by Karen Rivers
Charlie looks up at me from where he is sitting on the floor of the boat and says, “Seriously, I might have liked you better when you were dumb,” and I say, “What?” at the same time as Darcy is saying, “Charlie, that is rude!” and he says, “Muuuum, that’s what you told me it was called. And he’s scaring me.”
And I’m like, “Don’t be scared. We can do something about it. You can be in my shark army. We can save the sharks!” And he says, “But what if they don’t know we are saving them and they bite off our feet?” And I say, “They probably won’t.” And he says, “That doesn’t make me feel better, champ.”
Kelby is laughing and laughing.
And Darcy says, “I’m sorry, JC, I don’t know what is wrong with these kids.”
And we are all talking at once and laughing and it’s so normal, like we are normal people who aren’t crazy. We don’t have ghosts and weirdnesses and a terror that lives in the pit of our stomach, twisting there while it waits to explode outward. We are just people. There are cormorants on the exposed reef, drying their wings, hanging out in a row like babies in Batman costumes; the seals languish in the last of the sun; the bucket is full of scallops; my skin is sweating under the wetsuit, and it’s a perfect day.
Perfect.
I help with the boat and then take a quick swim in the bay with Kelby. Finally, I climb back up the stairs to the cabin where Dad is hunched over his laptop typing. I raise my hand to greet him and he says, “How was it?” and instantly, my voice is gone again, my throat feeling like I swallowed gravel. It’s not that I don’t want to talk, more like it would be impossible even to try.
But it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I don’t want to tell him. I want to keep today to myself, like a piece of art, like something I’ve created for only me.
And Kelby, I guess.
And Charlie.
And I guess even for Darcy.
But not Dad. Not yet. I’m just not ready for that.
26
I go upstairs and pick up my phone. It feels wrong, weird somehow. Foreign. Like an alien object that doesn’t belong here. But I can’t help it. It’s such a habit. I text Daff. I type, “Le tout est magnifique sous le Salish Sea.”
Then I delete it. Actually, I delete her whole conversation, so the top of my screen says Daff and then the entire screen is pure unadulterated whiteness. None of her begging to talk to me. None of my French nonanswers. Only nothingness.
The void.
Which is kind of what I believe death is like. Is it? I ask The King silently. Is that it? I type, Can you hear me now, caller? and send it to him. Even the swoop sounds slow and bored with my attempt, carrying my message into the ether.
But right away, the phone vibrates and she’s there. Lstn, Shrk, I don’t care if U nvr talk 2 me agn. But read yr mail, kk?
I type unsubscribe, and hit Send. I’m too lazy to Google what that is in French.
FU, she responds.
I take a picture out the window. It’s perfect. The tide is starting to run, so you can see whirlpools skimming the surface of the pass outside the window, a few small boats bobbing there, people fishing for salmon in the current. The little rocky beach is empty, Charlie’s tree splaying a perfect shadow of itself onto the ground. I don’t bother with filters. I hit Send and the pigeons swoop.
And right away, a response buzzes. At first I think it’s her.
But it doesn’t say Daff.
It says, The King.
And I think, for that split second, that somehow he’s made it work, texting from the marble tomb.
But that’s not it.
It’s nothing.
Only a blank.
My own message bouncing back or maybe for real this time, it’s over. There’s nowhere for it to go. Maybe his phone is decomposing, too, disintegrating in what is left of him.
I curl over, like I’ve been struck.
“No,” I say out loud. “NO.”
I grab my phone and throw it hard into the corner of the room where it breaks a huge cobweb and then falls to the floor. The glass cracks and I leave it there, faceup, the jagged glass looking like how I feel, ruined beyond all repair.
I mean, I knew he wasn’t getting the messages. Of course he wasn’t.
It’s just that I sort of thought he was.
I needed to send them.
I needed them to land.
And right away, the beautiful day turns ugly and I am alone on a lumpy single bed with stupid Spider-Man sheets and three dogs that are too big for the space, wondering why I’m here and what I’m supposed to do next.
27
Here is what I do next:
I get up in the morning.
I walk with the dogs.
I swim with Kelby.
I talk less.
And less.
I dive more.
And more.
And inside, I feel like my tinfoil heart is crumpling harder and harder into a tighter and tighter ball, so that even if you could reinflate it, it would be so damaged, you’d hardly recognize it as being the heart it once was.
I walk more.
I swim more.
I slowly am becoming the island. I imagine becoming the island. I visualize my arms and legs becoming trees, my torso hardening to sandstone, my mind flying off the reef with a cormorant, black wings against the blue sky.
The skin on my feet is like leather.
I climb trees and swing from branches.
I think about staying.
Never going back.
I think about that a lot.
28
Dear Daff,
This is the first time I have opened my laptop in two whole weeks. It’s dusty.
I feel like you won’t forgive me.
I feel like you shouldn’t.
I haven’t read your stupid attachment yet, if that’s what you’re wondering.
I am in a weird place right now. In my head. And also, literally. I mean, places like this don’t really exist, yet here I am.
Maybe I time traveled, like the hero in Dad’s book, jumping through time and space to come to a place that can’t exist, yet does.
The Internet doesn’t belong here.
Nothing does, least of all me.
But here I am.
It all makes me think of the word bisect.
My life was bisected. I’ve been thinking about words a lot. About abscission. Have you ever heard that word? It means something about how the trees get their leaves off in the fall, like a dog shaking them free. Sort of. I think about how The King’s dad’s stupid building abscised him. Right? Does that make sense to you? It’s like his whole life, his dad was trying to shake him off, and then at the end, it literally happened. And I can’t figure out how to feel about that.
There was before and now there is after, and they are so different that it feels like everything was a dream anyway and it wasn’t real and right now, this is more real than that, but when I get home, that will be more real than this.
Is it like that for you, too? Is this just temporary?
I broke my phone a couple weeks ago and I haven’t missed it.
I broke my phone a couple weeks ago and I’ve missed your texts so much.
I broke my phone a couple weeks ago.
It’s not like there’s a place here to get a new phone. It’s not like I could afford it if there was.
There are no stores. Nothing. We have to go into town one of these days because there is no milk and the only kind of cereal we have left is cornflakes, and without milk those are basically like eating wood chips.
I wonder how you’d be here. I feel like the island would change around you and you’d stay you, you’d still be Daff. Remember that time we went “camping” on Long Island? And it wasn’t even camping and the cabins were nicer than any house, but still. We roasted marshmallows on that beach fire until one of the sparks flew up and landed in your hair and we got sand in our pants and everywhere and no one died. I feel like
I flip through our memories and look for the ones where no one died, because that’s all of them, I guess. Except the last one. And that one eclipses the rest.
I’ve been really busy.
That’s why I haven’t written.
Mostly I get up in the morning and walk the dogs to the beach. If the tide is right, I swim out to this raft and sit in the sun on this chair that is out there. It’s a yellow Adirondack chair. It is exactly the same color as the table in the kitchen at home. It makes me miss my mom and feel guilty about my phone, which she can’t afford to replace, and anyway, neither can I. Maybe The King’s dad can pay for it.
That’s a joke, but it isn’t a good one, so forget it.
The other thing I do here is dive.
There’s a girl. Her name is Kelby.
There’s a girl. I like her.
There’s a girl who I dive with. Her brother is only eight but he drives the boat and waits for us to come up. That seems kind of crazy to me, but it works. We go down and then come up with bags of scallops and every day I see something unbelievable.
Yesterday, I saw an angel shark lying in the sand at the bottom. Most of the seafloor here is rocky and alive with barnacles and anemones and seaweed and everything else, but we dove down and found one patch of sand and in the middle something moved, and I nearly choked I was so excited, trying to show Kelby.
The girl’s name is Kelby.
Anyway, I’ll delete at least half of this and then send none of it.
You know, I’m scared that you’re a star that’s already burned out, I just haven’t seen that yet. You were so much like him. You are so much like him. And both of you are stars, aren’t you? As in, famous. But you move differently. You are different. You’re brighter.
Are you already gone?
I feel like you are. I wouldn’t ever say that for real because it sounds seriously crazy. Medication-level.
I’m scared you’re already dead.
Daff.
I’m sorry.
Disregard le tout.
D’accord?
Bon.
Love,
JC
Delete.
29
Dear Daff:
Today, I was diving for scallops with my dad. He does it to help out his girlfriend. She makes her living selling scallops in the summer. In the fall and winter and spring, I guess she’s a teacher. She’s pretty. You’d like her.
She’s nice but she’s Christian. I mean, she takes “Christian” to a whole new place. God is everywhere when you’re with Darcy. She found Jesus in a potato chip. She sounds like a joke but somehow when she says it, she’s so sincere that I want to believe her.
I like her, I guess.
I feel like I should say that.
I feel horrible for my mom when I say that, but it’s true. I think Mom still loves him. I think she still doesn’t understand why he left. I’ve been thinking about stuff like that. There’s a lot of time for thinking up here. Thinking and walking and swimming and sitting. Yeah. I wonder how I ever thought about anything before because I don’t remember ever feeling like time was this big open thing that I could go into and stay in.
He never mentions her. Dad never mentions Mom.
It’s weird how someone can stay so present for one person and just be gone—poof—for another.
Kelby and I do most of the diving and get the scallops. We’re getting braver. We’re exploring farther and farther.
Kelby knows a lot about the stars. When she explains it, it makes sense for a minute or two. Stuff about the galaxy that I’ve never thought about. Then I try to think about it afterward, and I can’t make it make sense anymore.
Anyway, she was busy. Or asleep. Or spending the day lying on a rock reading a novel about someone who was doing something. Or looking after Charlie, her brother, and our three dogs: Maximus and Apollo and Zeus.
Or
Okay, I don’t know what she was doing and it doesn’t matter.
Okay, I do know what she was doing. Her boyfriend was here. People who come here who aren’t supposed to be here stand out, intrusions in a scene where they don’t belong. He was awkward and clumsy. I laughed when he slipped on a wet patch of green seaweed that papered the rock where he jumped. He cut his knee and she gave me a look like she hoped I’d die.
But then she winked and grinned.
But you don’t want to know about Kelby.
But I’m not sending this, so it doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters.
Hey, what do you get when you cross a chicken with a goat?
Forget it.
Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to tell you.
I have to tell you about the whales.
You were the first person I wanted to tell.
I wasn’t wearing a wet suit because Dad needed his and I pretended that was okay, but I was freezing. I actually thought I might die from how cold it was, except not really. Do you find you do that, too? Hesitate when you say, “God, I thought I’d die”? Because now it means so much more, and eff that, no one ever died from cold water. Although, I guess people have.
I liked the feeling of the water on my skin. This will sound stupid, thus guaranteeing I won’t hit Send, but it made me feel like I belonged there. Like I was a shark or a fish or a seal. I could have been anything, part of the ocean. We’re all part of our own life cycle, right? But somehow the ocean life cycle makes more sense to me. It fits me better.
I don’t know why.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It sounds so dry.
That rhymed. I’d rap it for you if you were here.
I’m glad you’re not here.
I wish you were here.
I wished you were here when …
I seriously wish I could forget you even existed. If you don’t exist, then neither did he.
But whatever. That’s not what I wanted to say.
We were diving. Me and Dad.
It was almost time to go up, mostly because I was getting seriously cold. Then I heard this sound that was like nothing I could ever imagine having heard before, yet I knew what it was because it was obvious. Do you ever recognize something you’ve never heard before? The clicks and whistles. Dad started gesturing at me like crazy, pointing at the surface. I looked up. Passing between me and the sky were three whales. They were so big, Daff. They were so real and present and alive. I don’t think you can imagine what that’s like, looking up from underneath at the belly of an orca, like they were flying and I was the one underwater. They didn’t stop or look at us. They didn’t dive down and touch us with their fins. There wasn’t some kind of magical freaking Hallmark moment of understanding between us or anything like that. They didn’t even seem to notice us. They were simply passing by, perfectly black and white, blocking out the light for only a few seconds, their spray sprinkling the surface with a cloak of fine white bubbles.
It was the most everything I have ever seen. The everyanything.
Remember that poem?
You loved it.
I guess I thought it was dumb, but I kind of get it now.
I’m more like my dad than I would have thought. The whole thing didn’t make me feel like I understood the whales, it made me feel like I understood him. Dad. Because when we got to the surface, he started to cry. Then he said, “I don’t know why I’m crying, but I can’t stop. Holy crap, that was amazing. That was amazing.” Then he just went ahead and cried, like that was an okay thing to do.
I think maybe my dad is a good man after all.
When we came back in on the boat, every one of the seals was gone from the reef. They know when the whales are coming through and they disappear for days, Dad says.
I’m the seal.
You’re the whale.
We’re all the seals.
We’re all the whales.
Dad dropped me at the raft in the middle of the bay and I sat in the yellow chair in the sinking sun until I stopped shivering.
The dumb
part was that I then had to swim in. Now I’m cold again. My hands are shaking, typing this.
What are you doing right now?
Are you over him?
I want you to walk down the block where it happened. I want you to look at the sidewalk and see if you can see the mark. See if it’s still there. How does that work? Does someone have to bleach it away? Scrub it clean?
That job would suck.
I miss you.
I don’t miss you.
This place is amazing.
Those whales. Seriously.
Love,
JC
30
“He’s gone, you know,” says Kelby. She is sprawled out on the reef next to me, like a seal, absorbing the heat. Except she’s a pretty seal in a hot bikini.
A pretty seal in a hot bikini who has a boyfriend with a mashed-in nose who looks like a human pug puppy, who has finally packed up his tent and gone back to the city. When she was around him, she was different. She drank beer and belched and laughed too hard and touched him too much. I wanted to say, Look, you can like him, but you don’t have to be him. But I didn’t want her to like him. He was such a regular guy. He was so average, it hurt. Normal. I totally got what she meant once I met him, with his broad smiling face and farmer’s tan. Even the way he swam, too much splashing, interrupting the water. He threw himself into the bay and expected the water to hold him up.
“What?” I say, even though I heard her. My voice still tastes strange to me, metallic and robotic.
I splash my feet in the water, risking the backs of my calves being maimed by barnacles. The splashes are sending out widening rings that ripple the surface. In the sky, a few puffed-up clouds look like they are playing a part in a kids’ cartoon. The heat wave has loosened its grip, finally. Yesterday it poured rain all day, making the whole island seem almost like the only place in the world. The rain erased Vancouver and most of the Salish Sea and the fire risk and the mood that had gripped Dad of resignation. He was freaking elated. A bullet dodged. The place can’t burn when it’s wet.
