Which is why they have sailed

I.

It’s strange for Claudia, who has never been boating before, to live in a boat. Its name is Arden.

            “Why do we live in a boat if we never go boating anywhere?” Claudia once asked her father. Her parents are both short, so at least they fit under the snug roof. Claudia won’t be short, but for now she is.

“Bah,” Her father says, “We’re always going somewhere. Just think of Attila the Hun.”

She always thought that comment did not make sense.

He flips an egg on the stove, “Just use your imagination.”

If you walk by you can see how charming the Arden is—look at that little window with Claudia’s father frying eggs. Look at his kind face with his curly, white-haired head too-big-for-a-hat. He is moving back and forth in a kind kitchen, with a miniature flowerpot on the windowsill. These are clay flowers—they keep on living even if they have been forgotten (except that Claudia broke one of the pedals recently, on accident, and turned the miniature flowers so the wound could hide from innocent eyes).

Sometimes, green dragonflies fly in and die. “This one lived a nice life,” her father says. “How could you live a sad life if you were that color.” He holds up the dead thing for Claudia to see.

“Shall I put it in the omelet?” he asks.

            Sometimes, Claudia thinks her father is going mad. But at least he’s consistent in his madness. He makes her eggs with lots of butter every morning. In the evening, they watch pigeons together. They talk chimneys and make observations about how the sun peeks up and over the edge of the forest with its long, fiery eyelashes.

3:00 am is the witching hour. You can barely feel it, just as you can barely feel miniature red spiders crawling all over your skin, maybe burrowing in a little (Claudia’s dog died from too many ticks in the forest where they used to go walking below arched trees).

            This is no reason to be afraid.

Which is why they have strung fairy lights all around the Arden and on the inside of the Arden. Which is why they collect clay flowers and gauzy white curtains, and put beautiful pictures on the walls, and make fancy French eggs in the morning and dragonfly soup at noon.

Every night at the witching hour, Claudia’s mother weeps uncontrollably, and Claudia’s father gathers her mother up beside him and they read. (Claudia has seen her parents lay together reading, her mother’s large nose casting a shadow on the wall. The orange light is their friend. They are like animals with green necks, sheltered by parenthesis, separated from a furious land by some thin strip of water. They are quiet birds who wish to slip away under the clarity and maybe stay).

           

II.

Sometimes the whole world feels like an open-faced sandwich. “Why would there be treasure here,” she asks Wes, “There’s nobody around. Nobody lives here.”

“You never know,” says Wes. He is self-assured and has red hair. They sometimes ride scooters to get where they’re going and his scooter is red. He speaks with his tongue too far forward in his mouth, but doesn’t worry about where he will end up this day or that day (he doesn’t tell his mother where he is going in the morning, and she doesn’t ask).

Wes is a treasure hunter, and they have become childhood friends.

He commands, “let’s find some treasure.” So then after school, instead of doing sports or homework they go to the sand streams nearby, and watch the sun blaze in a shroud of eyelashes, pushing their eyes to the limit, wearing the glasses Claudia stole from her parents so that she can see further and deeper.

Beep beep beep.

Except the beep is not really a beep, but a noise like an animal might make if an animal were a metal detector. They spend a while digging up the sand. The sand gets wetter and wetter as they go down, but they keep pulling it up, feeling destructive or maybe humming a little.

“What did you find?” Claudia asks. Her voice is cold because it has started raining, and she pulls a sweater up around her like a poncho, ties it around her neck.

“Nothing, there’s nothing,” He is disappointed. They are both disappointed and feed their disappointment to the ducks as they walk by, and to the pigeons, and to the geese with green necks (how some children have childhood friends and others only have bad memories).

This was a strange love between Claudia and Wes. If they weren’t on a plateau hunting treasure, or in a bookshop counting double chins, who knows where they were. But not here).

On Friday at lunch, Wes shows Claudia his pocket watch and eats a bologna cheese sandwich. He chews slowly, with his tongue too far forward in his mouth and with fat lips.

“Where did you get the pocket watch?” Claudia wants to know.

“From my brother. He’s a student in Arizona. His name is Chad.” Wes says it all proudly, as if it’s an honor to have a brother who is a student in Arizona.

            “Can I have a piece of your hair?” Wes asks Claudia.

            “That’s weird,” Claudia says, but gives it to him anyway. It hurts when she pulls it out, which is strange because her hair is usually falling out all over the place. Wes scrunches the piece of yellow hair until it is small enough to fit in the watch. He is proud, as if all the painted arrows are pointing to the seven seas, as if he can jump up into the sky and keep going up, like a space agent, like a white wall that rejects paint, like a salamander who has forgotten how to swim and lies out on the beach breathing heavily but is content.  

Altogether, it is a strange love. They are young, of course, young enough to rejoice in making toaster strudels for each other after school.

            “Do you want the strawberry and cream cheese one or the apple one,” Wes asks. They are on his front porch talking about unconditional love. Talking about armies of chairs battling armies of stools, and how mint leaves make lemonade so much better.

            “Let’s split them,” says Claudia.

            “Split what?”

            “Split the toaster strudels.”

            On Wednesday, Wes shows her his collection. He once went abroad with his family, and with Chad, and kept a French fry, or “chip” every time they went out to supper. This collection was sealed in a plastic bag, each fry painstakingly labeled with permanent marker and the name of the restaurant. It’s almost as cool as Claudia’s castle made of gum—how the colors fade into each other, bright like clay flowers. She keeps it on her very own windowsill, where she can watch the people who walk by on the little path—who look at houseboats and wonder “why is this houseboat just sitting there, why doesn’t it go anywhere.”

            “This is a beautiful French fry collection,” Claudia compliments Wes.

            “Thanks,” he says sheepishly. “I know it’s not very useful, but at least it’s beautiful.”

            They look at it for a long while and admire how the golden yellow melts into the moldy green.

            “Chad has a collection too, and when he went to college he gave it to me.” Wes pulls out another Ziploc bag and they admire it together. His cheeks are rosy red like the color you would think of when you imagine a cockatiel drinking hot chocolate.

            “My family is moving,” He confesses to Claudia.

            He leaves in a not-so-dramatic-way. It’s not as if he dies or anything, but just leaves, uncomfortably, like when someone you’re staring at turns, and looks at you, and then turns away.

Claudia finds a letter the next day, in the very large locker where she keeps her bass.

Dear Claudia,

I’m sorry I had to leave to go to Australia. My parents are restless creatures you know, with lots and lots of money, and they’ve always wanted to run away. I’ll miss you. I’ll try to send you some French fries in the mail. You can have the rest of the toaster strudels that I left here.

On the letter, there is an arrow drawn, pointing to the box of toaster strudels.

He also leaves her the metal detector, but doesn’t say anything about it in the letter.

III.

Claudia dreams of Australia, and of purple trees in Australia, and of little houses in Australia along the mountainside, where Wes probably lives now.

            When she wakes at the witching hour her mother is weeping, and the water has crept up past the window. Arden is rocking. She likes the rocking. The water seems to her like so many lumps of white liquid sugar. The waves remind her of mountains with shiny little peaks and avalanches. There’s a weird, unidentified feeling in her stomach, as if all the beheaded dragonflies are crying out for justice—as if all the live ones feel lonely at the world but it is not the world’s fault and loneliness is not like anger.

            “There is no reason to be afraid,” she tells herself. She reads for a little while, about moths. She is good at entertaining herself. She has her father, she has her morning eggs and her water peaked mountains. Once, she overheard her father talking to a friend after dinner. They were drinking beer. They had given her some beer, and they thought that she was asleep in her little room with her little bookcase, a fairy tale book lying across her stomach, open to “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.”

            “She’s just not the same,” her father said.

            “What happened?”

            “Nothing. Nothing happened.”

IV.

            “Do you want an egg, dad,” she asks.

            “Yes,” he says. He is reading something of little consequence.            

“How do you stop missing someone?” she looks at her father’s eyes. Tries to will her father’s eyes to look up at her. When they do, the sea is in them (he is reading Tennyson). They are imperfect eyes that are learning to be vast.

“I don’t know if you can,” he says.

“Do you want a toaster strudel,” she asks.

“Give one to your mother.”

Yes, yes that is a good plan.

            “Maybe we can use the boat today, dad. Let’s sail out into something. Can we please.” She makes his egg white with cheese, looking out the window at folks as they pass by with their baby strollers and their Saturday sweatpants, with roses in their cheeks and renegade raindrops uncoddled by clouds.

            “Yeah. Let’s use the boat.”

Its name is Arden.