Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  He saw the concern on my face. “Straight down,” he said.

  I was already wearing my suit, so I dropped my shorts and T-shirt to the deck and climbed over the rail. He put out his arm to steady me. Once we were seated side by side on the railing, we looked at each other. We were both grinning. His face took on a boyishness when he smiled; the lines around his mouth and eyes swapped their age for youth, his light eyes brightened. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that he was a quarter-century older than I was. He maneuvered until he was standing on the outside ledge, holding on behind his back. I did the same.

  “Let’s go at the same time,” I said.

  He put out his hand and we threaded fingers, which I hadn’t expected.

  He counted to three and we jumped. I lost his hand after we submerged. The water was warm and I let myself sink, landing softly on the seabed before coming up into the heat. We climbed onto the dock and wrapped ourselves in towels, then went back to work.

  Half an hour later, I looked up. Charlie felt my attention on him and raised his eyes. I said, “We stopped by the Abyss Gallery on Monday.”

  He rested his cheek in his hand and waited.

  “I don’t want to make a big deal out of it,” I said. “But when Frankie saw your art, he spoke.”

  “What did he say?”

  I stared at the sea turtle in my hand, at the encyclopedia page beneath the artwork. The heading read: MINES AND MINING. “Just one word,” I said. “Your name.”

  When I looked up, Charlie had one hand pressed to his lips, but I could tell he was smiling. “Isn’t that something?” he said.

  Later, after we’d made our way back to the Lullaby, I sent Frankie up the lawn with Lidia to take a bath, and set to cleaning out the tote I’d used since arriving in Miami. I threw out receipts and a half-eaten granola bar and a pair of dirty socks of Frankie’s that I’d been carrying around for at least two weeks, and then I noticed something unfamiliar at the bottom of the bag. I pulled it out and held its dense weight in my palm, running a fingernail over the rough surface. It was a couple of inches tall, painted in antiqued powder blue. Hair in ropes, stomach tautly curved, fin flipped in motion: it was a small cast-iron mermaid, scalloped tail folded beneath her and one hand behind her head, expression a little wistful. I set her on the ledge above the sink while I washed dishes, but the feeling she gave me—hollow and exposed, as if I were being watched—rose up, and I took her to my berth and stashed her deep in the storage trundle. I returned to the salon, my heart beating fast.

  But I needed to see her again. I retrieved her from the bunk and settled her on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, and that is where she stayed.

  JELLYFISH SEASON CAME EARLY THAT year. I was in the office and Charlie and Frankie were sitting in the rocking chairs on the porch, taking turns with a pair of binoculars. Through the window, I heard Charlie say, “What is it?” When I looked out, I saw Frankie make the sign we’d learned, one hand against the other, pulling away and moving back again.

  “What’s that?” Charlie said.

  I blurted, “Jellyfish!”

  “They’re early,” said Charlie when I came out to the porch.

  I couldn’t see them at first, but a moment after they appeared the water was thick with them. They came in a wind sock pattern, a leviathan in aggregate, dense at the start before petering out. Charlie told us this was called a bloom, that it happened every summer, usually not until August. It was still only mid-July, but there had been a rash of small storms in the Atlantic, and they’d washed in prematurely.

  We went down to the dock to watch them advance. These were moon jellies, the umbrellas cloudy along the rims and a bud of pink at the heart. Before the first one crossed in front of the dock, there was a flurry in my peripheral vision, and I turned to see Charlie drop his shirt and dive into the water. Frankie looked up at me and I gripped his shoulders. Charlie surfaced, facing the advancing battalion.

  I called, “What are you doing?”

  “Swimming!”

  He dove again. When he came up, he was in the thick of the bloom, less than a foot from a jellyfish in every direction. He dove again and came up again in a different place. Each time he came up, he looked around to get his bearings, keeping his arms in close and staying buoyant using just his legs, and once—he was yards down the channel by this time, hemmed in on every side—he gingerly lifted one arm to wave. Frankie waved back. The look in Frankie’s eyes as he watched Charlie was of pure amazement.

  There was a feeling I’d had several times in my life, including when I realized I was in love with Graham: it was the smidgen of sadness that, at least for me, always accompanies happiness. The disquieting underbelly of loss that comes with getting something you badly want. The thing I’d always understood, even before my mother got sick, was that anything started will inevitably end, anything loved will be lost. I suppose it was possible that Frankie could see the dark underside of joy in my eyes when he looked up at me. Charlie was too distant to see it. He’d reached the far side of the bloom unharmed, and was treading back up the channel behind the jellies, like a shepherd. All he could see from that distance were my arms beckoning him back to us, my mouth open in laughter.

  I SAID NOTHING TO CHARLIE about what I’d found in my bag. I didn’t know how long it had been there, and as far as I knew—this is what I told myself—it had come from Frankie, lifted somewhere in a fit of love. It might even have come from Graham, though gifts from Graham had always tended to be practical in nature, sunglasses or a sweater or a new radio for my car. The following week, I was tasked with culling pieces for another show at the Abyss—Henry Gale had mentioned, in a giddy way that I found sweet, that the “Battles of the Deep” show had sold out—and I started with some of the recent sea turtles. I chose an eel and a couple of jellyfish, a squid and a nautilus, a starfish and seashell. The show would be called, simply, “Sea Creatures.”

  As I was moving boxes, reorganizing, a paper on Charlie’s desk caught my eye. The desk was normally bare but for the pencils and eraser and sharpener—I’d seen him stand there only a few times—but today, beneath a glass saltshaker half-filled with rice, there was a drawing. It was rough and lined, not shaded like the others. The girl’s hair was a little longer than mine, her arms and shoulders a touch more toned—and there was the matter of the scalloped tail and ridged dorsal fin. But there was no mistaking the rough curls and dark eyes and inky eyebrows, the plump cheeks, the beauty mark above the lip, the pointed chin, the spray of lines at the corner of each eye. She was seated on a dock with her tail curled beside her, her palm flat on the wood, and she smiled with her mouth open a little, as if she’d just come to the end of a sentence.

  It was incredible, seeing myself rendered in Charlie’s hand. It had been a long time since I’d considered—really considered—what I looked like.

  When I was nineteen, home from my first year of college, my dying grandmother had lived in our guest room, occupying my mother’s every bit of energy. They’d sat talking in bed in the mornings before I was up, a tray of coffee and toast between them, and once, after I’d woken early to meet Sally for windsurfing lessons, I’d overheard my mother and grandmother agreeing offhandedly that my “plain” face was mitigated, gratefully, by my “spectacular hair” and “lovely bosoms.” I’d stopped short outside the room. They’d gone on to talk about, of all things, tea towels—how a few well-considered tea towels could freshen the look of an entire kitchen. The two conversations—my plain looks and the restorative powers of tea towels—have always been paired in my mind. As an adult, I came to realize that the notion about well-chosen tea towels was correct. I felt I had no choice but to agree that the assertion about my appearance was correct as well.

  My mother never would have said such a thing to my face, even backhandedly. The most she’d ever said to me was that a little lipstick gives a girl some color. To hear her speak so unprotectively of my face was as jarring as it might have been to hear her having
an orgasm. I left the house that morning red-faced, without saying good-bye.

  My “lovely bosoms” had come early. I’d worn a training bra in third grade. Later, my friends would still be praying like zealots for the arrival of their own breasts while I’d taken to wearing oversize shirts to hide mine. My mother, also large-breasted, indulged my oversize-clothing phase and let me wear T-shirts over my swimsuits.

  But it was my walk, not my face or premature breasts, that plagued my teenage years. I begged for lessons with a modeling coach to sort out my pigeon-toed gait. My father, after a particularly good tour season, relented, and the summer I was fifteen I spent Saturday mornings at the Fontainebleau hotel with an acting and modeling coach named Priscilla Teague. Again and again, I walked the length of a catwalk under Mrs. Teague’s critical gaze, starting over each time my feet turned inward. I left every session close to tears. My mother begged me to quit. She told me I was perfect in her eyes, that this silly thing did not matter, that it was barely noticeable to anyone but me. I persevered, and the lessons did help to some extent, though still my natural walk comes through when I’m tired or self-conscious.

  This mermaid version of me, filtered through Charlie’s generous lens, came as a great relief. I wished my mother could have seen it.

  Beside the mermaid on the dock were several small objects. It took a moment for me to sort out what they were, not because they weren’t accurately portrayed but because I was having trouble focusing. My heart had quickened and my vision had blurred, as if I were underwater. Finally, I recognized them: a shark, a conch, and a scuba diver. Frankie’s toys. I heard Charlie’s steps in the hallway and looked up to see my discovery register on his face. From beyond him came the sounds of Frankie arranging bowls on a tray for lunch, his little feet shuffling.

  I said, “Is this me?”

  “Of course,” Charlie said. He crossed his arms over his chest and cleared his throat.

  “I love it.”

  “Good, because they want more. I’m working on a whole slew of Georgia mermaids.”

  “Really?”

  “That one’s just a sketch. Keep it. Call it a modeling fee.”

  He lingered a moment, then turned away. I found a plastic sleeve and slipped the drawing into my bag. I stood at the window and took in the sea air. Next door, Charlie’s neighbors—husband and wife, no sign of the daughter—were poised to jump together off their porch the way we’d jumped off Charlie’s. Their arms waved joyfully all the way down.

  I SENT OFF A PACKAGE for baby Jennifer, kicky pants and matching cardigan and cream-colored loafers, and the following week when I checked Charlie’s post office box, there was a letter with a Seattle postmark. In the car outside the post office, I held the envelope to the sunlight, and though I couldn’t make out words, I could see that it was comprised of a few handwritten pages. When I handed the mail to Charlie, I saw him register the envelope, and though he didn’t open it in my presence, it seemed to please him.

  New mermaid drawings appeared. He didn’t put them in boxes with the others. He left them on the standing desk—I pictured him there, one foot balanced on the other in that way he had, drawing me—and I sorted through them myself.

  We didn’t chitchat a great deal, Charlie and I. But once, while we were both in the office and Frankie was lying on his belly in the corner, working with his colored pencils, I found myself describing my failed business, all the way from how I’d started in the admissions office and worked my way up, to how my last client had told me, red fingernail stabbing the air in front of my face, that if her daughter didn’t make it into her safety school, I would hear from their attorney. When I finished, Charlie was stifling a smile.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “I just—well, you don’t strike me as particularly—how do I put it? Authoritative.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Don’t pout. I’d hire you. But I can just picture these nervous parents and their mopey kids. Everyone expecting you to perform a miracle.”

  “I didn’t perform miracles. I wasn’t trying to. I just wanted the kids to—concentrate, I guess. Show their best selves. I had this idea that if they would all just quit it with the oboe lessons and the volunteering on weekends, if they were sincere and knew what I knew about what colleges really want, even if they knew which colleges wouldn’t want them in a million years—I thought I could help them get through it. I know it sounds naive.”

  “Maybe a little.” He chuckled and shook his head. “I’m sorry. Desperate parents—you stood no chance.”

  I’d never thought of it this way, as doomed to fail from the start, like when a little shop opens up and the minute you see how the window is arranged, you know it’ll be gone in a month. I’d been retracing my steps, trying to figure out where exactly I’d gone wrong. This other way of thinking about it was worse in a way, but in a way it was a relief.

  “Don’t dwell,” he said, waving a hand.

  This struck me as funny in itself. I laughed and he looked confused. I wiped my eyes. In front of me on the linoleum was a mess of sea animals, all seeming to swim together in the same brew. It struck me suddenly that it was possible, what Charlie had said—that it was no big deal that I’d wasted thousands of dollars and run a business into the ground. That I’d made foolish choices and had no one to blame but myself. Maybe all I’d needed after it happened was someone to tease me a bit, to take it all less seriously.

  Once a week, we took the Zodiac to Soldier Key and roamed the beach. I forced Frankie into water wings—I’d bought them against the advice of his swim teacher—and both he and Charlie balked. “They reassure me,” I said firmly, and they shut up about it. Frankie played a game where he tiptoed through the shallow water wearing his mask, then dipped quickly under, to spy on the fish as they went about their lives. He was undeterred by a lack of goings-on, and every so often, when he did manage to catch sight of a fish darting past, he squealed audibly. The sound thrilled me.

  Charlie and I watched him from the shade of the hammocks at the water’s frothy edge. I said, “My mother would have adored him. I mean, she really would have adored him.” I felt the inadequacy of my own words.

  Charlie cleared his throat. “I knew your mother a little.”

  I looked at him, his silver-stubbled jaw and lined eyes.

  He kept his gaze on Frankie. He said, “Once, after Jenny died, I came home to this terrible racket in my house. Inside, there was your mother sitting at my piano, playing—”

  “ ‘A Mighty Fortress’?”

  He nodded. “I must say—”

  “She did not sing well.”

  “No, she did not. But she was belting it out, I’ll tell you. And Viv and another lady were sitting there with their glasses raised, singing along. I said hello and went into the kitchen. Sometimes women can be a little intimidating, I find.”

  The image of Charlie shuffling in the doorway while my mother sang a rousing rendition of one of the three hymns she knew how to play, her fingers sliding around, missing every fifth or sixth note—it was easy to picture. “Probably best you got out of there,” I said.

  “I met your father once or twice. He was never one for the social stuff. I remember thinking we were probably two of a kind.”

  “Not really.”

  “As husbands go . . .” he said, but then he didn’t finish his sentence. He said, “She was around a lot, in those days, usually when I wasn’t home. Vivian said they laughed a lot. People get uncomfortable—it’s not their fault—but not your mother.”

  “No, not her.”

  I’m not sure I ever saw my mother uncomfortable. I would have liked to ask her about this, to see if maybe there was some trick to it. How could we have been so alike in so many ways, and so unalike in this one?

  The other hymns she knew by heart were “We Are Marching in the Light of God” and “I Love to Tell the Story.” She could play a couple of others�
�“Amazing Grace” included—haltingly, with close peering at the sheet music. I had the urge to sit in that room, on the evening of Charlie’s memory, and sing along. It was nothing I would have enjoyed while she was alive.

  I said, “What happened after that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did she stop coming over?”

  He tossed a clump of seaweed into the shallows. “I doubt it. I don’t know what happened next. I came here.”

  People get uncomfortable, I thought.

  Frankie had gone from trying to catch the fish in his sights to trying to catch them with his hands. He ran to and fro, knees high, splashing and lunging, laughing in his soundless way each time he came up empty.

  Charlie pointed to my boy. “She would have thought he hung the moon. She would have thought he was—” He took a breath. “Magical.”

  I sat quietly in the warm surf, letting this wash over me.

  He said, “And you—she would’ve been damn proud.”

  ON THE WAY HOME FROM Soldier Key, Charlie throttled down, then killed the engine as we drifted over a shoal. Frankie and I looked at him for an explanation, and he said, “I have something to show you.”

  “What?” I said.

  What? signed Frankie.

  To Frankie, he said, “A while back I told your mom that I used to have a boat.” He stepped to port and searched the water. “There,” he said, pointing.

  We peered into the clear, sunlit water. At first I didn’t see much of anything, just sand spotted here and there with sea cucumber and urchins. But then we drifted, and into view came the white hull of a small boat, upended on the ocean floor.

  “Your boat?” I said.

  What happened? signed Frankie.

  “Sank,” said Charlie.

  “How?” I said.

  “My best guess? Hose clamp failed. It was late, getting dark.”

  The stilt house was half a mile away, maybe more. “What did you do? Did you swim?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But I hung around for a while first, to watch it go down.”