The Salt God's Daughter (37 page)

As I watched their car pull away, Berta didn't take her eyes off me but waved through the window. I took a deep breath and turned my back, not wanting anyone. This, I would do alone.

I walked around to the back of the motel. There was an empty birdcage hanging from the ceiling, all rusted up. When I looked in on the courtyard, I drew in my breath. There on the grass.
A metal sculpture of a horse and plow looked out over a line of tall palm trees on the beach. My father had been here. Of that I was certain. This was what I'd seen in my vision. Something had shifted out there in the ether, or perhaps inside me.

I sat down on the ground by the horse in a patch of hot sun and tucked up my knees. I had never been away from my mother. Not even for a night, not since my accident when I was four. Now I cried, sobbing into my arm. Here was my father. Here was the end of my search. The end of the road. My last hope. My last hunt. It would all end here.

I walked down to the beach. The sand was warm; the water looked inviting. I changed in the bathroom of the Beachcomber Restaurant and swam until it grew cold out. I bought myself a hot dog and onion rings and ate them on the beach, watching the families come and go for what seemed like hours. I'd never felt so alone. I watched the sun set, paging through my grandmother's almanac, staring at the dagger and the bible on the sand in front of me, at the white handle and the curling mane. That night, I tucked myself up in the courtyard of the motel, cold, my face covered with an old newspaper I'd found. I shivered all night in the sea breeze and didn't sleep much.

When the first rays of morning lifted through the palm trees, I was finished. It was over between us, me and my imaginary father. Then I began the long walk home.

The sun burned my cheeks as I headed back down the highway. Kicking the stones with each step, I imagined my mother, all her stories of being left. And here I was, walking alone by choice, thirsty and hungry, a little bit frightened. Perhaps in that thunderous boom of creation, when the planets spun off and the dust formed into bits of water, when light was grown from seeds and planted in the clouds, perhaps after all of that happened, a smaller moon spun off from the larger one. That smaller moon would circle in the bigger moon's orbit, around and around for years, following a gradually widening track.
Then the smaller moon would curve, with each rotation a little farther and farther away, until suddenly it had left the tracks of Earth's orbit. It would spin out and make its own orbit for a while. Perhaps it would even find its own galaxy. Then, little by little, it would come back. When its wheels found its old tracks again, there would be a shift in the atmosphere. Some things would lift off from the water, other things would fall. This, what would be called the Daughter Theory of Creation.

As I headed down the highway, I noticed the oil derricks on the islands. Once you knew the truth, you'd never again see the mask. How much energy and electricity was being used just to create the artifice? This was not the aurora borealis, or anything close. This was a human construction made to look like a carnival, like a circus, like a magic show, like Disneyland.

This, what was known as the Father Theory of Creation.

I stopped into a small grocery store and bought myself a blueberry muffin and a can of V8. I wolfed down the muffin and bought another, and then walked some more, until my legs began to ache. At the next bus stop, I got on and rode home, sitting alone, falling asleep with my head against the window, jarred awake only when the driver shouted, “Long Beach.”

 

I PEDALED HOME through the light rain, keeping my head down. When I reached Wild Acres, just beyond the hill, I could see flashing blue lights. There were two police cars in the parking lot, and my mother and my aunt were standing there, my aunt with her arm around my mother's waist, talking to the police. My mother dropped her phone when she saw me. She held her arms out and cried, hugging me as if she'd been without me for a year. But that's how it felt.

“My baby, my baby,” my mother said. Aunt Dolly wiped her eyes and told me never to do this again. I had a lot of making up to do. I hated for anyone to be disappointed in me. My mother stepped back, keeping me at arm's length. “I've tried so hard to
do the right things for you. All I ever wanted was to not break your heart. I never believed you'd break mine.”

I watched as she walked out to the porch. She leaned on the railing, putting her head in her hands.

I glanced at Aunt Dolly. “What do I do?”

“Fix what you broke. If you can.”

I didn't want to force my mother to look at me. I stood quietly next to her. “You didn't break my heart. Not once,” I whispered.

When she turned around, I saw a hesitancy in her eyes that hadn't been there before, something I recognized as mine. My lips quivered as I stared at her.

“Don't ever do that again,” she said, pulling me toward her. I didn't worry about how long she would hug me.

 

THAT NIGHT, I dreamed of the desert, the opposite of the ocean, a place I'd known my whole life. I was standing under the open sky at night, surrounded by huge rocks on all sides. Piles of tumbled boulders were waiting for the right light to hit them, turning them into sculptures. Soon the animals would reveal themselves in the rocks and become moving breathing beings that could stampede across miles of sand, dust, and water. Creation was faith, no matter what story or version of it you chose. The details didn't matter. Your particular version didn't matter.

There were others, not only you, finding their way back to each other through the oceans. Everywhere now, there were sea lions made of rock, the largest a gleaming blue-black. In this light I could see the bony crest on its head. I could make out two eyes as big as moon shadows. The eclipse rose, just a few seconds of this particular light from this angle. As quickly, the light faded and the shadows retreated, causing the sea lions to disappear.

Then a golden light spilled over the boulders and across the waves of the desert, drawing shadows all the way back to the sea.

O
NE NIGHT IN April, under the Missing Bird Moon, people across the western United States saw a blue-green light with a streaming tail shooting across the night sky. Nobody had thought it a parakeet, though that's how it appeared to some. If you were watching the sky, you might not have known what to call this. The full moon in April had many names, none of which was the Missing Bird Moon.

You'd hear that it traveled from the coast to the desert, rapidly changing color along the way—from blue to green to orange, and then back. Some called it a dead satellite that had fallen to Earth, or a piece of interplanetary debris that had hit Earth's atmosphere and exploded. Or a falling star that just kept going until it was too low to see. Within minutes, residents from Orkney to Orange County reported seeing it, too. Within an hour, people from all over the West were calling their friends and relatives, telling them that the sky was falling. In the end, the glowing bird was deemed a meteor. If you were driving down the 91 freeway, seeing this might have caused you to pull over and call a loved one. If you were on the 405 going south, you would have seen the glowing light in the East.
You might have thought it the searchlight of a helicopter, but then it headed for the ground. This might have made you pull over to the side of the road and make a list of things you wanted to accomplish when your life began. Other people might have thought it part of a fireworks display. Someone in Las Vegas would call in to a radio show, saying that it had landed on the next block, and that the military had roped it off and everyone should head for the hills.

Dr. B. told me Tick Tock had escaped. She'd found an opened cage. I helped her look for him. Together, we walked around the neighborhood, casing the beach, checking under parked cars in the lot. I climbed a tree when I thought I saw him. I reached up and grabbed a branch, swinging my legs over it until I caught a foothold. Then I stood up. The bird fluttered out of the branches. It was another bird, not hers. We checked underneath windows, looking up through the branches and nearby bushes all around Wild Acres. Perhaps he had disappeared into the atmosphere, too, right along with the satellite or the piece of broken planet.

Dr. B. stood back and waved her hand. “My old friend. I've lost him.”

She told me years ago that she thought I had an affinity for birds. She was just trying to give me something I could hang on to, something to make me feel connected. Parakeets needed a back wall to retreat to. They would not feel safe without a wall. It was their breakwater, which caused more people than you'd expect to move to this place, feeling as if they were protected. She said a person needed to keep one hand behind her touching the wall of her past, and one hand in front of her, open to the future. She said some people didn't trust things right off the bat, even when they had a reason to. They'd leave you and then come back, if for no other reason than to make sure you'd always be there. No other animal needed to test things like human beings, I thought. Some people would wait for you
after you left. Even if you never came back, sometimes they'd still wait. I thought about my mother. About those who would stay with you forever.

Dr. B. said she didn't want another bird.

 

A MONTH LATER, under the House Moon, Dr. B. returned from her trip back East and called us into the lobby of the motel. I sat next to my mother on the couch, noticing how Dr. B.'s face flushed when she cleared her throat. I'd never seen her like this. My mother held my hand when Dr. B. said she was closing the motel for good. She could no longer run it, and Sasha needed her now. She wanted her mother with her in upstate New York, in the land of snow and ice. My mother squeezed my hand. I hoped she wouldn't cry. I wiped my eyes with the corner of my sleeve, tried to look at Dr. B., tried to imagine what this place would be like in her absence. I couldn't.

“This old bird will soon be a snowbird,” said Dr. B. “Never thought I'd say those words, but you can't argue with your child if she says she needs you.”

“No, you can't,” whispered my mother.

“Now I've got to go tell Lou. I've called his son already; he'll go back home.”

“I don't know how I'm going to let all of you go,” my mother said.

That night, as I lay in bed, I tried to imagine where we'd live. I tried to imagine myself waking up in the back of a green station wagon, and what I'd see when I looked out the window. Here was the only home I'd ever known. I tossed and turned in bed all night, wondering what window I'd look up at, who my neighbors would be, and whether we'd live at the beach or not. I couldn't imagine not waking up every morning to another horizon, or walking right out onto the sand every day. I couldn't imagine a lot of things. If you had told me that we would ever leave Wild Acres, I wouldn't have believed you. I had assumed
my mother and Dr. B. would always be here, unchanging, like the sentry palm. My mother used to say that no one ever left this place. Not ever, even when they tried. Some places would always pull you back.

That night, I snuck into my mother's room. “Can I sleep in here?”

She opened her eyes and asked me what was wrong. “Are you upset about the motel?”

I nodded, crawling under the sheets.

“The most important thing is that we're together,” she said. “That's all that counts.”

I took a deep breath. I told her about my imaginary sisters, finally letting her into my world. About how I dreamed of green water and sea gardens, of orange coral reefs and black caves where iridescent flowers bloomed in the darkness—all those dreams I had never shared with her about a beautiful world filled with castles of rock, where striped fish darted through the rows of tall sea trees, where jellyfish floated by as if on glass, where girls raced each other across the sea, arms gliding over the chalky bones on the ocean floor.

“I have a secret, too,” she said, her voice low and soothing. “I'm going to try to buy this place. Dolly and me. Dr. B. has suggested it. I've never done anything like this in my life. Dolly's got money saved up, and I have a little bit, too.”

My eyes grew wide, and I jumped up and shouted into the darkness.

She glanced up at me. “You're so pretty when you smile,” she said. “I remember when they put you in my arms. I couldn't believe you were mine. Of all the daughters I could have had, Naida, I'm so glad I had you.”

Then I told her, in the quietest voice, that I loved her. She said she knew.

M
Y MOTHER HAD always said the bougainvillea were holding Wild Acres in place, rooting us all to the earth. That the colors that swirled through the ocean reflected onto the sky, and not the other way around. They flashed across the ether, illuminating the ocean's changing mood, and they were a beacon. That once upon a time she had heard the voices of women in the petals at the Bethesda Home, but here they had always been more like whispers. Still, they'd echoed the chaos and the fervor, the angst and the longing, the elation and the swell of love that was never captured.

But that night while we slept, Mr. Takahashi, distraught over the news of the closing of Wild Acres, cut them all down with pruning shears. In the morning, there was a sudden lightness in the air, as if the whole place could just lift up and disappear into the sky. Vines were strewn across the beach, heaps of fuchsia and green. My mother, Dr. B., and I cleaned them up from the sand. No one could find Mr. Takahashi. When he didn't return after a half hour, Dr. B. called his son and told him to come. There were petals scattered across the water, vines and flowers floating away on the waves. My
mother piled the wreckage and blossoms into big green plastic garbage bags. Dr. B. said she didn't care about the flowers; they would grow back. The most important thing was to find Lou. My mother stayed behind while I got into Dr. B.'s black Lincoln, and we drove around looking for him. Suddenly, I knew where to find him.