What the Waves Know

by Tamara Valentine

  Shrugging, I let my eyes flick toward a billboard outside the window. A woman wearing a man’s plaid button-down with the cuffs rolled to the elbow held up a small box that said: JELL-O—THE FIRST NO COOK EGG CUSTARD EVER! Normally, I loved the A&W stand, sitting in the car while waitresses in black tuxedo trousers with an orange stripe down the sides and matching hats hustled out to bring us root beer floats and hot dogs. My father brought me there for special celebrations, but I didn’t feel like celebrating. I shook my head.

  Take not with thy own hands that which thee has not begotten. It’s written on the Sunday school wall and in the Bible, too.

  “What does that mean?” I asked my mother once when she came to pick me up from the small classroom in the church loft. The distinct smell of old paper and holy dust wafted through the room.

  “Don’t take what isn’t yours or God will punish you,” she huffed, trying to stuff my mittened hand through the sleeve of my coat. I turned my eyes from the large coffee stain that had long ago bled over the blue carpet and studied Mary’s sad amethyst eyes looking down from the wall—and I knew for sure she was looking at me.

  Over the next several years that scripture stuck with me like a wad of stepped-on bubble gum, somehow making sense of the timbers falling away from our lives.

  My father and I had stolen from God. We had snatched one of Yemaya’s mothers, taken a life that wasn’t ours to take, and the ghost of that fish followed me through my childhood. Sometimes it returns to me still. In a wayward dream, she stares at me with sad watery eyes tallying the details of her murder, mirrored gills searching for the cool rush of water. There is no telling what might set the memory flying into my head: a particular bounce of light in the water, the rickety old fish cart down on the docks, the recollection of what happened to my father. But the memory comes back to me clearest sitting in the stuffy pews of the Talabahoo First Congregational Church with Mary’s mournful eyes looking down at me; I remember the fish and the moment Daddy and I were God.

  That September my mother returned to school to finish her PhD in art history. A month later, my father decided if she was going to chase her dreams, so was he. He surrendered his position as an English professor at Brown University to become a freelance writer, and in one quick turn, our house became a series of misses: missed bedtime stories, missed jokes around the kitchen table, missed midnight strolls on the docks.

  When Grandma Jo was not visiting to keep me entertained, I spent hours flopped on the floor of my father’s office drawing pictures. You would think with all that time apart my parents might have a lot of catching up to do when they saw each other, but instead the space between them seemed stuffed with unspoken words and when they came back together, and those words were finally set free, it turned out there was not one single kind thing left to say.

  Arguments began to crop up between them like weeds overtaking the path that connected their lives. When my father was not on his way to Columbia to find skulls of crystal, he disappeared into deep oceans of darkness and his writing.

  “Where are you going?” I sat crisscross-applesauce on my parents’ bed, picking at a scab on my knee.

  “Manchu Picchu.”

  “Why?’

  “To feel the ley lines.” My father balled up a shirt and stuffed it into his backpack.

  “Why?”

  “To recharge my spirit.”

  “With who?”

  “God.”

  “Can I come?” Glancing up, I cocked my head, waiting for an answer.

  “Mommy won’t let you.” He winked at me. “Next time, okay?”

  “Okay,” I nodded, turning back to the television, where Lassie was leading Timmy into an abandoned mine to save a missing boy.

  Sometimes I went with him when he won the battle over what type of outing was appropriate for a young girl, or when he didn’t tell my mother. Like the time he woke me at three in the morning, sneaking me down the back staircase.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Shhh . . .” He tipped his finger to his lips.

  “Where are we going?” I whispered, slipping out the door and reaching for his hand. I did not care if the Nikommo were friendly; the thought of tiny people in the woods gave me the heebie-jeebies.

  “To swim with the moon.”

  “Why can’t Mommy come?”

  “It’s just for us.” He pulled something small and round from his pocket, turning it in the light of the stars, and it took me a full minute to recognize the stone from Potter’s Creek. “Mommy can’t hear her,” he mumbled, more to the stone than me.

  I wanted to go home. Staring at the inky ripples from Moonstone Beach, which my father believed poetic for the experience, with cold sand squishing between my toes, I knew I wanted to go home. Being sucked under the waves on our fishing expedition was so fresh in my mind that I could still feel the water burning up my lungs. But I didn’t say so. I didn’t want to ruin the magic for my father like my mother always did. I didn’t want to be left behind. Just offshore, a fat moon danced on the sea, wavering with every breeze, while my father stripped down to his skivvies.

  “What if there are sharks?”

  “They wouldn’t dare bother a moon dancer,” he said, as though that were a real thing. “Come on.” He laughed, running into the dark water and leaving me alone with the Nikommo.

  I shook my head, willing him to come back, willing him to choose me over the tide pulling him away. But he couldn’t see and I knew that my grandfather was right. The current was not his to command—that was the right of the moon.

  “Come on, Be. Come dance with the moon!”

  Slipping off my nightshirt, I remember this. . . . I remember thinking I would rather drown in the arms of the moon with my father than be left alone, would rather die chasing the light with him than live in the darkness as he swam away.

  “This is our secret,” he explained. “Secrets lose their magic if you give them away, so you can’t tell Mommy, okay?” Hooking his little finger around mine, he gave it a squeeze and I squeezed back in a pinky promise. The truth is, I wouldn’t have told anyways. She wouldn’t have understood what it meant to waltz with the moon.

  When the first fingers of dawn took hold of the horizon, we collapsed on the beach half naked and pulled a blanket around our shoulders, watching as the morning light snuffed out the stars. And that is where a woman hunting sea glass found us asleep several hours later.

  I don’t recall my mother yelling. In fact, I don’t recall her uttering a single word. She just looked at him with eyes bloodshot and puffed up like marshmallows over the campfire, wrapped me tight in a fresh blanket, and marched me upstairs to dress in dry clothes.

  Sometimes I didn’t get to go when my mother won, or caught us. Sometimes he vanished for weeks at a time into the wind. I didn’t know where he was, but I knew where he was going: God’s country. And I knew why: the Nikommo were calling.

  When he was home, he would disappear into silence at his desk for days then fox-trot into the living room and dance my mother around like a soldier on leave, as if he’d been right there spinning her dizzy all along. In his defense, with his eyes buried deep in his typewriter and his back to the outside world, he could not possibly have seen me plopped on the floor with my crayons by his study door. He could not count the times my mother hesitated at the landing, letting her eyes linger on his turned back over a basket of laundry or a stack of files. He could not see the question forming on her lips, wondering how to shatter the space between them, or realized how the tapping of his typewriter so thoroughly drowned out the soft brush of her fingertips running over their wedding photo as she climbed the stairs to an empty bedroom. He was either intoxicated by the light or bogged deep in the darkness—that’s what she would say—sunk into a story that promised to sail him away from his own.

  I don’t like to say so, but the truth is, I blamed her—for keeping me from him, for not breaking down and crossing the threshold, for not calling him back like
she meant it. And the more he wrote, the more that darkness began to swallow us all, until by the time my sixth birthday rolled around, that emptiness had taken us over with tumor-like persistence.

  CHAPTER TWO

  This is what the Oxford Dictionary says about departures. “Departure: (1) the act or an instance of departing; (2) death; (3) setting out on a new course; (4) divergence. To depart: (1) a starting point.”

  This is what I say. Departing is when all the tiny pieces that make you whole spring away from you like a big fat touch-me-not and get lost in the grass beyond any hope of coming back together. It is the very moment when all your stories tumble from you, and you are reduced again to the weakest form of “to be” in the universe, leaving nothing to do but begin again.

  There is nothing left of the evening of October 3, 1966, except a cluster of broken bits of memory. I try to gather them up and put them together like puzzle pieces, but they are lacking glue for the edges to hold and too many pieces have gone missing.

  Determined to spend my birthday together as a family and leave work behind, my mother had raced daylight to herd us onto the last ferry across the bay to Tillings Island, sending the three of us puffing and laughing up the ramp. For one solid second, my father’s eyes had sparkled when he snatched our hands up in his, the dimples tweaking the centers of his cheeks, just the way they do in my memory. I wedged myself between their hips like a bulletproof shield so my mother couldn’t spoil it and took my first real breath when we got to my grandma Haywood’s cottage before dusk—but that is where things start to get fuzzy.

  Here are the things I do remember:

  One. Fall roses tumbling over the cottages of Tillings Island, where the streets do not have names, but the houses do.

  Two. Fireflies skittling through the evening in golden slivers flickering on, off, on. . . .

  Three. Praying. With my parents spending all their time quarreling over everything from money to the proper direction for toilet tissue to unroll, I was wasting all my time rendering up prayers to make them stop and receiving not a single morsel in the form of an answer, leading me to wonder about all those hours spent in Sunday school. My teacher had described hell with its fiery mountains as a place tucked deep in the bowels of the universe. During these last months, I came to know for a fact that she was wrong. Hell was right here—smack-dab in your living room, or backyard, or any other place where your parents chewed each other’s face off three times a day right in front of you.

  Four. Stairs. I know there were stairs, because sometime around sunset a thick fog of silence began slinking up them in the way it did every time my parents went to war. This was my birthday night and their anger was floating up to me like a swirl of smoke, welling up inside me until it threatened to pop me into a million tiny bits. I tried to hold it back; I truly did, spending a good hour pacing back and forth between the door and my bed, trying to drain the fury out of me. But, as it turns out, anger is more like a water balloon than a drain.

  Five—and this is the big one. The stupid candles and I hate you, hate you, hate you bouncing out the door and into the night.

  Somewhere between my father unpacking his work and slipping onto the sofa with a packet of papers, the smile had run out of my mother and she was snapping at him to light the birthday candles before I came down from my bedroom. I happen to know this part to be fact, because I was already stomping into the kitchen pissed as a white-faced hornet that they were arguing on my special day.

  “Forget it,” my mother hissed in Daddy’s direction. “I guess I can just do it myself, along with the cooking, cleaning, and decorating, while you chase your fairy tales.” She stormed out of the kitchen into the dining room, match in hand. “Come on, Iz. Come make your birthday wish.”

  She might as well have placed the flame from that match squarely under the seat of my father’s pants, because something snapped so soundly inside him I still swear I heard a poink! slap through the air as he turned to scream after her, “Jesus fucking Christ! I cannot do one goddamn thing right with you, can I?”

  The fight was back in motion. I tried one more time to lob a quick prayer God’s way, offering him back my birthday wish—and it was a doozy, a candy-apple-red bike with trainers I’d been waiting all year to wish for—trying to stop it. But it was Sunday and I can only assume he was busy watching the fish fly in Potter’s Creek. The anger I had not been able to rid myself of popped right out of my mouth in the shape of words.

  “Stop it!” The words spun me right around until I was facing my father. “Stop it, stop it! I hate you! I wish you would just go away!”

  And there it was; I had given up my perfectly planned birthday wish, letting it loose with no way to get it back, before I realized what had happened. The truth was, I was screaming at the air, but my father was the only one left in the room to hear it, and at the time I’d believed that was good because he was the one I knew for sure would scoop me up with a heartfelt “I’m sorry, Be” instead of delivering a sharp slap to the side of my cheek for mouthing off. I cannot recall a single time before, or since, when I have been more mistaken.

  Dazed by the force of my anger, I almost missed my father whispering, “Fine,” as he climbed the steps, leaving me standing alone, unscooped and unapologized to. Fifteen minutes later, my birthday wish came to life as my father marched out the door with my voice tucked in his pocket and both were swallowed up by darkness.

  A thousand times my father had chased shadows from my room, promising nothing evil lurked in the night. In that very moment, deep in my gut, I knew he was wrong. Knew it but could not warn him before it was too late, because that was the very moment my words ran dry.

  And that’s it.

  What began as the clearest memory of my life petered into a cloud of noise until there was nothing but staggering emptiness and the gnawing sensation of a memory that belonged there and might be the key to unlocking my voice. The truth is, I tried a thousand times to find the courage to pull the memory free, to reach right into the hole and yank my voice back out. But each time my mind brushed against the jagged corner of it, the feeling of falling from a cloud brought me to my knees. And when the dizziness steadied and my stomach stopped flip-flopping all over the place, the memory was gone again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Word of what had happened reached Tuckertown before we did, and the year that followed is less a memory than a residual feeling of walking through the world with that same sensation I’d felt at Potter’s Creek—alone and off balance without my father’s hand.

  If there were whispers or rumors, I was too young to realize. Periodically, sympathetic neighbors would stop by with a pie or fresh-cut flowers from their garden and tilt a curious glance in my direction with a wave as though my being mute meant they were, too. Not a single word had crept through my lips since my sixth birthday and my mother devoted much of her time trying to wriggle them free.

  “Just say something, anything,” she pleaded. Every tinge of hope and panic in her voice said she didn’t want to believe I couldn’t, didn’t understand that the secrets buried in my memory had me by the throat so tightly that the words were strangled. That I could never ever give them wings. “You know the bad words you aren’t allowed to use? You can even say those. Go ahead, let one fly.”

  There was no way for her to know that I’d already said the worst words in the whole world. I’d breathed life into them, let them loose into the universe, and they had destroyed us all. I was the only one who understood . . . who knew Yemaya and listened to the Nikommo, who had spent a whole lifetime clinging to my father so he wouldn’t go and, in a fit of anger, had wished him into nothingness, a nothingness so pure and powerful he never came back. I walked through the days with the Yemaya Stone in my pocket, silently wishing him back, not saying a word for fear the magic would spill out and I would accidentally wish her away, too.

  I’m sure we ate, because neither my mother nor I starved to death during that time, even if my mother
had shrunk to the width of a withered-up strand of linguini. And we must have shopped and left our house for necessities, because I do not remember being without toilet paper or Kleenex. What I do recall being fresh out of were answers. Had he found God’s country? It always seemed to be moving from one place to another. When was he coming home? Did he still wake up in the middle of the night to dance with the moon?

  Still, I cannot pull any one moment into clear view. The closest I ever get are the times when Grandma Jo came to stay, and even those are blurry snapshots of my mother switching from diet cola to Canadian whiskey and the soft pressure of my grandmother’s hand stroking my back to get me to sleep.

  Although I didn’t see it then, I was coming to understand the true nature of my parents’ quarrels, that they were all the same fight—the money, the candles, the toilet tissue. My father had turned the roll of Charmin around so that my mother could no longer reach into thin air with confidence and know it was there, know he was there. He had shifted the direction of our lives with it, in ways that we could not turn back.

  My father was gone, but the truth of the matter is a person never really leaves you all at once. He slips away from you inch by inch until he has left you a thousand times. First, he marches right out of your life, leaving you only with memories. Then, one by one, those memories march out on you, too, and they take pieces of you with them as they go.

  When I started kindergarten in the fall of 1966, I began to appreciate the bits of myself that had gone missing. I spent the morning slunk low in a corner desk at the back of the class wishing myself invisible in a room thick with the smell of pencil shavings and Elmer’s glue. It hadn’t taken long for the other children to figure out I couldn’t speak.

  “What’s wrong with her?” a blond-haired boy with a face oval as a peach pit whispered.

  “I think she’s a retard,” sniggered the squat redhead beside him.