Family of Origin

by CJ Hauser

  All the ducks but two had waddled away from the Lobby soon after the initial debacle, realizing that inside living was not for them. The two that stayed circled the green, chlorine-depleted water of the swimming pool. David liked to stand at the pool’s edge, smoking a joint and feeding them. David fed them bread. He fed them rice. They ate whatever he gave them. If he sat on the ground, they would even sit in his lap and let him pet their feathers. Stupid birds. But sweet. Pets. He dragged on his joint. It was not their fault that they had adapted to this tame life. That the world they were trying to be good at living in was really just a chemical puddle and a series of handouts.

  He was high, but something clicked for David. Or perhaps something clicked for David because he was high. He went to the doorway of Leap’s Retreat—Grand Hotel and Paradise Spa and looked out at the island. He was naked except for his shorts as he squinted into the swampy forest. He didn’t want to go back to the mainland. And perhaps he didn’t have to. Maybe there was a better way of living, here.

  That week, he started using the stacks of abandoned building supplies to construct seven shacks. When they were done, he called his friends. He said, Let’s start something here.

  3

  There were other years, and other Towneses, but spinning backward rapidly enough, we find the original. Albert Townes discovered and founded Leap’s Island in a leap year, February 29, 1919.

  He and his men were hauling steel and pig iron but having a terrible time of it; every day Townes woke up hoping US Steel might buy them out and make them all as rich as Carnegie. He was looking for an exit strategy—and then they found the island.

  Townes and his men anchored and took smaller boats to shore.

  They delighted in the discovery.

  We say discover, but of course, the island had existed before Albert Townes had ever set foot on it. An island has nothing to do with the men who ride its back. Who drink from its streams. Who drown on its shores.

  Townes and his men crept into the home of a family of Choctaw Indians who lived on the island and slit their throats in the middle of the night. They left their bodies out of doors, and as they built their settlement, they watched the family’s flesh turn to jerky and saw flies crawl over their eyes and saw birds, carrion hunters, pick at them, and Townes and his men told themselves that but for the grace of god this would be them. Those Choctaw would have murdered us in our sleep if we had not killed them first, they said, and because we did, here we are on our island. We are so lucky. So blessed. By the grace of god we are here.

  2

  When the mother of the Choctaw family who were murdered on the island was a girl, she had a favorite story. Her name was Nita, and the story was about a turtle and the movement of the world.

  On that same island, her own mother had told it to her.

  In the story, a girl was crying, and a turtle made fun of her for being sad, so the girl hit the turtle, and she cracked his shell into pieces. The girl ran away, and the turtle cried over his broken shell, but then red ants came and stitched it together in a patchwork so the turtle’s shell was whole again.

  Nita’s mother told her that their island was just one of the turtle’s many shell pieces and that sometimes the world moved when the pieces bumped up against each other because the world was being restitched. Made into a better arrangement of itself.

  Even when she was grown, Nita would lie still at night and wonder if she could feel the island moving beneath her. The world becoming something better. Sometimes she thought she did, but other times Nita wondered if she only thought she felt the world moving because of the stories her mother had told her about it.

  Maybe all stories are a trick.

  Still, at night, Nita waited, thinking of her children and hoping to feel the kind of movement that would allow her to believe in the stories she needed.

  1

  The island is an island. No men live here. There are no stories about it. No one has named it. No one has declared its purpose. The animals who live here have always lived here or have come by chance.

  New plants spring up when bird droppings full of seeds plop down. The first of the poisonous berries will arrive this way and the island’s many moronic opossums will eat them, their oily black eyes dimming, their pink toes curling tight, because they cannot resist the sweet poison. Other craftier rodents, muskrats, learn quickly not to eat the berries. The muskrats build immense networks of burrows beneath the soil and stuff their nests with the molted feathers of migrating geese, because they are the softest, and in the southern winters, they curl into these feathers at night, fat with grasses and lilies and snails, as they weather these mildest of hard times.

  The pill bugs are pilling. They roll, flexing their armor, their translucent legs splayed. They dig enthusiastically into the ground, their whole lives focused on one purpose, driven forward, through the soil.

  This is the island alone. Still without man. And in stillness, there is happiness. In the absence of story, only fluid circling joy.

  0

  Everyone here is insane, Elsa said.

  They have their reasons, said Nolan.

  They have stories, not reasons.

  What if you’re my story? What if the story of why I’m on this island is you?

  What’s my story?

  Your story is Dad.

  Go to sleep.

  Tell me a story.

  III

  The Paradise Duck

  It was easy enough to despise the world,

  but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.

  The House of Mirth

  Edith Wharton

  San Francisco

  FIFTEEN YEARS BACK

  Elsa rolled the rental car window up and down on the highway so the whole car rattled and grew cold. Ingrid remained uselessly calm, letting Elsa do it. They were on their way to Elsa’s ex-father’s house for her “birthday.” It was a farce that made Elsa want to scream.

  And this was the week for screaming. The week Elsa had come home demanding to know why her blood said that at least one of her parents was not her parent.

  The week Ingrid told Elsa that Ian was not her father and that she had hidden this information from her for twenty years. Elsa screamed and broke two ceramic bowls once she understood that Ian knew. Had known for years. That even Keiko knew.

  Ingrid did not scream. She had always been hopelessly serene, had a nurse’s patience, even at home, and it drove Elsa crazy. When she was small, Elsa came home from school with end-of-the-world problems. The mug she had made in art class had shrunk so small in the kiln that only a doll’s portion of liquid could be drunk from it. The boy who sat next to her had been stung by a wasp right next to his eye. No matter how awful anything seemed to Elsa, Ingrid would understand, find the sunny side, trust in the universe, and try to calm Elsa down. Even when Ian left, Ingrid never once seemed distressed that their family was dissolving.

  Perhaps, Elsa thought, Ingrid was this way because she had spent the past thirty-five years of her life as a hospice nurse. Ingrid’s job, every day, was to interact with the dead and dying and while she was sad when she came home sometimes, mostly she was calm. It was as if her shifts drained her capacity to care about anything smaller than a typhoon, a bomb, anything smaller than literal, actual, immediate death.

  This was the week Elsa learned that her biological father had been one of Ingrid’s patients.

  Elsa’s father had been in hospice, but he was not old. He was twenty-five, and he had cancer in his lungs and in his blood, and he was a Quaker and a virgin because he’d been waiting for marriage. He was full of regrets.

  He told Ingrid he was afraid of his life flashing before his eyes when he died like people said it did. Wouldn’t it be so ugly to have to watch a thing like that? It would make you cry. He imagined people shout
ing: Don’t go in that room! Kiss this girl, not that one! Why aren’t you paying attention to that car? Why are you smoking those cigarettes? Don’t you know you’re running out of time?

  It would be better, he said, if your life flashed backward. Time and possibilities would be given back, unspent. You would see yourself stripped clean of experience and pain. Watch each refired memory safe in the knowledge that it would soon be over. Or better yet, undone. To see your life run backward would be a kind of unknowing. Of forgetting. And imagine the peace of seeing yourself grow clean and refurl into a moist bud of a thing. Yes. That was what Elsa’s biological father wanted.

  That and to have sex before he died.

  He wanted so little from the end of his time on the planet. So of course Ingrid slept with him.

  He was not strong enough for most things, and so Ingrid lowered herself onto him gently and rocked there. She lifted herself and pushed against him, and he came almost immediately. It was his first time and his last time all at once and that was how Elsa was conceived, in that confused moment of coming and going. Of living and dying. Of moving forward and backward all at once.

  Of course, Ingrid did not tell Elsa any of this. What she told her was: He was very beautiful, and very sick, and a Quaker. He was laughing all the time even though he was dying. He had been saving himself for marriage and then, instead of marriage, he had a hospital bed. That he had asked Ingrid whether she would take him out for chocolate ice cream (Elsa knew how Ingrid loved ice cream), and so she’d taken him out, and then one thing led to another and now here was Elsa. The ice cream had been strawberry because they were out of chocolate and Ingrid regretted that. That on the third to last day of his life, Elsa’s father had had to settle for his second-favorite ice cream flavor. Other than that, Ingrid regretted nothing.

  Elsa hated this story. It was such an Ingrid story. It was charming. It was sappy. Her father was a Quaker, for fuck’s sake. It was exactly the sort of magical moment that Ingrid thought made the world wonderful, and exactly the sort of thing Elsa had spent years trying to show Ingrid made her naïve and dreamy and maybe even a little bit dumb.

  They were getting close to San Francisco, to Ian’s house, and Elsa rolled up the window of the rental car. She asked, Why didn’t you just tell me?

  Because I wanted you to have a father, Ingrid said. And I was married to Ian, and I knew he’d be a good one.

  Do you ever feel just sick over how wrong you were?

  I wasn’t wrong, Ingrid said. Ian was a great father. It was unfair of me not to tell him. To let him love you so much for six years and then for him to find out like that. But, of course, it was too late for him to stop loving you.

  And to Elsa, this was the worst part: Ian had found out about Elsa’s origins around her sixth birthday. It was the explanation for her parents’ divorce, for Ian’s departure from her life, the thing Elsa had been choking on, trying to understand for years. The answer had been sitting there, the whole time, but he had hidden it from her. That Ian had denied her this explanation was a betrayal almost as bad as all the rest.

  But he did leave, Elsa said. He left.

  He left me, Ingrid said. I did an unforgivable thing. But he’s never left you.

  What if he does? Elsa said. What if I do something wrong or behave in a way he doesn’t like, and then he just leaves because hey, not really his kid?

  But you are his kid, Ingrid said. You’re so totally his kid that you think biology is the only way you can be his kid. When really, what matters is that he talked to you in my stomach and he saw you being born and for the first six years of your life he was your father completely. He could never leave you.

  But what if he does? Elsa said.

  She had hated losing Ian from her house, but it was true he had not stopped calling or visiting or being Ian. He had not stopped teaching her about animals and making the face he did when she asked him a question the answer to which he didn’t think she’d understand and was formulating the best way to tell her where baby whales came from or where crickets went when they died or how a snake knew when it had eaten its fill. But that was not enough now. She’d felt a tenuousness to their relationship after he’d left and had banked on their genetic filament—reassured herself that she could yank on that cord at any time, and he would come, because she was his.

  Elsa toggled the rental car window again, and when the cold air rushed through the car like a wind tunnel, Ingrid only lowered her sunglasses to protect her eyes.

  * * *

  ——————·

  Dinner had been a disaster. Elsa had seen to that. And now the parents had gotten rid of her by sending her off with Nolan. Elsa shuffled along the perimeter of the pool, pulling up filters, furious and bored. How dare they try to pretend to be happy and fine and force her to go through that spectacle of a dinner like everything was normal? How dare they talk to each other, but not to her, when it was her they were discussing? How dare they force her to squish every terrible feeling she was having down inside her? And how dare they not tell Nolan what was happening, make him wait to find out in the morning, until they were “ready to discuss it”? How dare they do to him the very same thing they’d done to her—lie, and say it was for their own good? Lie, and pretend the world was fine, so you trotted out into it like an idiot who doesn’t see the storm coming. Nolan wasn’t a baby. He was in high school, for fuck’s sake.

  She watched Nolan swimming in the pool, the muscles of his shoulders and chest propelling him neatly through the lanes, his hair streaming behind him, and for an idle moment, Elsa considered seducing him like she’d been doing the boys at college. She was on the pill, and the boys she fucked at school, she fucked for sport and for pleasure. To forget herself a little while. It was easy. Still, the swiftness with which she turned this gaze on Nolan surprised her.

  Ugh, Elsa thought, as the idea materialized. He’s your brother, gross.

  But then Elsa remembered: he wasn’t. Not even a little bit.

  Elsa was Ingrid and the Quaker, and Nolan was Ian and Keiko. They had nothing between them but a dozen weekends of shared parenting. Nolan was no longer her brother. He was no longer anything at all.

  It was still gross, Elsa thought, as she pulled the caps from the pool filters and stared into their hidden wells for secrets, or something small and dead. The parents were having their stupid summit, trying to figure out how to most healthily assert that Ian was still her father. Keeping Nolan in the dark for one more night and making her wait. But what would Ian say if she did seduce Nolan? Kiss him, maybe. More. She could show them how wrong they were. That there was harm in waiting. She could show them he wasn’t so young.

  And as Elsa sulked around the pool and considered how she could make her parents as miserable as she was and punish them for what they’d done, a kind of logic equation came to her. One that pitted biological truth, her father’s favorite kind, against emotional truth. The logic ran like this:

  If I am his daughter, it is not okay for me to sleep with Nolan.

  If I am not his daughter, it is acceptable for me to sleep with Nolan.

  And so she would see, wouldn’t she? She could force an error, and Ian would have to choose between accepting a monstrous daughter whom he loved in the face of any vile thing she might do, or accepting the biological truth of the matter. That she was not his. That she was an unrelated girl who’d slept with his biological son and nothing more. Was Ian’s love conditional?

  The parents, all three of them, thought they were handling this so beautifully. But they had lied to her, for years, and now they had dropped this dead Quaker on her just when she’d thought she’d figured herself out.

  They’d taken her certainty away, and she would ruin them for it.

  Nolan climbed from the pool. Water coursed off his body. He was a beautiful boy. His perfect hair falling in his perfect face. Elsa held out
a towel. Here, she said, Let me, and then toweled dry his damp head.

  Leap’s Island

  Elsa woke up alone in the pupa. Morning light illuminated the canvas honeycombs. She should not be here. Maybe she could stay here forever.

  Just outside the tent flap, she found a neatly folded set of t-shirt and shorts. Mitchell’s. She smelled the shirt. It was not an especially intense, pleasant, or sexy smelling shirt, but she put it on anyway. She felt dehydrated and dirty. Her hair was salt-stiff and her legs were rubbery as she descended the stairs.

  She crossed the Lobby. She would find Mitchell. They would eat breakfast. She needed to spend one more hour with someone who didn’t think she was a monster. Then she would go find Nolan and they would make up. Or they wouldn’t.

  As Elsa passed the dining room, she heard voices. She peered around the door and saw Mitchell and Esther Stein.

  They were eating breakfast, having what looked like a meeting. There were stacks of papers between them on the pink linen cloths. Mitchell was annotating something with a felt pen and drinking coffee, every so often passing a page across to Esther. Esther had a large plastic calculator out and was punching at it. She had her glasses on and hadn’t touched the bowl of yogurt at her elbow.

  Elsa could go in and join them. She could ask if they were working on the Nature article. But seeing the two of them like this, Elsa knew she would sneak away from the Lobby and not do anything of the sort, because she was ashamed.

  Elsa and Nolan had told themselves the Reversalists were crazy, but Mitchell and Esther, sat down to breakfast, with their quiet understanding and their work, didn’t look crazy, whereas Elsa, hiding, peeking around the dining room wall, wearing someone else’s clothes, hair dirty after having thrown a fit and nearly drowned herself, did.