Sea Creatures (15 page)

Frankie nodded.

“Can you please tell me?”

He opened his mouth. He gave a very low roar. I took a breath.

She went on. “That's about right. But dinosaurs are very big and very scary, so they make a little more noise.” She held up the cow card. “Can you tell me what this guy says?”

Frankie
moo
ed, then jumped a little in place and eyed the other cards in Dr. Sonia's lap. One by one, they went through each: the pig snorted, the bear growled, the frog croaked, all softly but clearly. When she got to the rabbit, she said, “Rabbits are quiet, but can you show me how they move?”

Frankie squatted, hands on the floor, and then he was off. He crossed the room, hop by hop, then returned the same way. A nurse came in and left a tray with a hypodermic needle and a vial, and Frankie stood up and eyed it suspiciously.

“Do you know what a shot is?” said Dr. Sonia.

Frankie nodded.

“And what sound does a boy make when he gets a shot?” said Dr. Sonia.

“Ow,” said Frankie. Each sound was bracing, like a fall of cold water over my head.

“That's right,” she said. She readied the needle. “Are you ready to say ‘ow'?”

Frankie nodded. She leaned down and pulled up the hem of his shorts.

“Ow!” said Frankie. He rubbed his leg and glowered at her.

“You're like a voodoo doctor,” I said to her.

“That only works once,” she said. “Frankie, what's your favorite thing to do?”

He arced one arm, then the other.

“Swim?” she said, and he nodded. “What else do you like to do?”

He mimed casting a line.

“Fish,” she said, nodding. “What else?”

He signed again: one hand flat and the other scrawling above it, pinkie finger out.

“Draw?” she said, and he nodded.

This was a recent development. He'd always enjoyed crayons and paper, but not until we'd started going out to Stiltsville had Frankie's interest deepened. Charlie had given him a box of colored pencils and a sketch pad, and was teaching him to draw human figures using a wooden manikin that moved at all the joints.

“Just as I suspected,” said Dr. Sonia. “I like all of those things. And I like to be quiet, which I know you like. But sometimes I like to talk, too.”

He knitted his brow. She got up and opened the door and called for the nurse, who appeared immediately. “Ten minutes,” Dr. Sonia said, indicating Frankie. To Frankie, she said, “Get yourself a lollipop.” He followed the nurse into the hall.

Dr. Sonia put a box of tissues in my lap. “All right,” she said. “Here's what I see. He hears fine. Maybe there was some early hearing loss that wasn't caught, but I doubt it. There's a language and speech person I work with. Call her from the front desk, make an appointment. Tell her I said to make it speedy. Let's double-check what's already been checked, just in case.”

“Okay,” I said.

She picked up a pen. “How does he eat?”

“Fine.”

“Any siblings?”

“No.”

“How does he sleep?”

“Fine.”

“What hours?”

“Down around seven, up around eight.”

She frowned. “That's too much. Naps?”

“One, a couple of hours or so.”

“Too much,” she said again. “Stress in the family? Changes?”

“We just moved here. There's been some stress, yes.”

“Divorce?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to guess?”

I stammered. “There—there was an incident, back in Illinois. Frankie's father has a—sleep disorder. He went through a window in the middle of the night. Frankie saw it happen.”

She scribbled quickly. “Listen,” she said, “when the speech therapist gets to your place, I want you to tell her what you just told me.”

My mouth was so dry I couldn't lick my lips, couldn't swallow. “He stopped talking long before that.”

“Just tell her.”

“Okay.”

She sighed. “There's something called
selective mutism
. I can't say for sure that's what's going on, but it's my best guess.”

“I've never heard of that. Why haven't I heard of that?” I thought of the first, lengthy visit from the language pathologist back at the cottage, all those hours with the social worker.

“It's not easy to diagnose. And it's not something they'd just toss out.”

I tried to speak evenly. “Maybe you think I'm an idiot. But I spend every day with my son. I spend every waking minute with him.”

She tilted her head. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you spend every waking minute with him?”

I felt a surge of defensiveness. “I don't understand.”

“Have you thought about preschool?”

“I thought maybe next year—”

“Put him in preschool. Two or three days a week, at least,” she said. “Look, some kids don't need preschool, some do. It's not easy to let go—I know, I have four. I stayed home with the youngest until I'd forgotten how to dress myself.”

This gave me pause over my own outfit, one of a few similar cotton skirts I wore almost every day, and a sleeveless blue T-shirt.

She continued. “We're not perfect teachers just because we're good mothers.”

“You're saying—”

“I'm not saying it's your fault he doesn't speak.” She placed one chilly hand on my shoulder, then took it away. “I don't know why he doesn't speak. Could be something, could be nothing. But most kids Frankie's age talk a great deal, and he doesn't. He needs to be around other kids. He can't talk like you talk, but my guess is that he can talk.”

It was an enormous relief, this courage of conviction, this fortitude. But it made me feel spineless and ineffectual, which were two things I'd never thought of myself.

She saw my doubt. “I know,” she said. “You wake up, you fix food, you clean up, you go to the store, you read him a book, fix more food. Then it's a new day.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And there's other stuff going on, sleepwalking husbands, what have you.”

“Preschool?” I said.

“And the speech pathologist. Back here in a month, please.”

She left the room, taking most of the oxygen with her, and the nurse returned with Frankie. We made an appointment at the front desk and walked to the car, each breath in my lungs deeper than the last.

On the way home, we were detoured by construction on LeJeune, and ended up on Ponce de Leon, a pretty street hedged by low coral walls and smooth pink sidewalks and ponytail palms. As I made my way around a neatly landscaped traffic circle, I noticed an unassuming storefront on the far side: the Abyss Gallery.

I parked and pulled Frankie out of his car seat. Just inside the gallery was a wall that ran parallel to the door, so not until we'd navigated the wall did we spot a cluster of frames filling one corner of the deep room. A man came from the back and I told him we were just looking. I made for the corner, where Charlie's name,
CHARLES F. HICKS
, was painted neatly across the wall in handsome letters. Above and beside his name were the prints I'd chosen—the drowning clipper ship, the menacing sea snake, the sparring sea horses. Since I'd last seen them, Henry Gale had shaded them in jewel colors, which had given them depth and soul. And Henry had done something a little different with these: he'd burnished the shadows, lending the emerald and ruby and aquamarine a sinister appearance. Together, Henry's talent and Charlie's talent added up to something greater than their sum. Henry must have brought the portraits to the gallery himself, or sent a messenger. I hadn't been to the print shop in more than a week.

Beside me, Frankie stared. In his hand was a small brown walrus, the most recent addition to his collection. When he saw me watching him, his hand came up, pointing. And surely it was Dr. Sonia and her game, her commanding presence, but still nothing could have prepared me for what happened next. My son spoke one word, clear as sunlight: “Charlie!”

12

EVERY TIME I ARRIVED AT
Stiltsville, I experienced a strong sense of inverted, irrational nostalgia. It was as if rather than being there in that moment, I was somewhere else, wishing I could be there. It wasn't unlike the feeling I had sometimes after putting Frankie to bed, even after a long day, even if I'd been relieved to say good night—sometimes I was seized by the desire to wake him just to be in his presence again, to reassure myself of him. The strange reverse-nostalgia itched at me every time I stepped from the boat to the stilt house dock, and it was several minutes before I could slough it off and relax. I think as much as anything else it was a weighty sense of gratitude, as well as the foreknowledge that whatever this was—this occupation, this friendship, this parallel life—it would not last forever.

In the forty-eight hours since Frankie had spoken Charlie's name, I had been unable to make contact with Graham. I'd known that once he was transferred to the research ship, which was called the
R. V. Roger Revelle,
getting him on the phone would be something of an ordeal, involving a message center on land that routed emergency calls and other messages, and a shared ship phone meant to be used sparingly. But until that time—and he wasn't scheduled to be transferred for a few more days—he was staying in a business hotel in Jacksonville with his colleagues and the team from Scripps, and I'd assumed getting in touch would be as easy as calling his room. This hadn't been the case. I'd left three messages at the front desk. Once, Lidia had taped a note to the screen door of the
Lullaby
saying he'd called me back on her line—there was no phone line leading out to Lidia's pier, which was a logistical complication that hadn't occurred to me when we'd bought the boat. The message, written in Lidia's sloppy script, had read:
Graham got your messages. Has been very, very busy. Love.

Since I couldn't tell Graham, I told Lidia, who shrieked and squashed Frankie to her bosom, and Sally, who also shrieked. I planned to tell Charlie as soon as we saw him next. But when he came down the stilt house stairs to greet us, shirt unbuttoned and bare feet slapping the wood, talking about taking Frankie for a walk on the flats while the tide was still low—the impulse faded. I suppose I was sheepish about telling him because I hadn't yet told Graham, and because he figured so prominently in the story. Also, I wondered if he would appreciate the significance of what had happened, the magic of it. I'd already convinced myself not to make too much of Graham's response. Rather than being jubilant, as I'd been, it was likely he'd be impatient, as if I was excited over what amounted to very little. At the library, picking up books for Charlie, I'd read a little about selective mutism, and what I'd learned was not encouraging. In two days, Frankie's voice was already fading from my memory, but still each time I recalled it, I felt a shiver of glee.

Charlie handed Frankie a toy scuba diver, and Frankie rose to his toes, bouncing a little, and signed his thanks.

“We're off, then,” said Charlie. “Okay, Mama?”

“Be good,” I said to Frankie. I handed over the sunscreen and carried Charlie's cooler upstairs.

Some days, it was so hot and humid in the office, despite all the open windows, that the pages wilted in my hands. I wet my hair in the bathroom sink and wore a bandanna around my forehead to keep sweat from dripping onto the paper. Later that afternoon, while Frankie napped, Charlie sat in the low chair in the corner of the office, working on correspondence that he would send back with me to the mainland: letters to his wife and Henry Gale and Riggs, and usually at least one message for a curator interested in showing his work, which I would deliver. He silently steamed in the heat, breathing hard through his nose, his face flushed. He seemed to be making a point of not complaining, so I kept quiet until I couldn't take it anymore, at which point I simply said, “This heat is insufferable.”

Charlie was out of his chair and heading into the hallway as soon as I spoke. I stayed where I was, kneeling in front of a pile of leatherback sea turtles—these had started to appear after I told Charlie what had happened in the Dry Tortugas—until he returned with a towel, which he tossed at me. “Let's go,” he said.

Frankie had been asleep just under an hour. “I can't—”

“We'll be quick. Hurry up.”

I found him on the porch, one leg over the railing. Balancing, he pulled off his shirt and dropped it to the deck, then swung over his other leg. I came up beside him and looked down at the jade water. The tide had risen—I could tell because it swallowed the barnacle line on the pilings—but beyond the patch of water, the dock doglegged. If I jumped too far from the house, I'd land on wood.

He saw the concern on my face. “Straight down,” he said.

I was already wearing my suit, so I dropped my shorts and T-shirt to the deck and climbed over the rail. He put out his arm to steady me. Once we were seated side by side on the railing, we looked at each other. We were both grinning. His face took on a boyishness when he smiled; the lines around his mouth and eyes swapped their age for youth, his light eyes brightened. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that he was a quarter-century older than I was. He maneuvered until he was standing on the outside ledge, holding on behind his back. I did the same.

“Let's go at the same time,” I said.

He put out his hand and we threaded fingers, which I hadn't expected.

He counted to three and we jumped. I lost his hand after we submerged. The water was warm and I let myself sink, landing softly on the seabed before coming up into the heat. We climbed onto the dock and wrapped ourselves in towels, then went back to work.

Half an hour later, I looked up. Charlie felt my attention on him and raised his eyes. I said, “We stopped by the Abyss Gallery on Monday.”

He rested his cheek in his hand and waited.

“I don't want to make a big deal out of it,” I said. “But when Frankie saw your art, he spoke.”

“What did he say?”

I stared at the sea turtle in my hand, at the encyclopedia page beneath the artwork. The heading read:
MINES AND MINING
. “Just one word,” I said. “Your name.”

When I looked up, Charlie had one hand pressed to his lips, but I could tell he was smiling. “Isn't that something?” he said.

Later, after we'd made our way back to the
Lullaby
, I sent Frankie up the lawn with Lidia to take a bath, and set to cleaning out the tote I'd used since arriving in Miami. I threw out receipts and a half-eaten granola bar and a pair of dirty socks of Frankie's that I'd been carrying around for at least two weeks, and then I noticed something unfamiliar at the bottom of the bag. I pulled it out and held its dense weight in my palm, running a fingernail over the rough surface. It was a couple of inches tall, painted in antiqued powder blue. Hair in ropes, stomach tautly curved, fin flipped in motion: it was a small cast-iron mermaid, scalloped tail folded beneath her and one hand behind her head, expression a little wistful. I set her on the ledge above the sink while I washed dishes, but the feeling she gave me—hollow and exposed, as if I were being watched—rose up, and I took her to my berth and stashed her deep in the storage trundle. I returned to the salon, my heart beating fast.

But I needed to see her again. I retrieved her from the bunk and settled her on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, and that is where she stayed.

 

JELLYFISH SEASON CAME EARLY THAT
year. I was in the office and Charlie and Frankie were sitting in the rocking chairs on the porch, taking turns with a pair of binoculars. Through the window, I heard Charlie say, “What is it?” When I looked out, I saw Frankie make the sign we'd learned, one hand against the other, pulling away and moving back again.

“What's that?” Charlie said.

I blurted, “Jellyfish!”

“They're early,” said Charlie when I came out to the porch.

I couldn't see them at first, but a moment after they appeared the water was thick with them. They came in a wind sock pattern, a leviathan in aggregate, dense at the start before petering out. Charlie told us this was called a
bloom
, that it happened every summer, usually not until August. It was still only mid-July, but there had been a rash of small storms in the Atlantic, and they'd washed in prematurely.

We went down to the dock to watch them advance. These were moon jellies, the umbrellas cloudy along the rims and a bud of pink at the heart. Before the first one crossed in front of the dock, there was a flurry in my peripheral vision, and I turned to see Charlie drop his shirt and dive into the water. Frankie looked up at me and I gripped his shoulders. Charlie surfaced, facing the advancing battalion.

I called, “What are you doing?”

“Swimming!”

He dove again. When he came up, he was in the thick of the bloom, less than a foot from a jellyfish in every direction. He dove again and came up again in a different place. Each time he came up, he looked around to get his bearings, keeping his arms in close and staying buoyant using just his legs, and once—he was yards down the channel by this time, hemmed in on every side—he gingerly lifted one arm to wave. Frankie waved back. The look in Frankie's eyes as he watched Charlie was of pure amazement.

There was a feeling I'd had several times in my life, including when I realized I was in love with Graham: it was the smidgen of sadness that, at least for me, always accompanies happiness. The disquieting underbelly of loss that comes with getting something you badly want. The thing I'd always understood, even before my mother got sick, was that anything started will inevitably end, anything loved will be lost. I suppose it was possible that Frankie could see the dark underside of joy in my eyes when he looked up at me. Charlie was too distant to see it. He'd reached the far side of the bloom unharmed, and was treading back up the channel behind the jellies, like a shepherd. All he could see from that distance were my arms beckoning him back to us, my mouth open in laughter.

 

I SAID NOTHING TO CHARLIE
about what I'd found in my bag. I didn't know how long it had been there, and as far as I knew—this is what I told myself—it had come from Frankie, lifted somewhere in a fit of love. It might even have come from Graham, though gifts from Graham had always tended to be practical in nature, sunglasses or a sweater or a new radio for my car. The following week, I was tasked with culling pieces for another show at the Abyss—Henry Gale had mentioned, in a giddy way that I found sweet, that the “Battles of the Deep” show had sold out—and I started with some of the recent sea turtles. I chose an eel and a couple of jellyfish, a squid and a nautilus, a starfish and seashell. The show would be called, simply, “Sea Creatures
.
”

As I was moving boxes, reorganizing, a paper on Charlie's desk caught my eye. The desk was normally bare but for the pencils and eraser and sharpener—I'd seen him stand there only a few times—but today, beneath a glass saltshaker half-filled with rice, there was a drawing. It was rough and lined, not shaded like the others. The girl's hair was a little longer than mine, her arms and shoulders a touch more toned—and there was the matter of the scalloped tail and ridged dorsal fin. But there was no mistaking the rough curls and dark eyes and inky eyebrows, the plump cheeks, the beauty mark above the lip, the pointed chin, the spray of lines at the corner of each eye. She was seated on a dock with her tail curled beside her, her palm flat on the wood, and she smiled with her mouth open a little, as if she'd just come to the end of a sentence.

It was incredible, seeing myself rendered in Charlie's hand. It had been a long time since I'd considered—really considered—what I looked like.

When I was nineteen, home from my first year of college, my dying grandmother had lived in our guest room, occupying my mother's every bit of energy. They'd sat talking in bed in the mornings before I was up, a tray of coffee and toast between them, and once, after I'd woken early to meet Sally for windsurfing lessons, I'd overheard my mother and grandmother agreeing offhandedly that my “plain” face was mitigated, gratefully, by my “spectacular hair” and “lovely bosoms.” I'd stopped short outside the room. They'd gone on to talk about, of all things, tea towels—how a few well-considered tea towels could freshen the look of an entire kitchen. The two conversations—my plain looks and the restorative powers of tea towels—have always been paired in my mind. As an adult, I came to realize that the notion about well-chosen tea towels was correct. I felt I had no choice but to agree that the assertion about my appearance was correct as well.

My mother never would have said such a thing to my face, even backhandedly. The most she'd ever said to me was that a little lipstick gives a girl some color. To hear her speak so unprotectively of my face was as jarring as it might have been to hear her having an orgasm. I left the house that morning red-faced, without saying good-bye.

My “lovely bosoms” had come early. I'd worn a training bra in third grade. Later, my friends would still be praying like zealots for the arrival of their own breasts while I'd taken to wearing oversize shirts to hide mine. My mother, also large-breasted, indulged my oversize-clothing phase and let me wear T-shirts over my swimsuits.

But it was my walk, not my face or premature breasts, that plagued my teenage years. I begged for lessons with a modeling coach to sort out my pigeon-toed gait. My father, after a particularly good tour season, relented, and the summer I was fifteen I spent Saturday mornings at the Fontainebleau hotel with an acting and modeling coach named Priscilla Teague. Again and again, I walked the length of a catwalk under Mrs. Teague's critical gaze, starting over each time my feet turned inward. I left every session close to tears. My mother begged me to quit. She told me I was perfect in her eyes, that this silly thing did not matter, that it was barely noticeable to anyone but me. I persevered, and the lessons did help to some extent, though still my natural walk comes through when I'm tired or self-conscious.