Free Sea Creatures by Susanna Daniel Page A

creeps.”
    â€œGood idea.”
    â€œAnd a new pediatrician, for heaven’s sake.”
    I said something about taking the time to interview a few doctors, to find someone who was a good fit.
    â€œJust ask Sally,” he said.
    My old friend and I had swapped messages but had yet to see each other. She had three boys under the age of eight; surely, she knew a good pediatrician. “It’s just the talking thing—I don’t want anyone too strict.”
    â€œMaybe strict would be good, babe.”
    It was a conversation we’d had a dozen times. Neither of us wanted to get into it. The plastic table where we sat—it had been included, along with all of the furniture, in the price of the boat—rocked a little. Graham pushed against it, then slogged inside and came out with a few paper towels. He kneeled beneath the table, stuffing them under one leg and then another. He had a restless, struggling energy about him. It might have been a cousin of unhappiness or anxiety—he’d been sent to a shrink by every sleep doctor he’d ever seen, with no clear diagnosis—but I didn’t think so. It seemed to me that when other people’s brains started to turn off at night, after the day’s work was finished, Graham’s struggled to stay on, as if sleep were a kind of death and only by remaining awake could he survive. Sometimes I wondered about the prohibition against alcohol. Graham seemed like a person who could use a drink.
    â€œSit down,” I said.
    He continued to try to fix the table, one leg at a time. Finally, he gave up. “Your stepmother is driving me a little crazy,” he said.
    I shushed him. There was only the lawn between the Lullaby and Lidia’s house. “Don’t call her that,” I said.
    He reached over and pinched me lightly on the arm, pleased to have gotten my goat. He tried to whisper, but it was hard for him, his gruff voice. “All the jibber-jabber, every time I come up the driveway. It’s like she’s waiting to pounce.”
    Lidia was a talker, it was true, but I had found I didn’t mind it. Those early days on the Lullaby would have been awfully quiet otherwise. “I miss privacy,” I said, and Graham sighed heavily.
    But our privacy had been compromised before we’d even left Round Lake. It had only been a matter of time before the neighborhood had known our business. Late one spring night, Graham had rung the bell of our closest neighbor. It was after midnight. When she answered, he asked if she wanted him to build a bat house for her backyard, to keep the mosquitoes under control in the summer. (This was something we’d discussed doing in our own yard, but never got around to.) She’d said no, thank you, and closed the door, and once he was gone she debated calling the police. She didn’t call. I didn’t know this had happened until much later, when I read about it in the newspaper.
    Across the canal, inside the grand multilevel home, a family was seated at an enormous glass dining table, spotlighted under a pinecone-shaped chandelier. The parents, grandmother, and four children all had lacquered dark hair and caramel skin. Now the children wore pajamas, but I’d seen them in their matching church clothes, white shirts and navy knee-skirts for the girls, navy trousers for the boys. The word family —in my mind, both hands made the letter F , forming a semicircle away from the torso—encompassed so many possible configurations. What did we have in common with this neatly dressed brood in their enormous home?
    When I was a kid, roaming the decks of a cruise ship, I’d studied the families from behind my sunglasses. To me, they’d been unknowable as wild animals. They’d sulked and shouted and laughed and nagged. The fathers came from the blackjack table to dinner, suited and smelling of aftershave. I’d assumed that when I grew up and had a family of my