Candice May is a writer from British Columbia, Canada. Her work has appeared in Pleiades, december, Epiphany, PRISM, The Masters Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.
Halfway between Victoria, where he lived, and Vancouver, where he had no reason to go, my brother jumped off the top deck of a passenger ferry. It was a calm, placid afternoon in the middle of summer, and his body made only the briefest of splashes. At first, the woman who spotted him thought he was a whale, her spirit animal. And this one, so close! She rushed to the railing, scanning the sea foam churning against the side of the boat, and waited for the creature to resurface. On the horizon, the coast mountains melded with the blue of the Pacific.
The woman cried out when she saw my brother’s swirling mess of brown hair, his limbs flailing in the wake, and a flash of face. Not a whale. A man! She saw his stoic gaze, expressionless, go under.
When the ferry crew stopped the sailing and backtracked, throwing buoys overboard and sounding the alarm, my brother refused to grasp on. The woman yelled, “Take it! Please!”
The crew ran back and forth along the deck, shouting and pointing, untying the knots and loops of two small rescue boats. When they told the other passengers to leave the deck and go inside, the woman said, “I know him. I need to stay.”
She planted her feet firmly on the deck and inhaled deeply, closing her eyes against the sun. She counted, “One, two, three, four, five.” And when she found the quietest moment, one pause, she opened her eyes and yelled again. “Grab hold!” she pleaded to my drowning brother, his ears and eyes awash in seawater.
My brother told me later that he didn’t hear her, and hardly remembered if she was there at all, nor any part of the rescue operation. Rather, the bright reds and yellows of the buoys and life vests became too much like the neon colors already flashing inside his brain. The hollering of the ferry crew through the megaphones sounded too similar to the noise forever screaming between his ears. A taunting so familiar he wasn’t sure if he’d actually jumped, or was just locked inside another chaotic thought. He finally grabbed hold of the ropes because he couldn’t bear the noise and the sirens for one more second. “It was supposed to be quiet,” he told me. “It was just supposed to be quiet.”
. . .
After my brother’s rescue, the hospital contacted me, his older sister. Moments before they called, saying words like hypothermia, resuscitation, okay, I was rinsing off my wetsuit in the shower, drying my hair after a solo dive, and avoiding work on my PhD thesis. Hot noodles steamed from a bowl on my kitchen counter, and a documentary was playing on the television: Aquariums, Exposed! It was a lengthy debate about best practices for aquariums, complete with hidden cameras and stealthily conducted interviews. The part about captive whales being routinely administered sedatives was particularly scandalous. A close-up of a whale’s eye, unblinking, filled the screen.
When I got the call, I put my noodles in the fridge, threw on sweatpants and a t-shirt. I paused with my car keys in hand, flipping the TV to the news, in case my brother’s incident was being reported. But they were still covering the controversy at the Vancouver aquarium. Too many whales were dying in captivity. An orca named Chester; the belugas, Aurora and Qila; and a harbor porpoise named Jack had all died within the last three years. Activists had been protesting all summer; crowds blocked the ticket booths. Set the cetaceans free! They paced in the heat for hours, gripping black-and-white cardboard cutouts—killer whales on sticks. “Your mother is a mammal!” they chanted. News reporters surrounded the aquarium. Tourists squirmed in the ticket lineup, looking down, clutching their glossy pamphlets.
I clicked off the TV and drove straight to the hospital.
. . .
When I entered my brother’s room in the E.R. he was sleeping, hair matted against his head. A tube flowed into his forearm, saline water into his bloodstream. Stepping towards the bed, my shoes lifted with a plastic squish. His bare feet stuck out from underneath the hospital blankets. He was long, the bed too short. I wrapped two fingers around his big toe. Cold.
A young nurse breezed in, slowing her pace when she saw me. She tapped his monitors and checked the liquid drip. “Where are his shoes?” I asked. She tucked notes into a folder, not looking up. “Missing,” she whispered. I watched him sleep for an hour—his slack expression; the gentle rise and fall of his stomach.
Cold was the season his behavior first started to change. It was winter, and we were both teenagers. It began with bridges and his inability to cross them. Then he mentioned wanting to jump off them. He complained of noises that no one else could hear. There were day-long searches, all of us calling his name on the streets, newspapers blowing in the wind. We’d always find him close to home, curled in the fetal position, or holding his hands over his ears. Each time we found him, he cried. Apologized. Then he’d sleep for a few days, start laughing again, and life would unfurl back to normal, with my mother singing in the kitchen and baking sweet-smelling things with cinnamon. We didn’t discuss his episodes, but my mother suggested he try deep breathing and slowly counting to five when he felt overwhelmed. “I’ll try it,” he promised, but I never saw him trying it.
Cold was also the temperature of my mother’s hand, last year, when she was lying on an examination table, both of us quiet as dust as the technician slathered cool jelly onto the outer contours of her right breast, then glided the ultrasound stick up and down. We watched the black-and-white screen above us like a liquid photograph, an aquarium of ducts and globules. The technician lingered a moment, pushing deeper into her flesh, and my mother said, “Yes, there, can you feel that there?”
The technician nodded slightly, snapping a picture with a click of the keyboard. An opaque, oval-shaped thing with a rugged border. “What is it?” my mother asked. The technician squinted at the screen. “I’m not allowed to diagnose,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
It was a cold year, like winter blew in and never left. Or like slipping underwater in a wetsuit. That frigid, west coast Canadian ocean. I sank a lot last year. I mean I really did. I took all the practicums for my degree I was allowed to sign up for. I breathed underwater with scuba gear, and when I came back up, I wrote technical essays about the threat of rapid extinction of Pisaster ochraceus, the ochre star. Pisaster, sounds like disaster. The starfish were all gone by the time my paper was published, and so was my mother.
. . .
When two social workers came to interview me, I told them about the woman who first noticed my brother in the ocean, after he’d jumped off the ferry. I told them her spirit animal was a whale. I told them too much.
“How do you know that?” the woman asked me, holding her pen mid-scrawl. “Did this woman contact you? What is her name?”
Of course, I couldn’t answer those questions, so I went to the kitchen to get some water. The other social worker, a man with a buttoned collar and a mustache, tapped his pen against his mouth.
“I think I understand,” he said. “Are you your brother’s advocate, then? Your father gave us your number. Do you have any help? Do you need—”
I cut him off with a coughing fit from swallowing water down the wrong way. I shook my head while my eyes watered. They asked me what I did for work, and I told them about my studies, how I’d been in school my whole life. I told them about my PhD dissertation: Patterns, Puzzles, and Consequences of Connectivity within a Hermit Crab Meta-population.
“Marine biology,” the man nodded, while the woman scribbled more notes. “That’s very intriguing work.” When he asked me if I’d seen the aquarium protests on the news and what I thought about whales in captivity, the other social worker interrupted, “You call us if you need assistance, yourself,” and she pulled out a card with their organization’s number on it. “We have resources.” The man handed me a card from his wallet as well. Andrew Reed. “I’m interested in your research,” he said, shaking my hand as they left.
I knew they didn’t believe me about the woman on the ferry, and I hardly knew how to explain it myself. It was one of my un-memories. I had to remember it that way. If not for her, my brother would have been completely alone.
. . .
My brother was still in the hospital when I was called for a meeting with the lead psychiatric doctor. He sat across from me and my parents. Florescent lights buzzed from the ceiling; one flickered on and off like an arrhythmic heartbeat. The leather couch shone with oily fingerprints, and the doctor’s desk was so polished I could see his chin reflecting back up into his glasses.
“Medication,” he said. “It’s high time.”
My parents nodded slowly.
Even though my mother had been gone for over a year, I still thought of my father as parents, plural. He’d even grown his hair out a little, his features softened by enough grief to appear more feminine. There was a roundness to his eyes, and a curling forward of his shoulders, like one who has nursed.
“His mind is adrift,” the doctor continued. He jotted some marks on a prescription pad, turned it towards us. A large empty circle for a head, a neck with shoulders. He looked at my father, who gazed at the drawing like it was a photograph of someone he couldn’t quite recognize. “We need to help him,” the doctor said, locking his eyes with mine when I looked up. “You’re his sister. Don’t you want to help him?”
He scrawled several medications for my brother across his prescription pad, ripped it off and handed it to me, because my father had closed his eyes and was leaning back in his chair, arms loosely folded across his chest.
My father had a love of sleeping. That’s how my mom explained it to my brother and I when we were young. “Don’t go in there,” she told us one day, standing by their bedroom door. “Your father is like a bear who needs to hibernate in the winter.” My brother was carrying a large rock that he’d dug up in the backyard. He pressed his face to the bedroom door. “But I found a fossil,” he said, “and a bear would like a fossil.”
When my brother went back outside, my mother said, “Imagine metal crashing on metal, cars and trucks racing down a speedway, everything zooming all at once. You can’t stop that kind of chaos without causing an accident.” From the window, we watched my brother digging in the sandbox, his pants and hands painted with dirt.
“But what about—” I started.
“Shh,” she said. “Listen. They have loud, delicate minds.” My mother tilted her head, as if listening for that roar of traffic behind my dad’s bedroom door, from the sandbox where my brother played. “We must be very smooth,” she told me, “very soft.”
Our father slept for fifteen years, and then three more, and by the time my brother and I were adults, old enough to leave home, my father was still sleeping. Five years later, I wanted to poke him with a stick in that doctor’s office, but I dug my fingernails into my forearm, instead, and took the medication slip.
. . .
Starfish, sand dollar, seaweed, oyster. These I once saw beneath the surface of the sea as my brother rowed us towards our grandparents’ dock. We spent summers at their cottage up island, the tiny town of Union Bay, while our mother cleaned hotel rooms in Victoria and our father slept between odd jobs. I skimmed my pinky finger through the water, leaving a trail behind us that was quickly swallowed by the wake of the aluminum rowboat. My brother rowed perfectly, having been taught by our grandpa. I was older but he was the boy, and so I was the passenger. I didn’t mind. His small biceps bulged and softened with each row forward, as we cut through the water, backwards.
On the dock, we lay on our stomachs and gazed into the water, watching for fish. My brother tried to catch them with his net. We stayed out there until dusk, until we were just two slim silhouettes dancing on the horizon line, our faces aglow with the same sunset that flickered on the waves.
. . .
Now I stood beside my brother, still reclined on his hospital bed. Six small pills in a paper cup. Four white, one pink, one blue. I swirled the cup and the pills bounced around like candies.
“Jellybeans,” I said, “for your inner child.”
His eyes were closed. Beside his bed were the shoes I’d bought him from the thrift store down the street—a convenient location for the haggard and the hurried. They were dark brown, earth-toned, and hardly worn. A faint stain of grass smeared the rubber soles.
“Hello?” I asked my brother, “are you even listening?” He exhaled a heavy sigh. I pressed the cup into his open palm and he slowly curled it into his fist. Nurses pushed carts back and forth along the hallways. Machines beeped; slippered feet shuffled. My brother had been moved to a ward, which smelled like the rest of the hospital: floor cleaner and urine. But from here, the exit door was down a much longer hallway.
“Take the pills,” I told my brother. “You want to get better, don’t you?” His eyes traced back and forth from behind their closed lids. Above us, a small TV monitor played the local news without the sound on. The headline: Empty the Tanks? A child’s hands were pressed up against a glass aquarium. A captive killer whale; a captivated child. There was the whale’s eye again, staring murkily into the camera. It hurt my bones to see the whale like that, stuck inside a tank which was stuck inside the television. I couldn’t keep looking at her. I didn’t want to feel that feeling, there, like a knife making a slow incision below the skin, into my spirit—I had to stop thinking of it, immediately. I stood in the hospital room. I stood at the shoreline. I stood on the top deck of the ferry. I stood at the bottom of the sea.
“There’s a cure for this,” I told my brother, before I left. “The pills are going to make you feel better.” I’m not sure I believed this, but the doctor had said so, and to me this sounded like a battle cry. Something one would scream at a protest. There’s a cure for this! I walked down the hallway, hollering internally. There’s a cure!
Down the hall, I passed a door, halfway ajar. A puckered woman leaned on the back of a chair, hair stringing down her naked back. Her underwear was damp and stained. She reminded me of someone. A sick person. Someone trapped, someone going extinct. Her eyes caught mine for one moving moment.
“Hello?” she asked, reaching out her hand. “Hello?”
But I was already gone. In another room, another time. The sick woman reminded me of my mother, the day I helped her change clothes, tying her cotton gown that opened in the front.
Biopsy of the breast. The doctor had said any pain would be minimal. The needle is so fine and the tissue so soft, it’s like carefully opening the oven door and testing the muffins with a toothpick. Sliding the needle in, the doctor told my mother to anchor her eyes to the second hand, circling its way around the clock. My mother cried, grasping my hand. I hitched my heart to the ticking.
The sick woman reminded me of words like hot, fast, spread, bones.
And that was how it happened.
. . .
My mother was the only one in our family who sang, who brought the voices she heard inside of her head to the outside. She sang while she cooked and loudly, in the shower. She even sang, whispering, while dying in her bed, the three of us clinging to her like flitting birds on the branches of her limbs. She smoothed my brother’s hair from his face and pressed her fingertips onto my father’s eyelids. To me, when we were alone in the room, she said, “Honey,” and cried openly, letting tears track down her cheeks and stay there, not wiping them away. She squeezed my forearms and said, “You be the rock, now,” but all I could think about was putting on my wetsuit, my weighted belt. How quickly a rock sinks to the ocean floor.
. . .
For the rest of the week, I alternated visiting my brother in his ward and sitting on my couch, watching TV. I didn’t answer the phone when my father called. “I’ve been having dreams of your mother,” he told my voicemail. “Call me back?” But I didn’t.
I stayed up all night, flipping channels. I had enough money until my next student loan check arrived, early September, and I only bought what I needed from the market down the street: noodles, peanut butter, bread. I watched TV and ate food and didn’t write a thing about hermit crabs for my research, but I doodled their shells on the back of my hand and up my arm.
One afternoon, after dropping off snacks and books and reading a fantasy novel to my brother in his ward, the lead psychiatrist cornered me as I was leaving. He spoke rapidly, glasses sliding down his nose. He smelled of hamburgers, like he’d just eaten a fast-food lunch. “Institutions,” he said, “have advanced tremendously since…”—and there I tuned out, imagining those whales in their tanks, the so-called advancements to their feeding and care, their training regimes—“...suicidal genes and rehabilitation…” the doctor continued, his voice barreling after me as I walked quickly down the sticky-floored hallway. The doctor walked to keep up with me, filling my ears with worrisome words—“...burden of care, progressive disorder, spectrum of sanity…”—until finally I was running, fleeing, the doctor yelling after me, “Someone has to take responsibility!” as the automatic exit doors swooshed me outside.
I ran all the way to my car, then gunned it towards the ocean, my scuba gear in the trunk. At Ten Mile Point, I flung on my wetsuit, weighted belt, and oxygen tanks like a distraught astronaut late for her flight off the planet. Children pointed at me as I ran, tripping in my flippers over the rocks, fixing my mask to my face. The cold water entered my suit like a second skin, and I bit into the regulator, inhaling deeply as I dropped down, submerged by dark water.
A gentle current, approximately one knot, carried me through beds of kelp. I surrendered to the drift, passing my fingers against a wall of plumose anemones, their feathery arms recoiling. My diving flashlight illuminated the reds, oranges, pinks, and purples of colonial ascidians, cup corals, sponges, and scuttling Dungeness crabs.
I relaxed in the sounds of underwater: the whooshing pulse, the busy ticking and clicking of marine creatures. Seagrass swayed like shoelaces. A grimacing red Irish lord, nearly camouflaged against the rocks, reminded me of my brother’s missing shoes. As the current took me, I thought of the woman on the ferry, how I’d told Andrew Reed and the other social worker that she’d spotted my brother drowning, she’d called for help, and stood resolute on the top deck, a true advocate, breathing, counting—one, two, three, four, five. I thought about calling Andrew Reed, apologizing for making that woman up, because it was unbearable, otherwise—my brother, alone, deciding to jump. Alone, drowning—only strangers there to help him.
A cabezon swam by, glaring at me with its deadpan face. A clown nudibranch, white and speckled orange, drifted in and out of the kelp fronds.
I’d tell Andrew Reed everything, even the worst of it. How I wasn’t holding my mother’s hand during her ultrasound, either, and I didn’t watch the clock during her biopsy. I wasn’t there for my mother’s last breath, because I was here. Weighted, sinking, alone.
I removed my regulator and screamed on an exhale, a cascade of high-pitched bubbles. Tiny fish scattered. I wanted to scream at my mother: “Nothing is smooth! Nothing is soft!” I wanted to drag her up from the ground, press her decomposing eye against the ocular lens of my microscope, show her slides of dinoflagellates—marine algae. “Look,” I’d say. “Zoom in.” That soft and goopy substance, magnified by thousands, becomes a piercing geometrical shape with armor-like arms.
Too late. Now I had to live without her, inventing versions of memories where I was a better sister, a better daughter. I aimed my flashlight at the seafloor. There was a spotted wolf eel, snaking into the rocks. There was an empty gastropod shell, the abandoned home of Pagurus hirsutiusculus—the hairy hermit crab. And there was the forgettable little crab itself—two of them, three—crawling along the crust of the Pacific.
. . .
Later that night, my skin sticky with saltwater, hair frizz-drying in the late summer heat, I did call Andrew Reed. “Want to know the most interesting thing about hermit crabs?” I said to his voicemail. “It’s a misnomer. They live in colonies. They love the company of their own kind. They trade shells and socialize. They don’t want to be alone.”
. . .
My brother was released from the hospital a few weeks later. We had a stabilization plan, of sorts. He would live with me, attend out-patient therapy, seek employment, establish routines. I made up the futon couch with my mother’s old sheets that still smelled of her. I bought a bouquet of yellow roses and filled my fridge with ham, cheese, organic yogurt.
Andrew Reed had called me back, said, “I guess we can learn a lot from the lowly hermit crab,” and we set up regular check-in appointments.
My brother and I sat side-by-side on the hospital bed, waiting for his discharge papers. His clothes, books, and medications were packed in a bright blue backpack.
I leaned close. He smelled of a fresh shower.
“Look,” he said, pointing to the TV on the wall, the local news. Breaking! Cetaceans Emancipated! At the Vancouver aquarium, the crowds of protestors were cheering and hugging, waving their orca-shaped placards. The aquarium’s board had relented; they would be releasing their captive whales, no longer taking new ones. Only one whale would remain in the tank, a Pacific white-sided dolphin named Helen.
I set my head against my brother’s shoulder. He landed a steady hand on my knee. I strained my ears, listening for the sound of metal crashing on metal, the screaming of cars and trucks on a freeway, zooming and zagging and nearly colliding in their uncontrollable speed. But all I could hear was a foghorn, like some familiar dream. The distant barking of seals. A rowboat, scraping against the shore.
The nurses hugged my brother goodbye. “You take good care now,” they said. They gave him cards and a teddy-bear with hearts for eyes.
In my car, we clicked in our seatbelts and exited the parking lot. “Maybe we can visit her,” my brother said. “Helen. She’s going to be all alone.” And in my un-memory, we did just that. I drove us straight from the hospital to the ferry, where we stood on the top deck, shielding our eyes from the sun. From Horseshoe Bay we drove to the aquarium, found the dolphin tank.
Helen, the one who had to stay, popped to the surface, splashing water on our shoes. A long smile sliced up her dolphin face; she chittered a dolphin laugh. The way I remember it, my brother and I held hands at the edge of Helen’s tank, counted to five, and jumped in.
