Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  Upstairs were three bedrooms—chalky gray-blue for the master bedroom and baby blue for the master bath, cream for the larger of the two other bedrooms and taupe for the third. In the hallway were strips of wallpaper in toile and floral prints, and I circled one covered in cheery hibiscus blooms. In the closet of the master bedroom was a large, open box, and when I peered inside I found hundreds of what I assumed were Vivian’s photographs. I wanted to thumb through them but forced myself to close the closet door.

  Off the master bedroom was a screened sleeping porch with a wide-plank wood floor that needed a good sweep. Through the screens I could see the patchy lawn stippled with acorns, the mossy rock wall, the cabana’s pitched roof. Just beyond the perimeter of palms was the crystal blue of a neighbor’s swimming pool. I could no more easily imagine Charlie lounging on the sleeping porch with a newspaper, swimming in the pool, or using the barbecue, than I could imagine him choosing wallpaper for the hallway. We were alike, it seemed. We both had a place to go, but that place wasn’t the right one at all.

  Before going downstairs, I stood on the sleeping porch and fanned my face, trying to cool off. I looked down at the disrepair of the pool and grounds, so lovely in their own way even in that state, and hardened my resolve: when he asked, I would decline, for his sake as much as my own.

  His eyes were closed when I came back downstairs. There was a sheen of perspiration on his stubbled cheeks, and he’d pulled up the hems of his jeans, baring his ankles. I circled one ankle with my hand and his eyes opened. “I’m done,” I said.

  He touched his cheek. “Come on,” he said, pulling me down by the wrist. His hands dug in my hair and his thigh spread my legs. My resolve weakened.

  We were still at the house when the roofers took their lunch break. The terrible hammering stopped. I started to feel pulled back to the hospital, back to Frankie, and hurried to dress. But Charlie put on each of his shoes and buttoned his shirt so deliberately that it occurred to me that he was biding time. Before I could ask him what was going on, the doorbell rang and there stood a pert forty-something woman in a ponytail and linen pants suit. She was pretty in a calculated way, with a glossy, heart-shaped mouth.

  “Victoria,” said Charlie.

  “Did you make any decisions?” she said brightly.

  “We did!” he said, then introduced me. “This is the decorator,” he said to me.

  “Designer,” corrected Victoria.

  “I love those corals,” I said.

  “This house begs for old Florida tones. All the white—I shudder.” She laughed loudly, then gestured for us to follow her into the kitchen. From a briefcase she pulled a file filled with pictures of cabinets and laid them out on the counter. Then she pulled out four squares of stone countertops in hues of white and gray. “The clock ticks,” she said.

  “We were headed out, actually,” I said.

  Charlie put a hand on my waist. “Just one more minute.” He put the photos in my hand. “Please.”

  I understood then that this had been his plan all along. Not for me to just see the house, but for me to make these choices for him, even to meet Victoria; he’d been stalling until she arrived. And it was easy, picking out someone else’s kitchen cabinets and countertops. It took me all of five minutes, after which Victoria led me through the house, pulling out photographs of ceiling fans with palm blades and upholstery options for the dining room chairs and living room sofa. When Graham and I had made some of these same choices at the cottage, it had taken weeks. What energy we are capable of wasting, when nothing more urgent is going on.

  No, Frankie and I would not return to Round Lake. Whether I would sell the cottage or keep it, maybe for Frankie or as an investment, I wasn’t sure, but there was no need to decide right away.

  Finally we were done. We left Victoria behind in the house. The roofers had returned to their hammering. Sunlight dappled the driveway. As we drove away, I looked back at the house, which only an hour before had seemed so shabby and unloved, and saw it now as simply tarnished, in need of a spit and shine and not much else. I didn’t think Charlie would be happy there, but I was happy for him.

  “So what do you think?” he said when we were in the car. He didn’t look at me. I studied his hard-set jaw, the lines of his handsome face.

  “I think you have a beautiful home,” I said. “The designer was a good idea.”

  “I’m getting the friend-of-the-boyfriend discount.”

  “She’s getting divorced?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “Riggs is smitten. It’s ‘Victoria this, Victoria that . . .’ ” He trailed off.

  We parked at the hospital and I started to get out of the car, then stopped. “Charlie—”

  “I’ve got a couple errands to run,” he said. “Henry Gale’s shop, for one.”

  “We’ll see you tonight?”

  He hesitated. “Not tonight, no.” He pressed his palms against his thighs. He didn’t look at me. “I’ve got a few things to catch up on.”

  “I have something to tell you.”

  He raised his eyes. “All right.”

  “If you’re thinking—I don’t know if you are, but if you are—that we might live together . . .”

  His smile was soft, apologetic. I saw that I’d been foolish. I saw, too, something I’d been ignoring, which had been right in front of me the whole time: he was much, much older than I. He had no intention of starting over, at least not in the way I might one day start over.

  “I wasn’t thinking that,” he said.

  “Of course not,” I said. You’re a hermit, I thought. And though I’d been certain, or nearly so, that living together would not have worked, I was crushed to realize it had never been under consideration.

  He opened his mouth to say more, but I didn’t want to hear it. I kissed him quickly on the cheek, but when he pulled me in for more, I broke away.

  “Tell the boy,” he said before I shut the door, “I miss him.”

  I waved good-bye over my shoulder. That evening, when I undressed for a shower, I could smell him on my clothes and in my hair. I sat on the toilet seat as the small hospital bathroom filled with steam, thinking that he had most certainly—I was almost sure of it—said, “Tell the boy I miss him,” and not, as it had started to sound when repeated in my mind, “Tell the boy I’ll miss him.”

  22

  A WEEK LATER, FRANKIE WAS discharged from the hospital after having been there twenty days. Lidia and I stood on chairs and pulled the mobiles from the ceiling as Frankie called out, “Gently! Gently!” The swelling was all but gone, the bruising reduced to a mustard stain under his left eye.

  He’d asked after Charlie every morning, and every morning I’d told him the same thing: “He’s gone now, but he misses you.” Eventually, I knew, he would stop asking. I found it very sad, the promise of his short memory, but also very comforting.

  We took away with us a roster of exercises that Dr. Lomano believed would help keep the still-unexplained seizing behavior at bay. I made an appointment with an ophthalmologist to check on the strabismus, which continued to appear when Frankie was tired. We donated a large box of puzzles, toys, and books to the pediatric lounge.

  Riggs had brought the mortgage papers to the hospital. He’d gone over them with me while I bit my thumb to keep from crying. A notary looked on as I signed where Riggs told me to sign. When I was done, Charlie’s house and its property, including the grounds across the street, belonged to me. I didn’t ask where he had gone; I knew Riggs wouldn’t tell me, but also I believed I already knew. Most likely, Charlie had been planning to go since long before meeting me and Frankie, had been waiting until after Vivian’s death. For a long time I would wonder why we weren’t enough to keep him around. I would wonder if there might have been something I could have said or done to make him stay. But there was the matter of our age difference, which would only have become more relevant as time passed, and there was the matt
er of his preference for solitude. Riggs was also sorry to see him go, I knew. He gave me back my job when Angela quit to go to school full-time, and though the two years I spent as his assistant weren’t easy, he never again raised his voice to me, which is saying a lot.

  We held a memorial service for Graham in Lidia’s backyard, and there, for the first time, I met Larry Birnbaum in the flesh, along with a dozen of Graham’s Rosenstiel colleagues. Larry had light green eyes and a deep tan and receding blond hair. He showed me wallet photographs of his four towheaded daughters. After we’d spread half of Graham’s ashes in the canal and Lidia had served key lime pie, Larry and I sat together on the pier, and he told me in as much detail as he could what had happened on the Revelle. After, I was more certain that Graham had meant, or at least hoped, to take his own life. But I kept this to myself, for selfish reasons and also because that’s what he had wanted.

  IT WAS A MONTH BEFORE the farmhouse was ready for us. In the meantime, Frankie slept in the guest room at Lidia’s and, unwilling to provoke the sleep gods, I slept beside him instead of in the den Lidia had cleared out for me. One afternoon, Marse Heiger picked up me and Lidia in her boat and ferried us out to Stiltsville to see for ourselves what had been lost. It took a while to find the watery land where Charlie’s house had stood. We were able to, finally, only because a few of his neighbors’ pilings remained. We puttered fifty yards west of the pilings and circled until we spotted Charlie’s refrigerator and oven beneath the surface. Nearby was a barstool and a kitchen cabinet and nothing else.

  “Dios mio,” said Lidia.

  Marse shuddered visibly. “Can you imagine?”

  I had been imagining it, in fact. The windows might have blown out first, followed by the eaves and the roof. How does a floor give way? How does a dock splinter? What does it sound like when a wall collapses? I focused on these images and tried to block out the one that kept coming: Frankie falling, and landing.

  On the return, I asked Marse to keep our speed low and stick close to the shoals, so I could scan the water for Charlie’s boxes. I wondered what the drawings would look like if I found them. Would they be unrecognizable, after all that time in the water, or would they be preserved, fish-nibbled but otherwise intact? I found no trace. Maybe Charlie went back for them himself, though with the storm and tides, it’s more likely that they were carried out to sea. I like to think that they still exist somewhere, which leaves the possibility that they will be found.

  For a long time I remained fixated on the accident. In particular, I circled around one question: What must it have been like for Charlie, during that swollen heartbeat of time while Frankie was falling? If I’d been faster, Frankie might have fallen into my arms; I might have broken his fall. But if Charlie had been faster, Frankie might not have fallen at all. I think this distinction instilled in Charlie an unbearable guilt, one that echoed the pain of having arrived too late to save his daughter. And I think this guilt helps explain why he left us the way he did, without saying good-bye. Without, even, any recognition of his love or ours.

  I think Frankie missed him even more than I did. Whether he missed him as much as he missed his father, I couldn’t say, but the fact that both men disappeared from his life within a week of each other was a blow from which he will never fully recover.

  By the time we moved into the farmhouse—there was not much to move—the new paint smell had faded. Despite its face-lift, the house has echoing acoustics, leaky windows, noisy floorboards, and a persistent ant problem in the kitchen. I live with the choices I made so hastily that afternoon when I first visited, and for the most part they were good ones.

  When we arrived, I found a new wooden manikin like Charlie’s in the closet in Frankie’s room. And in the closet of the master bedroom was the ruined T-shirt I’d worn the afternoon we’d painted the office; it still smelled of me. I wasn’t sure if this was his way of acknowledging what we’d shared or of making sure I knew that what we’d shared was finished. Vivian’s photographs were gone, but I pestered Riggs until one day at work he dropped an envelope on my desk. There had been at least a couple hundred in the box I’d seen, but in the envelope there were only five, all black-and white: the banyan behind the farmhouse; the house casting a sharp shadow across the lawn; the areca palms on a windy day; a hibiscus in bloom in the side yard. The fifth was of the pool, and in the water a female figure wearing a dark suit swam away from the camera. I framed the photographs and hung them in the upstairs hallway, where they remain to this day.

  I spent a lot of time that first year trying to put Frankie’s accident in the past. I tried not to dote on him, to give him space to get used to the changed circumstances of our lives, but he clung to me. At bedtime, he screamed unless I agreed to stay the night in his bed, and during the day he followed me from room to room. We were on rocky ground for a while, sanity-wise. I filled the swimming pool but he refused to go near it. Among all he lost, then, there was also swimming and water, games of Marco Polo and pool parties, the beach and the ocean and fishing. My father brought a child-size acoustic guitar and taught Frankie to play. Lidia brought craft projects and a small trampoline and picked him up every few days to go to the airport to see planes or the marina to see boats. One day, she brought him an easel and a set of watercolors and pencils, and from then on the house was littered with his masterpieces: fish of every shape and color, the farmhouse, the live oak, me.

  My sleeplessness returned. I took up the habit of swimming laps before bed, which helps. Still, many mornings find me watching from the sleeping porch as sunlight spills into the grooves of the oak. We are surrounded by neighbors, but the rambling house and property feel to me like they exist in a separate time and place. I think of Vivian often. I wish I could thank her.

  After we’d been in the farmhouse more than a year, I placed an ad in the Round Lake newspaper and found a new tenant for the cottage, another academic looking for a place to write his dissertation. I flew out and hired a local caretaker to put in the dock every spring and take it out in early winter, to set mousetraps and clear them, to winterize the pipes and have the chimney swept in the fall. I found myself glad that this place that once had been my home wouldn’t be gone from me forever. I put away Graham’s old posters, the gifts from his father, to save for Frankie. Before I returned to Florida, I spread the last part of Graham’s ashes off the pier and spent the evening on the back deck, recalling the evening we’d made our lopsided decision to start a family.

  And so I own two houses, neither of which feels like it truly belongs to me. Sometimes I daydream of a time after Frankie is out of the house when I might move into a soulless condo with no ghosts haunting the cupboards. Not because I’d rather live in such a place, but because I wonder what it’s like to break with the past.

  THERE IS ONLY ONE STORY I haven’t yet told. It involves a young woman named Anna Fitzgerald, who, during the second semester of her graduate work at the Rosenstiel School of Atmospheric and Marine Science, was awarded a spot on the R. V. Roger Revelle. I’ve seen photographs: she was a very tall, pale person, with a prominent nose and poor posture, pretty in a way that she didn’t seem to recognize. Graham’s one-time roommate, a German-born Scripps student named Alfonso, did recognize it, and campaigned for her affections as soon as she was transferred to the ship. He and Anna had a habit of meeting at night on the stern deck, beneath the pilothouse, where they spent an hour or two talking and watching the shoreline lights. One night, a sleepwalking Graham happened on them, and for reasons no one but I can imagine, Graham charged at Anna with both arms extended, taking her completely by surprise and pushing her over the ship rail into the blue-black depths of the Atlantic.

  I can imagine it, yes. Sometimes I even think I can explain it, though it’s an explanation that falls short of pure logic, and therefore would be one that Graham would loathe on its face. Anna and I don’t resemble each other, and Alfonso, who had rejected Graham’s friendship after a tumultuous month of bunking together, do
esn’t resemble Graham, so the parallels are not perfect. But Graham was no dummy, and I think my pleasure at having escaped our shared life, however impermanently we believed that escape was at the time, was evident to him, even if it wasn’t yet evident to me. He was in a state of heartbreak and loss, over me and Frankie as well as his mother, feeling no small measure of anger at me and at himself.

  Anna lived. Alfonso punched Graham in the gut, sent up a flare from a nearby lifeboat, grabbed a life preserver, and jumped in after her. If they had been standing anywhere but the stern, where the ship rail was lower, it’s unlikely Graham would have had the power, in his state, to force her over. And if the ship had not been anchored, she likely would have drowned. As it was, it’s a wonder that she did not hit anything on the way down, not the gunwale or the anchor line or something in the dark water. It is a wonder that she was able to surface, and I’m grateful still.

  Graham was transferred to shore and arrested by the Jacksonville police. He refused to hand over Lidia’s phone number, so I was not contacted. By the time he returned to us, he was out on bail posted by Larry Birnbaum and a psychiatric evaluation had been ordered. And although he would have returned to Detention willingly rather than lose me and Frankie, I know that being institutionalized without the freedom to leave would have seemed to him the end of anything workable in life.

  Learning what Graham did to Anna Fitzgerald released me from some of my guilt, over leaving him and over Frankie’s accident. I still wake in the night, my heart racing, with an agonizing image in mind: Graham on the deck of a ship, standing behind not Anna Fitzgerald but Frankie, arms up and ready to push. After I wake, I play it out. I save Frankie, again and again, but not by jumping in after him. I save him by knocking Graham to the floor before he can do his damage. In my edited version of imaginary events—as real to me in the dark hours as the clock ticking on the nightstand—Frankie turns to find his mother open-armed behind him, and his father, no kind of villain, alive and awake.