Sea Creatures (10 page)

There was something drawn in her appearance, in the half-moons beneath her eyes and the way she pushed her hair away from her face. I took a swallow of my wine. I said, “When I asked about the pediatrician—there's some urgency. Frankie doesn't speak.”

She searched my face. “Not at all?”

“Not at all.”

“They checked his hearing?”

I nodded. “We've been waiting and seeing.” I pressed my fingertips against the bridge of my nose. “Graham thinks I play it down. Maybe he's right.”

She squeezed my knee. “It's probably nothing serious. Call Dr. Sonia. She won't freak out about it.”

There came a commotion from inside. The bigger boys tore through the living room toward the front of the house. Then Stanley rounded the corner, wearing a tie and wingtips, one child in his arms and the other clinging to his leg, and a new sound cut through the melee: a deep, voluminous monster-roar coming from Stanley. As we watched, he tromped into the living room and crashed with the boys into the pillowy fort, bringing the whole thing down.

8

SINCE I'D BE LEAVING TOWN
on a Friday, when I'd normally work, I told Charlie as soon as we arrived about my trip to the Dry Tortugas. He rubbed his chin and frowned, then said, “I guess that's fine.”

He handed Frankie a small, rubbery orange octopus with catlike yellow eyes, and Frankie's face lighted up and he signed his thanks. Charlie had given Frankie one toy creature every day we'd visited. Early on, I'd asked him to please not give Frankie gifts behind my back, if he wouldn't mind. At this, he was unable to stifle a humoring smile. “Alrighty,” he'd said.

Frankie had amassed a small gang of toy animals by this time, and he took them everywhere we went, all knocking around inside Graham's old canvas Dopp kit, which had a zipper with crooked teeth, so it took a long time to open and close. Upstairs at the stilt house, Frankie wrestled with the zipper, then lined up the toys on the linoleum floor, as if preparing them for battle. An orange octopus, a turquoise squid, a clown fish, a black manta ray, a gray shark, and the original yellow sea horse. Then he arranged them into a circle, as if having them reconcile. Then he put them in pairs.

In three weeks of coming to Stiltsville, I'd made it roughly a quarter of the way through Charlie's work. I no longer fought a swell of alarm each time Frankie stepped into the Zodiac or climbed the zigzagging stairs. I no longer checked repeatedly that his life vest was fastened, though he still wore it all the time at the house, except during his nap. Also, Charlie had convinced me that he shouldn't wear it swimming, that it would keep him from learning natural buoyancy. Each time we'd come, Charlie had fixed the same midday buffet, and once I'd teased him about his apparent aversion to cooking food, and he'd looked puzzled for a moment—I thought I might have crossed a line—then brought his fingers to his cheek. “You know,” he said, “I can't remember the last time I so much as toasted bread.” I brought Tupperware containers of tabbouleh and hummus, which he regarded skeptically at first; two days later, the containers were empty and he asked if I wouldn't mind bringing more. I told him about Lidia and her strict food schedule: Mondays were tuna casserole, Tuesdays lasagna, Fridays meat loaf. She ate fruit and deli chicken salad every day for lunch. The nights my father was at gigs, she either went out with her girlfriends or came down the lawn to eat with us. It was kind of her to cook for us three times a week, especially since preparing a meal in the
Lullaby
's miniature galley was something I cared to do as rarely as possible. I found it fascinating and not a little admirable, the way she coped with her clear distaste for the culinary arts. Three meals, three nights, no substitutions.

“And this meat loaf,” I said to Charlie, who for once listened with his gray eyes trained on mine. “It is really, really good.”

Charlie had procured—I suspected Riggs visited regularly, but I didn't ask—a purple plastic fishing pole, child-size but still a little large for Frankie, which Charlie leaned against the generator room beside his own. When they went downstairs, Charlie carried his own pole and Frankie carried the smaller one, and they went together to the far end of the snaking dock, the rods propped against their shoulders. This was something that, like my father leading Frankie up the steps, reminded me of my mother. Or not of her, exactly, but of her absence. The empty vessel that consumed so much space, the thunderous void. I didn't believe in ghosts or spirits or even angels, though I'd always loved the idea of these things and wished I could believe—but how else to define the bellowing, chest-beating presence of absence?

Above the bunk in Frankie's shallow berth, I'd hung a photograph of Graham's mother, Julia, holding Frankie when he was five weeks old. Julia was a fragile person, less because of age than comportment and personality, and I remember worrying that she would drop into sleep and he would roll onto the polished marble floor of her sitting room. In the photo, her eyes are cast downward and you can't tell whether they are open, but there is a discernible tension in her arms, a mindfulness over the small life in her lap. I look at that photo, and I'm relieved that it exists and that I framed it, that it will not disappear down the sinkhole of photographs printed but never looked at again. But also, it gives me a pinch of regret. Naturally, there is no such photograph of Frankie with my mother. We started trying to get pregnant while she was still alive, but it took too long. As far as she knew, she had no grandchild.

Charlie wanted to drive the Zodiac. We'd fallen into the routine of taking a break after Frankie's nap for a swim around the house, but today he wanted to head out straightaway, before I got to work. He made the request while I was in the kitchen pouring water for Frankie. I had to ask him to repeat himself, he spoke so softly. He said, “I wondered if I might take us all on a ride in your boat.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“For a swim. There's a good place, with shallows for the boy.”

To Frankie, I said, “Let's lather up,” and Frankie scrambled to get the suntan lotion from my bag.

I'd gotten into the habit of leaving the keys on the boat while it was docked. Frankie took up his usual spot next to the captain's seat, so I stood starboard of Charlie and gripped the metal rail that looped around the back of the bench. Charlie wore a canvas fishing hat with a strap tightened under his chin, and our hat brims collided when he turned to check the engine. “Excuse me,” I said, leaning away. He didn't respond. His large hand pushed forward on the throttle, and he said, “Hang on,” and then we were spitting smoothly into the channel. We turned to cut across the flats between Charlie's house and the house to the east—this was the stretch of shoal between houses, which in low tide was walkable and during very low tide broke the water's surface—and I gasped, fearing we'd run aground. But it was high tide. Charlie glanced at me. “We're fine,” he said over the wind, then—this was the most unexpected gesture from him—he raised an arm and waved as we passed a red-painted house where a man, woman, and teenage girl sat on rocking chairs on the porch. All three waved back. It occurred to me, though there was no clear evidence of this, that Charlie might have been proud to drive by his neighbors with a woman and a child beside him.

I kept one eye on Frankie as we drove. I thought he might be wary of grabbing Charlie as he would me, if we bounced off a wave. I'd bought him little aviator sunglasses that slid down his fleshy nose and obscured much of his face, and he looked small but grown up, his gaze on the horizon.

We wound up at Soldier Key, a lump of uninhabited island south of Stiltsville. The world stilled when Charlie cut the engine, then filled with the noise of water slapping the hull and rushing up on the brief, seaweed-laced beach. A pair of gulls took off squawking from the island's thick mangroves. Charlie set the anchor while I helped Frankie into swim trunks patterned with cartoon turtles. He got Charlie's attention over my head.

Turtles,
he signed, indicating his shorts.

“Maybe we'll see one for real,” said Charlie.

Frankie saluted—this is something Charlie had taught him—and climbed onto the gunwale.

“You're in a good mood,” I said to Charlie.

He frowned. “Am I?”

The week before, a miniature mask and snorkel had shown up at the stilt house, and after every swim since Frankie had signed excitedly about the sand dollars and urchins and starfish he'd seen underwater, using his hands to describe the creatures when he didn't know the words. Now Charlie fit the mask to Frankie's face, then lowered himself into the water and told Frankie to jump down, which he did. Sally and I had hired a teenager to give Carson and Frankie weekly swim lessons, though they hadn't yet started. I was wondering now if this was necessary. For Charlie, Frankie jumped through the air as if he'd never believed any harm could come to him by doing so, as if the act of falling into water posed no threat at all.

I'd taken to wearing my swimsuit, a modest black halter I'd bought on a whim, under my clothes, so I could pull off my shirt and get a little sun on my shoulders while we crossed the bay, and also to dispense with any awkward ducking into the bathroom before swimming. Now I felt nearly naked standing alone on the warm deck, blowing up an inner tube. I eased into the water holding the inner tube in front of me, then kicked toward the beach. The water was warm and soft, and the sandy seafloor was gluey underfoot. Frankie and Charlie stood with their masked faces in the water, hands moving back and forth at their sides.

Charlie took the inner tube from me and lifted Frankie into it, so he could hold on. They moved into deeper water, faces down and snorkels spiking into the air. I waded onto the beach and sat in the wet sand, shading my eyes. I could no longer hear Charlie's words, but every so often he tapped Frankie's shoulder, and Frankie's head popped up, the mask overwhelming his face like a parasite. Charlie pointed under the water, and Frankie adjusted and dipped again. When Frankie rocked forward to put his face in the water, the little turtles on his trunks crested the surface. It was too deep for him to stand, and every so often it looked like he might topple forward out of the inner tube. Each time, Charlie put out an arm for balance.

I had the thought that maybe Graham and Frankie and I could carve out some time to come to Soldier Key as a family, though my next thought was that this was unlikely. Graham didn't have a lot of free time. On the weekends, he'd taken long bike rides in the mornings, before Frankie and I were up, then made breakfast for us all, then worked at the banquette or on the deck through the afternoon. In addition to doing his own work, he was studying the work of his new team members, as if there might be a test. Knowing Graham, he was compensating for something he suspected had happened. Maybe there had been a conversation or meeting where he'd felt insufficiently prepared. Anytime I mentioned how many hours he was working, he looked wounded, as if I were betraying some common understanding about the importance of what he contributed to our family. Our situations, in his mind, were equitable: he worked and I took care of our son. His job wouldn't last forever, after all. If I wanted to stay in Miami, he would have to earn himself a more permanent place.

There was a certain logic, I had to admit. But still, there seemed to be some experience we were meant to be having as a family. I didn't know if other mothers felt this way, but I thought my own mother had, what with the way we'd paired up while my father orbited the universe on his own, colliding with us every so often, as if by chance. I grew up missing my father a little bit all of the time, looking around for him only to discover he'd left the house. The notion that Frankie was growing up the same way carved a rut in my heart.

There was something about the way Charlie stood in the ocean, his focus trained on my son, his muscular arms tensed in preparation to help Frankie stand or lift him out of the water. I remembered, watching them together, that my mother's old friend, Vivian, had had a daughter, which meant Charlie had a daughter. One could tell he was a father, looking at him. He wore fatherhood on his skin.

After Graham and I were married but before we'd decided—
I'd
decided—to try to have a baby, my mother had told me that she believed it wasn't a matter of being
meant
to be a parent. Rather, it was about inclination, like spicy food or heights. I think she meant to seem neutral on the subject, but I sensed an undercurrent of disapproval in her words, and I wondered if she believed that
I
did not possess this taste for parenthood, what with my moodiness and introspection, my only-child independence. It had always seemed that when my mother made a pronouncement about me, regardless of whether previously I'd believed the pronouncement was true, it
became
the truth. As if she not only had information that I didn't, but also had the power to mold my future self, which maybe she did. Once, I'd mentioned on the phone that I was in the process of reorganizing my kitchen cabinets, and she'd said, not rudely but with a thoughtlessness that asserted itself only after she started to get sick, that this seemed like a task for which I was ill-suited. “You've never had much of a head for that kind of thing,” she said guilelessly. It wasn't only that my feelings were hurt by the comment, but also that I was perplexed by it. I'd assumed, until that conversation, that in fact I was perfectly capable of simple home organization. Suddenly, I believed the opposite.

If my mother had ever said that she thought I would be a good mother, maybe I could believe that I was.

Offshore, there came a shout—but it wasn't Charlie's, it was Frankie's, and then he was moving silently but frantically, scrabbling at Charlie's shoulders until Charlie was holding him and the inner tube was floating beside them. I stood up, but Charlie gave a reassuring wave.

“Stingray,” he called.

Through the clear water I saw a gliding dark cloud of color, then the smooth flip of a fin. Frankie was grinning now, bouncing in Charlie's arms. Up came his hand beside Charlie's, and then, as the creature skated into deeper water, they both pointed emphatically to get my attention, signing for me to
Look
,
look
,
look
.

 

MAYBE IT WAS THE SEA
air or the swimming or both, but at Stiltsville Frankie took marathon naps, stretching well into a third hour. I worked in the office while he slept, listening for his knocks against the wall, and every so often I trudged out to the kitchen for water or coffee and found Charlie napping on the sofa with his forearm over his eyes or sitting in the armchair under the heaping yarn, needles clicking.

After our swim at Soldier Key, Frankie's fingers and toes were pruned and his cheeks were the fruity pink of plums. I read him a book—I'd taken to leaving a few behind, along with spare clothes—and kissed his clammy hairline, and when I came out to get a glass of water, I found Charlie cutting limes at the kitchen counter. He dropped a slice into a bottle of beer and handed it over with a white paper napkin wrapped around the base. A salty, warm breeze swept in from the open doorway.