A Seahorse Year: A Novel

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

BLOOD

Sonoma

BREATH

El Cerrito

BONE

Walnut Creek

STRING

Coda

About the Author

FIRST MARINER BOOKS EDITION 2005

Copyright © 2004 by Stacey D’Erasmo

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

D’Erasmo, Stacey.

A seahorse year / Stacey D’Erasmo.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-618-43923-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-618-43923-2 ISBN-10: 0-618-43923-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-618-61887-8 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-618-61887-2 (pbk.)

1. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 2. California, Northern—Fiction. 3. Runaway teenagers—Fiction. 4. Lesbian mothers—Fiction. 5. Problem youth—Fiction. 6. Teenage boys—Fiction. 7. Gay fathers—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.E666S43 2004

813'.54—dc22 2004042724

eISBN 978-0-547-72583-3

v2.1213

FOR INVALUABLE HELP IN WRITING THIS BOOK,

I would like to thank Jennifer Carlson, Michael Cunningham, Esopus, Gloria Fisk, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, Cammie McGovern, Catherine E. McKinley, Laurie Muchnick, Roy Parvin, Elaine Pfefferblit, Laura Pinsky, Dr. Michael Rendel, Peter Rock, Robyn Selman, the Ucross Foundation, Michael Warner, and Jacqueline Woodson. Thanks to Jeanne Fury for the rock education. And most of all, thanks to my dear Elizabeth.

For Rose D’Erasmo,

1917–2003

MY LOVE WILL STAY

TILL THE RIVERBED RUN DRY.

—PJ Harvey

HAL WALKS UPHILL. My son is mad, he thinks, and turns a corner, passing a coffeehouse where three women in sweatshirts sit at an outdoor table. It’s cool, gray, and damp: summer in San Francisco.

Hey, Hal, says one, a client. Hal waves.

Yeah, he’s great, she says to a friend as he walks on. He got me back a thousand dollars last year.

My son is mad, thinks Hal. I am dying. He almost stops to call Nan and say that—I am dying, I am dying—but he knows that she will reply, calmly, You are not dying, Hal. Did you talk to the police today?

Sometimes he just can’t handle her—her persistence, her smooth face, the way she occupies any chair as if she has just built it herself out of a tree she felled with her little saw. I am lost, he thinks, I am sure that I’m dying, my son is mad, and his mother won’t admit that she can’t carry him by herself.

Hal walks on. No one has found Christopher yet, no one has called to say that they’ve seen him, no one—not even Nan—has come in from the desert or the mountains carrying him. Hal looks up at the sky, as if Christopher might appear there, but the sky is blankly bluish gray. Back in Christopher’s room in Hal’s house, Christopher’s saltwater fish tank is burbling to itself. Expensive fish circle through the carefully tended water: a lionfish, a snowflake eel, three temperamental tangs, and a bamboo cat shark who spends most of its time lying on the bottom of the tank, looking malevolent and morose. Since Christopher has been gone, it has fallen to Hal to take care of Christopher’s fish. This morning, Hal noticed that the tank seemed warm and the fish sluggish, that they were swimming slowly, like a carousel winding down. Hal felt a panicky rush. He believes in omens and portents and signs of all kinds. He immediately set out for the aquarium store, the good one in Noe Valley where he had opened an account for Christopher. He thought he might see an omen or sign on the way, but so far there has been nothing, nothing at all, but that random, friendly hello and miles of sky without a break.

Hal looks down again, at the street. A not uninteresting man with a squashy nose looks Hal’s way, but Hal doesn’t look back.

Hal, walking uphill, is equally certain that Christopher is alive and that he is dead. Either way, he is certain that it will fall to him to carry Christopher—who, at sixteen, is much too heavy and tall now to be carried even by Hal—in the end.

Nan works in her garden. It is a long, narrow plot of land containing four square beds of flowers outlined by planks of silvered wood; around the beds is grass. Around the garden is a fence, also silvered. Trumpet vines tumble wantonly over the fence toward earth. Midway down the garden is a slender, deep purple, flowering plum that has never flowered or plummed but maintains a hopeful, leafy look. A few feet away from the plum tree, nestled in some tall grasses and a few wayward daisies, is the stone head of Sor Juana. Nan pulls a few weeds from around the pansies. She chews on a shred of chive. Her right hip aches, a tedious reminder of being forty-five, of the car accident at eighteen that broke her hip in the first place, and of the doctor in Mexico who didn’t set it right. She picked up the statue during that trip, before she even knew who Sor Juana was or had a garden to put her in. She just liked Sor Juana’s melancholy, downturned stone eyes, her stone wimple; feeling like Orpheus, Nan lugged her back over the border on the bus, placing her heavy stone head on the next seat. Nan’s body remembers everything and retells it to her from time to time whether she wants to hear it or not. She taps a loose end of a plank into place with her spade.

Marina said, over dinner the night before, He’s all right. I feel that he’s all right.

Nan had stared at her plate, willing herself not to think. She found her hand closing and willed her fingers to open. She willed herself not to say, You couldn’t possibly feel him. You didn’t bear him or raise him. She put her plate in the sink and walked outside to stand in the dark garden. But what was worse was the fact that Nan didn’t feel anything either. She had no idea at all where Christopher could be. No breeze stirred the dark leaves.

Today the garden is calm. Nan stands up, holding the spade: a hopeless, foolish tool against the wide world. She thinks how foolish she herself must look, a short woman with short, gray-streaked hair, in dirty jeans, armed with nothing but a spade. She sighs, dirty fingers clenched around the dirty spade. She closes her eyes for a minute, thinks ChristopherChristopherChristopher, then opens them again. The garden remains empty.

Nan leans down to pick a few small green tomatoes for the windowsill. She tugs at a weed. Her hip complains. The cool, damp air washes over her. She tries to feel comforted by its purity. She listens intently for some sound or cry, perhaps from a great distance, but the only sound is the chink of her spade in the earth.

Marina paints the branch of a tree. The light in her studio is muted. The studio is in a converted church in the Mission; now it’s a church of art. She works in the choir room, a boxy space with rickety windows and the ghost of the smell of wet wool. It’s a mess: scattered around the room are, among other things, her bicycle, canvases in various states of use, work boots, cans of powder paint and acrylic, squashed tubes of oil paint, archival glue and Elmer’s glue, a jigsaw, a drill, sketchbooks, a box of old snapshots bought at a flea market and another two or three overflowing with cut-up old books and magazines from her collage period, a hunk of dried-out clay, a kid’s bead loom in a box that says AMERICAN INDIAN LOOM, a ruler, a bunch of mismatched baby shoes, a sculpture leaning against one wall—an exchange with another artist—which looks something like a side of cured beef. A big plastic bucket is filled with clipped pictures of nineteenth-century valentines. Hearts and the empty shapes where hearts used to be are tangled together. The bucket sits under a table with curlicue white metal legs and a glass top, meant to be patio furniture; the glass is covered with swirls and blobs and streaks of paint, years of it in a multicolored, perpetual storm. Tacked onto the wall next to Marina’s worktable is a yellowed postcard of an Agnes Martin painting: rows of white lines like stitches traced vertically across a slate background, determined and lonely and earthy. When she first met Nan, she thought Nan was like that painting.

Scotch-taped to the upper frame of one window are three dried seahorses, a gift from Christopher: one, two, three little rocking creatures with fixed rococo stares. There is a rent notice lying on the floor near the door, along with a note from Turner, a printmaker who has the studio directly beneath Marina’s. The note says, The cow Roberta won a Prix de Rome. She’s a cow. COW. Marina can hear Turner below her, laughing and talking on his cell phone. Through the old porous floorboards, she can smell the etching acid he uses.

Marina dots the tip of the branch. It’s okay. Today the tree is okay, not so bad, she won’t have to scrape it off and start again. Probably. She looks at it, wrapping a lock of "hair around her finger: a schoolgirl habit, though this schoolgirl has a head of silver hair cut in a bob that just grazes the nape of her long neck. Marina is only thirty-eight, but her hair has been silver since she was twenty-five. She would no more have bothered to dye it than she would have bothered to iron a wrinkled shirt or mend a sweater with a hole. She has always preferred a life of casual accretion. In fact, she believes in it, almost as an ars poetica: what accretes naturally always turns out to be exactly what’s needed. Painting should be like riding a bike with no hands, a mixture of velocity and trust.

For instance, this tree that she’s been making for the last seven years: it hasn’t been that well received, but she has persevered for reasons she can’t quite explain. She’s made the tree big; she’s made the tree small; she’s made the tree in oil, watercolor, gouache, collage, tinfoil, Polaroid, and acrylic; she’s repeated identical trees in suspiciously regular rows on a single canvas; once she made an entire forest of trees from fabric remnants. This is a tree in oil, dense and telegraphic. She might have to scrape it off after all. There’s another tree, a tree she can see clearly in her mind’s eye, that will not fail, as this one suddenly seems in imminent danger of doing. The tree at this point has become fairly representational, close to the tree she drew over and over again when she was ten. It’s a leafy, spreading, eastern sort of tree that seems quite specific, though if one were to look at it more closely, one would see that it isn’t actually any particular organic species at all. Its branches bend strangely; its leaves are an uncanny shape. There are suggestions of faces in the bark. When she first drew it as a child in Los Angeles, it was a tree she. had never seen, except in a dream. In the dream, it was the most beautiful tree in the world. She woke up needing to draw it. That was all she knew. In many ways, she thinks it may be all she still knows. She begins on another branch, with guarded hope.

When the wind blows, the rickety window shakes and the three seahorses, loose in their old tape, rap very faintly on the glass. It is, to Marina, an unbearable sound. In one corner of her studio, a boom box splattered with paint rests next to a wooden tray full of a random collection of CDs: some opera, some Depeche Mode, a boxed set of Patti Smith with crushed corners. She doesn’t turn on the boom box. She listens hard for the tiny, unbearable rattle of the seahorses. It seems important.

Christopher has been gone seven days. Day by day, the time accretes with other events, events of much greater magnitude that have affected many more people: an earthquake in El Salvador; a change of power in Israel; the rise of the temperature of the earth by a fraction of a degree. Those events, however, are bearable. What is not bearable is the silence, punctuated by that tiny, almost imperceptible rapping. How will they survive this? Marina has no idea. A leaf appears, then another.

Nan parts Marina’s thighs with her hands, buries her hands, her tongue, in Marina, as desperately as if this is their last fuck on earth. Marina shakes, but doesn’t come yet. She pulls Nan up beside her in the twisted sheets. Nan is sweating and crying at the same time, and her lips feel rough and hot. Marina kisses Nan with deep, purposeful kisses, wanting to draw the poison out, but they are both poisoned, so she can’t. They can only pass the poison between them. Nan reaches into the drawer of the night table and pulls out the old cracked maroon cock, slides it up inside Marina, whose glue- and paint-stained shirt is still half-buttoned on her body. Her silver hair is snarled and sweaty. Nan says into Marina’s ear, Give it here, and when Marina does it’s like a wall falling down and on the other side of the wall is a rushing wind.

Marina starts to cry. Nan sits up, running the heels of her hands through her hair. She looks at the clock and sees that only twenty-one minutes have gone by.

Somewhere near Denver, Christopher hitches a ride with a truck heading south.

BLOOD

NAN STANDS IN LINE at Celestial Coffee, the alternative Starbucks, behind a teenage Goth girl and a woman in running clothes with a baby in a jogging stroller. Celestial Coffee has signed posters of jazz musicians on the walls, vegan baked goods, and one visible employee, a meditative young man in a Keep on Truckin’ T-shirt. Nan hates Starbucks, but needs coffee, especially now, so Celestial is her compromise. She makes it with a kind of wry despair. O, San Francisco. Sometimes she finds it funny; at other times it makes her want to weep. When did the city of free love become the city of cash? Though the headlines insist that the bubble has burst, there remains an overcaffeinated fantasy, a bewitched atmosphere. Parades of people in khakis instead of parades of men in dresses, on roller skates. The mini-titans are jobless but still smiling. Lattes are being made all over town. She watches the procession go by, feeling like the only disenchanted one.

The woman with the baby in the jogging stroller has blond hair, pulled back in a ponytail and tied with a piece of purple yarn; the color in her cheeks is high, though her eyes look tired. The baby is sleeping peacefully, its tiny pink fists folded on its chest. In the aerodynamic wedge of stroller, he looks to Nan like a modern Moses in a polypropylene basket, floating down the river. She barely resists the urge to adjust his exquisite, sapphire blue Polartec blanket, saddle-stitched around the edges in white, the Patagonia label showing. The Goth girl, despite the thick eyeliner and witchy dyed black hair and bits of metal studding her face, has a tentative expression, a skittish manner, as if this is her first time out as a Goth. She orders a double mint cappuccino. The woman with the baby orders a chai tea with steamed soy milk.

Coffee, large, black, says Nan to the meditative young man behind the counter as he steams the soy milk, then, to the blond woman, How old?

Twelve weeks, she says proudly. He was up all night last night. She gazes at the baby with exhausted wonderment. We tried everything. The young man hands the woman her tea in a plain white paper cup.

The Goth girl, sitting at a table nearby reading the San Francisco Weekly and drinking her double mint cappuccino, says, Have you tried holding him on your knees, you know, on his stomach, while you rub his back?

Oh, says the blond woman. No.

Try that, says the Goth girl.

The woman laughs and looks at Nan complicitously. Well, she says.

It’s true, says Nan. The young man hands her the large black coffee; the cup is warm and heavy in her hands. She was up all night, too, again, and now has the transparent, vertiginous feeling that coffee shreds but doesn’t soothe.

Oh? says the woman, tightening her ponytail. Are you a doctor? Her eyes drift over Nan’s face.

I’m a mother, says Nan, and she knows her tone is aggressive. She tries to smile. But my son is sixteen. A big boy.

Ah, says the woman, tucking in her baby, who is still sound asleep. So you’re past all this.

Nan abruptly turns away, panicked by a strange thought. As she fumbles to open the door, she blows into the little sip hole in the plastic coffee lid, then burns her tongue on the hot coffee. She rubs the warm cup on her cold forehead, feeling defeated, which makes her only more focused. If she could stay awake all the time, she would. In her mind, Hal tuts, "Hard-ass, and Marina, more tenderly, tells her that she’s hypervigilant," but they’re not, Nan thinks, mothers. They’re not her. Demons walk right past those two all the time and they don’t even notice, but she does. She sees demons every day, as ordinary as dirt—except, of course, that she didn’t see this one coming at all. Which makes her no different from the ponytailed blonde, no matter how little soy milk she puts in her coffee.

The strange thought is this: maybe it was the otters.

When Christopher was ten, she took him for a treat to the Monterey Aquarium. He was already a fish expert. Marina had just sailed into Nan’s life, silver flags flying. When Marina left Nan’s house early—a Saturday morning, she remembers—Nan went into Christopher’s room and woke him up. Hey, she said, let’s go see some fishes.

He blinked at her, sleepy, faintly suspicious. Who was that? he said.

Who?

Who left.

A friend. Come on.

They drove down the 101, past the crowded suburbs to where eucalyptus trees lined the road and signs advertised cherries and garlic. Christopher was wrapped up in the big Complete Guide to the Undersea World, which was open on his knees, but Nan was still wrapped in Marina, who was, she had told Nan without any irony or self-deprecation, an artist. Nan could tell that Marina was younger, but by how much she didn’t know. Marina’s skin was unlined; her hair was silver; her gaze was somehow both frank and elusive. Marina Sweeney, she had said, holding out her hand. Marina Sweeney was almost waifish, but at the same time not: a wise child, with a long neck and a deep laugh. Taller than Nan. She wore a cheap ring with a little cartoon Mao star on it, a wrinkled, untucked blouse over a strange short corduroy skirt appliqued with a leather flower, and her hair was messy—in fact, everything about her was messy, half-wild, but beautiful, like a fire. The skirt looked like a hand-me-down, but somehow that was the sexy part. Nan, who hadn’t even wanted to go to the party and had thought she’d leave early, was surprised to find that she was already burning as she shook Marina’s hand. Nan was on the hunt then, but without any particularly keen hunger. It was a rough hand, Nan noticed, which was strange on such a pretty, almost waifish woman. Marina also had a little smirking smile, the smile of a woman with a secret. Nan’s senses awoke; she immediately wanted to know what the secret could be. Oh, an artist, Nan had said, thinking: Just what this city needs. She was still burning the next day. The hills, on the way to the aquarium that day, were browm and flammable, too. It was hot September: fire season. Christopher, his chest neatly crisscrossed by the seat belt, studied the pages of Undersea World as if he hadn’t already read them a hundred times before. Hot air blew in on him, reddening his cheeks. The car’s air conditioning had long been defunct. He didn’t seem to notice.

Nan took his hand in the ticket line. He danced at the end of her arm, happily mother-bound and dreamy, with his white, white skin, cloudy blue eyes, and a delicate clear drop of snot coming down from one nostril.

Christopher, said Nan, wipe your nose. He purposely wiped it on the sleeve of his jean jacket, which was identical to hers. Oh, silly, said Nan indulgently, and he laughed his exhilarated little boy’s laugh. She handed him a tissue.

Nan paid the admission fee. She had meant to save this expensive treat for his birthday, but today she was in love. Their lives were about to change. Don’t let go of my hand, she said. It’s very crowded.

Christopher nodded, already craning his small neck to peer into this simulated undersea world. Where are the otters? he asked intently.

I don’t know. Nan led him forward. The cool exhibition spaces were dark, the only light coming from the tanks. Myriad configurations of people swirled around them: a blond family of four in matching T-shirts from Disneyland; two Asian women, holding hands, and a teenage girl who was probably the daughter of the shorter one; four gay men with tattoos and little cameras; a straight black couple with a tiny baby all in blue, facing out in his Snugli from the man’s chest; a loose group of deaf kids, their hands making faint slapping noises as they roamed from tank to tank; a middle-aged white man and woman obviously on a date, making conversation about the fish. Nan held Christopher’s hand, feeling nervous: one small boy, so many strangers, yards of dark, carpeted corridor that would muffle the sound of his footsteps. In clumps or clutches of two and three, everyone crowded up to the glass, where the dim shapes of fish could be seen swimming slowly through the artificial deep.

Isn’t that one glamorous! said the woman on the date.

How different these people were, Nan thought, from her own terror-spotted family. On a day like today, someone—probably her mother, that helpless beauty—would already be crying. Nan and her brothers would be communicating out of the sides of their eyes, with the hunch of their shoulders, the way they walked. Not that there was an aquarium in their Texas town; not that there was any wildlife to watch except dogs and their father. Nan knew it was irrational, but still, grown as she was, she always half expected him to rise up out of all shadows, to burst at her from around a corner.

Leaning against the wall outside Celestial Coffee, Nan wonders if she should have known then. There were dangers in the world, even here, where predators seemed to swim peacefully together in the same tank.

Instead, she said, Look at the octopus! She pointed to a huge, orange, many-limbed creature lolloping over a hunk of coral.

No, said Christopher sternly. That’s a squid. He watched the squid, deep in its squid funk, for a long time. Only the squid’s head moved in the current. The current moved around it, making the plants sway.

Let’s give someone else a turn, said Nan. She let Christopher lead. He was confident, as if he had been there before. Nan started to explain ecosystems to him, but he stopped her.

I know that, he said with some impatience. They wandered upstairs and into a small atrium with a domed ceiling. Inside the dome, hundreds of silver anchovies swam around and around in circles, like a silver tornado. The light fell on Christopher and Nan’s upturned faces. Christopher laughed. Nan smiled. The silver tornado was Marina whispering all around her. A silver tornado, but with small, rough hands, and an unearthly chemical scent. In the morning, Nan found that Marina had left a smear of lilac paint inside her elbow.

Sipping her coffee, Nan thinks, Was I distracted back then? Dreaming about lilac paint when I should have been noticing even smaller, more important signs?

But she didn’t let go of his hand. She wouldn’t have; she was always so careful. His was a little damp with excitement as he pulled her on, to see the turtles. No, she did let go of him for a second. He got as close as he could to the mammoth sea turtles lumbering through the deep. He spread his hands on the glass, staring, as did every other child there. They all ran to put their hands on the glass. A little girl in stretchy red shorts who smelled of candy bumped into Nan, eager to see what Christopher saw.

Say excuse me to the man, said her mother. Nan turned around; the woman blushed. Oh, said the woman. Oh. Sorry. Nan looked at Christopher. In deep communion with the sea turtles, he didn’t seem to have heard. Nan was sure, however, that he had heard; recently, he had a way of darting in and out of comprehension when it suited him. She kissed him on the ear, gently moving him to one side so the little girl could see.

Are we gonna touch ’em? asked the little girl, wistfully. Christopher shook his head.

He and Nan made their way to the sharks. I wish I had a shark, Christopher told her as they watched the malevolent faces and unblinking eyes skim the other side of the glass.

Do you think they’re happy in an aquarium? asked Nan.

He shrugged coolly. They’re okay, I think.

His nose was running again. Nan took out a tissue and wiped it.

Where are the otters? Christopher asked.

Oh, right, said Nan. Let’s get some lunch first.

He nodded. Don’t forget.

When they reached the cafeteria, Nan must have released Christopher’s hand again—so that was twice—as he sauntered in his little jean jacket down the hall and into the food line, picking up a plastic tray and setting it onto the metal runner in the practiced manner of a child who goes to public school. He extended his arms onto the tray and attempted to hang from it, picking up first one sneaker and then the other in a way that Nan should have reprimanded him for but didn’t. She was letting him get away with everything today because she had fallen in love with a silver-haired woman and she could tell already that Christopher wasn’t going to like it. He preferred the women who came and went like social studies units at school: anthropologically interesting but forgotten as soon as the test was over. It was not, Nan reflected, so different from what her own attitude had been until today. I’m sorry, Chris, Nan thought, joining him in line. Our lives are going to change.

She bought them both greasy fish sticks and listened as he identified all the fish on his paper placemat. Nan thought it was oddly cannibalistic to serve fish sticks in an aquarium, but Christopher was sanguine. The border between looking at the fish and eating them, between love and ingestion, seemed to be irrelevant to him. Why not have the creatures you love inside you as well as outside you? She looked at the fish on her own placemat, thinking that if someone made a paper placemat of her ex-girlfriends, they’d all be the same breed: Femina aenigma. Prone to migration, sleeplessness, and a compelling faraway expression. Marina, in bed, let her in. They were inside and outside together. Marina’s rough hands were surprisingly strong.

Bat ray, said Christopher loudly. The ocean tumbled outside the large cafeteria windows.

You said that one.

In seahorses, Christopher informed her, the boys have the babies.

Then if I were a seahorse, I guess I’d have to be a boy so I could have you, said Nan.

They eat plants.

I like plants.

Every day? Three meals a day? Plant cake?

Sure. Like Sharon—she’s a vegetarian.

All right. Christopher nodded, satisfied, and set his small milk carton into the center of his empty, greasy paper plate. Then he drew his eyebrows together, poised on the brink of a question.

Nan didn’t feel like answering questions about Sharon today; Sharon was irrelevant now. But just then a man at the next table glanced out the window and said, There are two sea otters.

Christopher jumped up and stood on his chair.

Chris. She tugged the back of his pants.

I don’t see them! He leaned, Nan tugged again, and he sat back down reluctantly.

Nan crumpled her napkin. Let’s go around, then we’ll come back and see the otters.

They left the cafeteria and walked on, strolling beside the walls of sea life. Nan’s feet were already getting tired. Christopher gazed soberly at each tank, as if he were a small scientist. The little girl in the stretchy red shorts was ahead of them, glancing at the tanks, then, excitedly, back at Christopher to see if he was watching her watch the fish, which he wasn’t. The girl’s mother, who had a sober face and slender arms, looked at Nan once, twice, in a quizzical way. Nan rested her hand on Christopher’s shoulder; her palms were sweaty.

What? he said.

Nan didn’t reply. She looked at Christopher, who was gazing into the kelp forest. Thick strands of two-story-high kelp breathed gently underwater. In the tank light, Christopher’s face was perfect; he was an illuminated boy, a hologram. It occurred to Nan that maybe she loved him too much, maybe she had damaged him in some deep and subtle way by holding him so tightly in her heart. Maybe, she thought, she should have another one, to dilute her passion.

That was the only danger she saw that day: that she might love her son too much.

Hey, I wanted to see the jellyfish, Nan said. They’re just across there.

Christopher looked unhappy.

Then the otters. I promise. She held out her hand.

They feed them at three, he mumbled grumpily, taking her hand.

In the jellyfish halls, backlit tanks contained both enormous and tiny jellyfish in incredible colors, neon pink and daffodil yellow and cerulean. Each tank was a moving painting. The transparent bonnet tops of the jellyfish undulated, gently turning inside out, then reinflating. To Nan, they were the discarded shifts of bare-breasted mermaids, slowly floating down from the surface, where the mermaids combed one another’s long, wavy hair. Marina Sweeney, with her small, white feet, would be the mermaid who lost her comb, dropped her lyre, had a tangle in her hair. She would sit just a little bit apart from the other mermaids, lost in some thought of her own, chewing on her nails. Nan would wait behind the next rock, watching. After Marina left in the morning, Nan had found a barrette in the bed. It was a kind of shimmery opal color that had almost disappeared in Marina’s silver hair. So now Marina had a reason to call: I left a barrette . . . Nan had closed the barrette and set it on the bedside table, next to the phone. Surrounded by jellyfish, she let go of Christopher’s hand then, too, she thinks—that was three—to reach out and touch the glass where the mermaids’ dresses drifted down.

A few feet away, Christopher stood in front of a large tank where a vast constellation of little greenish jellyfish swam. He squinched up his eyes in the dark, tilting himself left, then right, as if he were an upside-down pendulum. Nan knew that he was making the jellyfish into crazy visual streaks. He had just started loving to draw that spring. Nan thought she might tell Marina that later. She wondered if Marina had noticed yet that she’d lost her barrette.

By the time Nan and Christopher left the jellyfish halls, they had missed the otter feeding. Christopher’s head drooped. The interior otter pool was empty, the crowd dispersed. Nan felt frantic and annoyed, then had an inspiration. Hey, she said, I think they go outside, too. Christopher brightened. They went through a door, ascended a wide wooden staircase to a deck overlooking the otter pool. The Pacific Ocean crashed and spit on the rocks. The wind was sharp.

Do you smell the salt? said Nan.

He stuck out his tongue. I taste it. Where are the otters?

They went to the edge of the deck and stood by the railing. Nan read the otter information plaque aloud to him, but he wasn’t listening. He was scouting. The otters weren’t confined to the pool; they swam from the sea to the pool and away again, as they wished. The surf was very rough and it sprayed lightly at Nan’s face; it was cool on the deck despite the sun. Nan turned Christopher’s collar up. I don’t know, Chris, she said. The otters might be sleeping.

No, he insisted. They’re coming. He seemed tense, and Nan worried that she had gotten his hopes up only to dash them again. She shouldn’t have stayed so long in the mesmerizing jellyfish hall. Now they might be in for a late-afternoon mood tailspin. She put on her sunglasses, rested her forearms on the upper rail, and perfunctorily watched the horizon, thinking: Five minutes, and then we’re starting for the car. He gripped the lower rail, frowning.

Nan silently cursed the lazy otters, cursed the expensive aquarium for its impeccable environmental sense that let the otters appear and disappear like movie stars. If you’re going to have kids here, she thought, put the fucking otters in a pen and shut the gate. Hey, Chris, she said, let’s go get ice cream sandwiches—

No, he said in the burdened tone that she and Hal called cranking. Nan put her arm around his small, tense, denimcovered body. One of his shoulders still fit in her palm. The salty wind toyed with his fair hair.

Mercifully, miraculously, not just one, but a cluster of sleek, wet otter heads appeared in the surf. Look! said Nan, but Christopher had already spotted them and was jumping up and down in place. He waved his arms frantically as the otters tumbled toward them. As they got closer, Nan could make out their opaque black eyes, their strangely human fists, curled on their furry chests. They looked to Nan like fairies, advancing through the waves—she’d always thought fairies would be half-animal, half-elf, not those flossy Tinkerbell things. A real fairy would have paws.

Christopher was entranced; Nan held onto the back of his jacket as he hopped around in his red Nike sneakers. Hey! he yelled to the otters in his reedy voice. Hey, look! Over here!

Nan knew that the otters hadn’t really looked; the subtle movement among them, the slight turning, must have been the current. One fat otter picked up his head, as if listening, then dove underwater. Christopher leaned over the lower rail, watching the otter go. Nan kept hold of his jacket, but every muscle in his body was straining away from her.

A cloud crossed in front of the sun. The ocean turned gray. Nan looked ahead as far as she could, to where the water disappeared into the sky. She thought, then, He will be a sailor and sail away from me one day.

Now she wonders what the otters knew that she didn’t, and if they came because she let go of his hand three times. It couldn’t have been more than three.

Christopher crouches below an underpass, waiting for the rain to stop. The highway is wide, dirty, and loud. The blue crayon is broken, but there’s still enough of it to fill in a good bit of the inland sea.

Nan is late for work, but Peta sits faithfully, if somewhat arrogantly, at the counter, pert and smart and green-haired. Hal called, says Peta.

Okay. Did those returns go back?

Of course. Peta regards Nan compassionately through her young, heavy-lidded eyes. I’ve got it covered.

Nan ignores this last comment and goes into her office in the back, hangs up her coat, turns on the computer, LET GO. BREATHE. KNOW THAT YOU ARE LOVED, says the screen saver—not her idea; it was left on there by the petty, pretty woman she once hired to do inventory who was going through a grueling divorce and borrowed a raft of self-help books that she never returned. The sentiment is punctuated by a spinning globe, as if God set it there. Nan hates the platitudinous screen saver but hasn’t bothered to change it, though it seems particularly ridiculous situated among so much businesslike stuff: books and catalogues and faxes, dust jackets mounted on cardboard for window displays, stacks of Publishers Weekly, menus from local take-out places, memos from distributors. Pictures