Useless Bay(42)

Two weeks ago a crate arrived on our doorstep with a note from agent Armstrong that read: “This dog is a complete calamity. Man up and train her.”

And then Calamity crawled out.

She was smaller than Patience, and thin, too. I could count her ribs under her fur. The first time I unleashed her in the backyard to soak up the wildlife smells, she stayed at my heels. She wouldn’t eat unless I sat on the floor next to her.

After two weeks of training, she follows a scent for five feet, then realizes she’s gotten away from me and comes cowering back. She jumps at the slightest noise. Tall men freak her out. Loud noises freak her out. Even bunny rabbits freak her out.

I mean, how do you train someone to be brave?

Henry still has no idea what really got Joyce that day in the garage. He thinks she drowned in a really big wave so powerful that it split her in two—both halves washing up in different places on the shore. I was there when we discovered her top half. Everyone kept saying what a blessing it was that the crabs hadn’t gotten to her eyes, which were wide open. I didn’t think it was such a blessing. She looked completely terrified. I couldn’t tell from the deluge in the garage that day, but I wonder if, in that last moment, she saw the troll who had her in his grip and recognized him for what he had once been.

The only ones to whom I can tell the tale are Hannah and her wai po. They believe me.

Hannnah’s wai po is a small woman who walks with a cane, nearly bent over double. But I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side. Her eyes, according to Hannah, are “freaky.” To me, there’s nothing freaky about them.

They’re the color of the sea.

“Oh, that one,” she says to me as I strain the seeds from tayberries to make ice cream. “The troll. I’ve been hearing him for years. I knew the sea was unquiet. I’m surprised he allowed his feast to wash up on the shore and didn’t keep it all for himself. But he did his job. He got his vengeance. And then he spat her out here for the family to see what kind of fate had been meted out to her. Now, I call that justice.”

I agreed with the justice part of what Hannah’s wai po was saying, but I thought there was another element she’d missed, which was that everything dead washed up on Useless Bay. I suppose that applied to Joyce, too. It was gross, but part of the wild beauty of the place that I loved so much.

It is the last weekend of summer. We can see weather systems rolling up and down the entire Sound. One moment it’s sunny; then the wind blows a certain way, and it rains.

My brothers and I hoist the coolers with the sandwiches (excuse me, panini) and Gatorade to take down to the Shepherds. Grant runs to meet us halfway. He appears unfazed by his time in hiding with Hannah’s wai po. He helped make loganberry wine. He got served sweet potato waffles with fried chicken for dinner.

But no matter how good Hannah’s wai po was to him, I know he is not unchanged by his experience in the Breakers that day. He saw his own mother strangled. Mr. Shepherd whisked him straight to therapy—none of which seems to help as much as that book of Russian fairy tales, Henry tells me. “He keeps looking at the illustrations. He wants to know if, wherever his mother is, she is dancing. I tell him that, yes, she is dancing the Firebird Suite so well she lights up the morning sky.”

Here at the bay, safe with us, Grant can still be excited by things. “Can I see? Can I see?” he asks Sammy now. We are in the middle of the dike path, halfway between our house and his.

“Sure, spud,” Sammy says, and unwinds the layers and layers of packing around his right hand. Even after two and a half months, his hand looks like something out of Frankenstein. His stumps are red and uneven. His middle finger sticks up, but the skin around the base is raised and jagged.

“Does it hurt?” Grant asks.

Sammy allows him to feel the edges of his scars and gives him a grown-up answer: “You get used to the pain.”

Grant reaches out with his whole little-boy fingers and traces the outlines of what’s left of Sammy’s hand. I can almost hear him thinking: Where does it hurt when someone cuts away your mother?

Henry isn’t far behind his little brother.

I want to say I don’t get the same lurch of sensation I used to get seeing those auburn curls coming at me over the beach grass, but I do. And the lopsided grin that’s finally directed at me: I hoard it like found treasure. “Well, look who’s here. If it isn’t the shortest Gray. She’s my favorite,” he says, and he kisses me on the lips. These days his kisses don’t feel like desperation. They feel like they should—a day at the beach, grass waving, and the promise of volleyball and good food and the only worry being whether Mom burned the panini.

I wonder if his kisses will always be beach kisses.

He takes my hand in his and clutches me a little too hard. After the incident in the garage, sometimes we are both afraid that the other will be washed away.

He also has a bad hand. But, unlike Sammy’s, his will get better. He doesn’t have to keep his scars in a jar on the bookshelf. In fact, the one that was so bad, the one on the valley between his thumb and trigger finger that he kept picking at? It’s smooth now. We’ve decided it’s been downgraded, like Pluto, to dwarf-planet status.

He squats and whistles. “Hey, Calamity Jane,” he says softly to my puppy, and waits for her to come to him. Calamity is afraid of tall men, so she lives in constant fear of my brothers, but not of Grant, and she tolerates Henry as long as he doesn’t talk too loud and bends low. I don’t know how I’m going to train her to do anything.