The Salt God's Daughter

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“When angels fell, some fell on the land, some on the sea. The former are the faeries and the latter were often said to be the seals.”

—Anonymous Orcadian

 

 

P
EOPLE HAD BEEN calling me the Frog Witch for as long as I could remember. My mother, Ruthie, lied and told me it was because they envied the long wavy locks of jet-black hair that fell across my back, which I had inherited from my father. His pale green sea glass eyes were mine. My dark red lips appeared bloodstained just as his had, as did the skin between the toes on my left foot. I knew my mother hadn't wanted to lie, that we had to agree to pretend there was nothing special about me. Even though I remembered everything that had happened, even though I noticed the shape of his absence all around us, how it lingered at the foot of my bed at dawn, caught between darkness and daylight.

When my mother first discovered me, felt me start to crawl deep within her, she thought of how my father had left her and her breasts dripped milk. She didn't know about the seasons of living things, that they needed to settle like water, to find their right place on Earth so as to fall in step with the moon. She didn't know how fast I was growing inside her. In my mind, I was already three years old when I pushed out of her body and into her hands.

But now, at twelve, I wanted to believe there was nothing different about me. My mother had refused surgery on my foot when I was a child because she didn't want to cause me pain. Now I kept my foot hidden as much as I could.

“Hey, Frog Witch, catching any flies?” the kids would taunt me, before knocking into me in the hallways, causing me to drop my books. Sometimes, when I tired of the bullying and teasing, when the name Frog Witch made my skin burn like fire, I snuck out at night under the stars and dove into the water where there was solace, where there was peace. When everyone else was sleeping, I'd dive into the cool Pacific and swim among the three sea lions that sometimes lived under our porch. They were my companions, and this was my meditation.

But some people wouldn't let me forget the past. I knew all my classmates talked about it, not just the mean girls who called me Frog Witch. They liked to point to the raised pink scar on my forehead I'd gotten one night when I was four. I stopped trying to hide it with bangs when Sister Mary came to visit and told my mother that the Devil and God had wrestled for my soul and God had let go first. If I was damned I might as well show it.

Each day after school, I'd run up and down the bleach-scented, burgundy-carpeted hallways of Wild Acres, the retirement home where I grew up. I could knock on any door whenever I wanted. I visited Dr. Brownstein every afternoon because her soft brown eyes were always warm if not slightly hidden under heavy painted-blue lids, because she kept two plastic palm trees and a parakeet that would say, “Hello, sweetie” and, “Time to make the donuts.” Also because she kept fistfuls of Tootsie Rolls and butterscotch candies in the pockets of her housecoat, which she'd drop into my outstretched hands.

My moods were unpredictable and changeable, my mother said, like the ocean. It was true. Sometimes when I thought of my father and how he left us, I became so full of rage that
my mother sent me out to the beach to scream at the seagulls, and after, I'd watch them drift down through the air like white scraps of paper. The sea lions would start barking on the shoreline, causing my mother to rush out onto our overhanging porch, calling me inside.

Didn't I deserve a life? The girls in my grade were just discovering how mean they could be. I just wanted a boyfriend, to be loved, to be kissed in the same ways other girls my age were kissed. Boys chased me down Second Street after school, calling me names, forcing me to find new paths home. Soon, I would need protection. I thought that if my father came back, he could stop this. As much as my mother said she hated him, I knew she idolized him. And because she did, I did too.

People whispered when I passed by on the pier.

“There's a Frog Witch,” I heard them say every word.

Once when I was buying milk at RiteAid, a girl pulled a few hairs from my head as she walked by. “Nice foot, Frog Witch,” she said, excusing herself in a laughing tone. She was hoping to get a piece of me. The worst was when the girls my age pretended to like me. Friendships were a bit foreign to me, as much as I craved them. My only friends were my mother and Aunt Dolly and the residents of Wild Acres. I'd be on cloud nine for days when I thought I had made a new friend. Then I would find out that she only wanted to be told stories: that things would work out just as she'd planned, that she'd meet a true love while seeking shelter in a rainstorm, or that she'd get accepted into Dartmouth or Harvard, land a good job after that, get married and then have a baby. As if my being different still lent me some kind of secret knowledge. I knew people craved assurance. That life wasn't hard, or painful, or that they wouldn't have to face it all alone.

Many nights, I crept out onto the porch and watched my mother standing on the sand below, her nightgown billowing under the hem of a shiny blue raincoat as she doled out fish for the three sea lions that crowded around her, filling her
loneliness. Even though she could not swim, they were hers and she was theirs. They were mine, too. They were my guardians. And I was hers.

After, she'd crawl into bed with me to tell me the stories of her life. Sometimes she'd weep, and I'd hold her and promise never to leave her. I coveted her midnight visits even though I had trouble staying awake the next day. Once or twice, I put my head down on my desk and broke into sobs. My teacher asked if it was due to the bullying, but it wasn't. It was the weight of her, the sheer weight of my mother's love for me, and mine for her, and the memory of our bodies curved inward, our knees touching, and the feel of her hands bracing my shoulders as if I could ward off harm for us both. “You are my life, Naida,” she'd whisper, waiting.

My words “and you're mine” became like escaped birds that floated above me, irretrievable. I wanted to reach out and grasp them, to tell her she was mine, then to tuck my mother's hair behind her ear as I usually did. But I held my breath under the blue sheet, pretending to be asleep, listening to the waves crash into the space between her need and my silence, until one of us fell asleep.

There was no water that was too rough or frigid. I could swim in nighttime storms beyond the breakwaters, and had dozens of times that my mother did not know about, letting my fingers sift through the tips of the feathered sea grass near the oil rigs as barracuda darted around my legs in figure eights, and a swarm of fish swam in silvery bubbles as a sea lion crossed, the slip of its coat brushing against my arms as its dark eyes flashed in the water. I was a person who remembered. My mother understood this. She said my father had the same gift. The story of what happened to me when I was four years old would never go away. I didn't want to think about lying in the hospital bed with drool dribbling out of the corner of my mouth and an IV stuck in my arm. Humiliating—my aunt took pictures.

The attack on me would be the last straw, and I could feel it in the same way certain animals lay down before a storm. I knew it, just as I knew that my mother's eyes would tear up whenever she'd catch me staring out at the ocean.

I knew that soon it would be time to leave home. As much as I loved my mother, I knew it would no longer be safe for me to be here with her. I was almost a woman now, a nerd by all accounts, a solid competitor in the science club, a good and loyal daughter, a friend who remembered the residents of Wild Acres, and an impressive swimmer. My father needed to know me, and I to know him. I didn't have a name for what I was and what I could do. But I needed to save myself. There were things I needed to discover—about who I was, my mother's past, and even the woman who came before.

The attack on me would happen first, though. I could feel it coming.

 

W
E RAN WILD at night, effortless, boundless, under a blood-red sky—to where and to what we couldn't have known. We craved it, that someplace. We were two little girls, sisters, daughters with no mother, distrustful of the freedom we were given, knowing she shouldn't have left. We tore across dirt campgrounds where we slept, naked but for our mud boots, letting the wind shiver up across our bare chests. We stole bags of chips from the canteen on the pier. Our feet pounded the crushed oyster shells in seaside motel parking lots when we'd search for drinking water, and we let calluses thicken up our soles to withstand the hot desert sand, or dash over a highway of broken glass, wherever we'd been dropped. We scampered across the foggy cliffs that separated Pacific Coast Highway from the ocean in old ballet slippers, as nimble as two fairies, our long red hair whipping into tangles in the wind. We bumped up against the night, without stopping. We stole wrinkled leather sneakers that were two sizes too big, and wore them until they fit. We raced in the sand, fought in the dusk. We knew we were not invisible. We tightened belts around our stomachs at night and bicycled unlit sidewalks and sometimes
tucked up our knees and steered with no hands through the darkness. No one hit us. We believed we were unstoppable. We slept under sleeping bags, beneath trees, and pushed our backs against cliffs, our noses cold.