What the Waves Know

by Tamara Valentine

  “Perfect.” My mother had sighed once he’d gone. The letters added up to p-e-r-f-e-c-t, but her tone added up to s-h-i-t-h-e-a-d.

  “Izabella?” I turned toward the sound of Remy’s voice. “Do you want me to open the rest of the windows?”

  I shook my head, sweeping the memory back into the corner of my mind. It was hard to sort out exactly when my parents’ marriage started to unknit. When I tried, the memories got all knotted up together: one moment I recalled my parents tangled up on a blanket in the backyard whispering to each other and laughing, and the next they were standing a world apart screaming at each other and crying. Not for the first time, I wondered if my mother missed him, if she ever longed, like me, for him to come home.

  As I stepped closer to the window, the sharp crags of Knockberry Ridge pulled into view. The sight of them snagged at my gut and I had the distinct feeling one good yank might just go ahead and unravel the entire fabric of me.

  “Hey, come have a look at this.” Remy crossed the room, pointing out the northern window. “You see the really tall boulder out there? That one, down the path there.” I squinted out the window where a huge rock seemed to pitch over the side of the cliff in the shape of a curled wave. Behind it was a ramshackle shed with a broken weathervane on its roof. “That’s Witch’s Peak. It’s where Yemaya watches for the sailors to come home.”

  I nodded, leaning over to scoop Luke up before turning back to study the room where two stained-glass side windows threw braided rainbows wavering along the pink walls in the shape of ships. It reminded me of Jesus flying up to the rafters of the Talabahoo First Congregational Church.

  When we returned downstairs, Mr. O’Malley was fighting with a damp match to light a fire in the hearth. Remy went over to help him.

  “These matches are no good,” she muttered, tossing the entire book into the fireplace. “They can start their own damn fire.”

  “I said I’d have the place ready, and I intend to do so. I’ll get mine from the car,” Mr. O’Malley said, stepping for the door, and I recalled what my mother had said on the boat about him looking after the house in our absence.

  “No, you will not!” Remy bounced to her feet. “You’ll just light that damned pipe of Satan again. I’ll get them.” She vanished through the door, trotting back two seconds later wielding a Zippo in her right hand. Bending low, she fiddled with the stack of kindling then touched the lighter to the paper’s edge, tending it as if it could not be trusted to burn on its own.

  From the kitchen, the phone rang and my mother knocked something to the floor with a thump trying to answer it. It was not until her voice picked up volume in the way of panic that I could make out what she was saying.

  “Really, Mother, now probably isn’t the best time. . . .”

  Across the room, Remy drew her head out from the ashes to raise an eyebrow at me. I shrugged.

  “I’m fine, Mother. Iz is fine. We are all fine. Really, you needn’t come right away.”

  Pause.

  “Well, I don’t care if you believe me. It’s true.”

  Pause.

  “Yes, I’m eating.”

  That was an outright lie. Several times a day plates appeared in the kitchen sink full of food she hadn’t bothered to touch. She prepared meals for me . . . well, at least in the way of pouring some milk over cereal or boiling noodles, but she never ate them. It was a small wonder she needed to wrap herself up like a mummy to stay warm.

  “Maybe later . . . another week or two . . .”

  A weighty sigh and, “Fine.”

  Remy shoved another log in the grate as the phone clinked into its cradle. A second later, my mother made her way into the doorway, leaning heavily against the frame. “Who the hell hooked up the phone service?”

  “Sorry about that.” Sincerity was lacking in Remy’s words, which were muffled by the stone hearth. “I just assumed—”

  “Incorrectly.”

  “—incorrectly, that you might like to be able to ring the operator in the event your house catches fire or you break a leg or something. I radioed ahead from the boat.”

  “Raving lunatic,” my mother grumbled under her breath.

  “And damn proud of it,” Remy chirped, but whether my mother was referring to Remy or Grandma Jo wasn’t plain. I figured it was a fifty-fifty gamble.

  I bit my cheek trying to force back a smile. It was too late.

  “Your grandmother’s coming,” my mother huffed before letting the door swing closed behind her. “Tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was our second day on the island and I had spent a good portion of the afternoon just wandering from room to room, peeking through closets and under carpet edges. There was no shortage of small hidden doors fit for a leprechaun, which Luke took to wiggling in and out of, and cabinets leading to nowhere. I’d decided Captain Booth must have built his whole house around the notion that he’d someday have a lot of treasure to stash. If he ever did, all he’d left behind was a small brass monocle I slipped into my back pocket.

  I found my mother sitting cross-legged on the floor of her room, staring at the closet door among piles of half-hung shirts. The dresser drawers were pulled wide open, but not one pair of socks had yet been put away. From all evidence, there had been a struggle and the shirts had clearly prevailed. The closet door hung lopsided from one hinge with a big chip in the frame and my mother was staring hard at it with bloodshot eyes while holding a screwdriver in one hand. In the back of the room, a stack of my father’s old stories tilted against the wall covered in splinters and dust. He’d brought them over with us on our last visit, but in his rush out of our lives, he’d left them behind. Whisking the corner of her hand across her eyes, she gazed up at me and cleared her throat.

  “All this dust is setting my allergies off,” she croaked, as though I were expected to believe a huge dust bunny had wrestled her to the ground, leaving her crumpled there on the floor sniffling. However, something clearly had. Luke whined, stumbling over to her, and lapped at her wrist.

  Giving Luke a gentle shove, she got to her knees, trying to wriggle the bottom hinge back into place. It slipped away from her, catching the joint of her thumb in the process. She kicked the door then threw the screwdriver at it as if to finish it off.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  The words drifted in like fog, leaving me disoriented and reeling through the years to this very spot on my sixth birthday. And then it was not her but me on the floor just like that, blood trickling down my shin from landing on the closet door. I had followed him that night, had tried to take the wish back and make him stay. The memory knocked the wind out of me.

  My father had stormed upstairs after my tantrum in the kitchen. Standing in khaki shorts and a sweater, he’d already made one attempt at sliding back the closet door before kicking it squarely off its track when I ran up behind him. His shoulders were cocked back with a cowboy’s readiness to take the quarrel outside and end it once and for all, which, in a way, is exactly what happened. I could feel it then, the secret of what I had done taking its first breath, burning its way through me the very way I had imagined the air burning through the gills of that salmon in Potter’s Creek.

  There are times when a person is so mad that a bubble of rage circles right around him so tightly nobody else can get in, and that is how my father was that night. He grabbed my mother’s suitcase, the one printed in Wedgwood blue roses, and flipped it open. Him being fond neither of the color blue or flowers of any sort, I knew then he was bent on leaving at any cost, that he was going with my mother’s suitcase tucked under his arm and my “I hate you” tucked in his ears.

  “I didn’t mean it!” It had started as a whimper climbing up my throat but came into the world as a full-blown wail. “Don’t go!”

  In hindsight, the words should have been more poetic, or profound, or tragic. But I was six and in a hurry to get them out. Throwing myself at him, I latched on to the arm of his purple striped sweater, th
e very one I had picked out on my own for a Father’s Day gift that year. It had taken me three months, and a thousand extra chores, to raise enough money for that sweater; but I did not care one stitch if I tore it in two stopping him.

  The weight of me hadn’t slowed him down; he continued to toss clothes among the blue roses while I swung like a monkey from his arm. The reason he was leaving was my stupid, horrible fault, and I was trying desperately to undo the words I had spoken.

  “Please, please, don’t go. I didn’t mean it. Honest, I didn’t. Daddy, don’t go!”

  “Don’t, Be.” The command came at me just like that, don’t be, as if he wanted me to drop from existence right there. For the first time ever, my father, who had always acted as if the whole world spun just for me, stared straight through me, plucking me from his arm and letting me tumble to the ground like an old winter-scorched burdock. I’d hopped to and latched on again, pleading with all my might.

  “Noooo, Daddy, pleeeease, no!”

  “Goddamn it!” He roared, pushing my foot so it hit a stack of papers and sent them flying to the ground. “Knock it off! Knock it off, I said!! Let go!” Let go, let go, letgoletgoletgoletgo. “Don’t, Be!” The words hit me with the smart of a firm slap on the cheek as a request to God to take my last breath. Don’t be. They tinkled down around me in broken bits. When I looked up, my father’s gray eyes had narrowed to razor shards of shattered glass.

  This is the first and only memory I have of my father hating me; still, one moment of hating does not seem like enough to make someone go away forever.

  With a final whisk, my father shook himself free, sending me flying into the broken closet door with a thump, leaving me crumpled up beside his shoes with air hissing out of me like a popped tire, but he never looked down. Tears bit the corners of my eyes as I untangled my legs, wiping a streak of blood from my shin where the splintered corner had grated the skin. The severity of the situation became water clear: my father was leaving. It was my fault and I could not stop him.

  “Son of a bitch!” My mother had rushed into the room behind us, planting herself firmly between my father and me. She was half my father’s size, but twice mine, and her legs blocked me with two pillars of tan corduroy. “Are you totally fucking crazy?” My father’s eyes dropped to where I’d landed. “Get the hell away from her.” She reached down to put a hand on my head. The look in her eye said she did not give a rat’s ass how big my father was; one more move and she would cut him down to size two inches at a time.

  When the shock of what had just happened cleared, I bolted between the rigid V of my mother’s legs so driven that the confused fear in her eyes passed by almost unnoticed. When she swept me up from behind, I felt the wobble of her legs shifting slightly from their fighting stance to stop me. And then I did a thing I had never done before. I hit her. I balled all my six-year-old fingers up into a neat knot and swung at her with everything I had. I was so angry at that moment, at both of them, that I might have killed her flat out if I’d been seven. I wasn’t. But the blow hit with enough force to shock her into letting go long enough for me to roll back to the floor and bolt for my backpack. To this very day, I can’t help wondering why she didn’t grab him instead.

  “I give up,” my mother now said, sucking the blood from her thumb.

  Climbing to her feet, she tossed the screwdriver to the ground. “I’m going to start a fire and make some tea.”

  I followed her downstairs, snatching my notebook off the dining room table as we walked by. While she started the stove I hopped onto the counter.

  How do you know them? Mr. O’Malley and Remy. I tossed the pad on the counter beside my mother’s mug and studied a scratch on my right knuckle.

  “I don’t know what you mean. I told you, Mr. O’Malley looks after Grandma Izabella’s cottage when we aren’t here. You know, mowing the grass, checking the boiler, putting in the screens. You’ve met him before, when you were little.” She glanced my way, but I noticed she didn’t look me in the eye. “They live down the lane. They always have—well, Mr. O’Malley, at least. I think his daughter lived in Boston or something. I haven’t seen her in years; I didn’t even recognize her.”

  I leaned over the paper and scribbled, She knew Dad.

  My mother paused over the statement before clearing her throat. “Yes, she did. It’s a small island, Iz. Everyone knows everybody else here.”

  I went to reach for the paper again, but my mother put her hand over it.

  “Go get the matches, please. Mr. O’Malley left a pack on the bookshelf.” She turned and walked into the living room. “I want to set the fire before Grandma Jo gets here.”

  The kettle had just begun to shrill and my mother was head down in the mammoth stonework of the living room fireplace trying to convince the wood to burn when Grandma Jo came through the door two hours early dangling a pair of leather flip-flops from her thumb. Holding tight to the 1960s, and liking nothing to come between herself and the natural world, she seldom wore shoes and often wandered around the house stark naked, a habit which drove my mother to distraction. “Jojo the naked Hobo,” my father used to tease her.

  She paused to examine my mother with a perplexed expression. “No, dear.” She laughed. “You’ve got it all wrong. It’s the gas stove you want to stick your head in when you would rather asphyxiate yourself than greet your mother. Don’t you keep up with the poets? It’s all the rage in San Francisco. Wood won’t do at all, at least not unless you can actually light it. Then I suppose it might have a certain poetic cadence to it.”

  “Mother!” My mother withdrew her head, smudged with soot at the cheeks and chin. “I thought you were taking the two o’clock ferry.”

  Grandma Jo crossed the room and hugged her tight, kissing her squarely on her smudged cheek. When she finally let go, she turned to me, taking two steps back to look me over. “It is an impossibility that you are fourteen years old. My God! Have you seen yourself in the mirror? You’re lovely.”

  I ran up to kiss her, letting her wrap me up in one of her famous tourniquet hugs.

  “You look fabulous, Mom,” my mother said, swiping the dust from her hand onto her jeans.

  “You look perplexed,” Grandma Jo answered. “I’ll trade you, a fire for a cup of Earl Grey.”

  “Deal.” My mother’s face relaxed.

  “And you, my gorgeous, please get the bags on the steps and tear them open before one more moment ticks past your birthday while I go call the Girl Scouts and demand a refund for your mother’s woods-woman training.” Grandma Jo rolled up her sleeves, heading toward the fireplace.

  “You know the reason you can’t start a fire, Zorrie?” she called after my mother. “It’s that job of yours. Antique chairs, collectible frames, dusty old whoosits, thingamabobs, and whatsits. Those people you work for are so flipping concerned about how much money they can get from old wood you forget that sometimes,” Grandma Jo tossed a match into the pile with ease, “it is in a thing’s nature to burst into flames just for the fun of it.”

  My mother managed a genuine laugh from the kitchen, surprising me down to my toes. “Well, I may agree with you, but I won’t get many appraisal contracts with that on my business card.”

  “How many old relics does a person need from a bunch of dead artists before they rejoin the living?”

  “A lot,” my mother called through the clinking of teacups.

  “That’s the problem with people. Holding on to every inch of the past, while the present speeds on past them.”

  My friend, Libby, called my grandmother a granola head, and I counted myself lucky for it. While her grandmother spent hours knitting toilet paper cozies, mine had dragged me to lectures at Brown by the Dalai Lama and traveled all over the world volunteering.

  She leaned over the wood shifting the kindling around and in less than a minute the hearth was ablaze. The glow of the fire rendered her cotton tunic transparent. Beneath it, her breasts hung braless in soft mounds. Even at sixty, I
thought she was the second most beautiful woman I had ever seen, next to my mother, who looked just like her. Together they could silence a room simply by floating into it together.

  Setting down the bags Grandma Jo had brought and digging through them, I lifted forth a volume of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, flipping it over in my hand.

  “Oh, and look at these; I got them at the Ben Gurion airport in Israel at one of the kiosks.” She pulled a small square envelope from her bag and peeled a sticker of a Tootsie Roll donning a man’s dress loafer free. Giggling at the label, which read FOOTSIEROLL, she stuck it to the tip of my nose. “They call them Wacky Packs”

  Plucking it free from my skin, I dug back into the bag and pulled forth a compact filled with blushes and tints made from African wildflowers, and a fitted silk shirt with a low-cut sweater to go along with it—styles my mother would clearly not approve of, making them all the sweeter. At the bottom of the bag was a brand-new leather-bound journal and a carved wooden fountain pen that must have cost a fortune. I bolted from the room, shirt and makeup in hand, brushing her cheek with a kiss as I passed.

  When I returned my mother gasped.

  “Look at you!” Grandma Jo gushed, standing up to blend the blush on my cheeks. “You could join the plastic ranks of supermodel.”

  “Mother! She looks . . .”

  “Stunning.” Grandma Jo leveled two hazel eyes in my mother’s direction.

  “That shirt is cut to her navel. Why didn’t you just buy her a roll of cellophane to wrap up in?”

  “Because the store was clean out, if you must know. Zorrie, she’s a young woman now. Don’t you remember being fourteen? I used to have to stand by the door and button you up three notches every time you left, and don’t think I don’t know you used to undo them once you were gone.”

  “No, Mother, I didn’t. That was me, buttoning you up. You were the nudist of the neighborhood.”

  “Well, that’s neither here nor there. She’s growing up and dressing her like a football player will not stop her from going right ahead and doing it anyway. Look, she’s even developing beautiful breasts.”