Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  “I don’t know.” What I was thinking was this: most likely, Graham had gotten up midsleep and gone out into the storm. Something had happened to him. Except—and this came as brief respite—if this had been the case, then the bed would have been slept in.

  We returned to the room. My mind raced. My father bent down to kiss Frankie and tease him gruffly about his wounds, which in the daylight were both more gruesome, with their unearthly pinks and purples, and also less so, without the spectral shadows cast by overhead lighting.

  I barely registered Frankie’s giggling or Lidia’s admonishments to my father to not make him laugh. In the back of my mind, an idea was forming. My father saw the alarm in my eyes, and then so did Lidia. She took my arm. “Don’t worry—” she started, but I shook my head.

  Quietly, I said, “Did you check the Lullaby?”

  Horror registered on her features. But my father, who overheard, did not understand. He spoke in a low voice, so Frankie wouldn’t catch it. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I did the best I could with it, but the lines snapped.”

  “It sank?” I said.

  He nodded. “All you can see of it is the propeller sticking out of the water. It’s gone.”

  ANDREW WASN’T EXPECTED TO HIT Coral Gables dead-on. The storm’s eye was predicted to hit farther south; these were the neighborhoods that evacuated. In Coral Gables, families went to sleep in their own beds that night assuming the storm would wake them when it came. Maybe they’d taped some windows and stocked their kitchens, as my father had, and those with boats on the canal had lengthened the mooring lines and doubled the knots. But they didn’t expect to lose much more than a few shingles from their roofs, maybe a window or a shrub or two. Once the streets were cleared and the roofs fixed, Coral Gables would return to itself—less lush and certainly less neatly manicured, but wholly recognizable. South of the Gables, in the evacuation areas, including several developments like Sally’s, the same could not be said. Sally would tell me later that out of the mounds of rubble scattered throughout her neighborhood she recognized her own house only because Stanley’s candy-apple Porsche peeked out from beneath the collapsed garage, one headlight broken and one unbroken, as if winking.

  This is the only half-plausible explanation—that the eye was not forecasted to hit the Gables—that I can find for the decision Graham made that night. There’s also this: he loved weather, and he hated sleep. In his experience, one was benevolent and the other malevolent; maybe he did not imagine the roles could reverse. Maybe he believed that the following days at Frankie’s bedside would require as much strength as he could marshal, and he knew sleep would not visit him in Lidia’s guest room. If the guest bed had been slept in, I might have convinced myself that he’d gone to the Lullaby and taken his pills and wrestled one-handed with his cuff all in the psychotic haze of half-sleep. Sometimes I managed to convince myself of this anyway. How much of a stretch would it be for a half-sleeping Graham to make his own bed after leaving it, after all?

  But I don’t really believe this is what happened. After he was found, still cuffed, at the bottom of the canal, every memory of the two of us together would fragment and reorder in my mind. Even the memory of that sea turtle in the Dry Tortugas, and his decision to leave me alone in my kayak while he went on to Loggerhead. Marrying a reckless man—and having a child with him—is a reckless act in itself. This was something I’d never admitted to myself.

  Maybe if the story is told in a certain way, it would seem obvious to anyone that Graham had been untrustworthy all along. But I was there and I saw the way he cared for me, and so I have my doubts. It would be easier if I could believe it. It would remind me that no matter his intentions, he’d behaved carelessly not only with me and Frankie but also with himself. It would remind me that I’d been right to leave him.

  But if I hadn’t left him, hadn’t succumbed to the pull I’d felt toward Charlie, then I might have tried to convince him to stay at Frankie’s bedside with me, no matter what, for Frankie’s sake. It had been selfish of me to let him go. It had been easier for me to be alone with Frankie, especially given the possibility that Charlie might return. If I’d coerced Graham to stay, I eventually would have ended up without a husband, but my son would still have a father.

  20

  FRANKIE’S ROOMMATE AT SOUTH DADE was a ten-year-old black boy named Antoine. Days before the storm, Antoine had been in a car accident with his parents, both of whom visited every morning and evening. Though I wondered how it could be that Antoine had been hurt so badly when they’d sustained only bruises and cuts, I never asked about it, and they were all so gentle and loving that I knew either parent would have cheerfully switched places with him. About once or twice a day, Antoine’s pain medications stopped doing their job, and the nurses wouldn’t give him more until it was time, so his parents held him while he softly cried. If his parents weren’t there when it happened, I held him myself, wiping his nose and singing to him until Nurse Barb showed up.

  The night of Frankie’s birthday, as Hurricane Andrew skulked over Florida’s western coast and limped into the Gulf, Lidia walked to a Publix close to the hospital. She told us when she returned that the store was being indiscriminately, almost lazily looted when she’d arrived, and she’d slipped a twenty-dollar bill under the locked manager’s office door before walking out with a sheet cake, a half-deflated helium balloon, and a potted plant. Charlie disappeared for a few hours, then returned with construction paper, glue, string, and scissors, and sat in the corner working on a project, shooing me when I got close. I gathered paper plates and cups and soda from the cafeteria and made an IOU for a bike—the choice gave me pause, because Graham would have wanted to pick it out—then decorated the envelope using Frankie’s crayons.

  My father had been gone for hours, since he’d put two and two together and rushed off to find a working phone or a police officer. I hoped for Frankie’s sake he would be gone until after our ramshackle party was finished.

  Charlie worked for more than an hour. After he finished, he made a construction paper blindfold for Frankie and asked me and Lidia to step out. When he spoke to Lidia, he averted his eyes and lowered his voice, which reminded me of the way he’d been with me when we’d first met. Ten minutes later, he invited us back in, looking sheepish. He’d decorated the space above Frankie’s bed with a variety of uncannily accurate cutouts of sea animals, each suspended on fishing line from its limbs or fins or tentacles, spinning and swaying in the air. A purple-and-pink octopus, a magenta-and-orange sea horse, a black shark with red teeth, a blue-and-green dolphin, a green-and-black turtle, a pink-and-white conch, and a red finger coral. Each was shaded and detailed in pencil. Altogether, the assembly looked like a snapshot of a particularly busy reef.

  I thought of Graham’s origami, then put the thought out of my head. Charlie removed Frankie’s blindfold and Frankie squealed. “Sea creatures!”

  “Happy birthday,” said Charlie.

  “I wish I had a camera,” said Lidia.

  More than anything else, I think it was those colorful mobiles, that act of love for her grandson, that gave Lidia the permission to forgive Charlie. I would never again hear so much as a skeptical word from her. And it seemed, as we beamed at him and his cheeks reddened under the attention, that he knew it, and was proud. He was a man at least partially redeemed.

  The hospital was not air-conditioned. They were conserving generator power for as long as possible, since no one knew how long the electricity would be out. The mayor had said it would be out for a week, but then experts in interviews had said that a week would be miraculous. So little did we all move around in Frankie’s room that I barely registered the intensity of the heat and humidity, the ever-present skein of moisture on the backs of my neck and knees. Lidia had brought some of her own clothes for me, and for Frankie’s party I wore a sleeveless linen sundress and a pair of underwear from the grocery store, where Lidia had gone again with a list and a wad of cash. This time, there had
been an employee taking money, using a little plastic calculator to figure tax. Lidia said it was like the world outside was moving in slow motion. I thought to call Sally—we’d seen photographs of her neighborhood on the news—and went as far as picking up the phone beside Frankie’s bed before remembering that the lines were dead.

  Frankie started asking about his father an hour after the party wound down. I’d read him two books and turned off the light. Lidia had gone home; my father had not returned. I had very little hope that Graham would be found alive, though part of me tried to believe that maybe he simply didn’t want to be found. Since the wheels of detective work were turning slowly—had my father yet been able to summon the police?—I lied. I told Frankie his father had to work, but was thinking of him every moment.

  That night after Frankie and Charlie were asleep, I took a shower in the room’s small bathroom, and wept under the tepid fall of the water.

  The next morning, Lidia arrived without my father and explained in a whisper that he was still waiting for police divers to arrive. She set about unwrapping Cuban sandwiches and arranging them on plates, for Antoine’s family as well as our own. Charlie, fidgety in Lidia’s company, wandered off again. We’d spoken briefly the night before, in whispers, about Graham, and he’d been unconvinced by my theory. “Let’s hope you’re wrong,” he’d said, squeezing my hand.

  My father finally showed up—with Riggs, of all people—late that afternoon. Riggs brought a twine-tied pastry box and opened it at Frankie’s side, wincing at the sight of Frankie’s still-battered face. “That does not look good, kid,” he said. “Have a pastelito.”

  I followed my father into the hallway. Lidia came up quickly behind us, and by the time she was at my side I had taken in the look on my father’s face, and started to weaken on my own feet. I didn’t cry, exactly, but in Lidia’s strong arms I found myself shaking, thinking less of Graham than of Frankie, of his fatherless future. After my father told me everything that had happened since he’d left the hospital, he offered to take care of having the houseboat brought up and taken away, and of having Graham’s body cremated, which is what he would have wanted. I found it touching that my father knew to make this offer. The work of death, therefore, was off my plate, and I could tend to the more imposing task of telling my son that his father was dead.

  MY FATHER HAD DRIVEN STRAIGHT to the Coral Gables Police Department from the hospital, but the missing-person case he’d started was still in limbo, waiting to be active until forty-eight hours had passed. The officer who’d opened that case was out, so a different officer took notes as my father explained the situation. The officer interrupted to ask if my father was talking about the same ratty Sumerset houseboat he’d been ticketing for weeks, behind the three-thousand block of Granada Boulevard.

  My father said that, yes, he was speaking of the same boat. Then he explained Graham’s sleep disorder and described the night in Chicago when Graham had caused the accident, and the night in Round Lake when he’d gone through the hotel window. I’d never discussed the details of either incident with my father—he must have heard the stories from Graham himself.

  “What did the officer say?” I asked my father.

  “He said, ‘I’ll be damned.’ He said he’d rustle up some divers to take a look.”

  For the rest of the day, my father waited in the backyard, clearing debris. No boats came down the canal, no divers showed. I asked about the family in the mansion behind Lidia’s, and he told me they’d cleared out; the yacht was gone. There was a broken glass door off their back patio, which my father drove over to close up with a sheet of plywood. I wonder, still, about the mother of that family and her canal swimming, about what she gained from it, about the risks people are willing to take when they want something badly. My father slept uneasily that night, dreaming of shipwrecks. He emphasized this, as if sleeping uneasily were a detail that would particularly interest me.

  The next morning, Lidia left for the hospital and my father resumed his work in the backyard. Next door, Felix Genovese hacked through the destroyed mangrove wall, and without bothering with banter asked my father about his fuel reserves. Lines at gas stations were a mile long, there was no reason to think marina fuel docks were open, and the Genoveses were itching to get out of town. The canal was slightly less impenetrable than the streets, and they planned to make their way to the bay in their sport fisher, then head up to Sarasota, where their daughter lived. But they needed a bit more fuel than they had on hand to make it as far as Fort Lauderdale, where they could buy more. He was willing to pay.

  “Tell you what,” said my father, and offered one car’s worth of fuel if his neighbor would do him a favor. Genovese agreed without asking questions. My father stared hard at the propeller sticking out of the murky canal. “Wait here,” he said. He went inside and changed into swim trunks, then got rope and a mask and snorkel from the garage. He told Genovese to hold one end of the rope. “Felix,” said my father, “can I trust you?”

  Genovese shrugged. “Sure.”

  My father pointed to the canal. “I’ve got to go down there, and I want you to make sure I get back up.”

  “I don’t swim,” said Genovese, who had a pool in his backyard.

  “Just hold on,” said my father. “Don’t let go. I’ll be careful, but if you feel me tug hard a few times, I want you to pull me out.”

  Genovese looked nervous, but he puffed out his chest—these are my father’s words—and called my father a lunatic.

  I found it distressing how willing my father was to do this frankly terrifying thing. For Graham in death he was brave, when during his own wife’s death he’d been such a phony. Not only had my father made no grand gestures toward the end of her life, but he hadn’t even made the little gestures, dispensing medicine or talking to doctors, canceling a show or two to stay by her side. Maybe in Graham’s case, my father’s morbid curiosity got the better of him, but it seemed like more than that. It seemed like he wanted to see Graham for himself, to be the first person to face the end of Graham’s life, instead of waiting for strangers in city-issued wet suits to confirm it. Or maybe my father was plainly uncomfortable with the in-between of life and death, the anticipation, and diving for Graham was, in its way, the same as disappearing during his wife’s demise: he preferred to avoid the wait entirely.

  My father tied the rope around his chest and eased off the pier into the water, dog-paddling through floating debris. He waved at Felix Genovese, who waved back, then he dived. He came to the screen doors of the Lullaby first, then made his way around the starboard side to the window over the banquette, which was broken enough to push through. He came up for air first, made it through the window and as far as Frankie’s little bunk before retreating. He couldn’t dive long enough to reach the main berth if he swam through the boat. He breathed at the surface for a long time, buffering his nerve, then dived once more. But this time he went down at the bow, knowing he wouldn’t be able to fit through the small windows there even if they’d shattered. Instead, he swam to the forward window on the starboard side, and held on to the trim so he could get a good look inside.

  The mattress had come off the bed and fallen toward the door, barricading it. The trundle storage had come open and clothes floated midroom, as if worn by sea-ghosts. Graham’s body hovered where the mattress had been, silver hair covering his eyes, bedsheets twisted around his torso and legs. His arm was tethered to the wall.

  My father came up heaving, just in time to stop Genovese from jumping in after him.

  It was not Genovese but Riggs who took my father back to the police station to report what he’d seen, then brought him to the hospital. My father had emptied his own car’s fuel tank for Genovese, and Lidia had her car at the hospital, so it was dumb luck that while my father was contemplating using Graham’s bicycle for transportation, he heard a knock on the door, and there stood Riggs. Behind Riggs was a gleaming black Mercedes-Benz. Riggs introduced himself and said something abou
t Charlie having taken his car.

  “Isn’t that your car?” said my father, gesturing to the Mercedes.

  “Charlie took my other car.”

  My father invited him in. Within minutes, he’d told Riggs the story of Graham’s disappearance and discovery. They headed together to the police station.

  “It’s the damndest thing,” said my father to me. “Can you please tell me why he did this?”

  I shook my head. I could not, and cannot still.

  RIGGS HAD COME TO THE hospital with sad news of his own to deliver. He’d brought Polaroids and handed them to Charlie, clapping him on the shoulder. “Sorry to bear bad tidings, friend,” he said.

  Charlie took the news stiffly, nodding and shrugging at each photograph of his fallen home, blinking rapidly. “Well,” he kept saying. “Well.”

  Riggs seemed reluctant to leave even though there was no place for him to sit. Lidia went off and returned half an hour later with two patio chairs, tags hanging from the aluminum frames. She also brought jigsaw puzzles, and Charlie found a cafeteria tray and lay it on Frankie’s lap. He and Riggs edged up close to the bed and with Frankie’s eager assistance got to work. I sat beside them breathing deeply, trying not to arouse Frankie’s suspicion.

  Later, I dozed lightly in the corner on a floor pillow Lidia had brought from her den, and it was in my semiconscious state that I heard, as if through a fog, the sound of high heels clacking into the room. I opened my eyes to find Dr. Sonia standing at the foot of Frankie’s bed, absorbing the stares of Riggs and Charlie, who were paused midpuzzle with pieces in their hands.

  Frankie took it on himself to be the welcoming voice. “Hi! You came for me?” he said.

  “I did,” she said.

  I got to my feet. “What are you doing here?”

  “Checking in,” she said, opening Frankie’s file. “You look better,” she said to Frankie.