Free Sea Creatures by Susanna Daniel

last item was a plastic yellow sea horse the size of my pinkie finger. I touched the sharp ridges along its spine.
    â€œWhere did you get this?” I said.
    His hands came up. Man give it to me .
    I signed: When ?
    â€œSpeak?” said Graham to me.
    â€œWhen?” I said to Frankie.
    Frankie looked back and forth between us, his mouth turned down at the edges and his shoulders slumped. You in kitchen , he signed. Washing dishes.
    I’ve been asked time and again—by doctors and speech therapists, who had failed to find anything physically wrong; by Lidia and my father; even by friends back in Illinois, whose calls I’d stopped returning as their children’s vocabularies multiplied—why sometimes I chose to sign instead of speaking. When I’d first started with the signing, not realizing how instrumental it would become, I’d pressed Graham to learn some basics. He’d said, “The boy can hear, right? Why are we doing this?” I’d said, “He can hear, but he can’t talk. I don’t want him to feel alone.” I hadn’t known why I was doing it until the words left my mouth. I knew people believed I should have been doing something quantifiable to help Frankie, and I didn’t disagree. But so far, no diagnosis or treatment had been chosen for him. And I believed strongly that until we knew why he refused to speak, we would not entice him to start.
    I cleared the table. Frankie’s eyelids were heavy, his stare unfocused. He made the sign for Sleep : one hand cupping his soft, full cheek. Graham lifted him and playfully slung him over one shoulder, then stooped to let me say good night before taking him inside. I poured myself a glass of wine. When Graham came back out, he stumbled over the doorway and dropped into a patio chair. He stretched his long legs and sighed. The Lullaby docked bow-in, so the wide stern patio—fully a third of the boat’s living space—faced the canal. Breeze trembled in the mangroves and across the surface of the water.
    â€œI like what you did with the—what do you call them—area rugs,” said Graham, his voice a little shaky.
    â€œWe needed a little sprucing,” I said, but I could tell he barely heard me.
    Every few weeks it hit him, the need for sleep. I knew tonight he would take his pills, would lie down in our bed, and would fasten the soft black cuff that we’d leashed to the wall. He hated the pills, hated the cuff, but every couple of weeks he was forced to spend a few nights more or less the way regular people did. The cuff had come home with him after his third and final visit to Detention, after the incident on our anniversary. The doctor who gave it to him had said that he’d treated patients with such extreme parasomnia only a few times in his career. One patient had sex with strangers in her sleep; another stabbed her husband. He told Graham—and I hated that doctor for it, though I never met him or even knew his name—that the worst was likely still to come.
    I sipped my wine. I’d steam-cleaned the houseboat’s carpet after we’d moved aboard, but the industrial gray stuff remained faded and stained. Frankie and I had gone from store to store, digging through sale piles, until I’d found a jute rug for the deck, a small braided mat in sherbet colors for the kitchen, and a large, colorful wool one in Moroccan patterns for the salon. On the deck I’d hung hurricane lamps, and on the sofa I’d arranged bright pillows in orange, grassy green, magenta. The Lullaby was not pretty, no, but she was showing a little personality.
    Graham rubbed his eyes and tried to focus. He gave me an effortful smile.
    â€œWhy don’t you lie down?” I said.
    â€œWe should get a new mattress.” He’d lain on our mattress two or three times, total, since we’d moved aboard, and never for more than an hour or two. “That old one gives me the