*
In the next Mysteries of the Sea, my mother tells us about the painting above her cot, a print by Winslow Homer called Rowing Home. Outside the Hospital, night is already spreading. As the light from the barred window dims, the TV grows brighter. In the painting, there are three figures, dark and obscure, in a small boat. A red sun bleeds color into the sky and into the stormy waves. My mother says no one captures sea light like Winslow Homer. No one makes water look more alive. It took him a week to paint the oars alone. She says she looks at this painting every night—the falling light, the small act of three men rowing, set against the vast motions of the sea—and it helps her find her place in the world, to feel at peace.
*
I wonder if I will ever know what it’s like to feel at peace.
9.
On Thursdays, there was free admission to the museum where my first fosters, Mr. and Mrs. Carroll, worked. One afternoon, I rode the T to the waterfront.
In the station, a flyer for a missing girl, taped to a concrete post, stopped me. From the date of birth, I knew I was around the same age. The girl even looked a little like me. She had been missing for six years, a span of time that made the flyer seem more like a memorial than a way to search. I stared at the hotline number and imagined what it would be like to look at a flyer and recognize your own face, to realize you had once been someone else, that people were out there looking for you.
At the waterfront, the buildings were ragged with construction. I passed lots with long trash Dumpsters behind orange safety fencing. An office chair, the seat torn open, on a corner. I walked through a tunnel of scaffolding, smelling fish and brine. I saw a green rubber glove on the ground—a sign, I would later think, of the Hospital that lay in my future. The fingers were splayed; gray pebbles had collected in the palm. When I emerged, back into the light, my arms were sticky with sawdust. The sidewalks were damp from an early morning rain. All week I’d been feeling cold and restless. I thought maybe I was coming down with something.
That morning, I had woken up in my Stop & Shop uniform, in the dark of the basement apartment, and couldn’t go back to sleep. I felt the itch of the black spot in my memory and decided to go looking for Mr. and Mrs. Carroll. I had questions about their son.
I passed a man in a red sweat suit walking down the sidewalk very slowly, a pace I didn’t like. If you walk slowly in a city it means you don’t have an internal destination in mind. You are just waiting for something to come along and that something could be me.
The museum looked like a spaceship teetering on the edge of the water, a huge glass box supported by an intricate system of smaller glass boxes. Inside I got my ticket and started looking around. Some guards sat on stools, limp with boredom. Some skulked from room to room, hunting for open beverages and cameras with a flash.
As I wandered the museum, I counted the things I remembered. He bought his reading glasses at the drugstore. In his bedroom, he had a whole drawer of them, the frames large and square. He had an old white Honda with broken windshield wipers. In the rain, he took the bus. He did not put milk in his cereal because he was allergic to dairy. Once I brought up the way a boy from the deaf school who lived in our neighborhood drifted through crosswalks, like he was moving on a different wavelength. How at the playground he stood on the swings instead of sitting, how he kicked around the mulch. The Psychologist pointed out that if the boy could not hear the rules, it would take him longer to learn how to follow them, and I remember thinking he sounded wise. For a brief time, he went out with a woman who worked at the deaf school. She came around the house once, in a cardigan and a jean skirt, and then I never saw her again.
In the Hospital, I do not tell anyone that this list is the memory trick I practice when I’m alone at night.
I couldn’t find Mr. or Mrs. Carroll. I even asked Information and the woman at the desk said that wasn’t the kind of information she was available to provide. I ended up in a dark, curtained room on the top floor, watching a video. No one else was up there. I sat down on a bench. On the screen, a woman stood in a green room with a pair of antlers on her head. I heard ocean sounds: a rushing tide, a gull’s cry.
The scenes began to change. There was a field and the damp bottom of a stairwell and a train racing through the night. The woman in the green room, sitting on a bench like the one I was sitting on, and staring into the camera.
Why didn’t I just go to the Carrolls’ house? I remembered their street in Allston. I could see the brass numbers tacked above the entrance. Over a decade had passed. They could have retired or gotten new jobs. Was this even the right museum? When I thought back to Allston, it was like being able to see all of a room except for one little corner. What was that dark spot hiding.
The video played on a loop. I kept watching. I imagined myself stepping into the screen and sitting next to the woman. I imagined wearing my own set of antlers and staring out at the empty room. I saw myself turning to the woman and asking what it would feel like to not carry such division within, because to look inside yourself and see so much mystery is the worst kind of loneliness.
For me, the woman had no answers.
10.
In the New Year, I start keeping a list of all the nautical terms I’ve heard on Mysteries of the Sea. It’s like learning a new language, my mother’s language. Abaft. Aft. Hull down. Brails. Doldrums. Scud. Sextant. Beaufort scale. Windward. Windlass. Lee side. Absolute bearing. Bower. Magnetic north. Whitecaps. Starboard. Vanishing angle.