The Salt God's Daughter (30 page)

 

I GAVE NAIDA a glass of milk and sent her back to bed. I put down my glass of whiskey, trying to still the occasional shivers. I heard a noise out on the beach. There, in the sand, a huge male sea lion waited, his eyes large and piercing, his ears pricked. Magnificent, his blue-black body was unmovable, his neck as thick as a tree trunk, his forehead formed of a bony crest. His long front flippers were winglike, made of bones similar to those of an arm and a hand. I turned off the porch light. I kept checking, though, well after I'd put her to bed. That animal, all eight hundred pounds of him, was a mirror image of the sea lion I'd once seen shot in this very parking lot.

He remained on the beach all night. I couldn't stand it, his barking. Mr. Takahashi and Dr. B. stood on their porches, hands on their hips, complaining to each other through the wind. Dr. B. said she'd have someone come get him if he wasn't gone by morning.

It sounded to me as though he was grieving.

By sunrise, he had disappeared.

 

T
HE FIRST TIME anyone ever called me Frog Witch, I was six, with chapped red lips, as if my mouth held a small flame. The humidity was so thick, it coated me in sweat seconds after a shower, convincing me to finally forgo beach slippers. To go barefoot.

The heat wave sank the pink bougainvillea blossoms over Wild Acres, threatening to cave in the roof, causing the sea creatures to stare back with gold-flecked eyes, refusing to leave the ocean. Mr. Taki knelt beside me, scraping a moat around the sand castle we'd just built. My mother lay stretched out on a blue blanket a few feet away, holding a book over her face, her feet tipped in wet sand. Everywhere, people laid themselves out like downed trees on colorful patchworks across the beach. I pushed my wet hair from my eyes and drew a dragon on the side of the castle wall with a stick when Mr. Taki got up to go for a swim.

My hands were blanched by salt. My foot twitched in the heat.

A little girl in a gold bikini wandered up to me. She had short brown hair pushed back in a ribbon headband and a wide
smile like her mother, who watched from her blanket a few feet away. The girl crouched beside me, lacing her plump fingers over her knees. She admired my castle and its adornment of white shells. Then her eyes grew wide.

“What's
that
?” she asked, pointing at me.

“So the bad guys can't get to the castle,” I explained, waving my hands over the moat. “Because of the alligators in there.”

“No, your
foot
. That
frog foot
.”

I heard the scrape of waves hitting the rocks as something hard and frozen shifted high inside my belly. It rose up in my throat, capturing my voice. Shadows of blue-black distilled into ivory and lavender hues, fading into the distant sky. I pushed my foot into the sand, burying it up to my ankle.

“Are you a frog?” Her blue eyes held mine, burning, before I could answer. “You're a Frog Witch,” she said, matter-of-factly. She said the words over and over as Mr. Taki walked toward us from the water, dripping wet in his white button-down and cuffed jeans. “Frog Witch picks up sticks. Frog Witch has an itch. Frog Witch—”

I started flinging words right back at her in a louder rhyme, telling her she was a
gold witch
, and a
rich witch
, neither of which really sounded like an insult, mostly because in my heart, I didn't want to hurt her feelings, which I knew, even at six, didn't make sense.

“I'll beat you in swimming,” I said, to which she said we'd have a race, and yet what if I failed miserably? What if she left me even more embarrassed than before? “Over there to there,” I said, pointing from the lifeguard's chair to the blue-striped buoy about ten feet away.

Then, suddenly, I was lifted out of there by my mother. “Why don't we take a break from the castle and have a little lunch? You can come back and play later,” my mother suggested, more as a demand, as I buried my face against her freckled chest. The girl ran off with my secret, and my shells.

“What am I? Am I dangerous?”

“No, of course not.”

“What about poisonous?” My mother shook her head no and wrapped me up in a thick red towel. I was not beautiful and perfect the way God made me, as the residents of Wild Acres always insisted. That was a lie; I knew that now. The Wizard, who operated the fuse box that controlled the timing and installation of bodies, had ruined me, despite all his metallic circuitry, switches made of glass, and tangled nests of messed-up copper wiring. Why, if the Wizard could part the Red Sea, could part the heavens and make rain, could rip apart the continent with an earthquake, couldn't he part the skin between my toes?

“Sometimes God decides things before we're born, honey. Then she wants to see how we'll do.”

“Like a test?”

“It's no one's fault. It makes you different. Special,” my mother said. But I just wanted to be like everybody else. She kissed the top of my head. A few feet away, the little girl's mother waved apologetically. I reached my hands around the back of my mother's neck, pulling her close to me. She carried me back inside, waving to Mr. Taki to follow us. “I know it's hard, Naida, but you're beautiful and perfect in my eyes, and you'll always be.”

I could already sense that the little girl's stories had begun careening through the ether, taking root like wild raucous flowers, spreading like wildfire. My green foot, scaled like a lizard's. My hoof. My toes like claws. Like a bird's foot. Like a paw. My foot that had a snake's face with a forked tongue. My foot. My difference. The one that didn't make me special. The one that made me the Frog Witch.

IT MIGHT HAVE been better to have just pounded my fists in the sand, or better yet to have run away—some moments are better marked in that way, recognized for their significance. Moments such as the one that had just transpired, when careless little hands tore your secret from the air, should not go unnoticed. They should not pass as silently as an eclipse, capable of tricking the birds into thinking it was twilight, or tricking you into thinking your life would continue to move along swimmingly, when in fact your whole life would never be the same. Not everything that had significance made a sound.

Little girls raced each other through the waves, swimming for their lives. Planets raced silently through the galaxy, scraping gaseous edges from the corners of the atmosphere as they halted like freight trains on rusted orbiting tracks, tumbling red velvet seats and twisted chrome bumpers through the air onto land, leaving dented chrome and smoky tunnels. There wouldn't even be a ripple of noise. You might see the sparks fly as if stars and call it a meteor shower. Comets whisked across the night sky, carrying within them the molecules of noise from all those comets that had come before, but you never heard them hit the skin of Earth's high atmosphere. Astral avalanches were somber, silent things, even when meteors left canyons in the earth. Dowsing rods quivered as soon as you stepped into a circle of neolithic stones, where whispers were amplified to the degree of screams.

Those stones in Orkney, the ones I read about so I'd know where my father came from, just confirmed what I knew to be true. Whispers were as dangerous as nasty nicknames, more so, for their energy would go unseen and therefore wouldn't dissipate quickly, and could return years later, having been redirected to the future as if by Earth's magnetic lines, causing things to catch up with you and one day explode. And yet I didn't know that things returned in the way they did, that
whispers would boomerang onto those whose lips they first escaped.

 

THE BOUGAINVILLEA WERE holding us all in place, rooting us to the earth, Dr. B. always said. Each year they grew more lush, capturing Wild Acres in a net of fuchsia petals, entangling us all. No one had ever seen vines as thick as these, which could become full with bees and butterflies.

I'd lived in the glass fishbowl of Wild Acres up until that day when I was six, my bare feet never to be worn outside again. More than what it did to me, I worried about my mother, her guilt. The Most Beautiful Lady in the World had been my universe—my first love. She vowed I'd never feel unwanted, and I hated to be away from her. Trying to pattern myself after her, an unattainable goal, I'd realize, I'd memorized the constellation of freckles across her face, the black beauty mark on her shoulder I once thought of as the earth, a planet around which all the stars revolved. She was a reflection of all that was right in the universe. The Big Dipper constellation on her chest was proof, for it mirrored the night sky, which I had traced from the time she kept me in an ERGO pressed to her skin. But that didn't protect me, not from my own judgments and failings and my ever-shifting need to be distant and then suddenly close. We'd always told stories in my family like the ancients who tried to find reasons for the weather, who found reasons to create gods and goddesses. Somehow we had not been satisfied by thousands of years of revelations and inventions.

The world I now knew held no calm bed of pine needles beneath the trees, the place where the children in fairy tales always fell asleep when they wandered off lost, before they would wake up to a new day, having been found by fairies or by a compassionate woodsman or by a kind princess. No matter what stories my grandmother had told, they could not carry me away.

The world I now knew would be made up on my own. The fine line between a truth and a lie seemed only a matter of consensus, of how many people believed or did not, which seemed irrelevant to me, given the haphazard ways opinions were often drawn or judgments made with little evidence, like those who bullied me about my foot or drew their eyes away from me when they saw me being teased. It was just a hairline, barely visible. But when Aunt Dolly announced that breathing underwater was impossible, obliterating it from my life under the guise of something called common knowledge, a thing that could win you an argument without even trying, I thought she was playing a trick on me. I'd never questioned it or thought to tell anyone about it, for I assumed everyone did it.

“I'm not saying you're lying, Naida. I'm only saying that it can't happen.”

“But it does happen.”

“Must have been a dream, honey.”

“You can't do it, so you think I can't.”

“Come on, now. The truth of the matter is that you simply don't have gills.”

Gills. I knew what gills were. What did that matter, though? Why couldn't I breathe underwater? If I had a webbed foot, who said I couldn't do other things, too? “I have gills
inside
my chest.”

“So do I. They're called lungs,” she said, winning the argument and reducing me to just human. I'd let her believe that, at least. But in truth, I still didn't buy it. It didn't make sense to me that the body would stop doing something that worked on automatic pilot, just because of a thing like water. This would be the first of many things I'd mistake for normalcy, like eating cereal for dinner and staying up late in celebration of nothing in particular, when my mother was working and Aunt Dolly was staying with me, her unpredictability making her a favorite babysitter, letting me watch her make a Jell-O mold for a
work picnic she was going to the next day, or playing checkers with her on the patio in the moonlight until she'd say she was tired and then dance me off to bed. Aunt Dolly's stories were always good ones, always starring little girls who grew up in a world without adults and had adventures as they struggled to survive without grocery stores, policemen, hospitals, cars, bicycles, and other civilized things like bedrooms and furniture and dishware.

Her rogue honesty both enticed me and infuriated me.

I'd stared in disbelief after she broke the news of breathing underwater. How I wanted to curl up on the bottom of the ocean to prove her wrong. Distraught, I'd snuck into the hall closet to wait for my mother to get home. As soon as I heard the door open, I planned on rushing out like a butterfly, flitting around her, begging to be told I was right and it was true, making sense of all those times I'd taken my time to evaluate what I saw underwater, my sisters and their translucent arms. My mother had always maintained that I remembered everything, which I assumed included some things before my birth. That's how I knew that my father's voice in my head wasn't a dream. The heavy sound waves once made by his words were stacked like bricks in my memory. On nights when sleep seemed impossible, when the sea switched places with the sky and turned quiet and thunder grew from the earth, shaking the ocean as if with knotted arthritic hands, I'd stand on my bed, feet planted squarely apart, and I'd hold my hand to my eyes as if from a glaring sun. I'd replay my father's voice, showing the world and all its creatures that he would be supreme over all, including the planets, the animals, and the weather. All the things he would come back for.