x Tx - Normally Special

He never touched me. I love my dad.

My dad has a tool shed. Its walls are vertical aluminum waves and in the summer, when you are hiding inside of it, the heat stifles. My knees eat the dirt and I hold my breath when I hear them coming. My brothers are running outside. They are looking for me. This is real fear. No joke. No playing around. I smashed the wall of the fort they were making. The wall it took them two days to get higher than their heads. It was made of dumb dried clay-mud bricks they had made with a wooden mold my dad had put together for them in his workshop, which was adjacent to the tool shed I was hiding in. I used a sledgehammer. Not a heavy one. I felt so powerful. I smashed the fuck out of that wall and I was crying while I crushed it. In that moment I wanted to kill them. I hated my brothers. I didn’t care that they would kill me for this. I did not care. In that moment, all I wanted to do was destroy. And I did. Every blow shook my ribcage, rattled my skull. My halter top inched down and down until my baby nipples showed, tiny and pink. Snot fell onto them. Tears fell onto them. My hair stuck to my wet eyes and my snotty nostrils. The air was filled with the dust from the breaking and I choked with it. When everything was smashed I fell to my knees and I remembered this lady from a movie I saw where she found the hands of her murdered children buried in a cornfield. I thought about how crazy that lady looked with all of her out of control snot and tears and screaming. I saw myself outside of myself for a minute and that sort of woke me up and I “snapped out of it” and saw what I had done. Instinct told me I had better get the fuck out of there and I did. I left the sledgehammer. I pulled up my halter top. I hid in the tool shed. Their fury paralyzed me. They were banshees. I felt their tornado of anger whirling around the house while they searched for me. It shook the walls of the shed. I writhed myself small and squeezed as tight as I could into a place under a shelf and between the scalloped wall and a wood cabinet. I will not talk about the cramping, or the thirst, or the blood from sharp edges of BB gun holes in the aluminum or the brutality of the retaliation when they finally found me.

That day taught me there is a safety in all of those things. I am decades older and I look for that safety. I say, “sit on my chest big boy,” and, “deep enough to draw blood, please,” and, “as tight as you want, for as long as you want, double knots.” There are tears and snot and nipples and sticking hair like before. There is a rampage. There is a tornado of anger. I hand them the sledgehammer. I am their fort wall.

I still hide in the tool shed. It is so very, very useless.

Thirty-three starfish, forty-two seashells, eighteen crabs, fourteen lobsters, ten waves, eight gulls, twelve fish, seven lighthouses, four fishermen, eleven pieces of coral, sixteen sailboats, nine seahorses, and a handful of signs indicating the direction you need to take should you want to go to the beach. In bas-relief on shower tiles, on the edges of towel racks, mounted to drawer pulls, painted on wallpaper, dotted on baseboard tile squares, crowded into baskets on mantels, on wooden steps, in bathrooms, mounted and framed and hung on walls, painted on dishes, decaled on drinkware, the bottoms of bowls, sculpted into the handles of serving utensils, hanging from the ceiling, stitched onto towels, on lamp bases, printed on bed sheets, comforters, pillow cases. A fish skeleton key rack. The beachside vacation rental drove the point home like a mother reminding you of every single thing you needed to be afraid of.

In every cupboard, towels with nautical themes are stacked neatly with labels indicating the size of towel and method of use: hand towel, body towel, beach towel, wash cloth. Tiny laminated instructions with filigree and smiley faces explain how to use each appliance; washer, dryer, microwave, dishwasher. Quiet coaches.

At first it’s charming, but eventually their naggy cheeriness begins to annoy. I know how to use a microwave. I know how to dry my clothes. I know how to wash dishes.

There is no way you can make a mistake here.

***

After two delicate attempts, Frank gives up on begging the children to temper their steps. Their excitement of having stairs and bunk beds overwhelms them and they rampage. I watch him watching them. His face is lit up with something that looks a lot like pride.

Anna gets on her belly and slides down the stairs, taking her little brother with her. Hands clasped around his tiny ankles, they bump — scream their way down the stairs. I think about stopping them, but I am unsure. They look like they might bite.

***

Every day I pack a beach bag of every possible thing: suntan lotion, rubber bands, whistles, scissors, a sewing kit, wooden stakes, magazines, floppy hats, Frisbees, throwing stars, kickstands, pencil sharpeners, parachutes, jumping ropes, courage, swizzle sticks, tweezers, and machetes.

I do my best to anticipate.

We bring towels that have been brought before and sandwich them between our bodies and the hot sand, symmetrical. I place the chairs just so. Frank pounds an umbrella into the sand. When he is finished, he stands back with his hands on his hips, surveying our setup. He is breathing heavy and I wait for him to see through me but instead he says, “Alrighty!” and then captures the kids in his arms and runs them toward the sea. I want to ask him how he knew to do that.

Their screams disappear into the waves.

I sit in a chair and watch the sea roll them around in its mouth.

***

At night, we twist loose, fighting silent blanket wars; each of us noiselessly willing the other to shut the windows that bring the cold night air of the sea to freeze our skin.

I, always the cold one, lose. I throw the blanket from his back, stand, stride, and slam the glass closed, faintly remembering just seven hours earlier how delicious the opening of that window was; the cool air quelling the sweat of my brow, the crevasses in my skin. I think about change and how suddenly or how gradual, it can happen, how it makes almost everything unreliable. I shiver.

I slide back in alongside him, surrendered. Fight forgotten, I snake my hands around him, taking his warmth for my own.

***

My son digs for sand crabs where the waves slick the sand dark. His bare feet make tiny tracks that the sea licks away at crooked intervals. It is like he is being tasted and savored.

My daughter plays in the water with her father. He brings her back to me shivering wet, face strangled with a clown’s smile, spread too wide and unsettling. He sets her down and she stumbles into my arms. Her fingertips grip my shoulders like pincers and I swear I can feel the press of shell against my skin.

My husband lies on the bright colored terrycloth, eyes closed to the fight of the sun. He doesn’t see me shudder and wince.

Anna whispers she wants to tell me a secret. She leans in and opens her mouth revealing a black green strip of seaweed. I pull on it and, like a magician’s scarf, it ribbons out into a small clumped pile crawling with tiny sand gnats. The last bit plops and I cringe at the noise. My daughter laughs a gurgle sound and skips down to the wet to help her brother with the crabs. Their heads touch briefly and I cannot see who they are for a moment, their forms black in front of the sun.

I look at the sky knowing that with my attention missing, there is a chance that something bad might happen. I watch a cloud change from a bird into a dragon into a skull.