The Salt God's Daughter (18 page)

Sometimes, you might be one of them but just not know it.

Then, when they'd come for you, you'd change, your body no longer the body you knew. You'd swim through the waves, fast. Your every movement, every decision, ruled by instinct, as if breathing, as if the orbiting earth.

You'd know the ways of the fish and the habits of the giant green waterhorses that tried to drown you if you suddenly
climbed onto their backs unannounced, their tails like wheels. Your body would become large and powerful, your skin as sleek as fur. You'd be afraid of nothing, your heart drumming beats, your blood thick like rushing rivers. You'd know the signs of white skies, the direction of the wings of the seabirds, and the invisible places where the emerald pools stilled on the floors of coral caves. The magic of sea mist would turn your eyes to the future, allowing you the gift of second sight. You could begin storms, rescue swimmers torn from the saddles of waterhorses.

You had to be careful. If you accepted their animal skin, you would always be torn between two worlds, land and sea. You'd never feel completely at home in either. You would always miss the place you were before, the place where you no longer were now, and the ones who loved you in that place, who couldn't go with you.

“What would you do, Ruthie? Would you take the animal skin?” Dr. B. asked.

“She would. I wouldn't,” said Dolly.

I'd been hiding. “Would I be able to still see my sister?” I asked.

 

ON JANUARY' S WOLF Moon, I woke up with the taste of salt on my lips. Just weeks after I'd met Graham, I marched down to the ocean and waded out up to my waist, farther than I had ever gone. I had only ever walked into the Pacific up to my ankles, to leave fish for my sea lions, and on rare occasions to my knees. I was alternately drawn to and terrified of the water. Still, the waves piled up. The undertow bucked. It kicked up sand, trying to knock me off balance. But I resisted.

Not the smartest thing to do. Not the safest thing to do. None of it was.

Everything appeared captured, or perhaps it was I who was captured by everything. The red tides had come, turning the sea into a red noose by noon, now haunted by glowing blue
caps. Prey was scarce. Hunters would wade through empty landscapes, swearing they saw animals in the storm clouds. Light could engage emotion, causing you to read messages in the random spill of driftwood across the beach if you felt abandoned. The moon could warm the waves when you were feeling as if the world, and everybody in it, had frozen you out. The tips of palm fronds could appear burnt as if holding on to the memory of daylight. You might think, if only for a moment, that the glowing waves had been caused by your need for a greater sense of power over your life. Then you'd see it was only water.

On this night, the waves swelled up lace on the beach, pooling in my footprints. This bioluminescence was the effect of single-celled organisms that formed toxic blooms. When disturbed by a wave, a fin, or a swimmer's kick, they released an enzyme that appeared as a luminescent hue.

“Swirl it,” I told Dolly, after she'd captured some of the water in a glass jar. We put it on my porch, swirling it every so often to create enough light to read by, just as our mother had used the moonlight for this very reason.

I steered clear of the teenagers on the beach sitting around a bonfire, who were smoking pot in hooded gray sweatshirts. I walked far enough away that the scent of marijuana dissolved into the salty air and my image was unrecognizable. Now, I took my clothes off, hands clasped behind my head just as Dolly and I used to do while riding bikes with no hands at night. This is how I entered the sea. I knelt so that my hair was soaked with seawater. I had done this before and would do this after this night, time and time again. On nights like this, I swore my hair grew longer. I stood in that water, watching the light play upon the waves, and I pictured Graham's profile, the slope of his neck and the width of his shoulders, and I tried to trick myself into thinking that I could see him. But all I could see were little jellyfish floating on top of the water like moonlit
snowflakes, and the sea lions thrusting up through the skin of water, spilling white foam.

The longer I stayed out there, legs numbed to my thighs, the stronger I felt.

“He's not coming back. It's a one-night thing,” Dolly said over the phone. “Let it go.”

I told her I would not.

Now, I recognized a hazy figure in the ocean, the waves swirling around his shoulders. So one could say he was, indeed, a fisherman. One could say his boat couldn't dock here in Long Beach, with its crowded marina. One could say it had dropped him off far from shore so he had to swim in. Some boats were hard to dock at night.

I jumped up and waved, but he didn't see me. I called his name, and the image disappeared.

Later, as I sat on my porch, shivering, letting the whiskey burn my throat, I spotted the animals.

Three female sea lions were watching me from the waves, their brown bodies tumbled on the sand, revealing spotted bellies. Their noses were sharper, finer than the others I'd seen, their eyes a soft black. Huddling against the winds, they reminded me of Dolly and me as children, always keeping an eye on the rogue parent. From this night on, they would pile up like tossed blankets, folding and unfolding. Sometimes they appeared as boulders, and then other times as clouds, their coats drying to a bluish-purple hue. They'd bundle against each other, bodies overlapping as if there were not enough space, as if they were trying to ward off what was coming, when really there were miles of ocean and beach, and yet I—and Dolly—understood the natural inclination to be close.

I named them the Sisters, for they never strayed too far from each other. Female sea lions would gather in groups to protect each other from competitive males looking to mate, Dr. B. would tell me, watching them from my porch. I'd rush down
to the beach, creeping across the sand to kneel a few feet away, watching to see how they could do it—remain together.

Night after night, they slept beneath my porch. While Mr. Takahashi and some other residents complained about the high-pitched barking, I secretly relished it. Their noise crowded my loneliness. Some renegades would even leave fish for them.

No one knew it was me.

They would ward off storms and danger with their flashing dark eyes. They'd watch me as I carried clean sheets and fresh towels from room to room, as I'd climb up and down stairs. Each day, I'd pull sheets from the clothesline strung across the courtyard, peeling nightgowns from the salty air and tucking shirttails into drawers. The residents would check their reflections in the freshly washed windows when they forgot themselves—I gathered the reflections of my people and the Sisters, both at the same time.

I was not afraid of hard work. I patched holes in the cracked cream-colored walls, steamed the wall-to-wall gray shag in all the apartments. The Sisters grew frenzied when Wild Acres became a revolving door. Too many new people, pieces of furniture, stacks of books, framed photographs, and old records tossed around. The residents—with knotted fingers pressed to their thin white lips—had become my family. I knew them well. I would fill in their words for them when they forgot what they were saying, like sand into canals. They could not get enough of me, even when I wanted to disappear. Each time one of the nighttime “travelers” escaped, they'd trip the new alarm system Dr. B. had installed, which would call me out from hiding. I'd race out at night to capture them.

They said I was their lucky angel.

I took Mrs. Green for long walks, her large white hat and sunglasses warding off sunlight. The Sisters retreated into the foam when I set up Mrs. Green's easel on the beach, watching the swoop and arc of her sable brush across the waves, her
gold bangles sliding down her wrists. The Sisters would look up suddenly, as if called by an inaudible voice alerting them to escape. They came and went, always without warning, attuned to their own drumbeats.

I painted each door a different color so the residents could find their places. Just as she'd done before, Dr. B. put a moonstone in my pocket whenever she thought of it, telling me it was for protection. I never asked against what. I never knew I could paint. I never knew I could stand next to the ocean without wanting to run, without thinking of the desert.

“Ruthie, you can do anything you can imagine yourself doing,” Dolly told me over the phone.

“You sound like Mom,” I said, and yet I was grateful.

With a paintbrush in my hands, I could make things up. I gave Dr. B. a yellow-gold door because she held the lasso that kept people from getting lost. Mr. Takahashi's door was painted white, to help him sleep. Regal purple for Mrs. Green, because she could forget all she was.

“Ruthie, I've never seen you as happy. Do you know you sing when you paint?” Mrs. Green stood a few feet away as I knelt on a drop cloth in the hallway, clutching a wide thick brush covered with blue paint. “I have a surprise,” she said, the gray feathers of her hair wrapped in a flowing pink scarf. She hooked her arm in mine as we walked out to the beach, her scarf whipping crisply in the wind. My eyes focused forward, concentrating on the gift in front of me.

Two easels stood, side by side. “Let me have my joy,” she said.

My cheeks grew flushed. “I don't even know how to paint.”

“It's another language, Ruthie. A fine one, if you can learn it.”

“What if I'm no good at it?”

“You have a good teacher,” she said. She would teach me to trust the currents of my own imagination, to navigate my thoughts. She'd teach me to paint wet on wet and wet on dry, both ways of interacting with the paint. When you understood
a thing, it gave back to you, could bring you energy though you believed you were expending energy to do it. The paint would fight you unless you understood it, just like the weather. Just like people.

She'd teach me that the old master painters made calculations about light and shadow. Mathematical. Precise. They added and subtracted depth, she explained.

“See here, the hairs of these brushes should be stiff and snap back into place,” she said. She had brushes and palette knives in cups. Flats would create sharp edges, and filberts, rounded strokes. Her “favorites” were two size 12's, two 6's, and two size 2 small ones. “Do you like it?”

I nodded. “No one has ever given me anything like this,” I whispered.

In no time, my kitchen was filled with boxes of paint supplies—rags and turpentine, gesso, and tools. I became a collector of colors—Ultramarine, Viridian, Cadmium Red. Each had a temperament and would take to the canvas differently.

No matter what, you had to know at what point the paint would refuse you. I worked on my canvases, splashing dabs of crimson, desire; white that kept my secrets; and blue, which deepened into sudden careful thought. I liked a shade of soft lavender that wanted both to be seen and to remain quiet.

Mrs. Green showed me how to scrape away paint with the end of the brush when the colors would mix, turning to brown. “Slow down, Ruthie. You can't learn everything at once. Take your time. You're still just a baby.”

“Twenty-one,” I said.

I sat alone with the paints at night, learning which colors liked each other and which would create a sharp hedge. What would my mother say about all this, I wondered, about the ladders I drew in the waves, making them reach into the clouds? I imagined her leaning up against the car in the hot desert sun, smoking a cigarette and staring at the heavens.

Mrs. Green called me her protégé as our relationship deepened during afternoons of painting together. We were living parallel lives, both of us waiting and not waiting for someone to return from a distant world.

My car broke down by the side of the road, a white Honda that Dolly called Little Ugly. I was almost grateful to be free of it. While it was in the shop, I traveled by bicycle. My own muscles would carry me, making me aware of my strength. Each evening, I biked beyond Belmont Shore into downtown Long Beach, to a noisy little haven called Sheet Metal Moon Café, named for the metal furniture with its scoured patina. There, the tall palm trees with their feathery fronds reached over the buildings as the oil well pumps lifted toward the bright stars. Beneath the steel and cement forest, the Teutonic plates shifted, and a green waterhorse raced through emerald labyrinths, roiling the earth with its tail like a wheel, I'd tell Dolly.

 

THE SHEET METAL Moon Café became my home away from Wild Acres, a painted-gold respite. At any time of day or night, a group of children gathered outside on their bicycles. Maybe they liked the huge picture window that was always strung with Christmas lights, or the round metal tables that made tinny sounds when drummed. I'd sit at the same table, sipping coffee and reading from my mother's almanacs, which I'd recovered from the storage room. The calendar pages contained charts for each month, long narrow columns filled with planetary symbols, times of high tide, rising and setting suns and moons, full-moon names, and other astronomical and planetary data. My mother had marked up the pages with notes and hand-drawn pictures. Her scribbles streamed across the columns. I deciphered her notes, trying to correlate them with my memories of my past. Had I finally captured her? Beyond what I saw as a child, beyond what had appeared so random to me?

There were fifteen almanacs in all, the first, 1965, skipping 1966—the year of my birth—then from 1967 through 1980, the year of her death. The more I read, the more I saw certain scribbles repeated in several months and through different years. These included but were not limited to:

Good moon-Bad man
. Or the converse:
Bad moon-Good man
. And then:
Good moon-Good man
.