Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  Charlie headed off with a wave. While he was gone, Frankie and I drew pictures of stingrays and manatees at the kitchen counter, then sat on the porch, singing—this was Frankie’s choice—Christmas carols. He asked questions about the hurricane: Is it here yet? Why did it get that name? Will it be wet or dry? Will it make it all the way to Mimi and Papi? Will we see it?

  The sunlight thickened as evening approached. The breeze slowed, then died.

  In the time I’d spent at the stilt house, I’d learned a good bit about its logistics. I knew that the generator came on only to cook meat or boil water, and for showers—Charlie didn’t abide cold water—and I knew that Charlie always closed the bedroom and bathroom doors, to cut off the hottest part of the house. I knew that on particularly beastly days, Charlie draped dark sheets over the bedroom windows, keeping out as much heat as possible. I knew that sometimes this wasn’t good enough, so he dragged one of the spare mattresses onto the eastern porch and slept there until his own bed was habitable again. I’d learned that there were mosquitoes at Stiltsville, but not many, and only on evenings with very little wind, and there were none of the no-see-ums that hounded us in the canal. There were a few cockroaches around, too, and once I’d asked Charlie where they came from—for a second I wondered if maybe they could swim—and he’d cocked his head at me. “They come with us,” he said.

  I turned on the generator to make dinner, and when I was finished and turned it off, the noise died abruptly and a hush descended. I went to the porch to scan the channel and was reminded, briefly and fondly, of how the midwestern sky gathered before a snowstorm, smelling faintly of tin and blotting out sound and light and all sense of distance.

  It was distressing to be at the house without Charlie. Any fantasy I’d indulged of moving out there, even temporarily, revealed its foolishness for a number of reasons, not the least of which was—this was a surprise to me—I didn’t much enjoy it. With no means of getting us home, I was jumpy and agitated. I followed Frankie every time he crossed the room or went to the bathroom, scooting close as we sat together. This was something that had been taken from me with motherhood—the ability to relax and enjoy something as idyllic as an evening on an island. After we ate, we worked on a jigsaw puzzle that was much too difficult for him. I offered heavy-handed assistance, my ear trained to the open doorway, listening for the Zodiac’s high whine.

  Finally, Charlie returned. The Zodiac’s engine noise deepened in pitch and cut off. This is what it’s like, I thought as I got up to greet him. It felt like waiting for rescue. I think for Charlie, the sound of a boat headed in his direction hastened his heartbeat the way the solitude hastened mine. I wondered what it felt like for him to head back knowing someone was waiting for him. Was this something he would even enjoy, if it happened regularly? Something told me it was not.

  I watched from the porch as he stepped off the boat. He looked up pleasantly, his face youthful in the blue evening. “Do I smell food?” he said, then clapped a hand against his stomach.

  We finished loading up the remaining boxes, then worked by candlelight over the puzzle. Charlie and I attended closely to Frankie, bringing him bowl after bowl of cubed pineapple for dessert. I let him stay up until his eyes took on their glassy look. He was excited to be sleeping at the stilt house—he’d clapped and jumped around when I’d told him—and I worried that he would be disappointed by the experience, which in reality would be not much different, for him, than a long nap. I took my time tucking him in. I sang our usual songs and read our usual books. The moonlight through the window blued his skin and lips. He fought sleep. I sang again, read again, until he turned over, pulling my hand alongside his body and burying it in his warm neck. A few minutes later his grip loosened, and I moved away.

  Charlie wasn’t in the living room when I returned. The candles were still burning, dripping clear wax onto the part of the puzzle we’d completed. I blew them out. I stood in the dark until I was certain Frankie was asleep. Once a week or so, he might rise in the night to use the bathroom or drink water, and it occurred to me now to deliver a glass to his bedside, just in case. But I didn’t do it because I heard footsteps on the porch, and Charlie appeared in the doorway.

  “Coming?” he whispered. He put out a hand for me.

  IT WAS TWO OR THREE in the morning—time blurs—when I found myself standing on the far edge of the stilt house dock, having negotiated its zigs and zags in near total darkness, my hand touching the flat top of each piling as I passed, feeling the cool cement on my fingertips. Water slapped against the pilings. There was a smudge of moonshine against the surface of the sky and on the planes of the waves in the channel. Hot wind tugged at my hair. I doubted we were the only ones out at Stiltsville, but it felt as if we were. The nerves I’d felt the evening before were gone. It seemed to me, for a long moment, that there was nothing to fear in the world. I imagined that Charlie and Frankie and I had survived some kind of apocalypse. We would make the most of our supplies. We would swim every day until our fingertips pruned. Frankie and Charlie would fish, and we would cross the flats at low tide and raid the red house for propane and canned goods and reading material. We would be happy.

  My hair moved against my shoulders. The stars pushed down against the night, and the lights of downtown Miami swelled, as did the blinking red lights of the radio tower to the northeast, and the fat black stalk of the lighthouse, and the weathered wood beneath the soles of my feet. All of it heaved against me. I felt as if time had paused. The moments that followed would stretch into hours, days, weeks.

  I’d left Charlie dozing on a bare, salty mattress we’d dragged from the office onto the side porch, beneath the window where Frankie slept. When I heard footsteps upstairs, I assumed he was coming to join me. But something was off—the steps were too flat-footed, too frantic. I turned, and in the darkness I made out the figure of my son, my baby, as he shuffled through the doorway and across the porch, then walked straight into the railing, as if it wasn’t even there. I called his name. He reached for me before he slipped. Down he went into the wide space between rail and floor, and then he was falling through the dark. The sounds of the wind and my screams were joined by the thud of my son’s head hitting the dock. His body slumped, suddenly boneless, half on the dock and half off of it. Then he tumbled over the edge, and disappeared into the dark water.

  18

  MY MEMORY OF THAT NIGHT is comprised of fragments, of flashes of dark and noise, of the sensation of Frankie’s limp body in my arms.

  Charlie came around the corner the instant Frankie stumbled. He shouted Frankie’s name as I did. He crossed the porch and dived to the floor and reached through the railing. He would tell me later that, unbelievably, his fingertips brushed Frankie’s ankle. I moved forward to try to catch my son’s falling body, though I can’t recall how quickly. Was there a second when I stood still, unable to command my own legs? Was this a crucial second?

  He fell headfirst but also sideways, so his belly hit just after his head, followed by his legs, which missed the dock almost entirely.

  Maybe Charlie felt Frankie’s ankle against his fingers. Maybe he was that fast, but I was not. By the time I reached Frankie—could it have taken more than three long strides?—he’d been swallowed by the water.

  Charlie launched over the porch rail. Frankie was in his arms before he surfaced. Then Frankie was in my arms, and in the darkness I could barely make out his eyes rolling in their sockets, the lids fluttering. Charlie was shouting at me to get in the boat, then we were moving fast across the bay. I sat on a box and hollered at Frankie to keep his eyes open, to stay awake, to talk to me. I told him we were going to get help, that he was going to be all right. I told him to squeeze my hand. If he did, I didn’t feel it. He did open his eyes, though, and kept them on me, but it didn’t seem as if he saw me. It seemed as if he was looking through me to the star-filled sky. I had the fleeting thought that it was just like him to space out when I was vying mightily for his attention
.

  The left side of his face swelled, forcing his eye shut. The skin turned blue. His right eye maintained its dazed assessment of the space of my face. There were no tears.

  The Zodiac rode low under the weight of all that paper. I didn’t notice, but then there was a sharp slapping sound and the engine stalled and we jerked to a stop. I slid forward and landed in the well of the boat, Frankie in my arms. From Charlie came shouting and cursing. I kept talking to Frankie, telling him it was going to be okay, and then Charlie was up at the bow, pitching a box over the gunwale. At first I thought he was doing this out of frustration, and I stumbled to my feet with Frankie, meaning to stop him. But when he bent again to hoist another box into his arms and pitched that one after the first, I understood. I wanted to help him but I couldn’t manage to let go of Frankie. I turned away from Charlie’s frantic heaving and rocked Frankie in my arms. There was a heavy splash as each box hit the water. The sound cut through the static of my desperation, a terrible reminder of how thoroughly the world had upended itself.

  When the boxes were gone—all but the one beneath me—Charlie tried to start the boat, and after several attempts we were again on our way. The engine continued to make a choking noise and every few minutes gave off a high-pitched whine, as if losing a fight.

  Mercy Hospital was on the bay, with a cement dock twenty yards from the emergency room entrance. The Zodiac bumped hard against the wall and Charlie jumped off with the spring line and pulled us in. He barked at me to hand him Frankie. By the time I’d made it off the boat, he was almost at the emergency room entrance, Frankie’s legs flapping at his side as he ran.

  Inside the bright ER, Charlie drew the attention of a doctor and two nurses in blue scrubs. They directed him to an open bed, where he lay Frankie on his back. The fall had been at least fifteen feet, he was telling them, maybe more. The team ignored me as they secured a brace around Frankie’s neck and shined a penlight in his eyes and snapped fingers beside his face. The doctor asked if he’d lost consciousness, and seemed skeptical when I said that I didn’t think he had, not completely. Charlie stood apart from the activity, hands clamped over his mouth in a way that I couldn’t bear. Someone—it might have been me—told the doctors Frankie’s name, and then they were saying it loudly and often. A nurse tickled his feet. The doctor was young, black-haired and dark-skinned, with a prominent Adam’s apple and a smooth, calming Cuban accent. He told me there were no obvious signs of spinal injury—this, apparently, was the worst-case scenario—but they would take Frankie immediately for a CAT scan, to assess the swelling in his brain and check for broken bones. “You need to wait here,” said the doctor firmly. Then Frankie’s bed was being rolled away, and though I hadn’t realized I’d been holding Frankie’s hand, I felt his fingers slip out of my own.

  They were gone twenty minutes. Someone led me to a hard plastic chair. Charlie had disappeared, but then he was back, saying they wouldn’t let him in during the scan. His hands went to his mouth.

  “Stop that,” I said.

  He dropped his hands. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

  I didn’t understand for a moment, but the look on his face, his rapid blinking and tight jaw, explained: he felt responsible. If he was going to insist on offering himself up for blame, I thought I might let him. “Shut up,” I said.

  He looked afraid of me. He took a step away. The doctor and nurses came back with Frankie on a gurney, and they headed into another room. One nurse explained that they’d seen a severe concussion and two skull fractures, one along Frankie’s eye socket, just above the eye, and one below, along the jawline. They believed he’d broken at least two or three ribs, but were taking him for X-rays to make certain.

  “We’re giving him something to sleep,” said the nurse.

  “Why?” I said.

  “We need him to be as still as possible for as long as possible,” she said, then hurried off.

  As she went, I heard myself call after her. “Did you tell him good night?” Then Charlie was holding me up, because I could no longer hold myself.

  LATER, AFTER THE EVACUATION, I would have a hard time remembering that first night, the night before Andrew, without remembering shaking walls and roaring wind. But my mind plays tricks. The storm hadn’t hit us yet. It hadn’t even gotten close.

  An unearthly orange finger of sunrise was visible through a window by the time a nurse came to move us to the Intensive Care Unit. Frankie was given a bed in the middle of a row of beds, with heavy blue curtains separating him from his neighbors. Charlie and I had decided not to call Lidia’s house—this would be the first step in trying to get in touch with Graham—until the sun was up, so after he’d settled me in at Frankie’s bedside, Charlie went off to find a phone. The doctor came by while he was gone. His name was Dr. Cristian Lomano. He explained again about the sedation: he was concerned about the swelling in Frankie’s brain, which he called “extensive,” and about permanent damage to the optic nerve.

  “He’s a pretty big kid,” the doctor said, nodding in approval. “Big kids bounce.” This was, apparently, a small bit of good fortune.

  Half an hour later, Lidia and my father burst into the room. He was dressed in rumpled linen trousers and her face was unmade. The circles under her eyes had a satiny mauve tint. She paled at the sight of Frankie’s battered face and touched my shoulder tentatively. She glanced at Charlie.

  “Hello,” she said quietly, bending down to Frankie.

  “Don’t bump him,” said Charlie.

  These were the instructions we’d received. The nurses had fitted snug bolsters along either side of Frankie’s body, pinning him into place in a funereal way, and around his neck and head they’d assembled a brace made of white plastic. His body filled only a slice of the hospital bed. His bare chest was wrapped in gauze.

  Lidia’s hands recoiled. She cupped them at her collarbone. “Mi’jo,” she said in a whisper. Then she did something I’d never seen from her before. I’d never seen it from my mother, either. She pivoted into my father’s arms and buried her face in his chest, saying, “Harvey Harvey Harvey.” He rubbed her arms and shushed gently. “He’ll be okay,” he said. Whether it occurred to my father that this might not be the case, I don’t know. It wasn’t in his character to imagine the worst. This was a defect, in my estimation. I’ve always believed that the worst hunts us, and to be caught unsuspecting is to be some kind of sucker.

  From where I sat at Frankie’s side, I was free to study the wasted landscape of his face. I’d seen the X-rays: above his left eye was a fracture the size and shape of a man’s eyebrow, and beneath the same eye, along the upper jaw, was a second fracture the shape of a sickle, an inch long. Scans had confirmed three broken ribs. But these injuries were buried, like the cracks in the earth’s crust that cause an ocean to swell, and what one could see plainly was this: his face had been flattened in parts and engorged in others. His brow line rose and sloped like the neck of a spoon. His cheekbone was a hard, purple knot reminiscent of a link of sausage, and it was so turgid that it blended into the bridge of his nose. The skin was eggplant-colored in places and bright red in places, and his right eyelid, which wasn’t swollen at all, was the sweet coral pink of the inside of a shell.

  I was repulsed by the sight of his face—not the gruesomeness but the evident pain. At the same time, I was unable to look away. Watching him, while around me Charlie and Lidia and my father whispered and shuffled, seemed a great responsibility, one I’d shirked and now embraced feverishly, like a convert. I’d been judged. This was clear. The verdict was on Frankie’s face.

  People speak of strength in times of crisis, as if strength were some great beast that swoops in to gird us, to repair our voices and limbs when it seems they might fail. But to this day, I don’t know exactly what we mean when we speak of strength. Was it strength that I didn’t sob? Was it strength that kept me from screaming myself hoarse at every nurse who pulled back the curtain around Frankie’s bed, kept me
from demanding to know if he would recover, and when? Every few minutes, I bit down hard on the urge to shake my boy until he opened his eyes. In my mind, this was the one thing he absolutely needed to do. My magical thinking settled on a specific fear: not that he would die or wake with severe brain damage—these possibilities were incomprehensible, though of course I felt a desperate, clawing fear of both—but that I might never again see his beautiful eyes open. The fact that this probably wouldn’t happen for hours, possibly even a day, was inconceivable. It was as if I was being commanded to breathe deeply even as a hand tightened around my throat.