by Karen Rivers
He’s different here.
He’s not the bumbling doofus he is in New York. It’s like he fills the space differently. He looks okay, solid inside his own skin. Under this sky. New York is like a T-shirt he’s borrowed from someone else that is stretched out wrong and fits him badly and makes him always look like he wants to scratch at where the tag is rubbing his neck.
Here, he fits.
This is a fact. It doesn’t make me like him any more or anything, it’s just an observation.
The boat smashes down hard on the wake of a passing cruiser and a bunch of bananas fly out of a box and into the glass-green water. I think about reaching for them, but I don’t. Instead, I trail my hand through the water, which is ice cold, spraying up my shirt and soaking me through. I feel for my phone in my pocket. Still there. I reach for it to take an Instagram of the bananas bobbing behind us, but the battery is still dead. The salt spray freckles the screen. I shove it back in my pocket.
It takes a half hour or maybe less until Dad slows the engine, and then he is nosing the boat onto the shore of a pebbled beach, the aluminum crunching hard against the rocks. He jumps off the bow and pulls the rope, shifting the whole boat from floating to grounded. The muscles in his arms ripple.
Above us, the face of a cabin peers down through the foliage like a shy kid. Reflecting in the late-afternoon light, the glass seems to appear and then disappear in the shadows. It’s up a flight of steps that are made out of driftwood, oddly angled and steep. I think about the huge pile of boxes and bags in the boat and sigh.
No wonder Dad has muscles.
A dog barks from inside, followed by more barking, as though Dad has the entire SPCA camped out in his living room. All around, the trees are making dappled shadows that splay over the pale pebbles of the beach, mottle the stairs, freckle the water.
It’s so pretty. There is no explanation for why I feel like punching a tree trunk just to feel pain. I have to shove my hands in my pockets and will myself not to do that. Make myself feel less crazy. Is this what going crazy is like?
I have never seen trees like these. Some are squat and stunted in permanently bent positions, like the wind has blown them sideways and they never bothered to right themselves. Some are huge and obviously ancient, their bark so gnarled and twisted they make me think of the skin of old people, leathered and thick. The treetops vanish into the dusking sky. Looking up makes me dizzy. Scattered among them are smooth-skinned trees that look almost soft. Dark green waxy leaves, red papery bark feathering down to the ground in the wind.
“Arbutus,” Dad says. I reach out and touch one and it feels firm and smooth, like cool human flesh. I pull back. Hands into pockets. Pretend not to be weirded out. Pretend not to be weird, in general, I guess.
“The boys are saying hello,” Dad says. “Come on. Let’s go up and let them out before they break through the glass door. We’ll haul the stuff up in a few.”
I follow him up the long stairs. He keeps a running description of everything we can see: types of trees, a passing bird. I wonder if there will be a test at the end.
“Salal,” he says. “Dried seaweed we use as fertilizer. Douglas fir. Bald eagle.” My legs feel funny, like they are someone else’s legs, which makes sense, because this is someone else’s life. Someone else’s forest. Someone else’s crooked steps, grass and moss growing on the rotting wood. Someone else’s cabin, lopsided and saggy.
But unfortunately not someone else’s dad.
“It’s not really a house,” he says. “More of a cabin. Don’t expect much. I mean, I like it, but I get how it might be a shock to you, city boy.”
I pretend to not be shocked, but I guess he’s right and I am. Rustic doesn’t even begin to cover it. I follow him inside, past the front porch where a molding floral sofa sags depressingly toward the boards. A hammock with an assortment of empty beer cans scattered under it swings in a cold breeze. There is a table with four typewriters in various states of disrepair: partially pulled apart and rusty looking. Shells sit in rows along the balcony. A sign on the door says, PLEASE COME IN, UNLESS THE DOOR IS LOCKED, IN WHICH CASE, STAY THE ^*&! OUT.
Everything smells unfamiliar and wrong, that’s the first thing I notice. Not just the dog smell, but everything. And the dogs themselves look like wolves, three of them, stepping on and over one another to get to me and Dad, their ice-colored eyes fixed on my face, fur bristling.
I can feel myself starting to scrunch up inside, anxious, like I used to when Mom would take me to that group diligently once a week to help me try to figure out why. The old feeling of panic catches me off guard. I’m not much used to dogs. Not dogs like these, dogs that look like they should be pulling sleds through miles of snowy tundra in a movie, not big huge northern dogs licking my kneecaps like I’m a steak dinner, their lips sneering back to reveal sharp yellowing teeth.
Canines.
A mosquito lands on my arm and I slap it down in time to see a blob of my own blood spilling free. In my pocket, my phone is as still as death. I want it to vibrate. I want, at least, for Daff to text me so I can feel like I’m still at home, still connected to somebody, somewhere, somehow, even if only through a bunch of texts that I’ll never answer. I clench the phone in my hand, just to feel it, solid and familiar in my pocket, while I look frantically around the open space for a place to go that isn’t here.
The dogs are snuffling and hot-breathed, pushing too hard against my legs. There seem to be too many of them all at once, and without thinking, I drop to the floor, rolled up in a ball. I think I say something.
I think what I say is no.
But the thing with these dogs is that they don’t let up. A head pressed to my chest, another one in my face, licking licking and in the background, Dad laughing and laughing, like the funniest thing he’s ever seen is his own kid, drenched in panic-sweat, under a thousand pounds of dog, on his plywood cabin floor.
17
I sleep between Spider-Man sheets in a loft that I get to by stairs that are so steep they are almost a ladder, a fact that doesn’t stop the dogs from following me up and filling the available space with their breathing. It’s a place that Dad had clearly been using for storage, and to “get it ready,” he simply shoved the cases of cereal and wine and beer and soup to one side to make room for a bed for me.
I dream of something dusty and wake up sneezing. “Cleaning” is obviously a low priority for Dad, along with “home decoration” and “hygiene,” which makes him the opposite of Mom in yet another way. She would have a heart attack if she saw this place. She’d be bleaching the dogs, whose hair drifts around on surfaces like it’s hoping to eventually weave itself into a new dog. The dogs themselves are sprawled widely, like men who spread their legs open on subway seats. They sleep heaped up on the floor. And when they are up, pacing around, they are too big for the space, their claws clattering on the scratched hardwood, their breathing taking up all the air. I hiss at them between my teeth and one looks at me and thumps his tail on the floor. We aren’t friends, I tell him with my eyes, and he sighs like he gets it.
“They’re friendly,” Dad says. “They’re the best dogs. You’re going to love them. Man, I wish I’d had dogs when I was younger. They teach you so much, you know, about how to be human. They were sled dogs. It’s a terrible story, how the owner rounded his dogs up and shot them when his business failed. Someone managed to save a few and I took these three. They are so so so great. They are the best. You’ve got to love them.”
I nod and shrug. The nod-and-shrug being my primary way of communicating with Dad.
Their eyes glisten pale blue like a sky with the richness frozen out of it. They follow me around the main area of the cabin, which is kitchen/living room/dining room/every room. Dad’s bedroom is stuck on the back, like an afterthought. There’s no bathroom.
Like he’s reading my mind, Dad goes, “Oh, yeah, I don’t know why you didn’t ask yesterday, ha ha, but there’s no bathroom, it’s an outhouse down the tr
ail. Or, you know, pee behind a tree or whatever. Like I guess you did. Unless I should worry about kidney failure! No biggie. There’s no one around.”
I stare at him. Okay, sure. Fine. An outhouse down the trail. Why not? I think of our bathroom at home, the way Mom cleans between the tiles with a toothbrush soaked in Tilex. The way the water drips rustily into the drain, leaving a sad orange mark, like tears on the white face of a clown and how every day she’s scrubbing at it with a Magic Eraser until every mark of it is eradicated again.
I whistle between my teeth and Dad jumps. The dogs don’t shift.
“Yeah?” he says. “Did you say something?” His face is so hopeful. I hate him. There’s a lump in my throat. I want to slam my hand in the door, or worse. I don’t know what I want. I press my foot hard into the ground so my ankle predictably aches.
I snap my fingers and then the dogs come to me, giant heads nudging my legs, tails wagging. Good dogs, I say silently. Good boys. I don’t know who I’m reminding. Me, or them. Maybe I just want to be the kind of guy who understands dogs in some profound way. Maybe I want to be a guy dogs like.
Why not?
Dad lies on the floor and they lick his face, paw his chest, rest on his legs.
I fight the urge to kick him. Getup, getup getup. You aren’t five. He laughs like he doesn’t care how stupid he looks. Grabs a dog and rubs its belly hard. The dog’s eyes practically roll back in his head from joy. Man, those dogs love him.
I was five when Dad left. Mom has made a real effort to never say anything bad about him. She says things like, “He tries his best.” And, “He just doesn’t know.” And, “We weren’t right for each other.” And, “He was never right for New York and it wasn’t right for him.” I try to imagine what really happened between them. Did he cheat? Lie? Drink? Hit her?
Did she hit him?
It’s not like I’m going to ask.
I don’t remember much about it. But I do remember how Mom’s voice would curl sharply up into the air like cut glass when she was angry. I remember how his edges seemed dulled and floppy in comparison. The way he’d slink out of the apartment, hunched and folded, and not come back for hours or days.
How my heart would race and stutter. He was like the opposite of a hero. He was soft in every wrong way. How much I hated him.
He gets up off the floor, pours cereal, slops milk in that spills over the side of the bowl. Takes a bite, crunching loudly. I make for the door. With a full mouth, Dad yells, “Stop.” He runs into the kitchen and grabs a roll of paper towel, tears one off, and starts drawing frantically, like my life depends on it. The dogs thud down around me, like they know this will take forever so they may as well nap. I tap the screen of my phone, even though there are only two bars of signal and nothing is coming through.
“Signal here is kinda spotty,” says Dad. “It’s better down the beach a bit.”
I type, Tell Daisy, wazzzuuuuuuuuuppppp.
Send.
I close my eyes, feeling my message being carried into the cold marble box where The King’s remains are probably liquefying.
I swallow hard.
Gag. Cough.
Recover.
I am okay, I tell myself. I am fine.
Daisy was The King’s toy poodle. He carried her around in a purse for a few months. “It’s a murse,” he’d say, offended. “Not a freaking purse.”
“Yeah,” I’d say. “That’s really manly, dude. A poodle in a purse.”
He’d raise his fist as if he was about to belt me, then he’d laugh. “Murse,” he’d say.
We taught Daisy to play dead when someone said wazzup. We taught her to sit by saying roll over. We thought it was funny. It was probably pretty stupid, now that I think of it. A lot of things are a lot funnier at the time than when you look back on them, I guess.
Then one day he stopped bringing Daisy everywhere. “She’s at home,” he said. “She has diarrhea.”
Turns out his dad kicked her so hard he punctured her liver with her own rib bone and she had to be put down.
Dad finishes his sketch and presents it with a flourish. It’s a map to the best beach, which is dumb because I can see the beach out the window. This is an island. It is basically all beach. Anyway, mostly I really need to use the outhouse.
The cabin is perched on a point, the pebbly bay on one side and a sweep of sandstone beach carved by wind and water down the other. There is ocean all around. Behind us, back up in the forest, is the skeleton of the hotel that—according to Dad—will likely never be completed. He mumbles something about legal issues and cost of electricity and transportation. I’ve got to be honest, I’m not really listening.
There are no other cabins this far down the island. There are about a dozen of them about a mile up the coast. Dad says the people from there don’t come down our end very often. He gets power from solar panels and Internet from the more populated island across the narrow pass where the tide runs so hard it makes whirlpools that I can see from here, through the not-too-clean glass of the sliding door to the deck.
I scrunch up his map and shove it into the back pocket of my shorts, like I’ll ever look at it again.
“Watch for cougars,” he says. “Not kidding. Haven’t seen any this year, but they’re probably around. The dogs can get aggressive, so I kinda worry. Don’t get one of my dogs killed, you know what I mean? Not that they would. Or you would. Or—” He sighs. “Anyway, I have work to do. And you’re practically grown up! Not that a cougar cares. You know what to do, right? If you see a cougar?”
I blink. I don’t have a clue, but I’m not going to tell him that. For one thing, that would involve talking. He grins. “Right,” he says. “No cougars in Brooklyn. At least, not feline ones. Ha ha. So … be big. Wave your arms. Big and loud. Not that the big cats want to eat you. Not really. They’re scared of people. Besides, they’d rather eat a deer, I’m sure.”
I nod once, fast. Big, loud, got it.
Like even a cougar would make me talk.
Not.
Dad’s wrong about cougars in New York. There is one. Or was one. Daff and I went on this field trip to the Bronx Zoo last term for Science/Life class. I don’t know where The King was. He was probably away: the Bahamas, Europe, or maybe only the Hamptons, where he liked to lie by the pool and read the classics. He said it was better than school, a more intelligent use of time. And he was probably right: the zoo was terrible to the point of being the most depressing place in the world. All these concrete enclosures and sad animals looking around and thinking, WTF? This is not my beautiful life.
I wondered if they dreamed of savannas where they had never been, if sometimes they woke with a start to the sound of a snake slithering through their imaginary territory. If they thought about the kills they’d never make, the places where they’d never run.
It broke my heart, if I’m being honest.
There was a cougar in one of the concrete enclosures, stretched out in the sun like an overgrown house cat. Snoring.
“OMG, he’s so cute!” Daff had said. She’d pressed her face up to the bars. “I am the Cougar Whisperer,” she whispered. “Come to me, cougar.”
The cat woke up. He sniffed the air.
“You won’t think he’s cute when he claws your face off,” I’d said, pulling her back.
“Silly,” she’d said. “Like they’d put a face-clawing cougar in the zoo.”
“Daff,” I’d said. “Seriously? You think that this is a special cougar? One who has signed something saying, ‘I will never claw off someone’s face’? For real?”
“No!” She’d laughed. “He wouldn’t. I can tell. He has soulful eyes. He has a gentle spirit.”
She put her face back close, whispering like a crazy person. “Kitty, kitty, over there, come and lick my looooooovely hair.”
I remember how he crouched low, staring at her. I remember how quickly he moved. I pulled her away so fast that she staggered a couple of times before finally she fell hard on he
r knees. She was so pissed. She’d been wearing shorts and her knees were skinned on the pavement, the skin cracked, her red flesh shining through.
“He couldn’t have reached me,” she’d snapped. “He was too far. He was caged. Idiot. Now I need Band-Aids.”
And she was right. He couldn’t have. There were two fences. There was no way.
“Is that how you thank me for saving your face?” I’d said, mock-heroically. “What happened to, ‘You’re my heeeeee-ro’?”
She’d smacked me on the arm and taken off running, blood bubbling through the wounds, streaking down her shins.
Of course she was only pretending to be mad. It never lasted.
“… okay?” Dad said.
I blinked. Nodded. Yeah, dude, I thought. I’m just fine.
18
Dear Daff,
This is an island.
This is not an island like, say, Coney Island or like any other island I have seen. The forest is crazy thick and deep and unbelievably green and I can’t even really describe it, it’s like the long exhalation of everything natural in the world, like it’s been sucked out of everywhere else and dropped here. Every city and every crummy town and every strip mall dreams of being a place like this. No kidding. I can see the lights of Vancouver and the smog that hangs over that city during the day, but it’s too far away to hear it. It’s quiet here. And there are no lights, except the solar lights we use after dark in the cabin. No streetlights or shop lights or car headlights or anything. The darkness is absolute. I feel like even my blood runs blacker somehow. You know?
There is nothing here.
No one.
I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere before where there aren’t people and sounds, honking and cars and music and shouting and doors slamming and things crashing and so this is like suspended animation. It’s like what I would imagine being in a coma is like or maybe like being dead.
