It rattled glass tanks and shook sea animals. I felt it everywhere, too. Jake and I ran around the Sea Institute at night, looking for lightning like we were crazy, and searching for more than love.
Jake was easy to pretend to love. He was from a landlocked place in the middle of the country, surrounded only by faraway rivers that dried up before they found the ocean. His fascination with the Pacific drove his will to live, and he’d been working at the Institute as a research fellow for a few years when he found me mopping up bloody bait leftovers from the faded blue concrete floors. He assumed I was waiting for an opportunity to train a whale.
“Those whales will die in there, you know,” I said.
To pay for his tuition, Jake cleaned the glassy tank walls. He mopped, too. He cleaned the cafeteria. Together, we scrubbed the bathrooms in the camp bunks. He smelled like mildew and fish most of the time, and the smell of his ocean rot lingered on my pillows even after vinegar baths. I got used to it. Even his Kentucky accent. Even his hemp necklace.
I was really good at telling myself I was in love with him. That’s what I always told him, too. We’d spend days off wandering around the Sea Institute, talking about our dysfunctional parents and dead pets, kissing against windows to jellyfish. He let me stay in his dorm when my mother stopped paying rent and said she’d got an opportunity to sing in a folk band in Nashville. She said it was her dream, and before I could say something like, Must be so nice to follow your dreams, she was all packed up and all moved out, and had left a note on a box of pizza that said: So much love to you and Jake. Keep saving your fish!
I told Jake I was born near the sea, I’d almost died in the sea, and I was made of more salt than blood. In the early morning sunlight, when Jake awoke next to the tiny window that peered into our small dorm room, I could see a swipe of sun rash on his cheeks, which looked like small holes that had been carved out by shells, and I knew he wouldn’t last. He made eggs in a pan on a hot plate and told me that he’d never spent so much time near the ocean, that it made him feel alive, and that one summer, he’d gone to dolphin training camp in Florida, and that’s how he knew he was not really born to land.
“You know it’s so much colder here than in Florida,” he said.
“Can you put cheese on my eggs?” I asked.
Jake was the kind of person who’d studied the history of the Sea Institute and read Jacques Cousteau’s entire thesis on Winter Island. He’d seen the Nat Geo specials. He knew that my island was part magic. He treated me like a real celebrity, like my lineage meant something special, like I was special. It was enough to say love and pretend to believe it.
“You always wanted a girl from Winter Island,” I said.
His pockmarked face crept closer to me. “Always,” he said.
The small bed didn’t bother either one of us, and we managed to take study turns at the built-in desk. I’d gotten a small promotion, to helping in the lab, not just cleaning, partly because the guy who hired my mom felt terrible she’d left me alone there, and partly because I knew what the fuck I was doing. I was valuable at the Institute. I bore traditional ecological knowledge of my land. I could speak to controlled burns and trophic cascades.
We spent our time with the animals and made obnoxious poetic comparisons to the creatures who mated for life, the ones who ate their young, and then the miraculous seahorse, who could change its sex. Before bed, half-dazed and mostly stoned, we pretended we were animals.
We’d take the skiff and trace the edge of California’s coast on hot days. The boat was big enough for kissing but not private enough for fucking.
Our playing love made it easy not to think of my father, imagining him falling down steps, or slamming his truck into a tree. It was easy to forget my mother again, to ignore the hurt, the constant abandonment. But Winter Island lurked nearby, and each morning Jake pointed to the horizon and asked things like, How can you get lost on an island?
We spoke of going to Kentucky for Christmas, but the draw to be back on the island, to see if it had eroded in the time passed, was too great. Or, I missed my father. Jake agreed we wouldn’t tell my father that we were living together, or that I might stay away forever, or that my mother had evaporated.
Dad was waiting when the ferry locked into the land. I warned him that Jake was my real boyfriend and that he should not make fun of his accent.
“Well, how-dee-doooo-dee, sir. How y’all doing on dis fine daaay?” Dad said.
“Jesus, Dad,” I said.
But Jake was already zipping up his jacket and paralyzed by wonder. He said the air smelled different and that it tasted sweet. As we squished into Dad’s truck, he grabbed my arm and whispered, It’s all true.
Dad’s face was wind-chapped, because of the time he’d been spending at sea and in the fields. As he pointed out landmarks on the island, he said the tuna were running that year and that he had more tuna in his freezer than he knew what to do with. He was on his best behavior. The car ran smoothly, and he seemed kind of sober. There was no way to tell, when he was being charming.
“Mind if y’all make uh quiiick pit stop before we eat?” Dad said.
Rain beat on the ocean from a family of black clouds. Haze fixed on the horizon. Dad and I knew that it meant a dark storm was coming, one that would knock the power out, close the ferry, and keep Jake with us at least for the night. Dad eyed it in the rearview mirror as we approached the Old Institute. He must have already known it was coming—with all that time at sea and all of his gadgets—and he had let us come anyway. Maybe I had known it was coming, too.
Jake perked up at the hammering of thunder miles away.
“You think there will be snow on top of the volcano?” he asked.
Dad finally stopped talking like what he thought a southerner sounded like and asked me to unlock the chain-link fence into the Old Institute. I could feel that special cold creeping in, and everything, even my eyelashes and the tips of my hair, started to feel damp.
Even though I was gone for a few months, even though it felt like an eternity, I was still proud I remembered the combinations to the locks on the gate.
Dad told us to get out. To explore the old housing tract, to show Jake my grandmother’s bunk, to hang out in the dried-up old dolphin pool. He’d be back in a while. Dad vanished into the trees, and Jake looked puzzled, but he ran for the giant map painted on the wall of an old building of classrooms.
“Smells like burgers,” he said.
“People still live here,” I said.
“What kinds of people?” he asked.
“The kind who never want to leave Winter Island,” I said.
He opened and closed doors, bursting in and out of abandoned lives, and he took notes on a pad he kept in his pocket. I sat on the concrete bed frame in our old bunk. I could have told him that this was where I’d spent a few years when Mom left. That we cooked on a barbecue right outside the door and that I had a Paula Abdul poster (which was the exact size of my window) as a curtain. Instead, I let him run his hands along the deteriorating walls while he made jokes about the Old Institute looking just like a mess.
We wandered around the remnants of the decrepit research institute, so much smaller than the giant sea city we now inhabited. The traces of entire families lingered on benches and swings.
I lay down in the dolphin pool and looked up—at the same dark clouds that came every once in a while to remind us that Winter Island wasn’t really ours. I drifted off and tried to remember a time I was happy amid the crumbling of our village, and it was most of the time. The sweet air—I’d missed it—was part of me. Jake, wherever he had wandered off to, surely couldn’t understand.
“Get this motherfucker out of here,” someone shouted.
“Please don’t hurt me,” Jake yelled.
He called my name over and over, so loudly, and I bolted to the edge of the forest, where two men were holding rifles to his back. His hands were up and if I wanted to be honest, I’d say he peed his pants. He was shaken, in tears, screaming my name.
“Tell them!” he shouted.
They guided him to me with the tips of their guns—both men staring me in the eye and one giving me a wink. I had known those beaten faces my whole life. Leftover guys who watched Dad’s pot field in exchange for fish, boat parts, coke, pills, and weed.
“Get him out of here,” they said.
Dad honked in the distance, and I grabbed Jake by the hand and ran to the car.
“You know those guys?” he huffed.
“Guards,” I said.
“What do they guard?”
“Protected land,” I said.
We slid into the truck, and a drizzle painted the window. Dad kept his window down, and Jake rolled his up. Jake was flushed, and choking on quick breaths.
“Like this,” I said.
I breathed deeply through my nose and held it, eyes closed, and let it all out of my lungs.
“Y’all are nosy out there in dat darn town of Kentucky, eh?” Dad said.
I glared at my father.
“Now, who wants some real goood fish ’n’ chips from Win-tur Island?” Dad asked.
He peeled out. We headed to Rocky’s, Jake inhaling deeply with his eyes closed.
In the mirror, I could see that Dad’s grow had doubled in size, more than he’d ever had of the greenest Winter Wonderland. I put my hand on Jake’s back, and the thunder crept closer.
Jake finally opened his eyes when I begged him to watch the black tunnels of water on the horizon. Dad drove like an outlaw and cheered at the oncoming weather.
“Y’all ain’t goin’ nowhere tonight,” he said.
“Waterspouts out there,” I said.
I made small talk about the famous fish-and-chips, which were really fish that were fresh but with everything else from Costco on the mainland. I guided Jake out of the truck before he could see Dad carrying two giant duffel bags stuffed with weed into the office of Rocky’s.
When he came back, Dad sat down with a pitcher of beer and told us to drink.
“Hey, how’s your mother?” he asked me.
“Light as a feather,” I said.
He let out a long yee-haw, and Jake joined in, like they were two wolves crying in the night.
What are your specific qualifications for Lab Research Assistant I? Please explain in a paragraph or less.
(My father and I have grown distant. Our phone calls are bland, and we often talk about my pet fish or whether he’s eating enough. I think he’s dying.)
Balaena mysticetus
QUESTION: About how many hundreds of years does a bowhead whale live?
Your father will say that someday he’ll turn to salt at eventide. That you are to bury him, or set fire to his warm remains, or collect shells and stack them around his body, or whatever the fuck you want to do to him when he’s expired. Some days, he’ll have preferences about where he wants to disintegrate; some days he’ll say things like, Let me become the air. You’ll shrug, because what else can you do with a man who you believe will live forever.
But he won’t live forever. What made you think that? His taut and gold skin? Or his eyes, deep with many lives before you? Was it because he said he’d be here forever? Or that’s just what you wanted to believe?
You will have pictured him dying by so many swords, so many different ways—him leaving and never coming back. After all the nights he never came home, he still came back. What about all the times you imagined his head separating from his body, his heart exploding at the sight of a seagull swooping low one of those perfectly warm days. Him just crying to death. He always rose, his lungs full again, and his feet one in front of the other—broken, but there.
Your schoolbooks say that death cannot be prevented. People say to not think of that kind of darkness. That if you see a breathing baby bird fallen from a tree, you cannot save it in a shoebox with soft tissues and toothpicks and love and caution and care. Your father says death will come for you, that everything will come for you, even if you are an island, even if you believe that things last forever. That all of this living forever is tiring.
When your father dies, there will be a pool of blood. He’ll die because of a misstep in the dark. A poor calculation of the placing of feet. On the deck of a boat, where there was no light, because your father didn’t replace the bulbs after a storm.
But that storm had always been coming. Him sinking, him shriveling up, choking, laughing so hard. You’d like to imagine him as old as the oldest whale, weathered and ready to drop to the bottom after all the years a body can carry. You’ve always been preparing for this death, before you realized that he’d just be gone forever. Believing that one day, when you are annoyed that there isn’t any cream left for the coffee, you’ll get the news that it’s over.
You will guess he’d wanted his death to be more romantic than a drunkard falling in total darkness. Hoped that his passing from one island to another wouldn’t be covered in blood; that maybe there’d be some romance, some kind of ocean monster taking him whole, some kind of end-of-the-world sunset to take him home. But by the time they find him, there will be blood everywhere. His head slammed against the side of the boat so hard it nearly split him in two. Maybe that part is sweet. They’ll let you see the star-shaped stains on the deck. They’ll say it will take forever to make clean again.
There will be some shock and some relief, too, because do you have to worry about someone who isn’t yours anymore? When you get the call, you’ll be lying on your back, on a bed that’s not yours in a little bedroom on the mainland, dreaming of Winter Island, quietly worrying about everything, but still happy to be away from him.
When you hear they’ve found a body, that space between you and him will be the pressure of all the oceans on Earth. You’ll say sorry to the captain on the phone, like you knew this would happen, like it was your fault. It’ll be the only time in your life you say what you mean out loud: Wait, is he coming back?
You’re sorry for everyone, even yourself. For him, too, because no one was there to hear his last gurgles of blood. Because no one was there to fix him. To force him to quit the bad things. To tell him to stop. To tell you to lock him in a cage.
In a letter, the state of California will explain that he bled to death after smashing his brains apart. That he was so goddamn wasted out at sea that his blood alcohol level was thrice the legal limit. They imagine that he woke up to piss off the side of the boat, a dream you replay in your mind for the rest of your nights. They say you will never know if he tripped, or slipped, or—damn it—slammed his own fucking head into the bluntness of the bow.
Your father was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with loose-fitting boxers when he died, they say. You can have his clothes, but they say that sometimes people shit themselves when they die, so you’ll say you don’t want them. You won’t want any of it.
You’ll know that he ate onions, because they are in the gray matter of his stomach. And beer. And THC. And just about everything else. He had bloody knuckles when he died. That poor coroner tried to piece them together with stories of violent sea hooks and storms, but you’ll know those bloody hands were traces of other men’s faces and noses and ribs. You’ll keep replaying his few steps to the end, rocking out there at sea, and you’ll imagine him as he always was when he stumbled home: with one eye open.
You won’t be able to help but think of the times he never came home, before you left for the mainland, when you knew he was somewhere out there, breathing and surviving. He could get by on very little. He always said the important things were deep inside him, protected by a rib cage, and that once he vanished, you’d always be able to find him there.
For years, you’ll keep asking, Where? Until the day you dump his ashes overboard, because there is no money to bury him on Winter Island, and you hope that he won’t be lost at sea forever but that he’ll fall to the bottom, where an entire universe can form around what’s left of him. The rest of him, you guess, is somewhere inside you now.
Some nights, when your father returned after long days, he’d bring a gift. A peace offering. A seashell. A magazine. A doughnut. A bag of gummy worms. A kitten that you’d have to give away. A hula girl for the dash. A necklace that would turn your neck green. He’d never say sorry, and you’d never ask him to. Sometimes, your anger felt like nothing, and sometimes, everything. All the time you pretended it never happened. Because you loved him and he loved you, and there was no time to waste, because you must have known that it was unlikely that your father would live forever.
You’ll keep dreaming of him each night after he’s gone. For a long time in those dreams, he hides from you—pretends you are not his—and then, finally, he appears from behind curtains, frightened to see you. Sometimes in your dreams, you’ll scream at him. Sometimes, you’ll wake to your own tears. You’ll replay your father walking in the night to the bow of that boat, until you fall asleep, and you dream again.
There he is, in his loose-fitting clothes, and there’s a breeze and maybe some moonlight. And it’s not him pissing off the boat; it’s him waking to the sound of a whale calling to him. The sound of air pushing through water. You’ll dream he died chasing wonder. And eventually, he gracefully dives off the tip of the boat, and you can see him there floating on top of the Earth.
In some of those dreams, you jump with him.