The Highest Tide (6 page)

It was a typical Florence line that I assumed she tossed to all of her friends the way others say “have a great day.” But she hit me with it after a week in which I’d found a giant squid and brought a dog back from the dead. It wasn’t that I was starting to feel that I actually had some higher calling, it’s that I’d begun to feel as though I’d received a bigger role than I’d auditioned for.

Florence lived on the other side of the Stegners in a steel-roofed summer cabin similar to ours, but smaller. And while half of ours stood on stilts, hers rested entirely on six-by-sixes, and the ten highest tides of the year washed completely beneath her, leaving about two feet of air between her floorboards and the suds, kelp and jellyfish. When the stink of low tide blew inside her drafty cabin it overpowered the musty odor of old hardbacks and, more recently, the faint whiff of urine.

Florence had lived alone since her sister died a decade earlier, and she’d been on the bay since 1938, which made her its senior resident, not counting some of the clams who might7vebeen there twice as long. Angie once told me Florence used to babysit the judge, and he’d recently turned sixty-eight, so that tells you how old she was even if she wouldn’t give out a number.

On this day, I found her with an inch-long forehead gash like boxers get along the seams of their eyebrows. I knew she had some cruel variation of Parkinson’s. She’d shown me the paperwork, but I was slow to understand what it was doing to her. I just knew that she seemed stiffer almost every time I saw her, and at some point she’d started shuffling instead of walking. She’d rock her shoulders to loosen her feet, then she’d baby-step toward the kitchen as if crossing a wet log. And when you shuffle, I learned, you eventually fall.

Her old friend Yvonne shopped for her, so she didn’t need to go out, but even her stairless cabin had turned treacherous. This was the second time within a month that I’d found her trying to mend a head wound with butterfly Band-Aids. She downplayed it, as usual, but I insisted she ice it, and she finally agreed once I pointed out that the swelling drew attention to an otherwise perfectly disguised wound.

I’d visited Florence at least weekly for the past three years, in part because she increasingly seemed like the person most like me. She was almost as short and skinny but with huge bottom-fish eyes, as if she were designed to read in the dark, which suited her seeing how her gloomy home overflowed with books to the point stacks had to be moved to offer seats to more than one visitor. The clutter also added to the assumption that she was nuts. Most people didn’t know what else to call someone who called herself a psychic. My mother did. She called Florence a crazy witch.

She used to have a tiny upstairs office off Franklin Street, where her sign—
PALM READINGS, TAROT READINGS AND OTHER PSYCHIC PREDICTIONS
—always struck me as far more irresistible than the nearby insurance, restaurant or clothing storefronts, yet there was never anyone inside but her. The worst part of it was that her reputation was that of a psychic who was always wrong.

At least that was her rep, my mother explained, h e r Florence began testifying at hearings against housing developments, off-ramps and roundabouts based on her intuitions about safety. She even argued that the proposed Capitale Apartments shouldn’t be constructed near Capitol Lake because the building would be vulnerable to a future earthquake. Not surprisingly, it was built anyway and had endured thirteen years and a few regional quakes without so much as a ceiling crack.

None of that made me doubt her. All I had to do was watch her eyes, which reflected light from so many angles it was impossible to tell whether she was looking at you, past you or into you. Plus, she read me better than anyone. I made a point of not thinking too loudly around Florence.

“This is your summer, Miles. This is the summer that defines you.”

That was the sort of thing she’d been saying ever since school got out, as if she were preparing me for something she knew was over my head. She also kept insisting that she didn’t want to burden me.

It really didn’t strike me as a burden—at first-to wait on her and save her trips to the medicine cabinet. And in exchange, she increasingly gave me what she thought I needed, including lessons on how to meditate, how to “dream while awake” and how to see auras.

I tried. I practiced kicking thoughts from my head until it was empty, but instead of leading to meditation it led to even crazier thoughts. And trying to dream while I was wide awake did nothing but make me feel psycho. As for auras, I stared at imaginary dots in the middle of people’s foreheads until my vision blurred, but during a whole week of that I still saw nothing more than confused people looking at me like I had something in my eye. Florence swore I had one of the brightest yellow auras she’d ever seen. I took it as a compliment, but I couldn’t see it no matter how many times I snuck up on myself in mirrors.

“What did Norman say about it?” She often asked about the judge.

“About what?”

“About you rescuing that dog.”

“He said, That’s my oyster man!”

Florence grinned. “He adores you. You know that?”

Sweat lathered my neck like it usually did when I sat in that rocker. Florence kept the thermostat at seventy-nine, and always said things that heated me up.

“Are you sleeping at all?” She was the only one who knew much about my insomnia.

“A little,” I explained. “Usually from three in the morning until around seven or eight. Didn’t sleep at all last night though.”

“You staying up to read or explore?”

“Both,” I said. “I’ve been reading about how scientists disagree like crazy when it comes to giant squid. Some think they’re probably among the fastest swimmers in the sea, that they’re these great sprinters who dart along at more than thirty miles an hour with their siphons giving them jet propulsion and their two hearts pumping like mad. Can you imagine having two hearts racing inside you? But see, nobody’s actually ever seen them swim, so other scientists insist they’re probably slow and weak for their size, that they just hover in deep water, then wait and watch with those huge eyes until something swims within their grasp. Then they pull their catch to their mouth, which is like aparrot’s beak, but ten times as big, and strong enough to break steel cables. The one thing we know for sure is that sperm whales swallow ‘em whole even though their arms are filled with ammonium chloride, which makes them buoyant, but also probably makes them taste like bleach. Yuck, huh?”

I told her how Professor Kramer had called the day before to update me on what little they’d learned from studying the giant I’d found. “They were all excited to see what was in her belly because they still don’t know exactly what they eat. Guess what they found: nothing. Maybe she’d been fasting because she’d just spawned. Who knows? Squid were originally called ‘kraken,’ which means ‘uprooted tree,’ which makes perfect sense if you picture one.”

Florence listened so intently she pulled words out of me, then digested them without those space fillers most grown-ups leaned on—
I see . . . anyway. . . at any rate. . .all right then
—or those hums, grunts and sighs that don’t mean anything other than perhaps that they weren’t listening at all. Finally, she sat up with a wince and told me to trust my intuition, then half-closed her bottomfish eyes and informed me that something big was going to happen during the next two weeks, something right there in the bay.

“Bigger than the squid?” I asked, trying to sound captivated.

“Different.”

“What?”

She hated to be pressed. “There also will be a freak tide this fall.”

“When’s that?”

“September eighth,” she confided. “It’ll come up higher than anyone expects.”

I looked away. Maybe Florence used to be a bit psychic, I thought, at least as psychic as people usually ever get. But her gift had apparently exited without saying good-bye. There was no reason for me to think quietly around her anymore. Vague predictions were one thing, but once she crossed into Rachel Carson’s precise world of science she’d left her realm.

Tide tables were remarkably accurate. Tides were no more likely to blindside us than the sun would rise an hour earlier than expected. Plus, September was known for mild tides.

“Even science goes haywire sometimes, Miles.”

I blushed, wishing she’d at least lower her eyelids.

She caught me looking at her wound again. “Thanks for not telling anyone about this little cut.”

That was pure Florence. Instead of asking you to keep a secret, she thanked you in advance for preserving it. She flattered instead of burdened.

“If the state people learn that I occasionally have these little falls,” she said, “they’ll want to move me into a
home.”

I couldn’t tell if she was making a prediction or sharing a fact, but I knew her well enough to see fear.

The odd thing was it scared me too. Not just because I couldn’t imagine losing her, but because it fit into my growing sensation that everything was shifting beneath me. It wasn’t just my folks’ divorce chitchat. There was the likelihood that Angie would go away to college in September, and maybe the judge would decide that he didn’t need such a big house anymore. Even the bay itself was seemingly shifting into something else-a trophy view for people rich enough to build houses in Sunset Estates.

I didn’t have any terrific idea how to accomplish it, but my goal for the rest of the summer was to stop things from changing, to keep my bay, as I knew it, intact.

Maybe Florence heard me thinking, or maybe she was confronting her own ghosts, because her eyes reddened and her swollen knuckles waved me toward her until I was close enough for her to kiss my forehead without getting up.

CHAPTER 8

A
FTER SLEEPING HARD
for a few hours I woke to an empty house and a note: “Dad’s going to the M’s game with the 3 Dons and I’m meeting Aunt Janet at a play in Seattle. Be home late. Leftover tuna loaf in fridge, ramen in cupboard. Love, Mom.”

What read like a routine night out suddenly sounded ominous. The three Dons were no longer just my father’s festive buddies who called me their main man. They were three old
divorced
bachelors my mother called permanent teenagers. And Aunt Janet wasn’t just my mother’s wealthy sister anymore, but someone who never seemed to like my father, something he’d occasionally point out hours after she left with some glancing comment that my mother usually ignored. I ate two bowls of Cheerios staring at my parents’ wedding photo. It looked like a different couple. Time had erased their cheekbones and dulled their eyes and skin the way ocean surf rounds and fades rocks until they all look the same.

I emptied and loaded the dishwasher before finding my mother’s to-do list atop an avalanche of unopened mail. The dusting and vacuuming was easy enough, as was weeding the roses. I tried cleaning the oven with dishwashing soap, but that was hopeless, and I couldn’t find the toilet scrubber so I poured a ton of Comet in the bowl and flushed. Then I turned the bathroom scale back three pounds and headed out to Chatham Cove feeling hopeful about everything.

When I hooked up with Phelps, I could tell right off that something was different.

He kept asking in his roundabout way about tidal life. I’d seen it creeping up on him. You can only keep your curiosity down for so long out there. Eventually you want to know.

So I started at the top of the beach amid the jumble of logs, rocks and root wads. “mis is the roughest part of Tidal Town,” I said. “Basically only barnacles and mussels are tough enough to handle the waves, weather and birds. Mussels can hack it because they spin anchor lines that attach to anything. Barnacles are even tougher. Their conical shape fends off waves, and they secrete a natural glue that permanently fixes them to wherever they land as babies.” Phelps was obviously fading so I asked him how he figured they reproduce.

“By getting girl barnacles drunk?”

“Think about it,” I urged. “They can’t move. They’re stuck for life wherever they land. So how do they get pregnant?”

He shrugged. “Immaculate conception?”

“Nope. Their penises are rolled up like fire hoses inside their shells. When the time is right, they unfurl them and feel around outside their shells for willing mates to shoot their sperm inside.”

Phelps laughed. “Come on. Fire hoses?”

“That’s right. A barnacle’s penis can be four times as long as the diameter of its base. So, yeah, those four-inch-wide giant barnacles you see along the coast are packing sixteen-inch penises.”

Phelps pointed at a log half-crusted with tiny barnacles. “These guys are the studs of the beach?”

I showed him a hermit crab shopping for a larger shell, its antennae-ball eyes looking both ways before it dashed from its undersized shell into one left behind by a mudflat snail. The crab tried it on, but found it too heavy and hurried back into its old shell. “They’ve got little suction cups on their butts,” I said, “that help them secure themselves in there.”

Phelps yawned.

I pointed out striped, quarter-sized limpets that looked like Chinese coolie hats. I told him Aristotle himself marveled at their homing instinct that allows them to slide snail-like around the beach, scraping up food, before returning to the exact same spot. It struck me right then that I needed to alert somebody that old Florence was already a limpet and on her way to becoming as stuck as a barnacle.

As we neared the tidal line I reminded Phelps that sea stars can regrow lost legs, and that severed legs can grow new mouths and bodies as well. Then I explained that there were millions of microscopic critters living on top of the water and in between grains of sand, and that someone recently counted two hundred different species in one square yard of gravel, sand and mud off Whiskey Point.

I turned over rocks and found longer worms and more crabs than I expected, to the point I thought maybe it was time to coax Professor Kramer out on the flats to ask him about the changes. I showed Phelps how sand dollars travel by moving one grain of sand at a time with their tiny, glistening Velcro-like feet. “And do you realize that all sand comes from rock, and eventually all rock breaks down to sand and falls into the sea, which makes the ocean saltier?”