A Private State: Stories (14 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

BOOK: A Private State: Stories
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Page 88
Sam. She'd write him apologies on deckle-edged paper. He'd kiss the bone of her jaw down to her chin. They hadn't done those things in years. Helen shifted in the bunk and became aware that she couldn't stretch to her full length. Sam would have had to curl up like a comma. If she were six months pregnant, she couldn't have fit in the slit of the shower.
It was a possibility. Helen had been feeling sick, but everyone had, thanks to the combination of diesel fumes and fried food. But she was quite late now. Helen, your husband's just left you, Alexa would have said. You're out of whack. Was that the twitch of a cramp? Her hands traveled to her belly, still its regular size. Children. One of the reasons she and Sam had splurged on this trip. They'd finally acknowledged a long-settled coolness, and in December, Helen found the Pacific sea-life brochure at a travel agent's, crammed with photos of flukes and seals, lovely, slick, and clearly warm-blooded. Helen imagined they would watch whales, turn slightly golden in the western sun, and talk reasonably about babies. As if babies induced reason. As if you could talk about anything but whales once you'd seen them.
Then a week before they were supposed to go, he'd told her he'd taken a leave from the paper. "So the
Globe
's not big enough for you?" she'd snapped. He wanted, he said, to see the heartland again. "I'll come with you," she yelled when she saw he meant it. But he said no. All she did then was smack the table so hard an empty wine bottle thudded to the ground.
He looked at her and said, "Your hair's a mess. It looks great." They made love then, for the first time in months. He had still gone. Helen's head ached. It was time for dinner. On her way up, she stacked three rolls of the right kind of Kodak by Sue and David's door.
Passengers were assigned to tables and Helen had been lumped with the two others traveling alone. Dr. Marquand, a recent widower with gentle, spacy eyes, settled himself next to her. Anne
 
Page 89
arrived a minute later. Helen had the bunk next to hers and last night listened to a cough that rotted like a wave through the older woman's lungs. Anne helped repair Mayan pottery in a museum in Philadelphia. They had traded these slight basics last night, while pork chops slid around their plates and the boat pitched in heavy surf.
Tonight, no one touched their food. Everyone spoke in quick voices about the sighting. Hands swam through the air, in imitation of the long backs. Even the Donaldson children sat up straight. Melissa glowed, even as she called the whales "cetaceans."
During the next few days, there was even the possibility of touching the creatures. Passengers would pile into a twenty-foot motor boatsteered by the silent blond crew, the tuna boat's old handsand lurk at the edges of the breeding grounds, Mexican lagoons another day to the south. Mothers and calves were drawn to the small engines and sometimes got curious enough to come inspect these humming fish on the edge of their bays. Helen was both appalled and riveted by the thought of touching something as large and alive as what she saw today. They moved so quickly. They were so clearly aware.
"Pretty spectacular," Anne said.
"Yes." Helen wasn't sure she was ready to engage in whale banter just yet.
"Is this your first time?" Dr. Marquand asked her.
"Yes, before today, I was innocent of whales." To her surprise, Helen waved her fork in the air.
Anne laughed. It was hard to tell the sound from her cough. "The first time I saw them, I burst into tears when they left. I felt totally abandoned."
Dr. Marquand said, "Perhaps it's because they've gone back to the sea and we can't." Being anchored to land seemed to sadden him. Helen remembered one of Jan's books, a money-maker on ocean fauna. He'd reproduced pictures of whale skeletons: under
 
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the pads of skin and fat, the almost useless front flippers were hands, the remainders of how they managed, after an unhappy era as mammals on earth, to crawl back to where they'd come from.
"Isn't that it? Isn't that why they got so big?" the doctor continued. Helen wondered how many nights he had spent lulling himself to sleep with stories of big, warm fish. She imagined him in a single bed, whale book propped over his nose, in his dreams a bearded merman who swept past fans of coral on a dolphin's back. With water to support them, he told the women, there were no limits to how heavy they could get. "But not me," he added. "Negative buoyancy.''
Then he said to Anne, "That's a bad cough you've got."
Anne said, smiling, "It'll be the death of me." Helen and Dr. Marquand looked at their plates. Anne said, "I just thought I'd go crazy trying to piece together one more pot and waiting for my hair to grow back. So this was my Christmas present to myself."
Helen took her cue from Dr. Marquand, who nodded and looked calm, professionally detached. He unbuttoned a shirt pocket and showed them a brown vial. "Nitroglycerin," he said frankly, now that one frailty had been revealed. "My doctor told me to have the bypass done last month but April's the best time to see the whales." The crew was coming round to collect the plates, most still full. Other passengers followed Melissa into the main cabin to watch a presentation on endangered pinnapeds. In the morning, they would visit a colony of elephant seals. But Helen wanted to sit here with Dr. Marquand and Anne. She wanted to settle her elbows on the table, sip coffee that sloshed over the lip of a blue cup and avoid the topic of any remotely threatened species.
"Your husband wasn't able to make it?" Dr. Marquand asked.
Helen looked at her ring and was quite suddenly uncertain if she should wear it anymore. "Right now, Sam's just this voice that calls from Baton Rouge once in a while." Her coffee spilled some more. "He'd rather talk about zydeco than whether or not he's coming back to Boston."
 
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Anne sighed and Dr. Marquand said, "Silly man." He ordered them all more coffee, although none of them drank it. They sat in their booth, hands wrapped around the hot, thick mugs.
Helen woke in the middle of the night, not to the tap of a flipper on the porthole, but to some creak in the boat. The air in the cabin felt muggy and she wanted to look at the Pacific by herself. Were the whales back? Melissa had said they were young males heading toward the breeding lagoons. Speeding along, Helen thought, to cash in on the carnal festivities further south. But on deck Helen saw little past the glow the light cast from the captain's cabin. Phosphorous flared as the prow cut through the ocean, but beyond that, there was just a shifting, rushing blackness. A tang of pine scented the air, a land smell carried from the island they would visit tomorrow. A few weak stars through clouds. No Alexa, no Jan, no Sam.
Helen wondered where he was, imagined him leaving Louisiana and wandering in a Kansas wheatfield. She doubted he would make it much past the Mississippi. She doubted he would make it back to Boston and for once this thought didn't leave her feeling like someone had shoved her head in a bucket of cold water and kept it there.
She was just Helen, in her new sneakers with the undone laces and ragged bathrobe. But maybe not. What if there were the beginnings of a baby, rocking like a tethered seahorse in her belly. In the books she corrected, parents were relaxed and resourceful, uncannily attuned to developmental stages. She had no idea if she'd be good at that or not. You couldn't edit children. They came with mistakes and problems wound into them from the start. Then the parents could start adding their own. Even with Sam puzzling through it with her, she wasn't sure she could imagine such complex immersion. Alone, it seemed absurd. Chilled, she started to make her way back to the cabin, but she stumbled on the gangway as the boat lurched against a wave.
 
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She barely felt the hit, though she had an impressive welt on her arm the next morning. At breakfast, Dr. Marquand said, "Oh my, look at that nastiness," and took her elbow.
Helen had hoped the collision might knock the blood from her, but instead said, "It's my Melissa vaccine. Anti-antimystery."
"Oh, really," said Anne, who had added dark glasses for the day's trip to see the seals. "I didn't know they'd found a cure."
"Quite useful," said Dr. Marquand, still examining her arm. "Next time try not to break so many blood vessels."
Melissa cried, "Time to go! Remember, the animals are quite tolerant of the human presence but you should respect their limits. Touch with your perceptions, not your hands."
"Touch with my perceptions, my eye," muttered Dr. Marquand.
"The males," said Mrs. Donaldson. "They won't charge or anything? On the National Geographic special, they looked, well, so fierce."
Helen saw Mrs. Donaldson's children sneer at the ridge of tummy poking over their mother's pants. That was it. No baby. Ever. She couldn't have stood a child turning on her quite so sharply. Too many betrayals, as constant as tides. Melissa assured Mrs. Donaldson that seals were more nervous around humans than the other way around and went on to describe the elaborate, bloody dance that led to next year's set of pups. Teeth were used to grasp and clinch; wounds that led to serious scars were common; but Melissa made it sound as pragmatic as calculus, something graphed and understood.
Motoring toward the island with Anne and Dr. Marquand, Helen was unsure if she wanted to be back on land. Last night, Dr. Marquand had told them no one really knew why whales sometimes beached themselves. Viruses might destroy their inner compass, but that was just a guess. Helen was thinking she knew what being directionless felt like, when she heard a shrill honking, sounds utterly at odds with Melissa's clipped descriptions and closest to painful attempts to clear blocked sinuses. The seals.
 
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Helen was ashamed at her pleasure that nature once again proved larger than Melissa's pinched, respectful vocabulary.
Rippling darkness stretched across the beach. Elephant seals of all sizes coated the sand. Males tossed the brown sausage of fat that hung from their noses; females like plump cigars had strewed themselves in messy rows across the beach. But their hind flippers were delicate, spread as slack and graceful as black petals.
In spite of herself, Helen remembered what Melissa told them about the animals: that they did nothing but eat for months on end, then lolled on the beach to tend the pups and recover from the exhausting swim from Alaska. The same route the grays took. All these vast migrations, all these mammals braving the ocean thanks to some old instructions inscribed in their cells. Without realizing it, Helen stopped on the path the others had traced. Her head swam, unused to level land, unused to swarming seals, some still with their pups' snub noses attached to the firm bulb of a nipple. The babies didn't let go for a second. Plugged into their mothers, they trained their dark eyes on Helen. Even the mothers stopped their squeals as they watched her try to pick her way quickly through the honking nursery.
As Helen scrambled up the beach, she heard Melissa say, "Cedros has been the home of migrating seals for at least two thousand years." The young woman explained that biologists had used carbon dating on samples of fossilized droppings.
"Imagine coming here and looking for dung as old as Christ," Dr. Marquand mused.
"Do they mate for life?" asked one of the Donaldson children. He cupped a black oval stone.
Dr. Marquand said, "Of course they don't. I have never seen such bedroom eyes. Even the babies have them."
"They remind me of those people on the beach in Cannes," Anne said. "Everyone sort of loose and flabby without a stitch on. Which is sort of awful and kind of great at once."
Dr. Marquand didn't seem as sure about this as Anne, but
 
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Helen glanced back at the seals. For all their flapping, all their fighting, they looked quite at ease. Maybe it was because they didn't have much choice in the matter. Hand on her belly, Helen thought there must be something calm in giving in to your biology.
Dr. Marquand blew his nose loudly in a lawn handkerchief. "It's wrong. It's just wrong. I don't feel right about tramping across breeding grounds."
"They seemed so indifferent, as if they were sorry for us," Helen said.
Tucking in the ends of her kerchief, Anne said, "I felt a little like I'd just walked into someone's house uninvited. Though they were good sports about it."
"That's just it," said Dr. Marquand, "They could give two figs. But they should. Or we should."
Melissa called, "Time for harbor seals, people." She was going to show them a cove where these daintier cousins of elephant seals could sometimes be seen. Helen, Dr. Marquand, and Anne were straggling behind when Anne sniffed the air and said, "Garlic. She didn't say anything about people being here."
"Where's it coming from?" Helen asked and Anne pointed to the top of a dune, where, climbing to the crest, Helen saw a pair of weathered shacks. There was a chicken, its wattle flicking in the wind. Children scampered.with a thin dog. When they saw Helen, they froze. Where were their parents? The children broke into motion and dashed inside a shack. The dog yapped once, then trotted off to sit near a pile of tires. Helen noticed diapers on another line. She skidded down the dune to join Anne and Dr. Marquand.
"There are children up there, chickens, a dog," Helen told them. "Diapers on a line."
"People. Not a mention of them," said Dr. Marquand.
"Maybe they poach seal skins and turtle eggs," said Anne.

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