I’m sure I’ve told you this story before but maybe not out loud, or maybe out loud, just very, very quietly. But let me tell it to you again: It was Thanksgiving, and my parents abandoned me on a boat in the middle of a Nor’easter.
Like all good dystopian adventures, the year was 1984. My sister was 17 months old and I was 76, and we lived in a boat docked behind a surf shop at the end of Jensen Beach Boulevard. Ambrosia was a chubby, squawking thing, born with a full head of thick black hair and lungs full of ire. She bounced about the cabin in a baby walker, never quiet, never still, but always toddling and screaming and screaming and screaming. She was not the baby sister I had asked for.
I couldn’t tell you how that day began, but I could tell you how it progressed, how the day turned greyer and greener somehow, and how the wind huffed and puffed and wound itself up until it forgot how to stop. I could tell you some about the boat itself, about the five or six narrow stairs leading down to the gloomy hull and the splintered wood paneling of the bunks below deck. About how I had to stand on a milk crate to reach the tiny galley sink, and how the toilet closet was so cramped that even an undersized six-year-old felt interred.
Instead, let me tell you about the water. On the best days the Indian River Lagoon was a sparkling sapphire mirror, but not Thanksgiving ’84. The morning was choppy from the start, and our boat bobbed up and down not like soothing a fussy baby, but like my tornado of a sister in her battering-ram walker. As the storm clouds gathered and the wind began to bellow in earnest, the lagoon shrugged off its impatience and began to darken and churn. I was perched on the bow as usual, my bare feet registering the boat’s bounce shift steadily into a sway, then to a jerky port-to-starboard rock. That’s when someone finally decided to parent.
It rains a lot in Florida, but it hadn’t rained like this in a long while. It fell steadily throughout the day, making the deck slick and the footing precarious. When my feet lost purchase I was banished inside, and then the skies opened and it was chaos. In an instant mid-afternoon turned midnight and the steady rain became a wall of solid water. The wind blustered and howled louder and louder and when it decided it wasn’t being taken seriously enough blasted rain and river water both through the boat’s windows. My parents and I honest-to-Santa battened down the hatches, and when the boat’s pitch threatened to capsize us they ran out the door leaving me in charge of a maelstrom.
My mom and dad left two children alone in the dark to be tossed around like rag dolls, or anyway, they left me to be tossed like a rag doll. Amber was oblivious as always, bashing around in her baby tank, screaming her face off about who even knows what. But I was scared, and I didn’t know what to do, so I sat as still and as quiet as I could, gripping the couch rail as tight as I could, hoping the rain and the wind and the waves would stop. That’s when my sister decided to fall down the stairs.
Like all good action scenes, I saw it in slow motion… her tentative steps towards the staircase… the boat’s bucking causing her walker to roll back a few inches… her determined silence as she regained ground…. And then she was gone. When I close my eyes I can still see her below deck, still strapped into her capsized walker, still screaming, but this time louder and angrier than the storm outside. She was wearing a black-and-white-striped onesie. Long-sleeved.
Anyway, my parents heard her and rushed in and I got in trouble and I don’t even remember what happened after that. But the great Thanksgiving Storm of ‘84 killed one person that night.
My generalized ennui has mutated into a gut-level malaise, all strings of vowels and words one reads but never speaks aloud. I’ve developed that habit too, of not speaking aloud. So far, no one has even noticed.
No comments:
Post a Comment