The Highest Tide (15 page)

At least that’s the way I remember it. Time was jumping around on me again. The day of the quake itself felt like a week, and it still doesn’t sound possible that I ate raw oysters with the judge during the same twelve hours that included that first visit from the cult.

When we heard the knock at nine-thirty we assumed it was another chatty neighbor, but my mother opened the door to strangers—a tall older lady and a stumpy, lipless man in a tie. The lady apologized for calling on us so late, then explained that they were members of a community school that hoped to speak to Miles O’Malley.

“Which school?” Mom demanded.

“We’re with the Eleusinian School,” the lady said gently. “We’d just like to talk to your son, if that’s okay with you.”

“You’re with
the cult?
” Mom half-shouted, then laughed so abruptly the lady flinched. “I’m sorry, but my son won’t be talking to any cults today. Thank you very much.”

“We’re not a cult,” the lady patiently explained. “We’re not a religion either. We’re students at a school.” The open door sucked wind and her soapy perhme into our house. “And our teacher is interested, with your permission, in conversing with your son.’’

“And why is that?”

“Well, she saw the television special on him, ma’am, and she simply wants to be open to the possibility that he is tuning in to the natural world in ways most of us aren’t. And then with today’s earthquake right
here
and all, she just wanted us to say hello, and to let you and Mies know that we’d like to open a dialogue, if that’s okay.”

My mother’s laugh was cold. ‒We’re not interested in our son being part of your freak show.
No thank you very much.”
She shut the door and vibrated her lips, then congratulated herself for telling the cult to shove it. Finally, she looked at me. “You didn’t want to talk to them, did you?”

“I don’t know anything about them,” I said. The day had been so crazy, having some cult come looking for me didn’t seem all that peculiar.

What I learned from my mother’s subsequent rant was that the Eleusinian School was a cult of
loons
, including Australian loons for some unknown reason, who followed a local crazy lady conveniently named Mrs.
Powers
who claimed to have visions about the secretive rites associated with the so-called Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece. My mother called the cult’s fenced compound a nuthouse for suckers and psychic wannabes. “At least Florence only charged ten bucks for her mumbo jumbo. This woman takes your life savings.” Mom then mimicked the tall lady who’d just left:
We’re students at a school.

My mother’s impersonations were often entertaining, but never flattering. She was so good at the rhythm of the judge’s words you forgot her voice was so much higher. She could flutter her eyelids exactly like Florence and talk without vowels like one of the three Dons after his second Crown Royal. She did Phelps once right back at him, flopping bangs in her eyes and asking,
What’s up, Mrs. O?
and followed that with a long smile that, amazingly, matched his.

“It’s getting to the point, though,” Dad said cautiously, “where you’ve got to be careful what you say about that place. I just discovered, for example, that Nellie Winters is a student. And Nellie says it’s basically good self-help information that a lot of people need to hear.”

“They’re a
joke
, Sean, and don’t let loony Nellie tell you otherwise. It’s new age bullshit at its worst. She mixes ancient rituals with the latest hokum. She blindfolds ‘students’ and sends them through mazes to teach them how to read minds! She makes them sit in bathtubs of seawater and scream while they listen to Yanni! She’s been married twenty-eight times! She’s a high-school-dropout-Rolls-Royce-driving con woman! Either that or she’s got an amazing multiple-personality disorder—probably both—all of which suggests to me, at least, that we shouldn’t let her anywhere near our son.”

“Shirley MacLaine wore by her,” Dad said sheepishly, lighting a candle.

“
Shirley MacLaine
,” Mom hissed, as if the words were more than a name. “Why is it, Sean,” she asked softly, “that you always believe the last person you talked to?”

“All I’m saying is that I don’t know that they’re any more ridiculous than a lot of other things going around these days.” He lit another candle. “And old Florence sure isn’t looking like such a crackpot tonight.”

Mom groaned. “You make enough predictions and something’s bound to come true! Everybody eventually wins at roulette if they play long enough, Sean. You think I was rude to them, don’t you?”

“You were fine.” He wouldn’t look at her. “It’s late.”

I eased toward the door to check on Florence and to step into a night where beauty loitered and the sun took its time setting, as if it, too, didn’t want to miss anything.

“Do you think I was rude, Miles?”

I looked past her to the trembling candle flames. “You didn’t seem to bother them.”

In other words, I knew they’d be back.

CHAPTER 18

T
HE NEXT DAY
the bay swarmed with boaters, rubberneckers and three television crews, as if a Loch Ness monster or a Sasquatch might appear, or a prophet might speak, if they just hung around and didn’t blink.

Several minutes after my parents sputtered off to work the same odd duo that visited the night before moseyed to the door. I noticed another eleven cult members beyond them, including one with a drooling baby in her backpack, shuffling in our driveway. The tall lady introduced herself as Carolyn and asked if she could talk to me for a minute.

We did that while the others sheepishly loitered, their hands folded in front of their privates, as if waiting on a principal or a priest. They all looked normal enough, other than that they seemed too friendly. Whenever I glanced in their direction they smiled the way Aunt Janet did if she hadn’t seen me for months.

After hearing Carolyn’s boring talk about their school and her exhausting apologies about their “intrusion” the night before, I asked whether their leader had a personality disorder. That answer got so long and boring, with all sorts of filler about religious mysteries and some “goddess of life,” that I interrupted to ask if she wanted me to show them the flats, seeing how it was an hour before low tide and I couldn’t bear listening to her any longer.

Her face bloomed as if I’d flattered her.

Once we shuffled to the beach, I treated them like third-graders. I told them to stick their heads between boulders to listen to the barnacles slamming their doors shut. Like most people, they couldn’t believe the crusty little bumps actually housed live animals, much less critters who sealed seawater inside their shells whenever the tide rolled out. I also explained how tube worms recoil and trap water with filaments that work like corks, and how snails contract and slide doors shut too, and how crabs and sand fleas burrow beneath rocks to stay as moist as possible until the tide returns.

Then I strolled onto the flats, showing them exactly where to walk and how to avoid sinking in the mud. I pointed out how tidal life descends into everything, every crack, every shell and even between grains of sand, how if they slowed down and relaxed their eyes, they could see that much of what looked stationary was moving, like the thirteen tiny hermit crabs I pointed out in identical brown and white checkered periwinkle shells. I showed them life on top of life, barnacles and limpets stuck to oyster shells, clinging to each other, piggybacking on larger shells and barnacles on top of everything, as if there’d been a Superglue party the night before.

Most kids just want to know about the biggest and grossest stuff. This group was interested in
everything.
They jockeyed for position to actually see me explain things to the point I wondered if some of them were lip-readers. Carolyn was the only one who asked questions. The others smiled whenever I poured on the details. One of the ladies kept glancing around and chewing the side of her mouth. My guess is she was imagining aflershocks. I suspect we all were. It didn’t help that Fort Lewis kept firing mortar rounds thirty miles away, with each blast sounding like a heavy table skidding across a wooden floor above our heads. But it was more than that. It takes time to trust the earth again once you’ve seen it move. It even looks different, the way your father looks different after he spanks you.

I pointed out how the eel grass lay flat on the beach, and asked them to imagine what it must be like to live in a forest that worked like a folding stage prop, going from three-dimensional to two-dimensional twice a day. And I asked them to consider that the hundreds of stranded moon jellies, scattered like palm-sized transparent blobs on the mud, would all be dead by the first fall storm if they even survived the wait for the next tide. I picked one up and showed them its torn underside. “They don’t live long, but they got it pretty easy once they get to a size where nothing wants to eat them.” I gently tossed that jelly into deeper water. Carolyn followed my lead, then all of them were hunching over, scooping moon jellies into their bare hands and ferrying them to deeper water like some jellyfish rescue squad. If Phelps had been there he would have laughed himself breathless.

I told them how the
Cyanea
jelly grows from the size of a gum ball to that of an umbrella in a few months. “And when they’re full grown,” I said, “they trail these long poisonous tentacles behind them that some smart baby fish use to shelter themselves from predators.”

After I warned them to try not to crush the sand dollars—though there was no avoiding them completely—they tiptoed across the flats, as if sand dollars were an endangered species. One of the ladies limped slightly, and I noticed that her left ankle was twice the size of her right. I watched her pick up a sand dollar, turn it over and gasp at its tiny shimmering legs quivering in the sun like a stadium audience seen from above.

“You all probably know this,” I said, knowing none of them would, “but the moon’s influence on the tides is twice as strong as the sun’s. Distance is more important than size when it comes to gravity. So it’s obviously no coincidence that the tide and the moon usually rise about fifty minutes later than they did the day before.”

They looked at me like I was Copernicus. Why did my mother mock these people? If they were crazy they seemed crazy in the right direction. I dodged their eyes and looked around my feet for clam signs. Even a middle-aged horse clam would get an ovation from this bunch. They mimicked my clam-hunting stoop and followed my path so precisely I made sure to traverse only solid mud, which was what I was concentrating on when I spotted the mermaid’s purse.

I’d seen them on the flats before, but never this late in the season. Yet there it was, looking like a leather satchel some child had left behind. They crowded me as I kneeled to study it. I glanced up. “What is it?” I asked.

A stubby man cleared his throat and said, “Petrified bark?” Another one said it looked plastic. “It’s not manmade?” Carolyn asked.

I opened the purse to what I expected to see, two baby skates set like human eyeballs against a black backdrop.

Carolyn gasped and tripped into the man behind her who stumbled into the lady behind him which set off a series of apologies that took a while to settle. When everyone crowded forward for a better view they were beyond startled and gawked at me as if I’d unwrapped the beginning of time.

“They usually show up in the spring in rockier areas,” I explained, “but every now and then they wash up down here. They’re egg cases for baby skates, better known as rays.” I mimicked their kitelike glide through the water. “They come out soft, then harden into purselike pouches to protect the eggs. But these ones are very dead. I’m surprised nothing’s eaten them yet.”

I closed the purse and set it back in the mud, then splashed the stink off my hands.

“Where’d you find that giant squid?” Carolyn asked. “Around here, right?”

I pointed in the general direction.

“Could we see that too?” someone else asked.

“See
what?
”

“Where you found it.” More heads nodded.

“Why?” I stalled. “There’s nothing to see, and most of you don’t have the right shoes.”

“We don’t care if we get wet.” More nodding.

“You wanna risk getting stuck?” My eyes settled on the lady with the snoozing baby on her back, then on the limper with the huge ankle.

The nodders won, and I led them out. We had to help the fattest one out of two sinkholes, but eventually we all stood on the mud bar where the relentless tides had erased almost every sign of the squid, the TV crews, Professor Kramer’s news conference, the judge’s coffee stand and the rest of that morning.

I showed them exactly where the squid beached. I described its size, how my flashlight bounced off its purple skin, how its siphon quivered, and the loud sigh I thought I heard come out of it.

Then Carolyn talked quietly to all of us, although mainly to me, about the way their school viewed nature and particularly seawater. She said they were having a special gathering in two weeks, and that their leader herself had hoped I could attend and discuss sea life with her.

“Take me to your leader,” I said in my best alien voice, which dazzled them all over again. Two weeks was a long ways off. It was so easy to say yes.

The backpack baby yawned into the next lull and peeked over her mother’s round shoulder at me. I didn’t make any faces or anything, but she broke into this gummy, fat-cheeked smile to the point people started giggling and I blushed so hard I must have looked like a cartoon character.

Florence had told me that babies often look slightly above your head because they’re checking your aura to see if you’re friendly. She claimed it’s a skill we all lose and have to relearn. I admit it: I gave Florence’s psychic lessons a second chance after she predicted that earthquake. In fact, I’d tried to meditate earlier that morning, although I couldn’t even settle on a mantra. And the truth is, babies had always made a huge deal out of me. But until then, I’d assumed it was just because I was usually the closest one to their size.