Sea Creatures (13 page)

“The stakes,” I said. “They're higher now.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” I said.

He didn't answer. He loved me too much to say what I believed he was thinking:
We used to have a different kind of marriage, and I liked that one better
.

He changed the subject. He was in a good mood, and wanted to stay that way. We got to talking about the research team he'd joined, which was studying how air and water interacted during hurricanes and typhoons. He didn't talk much about work normally, but I'd gleaned that despite the long hours, he liked his colleagues and the job itself. He'd spoken excitedly about a saltwater wave tank in the room next to his office, where a colleague spent twelve hours a day simulating hurricanes, and about how one of his office mates was working to determine the best paths for aircraft flying through storms.

Now, he explained, hands gesturing in the air between us, his team was about to deploy four new research buoys 250 miles off the coast of Jacksonville, in the thick of Hurricane Alley. The buoys would gather data about the force and temperature of the air and water during weather extremes, and about the sea spray that lubricates surging winds. A Scripps research ship would host the team offshore for weeks, maybe even months.

I was having difficulty following him—it seemed an odd time to launch into such a detailed explanation—but I liked how he talked about work to me as if we had the same basic foundation of knowledge.

He said, “The software that processes the data has a few glitches. I'm working them out. Larry's relieved to have a computer guy on the team. Everyone's headed up for the launch.” He paused to drink from the water bottle. “The Scripps people need someone who knows the back end, just in case. It would be a mistake to count myself out.” As he spoke, he wore grooves in the sand with his heels. “They're leaving next week.”

Seeing my expression, he stopped talking. It was dawning on me what this conversation meant to convey. Graham knew I wanted him around more—of course he knew, though I prided myself on not repeating myself endlessly, the way my mother had. He was telling me that for the unforeseen future, my wish would not be granted. Not by a long shot.

I said, “I don't want you to go. But it doesn't sound like there's much choice.”

“Are you saying I can go?”

“You're not asking my permission.”

“But I'd like it.”

“Go,” I said, but my voice broke.

“It's a good opportunity,” he said quietly.

We sat still for a moment. Maybe he assumed I'd been unpersuaded of the importance of the trip, that I didn't understand the relationship between his job—our bread and butter—and the work he'd be doing on this ship. But to me, all of that was beside the point. A year earlier, if Graham had announced that he was throwing himself more fully into work—well, I might have left him. Though I would not have admitted it, on some level I was grateful to Graham's work, to the fact that he'd immersed himself so fully. Otherwise, he might've wanted to go back to Round Lake.

Graham shifted forward to kneel in the sand. He pointed at the sun, which was falling fast toward the hazy horizon. “Here we go,” he said. “Watch.”

I watched. As the sun's midsection disappeared behind the horizon, a burst of iridescent green flashed at its apex, then was gone.

“Holy shit,” I said.

The sun sank. The bruised sky closed in. Low waves lapped at our feet.

Graham said, “I know I disappoint you. I disappoint myself.”

His hair luffed in the breeze, a nest of white feathers. I moved toward him but he shifted away. He stood and walked toward the campsite, then stopped to let me catch up. I knew he would spend that night, as he'd spent the night before, roaming the island. He hadn't packed the cuff because there was nowhere to fasten it. Anyway, he'd said, why bother?

In my mind, I closed a fist around the image of the green flash, that miracle of the natural world—summoned into existence, it seemed, by the man I married.

10

FOR OUR NINTH ANNIVERSARY—THIS WAS
a year before we left Round Lake—we'd planned a weekend in Chicago, during which Frankie, who was almost three, would stay with Graham's mother and her husband in their apartment, and we would stay in a hotel. Graham was excited about a geology exhibit at the Field Museum, and I was excited to eat meals in loud restaurants crowded with adults. We were moderate in our ambitions, yes. It would have been the first time I'd left Frankie overnight.

The day before we'd planned to leave, I met a client and her family at their home in Skokie. An hour into our meeting, I received a call from the sitter, our next-door neighbor Kathy Lyman. Frankie had a fever of 104 degrees. I left my last remaining employee, a student named Tad Curry, in charge of packing up and collecting our fee, and headed home.

We left for the emergency room after Frankie's fever reached 106 and he had a febrile seizure in my arms. Harmless, as it turns out, but terrifying. Graham, of limited use in any emergency that required driving, held Frankie's hand in the backseat while I navigated the rain-wet streets to the hospital. I couldn't stop glancing at them in the rearview mirror, and at some point I had to veer roughly to avoid a deer standing in the middle of the road. I drove slowly after that, and by the time we reached the emergency room, my baby seemed more or less normal, if still warm to the touch.

Graham canceled our hotel reservations and called his mother. The next day, when Frankie's temperature was down, Graham lit on the idea of a last-minute overnight trip to a hotel water park on the edge of town. We argued about whether Frankie was healthy enough, and Graham said he'd take him down a few slides and that would be that. When had I abandoned all spontaneity? he asked. He had that way, when he got an idea in his head, of forcing that idea's inevitability—not only would we go, but we would enjoy ourselves. We checked into the hotel's last available room, a suite with a balcony overlooking a narrow strip of lawn, a parking lot, and an interstate. We were in a part of Round Lake that villagers didn't consider part of Round Lake at all. This was where they kept the chain grocery and restaurants, and next to the hotel there was a pool hall the size of an airport hangar. The hotel water park was something I'd been unfamiliar with before moving to the region. In Florida, water parks were built outdoors, but in the upper Midwest, where it might snow as late as May and early as October, they were built inside mammoth, chlorine-soaked structures with bad acoustics. Some had log cabin or wildlife themes, but many, like the one we visited that weekend, were simple: an intestine's worth of weaving fiberglass slides dumping out shrieking, brightly clad people.

It
was
fun. Frankie was agreeable and clingy. He roped his arms around Graham's neck each time they scooted together into the rushing water. They came out with openmouthed smiles, Frankie signing
Again! Again!
That night, we put Frankie down on the sofa bed, then sat a long time on the balcony, watching trucks rumble past on the interstate.

Earlier that month Graham had submitted his tenure materials; the committee was about to convene. He'd been warned by doctors about stress, but to me he seemed as relaxed as one could reasonably hope to be under the circumstances. He'd been warned, too, about changes in routine, but it didn't occur to either of us that one night in a comfortable hotel fifteen miles from home might pose a problem. I was especially sleepless, myself, those days, for no reason except the whim of my own insomnia. I was waiting it out. That night in the hotel, I fell gratefully asleep with Graham beside me, his body rigid and his eyes on the popcorn ceiling. Shortly, he would rise to read or take a walk, I assumed. I didn't worry about what might occupy him in the dark hours. Instead, I was thankful for that pleasant, underwater feeling of near-sleep. It's not overstating the case to say that I felt blessed by sleep when it came, as if it were tapping me with its wand.

Hours later, I woke to the sharp, unmistakable sound of shattering glass. Graham wasn't in bed. Frankie was wailing, but at first I didn't recognize the noise; he'd stopped using his voice months earlier. He was sitting up on the sofa bed, tears running down his face. He wasn't hurt. He pointed at the picture window, where vertical blinds swayed. Shards of glass covered the carpet. I went carefully to the window and looked out. Graham was lying on the strip of grass between the hotel and the parking lot, blood streaking his face and hands. He was crying out and holding his leg.

I did not decide, then and there, while my child wailed and my husband twisted on the ground, to leave Round Lake. I didn't realize that we would need to leave until long after the local paper had run its ungenerous article, which quoted our neighbors and their reports of odd goings-on at our home, none of which had ever been reported directly to me. In that article, which was accompanied by a piece about the Illinois Regional Center for the Study of Sleep, our neighbor Kathy Lyman, a garrulous woman who played in a bowling league several nights of the week, told a reporter that she'd “never felt safe” having us as neighbors. She said that if I wasn't aware of what was going on in my own house, I was “deaf, dumb, and blind.” She told about the time she was woken in the night by Graham at the door in his pajamas, asking about the bat house in a “chilling voice.” Another neighbor, someone I'd known only to wave hello, said that our house gave him “the willies,” and cited the fact that Graham came and went and lights stayed on all night.

Even then, leaving didn't seem inevitable.

The night of our anniversary, in the moment that it took for the events to order themselves in my head, as I grabbed Frankie and headed for the phone, I did not think of moving away. But it did occur to me—not out of spite, but simply as a matter of course—that I would have no choice but to leave Graham.

Low hedges had partially broken his fall. He'd twisted an ankle and torn a ligament and cracked a kneecap, and he had a concussion. We spent the next twenty hours in the hospital, and when there wasn't a doctor or nurse in the room, there was often a pair of affable, baby-faced police officers, a woman and a man, who for a time acted inquisitive rather than interrogative. Their questions circled themselves, moved forward and backward in time. They took few notes. For a while I thought they were a little bumbling, that they were more curious about Graham's affliction than anything else, that they were just killing the hours and enjoying the snacks from the nurses' station. But after Graham's knee had been set and his head stitched, they returned to the room and read Graham his rights. It was then that I understood that all the chatting, the snacking, the pats on Frankie's shoulder—this was the light-handed, avuncular style of detectives who were good at their jobs. We hadn't been hoodwinked, exactly, but we'd—
I'd
—been naive.

Graham was charged with property damage and with recklessly endangering the welfare of a child. This last charge, we were told by the officers, who continued to treat us like pals, would probably be dropped. There was a lot of double-speak, a lot of explanations that didn't make much sense, but in the end I understood that they'd included the charge for two reasons. One was that we'd both admitted, in describing Graham's sleep problems over the years, that we'd known the extent of the situation and still let him remain in the care of our son. (I was not charged with reckless endangerment, and it didn't seem as if this had been under consideration.) The other reason was that without the charge, it was possible the right people wouldn't get the go-ahead to send the right kind of social worker to work with our family. The administrative shades of gray were lost on me. Something in me wanted to clarify in no uncertain terms that we did not need a social worker. But there was a smaller voice, too, that wondered why we wouldn't want some help. I called a lawyer from the phone at the nurses' station, realizing this was something I should have done hours before.

I couldn't help but wonder, at the time, how the same situation might have played out in Miami, which it seemed had a harsher but less passive-aggressive law enforcement culture. Maybe in Miami Graham would have been hauled off to jail, but there would have been no bones made about it, no soft-spoken cops repeatedly referring to my son by name, as if he were as much their responsibility as mine.

Graham's mother, Julia, came from Chicago. Reporters called. The lawyer haggled with the hotel and hashed out a figure for repairs. I drove over with a check and handed it to a jowly, silver-haired manager who lectured me about the difficulty of getting glass out of a deep-pile carpet. I reassured him that he would never see my family in his hotel again. The lawyer recommended that Graham check himself into Detention for a third, longer stint—this would look good to the court, he said—so we packed him up and drove him there right away. Kathy Lyman didn't show herself. A neighbor I barely knew, an elderly woman who'd known Julia in the old days, stopped by with a basket of muffins. How news spread even before the newspaper ran the story, I didn't know. “I'm so sorry for your troubles,” said the neighbor as she handed me the basket. She patted my hand. “Lord protect you.” It was the first spot of sincere kindness in the ordeal. I could have wept in her frail arms.

Julia brought me the newspaper. There was no picture of Graham in his fugue state this time, but there was one of the broken window, taken from below, and one of Graham taken from outside his hospital room. In the photo, he scowled at an unseen person, an embittered expression on his face. I don't recall any anger in Graham that night, so I don't know how long the photographer must have waited to capture that look. When I think of Graham during those hours, the papery gown and the painkillers, his pliant answers to the unending questions, I recall only how dejected he was, how powerless and ashamed, when just the evening before he'd come whooshing out of a waterslide, his face as full of delight as I'd seen it. When I saw my husband's disgust with himself, any notion I'd had about my obligation to take Frankie away simply dissolved.

In the article, we were referred to as “eccentric neighbors,” which I never understood. Surely, to be labeled as such, there must have been something other than Graham's parasomnia. Did it have to do with the fact that I hadn't grown up in the area? Was it Graham's prematurely white hair, his all-season bicycling and refusal to drive a car? Was there something about us I didn't recognize, some odd mannerism or behavior? It was more likely sloppy reporting than anything else, but still, I was humiliated.

The social worker visited me and Frankie at home every week. Her name was Claire David, and she was new to the work, perhaps a little out of her depth. There was Graham's parasomnia, yes, but that was overshadowed by Frankie's speech, which commanded the majority of her attention. She did not mention, not once, the possibility of a connection between the two. She sent a language pathologist to the house, and for two hours the pathologist watched Frankie and me play while scribbling in a notebook. A week later, I received a seventeen-page report in the mail, saying more or less what we already knew: there was no obvious learning defect. Frankie had great capabilities with sign language, and if signs counted as words, his vocabulary would have been par for his age.

There was no law on the books with regards to property damaged during the act of sleepwalking. There was something complicated about choosing an insanity defense versus a guilty defense, and for a while we tried to sort out the best course of action, but in the end the charges were dropped, and Graham paid a fine. Claire David's responsibilities toward us were dropped as well. Graham returned home after two months in Detention, his second leave of absence from the university, to find that he had not been granted tenure. Coupled with my business's decline, it seemed to me as if the ground had swelled beneath us like a tidal wave, lifting us from every mooring. Then Larry Birnbaum called with news of the Rosenstiel fellowship, and Graham applied, and we found harbor.

The night we decided to leave Round Lake, Graham lay down and I helped him fasten his cuff for the first time. Graham joked—our first joke, since!—that if I went to sleep angry he might never be allowed to leave the bed again. Then he lay very still, his eyes on the ceiling. His smile faded.

“I've never been afraid like this before,” he said.

“Not even after waking up in the street?”

“I'm not afraid of hurting myself,” he said, clenching his teeth.

I knew the answer, but still I asked. “What are you afraid of?”

He blinked at me. “Of hurting Frankie,” he said, then turned his back. He trembled and I wanted to reach out to him, but something kept me still. It was weeks before I allowed myself to take a sleeping pill again. Nights, I wandered the house, alert for noise. When I was forced to lay down, I lay in Frankie's bed instead of my own, and held him until I was lulled to sleep by the tide of his warm breath.

 

IT RAINED ALL DAY AFTER
we arrived home from the Dry Tortugas. I dozed on the sectional sofa in the
Lullaby
's salon, then woke to find Graham and Frankie sitting at the banquette. Graham had one leg crossed over the other—he wore his shirt tucked into his belted pants, and shoes laced up, even inside. Frankie sat on his knees in robot underwear and a T-shirt, a pair of blunt kid scissors in one hand. He leaned far over the table, looking as if he might tumble into his father's lap. Graham was cutting even strips from cardstock, then folding each into a shape. Littering the table were pieces of Graham's work: little boxes with folding lids, cranes with pointed beaks, accordions of various sizes.

Frankie looked away from Graham long enough to squeeze one of the accordions between two fingers, then let it go. It soared over the table and landed on the floor.