What the Waves Know (4 page)

“What is it like to never speak?”

It may sound strange, but I was thrown by the question. Nobody had ever had the balls to ask me that before, and the look on his face said he really wanted to know.

Even if I had agreed to answer the question for him, I could not. You don't really know what it's like until you are six years old on Santa's lap at JCPenney's and all you ever wanted was a cotton-candy-pink dollhouse with green shutters, but you have no words to ask, so you get another stupid paint by numbers. Seven years old and shaken awake by a nightmare you are left holding in your heart because you have no voice to give it wings. Eight years old and folded neatly in your Sunday best, unable to save your soul by confessing that you chased your father straight out of existence. Nine years old and pelted with snowballs by strangers screaming, “Silent Sam,” until you are sure you have breathed your last because you cannot yell for help. Ten years old when a girl tells the whole world you were born without a tongue and with no way to call her a bitch. Eleven years old and you know every single chapter of
Treasure Island,
but can't talk about it with anyone. Twelve years old when the cutest boy in the world says “hi” at the ice cream shop, but you can't answer, so he walks away. Thirteen years old and given a child's menu because you can't explain you're a grown-up now.

Then, three weeks before your fourteenth birthday, you look down at the bright red slash on your clean white panties unable to tell anyone, and even if you could speak, it doesn't matter because there is nobody to tell anyway. Only then does the situation
really
start to take shape in a way Dr. Boni would never understand.

To exist without a voice is to forever live in your weakest form. You are forced to boil a universe of feelings, fears, and dreams down to a half-inch margin in a tiny flip-top notebook.

Quiet
, I scribbled, which was an outright lie because when you don't speak you are stuck inside yourself with a gazillion unspoken thoughts clamoring inside their cage rattling to be freed. You can hear a duck crinkle to the grass across four fields during hunting season, hear your mother sigh a thousand dead dreams two rooms away.

Dr. Boni looked deflated.

The monologues commenced each Wednesday at four o'clock, when Dr. Boni pinched the crease of his trousers between his fingers, hiking them over two twiggy ankles, and sat down. The session ended when he punched his arm clear of his jacket cuff to glance at his watch. He would ask me questions I hadn't one spit of an inkling
how to answer:
Why won't you speak? What are you afraid of? What did your mother do to make you so angry with her?

Nothing
, I scribbled. Out the window, a pear tree bowled over in the wind. For a full minute, I watched to see if it would snap in two, trying to sort out how anything fragile survives under the weight of the world.

At first I refused to tell him anything. I'd just sit in the chair and doodle while he asked questions. Sometimes he just talked. Then I started writing him things I knew he couldn't tell my mother just to see if it would drive him crazy holding on to my secrets for me, or if he'd tell her when I was out of the room. I told him that I snuck my mother's cigarettes every now and then and that Libby and I had tried drinking once. I even told him that sometimes I snuck out after my mother fell asleep and slipped down to the docks to watch the moon dance in the ocean.

I knew the rules and my mother had agreed to them: he would not disclose anything that did not put my life in danger or hurt anyone else. Anything else was fair game. To his credit, he never did tell and after a while he kind of grew on me because of it. Once, he asked me why I felt I couldn't tell my mother my secrets, what was I afraid would happen? I grabbed a piece of paper from his desk and gave him an honest answer.

They would lose their magic.

The questions continued for six months until on my final visit it was laid clear there would be no going forward without first going back.

“Listen, you're paying for my professional opinion, so here it is.”

I was spinning myself dizzy in Dr. Boni's desk chair—which let out a high-pitched squeal on every turn while he spoke with my mother—staring at a fly somebody had seen fit to smash, but not remove, from the ceiling fan.

“Izabella is not trying to hurt herself by doing this, and she certainly isn't trying to hurt you.”

The chair spun faster, squealed louder.

“She's trying to protect herself the only way she knows how. She has blocked everything about the incident with her father out of her conscious mind: the police, the night, all of it.”

Faster, faster, faster. Louder, louder, louder
.
.
.
until I thought I might throw up right there from spinning his words away. Vaguely, I felt his eyes flick in my direction, heard him pause, and veer away from the details of that night.

“She has shut the door on the whole affair so tightly,” he continued cautiously, “her voice is caught on the other side. She's scared—scared of what she'll find if she opens it. Ultimately, the only way to get beyond a fear that overpowering is to show her the monsters in the closet are not going to destroy her. She has to stand face-to-face with that day and survive the moment.”

“You want me to take her back?” A tinge of panic laced my mother's question.

“That's my recommendation.”

“I can't.”

“You can't protect her from her own memory.”

“What if . . .” She glanced at me and let the question die in the air.

“She is not like her father.” Dr. Boni looked squarely at my mother. “It isn't the same thing. This is not,” he paused, glancing my way, “organic in nature.”

I had no idea what the statement meant, unless he was implying I was free of pesticides, but my stomach knotted into a ball just the same. Besides, I
was
like my father, just like him. I had his dimples, and his nose, and his freckles. I danced with the moon and understood the tides, and even if I could not hear the Nikommo, I knew that they were real.

My mother stared at him quietly for a drawn-out moment then grabbed her bag and held the door for me before following me out to the parking lot.

“Iz.” My mother shook her head, marching over to the car. “I swear to God you are determined to find my last breaking point.”

My mother's last
breaking point arrived on the morning of October 3, 1974. All worn out with doctors and tests, she decided Dr. Boni was right: my voice was not a thing gone, but missing. So, on my fourteenth birthday, we set sail to find it. She never said this was the case, exactly, but I could read the truth in the deep weariness casting webs of wrinkles around her eyes.

The morning arrived not to the mountain of brightly beribboned gifts every girl wishes for, but to three mismatched steamer trunks propped beside our front door and my mother's rear end peeping into the room over a small crate. Halfway down the stairs, a small whimper caused me to stop and try to make sense of the scene while my mother wriggled herself free.

“Happy birthday, Iz!” Lifting a handful of wrinkles, she popped the small animal into the crook of my elbow. “He's a shar-pei.”

The puppy studied the room with watery bronze eyes, laying one tiny paw flatly against my jaw as if searching for some piece of familiarity, a paper-strewn corner, a brother or sister to nip his tail, the warm teat of his mother. A small shiver moved over the animal's body, causing my fingers to quiver right along with him, and I realized at the same moment he did that he was alone. Some small corner of the fabric of me snagged, threatening to unravel. With another whine, the puppy snuggled into me, tucking his nose under the fold of my robe and licking my wrist.

“He's yours.”

Squiggling my pinky between the puppy's ribs and my neck, I rubbed his soft fur as he chewed my finger softly then sucked at it, the shiver subsiding. A moment later, the quiet sniffing deepened and the puppy's head tottered into my curls with a sleepy weight tumbling right into an empty hole inside of me. In one flat half second, I knew I
would never let him go, never let him be scared or alone again.

I rubbed the puppy's ear, eyeing the trunks at the front door.

“I thought we'd name him Luke. You know, like in the Bible. I always liked that name. It would have been yours if you'd been a boy. We can bring him with us.”

My hand froze halfway down the soft spine, and she must have noticed because she turned abruptly toward the kitchen to answer the ringing phone, which she'd been ignoring for a solid minute. I gazed down at the puppy trying to fish the Gospel of Luke from a million daydreams during Sunday school. All I could recall was the part about Jesus's resurrection, and I realized that my mother wasn't just searching for my voice. She was trying to breathe life back into everything that had withered around us. “It's going to be okay, Iz. You'll see.”

She didn't say where we were going. She didn't have to. Since there seemed to be no going forward, we were going back. Back to the spot where my voice had fallen against the night and shattered into silence eight years earlier, to the moment my father disappeared.

The ferry's hull knocked against the landing like a bloated white whale, thudding in time to the argument my mother was having with the ticket agent.
One, two, three, four
. . . , I ticked silently, as though the same laws of nature choreographing thunder and lightning could rule over a knocking ferry.

A large poster on the side of the boat read: P
ARDON
A
MERICA!
N
IX
N
IXON
Making clear the fact that whoever owned the ferry, like most of the country, was still chewing sour grapes over the Watergate scandal.

Tracing the shoreline to the tip of the cove, I studied the jagged granite face of Anawan Cliffs steepling into the sky. I had been there a hundred times with my father, but I wasn't allowed to tell because the drop-off plummeted three hundred feet into a sea dappled with boulders of smoky quartz and there were no railings to keep you on top. The very type of place my mother would not
have allowed me to go. The cliffs were just as famous for the number of miles a person could see from their crests as the number of people who had tossed themselves off them. My father and I had climbed the trail up to the rocky crest a dozen times together. The sky was so clear the last time we went you could see the pointy peaks of the Newport Bridge poke straight into the clouds. I remembered thinking it looked like a giant skewer piercing a marshmallow.

“Over there, Be.
Can you see it?” My father had lifted me onto his shoulders like he was tossing a scarf around his neck. “Don't be afraid. Nothing is going to happen. Just don't let go.”
Don't let go
. Weaving my fingers into his hair, I'd clenched my fists while he crept up to the ledge until his toes were close enough that pebbles had skidded down the edge and into the waves below, sending three tuxedoed gulls into flight. “Look at that.”

The gulls stretched their wings until they were paper airplanes sailing gracefully over the rocks. My father watched them wistfully, his voice drifting a million miles away. “Someday we're going to fly straight into the clouds like that.”

I can't say where his mind was then, only that it had been elsewhere, because that was when I first came to realize I was afraid of heights. My stomach lurched, spinning my head into a somersault and setting my body tee
tering as I tilted sideways. The jerking must have snapped him to, because he grabbed my wrist as I slid down his shoulder, stepping sideways so that I swung over the ledge and back onto the cliff with a screech.

“You flew!” My father laughed, kneeling down to brush the bangs from my brow. Then his laughter died and he looked me deep in the eyes. “What did it feel like? Was it amazing?”

How do you answer a question like that?
It felt like a father tossing his child to the rocks to be smashed into a million bits. It felt like tumbling to my death.

“Was it?”

The memory was so clear I could almost hear his voice on the wind and I found myself nodding.

“Ma'am.” The woman
at the ticket counter's voice jolted me back to the present. “Like I said, I got room for you and your girl. I can even squeeze in the mutt, but the carport's full.” Wild mahogany curls spilled out of a loose pile pinned to the crown of her head with a broken pencil. Folding her arms onto the counter, she leaned in toward my mother. The milky porcelain of her skin was slapped pink at the cheeks from too much sun.

Luke gave a little whine. I bent low, popping the crate open and snuggling him close.

The muscles along my mother's neck visibly tensed, drawing her shoulders into an involuntary shrug as she
dug the wallet from her bag. “Here, Iz, hold this.” She shoved the purse in my direction. “He isn't a mutt; he's a purebred shar-pei puppy.”

Luke licked his nose, stretched, and curled into a mound of toffee-colored folds as a hollow whistle rolled forth from the boat's stern.

“What I see,” the woman leveled steely blue eyes at my mother, aimed, “is that some smart Sally went and got you to give your purse for hauling away an old mass of wrinkles and called it a dog.” And fired. “And if you would like me to haul
your
wrinkled old mass out to the island tonight, it'll be twenty-two dollars for the lot a' ya, minus the auto, 'cause there's no room.”

Bull's-eye.

I bit the stiff collar of my jacket so my mother wouldn't see the grin spreading over my lips, but not before the woman behind the counter saw it and tilted her head inquisitively.

“But, if you'd like to write your name and number on this tag and leave the keys, Telly over there would be happy to deliver it to you sometime next week, or the week after.” The woman nodded at a too-thin man who might have passed for twenty-five years old as easily as seventy-five. The remnant of a single tattoo, which could have been either a naked lady or a parrot with a broken wing, had faded to a purple splodge on his left arm. Telly gave my mother a how-do nod, letting flash a golden stud where a front tooth belonged.

The woman dropped me a quick wink, and in that instant I knew two things for sure: my mother's shiny silver BMW was not getting on that boat, and this stranger was somebody I could quickly grow to love.

“Next week! Next week?”

“Or the week after.”

“You expect me to just leave it here until whenever? What if I pay more?”

“Miss, I don't expect anything from anybody. But I have a boat full of people waiting to leave, and the Yemaya Festival is coming up. My carport's crammed tighter than a nest of rats until it's over. I don't give two hoots about your money or your dog or your uppity attitude. Unless you're using any of it to build me a bigger carport you're out of luck, because there isn't any more room. So you'd better make up your mind where you fancy sleeping tonight, here in Suttersville or across the sound on Tillings.”

I slid my hand into the compartment my mother had unzipped in her bag and slipped three cigarettes free before tucking them into my own bag. It wasn't true that we were wealthy. My mother had bought the car used when my father's Jeep finally refused to be coaxed back to life with money from my father's pension and insurance, which the university had released when it became clear he wasn't coming back. The difference it made was not one of shifting from glass to crystal but from recycled Dixie cups to the variety that could withstand a dishwasher without dissolving.

It was true, though, that in the years since my father went missing my mother had become guarded and cool in a way that gave her an uppity air. My father's disappearance had been an all-you-can-eat buffet for the rumor mills around town and I guess it was just easier to freeze the world out than be burned each time you trusted another person. There was a lot about my mother that confounded me, but that was a thing I understood.

“What's your name?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your name. You do have one, don't you?”

“Remy. Remy O'Malley. Well, technically Mandolin, but I go by O'Malley.”

“Remy.” The name escaped my mother's lips in the form of a whisper that seemed aimed at nobody and the color seemed to wash from her face. Studying the lines of the woman's face like they might give up some secret about her, she cleared her throat then lowered her eyes down to the counter. “Fine. Ms. Mandolin.”

“Remy.”

“Remy.” My mother's jaw tightened, forcing the name into the air in a way that appeared to hurt. Giving the Anawan Cliffs one last glance, I gazed up at my mother, who seemed suddenly discombobulated, nervous almost, in the company of this woman. “If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to speak to your boss.”

“Suit yourself. Telly! This nice lady would like a word.” Remy Mandolin tossed her head back with a deep smoky
laugh and flipped the sign in the window to
CLOSED
.
I wondered if she would really leave us standing there on the dock with a tattooed gold-toothed pirate or mass murderer—it was hard to tell. My mother glanced between the two of them before coming to her senses, or at least admitting defeat.

“Arrrgh! Fine, here!” The keys to the BMW tinkled onto the counter and my mother scribbled the information onto the tag, giving it a nudge toward the window with her finger. “First thing next week,” my mother huffed, grappling with the last trunk and Luke's crate.

“Or the week after,” Remy quipped, scooping up the keys and sliding the Plexiglas closed before my mother could reply. On the other side of the window, she hung the keys on a little brass hook, pausing to read the tag. I couldn't help but notice her face twist up a bit as she mouthed the name, or the way she glanced back at my mother with a contemplative expression while my mother kicked the trunk, mumbling something about a royal pain in her ass, and stuffed the tickets in her back pocket.

“At least we're rid of her,” she grumbled.

Staring at the sea, I could not stop the butterflies fluttering in my stomach. Here is the thing about an island . . . there is no escape; you are stuck with whatever is there. At least on the mainland running away was an option, if only I could figure out which direction to point my legs.

“Okay, got everything?” My mother sighed, looking down at me.

I patted my jacket pocket seeking the crusty rectangle of a map Grandma Jo had given me three years earlier, and then slid my right hand down to the pocket of my jeans, running it over the hard edges of the Yemaya Stone from Potter's Creek. It was the one thing left on this earth that connected me to my father, and although I was too old to believe he could hear me if I wished into a dead piece of amber, I still tried. Just in case. I wanted him to know I hadn't forgotten him, that I was still looking even if everyone else had given up. I didn't want him to forget me.

I nodded, snuggling Luke back into his crate for the trip.

The
Mirabel
, a reincarnated fishing rig serving its second life as a passenger ferry, teeter-tottered over the waves, dragging my stomach along with it. In my experience, there are three types of boats: boats big enough to barrel gracefully through the waves, boats small enough to zip roller-coaster fashion over them, and every vomitous size in between. The
Mirabel
fell woozily into the final category, climbing each swell lazily before sledding slowly down the opposite bank of the swell until my breakfast washed rhythmically over the back of my throat. Even Luke had resigned himself to the back of his crate amid a banter of whimpering.

“Do you want your mittens, Iz?” My mother dug into her jacket pocket, pulling forth two bright red mittens. “You look cold. Why don't you let go of the bar; the metal's going to turn your fingers raw with frostbite.”

I shook my head in small calculated wags, not wishing
to give the
Mirabel
any further cause to rock. My knuckles were not white from the cold but from clutching the handrail in an attempt to steady the boat, or at least my place on it. The cold would need to outwrestle my nausea to make me let go, and I was pretty sure that wasn't going to happen.

My mother tucked the little red mittens away again and pried free a rumpled pack of Merits. I was retching before the match even took.

“Iz?” Flicking the cigarette overboard, she pulled me upright, tucking my hair into my collar in time to save it from being caught in the splash of undigested pancakes left over from my birthday breakfast. “Here, I've got a soda in here somewhere.” She rifled through her handbag, digging loose a half-sipped Coca-Cola covered with loose tobacco and lint bits.

By the time she actually managed to unscrew the top, my vomiting spell had set off a chain reaction and Luke was now collapsed in a pool of regurgitated kibble, as well. My mother was handling the mess and the stench with clinical efficiency until a familiar voice sounded over her shoulder.

“Are you trying to see if that child can turn her intestines out onto the deck?” Remy sauntered up. “The only sound reason for feeding cola to a person with sea stomach is if you don't particularly like them.”

I have found it generally bad wisdom to share a thing like that before you have determined the nature of a rela
tionship so I clenched my jaw tight, now that the cat was out of the bag, half expecting my mother to shove the whole bottle down my gullet.

“The only thing worse is fried clams, which have the God-given power to knock you to your knees to pray for death. And don't stand her up; lay her flat so she moves with the boat.”

“Don't you have something to do?” Twisting three directions trying to steady me, my mother looked like a porcelain doll whose limbs some angry child had bent into broken and unnatural angles. “Eat some fried clams, maybe?” It was meant to be snotty, but my mother was too busy trying to keep us aboard to really pull it off.

The snowy skin pulled tight over her flushed cheeks as Remy Mandolin popped the top off a metal canister with a tinny snap. Her lack of fear, primarily of my mother, filled me with the urge to climb into her lap and stick my tongue out at the world. The only other person I knew who was completely unafraid of my mother was Grandma Jo. Everything about Remy Mandolin was bold, like the wild samba of the djembe drums my mother had taken me to see last year during a Brazilian festival in Mystic, Connecticut. I could almost see her bare feet stomping gypsy circles, a rainbow skirt twirling wildly to and fro at her ankles. Still, as much as I respected her, I wished she had not opened the tin so close to me, for the strong punchy scent of fresh ginger hit me full in the nostril, setting me on another retching spell.

“Here, this is what she needs.”

“Don't tell me what my daughter needs,” puffed my mother as she made a valiant attempt to keep me from flopping over the handrail. “Look what you did!”

Once I had emptied my stomach of its last crumb, Remy stuck a thread of fresh crystallized ginger into my mouth. “Chew.” My eyes must have widened to the size of horse chestnuts, because Remy laughed right out loud. “Chew.”