100 Proof

One by one, I steered each ship to the open water, doused their decks with kerosene, and dropped sputtering matches onto the wood before swimming away.

You’re making a lot of changes all of a sudden, he said. What is that about?

I tried to explain how so much rigging distracts from what most needs focus. I have spent years hoisting unnecessary sails.

When I told this story to a friend, she shook her head and smiled. Doesn’t he get it? she asked. Doesn’t he see he’s as much a catalyst for you as you are for him?

My father taught me to never turn down what hasn’t been offered. He taught me, too, that being offered something is sometimes as good as taking it—this lesson is harder for me to learn. Also: Choke up on the bat, make the new kid feel welcome, and call home if there’s any trouble.

He delivers these lessons through stories that meander like rivers, then oxbow in to where they started—tangents always return to their source. I listen carefully, grateful for each word. I am the most fortunate of daughters.

* To my father, on his 70th birthday

Light filtered in, and it was the worst kind of light, the kind that heralds an end to a beginning, the kind that eradicates the careful boundaries of an incautious night and lets the rest of the world bleed in.

This can’t become a habit, he said. And then, so quietly she could barely hear him, I really want this to become a habit.

She had told him she would remember him always, but there came a day when she realized he had stopped inhabiting all the stories. As if he were a hermit crab, he had scuttled away and left her talking about empty shells.

If she held them to her ear, she could hear something that sounded like breathing, but in her hand, they were as cold as the sea before dawn.

She had once been a woman with faith in directions, in paths worn down by hundreds of feet, but she searched so long, she ran out of maps.

What you’re looking for will find you, said her friend. Just wait.

Though she was much better at traveling, she waited as she was told, holding her compass tight to her heart, no matter how wrong it had steered her. She hoped her hands would convert it to some strange beacon, marking true North on her heart in a way only recognized by the one on the right itinerary.

That week, food turned to dust in my mouth. Ravenous, I sat in front of plate after plate and found my appetite disappearing three, four, five bites in.

“That’s all yours,” she said, gesturing with one chopstick.

“Take it,” I said. And then, “This has never happened to me. Ever.”

For years, I’d felt like I was starving to death. Now, running on a steady diet of adrenaline and hope, it felt like just the charged air around me was enough fuel for the journey.

How are you? she asked.

It all seeped through the cracks then, as uncontrollable as mercury loosed, and I tried to bring it back in like breath. The last time such an escape happened, I nearly drowned in all the liquid, struggling for air, blinded by salt. The last time, I required rescue.

This time, I forced the retreat, dammed it back behind my fissured heart.

I’m doing OK, I said. This day, there was no time for floods.