Unfurled Read online

  His face is already saying it, but he says it anyway.

  “Your father,” he says.

  I refuse it. I shake my head, shake my whole body against whatever he’s saying. The expression on his face and those two words are not a match. I think of only one thing—that I can smell the forest on Neil’s jacket. I love this smell almost as much as I love the smell of the ocean. Almost. So I know I must look at Neil’s face again, and let myself hear what he’s come in to say.

  3

  “I DON’T WANT THAT,” I TELL THE POLICEWOMAN, shoving the plastic bag toward her. It is seven hours later and we’re at the hospital in Seattle. Neil is standing behind me so close that the front of his shoes are touching the backs of mine, so close that when I flinch backward from this bag his chin grazes the top of my head. She tries again and this time I fold my arms, stick my hands tight into my armpits. I don’t want this. This plastic bag of everything my dad was carrying on his person at the time of the accident. The woman keeps calling them “Mr. Tomlinson’s personal belongings” but she’s stretching out that last word so all I hear is the word “long” and I think, yes, what could be taking him so long?

  We are in an office—a woman brought us in here, specifically came to where we were sitting for a long time in a waiting room and asked us to come into this private office, and Neil and I both pretended we didn’t know what this would mean; we walked calmly, side by side, he may have stretched an arm out to me, but only lightly, while he kept a step behind. They gave us their information and we answered their questions: no, we did not require an autopsy; no, my dad did not wear a wedding ring; no, we do not have any specific rituals requiring their attention.

  Yes, this policewoman has come in, but only halfway in, so the door is still open behind her, with the long hallway stretching off, and I’m looking past her like maybe my dad will step out from behind a closed door and take this bag himself. These are his things.

  “We found his wallet some distance from the corner. He must have been holding it at the time of the accident.”

  Of course he was holding it. “And his lottery tickets?”

  She frowns.

  Because I see him. Returning from the store with his supper. On foot despite the weather, wearing his great navy overcoat, his rain hat, his scarf. I see the canvas bag over his shoulder with its two bottles of beer at the bottom, the Kit Kat bar, a freshly wrapped piece of fish. Those lonely goddamn carrots. Maybe a carton of eggs for his breakfast. And in his gloved hand, his three scratch tickets. He would have had his nickel out, his tickets gripped in his fingers. His wallet folded up but not yet back in his pocket. He would have waited for the crosswalk. I know this about my dad. Even if he didn’t look up when he stepped out into the road.

  The woman holds the bag out toward me again but she stops her hand this time and redirects it toward Neil. I can see it on her face, this idea that maybe he’ll take it from her. The husband, the son-in-law, the one who appears to be calmer. But Neil just stares at the bag.

  I turn to George—small, wiry George, my dad’s best friend. His workman’s hands are clenched and tense, held tight against his sides. How long has George been here? Of course, I remember with relief, because I need to keep things straight, George has been here longer than we have. He’s the one who called us, called us for nearly an hour until he finally reached Neil. Needing to tell us to get to this hospital as quickly as we possibly could. His face is tired with the length of time he’s been waiting, waiting here alone as we drove over the mountains to meet him. Beside us there are others talking—a doctor, a surgeon, a woman with glasses in a navy blue sweater—they’re speaking so quietly, it’s like everything is normal. So I snatch the bag of my dad’s belongings, hurl it hard against the wall beside them and watch everyone duck as the bag splits and the items fly backward across the room. Nothing about this moment should be normal.

  The surgeon crosses to me and takes my shoulders in a pair of strong hands. I give him my full attention and it quells the heat that is flooding through me. Here is a man with so many lines on his face. A man just about the same age as my dad. His voice is extremely calm and although I don’t hear everything he says, I do catch something about “did not suffer” and “unconscious” and I know what he’s doing, and so I nod and say “thank you”. What I’m really hoping is that he might reach out and punch me right in the face.

  Ashamed, I breathe hard, lean down to pick up everything I’ve thrown.

  “I’ll help you,” says the woman with the perfectly nice blue sweater, kneeling down beside me.

  “Don’t touch them,” I say. These are my dad’s things and no one else should be able to touch them. She stills, crouched, watching me.

  None of these items make any sense. Keys. A watch. I see the wallet she mentioned. His rubber coin purse and the cell phone I gave him for his birthday. The screen isn’t even cracked. The Washington State Ferry pin from his coat. Credit cards and loyalty cards. Receipts. Yes, these are my dad’s things.

  I see him again. At the door of the house, fumbling in his pockets, hunting for his keys. He would have put them in his left jeans pocket. He would have checked for them twice as he walked down the street. His yellow rain hat tight at the chin. Like he was just heading out to the boat. Like he had a fishing pole on his shoulder and not his shopping bag. Alone as usual. The woman stands up. I am grabbing items from the floor—a folded grocery list, another credit card. But alongside these items is a photostrip. The stark white border draws the eye. It’s a rectangle of photo-cabin slides like the ones my dad and I used to take when I was younger. It seems perfectly natural that he would still have had one of these in his wallet. And that it would have gotten separated somehow, dislodged from alongside his money and driver’s license and launched into the street with the force of the impact.

  I’m looking carefully now, eyes narrowing, remembering years and years before when I would meet my dad at the ferry docks after school. Remembering how we liked to document the day with a series of photos from the instant photo box at the Pier. Black and white markers of our age progression: me at thirteen with braces and glasses, at fifteen with a long ponytail and my first pair of contact lenses, at sixteen when my dad shaved his beard for the first and only time.

  I keep staring at these photos, trying to figure out when I have recently taken this kind of picture again. I look so old.

  But I’m not that old. I reach for the photo, think to retrieve it from the floor and bring it closer to my eyes, but my hand doesn’t reach its target. It isn’t me in the photos.

  This is how my mother reappears. Impossibly. Like a ghost ship washed up in a bright clean harbor.

  “Wait, is that you?” Neil asks, reaching for it.

  I am much faster than he is. I snatch the photostrip and am up and across the room into an empty chair, the half-refilled bag still in my hand. I curl my chest over these pictures, hold them to my belly and breathe and breathe and breathe until the desire to vomit passes. If I curl myself tight enough than this, too, won’t be happening and maybe no one else will see what the ocean has cast up before us. Especially not Neil. Neil can’t be allowed to see this. He knows nothing of the ocean and he cannot possibly understand.

  Someone asks me what’s wrong. The nurse and the woman in the blue sweater are conferring rapidly. George has cocked his head at me.

  “Ella?” he says.

  “How dare she,” I say. Because I made the bargain the summer I turned ten, the summer of Lizzy, when I agreed to give up my mother if I could keep my dad. I have held up my end of things but like always she has backed out of the trade. Like always, she has ruined everything.

  Neil crosses to me, kneels beside me. He smells of panic and of our closed up car and its journey across the snowy Cascades to get to my dad. So why can’t someone bring him in here? Because he would know what to do, he knows all about the sea. I close my eyes and I see the two of us watching for boats, how we loved the sound of the waves, how
he always knew exactly how to take us safely across the water. That’s what I want.

  I open them and see George, and I stand quickly because I could hand him the photos. Yes, he can take them. Nothing will have to be said and no explaining will have to be done. But my God, he looks so tired, his face gray and tight. I keep the photos flattened against me, until the policewoman begins to step backward through the door and I try to follow her, waving the bag at her, waving the photostrip. Maybe I can just hand all these items right back.

  It’s too late. The woman is gone and Neil is up and beside me craning his neck—gently, his curiosity is so innocent and gentle—to see these photos, to actually see her face. And who can really blame him?

  “You look … I mean, it’s so surprising. You’re the same,” Neil says.

  I know what to do. I hold tight onto this strip of three black and white photos and I rip them. I rip and rip, separating the glossy paper along the white spaces. Then I make a stack of them in my hands and shuffle them over and over like maybe the woman who isn’t me might go away if I keep placing her at the bottom of the stack.

  “Ella?” George says. “What the hell is this?”

  But it isn’t a real question. There’s no way to answer him. This is a photo of my mother inside my dad’s wallet. This is also my dad’s wallet inside a plastic bag. I want neither of these things.

  The room is silent then. George. Neil. Me. The surgeon. Another doctor, or maybe this person is a nurse. The blue sweater woman is rubbing her left wrist with her right hand. But she stops and reaches for me, tries to put her hand on me too. It comes to me that she’s the counselor. The person meant to manage all the emotions in the room. She says, “It’s okay to be upset, Ella. What can we do right now to help you?”

  So I say, “Why couldn’t you have found her body in a dumpster instead?” I have always been able to handle this idea. This has always been part of the trade.

  Everyone looks at me sharply. No one says a thing.

  4

  IT’S LATE MAY. SCHOOL WILL BE OUT IN just over a week. I’m in line for the bus when I spot her and it startles me, but just at first. It’s good she’s up and about. I shoulder my back pack and walk over so she sees me too. When she does, her smile breaks wide and I know everything will be fine today. What I don’t know is that this is the last summer. But neither does she, so right at this moment we’re even.

  She’s wearing her hair tucked beneath a beaded head-scarf, she’s tied a gold fabric around her waist that has a little bell, and she’s wearing a long skirt. She jingles as she walks. She’s come to meet me after school, something she hardly ever does anymore.

  When she sees me walking her way, she holds up her hands and says, “Shall we dance?”

  I smile, shake my head and fall in step beside her.

  “Got everything?” she asks me. Then she stops, pulls a tissue from a pocket in her skirt and blows her nose, stuffing it back away when she’s done. She announces, “Doctor says I’m just lucky I didn’t get pneumonia. But what he doesn’t know is how strong these lungs are.”

  And it’s true. She’s been sick for months but she never coughs. She keeps the cold in its place.

  “Are you wearing a costume?”

  “I found it in the attic, isn’t it marvelous?”

  “So what does it make you?”

  “Huh?”

  “What does it make you?” I repeat, a little louder. “A fortune teller?”

  “I think it belonged to Grandma Sourmany.” She twirls once, throws her head back and dances a funny cross-step. “I think she must have worn it for her wedding.”

  It doesn’t matter that I can still remember a previous Halloween, of hunting for costumes with her at the Goodwill and of her wrapping me up in this same scarf amidst the aisles of men’s coats. It does look like something Grandma Sourmany might have worn a long time ago. “It’s beautiful,” I tell her.

  “You’re just wearing this on the inside, you’re just as beautiful.”

  She reaches down and takes my hand. Gives it a squeeze. I squeeze back. The late bus passes us then, and there’s Alex White sticking his tongue out at me from the back window. If she wasn’t with me, I’d flip him the bird.

  The jingling quiets and her face stills. “What’s that kid about?”

  I try to squeeze her hand again but she pulls it away. “He’s just stupid,” I say, waiting for her face to smooth itself out again. “He doesn’t matter.”

  “Is he in your class?”

  I shake my head. It is really important she turn back at me. “You should be wearing some big hoop earrings with that, don’t you think? We could go find some.”

  But her gaze stays fixed on the bus. Her hand flutters up to her mouth; she presses three fingers to her lips and her eyes narrow.

  “Or big fake rings,” I try again, my voice too high. “Like ten of them, like the movies. We could go to Luke’s and hunt in the jewelry bins.”

  Nothing. She’s staring and I’m thinking hard and fast about what I might do but then she drops her hand and shrugs. “I really don’t think I need to worry too much about him, do you?”

  No, I’m thinking, you don’t have to worry about him. It’s just stupid Alex White and we do not have to follow him or call his mom or do anything that will embarrass me. It takes her a minute, but she lets it go and my body relaxes as we fall into step.

  We walk up the street and she’s gliding along. Her leather sandals silent but her skirt and scarf tinkling with each step. Kids pass us on their bikes. We wave to neighbors. She stops to talk to old lady Stevens and when I keep going, she puts her hand on my shoulder and I know to stay put. Right beside her. Her hair touches my cheek when I stand that close; she’s left it down but brushed it out and it’s wild, electric, the tips frizzing. It’s like her when she’s being fun.

  We say goodbye to Mrs. Stevens and my mother says we need to stop at the grocery store. “I had extra work,” she tells me as we walk through the doors. “I didn’t have time to get anything before getting you.”

  “Busy day?” I ask. My mother works part time at O’Sullivan’s Flowers. She doesn’t usually work on Wednesdays. “Did they need you special?”

  She raises her eyebrows at me, then peers around the shop. There are a lot of people—older kids from the middle school mostly, but there are also a few young mothers with their strollers and some other adults. Classic rock is playing on the overhead speakers and my mother frowns as she cocks her ear to it, then starts mouthing along with the song.

  She leans down and her voice is loud in my ear, “Get me a can of pineapple, El.” Then she pulls a list from her pocket. “And the big container of Nancy’s yogurt. Meet me back here.”

  But when I get to the yogurt section she’s just behind me. “We need butter. I forgot.” A woman in the aisle startles; my mother has practically shouted. I smile at the woman because I have learned that this helps.

  I take the butter we always buy, put it in our basket. My mother is watching the other woman walk away.

  “Mom?” I have to say this twice. Then, “What else, Mom?”

  She checks her list, still bobbing her head to the music, and asks me to grab some mayonnaise from the second aisle. “I’ll get wine.”

  But she stays with me instead.

  “I can get it,” I say, turning around to face her. “Mayonnaise and whatever else we need. Meet you at the check-out.”

  But she just says, “Ice cream for dessert?” I nod.

  I don’t offer a second time.

  We get the ice cream and join the check-out line. We wait, not talking, and I shift to look at the magazines just beyond the cashier. She stops me, “Stay starboard, it’s nearly our turn.”

  It isn’t, but I don’t argue.

  This is when the elderly couple behind us lean forward, smiling at each other and at us. The woman giggles and raises her eyebrows, “I think I know a boating family when I hear one.”

  Out of the corner
of my eye I am watching my mother. Gathering my clues for how I should respond. She doesn’t smile at first, but then she does—slowly, widely.

  The man squares his thin shoulders and says, “Chief Engineer. Oil tankers. Forty-seven years of service.”

  “My dad’s a Chief Mate,” I tell them quickly, checking my mother’s face, but she doesn’t seem to mind what I’ve said. “He’ll be Captain soon.”

  He nods in approval. “Chief Mate’s a big deal. Lucky girl! But how’d you like to spend four months in the engine room of one of the big boats? A captain can’t do anything without a well-run engine room. Young lady, I’ve fixed more axles than you can imagine!”

  We move forward in the line, and I’m glad because I don’t have to say anything to that. I cannot imagine such a skinny old man would be strong enough to fix anything in the engine room of a ferry. I’ve watched Leonid on my dad’s boat unwinch a broken cable in two seconds, his thick arms streaked with grease.

  “You and your engine rooms,” the woman says, rolling her eyes, and fiddling with the vegetables in her basket. “Always trying to get people into them. No one else likes all that noise.”

  “I love the engines,” I say, proud of my knowledge of the boat.

  My mother shushes me. “You’ve only seen one a few times.” To the woman, she says, “And they are noisy.”

  “I’ll take you to mine, little lady,” the man says, winking at me. “You’ll like it so much, you’ll never want to get out. Every boat needs a good oiler, and my boat needs someone just about your size!”

  The woman speaks to my mother in a lower voice, “Personally, I can’t stand to go down in them. They’re so dark.”