I am standing with my mother, father, and three younger brothers in the middle of a surprisingly short—considering the fact that we just landed on it—cracked cement runway. The air, after the cool of the Bristol-Myers (the company funding my father’s new movie production company) jet, is so wet and thick with humidity, it’s hard to breathe. Three ebony-skinned men dressed in brown shorts and matching short-sleeved button-down shirts pass our suitcases from the hold of the plane and pull them toward a small cinder-block building. Vines creep through the cinder block’s cracks, splitting and infiltrating the building as if they are taking it over in slow motion. It’s clear that a stronger, stealthier Mother Nature than the one I know in New York City is at work here.
“Dis way, please,” one of the men says. When he smiles, the pink insides of his lips match the pink pads of his fingers. I have heard the lilt of this accent before. In our apartment, my father sings, I must declare my heart is there though I’ve been from Maine to Mexico … I had to leave a leettle girl in Kingston town, and swings me by my hand, in a rare moment when he’s focused just on me. Now he’s walking beside the official, happy and relaxed.
“Is this Green Turtle Cay?” Greg, seven, asks.
“We have to go through customs,” my mother says. She is holding Braddy’s hand. Jay trails after one of the men in brown shorts.
My mother looks as she always does: shoulder-length shining dark hair, deep red-lipsticked lips, tall and poised and elegant as if she makes this sort of journey every day, traveling from our apartment on Central Park West to a three-mile-long, half-mile-wide island in the Caribbean that was once a stopover for vessels during rage seas in the Whale Cay Passage. Though her smile looks slightly forced, it has not wavered since we got off the jet, and she gives no other indication that she is terrified of the ocean, terrified of the feeling of putting her head underwater, terrified of the idea of any of us in the sea.
“After customs, we’ll get on the ferry,” she adds. “After the ferry, we take a motorboat, and then we’ll be there.”
I am eight and have found that an experience that starts off feeling scary usually feels scary all the way through. I have developed a system: if I can catch a thread of something comforting when exposed to a new experience, I am usually able to connect to that comfort when I need to. The flat sandy landscape of palm trees and dry feathery pines around the runway seems friendly. So far so good.
* * *
My mother calls it a ferry, but the boat we are helped into has seen better days. I’m leaving the friendly trees behind and am now looking for something reassuring in the worn yellow patches of fiberglass where the vessel has bumped too many times against a dock, the worn fiberglass bench seats, the worn blue paint, the fact that this small craft is riding so low in the water that every time someone steps into it, the boat tips and water splashes in over the side. In my world, when something looks this old, it is replaced. But the two ferry captains who load our suitcases, maneuver along the inches-wide walkway between the cabin and the edge, their feet clinging to the sides as if they are sticky with glue, seem unconcerned. My mother has told me there are two reasons we are going to Green Turtle Cay. She lowers her voice as if she is protecting family secrets: so my father can fish, his only form of relaxation. And so he can fish undisturbed by the office. That we have to travel one thousand miles to get out of range of his office phones doesn’t seem unreasonable. When he is on the phone in our apartment, my father behaves the same way he behaves off the phone. The decibel of his voice rises, as does the urgency of what he’s saying: I’m fighting for my life here. I’m dying here. I’m telling you. When his tirade is not directed at her, my mother will sometimes tiptoe into our rooms and whisper, “Your father has a lot on his mind,” sounding shaken but also proud. It’s not a huge stretch to see how shouting and being important might go together, and it feels completely unrelated that I continue to pull my hair out at the nape of my neck where the tug feels good, and suck my thumb with the hair. Jay stopped sucking his thumb a few months ago by whispering stories to himself at night after we were tucked into bed. I am both very impressed by this—he is two years younger—and a little sad for him because I can’t imagine life without the snug feeling of my thumb in my mouth when I need it.
* * *
An inch-long slice of horizon has begun to thicken, a short dark worm along the otherwise unbroken blue line. On our earlier ferry ride, we never lost sight of land, but in this second, much smaller boat, a Boston Whaler, the same kind of boat my father has at our beach house in Point Lookout back home, I can see nothing but eggshell-blue sky and turquoise sea. We ride low in the water, and everything—our hair and clothes, our suitcases, my face and arms—is wet with warm salt spray. I sit on the worn fiberglass bench at the rear, everyone’s backs to me because my brothers fought for the front seats, and trail my fingers in the thick bathtub-warm foaming folds where the motor churns the sea light green and leaves a long V of wake behind us.
As we make our way closer, the inch of horizon continues to thicken until it is a flat, green, solid-looking piece of land. Walter, the caretaker of the cottages we are traveling to, swings the motor and the boat turns toward it. Soon coconut trees come into view. The motor grinds into a downshift as we round a promontory, motoring close to a forest of low, bent trees. The half-submerged roots are gray and waterlogged, their bark peeling; they look more like entwined limbs than plants. As we proceed, waves from our boat wake continue on in neat lines, slapping against the edge of this swampy tangle, then pushing through to crest and die between branchy elbows and knees. I wonder if we will be spending the next two weeks on an island made of roots.
“Don’t suck your thumb, Christine,” my mother says as we pass over an underwater lawn of sea grass so dark, it feels like the sun has gone behind a cloud. Though we are easily in twelve feet of water, at this slower speed the sea is so transparent, I can see the short sharp blades of grass below, tar green, speckled black. We leave the grass and glide over sand stamped in endless rows of repeating ridges that remind me of the roof of my mouth when I rub it with my tongue. Despite all the forces at work—wind, waves, storms—the pattern repeats itself perfectly, nothing out of place.
Walter makes another grinding turn and we are in a lagoon. At the other end sits a light pink boathouse and matching pink dock nestled amid the green. As we pull up to the dock, a fish, striped neon red and blue and yellow, so electric that it looks plugged in, hovers by one of the dock’s seaweed-covered pilings. It pauses long enough to be admired, then zips out of sight. Walter jumps out of the boat and loops a thick brown rope around the middle piling.
“Go on, Christine,” my father says, as if I have been holding everyone up.
Walter reaches down and grabs my upper arm and pulls me onto the dock.
* * *
Walter carries our suitcases, hoisting them into the back of a small rusted jeep. My father helps him with the heaviest bags, but Walter is moving so fast, my father has to step out of the way. Once the bags are loaded, Walter swings me up on one hard bench, Jay on the other, then he climbs into the driver’s seat.
“The cottage is just a few steps down the path,” Walter, whose ancestors are from Scotland, says with a slight twang, and turns the ignition. The jeep starts up, kicking and vibrating and rumbling, spewing a cloud of oily exhaust into the feathery light green foliage. I’ve never been in a car with no roof, no sides, and no back. I dangle my feet as we bounce along the sandy path, my father and mother following with Greg and Braddy behind. We pass a corrugated lean-to with tools hanging on pegs over a low workbench, then a wooden tower that my mother later explains functions as the water catch for the cottage. At the end of the path is a small neat sign, painted pink: SEA STAR 1. Walter downshifts and turns the jeep off the path, switches off the ignition, and begins carrying our bags into a pink stucco cottage. Instead of panes, the cottage’s windows are lined with narrow slats of glass that flare out like eyelashes. The inside of the cottage smells like salt and beach. Sand crunches under my shoes. I take them off. A gray lizard clings, head down, on one wall, its tiny fingers spread.
My mother unpacks. The night descended quickly just a few minutes ago. Crickets have begun to chirp. They are so loud, she has to raise her voice to be heard.
“Smell the night-blooming jasmine?” She is dragging the big suitcase, the one with my brothers’ and my clothes and the toys she brings to keep us entertained—Silly Putty, Play-Doh, a bag of SuperBalls, Colorforms—into the room that will serve as our bedroom for the two weeks we are here. I want to tell her that of course I smell it; the heavy honey that fills the room is as dense as the thick night that has settled around our cottage. I’d peel back both and step out from under them if I could, but I’m still trying to look for something to feel good about. My mother pops another suitcase open and begins transferring our shorts and shirts into the open drawers of the low dresser against the wall. A second lizard, this one black, clings with green toe bulbs to the crack that runs along the plaster wall just at the corner above what will be my pillow. The biggest moths I have ever seen fling themselves at the single overhead light, their worm bodies thumping loudly as they hit the glass. Smaller moths flutter in a desperate cloud; the ones that work their way inside the light’s globe sizzle against the bulb then join the desiccated carcasses collecting at the bottom of the fixture.
After she unpacks, my mother tucks us in, sideways on the one grown-up–size bed, so we all fit. The sheets are thin and soft. My brothers are quickly asleep. My parents are quiet in the next room. The only evidence of civilization is the hum of Walter’s generator, though Walter has gone back to the village on the other side of the island, and the hiss of the green light on his shed just beyond the sand path. The honey of the jasmine, the spearmint of unseen plants, and the sticky, salty air; the thrum of crickets and the rhythmic roar of the ocean, wave after wave gathering and crashing just on the other side of the thin hedge that rims the cottage yard, keep me awake. We are on a nearly empty island in the middle of an unfamiliar ocean. Of the six tiny cottages on this side of the island, ours is the only one inhabited. Only a hook-and-eye closure holds the warped wooden door shut on the screened-in porch. All of my friends’ families go to hotels on their vacations. When, later, I ask why we don’t, my father says, “You can be anywhere in a hotel. You don’t get the feel of a place.”
* * *
My father’s fishing guide, Marcel, keeps his boat floating in the knee-deep shallows just off our beach. It’s still morning and Marcel has motored around the point from the village. In our cottage my father thumps him on the back, as if he has known him all his life, and calls “Mar-cel,” in his high whine although Marcel is standing right next to him. Marcel’s skin has a deep red hue and his hair is wavy brown; his facial features are strong; he has a large round nose, a prominent square forehead, though it’s his feet I can’t stop noticing. The bottoms are cracked and white, a thick sole of tough dead skin. How could he ever tuck those toes and that thick sole into a shoe?
“He probably has no need for shoes here,” my mother says later when I ask her. “He’s probably never had a need.”
No shoes means never leaving this island. It certainly means never going to New York City. Marcel probably loves being barefoot, as I do. But at a certain point, and this seems like something everyone needs to know so they can monitor their barefoot time, his feet had toughened up and it was too late to go back to shoes.
After my father and Marcel head off to fish, my mother pulls boxes of cereal, two packages each of Chips Ahoy!, Oreos, Nilla Wafers, and Ritz Crackers from the food suitcase and sets them on the Formica countertop as we lie on the daybeds watching. She unpacks Lipton tea bags, packs of Kool-Aid, Jell-O, strawberry and chocolate Nesquik, Cream of Wheat, Sun-Maid raisins, Aunt Jemima pancake mix, and packs of Juicy Fruit and Wrigley’s spearmint and peppermint gum. She cooks up some Cream of Wheat and adds brown sugar and raisins. Braddy takes the bowl onto the screened-in porch, sits down on the daybed, swings his feet, and eats.
Jenny, a woman from the village, has come to help, her dark shining skin in stark contrast to the white-and-red flowered dress she wears. She stands at the sink, chopping vegetables on a cutting board. Beside the vegetables sits a conch shell shaped like a horn, as shiny as ceramic, awash in the colors of a sunrise, speckled with black. Jenny touches inside the swirled recesses with the tip of her knife, and a tannish slippery something that had begun to protrude recedes quickly, gone in a flash back inside the shell.
“What is that?” Jay asks.
“Da conch.” Jenny pulls something from her apron, a blade, but unlike the knife from the kitchen drawer, this blade is curved like a half-moon. She slips it into the shell and with a few flips of her wrist, pulls out the tannish something from its hiding place deep inside the shell and lays it on the cutting board, and before either I or the creature has a chance to consider what’s happening, begins to chop. In moments the conch is reduced to tiny white cubes, which she scoops and drops into a bowl of diced tomato and onion. She squeezes lemon juice into it.
“Who wants da conch salad?” she asks.
Jenny hands Braddy a bowl. He scoops a healthy spoonful, pauses to examine it, then puts the whole thing in his mouth and helps himself to another. Jenny hands me a bowl next. The conch is firm, slightly slippery, chewy. It’s hard to tell if it’s the conch that tastes good or whether anything mixed with lemon, onion, and tomato would be this palatable. I feel sorry for the conch, but that doesn’t stop me from finishing my bowl.
Later we kick around in the warm gentle shallows as our mother stands knee-deep in the water, watching us. Before he left with Marcel, my father told her to stop hovering, to go sit down on the sand and let us swim.
“Let them play,” my father said.
“A wave might come up,” my mother said.
“No wave is going to come up,” my father said, his voice suddenly tight, loud. “What wave, Carol? This is the gentlest beach on the planet.”
Now the faint hum of a motor. My father and Marcel, still a speck out in the dark deeper water by the two uninhabited neighbor islands, No Name Cay and Pelican Cay, approach. Soon the boat pulls up a few yards out and Marcel drops an anchor into the water. He flips a ladder over the side and my father climbs into the water, which is chest deep, and wades to shore. Marcel wades behind him, holding a burlap sack above the water.
On the sand Marcel opens the sack and lays out six bloody fish.
“What kind are they?” Jay asks. I wonder if he feels as sorry for the fish as I do.
“That’s yellowtail, this is swordfish, and that’s snapper,” my father says, pointing at each one in turn.
Marcel pulls a knife from his pocket, snaps it open, holds each fish by the tail, and scrapes. Thumbnail-size scales, invisible when they were flush with the fish, gather slimily on the knife until Marcel flicks them onto the sand. After he’s done scaling, the tip of his knife disappears into the fish-with-a-yellow-head’s underside, slips easily from tail to gills. Marcel dips his finger into the slit and pulls out a pink-and-purple tangle of insides. He throws this over his shoulder into the water, then walks to the shore and rinses each fish. Finally he strings them on a line through their gills and hands the string to my father.
That night Jenny fries each fish whole in a pan; the eyes turn into tiny white marbles as they cook, and the tails curl up and crisp. We have one fish each on our plate, nothing else, with ketchup if we want it, for dinner.
“Watch out for bones,” my mother says. “I’m trying to get them all, but I might miss some. You’ll choke.”
“They’ll be fine, Carol,” my father says, his voice high and tight again. “A few bones won’t hurt them.”
The skin is hot, crispy, and oily, the meat inside white and flaky. It’s strange to eat a whole fish, and only that. My mother pulls off her fish’s jaws, sucks the eyeball, then scoops out the soft material inside the skull.
“Eww, you’re eating the brains,” Greg says.
“They’re delicious.” My mother’s eyes are half closed as she chews.
My father leans back in his seat, pats his stomach, then takes a toothpick from a holder on the Formica table and sticks it between his bottom front teeth. “Not often you get to eat fish caught an hour or so ago. That’s as fresh as it comes. How much healthier can you get?”
The next morning, our bay is transformed. Sand fleas rise up in clouds from fishy-smelling tangles of seaweed stranded from high tide. At the water’s edge, instead of the gentle lap of tiny turquoise waves, the sea has rolled back a quarter of a mile to reveal shiny, wet gray sand and lawns of black-green seagrass.
“Watch your step now,” my mother says.
Wearing the thick rubber-soled terry cloth slippers she has brought especially for this walk, we follow her off the familiar beach and onto the newly exposed seafloor. The sand is grayer than I would have expected and dotted with mysterious pinholes. This is where we usually swim, suspended in this bay’s shallow, glass-clear water. When I float, three feet over the sand, I feel like I am keeping my part of an agreement: I won’t bother you from up here if you don’t bother me from down there. But now Braddy pokes at a sea cucumber rolling, slug-like, in the warm shallow water. Jay crouches to examine a string of tubular slime. He touches it and it winds into a tighter spiral. Greg picks up a disc-shaped jellyfish, as firm and clear as plastic. Imprisoned by its own anatomical limitations, it offers no defense. I touch nothing. Are any of these creatures noticing us?
As we head out toward what is usually deeper water, the sea is still only inches deep and the grass begins. It is for this grass that we have our shoes. If you step on a sea urchin, my father has told us, all you will see of the spine is a small black inky mark on the sole of your foot. The remaining four inches will be buried vertically in your flesh. As there is no one on the island who can medically handle such an injury, a losing encounter with a sea urchin means our vacation is instantly over.
“Don’t step on it,” Jay says.
We have taken only a few steps over the crunchy blades, but already here is a sea urchin, a baseball-size orb of witch’s black spindles, hidden inside a green-black tuft of grass. The urchin seems to bring its own shadow with it, and it takes me a moment to see that its long black spikes are actually moving in slow motion, each spike taking its turn propelling it forward through the grass. After a short journey, it settles again in another tuft, almost completely camouflaged. As we continue on, I don’t dare put my foot down without making sure I’ve found a good place to land. As we get closer to the darker, rougher water ahead, I consider. How deep does it need to be for a shark to feel comfortable enough to swim through this tentative barrier of shallow sea? The fact that all the usual distance between us and the serious creatures of the darker, rougher part of the real ocean is growing shorter the farther we walk out is not lost on me. The water is at my kneecaps now. The tide is coming in. I have a vision of all the larger sea creatures rushing back in with it. My mother, who is terrified of the sea, will, nevertheless, do anything for a lesson and is still pointing out starfish. She proceeds slowly, with a forced smile, as if this wild place is here for our educational purposes, a neat and tidy classroom with boundaries no harm can cross.
On our way back to shore, an octopus the size of a grapefruit swims by Greg’s ankle and squirts dark gray ink at his white shoe before continuing on wherever it is heading, vanishing from sight.
* * *
It’s almost bedtime, and my brothers and I sit on the daybed in the screened-in porch, gathered around my father. He is reading “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”
“‘Oh, my God! Helen! It was the band. The speckled band!’” My father closes the book.
“Wead more,” Jay says.
“Tomorrow night,” our father says.
There is no TV on the island. This is our third Sherlock Holmes story. He stops at the best part and opens another book, his Oxford Book of English Verse, which he carries around with him, tucked in the crook of his elbow like an old teddy bear, when we are at home.
He begins, “The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor.”
One by one my brothers climb off the daybed and head to our bedroom until only I am left. Our mother is in the kitchen, helping Jenny clean up from dinner.
And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door …
Darkness cocoons us inside one circle of lamplight; the crickets are so loud, he raises his voice to talk over them; the air is thick with the smell of night-blooming jasmine. My father reads with flourishes, pausing, enunciating, waving his finger. He holds the words in his mouth before speaking them, enjoying their feel. I want to tell him that I love words, too. That he and I are alike in this way, but I can’t think of how to say it. When he finishes, he snaps the book’s covers together with one hand.
“Bedtime.”
* * *
The white fish with a yellow tail lies motionless on its side. We dip down a turquoise wave, and hot seawater, once clear, now pink with blood, rushes under my bare feet, across the brown patches where Marcel’s small fiberglass boat’s floor has worn thin, into the hold, to cover the fish’s dry, sticky scales. Its wide, staring nickel-shaped eye glares at the sky through the thin sheath of water. It’s my turn to go fishing with my father, and I have remembered, too late, how it feels to watch a fish wide-eyed and staring, its body slowly stiffening as it suffocates in the bloody hold of the Boston Whaler. My heart beats hard with the thought, if I throw this fish back now, will it live?
“Fish have a different nervous system than we do,” my father has said. “They don’t feel pain.”
I think of the stories my father has told us about fishing as a boy to help his mother. Here in a boat with a rod and reel in his hand, he’s calm and happy in a way he isn’t at home. So I don’t save this fish or any of the fish I watch die in the holds of his boats. And I don’t ask why, if the fish feel no pain, do they seem, so clearly, to be suffering.
* * *
At high tide we carry Styrofoam boxes from the cottage to the beach and float in them in the three-feet-deep water. The Styrofoam is so firm and buoyant as it holds my weight, my rear end tucked inside my box, my arms draped on either side, the sea so clear as my feet dangle in it, I feel like I’m flying. At this tide, the water in our cove is dark turquoise and spiked with little tufts of waves. I am reading Dolphin Boy, a book I found in a drawer in the cottage. With a mask and flippers, feet pressed together, I dolphin kick, arms pressed against my side for aerodynamics, over the sandy sea bottom. In the story, a scientific experiment gone awry causes an explosion on a remote island. The scientist and his wife are killed instantly, but in the blast their infant son is thrown into the sea, where he is found, before he can drown, by a mother dolphin that nudges him to the surface to breathe. As the child catches on, adapting his arms and legs as flippers and tail, he is able to keep up with his siblings and, in this way, becomes a dolphin himself. When the child, now a young man, encounters humans, he is forced to choose between his biological destiny and his adopted one.
He chooses the dolphins.
* * *
On some days, when my father fishes with Marcel in the Boston Whaler, puttering around where we can always see him, a dot floating in the distance, he picks us up from our beach and drops us at No Name Cay, a tiny uninhabited butterscotch drop of an island complete with a fringe of swaying palms that sits a few miles out from our island, the buffer between the dark, rough outer ocean and the quiet of our cove. The sand is yellow on this doll-size islet, thick and wet, as unspoiled as the moon. My feet sink to my ankles as I stand at the sloping shore. Just beyond my toes, in the clear, shallow water, a dark gray stingray as big as my brother swims silently past, lapping the island, gliding around and around, in its slow-motion pumping of underwater wings.
On this day my father takes us in pairs from No Name Cay onto the boat to snorkel.
“Marcel says there is a reef here,” my father tells me when it is my turn. All I can see is the dark swell of sea beneath the slap of the boat as we bob up and down the navy-blue troughs. The water here is nothing like the shallows we play in by the shore. Dark blue. I am unimpressed. This is New York Harbor water, Long Island Sound water. Just sand and water.
Do I want to go over the side?
What about sharks?
They won’t bother you out here, Marcel says.
I want to ask him how he can be so sure of this, but instead I slip on my mask and snorkel, my fins. I feel clumsy as Marcel’s calm, dry hands hold me, my arms and legs flailing despite my best efforts to be graceful, over the fiberglass edge. Then he lets go and I drop the two feet into the thick sea. It is so deep here that the water feels different; it holds me up indifferently. The thick sea holds me thinly, like it has better things to do. I kick my fins to tread water. I am surprised by how hard I have to work to keep my head and shoulders above the surface. Then, because I have agreed to this after all, eyes open, I put my face and mask into the water.
I am suddenly sucking gulps of air through the tube of the snorkel, trying to catch my breath. Beneath my treading fins, dwarfed now, I am floating over a mountain range with peaks so towering, so lush and green, I feel as if I am hovering over a rain forest. At the base of the peaks, far below me, acre-wide sweeping meadows of lavender-colored fans sway with the movement of the sea. I recognize the twisted white football shapes of brain coral and the orange treelike stinging corals we’ve been warned not to touch, clinging in alpine clusters to the slopes. Fish as big as me, neon yellows, blues, greens, purples, flick around this coral, nibbling here, darting there. Not far from me, I recognize the long, thin, slightly arched shape, the jutting jaw and silver flash of a barracuda. If it has seen me, it doesn’t seem bothered. It swims lazily among a school of neon-red and -blue penny-size fish; they scatter then regroup as if only because it’s expected.
That night I stand barefoot on the concrete porch in the hot, dark air, looking up. The stars are fat chips of light hanging low and wet, almost close enough to touch. They are no longer scary; this is how the stars are supposed to be.
My father comes out beside me. “That’s Orion, the hunter. See his belt?”
Where’s he been? I’ve known that for years. Still, I’m proud he’s come out to stand with me. My brothers are too little to appreciate the sky.
* * *
It’s morning and we’re packing to go home. The air outside the cottage is wet and heavy and salty, as it has been every day. The sun is already hot. My mother has laid our shoes out; I haven’t seen them in two weeks. I am walking around outside the cottage in the crabgrass, along the sandy walk. I want to soak in the last moments of being barefoot. I can’t believe that tonight I will be back in New York City.