The Seas

by Samantha Hunt

  The three of them argue. They try to develop an English word to match.

  “How about ‘disamoured?’” my grandfather proposes.

  “Or ‘screart,’ ” Jude suggests.

  “What about ‘evol?’” my mother says, and smiles. They look at me for an idea too. I don’t say anything. “Once loved” is not my specialty as I haven’t stopped yet. I step out our back door.

  The night is cold and beautiful. Though there is still a layer of damp moisture close to the earth, higher up the fog has lifted some and I can see a few stars for the first time in days. I crane my neck, looking overhead, studying the constellations for a long while. I used to know some of their names but have not studied the sky for so long that I have trouble remembering. I would be better off if I developed my own system of constellations, and that way I wouldn’t forget what Ursus or Pleiades or Orion is supposed to look like. I could make letters from the stars and have them spell words that I’d never forget. That way I would know the sky. I would be able to navigate accordingly. Looking up I start to spell. J, I see. I spell. U. I look around the sky. D, I see, and scroll across the stars looking for the next letter. I cannot find an E. My neck is getting rigid, my head filled with blood. That is how I know, how I can feel a tingling. Someone is watching me.

  I right my head. The rest of my body freezes. I scan the yard, moving just my eyeballs, until I think I see him. My breath is labored with fear so that it is all I can hear. “What do you want?” I ask, and just then my eyes focus for a moment against the wood of the shed that has grayed in the weather. I see him. He is shaking his head no, no, no. Only this time I recognize him. “Dad.” I try not to blink. I stare and am certain it’s him. “Daddy,” I say, because I haven’t seen him since I was eight years old. He is wearing a very old denim shirt. It is torn and sodden. It is the same shirt. He is wearing his rubber boots. The same rubber boots. “Daddy.” My eyes are getting dry but I’m scared he’ll disappear if I blink. My eyes start to tear. He dissolves.

  I walk very carefully, very slowly over to the shed. I am scared even though I know it was him. I am scared that something will jump out at me. I touch the wood where he stood. He came from the water and the wall is wet. Without turning I back away and shake my head just like he did in case he is still watching. Because I understand what he is saying to me. I run for our door. I lock it and pull the curtain shut, like a blanket over Jude.

  EROSION

  Scientists have found that the significant asteroid named Eros demonstrates signs of erosion. I am not making this up. The scientists have trouble figuring out why this is happening since there is no wind and no water in outer space to make erosion happen. I am nineteen and Jude is thirty-three. I think the only way I’ll catch up to him here, where we have water and wind, is for him to stop growing. He is outside my house and sees me in the window. He waves hello. Or for me to get old quickly, and so I wonder what the force is that is eroding the asteroid named Eros and wonder where I can get myself some before my father comes back again.

  “I’m tree. I’m tree,” the little boy who lives next door says to Jude, and holds up his pinky, ring, and middle fingers to demonstrate. Last week that boy asked me, “Do you love ice cream?” and I told him that, yes, I did. So he asked me, “Then why don’t you marry it?” and ran behind my house laughing.

  Jude says to the boy, “Why, buddy, I think it’s three.” It sounds like, “My bonnie lies under the sea.” I haven’t come out of my room yet since last night. I am too scared. I haven’t told any of them, not even my mother. I am too scared. They won’t believe me. I hear Jude come inside the house. He is downstairs with my grandfather. If Jude comes to my door I will ask him before I let him in, “Jude, do you love me?” and I think he’ll say yes, so I’ll ask him, “Then why don’t you marry me?” Because I have never heard of even one mermaid story where the mermaid’s family does not come up out of the sea to kill the mortal man who won’t marry the mermaid. They always come to get their daughters back.

  The scientists working on asteroids suspect that the erosion on Eros is caused by magnetic fields and magnetic storms. The friction in attraction. I am certain that I will erode faster than Jude.

  I learned about the asteroid Eros while I was visiting our local library with my mother. Oddly enough there were people receiving flu shots in the library among the books, of all the places. There were bright red bags to dispose of the used needles. The bags were clearly marked BIOMEDICAL HAZARD among all those books. There are many things to make me angry here, many unbeautiful things, but I know the ice caps really are melting and it fortifies me when I remember that all these ugly parking places, all these red bags, will be on the bottom of the ocean soon. At the library I saw a photo in the newspaper of dark and open water near the North Pole. When the ice caps melt, volumetrically speaking, there becomes more of it, so it is a concern for people who live on islands or people who have homes too close to the water. In the North where I live, the land is still bounding back up from the weight of the ice that once covered it. Each year the ground moves skyward in fractions. However, it is not moving fast enough. It would be best to get used to the water. I will try to tell people in town. I will go with Jude to the bars and strike up conversations with other drinkers. “It’s coming,” I will say. I will tell them about the biologists who found that whales evolved from something cow-like, something rhinoceros-like. “Whales evolved into the water!” I will say. It is possible, and not a backwards evolution. I will urge the bar patrons to practice in their bathtubs. I will repeat, “It’s coming.” They will think I mean Jesus and the horsemen. But I don’t. So I will tell them, “Well, the horsemen should remember how to swim.”

  Jude is out back helping my mother move some flagstones. I can see his arm muscle peeking out of his T-shirt. I notice my mother is also looking at Jude’s round arm muscle and for a moment I am angry at her. I look up at the ceiling in my bedroom and think that there must be a leak here in the house where the wind and weather has gotten to me. The leak follows me from room to room and drips on my head even when there is no rain. It is eroding me. It used to follow my father, but since he’s gone it follows me. This dripping torture waters down how I see things. This drip fills the tub upstairs. From the tub I tell my father, “I know you are very mad that Jude doesn’t love me. You are right to be mad. He has misled me,” but as soon as I say it I want the words back. I drag my fingers through the bathwater. One “very” left. No sign of “Jude” or “misled” or “you are right.” Just like water to take the best words quickly.

  SINKING

  The following day I finally come downstairs. My mother is in the kitchen. She is making a cup of tea and the two of us watch the odd direction steam takes in exiting her teacup. “Are you sure you don’t want any?” she asks.

  “Umhm.”

  There’s no draft or movement in the room but the steam is making it very clear that there are certain strata in the kitchen’s invisible air that are denser than others, and so the steam avoids them and wraps itself between them like rope.

  “Are you feeling better?” she asks. I nod my head yes. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” she says. “I went out with Jude after we finished up here,” she says. “He wanted to get drunk.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Well, he asked if I would have a drink with him.”

  “Oh.” I say. “Did you?”

  “I did. Yes. I’m sorry. I did.”

  “I don’t give a fuck,” I say, and stand to leave, but the word “fuck” has lowered a ceiling, making these certain strata in the kitchen’s invisible air even denser than before. I swat the air, trying to get it behind me but instead I end up spilling my mother’s tea into her lap. Which makes her scream. I didn’t mean to do it.

  “I’m sorry, Momma.”

  “It was an accident,” she says and goes upstairs to lie down and put a cool towel on the burn. She is in her bed and I bring her some ointment. I bring her a cup o
f tea.

  “Don’t be scared of me, please,” I say to her.

  “Shh,” she says. “It was an accident,” she says and takes the cup of tea from me. “Sit here,” she says and pats the corner of her bed, right up close to her. I sit down. “What’s making you so sad?” she asks me.

  I lift my shoulders up to my ears to say, “I don’t know” or, “Don’t ask me” without actually having to say either.

  “Did something happen with Jude?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. “That is the problem. Nothing ever happens with Jude.”

  “I see,” she says. “Well nothing happened between me and Jude either, if that’s what you thought. If that’s why you spilled tea on me.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “I know. I know,” she says.

  Then I tell her, “Last night I was in the bath and I tried to speak to Dad. I told him, ‘Jude is a stone.’ ”

  “Your father’s dead,” she says and bites her lip. Then asks, “What’d he say?”

  “He said, ‘If Jude is a stone then he should sink like one.’ So I let the water out of the tub.” I turn toward her. “I don’t want to be the mermaid who kills Jude, Mom.”

  “Oh,” she says in a voice that sounds like the voice of a mother whose daughter just broke something, a piece of china or crystal and she is trying not to get mad about it. But in this instance, though, the thing that my mother believes is broken is me.

  SCIENTOLOGY EXPERIMENT

  The Church of Scientology sent us a personality test in the mail. They send them to us on a monthly basis because they want us to join them. Many of the words within the quiz are inappropriately enclosed in quotation marks. For example, Do you keep “close contact” on articles of yours that you have loaned to friends? Could you agree to “strict discipline?” Are you “always getting into trouble?” Are you always collecting things that “might be useful?” Do you “wax enthusiastic” about only a few subjects? Do you ever get disturbed by the noise of the wind or a “house settling down?” Would it take a “definite effort” on your part to consider the subject of suicide? Do you browse through “dictionaries” just for pleasure? These are the real questions. I didn’t make them up.

  I am reviewing my answers at our kitchen table. I have the front windows open so that a breeze blows the questionnaire off the table and down to the floor in front of the refrigerator. The paper stays at the bottom of the refrigerator and I remain still. I am beginning to deduce that Scientology is not the same as science at all. The questionnaire scoots across the linoleum in the breeze. It blows beneath the table and I crumple my test underfoot.

  Jude is in love with something watery.

  My father told me I am a mermaid.

  Therefore Jude must be in love with me.

  But the above logic is faulty. Lots of things besides me are watery. Alcohol is watery. Water is watery.

  I devise my own test. I fill the tub on the third floor. I get in and put my head under the water, blowing bubbles. The test asks, Do you “miss your father” when it rains? Do you stay in this “God-forsaken town” because you think he is still here? Do you only like men who could match your father “drink for drink?” Don’t you know “drinkers” only love drinking? Can you “breathe” underwater? Are you really a mermaid or does it just feel that way in the awkward body of a “teenage girl?” I breathe water into my lungs. I wait for my test results.

  UNDER

  When I surface Jude is there. “Jude,” I say, but there is something covering my mouth, a nozzle with oxygen. Jude cannot breathe under the water. I pass him the nozzle of oxygen that is attached to my nose. He refuses and wraps it again behind my ears. We are not underwater. We are in an ambulance. An EMT is taking my heart rate. I can hear her as she yells, “Sinking! Sinking!” The back doors open and four people carry me into the hospital on this bed. I can’t see much except for the fluorescent lights passing overhead. I’m brought to a small room for more yelling. “Evacuate those lungs! Pump!” one doctor yells. Then I feel a needle enter the vein of my elbow and I don’t remember falling asleep.

  When I wake all three of them—Jude, my mother, and my grandfather—are there. There is also a doctor. At first it is difficult to open my eyes. The doctor sees I am waking up from the drug. The doctor says, “Young lady, what you’ve done is quite serious.” I try to look at him. I can’t quite keep my eyes open. I hear what the doctor is saying to my mother. “I don’t understand why she is still alive. Her lungs were sodden, filled with water. She should be dead,” he says and then, “It’s a miracle.” My mother asks the doctor to leave. My mother wants to issue all the scolding I deserve herself.

  I am beginning to see what putting my head under the bathwater looks like to them.

  My grandfather is holding my chart. He is nervous. “Franklin Gothic,” he says identifying the font they used to print my chart.

  My mother looks at me. “Gothic. Right.”

  “Momma.” I clear my throat. “I wasn’t trying to die.” But she turns away, crying.

  The drug is making me feel ill. I’d like to leave this place. I look at my arms and legs under the covers. I am unattached. I try to sit up. I want to leave but my mother stops me. “No,” she says. “You have to stay here.”

  When I was young I went down to the pier looking for my father. I accidentally got on board the wrong boat. The boat was out at sea before the sailors found me. I gave them a big surprise. Three thousand different aquatic life forms are carried daily into new ecosystems by unsuspecting ship’s ballast.

  I was scared on board, surrounded by five sailors. I thought that the captain was a pirate because he had a round bite taken out of his ear. To appease him I told him I’d work to pay for my passage. “What can you do?” he asked, and for a long time I had to think. I told him I knew how to set type. He shook his head. “I don’t need a typesetter. I’ve got a brand new dot-matrix printer.” Eventually I told him I would make a good end table or hassock. “Great,” he said. So I curled up on the dirty floor and prepared for work. I waited for some weight on my back but it never came.

  After awhile the captain said, “Come on now. Get up, sweetheart.” Which scared me. If there wasn’t going to be a legitimate trade he was probably going to steal something from me. But he didn’t. Instead, he gave me ice cream and told me I was a brave girl. Still, after the ice cream, I continued working and soon I was a hassock asleep.

  My mother always tells this story whenever she meets someone new. She thinks it is funny. It embarrasses me because the person my mother tells, for a moment, thinks of me as sea captain’s furniture, which, I believe, most people consider out of date or made from oddly colored Naugahyde. Though it is a truthful representation of me—oddly colored, out of date—I still am embarrassed.

  The three thousand foreign forms of aquatic life introduced daily into unfamiliar ecosystems usually don’t survive but, more commonly, float to the surface and get burned by the sun.

  When I was returned to my family I continued to work as a hassock around our house, and sometimes my father would actually use me, resting his feet while he watched the television. I liked the job because it reminded me of the sailors I had met on board.

  In this hospital I am embarrassed. Jude looks peculiar here. His paleness is awkward against the maize-colored walls. My mother and grandfather are both too pink and healthy to be here. I’m embarrassed because I want to look foreign here, as they do, and float to the top, get burned by the sun. I want to not belong here. I’m a mermaid. How can I belong in a hospital on dry land? But the gown I have on matches the sheets and there is a label around my wrist saying, “This is where you belong.” So I tuck my head and curl into a ball waiting for weight—something hard or sharp from Jude, a fist or a scream. It never comes. He sits quietly, uncertain of what to say.

  “I’m thirsty,” I finally tell him.

  Jude has not said anything. He pours me a glass of water, but while carrying it to the be
d it falls from his hand. The water explodes out of the plastic cup and Jude immediately slips on the water. His head nearly smashes my mechanical bed.

  “Shit!” my mother screams because she is completely on edge.

  “Hahaha,” the water says and it sounds like my father.

  “Did you hear that?” I ask. But they ignore me. “Jude, the water is coming to get you,” I say, and then the three of them exchange glances of the saddest kind. My mother looks down at my hands as if to look in my eyes would make her start crying again. She looks at my hands as though I am strange to her.

  “Jude, are you all right?” she asks. She bends to help him.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine,” he says and has a seat in a hospital chair. We sit for awhile in silence.

  Eventually I do get more visitors. The men in blue. The men in white. And my grandmother, Marcella. She is somewhere in between them like a beautiful horizon line. My grandmother Marcella doesn’t say much but holds up her finger to make a division.

  Wet. Dry.

  Sea. Sky.

  Dead. Alive.

  I have to stay at the hospital for three days. I’m required to undergo evaluation. That “undergo” is the word I keep using, as it somehow suggests a passage or secret tunnel to the doctor’s office. There is no secret tunnel though.

  In his office the doctor looks at my chart. “Huh. Had some eye trouble, I see,” he says.

  “I don’t. Not very well.”

  “Now this eye trouble, it says here, there’s nothing physically wrong with your eyes. How does that make you feel?”

  “I’m thirsty.”