Erika Swyler - The Book of Speculation

A clawed leg digs at my neck then burrows into my hair. Skin crawls, electric. Stop. Hit it away. It scuttles down my back, clicking over others. More hooking, clawing. Twitch. Shake them off.

Simon, she whispers. Hush. Hush, I have work to do.

More scratching, pricking. The weight. Another hiccup. Pull them off. The box drops. One moment, falling slow to the ground, lid open. Cards scatter, drifting. Horseshoe crabs swarm the box. Prince Ivan clawed. Firebird drowned. A hiccup. More air gone. I reach for it, but my arms won’t lift. Horseshoe crabs hang on my sleeves. Back up my neck they pile on. The Tower floats, then is flicked away by a crab. I kick. Scuffle them away. The bad ankle rolls. I fall, sag, to the bottom. Crabs move in. Ah, god. A thousand legs, a hundred tails. Onto my stomach, my rib cage, shoving me back. I look up. A beam of light, weak, clouded with algae and brine.

Simon. Sweetly, she says it, calling me home. I can hear her tell me I’m a good son, can feel the eggshells of that last morning beneath my fingernails.

My legs will not lift. My chest won’t rise. More breath is pushed away under the weight. On the shore they might look for me. My fingers brush something smooth. A card. A small thing, simple. Water and salt will eat the ink, wipe away its face. Good. Burning was too quick. A slow curse demands slow breaking. The orange will bleed into the Sound. The oil from our fingers will wash away and the paper will soften and dissolve into the sand, into the water’s mouth. As the cards break away, so will we.

Octopi for good luck. That’s fine. They’ll pull the trailer along to Ohio. Enola will lean an arm out the window, her hand flying over the wind. His family will be wide and warm.

I have saved her.

There is a woman with my sister’s eyes, and hair long and black like ink — my mother, but not — a silent man beside her — then the mermaid girls, the diving queens, the fortune-tellers and magician’s assistants, a sea of black-haired women with odd eyes, chests made wide for swimming and breath-holding, with laughs that sound like shattering plates. There are little girl hands, and scraped legs that I bandaged, knobby knees on my shoulders when I carried her down a cliff, the girl who left me because she wanted to live.

Ah, and now among the black hair and breath-holding, the fortunes and drowning, a single long red braid. Beside me, a pair of freckled hands digs into the beach with mine, French conjugations, cursing my family when I could not, the sweetest taste at the base of the neck, the curve of an arm reaching to the top of a library shelf. A life lived beside mine. I have not been alone. I can feel her now. I was never alone.

There. The last air. The crash of water around me. I am drowned, but it feels like being lifted — the sky’s hands on me, pulled up from the sea as I am swallowed by it. Light. Brine. And here, a voice.

You are home.

The fingers on my wrists are hot, almost burning. Though it might be the fire from skin being cold. There’s a tear in the black, a pinprick of light. It stabs deeper than the touch.

My name in a thousand voices.

A sharp electric snap, frigid. Bright.

Gagging.

Breath.

A soft voice. Two voices. Far back, distant smudges moving closer. My back hurts, itches, can’t get warm. Louder. My name again. Two sounds, a hiss and a mumble. One voice now.

Simon.

My lungs, my guts, pushing out water — not coughing but turning — outside in and inside out, forcing me dry. Dry. Dry, just once I want to be dry. There are arms around my back, pounding my shoulders, beating my spine, clutching and holding. They’re wet. Soaking.

A patch of skin worn hard and smooth by a fishing rod.

When light bleeds in again it’s forgiving and comes as dots that fuzz and fade into more light, then grains of sand, then dots again, brownish pink. Alice’s arms, pied like the shore.

I vomit a deluge onto the sand. Saltwater, algae. Once, as a child, I fell from the monkey bars on the elementary school playground and had the wind knocked from me. I lay on the pavement, diaphragm fluttering, gasping, waiting for the empty to fill. Undrowning is that in reverse. What’s full is emptying to again take in life. My lips move. A word forms, a scratchy “Hey.”

Enola answers, tiny, angry as I’ve ever heard her. “You asshole.”

And then I’m smiling.

* * *

On the sofa in the McAvoys’ living room I run my finger over the edge of Alice’s thumbnail, though I know that drives her crazy. There’s a solid sureness to fingernails, the shell over the tenderest parts of us. I tap on the tip of her nail and she flinches. Instead of pulling away, she tightens her hold. I stare at the scratches on my skin from the crabs’ feet, and the fresh black bruises that line the inside of my arms. It wasn’t easy to pull me up. I could tell her about her hands, and of all the women around me — all the water, the drowning, the voices — that it’s been her hands, always. But it hurts to talk. The Sound has left my throat raw.

Doyle is talking, pacing, telling Enola and Alice what I told him. Littered with nuances and tipped phrasing, he makes my words sound a little like wind. I watch his long toes bend against the living room floor and remember the bite of a spark on my skin. At some point, when I was fresh from the water, he must have touched me.

“I didn’t think he was gonna do that, Little Bird,” he says. “I swear I thought he was gonna torch the cards or I wouldn’t have swiped them.”

“It’s not your fault,” she says. “He’s always been like that.”

I let them talk about me as if I’m not there. I’m tired. I look at the room from across Alice’s shoulder, the slight bump of her vertebra, the still damp weight of her braid. I can see Frank in the kitchen, hunched over, shaken. Leah moving about, making tea. She walks with purpose, calmly sliding a cup into my sister’s hands, as though her entire world hasn’t shattered. Enola might not even notice where the cup came from, but she drinks. I look up at Alice’s mother, and catch the corner of a smile. Subtle, as if to say, let them talk.

Alice’s voice is soft but forceful. The angry librarian. “He’s worked himself to death for you, you know. Worried about you, wondered if you were ever coming back. Simon’s been killing himself over you for years.”

Enola says quietly, “Don’t you think I know?”

It’s Doyle who asks, “Shit, what’s he gonna do? He can’t swim at Rose’s.”

“Shit,” Enola says.

The deepest shame is the one that comes from looking my family in the eye after having died and woken up. They’ve imagined me drowning again, dying three times nightly in Thom Rose’s dunk tank. I can see them piecing together what to do with me, figuring out whether or not I need to be watched. I’m not used to being carried, but there are obligations that come with family, letting them care for you when they need to. Not one of them seems to notice that Enola’s hands aren’t twitching anymore, or that Doyle’s stopped quietly checking in on her. The nervousness has leeched from her, leaving behind someone closer to the Enola I knew when she was a little girl. That lifts the shame. I won. Let them worry a little while. Watching me keeps them from noticing the shift in the air, in the way the salt smells, and the turning that has happened inside us.

“He can stay with me,” Alice says. Enola starts asking questions about what I’m going to do, where I’ll work. I stop listening. I picture the mobile in Alice’s bedroom with its tiny horseshoe crab, and the photograph of her that her father took.

We carry our families like anchors, rooting us in storms, making sure we never drift from where and who we are. We carry our families within us the way we carry our breath underwater, keeping us afloat, keeping us alive. I’ve been lifting anchors since I was eighteen. I’ve been holding my breath since before I was born.