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psalm_onethirtyoneI know you guys all want to read my final story for Fiction Writing[1] -- a twelve-page magical-realism epic of a young aquarium guard on a quest to save her sick child. >_> This story exists mainly so I can write scenery porn about the aquarium, and also got I think a B- or a C, so we're not talking quality wordstuff here, but. This class was the bane of my existence, so I'll take what I can get.
Also, I should probably warn that the names of the main characters are stolen from Simmer Dim, even though the characters are not the same; there's kind of a Biblical theme going on. My deepest apologies to David, who I know would never do anything like this in real life[2].
In other news, I have a beekeeping dinner to-night at 6.00 and a poetry reading at 8.00 and I fully expect sweet death to overtake me at some point. Also, it's really dark outside even though it's only 4.00. O_o Thanks, weather, glad to know the apocalypse is still coming.
& without further nonsense, storytime.
[1]Ha, ha.
[2]Irony!
The Estuary
Eden has never been to the sea.
The closest she gets is shutting down the exhibits every night at eight, flipping off the switches in the marine halls so that everything is coloured with a pale, swimmy light from the bulbs in the tanks, where the shadows of the animals glide thoughtfully past the big viewing windows. The big rays curl their wings against the glass as they follow her.
When she gets to the jellies she always stops and stands there in the dark. Like most aquariums, the New Manchester Estuary lights its jelly tubes from underneath with coloured bulbs, so that the translucent moon jellies and walnuts glow neon red and blue and purple. The rest of the room is always dark, so visitors can see all the details of their bodies outlined in neon, pulsing up and down in the tubes.
Eden has a flashlight and a badge and her blue uniform polo to show she has a right to be here after the doors have officially closed, settling everybody to bed. Well, sort of to bed. She flips down the big switch in the Reef hall and the fish go on swimming, parrots and triggerfish and the sweet lemon shark that’s nearly as old as the Estuary (seven years).
When her cell phone rings she nearly drops the flashlight.
“Hey.”
“Eden, can you buy milk on the way home?”
“Oh -- sure, baby.”
“Great, thanks. And I had to call your mom, Evie was crying again.”
“I told you, it’s totally normal. All babies do that.”
“Yeah, but she wouldn’t stop crying.”
“That’s what babies do.”
“Sure. Anyway, thanks for getting the milk.”
“Sure.”
As soon as she hangs up, the Estuary is quiet again, but not still -- it’s never still in here, not with the light playing on the walls and the graceful undulations of the animals. Eden leaves the Reef hall to check on the octopus. It’s only a common octopus; a marine invertebrate biologist from the university applied for a research grant to house and study a blanket octopus at the Estuary back in March, but he was denied. Eden stands in the shallow darkness with her hand against the octopus’ glass, watching it coil and uncoil its arms.
She knows she wants something, but she doesn’t know what it is. She just knows that she wants it more when she’s here.
On Friday when she closes down, the rays in the hands-on tank whisper through the water like lost ghosts, circling continuously. Their tails are cut to remove the barbs, and when she puts her hand in they brush up against her palm, slimy and rough at the same time, lifting their wings out of the water with a loose flapping sound. The sand sharks huddle at the bottom of the tank as if they’re resentful, clustered under the bridge to the little island in the centre where during the day one of the Estuary’s employees sits and reminds children not to grab or squeeze them -- fingers only, just let them swim, let them touch you.
Eden dries her hand on her pants and moves on to the Reef. Somewhere there’s a sea turtle -- he’s missing both flippers on his right side, rescued by the Estuary after an accident with a motorboat propeller. He’s the Estuary’s mascot, but most of the time he keeps to the back of the Reef tank where nobody can spot him. At feeding time one of the divers throws him a head of cabbage, and he struggles after it; the missing flippers make it hard for him to do anything but swim in circles.
Her back aches.
Evie woke up at three in the morning crying again -- she’s not that young, she’s eight months, but she never seems to sleep well, and for all the advice Eden’s mama gives nothing really quiets her down. Eden bites her lip. David’s still out of work, so at least there’s someone at home to take care of Evie, but she knows he’s not happy staying in the house all day. He takes Evie in the stroller down to the public library and fills out job applications all afternoon. Eden’s mama helps, but it’s not enough.
It’s hard to get enough.
She sits on one of the benches in front of the Reef’s huge viewing windows, resting her back. The lemon shark swims by. In the silence, the way the bulbs light up its smooth pale belly is enough to make you superstitious. It turns its head to the side back and forth like she’s caught its eye and it’s trying to get a better look, and then it’s gone, into the next part of the exhibit. Eden lets out her breath.
…
On Sunday she starts with the small exhibits, closing the cuttlefish first. There are seven, lurking around their tank in places where they blend into the pebbled sand, rippling their mantles in time with their breathing.
Eden had her first fight with David the night before. His smile, which she’d been starting to think was permanent, even when it was strained, reshaped into something she’d never expected to be so bitter.
“I’m tired of living off your mama, girl!”
“Don’t you think I know that?” she said, fighting to keep her voice level. “I know it’s tough.”
“You know, folks expect me to take care of you. And here you’re the one working, and I’m at home with the baby? How d’you think that makes me feel?”
“So what am I supposed to do? I can’t just quit my job to make you feel better about nobody wanting you!” She clenched her hands into fists, tried to settle her stomach (hadn’t meant to say that, knew exactly how hard it would hit him).
David’s face closed up, tight. She could see his eyes -- like the lemon shark’s, black and full, except that David’s were hurting and the lemon shark never looked like it felt anything at all. It just was. “Fine.” He grabbed his keys. “I’m gonna spend the night at Matty’s.” And then he was out the door, just as Evie started to sob in the next room.
The cuttlefish ripple.
Evie wouldn’t fall back to sleep after David left, so Eden stayed up most of the night rocking her and singing, lullabies her own daddy used to sing to her back before he and her mama got divorced and he moved to St. Louis to work at a construction company. His voice was low and gravelly, like a cement mixer rumbling. Eden rocked until Evie dozed off, around three in the morning, hoarse from crying.
Her eyes feel numb now from too little sleep. Evie is with her mama, since David wasn’t back by the time Eden came in to work. After a little while she moves on, playing her flashlight across the walls of the Estuary, watching the glowing neon of anemones as they open and close like stop-motion photographs of flowers. They cluster along the sides and the floors of the tanks, soft and inviting, but Eden’s read the wall plaques; almost all of them are poisonous.
When she was a little girl, her mama kept a goldfish in a bowl on the kitchen counter. It had a big fantail and would swim in wiggling circles around the bowl all day long, looking like it had a real thought-out purpose. Eden can remember the day she figured out it was trapped in that bowl -- when she actually realised that it wasn’t going anywhere, just swimming around day after day because it had nothing else to do and no hope for better. She must’ve been seven or eight, she figures.
She spent nearly an hour trying to catch it before she got it out of the bowl, soaking her clothes with slightly smelly water. When she had it she took it up to her room and tucked it into bed while she changed her clothes. By the time her mama got home it was dead.
Eden remembers that there was a lot of yelling and lecturing and she remembers that she was crying when she tried to tell her mama that she was letting it go. Her mama explained that fish couldn’t breathe out of water, and that it was perfectly happy in its bowl. But Eden knew better.
The Estuary is different. There’s something big about it. When the lemon shark is circling in the Reef hall, it feels like the whole world is inside here, and sometimes, on a bad day, she gets to wondering how easy it would be to disappear through the glass of one of the big tanks.
Ever since Evie was born, she and David have had trouble -- not that she doesn’t love Evie, with her whole heart; it’s just the timing. It’s hard, managing a baby when she’s the only one with a job and David is getting steadily more depressed about being out of work. She has her mama, and David has Matthew, but her mama’s only got so much money to lend them, and Matthew -- the last time Eden saw Matthew was back when he was still in the hospital, red-eyed and looking tiny and sick in his blue paper gown. The doctors say he’s better now, that’s why they let him go home, but he takes more pills a day than Eden’s taken in her whole life.
It’s like a whirlwind of crazy out there, just one problem after another.
The Estuary is always safe. Everything is quiet and static, the same animals in the same tanks watching her with the same silent eyes every day. It’s like the opposite of her mama’s fantail -- the only way to get out of the bowl is to come inside.
Maybe it doesn’t even matter if you drown.
…
Tuesday is her day off, when Noah, who usually sells tickets at the front, stays late to shut things down. Eden sleeps in until seven-thirty, when Evie starts to cry. She makes David breakfast with Evie in the cradle of one arm, Evie’s tiny baby hands curled in her sweater.
David got back from Matthew’s house just after Eden picked Evie up from her mama’s on Sunday night, dropping his keys on the counter. Eden was in the kitchen making coffee and he came up behind her and set his big hands on her shoulders.
“Hey,” she said, bending her head to focus on the coffee maker. “I’m sorry.”
He squeezed her shoulders gently. “Matty says hi.”
“Did you tell him hi from me?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Could be better. Doctor gave him more pills, I guess.”
“You want some coffee, baby?”
“Yeah.” David paused, and she didn’t have to look to know he was running a hand through his black hair, all weary like he was most of the time now. “I gave ‘em my number up at Santos’, couple other places.”
“Great.”
“How’s Evie?”
“Oh, don’t touch her, I just put her down, don’t know how long we got before she starts crying again.”
David lifted his hands apologetically. “When’s she gonna see the doctor again?”
“To-day,” she says, when David asks it again, between bites of egg. He’s looking up at her expectantly from the kitchen table, his warm black eyes watching her like he thinks she’s got some magic mother knowledge that can fix any baby problem. “And it’s stupid. She ain’t sick. We already paid that cheat on the strip three hundred dollars to tell us she’s the healthiest damn baby he’s ever seen.” Evie stirs on her shoulder, but doesn’t wake up. “Look at this kid. She’s fine, except she just cries all the damn time.”
“All right, all right, sorry.” He looks away. “I just don’t get it.”
“Look, even my mama says there’s nothing wrong with her. Jesus, baby, I don’t know, maybe she’s allergic to air.”
“No, you’re right.”
“So what are you doing to-day?” she asks, stroking Evie’s head. Evie’s hair is curled tight and thick like cheap carpeting and feels good under her fingertips.
David sighs. “Checking the unemployment office again, I guess, since you got the baby.”
“Don’t worry. Maybe this one will figure out what’s wrong with her. And maybe you’ll get the job with Santos. We’re gonna be fine,” Eden says.
…
But she’s wrong. And by Thursday they’re fighting again.
When she’s finally standing alone in the Estuary with half the lights out, she feels like one of those people a couple-hundred years ago seeking sanctuary in a dim-lit church. She stands in front of the Reef tank, her hands up against the glass, breathing slowly.
“What is wrong with me?” she whispers to the lemon shark, as it circles in front of her, watching her sidelong. “What’s wrong with Evie? Why can’t she get better? We’d be okay if she was better. I mean, things wouldn’t be great, but it would be a start, right? Shit! Am I just a bad mama? I don’t know.”
For a moment the lemon shark pauses, and Eden would swear it’s looking at her, really looking at her, not like a predator -- really meeting her eyes. Like a person. Like it understands her. She presses closer to the glass, waiting for it to answer her, half-surprised when it doesn’t.
“I guess you never have that problem, do you?” she says finally, almost smiling.
It swims into the shadows in the back, out of her sight, and she sighs and drops her hands.
…
In January, David leaves.
“I told you so,” her mama says. “I told you if you didn’t marry that boy you’d never hold onto him.” They’re sitting in the kitchen in her mama’s apartment, with coffee and a box of tissues Eden hasn’t touched, the cell phone with David’s message on it lying on the table between them. It’s Friday.
“Shut up,” Eden says, stroking Evie’s hair like her life depends on it, slow and steady; she hasn’t let up for an hour. Lately, Eden’s started to run her fingers down Evie’s neck looking for gill slits, as if the reason Evie can’t stop crying is because she really is allergic to the air. “You married Daddy, and you didn’t hold on to him.”
“Your daddy was different.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
She knew David was going to do something big after Matthew died. She knew as soon as her cell phone rang at the Estuary, right when she was turning the lights out on the thee Nautilus watching her suspiciously from behind their glass.
“Hey?”
“Matty’s dead.” David’s voice sounded weird, like he was talking through water.
Eden stood there with the phone in her hand, staring blankly at the Nautilus. They stared back. “Oh, God, baby, I’m so sorry.”
“Fucking doctor said he was doing fine. Goddammit!”
“Do you want me to come home? I’ll be right home--”
“I’m going right over. You just go home and take care of the baby. They said it’s a fucking mess over there.”
“Baby, I’m so sorry--” but he’d already hung up on her. She turned off the phone and put her hand against the glass, and the biggest Nautilus eased over to her, bobbing a little like somebody trying to walk on the moon. If she’d been thinking, she would have wondered why. Usually they shied away from hands and faces, too used to people tapping on their window. “Shit,” she whispered. “Shit. What are we gonna do?”
When she unlocked the front door, Evie was in her crib crying and screaming like the world was going to end.
“It was Matthew,” she says.
Her mama sighs. “Yeah, I reckon it was.”
“He didn’t love nobody as much as that kid, not me or Evie or anybody.”
Her mama nods.
Matthew’s funeral already feels like it was years ago. All Eden remembers is that everybody brought casserole, like everybody does when somebody dies, and that they sat around in the living room, her mama crying and David trying not to. And she remembers sitting on the couch trying to hush Evie enough that David could read his eulogy off the paper.
She guessed then that he was going to be leaving her.
“I think we’re gonna have to move somewhere cheaper.”
“You could move in with me, just till you get a better job.”
“I’m not changing jobs.”
“Honey, that old aquarium is not gonna pay you enough to raise a kid.”
“It’s gonna be enough.”
“You know I didn’t mind helping you and David out before. I still don’t mind. If you move in here I can babysit, and then you can--”
“I’m not changing jobs.”
“Just think about it.”
On Tuesday Eden moves downtown, into a little one bedroom apartment over an old art supplies store. The landlady coos over Evie.
“Where’s her father?”
Eden lets her breath out slowly. “He had to go.”
The landlady gives her a sharp look. “Prison?”
“No, he just-- he had to go.”
“What are you going to do with her while you’re at work?”
“I don’t know yet. Is there daycare around here?”
“You can look. Don’t know what you’ll find.”
“Okay.”
As soon as everything’s moved in, Evie starts to cry again. Eden picks her up and rocks her, singing her daddy’s songs. She moves around the apartment slowly, showing Evie the bedroom and the bathroom and the tiny kitchenette, the window looking down on the street.
“Look, sweetheart. We’re okay. Why don’t you show Mama what a smile looks like? Huh? Why don’t you smile for Mama?”
But Evie never smiles. She just never has. Eden walks around the apartment in circles like her mama’s fantail in its bowl, with nowhere to go and no way to get out to it even if it was there, while Evie wails like a coal train leaving the mountains.
“Come on, sweetheart. It’s not so bad. We’ll be okay here. Come on, just stop crying, I don’t know what to do any more; I don’t know what to do when you cry. Come on, baby.”
Then she sits down on the couch and cries too, because they’re both suffocating.
…
On Wednesday, she’s back at work. Noah grins at her when she comes in, her badge clipped on and her hair pulled back.
“Hi, Eden!”
“Hey, man.”
When she closes down she sits for an hour in front of the Reef hall, watching the lemon shark swim back and forth. Now she’s sure it isn’t all shark -- there’s something human in there that understands her, that knows her, better than anybody else outside the Estuary. That human piece has answers, and Eden feels like if she just stays there long enough, studying it, letting it study her, it’s gonna tell her what she needs to know. It’s gonna open those smooth, curve-toothed jaws and tell her exactly how to be the right kind of mama for Evie.
Eden stares at it earnestly, and the lemon shark’s black eyes watch her back, just like David’s -- but it moves like it’s cutting open the sea with its body, like it it’s in charge of everything, in a weird, peaceful kind of way.
There’s nothing peaceful about the apartment.
She hasn’t talked to her mama since she moved. There’s no point. Her mama’ll just try to convince her she should come back, take a different job, let go of the Estuary, which she knows she can’t do. It’s the only place anything is all right.
Eden’s out of ways to protect Evie. She’s out of ways to make her better. She can’t afford another doctor who won’t find anything wrong, she can’t bring Evie’s daddy back. All she’s got any more is the closing, being here in the only safe place in the world, and Evie hasn’t even got that. There’s nothing Eden can do for her.
For a moment she thinks she’s going to cry, but the idea of crying makes her want to be sick. All she hears any more is crying. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, and opens them to see the lemon shark swim by her again, its pale belly glowing the reflection of the moon on water.
It doesn’t make a sound, but suddenly Eden knows what it’s telling her to do.
…
On Thursday, after she turns all the lights out, she takes the bus home and picks Evie up from the depressed blonde babysitter three floors down. She dresses Evie in her prettiest jumper and her tiny winter coat.
“We’re going for a ride, sweetheart.”
Eden’s never wasted money on cab fare before, but she does to-night.
When the cab stops outside of the Estuary, she unlocks to the employee side door and goes in, Evie tucked against her shoulder. Turning on the lights doesn’t make any sense, with all the animals settled down and all the tank lights to guide her through the exhibits. She passes the neon of the jelly tubes, and stops for a minute to watch them floating up and down. The octopus unfurls its arms when she goes by, then curls them back up again. The cuttlefish ripple.
At the end of the Reef hall, there’s a small locked door that leads to the room where the divers get prepped for the daily feedings. Eden opens it with her keyring and goes in. There’s all the usual stuff -- wetsuits in lockers, desks and chairs, and the ladder that goes up the side of the tank. She sits down in one of the chairs and takes off Evie’s coat and jumper. Evie looks up at her.
“We’re almost there, sweetheart.”
The ladder is the kind you’re supposed to climb two-handed, but Eden does it one-handed without much trouble. When she gets to the top, there’s a small platform moulded to look like the top of a coral reef -- it starts out above the water and then goes under so the divers can get in more easily. She sits down at the edge with Evie in her lap.
“What do you think?” Eden says softly.
Evie splashes, striking at the water with one of her small hands. Eden’s never noticed before how flat and close together her fingers are, like tiny fins.
“Yeah,” Eden says. “That’s what I was thinking too.” She unties Evie’s shoes and takes them off along with her socks. Hope is starting to billow up in her like an algae bloom along the coast -- it’s her last chance to help, she knows that, but she isn’t worried that it won’t work. She lifts Evie up, real careful, and sets her down on the part of the platform that’s underwater.
Evie smiles.
…
When Eden comes in on Friday, Noah waves furiously at her.
“Hey, Eden!”
“Hey, man. What’s up?”
“The lemon shark had a pup last night while we were closed! Isn’t that crazy? Sam said that’s not totally weird at aquariums -- like, sharks having pups and the staff having no freaking clue. There was a case in Baltimore a few years ago where another shark in the tank did, like, a C-section of the pregnant mom and saved three pups that the staff had no idea were even due. But Sam said they checked her out when she came in and they thought she was clean. And just one pup! Isn’t that crazy?”
“Are you serious?” Eden asks, hands on her hips. Noah flips his red hair up out of his face.
“Yes. They’re trying to decide what to call it. Sam said they’re gonna do a whole publicity campaign around it, trying to get in some more business.”
“They should call her Eve. Miracle birth and all.”
“Hey, you should suggest that.”
“Maybe. They leave the pup in the Reef with her?”
“Yeah, go take a look.”
The lemon shark is in the main viewing tank of the Reef hall, swimming in long, easy ovals. Under her belly is the pup, its back pressed against her, hiding in the shadow of her body. The slits of its gills flutter gently as it filters the water through.
Eden watches, her nose up against the glass. “Hey, sweetheart,” she says under her breath. “I miss you. But you need a mama knows how to stop you crying.”
The pup looks at her.
Its eyes are black, and silent.
Also, I should probably warn that the names of the main characters are stolen from Simmer Dim, even though the characters are not the same; there's kind of a Biblical theme going on. My deepest apologies to David, who I know would never do anything like this in real life[2].
In other news, I have a beekeeping dinner to-night at 6.00 and a poetry reading at 8.00 and I fully expect sweet death to overtake me at some point. Also, it's really dark outside even though it's only 4.00. O_o Thanks, weather, glad to know the apocalypse is still coming.
& without further nonsense, storytime.
[1]Ha, ha.
[2]Irony!
Eden has never been to the sea.
The closest she gets is shutting down the exhibits every night at eight, flipping off the switches in the marine halls so that everything is coloured with a pale, swimmy light from the bulbs in the tanks, where the shadows of the animals glide thoughtfully past the big viewing windows. The big rays curl their wings against the glass as they follow her.
When she gets to the jellies she always stops and stands there in the dark. Like most aquariums, the New Manchester Estuary lights its jelly tubes from underneath with coloured bulbs, so that the translucent moon jellies and walnuts glow neon red and blue and purple. The rest of the room is always dark, so visitors can see all the details of their bodies outlined in neon, pulsing up and down in the tubes.
Eden has a flashlight and a badge and her blue uniform polo to show she has a right to be here after the doors have officially closed, settling everybody to bed. Well, sort of to bed. She flips down the big switch in the Reef hall and the fish go on swimming, parrots and triggerfish and the sweet lemon shark that’s nearly as old as the Estuary (seven years).
When her cell phone rings she nearly drops the flashlight.
“Hey.”
“Eden, can you buy milk on the way home?”
“Oh -- sure, baby.”
“Great, thanks. And I had to call your mom, Evie was crying again.”
“I told you, it’s totally normal. All babies do that.”
“Yeah, but she wouldn’t stop crying.”
“That’s what babies do.”
“Sure. Anyway, thanks for getting the milk.”
“Sure.”
As soon as she hangs up, the Estuary is quiet again, but not still -- it’s never still in here, not with the light playing on the walls and the graceful undulations of the animals. Eden leaves the Reef hall to check on the octopus. It’s only a common octopus; a marine invertebrate biologist from the university applied for a research grant to house and study a blanket octopus at the Estuary back in March, but he was denied. Eden stands in the shallow darkness with her hand against the octopus’ glass, watching it coil and uncoil its arms.
She knows she wants something, but she doesn’t know what it is. She just knows that she wants it more when she’s here.
On Friday when she closes down, the rays in the hands-on tank whisper through the water like lost ghosts, circling continuously. Their tails are cut to remove the barbs, and when she puts her hand in they brush up against her palm, slimy and rough at the same time, lifting their wings out of the water with a loose flapping sound. The sand sharks huddle at the bottom of the tank as if they’re resentful, clustered under the bridge to the little island in the centre where during the day one of the Estuary’s employees sits and reminds children not to grab or squeeze them -- fingers only, just let them swim, let them touch you.
Eden dries her hand on her pants and moves on to the Reef. Somewhere there’s a sea turtle -- he’s missing both flippers on his right side, rescued by the Estuary after an accident with a motorboat propeller. He’s the Estuary’s mascot, but most of the time he keeps to the back of the Reef tank where nobody can spot him. At feeding time one of the divers throws him a head of cabbage, and he struggles after it; the missing flippers make it hard for him to do anything but swim in circles.
Her back aches.
Evie woke up at three in the morning crying again -- she’s not that young, she’s eight months, but she never seems to sleep well, and for all the advice Eden’s mama gives nothing really quiets her down. Eden bites her lip. David’s still out of work, so at least there’s someone at home to take care of Evie, but she knows he’s not happy staying in the house all day. He takes Evie in the stroller down to the public library and fills out job applications all afternoon. Eden’s mama helps, but it’s not enough.
It’s hard to get enough.
She sits on one of the benches in front of the Reef’s huge viewing windows, resting her back. The lemon shark swims by. In the silence, the way the bulbs light up its smooth pale belly is enough to make you superstitious. It turns its head to the side back and forth like she’s caught its eye and it’s trying to get a better look, and then it’s gone, into the next part of the exhibit. Eden lets out her breath.
On Sunday she starts with the small exhibits, closing the cuttlefish first. There are seven, lurking around their tank in places where they blend into the pebbled sand, rippling their mantles in time with their breathing.
Eden had her first fight with David the night before. His smile, which she’d been starting to think was permanent, even when it was strained, reshaped into something she’d never expected to be so bitter.
“I’m tired of living off your mama, girl!”
“Don’t you think I know that?” she said, fighting to keep her voice level. “I know it’s tough.”
“You know, folks expect me to take care of you. And here you’re the one working, and I’m at home with the baby? How d’you think that makes me feel?”
“So what am I supposed to do? I can’t just quit my job to make you feel better about nobody wanting you!” She clenched her hands into fists, tried to settle her stomach (hadn’t meant to say that, knew exactly how hard it would hit him).
David’s face closed up, tight. She could see his eyes -- like the lemon shark’s, black and full, except that David’s were hurting and the lemon shark never looked like it felt anything at all. It just was. “Fine.” He grabbed his keys. “I’m gonna spend the night at Matty’s.” And then he was out the door, just as Evie started to sob in the next room.
The cuttlefish ripple.
Evie wouldn’t fall back to sleep after David left, so Eden stayed up most of the night rocking her and singing, lullabies her own daddy used to sing to her back before he and her mama got divorced and he moved to St. Louis to work at a construction company. His voice was low and gravelly, like a cement mixer rumbling. Eden rocked until Evie dozed off, around three in the morning, hoarse from crying.
Her eyes feel numb now from too little sleep. Evie is with her mama, since David wasn’t back by the time Eden came in to work. After a little while she moves on, playing her flashlight across the walls of the Estuary, watching the glowing neon of anemones as they open and close like stop-motion photographs of flowers. They cluster along the sides and the floors of the tanks, soft and inviting, but Eden’s read the wall plaques; almost all of them are poisonous.
When she was a little girl, her mama kept a goldfish in a bowl on the kitchen counter. It had a big fantail and would swim in wiggling circles around the bowl all day long, looking like it had a real thought-out purpose. Eden can remember the day she figured out it was trapped in that bowl -- when she actually realised that it wasn’t going anywhere, just swimming around day after day because it had nothing else to do and no hope for better. She must’ve been seven or eight, she figures.
She spent nearly an hour trying to catch it before she got it out of the bowl, soaking her clothes with slightly smelly water. When she had it she took it up to her room and tucked it into bed while she changed her clothes. By the time her mama got home it was dead.
Eden remembers that there was a lot of yelling and lecturing and she remembers that she was crying when she tried to tell her mama that she was letting it go. Her mama explained that fish couldn’t breathe out of water, and that it was perfectly happy in its bowl. But Eden knew better.
The Estuary is different. There’s something big about it. When the lemon shark is circling in the Reef hall, it feels like the whole world is inside here, and sometimes, on a bad day, she gets to wondering how easy it would be to disappear through the glass of one of the big tanks.
Ever since Evie was born, she and David have had trouble -- not that she doesn’t love Evie, with her whole heart; it’s just the timing. It’s hard, managing a baby when she’s the only one with a job and David is getting steadily more depressed about being out of work. She has her mama, and David has Matthew, but her mama’s only got so much money to lend them, and Matthew -- the last time Eden saw Matthew was back when he was still in the hospital, red-eyed and looking tiny and sick in his blue paper gown. The doctors say he’s better now, that’s why they let him go home, but he takes more pills a day than Eden’s taken in her whole life.
It’s like a whirlwind of crazy out there, just one problem after another.
The Estuary is always safe. Everything is quiet and static, the same animals in the same tanks watching her with the same silent eyes every day. It’s like the opposite of her mama’s fantail -- the only way to get out of the bowl is to come inside.
Maybe it doesn’t even matter if you drown.
Tuesday is her day off, when Noah, who usually sells tickets at the front, stays late to shut things down. Eden sleeps in until seven-thirty, when Evie starts to cry. She makes David breakfast with Evie in the cradle of one arm, Evie’s tiny baby hands curled in her sweater.
David got back from Matthew’s house just after Eden picked Evie up from her mama’s on Sunday night, dropping his keys on the counter. Eden was in the kitchen making coffee and he came up behind her and set his big hands on her shoulders.
“Hey,” she said, bending her head to focus on the coffee maker. “I’m sorry.”
He squeezed her shoulders gently. “Matty says hi.”
“Did you tell him hi from me?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Could be better. Doctor gave him more pills, I guess.”
“You want some coffee, baby?”
“Yeah.” David paused, and she didn’t have to look to know he was running a hand through his black hair, all weary like he was most of the time now. “I gave ‘em my number up at Santos’, couple other places.”
“Great.”
“How’s Evie?”
“Oh, don’t touch her, I just put her down, don’t know how long we got before she starts crying again.”
David lifted his hands apologetically. “When’s she gonna see the doctor again?”
“To-day,” she says, when David asks it again, between bites of egg. He’s looking up at her expectantly from the kitchen table, his warm black eyes watching her like he thinks she’s got some magic mother knowledge that can fix any baby problem. “And it’s stupid. She ain’t sick. We already paid that cheat on the strip three hundred dollars to tell us she’s the healthiest damn baby he’s ever seen.” Evie stirs on her shoulder, but doesn’t wake up. “Look at this kid. She’s fine, except she just cries all the damn time.”
“All right, all right, sorry.” He looks away. “I just don’t get it.”
“Look, even my mama says there’s nothing wrong with her. Jesus, baby, I don’t know, maybe she’s allergic to air.”
“No, you’re right.”
“So what are you doing to-day?” she asks, stroking Evie’s head. Evie’s hair is curled tight and thick like cheap carpeting and feels good under her fingertips.
David sighs. “Checking the unemployment office again, I guess, since you got the baby.”
“Don’t worry. Maybe this one will figure out what’s wrong with her. And maybe you’ll get the job with Santos. We’re gonna be fine,” Eden says.
But she’s wrong. And by Thursday they’re fighting again.
When she’s finally standing alone in the Estuary with half the lights out, she feels like one of those people a couple-hundred years ago seeking sanctuary in a dim-lit church. She stands in front of the Reef tank, her hands up against the glass, breathing slowly.
“What is wrong with me?” she whispers to the lemon shark, as it circles in front of her, watching her sidelong. “What’s wrong with Evie? Why can’t she get better? We’d be okay if she was better. I mean, things wouldn’t be great, but it would be a start, right? Shit! Am I just a bad mama? I don’t know.”
For a moment the lemon shark pauses, and Eden would swear it’s looking at her, really looking at her, not like a predator -- really meeting her eyes. Like a person. Like it understands her. She presses closer to the glass, waiting for it to answer her, half-surprised when it doesn’t.
“I guess you never have that problem, do you?” she says finally, almost smiling.
It swims into the shadows in the back, out of her sight, and she sighs and drops her hands.
In January, David leaves.
“I told you so,” her mama says. “I told you if you didn’t marry that boy you’d never hold onto him.” They’re sitting in the kitchen in her mama’s apartment, with coffee and a box of tissues Eden hasn’t touched, the cell phone with David’s message on it lying on the table between them. It’s Friday.
“Shut up,” Eden says, stroking Evie’s hair like her life depends on it, slow and steady; she hasn’t let up for an hour. Lately, Eden’s started to run her fingers down Evie’s neck looking for gill slits, as if the reason Evie can’t stop crying is because she really is allergic to the air. “You married Daddy, and you didn’t hold on to him.”
“Your daddy was different.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
She knew David was going to do something big after Matthew died. She knew as soon as her cell phone rang at the Estuary, right when she was turning the lights out on the thee Nautilus watching her suspiciously from behind their glass.
“Hey?”
“Matty’s dead.” David’s voice sounded weird, like he was talking through water.
Eden stood there with the phone in her hand, staring blankly at the Nautilus. They stared back. “Oh, God, baby, I’m so sorry.”
“Fucking doctor said he was doing fine. Goddammit!”
“Do you want me to come home? I’ll be right home--”
“I’m going right over. You just go home and take care of the baby. They said it’s a fucking mess over there.”
“Baby, I’m so sorry--” but he’d already hung up on her. She turned off the phone and put her hand against the glass, and the biggest Nautilus eased over to her, bobbing a little like somebody trying to walk on the moon. If she’d been thinking, she would have wondered why. Usually they shied away from hands and faces, too used to people tapping on their window. “Shit,” she whispered. “Shit. What are we gonna do?”
When she unlocked the front door, Evie was in her crib crying and screaming like the world was going to end.
“It was Matthew,” she says.
Her mama sighs. “Yeah, I reckon it was.”
“He didn’t love nobody as much as that kid, not me or Evie or anybody.”
Her mama nods.
Matthew’s funeral already feels like it was years ago. All Eden remembers is that everybody brought casserole, like everybody does when somebody dies, and that they sat around in the living room, her mama crying and David trying not to. And she remembers sitting on the couch trying to hush Evie enough that David could read his eulogy off the paper.
She guessed then that he was going to be leaving her.
“I think we’re gonna have to move somewhere cheaper.”
“You could move in with me, just till you get a better job.”
“I’m not changing jobs.”
“Honey, that old aquarium is not gonna pay you enough to raise a kid.”
“It’s gonna be enough.”
“You know I didn’t mind helping you and David out before. I still don’t mind. If you move in here I can babysit, and then you can--”
“I’m not changing jobs.”
“Just think about it.”
On Tuesday Eden moves downtown, into a little one bedroom apartment over an old art supplies store. The landlady coos over Evie.
“Where’s her father?”
Eden lets her breath out slowly. “He had to go.”
The landlady gives her a sharp look. “Prison?”
“No, he just-- he had to go.”
“What are you going to do with her while you’re at work?”
“I don’t know yet. Is there daycare around here?”
“You can look. Don’t know what you’ll find.”
“Okay.”
As soon as everything’s moved in, Evie starts to cry again. Eden picks her up and rocks her, singing her daddy’s songs. She moves around the apartment slowly, showing Evie the bedroom and the bathroom and the tiny kitchenette, the window looking down on the street.
“Look, sweetheart. We’re okay. Why don’t you show Mama what a smile looks like? Huh? Why don’t you smile for Mama?”
But Evie never smiles. She just never has. Eden walks around the apartment in circles like her mama’s fantail in its bowl, with nowhere to go and no way to get out to it even if it was there, while Evie wails like a coal train leaving the mountains.
“Come on, sweetheart. It’s not so bad. We’ll be okay here. Come on, just stop crying, I don’t know what to do any more; I don’t know what to do when you cry. Come on, baby.”
Then she sits down on the couch and cries too, because they’re both suffocating.
On Wednesday, she’s back at work. Noah grins at her when she comes in, her badge clipped on and her hair pulled back.
“Hi, Eden!”
“Hey, man.”
When she closes down she sits for an hour in front of the Reef hall, watching the lemon shark swim back and forth. Now she’s sure it isn’t all shark -- there’s something human in there that understands her, that knows her, better than anybody else outside the Estuary. That human piece has answers, and Eden feels like if she just stays there long enough, studying it, letting it study her, it’s gonna tell her what she needs to know. It’s gonna open those smooth, curve-toothed jaws and tell her exactly how to be the right kind of mama for Evie.
Eden stares at it earnestly, and the lemon shark’s black eyes watch her back, just like David’s -- but it moves like it’s cutting open the sea with its body, like it it’s in charge of everything, in a weird, peaceful kind of way.
There’s nothing peaceful about the apartment.
She hasn’t talked to her mama since she moved. There’s no point. Her mama’ll just try to convince her she should come back, take a different job, let go of the Estuary, which she knows she can’t do. It’s the only place anything is all right.
Eden’s out of ways to protect Evie. She’s out of ways to make her better. She can’t afford another doctor who won’t find anything wrong, she can’t bring Evie’s daddy back. All she’s got any more is the closing, being here in the only safe place in the world, and Evie hasn’t even got that. There’s nothing Eden can do for her.
For a moment she thinks she’s going to cry, but the idea of crying makes her want to be sick. All she hears any more is crying. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, and opens them to see the lemon shark swim by her again, its pale belly glowing the reflection of the moon on water.
It doesn’t make a sound, but suddenly Eden knows what it’s telling her to do.
On Thursday, after she turns all the lights out, she takes the bus home and picks Evie up from the depressed blonde babysitter three floors down. She dresses Evie in her prettiest jumper and her tiny winter coat.
“We’re going for a ride, sweetheart.”
Eden’s never wasted money on cab fare before, but she does to-night.
When the cab stops outside of the Estuary, she unlocks to the employee side door and goes in, Evie tucked against her shoulder. Turning on the lights doesn’t make any sense, with all the animals settled down and all the tank lights to guide her through the exhibits. She passes the neon of the jelly tubes, and stops for a minute to watch them floating up and down. The octopus unfurls its arms when she goes by, then curls them back up again. The cuttlefish ripple.
At the end of the Reef hall, there’s a small locked door that leads to the room where the divers get prepped for the daily feedings. Eden opens it with her keyring and goes in. There’s all the usual stuff -- wetsuits in lockers, desks and chairs, and the ladder that goes up the side of the tank. She sits down in one of the chairs and takes off Evie’s coat and jumper. Evie looks up at her.
“We’re almost there, sweetheart.”
The ladder is the kind you’re supposed to climb two-handed, but Eden does it one-handed without much trouble. When she gets to the top, there’s a small platform moulded to look like the top of a coral reef -- it starts out above the water and then goes under so the divers can get in more easily. She sits down at the edge with Evie in her lap.
“What do you think?” Eden says softly.
Evie splashes, striking at the water with one of her small hands. Eden’s never noticed before how flat and close together her fingers are, like tiny fins.
“Yeah,” Eden says. “That’s what I was thinking too.” She unties Evie’s shoes and takes them off along with her socks. Hope is starting to billow up in her like an algae bloom along the coast -- it’s her last chance to help, she knows that, but she isn’t worried that it won’t work. She lifts Evie up, real careful, and sets her down on the part of the platform that’s underwater.
Evie smiles.
When Eden comes in on Friday, Noah waves furiously at her.
“Hey, Eden!”
“Hey, man. What’s up?”
“The lemon shark had a pup last night while we were closed! Isn’t that crazy? Sam said that’s not totally weird at aquariums -- like, sharks having pups and the staff having no freaking clue. There was a case in Baltimore a few years ago where another shark in the tank did, like, a C-section of the pregnant mom and saved three pups that the staff had no idea were even due. But Sam said they checked her out when she came in and they thought she was clean. And just one pup! Isn’t that crazy?”
“Are you serious?” Eden asks, hands on her hips. Noah flips his red hair up out of his face.
“Yes. They’re trying to decide what to call it. Sam said they’re gonna do a whole publicity campaign around it, trying to get in some more business.”
“They should call her Eve. Miracle birth and all.”
“Hey, you should suggest that.”
“Maybe. They leave the pup in the Reef with her?”
“Yeah, go take a look.”
The lemon shark is in the main viewing tank of the Reef hall, swimming in long, easy ovals. Under her belly is the pup, its back pressed against her, hiding in the shadow of her body. The slits of its gills flutter gently as it filters the water through.
Eden watches, her nose up against the glass. “Hey, sweetheart,” she says under her breath. “I miss you. But you need a mama knows how to stop you crying.”
The pup looks at her.
Its eyes are black, and silent.
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Date: 2011-05-03 03:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-03 03:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-03 03:51 am (UTC)