THEY WALKED THE beach in search of a lifeguard: steadfast Evie calling out for Barry and Sharkasaur, her face impassive; sweaty Mom lugging a sticky squirmy crying child, a child beset by dichotomous affection and rage, his squidinox trainer dreams dashed by ridiculous parent logic, his arms wrapped tight around her neck. A child who refused to let go. When she stopped, her back aching, her leg muscles on fire, and wrenched his hands apart and set him on the ground and insisted you must walk, he went limp. Slumped on the ground. Declared himself beached. I can’t walk. I can only swim. I’m a water type. So she scooped him up in her arms and carried him back, along the blazing beach—where the flocks of squidinox sunbathed in the shallow water—up over the dunes, to the house.
At the house, she situated the children on the couch. She brushed sand from their feet. Covered them with blankets. Gave them bowls of Goldfish and gummies. She offered consoles and screens. She told them: “Screen time.”
She went out onto the deck with her phone and her regrets.
She should have called the cops the night that Timmy first appeared, claiming to be the lost Caruso boy. She should have stuck him in her car and driven to Milwaukee and delivered him to his sister. She should have run faster. She should have seen it coming. The goggles. The pronouncement. The world needs our help. She should be inside now, on the couch with her children, holding them, comforting them, providing the explanation appropriate for their age. If she knew what that was. She should know. Chuck would know, or he would pretend to. Fake it till you make it, Chuck would say, in his car-salesman voice, selling the aphorism to himself the way he had sold himself to her, the way they had sold their marriage to each other when she should have seen from the start how doomed it was. They were never the right people for each other, but Chuck was the right dad for their kids. The only dad. She should divorce her loathing for Chuck the Deserter, Chuck the Rejector, Chuck who in his quest to actualize had stirred the latent loathing she felt for herself, from the reality of Chuck the Dad, who maybe, maybe, had sent that Snorlax float because he knew the kids would love it, and not just to win points.
She should stop obsessing over points.
The time had come to call the authorities.
“Thank you for calling the Pearl Island Police Department, Emergency Services. Please state the nature of your emergency and the next available representative—”
Jenn hung up.
She called back.
“Thank you for calling…”
She left a voicemail message with her name, her telephone number, a description of the emergency. A boy had disappeared. In the shallow water. He was there and then he was gone, in an instant. Faster than you could say Time Travel.
She omitted the boy’s name, and the fact that the boy had not existed for thirty years, and the fact that the boy had disappeared before, in the same improbable manner. Time repeated itself.
She stood on the deck, phone in hand, a pit of acid in her stomach, a sense that she had lived this life before and was watching on repeat, the same scene from a different angle, and she couldn’t understand it any better the second time around despite all those years in between.
Timmy was gone. Had he really been here? He was gone. The dog was gone. The sea was a menacing vista of navy destroyers. The sea was stark and beautiful and danger lurked beneath its placid waves. Fake it till you make it, the sea said to itself, looking pretty, but deep down it was dark and full of wicked things. Jenn paced the back deck. She wept for a spell, out of fear, out of frustration. Her mind spun new titles for Philipia Bay. Philipia Bay and the Boy from the Sea. Philipia Bay and the Dawn of the Squidinox. Philipia Bay and the Sea Monster Seduction. Her mind flashed an image of the contractor, his jaw chiseled, his chest bare, his long mane majestic in the ocean breeze. She shouldn’t think about the contractor. Not now. In this Time of Panic.
Or ever. She was too old. She was stuck out in Cougarville. She had a Chuck-shaped chance and she lost it, and maybe that meant something. About her capacity to love. Her aptitude for anything other than work. Her ability to differentiate the fictional universe in which she largely resided from the facts of her broken life. To recognize that fact and fiction should stick to their own separate tracks. She was, in this respect, like her children.
She wandered inside, clutching her phone, in search of a sign. Some clue that she wasn’t as crazy as she felt. Six-inch action figure Sharkasaur stood on the kitchen table, packing cannons, looking fearsome. She picked him up, turned him over in her hand. Beneath him lay a stack of papers. A battle map. A portrait of Jeweleon, the Mermeon princess, adorned in sapphires and emeralds and rubies. A picture of Sharkasaur that Timmy had signed at the bottom. Timmy Caruso in orange crayon. Team Wave Blast. Wild Squidinox Trainer.
Jenn hung the pictures on the fridge. She found a bag of gummy bears in the cupboard. She carried the candy and the Sharkasaur outside. She waited for a call back. She waited for something to happen. A sign. Anything to relieve the pressure of having to figure out the next right move. Every move felt wrong after she made it. She had no battle plan. She had not been properly trained for whatever this was. She squeezed the Sharkasaur. Checked her phone. Tossed gummies into her mouth. Checked her phone. The stupid police did not call back. The internet refused certain services. Pearl Island News she typed, but the page wouldn’t load. News she typed, June 6, and the search wheel spun nowhere. Where are sea monsters? she typed, and the internet brought results.
Sea monsters are fantastical creatures from folklore. They dwell in the sea, or, in some cases, vast freshwater lakes. They may be massive in size. They have purportedly appeared in various forms, including as serpents, dinosaurs and dragon-like creatures, and cephalopod-like beings.
She scrolled through the pictures. The ribbed long-necked water brontosaurus. The mouthy green sea serpent. The dignified water dragon. The three-headed tentacle-spectacular. The red-eyed kraken. The shark with the excess rows of teeth. None of them looked like the squidinox. None looked smart or malicious enough to deliberately splinter a shallow-water fishing boat and pluck off the fishermen one by one, like hors d’oeuvres. They all had small heads with tiny brains, except the sea serpent, which was mostly mouth, and the kraken, which had a head like a mutant testicle. Not entirely unlike the squidinox, except that squidinox possessed an infantile cuteness that the legendary ship destroyer lacked.
Are there monsters in the ocean? she asked, and the internet, after several minutes of loading, said probably no. Not for hundreds of years at least. Once upon a pre-film era there purportedly existed a long-armed ship-tossing sea beast and a shark with a thousand teeth that could swallow a whale and a mile-long eel that would give you nightmares if you touched it, but none of those monsters had ever gotten captured or recorded. The accounts of their existence were sparse and contradictory. Anyone who got close enough to really see them inevitably drowned or got eaten alive. If they ever existed, they had not reared their gnarly heads since before the dawn of videography.
Are sea monsters real? she asked, and the internet suggested she might enjoy watching She Came from the Deep 3, in which the sexy sea captain, played by porn-hunk Randy Rudolph, gets seduced by a buxom Kitten McInnus in the role of a bewitching mermaid-squid.
But are there really sea monsters? What are they? she asked, and the search engine led her to an article by Dr. Marcus Flick, preeminent authority on monster studies. The sea monster, Dr. Flick wrote, has come to represent the subconscious mind. The monster, symbolizing our fears and pathologies, dwells within our unconscious selves, even when the surface waters of our conscious mind seem calm and placid.
This insinuation did not make Jenn feel any less crazy.
But the psychoanalytic manifestation of the sea monster, Dr. Flick went on, has its origins in real-life encounters with mysterious sea creatures, most prevalent in the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, although a few scattered sightings occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, most notably by the famed monster hunter George Corcoran McCloud, whose transatlantic voyage nearly met a tragic end when…
No.
No because sea monsters weren’t any more real than Seaninjas and Sharkasaurs and time travelers, and the real looming monster in the proverbial waters of Jenn’s frayed subconscious was the mélange of trauma and rejection left to grow and fester in her long hours and years of pretending everything was A-OK.
Like now. Her in screenland. The kids delivered safely to screenland. All of them lost there, practicing the art of coping in the American way, gratified by shiny sugary distraction.
Said art led her away from the boring article by a boring professor of monster studies and back to the synopsis of She Came from the Deep 3, which maybe she did want to watch. Maybe she would, in the late sexless hours of the lonesome cougar night, when the kids wouldn’t overhear the moans.
She scrolled from the She Came from the Deep 3 synopsis to a synopsis of the acclaimed porn feature Sexski Lodge 2, which had eight more like-named sequels, the last of which starred the cover model from Philipia Bay and the Mountain of Mystery, which made her wonder why her books had never gone the full-erotic route. If they had, then maybe she would have had to look deeper, to peel back the layers of her superficial self, to confront the true creature inside.
She scrolled, paced, finished off the gummy bears, and then her phone rang and her jumpy brain screamed Police! and she answered before she could register the name on the screen.
Chuck.
“Jenn? Jenn, are you there? Can you hear me? It’s me, Chuck.”
As if he had to say it. She knew the grating of his voice from a thousand miles away.
“What is it?”
“I’ve been trying to call you all morning! And I tried Evie’s phone, too. And I sent about a hundred texts! Seriously, Jenn, I know you’re mad but ignoring me like this—”
“What are you even talking about?”
“Ignoring me only undermines—”
“I haven’t been ignoring you!”
“Well then, um, deflecting me, if you want to call it that.”
“No. Let’s call it I HAVEN’T GOTTEN ANY CALLS because the SERVICE HERE SUCKS. Let’s call it CHUCK MAKES ASSUMPTIONS WHEN HE COULD JUST ASK QUESTIONS. Because he’s an ass. You’re an ass. And I don’t need this. I’m going now.”
Her finger reached for the red Hang Up button.
“Wait!” Chuck said. “Don’t go! Please!”
Sigh.
“Fine,” she said. “What do you want?”
“I— Are you okay? Are you safe?”
“Yeah. I mean—” Maybe. No. Sea monsters. “I’m here.”
“And the kids—”
“They’re with YouTube.”
“Did you really not get my calls?”
“I really didn’t.”
“And my texts—”
“I haven’t ignored you since yesterday. I was definitely ignoring you yesterday.”
“But today—”
“The service is terrible. I— Well, I tried to call Betsy, and the call wouldn’t go through. And the internet is, um, wonky. It’s just been, well…”
“But you’re okay?” Chuck asked.
“I guess.”
“Because this whole thing is getting really scary.”
“What whole thing?” Jenn asked. She eyed the fleet of destroyers.
“This…well, now they’re calling it a vector field disturbance.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I think it means they’re trying to make it sound more benign than whatever it actually is,” Chuck said. “Yesterday they said it was tectonic. But no one really seems to know. And there might be, I mean…This might be the start of the next world war.”
“Oh. So you think it’s Russian nuclear subs, or—”
“I don’t know. The Russians say it’s not the Russians.”
“They would say that. Or maybe North Korea? Though you’d think they’d be over on the Pacific coast instead.”
“I don’t know what it is,” Chuck said. “No one knows. Or the government knows, but they’re claiming not to. But some of the towns along the coast have evacuated.”
“Oh.”
“And they tried to fly a helicopter in to rescue people from some shipwreck near Pearl Island, but they had to turn around because of some sort of electrical disturbance in the airspace.”
“Oh. That’s not good.”
“No.”
“But whatever it is, it’s, well, I mean…”
She didn’t know what she meant.
“Jenn, if there’s any way that you and the kids can get off the island—”
“We tried.”
“I know, but—”
“I’m not getting on a boat.”
“I just want you to be safe. I want you to come home.”
Home.
She envisioned Chuck, at home, safe in his town house with his rented furniture, his streaming passwords, his exercise bands, his selection of wines, his MAS Certificate of Ascension framed and hung on his wall, his ever-lengthening List of Underminstances, his worn copy of Bond with the Man You Were Always Meant to Be signed by The Man Danz Landry himself.
Home didn’t mean what she wanted it to mean.
Home was a house packed with the artifacts of her mother’s life, once prized and then forgotten, headed for the storage unit, where she could forget them all again. Home was a mold-stricken house for a squatter family of opossums. Home was an empty house in Ohio where the neglected houseplants were slowly dying, where a Chuck-sized dent defaced the bed, to remind her every time she deigned to sleep there that he was gone. That she had been left. She slept in the guest bedroom, but that reminded her, too. In the middle of the night, when she woke, when she wondered: Where am I? What have I done with my life?
“Home.” She laughed.
“Don’t laugh. I’m serious.”
“Right. Because you care so much.”
“I do care! This isn’t what I wanted. This animosity.”
“Well,” she said. “Maybe you should have thought of that before—”
“Jenn—”
“—before you dumped me.”
She could hear him breathing into the phone. But his breath was just noise. His words were just words. Chuck had dumped her, and in his absence, he lost dimensionality. He became a paper doll cutout. A caricature of a man. The real him was obscured beneath flurries of texts, grievances, papers served, feelings hurt, until there was, in her mind, no real him left.
“I just wanted…” he started to say, and there was a tremor in his voice. Like sadness, if he was a real human and not just a 2D rendition of himself. “I…Do you remember last summer?”
“Last summer.”
Last summer intermingled with every other summer in her memory, every hot sticky sweaty summer punctuated with sunburns and bee stings, missing goggles, swimming pool ear infections, day camps, playdates, rainy-day kitchen-table forts, firefly hunts, chalk and sprinklers in the driveway—all the things happening in the background somewhere while Jenn was busy working.
“When we went out to dinner,” Chuck said. “At Lucetti’s.”
“Um…”
“We sat on the patio. You ordered manicotti.”
“Okay. If you say so.”
“And I told you how I wanted to start a business making custom furniture,” Chuck said. “Just dining room furniture to start with, but then once I had a good customer base I’d expand to foyers, kids’ rooms, closets—”
“I don’t remember this,” Jenn said.
“I know.”
“Are you sure you said this? I mean, it maybe sounds vaguely familiar, but—”
“I’m sure. Jenn. I had a business plan. I told you. Over dinner. But, well, the thing is, you weren’t listening. You were there. Right across from me. You heard what I said. But you weren’t really listening.”
“Right, and then you added it to your little List of Underminstances.”
“No,” Chuck said. “This was before the list. This was…It was the first time I guess I ever really understood. This thing you do. Where you seem like you’re listening but you’re not really listening. And you don’t do it with anyone else. Or, I mean, sometimes you do with the kids. But with me…it’s like…it’s like I’m not really there. That’s how I felt. When I told you this dream I had. About making furniture. And the next day it was like you hadn’t even heard it. You hadn’t heard me. And I felt like, like you hadn’t heard me in years. Even before the kids. It got worse after the kids, after I stopped working. Maybe that was just because I was home more. So I noticed it more. But it’s always been like this, Jenn. I guess I’ve always felt like you don’t really see me. I just wanted you to see me….”
He trailed off, and in the silence she tried to picture him across the table at Lucetti’s, a glass of pinot in his one hand, his animated other hand flapping around the way it did when he rambled. In her mind, his face was hazy. She could hear the excited tenor of his voice, but the words eluded her. She scrolled back through visions of Chuck, but all the visions had the same washed-out haze, the features undefinable, the Chuck figure existing as a proxy for something or someone else. She didn’t know what. She felt unsure, now, in the mid-divorce fog-lands of her muddled present, if she had ever seen Chuck. If they had both gazed through and past each other, their phantom selves passing in the hallways of their house without a word. If they had loved each other. It didn’t feel like love now. Love was an ocean away.
“I…” she started, paused, searching for the words. “I didn’t mean…I never meant it to be like that.”
“I know. But it was.”
“It was.”
“I…It was my fault, in a way,” Chuck said, and the admission disarmed her. Chuck had never admitted fault. Not when he destroyed her dry-clean-only sweaters in the wash. Not when he stank up the bedroom with his garlic-onion farts. Not when he left a plate of meatballs on the coffee table where the dog could eat them all, and did, in one swift delicious binge, and got a plastic sword–shaped toothpick caught in his throat that the emergency vet charged a thousand dollars to remove. Chuck had always carried himself with the regality of the blameless. But maybe MAS had taught him a lesson he had failed to learn anywhere else. That to actualize he had to recognize the faults in himself.
“How was it your fault?”
“I rambled. About things you didn’t care about, and I knew you didn’t care about them, but I would carry on and on.”
“The Chuck Lanaro soliloquy on college basketball.”
“Yeah. Well. I love it. And, I don’t know, maybe I hoped I could sell you on it. That I could make you love what I love. Even though I knew deep down I couldn’t. I persisted.”
“You are persistent.”
“You tuned me out.”
“Well, yeah.”
“The more you tuned me out, the easier it got. Like I was just a switch you could flip on and off at will. That was how it felt.”
“I didn’t know,” Jenn said. “You never told me. Or did I tune that out, too?”
“I didn’t,” said Chuck. “I didn’t know how to name and acknowledge my Ingrained Triggers and Reaction Barometers. Which is one of the first steps on the path to Actualization. But I felt it. And so I just talked more, and louder. Which just perpetuated the Grievance-Trigger Cycle.”
“But now you’re putting an end to that cycle?”
“It’s ended. It’s over.”
It was over. Chuck had moved out. She was stranded with the kids on Danger Island. They both felt bad, but there was nothing to be done. Not anymore. Their lives had turned out the way their lives turned out. The phone felt heavy in her hand. A dead weight. Transmitting silence. She stared out at the sea, that blue expanse, awash with life, immensely empty. White seagulls circled overhead. Waves sloshed at the shore. There was no boat back, not one that she would take. There was no bridge to connect them.
“Just promise me,” Chuck said, breaking the silence. “Please. Do whatever you can to stay safe. To keep our kids safe.”
“I will. Of course I will.”
“And text me. To let me know. I still care, Jenn. I care about you. I always will.”
“Yeah. Well…” Her brain searched for a quip, a dig, a petty comeback to follow a Well maybe if you…But she felt depleted of her usual snark. She felt sad for herself and for Chuck in this moment. She despised Chuck but maybe she still cared about Chuck. Maybe she always would. “I’ll try.”