The summer I turned sixteen was the valley of my life.
My dad—Jonah Preston, his name was Jonah Preston—was gone, and he'd been gone since May. The last I'd seen of him was on a muggy dock in a bustling portside. He was the captain of a massive fishing trawler, the Consuelo, which he'd named after my mom a month after they met. Around us, greasy seamen shouted and hauled crates and machinery onto her decks, but he and I stood face to face. He struggled with his tongue. I have no idea what was going through his head (I never did, with my dad), but there was a goodbye he just couldn't get out his throat. It ravaged his heart something wild, though; I could see it in his eyes. In the end, he just swallowed, clapped me on the shoulder with his weary, thick-skinned hand, and called me "Son." Then he turned and walked aboard, and the gangplank retracted behind him. I was left there in the shadows, staring upwards at Consuelo's great hull—a tall, iron sea-cliff I could never hope to climb.
He steered her and a crew of thirty-one men to the untapped wilds of the South Atlantic on the longest voyage they'd taken yet. It's disturbing how quickly it takes to forget someone's voice.
Back on my lonely shores, I wasn't up to much. I didn't have all too many close friends. And I'd hang out with them from time to time, but where they were all I had, they had less space in time to spend with me. (Family, vacations, friends from outside the Irish Channel).
In the long spaces between the days where I actually did things, my days flew by with the blurred monotony of pages flipping under a thumb. Every night, I had dinner at the Duponceau's, our neighbors. Ms. Lucy Duponceau had been Mom's best friend.
And during the day, I spent hours on the old grey couch, the shades down, munching on baby carrots and veggie straws, and watching X-Files reruns on our old box TV. But really, I was daydreaming about things that were never going to happen.
For instance:
One day, I dreamed about Echo coming back.
Her name is actually Julissa Noah, but back when I was a lot younger, I was so quiet and shy that no one ever heard me when I spoke up. So she would repeat what I said, but louder: my echo.
About three years ago, Echo abruptly fucked off from the Irish Channel, New Orleans to Florida Institute of Technology to pursue a sudden passion in marine biology. She'd always told me, for as long as I knew her, that she wanted to open a diner, and she never explained what changed her mind. At first, we talked every day. But with time, the emails and AOL chats radioactively decayed from days, to weeks, to months, to silence.
It felt kinda like she died. But not like the cruel sweep of grief when someone just up and suddenly dies—more as a ghost which lingers in the after but, day by passing day, fades into the next life until it's just gone, and you're left not devastated, but haunted. Echo haunted me. Three years, and I still missed her all the time. She was my best friend. My history was inexpressible without her name.
Smoke curled from between the Smoking Man's fingers in Skinner's dark office on the grainy screen, but in my sunny imagination, Echo comes back home for me. She takes me out on a little research dinghy—that's what marine biology people do, right?—and we spend long hours turning brown out on the Gulf. Then, at night, she takes me to parties with her cool, nerdy college friends. Rum-drunk under neon lights, they become my friends. I am champion of the silent, epidemic fantasy: the unremarkable teenage boy who falls in with the dangerously cool older crowd.
In my mind, her friends had names, and I felt the sun on my half-Cuban skin. I dreamed it so hard that it seemed more real than the room around me.
Someone knocked on the front door.
I ignored it the first time. As Mom always said, don't open the door if you're not expecting anyone. It's probably a Jehovah's Witness, ay Dios. If they really want to see you, they'll knock again.
Whoever it was knocked again, and I fell back down into my valley. It was early July. New Orleans was hot, thick with humidity. I ran over to the door, muttering "vengooooo" as a third knock sounded from the wood. I opened the door, and Dolores Miktlaney stood at my doorstep.
It had also been about three years since I'd seen Ms. Miktlaney, but I'll be honest, I never dreamed to see her again.
"Mr. Preston," she said.
Oh yes—my name is Lincoln Yordani Preston. I had forgotten.
Dolores Miktlaney had the visage of a stone on the side of the road, one that you could pick up and throw against a wall over and over and never have it break. She was sharp and severe. And she wasn't kind, at least based on when I had first encountered her, but neither was she merciless.
"Oh, I- Ms. Miktlaney. Hi." I paused awkwardly. "It's nice to see you?"
"Can I come in?" said Ms. Miktlaney. "I have news I urgently need to discuss with you."
"Yeah. Yeah, come in." I opened the door wider and stepped aside, allowing her to pass under our threshold (again). The living room couch was covered in crumbs, and the TV still threw changing light on the dark lights, so I led her into the kitchen, to the kitchen table.
Before I had ever met her—before I had ever needed to meet her, we all had our own little assigned seats at the kitchen table. Mom was beside the sink, and Echo beside the door, and me beside Echo, and Dad beside the fridge, just within reach to grab a beer. That was how many nights went. Dad would reprimand Echo and I for smacking each other under the table and stealing food from each other's plates. "You're too old for this, Echo, you're supposed to be a good influence on Link," he'd say, even though Echo wasn't technically, legally a part of the family, and then he'd simply sigh and grab a beer. Mom just laughed the whole time. Her laughter rang through all of New Orleans like delicate golden bells, like starlight.
The first time I ever met Dolores Miktlaney was at this table, too. I was three years younger. So was Dad, but he aged seven thousand years in those three. So was Echo, but I had no idea how those years had sculpted her.
She had been there because Mom never left a will, and so we needed to hire a lawyer to organize and divide everything under the name of Consuelo Preston.
"Of course she didn't. My silly, wonderful girl," I remember Dad saying. No mirth in that voice, but a mighty tenderness kept his words from collapsing under the weight of his sorrow. "Every day she told me, all'll be fine, we've got tomorrow. If she said she'd live another day, she would. She believed that. That's how she was building a long life, by stacking tomorrows on top of each other. I suppose she never thought her supply of tomorrows would ever run dry."
I don't remember what was ever determined in that meeting, only this: that Dolores and Dad sat at the table while Mrs. and Mrs. Duponceau, Echo, and I stood behind them as witnesses, and that I thought the whole thing was total horseshit. How could they, I had thought, standing there so angry that I was almost shaking, almost crying. How could they reduce Mom down to numbers and objects? How could they try to assign value to someone worth more than all the seas, the kingdoms, the music, the moon, the stars, and the darkness in between? Just get out of here, I had dreamed of telling Ms. Miktlaney, this is not your place. I didn't hate her; I only hated the role she was there to play—but to a thirteen-year-old boy who'd just lost his mom, there was little difference.
And now I was fifteen, almost sixteen, and Ms. Miktlaney was back, and I knew exactly why she was here: she was going to tell me that Dad was dead.
That thought was me lying to myself.
If it makes any more sense, then think about those times that your parents (or parent, or whoever might have had their eye on you) went out to dinner or a movie and told you, we'll be back at ten. But ten o'clock came and passed and now it's eleven; now, you think to yourself—this is it, the end. They've gotten into a car accident and died. You convince yourself of its truth, that this is your reality now, and that your parents are gone forever. You're absolutely certain.
But deep down, you know that this certainty is nothing more than an elaborate, ambitious fantasy. Your parents aren't really dead. You know this, and this knowledge takes no convincing. It's an effortless knowledge that is rooted in this: things like that don't happen in real life.
Sure, intellectually, you've read news stories about that happening to real people. But the most you can do when you read about a kid's parents dying in the newspaper is imagine how the kid must have felt going through all that. Once again, the story is confined to your imagination; no realer to you than that fantasy you contrived. There's quite a precipice between imagination and reality.
I got off track there a little.
My dad was dead, I knew. (He wasn't dead.)
Ms. Miktlaney sat, again, in Mom's chair, and looked up at me with worldless concern. "Would you like to sit down first, Link?" she said.
"I'm fine." I hovered awkwardly across the table from her, unsure what to do with my feet or hands or where to look.
"Well." She shuffled in her seat. Something was on the verge of crumpling in her expression. "Link, I am so sorry that I have to be the one to bear this news to you, but your father has... passed away."
"What?"
"He was lost at sea," she said, as my precipice crumbled and I fell headlong off the edge. "I wasn't informed on the specifics, but he was thrown overboard while saving a crew member's life during a storm. Rescue teams returned to the area as soon as the storm abated, but he was nowhere to be found. He is presumed dead."
"Oh," I said.
"He's gone," I said.
"I'm very sorry, Link."
I think I've been falling ever since.
"What's going to happen to me now?"
"Well," said Ms. Miktlaney, as she had before. Her face composed itself, rearranged its imperceptible agonies into her sidewalk stone. This was a comfortable zone for her. "Your father, thankfully, left behind a detailed will. I don't have it with me, but I can unofficially tell you now that nearly all of his earthly belongings go to you."
I nodded. My gaze drifted about the kitchen as the information registered: the jars on the countertop, mine; my dad's ship in a bottle, mine.
"However, he requested that the house, and all the furniture and appliances within it, be sold, and the proceeds from that go towards your inheritance. Which you'll be able to access when you come of age, I should add."
"Right," I said, disregarding all that 'mine' shit. "So, uh—do I count as furniture and appliances?"
Dolores' stare was granite and resolute. I suspected she didn't find that one funny. "He didn't specify any person to take legal guardianship of you if anything should happen to him. Therefore, you'll be taken into state custody while the legal proceedings of his will are taken care of. You're a minor—you're not responsible for managing his finances."
"And when does this state custody thing begin?"
"It began, technically, the moment that Jonah was declared deceased." She folded her hands on the tabletop. "Really, my visit has a double purpose. The other is to inform you that a social worker will be coming before the end of today to take you into custody. I just..." She parted her lips and stared down at the table, a great many things swirling behind the colored glass of her eyes. "I wanted to let you know in advance so you have time to prepare. Social workers are too busy in New Orleans, and whoever comes might be impatient."
There was nothing I could do but agree.
I went to my room, took the largest suitcase we owned, and packed as many clothes as I could. It was bizarre—I'd rarely gone on long trips before, but whenever I had, I'd had a time frame to keep in mind as I packed. Now, I had no ultimatum. Would I come back at the end of the summer to take more, or was this the last I would ever see of my little blue bedroom, the plaid quilt, the plastic soccer trophies on the homemade shelf? In went my clothes, and in went a few framed photos of me with my parents, with my friends, with Echo, and then I moved on from that room.
I hadn't gone into my parents' room since Dad had left. Hadn't had a reason to. The door was still cracked a few inches, and it creaked from being still for so long as I tentatively nudged it open.
I wasn't sure what I expected to see. The bed was made and there was probably dust on the drawers, but it didn't look like a monument. It just looked like their bedroom. Even though she'd been dead for years, Mom's jewelry box still rested on the vanity. Wooden beads in vibrant blue and white still hung over the double doors to the back patio; Dad's boots and sandals were lined obediently before the wardrobe. It wasn't a very big room, but I found myself wandering about slowly, cataloguing every inch to memory. With everything I saw, I promised myself, I'm going to remember this. This corner, this picture, this scratch in the wall, I promised to remember these.
My wandering brought me to Mom's bedside table. On a carpet of fine white lace, there stood a small wooden statuette of a dark-skinned woman in gilded robes. Atop her head, crowned with golden rings that ping'd when I flicked them, Mom had draped a silk veil the color of sea-foam, inexpertly embroidered with silver stars. In one hand she held a tiny, swaddled dark-skinned baby; in the other she held a cross. And though her features weren't painted on too finely—just a dot of red for her mouth, the barest suggestion of white and black paint for her eyes—I knew this woman was the most beautiful woman who had ever lived.
Hung from her hands was a rosary strung with pearls and seashells. Behind her, seven unlit candles stood in constant, quiet vigil.
I never knew who she was, but Mom always used to put molasses in a dish and cut white flowers from the garden and lay all that at her feet. In the heights of the Louisiana summer, the heat would creep in from the patio door, and the whole house would smell faintly of sugar and blossoms.
I knew I couldn't leave her here for some stranger to find and discard, maybe sell. Wherever Mom was, it would break her heart.
So I went and found a wooden box, padded it with old t-shirts, and laid her in it as gently as I could—the rosary, too. There were other things around the room that definitely had meaning too. But everything has to be left behind at some point, right? When no one is left to remember the memories that made them important. It was just the woman and her beads that I took with me.
Ms. Miktlaney knocked lightly on the bedroom door. When I turned, she was looking pensively through the room. Her expression—was it wistful, heartbroken, accepting? I didn't know. It was vulnerable. She snapped out of her reverie and looked back to me. "I just received a call. The social worker will be here in about an hour."
"Good to know. Plenty of time to clean up the place for the special guest," I said snarkily. My ingrained anxiety at being rude to adults kicked in. "Oh, uh, sorry."
The box went in my suitcase/my suitcase closed. There was really nothing left here. Oh, but there was something I had to do.
I walked to the side door in the kitchen. Ms. Miktlaney sat in Mom's chair, reading a hunker of a book with tiny print that probably used the word 'economy' more than the world really needed. She glanced up as I passed. "Where are you going?" she called to me.
"I'm not running away," I informed Ms. Miktlaney, showing her my empty hands as proof. "Just walking over to the neighbors to say goodbye and shit—uhhh, stuff. Very emotional. The house is all yours." I let the door swing shut behind me, hopped the three steps down, and crossed the narrow lawn to the Duponceau's.
Ms. Lucy opened on the first knock. Packed into the wide smile and taut crinkles at the edge of her kindest eyes was this: that behind the sea-foam woman and Mom in terms of beauty, she came about third. "Link, baby," she said warmly. "You're here early. What can I do for you?"
Here, I froze. I needed to tell her, but to tell is to speak, and to speak is to form word from thought, and to think was a hard call for me at the moment. I had options:
1. I'm leaving. Forever. This is goodbye.
a. Pros: Easier on the tongue.
b. Cons: She would ask, "Why?" and I'll have to tell her, "Dad died."
2. Dad died.
a. Pros:
b. Cons: She would say, "Oh, baby, I'm so sorry," and before the meaning of those two words even processes, word by word, and then together, I'll have to tell her, "I'm leaving. Forever. This is goodbye." Like sprinkling garlic in her fresh wound, like she sprinkles garlic in her jambalaya.
3. I'm an orphan, Aunt Lucy.
a. I'm an orphan. God, God please, I'm begging you. I don't know for what.
b. I would come back to this one later. About two hours. In the back of a car with a strange smell, when I had thought and formed and spoken and told, and when I wasn't with the woman who'd given her hand to raise me like I was her own.
I couldn't decide, so the water pressed against the dam of my mute, suspended tongue until it demolished and all of the words came bursting out at once. Some tears, too, in the process. "They're gone, Aunt Lucy, Dad died, he got lost at sea and he's gone now, and that lawyer just came by to tell me but then she told me that I have to go, I'm in state custody now and the social worker is coming soon to take me away and I have to leave forever, and oh, Aunt Lucy, I..."
The woman swept me down into her arms—I was around a foot taller than her, but she bore my helpless weight on her shoulders solidly. With her other hand, she pulled me inside and shut the door behind us, and I could feel her glaring past me, daring any evil spirits at my tail to even try following me in.
New Orleans wasn't all too loud, but the Duponceau house was so quiet, calm and warm and safe, like refuge from a howling storm. I shivered in her arms like I'd been standing in one for hours.
"I am so, so sorry," she murmured into my hair, just above my ear.
"Nothing you could do about it, Aunt Lucy."
She shifted her head; her gentle thumb trailed like a tear-track over my shoulder. "Your mother... Link, you know I've always seen you as something like an eighth son, like my own child. I could adopt you. I could go and adopt you and keep you home."
I shut my burning eyes and let myself dream. Lucy and Terry had seven children already—their oldest aged 13, their youngest 2. Terry had been a fireman before a terrible accident had permanently disabled him, and now he worked as a municipal something-or-another. Lucy worked in an accounting firm, but only part-time, as she had children who needed a childhood. They scrounged together just enough to put food on the table. Just enough.
I'd work, then, long nights and late hours through the summer and school nights to earn my keep. They had no room for another bed, so I'd sleep on the couch if I had to. And Helena, their oldest daughter, would sulk around for weeks, because she'd had a crush on me since she was eleven and now she'd never have a chance with me because I'd become her adopted brother. It would be a life of muddy shoes, tiny plastic dolls, sticky G.I. Joes scattered in the halls, nights fighting over TV remotes and the last pop tart, playing t-ball with little Joe and Isaac, frustration and never-pausing loudness, but never alone; aglow, aglow, with persistent love.
"I couldn't do that to you, Ma'am," I said. "You haven't got the room. Got enough on your hands already."
She pulled back somewhat and looked up at me. Her eyes brimmed, glimmered with my faint reflection. "I just can't stand to see you go on all alone."
"I'll be fine," I enunciated. "I- I promise. No matter what happens, I promise I'll end up okay." I, frankly, had no idea whether I was lying to her or not.
"Oh, you'd best." Then she yanked me into a hug so tight it seemed she was trying to pull me into her bones. "I'ma miss you so much, Link."
I'd never had much of a problem with crying, which always made me think myself strange in school, watching all my friends laugh at a boy for crying when he fell and scraped the whole side of his leg up in black and red, gravel and blood. Crying was a dangerous thing to do in a world of asphalt trod by wolves, a dangerous loss of control when control was the only thing which kept you afloat. Who knows when I'd next be allowed to cry? I cried now, in the embrace of the one living woman with whom I didn't need control.
"How long do you have?" she asked.
"Not long. Ms. Miktlaney said she could show up any minute now." I swallowed wetly. "I don't know if I'm ever going to come back. When she takes me."
"Well, then, you can only go forward." Remarkably, she reigned in her grief and found a clarity of purpose. "Link, remember—don't you let your life be ruled by all this tragedy. You are you, and you are alive." She whispered alive like a sacred name. "And... you won't be alone forever. You are so wonderful, baby, and I promise, you will be loved. And even though I'll be miles away, I'll always still be loving you, too."
"I love you, Aunt Lucy." But as I said that, the sound of an engine caught my attention, and I looked out the window to see a battered gray car pull to the curb in front of my house. A woman in khakis stepped out with a briefcase in tow and went to my door. Fear flooded me. I didn't want to leave here. I turned back to Ms. Lucy. "I think I have to go now."
Ms. Lucy stopped, and her big brown lips stayed parted. I realized suddenly that for as much as she seemed a stone pillar, holding together a bustling home and me with unwavering strength, she was a soul in a body, same as me. I'd always believed she had the magical ability to say every right thing and fix up everything alright—she didn't. She loved me, she wasn't ready to say goodbye, and she didn't know how, or what to say. Dropped upstream in a raging current, same as me.
I opened the door—
(Funny, isn't it; I promised myself I would remember my parents' bedroom and I never did, but I never forgot the telltale squeal of the Duponceau's door.)
--but suddenly, her hand grabbed my forearm in an ironclad, inhuman grip. I looked up, and in my wild state of seven thousand sorrows I didn't understand what I was seeing, but her face—
Her eyes were black as they ever were, but it wasn't her soul that danced behind them. I don't even know if I would call them the eyes of a stranger; they were the eyes of something knowing but unknowable, infinitely deep and strange; a void, but a living one. Her skin was the same brown hue it ever was, but the warmth of familiarity had drained away, and she looked now like she was sculpted from the oldest clay of the Earth, the one that God had first breathed life into.
"Aunt Lucy?"
"She will call to you," she said (if this was Ms. Lucy, I still don't know, but this was still woman). Her voice was the same as it ever was, but on a level I couldn't comprehend, it was infused with an Earth-trembling power. "She will call your name, in the sweetest of tones. But you must never, ever answer her call."
"Aunt Lucy," I said. Dark dread emerged in my heart's storm and was sucked out my throat and into her eyes. I didn't understand.
I blinked, and Ms. Lucy had returned. Even the tears in her eyes had come. "Bye-bye, baby," she said tearfully. "Go on."
I left the Duponceau's house, and I immediately forgot about what I had seen.