The Salt God's Daughter (36 page)

A framed painting of a jumping fish was propped against the wall on a box. At the other end of the room, a blue La-Z-Boy chair held an old radio or weather monitor, I wasn't sure which. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be an old Panasonic television. I walked over to it, spotting a cluster of dolls held together in a rubber band. A family—mother, father, baby. I remembered my mother talking about them. The mother doll had long blond hair and a flowery dress with an apron and lace collar. The father was tan, dressed in a red turtleneck and khaki pants, muscular. The baby had bright red hair—I'd never seen a real baby as peaceful. I wondered if this was what families used to look like, once upon a time. Back in the old days, when my mother was little.

My gaze drifted. The lighting wasn't good in here, just a bulb swinging from a wire, but I finally found what I was looking for. My mother's old canvases were stacked by the far wall. Red oceans. Piles of red oceans. I looked through them, remembering a time when they used to cover our walls. Now I saw
something else. Behind the painting of the fish, a box marked “Diana.”

I blew the dust off the top, drawing my fingernail through the tape to open it. My grandmother's Farmer's Almanacs were all inside, just as Dr. B. had said. They were all intact, but with worn yellow covers, some of the pages dog-eared. I picked up the almanac marked 1979, and it immediately splayed open to October. My grandmother had scribbled,
Luke and Laura
in black marker across the top. As I thumbed through the pages, I noticed the words
Bad Man
,
Bad Moon
,
The Wanderer
on several pages. Dr. B. would know what all of this meant and why my grandmother had written
Bad Moon
so many times.

Dr. B. called to me from the doorway. “Is that you, Naida?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, ashamed I hadn't listened to her. I glanced up. There, in a rectangle of light, she held my gaze. It was late. The lines in her face deepened. I put the almanacs back into the box and closed the top. As I started to leave, something caught my eye, something glowing from underneath the Easy-Bake Oven a few feet away. I went back and lifted the oven. There, I found a dusty blue velvet bag with a white handle sticking out. Dr. B. said to bring the box out as long as I had gone to the trouble of finding it. I pushed the bag into the box.

“Are you angry with me?” I asked, following her down the hall and back into the lobby.

“No, I don't get angry. Disappointed you didn't listen to me. But we are where we are. See here, your grandmother kept everything. For a woman who had no house for much of her life, she was surprisingly attached to certain things. These being some.” She patted the box. “Let's see what Diana has left for you.” I sat down next to her, smelling her Charlie perfume as the musty scent of old paper and dust clouded the air.

One by one, I removed the almanacs and set them out on the coffee table in three rows, five books in each. I didn't tell Dr. B.
about the glowing handle in the velvet bag. I'm not sure why I didn't. I somehow knew that was just for me.

“She kept a record of everything. She believed there was truth in books. She was very imaginative and thoughtful in certain ways. A lot like you.” Dr. B. opened the 1969 almanac, waving her fingers across the pages of charts. I swallowed, my throat aching.

“Does my mother even remember this? I wonder if this is why she was scared of the water all her life.” I pointed to a scrawled note about my mother's near drowning.

“I don't know. I don't think I've ever seen that. I never asked her,” she said, putting her glasses on. “I remember when I taught her to swim, though. I was a good teacher. She was a good student, bless your mother's heart. Courageous. Lord knows how afraid she was. You know why your mother learned to swim, don't you?”

I nodded. “Because my father wanted her to.”

“No, because you wanted her to, honey. You'd roll around in her tummy like you were already swimming, kicking those little legs of yours, and she couldn't keep up. She got over her fear of the water for you. You gave the Pacific Ocean to your mother. That's a fine present, I think.”

“What are all those funny pictures. Symbols?”

“The calendar is separated into months. The left-hand page lists the time of the moon's rise and fall. The right-hand page lists the full moon's name,” she said, running her finger down the columns. She stopped on a circle. “April. See here, April is the Pink Moon.”

Aunt Dolly had been trying to sort through the moon names—colonial Americans had called this the Planter's Moon. To the Celts, it was the Growing Moon. The Chinese called it the Peony Moon. To different groups of American Indians, it was the Flower Moon, or Wildcat Moon, or the Moon When Geese Return in Scattered Formation. “It bothers my aunt that there are so many names for one moon.”

“Some people don't like interpretations. They prefer things clear cut. And so it should be for your aunt.”

She picked up the 1975 almanac, flipping it open to a chart with more funny symbols and numbers. “Planets. Tide charts. Moon rising. The full moon was what captured your grandmother's imagination. But you know that. I can't imagine how she would have made it as far as she did without these books.”

“But my mother said they were sad a lot of the time. They had times when they had no food. When my grandmother left them alone. It sounded kind of scary.”

“I'm not glorifying it. Those were troubled times for her and the girls. Diana was the first to tell you that she made her mistakes. Now, Naida, you know the best thing about her almanacs?”

“No, tell me.”

“They led your family right here. Twice. Your mother three times. Like a boomerang. Just kept coming back.” She smiled. “See, you were meant to be here. This place right here where you're sitting? This has been not just your home but the home of your mother and your grandmother, of my own daughter, and maybe your daughter one day.”

“I'm only twelve,” I whispered.

She smiled. “Well, I'd like the place to stay in the family, just so you know, and Sasha will never leave the East Coast. She loves the snow, can you believe that?”

I took out the 1972 almanac and opened to the month of September. Seeing the way my grandmother had written my mother's name in big scalloped letters made me catch my breath, the
R
in big swooping curls. I decided that my mother's sixth birthday had probably happened on a good moon. I decided then that my grandmother had loved my mother. Big flouncy script meant happiness, meant love. I wrote the same way when I was happy. I would remember to show my mother this.

“By the way?”

“Yes?”

“You're a very wise young lady,” she said, taking the new note from her pocket where I'd put it.

 

IT WAS CLOSE to one o'clock in the morning when I snuck out of the house with my backpack. The tide glowed with bluish foam. A perfect Blue Moon, signaling a season for paths to cross and certain people to find you again. Footsteps on the beach would be filled with glowing water. Algal blooms feathered the beach. All things changed. Some things let you know they had been moved, torn apart, disturbed. That was actually a gift. Otherwise, how would you know?

I stood on the beach with a glass jar in one hand and my grandmother's 1975 almanac in the other hand. I watched the lacy spills creep over a large piece of driftwood. I reached into the water, covering my hands and feet. From across the sea, I imagined the whispers of a waterhorse, but I wouldn't fall for that again.

Water eased into the jar. Capturing it, I swirled it around. I pulled off my sweatshirt and pillowed it against the log. Stretching out on the sand, I opened to the calendar pages for October and then November. The jar of glowing water lit up the pages. The margins were filled with my grandmother's handwritten notes and tiny sketches. There were Joshua trees with twisted branches, as if hands balled into fists.

Then I unzipped my backpack and took out the velvet bag. Sticking out was a bone white handle. I'd seen it in my dream. I poured the contents of the bag onto the sand. The glow from the glass jar of luminescent blooms lit up the dagger, as well as an old bible with flecked gold lettering on the cover.

The blade was covered in a leather sheath, which held the imprint of the dragon, the same design as the pendent I wore around my neck. I felt my heart race. These had to be
my father's. Why hadn't my mother ever told me? Rubbing the handle with my thumb, I revealed the carving of an animal, its mane wrapped around the handle. Exposed. I thought of my mother's stories and imagined hands dropping strawberries like raindrops across the furrows.

When I brushed the dust from the cover of the bible, I felt a shock of energy. My hands felt funny, tingling as I traced the faded gold lettering: Anderson. Anderson. I repeated the name, my name. I opened the bible and stared at the inside cover. All lit up in the glowing liquid, a motel stamp bled through the inside page.
We appreciate your patronage. Grayson Motel, San Clemente, CA
.

This could belong to anyone, I thought. I didn't know any Anderson. I waved the jar of glowing liquid over the bible to get a better look. What appeared to seep through the inside cover, the dragon design, was this time so slight I recognized it only because I'd seen it twice now, once on my pendent and once on the sheath. Graham Anderson. My mother had never told me my father's last name. She'd tell me one day that it was a common name and that she'd known it. There were things that she'd tell me when I was older, decisions I'd have to make about my foot. About my father. But here I was, taking the decision out of her hands. Naida Anderson, I thought. I whispered the name over and over until it felt like my own. I thought about how I took up so much of her life, with my shifting moods and my questions. I loved her, but I deserved a life apart from her. I was tired of always staying on the threshold of my window, in between, never really staying and never really going. This was the moment I'd been waiting for. The silent meteor about to hit my life. There were other things that cascaded through my mind, memories, thoughts, and wishes that I was ready for, and some that I was not.

Secrets were risky, unguarded things if you found them this way, the way I did. How could I do this to my mother? There
was always the chance that my father didn't want to see me. I slipped the relics into my backpack and climbed back up the vines, hoisting myself into my bedroom window. This was one of those times when you didn't want to think. When you just did what you had to do. That's what I told myself as I threw a pair of jeans and my toothbrush into a bigger backpack. I pulled on my gray sweatshirt and twisted up my hair into a baseball cap. I emptied out my piggy bank, grabbing all the money in there—$44. The sun was rising as I snuck out. I rode my bike to the bus station and locked it there against the metal grate. Within a moment, I climbed the steps of Bus 1 and set out to meet the man I'd been waiting for my whole life.

I remembered my mother's always saying that you should sit next to an old woman on a bus so that no one else would sit next to you. A woman with long silver hair glanced up and smiled at me as she put on her lipstick. I pulled my hood up, slinking into the seat next to her as if someone would recognize me. All I could think about was what I would say to my father when I found him.

The woman, whose name was Berta, started talking. She offered me spearmint gum and showed me pictures of her grandchildren, two sets of twins. She unwound her purple tie-dyed scarf and folded it in her lap as she described them, all boys, all rambunctious. Then she adjusted it back around her neck, making a full loose knot just below her diamond necklace. It said
Mom
, with a diamond in the
o
. She told me all about her grandsons' sports, and about not seeing them enough. She was going to visit her son, who lived in San Clemente.

We rode the whole way together, talking so that I didn't even feel alone. Every once in a while as the bus shifted down Pacific Coast Highway, I'd glance out at the ocean and wonder if my mother had gotten up yet and about the crests of white foam spilling toward the beach, endless. I told Berta I was going to see my father. That I hadn't seen him in a very
long time. She said that must have been a lovely thing to have looked forward to.

“Is he coming to get you? Maybe you'd like a ride?” she asked, as we got off the bus and no one was waiting for me.

I nodded. “If it wouldn't be too much trouble.”

She kissed her son, and he picked up her bag. “Who's this? You made a new friend, Ma?” he asked.

“Naida Anderson,” I said. I pushed my hair from my eyes and smiled.

 

AS WE PULLED up to the old beachside motel, I bit back the tears. The white stucco motel was bordered up. There were no cars in the parking lot. The grass was overgrown with weeds, had overtaken the old porch, where I was sure my father had sat many times, drinking coffee or reading the paper, just like a regular father. “Are you sure you have the right place?” Berta asked.

“I'm sure,” I whispered, getting out.

“I don't want to leave you here alone. It's not safe.”

“Oh, this is the right place. He's meeting me here,” I lied. I thanked her and she stared at her son. He shrugged.

“Ma, the kid says it's the right place.” Berta reached into her pocket for a pen and pulled out a piece of paper.

“What's this?” she asked. She opened my put-pocket note and smiled as she read it. Then she met my eyes. “Thank you, Naida. Thank you very much. I'll treasure it,” she said, writing her phone number down. “You call me if there's any problem.”