For every funeral, I hoped my mother would return to me, wearing her jewelry and curled hair, and for every dead body, I’d send for her by letter to a hopeful address, only to have the letter returned. Even if just for one afternoon, I needed her. I never said it to Dad, but I know he wanted her back, too, because he shaved close to his face and wore cologne. He said it was to honor the dead, but I knew it was for my mother. When Old Tropez died, I secretly believed my mother would appear, in beautiful shell necklaces and turquoise earrings, sprinkling white petals on his grave. I waited.
Dad and I collected unscathed shells and beach glass, carefully in silver pails. We walked along the windy stretch of the Western Shore, and the rich people had left their mansions and gone back to the mainland for the winter. Those hours were spent in silence. My arms were tired from the gathering, and I told my father I ached. The buckets were heavy the whole way home. Dad drilled holes into the shells, and while he sat in silence by the fire, I strung the pieces onto long strands of twine, complaining that my back and hands hurt, wanting to ask why we decorated coffins with shells. Soon, there were endless ringlets of glittering shells that glowed in the almost-darkness. Tropez was still dead. Still no mother.
“Was it a heart attack?” I asked.
“I think so,” Dad said.
But I really wanted to know the how, what it looked like when someone leaves forever.
“Better sleep—you’ll need your strength for tomorrow,” he said.
I was always the only girl to carry the casket.
“Did you get a good look at him?” I asked.
“These aren’t questions for little girls.”
But he told me the answers anyway, because whether we said it aloud or not, I was never a little girl. He said the old man dropped right at his feet, slammed his face against the dock, and, without me asking, Dad told me what I wanted to know: that his eyes were closed, and that sometimes, loneliness can make a heart stop.
Once, my mother told me about the Mariana Trench. The deepest part of the sea, and the darkest. I knew about darkness before she spoke of the trench, but no book or visit to the Sea Institute had revealed just how deep and dark this trench was. The morning she told me, straight from her memory, I pretended to be a whale on the living room floor. I slithered and kicked my feet like they were a tail, and I made sounds of echolocation. She was in the kitchen, and there was coffee and toast.
Sometimes she’d call me for breakfast in her own whale voice, which was shrill and terrifying, and I loved it. She used to open every window in that apartment, the one with the wraparound deck, and she’d prop me up on a chair and tell me to search for whale spouts. Some mornings, my mother read out loud about the Mariana Trench: More than one thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. I repeated it back to her.
The morning we were to bury Old Tropez’s body, my father swam in the sea. I could see his arms rhythmically digging in and out of the ocean for hours. A thick layer of fog coated everything. When he made his way back, he said, Salt cures everything. He made eggs. I listened for the door. He shaved close. His cologne. He said the fog brought death. Or the death brought the fog. Or it was just neither, or both. He said that I was twelve, and I should know about the dying things, and what they mean.
“I want to be buried at sea,” I blurted out.
“It’s too dark, and too big, and how will you know how to get back here?” he asked.
Other days, we walked through the cemetery on top of the hill. We sat by his mother’s grave, or we traipsed around the damp lawn to stretch our legs and he’d point out where he wanted to sleep forever.
Once, he pulled me close, our sides smashed together, and I could feel his bony shoulder pressed against my temple. Always: the smell of fish, salt, beer, and stale pretzels. He pointed to a grassy hill that bloomed with wildfire color after the rains. That was the place. I couldn’t help but think of all the times we had been lost, and how it might be easier without him if I really wanted to find the way.
Atop the foggy, wild bluff, a captain read poetry to the men huddled around the coffin. We laid flowers and trailed shells on top, and Dad spoke, too. For the first time since my mother left, I saw him cry, and it must have been for a million things. He laid a piece of white sailcloth on top of the wood, and when he backed away, he looked like a child.
I looked around for my mother. Only walls of gray.
When the fog began to clear, there were traces of blue sky. Everyone talked quietly, and then men drank from the bottles they kept in their jacket pockets.
“You’re quiet,” Dad said.
I was really thinking of ways to leave my father. Passages to find my mother. I was daydreaming of Jason W from homeroom. The way his sweatshirt was always too big, and how it bounced every time he made a layup. I was tired, in fact, from staying up all night and forcing myself to think only of Jason W, just so I didn’t have to think about everything else. I was tired of feeling alone, even when my father was sleeping on the couch outside my bedroom door. I was tired.
“Just sad,” I said.
Once, my mother talked about atmospheric pressure. Said there was pressure all over, even in the deepest, darkest trench. My mother didn’t like this pressure, said it felt like she might explode. She closed the windows and used wooden dowels to lock them shut. I said something like, There’s so much pressure that your heart can explode.
When she went away, I learned this pressure, the weight inside my chest. There was the pressure of missing things, the leaving of things, the invisible weight that felt so thick, even when everything was still moving. She taught me the constant foreboding of implosion.
The funeral procession led the men to the bar, and Dad told me to walk faster. They drank. I read in my nook behind the bar, where I had learned to hide so as to let the drunken buzz of their voices lull me to sleep. Where I could imagine my life with Jason W—the kind of life where we’d have a boat in every size, and islands to match their splendor. I tried to think of Jason W’s bony knees and flashing green eyes. I replayed his hands dribbling a ball, to block out the grievers’ drunk wails. I tried to read. I read the same paragraph over and over. I pictured Jason W grabbing me by the hand and leading me past my father, to the parking lot, into a car, onto the ferry, over to the mainland, how we’d promise never to stop moving. His baggy sweatshirt.
I drank last sips of beer from the drunken bereaved. My first real buzz. Women came with flowers. Dad stood on top of the bar for some drunken speech. Jason W’s mother brought lasagna.
Then, I heard him dribbling the ball outside the back door.
“I thought you were in there,” Jason W said when I emerged from the bar.
The ball bouncing echoed against the alley walls.
“Sad day,” I said.
“My parents bought his fish,” he said.
I never told my father about Jason W’s parents inviting me over to dinner so often. Or that we met in detention, because I was so often late. Or that Jason W got detention for bad things, like stealing. That he was known for giving hickeys in the woods of Ferry Lands. From the window, I saw my father slurp a forkful of lasagna right from the pan, and there was cheese stuck to his blotched, drunken face.
“You want to sneak onto Ferry Lands?” he asked.
“No.”
“Tin Pan Carnival?” he asked.
“K.”
But I knew it was closed for the season. We walked until I needed his sweater, and until we reached the empty Ferris wheel with an empty booth that we slouched in for a few hours. He talked about basketball and I talked about whale books, and we didn’t say all the things about darkness. Eventually, we decided that Jason W should be my first boyfriend and, eventually, one day, slip his fingers down my pants. He proved his devotion with one solid, quiet kiss, our lips cold. We were far away from my father. And mother. And still, there was a world out there.
My mother said orcas have the same eyes as humans, that if you look deep enough they seem endless. I asked her if she believed there were undiscovered things in the sea, and she said there were undiscovered things everywhere. She asked me to imagine the pit of the Mariana Trench, that place where even humans couldn’t reach, the center of the Earth, the darkness. The fish there have headlights, she said. There will be plenty of things I won’t understand, she said. But there must be paths to those places unknown, she said. Told me to keep searching. Searching in complete darkness.
Orcinus orca
QUESTION: Why do orca pods (both aggressive and nonaggressive) hunt marine mammals by working together?
Because your father is charming, he will not say if he owns the boat. He will let you call him Captain, even when he’s only a deckhand, or a drug buddy of the boat’s owner. He will lead your entire sixth-grade class, and teacher, and teacher’s assistant, to believe that he owns the boat and the captain’s hat, and that he is a master seaman. He will say that despite their name, killer whales are social and they work together to get what they want. To hunt other mammals.
No one will say anything about the booze he is drinking out of a coffee cup, though the adults must know it’s booze. Instead, you will allow everyone to believe that your father is the type of father who owns a boat and a captain’s hat, one who has sailed the world ten times over. That would explain his tan. His worldly views. His reason for settling on this magnificent island, because, as he says, his ancestors were founders.
When the boat creeps out of a misty harbor, past a buoy of lazy sea lions, and picks up speed on top of all that open water, you won’t tell him to turn back. You won’t tell him to slow down. Though you know he’s going the wrong way, and that he’s going too fast, and that he’s talking to the class as if he is of scientist blood. You’ll believe he knows everything, too. This is why you’ll spend your life seeking so many answers.
In the winter, there will be orcas off the coast of Winter Island, he’ll say.
Will we see them today, Captain? a student will shout.
Your father will promise orcas, bottlenose dolphins, common dolphins, rays, clear water, and at least one fluke that will smash against the sea and splash your friends. He’ll say the whales know his boat. And as the boat moves faster, the horizon will become tangled with the sun shining in your eyes, and because of your father’s charm and his ability to just often enough keep his promises, there will be dolphins and whales. They’ll breach out of the water and slam so hard back into the sea. You’ll want to cheer, but your stomach will be sick. The rest of your class will clap and snap photos, and even your lady teachers will now be very interested in calling him Captain.
You’re the only one who will puke. You’ll hide in the cabin below, because you’ve been on this boat many times: for retirement soirees, for funerals, for weekend tiki-themed drug parties with Playmates and baseball players. Once there was Mick Jagger, although your father made you stay in the tiny cabin below for that party. You’ve always liked that boat, because you could get a lot of reading done when it was just circling, slowly, around Tin Pan Harbor. You’ve never felt the horror of open water until your father promises to show your sixth-grade class a pod of whales.
He’ll find you below—who fucking knows who is behind the wheel—and he’ll wipe your forehead with a cool rag. He’ll make a joke that you can’t be his daughter because you can’t live at sea, and you can’t really be related to him if you don’t got sea legs. He’ll say you are either born with these legs or you are not. You’ll hear the whales blowing air and the children screaming at the mist evaporating into the sky.
If you sit down here, it will make it worse, he’ll say. Look at the straight line of the horizon.
You’ll manage to climb up the twisted stairs to the bow, and you’ll lean over and throw up what feels like every single meal you’ve ever eaten in your life. Your dad will tell stories about the sea, and everyone will watch the horizon with wide eyes. You’ll think that now, while you are still dumping your insides into the Pacific, your teachers are drinking booze, too. You’ll think you hear the clink of their porcelain mugs.
He’ll pick up speed again; he knows how to drive the boat. Against the restless moving of the sea, you’ll be going so fast that the boat is smashing against whitecapped waves. You’ll have vomit on your windbreaker. You’ll keep throwing up as everything goes faster. Then there will be sea lions, and common dolphins, racing along the hull, and you’ll rest your head on your arms, which you glue to the side of the boat. You’ll miss the sea by a few feet by the time you are throwing up bile, and it’s everywhere.
Other children will crowd around you, some will run away at the sight and smell of you, and finally a teacher with beer breath brings you a towel. She’ll say she’s surprised it’s you, and that no one else got seasick; she’s also so surprised that your father is wonderful. Not the first time you have heard this. Not the first time he drove too fast and forgot that you were suffering alongside him.
Your father will insist that he’ll take your picture hanging over the bow of the boat with a disposable camera. As torture. As a memory. As a reminder that his charm will find you a pod of whales, or dolphins, or anything else that you’re looking for.