All things seen and unse.., p.6
All Things Seen and Unseen, page 6
Alex is about to cry.
“I can’t,” she says.
“No, Alex, I’ve got everything covered. You won’t have to—”
“It’s not that,” she says, and she can already hear the sobbing in her voice, even as she presses it down. “I can’t. Like, physically. I can’t.”
“But you’re the most athletic person I know.” Ella is confused. “You did all those insane trail races back in high school.”
“There’s something wrong with me.” It comes out as a whisper, even after all this time. Like a shameful secret, even though everyone who looks at her standing can see it.
“Did you get injured?”
“That’s what’s so fucking frustrating.” She wipes her eyes angrily. “I didn’t even get injured. Now I can’t even stand for fifteen minutes. You should see it. My joints swell up like balloons. And nobody — nobody will tell me what’s wrong with me. Because the first thing they think is just, like, oh, you’re crazy. You’ve got mental illnesses. You have low pain tolerance. You’re too stressed out. And I can’t—”
She is vaguely aware of how loud her voice has gotten, how it’s rising over the subtle café din, but Ella’s hand is still resting on hers, and it is so clarifying, so refreshing, to allow herself this anger.
“I can’t do anything that used to make me feel good,” she says. “And now I can’t do this with you. Even though I want to.”
Ella rises from her seat. She slips into the booth beside Alex, drapes an arm around her waist, leans her head against Alex’s shoulder. The touch is enough to make the floodgates burst. Alex covers her face.
“What do you need?” Ella says, her voice low and steady.
“I can’t go back to school. I don’t have any money. I don’t even have anywhere to live.” Her knuckles press red and white into her eyelids. “And it’s my fucking stupid fault.”
“No. It’s not.”
“You don’t know what happened.”
“It doesn’t matter what happened.”
Alex’s sobs turn into laughs. It’s actually funny, she reminds herself. It’s actually funny.
Ella isn’t laughing. She holds Alex tighter. “I’ll stay with you, then.”
“No,” Alex says immediately.
“Yes.”
Alex looks up. Ella’s face is right next to hers.
“Ella,” Alex says, “I’m not going to stop you from living your life. That would make me feel worse. You understand, right? Like, not only taking your charity, but wasting your time. I would be guilty forever.”
Ella doesn’t understand. “I have the perfect idea, though,” she insists. “We can stay at my parents’ place on the island. The summer house. They just had it built maybe a year ago? We’ve barely even been there.”
The island: an hour and a half on the bus, and then almost an hour on the ferry. Alex went there once on a school field trip when she was very young. They hiked up to where the fish spawned, and watched, in the cool September rain, as the red-backed salmon packed together, struggling up the creek, desperate to return to the place where their life began, the place where they would die.
“I’m not going to let you just sit doing nothing with me,” she says, her voice regaining strength.
“Well, I’m not going to let you just rot alone. I want to help you, Alex.”
“I guess we’re at an impasse, then.”
They sit, both staring at the empty booth in front of them, arms still around each other. Alex can’t see her, but she knows the gears are turning in Ella’s mind.
“What if,” Ella starts to say, then stops. She turns to face Alex again. “What if it was a job? Like, my parents are so paranoid. They’re always talking about how they think the house is going to get vandalized, or that people are trespassing on their property. What if they hired you to look after the house for the summer?”
“I don’t know how to garden or anything like that.”
“No gardening. It’s got a cliff on one side facing the open ocean, and total thick forest on the other. The only other living things I’ve seen when we’ve been there have been deer and seals and killer whales. Literally all you would have to do is hang out there and make sure there’s no one suspicious around. Which there won’t be, because, like I said, it’s in the middle of nowhere.”
“Why would your parents hire me, though? I have zero relevant experience. I don’t think I’m a very good crime-stopper, either.”
“Because they love me.” Ella grins. “And when I tell them it’s Alex who used to do cannonballs in our pool every summer, there’s no way they would say no. They were always so charmed by you.”
Alex doesn’t remember ever seeing Ella’s parents, let alone talking to them. “I don’t know.”
“And I could join you.”
“I told you, I don’t want you to—”
“After I do El Camino, if that’s what you want.”
Alex remembers the island: the gleaming, the smell of fresh death in the water. The way the trees seemed greener than anywhere else.
“Well?” Ella’s grin grows wider. “What do you think?”
“I’ve always wanted to see a whale,” Alex says. She is smiling, too.
2.
Alex watches as Ella’s blue Tesla speeds away. She turns and looks behind her. This early in the morning, the ferry terminal is empty. The sky is pale, and so is the ocean. The forested cliffs loom on either side of the bay, and Alex can just barely make out a pair of eagles, circling slow and even above the trees. If it weren’t for the cries of the seagulls, it would be nearly silent. For the first time in weeks, she is really, truly alone. She takes a deep breath, in and out, and the smell of saltwater is miraculous.
She had been trawling through nature guides and Instagram location tags the entire time she was staying with Ella, distracting herself from being an interloper, an ill-fitting installation in Ella’s velvet-trimmed spare room, sometimes tagging along on Ella’s various social excursions, but mostly there in the apartment, becoming one with the furniture. Everything she has seen of the island has made her more convinced that she is going to a place where she will be happy. There are hiking trails all over, loops around lakes populated by bright migrating birds; quiet beaches with docks to jump off; green swamps full of ferns and wet earth and chirping frogs. On certain shores, sea lions lounge on the rocks, their fur growing bright in the sun, and every so often there will be pods of transient orcas coming through to chase the sea lions, the seals, the salmon. Last summer, people saw a humpback whale, swimming lazily through the glittering schools of herring, right off the very shore upon which Ella’s parents’ summer home is perched.
Ella gave Alex a detailed list of things she would need to know about the house. The pages of printer paper are tucked into an envelope, folded into her backpack, along with all the hiking clothes she and Emma bought together. They tell her how to access the security cameras, the codes to the locks, and the backup codes to the locks; which rooms are off-limits; how to find the laundry room, because it really does seem to be hard to find, deep in the basement whose floor plan Alex can’t make sense of at all. Ella warned her, too, about how the house is inaccessible by road. You have to hike in on a barely-there dirt path through the forest from an abandoned parking lot. The buses are unreliable, when they run at all. Alex will have to get comfortable on an e-bike in order to get food. There is only one restaurant, and no delivery. It’s expensive and time-consuming to go back and forth to the city; there’s no urgent care, no hospital, the doctor only there a day or two a week.
But Alex can’t see herself worrying about any of this. Not on this island, which seems to be more beautiful than she even remembered, and not when the house is what it is. Alex has never had more than a tiny room to herself in her entire life, and most of the time, it was hers in name only. There was always someone who felt entitled to her space. Now she is going to have a beautiful custom-built mansion, its huge glass windows facing a private beach, a lighthouse, the western horizon dotted with islands, and all of it is entirely hers, with a whole forest for her to explore. Alone. Not holding anyone back, not having to keep up with anyone’s pace. If she wants to rest, she can rest. And she is getting paid to do it, to keep the house clean and safe. She’s not accepting charity. She can pay the government back. She can even start school again, once everything is said and done, if she wants to. It’s hard to get used to that idea: that she can want something and choose to do it.
Alex has still had no contact with Ella’s parents. They were supposed to all meet to finalize the arrangement, but their plans fell through. This remains a little concerning, but as she thinks more about it, she talks herself around the anxiety. It’s a sign of incredible trust, really, in Ella and in her, to sign off on letting her stay on their property. And Alex, for once, doesn’t feel like she is being patronized. This is something even she will be able to do.
There are twenty minutes left until it’s time for the ferry to board. Alex buys her ticket from the kiosk: twelve dollars closer to her credit limit, but it doesn’t matter anymore. She buys a coffee from the only place that’s open; it’s burnt, but she enjoys it anyway. Inching down a set of sea-worn concrete steps, her driftwood walking stick in hand, she makes her way to the little rocky crescent of beach that lies between the ferry terminal and the marina.
Despite the presence of the marina, the many yachts and skiffs crammed aside the narrow floating docks, the water is sea-glass clear, green and deep. A family of geese floats along the surface near the shore, the fuzzy grey-yellow goslings peeping and splashing, the parents occasionally honking with concern. Through the fog, anything that moves seems ominous, like a vision, or a ghost.
Her mom believed in ghosts. Alex doesn’t remember much about her life back when her mom was alive, but for some reason, she remembers that: how attuned she was to the possibilities of spirits, the conversations she had with Alex about what might be visiting her in her dreams. The dead world was firmly present in hers. Now she was the one who was dead, gone for more of Alex’s life than she’d been around for. Back when she had just left, Alex wished often that she’d explained what kind of ghost she would become, what kind of signs she would leave behind for Alex to find. There was no doubt in her mind that the signs would be there. It seemed impossible that someone so attuned to the world of spirits would seemingly vanish without a trace. But then, she hadn’t planned on dying. Maybe she just hadn’t had enough time to prepare.
That was when Alex started looking for signs. Once she started seeking them out, she saw them everywhere: in her environment, in her dreams. And yet none of them seemed like her mom, or even like anything that cared about her. The signs added up to something worse than what they were. Their meanings were obfuscated by each other. There was only confusion and a sense of hostility: a deficiency within her, a language she’d heard enough to recognize but not to understand.
Her dad, of course, thought it was all bullshit, “Vietnamese bullshit,” so she never talked about it, and as she got older she tried to convince herself that he was right: that there was no secret logic, no currents running unseen just beneath the surface of the world. It was all surface, even if the surface seemed to ripple when she stared at it too long. There was nothing to anything except what it was.
Farther out, the shiny heads of floating logs bob in the waves, pulled into the bay by the ferries’ churn and the roiling currents. One of the shiny heads seems to turn and look at her. She does a double-take — is it alive? Is she seeing things? — and then laughs. It is, indeed, alive, but it’s no log: it’s a seal, lounging upright in the water, peering at her. She waves.
The seal points his snout up toward the sky before fading backward into the water, the picture of leisure. Alex wonders where the seal will be swimming off to, how far they might travel. Perhaps they’ll see each other again on the other side. She hopes so; she believes, for no real reason, that she’ll be able to recognize them.
The sky lightens around her. It is chilly, still not quite bright, but it seems almost like she should have her sunglasses on. The peeps of the goslings, the guttural honks of their parents, grow more urgent; above her, the seagulls are flying in raucous chaos, screaming and diving. An eagle raid, perhaps, or the prospect of one. She squints into the sky above her head. Far, far up, a shape with black, ragged wings — a figure that seems to have no head — soars ominously, not flapping or changing direction.
When she looks back to the water, the ferry is approaching the terminal. It is time to go.
* * *
Alex is one of only a few foot passengers boarding the ferry. Since there are so few of them, they are herded into the dingy car boarding area, all pavement and dust and exhaust fumes. There is a man in black sunglasses and a baseball hat, a kerchief pulled over his face, carrying a huge backpack; a pair of serious-looking cyclists with fancy bikes; a girl, crying on FaceTime. When she hears footsteps coming up behind her, heavy and fast, she looks back and sees the security guard, heading her direction with a bulletproof vest and a sniffer dog.
She is gripped by panic. Does she have any drugs in her bag? Does she have any drugs that a sniffer dog could sniff out? There’s only the sleeping pills. No more anti-psychotics, no more SSRIs. She decided, as soon as she rolled into Ella’s, that she didn’t want to take them anymore. She didn’t need to. She was going to be fine — on the island, she was going to be fine, and the pills had never helped her before, only ever made her feel sicker, and besides, where would she pick up her prescription?
The sleeping pills are controlled, not illegal. But does she have an illegal amount? Will they believe her if she says she has a prescription? Now she’s tensed up. Animals can sense fear, she knows, and if the security guard sees her nervous face, he’ll immediately identify her as a criminal. She should have put the sunglasses on; she should have shaved her legs. The beginning of the rest of her life will end before it even starts, and she has no one but herself to blame.
She stares at the ground. The security guard and the sniffer dog pass her by. As the ferry docks, the hull squeaking against the metal buffers, the security guard yawns. The dog yawns with him.
This is a flaw she’ll fix, she thinks as the boarding ramp lowers, while she’s on the island. She’s going to become less paranoid.
* * *
The ferry elevator doesn’t work. The button is jammed. Alex slams it once, twice. Nothing. She waits at the bottom of the narrow stairs for the other passengers to make their way up. Then, slowly, she scales the stairs, step by step. Her bag — she packed light; she figures if she needs more clothes, she’ll be able to buy them once she starts getting paid — starts dragging her backward. By the time she gets to the top of the stairs, she is bent over, heaving. It takes the full force of her shoulder to shove open the heavy door to the outside.
Once she does, it is heavenly. The wind is cool, not too strong; from here, the swallows dipping and diving mid-air, catching flies in their tiny beaks, are at eye level. The family of geese is far below her, and the seal is nowhere in sight. She leans against the railing, catching her breath, getting a good look back at the ferry terminal. If everything goes according to plan, she won’t be seeing this shore for another three months.
Then the rumble of the ferry’s engine grows more intense, and she walks along the railing to the front deck. There, she sits on a bench, stretches her feet out. In front of her is a row of flags, flapping lightly in the wind, and among them, hilariously, a rainbow flag. It is June, after all. She wanders up to the flag, holds her fingers up in a V in front of her extended tongue, and snaps a picture. She considers sending it to Em, just to let them know she’s alive, but she doesn’t.
Behind the flag, the ocean stretches huge and green in front of her. The summer glacier runoff has given it a jewelled tone, almost the colour of turquoise, and the peaks of island chains layer over each other into the horizon. To the northwest, she can just barely make out the point of the island to which she is headed, extending out into the ocean. There could be anything out there. Anything. There could be whales, dozens of whales, just underneath the surface. There are, she knows for a fact, thousands of fish, so many different kinds of fish: rockfish, bobbing lazily near the surface just off the island’s shore; the salmon powering through deep water, snatching up the tiny baitfish swimming along; huge halibut and lingcod; flounders goggle-eyed on the sandy seafloor. This whole world underneath her, alive. Ella said that the house had kayaks, lifejackets, wetsuits, snorkels. Alex has lived near the water for all of her twenty-four years, and she’s never even gone under the surface. But now she will. There won’t be anything stopping her, nothing more to regret. The ferry begins to move underneath her. She closes her eyes, taking in the motion.
Without warning, an ear-splitting blast shakes the boat, so loud that it is physically painful. Alex yells, involuntarily, and covers her ears. It ends after a second or two, but within Alex’s skull, the sound keeps on ringing.
To distract herself from the pain, she wanders over to the railing, and for a while she leans out, experiencing herself as part of the wind, watching as the ocean spreads underneath the ferry, the looming shape of the island growing clearer. With every passing minute, she can make out more concrete details in the distance: houses on shores and nestled within trees, the shape of a power line cut into the top of a mountain. Bright dots on the water’s surface show themselves to be early-morning kayakers, or jet skis tethered to buoys. Occasionally, she turns and looks behind her, at the receding bay in the distance. It doesn’t take long before it disappears entirely.
