By then the little box had begun to disintegrate. Cheap ass pink crappy cardboard. As I peeled the dumb paper away, I saw that the ashes were actually inside a little plastic bag. Almost like a pot baggie. I tried not to laugh but I couldn’t help it, and Phillip went what? And peeked over my shoulder. We had giggles we couldn’t stop.
I said goddamn it I have to stop laughing. It’s not funny. It’s pretty fucking far from funny. He agreed, but he couldn’t stop either. I had snot all over my face. I was laughing so hard my stomach — former world — hurt. Finally I knew what to do.
I opened the little faux caul full of ash carefully with my teeth. Like animals do. Then I walked out into the ocean for real. I had a vintage red wool coat on. And brushed leather cowboy boots. Phillip tried to follow me in but I said no. I wave walked until I was up to my abdomen. The water felt ice cold on my stitches. Numbed the hurt there. I dumped the nearly weightless contents of my daughter into my right hand. Some of the ash blew into the air, but most of it didn’t. It was wet. Like sand. And then I let my right hand lower into the water, and I let go. I closed my eyes.
My father told me later it was the bravest thing he has ever seen. I never knew how to take that.
When I walked out of the water back to my first husband, he held me close — we were already apart by then — but he did it anyway. Then I felt his shoulders shaking, and I thought he was crying, but nope, he was laughing again, so I said what? And he pointed to the side of my vintage red coat at the smear of ashmud there. I laughed again too and went I know. I know. Clutching each other.
My sister said from where they were we looked like we were sobbing.
Maybe we were sobbing.
I don’t know.
I kept the plastic in my pocket like that for years. I still have the red coat — though if there is any trace of ash left, you can’t see it.
II. Under Blue
Baptismal
A FAMILY ON THE BEACH AS IF WE WERE EVER A FAMILY on the beach.
When my sister and I were adults we visited my mother and father in Florida. We visited them because of guilt. We visited them because of shame. We visited them because of delusion. We visited them because grown women are idiots. I don’t know why we visited them. I can’t remember. I think my mother begged to see her daughters. Me 26. My sister 34.
My mother stayed with her shorter leg on the sand. A father and his two daughters waded into the ocean at the beach in St. Augustine. When we played in the ocean we forgot ourselves: sister, self, father, memory loss. The water in Florida is body temperature. The waves, unless there is weather, are calm. They roll a body gently. I heard a sound from the shore. I saw my mother running, lopsided. I followed her arm and finger to the father face down in the sea. I tasted salt on my own lips. When I finally reached him I could see the moles on his back at the surface of the knee-deep water. Running in water is like running in Jell-O. Almost funny. When I flipped him over, his face was distorted into a grimace — clenched teeth, bulging eyes, purple and white blotching his face. My sister then there. Us pulling his 220 pound of dead weight onto the shore, both screaming at him, “Daddy.” The image of my mother: a tiny squawking penguin with a cane on the shore, too far from her daughters.
There are moments between years that surface with a great force when you do not expect it. My father almost dead in front of me. I’m going to say it plain: I could have killed him. I looked down into the flesh losing its color, the popping, staring blue eyes twinning mine, the animal teeth. His face so familiar I couldn’t recognize it. I held his nose closed. I put my mouth to his mouth. I could feel his tongue, his teeth, spittle. His lips were warm but unresponsive. My sister pumped her fists into his chest. His swim trunks were half off. His sex hung harmless. I held my lips to his. I breathed air into his mouth until an ambulance came.
Hypoxia is suffocation in water that does not result in death. It may include brain damage and multiple organ failure. My father lost his memory from hypoxia.
I did not kill him. I did not save him. How do you live on land?
Swimming with Amateurs
YOU CAN TELL A LOT ABOUT A PERSON FROM SEEING them in the water. Some people freak out and spaz their way around like giant insects, others slide in like seals, turn over, dive down, effortlessly. Some people kind of tread water with big goofy smiles, others look slightly broken-armed and broken-legged or as if they are in some kind of serious pain.
I swam, once, with Ken Kesey. In a man-made reservoir up near Fall Creek. Puffy with drink, his bulk rounded and bulged around his former reputation. It was night swimming. Five people, I think. Totally, completely, unapologetically, rocket shot high.
The moon kept coming in and out of focus as the clouds moved around. And the water was warm yet, so it must have been late summer, but in my mind it has the crisp clarity of fall for some reason. If it had been fall we would have frozen our tits off. So sometime in late summer less than a decade before he died, we entered the waters. Man-made reservoirs smell like dirt and concrete mixed with algae.
I dove down into the black and opened my eyes. Looking into lake water at night is like looking into deep space while drunk. Black, and blurry. I resurfaced and strong-armed into a glide, went down, came up again, then took a look back, and saw his unmistakable head and burled broad shoulders. “Goddamn girl, what are you, some kind of mermaid?” he said. Spitting a stream of water. Yeah.
In the black reservoir water we swam around each other looking at the sky, treading water, floating on our backs and letting our feet break the surface. Sometimes Kesey’s belly rose up like an island. We shot the shit, mostly he told stories …
That’s a bald faced lie. Just now I made it sound like we casually shot the shit out there, but really my brain was as numb as a wad of cotton and I couldn’t think of anything interesting to say, so I just let him talk and I don’t even remember what he said because my head was expanding and contracting like an idiot’s.
And he wasn’t really in the water with me.
He was on the shore.
But then he must have said something from somewhere that penetrated, because I opened my mouth, and it was nothing nothing nothing words until it wasn’t nothing anymore, and I was listing all the horrible things people had said to me since my baby died.
Things like: “You know, it’s probably better that she died before you got to know her.” Or: “ Well what you really want in your 20s is the freedom to party.” Or my personal favorite, from my father’s sister, fascist catholic: “The saddest part is that she’ll go to hell, isn’t it, since she wasn’t baptized.”
Then he was saying “When Jed died, everyone who talked to me said something asinine. Like the craziest crap you can imagine. No one understands death anymore. Death used to be sacred. Look at the Upanishads. Goddamn religion has killed death.”
I had read the letter he wrote to friends Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Ed McClanahan, Bob Stone, and Gurney Norman in the summer of 1984 in CoEvolution Quarterly when Jed died. How they built a box for his body themselves. How he threw a silver whistle with a Hopi cross soldered on it into the grave. How the first shovelfuls of dirt sounded like “the Thunderclaps of Revelation.”
I held my breath. I thought about water. I thought about the ashes of my daughter swimming in the ocean off the coast of Oregon. The deaths of our children swam in the water with us, curling around us, keeping us twinned and floating.