Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  I faced Garden Key and started paddling. After about five minutes, the wind picked up, jostling my kayak and pushing waves over the bow. The sky darkened. I was distracted by a thick limb of sunlight moving across the water’s surface. I had to push harder with my right arm than my left, to fight the cross-pull of the current. A light rain started to fall, then grew heavier. When I looked behind me, I could see Graham making progress toward Loggerhead. Between us, off the stern of my boat, a flying fish whipped through the air. I kept going. My right arm ached, but I could see already that I would miss the beach if I didn’t turn. I shifted my course so I was tacking toward the inlet, not perpendicular to the island but nearly so. The rain worsened. At one point, I lost sight of the lighthouse, though I could still see the beach. With spray hitting my face and waves splashing my boat, I kept going, and just before I reached the beach, I realized that I’d been speaking aloud into the rain. For several minutes, through gritted teeth, I’d been repeating the single word: Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie, Frankie.

  GRAHAM’S FATHER DIED FROM AN aneurysm five years before Graham and I met. Once, after we were engaged, we sat together on the roof deck of my old apartment in Bucktown, and I asked about the years he’d spent in the minor leagues, and about how he’d first become interested in baseball. (A torn rotator cuff had forced him to quit, at which point he’d enrolled in graduate school.) He told me his father had been the one to nurture his talent, but his mouth had tightened as he said it, and I’d let it drop. Graham never spoke in a prolonged way about his father. All I knew about the man was that he’d met Graham’s mother, Julia, in high school, and that while he’d served in Germany, she’d worked in a tire factory in their hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I knew that he hadn’t allowed Graham or his sister to attend church with their mother, which had reminded me of my own father. I knew that he’d spent the late portion of his career as a professor of biochemistry at the University of Chicago.

  Years after that brief exchange on the roof deck, when Frankie was just over a year old, I found Graham standing at our kitchen sink in the middle of the night, staring out at the lake, which had recently started to thaw. The surface was marbled with dark, pooling patches of slush, like worn places on an old blanket. I could tell by Graham’s bearing, the tension in his neck and shoulders, that he was awake.

  It wasn’t rare for us to bump into each other in the night, and usually we were quiet and respectful of each other, like ghosts with shared haunting grounds. But for no reason that I could discern, this night Graham started to talk. He said, “Did I ever tell you that as a kid I was afraid of being hit with the baseball?”

  “That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Little League, when I was eleven. The coach told my parents I was fit for the outfield.” He gave a wan smile. “So my father took me home and we threw the ball around a little, and every time it came near me—I remember it exactly—I cringed. I had a good arm, though. He could see that.”

  I had no idea where the story was going.

  He continued. “He went inside and told me to wait, then came out with some twine from the garage. He stood me next to a tree and tied my wrists behind my back and told me to keep still. Then he walked away and picked up a baseball and pitched it at me.”

  I gasped. He glanced at me, then looked back at the lake.

  “It wasn’t so bad. After half a dozen hits or so, my mother came out and screamed at him. There were some ugly bruises on my chest and arms. The next week at practice, my coach didn’t know what had come over me. He moved me to shortstop. You know the rest.”

  “That doesn’t make it right,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Maybe not. I think about it a lot. Was he right, or wrong, or both?”

  “He was wrong.”

  “Baseball put me through college. Baseball gave me confidence.”

  “There are other ways.”

  “But he didn’t know any. Fathers are supposed to push their sons.”

  “He crossed the line.”

  “But how do you know where the line is,” he said, “until after you’ve crossed it?”

  A wave of frustration rose inside me. That I might be pitted as the indulgent mother because I didn’t approve of a father pitching at his small, fearful son—in that moment, this seemed to encapsulate every disagreement we’d ever had about becoming parents, about whether people can become better versions of themselves for the sake of their children.

  There was a sponge beside the sink. I threw it at him. “You are not your father.”

  He caught the sponge. “I know that,” he said. “But what kind of father am I?”

  THE RAIN HAD PASSED BY the time I got back to the tent. I changed into dry clothes and lay down for an hour, then walked back to stand on the moat wall and keep a lookout for Graham. Loggerhead was little more than a jagged horizontal line in the distance. I paced the wall. Finally, a yellow dot appeared in the choppy blue. The sun descended an inch, and after a while the little kayak grew in size and I could make out Graham in the boat, his strokes even and powerful, his hair faintly metallic in the dying sunlight. I waved until he stopped paddling to wave back. I dropped from the moat wall. When he came ashore, I helped him haul the boat onto the sand.

  “Did you sign the guest book?” I said.

  His smile was wholehearted. “Yes, I did.”

  “I’m glad.”

  I took a step toward the campsite, but he stopped me. “Let’s wait for the sunset.”

  He pulled a bottle of water from his dry bag and took off his life jacket.

  “I kind of wish I’d gone with you,” I admitted.

  “I wish you had, too.” There was no reproach in his voice.

  We pushed our toes into the sand. He said, “You used to trust me, Georgia.”

  This was true. For years, I’d trusted him nearly blindly. Life with Graham had always been filled with small excitements, like walking the frozen lake behind the cottage as the ice groaned and cracked under our feet. He’d taught me to use a kayak before dawn one night when neither of us could sleep. He’d made me practice maintaining the paddler’s box so long that I grew frustrated, and only then did he reveal that he’d planned a kayaking trip through the Apostle Islands, where we would explore the sea caves and camp under the stars and—this part was scheduled specifically with me in mind, because it bored him to tears—tour as many Lake Superior lighthouses as possible.

  “The stakes,” I said. “They’re higher now.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?” I said.

  He didn’t answer. He loved me too much to say what I believed he was thinking: We used to have a different kind of marriage, and I liked that one better.

  He changed the subject. He was in a good mood, and wanted to stay that way. We got to talking about the research team he’d joined, which was studying how air and water interacted during hurricanes and typhoons. He didn’t talk much about work normally, but I’d gleaned that despite the long hours, he liked his colleagues and the job itself. He’d spoken excitedly about a saltwater wave tank in the room next to his office, where a colleague spent twelve hours a day simulating hurricanes, and about how one of his office mates was working to determine the best paths for aircraft flying through storms.

  Now, he explained, hands gesturing in the air between us, his team was about to deploy four new research buoys 250 miles off the coast of Jacksonville, in the thick of Hurricane Alley. The buoys would gather data about the force and temperature of the air and water during weather extremes, and about the sea spray that lubricates surging winds. A Scripps research ship would host the team offshore for weeks, maybe even months.

  I was having difficulty following him—it seemed an odd time to launch into such a detailed explanation—but I liked how he talked about work to me as if we had the same basic foundation of knowledge.

  He said, “The software that processes the data has a few glitches. I’m working them out. Larry’s relieved t
o have a computer guy on the team. Everyone’s headed up for the launch.” He paused to drink from the water bottle. “The Scripps people need someone who knows the back end, just in case. It would be a mistake to count myself out.” As he spoke, he wore grooves in the sand with his heels. “They’re leaving next week.”

  Seeing my expression, he stopped talking. It was dawning on me what this conversation meant to convey. Graham knew I wanted him around more—of course he knew, though I prided myself on not repeating myself endlessly, the way my mother had. He was telling me that for the unforeseen future, my wish would not be granted. Not by a long shot.

  I said, “I don’t want you to go. But it doesn’t sound like there’s much choice.”

  “Are you saying I can go?”

  “You’re not asking my permission.”

  “But I’d like it.”

  “Go,” I said, but my voice broke.

  “It’s a good opportunity,” he said quietly.

  We sat still for a moment. Maybe he assumed I’d been unpersuaded of the importance of the trip, that I didn’t understand the relationship between his job—our bread and butter—and the work he’d be doing on this ship. But to me, all of that was beside the point. A year earlier, if Graham had announced that he was throwing himself more fully into work—well, I might have left him. Though I would not have admitted it, on some level I was grateful to Graham’s work, to the fact that he’d immersed himself so fully. Otherwise, he might’ve wanted to go back to Round Lake.

  Graham shifted forward to kneel in the sand. He pointed at the sun, which was falling fast toward the hazy horizon. “Here we go,” he said. “Watch.”

  I watched. As the sun’s midsection disappeared behind the horizon, a burst of iridescent green flashed at its apex, then was gone.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  The sun sank. The bruised sky closed in. Low waves lapped at our feet.

  Graham said, “I know I disappoint you. I disappoint myself.”

  His hair luffed in the breeze, a nest of white feathers. I moved toward him but he shifted away. He stood and walked toward the campsite, then stopped to let me catch up. I knew he would spend that night, as he’d spent the night before, roaming the island. He hadn’t packed the cuff because there was nowhere to fasten it. Anyway, he’d said, why bother?

  In my mind, I closed a fist around the image of the green flash, that miracle of the natural world—summoned into existence, it seemed, by the man I married.

  10

  FOR OUR NINTH ANNIVERSARY—THIS WAS a year before we left Round Lake—we’d planned a weekend in Chicago, during which Frankie, who was almost three, would stay with Graham’s mother and her husband in their apartment, and we would stay in a hotel. Graham was excited about a geology exhibit at the Field Museum, and I was excited to eat meals in loud restaurants crowded with adults. We were moderate in our ambitions, yes. It would have been the first time I’d left Frankie overnight.

  The day before we’d planned to leave, I met a client and her family at their home in Skokie. An hour into our meeting, I received a call from the sitter, our next-door neighbor Kathy Lyman. Frankie had a fever of 104 degrees. I left my last remaining employee, a student named Tad Curry, in charge of packing up and collecting our fee, and headed home.

  We left for the emergency room after Frankie’s fever reached 106 and he had a febrile seizure in my arms. Harmless, as it turns out, but terrifying. Graham, of limited use in any emergency that required driving, held Frankie’s hand in the backseat while I navigated the rain-wet streets to the hospital. I couldn’t stop glancing at them in the rearview mirror, and at some point I had to veer roughly to avoid a deer standing in the middle of the road. I drove slowly after that, and by the time we reached the emergency room, my baby seemed more or less normal, if still warm to the touch.

  Graham canceled our hotel reservations and called his mother. The next day, when Frankie’s temperature was down, Graham lit on the idea of a last-minute overnight trip to a hotel water park on the edge of town. We argued about whether Frankie was healthy enough, and Graham said he’d take him down a few slides and that would be that. When had I abandoned all spontaneity? he asked. He had that way, when he got an idea in his head, of forcing that idea’s inevitability—not only would we go, but we would enjoy ourselves. We checked into the hotel’s last available room, a suite with a balcony overlooking a narrow strip of lawn, a parking lot, and an interstate. We were in a part of Round Lake that villagers didn’t consider part of Round Lake at all. This was where they kept the chain grocery and restaurants, and next to the hotel there was a pool hall the size of an airport hangar. The hotel water park was something I’d been unfamiliar with before moving to the region. In Florida, water parks were built outdoors, but in the upper Midwest, where it might snow as late as May and early as October, they were built inside mammoth, chlorine-soaked structures with bad acoustics. Some had log cabin or wildlife themes, but many, like the one we visited that weekend, were simple: an intestine’s worth of weaving fiberglass slides dumping out shrieking, brightly clad people.

  It was fun. Frankie was agreeable and clingy. He roped his arms around Graham’s neck each time they scooted together into the rushing water. They came out with openmouthed smiles, Frankie signing Again! Again! That night, we put Frankie down on the sofa bed, then sat a long time on the balcony, watching trucks rumble past on the interstate.

  Earlier that month Graham had submitted his tenure materials; the committee was about to convene. He’d been warned by doctors about stress, but to me he seemed as relaxed as one could reasonably hope to be under the circumstances. He’d been warned, too, about changes in routine, but it didn’t occur to either of us that one night in a comfortable hotel fifteen miles from home might pose a problem. I was especially sleepless, myself, those days, for no reason except the whim of my own insomnia. I was waiting it out. That night in the hotel, I fell gratefully asleep with Graham beside me, his body rigid and his eyes on the popcorn ceiling. Shortly, he would rise to read or take a walk, I assumed. I didn’t worry about what might occupy him in the dark hours. Instead, I was thankful for that pleasant, underwater feeling of near-sleep. It’s not overstating the case to say that I felt blessed by sleep when it came, as if it were tapping me with its wand.

  Hours later, I woke to the sharp, unmistakable sound of shattering glass. Graham wasn’t in bed. Frankie was wailing, but at first I didn’t recognize the noise; he’d stopped using his voice months earlier. He was sitting up on the sofa bed, tears running down his face. He wasn’t hurt. He pointed at the picture window, where vertical blinds swayed. Shards of glass covered the carpet. I went carefully to the window and looked out. Graham was lying on the strip of grass between the hotel and the parking lot, blood streaking his face and hands. He was crying out and holding his leg.

  I did not decide, then and there, while my child wailed and my husband twisted on the ground, to leave Round Lake. I didn’t realize that we would need to leave until long after the local paper had run its ungenerous article, which quoted our neighbors and their reports of odd goings-on at our home, none of which had ever been reported directly to me. In that article, which was accompanied by a piece about the Illinois Regional Center for the Study of Sleep, our neighbor Kathy Lyman, a garrulous woman who played in a bowling league several nights of the week, told a reporter that she’d “never felt safe” having us as neighbors. She said that if I wasn’t aware of what was going on in my own house, I was “deaf, dumb, and blind.” She told about the time she was woken in the night by Graham at the door in his pajamas, asking about the bat house in a “chilling voice.” Another neighbor, someone I’d known only to wave hello, said that our house gave him “the willies,” and cited the fact that Graham came and went and lights stayed on all night.

  Even then, leaving didn’t seem inevitable.

  The night of our anniversary, in the moment that it took for the events to order themselves in my head, as I grabbed Frankie and
headed for the phone, I did not think of moving away. But it did occur to me—not out of spite, but simply as a matter of course—that I would have no choice but to leave Graham.

  Low hedges had partially broken his fall. He’d twisted an ankle and torn a ligament and cracked a kneecap, and he had a concussion. We spent the next twenty hours in the hospital, and when there wasn’t a doctor or nurse in the room, there was often a pair of affable, baby-faced police officers, a woman and a man, who for a time acted inquisitive rather than interrogative. Their questions circled themselves, moved forward and backward in time. They took few notes. For a while I thought they were a little bumbling, that they were more curious about Graham’s affliction than anything else, that they were just killing the hours and enjoying the snacks from the nurses’ station. But after Graham’s knee had been set and his head stitched, they returned to the room and read Graham his rights. It was then that I understood that all the chatting, the snacking, the pats on Frankie’s shoulder—this was the light-handed, avuncular style of detectives who were good at their jobs. We hadn’t been hoodwinked, exactly, but we’d—I’d—been naive.

  Graham was charged with property damage and with recklessly endangering the welfare of a child. This last charge, we were told by the officers, who continued to treat us like pals, would probably be dropped. There was a lot of double-speak, a lot of explanations that didn’t make much sense, but in the end I understood that they’d included the charge for two reasons. One was that we’d both admitted, in describing Graham’s sleep problems over the years, that we’d known the extent of the situation and still let him remain in the care of our son. (I was not charged with reckless endangerment, and it didn’t seem as if this had been under consideration.) The other reason was that without the charge, it was possible the right people wouldn’t get the go-ahead to send the right kind of social worker to work with our family. The administrative shades of gray were lost on me. Something in me wanted to clarify in no uncertain terms that we did not need a social worker. But there was a smaller voice, too, that wondered why we wouldn’t want some help. I called a lawyer from the phone at the nurses’ station, realizing this was something I should have done hours before.