Claire Watkins - Battleborn - Stories

I am the only one who knows what it means, this compiling. I am the only one in Gwen’s life who can see what she’s doing. We have no one else — our father is long dead; he died when Gwen was a baby, like Jumbo Senior. We are alone and I cannot believe how long it’s taken me to realize this. I am the only one who can say, This has got to stop. You have to quit this and go back to normal and have a baby, a daughter, a beautiful daughter who won’t have to worry about her mother, who will be loved and never alone.

I do dream about our mother. Always in these dreams her death is a big misunderstanding. In these dreams she has won a stay at the Sands and simply forgot to call; she has been laughing and whirling around the roulette tables, and she comes back to her house on Stanford Lane wearing a plastic visor and a new bright white T-shirt. I Got Lucky at the Sands! And she’s brought us prime rib from the buffet, wrapped in tinfoil, and her plants are wilted and their soil is bone dry but none of them are dead.

Always in these dreams we have a great laugh about this misunderstanding and I am never mad that my mother didn’t call, just grateful that she is alive and that the confusion is cleared up. And then, when I wake, all that grace is gone.

But — and this is what I would have told Gwen when she asked me on that airplane, were I not a coward — in these dreams our mother looks and smells and sounds and feels just like she did, in a way I can’t re-create when I am awake. Which is to say, in my dreams she is alive in a way I cannot remember her ever being. And these dreams are a blessing, or as close to a blessing as it gets anymore. And for that at least, I am grateful. G-R-A-T-E-F-U-L. Grateful.

Gwen wasn’t a cowardly kid, just very small. She used to say everything twice, once aloud and then a second time, whispered it quietly to herself. She did this with everything she ever said. Said she was recording it in her mental journal. Even then you could tell that though she was born later, she was much older than me.

This morning, I woke before my alarm went off and I lay there thinking about the grizzly, how before the city there used to be grizzlies on this peninsula. How Peter told me that on our first date. About what other magic he could give me if I let him. I took a long ride around the city, trying to imagine grizzly bears loafing through eucalyptus groves. I rode to the Sutro Baths.

They’ve put signs up at the baths. They say, SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK or CAUTION: STRONG CURRENTS or some other euphemism for LOOK OUT! A BOY AND HIS STEPFATHER WERE DRAGGED OUT TO SEA HERE AND THEIR BODIES WERE NEVER FOUND (WE SUSPECT SHARKS) AND IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU; IT COULD HAPPEN TO ANY OF US. The signs have a picture, an illustration of a stick swimmer being swept out by a squiggly current, his stick arm in the air. I think they should put these signs up everywhere, not just at the beaches but throughout the entire city, call this what it is.

I rode hard from the Mission through Castro up to Golden Gate, then back down Lincoln to Baker Beach, through the Presidio to the wharf and back. Pumping up hills, hurtling down them. I wanted to get away from here, and for a moment I thought I felt my feet pushing me far from here to Canada, following the humpback’s route. Putting distance between me and her. But that’s all wrong. This city is a peninsula, seven miles by seven miles, and I just ricocheted from one edge to the other. I was never more than seven miles from anything.

I rode to Gwen’s. She wasn’t in the apartment. But then, I hadn’t expected her to be. I kept climbing the stairs past her floor, and here I am. I step out onto the roof. Great deep planters line the roof deck full of ice plant and bird-of-paradise. I don’t want her to be up here, but she is. She sits on a deck chair with her short legs stretched out in front of her, big tortoiseshell sunglasses over her eyes, her hands on her stomach.

And there’s a thousand things I want to tell her — about the Sutro boy and the whales I never saw, about Peter’s turbines turning and turning down in the bay without ever rousing anything, about all the great land mammals — and I want to say them all so bad I could say them twice, once to her and once to me, two thousand ways total to say, I know you’re slipping out to sea; please don’t go. Don’t leave me on land by myself.

Instead I say, Have you watched Dumbo lately?

Gwen looks up to me, lifts her sunglasses from her eyes. And right away I can tell she’s been crying. No, she says.

I was thinking, I say. If we call Dumbo Dumbo, aren’t we, you know…

A part of the problem? she says.

And maybe it’s that her stomach has gotten so big in the months since I last saw her, or that I can see the ocean from up here, but she just looks so small . She looks like she did when we were kids. She looks like a child.

Yeah, I say. We ought to call him Jumbo. Jumbo Junior.

Okay, she says, Jumbo Junior. And then, so brave for someone so small, she says, Catie, are you okay?

I watch the sun dipping down into the water. From here I can make out the dark shapes of whales like submarines down in the sea, hear their songs. They sing James Taylor; they sing Paul Simon. I see the drowned boy on his stepfather’s shoulders in 1951, wading in the freshwater pool at the Sutro Baths, his wide-hipped mother waving from the tiers above. I see tall Jacob spinning the roulette table at the Sands. I see Peter out on the savanna with the African white rhino, rubbing ointment on its stump, encouraging the horn to grow back. O! You swim like a duck, he says. I see Jumbo Junior and my beautiful long-legged unborn niece swayed to sleep by his mother’s great gray trunk.

Thank you:

Christopher Coake, my mentor, pep talker, and friend. This book exists in large part because you took me aside and said it could.

Nicole Aragi, for your vision and your vigor.

John Freeman, my fairy godfather, for picking up what I was putting down.

The MFA program at the Ohio State University and my extraordinary teachers there: Michelle “Do Better” Herman, Erin “The Good Is the Enemy of the Great” McGraw and Lee K. “Let Us Not Get in the Habit of Excusing Poorly Executed Art” Abbott. Thanks also to Henri Cole, Kathy Fagan, Andrew Hudgins and Lee Martin for your wisdom and support, and to Kelli Fickle, for looking after everyone.

My top-notch professors at the University of Nevada, Reno, especially Michael Branch, David Fenimore, Justin Gifford, Gailmarie Pahmier, Hugh Shapiro and Elizabeth Swingrover.

Percival Everett, Sue Miller, Padgett Powell and Christine Schutt for advice and encouragement.

My editors, Rebecca Saletan and Ellah Allfrey, for believing in this book, and for making it better. Jynne Martin for all the sage and all the good vibes that came along with it. Elaine Trevorrow and Yuka Igarashi, wondrous helpers. Christie Hauser, the Sir David Attenborough of publishing.

The magazine editors who first put these stories out into the world: Aaron Burch and Elizabeth Ellen, John Irwin, Kathryn Harrison and Robert Arnold, Patrick Ryan, James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, Scott Dickensheets, Hannah Tinti and Maribeth Batcha, Lorin Stein and David Wallace-Wells, Caleb Cage, Jill Patterson and Jonathan Bohr Heinen, Conor Broughan and Jessica Jacobs, Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies.

The Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, for financial support. My exceptional colleagues at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference and Bucknell University. The Journal . My students. Peter Harrison, ever-hospitable dreamer. Kirsten Chen and Lumans. Every single person at Riverhead.