Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  “You already know what it isn’t,” she said. “It’s not a hearing problem or a receptive disorder. This problem is expressive. I’m at a disadvantage, ironically, because—well, he spoke to me.” She blinked her owlish eyes. “But I can tell you what I’ve seen before.”

  “How much?” I said.

  “How much what?”

  “How much did he talk?”

  “Twenty or so words. No sentences, no pairs. We could have gone on and on, I think. He’s in preschool?”

  “Not yet.” I’d enrolled him for the remainder of the summer session, but his first day was still a week off.

  “His file says there’s been some stress in the home,” she said.

  “I meant to mention it.” I had meant to—really—but then she’d swept in and the power had blown, and it had gotten lost. I told her in bare terms the story of what had happened at the hotel in Round Lake. “He was not talking long before,” I said.

  She nodded. She took no notes. “You have trouble sleeping, too.”

  “I take pills. It’s not too bad, nothing like Graham.”

  “Any changes lately?”

  “Other than the move, not really.”

  “I like to meet both parents. Dad’s at work?”

  “Yes. I mean, he’s working, but he’s on a ship in Hurricane Alley. He left three weeks ago.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “That’s a change, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you work?”

  “Part-time. I’m sort of a personal assistant.”

  “Where is Frankie when you’re working?”

  “He’s with me. It’s casual.”

  Frankie lost interest in the toys and padded over to us. Emily winked at him without smiling. To me, she said, “You’re an assistant to whom?”

  I started to describe the situation, the kind of work I did and how we got ourselves out to Stiltsville, not knowing which facts were relevant and which were not.

  Frankie interrupted. “Charlie,” he said to Emily, then padded back to the rug.

  “I swear he doesn’t talk,” I said.

  “Gotcha,” said Emily, then continued with her questions, as if nothing noteworthy had happened. Finally, she sat back and looked over at Frankie, regarding him as he played. She kept her voice low. “Here’s what I’m thinking. You tell me that your husband has this problem, this sleepwalking. And you tell me that Frankie has witnessed at least one upsetting incident, that you know of. And you tell me that you sleep sporadically, usually on pills, and that your husband left town three weeks ago, and since then Frankie has spoken more than he has in two years.”

  We looked at each other. My legs started to tremble, then my arms. I felt a pulsing in my neck and something frenzied, something akin to rage, rising in my chest. Desperation, maybe. I said, as calmly as possible, “I don’t think those things are related.”

  A look sparked across her features—sympathy, I think. She said, “Plenty of kids have expressive delay. That just might be what we’re dealing with here, selective mutism light. He spends a few years taking it in before he lets it out.”

  Maybe she could tell I wasn’t listening anymore, that the world had closed in and was thrumming in my ears, because she leaned forward, speaking slowly and holding my eyes with her own. “I will say that it concerns me,” she said, “the matter of the timing.”

  Then I was up, crossing the room to Frankie, kneeling and squaring his shoulders. He looked at me, alarmed. I said, “Frankie, listen to me.”

  “Don’t push him,” said Emily.

  “Frankie, do you feel—” I stopped. “Frankie, why don’t you talk around Dad?” He shrugged. I struggled to control my voice. “Do you not feel safe around Dad?” I signed the word safe out of habit.

  His mouth opened but he didn’t say anything. He looked afraid. I was holding his shoulders too tightly. I felt Emily’s arms circle my own, pulling me back.

  “What are you saying to me?” I said.

  I thought of Graham’s story of his father and baseball, of Sally’s horror story from the radio—but nothing stuck. I knew every inch of Frankie’s body. I spent almost every hour with him. Graham hardly spent any time alone with Frankie at all. He never had. But if it wasn’t that, then what was it?

  Then it came to me. Graham had never laid a hand on Frankie—I was certain of this. But then again, he hadn’t needed to. A scene appeared in my mind: Graham waking in his underwear beside his friend Jackson’s bed, Jackson’s wife screaming, Graham seizing. Then my mind conjured another scene, and my blood ran cold. What if Frankie, as a baby or toddler, had woken in the night to find his own father standing in the room, unresponsive and unseeing? What if he’d said, in his early-language speech, “Daddy?” and the strange empty man had looked right through him. What if he’d repeated himself, babbling “Daddy? Daddy?” and the man simply turned and unhurriedly walked out without answering, without bending to pick him up or comfort him. What if this had happened time and again? It would have been like waking to find a monster in the room, all the more frightening for how the monster resembled his father.

  The scene in my mind had the texture of real life, and I knew in my gut that this, or something very much like it, had happened to my boy.

  I shook in Emily’s arms. “I take pills,” I said to her. “I have to, or I don’t sleep. I don’t know what happens in the night. I only wake to loud noise.”

  Frankie put a hand on my arm, then signed: Okay, Mama? Okay?

  “Yes, baby,” I said.

  Emily sat back and crossed her legs. “Sometimes kids freeze up when there’s something they don’t understand. Sometimes they freeze so much they get used to being frozen.”

  I wiped my face.

  She said, “I have to ask—when is your husband coming home?”

  “A couple of weeks,” I said.

  She patted my hand. “We’ll figure it out.”

  I rocked Frankie in my lap. I kissed his hair.

  Before she got up from the rug, Emily said to Frankie, “How lucky you are to have such a good mother,” and I had to take deep breaths before I could manage to get to my feet to see her out.

  CARSON STARTED RUNNING IN DELIGHTED circles when Frankie entered the loud, colorful room at the preschool. They wouldn’t have the same teacher, as I understood it, but their classes would share the same large space for most of the day, and they’d be on the playground together in the morning and afternoon. That morning, Frankie had refused to get dressed, then sat himself in his time-out corner as a protest. We were late. Frankie looked briefly pleased when Carson bounded over to greet him, but then he clambered into my arms and scowled at the room. I’d reminded him again and again that he was starting school, but until that morning it seemed he’d thought I was bluffing. When I’d pulled him from his car seat and he saw where we were, he looked at me as if I’d betrayed him.

  His teacher’s name was Carla. She was young—early twenties, if that—with two silver rings through her nose. But she had the straight spine and calm, confident bearing of someone who had been early to mature, which made me wonder about her background—not her training but her parentage, her home life. I set Frankie down next to her and he squirmed to get back to me. I stepped away, telling myself again that I was doing this for him, not to him.

  When we’d toured, I’d spoken to the school’s director about Frankie’s speech. To Carla, I said, “You know he doesn’t talk a lot, right? But he understands everything. He pays attention. So don’t, you know, not talk to him.”

  “Don’t worry.” To Frankie, she said, “I hear you like fish.”

  He stared at her nose rings as she spoke, then nodded.

  “Would you like to see our fish?”

  On the far side of the room, a colorful aquarium spanned the length of a low table. He nodded again.

  “Do you think you might help me feed them later?”

  He nodded again. I blew him a kiss and walked out, feel
ing his eyes on my back.

  EARLY THAT FRIDAY EVENING, AFTER Frankie and I’d spent most of the day cooped up on the Lullaby, me folding laundry and cleaning and him begging me to play with him, after two time-outs and one ugly episode wherein I yelled at him after he knocked over a pile of folded clothes, I decided we needed a change of scenery. I left the clothes strewn across the salon floor and went up to Lidia’s house. I wrapped three slices from the pan of meat loaf resting on the stove top, grabbed a bottle of wine, and left a note of apology. I stuffed Frankie into his life vest and shuttled him onto the Zodiac. As I started the engine, something splashed across the canal. It took a moment before my brain sorted out the pale lines in the water, the steady forward movement: it was the mother from across the way. She turned to breathe, then her head was down again. She traveled straight up the center of the waterway. I sent something like a prayer of safety after her, then pulled away from the pier.

  We’d never crossed to Stiltsville so late in the day. Ten minutes into the ride, as the melon sunset soaked into the violet horizon, I considered turning back. I forged on. The wind was blustery, lifting and dropping my hair, sending up spray over the gunwales.

  Go away, wind! signed Frankie. I pulled him close and he buried his face in my torso.

  Charlie came downstairs as I was tying up. Frankie stepped to the dock and peeled off his life jacket, as he’d taken to doing; I’d decided that he’d spent enough time at the stilt house to know to take care.

  “How are you with surprises?” I said to Charlie.

  “I can take them or leave them.”

  I handed him the meat loaf. “We brought dinner.”

  He held the package to his nose. “The famous meat loaf!”

  After we ate—Charlie agreed the meat loaf was as good as I’d promised—Frankie and Charlie went from room to room, playing a version of hide-and-seek wherein Charlie always counted and Frankie always hid, each time in a different closet or corner. Though just that morning, he’d said “please” after I’d asked if he wanted orange juice with breakfast, he was still signing more than he spoke. After an hour or so, Frankie gave up hiding and climbed onto the sofa with his sea animals and asked for a blanket. I told him the grown-ups would be on the porch if he needed us.

  Charlie and I sat in the rockers. He stretched his legs and steadied them on the porch railing. We drank wine from plastic cups and the wind swallowed our voices. I told him that I’d lost my cool with Frankie, that I’d yelled and he’d cried.

  Inside, Frankie was moving his toys around on the coffee table. Another child might have been talking to them.

  “It happens,” Charlie said. “Mothers feel a lot of guilt about these things.”

  “Fathers don’t?”

  “They feel a little guilt. A limited amount.”

  “I hate it when he’s sad.”

  “You can’t protect him from suffering, you know.”

  “I can try.”

  There was the constant slapping of water against the pilings, a faint thread of voices and laughter from a house down the channel. The lights of the skyline blinked faintly. There was something in the way Charlie looked at the shore. Regret? I thought.

  I said, “Do you ever think you’ll go back?”

  “I wondered how long.”

  “How long what?”

  “Before you asked that.”

  “And what’s the answer?”

  He took a long drink of his wine. The cup covered his mouth and jaw, and all I could see were his sorrowful eyes, the way they folded at the corners. “I’ll never go back.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because I remember what it was like. I don’t want to be like that again.”

  “Like what?”

  “Angry, mostly. Scared.” He stared at a point just beyond my knees. “I have a way of making other people miserable.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  He smiled. “Yes, you do.”

  “I’m not miserable.”

  “And I’m not on land.”

  There was no arguing. Over my shoulder, I could see Frankie moving around the coffee table, rearranging his animals, dragging his blanket along the floor and yawning.

  I got to my feet reluctantly. “We’ll be getting back,” I said.

  “Drive carefully, please.”

  The starlight threw soft shadows across his face. I thought of what he’d told me—it seemed long ago—about his daughter, and what happens to people after they lose a child.

  “I’m glad you didn’t drown,” I said.

  He looked confused, then his expression cleared. “Sweetheart,” he said, “that’s exactly what I did.”

  14

  I’M EMBARRASSED TO ADMIT THAT I’d had barely any contact with Graham’s mother, Julia, since we’d moved to Miami. Before we left, we’d talked about visiting at Christmas, but that was still a ways off. I’d sent a photo of Frankie and a brief update, with a crayon drawing I’d wheedled him into making for her, but it had been a month since then. I had not told her about the progress he’d made, though I think she would have been relieved to know of it.

  The morning Graham called, I woke with her on my mind. This is the kind of thing for which my belief system has no vocabulary. I woke thinking of the leather driving gloves she always wore in the car. Why one would need such a thing, I never knew, but every time I watched her pull them on—they fit perfectly, as leather does only when it’s very high quality and has been worn for years—I fell a little in love with the old-fashioned decadence of it.

  She died in her sleep from complications from pneumonia. She was seventy-six years old. Graham had called Lidia’s house every half an hour since dawn, but not until seven o’clock did Lidia answer, at which point she and my father came down the lawn and rang the cowbell. My father looked grave and Lidia’s face was full of something like anxiety, though I guess it was sadness. She folded her hands in front of her stomach. I had the strange thought that I was about to be scolded, though for what, I didn’t know. Leaving on lights in their house, maybe—this was one of my father’s most tightly held pet peeves—or being too liberal with their groceries.

  “Honey,” Lidia said, then delivered the news in a motherly voice. We walked up the lawn so I could return Graham’s call. Lidia carried Frankie in his pajamas. “Would I have liked her?” she said.

  “She was a little cold,” I said.

  Immediately, I regretted saying it. It wasn’t the most pertinent, not to mention flattering, fact I might have conveyed. But I’d been thinking that Lidia was warm, even at her most demanding, and that it’s possible she would have found Julia remote, the way I had for many years.

  “I didn’t mean to say that,” I said.

  “It’s forgotten.” She took Frankie into the den to watch cartoons.

  “Babe,” said Graham when I was patched through. The line was full of white noise. His voice was weak. There was a high-pitched whistle in the background, and we waited it out. “I’ve been calling and calling.”

  “I’m so sorry. I wish we had a phone.”

  “Whose stupid idea was that boat, anyway?” He forced a breathy laugh.

  “Are you okay?”

  He cleared his throat. “I don’t know. It hasn’t hit me.”

  “Are you going today?”

  “They’ll shuttle me to shore today, but I can’t get a flight until morning.”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  We stayed on the line for a moment, listening to static crackle between us. Then Graham said he loved me and would call with his flight information, and hung up.

  I made hotel and flight reservations, then called Riggs and asked him to tell Charlie I wouldn’t be back that week. The next morning, Lidia came down the lawn before Frankie woke, and I kissed him in his sleep and drove myself to the airport in the half-light, the streets mostly empty. When we landed in Chicago, the air had a funky green tinge—tornado weather. I rushed through O’Hare
to meet Graham at his gate. Heaven knows why, but he tended to sleep heavily on planes, which meant he was usually late coming off, and this flight was no exception. The circles beneath his eyes were deeper than usual, and his clothes were loose and disheveled. He dropped his bags and buried his face in my hair.

  “You’re a sight,” he said.

  “Poor baby,” I said.

  He pressed his forehead against mine. I felt the pull of him—his familiar smell, the breadth of his shoulders, the pure white of his hair.

  We rented a car and fought traffic in the Loop. Graham asked about Frankie’s talking and I repeated what I’d told him in my letter. He tapped the window as we passed the little French restaurant where we’d had our first official date outside of Detention. We drove to his mother’s apartment, where a group of women sat in the living room, a plate of coffee cake on the table. Julia’s husband, Bob Winters, stood in the kitchen with a coffee mug in his hand. His eyes were rimmed and swollen, which moved me. Bob had paper-white hair, very thin at the crown, and liver-spotted hands. He was a big man, barrel-chested and hunched in the way of the very tall, and his clothes were starched, as if straight from the cleaners.

  “Good of you to come,” he said distractedly.

  The apartment was spare and Scandinavian in style, the furniture low in profile and the walls adorned here and there with landscapes in dated wooden frames. The ladies cornered Graham, whispering sympathies, and I stepped onto the small balcony, where two robust ferns grew in clay pots. It was drizzling. The green hue was gone from the sky, replaced by honey-colored ribbons of evening sunlight streaking through the cloud cover. There was a loamy, agricultural odor in the air, a reminder of not-too-distant fields lined with hearty stalks of corn. A block away was the snaking green river, its color so different—so chemical and factory-fed—from that of the ocean. On a boat headed toward the wide disc of Lake Michigan, a group of tourists hunkered in ponchos.

  Graham joined me. His eyebrows furrowed and he stared down at the tourist boat. After a minute, he said, “We never should have left Chicago.”