Crying Wolf

1.

July. I was 9 that summer. We spent all of June and the first two weeks of July at the Mauna Kea, snorkeling and letting the sun leave its mark on our skin.

Mom was restless and ready to go home and Jess had only just begun to fall in love with the island. Nights she’d disappear into the jungle, hanging out the back of Jeep Wranglers with shirtless brown boys with hearty black hair as long as her own. She’d plead with our mother to join her before throwing up her hands and leaving with a smile and tears in her eyes. “I tried,” she’d say. And we’d watch the trucks pull away in the dirt.

Our mother, capsized by fear, would pull the sheets up high or drink rum and Cokes alone at the tiki bar, smiling vacantly at the strange men who offered to buy her drinks.

Jake and I would sneak down to the hotel lawn and spy on the luaus from a distance, feeling like voyeurs as we watched the grass skirts sway beneath generous hips, fire twirled by lean, wet looking men.

“I’m gonna marry a Hawaiian girl,” Jacob said one night, his eyes fixed on the hourglass shape of a dancer with black hair that hung down to the small of her back in a sheet. A little red flower tucked in behind one ear.

“Will I look like that when I’m grown?” I said.

“Nah, small fry,” he said, holding the top of my head in his palm, “You’re a white girl. No way around that. But you’ll be a beautiful one. That I can guarantee.”

The air smelled of plumeria as we dipped our toes in the pool on the walk back to our room. The trees swayed and seemed to reach for us, for a chance to skim their branches across the water.

Jess came home in the morning with dewey skin and glossy eyes and told to us about a secret reef she wanted to check out as Jake and I ate room service french toast with our hands. Bacon dipped in syrup, ripe mangos and papaya. Jess took bites from both our plates and brushed her hands together to knock off the crumbs.

My mother stood in her silk robe on the balcony sipping black coffee. I wiped sticky fingers on the starched bed-sheet as Jess gathered a backpack and told us how her new friend ‘Lo Lani would have to drive us to this beach that tourists didn’t know about. I reached for a bathing suit, my mouth still full of french toast.

“Come on, don’t you guys want to get away from these sunburned midwesterners and see the real thing?” Jess said, “Eat some real food, see the volcano, have a real adventure.” She waited for my mother to respond but she simply walked inside and closed the bathroom door and started the shower.

The week we arrived we took a catamaran packed with tourists out to Kealakekua Bay. It was 9am when we boarded. Our hair and clothes damp with morning fog. I had never been aboard a boat. The sea was a dark bottomless blue as we pulled away from the dock. Little white caps along the top. Jacob and I stumbled around the deck filling paper plates with egg frittatas and muffins and cantaloupe. A blueberry muffin rolled around my plate as I took careful steps towards a plastic table and sat down to wait for my brother. My mother and Jess were in line at the bar getting plastic cups filled with Bloody Marys.

A pink skinned girl about my age wearing a frilly one piece sat at the table across from me. She was already wearing goggles on the top of her head. The sun had started to rip through the fog and glittered across the ocean’s surface. I tore off chunks of muffin, washing them down with Sunny-D. The girl stared at me, a bright purple smudge of zinc oxide on her nose.

“I’m Adelaide,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me your name cause I already know it. “Where’s Deena and Michelle?”

She began shoving fistfuls of watermelon into her mouth. Juice oozed down her chin and onto her bathing suit.

“It’s just a TV show,” I said. “Those aren’t my real sisters.”

“Oh yeah? Then who are your real sisters?” she said.

“I don’t have sisters.” I was looking around for Jacob who was still holding tongs and loading fruit onto his plate one careful piece at a time.

“I have two sisters,” she said, “but they have a different mom. My dad’s first wife. They’re both in college now,” she said, waiting for me to be impressed by the coolness of being associated with college girls I’d never met.

The boat swayed, the horizon playing a game of peek-a-boo with the railing.

“That’s my mom and dad over there,” she said, pointing at a couple with the same pink skin. “Where’s your mom and dad?”

I pointed at my mom and Jess at the bar.

“Which one’s your mom?”

“The blonde,” I said, wiping juice from my chin.

“Where’s your dad?” she said.

“Those two, those are my parents,” I said. My father had left my mother when I was still an infant. We’d never met.

“Nuh uh, that’s a woman,” Adelaide said.

Jake made his way from the buffet line. One cautious step and then another. I wondered how he would answer this question. He always seemed to find some tactful way to dodge it all together.

The boat stopped and swayed and the island we’d come from looked tiny. Jacob sat down and picked at a fritata, examining each bite like it was a thing of beauty before setting it in his mouth.

“Who’s your friend,” he said.

The boat thumped in the waves and I could feel the blueberry muffin splashing around in the pint of sunny D in my stomach.

“I’m Adelaide,” the girl said reaching out her hand, then pulling it back to quickly cover her mouth, her skin looked gray.

She spewed orange liquid and half chewed watermelon onto the white table and Jacob and I jumped to our feet faster than cats.

“Sorry, she said. And then let out a panicked “Maaaaa.” She stood there with the puke sloshing around on the table with the roll of the waves. The mother came with handfuls of napkins and alternated wiping tears from the girls face and the mess from the table. Jacob couldn’t stop laughing as we walked away.

I found Jess standing at the railing beside my mother. Feeling me there, she wrapped me under her arm and stroked my back without breaking her gaze over the ocean. She was like a heat seeking missle that way. She could always feel me there. Always knew just when to reach for me.

We spent the afternoon feeding frozen peas to bright streams of fish as Jess taught Jake and I how to snorkel, how to spit in the mask so it wouldn’t fog over. I kept diving down too deep, filling my snorkel and mouth with salt water. It wasn’t enough to glide along the surface. I wanted to breathe water like the fish, stay beside them for hours without breaking for air.

Jess spotted a mother sea turtle and strode effortlessly after her and Jacob and I followed, my arms pasted to my sides, kicking my small fins with all my might to keep up. My mask wasn’t tight enough and kept leaking salty water that made my eyes sting.

Jacob thrust himself to the surface to catch his breath and I came up after him. He had a red line around his face where his mask was squeezing his skin.

“It‘s like she’s not even afraid of us,” I said, panting and fiddling with the plastic straps on my mask. “Can you make this tighter?” I kicked wildly to keep myself afloat.

Jacob tightened my mask while searching the water for Jess’ snorkel sticking up. “Hurry, we don’t want to lose her,” I said, scanning the water’s surface for signs of the turtle.

“I know,” he said, and gave the plastic strap a final tug.

“It’s like she wants to show us where she lives,” I said, my voice high pitched and panicky.

“Uh huh,” Jake said, and passed me his snorkel. “Hold this a minute,” he said, and disappeared beneath the surface.

I tore off my snorkel and dove down, holding my breath. The two snorkels like anchors as I tried to catch up to Jake.

A school of silver fish went past and I lost him. I dove down again but couldn’t tell which way they had gone. A Moray eel slinked out from behind a patch of coral and opened its prehistoric looking mouth just inches from my face and my body went cold with fear. I kicked my way back to the boat without stopping for air, my limbs fueled by anger and adrenaline.

I reached the boat on fumes and struggled to pull myself up the ladder, slipping and banging my shins into the metal.

“Let me help you there, girly,” said a red faced man with a pot belly. He grabbed me by both arms and lifted me onboard.

“Thanks,” I said, dropping my mask and snorkel into the white bucket of disinfectant. Jacob’s snorkel had dropped somewhere.

I found my mother sunbathing on the rooftop and plopped down beside her with a cheeseburger I’d taken from the buffet line. She was laying on her stomach with her bikini top untied talking with a dopey looking man who had recognized her from a TV show from before I was born.

I ate ravenously with the sun in my eyes, hoping to regain some strength. I nudged my mother when I’d finished. “Will you go in the water with me?” I said, the burger like a brick in my stomach. I’d hardly chewed.

“Not now, pickle,” she said. “I’m talking with this nice man. You just ate. You need to wait a while.”

She went on talking with the man and I went downstairs to wait for Jess and Jacob to return, holding the railing and squinting in the sun. I thought maybe I’d make a scene when they returned, throw a fit about them leaving me behind. But when they got back and I saw their smiles all I could do was ask what they had seen.

“We tailed her for like a mile,” Jacob said, his eyes electrified with the thrill of the chase.

“Well I saw an eel,” I said, grabbing Jacob’s elbow.

“That’s good squirt,” Jess said, squeezing my shoulder. She used a towel to shake the water from her sun-kissed brown hair. “Did you get some lunch?” she said. “We’re starved after all that swimming,”

“I ate already. I’m ready to go back out in the water,” I said, feverishly pulling on a pair of fins.

“Not now, sweetheart,” she said. Why don’t you wait until we can all go back out together.” She put her arm around Jacob and they walked off like two smiling thieves, telling every passerby of their great encounter.

“I saw it too,” I said.

No one heard me.

2.

Jacob and I had been playing in the sprinkler in the backyard with the neighbor kids when Jess' screaming put a halt to our laughter. Jess had come home from a month in New Mexico on a job and found our mother lying face down on the ornate rug in the living room in a puddle of vomit. Her fists clenched tight around handfuls of pills. Life had always seemed like a little to much for our mother when Jess was away, different. She barely spoke, but this-this was new.

I remembered how I’d stood dripping on the front lawn in my yellow bathing suit and bare feet with my mouth hanging open, gripping the hem of Jacob’s board shorts as I watched the lights on the ambulance turn on as it backed out of our driveway taking our mother and her lover away. We stood there long after they were gone, watching our street become one giant shadow as the sun made its way down flushing the sky with pink and orange as goosebumps formed on our skin. I was 10. It was the first time I understood what love’s absence could do to a person.

3.

I stepped out of the coroner’s office and onto the sidewalk. Into the dark. Into the wind. October in the city of angels. Headlights were bleeding by on the street. Pupils bleached in light. My eye sockets sore from crying. The wind kicking up soot from the street. I squinted. Turned my head so I wouldn’t taste it. My entire face felt swollen shut. A silence buzzing in my ears. I was numb. Empty. All of my insides had been hollowed out.

I was clutching the clear plastic bag containing Jacob’s possessions under my arm as I cupped my hand around my lighter to protect it from the wind and tried to light a cigarette. Eight tries to get it lit. I sucked in smoke like a sponge, exhaled, put it to my lips again and sucked. The smoke drowning the smell of his hair on my fingertips. My fingernails bitten down to bloody stumps.

My knees buckled and I slumped down onto the curb, my ass sticking to the cement in my too-short black cotton dress. I pressed the cig between my lips and opened the bag. Jacob’s faded red cloth wallet, a AAA card, a bent ATM card, a library card, a California Driver’s License with an 11 year old picture of him at 16, smiling innocently with one missing eyebrow from passing out drunk at a buddy’s house and wavy brown hair he’d shaved on one side by choice, a faded Motley Crue t-shirt. Unaware of what the world had coming for him. Nobody thinks these pieces of plastic will outlive us.

I reached into the bag and pulled out our grandfather’s gold wedding band on the silver ball chain and clasped it around my neck beside our grandmother’s. I watched a plastic grocery bag tear into the air with sudden urgency and hover a moment before whipping itself around my calf. I plucked it off and watched it soar into the road, wrapping itself around the grill of an old Cadillac as it sped by. I took one last drag off the cig and stamped it out beneath my boot, swallowed har and stepped into traffic.

After that it was the blow of my face slamming the pavement. After that darkness. After that nothing. After that was the nowhere space of being unconscious. Like a dream, I was given the sensation of being seven again. Jacob and I riding with our mother's lover in her 1976 blue Toyota truck with all the windows down in the height of summer. The three of us squashed up in the front. The gearshift between my legs. My long hair tornadoing wild and slapping Jacob in the face. He squinted and turned his head to the window and dangled an arm out, the other sweaty palm resting on my kneecap. He was 12. Jess was chain smoking slim menthol cigarettes. Newports. Her tan hand tapping ash out the window as she drove. I remember wondering how someone could drive like that. Smoking and shifting and changing the cassette in the tape deck all at the same time while both of our hair whizzed around in front of her face. I liked that she could.

We’d left my mother at home and were on our way up 395 to Bishop to ride Jess’ father’s horses. Dust blew in through the windows as we passed signs that said how many miles to Death Valley. I liked the gritty feeling in my mouth. We were drinking Cokes from glass bottles and listening to The Nightfly on the home stereo speakers strapped to the back of the seats with orange bungee chords.

I tapped Jacob’s shoulder to show him how far I could wiggle my front tooth with my tongue. The other had already fallen out. I’d worn a fake for the last month of filming until My Dear Family went on hiatus. He took it between his thumb and index finger and pulled his face in close to mine and smiled. My hair swirling all around us. “Can I pull it?” he said.

“Not till it gets a little loother,” I said, his fingers still holding on.

“Alright,” he said, and let go. “You keep me posted, Bud.” He squeezed my knee and turned back to the window. Our greasy fingers smelled of onion rings as Donald Fagen sang about what a beautiful world this will be and what a glorious time it was to be free. We had full bellies and fat hearts.

I came to in the ER like a landed fish gasping for water. Gravel stuck in my face and chest. Both arms outstretched with bony wrists handcuffed to the gurney like Jesus on the cross. Fluorescent lights blinding me. My chin throbbed with a dull ache, masked by whatever it was they were injecting into my skinny veins. I was watching the world through fogged glass as doctors and nurses and cops scooted around talking about but never to me. Something about a 5150. My kneecaps felt cold, like wind was hitting them. I realized that this was because the skin had been shaved off.

“I caught her just as she was getting ready to take on a semi.” A man’s voice. I turned my head and watched the blur of his navy blue uniform as he followed one of the nurses down the hall, focusing on the gun bouncing in his holster, and wishing it was in my mouth.