The Salt God's Daughter (25 page)

Light, like water, pushed into footsteps.

I got up. Before I could say anything, Graham pulled me onto his lap. We clasped hands. He stayed there, inside me. I climbed off him, my thighs aching.
This is my body
, I thought.
My body
.

I looked down over the railing, letting my fingertips touch the bougainvillea petals. I wanted to recapture the past, as if in a net. To run with it back across the beach to the first night I met Graham, to even before that, and then to spill it out over the sand so that I could relive it.

M
Y BLOOD WOULDN' T spill in August. The Red Moon.

This moon signified the end of summer and the beginning of the cool ocean breeze. Graham arrived with a bruise under his right eye. “It's nothing,” he said, when I reached for him. I told him we had to go. He knew where.

As we rode through the streets, the wind pushed against my face as I opened my mouth, breathing it in, memory, letting it dry my tongue, my lips, letting my tears drift onto the sides of my face, my hair, my ears, my neck.

The Bougainvillea Castle, still here after all this time, was more lush, more full with blossoms. When I looked up from beneath the canopy, I saw fuchsia, purple, and orange hues spilling across the night.

My heart flitted in my chest like a trapped bird as I gripped my bike handles, my toes touching the earth, one foot down, then the other up, tipping back and forth, letting my weight help me decide where to go. Clusters of vines heaved petals across the air, their buds reaching out ravenously, splaying the biggest blossoms. Into the vines were woven the secrets of all the girls who had gone before and after me. The voices
of those girls I could almost hear now. I pushed back my hair, trying to listen.

“Is this how you remembered it?” Graham asked, as I got off my bike. He stood next to me, his hand touching my shoulder. I felt the heat of the white sky pressing down, and the drumming pulse of the flowers. I felt the blood rushing through the veins of the trees, deepening the cadence of memory. I felt the long rain piercing the grass; the heat of the animals breathing in the dark; the quick beat of small hands on drums; the scrape of bird wings across tinny skies, their moonlit tails whipping against the flash of night, passing.

As ever, my own heartbeat. And now his.

My knees buckled. Graham reached out and steadied me. I motioned with my chin for him to look at the trees. He said he didn't see anything. But I saw the leaves parting. The bougainvillea revealed something I had forgotten about all these years, that iridescent pale blue sheen, the petals held in the white cast of mourning.

The wolf cries of the Santa Anas raced across the canyons and passes and dissolved into the skies. Petals fell like confetti through the wind, their edges torn. I shook off his hand and folded my arms, showing him I could stand alone. After all these years.

Leaves quivered in the breeze like ceremonial ribbons as I smoothed my jean miniskirt. As I knelt to untie my old blue high-top sneakers, my purple feather earrings brushed my neck. I'd kept the earrings all these years, never knowing why. Graham took the bottle of tequila from my basket and gathered the bouquet of red roses we'd bought at a small flower stand on Second Street. They had been wrapped in pink paper, which Graham tore off and shoved into a plastic bag. I was amazed at his attunement to the details of my recollection, even if my own memory had faded over time.

Whatever was here, I was ready to claim it. To stand up and say, Here I am.

And, What more do you want from me?

Catching my breath, I pressed my fists against my chest to steady my heartbeat. The grass was thick. The sky was too thin in patches. Graham remained quiet. I looked around. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by memory. “Let's go home,” I said, wishing I were back in my bed and that I could curl up and shut my eyes.

Graham's eyes held mine. “You have to be sure.”

“I need a minute.” I walked away. I glanced up at the leaves, at the place where I had gone all those years ago when I had left my body.

Up there in the canopy, I imagined the air was cool and all the sounds blended together, no one louder than the other, everything swirling into a murmuring hum. I closed my eyes to remember what I had come for. Memory met flesh. Birdsong. Bicycle tires crushing, leaves rustling. Insects with pulsing wings, tucked within the bark of trees, the sound and wind all greased by my blood, the marrying thread.

The events of my past could be rewritten. Who'd ever heard of such a thing? He wanted me to be whole, to give me back what I had lost. “Because it still follows you, that night. Only you can walk it down,” he'd said. “It chases you like an animal in your dreams.” That was exactly what it did.

I wanted to take the chance, knowing that it might be helpful. That the body might be able to do something about the mind's unrelenting jaws, locked on this night.

That girl. She was with me. Here, now. The girl who was tricked. The girl who hadn't known. That burning orchard. That girl with wings. The one who was left.

Everywhere, there was curling smoke.

I shivered, folding my arms. Suddenly, in my mind I was falling, my hands tunneling moonlight.

Carefully unfolding the white blanket, I let my hair fall across my eyes. When I shook out the blanket, it billowed up
so that a square of light fell over the grass. Graham knelt at one corner, his large hands spreading it out flat until it was smooth. He put the bottle of tequila near the edge of the blanket. Then he stretched out, hands clasped behind his head, starting up at me. Weaving through my memory, I pictured myself as I was back then, a fresh spray of freckles across my nose, my long hair tangled across a white blanket, streaked with summer sunlight.

I kept my shirt on and tossed my jean skirt in the grass.

I stood there in my underwear, as pale as moonstone. My top fluttered up around my bare stomach. I touched the peace sign charm on my old necklace. I knelt on the blanket. I wanted to feel the wind on my face, the sweet breeze. Then I lay next to Graham, my eyes holding his. I moved closer, my stomach pressed to his. “It's okay. It's just me,” he whispered, his warm mouth on my skin, connecting me somehow to myself. Looking up, I searched beyond the flower petals for the night stars. Graham reached over and handed me the bottle of tequila. He told me to try and relax. I told him I didn't want alcohol this time—I wanted to be aware, conscious. My eyes teared. I passed the bottle back to him, and he drank and then replaced the cap and set it aside. I tried to relax as the sky weighted deep blue stones on my shoulders. I imagined having left my body, and now looking down as if from the sky, at my body and Graham's splayed on a white blanket.

“Say when,” he said.

The liquor spilled from his lips, trickling down his chin and onto my chest. I reached up and wiped his face clean with my hand. Graham reached for my arm, and, lifting my hand to his mouth, he began kissing me. He continued, kissing my shoulder and the inside curve of my arm. Then he moved to the other side and held my other hand. He did the same thing, caressing my fingers and my palm, pushing my hair back from my neck, leaving kisses behind the ears. My body shivered from head to toe. I stared at the bouquet of roses he'd set in the grass.

He let me lie on top of him for a good long while, almost an hour, allowing me to meld into him, drowning in the musky scent of his warm body.

“It happened right after my first period,” I whispered, noticing how his gaze remained steady.

“You're safe. Just go at your own pace,” he said.

I would decide what happened this time, and I knew I could say anything to him, that he would not judge me, or think me horrid, or stupid, or naive. Or wrong. Graham kissed my neck, starting to move his hands across my stomach. His breath grew heavy.

“Stop,” I said.

He pulled away, and sat up. He understood.

I reached for him, clasping my hands around his neck, pulling him down over me. He began kissing me, moving his lips across my neck, burying his face in my hair. My eyes trailed up the line of tree bark, up to leaves and the scarlet hues streaked across the sky. I heard the whisper of branches, imagining the tree of lost virginities, my own name carved into its thick bark, its leaves rippling blue-white in the sky, like tongues or flames.

“Graham,” I said. “Graham, look at me.”

“I'm looking,” he whispered, not taking his eyes off me. I imagined the red tinge of his eyes, the ink spot approaching in the calm clear water.

I imagined a table underwater, covered by white linens and set with silver bowls filled with chocolate ice cream and freshly washed strawberries.

When we made love, I imagined flight.

Gazing up at the sheet-metal moon, I took it all back, everything I had left.

 

I WRAPPED MY arms around myself. For a little while, I cried. I hadn't imagined I would need to, but I did.

I lay in his arms, watching those memories now whipping across the air—

As we gathered our things to leave, I picked up one of the roses.

That night, I burned it on the beach.

O
N THE NIGHT of the Blood Moon in October, leaves fell under a sheet-metal sky. The deer were ready and fattened for the hunt, fed by the Santa Anas heat. They kicked up ash as they disappeared beyond the cement walls, parting the tall grasses.

Smoke crept up from the bluer than blue. The ocean swelled. The sea winds pushed enormous waves toward the shore. The Santa Anas rushed down from the mountains toward the sea to meet them. When the two winds met, they created havoc. I had been watching from my porch and was sent running to the bathroom, spilling myself out over the rim.

My hair curled up around my face. My mouth tasted bitter. I wiped my face with my sleeve. I hadn't slept. I needed something to eat, consumed by the thought of bread. My Naida, who was hungry already. She got me up in the middle of the night in the heat, looking for bread.

I vomited again in the bathtub, struggling for air. The weight of my body was enormous. Grasping the side of the counter, I pulled myself up. My reflection in the mirror looked faded. The purple welts under each of my eyes had deepened.

Graham hadn't returned since the Bougainvillea Castle in August. But I had other things to think about now. Dolly pounded on the bathroom door. She'd let herself into my apartment with her key.

“Moose! Let me in!”

She had come to check on me—she hadn't heard from me in weeks. She'd tried calling Dr. B., who'd left on a trip to Greece. Mrs. Green was visiting her son in Chicago. Mr. Takahashi had knocked gently and then gone back to his apartment.

I crawled to the door, reached up, and turned the knob. She knelt by my side, and she put her hand on my forehead. “Do you think you have a fever?”

I hadn't told her what had happened at the Bougainvillea Castle two months before. How I hadn't had my period since.

“I'm pregnant,” I breathed.

She nodded. “We need to get you a test,” she said, running cool water across the washcloth. My sister smoothed my hair as I crouched once more against the cold basin, my hands pressed like paws on the cold tiles. She held my hair back, and then I fell across her lap. She rocked me there, sitting on the bathroom floor. Just like she had done once before, all those years ago.

 

IT WAS CONFIRMED. We stared at the blue line creeping across the tiny white rectangle in the pregnancy wand.

“I told you,” I said.

“Moose. We'll figure this out together,” Dolly said. That night she tucked me into bed. Then she went to sleep on the couch. Dolly left with a promise to return that next weekend and told me to think about what I wanted to do, even though we both knew there was nothing to think about. When Graham knocked on my door a few nights later, I didn't run to open it. I sat on the couch and stared at it defiantly. This is what it was to feel emptied of everything, I thought. You wouldn't care.
Nothing could touch you. The world could be careening out of its orbit and you'd sit here, letting it take you.

This was a night that was not the full moon. I watched the doorknob turning, the fingernail of light scraping my reflection.

I could press on as long as I did the opposite of what I actually felt. This would be my compass. I got up and opened the door.

He smiled at me with surprise. He could tell something was different. I could see the effects of his fatigue pulling at the corners of his eyes. His wrists looked wrong, bony and large. His fingers too heavy as he pushed the door shut.

“You don't look like yourself. What's going on?” he asked, putting his bag down. He was earnest. That's what I noticed when he reached for my hand. That's what I'd seen from the start. “I've been working. I came as soon as I could,” he said. “Can I make you smile? At all? For a second? Just a minute? A half of a second?” Then he pulled back.

“What's wrong?” he asked, putting his bag down. He tried pulling me down on the kitchen floor, wanting to wrestle. I leaned back against the counter, my hands covering my stomach. Why was he so childlike now? I slinked down and pushed my back up against the wall.

“I'm eight weeks pregnant,” I said. I pulled up my shirt, revealing my swollen belly. “Yes. It's yours.”

He didn't say anything for a moment. Then he crawled toward me and pressed his ear to my abdomen. He smiled, his pale cheek against my tummy. I half wondered if he was going to ask me what I was going to do, or even how this had happened, but he didn't. My loyalty had never been in question. Not once.