The Seas (8 page)

“No.”

“Well then I suggest you and your vehicle turn around and head back to town. We have got a highly flammable situation here.”

Jude says to me, “I see how it is. We can’t leave town.”

“This highway is going to be closed for hours. I suggest you head back to town,” the policeman says very slowly.

Once I was pulled over by another police officer. The only thing I could think to tell him after he gave me a ticket was that he must have been born in the Sucksville County Hospital. The problem I have with authority isn’t because I’m particularly wild, but the idea of supervision. I know the way I see the world is more super than a policeman who charges me $55 for a U-turn in a dead intersection. If they asked him what he saw he’d say, “a car, a light, a solid line.” That’s not super vision. But ask me what I saw. From here he looks like, Head. Brick. Head brick. Headbrick headbrickheadbrick.

“You hear me?” the policeman says. “Back to town.” Jude doesn’t answer but turns his truck around. We head back to town, defeated, silent, and scared.

Even though Jude is much older than I am he still seems just right. I try to convince him of the fit by saying, “See that old man? He eats dinner alone at Friendly’s almost every night,” or, “You’re an Aquarius too? All this time. You’re an Aquarius too? Jude, I’m Aquarius. I never knew,” or when he traces a path of blue blood just below the skin on my face I say, “I have got more just like that one. I’m nineteen,” I tell him and I mean I’m old enough. “I’m nineteen,” I tell him and he groans.

There is a woman in town who once was so in love with Donny Osmond that she became a Mormon to be like him. Now that she is in her thirties she is still a Mormon and Donny Osmond hasn’t cut a popular album in years.

This woman’s story makes me feel rot in all things I touch. I try to distract myself from thinking of Jude because I don’t want to end up like her. I read books or instruction manuals or cereal boxes all day. I take baths to wash him off me, but then eventually I do end up thinking of him and I’ll try to finger that Beatles song on my mother’s piano so that I can sing his name underneath my breath while I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to make it taste like metal type that would spell his name.

I spend most of my time here waiting. Waiting to grow up. Waiting for my father to return. Waiting for Jude. Waiting for something big to happen. I wait in the water of my bathtub. I lie curled on one side under the water. In elementary school a teacher told me our bodies are ninety-five percent water. I don’t see how this could be true. Still I’m keen to believe him. Under the water I open my eyes. Because of the ocean we don’t have wells. All the ground water here is salty. We have town water that they add chlorine to so no one gets sick. The chlorine burns my eyes and some days my bath smells like a swimming pool.

In the bath, once the water is in my ears, ninety-five percent water becomes ninety-six percent I swallow a gulp of bath water, ninety-eight percent. That is as close as I get. I sit up with my knees bent and wait for the water to still. The water breaks my shins. I do have shins. I do have legs. To be one hundred percent water I would have to get my entire body under the surface and then some. I am small but I am going to need more water.

I move in the tub and the water begins to lap from side to side making a ruckus. Just then I hear a floorboard creak outside the bathroom door and my heart jumps up into my mouth and tastes like a bad word. I stand bolt upright in the bathwater, prepared to defend myself. I think of the gray man from the attic. I think of a bunch of bounty hunters as a swarm of black flies just outside the door. I strain to hear what is moving in the hallway but I have disturbed the water by standing. It is making a splashing noise, giving away my location to whatever spooky thing is creeping around outside the bathroom door. A floorboard creaks again, long and low, as if in pain. I breathe heavily. My blood rushes away from my lungs and flows instead to my ears that are trying so hard to hear the bad thing in the hallway that has come to get me.

“Hey,” the bad thing says outside the door. I suck in my breath. “Hi. It’s Jude.”

I don’t answer him. I am afraid he will walk in and I am standing naked in two feet of water. Plus I left some pee unflushed in the toilet. He opens the door but does not step inside yet. I cover my stomach with my hands and arms. I cover where I am the bluest. I hear him breathe and he walks in. He doesn’t move. He stands a bit frozen and stares like a bridge between his eyes and my body. Eventually the bathwater calms down. I tuck my chin to my chest. “What are you looking at?” I ask him. Jude sees but doesn’t answer. “Get out,” I say but he doesn’t move. I shut my eyes. I feel like my skin has never seen the light of day. Jude imagines that without moving. Like he’s the first. I lift my head. I don’t want to be the Mormon girl in love with Donny Osmond. I listen to him breathe and I stare at the oldness of his hands. He watches me until the air between us feels as thick as electricity right at the transformer.

He starts to tell me a story while he stares at me. He has a seat without looking away. “There was a town north of the Kuwaiti border. It was tiny. We only knew it by number coordinates, not by name,” Jude says. He rubs his hands across his thighs. I imagine I am between them. “They didn’t tell us the name on purpose because bad things had happened there, things that broke the rules of war. Its coordinates were on a list, an Army list of words we were never supposed to say, so that if we ever encountered someone from the media and we didn’t know they were with the media we wouldn’t slip and mention, ‘fear,’ or, ‘intestines,’ or, ‘bodies hung out to dry like laundry on a clothesline,’ or the name of that town, or any other phrase that was on the official list of things we weren’t supposed to say.” Jude looks at me. “My palms are getting wet,” he says and looks down at them. “I feel like your name was on that list. Like you are off limits. Like if I say your name or if I touch you, I’d get court-martialed, found guilty, and executed.”

I don’t say anything.

He stares and stares. “Sorry,” he says and starts to back out the door. “I thought there was something wrong with you,” he says. “Your mother told me you had been in the water forever.”

I stand naked, looking at Jude, concentrating on becoming one hundred percent water so that I could slip down the drain and out to sea or at least I could slip down Jude’s wrong pipe and fill his lungs, lovingly washing away every breath he takes.

I feel a bit funny after Jude has left, like I forgot to trick him in some way that I was supposed to know but had forgotten or had never learned because I’m not from here. Instead I felt like I had been tricked. Again. And an old defense from grade school welled up in me. I went up to our roof. I hadn’t been there in awhile. Not since the day four boys in my tenth grade class covered the hair on my head with duct tape. They told me it was a scientific experiment so I let them do it.

When I was young I retreated here rather often because from the peak of the roof I would will myself to imagine the entire town getting flooded and filled as the icecaps melted, as the ocean crept higher and higher. From my roof I thought I’d watch those boys sputter and drown. It wasn’t an experiment. I thought if they tried to grab hold of my roof while the water was rising I would walk over to the rain gutter edge and squish their pale fingers underneath my tennis shoe, though usually in my imagining I had on my father’s steel-toed work boots because they were more effective at finger crushing.

The dormer window out to the roof is already open so I swing one leg through and the rest of my body follows. My mother is already sitting on the roof. “Mama,” I say very quietly at first, scared to startle her when we’re up so high.

“Hi,” she says while I scramble up the incline to where she is seated. A few old houses in town have widow’s walks—the small square rooms or flat platforms built into a roof so that women left behind by fishermen husbands could look out to see if their men’s ships were ever going to come in. We don’t have a widow’s walk, so my mother sometimes just sits on the roof with binoculars around her neck. She acts as if she’s just looking at the ocean, the birds, or the waves but I know she is looking for my father. From here we can see just about everything, all the houses in town and past them the ocean straight out to the horizon line.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Just reading.” She shows me the book. “It’s about a mermaid. I have been looking for it. I wanted to give it to you. But your grandfather had it filed in the Gs, for ‘German author’ he said. That’s why I couldn’t find it.”

“What happens?” I ask.

“It’s not good,” she says. “Her name is Undine. Your grandfather says the word is Teutonic and means a female from the water. Undines like humans. They are soulless unless they marry a mortal.”

I smile a bit, as if I were saying I told you so.

“Why are you smiling?” she asks and turns to me. “Why would you want to be soulless? It’s a sad story. This Undine,” she says and hold up the book, “she falls in love with a knight named Huldbrand and Huldbrand loves Undine too, but he also loves her stepsister, Bertalda, a mortal. So Undine’s uncle, he’s a river spirit, is disgraced. He takes Undine back down under the water and tells her she must kill Huldbrand or else he will.”

“What does she do?” I ask.

My mother looks at me and pulls her shoulders back, pulling away from me to gauge my reaction. “Undine kills him.”

“Oh,” I say and look away while she stares. She is making me nervous and so the very tips of my lips curve microscopically into a smile. But because she is my mother, she sees it, the microscopic smile.

“Why would you want to be anything like that?” she asks me. “You’re nineteen. Why would you want to hitch yourself to some sinking ship like Jude? I mean Jude’s nice but you’re young. You should travel. You should move to New York City. See the world. Meet people,” she says and turns away to look out towards the ocean.

I don’t really like people, I think. That’s why.

Just then her expression grows wide and she raises her binoculars to her eyes. “What’s that?” she says, standing up, excited and pointing to a spot where the waves break. There is something floating there, some sort of mass—trash or a rain slicker or maybe just a seal. I suppose it could look like a man, but not if you looked at it for too long.

“It’s a log, Mom. Or a trash bag.”

“Are you sure?”

I nod yes. “Yeah, Mom.”

“Because for a second,” she says and breaks the thought off there.

“For a second you thought it was Dad?” I ask and she looks at me with a twisted mouth. Her mouth is twisted from having told me to do one thing while she always does the exact opposite. “You should move to New York City,” I tell her and she nods slowly and very slightly without looking away from whatever it is floating in the sea foam.

Jude has a headache so I tell him to lie down. I tell him I’ll rub his head. We are at his house. I rub the crown of his head and his temples for him. I am nervous and so I fear I am doing a bad job, that he won’t like it but after a few moments I feel him relax his neck and jaw and I am glad.

Sitting this way his neck is very close to me and his blood is only millimeters away from that. Having Jude’s blood this close makes me think of wrought iron in taste and texture, like the bumpy veins of a man or a horse, and it’s so rare that anything on land will make a warm bit of difference to me, sunk as I am. I’d take Jude’s neck down under the water and for few minutes it would still be red and hot as a horseshoe in heat.

He closes his eyes and I’d like to wrap my arms around him. I’d like to push the hair from his face and trace the lines of his nose. I’d like to hold my finger below his nostrils for a long time until it is damp from his exhalations. Then I’d put the finger in my mouth and drink Jude’s breath. It probably would taste like alcohol but I forgive him for that. There is little else to do here besides get drunk and it seems to make what is small, us, part of something that is drowned and large, something like the bottom of the sea, something like outer space. Drinking helps us continue living in remote places because, thankfully, here there is no one to tell us just how swallowed we are.

“I like you,” Jude says. He opens his eyes. He has small drops of sweat bulbing on his brow.

“I like you,” I say and more than anything I do. Jude would never make me think of a timetable or a bank account or a good job, whatever the fuck that means. He’d never make me think of any of the ugly things on dry land. Despite all that is not right with Jude, nothing I do with him is ever held up to the light for judgment. He never thinks I am odd or weird or poor or perverted or wrong. He’d never say, “You’re a real nut job.” I’d sit in his dirty laundry for days and he would understand. He would even bring me a cup of soup while I sat.

I want to tell Jude what it was like when he went to the war, what it was like to be waiting at home for him and wondering whether or not he would be killed. But I never do. I don’t want it to be a competition about which of us suffered more, so I never tell him that when he was in the war I tried to wrap my arms around the dresser in my bedroom. My cheek was doughy from sleeping where I’d been crying and the dresser’s corner left a red imprint. “Kiss me,” I said and kicked its leg when it didn’t. The varnish smelled sticky and old like Worcestershire sauce. I stuck out my tongue to taste it, but became scared that the emptiness of the dresser would suck me into its vacuum so I let go.

Or that when Jude was in the war I opened up the hole in my chest. I stored some new things there. There was plenty of room. Things like nail clippers, thread, addresses. Those things easy to lose that drive you mad to find. But every time I went to find them, they’d be gone.

When Jude was in the war I liked to imagine how difficult it was to get my letters past the war censors with their big black markers. I doubt that there are actually censors anymore, but I’d imagine them all the same. Sometimes I thought that what I had written to him would arrive looking like this: