I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (13 page)

For months Mike has pins in his skull, mouth wired shut, both arms in casts. He has to drink all his food through a straw. No job, no insurance, no family. Just us. People take him in. Sometimes I pick him up, and we go to a meeting. I can see he doesn’t want to go home and stare at four walls, wait for his bones to knit. So we go for coffee. Mike can calm me down, all that anxiety thumping in me, just with a look. Once, he said, “I’m more honest talking with you than with myself because I wouldn’t want to tell you something that wasn’t true.”

Saturday night I picked him up, took him to the New England meeting. He’s so tall, bony, with so many broken parts, I’m nervous helping him out of my small car. The pins in his head held in place with a kind of Frankenstein brace. I don’t want to jostle him, hurt him. He liked the meeting. I’m not used to helping anyone. Usually it seems as though anyone else would be better suited—whatever the task. But Mike actually needs me. There’s a place with nobody in it. I’d made him two Pep Powers at work, packed the protein shakes into a bag for him. He said they were even better than coffee. I gave him a birthday card. He’s thirty-two. The humidity makes his healing bones ache.

Since he fell, I’ve been alone more. Not talking. At work, I cracked inside, went in the bathroom. Hyperventilated. I think I need to ask someone to be my sponsor. When I ask M.J., she says she’ll help me do my fourth step. She says, “It’s nice to see you smile.”

At home, I lay my head down on my humming typewriter, try to pick up some energy. That night I dream that a coworker who doesn’t like me gave me a quart of Wild Turkey. In the dream I drink three inches straight from the bottle.

At work, Carey comes over from the Winter Park store. We act out the diseases in the
Back to Eden
book, a guide to herbal medicines and home remedies. Take turns reading the symptoms until we had the diseases down pat. “Hysteria” and “hydrophobia” (caused by wolf or rat bite) are best. We walk down the aisles, and every time we find a product with water, we gag, sob, convulse, act out the “dread of water” contortions symptomatic of wolf and rat bite. The store manager does this Amazon strut in high heels and shoulder pads—heaving and slinging her cannonball breasts. Head up, chin out. The store hardly seems large enough for her. When the phone rings, she squeals
Hello!
with game show expectancy. At some point, she’ll grab me by the elbow, say, “I’ll find
you something to clean.” All day long I ask people, mostly strangers, “Can I help you?” It’s a small store. I know where everything is. Usually they want to feel better. For once, I feel kind of useful. I’ll work for the health food store, at different locations, for more than ten years. It grounds me, pulls me through. Even when a customer is rude, or I’m fighting with a coworker, the store is something I can count on. I’m in the world, I have a task. Five days a week, sometimes six, I show up, I reach out to other people. It’s a relief to belong somewhere.

In July 1984, when I’m six months sober, my coworkers Michelle and Pat buy me a coffee mug as a gift. Mike lived near this mall for awhile, in the woods. It was before I met him. He ate from the McDonald’s Dumpster, timing it to get food when it was just thrown out. He had a friend who could catch fish from a river with his bare hands. He likes to talk about deer. His stories are like fables, myths he repeats. I don’t know how much of a person’s soul is visible in most people, what percentage is hidden in a back room, but Mike seems as though he is mostly soul. His body a gangly covering. When he listens to me, it’s almost as if I’m in another world. Sometimes I try to pay better attention, the way he does, to everyone—the customers, their stories.

A big, friendly girl comes in the store once a week to buy carob stars. She’s sort of shy, but always talks a lot. I weighed her a pound of stars, and she said, “There are so many accidents on 436. It’s Blood Alley.” Driving home from work, fire trucks were behind me because of an accident on Highway 50. Then, on 436, I get hit and pushed into another car. My car is totaled. It has no back to it anymore. My door won’t open. My neck and leg hurt, but no one is hurt badly. There’s a little boy in the car that hit me. A Navy guy was driving; he’d borrowed the car from a friend. But I never understood where the kid comes from. At most, he’s eight years old. Worried I’d want his name. The kid keeps saying,
“I’m on parole.” Parole? He’s got on camouflage pants that match the driver’s shirt, but it doesn’t appear that he’s either a friend or a relation. The boy’s got long, messy, blond hair, and his eyes slant in. He sits next to me on the curb and smokes, says, “Once I made my mom nervous when I turned up the music on the radio. Caused a three-car accident.” He takes a drag. I feel as though I should say something about the smoking. “My dad took the radio out of the car.”

“You shouldn’t smoke,” I venture. The air is full of water; my hair is getting longer.

“I wave my cigarettes in front of my dad and dare him to stop me,” the boy says. The cops are slow. “I don’t have anything to do tonight,” he says. He looks pleased to be in an accident. Keeps staring at me, saying, “You don’t look scared at all.” He says, “My mom was a wreck.” Wherever I go, he trails after me. Our hearts beating in a weird orbit. It’s almost 11 p.m., and this little kid keeps walking around the highway, smoking. He asks me, “Do you go to Winter Park High School?” He says, “I was going to drop out of school, but I’ve changed my mind.” Can eight-year-olds drop out of school? When someone came to take me home, the boy said, “I’m sorry about everything.” He stood there alone, said, “’Bye.” Realized I never heard anyone ask the kid if he was okay.

It’s as though I was hit by ghosts last night. That guy that hit me, the owner of the car, his insurance company—they all seem like weird ghostly voices. The guys lie about knowing each other. Someone gives me a cactus tree to save. I’ve already killed three plants. But I’m glad to be digging dirt out of the yard with my bare hands, trying to save this funny plant. When I cup the earth in my hands, I remember I’m a part of it, and the bruises, aches, dead car, ghost driver and company fade a little.

Catherine from Dry Dock shows up at Broadway. She cries when I tell her I got my six-month chip. She said, “I really like
you, can’t we be friends?” I really like her too, don’t know why I veer away. I don’t tell her that I want to find my son’s grave. Pull up some grass. And do what with it? Hold it in my hand, stuff it in my purse, use my fingers to comb it into my hair. Chew the blades of grass and try to swallow? Push my fingernails down into the dirt where it’s hard, pack it under my nails. And push further, dig and dig all night. Until I find what they put him in. Not wood I guess, what’s that vinyl stuff—maybe that’s inside the coffin. It’s a very small coffin, baby coffin. Dig until I can fit, curled up, next to him. Then start pulling the soft handfuls back in. Over my feet, over my knees, like a damp blanket at the beach. Like when the wind comes up at the shore, and the sun goes down. You’re mostly bare, so you pull the towel, wet from the sea, over your feet, up over your knees. It’ll be like being buried in sand at the beach, but darker. Use my arms like shovels to scoop dirt, dark and heavy, to my neck, drifting down my chin. Then from my hair down. Cool over my forehead. Over my eyes, and the line between my eyes. I thought I heard Tommy cry. I could swear I heard him crying. Maybe he’s not in this box. Maybe I should keep looking. I
could swear
I heard him—it was so sweet. Maybe if I said something of this to Catherine, said something true, I could come toward her.

When it’s Tommy’s birthday, I’m on the phone with Wendy from work. She knows. Her little boy starts singing. “What’s he singing?” I asked. She was embarrassed, didn’t wanted to tell me. She said, “It’s just a coincidence.” Then she said, “It’s his favorite song. It’s ‘Happy Birthday.’” She’s silent a minute, and I can hear the singing. Later she comes over to my apartment, my first nice one. White. Second floor. A fireplace. I go downstairs, sit on the steps to wait for them. Her son runs to me, sitting there. Puts his two toy trucks in my lap, laughing. It helps that these boys like me, Wendy’s son, the boy in the accident. I’m glad they come toward me.

One night in 1989, I’m at work in the store, reading an article on relationships in the new
East West Journal
. It mentions a new book,
Women, Sex, and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power
, by Charlotte Davis Kaslo. I order a copy in hardcover. It says that shame is the root of addiction, that violence gives instant escape. “Most of these women don’t really want to die, they want to kill the pain.” The author said that to get well a person needed to give up suicide fantasies and threats “and make a commitment to live, for better or worse.” A marriage to your own life.

I try it. Listening to her voice, I know, okay, close the door now. I can see it at the end of a hall, brown wood. Feel the ground under my feet. I shut the door. I turn around, face the other way. Into my life. I’m in my living room with this book in my hand, but I don’t see it anymore. I see the hall and the door, and I hear her helping voice. Something shifts inside me, like a big rectangle of light, as if the rooms in my body shift into place. No longer threatened. As if my body understands that I’ll stay.

Weeks later, the door looks tiny back there—I can see it without turning around. The more I walk, the lighter the hallway gets. It makes me think of sitting on the curb of Tangerine Avenue when I was eleven, knowing there would be a bright place up ahead when I grew up.

In 2009, three years after I’ve moved away from Orlando, I go back to the Broadway house for a meeting. It’s nonsmoking now. Before I’d moved away to the beach in 2006, I’d driven into the parking lot here, thinking a meeting was about to start. But I wasn’t going often enough, had the time wrong. Mike and Ray were there though, talking. So, I got to say good-bye. Ray said, “Stay in touch with us.” But I hadn’t.

A meeting is starting, lots of people arriving, parking between the trees, walking toward the door. I look for Mike. He’s always easy to spot. So tall, and also, I could feel him in a crowd, or he
sensed me. But he isn’t outside. I’m about to go in, when I see that one of the men outside the front door is Ray. I hug him, Ray whom I’ve known since before I got sober, who said stay in touch. I’m so happy to see him. “Is Mike here?” I ask. Smiling. He’s almost always there.

“I’m sorry,” Ray said. It’s registering on his face that he’s going to be the one to tell me. “He died.”

“What?”

“He died. Cancer.” I’ve stepped out of myself, can see my face, open mouth. Staring at Ray. “I was with him,” he says. “In the hospital.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“No one had your phone number,” Ray said. He’d said stay in touch. He’s not blaming me.

I have one photo of Mike, with a shark that he caught at the pier. He’s beaming. He’s so proud, loves this photo. So he gives it to me. Once, he disappeared, after he married, and his wife died, after he gave the insurance money away to anyone who asked, and he was broke, and went away and drank. I was in school then, away. When Mike came back to Orlando, he told me, “It’s hard getting sober when you’re older.” He was in a halfway house. It was 1996. I was teaching three classes, managing a bookstore, and running a literary organization as a volunteer. When I came home from my jobs, I was tired. And he’d call me nightly, talk for hours. I wanted to shower, eat, relax. I stopped answering the phone automatically.

Mike got sober, all over again. He was sober for the rest of his life. In the early days, we had the same sobriety date, except his was a year before mine. To celebrate, the recovery group had a cake for both of us, and I remember candles, which can’t be right—why would there be candles? But there was something bright. The room was packed, and everyone stood around Mike
and me, wishing us well. It doesn’t seem as though he can be ashes in an urn at Ray’s house. I can still see him. When I tell Mary this, my sponsor from Orlando, she says, “Mike isn’t ashes.” I’m ashamed that I’ve believed this, worried that I’ve gone so far away from Mike. Forgetting that he is unburnable, unburned, unburnt.

When I meet Ray at the pier at eight in the morning, he says, “You’re the only person I asked to come.” It’s so kind, giving me a chance to say good-bye. Ray and I haven’t spent much time in each other’s company for more than a decade. I don’t know if we’ve ever spoken on the phone before. But he’d called me at home after I’d seen him at the meeting and learned that Mike died. Ray had said we could meet on Saturday or Sunday. Whichever day is better for me. I know he’s nervous; he calls me “Ma’am.” He’s known me twenty-seven years. He’s never called me anything but Kelle.

There are a few silent men standing in corners of the pier, the ocean out front. Ray has a backpack, opens it. He’d been keeping Mike’s ashes in his house all this time. He opens a plastic bag. I thought that when a body burned, the ashes would be black like a house or a tree, but his are the color of sand. Six pounds, the weight of a baby. The sun’s getting higher. Ray says that he and Mike would sit here all day fishing, even in rain, even at night. They hated to leave. I know what he means, what it’s like to turn away from the ocean. When Ray reaches into the bag, it feels as if he’s reaching inside our friend’s body, everything slippery—heart, lungs. He’s got a small handful of ash. If I could, I’d reach in to touch the bones in his face, but it’s too much. I back away from Ray.

When Mike was in the hospital, dying, Ray said the room was always full of people visiting. Mike had known he had cancer, but hadn’t told anyone, took no treatment. When he’d collapsed at home, Ray was the one who went to him, drove him to the hospital. Stayed with him. When Ray scatters the handful on the other side of the pier, I follow from a distance. Ash blows around his
legs. Mike kissed my forehead one night. We’d gone somewhere in my car, and he’d opened the passenger door to leave, turned back. When he kisses me, I can feel he loves me, that he thinks I’m worthy, good. I try to see who he sees.