by Laura Resau
We arrived here on the same day—January first—when Layla’s new job started. It was serendipitous that Layla and I came across the job posting. Back in France, where we lived last year, I did an online search for Punta Cometa and found an ad looking for a multilingual family to manage cabanas. Layla was game, so we left France earlier than planned and came here. And the luckiest part of it—Wendell had just finished up all his credits for high school graduation in Colorado. He scrambled to get an internship for his last semester at the Turtle Center down the road from the cabanas.
The precise, ordered new path of my life with Wendell stretches before me like a shiny ribbon. Layla has agreed to give him his own cabana and meals in exchange for maintaining our website and helping with chores. He’ll stay for the next year and a half, with a few short visits home to Colorado. He’ll focus on building up his nature photography portfolio while I take online classes for my last year and a half of high school. After I graduate next spring, we’ll go to college together—the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he’ll pay in-state tuition and we can live with his parents to save money. His parents are disappointed that he isn’t going to a fancy art college and is taking a year off after high school, but they haven’t tried to stop him. Secretly, I suspect they like the idea of his going to college close to home.
Finally, Wendell and I will be together for more than a few months at a time. Finally, I’ll have a home to come back to. Finally, there will be no more wandering into the unknown.
I tuck my trig notebook and pencil into my bag, stretch my arms. Wendell shuts down his laptop and takes my hand. “How about a walk?”
It’s past midnight, but that doesn’t matter. Time flows differently here. “Sure.” I reach out and he pulls me up. “Sounds perfect.”
Twenty minutes later, we’re hand in hand, walking on Playa Mermejita, where moonlight and starlight melt together on the dark water. Usually, we go to the busier, well-lit beach of Mazunte, near downtown, but tonight, on an impulse, we’ve chosen this more solitary beach. There’s not an electric light in sight. There are no restaurants or bars. No bonfires or drum circles. Only an overgrown jungle path and a single-lane dirt road lead here. We’ve heard that the currents are rough for swimming, with hidden rocks and riptides. That must be why no one comes here. It’s remote, risky, and at night, eerily dark.
The moon illuminates the beach, reflects off the water, just enough for us to see our way. Waves rush, gather strength, slap against the shore, and retreat again. With every step, sand squishes between my toes and sea-foam licks my heels. Wendell moves my hand to his face, lets his lips run up the sensitive inside of my arm. Tiny shocks of pleasure ripple across my skin.
When he looks up, his eyes glisten with an idea. “Hey, Z. Let’s meet here for the handfasting.”
I stare, surprised. Surprised in a good way, a bien padre way. Last year, when Wendell spent the summer with me in France, we did a Celtic handfasting ritual, a promise to be together for a year and a day. We were told to choose a special meeting place for our next handfasting, on August second. If we both show up, then we renew our promise. If one of us doesn’t come, our bond is broken and we agree to move on. I didn’t realize he’d taken it so seriously, that he’d actually been on the lookout for the right spot.
My gaze sweeps over the beach, at our moon shadows stretching far in front of us. We’re standing beside a huge driftwood log, exactly in the middle of a long crescent of sand. One side is lined with jungle, rising into the majestic cliffs of Punta Cometa, and on the other, the surf forms a scalloped lace pattern at our feet. Yes, this is perfect. I mark an X on the sand. “Right here,” I say, smiling. “This very spot.”
“August second, at midnight,” he says, wrapping his arms around me.
“Midnight,” I repeat, raising my face toward his.
Our lips are on the verge of touching when that noise thunders from the forest above. It’s not as close this time, but it’s clearly audible over the pounding waves.
I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for the sound to fade into the rush of surf.
Wendell pulls away from me, scanning the cliffs. “What was that?” His eyebrows furrow. “I heard the same sound at dinner, Z. When you were on your walk. I was a little worried about you, actually.” He squints up at the trees. “What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know. But I’m not letting it scare me.” I twist my finger around my wind-tangled hair, deciding how much more to say. “I heard it earlier tonight, too,” I admit. “Loud. And close.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” His voice is full of concern. “Where’d it come from?”
“The place in the jungle with those weird signs.”
“The Forbidden Territory?” he asks, frowning. Up to now, whenever we’ve mentioned the Forbidden Territory, it’s been to joke around. As in, If you don’t help me take out this trash, I’ll banish you to the Forbidden Territory. But now, his voice is serious, worried. “What did it sound like up close, Z?”
I shrug. “Just—loud. And deep. Kind of rumbling. It’s probably some crazy echo from the cliffs.”
He doesn’t look convinced. Chewing on a fingernail, he stares up at the jungle. His wariness puts me on edge; he’s not a person who scares easily.
I’m almost angry at that noise for breaking the mood. Determined, I set my jaw. “Listen, Wendell, just forget about it. Let’s enjoy ourselves, okay?”
And to prove the point, I sink to the sand, pulling him down with me. Easily, he surrenders.
“As long as we don’t get devoured,” he murmurs, kissing my ear.
“Or eliminated,” I counter.
“Or cursed.”
“That would be the worst.…”
Within minutes, we’ve lost ourselves in salty skin and sea spray, and after a while, we fall into a delicious half-sleep induced by ocean waves.
Some time later, my eyes open. Wendell is nudging me gently. I prop myself on my elbow, brush the sand from my cheek. With a finger to his lips, he motions to an enormous dark form in the surf just meters away.
“What is it?” he whispers.
I rub my eyes and stand up, brushing more sand from my dress, my legs, my shoulders. Wendell’s already walking toward the thing. Following him, I squint in the faint moonlight. In a sleep-scratchy voice, I speculate, “Some kind of sea creature?” When he stops at a distance, I stand beside him, blinking, sensing that we’re witnessing something extraordinary. “Is it alive?”
He studies it. “I think it’s coming ashore.”
The ghostly form emerges from the surf, impossibly slowly. I take a step closer, make out its heart-shaped body, wide flippers like wings, tiny slits of eyes, glinting. Now I grasp the size of this beast. It’s as big as a car.
“A sea turtle, Zeeta,” Wendell whispers. “It’s so huge, it must be a leatherback. Endangered for years, hunted nearly to extinction.”
I watch the creature’s arduous trek from the surf, letting the magic wash over me. There’s something ancient about this animal, something that humbles me, mesmerizes me. And I feel the presence of my father. Whenever Layla talks about their one-night stand nearly eighteen years ago in Greece, she tells how he emerged from the sea like a creature from another world. Despite my eye-rolling, I started to think of him that way, somewhere out there, living his own deep-sea life. Then, last year in France, he began to emerge, only to retreat again before I even saw his real face. He worked as a mime, part of a troupe of street performers appropriately called Illusion. I’d met my father at last, met him without knowing it was him. Briefly, an image flashes in my mind—my father lost in dark waters, swimming in circles, aimless.
Disturbing. I shake off the thought, just as Wendell says, “Look, Z!,” gesturing up the beach.
There are more turtles ahead, although none quite as big as the first one. About seven or eight of them, most in various stages of dragging themselves from the surf. A couple have already started digging their nest
s, their flippers alternating, right, left, right, flinging sand.
“These leatherbacks migrate thousands of miles to feed,” Wendell says, his soft voice growing animated. “Down to South America. Every couple of years they swim all the way back to the same little stretch of beach here to nest. They’ll lay a few clutches of eggs throughout the nesting season, then head back to the waters off the coast of Chile, or Peru, or Ecuador. Isn’t that padre?”
I nod, grateful to focus on sea turtle factoids instead of that strange, underwater image of my father.
As we tiptoe around the leatherbacks, Wendell spouts off more facts, and I find myself becoming surprisingly absorbed. He’s always been most interested in the art form of photography. But something happened over the fall, as he was preparing for this internship, reading books and articles and watching videos back in Colorado. He apparently developed a fondness for sea turtles. More than a fondness. A passion.
Eventually, we reach the rocks at the end of the beach, then turn around, passing by the six turtles and stopping at the largest one, the one we first spotted.
“It’s instinctual,” Wendell is saying, “finding their nesting place—something to do with magnetic particles in their brains. After sea turtles hatch, they spend over a decade wandering, but they’re drawn to come back to the beach where they were born, where their mothers and grandmothers nested. They’ve been doing this for over a hundred million years.”
I take this in. “Maybe my dad is a merman after all.” I’m attempting to joke, but my words end up sounding almost grave. “A turtle merman.”
“A turtle merman?” Wendell looks at me, skeptically at first, then tenderly. “You think he’s really somewhere around here?”
I shrug, trying to figure out what I think, how to put the underwater image of my father into words. Back in France, I’d been certain this was where my father had gone, to his home town of Mazunte. But now that we’re here, and there’s no sign of him, I don’t know what to think. In fact, I’ve been trying not to think about him, and to focus instead on the perfection of this beach town. But tonight I can’t shake this picture of my father, lost in a dark place.
“Hey,” Wendell says, “we’ll find him.” He studies my face, trying to look inside me. “I’m sure he’s fine, Z. And I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you.”
After a moment, I whisper, “Then why hasn’t he contacted me?”
It’s the first time I’ve spoken the question aloud. Wendell knows the facts: My father has my email address. I check my account daily, just in case this will be the day the email comes. But day after day, there’s nothing.
Wendell pulls me close. “I don’t know, Z. But there’s still hope.”
“Maybe,” I concede.
“I read a story about a sea turtle,” Wendell says under his breath. His arm tightens around me; his lips graze my ear. “A Native American myth.”
“Tell me,” I murmur, keeping my gaze fixed on the creature.
“Ages ago,” he says, “nothing existed but darkness and sea, so Turtle dove far down into the water to retrieve the Earth. He disappeared for many years, swimming all the way to the bottom. By the time he resurfaced, all the Earth had washed away except for a tiny bit of mud under his toenail. But it was enough. Once the speck of mud was placed on Turtle’s back, it grew and grew and grew and became our Earth.”
After a pause, I say, “So you think my father’s just taking his time? That he’s out there somewhere?”
Wendell nods. “Maybe he’s holding on to a muddy little piece of hope.”
“Hope for what?”
Wendell thinks. “A new life, Z. One with you in it.”
I watch this enormous creature, imagining the depths it’s come from. It’s so hopeful, so slow and persistent, dragging its body up the beach to find the perfect nesting spot. I close my eyes and send a message to my father, wherever he is. Tell him to hang on to that sticky speck of hope.
“Good luck,” I whisper to the turtle.
I lean into Wendell, appreciating the way his body fits mine perfectly. At least he’s a sure thing in my future. I don’t have to worry about him leaving and returning. He’s with me, and he’ll stay with me. The most essential ingredient in my paradise.
Once we start walking back along the beach, I realize I’m utterly exhausted. It’s the deepest middle of night, and my eyelids are drooping, my legs heavy. Soon we leave the stretch of sand and enter a path that winds through a hillside of jungle, heading back to our cabanas.
A noise rumbles through my grogginess. I jump, thinking of the strange jungle sound. Then I catch a glimpse of headlights through the trees and my muscles relax. It’s just the roar of a truck engine. Now hip-hop salsa beats, heavy in the bass, are pounding through the night.
Wendell turns his head too, then gives me a puzzled look. “Weird,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “The road’s a dead end. Who’d be coming here at this time of night?”
I yawn. “Probably tourists looking for a new place to party.”
Wendell stares a moment longer, his eyebrows furrowed. “They’re over near the turtles. Maybe we should warn them about the nests, tell them to stay away.”
Walking all the way back there seems entirely unappealing. I tug on his hand, pulling him toward the cabanas. “Come on, let’s get a little sleep before sunrise. Remember my plan? Just enjoy paradise.”
Taking one last, reluctant glance in the direction of the music, he turns to follow me.
After a drawn-out kiss good night, Wendell disappears into his cabana—a small, octagonal wooden structure with giant windows and a palm-frond roof. I head into my own cabana, just past his. They’re nearly identical except for the starfish painted on the door of mine, the iguana on Wendell’s. His parents’ one condition for his staying here was that we have separate cabanas. At first I rolled my eyes, but now I’m secretly glad. I love having my own space, an entire little house to myself, even if it is just a room and bathroom. I’ve always had to share tiny spaces with Layla, put up with her propensity to throw silk scarves over everything—windows, lampshades, toilet tanks—but I get to decorate this place however I want. I’ve settled on minimalist decor—just a few carefully arranged shells and stones and pieces of driftwood.
And a jar of sand. I unscrew the lid, run the fine white grains through my fingers. My father gave me this sand. He’d saved it from the Greek beach where he fell in love with Layla—the beach he was sleeping on when, after one night together, she left him, without their ever having exchanged last names. His initials, J.C., were all she remembered. I later discovered they stand for José Cruz, which I suspect to be a fairly common name in Mexico.
I brush the sand off my fingertips back into the jar and secure the lid. Then I move on to the packet of carefully folded papers beside them. In France, he had these letters delivered, as he did with all his gifts. I untie the ribbon and flip through the letters, some crinkly and yellowed, addressed to Layla, written years ago, before I was born. Since he didn’t have her address, he couldn’t send them. Not until our paths crossed in France. My gaze sweeps over the words I’ve memorized, words that make my insides feel tender, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not. The letters are full of heartache, and grow increasingly heavy with despair. They capture my father’s illness—bipolar disorder—and remind me that he can become dangerously lost in cycles of depression.
I shuffle past the older letters to the two most recent ones, written half a year ago in France and addressed to me. I glance over the words for the hundredth time, idly searching for some clue—not so much to how to find him, more to why he hasn’t contacted me.
Please do not try to find me. Please just know that you have always been loved. And Zeeta, know that you will always have the love of a father, even if you don’t know me.
I move on to the second letter, written after I continued searching for him, against his wishes:
I admire your spirit, your strength, your resolve to find me despite ev
erything.… It’s not that I don’t want to be part of your life. I’m working hard to become a father who would make you proud. Please be patient. I will try to find the courage to introduce myself.
I’m tired of being patient. Part of me has the urge to crumple up the letters and throw them against the wall. Instead, I run my hands over the worn paper in a kind of prayer. I imagine a muddy speck of hope—hope that this is actually my father’s hometown, for starters. The clues that led me here weren’t airtight—just random memories my father shared with our mutual friend back in France. He mentioned that his childhood was colored gold from sunsets at Comet Point, that it was a famous nesting place for rare turtles. Which makes sense, since his nickname is Tortue—“turtle” in French. After online searches, I deduced that he must have been describing this little coastal village of Mazunte. But even if I’m in the right place, finding him won’t be easy if he doesn’t want to be found.
I press Play on the ancient CD–clock radio and my father’s music begins, undulating guitar melodies that seem in sync with the waves crashing on the beach below. Undressing, I shake off the last grains of sand, then slip on pajama bottoms.
On an impulse, I pull on the threadbare black Jimi Hendrix T-shirt my father gave me. I inhale the scent of the soft fabric—the musty, salty dampness that pervades everything here, a comforting smell. I breathe in again, trying to distinguish any last traces of my father’s smell, even though the shirt’s been washed a dozen times. I try to conjure up his voice, its warm tenor. I spoke with him in France without realizing he was my father. If only I could picture his face—but it was always hidden under mime makeup. I wonder what his sister looks like, the one who’s supposedly the mirror image of me. I try to subtract Layla’s features from my own face and imagine the part of me that came from my father’s genes. A frustrating task.
