The Salt God's Daughter Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  PART TWO

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  PART THREE

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  In memory of M.N., woman of the ocean

  “When angels fell, some fell on the land, some on the sea. The former are the faeries and the latter were often said to be the seals.”

  —Anonymous Orcadian

  Prologue

  Naida, 2001

  PEOPLE HAD BEEN calling me the Frog Witch for as long as I could remember. My mother, Ruthie, lied and told me it was because they envied the long wavy locks of jet-black hair that fell across my back, which I had inherited from my father. His pale green sea glass eyes were mine. My dark red lips appeared bloodstained just as his had, as did the skin between the toes on my left foot. I knew my mother hadn’t wanted to lie, that we had to agree to pretend there was nothing special about me. Even though I remembered everything that had happened, even though I noticed the shape of his absence all around us, how it lingered at the foot of my bed at dawn, caught between darkness and daylight.

  When my mother first discovered me, felt me start to crawl deep within her, she thought of how my father had left her and her breasts dripped milk. She didn’t know about the seasons of living things, that they needed to settle like water, to find their right place on Earth so as to fall in step with the moon. She didn’t know how fast I was growing inside her. In my mind, I was already three years old when I pushed out of her body and into her hands.

  But now, at twelve, I wanted to believe there was nothing different about me. My mother had refused surgery on my foot when I was a child because she didn’t want to cause me pain. Now I kept my foot hidden as much as I could.

  “Hey, Frog Witch, catching any flies?” the kids would taunt me, before knocking into me in the hallways, causing me to drop my books. Sometimes, when I tired of the bullying and teasing, when the name Frog Witch made my skin burn like fire, I snuck out at night under the stars and dove into the water where there was solace, where there was peace. When everyone else was sleeping, I’d dive into the cool Pacific and swim among the three sea lions that sometimes lived under our porch. They were my companions, and this was my meditation.

  But some people wouldn’t let me forget the past. I knew all my classmates talked about it, not just the mean girls who called me Frog Witch. They liked to point to the raised pink scar on my forehead I’d gotten one night when I was four. I stopped trying to hide it with bangs when Sister Mary came to visit and told my mother that the Devil and God had wrestled for my soul and God had let go first. If I was damned I might as well show it.

  Each day after school, I’d run up and down the bleach-scented, burgundy-carpeted hallways of Wild Acres, the retirement home where I grew up. I could knock on any door whenever I wanted. I visited Dr. Brownstein every afternoon because her soft brown eyes were always warm if not slightly hidden under heavy painted-blue lids, because she kept two plastic palm trees and a parakeet that would say, “Hello, sweetie” and, “Time to make the donuts.” Also because she kept fistfuls of Tootsie Rolls and butterscotch candies in the pockets of her housecoat, which she’d drop into my outstretched hands.

  My moods were unpredictable and changeable, my mother said, like the ocean. It was true. Sometimes when I thought of my father and how he left us, I became so full of rage that my mother sent me out to the beach to scream at the seagulls, and after, I’d watch them drift down through the air like white scraps of paper. The sea lions would start barking on the shoreline, causing my mother to rush out onto our overhanging porch, calling me inside.

  Didn’t I deserve a life? The girls in my grade were just discovering how mean they could be. I just wanted a boyfriend, to be loved, to be kissed in the same ways other girls my age were kissed. Boys chased me down Second Street after school, calling me names, forcing me to find new paths home. Soon, I would need protection. I thought that if my father came back, he could stop this. As much as my mother said she hated him, I knew she idolized him. And because she did, I did too.

  People whispered when I passed by on the pier.

  “There’s a Frog Witch,” I heard them say every word.

  Once when I was buying milk at RiteAid, a girl pulled a few hairs from my head as she walked by. “Nice foot, Frog Witch,” she said, excusing herself in a laughing tone. She was hoping to get a piece of me. The worst was when the girls my age pretended to like me. Friendships were a bit foreign to me, as much as I craved them. My only friends were my mother and Aunt Dolly and the residents of Wild Acres. I’d be on cloud nine for days when I thought I had made a new friend. Then I would find out that she only wanted to be told stories: that things would work out just as she’d planned, that she’d meet a true love while seeking shelter in a rainstorm, or that she’d get accepted into Dartmouth or Harvard, land a good job after that, get married and then have a baby. As if my being different still lent me some kind of secret knowledge. I knew people craved assurance. That life wasn’t hard, or painful, or that they wouldn’t have to face it all alone.

  Many nights, I crept out onto the porch and watched my mother standing on the sand below, her nightgown billowing under the hem of a shiny blue raincoat as she doled out fish for the three sea lions that crowded around her, filling her loneliness. Even though she could not swim, they were hers and she was theirs. They were mine, too. They were my guardians. And I was hers.

  After, she’d crawl into bed with me to tell me the stories of her life. Sometimes she’d weep, and I’d hold her and promise never to leave her. I coveted her midnight visits even though I had trouble staying awake the next day. Once or twice, I put my head down on my desk and broke into sobs. My teacher asked if it was due to the bullying, but it wasn’t. It was the weight of her, the sheer weight of my mother’s love for me, and mine for her, and the memory of our bodies curved inward, our knees touching, and the feel of her hands bracing my shoulders as if I could ward off harm for us both. “You are my life, Naida,” she’d whisper, waiting.

  My words “and you’re mine” became like escaped birds that floated above me, irretrievable. I wanted to reach out and grasp them, to tell her she was mine, then to tuck my mother’s hair behind her ear as I usually did. But I held my breath under the blue sheet, pretending to be asleep, listening to the waves crash into the space between her need and my silence, until one of us fell asleep.

  There was no water that was too rough or frigid. I could swim in nighttime storms beyond the breakwaters, and had dozens of times that my mother did not know about, letting my fingers sift through the tips of the feathered sea grass near the oil rigs as barracuda darted around my legs in figure eights, and a swa
rm of fish swam in silvery bubbles as a sea lion crossed, the slip of its coat brushing against my arms as its dark eyes flashed in the water. I was a person who remembered. My mother understood this. She said my father had the same gift. The story of what happened to me when I was four years old would never go away. I didn’t want to think about lying in the hospital bed with drool dribbling out of the corner of my mouth and an IV stuck in my arm. Humiliating—my aunt took pictures.

  The attack on me would be the last straw, and I could feel it in the same way certain animals lay down before a storm. I knew it, just as I knew that my mother’s eyes would tear up whenever she’d catch me staring out at the ocean.

  I knew that soon it would be time to leave home. As much as I loved my mother, I knew it would no longer be safe for me to be here with her. I was almost a woman now, a nerd by all accounts, a solid competitor in the science club, a good and loyal daughter, a friend who remembered the residents of Wild Acres, and an impressive swimmer. My father needed to know me, and I to know him. I didn’t have a name for what I was and what I could do. But I needed to save myself. There were things I needed to discover—about who I was, my mother’s past, and even the woman who came before.

  The attack on me would happen first, though. I could feel it coming.

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Ruthie, 1972

  WE RAN WILD at night, effortless, boundless, under a blood-red sky—to where and to what we couldn’t have known. We craved it, that someplace. We were two little girls, sisters, daughters with no mother, distrustful of the freedom we were given, knowing she shouldn’t have left. We tore across dirt campgrounds where we slept, naked but for our mud boots, letting the wind shiver up across our bare chests. We stole bags of chips from the canteen on the pier. Our feet pounded the crushed oyster shells in seaside motel parking lots when we’d search for drinking water, and we let calluses thicken up our soles to withstand the hot desert sand, or dash over a highway of broken glass, wherever we’d been dropped. We scampered across the foggy cliffs that separated Pacific Coast Highway from the ocean in old ballet slippers, as nimble as two fairies, our long red hair whipping into tangles in the wind. We bumped up against the night, without stopping. We stole wrinkled leather sneakers that were two sizes too big, and wore them until they fit. We raced in the sand, fought in the dusk. We knew we were not invisible. We tightened belts around our stomachs at night and bicycled unlit sidewalks and sometimes tucked up our knees and steered with no hands through the darkness. No one hit us. We believed we were unstoppable. We slept under sleeping bags, beneath trees, and pushed our backs against cliffs, our noses cold.

  We waited for our mother to come back.

  “Ruthie, do you miss her?” Dolly asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  We talked of Cool Whip and ice cream, of warm apple crisp and salty Fritos. We dreamed of flying.

  Then my mother came back. We’d crawl into our station wagon at night, trapped by her need for freedom, and then by her soap opera, General Hospital, which we watched on her portable television. Afterward, we listened to folk songs and Hebrew prayers as she’d strum a fat-bellied classical, knowing this meant that she was feeling fine, that she had acknowledged she had two little girls, whether she wanted us or not.

  We used our fingernails to cut away ticks from our legs, and we cleaned up her empty bottles before she’d wake up. We bit at the skin around our nails, leaving it swollen and red.

  If I told you that I ached for a different mother, I’d be lying. I ached for my own, every minute. As motherless daughters do.

  She was our child. We didn’t know anything different. Everyone knew a mother was a daughter’s first love.

  When she asked if we thought she was still beautiful, we said yes, because she was. We told the truth about the steely lightness of her eyes, how quickly they changed color with her emotions, from gray to blue, in parts. We lied when she asked if we thought she’d fall in love one day. We said yes.

  It was as possible to miss someone who was right in front of you as it was to miss someone who had left. It was also possible to miss someone who had not yet been born. This I had learned. My mother had told us as much. We walked around craving everyone, even before they’d leave. We never thought it would end, our ache. Often, from the windows of my mother’s speeding green Ford Country Squire, we shouted out the words to James Taylor ballads and motioned for truckers to honk on demand by pumping our fists up and down. We grew cocky, forgetting we were people who had been left.

  We were already nomadic, and from the most primal of places, we had become hunters, always searching for someone or something we could lay claim to, hook ourselves onto, to quiet our trembling clamorous souls.

  As long as she came back for us.

  I HAVE FEW memories before I was six years old, but waking up hungry is one of them. In the white sky of a January night, under the glow of a Hunger Moon, I remember looking out of the rear compartment window of the wood-paneled station wagon my mother called Big Ugly. We had been kept warm at the campsite all night, body pressed to body, wet leaves under the orange sleeping bag.

  We hadn’t eaten since the night before. I knew this only because my job was to get rid of the trash. My mother had spent the evening grazing the tiny bottles of liquor on the flipped-down tailgate. Dolly and I had kicked around the canyon, making Jacob’s ladder designs out of string and waiting for the portable television’s batteries to die, which always brought on my mother’s mood swings. Even as Dolly moved the television so as to get the best reception and I adjusted the antennae, my mother drank. She watched us now from the roof of the car as she paged through her Old Farmer’s Almanac in search of the moon’s clues, her legs tucked beneath her on a plaid blanket that spilled over the car windows, keeping it dark inside for us when we finally went to bed, keeping out the moonlight.

  When I woke up, I thought Dolly was crying because of my mother’s anger at the batteries, but it was the trees.

  The trees were falling off the hillside.

  We had never seen anything like it. I watched the blurred brushstrokes, the cascading sweeps of russet and umber tumbling beneath a blue-black sky. I had always clung to land, distrustful of the tide’s obedience to an irrational moon. Now, even the land was giving way. Storms from one of the strongest El Niños in years lifted the top layer of earth like a fingernail, flicking it off, along with rocks and branches. Dolly had woken up first, and started screaming. She pointed to the river of mud rushing down the canyon toward us. Only months before, fire brought by the Santa Ana winds had cleared the hillside of most of the trees. Now that there was little to hold the earth in place, the winds ripped the charred remains from their roots, spilling them across our campsite. The roots had released easily, willing to be exposed after having been tugged at and battered for so long. I could not blame them.

  “Dammit, where are my keys?” my mother said, climbing into the front seat. She skimmed her hand across the vinyl. “Where are those damn things?” Her hair spun in wild black tangles, along with her rage. Dolly and I scampered around the back, searching. My hunger turned to dust. I could not find my glasses.

  “Hurry up, Mom! Will you get us out of here?” Dolly cried, as rain swept across the windshield in blustery sheets, smacking the glass with rocks. Patterns of flesh and green filled the windows. Dolly handed me my glasses. Clarity.

  “My keys. What did you girls do with them?” my mother asked, as I climbed in front beside her. The river of mud was coming toward us.

  January’s Hunger Moon was supposed to keep us fed, or return my mother’s lover to her. But it had not done either, so far. The moon was misbehaving, my mother said. Bad unpredictable weather followed the Child Theory of Planetary Creation. The moon was Earth’s child, which meant that the moon’s materials had originally spun off from the earth. The Hunger Moon had conspired, teasing the storms toward the Pacific coast of California, bringing heavy rains and torrential winds, not a
t all following what she had planned.

  I kicked a pile of clothes aside and shook out my coat, reaching under the seat, feeling the sharp teeth of the keys.

  “I found them!” I cried, certain this would make my mother love me.

  She took the keys from me without a flicker of recognition. She pushed them into the ignition, and waited. Nothing. She pumped the gas three times and then flooded the engine. We started moving. “Faster. Keep driving, Mom. Don’t stop,” said Dolly.

  “Be quiet,” my mother whispered. “Please, just be quiet. If you’re not quiet I don’t know what I’ll do.” We drove off, barely able to see the full moon amid the darkness. This unforeseen storm had her rattled, threatening her mastery. My mother had been playing a trick on the world by surviving on her own with two little girls. Without a man. Without family or friends, to speak of. With only her Farmer’s Almanac and the full moons to guide her, she would do it on her own. But this storm had caught her off guard, and to boot there was hunger, which always made her anxious.

  I heard howling. I watched the gray Hunger Moon sneaking behind the San Gabriel Mountains. I wondered if it might be willing to help us find a safe place. She had told me such things were possible, and I believed that the reason we were stuck, why the moon hadn’t cooperated, had something to do with me, my behavior. Not being good enough, brave enough, like my sister.

  “We’re not going to die,” I whispered as I turned back to Dolly, noticing her hair, a deeper shade of red than mine, smeared straight across her wet cheeks.

  As Big Ugly spun onto the slick highway and skidded to a stop, shattering the air with mud, I wanted to disappear from the aftermath of her lack of control, which I could feel. Disheveled tree roots, cracked rocks, broken bumpers, and shards of glass littered the road. People were being evacuated. I could sense my mother’s anger filling the car as she weaved through fender-bender crashes, drove up beyond the curve of sky, and then, once out of sight, pulled off to the side in a quiet and dark patch of mud. She reached across my lap and pulled the door handle, opening my door. “Get out, Ruthie. Don’t make me tell you twice.”