What the Waves Know

by Tamara Valentine

  “I thought we’d name him Luke. You know, like in the Bible. I always liked that name. It would have been yours if you’d been a boy. We can bring him with us.”

  My hand froze halfway down the soft spine, and she must have noticed because she turned abruptly toward the kitchen to answer the ringing phone, which she’d been ignoring for a solid minute. I gazed down at the puppy trying to fish the Gospel of Luke from a million daydreams during Sunday school. All I could recall was the part about Jesus’s resurrection, and I realized that my mother wasn’t just searching for my voice. She was trying to breathe life back into everything that had withered around us. “It’s going to be okay, Iz. You’ll see.”

  She didn’t say where we were going. She didn’t have to. Since there seemed to be no going forward, we were going back. Back to the spot where my voice had fallen against the night and shattered into silence eight years earlier, to the moment my father disappeared.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The ferry’s hull knocked against the landing like a bloated white whale, thudding in time to the argument my mother was having with the ticket agent. One, two, three, four . . . , I ticked silently, as though the same laws of nature choreographing thunder and lightning could rule over a knocking ferry.

  A large poster on the side of the boat read: PARDON AMERICA! NIX NIXON Making clear the fact that whoever owned the ferry, like most of the country, was still chewing sour grapes over the Watergate scandal.

  Tracing the shoreline to the tip of the cove, I studied the jagged granite face of Anawan Cliffs steepling into the sky. I had been there a hundred times with my father, but I wasn’t allowed to tell because the drop-off plummeted three hundred feet into a sea dappled with boulders of smoky quartz and there were no railings to keep you on top. The very type of place my mother would not have allowed me to go. The cliffs were just as famous for the number of miles a person could see from their crests as the number of people who had tossed themselves off them. My father and I had climbed the trail up to the rocky crest a dozen times together. The sky was so clear the last time we went you could see the pointy peaks of the Newport Bridge poke straight into the clouds. I remembered thinking it looked like a giant skewer piercing a marshmallow.

  “Over there, Be. Can you see it?” My father had lifted me onto his shoulders like he was tossing a scarf around his neck. “Don’t be afraid. Nothing is going to happen. Just don’t let go.” Don’t let go. Weaving my fingers into his hair, I’d clenched my fists while he crept up to the ledge until his toes were close enough that pebbles had skidded down the edge and into the waves below, sending three tuxedoed gulls into flight. “Look at that.”

  The gulls stretched their wings until they were paper airplanes sailing gracefully over the rocks. My father watched them wistfully, his voice drifting a million miles away. “Someday we’re going to fly straight into the clouds like that.”

  I can’t say where his mind was then, only that it had been elsewhere, because that was when I first came to realize I was afraid of heights. My stomach lurched, spinning my head into a somersault and setting my body teetering as I tilted sideways. The jerking must have snapped him to, because he grabbed my wrist as I slid down his shoulder, stepping sideways so that I swung over the ledge and back onto the cliff with a screech.

  “You flew!” My father laughed, kneeling down to brush the bangs from my brow. Then his laughter died and he looked me deep in the eyes. “What did it feel like? Was it amazing?”

  How do you answer a question like that? It felt like a father tossing his child to the rocks to be smashed into a million bits. It felt like tumbling to my death.

  “Was it?”

  The memory was so clear I could almost hear his voice on the wind and I found myself nodding.

  “Ma’am.” The woman at the ticket counter’s voice jolted me back to the present. “Like I said, I got room for you and your girl. I can even squeeze in the mutt, but the carport’s full.” Wild mahogany curls spilled out of a loose pile pinned to the crown of her head with a broken pencil. Folding her arms onto the counter, she leaned in toward my mother. The milky porcelain of her skin was slapped pink at the cheeks from too much sun.

  Luke gave a little whine. I bent low, popping the crate open and snuggling him close.

  The muscles along my mother’s neck visibly tensed, drawing her shoulders into an involuntary shrug as she dug the wallet from her bag. “Here, Iz, hold this.” She shoved the purse in my direction. “He isn’t a mutt; he’s a purebred shar-pei puppy.”

  Luke licked his nose, stretched, and curled into a mound of toffee-colored folds as a hollow whistle rolled forth from the boat’s stern.

  “What I see,” the woman leveled steely blue eyes at my mother, aimed, “is that some smart Sally went and got you to give your purse for hauling away an old mass of wrinkles and called it a dog.” And fired. “And if you would like me to haul your wrinkled old mass out to the island tonight, it’ll be twenty-two dollars for the lot a’ ya, minus the auto, ’cause there’s no room.”

  Bull’s-eye.

  I bit the stiff collar of my jacket so my mother wouldn’t see the grin spreading over my lips, but not before the woman behind the counter saw it and tilted her head inquisitively.

  “But, if you’d like to write your name and number on this tag and leave the keys, Telly over there would be happy to deliver it to you sometime next week, or the week after.” The woman nodded at a too-thin man who might have passed for twenty-five years old as easily as seventy-five. The remnant of a single tattoo, which could have been either a naked lady or a parrot with a broken wing, had faded to a purple splodge on his left arm. Telly gave my mother a how-do nod, letting flash a golden stud where a front tooth belonged.

  The woman dropped me a quick wink, and in that instant I knew two things for sure: my mother’s shiny silver BMW was not getting on that boat, and this stranger was somebody I could quickly grow to love.

  “Next week! Next week?”

  “Or the week after.”

  “You expect me to just leave it here until whenever? What if I pay more?”

  “Miss, I don’t expect anything from anybody. But I have a boat full of people waiting to leave, and the Yemaya Festival is coming up. My carport’s crammed tighter than a nest of rats until it’s over. I don’t give two hoots about your money or your dog or your uppity attitude. Unless you’re using any of it to build me a bigger carport you’re out of luck, because there isn’t any more room. So you’d better make up your mind where you fancy sleeping tonight, here in Suttersville or across the sound on Tillings.”

  I slid my hand into the compartment my mother had unzipped in her bag and slipped three cigarettes free before tucking them into my own bag. It wasn’t true that we were wealthy. My mother had bought the car used when my father’s Jeep finally refused to be coaxed back to life with money from my father’s pension and insurance, which the university had released when it became clear he wasn’t coming back. The difference it made was not one of shifting from glass to crystal but from recycled Dixie cups to the variety that could withstand a dishwasher without dissolving.

  It was true, though, that in the years since my father went missing my mother had become guarded and cool in a way that gave her an uppity air. My father’s disappearance had been an all-you-can-eat buffet for the rumor mills around town and I guess it was just easier to freeze the world out than be burned each time you trusted another person. There was a lot about my mother that confounded me, but that was a thing I understood.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your name. You do have one, don’t you?”

  “Remy. Remy O’Malley. Well, technically Mandolin, but I go by O’Malley.”

  “Remy.” The name escaped my mother’s lips in the form of a whisper that seemed aimed at nobody and the color seemed to wash from her face. Studying the lines of the woman’s face like they might give up some secret about her, she cleared her throat
then lowered her eyes down to the counter. “Fine. Ms. Mandolin.”

  “Remy.”

  “Remy.” My mother’s jaw tightened, forcing the name into the air in a way that appeared to hurt. Giving the Anawan Cliffs one last glance, I gazed up at my mother, who seemed suddenly discombobulated, nervous almost, in the company of this woman. “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to speak to your boss.”

  “Suit yourself. Telly! This nice lady would like a word.” Remy Mandolin tossed her head back with a deep smoky laugh and flipped the sign in the window to CLOSED. I wondered if she would really leave us standing there on the dock with a tattooed gold-toothed pirate or mass murderer—it was hard to tell. My mother glanced between the two of them before coming to her senses, or at least admitting defeat.

  “Arrrgh! Fine, here!” The keys to the BMW tinkled onto the counter and my mother scribbled the information onto the tag, giving it a nudge toward the window with her finger. “First thing next week,” my mother huffed, grappling with the last trunk and Luke’s crate.

  “Or the week after,” Remy quipped, scooping up the keys and sliding the Plexiglas closed before my mother could reply. On the other side of the window, she hung the keys on a little brass hook, pausing to read the tag. I couldn’t help but notice her face twist up a bit as she mouthed the name, or the way she glanced back at my mother with a contemplative expression while my mother kicked the trunk, mumbling something about a royal pain in her ass, and stuffed the tickets in her back pocket.

  “At least we’re rid of her,” she grumbled.

  Staring at the sea, I could not stop the butterflies fluttering in my stomach. Here is the thing about an island . . . there is no escape; you are stuck with whatever is there. At least on the mainland running away was an option, if only I could figure out which direction to point my legs.

  “Okay, got everything?” My mother sighed, looking down at me.

  I patted my jacket pocket seeking the crusty rectangle of a map Grandma Jo had given me three years earlier, and then slid my right hand down to the pocket of my jeans, running it over the hard edges of the Yemaya Stone from Potter’s Creek. It was the one thing left on this earth that connected me to my father, and although I was too old to believe he could hear me if I wished into a dead piece of amber, I still tried. Just in case. I wanted him to know I hadn’t forgotten him, that I was still looking even if everyone else had given up. I didn’t want him to forget me.

  I nodded, snuggling Luke back into his crate for the trip.

  The Mirabel, a reincarnated fishing rig serving its second life as a passenger ferry, teeter-tottered over the waves, dragging my stomach along with it. In my experience, there are three types of boats: boats big enough to barrel gracefully through the waves, boats small enough to zip roller-coaster fashion over them, and every vomitous size in between. The Mirabel fell woozily into the final category, climbing each swell lazily before sledding slowly down the opposite bank of the swell until my breakfast washed rhythmically over the back of my throat. Even Luke had resigned himself to the back of his crate amid a banter of whimpering.

  “Do you want your mittens, Iz?” My mother dug into her jacket pocket, pulling forth two bright red mittens. “You look cold. Why don’t you let go of the bar; the metal’s going to turn your fingers raw with frostbite.”

  I shook my head in small calculated wags, not wishing to give the Mirabel any further cause to rock. My knuckles were not white from the cold but from clutching the handrail in an attempt to steady the boat, or at least my place on it. The cold would need to outwrestle my nausea to make me let go, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen.

  My mother tucked the little red mittens away again and pried free a rumpled pack of Merits. I was retching before the match even took.

  “Iz?” Flicking the cigarette overboard, she pulled me upright, tucking my hair into my collar in time to save it from being caught in the splash of undigested pancakes left over from my birthday breakfast. “Here, I’ve got a soda in here somewhere.” She rifled through her handbag, digging loose a half-sipped Coca-Cola covered with loose tobacco and lint bits.

  By the time she actually managed to unscrew the top, my vomiting spell had set off a chain reaction and Luke was now collapsed in a pool of regurgitated kibble, as well. My mother was handling the mess and the stench with clinical efficiency until a familiar voice sounded over her shoulder.

  “Are you trying to see if that child can turn her intestines out onto the deck?” Remy sauntered up. “The only sound reason for feeding cola to a person with sea stomach is if you don’t particularly like them.”

  I have found it generally bad wisdom to share a thing like that before you have determined the nature of a relationship so I clenched my jaw tight, now that the cat was out of the bag, half expecting my mother to shove the whole bottle down my gullet.

  “The only thing worse is fried clams, which have the God-given power to knock you to your knees to pray for death. And don’t stand her up; lay her flat so she moves with the boat.”

  “Don’t you have something to do?” Twisting three directions trying to steady me, my mother looked like a porcelain doll whose limbs some angry child had bent into broken and unnatural angles. “Eat some fried clams, maybe?” It was meant to be snotty, but my mother was too busy trying to keep us aboard to really pull it off.

  The snowy skin pulled tight over her flushed cheeks as Remy Mandolin popped the top off a metal canister with a tinny snap. Her lack of fear, primarily of my mother, filled me with the urge to climb into her lap and stick my tongue out at the world. The only other person I knew who was completely unafraid of my mother was Grandma Jo. Everything about Remy Mandolin was bold, like the wild samba of the djembe drums my mother had taken me to see last year during a Brazilian festival in Mystic, Connecticut. I could almost see her bare feet stomping gypsy circles, a rainbow skirt twirling wildly to and fro at her ankles. Still, as much as I respected her, I wished she had not opened the tin so close to me, for the strong punchy scent of fresh ginger hit me full in the nostril, setting me on another retching spell.

  “Here, this is what she needs.”

  “Don’t tell me what my daughter needs,” puffed my mother as she made a valiant attempt to keep me from flopping over the handrail. “Look what you did!”

  Once I had emptied my stomach of its last crumb, Remy stuck a thread of fresh crystallized ginger into my mouth. “Chew.” My eyes must have widened to the size of horse chestnuts, because Remy laughed right out loud. “Chew.”

  Never having been forced to chew raw roots of any kind before, I was unprepared for the intense burn in my mouth. Tears pooled in my eyes, and the rush of warm sugary heat left a trail clear from my tongue to my tailbone. Within seconds the lurching in my stomach slowed and, with two more straps of ginger, stopped altogether. When it appeared I was no longer at risk of dropping off the edge of the boat, Remy bent low and tossed a strap of ginger inside Luke’s crate. He sniffed the string of ginger tentatively before gnawing halfheartedly at one corner while holding the other to the floor of his crate with one paw.

  “There now, lay her flat, belly down, so she doesn’t drown in her own bile.”

  My mother did as she was told with surprisingly little rebellion, balling up her jacket and tucking it beneath my ear. Waves lapped up the boat’s hull. I watched them carefully, every so often glimpsing a flash of silver darting below them. I wriggled the small hunk of amber from my pocket, tucked my hand below my head, and watched for Yemaya until the bounce of light off the waves made me retch again. For an instant, I fantasized about rolling myself off the edge and into her arms just to free myself of the boat.

  “Let her be while you use the hose there to rinse that crate clean,” Remy directed. “Otherwise, I’ll have to charge you a clean-up fee for hosing down the deck. Besides, I’m dead certain my father will appreciate not having regurgitated dog chunks dropping all over his car. Runs the taxi stand on the wharf.” Remy tuck
ed a loose bronze curl back into her pencil knot. “Even if he lets you aboard with that mess, I’m betting whoever you’re lodging with on the island will not.”

  “Thanks, but I can figure out how to take care of my own dog.” Looking her over carefully, my mother appeared to have gone the way of Lot’s wife, paling to the color of salt.

  Had I not still felt too woozy to write, I might have reached for the notepad I always kept in my pocket and reminded her that according to the governing rules of birthday gift giving, Luke was technically all mine and not hers at all. “And we’re not lodging with anyone. We’re staying at the Booth House.” She seemed preoccupied, as though turning a thought over and searching for a spot to set it down.

  Now Remy, too, appeared to be reaching, trying to pull forth something that refused to come loose. She followed my mother, letting a steeliness settle in her slate blue eyes. When she spoke again, her voice hit the air in measured tones. “The Booth House?”

  “It was my husband’s grandmother’s cottage.” Her eyes seemed suddenly far away as she gave Luke’s cage a shove.

  I rolled onto my back, trying to remember the last time my mother had referred to Daddy as her husband. Was he still? I mean, technically speaking. It wasn’t as if there had ever been a divorce.

  “Well then . . . ,” Remy whispered. I squinted up at them, watching the expression on her face change, as though the thought she’d been tugging at had finally broken free. “I suppose you already know my father.” A moment of perfect silence passed between them before Remy added, “I guess that explains it. Why don’t you bring your girl into the cabin? There’s a cot in back she can lie down on.”

  “Explains what?” My mother dug another cigarette from her bag, lighting it and taking a deep drag before leveling her eyes at Remy. Annoyance hung tight to her words, but Remy Mandolin’s back was already turned.

  “Like I said, there’s a cot. She’s welcome to it while you hose off that mutt and its cage.” She shook her head halfway across the deck as if in wonderment about something. “I don’t want it stinking up my boat.” Breasts as round as grapefruits pushed her shirt into soft bouncy curves, the sort of which I dreamed would one day sprout from my own chest. She was dressed in faded jean cutoffs torn high enough for white crescents to peep out from the fringe and a man’s button-down shirt knotted at a waist as thin as a chopstick. Fleshy hips rounded into a peach-shaped rear end, which gave a mighty shake in my mother’s direction as she slipped into the control cabin. The gesture was as good as any four-lettered word. I could not see my mother’s expression but—my right hand to God—her hair tensed, pulling the black tresses up a notch.