Marina was named for the emerald blue cove where she was conceived, sheltered, and protected for such a short season of her life. But her sleeping mind recalls nothing of those promising beginnings.
In her nightmare, which recurs more frequently these days, she’s abandoned on an open sea in a perfect storm. She is a child of twelve, not twenty, choking on salt spray at that bleak spot in the Pacific where North America and Asia are equally distant.
She rides a rickety raft of sticks lashed together with long strands of black hair. Between the rising and the falling, the water grabs at her hair and snakes into her throat and slaps her face sideways.
Always, I’m with her—but she’s alone. I stand so close to her small body that if this wasn’t a dream I could touch her. In a different dimension I could wrap my arms around her shoulders and hold her above the water, save her with whatever powers have made me impervious to the danger here. My beautiful girl. In Marina’s dreams I never drown. I never even get wet.
The first time Marina experienced this night terror, the fragile ties held her float together until a rescue boat appeared behind a mountainous wave. Since then the raft has come to fall apart sooner each time, as if it doesn’t get to start fresh with each recurrence. The angry ocean swoops her up and then slams her down again and again. These stomach-heaving rides on Neptune’s tail don’t end until Marina tumbles off her imagined raft onto the real, unyielding floor of her bedroom, drenched in the salt water of her own sweat.
The battering has had a cumulative, exhausting effect across the years since it first took her, and tonight the platform is finally brittle, and its black lashings start to break within minutes. Marina spreads her adolescent wings to their full span, stretching out to grip the sides and hold everything together with her birdlike strength. This is what she does, not only in dreams. The tallest wave tops a skyscraper’s height before dropping her, and the raft bursts as it falls. Impact isn’t necessary to scatter the sticks across the white-capped water.
Marina goes down only for a breath. The water swallows and then spits her out. She pops up like a resilient buoy, gasping but whole, holding something glistening in her hands—a gold orb the size of an orange. It’s made of glass. It breaks in her hands and comes apart like an eggshell, and the salt water rushes over the cuts in her hands. She flinches away, blinded by water. But then we see:
The raft wasn’t made of sticks, but bones. A rib, an arm, a femur, a skull no bigger than Marina’s corresponding parts are grotesquely animated by the churning water. And I know—in the way one knows in dreams—that these bones belong to her brother.
The child Marina screams, and then the grown young woman wakes on the floor of her lonely room, and we sit together as far apart as the northern and southern horizons.
The imagined storm has broken, and sunlight is warm and red through my heavy eyelids. The breeze caresses and the gulls chatter, and it doesn’t feel at all like I lie on a rickety raft that is falling from the sky. But there it is: a sudden thrust, a dreamlike spasm, and on the platform beside me Marina is saying something that I can’t quite make out, something about how a power of attorney might have been handy at a time like this.
The gusts continue to stir my hair. Voices swirl around my head: Dylan’s and Marina’s and someone else’s. Male, middle-aged, authoritative. And then we crash on the water.
“You’re probably going to lose the house,” the man says. I recognize his voice then: Jamie Blythe, the attorney. “Without a miracle.”
The announcement takes my breath away. Me, I could live and die without this house. In so many ways I have. But my children need it.
I open my eyes. I’m sitting outside of the beach house on the wood bench on the porch, and the kids are inside. Again I am barred from the house. Their voices reach me through the open living room window. A soft mist rises from the tiles beneath my feet. I cautiously lift them up to the bench and turn sideways.
“I don’t understand,” says Marina.
But I do: the house will have to be sold to pay the inheritance taxes, and that isn’t the worst of it. Jamie drops one shoe after another.
“Your father’s debts are significant. The outstanding mortgage, the credit cards. He exhausted two lines of equity drawn before the housing collapse. Here in California, debtors have the right to collect what they can from the estate.”
I wonder if Marina and Dylan know what this means.
“Dylan needs this house,” Marina declares.
“Looks like we need to sell it,” Dylan says. I wish I could see his face.
But I can, as if through a window in my mind: his eyebrows are high in those shaggy bangs of his, and his lips form a tight smile. He’s trying to be funny because it’s better than showing his fear.
The attorney’s face is as coarse as a boat’s barnacled hull. It tells an intriguing tale of an acne-ridden adolescence, a brief career as a street fighter before he turned to the law, and a success-induced love affair with food and drink. His unattractive mug is far more interesting than the rest of him, which is nearly a Californian cliché: the sculpted body outfitted in silk, the feet clad in Italian leather, the spine straightened by a proud reputation. From what I hear he uses his suave confidence to his clients’ advantage, and I hope Dylan and Marina are no exception. Even if they have nothing to pay him.
“Unfortunately, the place is underwater,” Jamie says. “That means you’ll have to come up with another forty, fifty thou—”
“We know,” Marina snaps.
Jamie is patient. “When I said ‘lose the house’, I meant the bank will step in. They’ll simply take it back and ask you to leave.”
“Does it matter that Dylan’s underage?” Marina asks.
“Not to the mortgage holders. Am I right that you have family up in Monterey, someone who could help?”
“I’d have to look up their names. If they’re still there.”
“Doesn’t have to be family. Good friends can help you back to your feet just as well.”
Neither Marina nor Dylan respond to this.
“You’re old enough to assume guardianship of your brother, Marina, but the courts might step in if you don’t have a permanent address.”
“Step in?”
“Dylan is still eligible for foster care services.”
Foster care—as if having to leave the home wasn’t impossible enough.
The leather rocker by the fireplace, the one that we bought from the antique store in Thousand Oaks before Dylan was born, squeals as if it’s going to pop apart when Jamie rises from it. How we failed to notice the noise at the store became an argument later, when it was clear the chair made too much ruckus for any nursery.
“We have some time to think this through,” Jamie says. “I’ll work up a plan to clear you of as much financial responsibility as possible. It’s only been a month. Anything can happen.”
“Thank you,” Marina says.
She’s old enough to know that sometimes not even qualified people can do what they promise.
Marina is ransacking the attic. It’s nighttime, and I look in on her through the small dormer in the roof.
She’s shuffling heavy boxes within reach of the attic’s weak light, an old lamp for a child’s room. Dinosaur silhouettes decorate the shade and cast prehistoric shadows on the walls.
It was a playroom once upon a time, until one of the nannies declared it unsafely stuffy and hot, even when the windows admitted the ocean breeze. Over time the toys moved downstairs into the bedrooms and living areas. Boxes of outgrown clothes and school art projects were carried upstairs. The ABC area rug became covered by a sheet of dust, and the humid air peeled back the dinosaur wallpaper and filled the beadboard grooves with grime. When the garage was cleared out to make room for Marina’s new life as a licensed driver with her own car, she relocated the Christmas decorations and the winter skis and the suitcases to the short walls under the steeply pitched roof. Her prom dress came to hang on a coat rack in front of the window, and her graduation gown, and underneath these the file box containing applications and acceptances to three universities with paths to prestigious law schools.
But applying to law school was an expectation of others, not a dream of her own. The deadlines for declaring her intentions came and went, and without declaring anything at all she chose her home over a distant dorm by simply staying here. In Marina’s world, it went without saying that Dylan shouldn’t be alone while his father worked all day. She merely assumed it, the way she assumed the role of his mother at the age of three.
Marina attends a UCSB Extension program part-time, where she learns Spanish, French, and how to teach English to non-English speakers. She volunteers regularly for UNICEF. And at the end of most days, she stands silently at the edge of the Pacific and watches the sun set abroad. One day I expect she’ll walk across the water to whatever child in whatever country needs her. If ever she’s not needed here.
Right now, though, her attention is on the past rather than the future. When a ski falls over and hits the floor that is also Dylan’s bedroom ceiling, a puff of dust mushrooms.
A short while later her puffy-eyed brother stomps up the narrow stairwell. His slender fingers can do nothing to smooth his crazed hair.
“Still looking?” he asks.
She glances up. “You should go back to bed.”
“You go back to bed.” Out of any other boy’s mouth it would sound snarky. Coming from Dylan, it’s somehow respectful. He wins a flicker of a smile.
He comes to the top of the stairs and the floor creaks under his slight weight. Marina is emptying a clear plastic bin full of glass Christmas balls, stacking their cardboard boxes on a child’s table. Dylan pulls a miniature chair out from under it and squats to sit, blinking.
“What can’t wait?” he asks. He lifts the red lid of another bin that holds decorations. “It’s July. It’s four in the morning.”
“Mom died at Christmastime.”
This is a long-established piece of family history. A senseless nonanswer.
He narrows his eyes and whispers, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
But Marina won’t elaborate. So Dylan leans the red lid against a tower of brown boxes and begins to add to his sister’s pile on the table: the tinsel, the tangled lights, the reindeer candy dish that hasn’t been set out for years.
He finds an artificial plum rolled in purple glitter. “Here.” He offers it up to her. “Now we can go back to sleep.”
She gently pushes his hand away.
“Sometimes I think things would be different if they’d found Mom’s body,” Marina says.
“The ocean is a big place for a body to get lost in.”
“But don’t you ever wonder if finding her would have changed anything? For us, for Dad.”
“No.” Dylan’s lie is swift, reflexive. He’s not only thought about it, he’s written of it—nothing Marina has ever seen. But there are things we think and never speak. For some of us, more things than others.
Unfortunately, his answer shuts her down. “Maybe,” he revises. “What would be different for you?”
Marina pauses with a ceramic candy cane in her fist. “I dream about her sometimes. Being alive.”
“You knew her when she was alive.”
“You knew her too.”
“What, for three weeks?” The silliness of it forms a pfft on his lips.
“I believe your subconscious remembers the important details.”
“My mother killed herself after I was born. Were you referring to something that’d be more important to me than that?”
“Dylan, it wasn’t your fault.”
“Right.”
Marina sighs. She pulls out the kiddie chair next to her brother and joins him in emptying the bin at his feet.
“I don’t remember what she looked like,” Marina said. “In the dream I never see her. I’ve had it a zillion times. I’m on a raft in the ocean, and I’m drowning, it’s stormy, and she—I don’t know what she’s doing. Watching? She’s on some kind of boat, or land maybe. The point is, she could help me but she doesn’t. She just watches me go down.”
“See, I don’t think anything would really be different if she were alive. You think you’re drowning, but you’re not. Not even when she just stands there. You always survive. You don’t need her help.” Dylan reaches back into the bin for the closest distraction. “We don’t need it. In fact, maybe her leaving us early was good practice for what we’re going through now.”
He places a red satin box on the table, smacking it down like a period at the end of their conversation. It has a hinged lid and a band of red sequins around the rim. Marina doesn’t see it right away. Her eyes have welled with all the pain Dylan thinks he carries alone.
“You said Mom left us early,” Marina says.
“Died young. Left at the intermission. Took her life. Any euphemism sounds better than ‘committed suicide.’ You know I’m right. Pick your pet phrase.”
“What if she didn’t die? What if she just left?”
“I thought we just established that it wouldn’t matter.”
“She and Dad never divorced.”
“Hard to divorce someone who’s dead, isn’t it?”
“Maybe she could help us keep the house.”
Dylan shrugs and props his elbow on his knee and his jaw on his fist. “If she wanted to help us, she’s had plenty of time.”
“Maybe she’d still be responsible for his debts, whether she wants to or not.”
“Is that how it works?”
“Dunno. I’ll have to ask Jamie.” Marina picks up the red box and lifts it closer to the dinosaur lampshade that’s been shoved to the edge of the table. She leans in to examine the patterns of sequins along the rim. “When I was going through Dad’s stuff, I found an old brochure about bipolar research at Stanford’s School of Medicine.”
“And you’re thinking . . .”
She shakes her head. “What if she’s been there all this time? In a hospital. What if Dad put her away and just didn’t want us to know she was crazy?”
“That’d be hilarious,” Dylan deadpans. “Because if she is in a loony bin, she won’t exactly be in a position to help us pay the bills, will she?”
Marina shoots him a glare. “I thought I’d call tomorrow, ask some questions.”
Her brother seals his lips. There’s no point in trying to talk Marina out of this line of thought. Better to help her out. That’s what I would have told him anyway.
“I know it’s insane, Dylan, but what else am I going to do? I have to know. There’s so much Dad didn’t ever explain—and by the way, I don’t believe you when you say you never wonder. You sound like Dad.”
Dylan doesn’t argue.
Marina says, “It’s a gut feeling. I don’t expect you to understand.”
Gut feelings are one thing Dylan understands perfectly. She’ll remember this later. But he’s too wise to contradict her. He tries to go in the back door of her emotional lockdown with a peace offering: “This is probably nothing, but when I was going through Dad’s closet I found some pictures.”
“This is what I was looking for,” Marina finally says of the red box. Dylan surrenders. “It’s from Mom.”
She flips back the flat-topped lid and reveals a blown-glass ball cushioned by a red satin nest. Carefully she takes it out, lets it hang from her finger by its sheer gold ribbon. The opaque globe is weighty, its surface swirling with storms of gold and copper and white. The frosted exterior looks like cinnamon sugar.
The ornament has been out of its box three times since it was gifted: on Marina’s fourth Christmas, on Marina’s twelfth birthday, and today.
“For you?” Dylan asks.
“Christmas the year she died. I found it the year I started decorating the tree myself, but Dad didn’t like to see it so I never put it up.”
This is an alarming development. Why is she showing him this when there is no similar gift for Dylan? See what I have and you don’t? Dylan leans back in his chair as if the thing is radioactive.
“Tonight I had that dream again, and when I went under the waves this globe was down there, and I grabbed it, and it pulled me back up to the surface.”
“While Mom looked on,” Dylan says wryly.
“I’m just wondering why a mom would buy a present like this and then kill herself.”
In the dim light it’s hard for Marina to see Dylan’s expression, and his tone is tightly controlled: “I wouldn’t know,” he says. She isn’t listening to anything but her own thoughts, and she doesn’t really hear what her brother is saying. Because I completely disrupted her life. You should know something about that, Marina.
“Now that you found what you’re looking for, I’ll get out of your hair,” he says. “Let me know if you want help calling Stanford.”
“I’ll take care of it,” she murmurs.
He leaves Marina crouching over the miniature table like a storybook giant with stolen treasure, while the robbed peasant slips away, hoping to escape with nothing worse than a few flesh wounds.
I want to go to Dylan and stop the bleeding, but I can do that as easily as I can keep Marina afloat on a raging sea.