Chapter One

Normal kids are afraid of the dark. Skittish, I suppose, of the way it stuffs the hollow corners of their rooms with nothingness and wraps around the day like a muzzle until the clamor of the world runs quiet. I fell in love with the night after I lost my father inside it, in love with the way it folds itself over our ugliest secrets in a black lacy veil, transforming the saddest moments of our lives into little more than broken bits of light flickering overhead. After my father disappeared, I came to imagine him floating in the velvet creases of the night, watching me move through the years. I came to embrace the utter blackness stretching its arms out, hushing the world to the scratchy eet, deet, dee of a cricket’s song wisping through the breeze so softly you can hear the floorboards sigh.

But then, I am not normal, no matter how politely people try to argue the point. I last heard the sound of my voice eight years ago when it chased my father into the darkness. Then it was gone. And the moment that I was a kid, the real kind who skips Double-Dutch and neatly tucks teeth beneath their pillow waiting for fairies to arrive, vanished before it even fully materialized.

When I was born to Ansel and Zorrie Haywood on October 3, 1960, my parents named me Izabella Rae Haywood—Izabella for a dead grandmother I never knew; Rae for a string of light that was missing from their marriage. Put all together, I am breathing proof that for a single moment my parents were not cannibals snipping at each other’s back, but one: one body wrapped around itself, one sigh let loose on the night, one author of their next chapter.

Their story began two years before my birth beneath a harvest moon, where they were dizzy with love. This according to my father. According to my mother, it was the third blood moon and food poisoning from a basket of bad clams. Given what followed, I believe her. What they did agree upon was it began in Tuckertown, Rhode Island, where seagulls outnumber people twenty to one. Really, Tuckertown isn’t a town at all, just a broken-off spindle of land jutting clumsily out into the Atlantic Ocean. It does not have a market or even a school to call its own. What it does have, though, is a stall-sized post office once used as an honest-to-goodness rest stop for the pony express. And if you have your own post office, you get to call yourself a town. This is not to say the post office is the whole treasure trove of Tuckertown. There are also twenty or thirty ramshackle cottages, four docks where lobstermen haul in their traps each evening, filling the town with a marshy stink, and one billion crooked-winged osprey scavenging for carcasses. Not much, but it’s where I was born and lived the first fourteen years of my life.

My parents spent the earliest of those years sorting out a nickname that fit, because there is the name  God gives you and then there’s the name the whole rest of the world calls you. Late in the foggy gray of October 1961, when my first birthday rolled around, Reverend Mitchell of the Talabahoo First congregational Church poured holy water over my head, baptizing me “Izabella Rae in the name of our Father who art in heaven.” But by then God was the only one still calling me that. My father who art on earth called me Belle, and my mother, Izzy.

Somewhere around my second birthday, sweetsy names gave way to ones of utility, and my full Christian name returned to me in a broken series of monosyllables, “Iz-a-bell-a Raaaaae!” flinging through the air with hatchet precision to chase me to my plate at dinnertime. This morphing continued until, finally, by my fifth birthday I answered simply to “Be” when my father caught me up in a hug, and “Iz” when my mother did not. In no less than five short years I had been whittled down to the weakest forms of “to be” in the English language. It is a fact I have spent a good amount of time considering.

Grandma Jo says, “Izabella Rae, every great story begins in its weakest form and builds upward from there.”

She may be right or she may be wrong about that, but lately I have come to believe that, great or lousy, in the end we are all just the caboodle of stories we leave behind. The moment you die, all those stories tumble from their basket sticky-edged, and however they clump together, there you have it. Before you even wiggle one toe in the grave people come stand around your coffin to collect them. When I die, they will cluster beside my dead body whispering, “And that thing with her father . . . Poor soul never was quite right afterward.” And that will be true.

On that day, those bunched-up stories are the only real thing left of any of us, and as fate would have it, most of mine began on October 3, as if God himself touched me on the forehead and said, “Izabella Rae Haywood, I give you life, and each year on your birthday that life will change forever.”

And starting on my fifth birthday, that’s exactly what happened. In truth, it began two months before, in the summer of 1965. It is one of the only moments with my father that remains whole in a bucket of bent and broken memories, and it was the day I came to know Yemaya.

That August was the kind of hot which leaves you chewing grit between your teeth, “turning us all into the devil’s dust mop,” Grandma Jo would say. And this particular Sunday was roasting everyone into a state of crankiness, especially my mother, who stood barefoot in the drive, hair pulled up into a loose twist with one hand wedged on the pointy tip of her hipbone. Small damp tendrils clung to her neck, making her wiltedness almost beautiful, as if the heat were melting all her sharp edges.

“I cannot believe the two of you are going to spend a day like this cooped up in a truck for three hundred miles just to go splash around in Potter’s Creek. It’s got to be a thousand degrees out here.”

My father chuckled, throwing an extra reel of fishing line on the front seat of our old Jeep. “It’s only five hundred degrees in the water. Come on, Zo!”

“She’s going to miss church.” My mother tilted her head at him. “And Sunday school.”

“Sunday school.” He chortled. “God’s country is out there. He’s too damn smart to waste a day like this with a bunch of stuffy old Bible-mongers! Go throw some shorts on and come splash with us. I know just where to find him!” When my father grinned dimples bore deep into his cheeks in a Robert Redford sort of way that melted the whole world into happiness, only he had darker hair and soft gray eyes that glimmered with mischief. My mother called it his get-out-of-jail-free card.

“You’re impossible!” My mother dropped her hand from the crest of her hip, shaking her head with a smile. I thought, not for the first time, that my mother must be the most stunning woman in the world in my father’s company.

“I try.” He kissed her full on the lips until she pushed him away, clonking him gently on the head with the back of her hand.

Not knowing what to do, I busied myself with Malibu Barbie, whom I’d dressed in Ken’s camouflage trousers and tall rubber boots. The ski pole I’d stolen from my Ski Queen Barbie and given her to use as a fishing rod was bent from where I’d tied a piece of thread to the tip, with a lipstick-red stiletto shoe as a hook. I sent it spinning around and around, watching the shoe fly in circles.

“Come on, Zo. Come with us.”

“Ansel Jacob Haywood, you are stark raving mad if you think I am going to lock myself in that tin can in this heat.” She glanced at Barbie’s heel swinging in the air.

“All right, but if I do the catching, you do the cooking!” He laughed, plopping a floppy hat on my head. Two minutes later, we were spinning backward out of the drive with my mother frozen up like a statue on the pavement watching us go. Through the rear window, I could see her forehead pinch into a furrowed brow and for a second I thought she might run right after us, but she didn’t and I watched her shrink to the size of a spring tick until the truck veered left down Route 95, the droopy rim of my straw hat bouncing along to “C.C. Rider” on the radio.

My father was one-eighth Narragansett Indian and seven-eighths mystery. The fact of the matter might not be important if it weren’t for the Nikommo, which only descendants of the Wampanoag nation can hear. When I was little, with the wind whipping and whining at my windowpane, sending my quilt over my head until my knuckles ran white, my grandfather would dig me free from the folds of fabric with a chuckle. It’s just the Nikommo chattering to their mother, the moon. I had been raised with the Nikommo and knew the tiny woodland sprites of the Narragansett passed their evenings whispering to anyone who would listen, telling them where they needed to go—leading a famished hunter to a wild boar, a person lost among the fir trees back to his trail.

It is the right of the Nikommo to guide the land; it is the right of the moon to control the tide. Close your eyes and eavesdrop. In the morning, you will tell me what they were rattling on about.

It was no use. No matter how hard I listened, I could never make out what they were saying, where they wanted me to go. But my father heard them all the time, even if he never called them by name. The world was always chattering to him, calling to him from all four corners without notice or apology. And today, it had beckoned him three hundred miles from home to fish for salmon, although given the chance for a do-over I believe he might have thought better of it and pulled that floppy hat right off my head and sent me to the church ladies. Because I decided on our very first catch that I loved fish. I do not mean fried up with lemon rind over a campfire as he intended, but alive and swimming freely about my ankles, nipping and tickling my toes.

The epiphany struck while I was standing in Potter’s Creek, sixty miles north of the New Hampshire border. There we were, up to our underpants in water when—Boom! It hit me and I understood straight down to my toes why God spent his Sundays knee-deep in water instead of inside some stuffy church toppling with women in dusty hats stinky from mothballs and old Mr. Pontell snoring from the back pew.

Dancing with the current, throngs of salmon leapt in and out of the water like one hundred and one silver needles pulling trails of pink ribbon in their wake, stitching a path up the rocks, shattering the surface into slivers of mirror zipping through the water and reflecting all the colors of the world on their backs.

“Be! Look!” My father’s voice ratcheted up three decibels in the way it always did when he was on a mission nobody else in the universe understood but me. “My God, they’re beautiful. Have you ever seen anything so goddamn beautiful?” He flicked his finger across the rapids until a thousand water pearls skittled over the face of the creek. “Do you hear her?”

“Who, Daddy?” I reached for his hand, stumbling in the current, but he was wading in deeper to listen and I was afraid to follow. This was the story of us. My father slipping away to the Nikommo and me tripping after him—desperate not to be left behind.

“Yemaya. Do you hear her? She’s calling them home.” Glancing over his right shoulder, he studied me for a second. “You do, don’t you? You hear her.” The statement bounced off the water as fact and I listened with all my might, but just like with the Nikommo, the words he could hear were swept away in the wind and all I could hear was the shush of water and splash of salmon.

Giving him a nod, I teetered in the tide, trying to find solid ground as he turned back to stare at the creek. The water rushed over my toes, foamy whitecaps skating along top.

“My grandmother saw her once when she was about your age, said she was the most beautiful thing in the world. Mother of all mothers, protector of children. Long black hair, just like yours. Eyes the color of a perfect storm. Just like yours.” He glanced at my face as if trying to force the pieces to fit, and for a moment I knew he didn’t recognize the way they came together. It wasn’t the first time I had witnessed the current at work in his eyes, tugging him one direction and then the other until he was left spinning like the foamy whitecaps at my ankles. “If you watch, really watch, just below the water where the sun sparkles off the rocks, you just may see her. And if she’s in a good mood, she just might toss you one of her magic pebbles and it will bring you good luck forever.” The wish pressing up against his words was hard to ignore.

He stretched a hand out to me, and I tried to go to him, I truly did, but the current swept me one direction while my father motioned me the other. Before I knew what was happening I was pulled down hard against the rock I’d been propped up on, sliding down the slippery edge. Down into the water. Sailing away with Yemaya and her million silver salmon.

I can’t say how long I was under before I felt my father’s hand cuff around my wrist and yank me back. “Don’t let go, Be. Don’t let go!” Don’t let go. Don’t . . . let . . . go.

And then we were on the stony edge of the creek bed, me hiccupping out water, my father holding my small hand in his like a robin’s egg while he dabbed at the cut above my brow with his shirt.

At first I thought the blood had trickled into my eye, blurring up the world until it tottered upside down, but that wasn’t it. An enormous salmon danced into the air, its chrome gills billowing out into tiny angel wings fluttering it toward the clouds in exactly the same way I imagined a person’s spirit might break free of its body and soar toward heaven. Long as an arrow, it shot into the day and I swear the morning sun looped into a halo around it.

“Daddy, look!” I squealed, waving my free arm toward a ring of ripples ten feet in front of me and forgetting all about the gash over my eye. I jumped up and down, swaying to keep my balance in the absence of my father’s hand. It’s a sensation I have yet to grow used to.

The dimples poked in at his cheeks. He picked me up and tossed me into the air before splashing me back to the stream. Lifting his rod from its sheath, he let go a low whistle and cast it forward. The tiny yellow anchor at the tip of his line zipped through the morning and plopped into the water with a small splash. As though not a thing in the world had happened. As though I hadn’t nearly

died trying to bridge the distance into his world. I could not have known then that bridge may as well have been the River Styx, could not have understood that once you crossed, you could never come back alive.

“Woo-hoo! Would you have a gander at that?” My father yanked the line, reeling a large fish into the breeze so gracefully she might have still been swimming the waters of Potter’s Creek.

The fish’s body lurched, her eyes confused—betrayed. I realized the vision was not of an angel dancing through the day, but of a mother caught up by the jaw like a tangled marionette, and I imagined a beautiful woman with long black hair and eyes the color of a perfect storm hanging from my father’s pole.

“She’s stuck, Daddy. Let her go, let her go. Let go! Daddy, help her!” My screams did not stop until my father set the fish free, swearing at the crimson cut left by her razor scales, but it was too late. The fish swam several drunken circles before tottering to the surface on her side.

“She’s just resting from the fight,” my father said, sucking at the corner of his hand. Glancing at the tears wetting my face, he sighed, squatting low, and dug two chunks of amber from the mud before rinsing them in the creek. “Be, look! Yemaya Stones!” Cupping his hands, he shook the stones together before tucking one in my palm. “There. Now you are stuck with me forever.” He grinned, tweaking my cheek.

Although there are plenty of others—There is nothing scary in the night . . . If you wish a secret wish on a falling star . . . I’ll never leave you . . .—when I consider my childhood, this is the very first of my father’s lies that I can uncover.

Determined not to return to my mother empty-handed—and having frightened my father off the idea of catching our own dinner entirely—we stood at Mr. Matteson’s fish market that night with a hundred fish staring back at me with sad eyes. In that moment, I came to understand what it meant to be God. God was anyone strong enough to pull you straight out of your world with one good yank and powerful enough to decide whether or not to put you back in.

“Salmon?” Mr. Matteson asked.

“Haddock,” my dad corrected, glancing down at me.

“You see the coverage of those protesters at the Dallas County Courthouse yesterday over those three guys indicted in that Reeb murder?” Mr. Matteson offered in the way of small talk as he wrapped the Haddock in waxed butcher paper. He was short and squat with dark hair that was retreating from his forehead with determination. “That Dr. King’s started one hell of a mess down there in Selma.” He shook his head slowly in the way that almost always meant It’s a damn shame, sticking a strip of tape on the paper. “I swear, this country’s falling apart under LBJ.” “Must’ve missed it,” my father said dismissively.

“Voting rights,” he sputtered. But if he felt one way or the other about whatever he was going on about, he didn’t say so.

“You want to stop at the A&W on the way home, Be?” I looked up at my father in time to catch his dimples taking shape as he threw me a wink. “You know, celebrate a great day?”

Shrugging, I let my eyes flick toward a billboard outside the window. A woman wearing a man’s plaid button-down with the cuffs rolled to the elbow held up a small box that said: Jell-O—the first no cook egg custard ever! Normally, I loved the A&W stand, sitting in the car while waitresses in black tuxedo trousers with an orange stripe down the sides and matching hats hustled out to bring us root beer floats and hot dogs. My father brought me there for special celebrations, but I didn’t feel like celebrating. I shook my head.

Take not with thy own hands that which thee has not begotten. It’s written on the Sunday school wall and in the Bible, too.

“What does that mean?” I asked my mother once when she came to pick me up from the small classroom in the church loft. The distinct smell of old paper and holy dust wafted through the room.

“Don’t take what isn’t yours or God will punish you,” she huffed, trying to stuff my mittened hand through the sleeve of my coat. I turned my eyes from the large coffee stain that had long ago bled over the blue carpet and studied Mary’s sad amethyst eyes looking down from the wall—and I knew for sure she was looking at me.

Over the next several years that scripture stuck with me like a wad of stepped-on bubble gum, somehow making sense of the timbers falling away from our lives.

My father and I had stolen from God. We had snatched one of Yemaya’s mothers, taken a life that wasn’t ours to take, and the ghost of that fish followed me through my childhood. Sometimes it returns to me still. In a wayward dream, she stares at me with sad watery eyes tallying the details of her murder, mirrored gills searching for the cool rush of water. There is no telling what might set the memory flying into my head: a particular bounce of light in the water, the rickety old fish cart down on the docks, the recollection of what happened to my father. But the memory comes back to me clearest sitting in the stuffy pews of the Talabahoo First Congregational Church with Mary’s mournful eyes looking down at me; I remember the fish and the moment Daddy and I were God.

That September my mother returned to school to finish her PhD in art history. A month later, my father decided if she was going to chase her dreams, so was he. He surrendered his position as an English professor at Brown University to become a freelance writer, and in one quick turn, our house became a series of misses: missed bedtime stories, missed jokes around the kitchen table, missed midnight strolls on the docks.

When Grandma Jo was not visiting to keep me entertained, I spent hours flopped on the floor of my father’s office drawing pictures. You would think with all that time apart my parents might have a lot of catching up to do when they saw each other, but instead the space between them seemed stuffed with unspoken words and when they came back together, and those words were finally set free, it turned out there was not one single kind thing left to say.

Arguments began to crop up between them like weeds overtaking the path that connected their lives. When my father was not on his way to Columbia to find skulls of crystal, he disappeared into deep oceans of darkness and his writing.

“Where are you going?” I sat crisscross-applesauce on my parents’ bed, picking at a scab on my knee.

“Manchu Picchu.”

“Why?’

“To feel the ley lines.” My father balled up a shirt and stuffed it into his backpack.

“Why?”

“To recharge my spirit.”

“With who?”

“God.”

“Can I come?” Glancing up, I cocked my head, waiting for an answer.

“Mommy won’t let you.” He winked at me. “Next time, okay?”

“Okay,” I nodded, turning back to the television, where Lassie was leading Timmy into an abandoned mine to save a missing boy.

Sometimes I went with him when he won the battle over what type of outing was appropriate for a young girl, or when he didn’t tell my mother. Like the time he woke me at three in the morning, sneaking me down the back staircase.

“Where are we going?”

“Shhh . . .” He tipped his finger to his lips.

“Where are we going?” I whispered, slipping out the door and reaching for his hand. I did not care if the Nikommo were friendly; the thought of tiny people in the woods gave me the heebie-jeebies.

“To swim with the moon.”

“Why can’t Mommy come?”

“It’s just for us.” He pulled something small and round from his pocket, turning it in the light of the stars, and it took me a full minute to recognize the stone from Potter’s Creek. “Mommy can’t hear her,” he mumbled, more to the stone than me.

I wanted to go home. Staring at the inky ripples from Moonstone Beach, which my father believed poetic for the experience, with cold sand squishing between my toes, I knew I wanted to go home. Being sucked under the waves on our fishing expedition was so fresh in my mind that I could still feel the water burning up my lungs. But I didn’t say so. I didn’t want to ruin the magic for my father like my mother always did. I didn’t want to be left behind. Just offshore, a fat moon danced on the sea, wavering with every breeze, while my father stripped down to his skivvies.

“What if there are sharks?”

“They wouldn’t dare bother a moon dancer,” he said, as though that were a real thing. “Come on.” He laughed, running into the dark water and leaving me alone with the Nikommo.

I shook my head, willing him to come back, willing him to choose me over the tide pulling him away. But he couldn’t see and I knew that my grandfather was right. The current was not his to command—that was the right of the moon.

“Come on, Be. Come dance with the moon!” Slipping off my nightshirt, I remember this. . . . I remember thinking I would rather drown in the arms of the moon with my father than be left alone, would rather die chasing the light with him than live in the darkness as he swam away.

“This is our secret,” he explained. “Secrets lose their magic if you give them away, so you can’t tell Mommy, okay?” Hooking his little finger around mine, he gave it a squeeze and I squeezed back in a pinky promise. The truth is, I wouldn’t have told anyways. She wouldn’t have understood what it meant to waltz with the moon.

When the first fingers of dawn took hold of the horizon, we collapsed on the beach half naked and pulled a blanket around our shoulders, watching as the morning light snuffed out the stars. And that is where a woman hunting sea glass found us asleep several hours later.

I don’t recall my mother yelling. In fact, I don’t recall her uttering a single word. She just looked at him with eyes bloodshot and puffed up like marshmallows over the campfire, wrapped me tight in a fresh blanket, and marched me upstairs to dress in dry clothes.

Sometimes I didn’t get to go when my mother won, or caught us. Sometimes he vanished for weeks at a time into the wind. I didn’t know where he was, but I knew where he was going: God’s country. And I knew why: the Nikommo were calling.

When he was home, he would disappear into silence at his desk for days then fox-trot into the living room and dance my mother around like a soldier on leave, as if he’d been right there spinning her dizzy all along. In his defense, with his eyes buried deep in his typewriter and his back to the outside world, he could not possibly have seen me plopped on the floor with my crayons by his study door. He could not count the times my mother hesitated at the landing, letting her eyes linger on his turned back over a basket of laundry or a stack of files. He could not see the question forming on her lips, wondering how to shatter the space between them, or realized how the tapping of his typewriter so thoroughly drowned out the soft brush of her fingertips running over their wedding photo as she climbed the stairs to an empty bedroom. He was either intoxicated by the light or bogged deep in the darkness—that’s what she would say—sunk into a story that promised to sail him away from his own.

I don’t like to say so, but the truth is, I blamed her—for keeping me from him, for not breaking down and crossing the threshold, for not calling him back like she meant it. And the more he wrote, the more that darkness began to swallow us all, until by the time my sixth birthday rolled around, that emptiness had taken us over with tumor-like persistence.