“You need some tea? Something to warm you up?”
“No thank you, ma’am.” He drapes the towel over one shoulder, stares at something, not me. “I was under the ship.”
“What a nightmare. You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Yeah.” He looks at his pruned hands as if they might bite him.
“Have some tea. Or water.”
He looks up. “All right,” he says. “Okay, water.”
I fill a glass. “How long were you under there?”
“I don’t know. A long time.”
“How’d you get out?”
“I felt where her belly curves. Followed the curve up. Found the pilot’s ladder on her side.”
“I think you need a doctor.” The man must be in shock. “I’ll call an ambulance.” I pull out a chair for him to sit on. “What’s your name?”
He reaches his hands into the pockets of his uniform as if he might find his name there. He pulls out a wad of bills, money, soaking wet. “I’m Coast Guard. SIO,” he says. “Do you work here?”
I’m still wearing my pumps and skirt suit. No doubt there’s some maritime law restricting girlfriend access on a twenty-thousand-deadweight tanker that’s taking on a load of gasoline. And I’m not really even a girlfriend. “No. I work at the high school.”
The coastie tenses up, an electric current entering his wet body. He nods. He looks at me and I understand: I am breaking some Homeland Security law. I try to explain. “I was just bringing my guy dinner, just dropping it off. I’m leaving now. Right now.”
“The high school?”
“Yeah.”
“Where all the girls are pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
He stuffs the bills back in his pocket. “How are those girls doing?”
My voice is flat and annoyed. I shake my head. “They’re great. Yeah. Sure. Healthy.”
“Sounds like you’re mad at them.”
“They’re a lot of extra work for me.” I’m not mad. I’m just tired of trying to figure out what the girls mean.
“Must be something, standing in the same room as them.”
“They were in my office today.”
He pales. “That right? What’d they say?”
“Not much.”
“Thirteen of them?”
I shrug. “It happens.”
“No, it doesn’t. Not really.”
I fill his water glass again. “No. I guess not.”
“So. Why’d they do it?” Like he’s running an inspection. Like he somehow thinks I’ll know the answer.
When I was a girl I pretended my pillow was a different man each night. And the pillow men would take me here, or there, out into life, to a Bee Gees concert maybe. That seemed like an adult thing to do. Men made the weather and I loved them for it. Then I got pregnant, then the real men disappeared, and I made my own weather. Storms. Sunshine. Storms. I blow air up my face, faking exasperation. “I couldn’t say.”
There’s a pool of water beneath his chair.
“You were under the ship?”
He nods.
“Let me call an ambulance.”
“No, thanks. XO’s gonna kill me as it is.”
“You’ve got no shoes.”
“I’ll be all right.” He returns the towel he used and backs his way out of the galley.
I follow him up to the deck. From the gangway he throws one arm into the air, a goodbye. His hand makes a bird in the night. He’d be a nice one, I think. Make some girl happy. “What’s your name?” I shout, but he has already crossed back over to the wharf, leaving nothing but the damp stains of his footfalls.
*
My guy takes way longer than half an hour. Black ripples obscure the view, but that doesn’t stop me from staring into the water. It’s thick as oil, dark as glass, and I’ve got time to wonder how long that coastie was under, to wonder what’s down there.
One by one, round lights dot the surface of the sea like fireflies or lampposts just coming on, or something else maybe, colonies, mothers, boats heading to far-off places. I don’t know what the lights are. I can’t say if they’re coming from above the water or underneath. Golden circles float across the ocean surface as if the full moon rose while I was belowdecks. Only there isn’t one moon. There’s a grand chandelier, ten moons, then thirteen, ten more, thirty-two, one hundred and eight, seven thousand and six moons—an entire language made up of moons floating over the surface of the sea.
Can the coastie see this phosphorescence? Does he understand what the girls mean or does he, like me, at least understand that he doesn’t understand? We don’t know the alphabets they use, but we can read a curve. We see a girl’s reflection. We tilt our faces toward their glow, warmed by their light, their meaning bubbling up from a dark sea.
BEAST
I read the newspaper in bed at night, propping it open on my belly. My boobs fall off to either side as if they are already asleep. They care little for the news of the world after the day is done. Still, I read the paper as a refreshment, like a breath mint or a catalog filled with clothes I would never buy.
On page eighteen of the National Report there’s an article, “Good Guy Gets the Chicks.” It’s the story of a brother who works at a chicken rendering plant by day and at a security firm by night in order to send his sister to college. He sells his plasma to make ends meet.
He must be Japanese or Amish. I flip ahead to the jump page to see his picture. He’s just some white guy from Minnesota, and I guess I find that hard to believe. He’s like an artifact from the nineteenth century, back when people still took turns churning the butter or tending fires at night. In the photo he’s wearing sneakers and a plastic apron stained with blood. He’s positioned along a conveyor belt that is dotted with the dead bodies of chickens. He’s from right now.
“Archibald Lepore never finished high school,” the article says, “yet every month he sends the Student Loan Corporation a check for $578. Mr. Lepore has been working since he was sixteen years old to support his twin sister. He found a second job when they turned eighteen and she was admitted to Northwestern University without a scholarship. Mr. Lepore, from the refrigerated storeroom of PoulTech, says—”
But then it moves. Just slightly. “A tick,” I tell my husband. A tiny black dot with legs. A period, escaped from the newspaper, is making a slow-motion dash across my stomach.
“Another one?” My husband rolls onto his side. “Let me see.”
“Right here.”
He moves in for a closer look. “That’s a pimple you picked.”
“I wasn’t picking anything. I was just reading. It’s a tick. Do you see it?”
He spreads the skin of my stomach. “There’s a spot of blood.”
“Any legs?”
“I don’t see anything really.”
“Deer ticks are very small.”
“I know.” It’s my third tick this week. “But I don’t see anything.” He pauses over the spot, exhales. “Wait. All right. Wait. I see something.”
“What?”
“Squirming a little bit. Black.”
I knew it. “Pull it out.”
“You’re not supposed to pull them out. Then the head stays inside.”
We had received an illustrated mailer from the county. “Lyme Tick Awareness.” The sickness is carried in their saliva, it said. Get the head out.