Sea Creatures (14 page)

I watched them without moving or making any sound. Each piece Graham finished, he handed to Frankie, who inspected it from every angle. Then Frankie placed the treasure among the others, and looked eagerly to Graham to make another. Whether Graham gleaned any pleasure from impressing his watchful, adoring son, I couldn't tell. After some time, Graham glanced toward the sofa, and his eyes found mine—I would have closed them and pretended to sleep, but I was too late—and I had a vision of us all sitting together, marveling over Graham's creations. I saw how it might have been, him showing off and the two of us egging him on.

Instead, Graham took my wakefulness as a cue to excuse himself. He stood, stretched, and walked into the main berth. Frankie sat back on his feet, opening and closing the lids of each little box, sending the accordions springing across the table. Maybe a different child, a child with speech, would have said, “Sit down? Play with me?” But not my son.

I'd seen Graham's origami skills before. On our fourth date, in an Italian restaurant in Wrigleyville, Graham made a tiny collared shirt from a dollar bill. I'm sure the look on my face as I'd watched his bony fingers work had been similar to Frankie's. Graham had blushed as he passed the object into my hands. But for reasons I never understood, Graham had made the treasure for me willingly, a token of affection, while for Frankie he did it out of duty and boredom.

Maybe it was unfair of me, but I felt a rush of anger when Graham rose from the table. My husband could have been a very good father—of this I am certain. He had it somewhere in him, the cells of parenting cancer. Instead, for reasons I will never understand, the cancer stopped growing midcourse, a kind of medical miracle.

I wondered if by filling Frankie's life, I'd eliminated any place for Graham. I wondered if Graham loved me in spite of himself, and he didn't have room to love anyone else. I wondered if Graham gave up a piece of himself to make me a mother, and was resigned from the start to losing me in the process. Sometimes this is what I choose to believe—that he gave me himself, and when it seemed he wasn't enough (might he have been?), he gave me more at his own expense.

So what did I do? I got off the sofa and poured Frankie a glass of milk. I brought a stack of puzzles to the table and let him choose one for us to work on together. That night, sitting at the table on the back deck after Frankie was in bed, I gave Graham the cold shoulder. When he asked what was wrong, I seethed a minute longer, gathering my thoughts, then said, “Why don't you like spending time with your son?” My voice was full of grit.

He didn't say anything. I turned toward him, primed to fight, but found him slumped in his chair, his forearm over his face, his long, angular body shaking as he silently sobbed. The advancing army inside me dispersed. I pulled his arm from his face and forced him to look at me.

“I don't know what's wrong with me,” he said.

“Something is missing,” I said.

“I know it,” he said. “I do.”

He never promised he'd try to change, never reassured me things would get better. He never lied to me—I did that for myself.

11

GRAHAM LEFT FOR JACKSONVILLE IN
a van full of scientists at the end of that week. I got up early to drive him to Rosenstiel, and Frankie sat on my hip, waving sloppily at Graham while the van pulled away. We ate eggs at the dive bar at Dinner Key marina, watching the dayboaters maneuver from their slips, then headed out to Stiltsville. While I worked, Charlie and Frankie sat in rocking chairs on the porch. (When we'd first come, there had been only one rocker, but then two more showed up, which led me to think that Charlie must have had a house on land, where furniture remained as if in storage.) They were eating fruit Popsicles. I couldn't see them from the office window, but I could hear the slurping.

Every so often, Frankie's noise paused.

“What's that?” I heard Charlie say.

I had the urge to stop working and translate for them, but Charlie had been doing pretty well figuring out Frankie for himself.

A motor chugged by. “Them?” Charlie said. “Just looky-loos. Smile and wave and they'll go on their way.”

Minutes later, a louder boat roared by, and Charlie said, “That's more power than the fellow's ever going to need, I guarantee you. And he's going to run aground in—yep, there he goes.”

I called out the window. “What happened?”

“Guy ran aground,” called Charlie. To Frankie, Charlie said, “Stuck! How do you like that?”

From across the water came a man's faint curses.

“That fellow is not happy, I'll tell you,” said Charlie, chuckling. “No sir.”

I thought I heard a soft giggle from Frankie, but I couldn't be sure. The slurping resumed.

That night, Sally came over after Stanley and the boys were in bed. We sat cross-legged on Lidia's back lawn, a bottle of wine between us, a stone's throw from the
Lullaby
, which was dark and still. Frankie was in bed. I told Sally about the Dry Tortugas—the fort, the sea turtle, the green flash.

“I've never seen it,” she said about the flash. “But I hear it's quick.”

Across the canal, I could see the parents of the family that lived there carrying a couple of their kids to bed in a lighted room. Off went the overhead light and on went a lamp.

I said, “Do you ever think about not being married anymore?”

“All the time.”

“Really?”

“Sure. The other day I was loading the dishwasher—for like the fifth time in a twenty-four-hour period, right?—and Maxwell comes in because he's peed the bed. Stanley's asleep in front of the TV with his shoes on, so I go and change Max's pajamas and sheets and put him back to bed, and I put Tuck back to bed, because by this time he's up, too, and then I go back to the living room and Stanley's still there, still sleeping. So I go over and untie his shoes and slip them off, and I'm actually having this tender moment, thinking about how much I love all these slobs who live in my house. And I start to go back to the dishwasher, but out of the corner of my eye I see this white thing sticking out of the sofa cushion.”

The swimming pool gurgled lightly. “Okay,” I said.

“So this thing is right next to Stanley's ass, and I go to look closer, and it looks to me like a sock—probably Tuck's, because he likes to do this thing where he hides his socks—and when I pull it out of the cushion, ever-so-gently, I accidentally bump Stanley with my elbow, and he rears back like he's been attacked. He has this look on his face like he's going to kill me. Seriously. Then he realizes where he is or whatever, because he's like, ‘Oh, it's you. I was
sleeping
.' ”

I refilled my glass. The lamplight in the bedroom across the canal had gone out, and in another bedroom, a light went on. There were the parents again, with two more children.

Sally went on. “So I walk back to the kitchen with this sock in my hand, and suddenly all I can see, all around, is the mess. Like this sock is covered in crumbs from beneath the sofa cushion, and how do you keep on top of that, anyway? And the living room is full of toys and the bookshelves are all askew, and I start thinking about the kids' closets and what a fucking disaster they are. And I think, ‘I cannot do this one more day.' ”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing. I left the dishes. I went to bed. I don't really want to do it all—I just want to stop
feeling
like I should be doing it all. Stanley came in and woke me up with his stupid snoring.”

“So all's well.”

“No. I mean, yes, but there's more. The next day I have to meet this client in Kendall, and it takes like half an hour to get there, so I put on public radio—sometimes I put it on, when I'm in a mood—and there's this show on about a guy who, get this, was raped twenty years ago, when he was just eight, by a neighbor kid, who was sixteen at the time.”

“I warn you,” I said. “My skin has thinned.”

“I know. It's the kid thing. But you've got to hear this.”

“Go on.”

“So the guy's describing what happened while they're at this older kid's house and their parents are upstairs having cocktails, and the older kid is supposed to be showing him his action figures or something, and instead he tells him to take off his clothes and holds a knife to him until he does it.”

“Oh my God.”

“I know, horrible. I mean, I know kids get raped, right? I know sick things happen? But there's something about this story, about the guy telling it so calmly on the radio, that makes me want to be right back there in that kid's bedroom and just—” She strangled the air. “I get
rattled
.”

“Right.”

“So I can't stand hearing it, but I can't turn it off. And the guy describes how afterward, the kid made him watch TV until his tears dried, then let him go back to his parents.”

I took a deep breath.

“I know, I know. But wait. So I'm still driving, listening to this story, and I'm so upset that I feel physically ill. So I turn off the radio, and I just keep driving for a minute, but then I start crying so hard that I can't see the road—because, you know, that poor kid, and also Tuck and Carson and Maxwell—so I pull off at a gas station and call Stanley. And he freaks out because he thinks I've been in an accident or something, so I tell him I'm okay. I can hear the boys in the background, fighting over something, and I start to calm down.”

She shook out her hair, then continued. “So I finally tell him that I just heard this story on the radio, and I'll never listen to public radio again, and he says—you know, he's a Republican, so he says that sounds like a good decision. And then I tell him about that little boy, and the knife, and the goddamned TV. And he's real quiet, and I can hear the kids hollering, and I tell him I don't ever want our boys—any of them—left alone with a teenage boy, period. And he says, ‘Okay, okay,' like he just wants me to calm down. And I tell him I mean it, not even Salvatore or Bryan—those are his sister's kids. Never again.”

Sally looked at me, gauging my reaction. She said, “So I think he's going to get all reasonable with me, like he's going to try to talk me down even though I still feel like I might be sick. He's going to
reason
with me, I think, and defend Salvatore and Bryan, because of course they're good kids. But at that moment, to me, there's no good teenage boy in the world. And bear in mind that I'm raising three boys, and one day they'll be teenagers, and the thought of one of them doing that—I cannot stand it.

“So I have this thought. I think that if Stanley does this, if he tries to reason with me, I'll kill him. No, I won't really kill him, but I'll divorce him. I'll take all his money. And the boys are whooping it up in the background and I know they're about to need some intervention, but Stanley doesn't hang up. He says, like it's no problem, ‘All right. We won't leave them alone.' And I start crying all over again, from relief.”

I exhaled. “Good for Stanley.”

Sally's voice was low and steady. “So I tell him that if anyone ever hurts one of our boys I'll kill him with my bare hands, and Stanley says I'll have to beat him to it.” She shook her head, as if willing the story from her memory. “Anyway, long story, I know, but after I hung up with him I had this thought: I don't love him like I did. But I love him in a new way, and we are in this thing together. We are going to raise these children or die trying.” She finished her wine and pulled her knees to her chest. “Does that sound like I'm making excuses?”

“No,” I said honestly.

“I swear, if he'd gone the other way—if he'd told me to be reasonable—I think a little bit of the marriage would have died then and there.”

Marriages die in pieces, I thought. That's how it happens. I said, “Graham left on a trip for work. A month, he thinks. I'd bet a thousand dollars it will be longer.”

She sighed. “Maybe it will be good. Absence and the heart and all that.”

All the lights in the house across the canal were out except for the muted blue flashing of a television. Then a light went on in the kitchen, and the husband walked in and pulled down a bottle from a high cabinet, and at the same time the wife appeared at the back door and headed toward the canal. At first I thought she was approaching us, for some reason, but there was barely any light in Lidia's backyard, and I doubted she could even see us sitting there. She carried something—a towel. I thought maybe she was going to the boat—it was a forty-foot cruiser, surely stocked with a TV and full bar—but then she stepped to the edge of the dock, dropped the towel and her blouse, and dove into the canal.

“Good Lord,” said Sally. “Aren't there alligators in there? What the hell is she doing?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

There were alligators in the canal, yes. I knew this because my father was always talking about how over time the creatures were growing bolder, as if they'd been observing us and decided we weren't much of a threat. Two or three times a year, one came right up onto the bank and snatched a dog from its lead. My father had said that he fully expected to hear a knock at the door one of these days, and open it to find an alligator barging in, demanding a cold beer and a shower.

We watched as the neighbor woman slipped quickly through the dark water, pale limbs scissoring. Then she rounded the bend and her wake settled, and it was as if she'd never been there at all.

 

FRANKIE'S APPOINTMENT WITH SALLY'S PEDIATRICIAN
came up a week after Graham left. I'm not sure exactly what I'd expected, but while we were in the waiting room, a woman in a white coat stopped to pick up a file from the reception area, and this woman had a doll's pinched blond curls and a double chin and smart eyeglasses—this, I guess, is more or less what I'd thought our doctor would look like. Instead, after an intake in the exam room with a kind-eyed nurse wearing floral scrubs, there was a quick knock on the door, and in walked Dr. Sonia. She was no more than five feet in heels, with an arched, handsome nose and severe brows. She had dark skin—she was Filipina, I guessed—and under her open white coat she wore a plunging silk blouse and tight pencil skirt and black pumps. She introduced herself with a slight accent and did not smile.

When I'd made the appointment, the receptionist had asked about specific concerns, and I'd explained the one as calmly as possible. Dr. Sonia scanned Frankie's file—the nurse had skittered out of the room—and asked me to hold Frankie in my lap.

“Vaccinations?” she said as she listened to his chest.

I told her we'd been up to date until he was two, but we'd fallen behind since then. All of Frankie's records had been sent; I think the doctor just wanted me to acknowledge my own delinquency. When she asked Frankie to say “Ahh,” he opened his mouth but didn't say anything. She checked his lymph nodes, his reflexes, his ears. When she was done, she inched back in her chair and regarded Frankie.

“He needs Hep B. The others can wait. Runny noses that don't seem to quit? Recurring fevers?”

“No,” I said.

“So just the one thing,” she said.

“Just the one thing.” I smoothed the hair behind Frankie's ear. He looked back and forth between us, as if he knew what was coming next.

To Frankie, Dr. Sonia said, “You don't like to talk?”

He pushed out his lower lip and jutted his chin.

“Tell me,” she said to me.

Frankie wriggled off my lap and beelined for a basket of books and toys in the corner. It was clear that Dr. Sonia was not a person who would suffer a mother unhinging in her office, so I steadied my voice. “It started when he was a year and a half. He'd been talking a little, a few words here and there, and then he stopped. It happened quickly, within a couple of months. Every so often he makes sounds, but not words.” I thought of him crying in the hotel in Round Lake, laughing with Charlie at the stilt house. “They haven't found any kind of—” I moved my hands futilely, and all appropriate phrases left me. “They haven't found anything wrong with him. He listens, he communicates, he pays attention. He signs all day long, we both do. He's a great kid. He's
great
.” My words felt very forceful leaving my mouth.

She regarded me, then turned to him. “Frankie,” she said. “You don't want to talk?”

Frankie held up a toy bulldozer. I signed:
Speak?
He shook his head.

“Why not?” she said.

How long had it been since I'd even asked him? Had it been an entire year?

He came over and stood close, studying her face.

“We know you can hear,” she said to him. She cupped his ears with her birdlike hands, then tugged on the lobes. “These are working, I think.” He nodded. She rapped lightly on his skull. “Seems like this works, too.”

He smiled.

She opened a drawer and pulled out a handful of flash cards showing pictures of animals: a cow, a dinosaur, a brown bear, a frog, a rabbit. “Frankie,” she said, holding up the dinosaur card, “do you know what this guy says when he talks?”