This Is the Story of You (19 page)

There were four of us on the rock that night.
From up above we might have looked like the starfish that had left one tip inside Eva's hair. From below we looked like the lucky ones. The extra sweaters, towels, and sheets I'd hauled from home had gone only so far—Old Carmen handing them out earlier in the day to whoever needed them most. That's what she had said, just a few words, when I'd returned, late, from North. I'd stayed until dusk fell, until Dr. Edwards said that it was time to let Eva rest, even though all she had done that day was rest and rest, listen to the stories we told her, the cities we found,
Wake up, Eva. Wake up.
Her heart beating and her lungs breathing but her thoughts so very far away, all those layers that she kept inside, the past and the eternal, a coma or a dream. We didn't know. We needed help. A hospital.

Gillian's earrings ran like a black tear down her neck. She sat on the rock wearing one of my aunt's old sweaters like a cape and a pair of damp, ribbed socks on her feet.

It was cold. The heavy clouds had returned. Someone began to cry, and kept on crying, the saddest sound, and I sat up, found my doublewide, shined its light on the huddles, the blankets, the sheets, the awning canvases, the umbrella fabric under and over which the beach people slept, but the crying stopped, as if the light had shamed it, and now someone began playing that stuck song on the piano and someone tapped up the beat on the Maytag and Old Carmen snored through it and Gillian lay silent, not saying a word. Gillian, the castaway, on Old Carmen's rock.

Up at North, Deni and the brigade were taking care.

“I'm coming back,” I said. “I promise.” To Eva. To Deni. To Cinnamon Nose and the brigade. To Dr. Edwards, who had found James Joyce in the wreckage and was reading it out loud. I left him holding our best friend's hand:

“‘Once upon a time and a very good time it
was there was a moocow coming down along
the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named
baby tuckoo. . . .'”

“Don't let anything happen to Eva,” I'd said.

“We're all right here,” the others said.

“Hey,” Deni said, just before I started back. She put out her hand, the one still caught in the sling. She asked for mine. There, on my palm, lay her brother's glory medals.

“He's giving you his strength,” she said.

I woke to drops of rain near the edge of dawn.
I woke to the sound of Old Carmen's snores and to the silent sleeping of the girl on the rock, Gillian, who had stolen in and stayed, whose story sounded strange—a lie or the truth, I didn't know. She'd been given a place with us: Old Carmen's choice; Old Carmen making room.

I pulled the trench coat over my head, held it up, like a tent.

“Here, Sterling,” I said.

That cat, nesting in.

I slept.

I slept again.

I dreamed or I did not.

Mickey was near, and she was not.

She had news, or there was silence.

I slept, or I dreamed, or I did not, and now I was remembering something from long ago, my mother's words:
I don't know what to do.

What was I? Nine? What was my brother? What was Mickey? I never knew—her birthday slipping by each year without candles, without any kind of cake. I was dreaming or remembering, and there we were in the ghost of the cottage, on the second floor of that attic that was newly my room, though the life my aunt had left behind would always be bigger than the life I'd live, her things more present than mine, those closets full of her empty skirts and sleeves, her cracked-sole shoes, her straw hats, some of them with strands of hair inside. I was nine, and Mickey was crying, and we were side by side on the bed my aunt had left behind, and Jasper Lee was downstairs, Jasper Lee and his missing iduronate-2-sulfatase, his diagnosis. That was the news.

“It isn't fair,” Mickey was saying. Words thick between tears. “My son. His whole life. A goddamned enzyme.”

She took my hand and squeezed. She lifted my chin with her other palm. She shook her head no, and the tears fell again.

I was nine—that's right—and my mother was near, on the bed beside me, with her impossible news.

The sea was beyond us, gray and green. The rise and the crash and the colors and all those monsters. I could see the sea through the window, past the deck, across the sand. On top of the curio cabinet, in a silver frame, I saw the face of Mickey's sister, my aunt with her glamorous hair and her eyes stealing away from the camera snap, already gone. Mickey reached for the frame. She held the photo on her lap. She let the sea do its business on the shore.

“I always longed for a sister,” she said. “Someone to talk to.”

“You have a sister,” I said.

“Not a real one,” Mickey said. “Not someone I can talk to.”

“Maybe she's different now,” I remember saying. “Maybe she would talk if you called.”

“No.” That's all my mother said. “No.” The definitive answer.

I woke, and it was dawn. There was the flapping of the No Surrender flag above our heads. There was the patchwork quilt on the place of that rock where Old Carmen had spent the night snoring. She was down by the shore now, up to her knees, in the tide, the line of her fishing rod casting way, way out.

The fire was low.

The rain had stopped.

Sterling and Gillian slept.

I walked down the rock stairs toward her.

Maybe I'm medium everything, but beside Old Carmen I was tall.
I smelled like the days that had passed, the dreams I had had, and my teeth and my tongue were peach fuzz. My jeans were rolled to my knees, stiff as cardboard. My underwear was gross. My many layers were like many arms. My hair was clouds.

Old Carmen had stripped to her flannel shirt. She'd never changed her pants, and in her face were the first pokes of sun, and the hook at the end of her line was catching nothing but some of the things the storm had run off with. One half of a pair of green tube socks. The zebra wrap of someone's phone. A package of seeds no one had planted. A bright pink disk, like the sun.

“Chang's Frisbee,” I said as she reeled it in.

She unhooked it with one gesture.

She shook it dry.

She slid it toward me and cast again.

We stood there, side by side.

The giraffe from the Mini Amuse was bobbing on the horizon, nicking the beginning of the sun. Alice in Wonderland had sailed to Atlantis. The tide was sucking hard, urging us forward, crinkling our knees, sinking our feet deeper in. I leaned down, troweled into the sand with the Frisbee and tilted it toward the sun. I thought of all the ways that sand had been made, each speck the end of something that had lived and died and crumbled. Crumble. It would have been the name of Jasper Lee's Project Flow, had everything that happened never happened.

The dolphins were in the near beyond, their fins slicing the waves, easy, easy. They had come from the south. They were headed toward North. They began to swim a circle right before us. There are forty species of dolphins. They come in black and white and pink and gray; they are the size of dogs or the size of cabooses. They swim the rivers and the seas, they dream in every language, they find their way through the music they make, they know if you are pregnant.
The dolphin is the heart of the sea,
I'd written for my Project Flow, seemed like forever ago.
In many tales, in much of science, the dolphin is the savior.

Between the human and the shark, it has swum circles of protection.

Beneath the drowning girl, the drowning boy, the drowning ship, it has risen, it has buoyed, it has rafted.

Toward the fisherman's pole it has sent the brightest fish, along the banks of some beaches it has harvested its dinners, in the deep of the sea, it has made its own kind of love, and it has played, and it is this love and this play that makes dolphins almost human.

Apollo was a dolphin once.

Aphrodite rode a dolphin's back.

Dionysus turned a band of pirates into slick and silvery dolphins. He set them free.

And, once, in a fresco painted thirty-five hundred years ago, dolphins and deer were the “great leaping” things. They were the best beauty man had ever seen.

Project Flow. I will finish it someday. I will finish it for you, Ms. Isabel.

Old Carmen and I stood watching the silver fins slice, the bottlenosed snouts, the sun still rising. There was so much to say and so much to ask and so we were silent, saying nothing. She'd reel in, reel out, relieve her hook of its vagabond collection. I'd stand there with her bucket in one hand, waiting to stock up the community pantry.

“Have you heard the story,” Old Carmen finally asked, “of Pelorus Jack?”

“No,” I said. I hadn't.

“Pelorus Jack,” she said. “The dolphin. Years 1888 through 1912. Guided ships traveling the strait between Wellington and Nelson. Waited for them. Led the way. Led them again on the way back. Pelorus Jack,” she said. “Mark Twain traveled all that way to see him for himself.”

“For real?” I said.

“It's history,” she said.

Not a myth. Not a dream. Not a memory.

We stood there, and the dolphins came nearer. We stood there, and they circled closer again, and now Old Carmen began to sing a song from a long time ago, words by P. Cole, she said, music by H. Rivers, a song like a lullaby, not the words, maybe, but the way she sang it, gentle and understanding and slow.

“A famous fish there used to be, called Pelorus Jack

He'd always swim far out to sea, when a ship

came back

About her bow he'd dive and play,

And keep with her right to the bay

And all on board would cheer and say:

‘There's Pelorus Jack.'

Pelorus, Pelorus, good Pelorus Jack

Pelorus, Pelorus, brave Pelorus Jack

Everyone cheered whenever he appeared

Pelorus, Pelorus, good Pelorus Jack.

For years he'd meet the ships like this,

good Pelorus Jack

It seemed as though he'd never miss, any

vessel's track

He surely was a jolly sort, and everybody as

they ought

Declared he was a real old sport; Good

Pelorus Jack.

One day a ship came home again, poor

Pelorus Jack

The people looked, but looked in vain, for his

shining back

And now as day goes after day, the folks all sigh

in mournful way

‘Old Jack is gone,' they sadly say; Poor

Pelorus Jack.”

Shhhhh, shhhhh, shhhhh.
Her voice sounded like that. It sounded like the waves at night. It sounded like going under, going in. She sang the whole song, the whole silly song, and I closed my eyes not against it, but within it, and the tide was coming in and my feet were sinking deeper, and in the crumble of the sand I remembered that song, where I had heard it before, the faraway place of a night back then, the night when I was drowning. I felt myself going under. I felt myself buoyed up. I felt two hands beneath my head, heard someone singing. This was the song that had saved me. Hers were the hands. Hers were the feet in the sand.

Old Carmen.

“You were there,” I said. “Weren't you? Back then?”

She lifted her shoulders.

She let them fail. Maybe she confessed.

She stuffed the rod between her knees. She touched my hand. “Look,” she said. Because the dolphins were even closer now. Because if I reached out I could touch them. Because if I had asked, they'd have lent me their fins—to the sun and back, from here to Main, and also back again.

Safe passage home.