The Taste of Salt (2 page)

Daniel's voice softens when he says fish names. Parrot-fish. Tarpon. Gar. Sometimes I think I married him because his voice softened in the same way when he said my name. Josie. Squirrelfish. Blue tang. He came along when I'd pretty much given up on men as a gender. I mean, they are the ones I prefer sexually—in college I was with women a few times, but it wasn't for me—but I found them impossible in every other way. I couldn't get them, their behaviors.

When Daniel came along, I was dating a bartender who enjoyed his wares a bit too much—our relationship was on its last, unsteady legs. I don't even quite know how I got involved with a guy like that. He was good in bed; he had the kind of authority that you sometimes find in men who don't think too much. That can keep you going for a while. But not forever. Daniel came along, same field, same smarts, those kind blue eyes that could not stop gazing at me. What could I say? What could I do? I went with him. I loved him. I mean, I love him.

W
E DON'T HAVE KIDS.
I'm thirty-six, so I know time is running out. I don't feel that frantic urgency that a lot of women do, though. I've never felt like my femaleness is
tied up in whether or not I have offspring. To tell the truth, I'm not entirely sure that I want to have kids. Wait. The truth. The truth is, I know I don't want to. Daniel wants them. I don't. When we got married, I honestly thought I'd end up coming around. But I never did. Kids make me nervous. I'm afraid having kids would keep me from the water; I've never had the vision of a brown-skinned, perpetually tanned little fish baby that Daniel talks so wistfully about. I've blamed my unwillingness to pursue infertility treatments on the expense (which we really couldn't afford) and philosophical objections to the artificial manipulation of fertility, but that isn't really it. I'm afraid that I don't have enough to give, that I can't love a baby the way it needs to be loved. Sometimes I'm not even sure I have enough to give Daniel.

I wouldn't know what to say to a child really. How to raise it properly. How to tell it what life is really like. I think about that a lot. Being married, for example. They don't tell you how that's going to feel when you sign up for this deal. You think (well, you're supposed to think), “This is the one. All my troubles are over.” That's what all the songs say, the Bible, your mother, your father. Everything points toward a permanent pairing—even though they so rarely work out. To tell the truth, permanent pairings are unnatural—as a
biologist, I know that. “You're the one.” “You're all I need to get by.” “Together forever.” It's all in there, that belief that if you find the right person and love them properly, you will never open your heart again. But I'm not sure that's true. How would I explain that to a kid? My mother wouldn't get it. I don't think she's touched a man, or been touched, since my father left—since she put him out—when I was seventeen. I don't know if she really still loves him. It's just that she can't conceive of there being someone else. I can.

T
HERE'S THIS HOLLOW
place in me—this place that needs to be alone, this place that vibrates and can't sit still. My work requires me to be still; but sometimes, in my heart, I feel that toe impatiently tapping, waiting for the other shoe to drop, lonely, scared. I don't know how to explain that to anyone. I'm not sure how to explain it to myself.

I've been like this for as long as I can remember. Sure that it's never going to work out. Sure that it's all my fault. What is, you ask? Everything. Everything that's ever gone wrong in my life or the life of anyone I've loved. A therapist would say that's standard issue for someone who grew up like I did—classic adult-child-of-an-alcoholic stuff (yeah, I know the lingo). But so what? Given that, what the fuck am
I supposed to do? I have to go on from where I am. That's why I don't look back. That's why I put it all behind me, put them all behind me, my family. They live in Cleveland. They don't understand about the ocean. And that means they don't understand about me.

I turn Mom's car into the curving driveway of Riverrun, my brother's latest rehab. There has been one before this. Pray God there are no more after. He's got (well, I think he's still got) a great job, working as a trainer for the Cavaliers. Their employee assistance program paid for this stint. That's a change: Last time Tick was in here, about three years ago, my parents had to hustle it up from insurance and savings, which was more than a notion. I will never forget the look on my mother's face after she brought him home that time. I came home to help and was willing to go with her when she went to get him but she told me she felt better going alone. Afterward, it was obvious that it had torn her heart out, even though his homecoming was supposed to be the hopeful, joyous part. I think she felt that having had
a son in rehab was kind of like having had a son in prison. The shame of it. That's what made me agree to come get him this time, as much as I hate being home. Sparing her that moment of seeing him coming out of rehab—especially for the second time? How could I let her go through that again? Besides, I owed it to Tick. We owed each other.

A
T
R
IVERRUN—WHICH
is not far from Dean, the prep school where Tick and I were scholarship kids—the grounds gleam with an effortful calm and cheer. There are a lot of flowers, impatiens and other sturdy breeds that grow well without much care. I think the gardeners are trying to combat the disappearance of hope that brings you to a place like this. The sky is silvery and the air smells of leaves—it looks as though it is going to rain soon. There are a few people out on benches by the entrance, all nervously chainsmoking. I used to smoke but I never smoked with that much intensity, like I'd die if one second passed without a cig in my hand. The patients are all different races but have the same grayish pallor, like they don't get outside much. Like they don't even trust outside much. I feel bizarrely sun-soaked and muscular and fit next to them. I lean on the glass door to enter the building.

Tick is sitting alone on a bench by the front office, a small green duffel bag at his feet. His dark, once handsome
face is hollowed out around the cheeks and eyes. My baby brother. He looks so old. I almost don't recognize him.

He knows me, though. He hops up from the bench, and when he smiles, there's a ghost of the old Tick who always used to bust into my room without knocking. “Josie, hey, Josie. Thanks for coming to get me.”

“What am I supposed to do, leave you here for good?”

“Well, I knew you wouldn't, but you know.… It's nice to see you, that's all.” He pauses. “I don't think Mom could have stood picking me up.”

“Well, what'd you expect?” I say.

He looks at me, his eyes gone to rock. “Do you really need to start in right away with that shit?”

His voice is angry and defensive, the same tone of voice that kept denying that there was a problem even as you could smell it on him, see it on him. The same voice I ran away from, no matter what it cost me. Or him.

But wait, here's a difference. The tirade doesn't continue. The bluster vanishes quickly and his eyes turn sad. “Josie, I'm sorry.” He sighs the saddest sigh in the world. “I've got so much to be sorry for. I know that now. I just … sometimes old habits are the ones you go to first, you know?”

I look at him for a minute. Then I hug him. He's so thin that I can feel his bones shifting under my arms. “I know. I know.” I push away from him for a minute. “Who do I need
to see to get you sprung from this joint?” He tells me and I turn and go into the office.

Riverrun is clearly a place that is intended to help people start finding their way out of the darkness, but even so, it has the greenish paint and fluorescent lighting that seems to be endemic to the kind of places where you either get well or die. I think there's a special factory where they manufacture the paint for these sorts of places. A paint factory like the one in Ellison's
Invisible Man
(when I was fifteen, my father came out of his fog long enough to insist that I read that book; the sequence with the paint factory was indelible). I imagine the place where they make these paints is difficult and cold and hopeless like the most battered parts of the former Soviet Union or parts of Detroit or East St. Louis. They pour a little of that despair into every can of paint. I sit down.

There is a drug counselor behind the desk. She looks to be in her forties, a bit older than me. You know how they say that some folks look like they've seen it all? Well, you could tell with one look at her that she'd seen it all, and done most of it, walked away from what hurt her, and was just going to let you have your say. Her earrings are those big gold doorknockers that aren't in style anymore, but on her they look good. She is solid, but not fat. She has a generous smile. The name on her tag is Lakeisha James.

“Ms. James?”

“Yes?”

“I'm Josie Henderson, Edmund Henderson's sister?”

She looks confused. “Edmund? Oh, you mean Tick. And please call me Lakeisha.”

I smile a little—he never goes by his right name anywhere. “Yeah, Tick. I'm ready to take him home. Is there anything I need to do?”

“Just fill these papers out, honey. I think Tick's ready to go home. Does he have somewhere to stay?”

“Well … he lost almost everything, you know, before he got here. His job, his apartment, all that. But my mother is ready to take him in and help him get on his feet again. And his job said they'd give him one more chance. I … I'm here now but I don't live here anymore. I live up in Massachusetts.”

She looks at me noncommittally. “Is your mother up to supporting him?”

“Yes, I think she is. She loves him very much.”

“She's in good health?”

“Pretty good. Mom's a real go-getter.”

“And I understand from Tick that your father has a history of alcoholism, too?”

A click inside. “Yes. Yes, he does. He's sober now, though.”

“That's good. How long has that been?”

“I don't talk to him often.” Her cool gaze doesn't change but my face gets hot anyway. “My mother has had some contact with him. He slipped up once but he's been sober for about ten years now.”

“Sounds like he's over the hump. As much as you ever get over it, anyway—one day at a time,” she said, with a shake of her head and a slight smile. “Do you attend Al-Anon meetings?”

“No. I went to a few when I was in college, but I didn't find them that helpful.” She looks as though she wants me to say more. I don't know what else to say. The main thing I felt in those meetings was an intense desire to leave. People sat on folding chairs in a circle and told their stories of car crashes and lost homes and vomiting, and I'd think, “Well, my father didn't do any of that. What am I doing here?” After about five times, I stopped going. I hated the slogans—One Day at a Time, Keep the Focus on Yourself—and the way they made you feel like their way was the only way. I hated the folding chairs and the bad coffee. I hated that I was the only college student there, the only scientist, the only dark one. I stood out too much. And I'm not the drunk anyway—why do I have to go to the stupid meetings? I know meetings are great for some people. I'm just
not one of them. I mean, in the end we're all on our own anyway, right?

“Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Most of our families find them very useful. But to each his own. Is your father available to help your mother?”

“I think so. I'm not on the best terms with him, but I think they've been talking about how to handle things.” I take a deep breath. “They separated when I was seventeen—he got sober after that.” I hope she drops this line of questioning.

She nods and grants my wish. “Well, Tick has a tough road ahead. You know this, right?”

“I've heard.”

She laughs, then says, “How come your mother isn't here?”

“Why isn't my mother here?”

“You heard me.”

“She wanted me to. Tick and I are very close. We were, anyway. My mother thought it would be better if he saw me first.”

“But you're leaving town.”

A note of steel comes into my voice. “Yes. I'm married. I haven't lived here in more than ten years. I have work I have to get back to.” She keeps looking at me with unnerving steadiness, so I keep babbling. “I can't stay. I can't stay.”

Finally, she breaks her gaze. “Fine. But I hope you're prepared to support your mother. It's up to Tick to get to meetings and keep himself straight. He might need some help with that. If your mother couldn't bring herself to come here—are you sure she's prepared to give that help?” She hesitates. “Are you sure he hasn't hurt her too much?”

Hasn't hurt her too much. I sit back in the chair for a minute. I remember the day Mom told me that she needed me to come home and help her get Tick out of rehab. That day, my office door was closed and there was a lightning storm outside. The wind sounded like it was crying. I clutched the phone—I could imagine my mother's face even though I couldn't see it. I'd talked to her fairly often over the months that she slowly stopped being able to deny what was happening again with Tick. The last time I saw her, about a month before he went into rehab this time, her eyes were sunk back in her head as though she'd been alive for a thousand terrible years and would be alive for a thousand terrible more. “Josie, it's like he lost his mind. I swear. I've been talking to your father a little bit but it's too hard for me to talk to him much. There's too much water under the bridge. He understands and I think he really has changed, but …” Her voice thickened and she had to stop talking. I was holding the telephone receiver so hard that my hand hurt. “I went by Tick's apartment the other day.
The landlord let me in. He knows there's a problem. Josie, it was so filthy—bottles everywhere. I can't … an animal wouldn't live the way your brother lives. It's breaking my heart. It's breaking your father's heart. We don't know what to do. I can't believe that we're back here.” And I heard in her voice that she'd never meant anything more literally in her life. Her heart was in pieces in her chest, cutting her flesh to ribbons. She didn't know what to do about anything anymore.