, otherworldly call of an owl, then a quick rustling in the sandy grass.

“Rats,” said Graham.

“Let's go back,” I said.

The owl made its noise again. “Look up,” said Graham.

It was late and the sky was thick with stars. Was it possible I'd never seen such abundance in the night sky? I thought of Frankie. I wondered if Lidia had remembered not to give him milk before breakfast, if she'd helped him brush his teeth. I wondered if she was having trouble understanding him, if he was having trouble being understood.

“Magnificent,” I said to Graham.

He pulled me in. My neck ached from looking up but I didn't stop.

Quietly, he said, “Just old light, that's all.” I could hear the pleasure in his voice.

 

GRAHAM WANDERED THE ISLAND WHILE
I slept. In the morning, we snorkeled and ate breakfast, then headed in the kayaks half a mile southeast to Bird Key, the site of the closest shipwreck. Graham lassoed our kayaks together and dropped anchor and hoisted a dive flag. We'd read that in the mid-1800s the Keys had been populated almost entirely by wreckers and pirates, and there were a thousand documented wrecks in the area, plus a rumored U-boat that had never been mapped. What was left behind after a wreck had been salvaged was either worthless or too cumbersome to float to shore, and so skeletons remained. Graham dived to the seafloor right away, but for a few moments I stayed at the surface, my face in the water, my body lifting and dropping with the surface current.

What lay beneath me in no way resembled a ship. I knew from the guidebook that there was such a thing as shipworms, termites of the sea, which ate away at wooden hulls, but I'd expected to see something—the slip of a keel or curve of a bowsprit, maybe—that recollected the vessel that had drowned there. Instead, there was coral of every color and shape, clumps of sea grass, fish darting here and there, and hundreds of bricks. The bricks were scattered along the seafloor as far as I could see, mustard yellow in color with etched lettering on the faces. Graham was a few yards from me, a plane of flesh along the water's rim. I dove toward a cluster of bricks and hovered there, trying to make out the etching:
EVENS & HOWARD, ST. LOUIS
. There was movement in the corner of my vision, and when I turned I caught the silver flank of a fleeing barracuda. I rose and cleaned my mask and heard Graham calling for me. I kicked toward him, taking in the colors and textures of the coral as I went, the scattered bricks, the bright darting fish. When I reached him, he put his hands on my shoulders and faced me away from the island.

“Look down,” he said.

When I put my face in the water, I saw a massive iron propeller, each blade sheathed in toothy barnacles. There had been a ship here after all. I circled it. The act of snorkeling, to me, was like standing in a pitch-black room where you sense you are not alone, then lighting a match. It's a pleasure, certainly, to see up close what is shrouded from land, the busy citizenry of the sea—but it's also chilling. With the mask on, I had the feeling of wearing blinders, and each turn of my head could reveal something that had come forward from the deep, like this menacing piece of metalwork, its fat blades so stagnant that it seemed they might burst into motion if I continued to watch them. The rules of reality didn't seem to apply.

My heart was beating fast when I struggled into the kayak. The wind was up and the eastern sky was dark with storm. It would take half an hour to get back and haul up the boats, so it seemed unlikely that if rain was going to hit, we would get caught. But when I pulled up the anchor, Graham just sat catching his breath and looking west toward Loggerhead, a low ridge of foliage on the horizon. There was another lighthouse there, and a reef called Little Africa because of its shape. Graham wanted to go. The ferry captain had said that the island's caretaker invited visitors to sign a guest book. It was this—signing the guest book, leaving a mark—that drew Graham, specifically. The crossing—I knew this from the woman at the kayak rental place—would be choppier than the waters between Garden Key and Long Key, with a crosscurrent that pulled straight out to sea. But not forging ahead would be, to Graham, like turning down the chance to send a memento into space.

I said, “I don't think we should go.”

He arched his eyebrows and grinned at me. “Three miles, babe? We can do three miles in an hour.”

I said, “We didn't tell anyone we were going.”

“I feel good. Don't you feel good?”

I reached across the kayaks to touch Graham's shoulder. It was as close to him as I could get. “I feel pretty good,” I said. “But it looks like rain.”

“We'll beat it.”

I looked behind us at Garden Key, so close and sheltering, then ahead at Loggerhead, which in truth didn't seem so far away. Graham took my hesitation as agreement. He started to head off and I followed, matching my strokes to his. After fifteen minutes or so, my arms started to tire. Even if I got there—without being pulled out to sea—I wasn't sure I would be able to turn around and head back. I didn't have a watch, but I figured it was around four o'clock. The sun wouldn't start to go down until eight; there was time. But still, as the distance increased between my kayak and the campsite, I found myself glancing over my shoulder and falling behind.

“Graham!” I shouted. I stopped paddling.

He waved me forward. I shook my head and he turned and came back. As he neared, waves lapped the prow of his boat, and my own boat rose and fell with the swells. If we stayed unmoving for long, we would be carried by the current.

“What's wrong?” he said.

“I want to go back.”

He looked beyond me, gauging the distance. “It's as far back now as it is ahead. You can do it.”

Could I? Strength, sapped momentarily by swimming and paddling, was already returning to my arms after the brief rest. Loggerhead drifted a little: we were moving, and quickly.

“The current,” I said.

“We've got to keep moving.”

“I'm not going,” I said.

“Please come. I really want to go.”

“Go. I'll head back.”

“I can't go without you.”

“Of course you can.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Be careful.”

He cocked his head at me, then nodded. “You be careful,” he said. He gave me a last look, then turned away.

Maybe a different man would not have left his wife. But I'd been sincere when I told him to go on without me; I had no illusions about Graham and the decision he would make. Graham didn't confuse love with overprotectiveness, as so many of us do. He'd always guarded his own independence, which as far as I was concerned left me free to guard mine. He'd always believed I could do pretty much anything that he could do, and to have stayed would have betrayed a lack of faith in me. His confidence in me gave me a fresh shot of courage.

I faced Garden Key and started paddling. After about five minutes, the wind picked up, jostling my kayak and pushing waves over the bow. The sky darkened. I was distracted by a thick limb of sunlight moving across the water's surface. I had to push harder with my right arm than my left, to fight the cross-pull of the current. A light rain started to fall, then grew heavier. When I looked behind me, I could see Graham making progress toward Loggerhead. Between us, off the stern of my boat, a flying fish whipped through the air. I kept going. My right arm ached, but I could see already that I would miss the beach if I didn't turn. I shifted my course so I was tacking toward the inlet, not perpendicular to the island but nearly so. The rain worsened. At one point, I lost sight of the lighthouse, though I could still see the beach. With spray hitting my face and waves splashing my boat, I kept going, and just before I reached the beach, I realized that I'd been speaking aloud into the rain. For several minutes, through gritted teeth, I'd been repeating the single word:
Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie.

 

GRAHAM'S FATHER DIED FROM AN
aneurysm five years before Graham and I met. Once, after we were engaged, we sat together on the roof deck of my old apartment in Bucktown, and I asked about the years he'd spent in the minor leagues, and about how he'd first become interested in baseball. (A torn rotator cuff had forced him to quit, at which point he'd enrolled in graduate school.) He told me his father had been the one to nurture his talent, but his mouth had tightened as he said it, and I'd let it drop. Graham never spoke in a prolonged way about his father. All I knew about the man was that he'd met Graham's mother, Julia, in high school, and that while he'd served in Germany, she'd worked in a tire factory in their hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I knew that he hadn't allowed Graham or his sister to attend church with their mother, which had reminded me of my own father. I knew that he'd spent the late portion of his career as a professor of biochemistry at the University of Chicago.

Years after that brief exchange on the roof deck, when Frankie was just over a year old, I found Graham standing at our kitchen sink in the middle of the night, staring out at the lake, which had recently started to thaw. The surface was marbled with dark, pooling patches of slush, like worn places on an old blanket. I could tell by Graham's bearing, the tension in his neck and shoulders, that he was awake.

It wasn't rare for us to bump into each other in the night, and usually we were quiet and respectful of each other, like ghosts with shared haunting grounds. But for no reason that I could discern, this night Graham started to talk. He said, “Did I ever tell you that as a kid I was afraid of being hit with the baseball?”

“That doesn't sound like you.”

“Little League, when I was eleven. The coach told my parents I was fit for the outfield.” He gave a wan smile. “So my father took me home and we threw the ball around a little, and every time it came near me—I remember it exactly—I cringed. I had a good arm, though. He could see that.”

I had no idea where the story was going.

He continued. “He went inside and told me to wait, then came out with some twine from the garage. He stood me next to a tree and tied my wrists behind my back and told me to keep still. Then he walked away and picked up a baseball and pitched it at me.”

I gasped. He glanced at me, then looked back at the lake.

“It wasn't so bad. After half a dozen hits or so, my mother came out and screamed at him. There were some ugly bruises on my chest and arms. The next week at practice, my coach didn't know what had come over me. He moved me to shortstop. You know the rest.”

“That doesn't make it right,” I said.

He shrugged. “Maybe not. I think about it a lot. Was he right, or wrong, or both?”

“He was wrong.”

“Baseball put me through college. Baseball gave me confidence.”

“There are other ways.”

“But he didn't know any. Fathers are supposed to push their sons.”

“He crossed the line.”

“But how do you know where the line is,” he said, “until after you've crossed it?”

A wave of frustration rose inside me. That I might be pitted as the indulgent mother because I didn't approve of a father pitching at his small, fearful son—in that moment, this seemed to encapsulate every disagreement we'd ever had about becoming parents, about whether people can become better versions of themselves for the sake of their children.

There was a sponge beside the sink. I threw it at him. “You are not your father.”

He caught the sponge. “I know that,” he said. “But what kind of father am I?”

 

THE RAIN HAD PASSED BY
the time I got back to the tent. I changed into dry clothes and lay down for an hour, then walked back to stand on the moat wall and keep a lookout for Graham. Loggerhead was little more than a jagged horizontal line in the distance. I paced the wall. Finally, a yellow dot appeared in the choppy blue. The sun descended an inch, and after a while the little kayak grew in size and I could make out Graham in the boat, his strokes even and powerful, his hair faintly metallic in the dying sunlight. I waved until he stopped paddling to wave back. I dropped from the moat wall. When he came ashore, I helped him haul the boat onto the sand.

“Did you sign the guest book?” I said.

His smile was wholehearted. “Yes, I did.”

“I'm glad.”

I took a step toward the campsite, but he stopped me. “Let's wait for the sunset.”

He pulled a bottle of water from his dry bag and took off his life jacket.

“I kind of wish I'd gone with you,” I admitted.

“I wish you had, too.” There was no reproach in his voice.

We pushed our toes into the sand. He said, “You used to trust me, Georgia.”

This was true. For years, I'd trusted him nearly blindly. Life with Graham had always been filled with small excitements, like walking the frozen lake behind the cottage as the ice groaned and cracked under our feet. He'd taught me to use a kayak before dawn one night when neither of us could sleep. He'd made me practice maintaining the paddler's box so long that I grew frustrated, and only then did he reveal that he'd planned a kayaking trip through the Apostle Islands, where we would explore the sea caves and camp under the stars and—this part was scheduled specifically with me in mind, because it bored him to tears—tour as many Lake Superior lighthouses as possible.