I could see for miles. Gentle winds made a clear, sunshiny horizon. The whale breaths. Fish that flew. Sinking ships. I heard it might never be this clear again. I hiked to the top of the volcano, and up there was the rest of the world. Below, my father, his son, and perfectly manicured rows of marijuana. Everything was endless.
He sat on Dad’s lap—the exact same back-of-the-head hair. They were fishing in the little pond in the middle of the weed field. When they turned to me, I wanted to yell, to scratch Dad’s eyes out for all the lies, but it was so quiet and cool, and the pond water erupted silent bubbles to the surface. Tommy roared with laughter at the deep voices of frogs hidden under tall grass and moss. They pushed their poles into the earth, and my father smiled.
“You haven’t met Tommy yet,” Dad said.
He was three. A perfect little face and a sweeter disposition than Dad or I ever had. I was a rough kid, quiet, alone, pondering and wondering. But Tommy was happy, loud, excited. All the things I wanted to be. We shook hands. Tommy’s palm was a tiny, greasy thing, covered in dried mud.
“Top of the morning to you, Tom,” I said.
“Tommy!” he shouted.
He ran back to his pole and dunked his feet into the pond. Dad watched him out of the side of his eye. It smelled like weed, and my father smiled. It wasn’t the time to bring up the past, the deceit, the money he’d borrowed, the promises he’d broken.
“Rook’s gone, then?” I asked.
He nodded. Sad and old.
He never told me that Tommy was his, but it seems like everyone knew, including him, so we never did have to talk about it. I didn’t want the details about how Rook had been sleeping with Dad the whole time I was gone—probably the whole time before that, too.
I knew he’d gotten her a job waiting tables at Otto House. I knew he went there every night after Rocky’s. I knew these things but never found the right words to say anything. To ask him about it was to allow him to ask me how I felt about it. We were the kind of people who had to be quiet to move on with things. Talking it all out would have fractured us forever.
“Ice cream,” Tommy yelled.
In the distance, my father’s broken-down truck sat on the edge of what was left of the Old Institute. It was the last of any of the outside world that bothered to come anymore. Tommy clapped his hands and jumped—his feet squishing in and out of the mud. The guys with guns whistled to Dad.
“Watch him, would you?” he said to me.
I cupped a tiny frog in my hands and opened them slowly. Tommy giggled and reached.
“Be gentle,” I said.
He ripped it from my hands and squeezed hard, and the frog slipped out and into the green.
“More,” he said.
The top half of his face, and especially his wavy hair, looked just like Dad. And his smirk was all Rook. He didn’t get her ruby-colored lips, though.
I wanted to dislike this little boy, but when he grabbed my hand and led me into a muggy sanctuary of frog noises and puddle smells, I knew that he was part of us. We had the same eyes, as if his were mine and mine were his, and I hoped I had once been so full of wonder as he was. And I’d been hoping for things to keep for so long, although I felt like everything was always cracking and sinking, that I had learned to love despair even in sunlight. When Tommy turned to me with his eyes wide, telling me about bugs, I kept asking the same question: What if I could love someone despite betrayal?
After everything else we’d endured, it seemed useless to rage-scream at my father, or to scold Rook. And here was this new little body of a boy, with hope, stamping his feet into soft ground, asking me if I’d stay and pluck tadpoles out of still water. Maybe I needed him most.
Tommy couldn’t spend any more time in those sweltering-by-day and freezing-by-night barracks. For the sake of myself, for Tommy, and Dad, and the miles of things we were finally able to see, I had to stay. Forever.
Then Dad got an apartment big enough for three. Near the old butcher shop, so that sometimes smells of metallic meat and old, bloodied bones wafted through the living room. If I stood on a stool in the bathtub and stretched my neck out the window, I could see a tiny glimmer of the sea. That season, we could always see the foreverness of ocean. Depending on the time of day, it was an endless green or blue or purple. The plumbing was bad and the floors creaked, but that place was well worth the afternoon breeze. From the roof, we could see for miles.
Dad said that Tommy wouldn’t remember the mainland or Rook or the rains or the heat, or anything else that happened before now. I think we were all ready to forget a few hundred of our mistakes by then and focus on what to eat for dinner. On raising a boy.
“Fresh lobster,” Dad said.
All the storms had left my father tired. There was a small patch of yard where we grew fresh herbs, radishes, carrots, and peppers. Dad also grew tomatoes and cared for them with a gentle hand. His expertise in weed farming had translated into an old-man hobby, and by then, he was growing most of our food himself.
He’d lost the whole operation to crooks, and whatever was left, people came for it, and demanded he pay debts. He gambled anything else that was left at an Indian casino in the desert. The last few wads of cash were spent on quality steaks for the grill. People approached us about licensing the name, or making a movie about us, or asking us for the mother seed, but Dad never responded.
Those days were quiet. Dad worked on the yard and on fixing our old garage door and splintery steps. He drank less and looked forward to watching Tommy play submarines in the bathtub. He followed new recipes. We walked for miles. Tommy fell asleep in a fancy stroller sent by Rook’s parents.
Dad bundled Tommy in a snowsuit, a puffy onesie he’d received from Rook when she was waiting tables in Aspen. He appeared in the doorway, already sweaty, holding Dad’s hand.
“Tin Pan is reporting a big lobster day,” Dad said.
“Can Tommy swim?” I asked.
There were still a few hours of warmth, and we could see on and on, and Dad said the Earth looked round. There was a most pleasant breeze and I grabbed a bag full of snacks and water, in case we’d be stuck out there forever and ever. Some kind of motherly instinct had taken over, though I’d never had a mother, or been a mother, or wanted to be one. But the small army of people and the endless loop of Winter Island seemed to have performed some kind of magic trick: I could love unconditionally. Even still. After hating my father. And my mother. And Rook. And sometimes myself.
The fishing boat was the only thing that was really Dad’s, and it was tattered but functional, painted with a faded, horrific shade of coral that he said reminded him of the color of his mother’s apron.
Tin Pan glowed in the late afternoon, and we quietly slipped out of the harbor’s mouth. Tommy clapped at the seagulls shouting, and I held him so close, nearly pressing his life vest into my skin. I wasn’t a mother, but I was a mother. I wasn’t a daughter, but I was a daughter.
“You have to let him live a little,” Dad said.
“Maybe I shouldn’t take parenting advice from you,” I said.
Looking up from his rusted lobster pots, Dad scowled.
“You don’t seem so miserable being back here,” he said.
What if loving them didn’t make me miserable? What if I was happy even if nothing would be perfect.
Tommy pointed to anything that moved, and on the horizon, the whale-watching boats, packed tightly with tourists, were coming in for the day. Then there was the buoy with shiny black sea lions yelping as we passed, the same buoy Dad said I screamed at, too. Tommy told us to look and look and look.
“You can see the rest of the Channel Islands out there,” Dad said.
“You remember when you told tourists that was Japan?” I asked.
Dad anchored, and we dropped three pots, hoping for at least one lobster. But as we sat there waiting, Dad shuffling cards and Tommy watching, I think I must have forgotten why we were resting on top of the sea that afternoon. We ate crackers and all sipped water from Tommy’s baby cup. Tommy was loud, and obnoxious, and joyous, and for a moment, there was hope.
“I hope you’re not sad it ended up this way,” Dad said.
“Which way?” I asked.
“The way it was supposed to be,” he said.
I couldn’t tell him, right on the boat, that, no, he shouldn’t have fucked my friend, and then betrayed me, and her, that then there was Tommy, and what? We would just endure another round of suffering? I couldn’t, because there was this: my father, happy, with peaceful eyes.
We played War and enjoyed an eerily calm day at sea. When he pulled the lobster pots from the seafloor, Tommy squealed in excitement. We’d have enough for a week.
“Look at this big guy!” Dad said.
We coasted back to the dock, Dad pointing out new neighbors, new shops, new boats, and all the things he knew about the island’s future. His voice was older. The dock was decrepit and should have been torn down after the last hurricane, but Dad swore it would last another summer.
Tommy helped Dad carry the cooler, stocked full of slow-moving lobster, and I packed up the life vests and tied the boat properly for the night.
But that damn rickety dock was too unstable for Tommy, and within seconds, he tripped right into the sea. The sound of his body crashing into the dirty pool of shallow green water sent small pains to every sensor in my body. Like he was mine.
Dad had him by the arm and out of the water, plopped down on the dock, was consoling Tommy’s screams, before I could even get out of the boat.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I screamed.
I grabbed Tommy, covering him in all my dry coats and scarves and ran him back to the apartment. I never once looked back to see if Dad was behind me. Tommy’s lips were blue from the late-afternoon wind, and his screams—thank god for his screams—were hearty and real.
I stripped him down and plunked him in the bathtub with warm water, and I could hear Dad eventually building a fire in the living room. Tommy played with submarines, as if his near drowning had occurred in another life, as if those kinds of things didn’t happen on Winter Island.
In the kitchen, I heard pots clanking and the fire crackling loudly. I heard the sound of a fast knife on the cutting board, the refrigerator door squeaking open and the steam scream of the boiled lobster in the pot. Dad did the actual boiling of the lobster because I couldn’t bear a loud death. I wrapped Tommy in a warm robe and we sat by the fire, bundled up, full of warmth.
When we ate dinner, we ate in silence, only speaking to Tommy and entertaining his jokes.
“That happened to you, you know?” Dad said.
I made faces at Tommy.
“You fell in so many times,” Dad said.
“Let me guess, I saved myself?” I said.
“I saved you many times.”
Dad dutifully did the dishes after we ate, and we watched cartoons on the couch until all three of us, full and quiet, were falling asleep next to the fire. I could smell fall creeping through the curtains, and it roared in from the shore.
That night, there wasn’t a dream without dark-green water, mysterious islands, sea monsters with shiny black skin, and coral-colored winds that brought some courage and understanding.
Balaenoptera musculus
QUESTION: Which whale has the largest heart of any known animal?
Your father will tell you that your ribs are the same as a whale’s. A rounded, white, brittle cage that holds all the moving things inside you. That’s where your heart goes, he’ll say, and he’ll put his hand on top of his chest, and count off the beats with a funny drum sound he makes between his lips. Listen for it, he’ll say. Even if it doesn’t keep on beating, he’ll say.
When he tells you this for the first time, you are too young; you are rolling around in the sand, and you believe that you are actually made of seawater and that there are tiny creatures living inside the safety of your rib cage. How could you know that he’s telling you where love lives?
When your father tells you that your heart is the size of a blue whale’s, he’ll point to the horizon, he’ll smile, he’ll look just like him, he’ll be happy. He’ll say you don’t have to see it to know how it feels to have a heart like that. Four hundred pounds, he’ll say. He’ll tell you that, like his, your heart will sometimes ache as if it will explode, and that sometimes joy can kill you, too. Everything can kill you, is what he’s saying, but you won’t be listening. He’s telling you he hopes you’ll be wild enough to love things you cannot see.
He will tell you to be careful. Accidentally, he will tell you to build walls without telling you to build them. Over the years, you will watch his heart ache and sing and burn out. And then do it again, and again. He will tell you that once he goes, just like the sun sinks to the bottom of the ocean, you will just look inside your own body of swimming things, inside your own giant inherited heart, and he’ll be there. Forever, he’ll say. Because not everything dissolves in water.
And he will show you that most things hurt and that you don’t have to talk about them, but that if you seal yourself up to your deepest depth, your heart will shrink. It will beat slow, and low, and the light will go out. That joy will not find you unless your blood is pumping. He’ll say we are all made of the same salt water, our hearts too big, even if they seem so small. He’ll say we’ll always just miss each other, even when we are sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the sand.
Your father will tell you all of this when you are too young, when you are plucking starfish from sticky rocks. When the seagulls are loud. He’ll say his love for you is infinite, unexplainable like the things above and below, that his love for you could kill him. You will hug him, because you’re just a kid, and you’ll laugh at how much he loves you. You’ll imagine that everyone will love you this way, because what else could there be?
While you’re wrestling a starfish off of the palm of your hand, he will tell you to love even the things you can’t see. He’ll say to believe in the things that aren’t always shown in the light. You won’t care about this then. He’ll say it’s like when a devil ray swims right over your head. He’ll make a whoosh sound. He’ll spread his arms like an eagle. You’ll never see a devil ray, but you know it’s there, always lurking, and, goddamn it, it’s a real fish.
So your father will spend years telling you that when he’s gone, he’ll always be right there with you—except how can you know what that means? He’s been letting you run around a beach without any sunscreen, with no hat; he’s lost your shoes. How can you know what it’s like to lose the people you love when you are still trying to figure out how to love them? He will keep saying it—there’s a fish or a bird for it, every time, on every day. He’ll keep saying he knows that things just keep moving, and keep living, that they do it with him and will do it without him.
Then your father will take you the long way to the lost beach, with the whale carcass that has washed onto the shore. You’ll hike through the dunes, and you’ll dunk your hands into the coolness of morning sand and pull purple shells and shove them in your pockets. You won’t be able to believe the wretchedness of that whale odor, but your father will make you walk right up to the body—your first dead body. He won’t let you poke it with a stick. He won’t let you throw a rock at it. He’ll tell you not to plug your nose, that it’s rude, and then he will explain the process of a whale rotting. How it will become nothing and, also, part of everything.
He’ll take you to this whale each day, on the long hike to the shore, and you’ll always remember the curve of its body so vividly, the roundness of its eye. Eventually, the whale will have been picked apart by birds, unruly kids, and everything else, and your father will wait until night to steal the bones, the fullness of ribs.
He’ll take those giant bones to every single home you make together, even the ones in the woods, until finally, your father, too, is just a carcass working to dissolve in the saltiness of ocean, and you’re the one now stuck with no father, and with a few enormous tooth-white ribs that once protected a giant heart.
You will miss your father so hard, and all the things that have left, even some of the things that come back. You will lie on your back, looking at the sky, and count your own human ribs with your fingertips, until you can feel him again, until there is a tide rising in your chest, until, like he always said, he is not gone.