The Salt God's Daughter (38 page)

“I think I know where he is,” I said. I remembered seeing him at the boardwalk, disappearing into the alley. She stopped the car.

“Let me come with you,” she said. But I knew her hip was bothering her and that it would be better for her to wait. I got out and raced to the boardwalk. When I cut through the back alley, I heard a noise behind me.

“Is that you, Mr. Taki?” I asked, walking toward the Dumpster. I hesitated. Something felt off. “Everyone's waiting for you,” I called.

“Waiting for me, Frog Witch?” Julio appeared on his bike, cutting me off.

I started to back up, feeling the scrape of the brick wall behind me. “You don't understand. My friend is missing.”

“You don't have any friends, Frog Witch.”

“Why don't you leave me alone?” The air in the alley was dank, full of garbage smells. Fish and rotting tomatoes. The stench of rotting food swelled in the afternoon heat. An open bag of bread crumbs lay a few feet away.

“You know you want it,” he said, throwing his bike to the side. I started to run, and he grabbed the back of my shirt. He pushed me down, one side of my face hitting the asphalt.

Julio pushed one hand over my mouth. I could taste blood in my mouth, salty, my jaw tingling into numbness. Over his shoulder, I could see the bright blue, then the pebbles and sand by my face, streaked red with my blood. People were passing by on the street, but they couldn't see me behind the Dumpster. A seagull swooped in and landed near my face a few feet away.
Another flitted into the alley, pecking at the torn bread. Julio leaned closer, his lips brushing mine. Each time I struggled, he just pressed into me harder. Fear ripped through me, my heart pounding out of my chest. My body was on fire. The Wizard made my every cell signal danger. Julio's weight was too much for me. His voice grew thunderous in my ears.

You never believed something like this would happen. My mother had warned me never to walk through an alley at night. I had never thought anything would happen during the day.

His face was slick. I could see the whiskers on his chin as sweat dripped off him onto my neck.

“You'll never be anything but a Frog Witch,” he breathed, his mouth wet on mine.

Then, I felt rumbling.

There it was again. Back and forth.

The ground jerked out from under us. Julio lifted his hand from my mouth, and I started to scream. Mr. Takahashi, his face flushed and eyes burning as if with memory, was running toward us in the alley. Julio jumped off me and ran out of the alley, leaving his bike and the scrape of his footsteps to settle like the lids of tin cans against the sandy ground. Forcing myself up, I glanced at Mr. Takahashi, pain radiating through my right arm. He nodded and grabbed my free hand, and we walked quickly through the crowd on the street and out toward the beach, watching the palm trees sway back and forth as swimmers raced to shore.

Drop. Cover. Hold, I thought, but there was no time to do that.

We were far enough away from the buildings and any resulting debris. I looked out at the ocean, half expecting a curtain of water to fall across the shore. There had been a small tremor. The waterhorse had come and gone, wanting only to let you know he was still there. Some things wanted only to be told that they were seen.

Mr. Taki held my bruised face in his hands. “Where have you been?” he asked.

 

“A NICE BOY like Julio, from a good family.” That's what some people said about the attack. We would press charges, my mother said, without a doubt. This shouldn't still be happening. It should never have happened in the first place. In time, our school would enforce a new no-bullying policy. But I wouldn't go anywhere alone, not for a long while. There was so much attention on my attack, I knew he would never touch me again. Some older girls, who I hadn't known before, started walking me home. They said no one should treat me that way.

T
HE PHOTOGRAPH OF my father that had once scraped the cold winds had been kept in a bottle on an island in the North Atlantic. But nobody knew this except for the old woman who was now standing at our front door, dressed in a black raincoat streaked with salt, her long gray braids falling forward over her chest. I watched as she pushed back her hood, revealing a blue cap knit with orange circles. She said my father's name. Her skin looked windburnt across her cheeks, as she blinked back tears.

It was the old woman from my vision, whom I had seen on my birthday. She held up a photograph. “I'm not looking for anything. Just wanted to speak with you.”

“He's gone,” my mother said, holding her gaze. The woman nodded.

“Lost at sea” were the only words I heard before my eyes began to burn. I felt my face flush as if my tongue were fire. Something hard and sharp rose up in my throat. I reached for my mother's hand. The sea flooded the parking lot, covering the sand and oyster shells with a sheet of glass. It was a rainy Saturday, and we hadn't left the apartment all day. El Niño
had returned with a vengeance, and from the window, cars appeared to be floating islands.

“How did you find us?” I heard my mother ask, her voice catching in her throat.

The woman's watery brown eyes flicked from my mother down to me. “He talked about you often. He used to say you were his family.” She said she had worked alongside my father for a very long time. “I'm sorry there isn't more that I can do for you. But at least this.”

My mother squeezed my shoulder, the photograph of my father clutched in her hand. The old woman waited in the doorway.

And then, “He was one of the bravest people I knew. There's no law in the ocean, nothing to protect the animals. Only people to protect them from other people. He loved you both,” she said, pulling her hood back up.

In the photograph, my father is thinner than my mother had described him, with long gray hair falling over his shoulders, and an almost all-white beard. What struck me more than his hair were his eyes, the way he seemed to measure my gaze, drawing back as if to both evaluate me and capture me. He looks old, close to fifty, I thought. So depleted and aged and utterly human. His navy blue trousers are covered with splotches of white paint. He is standing in front of a boat about to be christened, holding a champagne bottle of some sort, a look of pride on his tanned face. The boat's name, painted in white, is
Naida Hope
.

I imagined I could see the boat that night, out there in the distance. I imagined the blue-green lights of the aurora borealis falling in curtains across the deck, illuminating the faces of sailors, and then flickering red as the curtains billowed over the water, creating a sea of gold as the sea lions rose up, appearing as stones scattered across the skin of the waves. I knew it would never be over between us, my father and me. I had said
goodbye once in San Clemente. When I cast him out of my heart back then, I imagined him lost.

I sat on the couch and buried my face in my hands. My mother put her arms around me. “Did he love us?” I asked her, leaving her no choice.

She nodded. “He was just a man,” she said. “The Shekhinah, she came to let us know.” She pulled me against her and rocked me there for a few minutes as the rain drummed against the porch window and the storm lifted the bougainvillea from their resting places.

My father had been as close as the moon and as far.

You could walk between two worlds, the desert and the ocean. Each would, at times, appear to be the other. You could love that which you didn't understand, and you could hold that which no longer existed anymore. My mother offered me the photograph.

 

THAT NIGHT, I dreamed of a bird fluttering against my window. In my state of half-wakefulness, I opened my window, but the bird remained hovering. I watched as he passed right through the glass. He flew over my head and dove across the room. A lightning rod of brilliant blue streaked across the air and then circled once as it made its way above our heads. When it fluttered down and perched on the top of the chair, I drew in my breath. I started to walk toward it, but it flew away then and escaped through my doorway into the hallway. I got up and ran into the living room, but it disappeared. I thought it might be the last bit of magic my father had to offer.

 

MY HANDS SLIPPED from the rusty ladder as I climbed, my chin lifted toward the moon. My feet barely touched the rungs. My toes curved on the edge. I looked behind me, held by the shadows and the flickering lights from the string of Chinese lanterns.

I extended my arms. I caught my breath, letting go of thoughts of my past. Then it all disappeared as I pushed off. I was flying, my body curved across the sea. Sea mist. Red moon. Bad man. Good man. All of it, swirling on Teutonic plates, amid my mother's nighttime whispers of blistering deserts and of her young body stolen under confetti petals, of breezes laden with tears that swept across desert skies and into the wide arms of the roiling Pacific, and then north to another ocean. I kept my eyes open, knowing the waves were rising to meet me; I landed with a small splash, sinking down through the water. I opened my eyes underwater, glancing up at the seaweed canopy and the moonlight spilling through like a tunnel. Suddenly a huge cloud crossed over me, blackening out the moonlight. A floating island, I thought as I watched from underneath. Then, a flicker of light. Animal. A sea lion overhead. In its black eyes, I caught that ribbon of light, that spirit of a thing. Now a rippling image, the sea lion floated away above my head until it became a tiny ink spot in the night sky.

A few minutes later, I woke up breathing underwater. I pushed back my blanket and walked out on the patio.

“Can't sleep,” I told my mother.

All things could shift their shapes. Molecules of hate could become love. Animals from a far-off place could huddle like rocks against the cold night winds. The sea turned over from storms, and then the fish came back. Mothers survived their daughters. And daughters survived their mothers. All things moved on. Knowing you had a home changed everything. My mother and I walked down to the beach.

There was something pulling at me, an echo—once filled with stories of rescues, of escapes, of dreams and wishes made on the full moon. Now there was something else. Something that reminded me remotely of me. I dug my heels into the wet sand as the first spray of sunlight splashed up across the rippling water, lifting the clouds.

The assumption had always been flight.

That canopy. That magic. That girl in the back of the room. That animal fading into the night sky. That girl in the miniskirt who got up and could fly. Just a girl. Who remembered that she was loved, and who would remember to love herself. In time.

The blue light that was scattered throughout the ocean, not the atmosphere, gave the sky its color. Sunlight, which would wake you from a cold dark winter, could convince you that your life was something entirely different in a matter of hours, could find you curled up in the smallest, darkest part of yourself. Sunlight, which drew and reversed shadows, illuminated the moon. If you believed that the moon started and stopped all things, you might believe that its presence enabled the sun to begin with. This is something my grandmother Diana would probably have believed. This, what was called the Grandmother Theory of Creation.

All this time. All those stories.

 

THE NEXT NIGHT, instead of escaping into the waves, I crept down to the courtyard, carrying a brown paper bag. I knelt in the moon garden we'd made beneath the sentry palm, which looked quiet and peaceful in this light, not struggling, not appearing to have struggled. The sentry palm's bark was still green, and it still grew only two palm fronds, the tips golden. We'd planted moonflowers, which bloomed only at night, which loved the humidity. We'd planted tall stakes in a circle around the tree, and the tendrils of each twining vine grew around them, each with seven six-inch blossoms. The blossoms opened so fast in the evening you could watch them, and they lasted through the night, closing with the slightest hint of morning. We planted the common white variation, starting them off as seeds, nicked with a file and soaked the day before. In time, a bright blue blossom would appear. Then another. I would learn that this was the rarest type—the blue moonflower, whose blossoms appeared a
striking bright blue and, after closing, my mother's favorite pale shade of lavender. Their fragrance was lush and sweet, filling the air each evening. One day, the vines would grow right along with the sentry palm, reaching up around the trunk of the tree to its full ten feet, petals splayed open at night, opening wider in times of harsh winds and rain.

We hadn't made the garden perfectly round. Not a complete circle. The moon was only ever full for just one night.

I dug my fingers into the earth all around it. Aunt Dolly appeared next to me. “What am I going to do about this tree?” she asked.

Without a word, she sank to her knees and pushed her fingers into the ground, scraping away the earth, clawing a deep trench around the trunk of the tree, careful not to disturb its roots. I turned the paper bag upside down, letting my grandmother's 1966 almanac—from the year of my mother's birth—fall into the mud—each page holding the promise of abundant stories. I had found it in the storage room behind a box of slippers. Across the top, she'd written: “The Wanderer” My mother had refused it when I offered it to her, saying that was no longer her life. My father's death had ended her need for stories.

Now the cells that made up the paper would be joined with those of the sentry palm and become a living, breathing part of it. Maybe seeing these stirrings, these stories of the moon, these words in the margins written by my grandmother, who believed, with every fiber, in the life she could create, would make the sentry palm grow.