You, Me, and the Sea Read online

“Is it my fault that Mama is dead?”

  “Of course not. Did Bear say that?”

  I nodded. I couldn’t look at him.

  My father held me with one arm as he leaned to the side and lifted the cans on the porch one at a time and shook them, releasing small clouds of wood dust each time he set one down. When he found a can that suited him, he sat back in the chair again and drank.

  “Bear misses your mama a lot, but it’s no excuse to say those things to you.”

  “He hates me.” The truth of my own statement caught me by surprise. I squirmed in my father’s arms. It was true. Bear hated me. That was why he had those knives in his eyes when he looked at me in the grove. It was why he never played with me.

  “He loves you. I know it. If you don’t feel it, you’ll just have to believe me.” My father hugged me. “You’re full of light, Merrow. When you’re full of light, it’s easy for you to love and be loved. Even Horseshoe Cliff loves you. Did you know that? It turns your little footsteps into heart-shaped stamps in the dirt. I see the hearts you leave everywhere I go.

  “Do you know what happens when Bear walks on the land? Dust rises up and makes him cough. He’s not easy to love like you are, and there’s a reason for it. He was born chock-full of complicated emotions that make him do things neither of us would ever think of doing. The things he has done have welded together to form an anchor that he has to drag around everywhere. He’s heavy with the things he has done, the things he has seen. But you are light, little Merrow. You are as light as a bird. Nothing holds you down. Whenever you choose, you can fly.”

  I loved when my father spoke this way, with poetry instead of plain words. But at that moment I did not understand him. My encounter with Bear had left me exhausted. The sun hung just above the ocean, and the sight of it made me tremble. My days were full of adventure, but at night my imagination got the best of me, and I hated being alone. The wind whistled against the side of the house outside my bedroom, and the blanket on my bed scratched me, and I didn’t like to walk outside to the toilet shed alone, so I lay awake and worried I would wet the bed. The mice came alive at the prick of the first star, their feet always whispering, their eyes always searching. I would grow hungry lying awake, and the only good thing about that was that my stomach groans kept the mice from climbing onto my bed. Bear wouldn’t let me sleep in his room, and my father cried out in his sleep in a voice that scared me even more than being alone. On warm nights, my father used to let me sleep in the pasture with my pony, but ever since half the chickens had been killed, he wouldn’t allow it.

  “It’s my birthday,” I reminded him now.

  “I know it.”

  I searched his face, but he was looking out at the scruff of meadow that spread from the porch to the sea, and he didn’t meet my gaze. He had soft brown eyes and a dark beard and dark hair to his shoulders and skin that was sort of pink—the color that a strawberry turned after it stopped being green but wasn’t quite ripe yet. He said that Bear and I took after our mother with our green-brown eyes and golden skin that never burned and pale brown hair that striped yellow in the sun. My little acorns, my father called us, which made me laugh because Bear was anything but little.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  We walked together every day. We checked on the chickens frequently because we’d lost half of the old brood to coyotes over the summer, and even though the new chickens were settled in now with the old, the blood that stained the coop ramp had not faded. We fed and watered the horses, Old Mister and Guthrie. We often walked the garden rows, rewarding ourselves with tiny sweet tomatoes that burst between our back teeth. Or we looked for wood for Dad’s miniature houses. Or stuffed steel wool into holes to keep mice out of the cottage walls and sang about answers that blew away in the wind.

  I always felt my father’s love for the land as we walked it. If he saw my footsteps everywhere, I saw his handprints everywhere. He had built our cottage and planted every tree in our orchard. Later, when he was gone, he was never really gone, because he was everywhere.

  Now, we ducked between the rails of the paddock fence he had built years before I was born. A strange sound came from the lean-to at the end of the pasture. I dropped my father’s hand and ran toward it, worried for the horses. There were hunting animals all around—animals I’d seen, like the mean, bold coyotes that had eaten the chickens, and ones I hadn’t seen, like mountain lions. Diana, my father’s old dog, used to guard the land at night, but she’d died a week before the coyotes attacked the chickens. Bear told me that the coyotes must have been watching us all along, waiting for Diana to die. Now I sensed the coyotes’ invisible eyes following me around the land just as I sensed the moon peeking from the sky all day, impatiently waiting for its turn to shine.

  My mother had died, Diana had died, and the chickens had died. Still, it had only lately occurred to me to wonder what might happen next.

  “The horses are fine,” I heard my father call behind me as I ran.

  And he was right; the horses were fine. In a corner of the lean-to, separated from the horses by a bank of hay bales, I was astonished to find a puppy.

  I clambered up and over the hay bales into the makeshift pen and lifted the puppy, a wriggling, yipping whirl of black and brown, into my arms and laughed.

  “This little guy,” Dad said, looking down at me, “is all yours.”

  When the puppy licked my chin, his sharp teeth raked my skin, but I didn’t mind one bit. I couldn’t believe he was mine. He squirmed in my arms, pressing his body against the bruises left there by my brother. I thought of Bear kneeling over me, pinning me down, the knives in his eyes. My mouth went dry. The puppy was mine. I looked up at my father.

  “What about Bear?”

  He ruffled my hair. “It’s not Bear’s birthday, is it?”

  I shook my head and tried to smile. My stomach felt knotted. I hugged the puppy tight to my chest. Bear didn’t want a dog, did he? Had he cried like I had when Diana had died? No. I had never seen Bear cry over anything. I guessed he was too old for crying, like my father. Dad’s eyes were only wet when he stared too long at the horizon at night. Bear said I did all the crying at Horseshoe Cliff while he did all the work. I decided then and there that I would take on more chores, and I wouldn’t spend so much time wandering around lost in imaginary games, and I wouldn’t cry. The puppy was already mine. He licked my chin, cooling the scrapes he’d left there. He smelled of hay, of home, and I could feel his little heart skittering around as though trying to reach mine. I will love this dog forever, I thought. What could Bear do about that?

  My father leaned over the hay bales and rested his big warm hand on my shoulder. “Happy birthday, Merrow,” he said. “Enjoy your new pal.”

  Chapter Three

  I was born in 1988 but since I never spent much time anywhere but Horseshoe Cliff, where for many years there was no television, my childhood never felt connected to the times in which I was living. It was only when I entered kindergarten at Little Earth School in Osha that I became somewhat aware of pop culture and the larger world. From the beginning, I loved school. I was not the sort of child who was afraid of new experiences. My father told me that I was like my mother in this way, always up for an adventure. There were other young students who clung to their mothers and sobbed on the steps of the school in the morning; I hopped out of my father’s truck and ran right past them. My schoolmates did not know what to make of me at first, but after some effort on my part, they came around.

  Little Earth occupied an old Victorian house. The upper school was upstairs, and the lower school was downstairs, with only twenty or so children enrolled in each. I had no idea, of course, that it was a little hippie school in a little hippie town. Little Earth might as well have been the whole earth—that’s how big and exciting it seemed to me. The raucous clatter of dozens of children talking and laughing at once was as wonderful a sound as I had ever heard. Until then, my only playmates had been covered with fu
r or feathers.

  It did not take long for me to understand that I was not like the other students at Little Earth. My classmates wore different outfits every day of the week. They had clean hair that smelled of flowers. They left school with blackened fingernails and streaks of dirt on their knees from playing in the schoolyard and returned the next morning wiped clean, all signs of the previous day’s activity erased. They had more food than they could eat in their lunchboxes, packed neatly by their mothers.

  They were kind to me, often offering me half a sandwich or a cookie when they saw how little I’d brought.

  “Here you go,” a talkative girl named Daphne said to me on our second day, handing me a plastic bag full of celery sticks covered in peanut butter. “My mom told me to be extra nice to you because you don’t have a mom and you’re poor.” Daphne spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. A few of the other children at our table glanced at me and smiled in a way that revealed that they, too, had been told to be nice to me.

  I’d known the mom part, of course, but the poor part surprised me. Was I poor? No one had mentioned it before. It made sense, though, upon reflection. I was often hungry, and the shelves in our kitchen were closer to bare than full. I wore clothes that my brother had worn years earlier, or things that we found in the free box in front of the Osha co-op. We did not have a television. We occasionally endured a week or more without the lights working. The only new things I had ever owned were presents from our friend Rei, and though my father sometimes protested her gifts, in the end he always accepted them.

  With the word poor echoing through my mind, I felt a sudden impulse to impress my new friends. When Teacher Julie had gone slowly through the letters of the alphabet the day before, I had not spoken up to let her know that I could already read, but now, I did. I had learned to read when I was four. We did not have many toys at Horseshoe Cliff, but stuffed bookshelves lined my father’s bedroom. He and Rei frequently traded books, discussing their most recent reads at length on the back porch while watching the sun set. When Rei noticed that I had taught myself to read, she started bringing me stacks of books that she had borrowed from a library some distance away, though she was less inclined to do so as of late because I had lost the last few books she had given me. The books were beside my bed when I went to sleep, and when I woke up, they were gone. Rei was soft-spoken but serious; she had never before scolded me the way she did when I lost those books.

  After only a few days at Little Earth, it became clear to me that I read far above the average level for my age. I offered to tutor my new friends, but they declined my help.

  My stories, on the other hand, delighted my classmates. I told them about the mermaid sisters who swam alongside the whales just off the coast of Horseshoe Cliff and the civilization of fairies that had been living in the eucalyptus grove for a thousand years. These were complicated tales with devious villains and plucky heroines. Not every character made it to the end alive. In the yard, my classmates would gather around me to listen to the latest installment of life under the sea, or in the trees. My audience swung from gasps to laughter. Sometimes, they clapped.

  When Teacher Julie would come outside to collect us from our recess, she would wait until I’d reached a suitable resting point in my story. One day, after sending the other kids inside, she handed me a clothbound journal.

  “You’re nearly bursting with these stories, Merrow,” she told me. “Why don’t you try writing them down?”

  I ran my hand over the journal sadly. I adored Teacher Julie, but how could I explain to her that the only way for me to keep my stories was to save them inside of me? If I wrote them down, I would only lose them. I was so forgetful I could hardly remember half the things I’d forgotten. Just a week earlier, one of the older girls at school had presented me with a doll that she’d sewn from old cloth and bits of ribbon. Within a day of bringing it home, the doll disappeared. I was sure I had left it at the kitchen table when I’d gone out to feed the chickens, but when I returned to the cottage, the table was empty.

  “I’ll lose it,” I told my teacher. “I lose everything.”

  Teacher Julie studied me, thoughtful for a moment. “Why don’t you keep it here at school?” she said at last. “You can write during quiet time and store the journal in your cubby when you’re not using it. I’ll help you remember to put it in the same spot every day, okay? Nothing is lost for very long at Little Earth.”

  Her words filled me with hope. I gave her a tight hug before hurrying to place my new journal in my cubby.

  AS MUCH AS I loved school, Bear hated it. In the morning, after Dad drove away from Little Earth in his truck, Bear would lumber off toward town. On those days, he smelled like beer in the afternoon when our father picked us up. Dad would tell him that if he skipped school again, he would have to drop out permanently and stay home to work in the orchard. But he kept giving Bear another chance and another chance until the Friday came when Bear learned he was all out of chances.

  I sat between Bear and my father in the cab of the truck. Since I refused to sleep during naptime at school, not wanting to miss anything, I was always tired on the way back to Horseshoe Cliff and usually nodded off. That afternoon, I awoke to hear my father telling Bear that from then on, he’d remain at home to help in the orchard. As Dad spoke, Bear’s elbow pressed sharply into my side. I looked up to see my brother glowering at me. I felt a chill around him that would not thaw; I’d seen the knives in his eyes every day since that first time in the grove. His elbow pressed into my side so hard that I gasped. He had never hurt me in front of our father, and I think I was surprised as much as I was hurt.

  “Bear!” Dad said.

  “She’s taking up all the space.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and pretended to sleep.

  “Ugh, she smells terrible,” Bear said. “She has fleas.”

  “Your sister doesn’t have fleas.”

  On cue, the red bumps along my arms began to itch. Once I started scratching, I could not stop. I had fleabites. It was true. Fleas loved Pal as much as I did, but I’d endure the bites of all the fleas in the world if it meant I could keep my dog with me at night.

  “Oh, Mer,” I heard my father say. “Are you letting Pal in your bed again?”

  I pretended to snore. I couldn’t stop scratching though. The scratching, at least, gave me something to do other than cry, which I knew would have made Bear only angrier. The kids at school never pointed at my fleabites or yanked my hair or told me manure smelled better than I did. Only Bear. My father told me that Bear loved me, but what I felt from him seemed the opposite of love. It seemed to me that before my fifth birthday, when Bear had sat on me in the grove, I had walked around in a kind of fog. I had not been able to see all the ways he mistreated me. But now I felt a kind of clarity. I knew Bear hated me and wished me only harm. I knew I should stay as far away from him as I could.

  As the truck tires rumbled from the paved road onto Horseshoe Cliff’s dirt drive, I hugged my backpack and kept my eyes tightly shut. I imagined that I was still sitting on the rug in Little Earth, surrounded by other kids, listening to Teacher Julie tell us how the Earth turned. I wished the Earth would speed up just this once, delivering me back to school faster. I shuddered at the thought of a weekend at home with Bear, especially now that he had been sentenced to full days of the farmwork he hated.

  OVER THE NEXT couple of years, I became more adept at staying out of Bear’s way. Still, the anger that I sensed simmering within him would boil over unpredictably, and there were times when I could not avoid his rage. These assaults felt random, but some calculation must have gone into them; Bear never shoved me to the ground or twisted my arms behind my back within sight of our father. And he never went so far as to hurt me so badly that my father could not dismiss my complaints as within the realm of normal sibling squabbling. I loved my father more than I loved anyone, but it always seemed that he was only half listening, only half watching. He did his farmwork and he put plates o
f food on the table and at night he sat on the porch, exhausted, coughing, whittling those tiny houses and staring off at the horizon and drinking beer until his words softened. He was a vague presence much of the time, benevolent but preoccupied. And what preoccupied him? The farm, of course, which needed near constant attention, but I also came to believe that my father’s thoughts never strayed far from his memories of my mother.

  When I thought of my missing treasures, I thought of a list as long and old as an ancient scroll, and at the top of that scroll was my mother. Of all that had gone missing, she was, of course, the most important. Of all the mysteries that hounded me, the mystery of how she had been lost was the most unrelenting.

  When I finally worked up the nerve to ask my father outright what had happened to my mother, the look on his face was so pained that I ran away from him and never asked again.

  It was Rei who at last gave me some hint of my mother’s demise. Rei had a quiet energy much like that of my father, but where my father’s attention was inconsistent, when Rei was near, I felt my every move observed. She wore an armful of colorful bangles that I admired and an enormous straw sun hat and a rotating assortment of overalls that always looked so crisp and clean that for a time I was convinced she stopped in Osha to buy them on her way to Horseshoe Cliff. She never raised her voice, but when her face went very still, and her eyes roved from my bare, dirty feet to my uncombed hair, her displeasure was palpable. She worried over me in a way my father did not, and never once came to our house without pressing some treat she’d baked into my open and eager hands. She worried over my father, too, bringing him strange-smelling teas and pots of honey for the cough that increasingly bothered him. Rei, I sensed, would have believed me if I’d told her how Bear treated me. And yet I never told her. I couldn’t say why, exactly, except that I had developed a notion that to do so would hurt my father, and I could not stand to be the one who made him sad.

  Besides, though I would not have traded her delicious presents for nearly anything in the world, it annoyed me that Rei treated me like a child far younger than I felt myself to be. It was Rei who convinced my father that I should not be allowed to ride Guthrie beyond the limits of the pasture without an adult to keep watch, and that I should not be allowed to swim in the sea alone. (Thankfully, he lost track of these rules as easily as he was convinced to make them.)