The Seas (15 page)

I don’t do anything in prison, and in fact I save and savor the few motions and things that I have to do during the day, holding out as long as I can, waiting, for instance, to brush my teeth, knowing that once I’ve done it, I’ll have even less to do that day.

My mother visits me every single day. Sometimes she brings my grandfather, but it disturbs him to the point of befuddlement, to the point where he says things that depress us even more. Things like, “We have to go, Marcella’s cooking a roast tonight,” or, “What are we doing here?” or, “I left the word _____ at home,” and he won’t say the word because he left it at home. After a few visits she leaves him at home.

My mother believes I am innocent, and not because the facts line up into a good defense but just because she believes me. For this I am extremely grateful. While she is here, I feel natural again. But her visits are limited to one hour, and so I have one hour of feeling natural, and twenty-three hours in which the only thing I have to do is brush my teeth twice and feel unnatural.

At night I speak to the wall, or at least I listen to it, and in the day I keep to myself and wait.

The sun rose earlier today than usual, I think. Not that I would know. I can’t see any windows from here.

Still waiting.

Today I thought about the word today.

Applying wait like a person might apply herself to a job.

Wait.

Wait.

Something is moving.

No. I was wrong.

The faucet in my cell has a drip, and today I counted two thousand nine hundred and eight drips while I waited. That’s about one drop every fifteen seconds for twelve hours.

That’s a lot of water.

So much, that it gives me an idea. I construct a temporary drain plug made of toilet paper and the water begins to collect, very slowly, but that is good for my purpose. I spend the day by the side of the basin and with every new drop that falls I say, “Dad, I’m in prison. Come get me.” By seven o’clock at night the sink is full with, “Dad, I’m in prison. Come get me.” I pull the plug and send my message out to sea.

I get in bed early. I am exhausted from being so vigilant all day. My cheeks and jaw hurt from having spoken so much. I am exhausted because all the hope I felt while filling the sink seems to have disappeared with the water down the drain. So though I’d like to hope that my message makes it to my father, there’s no hope left. I get into bed with anger. “Even if it gets to him he’ll probably be drunk,” I think, angry. I fall asleep.

Asleep I have a dream and in the dream I hear a bird chirp and warble. It is lovely. I pull a pad and pencil from my pocket. That is how I know I am dreaming—I am allowed a pencil and paper. On the pad, with my ear sharply tuned to the bird call, I begin to sketch a hirundine sirynx, that is, the vocal cords of a swallow. That is how I know I am a scientist, because I have never even heard of the word

hirundine – adj. of or like a swallow

before. When I have completed this sketch, in the dream, the sirynx I drew begins to chirp and sing and coo. That is how I know I am a real scientist. I collect my dream thoughts a moment. Then I collect a few choice science tools from a cabinet in my cell I had not noticed before. I chose a few pieces of equipment that I will need for my next experiment. I choose my doppler profiler, my conductivity-temperature-depth recorder, a compass, and the salinity sonar. It is a heavy load but it is a dream and I have no trouble bearing the weight.

I stand at the door to my cell, and exhaling I push the steel bars out of my way. Without fear, I walk through the hallway, turning left and right until I am standing before the prison gate. The gates bang with openness.

In the dream I carry my science equipment down to the sea. I will use it to pinpoint the exact location of Jude. I will take doppler readings. I will make salinity profiles. I will graph the results until I arrive at an exact reading, the longitude, the latitude, and the depth of Jude in fathoms and feet. I will conduct an experiment to measure whether the ocean is good or bad, because I have a hypothesis that it is neither. I think I can prove that as a scientist. I take my doppler profiler in hand. I imagine presenting my results to the world, and how in light of the startling results, the government will fund a study to prove the same thing about humans—that they aren’t necessarily good or bad—and if I could prove that I could pull Jude back up through the war and the water. I could make him mine.

In the dream I touch my toe to the ocean and the shock of the cold water is lovely. It feels like breathing. Unfortunately the shock of the cold water is really a shock and it wakes me up.

When I wake I am in prison. There is no cabinet of scientific equipment. It is dark and still and I am only momentarily confused. I remember the ocean and that it was a dream, but rather than feeling defeat what I feel is a residue of water that is so strong I imagine my toe feels wet and that thought makes me smile. I reach for my toe in the dark.

My toe is wet.

I bolt upright and the cot squeaks. “Shh!” I tell it. I get out of bed. At the end of the hallway of cells there is a red EXIT sign. It is required by law, though it has often been the source of amusement among prisoners as there is not actually an EXIT open to us. The sign glows very brightly at night and casts a red glow down the hallway. I grab onto the bars of my cell and see that the red is reflecting off something in the alley between cells. The red light is caught in a trail of water that leads to the door of my cell. I can see where each of his feet fell because there is a print of water and the water reflects the red of the EXIT.

I pull my hair as a test. It hurts.

My ribcage grows tight making it difficult to breath. For one moment I look back at the bed, but only for a very quick moment. I try the bars. They glide soundlessly and in my bare feet I follow my father’s wet prints.

I run and run and run through the hallways of the prison. At first I think, “If I run fast enough I will catch up to my father.” But the faster I run, the harder it becomes to breathe. This stiffening in my lungs is a question that is pounding and growing and taking up space. The question is “What do you mean catch up with your father? Catch up to being gone?” I stop running. People die so quickly already.

When I reach the gates of the prison the sun is coming up. The gates open to let me out and there on the other side of the prison gates is my mother, waiting beside our car with the engine idling. I run and quickly jump in. “Come on!” I holler. “Let’s go!” My father must have told her to come get me.

She turns slowly back to the car and gets in. She reaches across the gear shift to hug me. “Baby,” she says. “My poor baby.”

“Come on, Mom. We better hurry before they realize I’m missing.”

“Huh?”

“What happened? Did Dad come tell you?” I ask.

Her face wrinkles like sadness and confusion were a blanket covering it all of the sudden. “It wasn’t your father. Oh.” She looks away from me but still does not put the car in gear. “The police called,” she says. “They said you were free to go. They said there was a note, a suicide note. They said you weren’t responsible. Oh.” She holds onto the wheel until her flesh whitens. “They said Jude killed himself.”

My mother and I both stare straight ahead, waiting.

The prison is surrounded by very tall pine trees. And after my mother says this, the trees and the prison continue to stand, sturdy and appropriately in the middle of a dark forest that keeps all the dark secrets of a forest. Birds, squirrels, fog, deer bones buried under pine needles, and lichen. Jude killed himself. The possibility that this might be the truth swoops near my head like a bat at dusk, a bat that soon flies off in the other direction uninterested in me.

Jude’s note. I smile. He really fooled them.

“Mom.” I say, “Listen,” and begin to tell her about the drip. I tell her about the drain and the dream and the noiseless way my cell door slid open. “There were wet footprints and I followed them. It was Dad,” I say and after thinking a bit, biting my lip, I add, “And that is the truth no matter what plain or boring or painful excuse you choose to believe instead.”

“I don’t know what to believe just now,” she says exhaling. The word just gives me hope that she might believe me. Just seems more like a moth just passing through and once its gone she’ll believe me that Jude and my father are alive. She’ll believe that I am a mermaid and her life won’t be so dreary. I keep talking. I tell her about the other prisoners and how we got fed and showered and exercised like horses. I tell her about the mice and the poison the guards set out for them. I tell her details. Details make a story even as unbelievable as mine believable. My mother stares straight ahead at the prison, nervously fidgeting with the skin of her thumbs. I continue telling her about the police and the guards until she doesn’t want to hear anymore, until she is full.

“Ugh,” she says shaking her head no. “That’s not how it ends,” she says. “I’ve read enough books to know that’s not how it ends.”

“Tell me how it ends then.”

She squints her face up, thinking, trying to be very careful about the words she chooses. “It’s harder to say in words,” she says. “Words are so precise.”

“Why don’t you say it in sign language?”

“You don’t speak sign language.”

“I’ll understand,” I tell her.

And so she does. Her hand bobs up and down, like a fish swimming. Her fingers flare out slightly as she rises from each dip with words flying off them.

“Ah,” I say when she is done and for all I know it could mean, “Look out! Disaster!” But I don’t think so. I think it’s closer to Ocean. Continue. Forever. Smooth night with stars for navigation.

Words have more than one meaning all the time. Just like Jude’s note.

“Mom, listen to me for once without thinking no, no, no. OK?”

She nods and tears at her lip with her teeth.

“It was Dad,” I say. “He helped me escape.”

She doesn’t speak. She starts the car and, putting it in gear she pulls away from the prison. She stays silent for awhile while we pass out of the pine trees.

“Where is he?” she finally asks.

It takes me a moment to answer because I don’t really know. And in that moment her bottom lip starts to shiver.

“I think he went back to the ocean,” I say.

She nods her head and looks down.

“Do you want to go see?” I ask. “Maybe—” I say, but I am nervous to finish my sentence, to say, maybe he’s there. Her lips tremble so much that she begins to cry. She doesn’t answer me but turns our car away from our house. She points us towards the direction of the sea

“What about you then? Are you going there too?” She wipes her tears on her sleeve and shoulder.

I don’t have an answer to that yet.

“Maybe it’s time for both of us to go,” she says, but I don’t think she means to New York.

The sun is just coming up and it is turning the sky a beautiful shade of blue. She keeps driving straight down to the ocean. We park and as I climb from the car all the small, dry, yellow flowers that grow like trash by the side of the sandy road touch my ankles. My mother and I walk through the flowers down to the ocean. When we see the sea I jump. I am so happy, because I think, “Jude, there you are.” My mother cocks her head sideways, as though she wants to be happy but forgot how, and is only just now getting some vague recollection of what that felt like.

My mother and I reach the edge of the water and hesitate for just a moment to shed our clothes. We walk towards the water and we continue walking, right into the water. After a short while, we don’t have to walk anymore. The water is quite cold but it feels like a deep breath.

“Woo! That’s cold,” she says and splashes the tears off her face with a handful of seawater. “Look out,” she tells me and smiles because a wave is building in front of us. The water is filled with words. This wave is

smelly – adj. having or giving off a foul odor

like the sea. We dive under it and the words rumble over our heads. When we surface my mother has caught giving in her hair.

“I didn’t know you could separate definitions,” she screams to me but I don’t answer as another wave is coming.

wait – vt. 1. to stay in one place or remain

inactive 2. to remain temporarily undone or

neglected 3. to serve food

We dive clear. We don’t want any of that wave. “Of course you can,” I say and demonstrate as a small wave of hysteria passes.

hysteria – n. Gr. hyster, the uterus 1. a psychiatric condition, anxiety, fits of laughing, crying, simulation of organic disorders such as deafness or blindness

Floating over the wave I pick out laughing and throw it at her. “See,” I say and this does make her laugh.

“How do you do it?” she asks me.

“I think it’s like chemistry. Like the letters are atoms, the words are molecules, and the sentences are elements. You just chose what scale you want to see the world in.”

“I get it,” she says and we begin to jump up and down as the next wave grows in front of us. It is large, growing larger as we watch. We swim directly through it.

lady – n. from hlaf: loaf, and -dige from (bread) kneader 1. a woman loved by a man 2. a woman who has rights 3. a title

“Woo!” she shouts. In her hands she has grabbed rights and loved and loaf. She turns to show me the possibilities the definers never thought of. “Ha,” she says and her eyes widen to read something. “Look around your neck,” she says.

I touch the word. It’s a title.

“Is that what you want?” she asks.

I suppose so. I have been looking for a title. I hold onto the word.

We float on our backs, every choice, every word, every possibility is drifting somewhere nearby us. Somewhere nearby is Jude. Somewhere nearby is my father. Somewhere nearby are all the words the town will say about me. Sad. Stupid. Suicide. In time, my mother might get cold or tired. She might even go home, but for now we are happy right here. We let the waves roll beneath us and forget the dry land and forget the idea of ever going back because the water is