I was still young enough to hope that he was going to show up one day and demand custody of me. I didn’t understand back then that though my father loved me, he wasn’t really father material. He didn’t have the strength, the selflessness it takes to be a real parent. Neither one of them did. But my mom at least wanted me with her- some of the time, anyway.
The conversation ended, and I went into my room to cry into my pillow.
“He’s not coming for you, you know.”
I turned, startled and embarrassed to see Marlowe standing there in the narrow doorway. He leaned against the frame, hands in the pockets of his faded, dirty jeans. He wasn’t smiling; his expression was grim.
“I mean, I’m sorry,” he said, looking down at his feet and then back up at me. “I can see you’re clinging to that. But he’s not coming.” His voice was bass and throaty. There was an odd accent to his words, not quite a southern twang. Florida cracker, my mother told me, all their family born and raised in this hot, miserable swamp of a state.
“Shut up,” I said. “What do you know about anything?”
My voice shook; his words were a blow to the solar plexus, the pain spreading, taking my breath. In my deepest heart, I was afraid that he was right-and I hated him for it.
“If he was going to come, he’d have come by now. He has money, right? And time? As long as I’ve been here, he’s never even once called you. It’s always you calling him. How long have you been waiting for him to come?”
“Shut up!” The words just burst from me in an angry scream, a belch of rage. I got up and pushed past him, ran out of the trailer into the night.
I ran clumsily, crying, until I got a pain in my side and came to a stop at the ancient strangler fig that stood at the end of the park. I put my hand against its textured bark and rested, trying to catch my breath. The wide canopy of the tree sheltered me. The carpet of fallen and rotting leaves at its base was wet and stinking. Behind it was a teeming forest of palms and ferns, pond cypress and loblolly pine, surrounding a stream. I knew that the wooded area was rife with snakes and citrus rats, a terrible sampling of insects and spiders. Part of me wanted to enter its cover and be consumed by it. It seemed wild and barely contained, like most of Florida, as if it were only waiting for us to stop moving and clearing and digging, manicuring and trimming, for even just a minute, so that the lush greenness of this place could swallow all our silly structures, take back its rightful place on the earth. I sank between the thick roots of the tree and wept against its bark, ignoring the damp that seeped through my jeans, the mosquitoes making a meal out of my blood.
“Crying is not going to lift you out of this shithole.”
He’d followed me.
“If you want to get out of this place, this life,” he said as he swept his arm toward the trailer park behind him, “you’re going to have to do it yourself.”
I looked up at him, wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my shirt. He moved closer until he was standing right in front of me, our feet nearly touching. He offered me his hand.
The strangler fig, native to Florida, begins its life as an epiphyte, a plant that grows on another living plant. Its seeds make a home in the cracks and crevices in the bark of a host tree. At first the strangler grows slowly, insinuating itself gradually into the systems of the other tree. Over time, the strangler begins to cover the trunk of the original tree, forcing it to compete with the strangler for light, air, and water. Eventually the host tree dies. But the strangler doesn’t die with it. By that time the strangler has planted its own roots, grown its own branches, formed an intricate latticework of living tree around the host’s withered and hollow shell.
I gave Marlowe my hand, let my fingers entwine with his, let him hoist me off the wet ground.
I walk up the beach from Ella’s. I can see the lights from my own house just ahead, not more than two or three hundred feet away. I see that Victory’s bedroom light is off, and I smile to myself, wondering how Esperanza always convinces her to go to sleep without any fuss. I generally wind up lying on the floor of her bedroom, chatting with her quietly as the colored fish from her rotating night-light swim on the walls and ceiling.
“Aren’t you tired, Victory?” I’ll ask her.
“No, Mommy. I’m not,” she’ll say, then fall asleep a few minutes later.
The problem is, I love that time. I don’t mind staying with her until she falls asleep. And she knows it. I’ve rocked her and nursed her to sleep since she was a baby. They tell you not to do that, that then you’ll have to do it for longer than you want, that they’ll never learn to “self-comfort.” But I always figure the day will come when I’ll ache for those moments. And I figure if you don’t have a half hour to be with your child as she goes to sleep, if you think she’s better off crying alone in her bed so you can be sure of who’s in charge, then maybe you shouldn’t have kids. I’m thinking about this when I hear it.
“Ophelia.”
I stop, startled, and spin around to see the empty beach. The word, my name, cuts through me. My eyes scan the beach. The grass and sea oats rustle slightly in the wind, just as they did in my dream. There is no one ahead of me or behind me. My heart is jackhammering in my throat. The voice was low and male, more like a growl. I take a deep breath and start a light jog.
“Ophelia.” I stop and turn again. Except my father on the phone the other day, no one has called me by my real name in years. Even Drew used it with a kind of distance, referring to someone who was long gone. No one else in this life even knows about that name.
That’s when I see it-the long, bulky shape of a man rising from the grass. I can’t discern a thing about him, not his face, not the color of his jacket; he is a black shadow emerging from other black shadows like a plume of smoke. We stand there that way for a moment. The whole world is on an ugly, pitching tilt.
My mind grasps at the situation. Is this real? Another dream? The terrible twilight between the actual and the imagined?
I decide to figure it out later and break into a dead sprint for home. I don’t even look back to see if he has given chase. I just think about getting home to Victory.
With my lungs aching in my chest, I race up the wooden walkway that leads to my house and crash through the rear gate. I pause there and see the black form moving slowly toward me still far behind, just a shade, silent and ephemeral. There is no urgency to his progress.
“Ophelia.” I hear it on the wind. The word doesn’t seem to come from anywhere at all. At the back door, I fumble with the keys, my hands clumsy with adrenaline. I look behind me, but I don’t see him. When I finally get the door open, I slam and lock it after me, activate the house security system with shaking fingers. I think about bringing down the hurricane shutters, but Esperanza comes up behind me and I turn to look at her.
“Mrs. Annie! What’s wrong?” Her face is a mask of alarm; she must have heard the door slam. She wraps her robe about her pajamas, glances first at me and then through the glass panes in the door.
“There was someone out there. On the beach,” I say in a fierce whisper. I turn off the lights and look outside, scanning the darkness. Esperanza watches me with an expression somewhere between pity and fear.
“Mrs. Annie,” she asks carefully, “are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Esperanza,” I answer, though now, in the safety of the house, I’m not. Everything’s already fading away as if it never happened. The truth is, I
She looks again out the window. Then her eyes go wide. She backs away from the door and turns to me, incredulous. “There’s someone.”
I see the form at the end of our walkway to the beach. He is just standing there. A terrible tide of fear battles with an odd relief that it isn’t just my mind playing tricks on me again.
“Is everything else locked?” I ask her. I feel suddenly solid and sure of what to do next. You can keep the earthly threats at bay with locks and security systems…at least for a while.
She nods vigorously, not looking away from the figure.
“You’re sure?”
She nods again. Then, “I’ll check.” She scurries off and I hear her tugging on doors and checking windows. I move to the kitchen, keeping my eyes on the form through the window, reach for the phone, and dial Drew, my heart a running engine in my ears. I tell him what’s happened.
“He’s still there now?” Drew asks sharply.
“Yes. Esperanza sees him, too.” I feel like I have to add this for credibility.
