by Chris Girman

My cousin Johnny and I fanned out sand dollars and flat fuchsia scallops on the patio floor as if they were precious gems. I’d just finished the fifth grade, and we’d spent the day on Sanibel Island, famous for its lighting strikes and palm-sized Junonia shells. Johnny was a few years younger and prone to tantrums, but now he sat shirtless and sunburnt on the river rock surrounding the pool pointing and giggling at the shells. His sister was locked a few yards away in my older sister’s bedroom doing whatever fourteen-year-old girls do when they’re alone. My Uncle Mark watched us from the couch inside the house, his voice ever more slurred and meandering with each sip of beer, my father pitter-pattering in small, quick steps around the living room and kitchen as he wiped down the coolers and cracked open another beer.

“It’s getting dark,” my mother finally said as she crouched behind Johnny, who squatted over the shells as if expecting them to bloom. My mother had never wanted to live in this Florida swamp, reminding us often of the cool early summer evenings of her Indiana youth and the blossoming roses in her childhood yard.

My Aunt Sylvia dipped her pasty white legs in the pool a few feet away. She had a lighter complexion than my father, but I could see his dark eyes in hers and the same round and dimpled chin. “You’re going to step on those,” she told us from across the patio. “One press and—wham—shell shards all over the place.”

I watched as my mother averted her eyes and stroked her long ponytail, perhaps imagining a day that she might finally leave my father, but settling instead for the veneer of a somewhat happy wife. No crying in the car. No slapping herself repeatedly on the thighs. No brushing her hair for hours in front of the antique bedroom mirror. She stayed practical and mostly quiet throughout the day, helping load the car for the beach and silently cutting the crusts off our bologna sandwiches, the detritus of an unhappy marriage.

The night before, excited about our impending trip to the beach, I dreamt from my lower bunk bed that I’d found and polished the elusive colored spirals of the Whelk and held it high towards my mother’s waiting arms. She smiled and stroked my cheek as if smudging charcoal. Then she appeared as a child making pierogis with her Polish grandmother, a woman I’d never met, my mother’s tiny fingers light and electric as she crimped the dough and passed it to her grandmother for frying. Perhaps I’d seen a photograph. Or maybe this is how I imagined my mother happy.

But on this night I’d sleep on the living room floor in front of the open sliding glass patio door, a long arm’s reach from the shells, while my cousin collapsed early on the couch in his navy and yellow koala bear Geranimals. The adults were still awake as I meandered in and out of sleep, my Aunt Sylvia’s midwestern pitch not far away as she awkwardly maneuvered herself up the tiny wooden ladder to the upper bunkbed in my bedroom. My uncle and father continued to drink, their shared inebriation like a conspiratorial and dangerous charm flanking the house. From the floor, I imagined my mother waiting in her room, her face nervous at the prospect of sleeping in the same bed as my father, who usually slept on the family room floor in the front of the house. I wanted her safely alone as much as I wanted my shells to dry.

This is the way I remember it. My mother’s steps were heavy and unevenly matched. Above me the ceiling fan whirred, and voices trailed off the canal like fog. She was there, I am certain, perhaps checking on the kids, perhaps doing whatever she could to avoid a bedroom rendezvous with my father. My uncle must have joined my Aunt Sylvia on the bunk beds. I turned my head toward the kitchen, a glimpse of my father in his white underwear. I felt my mother’s essence—like a perfume—but when I raised my head from the floor, I couldn’t see her. I turned toward my sleeping cousin in the living room, his small body curled toward the back of the couch. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. In the safety of my bedroom it had all been withheld, my mother’s wounds mere conjecture. But here on the living room floor, the entire house had converged. Where was she? I shut my eyes, then squeezed. I opened them again. . . .

There. Floating over me, my back and neck still pressed to the floor, above me but below the ceiling fan. Or above me and through the spinning blades, her nightgown fluttering up as if blown from the outdoor breeze, a trail of colored sparks and sequins not far from my head. I saw it with my own eyes: she hovered along the open glass door frame, inches from the ground, somewhere between imagination and reality. Where might she land? The crunch and crackle of the shells! I listened for catastrophe, hunkering my head to my chest to keep myself safe, but instead I heard a trail of wind, the slither of the sibilant “s,” an intensity as sharp as the rose red in my mother’s imagined English garden. She, like our shells, had escaped the damage. I opened my eyes, felt my body pulse then relax, a lightness taking over my face, my neck, settling deep inside my chest. Where she went I’ll never know—hopefully far away from that room and my father—but the sensation I felt was like a thousand rose petals spit from her mouth.

Photo by Bruce Barrow on Unsplash