Instead of stopping where it had last time, the memory continued to unfold.
She is standing in the icy water.She turns and sees her father sprinting toward her, pointing. The kayak must have been washed out with the tide. He stops next to her for a second and she can smell his wet suit rubber as he zips up.
He points and she follows his line of sight to see the yellow kayak floating toward open water in a strong current. Her father dives in and swims as fast as he can toward it.
Minnow watches with no apprehension. As far as she’s concerned, her father is of the sea.
When he is almost there, she notices a disturbance in the water. Bruce seems to lift up and slam down again, then disappears entirely. A moment later, he pops up and lets out a terrible and unhuman sound. She covers her ears. This time a tall fin splashes around him and the water clouds red.
“Papa!” she yells.
No answer.
“Papaaaaaaa!”
Now she’s howling on the shore, pacing back and forth, wanting to go out there to help him but terrified. She begins to swim out anyway, but her arms and legs aren’t working properly. They’ve turned to lead, and she has to turn back. It’s then she sees her mother running toward her at an all-out sprint. Minnow turns to look for her father, weeping and unable to breathe.
“What happened?” Layla yells, wild-eyed.
Words will not come, so Minnow just stands there shivering. Her mom begins screaming and at some point Minnow tries to swim out again, but her mother drags her back. Takes her to the house and calls 911.
Her mother bends down so they’re eye to eye, both hands digging into her shoulders. “You have to tell me. What were you doing out there?”
All hollowed out, Minnow still has no voice.
“Why would you take the kayak?”
Minnow musters, “I didn’t.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not.”
Layla shakes her hard and Minnow squeezes her eyes shut and retreats into that underwater cavern in her mind. The place she goes when her parents fight or when others tease her or she just wants to be alone with her imagination. The place she buries her hurts and wishes and secrets.
A bird screech somewhere above drew her out of the daydream.Above, a handful of‘iwabirds circled, swooping and diving and hunting for fish. Dark feathered crosses in the sky. Same as the sharks, maybe they came for the chopped-up fish parts or whatever else the chummers were throwing into the ocean. Great frigate birds couldn’t swim or submerge themselves, so they were known as the scavengers of the sea.
Ho?ailona.
Even with the thick cloud cover, she could feel herself burning, so she put on Woody’s straw hat and wrapped a towel around herself. Then she sunk down and wept. All this time, every single moment of her life, she’d been shouldering the burden of her father’s death and her mother’s fury. Her pain and sorrow and eventual crumbling into oblivion.
All your fault.
You should have listened to me.
Why, Minnow, why?
But no. It was all a bitter misunderstanding. Minnow had been rolling around in the shore break, not out paddling around in the kayak as her mother had believed. Bruce must have been yelling for Minnow to get it, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying against the roar of the waves, so when he came down to the beach, the kayak had already been swept out. It was not Minnow he was going out to rescue; it was his trusty kayak. He would have been swimming frantically to reach it before it was lost for good. The shark hit him on the way out. One bite.
But one bite was often all it took.
A light ruffle of a breeze began to blow in from the south, rocking the boat from side to side, but she barely noticed. It felt like her skin had just been ripped off, exposing every nerve to the elements of nature and time.
“I’m sorry, Papa. I wish I had heard you,” she said aloud.
One weight had lifted, ever so slightly, but another had flattened her. The sharks had always been there, circling, and she needed a way to keep them alive. Whatever the cost.
Journal Entry
