Sea Creatures (18 page)

I shook in Emily's arms. “I take pills,” I said to her. “I have to, or I don't sleep. I don't know what happens in the night. I only wake to loud noise.”

Frankie put a hand on my arm, then signed:
Okay, Mama? Okay?

“Yes, baby,” I said.

Emily sat back and crossed her legs. “Sometimes kids freeze up when there's something they don't understand. Sometimes they freeze so much they get used to being frozen.”

I wiped my face.

She said, “I have to ask—when is your husband coming home?”

“A couple of weeks,” I said.

She patted my hand. “We'll figure it out.”

I rocked Frankie in my lap. I kissed his hair.

Before she got up from the rug, Emily said to Frankie, “How lucky you are to have such a good mother,” and I had to take deep breaths before I could manage to get to my feet to see her out.

 

CARSON STARTED RUNNING IN DELIGHTED
circles when Frankie entered the loud, colorful room at the preschool. They wouldn't have the same teacher, as I understood it, but their classes would share the same large space for most of the day, and they'd be on the playground together in the morning and afternoon. That morning, Frankie had refused to get dressed, then sat himself in his time-out corner as a protest. We were late. Frankie looked briefly pleased when Carson bounded over to greet him, but then he clambered into my arms and scowled at the room. I'd reminded him again and again that he was starting school, but until that morning it seemed he'd thought I was bluffing. When I'd pulled him from his car seat and he saw where we were, he looked at me as if I'd betrayed him.

His teacher's name was Carla. She was young—early twenties, if that—with two silver rings through her nose. But she had the straight spine and calm, confident bearing of someone who had been early to mature, which made me wonder about her background—not her training but her parentage, her home life. I set Frankie down next to her and he squirmed to get back to me. I stepped away, telling myself again that I was doing this
for
him, not
to
him.

When we'd toured, I'd spoken to the school's director about Frankie's speech. To Carla, I said, “You know he doesn't talk a lot, right? But he understands everything. He pays attention. So don't, you know,
not
talk to him.”

“Don't worry.” To Frankie, she said, “I hear you like fish.”

He stared at her nose rings as she spoke, then nodded.

“Would you like to see our fish?”

On the far side of the room, a colorful aquarium spanned the length of a low table. He nodded again.

“Do you think you might help me feed them later?”

He nodded again. I blew him a kiss and walked out, feeling his eyes on my back.

 

EARLY THAT FRIDAY EVENING, AFTER
Frankie and I'd spent most of the day cooped up on the
Lullaby
, me folding laundry and cleaning and him begging me to play with him, after two time-outs and one ugly episode wherein I yelled at him after he knocked over a pile of folded clothes, I decided we needed a change of scenery. I left the clothes strewn across the salon floor and went up to Lidia's house. I wrapped three slices from the pan of meat loaf resting on the stove top, grabbed a bottle of wine, and left a note of apology. I stuffed Frankie into his life vest and shuttled him onto the Zodiac. As I started the engine, something splashed across the canal. It took a moment before my brain sorted out the pale lines in the water, the steady forward movement: it was the mother from across the way. She turned to breathe, then her head was down again. She traveled straight up the center of the waterway. I sent something like a prayer of safety after her, then pulled away from the pier.

We'd never crossed to Stiltsville so late in the day. Ten minutes into the ride, as the melon sunset soaked into the violet horizon, I considered turning back. I forged on. The wind was blustery, lifting and dropping my hair, sending up spray over the gunwales.

Go away, wind!
signed Frankie. I pulled him close and he buried his face in my torso.

Charlie came downstairs as I was tying up. Frankie stepped to the dock and peeled off his life jacket, as he'd taken to doing; I'd decided that he'd spent enough time at the stilt house to know to take care.

“How are you with surprises?” I said to Charlie.

“I can take them or leave them.”

I handed him the meat loaf. “We brought dinner.”

He held the package to his nose. “The famous meat loaf!”

After we ate—Charlie agreed the meat loaf was as good as I'd promised—Frankie and Charlie went from room to room, playing a version of hide-and-seek wherein Charlie always counted and Frankie always hid, each time in a different closet or corner. Though just that morning, he'd said “please” after I'd asked if he wanted orange juice with breakfast, he was still signing more than he spoke. After an hour or so, Frankie gave up hiding and climbed onto the sofa with his sea animals and asked for a blanket. I told him the grown-ups would be on the porch if he needed us.

Charlie and I sat in the rockers. He stretched his legs and steadied them on the porch railing. We drank wine from plastic cups and the wind swallowed our voices. I told him that I'd lost my cool with Frankie, that I'd yelled and he'd cried.

Inside, Frankie was moving his toys around on the coffee table. Another child might have been talking to them.

“It happens,” Charlie said. “Mothers feel a lot of guilt about these things.”

“Fathers don't?”

“They feel a little guilt. A limited amount.”

“I hate it when he's sad.”

“You can't protect him from suffering, you know.”

“I can try.”

There was the constant slapping of water against the pilings, a faint thread of voices and laughter from a house down the channel. The lights of the skyline blinked faintly. There was something in the way Charlie looked at the shore. Regret? I thought.

I said, “Do you ever think you'll go back?”

“I wondered how long.”

“How long what?”

“Before you asked that.”

“And what's the answer?”

He took a long drink of his wine. The cup covered his mouth and jaw, and all I could see were his sorrowful eyes, the way they folded at the corners. “I'll never go back.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because I remember what it was like. I don't want to be like that again.”

“Like what?”

“Angry, mostly. Scared.” He stared at a point just beyond my knees. “I have a way of making other people miserable.”

“I don't believe that.”

He smiled. “Yes, you do.”

“I'm not miserable.”

“And I'm not on land.”

There was no arguing. Over my shoulder, I could see Frankie moving around the coffee table, rearranging his animals, dragging his blanket along the floor and yawning.

I got to my feet reluctantly. “We'll be getting back,” I said.

“Drive carefully, please.”

The starlight threw soft shadows across his face. I thought of what he'd told me—it seemed long ago—about his daughter, and what happens to people after they lose a child.

“I'm glad you didn't drown,” I said.

He looked confused, then his expression cleared. “Sweetheart,” he said, “that's exactly what I did.”

14

I'M EMBARRASSED TO ADMIT THAT
I'd had barely any contact with Graham's mother, Julia, since we'd moved to Miami. Before we left, we'd talked about visiting at Christmas, but that was still a ways off. I'd sent a photo of Frankie and a brief update, with a crayon drawing I'd wheedled him into making for her, but it had been a month since then. I had not told her about the progress he'd made, though I think she would have been relieved to know of it.

The morning Graham called, I woke with her on my mind. This is the kind of thing for which my belief system has no vocabulary. I woke thinking of the leather driving gloves she always wore in the car. Why one would need such a thing, I never knew, but every time I watched her pull them on—they fit perfectly, as leather does only when it's very high quality and has been worn for years—I fell a little in love with the old-fashioned decadence of it.

She died in her sleep from complications from pneumonia. She was seventy-six years old. Graham had called Lidia's house every half an hour since dawn, but not until seven o'clock did Lidia answer, at which point she and my father came down the lawn and rang the cowbell. My father looked grave and Lidia's face was full of something like anxiety, though I guess it was sadness. She folded her hands in front of her stomach. I had the strange thought that I was about to be scolded, though for what, I didn't know. Leaving on lights in their house, maybe—this was one of my father's most tightly held pet peeves—or being too liberal with their groceries.

“Honey,” Lidia said, then delivered the news in a motherly voice. We walked up the lawn so I could return Graham's call. Lidia carried Frankie in his pajamas. “Would I have liked her?” she said.

“She was a little cold,” I said.

Immediately, I regretted saying it. It wasn't the most pertinent, not to mention flattering, fact I might have conveyed. But I'd been thinking that Lidia was warm, even at her most demanding, and that it's possible she would have found Julia remote, the way I had for many years.

“I didn't mean to say that,” I said.

“It's forgotten.” She took Frankie into the den to watch cartoons.

“Babe,” said Graham when I was patched through. The line was full of white noise. His voice was weak. There was a high-pitched whistle in the background, and we waited it out. “I've been calling and calling.”

“I'm so sorry. I wish we had a phone.”

“Whose stupid idea was that boat, anyway?” He forced a breathy laugh.

“Are you okay?”

He cleared his throat. “I don't know. It hasn't hit me.”

“Are you going today?”

“They'll shuttle me to shore today, but I can't get a flight until morning.”

“I'll meet you there.”

We stayed on the line for a moment, listening to static crackle between us. Then Graham said he loved me and would call with his flight information, and hung up.

I made hotel and flight reservations, then called Riggs and asked him to tell Charlie I wouldn't be back that week. The next morning, Lidia came down the lawn before Frankie woke, and I kissed him in his sleep and drove myself to the airport in the half-light, the streets mostly empty. When we landed in Chicago, the air had a funky green tinge—tornado weather. I rushed through O'Hare to meet Graham at his gate. Heaven knows why, but he tended to sleep heavily on planes, which meant he was usually late coming off, and this flight was no exception. The circles beneath his eyes were deeper than usual, and his clothes were loose and disheveled. He dropped his bags and buried his face in my hair.

“You're a sight,” he said.

“Poor baby,” I said.

He pressed his forehead against mine. I felt the pull of him—his familiar smell, the breadth of his shoulders, the pure white of his hair.

We rented a car and fought traffic in the Loop. Graham asked about Frankie's talking and I repeated what I'd told him in my letter. He tapped the window as we passed the little French restaurant where we'd had our first official date outside of Detention. We drove to his mother's apartment, where a group of women sat in the living room, a plate of coffee cake on the table. Julia's husband, Bob Winters, stood in the kitchen with a coffee mug in his hand. His eyes were rimmed and swollen, which moved me. Bob had paper-white hair, very thin at the crown, and liver-spotted hands. He was a big man, barrel-chested and hunched in the way of the very tall, and his clothes were starched, as if straight from the cleaners.

“Good of you to come,” he said distractedly.

The apartment was spare and Scandinavian in style, the furniture low in profile and the walls adorned here and there with landscapes in dated wooden frames. The ladies cornered Graham, whispering sympathies, and I stepped onto the small balcony, where two robust ferns grew in clay pots. It was drizzling. The green hue was gone from the sky, replaced by honey-colored ribbons of evening sunlight streaking through the cloud cover. There was a loamy, agricultural odor in the air, a reminder of not-too-distant fields lined with hearty stalks of corn. A block away was the snaking green river, its color so different—so chemical and factory-fed—from that of the ocean. On a boat headed toward the wide disc of Lake Michigan, a group of tourists hunkered in ponchos.

Graham joined me. His eyebrows furrowed and he stared down at the tourist boat. After a minute, he said, “We never should have left Chicago.”

I looked at him.

“We should have stayed here,” he said. “We should have bought an apartment like this one. We never should have moved to the cottage.”

“This apartment smells like old people,” I said.

“You don't miss it?”

I shrugged. I had no desire to answer, to chase this line of thought to its unsettling conclusion. I did miss it, actually, but only a little. Chicago had always welcomed me—this was how I'd thought of it. It had been easy making a life there. But I'd been young. My concerns had been Laundromats and delis and bars. I had no experience being a grown-up, not to mention a mother, in Chicago. Besides, we'd moved to the cottage months before we were even married. Saying we shouldn't have moved was like saying we shouldn't have done everything else.

I went back inside but he stayed out, the mist falling on his hair. Inside, Bob's daughter, blond and largely pregnant, five or so years older than I, was straightening up in the kitchen. We greeted each other quietly. A couple of impeccably dressed women sat chatting in low voices at the breakfast table. Bob stood in front of a television set in the den, watching the Weather Channel. On the screen, a ferocious radar spiral moved haltingly across the southern Atlantic. The thing had yet to be declared a tropical depression, but it was intensifying just east of Bermuda, limping toward the Bahamas. I thought of Charlie and the stilt house, of wet winds lashing through the rooms, pulling the paintings off the walls and knocking the furniture around. I knew he followed weather events on the transistor radio in his kitchen. If this storm hit, would he go to shore?

The program switched to a commercial. “Nasty stuff,” Bob said to me. I don't think he knew, in that moment, who I was. “Good of you to come,” he said again.

I busied myself helping Bob's daughter in the kitchen. There was no ring on her finger, no sign of the baby's father. She said she was always surprised, when she saw me—three times now, including Julia's wedding—that I wasn't a Jew. “Because of your hair,” she said in a sweet but spacey voice. I wondered if she was on something.

That night at the hotel, Graham shared a memory of being at the zoo with his mother and sister. He remembered the otters playing in their truncated river, pushing their furry bellies against the glass. They'd made his mother laugh out loud. He remembered his sister in a pink scarf and a brown derby coat. She'd held his hand while they rode the merry-go-round. His mother held him on her hip so he could better see the polar bears, who skulked in the dark reaches of their manufactured caves.

“My family is dead,” he said.

“No, we're not,” I said.

I held him and he kissed me. His mouth, his taste, was familiar but renewed, like finding something I'd thought I'd misplaced. “What if I lost you?” he said. His hands found the clasp on my skirt, and then the buttons of my shirt. His fingernails raked through my hair. We didn't make it to the bed. After, he held tight to me, tugging against my hand when I got up for water. I finally fell asleep under the heavy weight of his arm, and when I woke I lifted my head from the carpet to see him standing at the window without his clothes on, his palms pressed to the glass. I could tell from his breathing that he was awake. “Do not jump,” I said loudly, and he turned around and laughed so hard he had to bend over to steady himself. He was dressed and ready to go by the time I woke again.

The funeral was in a Catholic church downtown. After the burial, we went back to Bob's apartment for a couple of hours, then we dropped off the car at the airport. At my gate, Graham fidgeted a little, avoiding my eyes, running a hand through his hair.

“You need a trim,” I said.

He took a breath. “They moved me to my own bunk.”

He tried to say it casually, like he was just making conversation, but he looked away after he spoke. I'm not proud of it, but in that instant, as I absorbed his words, I stepped away without moving a muscle. I told myself that if he'd wanted to talk about it, he would've mentioned it earlier. It's not that I didn't have the impulse to ask what had happened—but I fought it. Instead of pressing for information, I squeezed his hand, kissed him good-bye, and boarded my plane. He watched me go, the hurt plain on his face.

 

THE NEXT WEEK AT STILTSVILLE,
I asked Charlie how he'd fared during the storm that had hit while I'd been out of town. He didn't answer right away. Frankie was on the sofa, facing the open window, watching a ship on the horizon, and for a moment we both watched him. He called out when anything interrupted the palette of sea and sky, combining the game of speaking with the game of spotting. “Air-peen! Moto-boat!”

To me, Charlie said, “I stayed here.”

I wasn't surprised, but still I found myself suddenly, inexplicably frustrated with him.

He went on. “It wasn't much of anything. A little rain, a little wind.”

“I can't believe Riggs let you stay,” I said.

“He's not my father, Georgia.”

I started to gather our things.

“Don't do that,” he said.

Frankie turned to watch us. I said, “You can't stay here during a storm like that. It's not safe.”

“If they don't evacuate on land, why evacuate out here?”

I stepped out to the porch. The wind was kicking up sea spray. Charlie came to stand next to me, his hands on the railing. “You don't know what you're talking about,” he said. “This house has survived half a dozen hurricanes, for Christ's sake. It'll be here long after I'm gone.”

“You have a home
there
.” I gestured, and he glanced at the hazy skyline, as if the possibility of going to shore had never occurred to him.

“Not really,” he said.

“I need you to promise you won't do that again.”

This was a line I'd never crossed before, and he didn't like it. He refused to meet my eyes, and his mouth tightened. The words were hard on his tongue. “You were in
Chicago
,” he said.

“So what? You could've gotten a ride. Don't blame—”

“I'm not saying—” He stopped. A step would have consumed the distance between us. “You were in Chicago,” he said again, his voice softer.
“You were in Chicago
.
”

Maybe he'd thought that once I left, I wouldn't come back. I understood this concern because I'd been harboring the same one regarding Graham, even as I feared equally the day when he would return. But Charlie's voice broke a little as he spoke, and when he said it, the word
Chicago
brought Julia's funeral to mind, and the light rain and antiseptic apartment and too-green river. And Graham's haggard good-bye and our empty, cast-away cottage, and the feeling that something I'd loved deeply had moved on from me and no longer returned my love at all. It is possible to conjure an entire life from the ether, I thought, and lose it back to the ether again. It happens all the time. In Charlie's voice, the word
Chicago
took on new meaning.
Remote
, it said.
Lonely
.

“Next time, I won't be,” I said.

From the living room came Frankie's pitchy voice. “Sailboat!”

Charlie kept his eyes on mine for another moment, then went to share my son's delight.