The wind swept through Ferry Lands and whipped up the dusty hills and sank dirt into all the cracks. Even Mary complained. Mary was no biological mother, but she had motherly things: string cheese, apples in a large bowl, warm blankets, a patio full of wind chimes. In the crevices of her house were tumbleweeds of dust, and doors ridden with dampness, and the whole thing smelled like an old boat. A favorite smell. Her house creaked in the night, and its aching bones wobbled in the tug of a storm. She kept a fire most nights, and I spotted her sliver of a smoke trail like the North Star.
The girls in high school called her a witch and a dyke. But I believed Dad used to love her wholly, by the condition of her seasoned hands, by the hours she’d logged at sea, by the sight of her holy long hair. I knew that she could fix an open wound with superglue. Once, a girl called her an old lesbian, and it was Rook who punched that girl in the face. No one talks about your Mary, she’d said. And it was true that I wished Mary was my mother, especially when I couldn’t find my own.
Dad joked that we could never go to the mainland, because then we’d have to get on Mary’s ferry. He said she had a temper, and that if she had the chance to, she’d sink that fucking thing and run my father’s face into the muddy bottom of the bay. Her marriage didn’t work out, and the distance between her and my father grew, even after he told her again that he loved her, so I had to keep Mary a secret. I told my father that I wouldn’t take the ferry, because of Mary and a list of other semitearful things, that I’d have to stay on Winter Island forever. But it wasn’t true, and when he was away, I’d ride the ferry at night with Mary and sit in her booth, and sometimes we had covered so much open water that I finally got sea legs. I’d tell her about Dad and all his weed money, about school, about Rook, and she listened to all the things I wanted.
There were cold nights when Dad stayed late in the fields and spent long hours organizing a small army of men who would carry military-sized rifles and protect electric fences that fortified his massive weed grow. My father and I were in the business of surviving betrayal; we were kind, but we spent as many hours apart as possible. Maybe he knew that I knew, but Rook moved on quickly to a guy our age, and my father invested all of his time into growing Wonderland. I spent nights alone, waiting for Rook to sneak boys into my bedroom, reading romance novels, or writing letters to my mother that I tossed out after a few lines of bullshit and begging. In that winter’s one-bedroom apartment, Dad slept on the couch and I got the bedroom, and I might as well have just lived alone. I waited for the sound of the ferry horn coming into the harbor.
I often sneaked onto Ferry Lands the back way so that the automatic lights wouldn’t shine. I’d sit quietly on Mary’s vast lawn and watch the sea turn purple by the light of the moon. Some nights, I crept onto her porch and rocked in her chair and basked in aching. Sometimes, I could feel the warmth seeping from cracks in her house. Other nights, I actually peered into her windows, hoping to be caught, and fed, and loved, and understood. I tried to stay away from her, and that house, to be loyal to Dad, but when the winds blew, her garden snowed with white flecks of jasmine petals.
Then some nights, there were wool blankets left out to dry out in the sun and mistakenly left behind by nightfall. I wrapped myself in their thickness, her scent, and the leftover dog hairs. On the darkest night, there was an eyelash left of moon, no wind, no sound, the lighthouse quiet and dark. She must have heard me roaming through the fields of citrus, cracking dry things under my feet, inching my way along the dusty trails that led to her door. That dark night, Mary sat on the porch and waited with the dull glow of a lantern.
“Power’s gone out on the whole island,” she said.
I paused.
“I’m just glad it’s been you,” she said. “There are coyotes that come for the dogs.”
She said she’d wondered who, over the years, had crawled about looking for shelter on the emptiness of this land, where people came to fuck and kiss and fight. Where the dogs came to die. The others to eat. She said she’d wondered how many had lived in the divots of this land, and how many she’ll just never know existed.
The dogs rallied around my feet and jumped and made high-pitched screeches with their breaths. We sat in two chairs close to the fire, and it took a lot of our stillness to keep the dogs calm. When it was late, after we had said all of the useless things, she wrapped me in a blanket and brought me a cold piece of apple pie on a paper plate.
I finally told her about Rook and my father, and she didn’t say anything, except she stroked my hair, and that was too much. She told me about the mainlanders who wanted to build a bridge. The clocks flashed, and there was a short flicker of electric light. She said the winds were too rough to get back to my father, that I’d have to sleep there and be gone before dawn so my father wouldn’t worry. She opened a chest and pulled out two pillows. As she shook off dust, she said the only guests she gets are raccoons. She pulled out a book, a blanket, and a flashlight, and I climbed onto the couch.
“I’ve got an early morning,” she said.
I fell asleep fast, next to her fire, Mary and the gaggle of dogs asleep in the bedroom.
In the morning, the power was back, and she had made coffee and left The Origins of the Earth and More with a note that said: Return the book if you find what you’re looking for.
Once, I found my mother in the innards of the dusty San Bernardino Mountains. She was a waitress in a seedy mountain bar and grill, which was mostly a bar, and I was finally old enough to drink. It was messily overgrown with bikers, and they served fries with A.1. Steak Sauce. The chef, also the owner and my mother’s boyfriend, made garlic fries on Wednesdays. I took the ferry, a bus, a train, and a taxi, and if I could have, I would have latched on to a flightless bird if it had promised to get me there faster.
My mother was surprised that I found her. She acted happy, like a good mother, but talked so much at first that she wasn’t listening to anything I said. She said she hated Winter Island. She said she always felt trapped. And while she was wiping down tables with a damp rag, she told me she was sorry for leaving. Though it had been years, my mother was just like I remembered her: indifferent and aloof and always looking to the sky.
“Did your father tell you where I was?” she asked.
I said that I found her on the internet. That her blog, Mountain Mama, came up if you searched her name. I’d seen her daily mundane adventures in gardening and growing her own vegetables. Her photos were crooked with poor resolution, and her blogs were boring and sometimes full of typos. The garden seemed to make her happy, and I wondered if that is the way for women to be happy, with straw hats, cutoff denim shorts, tan stick legs, and lemonade on a porch swing. On the internet, my mother looked like a wonderful mother.
“Is your father sick?” she asked.
“He’s fine,” I said.
I wanted to ask why she left, but she would just say she could never stay. I wanted her to look into my eyes to see if she could hold a gaze for long enough to see that they’ve changed color with all the hurt and exhaustion. I wondered if our eyes were the exact same color. I followed her to each table while she wiped with vigor and stamina, and she asked me to help fill napkin dispensers and grimy glass ketchup bottles.
“Lunch rush gets real busy up here,” she said.
My mother’s arms were mine. Her hair, too. Her skin hung a little farther from the bone. Still, she was fit and covered in a spritz of perfectly appointed freckles, and she was firm around her rib cage, which protects her middle things. Two bikers called to her, and she wedged herself between them at the bar while they talked to her as if she were the most wonderful woman ever.
“You gotta meet my daughter,” she said.
She introduced me like I was no secret. Like she had told people about this daughter. One who has lived and breathed elsewhere. She called me a daddy’s girl. She wouldn’t say if she left me or if I left her, but it didn’t matter, because she told everyone how pretty I was, and how proud she was to be a mother to me. Me.
My mother mixed drinks behind the bar, and she tossed me a key to her place, which was just up the hill and behind the restaurant parking lot. Told me to go there until she got off, if I wanted, she said. She asked me to stay for dinner, at least. She must have known that I needed her, or the idea of her, even for just one night.
“You look like a grown woman,” she said.
She stared.
“Beautiful,” she said.
My mother’s house looked just like the photos—mismatched watercolors framed in thrift-store wood, signed by her, hung all over the walls. She had an easel on the patio, a small fire pit, because she’s always loved to watch things burn, and then a wild garden—in raised boxes, in the ground, and in handmade plastic-and-PVC greenhouses. It was all unkempt.
I opened the kitchen drawers and bathroom cupboards, and sifted through her closet. She loved paisley print, Leonard Cohen, white tea, black tea, herbal tea, cheap hairspray, and that hippie kind of toothpaste. She had a storage closet full of workout balls and light weights, yoga mats, and those long, stretchy wire things that do something to sculpt muscles. I snooped so much that I was the real kind of tired, and I read whatever I could find on her bookshelf, until I fell asleep in a low-hanging hammock out back.
She woke me with a chilled hand on my cheek.
“There are lots of bugs out here,” she said.
My mother prepared dinner and assigned me the small kitchen tasks, like cutting tomatoes and cucumbers for salad and, then, peeling potatoes. She was the kind of person who was always alive, and especially in her kitchen, she had a face full of color. She did the talking—about her garden, her paintings, her art shows, the time she almost made it as a painter and poet in San Francisco or Seattle. She called me by my real name, and it was not even my name anymore—Evangeline—so it sounded like she was talking to a stranger. I hated her and still missed her, too.
I asked her why I am Evangeline, for whom I must be named, and she says she just liked the sound, that I’m the first one she knew, and I was limp with disappointment that I was just a regular person. She sang my name and smiled.
Her patio overlooked the slope of backyard, and I swatted bugs from my neck while we ate. The bug zapper kept electrocuting invisible alive things, and I kept flinching. She talked over the death sound, more eager to tell me about her, until a tall man appeared in the doorway, and I recognized him from the bar, the blog, the photos on the refrigerator.
“The famous Evangeline,” he said.
So I smiled, because there’s nothing she could have done or said that would have made anything better, and I told myself there were no answers.
They told me about their life together. It was a whole life. And no one asked about my life, my almost-whole life. They talked into the night, even when they drove me down the hill to an empty bus stop, and they told me to come back soon. Against a settled sun and an early purple sky, I headed west. I could have evaporated before I got back to the sea, and at red lights before the freeway, I admired the fresh apples and avocados that rolled around in the bag on my lap.
Physeter macrocephalus
QUESTION: Is a sperm whale vengeful?
When your father lies to you, it will be the wave you’ve turned your back on. The one that hits you so hard that you scrape your knees on the ocean floor. The kind of wave that makes your knees bleed for a week. The kind of knees that must be attended to by tweezers, antiseptics, gauze, and tape. That kind of lie is the one that will scar your limbs and make you wonder if you’ll ever turn your back to the sea again.
But it’s the first rule of the ocean. Never, ever turn your back to the sea. She will get you. She will roar. She will teach you a lesson. It’s in the way your father always nodded—dontturnyourmotherfuckingback—when he let you swim alone when you were small, without fins, without floaties, without anything but your skin and your suit.
When your father becomes so desperate and lonely, isolated by every passageway of water, he’ll do terrible things. He will lie and tell you that he’s got cancer. That the doctor told him so. He will have said things like that before—separated shoulder, thrown-out back, gallstones, kidney failure, and more—because he needed you, or money, or affection, or consoling. But he’ll never say cancer until you are good and gone and barely coming back to the island. Cancer is the wave that knocks you right out of your suit, out of your skin, smashes you to the ground, and holds you down with such force that you can’t find up.
Your father will tell you that this time—yes, really, this time—he is telling the truth. That he didn’t want to worry you while you were away, and that now he must tell you, because it might be serious. You’ll tell him that you’ll come home—the next ferry out—that your small fellowship at the Institute isn’t that big anyway, that you’ll leave your boyfriend (you don’t really love him) and you’ll put him back together again. And then he’ll say, No. He’ll say, Absolutely not. He’ll say, Just wire me five thousand dollars.
Then you’ll know that wave is crashing right on top of you.
You will sit, crying, on your bathroom tile floor, uncomfortably leaning against the hard rim of the tub. He’ll be on the other line, crying, too. But you’ll know he’s crying only because his desperation has taken hold; he hates asking you for things. He’d rather charm an entire island out of their money, their panties, their homes, before asking you for anything. But he will ask this one time. He’ll say cancer is fuckingexpensive. Say that with the money, he can make rent, pay his hospital fees, and make it out—just as good as new. Because that’s what the fuckingexpensive doctor tells him.
When your Dad is an addict, he can still be a good man. He can also be a bad man. When he’s using, he’ll simply be both. On the phone, you’ll hear the bad man talking, the desperate one who needs love and money, and you’ll still hear the good one, too. His tears won’t be for the fake cancer, but for humiliation.
You will find your mother again in the dusty mountains, to ask her a favor. You’ll explain to her, over the best garden salad you’ve ever had, that your father is still a drunk, and he pops pills, and he uses whatever he can party with, and that he’s always broke. Even though he sells weed, even though he rips off the tourists, even though he’s owned boats. He’s never got enough, because there’s never enough money to feed a man like that. You’ll tell her softly, so she can try to understand, because your charming father taught you to talk that way. She’ll smile sweetly, like maybe she knows you, and hand you an envelope of cash that she keeps hidden under a floorboard in the garden shed.
She will touch your face, and for once, she’s not a stranger.
“Least I can do,” she’ll say.
For a moment, you’ll think now would be the time to tell her what she can actually do. She can come around; she can fix him. Though you know she can’t, that’s how it’s supposed to work, until she tells you no one can fix him. That that kind of love is not fixable. It’s just there—take it or leave it, good and bad.
You’ll know you can’t say much more to her and risk her taking the money back. You’ll smile sweetly, like he taught you, and you’ll tell her you want to see her more, even if you really don’t.
It’s the least you can do.
When you overnight a UPS box of cash—from the weed, from your mother, from your friends, and from your night job in the cafeteria—you won’t hear from him. You’ll text over and over again. You’ll get nothing back. That wave has smashed you so hard, and now you’re sitting alone, with empty pockets, and looking at your own home from the other side of the water. It doesn’t matter where the money went, you’ll think. You just know he must have needed it more than you. That’s what your mother said; that’s what you keep telling yourself.
He will avoid you for as long as he can, and finally, a few months later, you’ve kept calling and you’ll catch him in the lobby of Otto House, and you’ll have the front-desk girl put him on the phone. He’ll think it’s a hotel guest. He’ll think they need him to make them laugh. He’ll think it’s to sell weed.
His voice will drop, and yours will raise. How can you hold back the tears?
You won’t believe it. The treatment is working, he’ll say.
So you’re all right, then? you’ll ask.
Better than ever.
It will feel like drowning, except worse, because no one actually drowns.