There was a small tear near the Earth’s core, deep below the water that separates Los Angeles from Winter Island. Everything rattled. Things had fallen. My father, too drunk and too high to deal with the moving ground, said it was unlikely we’d get a big aftershock. Unlikely we’d get another big one, because that one had already formed our island. Despite the spooked cats that would not walk with their paws all the way to the ground, he said, we must celebrate my sixteenth birthday. With a limo. With Rook. With the shaken earth.
The limo driver sold weed and speed, but he also owned a furniture store piled high with bright-white lamps and shapely shades and a ceiling made of crystal chandeliers. Said that lighting was his real passion. Inside the limo’s hidden pockets were leftover party favors from island partiers: bar swag, a pizza crust, whale-watching ticket stubs, Tin Pan Carnival tokens, and tiny Baggies with traces of white powder.
Dad trusted the speed-lamp-limo guy, of course, through pills and weed buying and selling, as Richie was always one of his most loyal employees. Unlike the rest of the guys, who’d lost their kids to their ex-wives, Richie was just alone. But Richie’s druggie loyalty meant I’d be under the strictest supervision, so Dad agreed I could cruise around the island with Rook, drinking as much soda as we wanted, screaming out the windows at tourists, and winking at surfers in their rolled-down-window trucks.
Rook flashed guys as we lapped around the island. Dad often said Rook wasn’t welcome at the house, because she would sit inappropriately on the knees and crotches of his friends, because she was always there when I was crying, because I liked her more than I liked him. Because with Rook, I was never alone.
When we stopped at Rocky’s Fish N Chips, there were baskets of fried fish and fries, and Dad and his buddies hovering nearby at the bar. Richie poured a Bud from a can into a soda cup and put a lid on it, with a plastic straw. My first full beer from a man, seamlessly passed to me under the table from the lamp-limo driver. Until then, I’d been sneaking sips only when Dad was too drunk to notice.
Dad was so red in the face, blotched and raised with alcoholic red, like a Santa Claus who’d been gulping schooners of cold beers. I must have been red, too. I felt like we were doing something bad being in a bar, and I stuck close to Rook. I watched underage Rook flirting like she knew how to grab a dick. She even rubbed up close on Dad until I dragged her away. We held our shoulders back properly with puffed-out chests, giggling at the late-twenties-to-midthirties druggies and drunks staggering around the bar.
Against the jukebox, and nestled between two smelly trash cans loaded with sauce-stained paper plates, was the youngest of the old-man-bar gang: Bunny. Not thirty yet with long, soft almost-white-blond hair. The tips were almost always crusted with salt after a surf, and he’d stand in the parking lot, wet suit half-off, combing his hair. He’d lie on the hood of his warm truck to dry off, smoking cigarettes for hours. Like it was one long drag.
It was really just the Bud, and his white hair, but I was sure then that I knew what real love was, and I whispered to Rook, Should I fuck Bunny? Like I knew how to fuck.
Dad weaseled his way to Bunny, handing him another beer and announcing that it was my sixteenth birthday.
“Get over here!” Dad shouted to me.
Then he did what he always did: explained how well I was doing in math, how my good looks came from my mother, how I was the fastest on the cross-country team at Winter Island High School, and how I loved animals—especially whales. Like I was always five. Bunny smiled and tapped my Styrofoam cup with his. I sank.
“You’re a lucky guy,” he said to Dad.
He must have meant that, because when he said it, he actually looked in my direction. Into my eyes. My humiliation about the whales quickly subsided when I felt his arm accidentally brush mine.
Dad rushed to a bar fight up front.
“Your dad says you play sports,” Bunny said.
“Cross-country, which isn’t exactly a sport sport,” I said.
Outside, there was light rain. People said it was because of the earthquake—because we blamed everything on earthquakes. Because of earthquakes, things changed. Weather changed. People changed.
Rook was sitting on the lap of Boneyard Rob, a grumpy old guy with grabby hands, and I could tell that Dad was hating every minute of it.
“Get her out of here,” he said.
I felt like we were adults, surrounded by drunken old men who rushed home not long after it got dark. Dad was ramping up to an unusually rapid drinking pace, one that allowed him simultaneously to mourn our aging and our collective constant state of regret. He left without saying goodbye, telling the men at the bar that no teenager wanted him around. Rook said she saw him leave. He told me to enjoy the limo, that there’d be time for bars later.
When Richie brought the limo around front, we piled in, our skirts inappropriately flailing around from the storm winds, and we dove headfirst into the back seat. Bunny and the rest of the Rocky’s crew waved with boozy giggles. It felt for a second like we were leaving forever, driving away to someplace where these kinds of inappropriate activities didn’t exist. That was the moment when I knew it was all wrong, knew I’d have to let it all go, to someday survive, because it’s all we could do.
Rook grabbed me and said, You’re so going to fuck that guy. We had already forgotten that the earth shook.
In the back seat, Rook held my hand so tightly that our fingers were laced together. She said things like she would protect me, save me, make sure Bunny didn’t break my heart. Rook knew the things I wished a mother would know. It was hard not to need Rook in this way, to rely on her to tell me things were fine, and then to watch her make my life feel better and bigger. Because for all her lack of mothering, she was strangely perfect at making me feel safe. And alive. Like when we flashed our boobs to the passing ships from the top of the volcano. Like when she stroked my hair as I cried myself to sleep when my father spent the night in jail. Like when she told me I was beautiful.
There was a bigger earthquake long ago, so colossal that Winter Island shook, too. My mother lived at the epicenter of that mainland earthquake. Pictures fell off walls, hearts rattled, half-full beers fell from dressers, bedside tables, and kitchen counters. The mainland that had lain dormant for years burst alive in excitement and devastation. The news said people were buried.
Her house slid right down the slope of a mountain, and she said everything had dissolved into dust. Her garden, the roots, she said, they remained. Insurance would get her a better home, she said, but until there was something stable, she ferried over with nothing more than a CVS toothbrush and a pack of Hanes panties from the odds-and-ends, diabetic-socks, drugstore-hosiery section. There was some relief that my mother was not lost to the shaking, but some kind of worry, too, that she’d always been able to escape everything.
My father never said a word about her unannounced arrival and instead said things like, Oh, this is what we do in times of survival. Or, You would do the same for me if it were her and you and not you and me, you know?
Her hair was messy and her skin so pale, and she was the most rattled I’d ever seen her. But there she was, so rattled, and telling me the reason the earth shakes is because of divine miracles, and that tragedies can be miraculous. I was so sick of hearing her talk about how beautiful and magical and spiritual it was for those who can really live on an island. I was sick of hearing her say how much she loved it, too.
My father embraced her during this extended earthquake stay, and he danced with her in the living room light, and I was so annoyed to see him so happy. I was so annoyed that I was so happy, too. At night, my mother smelled like the cool that burrows deep into clothes, and I kept burying my head in her armpit and kept smelling her up as much as I could. Some nights, my mother helped me with multiplication tables. Some nights, I stayed awake listening for the door. Some nights, the news said they’d uncovered bodies.
My mother and father slept in the same bed again, and I could hear her laughing in the night. I was too old to appear in the hallway, fake-scared, but I did it anyway, and she came to my bed and fell asleep next to me, and I wondered whether I’d ever find love in my life and whether it would last forever.
I knew she would leave to go back to the devastation, especially when she showed photos of her mountain house. I felt it suddenly, the coolness in her, and I just blurted out: When do you go?
In the limo, Rook said Boneyard Rob had pinched her butt and then kissed her cheek so close to her lips that it was almost a real kiss. Rook squealed at the rain and opened the sunroof. I was drunk on two beers. Rook pulled a fifth of vodka from her bag, and we drank whatever we could stomach. We leaned back and felt the heat light up our insides.
We squished our bodies together and poked our heads out of the top of the limo, drinking rain like idiot wild turkeys. The streets were flooded, people were worried about aftershocks, and I knew things weren’t going to be the same forever; I was too old, and Dad was, too. It wasn’t safe anymore to be a daughter and father there.
Rook and I drank warm Buds, and we cracked open cans in the back seat, blasting music and singing our favorite songs. For hours. Richie said if I told about the booze, my father would certainly kill him.
“You’re so going to fuck Bunny,” Rook said.
I had forgotten, and then, it was all I could think about.
By the time we reached the house, it was pouring. This one was an Italian villa owned by a couple who invented something to do with construction. Dad and I lived there, in the pool house, while its Western Shore owners vacationed in Italy.
Dad had set up all of our camping gear on the great lawn. Drenched, we scurried to our tent and took cover. We braved the rain, lying on our backs and hearing thunder rolling off the other islands in the very far distance. We said no aftershock could reach us there. We started to fade into a dizzying sleep. There was some vodka left, and Rook put the clear plastic bottle to her face, peering through it like she was a fish in a tank.
“Let’s go back to the bar,” Rook said.
“My dad will know,” I said.
But I knew he wouldn’t. I knew he was already passed out in the pool house—I saw the light on. Rook and I unzipped the tent as quietly as we could, wearing survival ponchos from the camping box, and escaped out the back gate. We hopped it so the alarm wouldn’t go off. I was so agile, so drunk. My legs shook as we ran.
The island was cold and dead, just yellowy porch light through the rain and the deep groan of the foghorn getting louder as we ran along the beach back to the bar. When we arrived, Rocky’s was already closed, the sandbags stacked against the front door, and the chain gate down. We didn’t need shelter; we needed a thrill. We stopped to breathe, catching our breath over laughter and hysteria, bracing our hands on our knees. We slumped down against the gate, and Rook pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
From the parking lot, a white truck flashed its headlights. I told her I was happy with her. That she was enough.
“It’s Bunny,” she said.
He flashed them again.
Everything was sinking.
We scurried over wet pavement to Bunny, who was smoking a joint in the cab of his truck with another local guy—a crustie punk who Dad never liked. The sweet scent—of coconut surf wax, wet-suit mildew, and Bunny himself—was intense as we packed into the truck.
Rook already had her poncho off, her skirt hiked up and her body facing the crustie, and Bunny, sweet handsome Bunny, winked at me. He played music on the radio.
“She likes him,” he whispered to me.
Rook shook her shoulders to the radio and locked hands with the guy sitting next to her, and soon, she dragged her crustie out into the rain to dance. She looked lovely against the soft streetlights, swaying back and forth, carefully avoiding his tall Mohawk.
Soon, the rain turned to mist, and Rook wandered off with the crustie, and it was just Bunny and me in the front seat.
“You don’t have to be so scared,” he said.
I had to be terrified. There had been an earthquake.
He draped a blanket across our laps, and we watched Rook and her crustie dance and splash in faraway puddles. Underneath the blanket, Bunny’s hand crept to my knee and then up my thigh. He must have known I was near death then, because he stopped and casually took my hand and held it in his. I was spinning from so many Buds, from the way it was all happening without me knowing what was going to happen next, except that it was cold, and sweet, and quiet, and that there was a swipe of blood left over. I don’t even remember falling asleep in Bunny’s arms.
And then Rook was banging on the windows of the truck, the sun showing atop the sea. Her face was a mess, her eye makeup giving her black eyes. Her punk-rock one-night stand was asleep on the beach, looking like a dead body.
“Your dad will kill us,” she said.
I peeled my head away from Bunny’s shoulder, and she helped me jump out of his truck. We ran so fast that my poncho turned into a sail, and we laughed. The sand was cold and wet, and there was that smell of crabs washed ashore from the storm. Everything on my insides and outsides felt sore.
When we got to the gate, hopped it, and slid back into our tent, Rook crawled into my sleeping bag and cuddled up next to me. Dad’s light was still bright, a sure sign that he was still passed out.
“Did you do him?” she asked.
We were nose-to-nose, and I smiled, still drunk, still confused. We finally fell asleep to the top of our tent spinning under an early morning shower. The cloud cover kept our tent cool, dank and dark, and we slept in longer than usual. When Dad made fake bear noises outside our tent to wake us, I was thankful we’d survived the darkness that night. Inside the pool house, he’d cooked soft scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, all of which we devoured with our head-pounding hangovers. Dad thanked Rook for coming, for being such a good friend, for understanding.
Dad and I folded our sleeping bags on the living room floor, the ones we’d taken from apartment to apartment for all those years. We watched TV together for hours while it rained and rained, slurping chocolate milk and waiting for the weather to get worse so we’d have another reason never to leave.
Unidentified species
QUESTION: Describe the world’s loneliest whale.
You could end up like the loneliest whale in the sea if you are not careful. If you live on an island with a mother who doesn’t want you and a father who wants too much, you might scream and no one will hear you. The kind of mammal who can’t even articulate emptiness. If you want to survive, you must learn another language made of mysterious sounds, full of your own answers, and grow a new mouth and a new heart, and keep swimming to the light.
Your father will tell you about the 52-hertz whale, because, he’ll say, he’s heard her sing underneath the water. He’ll say that science says she sounds like a tuba. He calls her Toobie. Scientists have been tracking her songs for a decade, he says, and they say all her songs go unanswered.
Your father will be thrilled by all this unrequited love. The newspaper will slap a front-page rendering of a drawing of a photo of the dark-sea nothingness of this whale on Valentine’s Day. Just a lonely whale singing and screaming in a pitch that no other whale can hear.
He will say she sounds like a sinking brass instrument spilling out songs, and that if you put your ear to the ocean, you might hear her for yourself. Except science says that is impossible. Science says you’ll need equipment. One day, your father will be gone for the entire day, diving for pearls, and when he returns, his hands will be empty. He’ll say he can’t remember why he was underwater in the first place. He’ll burst into the house, hot with energy, and he’ll sway from side to side when he tells you that he saw Toobie. Heard her. He answered her song.
He’ll say: She’s a beautiful, beautiful blue whale.
Your father will call the scientists from all the institutes, and they’ll come to your island for interviews, and they’ll stalk your waters for a glimpse, but no one will find the loneliest whale. But he’ll tell this story for decades, until you’ll believe it, until you tell it, too.
You’ll ask your father if it’s okay to be that lonely, and he’ll say something like: She’s not lonely down there. You’ll ask your father if you will end up like this whale when he dies and if you’ll be left with nothing, and he’ll say something like: As long as you have yourself, you’ll always have me, and everything else.
Your father could have heard many things under the water. It’s not likely that the 52-hertz whale would have traveled to your island. Yet his story, especially among the drunks and the tourists and the scientists, will be the most credible story you have. Even when science says that this whale that lives alone is lonely, there might be more credible sources that say she’s just fine.