Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  “And you just left it here.”

  He shrugged. “Not much choice. All the maintenance, all the fuel—I was glad to be rid of it.”

  Frankie signed and I laughed.

  “What?” said Charlie, looking between us.

  “He said you littered,” I said.

  “Ha! Want to see more litter?”

  Frankie nodded.

  “You got it,” said Charlie. He started the engine and turned away from the capsized boat, then puttered east, staring hard into the water. He cut the engine and told me to throw the anchor. “You’ll need your mask,” he said to me. “I’ll take the boy down first.”

  It was an oft-ignored boating rule, I knew, to never leave a vessel unattended when anchored. Climbing into the Zodiac was a breeze—there was a level surface on the engine at exactly the right height—but still I appreciated his prudence. He helped Frankie adjust his mask, then jumped in and told Frankie to swim to him. He held him loosely on the surface as they peered into the green depths. They swam a few yards from the boat, then Frankie kicked excitedly and raised his face, waving with both hands and squirming in Charlie’s arms.

  I don’t know the word! he signed.

  “Let’s surprise her,” said Charlie to Frankie.

  They peered down again, and after a few minutes returned to the boat, and it was my turn. I swam to where they’d been, my face in the water. What emerged from the depths did so abruptly, as if a curtain had been drawn. The plane of its lid was unnaturally black, the curve of its case instantly recognizable. I could see, scattered in the sand, a few ivory keys, and when I’d come to the far side of it, the keyboard itself was revealed, broken and dipping. A yellow fish darted into a crack. The whole thing had settled deeply into the seafloor, splintered and flattened like a crushed can. It must have been dropped from a good height.

  “Crazy, right?” said Charlie when I climbed aboard.

  What’s the word? Frankie signed.

  “Piano,” I said. “We’ll look it up.”

  “Grand piano,” Charlie said.

  To Charlie I said, “Do you know how it got here?”

  He shrugged. “I figure someone was sick of practicing.”

  FRANKIE ASKED TO FISH EVERY time we arrived at Stiltsville, usually right after depositing whatever toy Charlie handed over into one of his little pockets. Unless the bay was too choppy, Charlie took him on the Zodiac for an hour or so while I worked. Sometimes I went along. Once, we drove out to the flats east of the radio tower, a stone’s throw from the continental shelf, where the waves rose and the water darkened. Charlie handed me his rod so he could dig in my bag for snacks, and while I was holding it, there came a tug that nearly pulled the thing from my grip. I braced myself against the gunwale and struggled for some time, gaining ground and losing it. Charlie and Frankie whooped, Charlie with his voice and Frankie with his arms. For several long minutes, I was possessed—it is the only word—by the fight. My heart beat forcefully. When finally I was able to wrestle the struggling fish from the water, we saw that it was not a bonefish or sea trout or sea bass or tarpon, all of which we were used to catching and throwing back or frying up for lunch—it was a young bull shark, thirty or so pounds. The black eyes were mad with what looked to me like fear.

  “Let him go!” I shouted to Charlie.

  He got behind me and helped reel. The shark struggled. By the time we had him in the boat, we were both sweating and Frankie had moved to the prow, as far as he could get without going over, his eyes wide. Without thinking, I placed both hands on the shark’s flank to keep him still—his skin was rough as a cat’s tongue, the richest color of gray I’d ever seen—and Charlie lodged one foot in his mouth and reached in. Charlie pulled away the hook and I wrestled the shark over the side and dropped it, and we watched as he spent one stunned second hanging there, then flashed away.

  “Mercy,” said Charlie, breathing hard. To Frankie, he said, “Your mom’s been holding out on us, kiddo.”

  That afternoon while Frankie slept, Charlie sat in his armchair, sifting through mail and peering down at it through his bifocals. I was supposed to take selections for the new Abyss show over to Henry Gale the next day, but I was having trouble choosing. I’d narrowed the field to twenty-one pieces, and I needed only fifteen. Charlie had made it clear that he wasn’t interested in this part of the process. He had never so much as seen his work framed on a wall.

  “Seriously,” I said to him, facing the grid of drawings I’d laid out on the floor. “I can’t decide. You have to help.”

  He didn’t look up. “Close your eyes and point.”

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  “You’re overthinking,” he said. “As you tend to.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Here we go,” he said.

  I waited.

  “Yes,” he said.

  But I didn’t know what I wanted to ask, exactly. I was keyed up from my battle with the bull shark, and I’d been thinking—this was near constant—about Frankie’s speech and our appointment with Dr. Sonia and what I wasn’t doing that I needed to be doing, what kind of mother I was and what kind I wasn’t. One of the reasons I loved Stiltsville was the way it could blot out my anxieties, leaving only glimpses of the real world, like sunlight across a windshield. Today, though, I was agitated. Our appointment with the speech therapist was a few days off.

  I said, “What should I be teaching Frankie? What’s the most important thing for him to learn?”

  Charlie pressed his hand to his cheek. “Kindness,” he said.

  This was reassuring. “I can handle that.”

  He started to go back to his work, but I stopped him.

  “If you heard about me and Frankie,” I said, “if you’d never met us and you just heard about us, about his not talking, and about us living on a boat and coming here and Graham being away. If you knew all that and nothing else—what would you think?”

  He blinked at me, frowning. “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you think—” I exhaled heavily. “Would you think we were strange? Would you be put off?”

  “Put off? No.”

  “Would you pity us?”

  “No.”

  I felt as if a strong wind had blown open a hatch inside me. My voice went high and breathless. “Would it sound like I was a bad mother?”

  I put my hands on the warm linoleum and tried to focus on them, blinking back hot tears. Charlie came to my side and took up the same position, kneeling with both hands flat. His shoulder pressed against mine, his elbow against my elbow. For a while we stayed there, and then he said, “I would think none of those things.”

  I took a deep breath. “Sometimes I think that when I had Frankie, I became a little bit crazy. And a little bit invisible.”

  “Invisible to whom?” he said, ignoring the crazy part, which was diplomatic of him.

  “I don’t know.”

  And I really didn’t know. Not to Graham—that wouldn’t be fair. Graham still saw me, though I suspected he saw only the old me and turned away from what had mutated in me. Certainly I was invisible to Frankie, the way air and water were invisible, food and clothing and shelter; invisible to him as my own mother had been to me, as was his right.

  “I’m being self-indulgent, I know,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Quiet,” he said. In front of us, the drawings swam in their grid, becoming less and less distinct, as if they’d been left in the sunlight and had started to fade. I felt Charlie’s eyes on me. He said, “You should have seen yourself today, reeling in that shark. You looked like you were fighting for your life.”

  He replaced his bifocals. His knees cracked as he rose. After he was seated again in his armchair, he spoke again. “We couldn’t take our eyes off you.”

  LATER THAT WEEK, CHARLIE SAT down to start a pair of slippers for Simon. He’d used Frankie’s feet as a guide, then sized up a little, and had taken my suggestion to line them with fleece i
nstead of cotton. Casting on was the hard part, and he cursed a few times and unwound the yarn, then dropped his hands to his lap.

  “You seem distracted,” I said, and he grunted.

  Intending to lighten the mood, I said, “You know, I think I’ll finish by the end of month.” I indicated the marked boxes that lined the wall. They were all filled with neatly labeled folders, and in each folder were portraits cased in individual plastic sleeves.

  His voice was stone. “I would have thought you’d be finished by now.”

  I was stunned. He stared into his lap and made no move to continue with the slippers. He said, “I apologize.”

  I said nothing. He sighed and left the room, and after Frankie woke they went downstairs for a swim. We’d been staying later and later, almost to dinnertime, but that day I toweled off Frankie and packed us up before three o’clock. Charlie had arranged a big bowl of fruit for Frankie to practice drawing, and when I announced we were leaving early, Frankie signed histrionically in protest; I had to pick him up and carry him, kicking, down the stairs. Charlie dropped the lines into the Zodiac and I busied myself raising the engine and starting the motor. I knew I was being petulant, but I couldn’t help myself. I hadn’t realized how proud I’d been of the work, how protective of it.

  “Check your bag,” Charlie called out as I pulled away. When I got home, I took my tote into the main berth. In it I found a note written in that meticulous hand. It read: I’M A GRUMP. NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU. SO GRATEFUL. PLEASE FORGIVE. —C.

  And the next time we saw each other, after I’d tied off and pushed the cooler onto the dock and climbed up, he touched my hair quickly—this was something he’d never done—and cleared his throat, then announced that he was very glad to see us.

  THREE

  13

  GRAHAM AND I CONTINUED TO swap phone messages, including on the day of our tenth wedding anniversary, which otherwise passed without fanfare. Finally, I sat down to write him a letter. In it, I delivered three pieces of news. One was that Frankie had spoken. This was the most important item. Two, our tenants in Round Lake were moving out. I’d received the call that week. The wife was bored being so far from downtown, and she’d had it up to here—the husband’s words—with the mice in the kitchen. They would lose two months’ rent per the lease agreement, but we’d need to find a new tenant. We’d never considered selling the house. Not because we had plans to return (though I never could get a read on how open Graham was to the idea) but because it had been in his family so long, and to sell it would have been treason. I had some experience with familial treason, so I empathized. After my mother died, my father had sold or donated every piece of furniture, every table linen and dish, every tchotchke, and finally the house itself. My mother’s clothes had arrived at the cottage in a pair of wardrobe boxes (the clothes were all too long on me or too small), and everything else was just gone. I still thought of things—the folding stepladder she kept beside the refrigerator, the Asian vases she’d made into table lamps, the library of psychology books she’d kept in the den—and wondered what had become of them. When I’d told my father, my voice straining to remain under control, that I would have liked to have kept a few things for myself, he was quiet for a moment, then said something about the expense of shipping. Men tend to be practical, I suppose. If he had known it would break my heart, he might have done things differently. As with so many things, there was no choice but to forgive.

  The third thing I told Graham was that Frankie had had two hour-long appointments with a speech and language pathologist named Emily Barrett-Strout, and she’d more or less upheld Dr. Sonia’s diagnosis of selective mutism. I told him we weren’t sure yet what it would mean for Frankie. Typically, I explained, the disorder shows up in unusually anxious or shy children, and most of these children are able to speak in some circumstances if not in others. The diagnosis didn’t quite fit, but it was the best we could do.

  I gave no other details. I did not tell him that for the past week, since he’d first met with Emily, Frankie sometimes talked to me or Charlie, each word like found treasure offered with both hands. I did not tell him what Emily believed had caused Frankie’s mutism, or what—this had been implied, never spoken—we might do to heal him for good.

  I left out one more thing: the City of Coral Gables had left a notice taped to the Lullaby’s sliding door. The notice cited code ZC 4-408: No houseboat, boat, watercraft or vessel may be used as an abode or place of dwelling while moored or tied up in any waterway or canal within the City. The notice read WARNING at the top, and there was no fine. When the city would be back to follow up, I had no idea. I figured I probably had one more warning before I had to get serious about looking for a new place to live. When I first read the notice, I kept myself from panicking by remembering my mother’s theory of juggling, to which she’d held tight: a person can keep only so many balls in the air at any given time. Something has to give.

  When, during my junior year of college, my mother had been fired by Dr. Fuller for reasons I never knew, the juggling theory had substituted for reason, even for regret. “I dropped Fuller’s balls,” she’d said when I asked what had happened. “Men don’t like that, honey.” She was back working for Dr. Fuller by the following summer. Again I asked what had happened, and she told me only that he’d thought he could do without her, and he’d thought wrong. I found myself wondering about the words he’d chosen to win her back, whether he’d allowed his face to betray any measure of affection.

  It felt odd keeping secrets from Graham. It felt like even more distance between us, which I suppose it was.

  EMILY BARRETT-STROUT—Miss Emily, as she introduced herself—arrived fifteen minutes late for our first appointment, looking more or less like what I’d originally expected of Dr. Sonia. She was older and plump, wearing nurselike clogs and oversize eyeglasses and a wraparound skirt. She had very pink cheeks and wore no makeup, and her face had a supple, youthful quality that didn’t match the rest of her. When I let her in, she shook my hand and said something about leaving a file on the roof of her car. “It’s scattered along I-95 by now,” she said.

  This seemed a bad start. “Are you talking about Frankie’s records?”

  “Goodness, no.” She frowned. There was a pencil stuck behind her ear, caught in a web of flyaway silver hair, and she carried a multicolored woven bag that hit her hip when she walked. She dropped it heavily on the kitchen table.

  Frankie eyed her and I introduced them. I poured a mug of coffee, but when I brought it to her, she said she preferred tea. I set a mug in the microwave, thinking this would be quicker than using the stove top, not to mention cooler in the humid morning. But I’d never used the microwave, which looked as old as the Lullaby herself. Sure enough, as soon as the water started to boil, the overhead lights blinked out and the hum of the microwave stopped.

  “Oh, well,” said Emily.

  I went to the helm—a shallow, wood-paneled compartment in the corner of the salon—to fiddle with the breaker box. Emily sat cross-legged on the rug beside Frankie, sifting through a bag of toys she’d brought along. After the lights were back on, I finished making the tea and she took it. Otherwise, she pretended I was not there.

  “Frankie,” she said. “I like that name. Frankie, I bet you can tell me which of these toys is a fish and which is a bear.”

  She placed several toys in a line. He took the fish and pushed it toward her, then did the same with the bear.

  “Sure, but which is which?” she said.

  Frankie picked up the fish, then signed with his free hand: Fish.

  “And?”

  He picked up the bear and clawed the air. Whether this was actually the sign for bear, I didn’t recall. Then, very quietly, he growled.

  “That’s what he says, but what’s he called?”

  Frankie stared at her.

  “Frankie?” I said, and Miss Emily held up a hand to me.

  He looked back and forth between us. “Bear,” he s
aid.

  It was a small shock, every time.

  Miss Emily picked up a pig. Frankie sighed, then said, “Pig.”

  She picked up a dog. “Dog,” he said.

  Weeks earlier, to convince me to start swim lessons with Frankie and Carson, Sally had relied heavily on one argument: that a child’s parent is exactly the wrong person to teach that child to swim. I’d started the lessons not because I agreed with her, but because I thought it would be fun for Frankie and for me, and this had turned out to be true. Every weekend, Sally and I spent an hour drinking fresh orange juice in the shade while the older boys kicked around in the deep end and Frankie and Carson had their lesson in the shallow end. But I’d continued to hold fast to the belief that although Sally was right in general—parents shouldn’t teach their kids to swim—she was wrong when it came to me and Frankie. I’d believed we were the exception.

  What came to me, as I watched Frankie indulge Miss Emily in her game, was that every single parent in history had believed the same thing. We’d all been wrong.

  “Okay,” Emily said, cocking her head at him. “So you can talk. Why am I here?”

  Frankie shrugged and looked longingly at the toys.

  “Mom?” said Emily to me. “Take a walk?”

  “I’d rather stay,” I said.

  “We’ll be just a few minutes.”

  I closed the screen door behind me. When Emily saw me watching, she gave a look, so I stepped onto the dock and faced the canal. The house across the water was quiet—the kids were wherever they went on summer mornings, the father at work, the mother on errands or at the health club. A fishing boat trolled by. The captain was a middle-aged woman wearing a pink blouse. She waved as she passed. I sat down and let my legs hang over the water. I thought of the cast-iron mermaid sitting above the sink, which every so often Frankie climbed up to retrieve, so it might commune with his sea animals for a couple of hours.

  Emily called for me through the screen door. Frankie was still on the rug, but Emily sat at the banquette. I sat across from her. Our knees bumped but she paid no attention.