Lily and the Octopus (22 page)

“Just on my heart. But only the figurative kind.”

Lily looks like she’s trying to figure that one out. Over the years, I’ve tried to explain about Jeffrey—about how he was there for six years and then suddenly he was not. How
the yelling and the sadness and the quiet and the deceit were not how love was supposed to be. Even now, I’m not sure she entirely understands.

I sit down next to her on the bed and scratch behind her ears.

“Did the octopus come to me because of karma?” she asks.

I’m taken aback by the question, and when I finally understand what she is asking, the whole thing is like a meaty punch to the gut. “No. No, of course not.”

“But you said a person’s actions in the present—”

I cut her off. “That’s just it.
A person’s
. Dogs, on the other hand . . . dogs have pure souls. Look at me.” I grab her chin and look straight into her eyes.
“Dogs are always good and full of selfless love. They are undiluted vessels of joy who never, ever deserve anything bad that happens to them. Especially you. Since the day I met you, you have
done nothing but make my life better in every possible way. Do you understand?” Lily nods. “So, no. The octopus did not find you because of karma.”

She nods again and I let go of her chin. I throw back the last of the scotch and set the empty glass down on the floor with a clunk.

“Shall we?” I climb into the bunk with her. Something is catching me not right under my back and I reach under the blanket and produce red ball. I set it on the floor next to the
empty glass. I tap on the Witchie-Poo charm for luck and I blow out the candle in our lantern. Lily gives me a gentle kiss on my nose and I kiss her back in the groove between her eyes.

I don’t tell her what I’ve wondered myself in the darker moments since our ordeal began: if the octopus, in fact, did come to her because of karma.

But not karma for her actions.

Karma, perhaps, for mine.

I
’m straddling Lily, punching her repeatedly in the snout and yelling, “
Die! Die! Die!
” Tears are falling from my face and
my knuckles are searing with pain and the air is fire and my lungs and my heart and my everything burns. I don’t remember anything but betrayal. The sharp realization that Lily is the
octopus. That she has been deceiving me all along. I no longer know anything. I don’t know where the boat ends or the water begins, where the water ends or where the sky begins, where the sky
ends or near space begins, where near space ends or where the darkness begins.

Or where the darkness ends.

I don’t know if the boat has capsized. I don’t know if the bed has crashed to the ceiling, if the windows will burst and water will rush in, if we will drown. I don’t know if
the whole world is upside down, or just mine. I don’t know anything except the pain of betrayal as I pummel my sweet dog in the face.

And that’s when I wake up gasping for air.

I turn immediately to Lily, who is sound asleep. Her face is perfect, unmolested by violence. She is not the octopus. She could never betray me. It’s not possible, it’s not in her to
do so. And yet the dream was so real, as if it were foreshadowing gloom. She looks so beautiful, so calm. I force myself to shake the feeling, but not before whispering, “Please don’t
ever die.”

Which is an impossible request of any living thing.

There’s a wetness by my side and I’m immediately afraid that the octopus is back, but the culprit this time is me, or more accurately the now empty scotch bottle I find by my side. I
reach to wipe my eyes awake but miss and hit my nose.

That’s when I realize I’m drunk.

I don’t know the rhyme or why that’s in my head, or who said it or where it’s from. Kipling? It doesn’t matter. I just have the overwhelming feeling I’m breaking
rules. Laws. Edicts. Things meant to be followed. Things not meant to be broken. Forces not meant to be tested.

Complete darkness falls over our quarters as the moon passes behind a cloud. As are we. Behind a cloud. We’ve lost sight of the journey, our purpose in being here. We are hunters, and the
night is for hunting. And here we are drunk and asleep. If the octopus were to strike now, we would be easy prey. Pathetic. Ripe for the killing. How did this happen? How did I allow it to be?

I look at my sleeping love and silently beg her forgiveness. What have I gotten us into? She doesn’t need this. She doesn’t want this. She doesn’t understand revenge. And while
I prefer to think of our voyage as an offensive maneuver, there’s no denying that’s partly what this is. Revenge.
You weighed anchor in our waters, now we sail deeply in
yours.

I stumble out of bed in the way drunk people do, clumsily and with great kerfuffle. I stand up too tall and bang my head on the ceiling. I trip over the empty scotch bottle and it sends red ball
scooting across the floor with a clang. Quickly I pick up the bottle to silence it. I look at Lily. If anything will wake her, it’s the sound of red ball roaring alive to play and bouncing
against the clapboard. Yet she sleeps soundly through it, a sign of our thorough depletion.

I climb the few steps up to the deck and let the night breeze wash over me. I inhale it deeply. The stars I can see number in the thousands; thousands more hang behind the clouds. The boat sways
and I nearly lose my balance, so I lie flat on the deck and look up. I am so very small. Physically small, but also petty. Why am I driven more by revenge than by forgiveness?

I think about all the people I need to forgive.

Jeffrey? We loved each other, and yet love alone was not enough. Did he throw it all away with his indiscretions? Or was I never available enough in the relationship to keep his eye from
wandering. In the end we were probably equally neglectful of what we had. So why was there so much anger when it was time to walk away?

My mother for not saying she loves me? We’re too often guilty of thinking that our parents arrived on this planet as fully functioning adults on the day that we were born. That they
don’t have pasts of their own prior to our birth. That the father is not also a son, that the mother is not also a child. My mother had a tough beginning, enduring things I know little about.
And yet I more often discount her pain and overvalue mine. This is suddenly funny to me, ridiculously selfish, and I laugh and the outburst is startling. I lie still as the sound launches skyward
like a rocket, reaches the stratosphere, then quietly falls back to earth in the form of a quote I once read:
Yours is by far the harder lot, but mine is happening to me.
In this moment, I
miss my mother.

The octopus? Does he merit my forgiveness? Was he just doing what octopuses do? Would I blame the lioness for taking down the gazelle? Or should I blame the ecosystem—the creation of a
world where flesh is food?

The worst of my scorn and derision has always been reserved for me. But what did I do to deserve it, really? Allowed a relationship to fail? Permitted the octopus to come? Tolerated depression
without fighting back? Dragged Lily and myself out to sea?

And suddenly I want to turn the boat around. I ache for home; grieve for it as if it were gone. But it’s not gone, it’s just far away. Waiting for us. What are we doing? We’re
adrift in the middle of nowhere, and it’s only a matter of time before we run out of food. Why? All I have to do is turn the boat around. Point the compass east instead of west. There are
tears in my eyes. It’s what I want. For me. For us.

But I don’t.

Some things are unforgivable. My problem is the opposite of mankind’s: not having gone into battle often enough, not having waged enough war. I’ve always shied from confrontation,
more often than not backing down from a fight. Quarreling has always felt silly, bordering on the ridiculous. War, after all, was something that happened to faraway people in faraway places. Not
something that is sparked by an eight-armed invasion of your own front lines.

But this, with the octopus, this
is
war. Guerrilla war. I can’t feel self-conscious about it. I can’t be chastened before the battle begins. We are soldiers now, like it or
not. As such, we need to be alert, awake, and on guard. And we need to continue plowing west.

All of this is sobering. I rise again to confront the night—this time my feet are steady, and I remember to sway into the pitch of the boat.

Remember the night is for hunting.

I walk to the deckhouse and flip on the echo sounder. It whirrs to life, transmitting its sound pulses on cue. I chuckle. Three weeks ago I didn’t know how to do any of this and now
it’s second nature. I wait for any hydroacoustic data that might signal the presence of our prey, but the pulses return little more than the depth of the trench below.

I know the octopus is out there. I move to the ship’s edge and grab the boat by the stern. “
You hear me? I know you’re out there!
” I yell. My voice is swallowed by
the murky night; the only echo is in my head.

I check the data one more time before turning off the sounder. Nothing. Instead, I find a pen and some paper in the deckhouse and scrawl my ominous warning.
I KNOW
YOU
’
RE OUT THERE
. I cram the message into the empty scotch bottle and screw the lid back on tightly. With all my might I hurl it into the darkness.

I do not hear it land.

T
hree days later when the storm begins, it comes without mercy or warning or forgiveness. I have just enough time to secure Lily’s harness
over her life jacket and anchor her to
Fishful Thinking
’s wheel before we take the brunt of it. It is a fight to keep the bow of the boat heading into the gale. Lily vomits twice
outside the deckhouse and asks for chicken and rice. I barely have time to explain how impossible a request that is while I scramble to weigh down our charts and maps and do my best to secure the
trawls. The sky blackens so completely I forget that it isn’t night; the falling rain hits like ice picks, every drop a skin-piercing sting. The boat takes on water until the engine sputters
and quits. The waves crash hard over the sides of the boat, and Lily fights to keep her nose above the sudden onboard surf. I try bailing with a tackle bucket, but all of my efforts seem futile.
The storm is going to rage.

There’s nothing to do except pitch into the surf; at least with my hands free of the wheel I can focus my attention on bailing and keeping Lily afloat. In the back of my mind I think we
might capsize, yet I have no choice but to banish those thoughts. Survival dictates absolute focus.

Lily shivers on her tether, and I crawl to lift her out of the water and onto a low shelf in the deckhouse. I don’t want to put her atop her usual perch on the stool; the center of gravity
is too high and I worry about her falling.

“Stay here!” She can barely hear me over the wind.

She nods her understanding and I return to bailing.

As if on cue the hail begins, hitting the deck with rhythmic applause. I thought nothing would hurt like the driving rain, but I was wrong—I can actually feel my body bruising. A
forty-knot wind gust drives the hail and the rain every which way and visibility drops to nothing. I scramble for the cover of the deckhouse to be by Lily’s side.

I! DO! NOT! LIKE! THIS! STORM! I’M! SCARED!

I huddle close to her for warmth. The wind shrieks across
Fishful Thinking
’s deck like a coven of angry witches. The gusts actually seem to flatten the seas, and the rocking calms
just enough to keep me from vomiting, too. The water washing aboard over the sides seems to slow, and we drift, taking the wind and the seas a few degrees abaft the bow.

“I don’t like being wet.” Lily shakes as best she can in my grip and a wriggle moves through her whole body like a wave until it has been released from the very tip of her
tail.

“I know you don’t.” I tell her a story to calm her. “When you were a puppy you wouldn’t even go out in the rain at all. I bought you a little raincoat and
everything, but you would have none of it. One night it rained very hard, and I was determined to get you to pee. I didn’t want to crawl into a warm, dry bed only to have to take you outside
again in the middle of the rainy night. You were being stubborn in not peeing, and I was being stubborn in not going back inside until you did, and we were each trying to outstubborn the
other.”

“How did we resolve that?”

“I found a small overhang with some dry gravel underneath and eventually you relented.” I remember the satisfaction of victory, and how short-lived it would be in our relationship.
“It was the first and last time you ever really gave in to me.”

Lily seems to enjoy the story, and for a brief moment as we focus on each other the storm melts away. But it is in this sudden calm that I fear the octopus may strike, and once again I am
shivering and clambering for direction. I spent so long thinking of the octopus as my only enemy, I hadn’t dreamed of him double-teaming me with as mighty a foe as the sea. I realize how
foolish it all sounds, how naïve, underestimating the ocean. This could be the end of us both.

Then Lily points with her nose off the bow where a shadow emerges from the darkness and fog.

LOOK! LOOK! LOOK!

The shadow becomes a shape and the shape becomes a ship and hope washes over me in a way I would have thought impossible just minutes before. Is it possible we are not alone out here after all?
I sound
Fishful Thinking
’s horn to announce our presence. Foremost in my mind is avoiding a collision. I sound the horn again, and again every ten seconds until we’re answered by
the quiet bellowing of the other ship, which is closer than the horn’s blast would suggest, most of her yell swallowed by the wind.