Fifteen years we climbed over that cave.
And then, one day, he fell.
I didn’t see it happen. He was ahead of me, and then he wasn’t. That’s what I told emergency services. There was a response boat. Helicopter. Harbour Patrol. Divers. They were out on the water until morning. We were told they’d stay in ‘search-and-rescue mode’ until ‘the victim’ was found. After the twenty-four-hour mark, they started to call it ‘body recovery,’ but even that search failed. I asked them what they were calling it now, but they would give no answer. They started passing the buck, each one telling me to ask another department.
In the aftermath, I spent most of my days at home with my hands pressed to the large glass panes facing our clear ocean view. When I had spent so long looking I could no longer tell sea from sky, my hands stayed put on the windowpane, feeling every vibration, every thud of wind. I was still in the womb when the shipping company they worked for moved my parents from Rotterdam to Los Angeles, but I was old enough to remember when they built it. Their dream home. How carefully they chose each detail, the joy they were able to take in it and each other. I didn’t understand why we needed to leave the small house with the floral wallpaper by the port, where we could see cranes unloading containers from cargo ships, and every day at dusk a man who skateboarded around the neighbourhood with a trumpet under his arm stopped to play ‘Taps.’ But when I first saw the house, it was unreal.
A great white box planted atop a bluff, a jut of land pushing into the sea, set apart from every other house on the street. Instead of sirens and trumpets, we heard peacocks and seals. The house was glass and steel and full of light. Once inside, you could see the ocean from just about any angle. At sunset the walls turned tangerine, then violet, before darkness arrived and gave us the stars. ‘Every day a love letter,’ my father would say, my mother in his arms, taking in the life they had built together. I preferred to think of them like this. Optimistic, trusting in whatever logic kept them from getting a divorce.
Standing at that same window, it wasn’t the ocean I saw but seams: silicone, grout, hinges, and brackets. All that was holding the house together and all the ways in which it could fall apart. Cracked Malibu tiles in the entryway, cracks running down the stucco walls. I inspected the silicone that held our kitchen sink in place, the build-up in the corners, the way the basin never really dried. Corrosion. I took the trash cans out of the cabinet under the sink and ran my fingers along the scar-like material holding it in place, feeling for edges that had unstuck themselves. Testing their integrity with my thumbnail, feeling sick when it slid underneath.
After my father disappeared, the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, my mother forgot to cancel the barbecue, which made for awkward conversations at the door. We didn’t invite anyone in but the caterer. I unplugged the phone. There was no reason for me to go back to my apartment in the city after the holiday weekend, so I waited a while, subsuming myself in her rhythm of sleep and reheated macaroni, marinated meat, and booze. The caterer had packed everything into single servings, some for the freezer, some for the fridge. You’ll need to eat, she kept saying. My mother split each serving in half, and when she handed me my plate she would say, This is no excuse to let ourselves go. Blanca cleaned up after us and made sure there was fresh milk for my father, as usual. After the milk went sour, Blanca asked where Mr. Jack was and my mother told her that he’d be back, but she must have asked around the neighbourhood because I heard her crying in the laundry room.
During these days, his absence led to a kind of ease between my mother and me, but we still didn’t find a way into conversation. What was there to say? He might still return. And when I thought, no, maybe he’s really gone, it wasn’t words that wanted to come out of my mouth, but screaming. Finger-pointing and blame. And if I started in on blame, I was afraid of what she would say. I would blame her for pushing him away, and she would point to my fear as the cause of his demise. When we’d exhausted each other, maybe we’d cry together, talk about the loss of a man who’d never been good at making room for us in his life. All of it was too much and too unpredictable. It was best to keep my mouth shut and wait.
Each night, we sat on the balcony and stared at the ocean. Each night, she’d go to the pantry and take out one cigarette from the ceramic jar marked ‘garlic.’ She’d drop the ash into a wet paper towel and toss the sooty lump in the trash can in the garage. She left no trace because she promised him she’d quit. One morning I woke to find an ashtray on the kitchen table and stale smoke in the air. I never loved her less than I did then.
It seems inevitable in the retelling. My mother and father playing house, building their lives and their love in the shape of something familiar, never stopping to question the structure, the structure not being able to hold. But really, I don’t remember much about those early weeks after he fell, how it went and why, apart from the forgetfulness – going to get milk from the kitchen but only managing to take a glass from the cupboard before being distracted by something else, and finding myself in another room wondering what the glass was doing in my hand. The crying that kept me from sleep, the thoughts that wouldn’t quit, guilt, resentment, the gape of loss. Day after day passed by, then June was over and I was still at my parents’ house. It’s easy to lose track of time in Los Angeles even when you’re not wondering where Dad is, whether gone means gone and what being gone means. The sun and sky are narcotic. Seventy-five degrees and clear afternoon skies by the beaches day after day after day.
THE FORTUNE TELLER SAW all of this coming. Or maybe her words were what had set my fears in motion so they could exert their force on the world. Sometimes I think if she had said something else, I’d be a different person now. You have to be careful with what you tell children. It sticks.
I met her right before my parents ‘took a break,’ a trial separation that would last only a few months. I was seven, maybe eight, already braced for change. Maybe it had something to do with the environmental education we had at school, which instilled a fear of unstable ground and the water running out. Some kids might have walked away with lessons on conservation, but me, I lost trust that anything could ever last. I was forever waiting for tragedy.
Like every year, the interpretive centre hosted a whale-watching jamboree. Crowds leaned their weight on the railing that ran along the cliff, trusting it to hold them, binoculars pressed to their eyes, scanning the sea for spouts and tails. Kids from my school were shoving their hands in bags of cotton candy and playing Pin-the-Tale-on-the-Whale as though it couldn’t have been any other way. I wanted to know how long we had before it would be all over. Before all this sun and sea and rock came to its end.
The morning of the jamboree, my parents had been fighting again. They’d been fighting so long they seemed to forget I was there, ready to get in the car, ready to watch for whales. They shouted their competing interests at each other, something about how my father preferred to spend his Sunday. He wanted alone time; my mother said that weekends were for family, and the jamboree had been in our shared calendar for weeks. He insisted that everything he did was for the family, and he needed one damn minute for himself. He punctuated his rage with the words ‘If that’s all right with you, dear.’ Dear: cold and slithering with sarcasm. I hadn’t known a term of endearment could be weaponized until then. My mother didn’t say anything after that. He took his car and ‘went for a drive,’ and I ended up alone with my mother at the jamboree. It was a sombre affair. She kept dabbing at her eyes under her sunglasses and disappearing with other moms while I threw darts at balloons.
Beyond the stalls selling windbreakers covered in puffy paint, I saw a purple tent shimmering off the main drag. The clapboard sign featured a crystal ball and stars. I imagined a sea witch who’d lost her seat in Poseidon’s court but whose dark magic was still at work. I was sure she was there for me. I begged my mother for the entirety of my week’s allowance so the fortune teller could tell me that this storm was not going to tear my family apart, that it would pass, as others had.
After the fights they’d had before their separation, they’d sit me down and say: Just because we fight, it doesn’t mean we don’t love each other. We get under each other’s skin because we love each other so much. Their rough patch