The Salt God's Daughter (26 page)

Later, I tossed off the covers and slipped out of bed. Pushing open the sliding glass door to the porch, I wanted to see the wetsuit. I touched the sleeve. It was thicker than I had thought, lined with heavy fur. Then I heard something. He was calling my name in his sleep. I ran back inside. Kneeling beside him, I
put my hand on his forehead. His eyes fluttered open. I leaned over him, my hair falling across his chest. “Where did you come from? Where do you go? Why me?”

He murmured something. I leaned in. “I could really love you.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Ruthie, I dreamed about you before I met you,” he whispered.

I touched his cheek, noticing the moistness of his skin, then the bruises on his neck that he'd never explain. I wanted to know his people, to see that he existed beyond our relationship. He caressed my face, moving his thumb around my lips, circling lightly, trying to spin this all into love. It was a beautiful gesture, meant to make me feel delicate. But I would no longer accept tenderness in place of permanence, in place of honesty. This was too high a price to pay. I knew the green waterhorse was shifting his weight under the Teutonic plates. I imagined I could feel its drumming pulse underneath my feet.

He was gentler with me now because he realized he loved me. Or perhaps it was because I was carrying his child. Deciding both could be true, I slipped into the bed and pulled the covers up over my face. He pulled me toward him, my body fitting against his. I turned my back against his chest. I didn't want to fit.

“I'm glad,” he whispered against the back of my neck. “You want to know. I am.”

“Are we going to raise this child together?” I turned toward him.

His gaze fell. “You know I can't.”

I didn't need him to hold me, for him to tell me that he'd always be there for me. That we'd always be friends. When his eyes met mine, I knew it was over even though I still felt something. I knew then that I always would. I had to send him away. He got up and started to get dressed.

The earth was cracking open. I held my stomach, watching him. Where was my sister? I wanted my sister, who'd been by my side forever.

This was not what I had imagined. Whatever life he was leading surely couldn't be more important than the life we had created. Did he care? The realization that I was following in my mother's footsteps, that I was going to do this alone, hit me like a wall of flames. I'd been waiting a lifetime for my child, never thinking that history would repeat in this way.

By myself. Become a mother. What if I would be like my mother? What if I could not stay with my child?

“You'll be a wonderful mother,” he said, picking up his wetsuit.

“I can't believe this is happening,” I whispered. He nodded and said he understood. It was an old story.

Standing in the doorway, he raked his fingers through his hair, watching me. “Some day, you'll meet someone who will love you like I can't. You deserve better,” he said. I nodded.

What I knew: We didn't want to be fighting. Neither of us was good at it. We both wanted to make peace. We craved it, that old stillness, all that time we'd sit on the beach in the sunlight and imagine the future. We didn't want the shadows that filled our eyes when we looked at each other, reminding us of the distance that had always been there, of what we had not buried, of the chasm that we had not successfully crossed. We didn't want our words to sound like thunderclouds. We knew we were not unsinkable. We didn't want this moment, or the necessary ending that it meant. We didn't want to have failed.

“I will come back. It's my responsibility.”

“Come back because you love me. Not because you have to.” I stood in front of him, my hands pressed to my swollen breasts. I had never felt more vulnerable in my life.

“Ruthie, you're more than this,” he said.

“Aren't you?” I said, but I didn't know that. Each time I opened my mouth I imagined birds sweeping by and catching my words. There were birds flocking between us now, a whole cavern of them, darting this way and that, curving and swooping. I understood what my mother wanted me to know, that we were different.

I bucked up. I threw my shoulders back. I had never abandoned anything in my life. Not a person. Not a single moment.

This feeling was familiar. I hadn't felt anything like this since she'd died. I missed her. I wondered if I was ready to go on without Graham, knowing I had no choice. I had never wanted to let anyone go. But I would never wait for him again.

Graham put his hands on my shoulders. “I know you'll protect my child, Ruthie.”

My throat tightened. “Never come back. If you leave, you can never come back.”

“Ruthie,” he said, his voice thin, “I shouldn't have come. It's better if I go. You'll see.”

He pushed open the sliding glass door and grabbed his knapsack and wetsuit from the chair. When he came back he took out two objects: a small white dagger, its bone handle carved in the shape of a horse, its mane encircling it. Then he took out an old bible with a black leather cover. “These are mine. I keep them with me for protection, but I want you to have them now.” I followed him into my bedroom. He lifted the mattress and pushed the dagger and the bible back to the farthest point underneath. “Keep these here. They'll protect you when you sleep. And our child. Will you promise me that?”

I could hear the Sisters barking.

He sighed, his eyes holding mine.

“These will protect you both. Will you promise me you'll keep them here under the bed?”

“I don't make promises,” I said. That was my new truth.

He lingered in the doorway. “I don't imagine I'll get over you.”

The fact that he didn't want to disappoint me made it that much harder. I told him goodbye.

All was quiet. Things were returning to their rightful places, reversing the mistakes of that first Blue Moon. I had been one of the in-betweeners that night, one who'd been trapped. I had become confused, thinking I'd been found. But people like me, like my mother, too, who couldn't read maps, who made up her map as she went along, would forget the signs and symbols she'd already found. The problem was forgetfulness. Time and time again.

Time could fool you; it could soften the sharp corners of a thing. You might see this as a change in the thing itself. You might think that a soft corner on a piece of sea glass meant that the glass didn't have the potential to break. But glass would always contain within it the capacity to cut you, no matter how it appeared. The same road would always lead you back to the place you once knew, back to the place where you were your most raw, unbridled self, back to the place where you were mostly animal.

Danger would always be danger.

After I closed the door, I removed the dagger and the bible and put them in a box in the storage room with my mother's almanacs. I would never take them out again. I would never take that same road again. Graham was now a part of my past, and so were my mother's stories. I closed the cover of the box and taped it shut, beginning a new life.

 

IN THE WEEKS and months that followed, my sheets would not unfold with sand. Staring out at the breakwater that abutted the waves, I thought about how the sea always knew where it stood.

“The only way to get over him is to let yourself want him. Want him until you don't want him anymore,” said Dolly over the phone. Her sensitivity surprised me.

“We both wanted something.” I held the phone under my chin. “Do you think Mom was a liar?”

“Why do you ask?” Dolly said.

“She said I would be a better mother than she was.”

“She wasn't a liar about everything,” Dolly said.

In my mind, I pictured Dolly as a child, straight red hair, sitting on the bathroom floor, pulling her hair out, leaving it across the tile, and then trying to hide it, kicking it under a towel. Now, here she was, my Rock of Gibraltar.

“Do you want me to come there and bring you something? Do you need anything?” Dolly asked.

I couldn't let her come. I noticed the bougainvillea crawling over my porch railing. It fed on yearning. I had never wanted my mother more than I did now. “I'm fine. I'm going to bed now.”

“You will do this. You will do this because doing this is who you are,” said Dolly. “I'll help you. Ruthie, you're not alone. I promise you that.” She meant it. Helping was her best intention.

Grief could disguise itself as a lover, and before you knew it, you would only feel safe in its arms. That is what Sister Mary told me over the phone when I called to tell her the news of my pregnancy. I'm not sure why I thought she should know. We owed each other nothing, and I hadn't talked to her in years. She'd been my keeper once. That was all. Maybe I had loved her. Maybe she had loved me. Yes, I was certain she had. Somehow I still thought of her as wanting something to do with me. I wanted her to say something loving. I wanted her to bless me, to tell me this would all be okay. She'd been there the first time. “God be with you, Ruth,” she said.

“And also with you,” I said, after I hung up.

 

DR. B. TOOK over my duties. For a brief time, I locked myself away in my apartment. One particularly bad night, I
took Graham's shells and spilled them out across the carpet. I wanted to see the size of my denial, to see it spread out before me. I needed to quantify it.

Someone was at the door. “It's us, Ruthie.”

“I'm sick,” I called, looking at the broken shells everywhere. “Come back later.”

“Fay made chicken soup. We have briscuit. Orange juice, fresh squeezed.” I sat there, knowing how this would look to them. Mrs. Green would hover over me and pretend there was nothing wrong with me. Dr. B. would fold her arms, staring me down. She would ask where I stood. What my plan was. What I'd decided. I would have to reveal how great my naiveté had been. They'd want to protect me. They'd say things. I'd have to defend Graham, which I didn't want to do right now. “Ruthie, open the door.”

I opened the door and sat down on the floor amid the broken shells.

Mrs. Green spread her tallith across my couch, pretending not to notice the litter. It was a relief. I could count on her for always taking the road most generous.

I pulled off the coral ring and put it in my pocket. I told them I was fine, that they could count on me to buck up. Mrs. Green warmed up some soup. I didn't want prayer now. I just wanted to be left alone.

 

LATER THAT NIGHT, after the air was cleared, to create some space for the new good things to come in, I walked out to the ocean toward the sudden piles of driftwood, chalky in the moonlight.

The water was freezing.

A wave splashed over me. I pushed up through it, trying to catch my breath.

Someone was shouting my name. I looked back. Dr. B. was standing on the beach with a red towel in her arms. Her curly
gray hair tufted in the wind as she kicked off her sandals. Her long black dress flounced up around her calves as she came toward me, meeting me halfway, waves sweeping her shins. She wrapped the towel around my shoulders and walked me back inside. She said that this would pass, my morning sickness and my feelings about Graham. “That little spirit is with you now. Motherhood is not about mothers. Now, you get yourself together.”

 

INSIDE, SHE SMOOTHED the blanket over my legs.

I pulled it up over my face. “I don't know how to be a mother,” I whispered. How would I be a mother when I had no mother to show me how to do it?

“You have us now. We're your family now. So sit up. Sit yourself up,” she said, straightening my shoulders, her voice stiffening. “You need to choose this. You need to choose the life that has chosen you.”

I looked into her eyes. Here, I read compassion. Here, I found more compassion than I'd ever seen, more understanding than I thought another person could offer. Perhaps it wasn't there before. Or I didn't need it as much. I felt her strength. Her belief in me. She knew me. She wasn't just giving me lip service, telling me what I wanted to hear.

“Promise me you won't ever turn your back on yourself like this again,” she said.

I promised.

I got up. Running into the bathroom, I thought about my child. I splashed water across my face. I took a deep breath. Then another. Then my eyes focused forward again. The map. It was here.

DAY AFTER DAY, the animals watched me as I passed by them on the beach. If I would always be scrutinized by the cashier at the grocery store, first eyeing my swollen belly and then directing her gaze to my naked ring finger, I had to become blind to it, to this continued examination of my motives, my choices. Some would feel sorry for me, which was almost as disappointing as being judged. Others would blame me. I'd be called irresponsible, irrepressible. Inexcusable. I would hear “out of wedlock.” I would hear “single mother.” I would put it all on pause, just as I'd learned to do. Dolly said not to trust anyone. I didn't believe it.