Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  “You’re back?” I whispered.

  He smiled his thin, frugal smile. “I was at Riggs’s place but I couldn’t stay. I sneaked in a side door. I found myself in the cafeteria. This is for you.”

  He handed me a large Styrofoam cup with a lid and straw. I thought maybe it was a soda—looking at it, I realized I was very thirsty and hungry—but when I took a sip, my mouth filled with the taste of cold, creamy chocolate ice cream.

  “Oh my,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “They turned off the freezers to save power. Free ice cream for everyone.” He grimaced. “Is it okay that I’m here?”

  I swallowed. “Yes.”

  “It’s nasty out.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I sneaked the keys to Riggs’s little sports car. It’s been so long, I almost dropped the transmission.”

  “I wish he could see it,” I said, meaning the storm, meaning Frankie.

  “So do I,” said Charlie.

  I moved to my knees and pressed my chest against the side of bed. “Open your eyes, baby,” I whispered to Frankie. Charlie kneeled next to me and our shoulders pressed together. We hunched there for a long time. I finished my shake and wished I had another. My head started to drop and Charlie pulled me against him and I let him, but only as long as I had Frankie’s hand firmly in grasp. Then, with my eyes closed against Charlie, I finally felt what I’d been waiting to feel for so many hours: my boy squeezed me back.

  I WASN’T AT HER SIDE when my mother died. Neither was my father, who had a gig that night, as he’d had almost every night since she’d been diagnosed. (That year turned out to be the most productive of his career, a fact that we never discussed and my mother never openly acknowledged.) I was asleep in my old bedroom. The day before, I’d hired a night nurse despite my father’s vehement opposition—the money, the waste, when here I was on loan from my other life, just as capable as anyone of lifting water to her lips or changing her sheets or turning her onto her side or reading her something unprovocative that neither of us would enjoy. Not until I was heavily pregnant, briefly on bed rest for high blood pressure, would I understand how physically uncomfortable and restless-making it is—worse, probably, for people with no experience with insomnia—to lie in one place for long stretches. This knowledge would have helped me in my nursing duties.

  I think to some extent I believed, without having given it much thought, that a person should be able to do the work of dying quietly and restfully, like a battery draining of juice. My mother’s death was cantankerous. She couldn’t lie still, much less sleep, so neither could I. She moaned and called out nonsensically and once, twenty-four hours from death, sat up straight in bed and insisted that she wanted to go home. When I tried to calm her, she fought me off, limbs flailing, unknowingly flashing the room, catheter and all—giving Graham, who had just arrived from Chicago, a view he later joked was a good-bye to remember. I think when she so fervently insisted on going home, she meant the small, beachy home in Fort Lauderdale where she’d lived with her parents as a child. All I remembered of it, from my visits there before they died, were white walls and white carpeting, no adornment in the house except for a collection of ceramic angel figurines housed in an antique corner cabinet, which I was warned repeatedly by my soft-spoken grandparents not to touch. Through a picture window above the sofa, across the cement bulge of a causeway, was the ocean.

  The drugs stopped helping eventually, despite ever-increasing dosages. If there was a way to make my mother comfortable, I never learned of it, and although making her more comfortable—so I, for any length of time, might be comfortable as well—was my primary objective every moment of the day, I never once sought assistance or even advice on the subject. I didn’t so much as think to pick up a book on end-of-life care or ask for tips from the hospice doctor who stopped by every three or four days, and whose offerings were limited to prescribing painkillers and clucking his tongue each time I mentioned that she seemed persistently restless. A fighter, he called her repeatedly, as if bestowing a compliment. I cannot explain why I never thought to study up, so to speak, except that I was sleep-deprived, anguished, ill at ease. With so many things, it seems I am a person who isn’t good at something until she’s done it at least once. And I had only one chance to get this right.

  I did not get it right. Despite my father’s resistance, I found an overnight nurse in the phone book. My mother’s health insurance, a plan partially subsidized by Dr. Fuller’s practice, covered a few hours of hospice nursing each week but nothing overnight. I’m not sure why more wasn’t covered, especially when she was already so close to the end, but I gleaned that the insurance establishment believes that people should take care of each other in this world, and not rely on professionals to do it for them.

  The night nurse, whose name was Amelia, was in her fifties and wore her thick red hair in two high, ridiculous ponytails. It was immediately obvious that she was not a person with sufficient intelligence for the job, what with the medication schedule and need to adapt to unfamiliar situations. But I’d gone bargain hunting and found exactly that. She woke me twice, once before midnight and once a couple of hours later, to say that my mother was calling out. Not for me, per se—she hadn’t looked straight at me or said my name in days, and I didn’t think she missed me when I was out of the room—but in a sloppy and unintelligible way, half-phrases distorted by medication and pain. Amelia interpreted this to be the end. Both times she fetched me, I came to the living room, sat with my mother for half an hour, saw no behavior I hadn’t seen before, and went back to bed.

  I asked, after the second time, not to be woken again. I said this firmly, telling myself that I would need to do so, to get the point across.

  The last time she summoned me was around 5:00 A.M. I was briefly annoyed, but soon enough knew this time was different. I came down the hall and into the room, and immediately, before even sitting at my mother’s side or studying her hollowed-out features, paid Amelia and tried to send her home. She wouldn’t leave; I gathered this was her protocol, to stay with the deceased for a certain amount of time. My father was still out—a late night, even for him. Amelia waited as I called the on-call hospice nurse, who told me I could have my mother sent directly to the funeral home I’d already chosen.

  I asked Amelia what it had been like in the last seconds. I didn’t expect much in the way of a fully drawn picture. She said my mother had taken a long breath, crossed her hands over her stomach—a gesture of resignation—and that was it. I think my mother died because she finally had some privacy from me, and I believe she would not have died that night if I had still been by her side; she would have continued to hang on. Whether I wish I had been there, I can’t say.

  Before they took my mother’s body, I wrestled her wedding ring off her bloated finger—not pretty, and another thing I should have done earlier—and sat a moment at her side, holding her now-naked hand. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel any kind of soulful presence in the room. She had been gone already, and now she was more gone. I felt relieved. My father came in as the room brightened; he’d seen the funeral home’s van in the driveway. I looked at her face one last time—something in the set of her jaw seemed hard and unforgiving, which wasn’t like her—and handed my father her ring, then went to bed.

  Five years later, feeling the slight pressure of Frankie’s hand in my own, I looked up into his face and saw that my boy, the love of my life, was awake and sluggishly blinking, his lips dry and parted as if poised to speak. In that moment, though it was nothing I’d ever thought possible, I felt the undeniable presence of my mother. I was careful with Frankie even as I embraced him, even as I called out for a nurse and my tears dropped onto his face, making him blink. All the time, my mother was with me, pulling me from where I’d been, a visitor at the bedside of a child who didn’t seem quite my own and returning me to motherhood. As only she could do.

  19

  FRANKIE DID NOT, IN THE end, miss the storm. T
o this day he remembers some of that night, though much of the following nine weeks—recovery weeks, two steps forward and one step back, in the hospital and back at Lidia’s—would be lost to him.

  Nurse Barb was the first to respond. She bustled around Frankie, her voice low but animated, sending another nurse to get him water, checking his pupils and heart rate and blood pressure. She seemed if not as delighted as we were, then at least in the ballpark. Dr. Lomano showed up soon after, and he carefully removed the bolsters beside Frankie’s torso, encouraging him to move his fingers and hands and arms if he could—and he could, thank heavens. Then he removed the neck and head braces and held Frankie’s chin while encouraging him to move his head from side to side. This elicited several muffled cries and a brief burst of tears. The doctor put the neck part of the brace back on. This was a precaution, he told me, since it seemed the swelling had gone down and there was likely little danger now of spinal injury or hematoma. He inclined the bed so Frankie could look around.

  Lost among the larger heartbreak was this small one, and I was the only one to witness it: Frankie wanted to speak but wasn’t allowed. This was obvious from his repeated attempts to get out a sentence, but Dr. Lomano—he didn’t mean to be insensitive, and his priority was on saving Frankie’s strength and assessing damage—told him not to. So while the doctor conducted his tests—reflexes, pupils, range of motion of toes and feet and legs—Frankie bit his tongue, making every effort to be a good boy, as he’d so often been admonished to be. Finally, the doctor was finished. He asked Frankie if he was still thirsty, and instead of answering, Frankie took the cue that it was okay to speak. His voice was weak but deliberate. “The hurricane,” he said. “Did it came?”

  How I wished, in that moment, that I had not let Graham go home. How could I have, when there was any chance of this happening? How could he have let himself?

  “It’s here,” said Charlie, and I said, “It came.”

  “Birthday hurricane,” said Frankie, then closed his eyes. He was smiling.

  THIS WAS NOT, IN THE moment, technically true. The outer tendrils of the storm had reached us, but the eyewall was still three hours away. The rains and winds had come first, slippery scouts, easing us into the real thing.

  Dr. Lomano’s nurse gave us instructions to wake Frankie every two hours to make sure his responses were still lucid, but otherwise to let him sleep. He was no longer under sedation, and without the drugs or the bolsters he slept in his usual way, with his mouth open and eyes slatted eerily and limbs spread. It was not difficult to wake him, and each time, he blinked and asked about the hurricane. Charlie and I had been taking turns checking the newscast and looking through the window down the hall, watching the palms bend calisthenically and electric-blue sparks flash in the distance, power lines snapping from their poles.

  The eye reached Biscayne Bay at around 3:00 A.M. When Charlie told Frankie, Frankie licked his lips and studied Charlie’s face. “The eye will look at your house,” he said, as if in reassurance.

  Charlie said, “That’s what I’m afraid of, kiddo.”

  The hospital itself rumbled, and the lights, which for hours had been powered by generators, blinked off every so often. The ghostly noise of sweeping winds grew louder. Charlie grew restless. He could no longer sit beside me on the floor, giving me the warmth of his body and the hard pillow of his shoulder. He paced. Around 4:30 A.M., he said, “I have an idea.”

  He pulled me to my feet, then got on his hands and knees beneath the bed and fooled with the casters. He glanced down the hallway, then gestured for me to take hold of the foot of the bed. “Be gentle,” he said, then started to pull Frankie’s bed away from the wall.

  I knew where he was headed. As we pushed Frankie’s bed down one hallway and another, my heart raced, and I questioned whether what we were doing was wise or foolish, or enough of one to justify the other.

  Nurse Barb spotted us. “Whoa, Nelly,” she said, putting a hand on the mattress. “You’re not supposed to move him.”

  I said, “It’s just for a minute—”

  “He’s got to see the storm,” Charlie said. “It’s his birthday.”

  From where we stood, we could see through the window that the air outside was peppered with debris, palm fronds and sticks and leaves flying in every direction. I’d noticed tape on the windows of the pediatric unit, but this window was bare; it had been overlooked. It reminded me of a secret portal in a children’s story. Frankie squirmed and we stared at him. “We’ll be quick,” I said.

  Barb stepped back. “Support his neck if he sits up,” she said. “And get back right away.”

  We positioned the head of the bed as close to the window as we could, and Charlie used the hand crank to raise the mattress. Frankie squirmed again and opened his eyes.

  “Baby,” I said. “Want to see the hurricane?”

  “Hurricane Andrew,” he said groggily.

  “Smarty-pants,” I said.

  He rubbed his eyes. The chaotic dark was illuminated every few seconds by flashes of light. Charlie put up his arms to cut the reflection of the overhead light against the glass. I worried for a moment that something would strike the window with us crowded so close, but really there was no tooth in my fear. It was like watching a movie of a storm rather than the storm itself, and if it weren’t for the rumbling walls and dimming lights and howling wind, I might have let go of my fear altogether.

  Charlie and Frankie apparently felt no apprehension. Frankie inched down in the bed, wincing in discomfort, trying to get closer, and Charlie kneeled and propped him up so they were inches from the glass. Charlie cradled Frankie’s head, brace and all, in the crook of his shoulder, and they would have looked so peaceful, sitting there together, except that as the minutes passed, they grew progressively more noisy. It started with Frankie, who despite our shushing couldn’t keep himself from crying out, “Look there! Look there!” each time something appeared outside, lightning or flying debris or a palm tree in whiplash. Eventually, Charlie was giggling each time Frankie cried out, a giddy laugh I’d never heard from him before. Then Frankie was giggling, and even I succumbed.

  Then Frankie quieted. “Look there,” he said one last time, pointing down at a parking lot. The car closest to the street, a dark coupe, had started to move. Not in the controlled, deliberate way of a car being driven, but in a stuttering, sideways motion, in the direction of the empty street. The spaces next to the car were empty, so it was as if it had been stranded on its own vulnerable island. We watched it make its way into the street. Then there was a gust I could feel in the floor beneath my feet, and in one powerful motion the car tipped and rolled out of sight, end over end.

  It was in those seconds, as we watched breathlessly, that the storm stopped being exciting. Charlie and Frankie shrank from the window.

  “Time to get back,” I said.

  We lowered Frankie’s mattress. He was asleep by the time we parked him in the hallway. Charlie and I sat on the floor, and I covered us both with the blanket and hugged the pillow to my chest. Charlie held my hand. I started to cry.

  “Aren’t you happy?” he said. “He’s going to be okay.”

  How could I answer him? Of course I was relieved, even joyful. But I was also—and this is yet another thing I would be unable to explain—filled with the knowledge that we had lost something that night, though exactly what we’d lost had yet to be named. I cried because it seemed to me that something new was starting, and it would come with the force of this hurricane and last much, much longer.

  LIDIA AND MY FATHER DIDN’T show up until late the next morning. A bed had come open in the pediatric unit and Frankie had been moved. The business of the hospital continued with a flow that amazed me. It was a wonder, I thought, that every member of the staff wasn’t off in a corner, getting some shut-eye or having a drink.

  I was lying beside Frankie in his bed, reading from a stack of books Nurse Barb had brought us, when they appeared. “Look who’s awake!” I s
aid brightly. But when I saw the anxiety on my father’s face, my smile died.

  “Mi’jo,” said Lidia, coming to Frankie’s side. From her bag she pulled a box of crayons and a sketch pad, and then leaned down to kiss him all over his face. My father shook Charlie’s hand and said that he was sorry about Vivian. They exchanged a few words and then, with a glance in my direction, Charlie mumbled something about finding coffee, and slipped out of the room.

  The phones were out, said my father, or else they would have called earlier. Lidia launched into a story about how their driveway had been blocked by one of Mr. Genovese’s pruned trees, and how, to get out, my father had driven straight through his neighbor’s hibiscus. In the rearview mirror, they’d seen Genovese gesture wildly at them from his semicircular front stoop.

  “As if we’d caused all the mess!” she said to Frankie. “Hurricane Lidia!” She threw up her hands and he laughed.

  “Georgia,” said my father, and gestured for me to follow him into the hallway.

  He stopped short once we were out of earshot, and I stepped aside to keep from bumping into him. “Is it the house?” I said. “Where’s Graham?”

  My father lifted his hands, palms upturned. “We don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He came over last night. Lidia set him up in the guest room. This morning he wasn’t there. The bed hadn’t been slept in. His bikes are in the garage.” He breathed hard through his nose. “We filed a police report.” They’d knocked on every door in the neighborhood, he said, before they’d spotted a police cruiser cutting through a yard.

  I pressed my palms to my eyes, trying to make sense of what he was saying. “Wait,” I said. “Maybe he’s at his office.”

  My father nodded. “Sure, maybe. But how would he have gotten there?”