Sea Creatures (11 page)

On the armchair was the bag of wool, and on top of the bag was a single knitted baby bootie made from cream-colored yarn. It was shaped less like a typical bootie than a prim little loafer, with a coconut button off to one side.

I said, “That's the cutest thing I've ever seen.”

He grunted in acknowledgment.

“But you know that won't fit Frankie, right?” I said.

“You don't think?” he said.

I couldn't read him. “You're multitalented,” I said.

“My wife taught me.”

I spoke without thinking. “Why don't you bring the chair into the office? Keep me company?”

He shrugged and took a swallow of his beer, then handed it to me to hold. He hoisted the low chair into the office, set it down in the corner, and picked up his needles. For an hour or so we worked without speaking, me sorting and him knitting. I started an unopened box, having finished five or so completely, and when I pulled off the lid, expecting to see a starfish or octopus or clipper ship, I saw instead something new: a map. Along the top of the page was an intricate strip of hammocks along a peninsula, and at the tip of the peninsula was a stout lighthouse. The rest of the page was Biscayne Bay, including the finger-channels of Stiltsville, and at the bottom of the page, the land petered out, and there lay a necklace of squashed shapes: the Florida Keys. The map was drawn on a faded and yellowing page from a dictionary, headed with the words that bookended the content:
qualm
to
quick
. The weekend before, I'd stopped at an art supply store and bought a three-pack of fancy technical drawing pens and a battery-operated electric pencil sharpener. I used my own money for these and didn't submit the receipts to Riggs. Charlie thanked me politely when I handed over the packages, but as far as I could tell, none of it had been used.

The box revealed more maps on dictionary pages. One—the headers read
standard
to
stave
—offered more detail of the swampy hammocks and the textured stucco of the lighthouse, and in the center of the bay, near the mouth of the big channel, was a small bonefish. No Name Cove was detailed, with a tiny sailboat moored in its middle, and farther south was an inlet, water lines swirling. On one of the islands was a hexagonal structure: this was the fort on Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas, where Graham and I were headed in a few days. Another map showed Soldier Key with a smaller key beside it, titled
1905
.

Frankie was still asleep when I finished sorting the maps. Charlie looked up. In his lap lay the rounded tip of a second ivory loafer.

“Maps,” I said to him, pointing to the box.

He put his finger to his lips, indicating the wall between the office and the main bedroom. “Yes, maps,” he said.

“They're exquisite.”

“They don't sell.”

“I didn't know there used to be another island next to Soldier Key.”

“Islands sink.”

“Those little shoes,” I said. “You're not making them for Frankie, are you?”

“No, I'm not.” He bowed his head and continued to knit.

The afternoon sunlight filled the room like a substance, viscous and damp. I stood near the window and waited for a breeze to cool my face. To the east, a little fishing boat slowed as it approached the neighbors' house, its whine shifting into a low roar. The woman at the house—she was blond, a little older than I—went to greet the visitor, a thin dark-haired woman wearing a visor. The brunette was familiar, and I thought she might have been a woman named Marse Heiger, a friend of Lidia's who stopped by every few weeks. It was impossible to tell for certain. She and the blond woman embraced on the dock. I went back to my tasks.

Charlie fell asleep while I was working my way through another box. His head rested on the back of his chair, facing the wall. I'd never known an adult to nap as heavily, as unself-consciously, as he did. I envied him. After a while, I stood and stretched and watched the rise and fall of his chest under his T-shirt. His hands rested on the arms of the chair and his eyelids fluttered. I found myself touching his forearm.

He opened his eyes but didn't move. “What's going on?”

“Nothing. I just wondered something.”

His mouth tightened a little. “What?”

I felt my face flush. “Can I ask,” I said, “do you ever miss living on land?”

“Not a lot, no.”

I was going to let it drop, but then he went on.

“I miss football, actually. Sometimes Riggs comes out and we watch on the set in his Bertram, but it's not the same.”

“What else?”

“Gardening. My wife had the green thumb, but I held my own. We had an English garden around an old oak out back. I would spend hours on my knees, sweating into the roses.” He rubbed his thighs. “Every so often I think I'd like to spend some time in my garden.”

“I'd think you'd miss”—I searched for the word. “Freedom.”

“I'm not sure we understand the term the same way.”

“Freedom of movement, of space.”

He motioned out the window. “You have more space on land?”

“Getting in a car and driving, that sort of freedom.”

“Doesn't hold much appeal.”

“Because of people?”

He nodded once. “Mostly.”

“People don't hold appeal?”

“Not most, no.”

“Is it hard to have me and Frankie around so much?”

“Not particularly. You can take that as a compliment.”

“I do.” I took a breath. “Why are you knitting those booties?”

We both looked down at the half-finished pair in his lap, the delicate coconut button.

“It's a little complicated,” he said.

I sat down on the floor close to his chair. He wiped his forehead, then put his hands on his knees. He didn't look at me. “Maybe you know that I had a daughter,” he said.

The past tense—
had a daughter
—landed in my gut. If I'd ever met his daughter, I didn't recall it.

“Sort of,” I said.

“She died.” He scratched at the stubble on his chin. “She was twenty-five. Married. Pregnant. This was ten years ago last December. Her husband, Sam, was an associate with my firm. I'd introduced them.”

He said the last bit with a father's pride, but still my breath caught in my throat.

“No, no,” he said, seeing my expression. “It was insulin shock. She was home alone. I came in the back with some ferns—sometimes on the weekends we did a little work in their yard—and I found her on the kitchen floor. There was orange juice spilled everywhere, but she hadn't gotten it to her mouth. Evidently.” He checked to see if he should go on. “Her cat was making a lot of noise at her feet. I called the ambulance. I held her and tried to get her to swallow something. She was alive when I found her, but by the time they got there she was gone.”

Age twenty-five. I'd been twenty-five when I met Graham. “Where was Sam?”

Charlie tensed. “He was at a job site. A pedestrian bridge at a college in Fort Lauderdale. His first big job. I'd made it happen.”

“You liked him,” I said.

“Very much. They had a good—” He searched for the word, then dropped it. “We thought they were too young when they got engaged, but we were wrong. Vivian was excited about the baby.”

I tried to recall whether my mother had ever told me this story, but came up blank. I knew she'd kept things from me, truths of her life and of life in general, meaning to protect me. She would have believed telling me something like that would harm my spirit, I think—this was the kind of thing that had irritated me about her, once upon a time. Or maybe she did tell me of her friend's daughter's death, and I'd forgotten. I'd lived away from home at the time, after all, and had been in the process of falling in love. But the daughter and I must have been roughly the same age, and I didn't think I'd forget a story like that.

He looked at the little loafers in his lap. “It's Vivian's design,” he said. “I mean, I'm sure other people have made baby shoes that look similar, but this was her pattern. She made them for years. She said they were her signature gift.”

He was a thick-shouldered, square-jawed, sandpaper-faced older man, holding a soft woolen shoe smaller than his palm.

“They're a perfect gift,” I said.

“She thought I needed something to occupy myself after Jenny died. Every time she made me sit down I felt like I couldn't stand it another minute.” He glanced up at me. “I wasn't very nice about it.”

“You learned.”

He held up the shoe. “A little leather under here,” he said, pointing at the sole, “and it's a slipper, for bigger kids.”

“What else can you make?”

“Cardigans. Babies wear a lot of cardigans, even in the heat, have you noticed? And roomy little pants. Vivian called them
kicky
pants.” On his face was a calmness I hadn't seen before. He noticed me staring and cleared his throat. “Once you've had a little practice, it's simple. Passes the time.”

I knew I should return to work, but this was the most he'd ever spoken. “What happened to Sam?”

“He remarried. She's an attorney, a real go-getter. Her job moved them to Seattle. He writes letters.”

“They have kids,” I said.

“Two. Sam sends photos. A boy about Frankie's age named Simon. And a new one, a little girl named Jennifer.” He touched the little shoe. “A nice gesture, naming the baby after her.”

My hand came to my mouth. In my mind, this family assembled: Sam was a little stocky, a little unkempt, with a mop of dark hair and kind, weathered eyes. The wife had smooth, styled hair and wore tailored pants. She listened when Sam talked about his first wife. She let him cry. They went to breakfast on weekend mornings, and the kids were noisy and playful and the parents laughed at the baby's expressions and the boy's odd phrasings. The mother never had the feeling that something was missing, or if she did, it was fleeting and inconsequential. They mooned over the packages that came, every few months, from Florida. At least I hoped they mooned.

“There's no need to cry for me,” said Charlie.

“I don't know how a person survives it,” I said.

“Some people pick up, keep going. Some people drink, divorce.”

I put my hand on the back of his hand. He frowned at it, but didn't move.

He said, “Some people go to sea, and they drown.”

From the other room came the sound—at first soft, then more insistent—of Frankie's knuckles against the wall.

9

GRAHAM AND I PACKED SNORKELING
gear, a tent and sleeping bags, groceries, and, because there was no freshwater where we were headed, two dozen bottles of water. Lidia came down the lawn as the sky was starting to lighten and settled on the
Lullaby
's deck with a newspaper. We'd said good-bye to Frankie the night before, explaining again about our little vacation and how soon we'd be home.
Come back
, he'd signed.

We stopped at a café in Tavernier for Cuban toast and coffee, then kept driving. We passed through Islamorada, Duck Key, Marathon, Big Pine. In the early hours, the sky was an unpleasant milky hue and the air smelled thickly of swamp. But as the sun rose the sky deepened in color and the air cleared. In Key West, we rented kayaks and strapped them to the roof of the car, then stopped at a bar in Old Town that was known for its oysters. Graham had never eaten oysters, but he was a good sport. I ordered a few of every kind and he grimaced at the raw ones and scarfed down the Rockefellers. I told him that my mother had always served oysters before Thanksgiving dinner. She'd placed a sliver of lemon on each and added a dollop of cocktail sauce, turning each half-shell into a tiny plate. For the meal itself, she'd always invited a gamut of single, childless friends. My father tolerated the parade of strangers through the house because she always spent days preparing his favorite foods: moist turkey, corn bread stuffing, cranberry sauce, grilled asparagus with hollandaise, several kinds of pie. My mother had eaten sparingly, careful of her figure, but she'd watched with pride as my father dug in.

We found a room at a motel on the beach. Graham made me laugh by imitating the very serious desk clerk, who before handing over the room key had asked, as he shuffled ahead down the corridor, if we would be kind enough to move the bed away from the wall before engaging in “energetic coitus.” Graham had a randy streak that I'd found crass when we met but over time had come to enjoy—it gave him an unpredictable quality. He climbed onto the bed after the clerk was gone, miming energetic coitus against the headboard, then bounced down on the satiny coverlet.

“Do you feel like a good hotel guest, wife?” he said, patting the bed. “Or a bad one?”

The next morning we were up early to catch the ferry, which made the two-hour passage to Garden Key, the largest of the Dry Tortugas, only once daily. The ferry was full, and after we pulled away from the dock, Graham took a map from his backpack and spread it across our laps. He'd circled snorkeling sites in red pen. We planned to camp two nights on the island, just outside the ramparts of Fort Jefferson, a Civil War–era marine fortress. There was also, said Graham, the option of paddling to Loggerhead, three miles across open water. The lady who'd rented us the kayaks had been skeptical when Graham mentioned this possibility—she'd asked about our experience, which was limited in my case to the lake behind our cottage and one trip to the Apostle Islands. Graham had just grinned gamely and assured her we'd be careful. When we docked, most of the passengers filed away to take a tour—they would return to Key West in a few hours—and Graham and I walked to the campground. It wasn't much more than a triangle of grass between the beach and Fort Jefferson itself, a hexagonal brick structure surrounded by a moat.

After unpacking, we walked the perimeter of the fort, weaving through the arched casements. Graham read from the guidebook. “It took sixteen million bricks to build this,” he said. “Sixteen million bricks!”

Graham had a way of zeroing in on exactly what made history interesting. Being a tourist with him was like traveling with your best high school teacher, the one who put down the textbook and relayed some bit of trivia that brought an entire era to life. When I read a guidebook, the information lay flat on the page, details muddling. Not so for Graham. He read quickly through some parts of the guidebook's brief history—the fort was used as a prison and once housed five of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, including Dr. Samuel Mudd, who'd reset the bone in John Wilkes Booth's broken leg—then rested on the bricks. The fort had been erected entirely from a material that had to be hauled across miles of ocean, Graham emphasized; some ships capsized under the weight. And despite the inspired design, the place was never actually used as a fort. With the invention of cannon riflery, marine fortresses were rendered obsolete, and ships were sent instead.

One hundred and fifty years later, the mortar was deteriorating. Bricks littered the sandy moat floor. A wide plank stretched from a beached boat to the ramparts: they were rebuilding. A worker sat drinking from a water bottle under a royal palm, and Graham stopped to ask the man where he was staying. The man described apartments in the casements, where he and his coworkers were spending a ninety-day stint. There was a small bathroom and a table and a cot, said the man. He had a roommate, another mason. There were no telephones, no television. A boat came from Key West every week with water and provisions, and the workers sent back mail and requests for alcohol, magazines, fishing supplies. Graham shook the man's hand when we said good-bye, and we walked along the moat wall toward the campground.

I was distracted. Would Lidia remember Frankie's date to play with Carson that afternoon? Would she sit with him while he ate, in case he choked?

Graham said, “Can you imagine that job? I can't install a light fixture without making three trips to the hardware store.”

“We'd be useless,” I said.

“I wonder how different it is, being a bricklayer now versus back then.”

I hadn't been terribly interested in the fort when we'd first planned to come. I'd considered the fort, the history, a toll we had to pay before we could change into our suits and do a little snorkeling. As we'd meandered through the rows of identical casements along the fort's perimeter, looking through the old cannon windows housed in iron that, like the bricks, was disintegrating, I'd been hungry and hot. How many times, in the decade since Graham and I had met, had I had the experience of barely registering something until he turned my head and forced me to look at it?

This curiosity, this connection with history—this was a quality that I'd hoped he might impart to our son.

 

THAT AFTERNOON WE KAYAKED TO
the closest island, Bush Key. Onshore, we dried in the sun. From where we lay, we could see tourists file out of the fort and back onto the ferry, and we watched the boat shrink into the limitless blue. I was reminded of the distance we'd put between ourselves and civilization, between ourselves and our son. I commented that it would be something to see the islands from above, the neat six-sided fort and the humpbacked shoals surrounding it. I was thinking of Charlie's intricate maps.

Graham sat up and fished through his dry bag and pulled out a brochure. On the cover was an aerial photograph of all of the Dry Tortugas. “
Voilà
,” he said, and lay back down again, dropping an arm over his eyes.

After an hour or so, we kayaked to Long Key, which was covered in scrub grasses and peppered with black-and-white frigates, their feathers shuddering in the breeze. The sun was starting to wane but the air was still hot. On the far side of the key, Graham stopped paddling and pointed: ahead, between the tiny island and the dark ocean, a round object bobbed. Graham started paddling toward it and I followed. The black shape surfaced and submerged again. When it came up a third time, we were just a boat's length away. I could see, from that distance, the glossy flat shell was not purely black but flecked with white. And it wasn't round, as it had seemed from a distance, but oval, with sharp creases down its length, as if it had been folded in several places and opened again. The turtle was at least five or six feet in diameter, almost as long as my kayak.

“It's not swimming,” said Graham.

He was right. The creature appeared to rise and fall with the current, not moving forward at all. I was closest to its stubby rear flippers, which pushed ineptly against the water every few seconds, as if running out of power. When the meaty, oblong slab of its enormous head rose from the water, its eyes black and cold, I backed up a little. From directly across the wide carapace, which continued to dip and rise every thirty seconds, I could see the back flippers with their sluggish movements, and the thick spiked tail—but I could not see its front flippers.

Graham nudged the turtle with the blade of his paddle.

“Graham!” I said. The animal turned. The movement of its back flippers increased, as if in panic.

Graham stared into the water at something I couldn't see. “Holy hell,” he said.

“What?”

“There's no front flipper. Just a stub and some blood.”

My stomach turned. “What about the other one?”

Graham paddled around the head, then said, “It's here. It's caught.”

“In what?”

“Some kind of line.”

Movement in my peripheral vision snagged my attention: a dark shape on the surface of the water. When I turned to look, it was gone.

“We should get help,” I said.

“I've got a knife.”

He dug at his feet for his dry bag. As he moved, the kayak shifted beneath his weight and thumped against the turtle's massive domed back.

“Careful,” I said. But the turtle didn't seem to notice. It dipped again and stayed down a while. Graham found the knife and waved me over. When our kayaks were side by side, facing opposite directions, he started to lift himself out.

“No,” I said, thinking of the dark shape. “Something
took
that flipper.”

“He's losing steam,” said Graham.

The whole back-and-forth played out in my mind, the minutes of argument while the sun continued its descent and the waters darkened. There was no stopping him, I knew. Sometimes I thought that in becoming a parent, I'd morphed into an entirely different person, while he'd remained exactly the same person he'd always been. I found this bewildering. I steadied his boat with one hand and he lifted himself out, then swam slowly toward the turtle, holding his knife out of the water. The turtle surfaced again, but only barely.

Graham steadied himself on the creature's flank, then started hacking at the tangles of line, his face very close to the water. I couldn't see his work, but after a breathless minute his head rose, and, several yards beyond him, a dark fin broke the surface. I stared at the spot where it disappeared.

“Shark,” I said to Graham.

“Where?”

I pointed with my paddle. “Five yards, maybe four.”

I thought he might abandon the rescue altogether, or at least rush. Instead, he said, “Keep an eye out. They don't want me—they want our friend here.”

“Graham, get back in the boat, please.”

“Almost done.”

A fin cut through the water off my port side. My God, I thought, they've surrounded us. Absurdly, I thought of jokes on the theme of circling sharks: lawyers, insurance salesmen, desperate older women.

“Hurry up,” I said.

“Look.” He pulled a knotted tangle from the water—ropey netting, maybe from a lobster trap—and ushered up a massive clawing flipper from beneath the turtle's body. Slowly, the flipper started to move. Graham kicked away as the turtle dived. “So long, friend,” said Graham, then wrestled himself into his kayak.

When he was in, I let go of his boat and punched his upper arm. “Goddamn it,” I said.

“Ow.” He rubbed his arm, panting. “You never know what will happen, do you?”

This was something he'd said a dozen times. To be fair, it had always been more true with him than without him.

We looked in the direction the turtle had gone. After a moment, its carapace rose, milky spots reflecting the fading sunlight, then dived again. I didn't see another shark, but I stopped looking for them.

“I bet that thing weighed five hundred pounds,” said Graham.

“You are reckless,” I said.

“Don't say that.”

I looked away from his lidded gaze, the heavy circles under his eyes. Begrudgingly, I said, “It's good you saved it.”

“What choice did we have?”

I didn't answer, but I knew exactly what choice we'd had. Once, months before we'd moved, a friend had told me she'd recently terminated a pregnancy at twenty-one weeks along, after an amnio revealed the baby had Down's. The reason she gave for the decision: her living son, a healthy boy named Jeremy, who at that moment was running naked through the sprinkler, trailed closely by Frankie. Their penises bobbed and their coltish, miniature-man's legs kicked. Their feet slapped the wet lawn. Of course she did it for him—for herself and her husband, too, but mostly for Jeremy, whose standing at the center of their universe would have inevitably slipped. I had no idea what I would have done in her position, but I told my friend I understood her decision, and it was true.

Where was that same instinct in my husband, to protect us at any cost?

We paddled quietly until we reached the beach. I pulled my boat ashore and sat in the sand. Graham stood above me, drinking from a water bottle.

“I was scared,” I said.

“You could try trusting me,” he said, and walked away.

That night, Graham borrowed a nature guide from the young guys at the campsite next to ours—they'd caught a bucket of lobster, and cooked two for us—and thumbed through it until he came to a photograph of a massive black sea turtle. “Here's our friend,” he said, handing me the book.

I squinted in the firelight. The leatherback sea turtle preferred deeper waters beyond the continental shelf, but was occasionally sighted in the Keys, en route from the Gulf to the Atlantic. “ ‘Instead of scutes,' ” I read aloud, “ ‘the leatherback has a thick, leathery skin covered in oils.' ”

“Less revolting in person,” said Graham.