The Salt God's Daughter (35 page)

Where was my father?

Just then a pair of gold-flecked eyes appeared beneath the water.

A sea lion thrust up through the waves, then disappeared. I dipped down, caught sight of a tunnel made of seaweed, a string of tiny bubbles strung through it like a necklace. Then long black spiraling strands of hair swirled through the water. I had to come up for a breath. The more I kicked in the other direction, the more it pulled me. I was fighting with myself, panicked, wanting to go back.

Where was my father?

I shouted into the distance, my words snuffed out by the crashing waves. I told my father that he'd lied. I screamed that he'd left me. “Where are you?” I called across the hazy sky, my voice dissolving like the sea mist over the rocks. As many obscenities as I hurled into that water, only silence flew back at me with its oily flustered wings, stinging my eyes with salt.

I finally reached the shore a half mile from my house.

Dragging myself onto the beach, I glanced back at the burning sea, all lit up with reflections. I wanted to reach out and push it back, back across the bike path. Back through time.
Back through my own decision to be born. Everyone was right. My father was not coming to save me.

When I reached the salmon arch of Wild Acres, the bougainvillea blossoms were rising, billowing over the sliver of moon that appeared too early in the late-afternoon sky and that I knew had conspired with the vines to draw me back onto land.

 

MY MOTHER STOOD on the porch next to Dr. B. and Aunt Dolly, calling to me as I realized there was no hiding. They would be angry at my unexplained absence, especially with all the panic of the fires. The deep orange sky cast long dark shadows over the sand. My black hair soaking down my back, I looked at my legs, moonstone blue in the now dimming light.

“What happened, child? Those fires won't come all the way here,” Dr. B. said, putting her arm around me. She ushered me into the lobby as if to give my mother a little cooling-off period, or perhaps to give one to me.

“Why are they so mean to me?” I asked.

Dr. B. reached out, her fingers brushing my cheek. “Who's mean?”

“Everyone,” I said.

“Surely not everyone. You're very loved. You're a wonderful girl.”

“No one at school wants to be friends with the Frog Witch.”

She waved me toward the green microsuede couch and offered me a box of tissues as I told her what had happened.

“You know who you remind me of?”

Tick Tock chattered, jumping between perches in his cage. “A lady who was an outlaw,” I said. She nodded, and told me my grandmother had been caught in an elevator that was stuck between two floors.

“Things won't always be that way. One day you'll grow up and you won't even remember.” I hadn't told her about Julio's attack. Only about the teasing. “This will get better. You can't
see that now because you haven't been down that road. But we've all been the subject of gossip at some point in our lives.”

“My foot. It's the whole problem,” I said.

“You know what, honey? I think if God had wanted feet to be perfect, she wouldn't have invented high-heeled shoes.” She raised an eyebrow. I offered her the only smile I could, a half-crooked poor attempt, only because she didn't deserve to worry. “I just hate being different.”

She shook her head. “You come from a long line of exceptional women. Different in other ways. Your grandmother, for instance. That lovely woman watched the moon like it was the rising sun, like it could begin and end all things.”

“What about my mother?”

“What about her?”

“You said a long line of women. You were including my mother and my aunt.”

She nodded. “That's right. Now your mother.”

“There's nothing wrong with her,” I said.

Dr. B. smiled and glanced at the ground. “Everybody's got something. Your mother would be the first one to tell you she isn't perfect.”

“But that's what makes her so normal. Besides, she has no secrets.”

“How would you know that?”

She was right. How would I know if my mother had secrets?

She told me my mother had had her own struggles. By that I assumed she was talking about my father. And I knew how my grandmother had raised my mother and my aunt. I knew it wasn't easy. “You know, sometimes people don't even know they have secrets. At least yours is out there for all to see. You know exactly what it is. And I reckon that one day, you won't even think about it anymore. One day, it'll seem so normal to you that it'll be like anything else you get used to, like the color of your eyes. But by then, you'll have other things to worry about.”

I glanced at her. “What other things?”

She shrugged. “Life. Your job. Your family. Maybe a husband. Children—they're worth it if you choose.”

Why was she talking about all these unreal things when my real life was so messed up and misunderstood? I couldn't see my own path ahead of me. How could she?

“I don't want to get married. Ever,” I said, surprising myself. No one in my family had ever talked against marriage. But no one had talked for it, either. My mother never mentioned it, in fact, which had never seemed strange to me, but now suddenly did. I knew all my mother's stories about my father.

“What's so bad about marriage?” she asked, folding her arms.

“I've just never seen it. Anywhere but on television.”

Dr. B. laughed and said she hadn't thought about that before. She said that when she was a little girl, she didn't know any adults who weren't married. “I think it's high time you got to know your grandmother a little bit better. The only way you'll know her is to read her own words. Has your mother ever shown you the almanacs?”

I said no.

“There's a box marked ‘Diana' in the storage room. You'll have to rummage around a bit in there. It's been years since your mother looked at it, and I've had movers going in and out of there since. But I know it's there. I don't want you in there by yourself, though. You come and get me tomorrow, and I'll help you find that box.” She reached out, lifting my chin. “My door is always open to you, Naida. You don't ever have to even knock. I'm always here.”

She gave me a hug, and I felt the strength of her arms and the smell of the freshly starched fabric of her faded yellow dress. Then she stared at me and smiled.

“You don't have to get married,” she whispered.

“Didn't my mother ever want to?”

She shook her head no. “Did you hear her say that?”

“No, but I just thought.”

“Well, you never can tell what people wish for, can you? Wishes change. You'll see that one day. Right now all you want is to blend in. One day, you'll want to stand out. That's the trouble with life, you know. Hard to get the right wishes matched with the right part of your life.”

I stood up to leave and crossed the small room toward the door.

“Naida?” Dr. B. asked.

“Yes?” I said, turning around to face her. I almost backed away farther from the intensity of her stare.

“Do you have a good mother?” she asked.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“That's important to know,” she said.

 

MY MOTHER STOOD in the living room, her keys clenched in her hand. The new pink silk pillows scattered across the brown couch shimmered in the late-afternoon haze. Her eyes were rimmed with blue eyeliner, and her freckled skin was slick with patches of powdery blush. I hated to be the cause of her worry.

“Naida, I left work and drove to school to pick you up. The secretary said you left an hour ago. I've been worried sick, driving around looking for you. Where have you been? Have you been crying? And of course you're soaking wet.”

I glanced at the television. The weatherman was reporting the fires, showing the map of Southern California. “The smoke. Made my eyes water a little,” I said. “So the fires are over?”

“Dying down. At least they're under control now. There's been a lot of damage out there. But we're safe, thankfully. I wish those poor people the best.”

No one was safe, fires or not. “I'm going to get into the tub,” I told her, escaping into the bathroom. I peeled off my clothes and ran the water as hot as I could stand it, letting the memories of Julio circle the drain and disappear.

Later that night, my mother flicked on the lights in my bedroom. She sat down at the foot of my bed, demoralized. “Why? That's all I want to know. Don't you know how dangerous this is? Swimming at all times of day and night. And on a day like today. What if something happened to you out there?”

Something is happening to me out there
, I wanted to say.
Something has been happening to me for my entire life
. My promise to stop made her sigh with relief. I rubbed my eyes, which were still burning. My body ached from Julio's attack, and I had bruises on my shoulders, my arms, and my thigh where he'd pressed his knees.

I had stayed in the water too long.

I had been designated as Other, destined for a place no one could reach or measure or contain. If I had any doubts that I was meant to be here, they'd been confirmed now. My father hadn't come to find me. But I wasn't convinced that he wouldn't. Maybe I just hadn't been looking at the right time. It was all timing, as Dr. B. said. Sometimes your life had to catch up with your wishes. I knew the ocean was still inside me, thundering in my ears, causing my hair to become tangled like the girl's in that painting of the naiad. I was certain my mother didn't understand me. Why did she have to argue with me all the time about the ocean? Didn't she know that the ocean was saving my life?

That night, I dreamed I was running through the hallways at school. The bell rang. I counted my breaths, as my mother had taught me. I raced past the hall monitor, the teachers, but they didn't see me. I knew I was invisible. I could hear laughter as I ran. Then I was running across the skin of the ocean, my steps leaving ripples like huge heavy raindrops. I felt something hit the back of my leg.

When I reached for it, my hand was wet, slick with oil.
Black. When I opened my fist, a bird's wing became a dagger in my hand. It had a horse's mane carved into it. It glowed bone white in the moonlight.

W
HEN YOU ARE lost at sea for any period that is longer than a short while, you will start to find the strangest things familiar. Aching for home, you will find similarities in remote things. Giant cliffs and craggy rocks will resemble sea lions rising up out of the water. A patch of rippling, reflected sky will become the window you used to look out when you woke up to your first backyard. Birdsongs will overlap with human voices and become indistinguishable. You will imagine yourself back home during your loneliest sleepless nights. If you are far from the Orkney Islands of Scotland, your home, on the longest day of the year, you will read a book outside at midnight, holding a flashlight, as you think of your friends enjoying a nightless night. You may even imagine seeing the aurora borealis—the northern lights—in the far-off sky. If you are a fisherman who has been at sea for long periods of time, you'll be so drawn to the colored lights on the THUMS Islands off the coast of Long Beach that you may even come ashore, thinking you're home.

Going against Dr. B.'s wishes, I snuck into the storage room late that night. I just couldn't wait. I couldn't go back to school
tomorrow. I had no idea how I would face Julio, or the rest of them. The story of my attack and my dive off the pier was sure to spread through the phone chain and become something else entirely.

I was on a downturn, as Aunt Dolly sometimes called it. Headed for no good.

It felt comforting to be in here, amid the boxes and the old furniture covered with dust, hidden among the stacks of other people's memories, all the forgotten things once valued and since left by the residents of Wild Acres, and even before. Old cameras, telephones, and bags of clothing. Children's toys. A box of old record albums. I sifted through them, hardly recognizing any of the names. Cheap Trick and Michael Jackson. Kiss and David Bowie. Lynyrd Skynyrd and REO Speedwagon. All those things someone once stacked in boxes. The last remnants of a life tossed here or there, slowly fading into worthlessness, when once they'd held so much power, so much value as to make it to the end of a life. Not an easy thing to do. Not for a piece of clothing, a record album, or a person. How many people made it to the end of someone else's life? When I looked around, most people I saw were alone. They had been at Wild Acres, at least. Everyone except my mother and my aunt. They would never part. No matter what. Though Aunt Dolly still lived in San Diego, one day they'd end up back together. They still planned gardens together. They still called each other five times a day. What all was there to talk about? And yet I knew even then that they had something lovely and divine, something I wished I had, too. By this time, the allure of my imagined sisters was fading. Something very frightening had happened, and I had begun to divide things into two camps:
Right
and
Not Right
.
Good For You
and
Not Good For You
. My sisters didn't fade entirely. I was not quite ready to let them go.

What was it about those things so imbued with memory that made them impossible to throw away? Mrs. Green's old easel
rested against the wall. An old plastic Easy-Bake Oven stood a few feet away, a box of broken Crayola crayons on top. I picked up the broken crayons and read the labels in the dim light. I remember my mother always loved the names. Cornflower Blue. Teal Blue. Jungle Green. Caribbean Green. Bits and pieces of crayon had been melted in tinfoil cake tins, now covered by a thick layer of dust. The swirls of wax appeared as
National Geographic
photographs of the earth from space. What else had my aunt and my mother captured in a pan of melted crayons when they were little, I wondered. Besides their wanting, their homelessness, their search for my grandmother amid her extraordinary tales. I shoved the old oven out of the way, reaching for the box behind it. I slid an old suitcase back into the stairwell and pushed some other boxes out of the way with my knees. I didn't see anything with my grandmother's name. I scanned the room.