The Salt God's Daughter (20 page)

T
HE GREEN WATERHORSE expelled sea mist across the sand and onto my porch. When the Hunger Moon came in February, the waterhorse kicked up driftwood, whipping its black mane across the waves. It had conspired with the moon to set things right. The bougainvillea were strangely fragrant on this night. Their sweet scent trickled over the bodies of the animals on the beach. This is what Dolly and I imagined in the parking lot of Wild Acres. We were sitting on the roof of my white Honda, which I'd gotten back the week after I met Edna.

We held a flashlight over my mother's 1972 almanac. We glanced up at the bank of moonlit clouds, as opaque as a blanket of feathers, as though one thousand doves had opened their wings, blocking out the moon and stars. “Look at the Hunger Moon,” I said.

“Snow Moon,” she said. “That's what the almanac calls it.”

“Mom never used that name. She always used ‘Hunger Moon.'”

“I know, we didn't have snow. But do you see how wrong this was? Mom made up some moon names to fit her purposes. You can't do that. She should have chosen one language and just
gone with it. If she'd been consistent, it might have helped. She bent the rules of the universe. That's why we always had trouble.”

Dolly had not read through all the almanacs, as I had. I now had some insight. “Do you watch the moon when you're not with me?” I asked her.

She drew her knees to her chest. “I could say I didn't. But I'd be lying,” she said, her long ponytail flowing soft and loose over her right shoulder.

“I like knowing. Otherwise, the past was all a waste,” I said.

“You can keep what she taught us. But not the stories. Moose, I don't want to see you get hurt.”

“I won't. That won't happen.”

“The moon isn't going to bring him back to you. I know you're waiting.”

“Don't worry about it. I know he's not coming back.”

Dolly had been wholly opposed to Graham from the beginning. She said the cycle of his comings and goings reminded her of our mother's, and that I was caught up in our mother's whirling escape hatch. I was still manning the threshold. I had somehow become the keeper of the in-betweeners. She said I was confused as to my role in the family, and in the world. But I wasn't. I had never been clearer.

My body knew. That morning, I'd woken up sweating, my cheeks flushed, as if I'd been running all night. That morning I'd known he was coming back.

“I have a friend at work who's out every night. I can't keep up with her. She just got a divorce.”

“What about you? Have you met anybody nice?” I asked.

“I like being alone right now,” Dolly said, resting her head on my shoulder.

Hours after she left, I heard a knock through my hazy sleep.

My fingers hesitated on the door before I opened the chain lock. “Ruthie-Ruth?” His voice was low, distant.

“You came back,” I said, trembling.

Graham stared at me, hesitant, his chapped lips, parted. It had been two months. His hair was damp, strewn across his white shirt. His jeans were torn at the knees. He handed me a bag of shells. I hugged him in the doorway, as if another earthquake had hit.

“I wasn't sure if you'd want to see me again,” he whispered against my neck.

“Come inside,” I said, pulling him in.

“You have no idea how good it is to see you. How much I wanted to come back here.” He pushed me gently back against the doorframe, kissing me roughly, his hands on my breasts. I could smell whiskey on his breath, and I tasted the salt on his chest as my robe opened. It was as if no time had passed at all. Somehow, I felt I'd known him forever, as if we'd grown up together, like I'd been kissing him forever. And yet it all seemed new.

“I can't believe you came back,” I said, sliding my hands up under his shirt, feeling his warm body.

“I had to.” He picked me up and pushed the door shut with his foot.

He put me on the bed. “Wait,” I said, pushing him away.

“What's wrong?” Through his unbuttoned shirt, I could see his clavicle, the muscles in his neck, his Adam's apple moving as he swallowed. This was comforting, somehow. His humanness.

I pulled up the blanket and covered my legs. “You really scared me, you know. You didn't call.” He reached over and smoothed my hair, pressing away one of my tears with his thumb. I hadn't realized it.

“I'll always come back to you,” he said, his voice low. Tears, he said, were just energy, not good or bad—the winds and the oceans could pick up this energy and carry it, and some people, when they were close, very close, could feel this and take it on.
Certain animals, too. All things that were sensitive, plants, too, could feel things on a different level. It was then that I noticed the bruises on his neck. He had what looked to be the beginning of a black eye.

“Gifts from the ocean,” he said, as if an apology.

“Tell me what happened, please. Whatever it is, just tell me. Where did you get all those bruises? I promise I won't judge you. Not at all. Just be honest.”

He looked worried, or sorry. “It was a difficult trip. Storms. Big squalls.” He winced slightly, as if he hurt. Then he got up and walked over to the cabinet, where he poured himself a glass of whiskey. He glanced at my easel and then leaned over the stack of canvases, sorting through my paintings like a deck of cards. He examined my seascapes, setting them up across the floor. “You paint the ocean so beautifully. Why not swim in it?”

“Those are mine,” I said, getting up.

He drew back his hand. “I just wanted to see what the ocean looks like to you.”

I explained that I'd been mostly teaching myself how to capture movement—birds flying, animals swimming, the way the waves looped and made circles for miles, and even how the air looked like it swelled over the beach sometimes.

“What does it look like to you?” I asked.

“Different. The ocean is dangerous, Ruthie-Ruth. The animals are hunted. I don't want to talk about it.”

“What about the good things?”

He nodded. “What I saw as a boy. ‘Orkney' means ‘Seal Island.'” He talked about sea anemones off the coast and starfish floating in shallow pools. Barnacles and sea gooseberries. About “groatie buckies”—rare snails that made you lucky if you'd found them. There were otters that hid in caves. Flurries of arctic terns could block out the sunlight momentarily. You could be lucky enough to see porpoises and dolphins if you were crossing in a ferry.

“The grays—gray seals, I mean—they don't get on too well with the fishermen. They have no fear, eating the catches. You can find them everywhere, thousands of them, and in October and November, with their pups. These are the pups that have the white pelts,” he said. He looked away then. He said you could float around them in an inflatable workboat, and they'd come up to you in the waves. “Everyone who visits wants to hear the seal song. If the wind blows in the right direction, you can hear the sound. It's the wind, mostly. That's what you notice: strong, cold. Few tall trees on the islands because of the wind.”

My equivalent of that was the sound of women's voices rising in the bougainvillea, which I rarely heard now. And which I was certain no one but I would want to hear.

“Tell me about all this,” he said, pointing to the brushes. I explained the different kinds of brushes, and how I preferred flat to round because you could pile more paint on top. I showed him how I toned the canvas so as not to have to paint on stark white, which could make everything appear too dark. I explained the use of shadow and highlighting needed when painting a face.

He liked this, my excitement. If not my paintings, then the fact of me painting.

“I'm just learning,” I said.

“You're good, Ruthie.”

I met his eyes. “I don't even know where you live.”

He sighed. “I keep a small room here and there. I'm away too much to need anything more. I have no phone. Yes, I know that sounds strange. Just never needed one. But I was out there in the middle of the ocean, and all I could think about was you. I came as soon as I could. There's nothing I'm hiding from you.” He walked over to the window and stood there for a moment, looking out at the purple and blue streaks just above the horizon. “What can I do to convince you?” he asked.

“I guess it will take time. To find out who you really are,” I said, offering him a smile.

His eyes softened. He took my palette from my hands and held it up to the moonlight. Then he opened the glass door to the porch and walked out to get a better look at it. I noticed the way his faded jeans crinkled up in the backs of his knees, and how his bare feet left prints in the rug. His shoulders hunched slightly, curved over the palette. The light caught the hair on his arms as he turned around, and walked back in.

“What do I look like to you?” he said, handing me back the palette.

He was so battered; I nodded, and I took out a canvas.

He pulled off his white shirt, letting it fall onto the carpet. Then he unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them off. He sat in a chair, his leg muscles boxy.

He turned to face me. The bruises on his chest appeared darker in the moonlight, and his body appeared to be fading right into the sky, the purple welts now merging with the clouds.

From his chair, he watched as I lined up the brushes in plastic cups—the round, flat, bright, filbert. I ran my thumb lengthwise across the tip of each brush's bristles just like Mrs. Green did, trying to figure out which one I should begin with. Up until now, I had painted only landscapes. At night, I'd curled up with art books.

I recalled how my eyes had followed the swanlike neck of a ballerina, the pink blossoms on her flushed cheeks, the rest of her captured in strumming white-gold strokes. Below, a rectangle of light on the hardwood floor, and the barre, touched with gold, too. The ballerina's lips would part slightly, her finger caught in that space. I'd examined a certain dark lavender hue, deciding that a flat brush had been used. I defined form in terms of instruments used to create it. As I paged through books, I hunted for patterns and repetitions, just as I did with my mother's almanacs. A blue-lavender hue might trail above a
fire near a hearth, and also make up the iron tub where a different woman hitched her foot and unrolled her stockings before she stepped into her bath.

 

I PULLED OFF the paint caps and squeezed the tubes, forcing the paint up onto my glass. I poured turpentine into a cup. I'd not start with flesh colors. Rather with violet and green hues. As I began to paint, I imagined scaling the cliffs in ballet slippers, holding on to the slippery rocks and feeling the jagged edges below. I had never fallen, not once.

Faces required you to first draw shadows, particularly for the eyes. A face would not make sense until you painted all the colors around it. You could mix Viridian Green with white to make a man's body.

I held up a charcoal pencil to sketch him first. I had never painted a man before. My hands shook too much. No one would understand my pull toward Graham. I'd stopped trying to explain it. I picked up a round brush and toned the canvas with Burnt Umber. I painted in the lightest skin tones first, Creamy White and Burnt Sienna. I used Ultramarine for the midtones. You could imagine a different ocean than the one in front of you. But what color to paint a man?

“Without eyebrows your face is going to look silly. Be prepared,” I told him. Dry lips. Sleek dark hair. Pale green eyes. A long straight nose. Flared nostrils. A face was nothing but form and texture, just like those cliffs of my childhood. I opened the curtains to let in enough light to bring out the edges of his face. Mrs. Green had told me that while painting her husband's portrait, she had to turn the canvas upside down in order to reboot her brain. She finished the portrait that way.

Graham's long hair fell across his shoulders but appeared too viny on the canvas. I wanted his hair to be a soft ash brown. “Don't move. You're doing extremely well. You're exceptionally good at being painted,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Handsome, right?” Highlights were not white. Shadows were not black. None of this would work unless you built up the color with different hues. Every color was made up of other colors. Water was made up of seven colors, not just blues and greens. There was no such thing as pure red or pure yellow. Nothing was wholly bad or good.

Each dash of color would have its own territory and history—a record of a moment, that millisecond when you placed it on the canvas, when everything around it became eternal, each brushstroke significant. I painted his shoulders stony. I wondered if my stony hands could paint only stony bodies. His stomach caved like the sunken hull of a shipwreck. As I painted his hair back from his neck, I revealed rope burns.

I'd hardly gotten anywhere when he stood up, spilling the light and shadows, ruining everything. He walked toward me. He didn't care.

“Go back,” I said. But of course now he couldn't find his exact position. We'd have to forget it. He parted my hair, drawing it down over my breasts.

He put his hands on my shoulders and leaned in so that our foreheads were touching. He was sweating, his eyes glistening. “Now, your turn.”

I put my brushes back. I was shy, self-conscious at first. But I lifted my sweatshirt and drew my arms up over my head, letting him see my full chest. I knew I was bigger than before, my breasts fuller. I didn't mind it, nor did he. He lifted my chin and kissed my forehead, then my cheeks and my chin. It was the most exquisite display of tenderness I'd probably ever been shown. The attention he gave my body captured me. As I unzipped my flowered skirt, letting it puddle at my feet, I regretted my bad knees, those had been passed down from my grandmother. I knew they knocked just slightly. My flesh pillowed beneath my navel. I'd stopped policing my body.