What the Waves Know (6 page)

That I wanted her gone was a lie. Once you have a
parent plunge off the planet, you live the rest of your days haunted by the knowledge that the one you have left could follow at any time and then you will be alone for the rest of your life. Life becomes a wrestling match between holding on tight so they won't leave, and shoving them away so your heart won't dry up like a dandelion and puff into the wind when they do. It isn't pretty and you won't find it in any poem, but it's the truth.

I glanced at Mr. O'Malley, who was now also standing back and tracing the sea witch's soft curves with his eyes. “This is Yemaya, the Great Mother.” With his toe, he nudged a stack of white sticks on the ground, sending them scattering apart. “Offerings. Fish bones and such. People come from all over to lay their dreams and secrets at her feet, hoping she can help them find whatever's missing—money, health, love. Those were probably from some sailor going out for a haul.” He pointed with the barrel of his pipe to where several alabaster bones had become caught up in the stained blue and white folds of Yemaya's skirt. “The festival starts in a week or so and ends with the Great Feast. The whole island turns out. Somethin' to see.”

When he turned quietly back to his paper, I looked up at Yemaya's brown face, studying it so intently I never felt my fingers creep up to touch her hand. Her eyes were haunting as they looked out over the ocean. It was as though she, too, were searching for a thing lost. I could not help wondering what it was.

I was already in the backseat of the taxi sketching the wooden statue on the inside cover of my notepad when I saw Remy locate my mother at the ramp, taking Luke's crate from her hand and setting it on the wooden planks. I cannot say how long they were talking out there, or about what. But it was long enough for my mother's face to grow pale and her mouth to draw into a surprised little O. So I figured Remy had just told her about the three of us being neighbors. Up front, Mr. O'Malley flipped his pipe end over end with his fingers, studying my mother with interest, until they turned for the taxi and he unfolded himself to open the trunk for our bags.

“Mr. O'Malley.” All the bark had gone from my mother's voice as she took his hand briefly.

“Thomas,” he corrected, taking her gently in his arms, as if he worried he might break her. He gave her a warm hug without letting go of her hand. “It's been a long time.”
I let my eyes ping up from my sketch long enough to trace the hint of sadness in his eyes, wondering what he meant by that. “Welcome back.”

“It has.” My mother nodded, patting his hand. “Too long. How have you been?” A gentleness moved over her tone in a way I hadn't heard in a very long time, and I believed she really wanted to know.

“Disobedient. Ornery. A generalized pain in the ass,” Remy interjected, dodging Mr. O'Malley's free hand when it shot out to rumple her hair.

What felt like an awkward hour passed before Mr. O'Malley dropped my mother's hand. Both of them stood motionless for a moment, and I couldn't help but wonder at the familiarity that seemed to pass between them. Remy's back was turned to the cab, but I could make out her hand touching Mr. O'Malley's right shoulder briefly before she dropped down to pick up Luke's crate.

“I'll ride with you,” Remy interjected, tossing a bag in the truck. “I've got too much to get done for the festival to sit around waiting for this one to wander back around for me in three hours.” She gave Mr. O'Malley a pointed glance. “You can drop me at home after we get these folks unloaded.”

“Have it your way.” Mr. O'Malley grinned. “But paying passengers sit up front.” He tossed my mother a wink, swinging the passenger door open for her to slip in.

“Fine by me.” Remy slapped the trunk shut. “The smell of that hell pipe gives me a headache anyway.”

We drove through
the village of Tillings quietly, Mr. O'Malley's taxi bumping along over the cobblestones. Outside the car, a frenzy of activity seemed to be exploding along the streets and inside the shops, which were preparing for the festival. Two men curled over a walkway popping cobbles from their bracings and hammering new ones in their place. A tall heavyset woman balanced on a ladder as she stitched up the corner of an awning in front of a sweets shop. Four people with rags and small tins polished the brass trappings of a small white church while the pastor plopped clumps of pink mums along the brick walk. The sign read:

T
HE
B
LESSING OF
Y
EMAYA

S
UN.
10:00 AM
.
V
ISITORS
W
ELCOME.

T
HE
G
REAT
M
OTHER'S
C
HILDREN'S
B
LESSING

TO FOLLOW AT
11:00 AM
.

“Most summer vacationers leave after Labor Day,” Remy said, eyeing the bustling street. “Then we all go a little crazy preparing for the crowd that comes over for the festival. After the Great Feast is over, Tillings will be dead as a beached whale until next Memorial Day.”

I didn't know if I would be there to see that. My mother hadn't said how long we were staying, but I had the feeling that my voice wasn't the only reason we were on the island. Over the last few years, my mother had worked primarily from home as a consultant for estate liquida
tors assessing fine art and pricing it for auction. At least, that was what she did when she wasn't busy scribbling down assignments for me from the room in the back of our house, which she had designated as a home classroom. I was the only kid I knew who had to live with their teacher, and while every kid in the universe got to go out and play for recess, I got to go and make my bed. Over the last three weeks, my mother had packed up her office to work from Tillings and every last pencil from my home-school kit was in my trunk. If she knew how long she intended us to be gone, she didn't say. It wasn't like there was really anything to leave behind, or anyone who would miss us.

Other than Grandma Jo, my mother had frozen the world out so thoroughly there were times she didn't even open the door for the UPS man. A month earlier, I had found her sitting on the living room floor with a bottle of Kendall Jackson, crying in a sea of loose photographs like some sort of rogue planet trying to hold its universe in orbit. Or maybe it was a black hole and she was willing it to swallow her up—I can't be sure. But this is what I do know . . . sometimes the only place left to hide is in the shadows of your own mind. Mr. O'Malley wove up and down a labyrinth of streets dotted with people repairing pickets and toting rakes. Behind them, small children dragged yard bags and jumped in leaf piles before stuffing them full. Finally, the taxi headed out of town on a road skirting the ocean until only a few homes speckled
the fields. We drove past the jetties, where a small boy in rolled-up jeans hopped up and down splashing the water from a tidal pool with bare feet. A starfish dangled between his fingers, its tentacles so orange in the sunlight that it appeared rusted. The girl behind him scrunched her face up, trying to force a small shovel into the sand beside a clam hole, working it with such force she kicked the tin pail at her toes, toppling it onto its side. Their parents sat on the rocks along the dunes, laughing.

We drove for another five minutes before Mr. O'Malley flicked on his blinker and a small green arrow winked to the left. I had just remembered to add the drips of water cascading into pearls off Yemaya's arm when the taxi passed a sign marked K
NOCKBERRY
L
ANE
,
which turned out to be about a mile of crushed oyster shells sparkling like pink snow in the dying sun.

The tires of Mr. O'Malley's Thunderbird crunched past a tidy stone carriage house through whose doors I fully expected seven midget men to whistle their way into view. It was cinnamon-sugar warm; the sort of place where a chimney fills the yard with applewood smoke in the fall, and whose shallow knolls seemed to tremble with children giggling their way through a toboggan race. Autumn roses climbed the chimney bricks and spilled over the roof in huge cotton-candy tufts; wisteria tangled so thickly around the garden its vines had long ago wrestled the chicken wire to the ground. The whole scene shooed away formality in a way Grandma Jo would have adored.

“Sit back and relax.” Remy laughed. “That old hovel belongs to me. The Booth House is at the very end of Knockberry Lane.” Remy must have noticed the corners of my mouth change direction, because she gave my knee a quick squeeze, adding, “But I have high hopes that you'll visit. Lord knows I could make good use of two more hands bringing in the cabbages and carrots. If I don't get 'em harvested just as soon as they're ready the wildlife around here will have them for supper. That crazy old Goliath in the front seat has a history of putting out salt licks. Now every form of cotton-tailed rodent on the island lives in my back orchard. There used to be gardens all through here. My mother would save her potato shavings all winter long and at the first thaw, she'd be out seasoning the soil. Priming the pot, she used to call it.” Remy laughed again.

My mother jerked around in her seat, locking eyes with Remy, and for a long second not a peep came from anyone. I looked back and forth between them curiously.

“Anyway . . . ,” Remy finally said. “Well, they aren't so grand anymore, but the damn deer seem to like them just the same.”

There came a chortle from the driver's seat, followed by the muffled
chhh
of a match striking against Thomas O'Malley's jeans. He dragged the flame to the pipe bowl in slow motion and touched it to the ball of tobacco, setting Remy to shaking her head again, the thin red ringlets at her neck bobbing like miniature Slinkys.

“Go ahead, grill your damn lungs. But don't think I'm feeding those rabid mongrels you're so damn fond of when you drop over gasping for air,” she grumbled.

“My lungs are just fine. It's my ears that are aching.” He chuckled, smiling at her in the rearview mirror. The statement said “Go on and zip your lips,” but the way Mr. O'Malley wrapped it all up sounded a lot more like “I love you, too.”

I glanced down at the journal in my lap. That was the problem with getting a phrase to sing the way you wanted it to. You could get the words all straight and neat between the lines, but the meaning was in the way they zigzagged toward a person when you gave them life. Mr. O'Malley and Remy tossed words into the space between them like a father tossing a child in the air and spinning around until both were laughing great big belly laughs. They could say, “You're a big old pain in my ass,” and know it really meant “You are the sparkle in my stars and the wind in my wings,” because each knew no matter how dizzy the universe got, the other would never let them hit the ground when it went off kilter.

The small stone inside my front pocket grew heavy, and my throat tightened. During the last eight years, I had rubbed its edges soft. In my back pocket, the corners of Grandma Jo's map poked into my hip and I wondered, not for the first time that day, where my father was, if his fingers missed the feel of my hair running through them.

For months after my father left, I slept in my parents'
bed with my mother on one side of me and Grandma Jo on the other, my face buried in my father's pillow. The fact of the matter is, I knew in the darkest crevices of my heart that he was gone, even if I didn't say so. In the middle of the night, I would wake with the cold fingers of that knowledge strangling me until every last memory of him was squeezed out of me, and the only way I could get them back was to bury my nose in the pillow, searching for the smell of him.

Inking in the final pearl, I held the sketch of Yemaya out in front of me, looking at it. Sea witches were supposed to be old hags, ugly creatures with snakes for hair who had been banished to darkness. But Yemaya was not. The sketch was clumsy, but even in its awkward state you could see the love in her eyes, the way she longed to let the arms of the ocean wrap her up in them. I knew precisely how she felt.

“What've you got there?” Remy's eyes rested on the picture in my hand. “Hey, that's not half bad. Can you make me one like that?”

Tearing the page from my notebook, I handed it to her.

“You know how she came to be our matron witch?” Remy tilted the sketch, studying it while she spoke.

I shook my head, closing the pad.

“The British were the first to arrive on Tillings. But settling an island is a whole lot of work, and let's be honest, have you ever known a Brit who liked getting dirt under their fingernails? So they brought slaves from Africa to
do it for them, and those slaves brought Yemaya. Turns out, she liked it here, and to this very day she protects the island and everyone on it. Anyone who doubted the fact came to believe it was so in 1920, when Hurricane Gilbert leveled every one of these barrier islands then set its sights on Tillings. It was barreling right for it, and then stopped—just stopped—four miles out, did a forty-five-degree turn and went right back out to sea without knocking a single branch off one tree. Old-timers, like the one up there,” she waved toward Mr. O'Malley, “say Gilbert came close enough to get a good look at Yemaya's eyes and thought better of it.

“Then there was Captain Booth, who built this property. He swore until his dying day he'd been rescued from the sea by her in the spring of 1936, when his ship went down on the ledge rock out there.” She pointed vaguely toward the ocean beyond the cliffs. “Legend says when he cast his line, Captain Booth pulled in the biggest marlin anyone here had ever seen. He drew the harpoon back with two hands, ready to put it out of its misery. But when he looked in that fish's eye he couldn't kill it, claimed God's hand reached down and stopped him in his tracks a split second before he ripped through the fish's heart. I know it sounds crazy. . . .”

Not to me
, I thought. The memory of the dead salmon bobbing pathetically onto its side in Potter's Creek drifted back to me.

“Anyway, he cut the line just before his skiff ran against
the reef, ripping it in two. Every single man on deck drowned. But not Captain Booth; they found him two days later half-conscious on the beach mumbling about a marlin who'd taken the shape of a beautiful woman and carried him home. The islanders say she fell in love with him when he spared her and couldn't bear to see him drown. They say she watched over him for the rest of his life, that you can still see her pacing the cliffs up here on stormy nights watching for him to come home.” I squinted out the window toward the cliffs of Knockberry Ridge with a sting in my chest.

For an instant, the purple nose of the taxi headed straight for the ocean, looking as though it might plummet right off the edge of the cliff. Then twenty yards before reaching it, the car rounded a bend where a driveway veered to the right.

“You see there?” Remy was poking her finger toward the cliff where a proud pointy-roofed Cape sprouted right up from the hill. Small white bricks littered the lawn on all sides. “That house's where Mr. Audubon up front resides. Do you see those white blobs scattered all over his lawn? Salt licks! Brunch for all the deer and fox and rabbits on the island; and I am here to tell you every last creature on this island has moved into our backyard. When they come cart me away to the hospital on a stretcher paralyzed with Lyme disease, you be sure and tell them to send the bill to Mr. Thomas O'Malley, the old fool on Knockberry Ridge!”