Permission. Saskia Vogel
kept her hair in rollers, so she would always be ready for her day in court. In my mother’s eyes, I saw my father being flung around the North Pacific Gyre.
The idea of selling the house had whipped up my castaway dreams again, my hope for his return. Maybe Dad had made it to San Nicolas Island. There, in the early nineteenth century, Aleuts hunting for sea otter decimated the local tribe. A rescue ship, the Peor es Nada, arrived to spirit the remainder of the tribe to safety on the mainland among the missions, but they left one behind. And maybe like this Nicoleña, who lived alone on the island for years, my father could also find a way to survive. The island was now a naval base, and that gave me hope. I imagined him being washed ashore on any one of the Channel Islands and being found. Maybe with amnesia. He might be in a hospital. In critical condition, in a coma, but alive. I was scanning the news. Making calls. Nothing.
Later that afternoon I drove to a small bay guarded by a group of locals who had surfed its break for generations. They’d know about this ocean, these currents, the stretch of coastline where it had happened. The waves were mushy, and only a few surfers were out. I wasn’t carrying a surfboard, but still they shouted at me to go the fuck away as I came down the bluff. The one I recognized recognized me and hushed the others up. I found a spot on the rocky beach and watched the men in the water. The pack left the sea before dusk, and Krit and I hung back. He asked me about Ana and I told him we’d lost touch, which was true.
The last I’d heard from Ana was about a year after we graduated high school. I’d finally found a permanent place of my own and was still settling in, still getting in a rhythm of paying my own bills. It was good to hear a familiar voice, someone who knew me well. It was like old times until she started telling me about someone she was seeing, a classmate at university.
‘What do your parents say?’ I asked.
‘They don’t know. They wouldn’t approve of him.’
‘Oh.’
‘We had sex,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I said. I wondered if she thought of me as the person who took her virginity. I thought of her that way.
‘I didn’t come.’
This wasn’t a friendly phone call. I could hear what she wanted, and I couldn’t give it to her. I wasn’t ready.
‘I can’t help you,’ I said.
It was silent for a while, and then she said: ‘I’m sorry.’
And that was it.
Krit built a fire in ‘the fort,’ a rock-and-cement shack with leantos thatched with palm fronds. The structure had gotten bigger since I’d last seen it. When we met him, he had been living between this beach and his van and did things for money that our parents never would’ve done. Ana had said she liked him because he was free.
I wanted Krit to tell me if my dad could’ve reached land, but instead I asked about the Catalina Channel. He lit up. Krit had swum it for the first time this year. He’d just missed his own deadline – his thirty-eighth birthday – but he completed the swim in record time. Had he always been so old, I wondered as he spoke. How young we were then. Her skin.
‘I’m famous,’ he said, catching my attention. ‘People know me now. They got my picture up at Bizny’s and everything.’
He mistook my expression and sweetly explained the secret of his success: it was all about luck meeting preparation. It had taken him longer than he expected to build up the endurance: races and open-water swims, day and night. Working his way up, mile by mile, fifteen, then twenty, then a few more for good measure because it was likely he wouldn’t be swimming in a straight line. He’d gathered his support team and taken the boat to Catalina Island. Waited for the neap tide. The exhilaration of stepping into the ocean at midnight, body greased for heat. He swam toward the mainland with only the glow sticks on the escort vessels to guide him. One vessel trailed a rope on which his water bottles and mouthwash and energy gels were stuck with duct-tape and thick rubber bands, like cluttered kelp.
‘You lose time if you have to swim up to the boat,’ he said. Time was a matter of life or death. He said vertigo had set in at mile twelve. He started to freeze three miles out from the mainland. But: ‘I rallied.’
The firelight danced on his powerful body. I wanted to be close to it. I wanted to know what it felt like to be in it – everything it contained and had accomplished, all it was capable of.
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