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Show But I was crying too hard by then. We reached the shore, and he roughly gathered the gear together. In the dark it was hard to see the black fins and booties. We would rinse them with fresh water when we returned to the cabin. My father's silence was almost enough to make me try again. I looked out at the liquid black water and imagined the kinds of creatures that might roam the sea at night. All the animals come out at night, my mother had first said as we wiped saliva in our masks and prepared to enter the water. Just wait. I chose the known quantity of my father's anger that night instead of the darkened sea and felt his disappointment as we walked back up the sand. She could describe other moments in the sea those first few years back in the islands. Days when the surf was down, summers mostly, and they had to play games in the pan flat water. Throw a ball, dive for a rock, jump like popcorn over knee-high waves, and "Giggle and Drown," a game in which her father would take her out into water that was over her head and begin to tickle her, her ribs, her legs, the hollow pits under her arms. She would laugh and struggle and cough and choke, and he would chant giggle and drown, giggle and drown, giggle and drown. The tickling continued and the chanting. Of course, he always stopped long before she drowned, and often she would beg him to play again even as salt water ran from her nose and her chest heaved in and out. His point, he would tell her, was that she needed to remain focused in the ocean, not get distracted by emotions, always remain in control. If she got caught up in laughing, well, then, she would drown. And he was right. At some point, when she was taking in more water than air, she would, indeed, stop laughing and would take the measures 121 |
