Dragonfish: A Novel (23 page)

After we ate, the boy helped me clean up. He was like a woman that way, thoughtful and thorough in how he tidied everything. I asked him to please take you outside to play. I explained that I needed to talk with his father. You sat put and looked suspicious of the boy’s obedience to me. But when he offered you his hand, you softened and let him lead you outside. Those eyes of his must have convinced you.

Son and I sat staring at the open doorway, the white sunlight outside. His silence made me hold my breath, but I know now that what frightened me was myself. For days, I’d been driven by the sensation that I was once again the person I’d been before you came into the world, only touched now by a profound loneliness that that person never knew. This loneliness, though vast and terrifying, was the most genuine thing I’d ever felt. If I had become someone worse, someone undeserving of forgiveness or understanding, at least it was someone I had created.

I went to pull the drapes over the doorway, casting us into darkness. Son was already beside me, his thick fingers around my neck, pulling me to him.

Every day you and I arrived before noon and would not leave until dark. I cooked lunch and dinner, combining all our rations with the fish they caught and the extra food I bought at the market. I ended up selling all three of my gold rings. We ate well, and it took no time for Son to start talking more and even smiling. Whatever he still felt about what I’d done, he had either set it aside, close beneath the surface of his contentment, or simply absorbed it into the sudden familiarity between us. He was quick to upbraid me when I overcooked the fish or didn’t comb my hair, and in these moments his voice betrayed tremors of his outrage that day on the promontory. But I soon discovered that placating him was as easy as asking his opinion on something as if only he had the answer. He loved explaining things, himself especially. He was affirming his existence in the world.

After lunch we would all make the long, quiet walk together to the promontory where he and his boy fished and swam and took naps on the rocks. We spent a few afternoons at the remote beach farther down the path, luxuriating in the white sand, but when a few young people started showing up, we decided to keep to the promontory, where we were always hidden. There was better fishing there anyway.

You soon insisted on fishing too, so Son obliged you with detailed lessons that you followed with enthusiasm and care. You didn’t want to disappoint him. He even taught you to swim, though you could only go a few meters at a time, the boy always there as your buoy.

I often sat in the shade and wrote in my journal. More letters to your father. Long letters that I would start one day and finish the
next. Certain afternoons, I hardly looked up from the journal. The boy once asked me what I was writing, and when I told him they were letters, he asked me to whom. I just smiled and said, Someone who will never read them. This satisfied him as though he understood exactly what I meant.

Sometimes I did little more than sit there and watch you all, or listen as Son told stories from his youth about how he caught more fish and swam faster than every boy in town, about his days running with the neighborhood gang, the time he chased down a thief who tried to steal the family bicycle. I suspected these stories were really for me, even though he was telling them to you and the boy and rarely looked my way.

When he and I were alone, I waited for the stories he never told. About his wife or his time as a soldier or his two years in the concentration camps, just like your father. I also wanted to know, from his own lips, about that incident on the island that kept everyone away from him except me and you. He would have told me all these things, I think, had I only asked.

One day you pointed at his right ear and asked him what had happened to it. The top tip of it was missing, an old injury perhaps. In bed, I sometimes stared at the scar while he slept and imagined some animal biting him and him crying afterward.

I hurt it a long time ago, he replied. Nothing you need to know.

Why not? you said.

He fixed you with his eyes and called you by your name for the very first time. From now on, he said, if you ask me something and I say no, you don’t ask me again.

You looked startled and embarrassed and did not say another word. For the rest of that day, you stole searching glances at him as though you were invisible and waiting desperately to reappear. I knew then that a future with him was possible.

For weeks, we hardly saw or spoke to anyone. The four of us were like a conspiracy. People started talking, watching us every day as we walked off to our secret place. Who knows what aroused their judgment more, that I was a young mother taking up with a new man or that the new man was an outcast. What kind of woman forgets her husband so quickly, replaces him so easily? What kind of woman falls for a man who hacked off another man’s fingers? They must have imagined me a happy woman.

Every Sunday morning I awoke on my pallet like a lost traveler, unfamiliar with where I had arrived, unaware of how I had gotten there. The church bell would toll a dozen times, each slow dong a reminder of what I was doing, and I would try to sleep through them despite the looks from our housemates who now walked to Mass without us, and despite you nudging my shoulder to remind me it was Sunday and then rolling back to sleep once I shook my head or simply ignored you.

Around Son, I tried to appear content, and soon I found that his presence actually calmed me, filled me with purpose, made me forget sometimes that I had no idea what the future held. I was more quiet around him than I’d been around anyone in my life. I spoke only when I needed to, and with a confidence that disarmed him yet aroused something fierce inside him too.

He would take me the second we were alone. He would not ask. He would not say a word. At first it frightened me, how he’d grab my wrists and hold them down and cast all his weight upon me, dive into me, never looking into my eyes until he had finished and come up for air. His smell, the ferocity in his breath, the pain I felt afterward. It frightened me because I enjoyed it, thrilled in it, because I would often hurry you and the boy away and would forget you both entirely as soon as his hands were upon me. I felt possessed and
yet also in possession of myself for the first time ever, though only months before, even as I knew your father was dying, I was still the young girl who could not imagine being with any other man, who prayed every night for miracles she knew could not come to pass. When I was with Son, I was mourning that girl, and I suppose that was what frightened me the most.

In America, I spent years trying to retrace how he and I came to need each other on that island, and it’s only in finding him again that I understand that people need each other not for reasons they can measure or explain in detail. It happens in an instant, when life becomes startlingly new and frightening and profound, and you turn to the person next to you and see that they feel it too.

Those were happy days for you. You were eating and talking more and the swimming had tanned you and made you stronger. Sometimes I watched you in your happiness and saw someone else’s child. I would see the three of you walking together down that path, you holding the boy’s hand and talking up at Son, asking or telling him things in your loudest voice as if to measure up to him through sheer volume, be deserving of him, and he would listen to you and correct you and respond in his long-winded way, and you would all look like a family that I was not a part of, which filled me first with contentment and then inevitably with despair.

You awoke me one night, your fingers grasping my arm. You had heard your father’s voice calling us, and when you peeked outside our hut, you saw him by the palm trees. He’s just standing there, you said, but I can’t see his face.

Don’t say such things, I told you. That’s impossible. You were dreaming.

In truth, I believed you. I had not yet forgotten that woman on
the beach. Some nights her voice still startled me awake, though I never knew if it echoed from my dreams or from the world outside. It terrified me now to imagine your father out there roaming the night alongside her.

You tried to pull me up by the arm. Your eyes were tearing up. For weeks, ever since Son entered our lives, you had not mentioned your father or showed any confusion that we were around this new man all the time, that I was cooking for him and spending time alone with him, talking to him as I had only talked with your father. To my relief, you finally seemed willing to let someone else in.

But that night I realized that your father still shadowed your every thought. You looked both frightened and hopeful that he was out there.

I should have told you then of his death. I should not have waited as long as I did. In your eyes I could see my own sadness, that pang of recognition I still feel to this day when I think of him.

To save our housemates from waking, I let you lead me outside. We stood near the doorway, beneath a full moon, and watched the palm trees and their broad arms swaying in the breeze.

You must have seen a shadow, I told you.

You shook your head and said, It was him, Mother. He stands that way.

When we returned to our pallets, you hugged my arm and laid your cheek against it. You had not slept this close to me since our nights on the boat. A small part of me wanted you to remain this way forever.

Our very first night in America, it happened again. We had moved into a two-bedroom apartment with your father’s uncle, who I had
only met briefly one other time, and his wife and three teenage children, who I had never met at all. We were sleeping in the living room, you on the couch and me below you on the carpet. I remember waking with a start and finding you beside me, your eyes blinking in the darkness.

You whispered that your father had just wandered through the living room and into the kitchen. You had said his name out loud, but he did not hear you. When you followed him into the kitchen, no one was there.

I think it was a ghost, you declared as though you had just decided to believe in such things. When you rolled over to face me, I realized you were not lying beside me because you were afraid. You had come close to ask a question.

Does that mean that Father is gone? you said.

I did not let my thoughts give me hesitation. Yes, I said, and let that linger for a moment. The rest came out like a slow exhalation. A few months ago, I told you, your father went to sleep and did not wake up. He was very sick. There was nothing that anyone could do to help him. But he’s with God now, and he’s watching over you. He visited you tonight to let you know that.

Your only reaction was to glance again at the dark kitchen. I had considered never telling you at all, just letting you find out on your own. Now I could see that you had already done that. The old people call it a sixth sense, but I knew it was that mystical connection you shared with your father. On some level, I truly did believe that he was watching over you, that he had passed me over and whispered his farewell in your ear alone. You needed nothing more from me that night than confirmation.

After a while you said, I hope he visits me every night. You climbed back onto the sofa and wrapped yourself in your blanket. I waited for you to start crying to yourself, that distant lonely sound
you made, but all I could hear were your cousins snoring in their room nearby.

In the coming months, you would befriend your cousins, play games with them, learn their American ways and bicker with them like a stubborn baby sister, eventually sharing their room while I slept alone on the sofa. You started kindergarten and soon spoke words I could not understand. You enjoyed hot dogs and hamburgers and other foods I could not eat. You watched television and sang songs I did not know. Not once, that entire time, did you mention your father. If you mourned him, you did so in your own way and kept that part of you, as with every other part, closed to me.

I wonder now if he did visit you again in the night. As you got older, did he ever appear at your bedside or walk past the doorway of your cousins’ bedroom? Or did you grow up and stop believing in ghosts?

I should tell you now that I am writing these letters in a room that is not my own. I am alone and it is always night when I am here. Outside my hotel window, I see lights glittering and flashing. You’ve seen these same lights, I’m sure. They never stop, never go out, not even during the day. Perhaps that is why I’ve remained in this city for as long as I have. Here, the world outside always feels awake and alive with the stories it wants desperately to tell you, so long as you are willing to listen. Nothing here to remind you that the lights will one day go out, that all stories end whether you want them to or not.

Son ended up telling us about his ear. It was drizzling at the promontory one afternoon, and as you and I and the boy sat together
beneath some tree branches, Son sat happily in the open, shirtless as always, with water trickling down his lips.

My father loved to drink, he said suddenly. When I was thirteen, he was stabbed in a fight and was too drunk to know how bad it was. I came home from school that day and the house was empty. Everyone had gone to the hospital. The only thing I found was a bloodstain on the couch the size of our cat.

Son was grinning as he spoke. From the way the boy was listening, I could tell he had never heard this story. But Son was not looking at him or at you. He was speaking directly to me, as if sharing the proudest experience of his life.