44

As a child I loved rainy nights. I listened to the drift of the rain over the shingled roof and felt protected. As I grew older, and sued builders for roofs that could not withstand fallen branches, foundations built in dry creeks that flooded every January, I learned that no refuge is what it seems to be.

And yet, under the sea those long hours, I again felt protected. The waves were a quaking roof, the walls made of water.

So when I woke, the last light of sunset dimming from the water, it was a shock to find myself alone. I spun in the water, kicking hard in the direction Rebecca had been asleep during those hours of daylight. Her rope coiled and twisted high above, drifting. She was gone.

I scrambled to the surface. The ocean was calm, but a calm that breathed, alive. I called her name. The radio dangled from its bent nail, and the mattress on the bunk was just as we had left it, a wool blanket folded neatly at the foot. But the mattress was damp, and there were drops of water gleamed on the planks of the floor.

The Radio Shack receiver had been left switched on, faded now to an even more ghostly whisper, three to five knots out of the north-west, an innaccurate report. Still, I understood the instinct that had driven Rebecca to hear a human voice. I switched it off. There was a footprint, a parenthesis of water. She had sat here, on the bunk.

I could detect no wind, and the swells were glassy. I leaned against the stem calling, rushed to the bow, continuing to sound the three syllables of her name.

A gray whale lifted above the surface, breath fuming. It lifted a forked tail, lazily, and dropped it, a loud clap that reached me after a few seconds.

There were two layers of weatherproofing on the deck. The layer that was peeling, the outermost coat, was plastic, verathane. Then there was a yellow varnish, a coloring that did not peel away but wore through. Beneath it all was the decking itself, teak, fine-grained.

I had worn through to an inner core of myself. This was a substance that endured, my fiber. I climbed to the top of the cabin, crooked my arm around the mast, and called her name. In the early evening there were two tight clusters of lights, small craft making way to the north, toward the Golden Gate or Monterey Bay; I wasn’t sure how far south we had drifted. For a moment the sight of these fishing boats or pleasure craft made me feel thin comfort.

But another sort of vessel, still far to the north, was heading this way.

The prow of this fast boat was cutting the seas. The waves parted neatly, twin leaves of water catching the starlight. The vessel sported a tall tower of radar equipment and broadcasting gear. A wide cylinder of light winked on, and its beam swept the water.

Surf worked the dark rocks to the east, cliffs and evergreens. The seas around the hull roiled, and something tangled and dark clung to the keel, slowing the boat. Some merchant marine or fisherman had spotted our boat, perhaps thinking we were in danger. But it was more complicated than that: we had left behind an abandoned car, not to mention an aggrieved boat owner. Perhaps all the deaths had been pieced together by now.

This new craft kept coming. I balanced briefly on the rail. Then I dived deep, slipping through the pods and stalks of a grove of kelp. A bank of fish broke around me, perch, shivering with the tide that swept through their fins, their gills.

My arms warped, my legs deformed, muscling into a shape that powered through the water. I had no clear concept of my body’s configuration, only the awareness that I hunted and found nothing. Two otters tumbled through the water, awakened by me. They avoided me, and then tailed after me, urgent, curious.

A sea forest surrounded me. The vegetation was gigantic, hollow tubes connected to the sandy bottom with yellow roots. Mats of tangled plant stuff floated on the surface, kept bouyant with hollow knobs speckled with limpets. The stalks of the trees were bronze-brown, and they clung to my limbs, slowing my progress as I writhed and twisted.

The otters attracted my eye. They circled, and something about their curiosity guided me, as they began to wend onward ahead of me, as though they knew something.

What had I become now, I found myself wondering, a sea lion, that man-seal of legend, the Great Selkie? I floundered through the waves, and there on the beach was a scattering of logs, piled haphazardly together. But the logs were creatures, nosing the air as I dragged my body through the water. What I expected to be an arm was a broad, wet paddle, cutting the sand, and when I tried to lift my head I couldn’t, my huge body clumsy and heavy.

At the very last a surge of foam caught me and carried me high onto the beach. The dry sand crusted on my flanks, loose sand in my nose. I sneezed. This was not a sneeze like any I had experienced before, the convulsion of a strange body. I was helpless afterward, flailing. My body wrenched, bones reknitting, my skull swelling again into a human form. It was painful, but sudden, and when it was finished I clutched at the wet sand.

I approached the sea lions with a thought that quieted them. At sea, the Coast Guard cutter bore down on our boat. Our baremasted vessel was caught in the kelp, kept by the island of plant life from running aground. The Coast Guard beam illuminated the heaving sea weed, and the mast of our boat was a bright needle. Then the light dismissed our boat, and searched the beach.

Perhaps my presence would have made the beasts more restless, except for the distraction of the boat’s searchlight. The seals were ruddy in this bright beam, auburn, brunette, their fur knicked and scarred. A loudspeaker sounded, words I could not make out.

I felt that some inner tongue, a power articulate in my psyche, could ask these animals where she was, and they would tell me. But it wasn’t necessary. The way they had shifted along the beach, the sand scraped and molded, showed me where to look.

I found her human form on the beach, beside a huge mass of kelp. Her body left an imprint in the wet sand as I scooped her up and held her in my arms. I carried her through ferns, into the woods, to the side of a stream.

Human flesh itself was clothing for something effervescent, but I could not awaken her. She lay still, one hand open in the current of the stream, water streaming through her fingers.

A fox hesitated, one paw raised, ears cocked.

The air whispered above him. Wind, or a night bird. He couldn’t tell. His dark eyes took in the sky, the leaves, everything that moved. But I did not move. I clung to the branch of a tree.

He lowered his head and lifted it again without touching the water. He heard it, too. The far-off rattle of an outboard motor above the rustle of the surf.

He sniffed the wind. Noise, and the scent of cold things, steel and rubber, and fuel. Silence was life. He lowered his nose and drank from the stream.

I did not want to take this quickness, this color. I found myself in a tree, hanging upside down, my body enfolding itself. The sound of his tongue on the water was not comforting, as the lapping of a family dog can be. It was a furtive sound, paws pressed into the mud of the stream.

I captured him. In an instant I knew what he knew, the field. And his prey, the sudden rush, the feathers, the warm heart, the quarry with its tiny bones, its stuttering blood.

She opened her eyes. As always, she touched my face, still trusting her fingers more than her sight. Then she looked up beyond me in wonder, and a little fear.

“Redwoods,” I said.

Her lips shaped the question.

“Somewhere south of Point Lobos.”

“A forest,” she said at last. “How did we get here?”

I counted off her actions on my fingers. “You untied the rope. You swam up into the boat. You got tired of waiting for me—”

“Don’t tease me, Richard.”

“You tell me—what happened when you dived into the water?”

“I don’t know.” She meant: she didn’t want to remember.

“I was very proud of that knot,” I said. “Was it difficult?”

She gazed at her hands, her fingers, her nails. “No.”

“So you do remember that much.”

She sat up. Her fingers searched her surroundings, moss, wild iris, its blossoms folded, sorrel, like oversized shamrocks. She seemed to glow. “We need a doctor.”

“That’s a brilliant idea. We’ll just drop in, sit in a waiting room, and then what? The doctor will ask us how we’re feeling, and what will we tell him?”

She had already adopted the mannerisms of someone who could see, and expected to be seen in return.

“We have so much to do,” I said.

She stood slowly, shaking out the folds of her gown. “I am starting to believe it all.” She reached out to touch a sapling that was growing straight upward out of a fallen log. “I won’t be able to see Simon again, or my parents. I won’t be able to play the piano.”

I had hoped to protect her. “You won’t be able to see the sunlight,” I said.

“You make it sound like good news.”

“You flew,” I said.

She was examining a redwood branch, the evergreen needles, the way leaf connected to twig, to frond, to the trunk, the tree sweeping upward. “I don’t believe we can do that, Richard.”

“Then how did you get here?”

“You brought me.”

I smiled, shook my head.

She said, “I swam.”

“I think the first thing you wanted to do when you woke up was take wing, like a gull.”

“And I couldn’t.”

Another motor brayed beyond the surf. I parted the shrubbery and gazed out across the beach. Our boat was brightly lit. Yellow rubber rafts were tied to it, and men climbed the cabin, leaned over the stern. It was hard to make out what they were doing at this distance, but it was easy to imagine the radios sputtering.

She said, “They’re going to find us.”