Swimming With The Sharks

The guy a few houses down from us was dumping an orange Home Depot bucket of fish entrails into the Atlantic ocean. We could smell the decay of blood and guts almost immediately. It was near dusk and there were still several families at the beach, a bunch of kids not yet ready to get out of the water. Not an ideal time or place to attract sharks. I wondered how he could handle being so close to that smell. He was about knee deep in the water. It always amazed me how far out you could go in the ocean and still only be knee deep, until suddenly, you weren’t. He stuck his hand in the bucket and threw some guts farther out, and I watched as the waves carried them back in. I wondered if he could feel the rotten guts pushing against his legs.

I sighed and kept a closer eye on Maddie, and then told Seth we should probably have her and my mom come in. No point in spending all that time and money making sure she had a waterproof insulin pump only to have her get eaten by a shark, pump and all. My mom, who was generally clueless and not someone we relied on to take care of children, had smelled the fish guts, too. She shielded her eyes from the sun and looked toward the guy, and then I saw her turn to Maddie. They both rode the next wave into shore. It was gentle and rhythmic, watching them come in like that. They had drifted down the beach a ways with the current and Seth waved at them so they could see us. Mom’s moments of lucidity always surprised me. I could count them on one hand, no exaggeration. I mean throughout my whole life. One time had been when I was learning how to drive and I pulled forward in an intersection that wasn’t a four-way stop. She had asked what I had been thinking heading into oncoming traffic, and it was the first time I recalled her sounding like a mom. I wanted to do it again. Another time had been when Dad died. At his funeral, I heard one of Dad’s longtime coworkers say something to her along the lines of how accomplished and poised all three of us—me, Etta, and Owen—were. She had agreed with him, but had said she couldn’t take any credit and it was all my dad’s doing. I guess I agreed with that, but maybe whatever accomplishments and poise my siblings and I had managed to convey was a combination of Dad’s influence and also a result of persevering through less than ideal circumstances, so in that way, she did something. I guess that’s all the credit I’m willing to give her.

Mom had been clueless and unreliable my whole life but the medical term for it was brain damage. Maybe there was a more specific term, but it didn’t matter. Everything sprung from the carbon monoxide poisoning and subsequent brain damage. It wasn’t a new development, but recent events had made her worse. Recent events being she had tried to kill herself. Again. It was her third try, but at least one of those attempts had been a very lazy attempt if you asked me, which of course, no one had. When you think about it, the rating system for suicide consisted of attempts and success. Success or failure. Those are your options, but the attempts could have a bevy of effects. Maybe there was a separate rating system for attempts that no one had bothered to classify. It was complicated. It had been about five years since that last attempt, but damn if it didn’t still feel fresh. It had resulted in a slew of setbacks, but part of that was because she was older. Everything gets harder as you get older. At her age, a fairly old 72, she presented to the medical community as having some form of dementia. It was difficult to explain that she had always, at least as long as I had been alive, been this way because of the brain damage. She never seemed to fully recover from the setbacks. In fact, the setbacks had formed her personality as I knew it.

“Thanks,” I said to my mom when the two of them had made their way back to us.

“That guy’s going to bring all the sharks in,” my mom said. The way she sounded when she was scared or surprised always made me cringe. What’s worse is that I sometimes heard it in myself, too.

She and Maddie toweled off and I forced myself not to ask Maddie if her pump was okay. She hated when I babied her. Sometimes I tried to take my cues from Seth, but he was probably forcing himself to do the same. The pump was waterproof, but we did still need to inspect it to make sure it wasn’t cracked or damaged. The specialist, Dr. Edgar, had said we would be fine on our beach vacation. He had assured us that she could swim with it as long as she wasn’t doing any deep-sea diving, and he had also said we could disconnect it for about an hour if she wanted to swim without it occasionally. We would just need to check her glucose levels ahead of time. He had made it sound so casual when in actuality it felt like we had a new child. I don’t mean that Maddie felt like a new child, but that Diabetes Type 1 felt like our new, third child. I knew I was supposed to look at Maddie and not see just her diagnosis or her insulin levels or glucose level or as a piece of medical equipment that we had to keep intact. The social worker had told me it would come, in time. But of course the worry would never completely go away. And that was true with or without diabetes.

Maddie really loved the water and I worried we hadn’t conveyed that strongly enough to Dr. Edgar during our last appointment. We had been going back and forth between the chlorinated pool and the beach for two days now, and I wasn’t sure how rugged this pump was. I was certain that it would forever carry grains of sand, just like the trunk of our car and the folds in my bookbag. I wasn’t used to it yet and I had to remind myself that Maddie was already treating it like a part of herself just after one month. I was really proud of her responsibility with it, even though the thought of her shouldering a new burden so well was not an ideal way to recognize that someone was growing up. I had told Seth that it was unsettling having this piece of medical equipment be a new part of her body, something that I hadn’t put there. He had agreed, but I don’t think it was the same for him. Sure, we had both made her, but she came out of me. It was different for moms, even my mom had agreed. My own mom was a mom in that she had given birth to me, but if I had acquired an insulin pump at age 12, it would have been Dad as the custodial parent, not Mom, who would have handled everything. When they had fitted Maddie for the pump, they showed us a video about how to take care of it and work it into your lifestyle. It was an old video, but the facts were still the same. Maddie had been so embarrassed about the part in the video titled “Intimacy and Your Pump.” We were all a little uncomfortable. It didn’t help that we had to watch the video with Dr. Edgar, who was probably around my age, and his young intern, Dr. Yillin, who told Maddie she could call her Sida if she wanted. We learned that it was important to discuss your pump with your partner ahead of time. I was surprised, actually, that the video fit this part seamlessly into a discussion about consent. It was a lot of stuff that wasn’t relevant for her yet, like making sure your tubes didn’t get tangled or making sure your levels were okay if you wanted to take it off during intimate moments. I wondered if they had a more age appropriate video, but what would you show a 12-year old on the cusp of the rest of her life? She was worried about holding hands and maybe kissing someone. Eventually, we all laughed at the video and Sida told us we could download the video to rewatch it later.

Maddie’s diagnosis, at least, had brought some reassurance. It was a manageable disease. I was still scared, though. Before Seth and I had children, I don’t remember being afraid of anything. I had always been reckless, though. Adventurous might be a kinder way to say it, but it wasn’t as truthful. Seth had always done what he wanted but had never felt the need to name it. This, too, was different for moms. Maddie was 12 now, newly diabetic and swimming with sharks with my mom. Charles was 16 and was off somewhere with his cousins. He would have liked seeing the guy dumping fish guts into the ocean though. Sometimes I worried that my carefree way of parenting was too much or that everyone else was judging me for letting my kids do all that they did, so I was glad that my mom had decided it was time to stop swimming for the night. There was still the pool, and since Maddie seemed to be part fish, it was hard to keep her and her cousins away from the pool all night.

Seth said that maybe we should tell the guy to stop with the fish entrails. Maybe he didn’t know it could attract sharks, he said. I wondered how you couldn’t know. I generally didn’t want to tell strangers not to do something, but then I saw some other people walking over to the guy as he stomped over the protected dunes with his empty bucket. A family of four stood on the walkway to the guy’s house, so Seth and I decided to head over there, too. We asked Maddie to drink some juice and start the grill and have Aunt Etta or Uncle Owen help if she needed it. It was our night to cook dinner, and we had already prepped the salads and marinated the chicken. We were having grilled corn on the cob, grilled chicken, grilled veggies, some burgers, and two different types of salad. Maddie wanted to come with us and tell the guy off, both for dumping fish guts into the shallow water and for walking over the dunes, but I told her she needed to get Grandma Jean out of the sun. It was true. Mom was looking exhausted. I felt bad that Maddie sometimes had to help take care of my mom but I also liked giving her some responsibility. I reminded her about the juice and she stuck her tongue out at me.

The family of four was already telling the guy how irresponsible it was to dump fish guts in such shallow water where people were swimming. When we walked over there, Seth and I nodded at the other family. We all pointed toward the public fishing pier about a mile away where he could dump his fish guts. You couldn’t see the pier from here, but you could make out the green light. Like in the Great Gatsby, I wanted to say but didn’t. He started spouting all this stuff about how it was the ocean, nobody owned it and he was free to do what he wanted. That was too much for me. I cleared my throat and told him that my mom happened to have a death wish, and although sometimes I wished her a modicum of success, I knew that wasn’t what I actually wanted, especially not on vacation. And anyway, with her history of poorly rated suicide attempts and destructive behavior, she would end up with a missing foot. That was her luck. He looked at me like I was crazy, which was fair. I was sharing some personal details, a tactic I had learned from watching Dad give closing arguments in court. When you find the right moment and the right details to share, the passion and vulnerability can add to the strength of your argument. Or maybe it just distracts, I was never sure how Dad got it to work. Perhaps I didn’t have the right details to share or the right moment in which to share them. When the guy still hadn’t agreed to dump his fish guts off the public fishing pier, I told him I was on my period, which would attract even more sharks. It wasn’t a solid argument, because he could have told me that I should stay out of the water. I was also attracting sharks, he could have said. But you know how some men are, one mention of a period and they shut down. Jesus Christ, lady, he said. But he agreed to dump the guts elsewhere next time.

He stomped back to his beach house and looked embarrassed. The other family thanked us for backing them up and then they all waved and walked away, but the mom in the group turned around and walked over to the railing. “Sorry about your mom,” she said, “that sounds rough.” I waved my hand to dismiss it, then shrugged. “Thanks, but it’s not always so bad,” I said. Seth squeezed my hand and we walked back home to make dinner.

At dinner, it was apparent that Maddie had heard me yelling at the guy. Maddie was regaling everyone with what I had said, weird as it was. At first, I was uncomfortable and wondered if I should stop her. I couldn’t tell if it was okay to be so glib about it or if that was the same as acceptance. My mom and I never talked about all her suicide attempts or any of it. We didn’t need to; it was always there anyway. Would have been like talking about the air that we breathe. But Maddie was different, and her experience with my mom was shaping her differently. She didn’t shy away from the obvious, even when it was uncomfortable. And besides, telling the guy about my mom’s death wish had been a weird decision on my part and I could see the humor. We laughed at my mom swimming with the sharks, and how it was just her luck for there to be sharks in the ocean, completely avoiding her. Of course, none of us were sure there had been sharks nearby, but by this point, the story had gathered more drama as it churned. In Maddie’s version, the sharks had practically been circling them, turning their noses up. It was like the time the small passenger plane crashed near Mom’s apartment. It had crash-landed into another apartment building and killed all three occupants immediately. All five people on the plane had died, too. An explosion, like nothing had ever been there. Mom, sitting at home less than a quarter mile away, had said it was just her luck to be so close to death like that. I had wondered if she even felt sad for the people who had died. But when you think about it, we’re all pretty close to death all the time and maybe it’s always a matter of perseverance and dumb luck that saves us or keeps us going.

BIO: Emily Dressler lives in Northeast Ohio. She works as a proofreader for a global ad agency. Her short fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Villain Era Lit, The Citron Review, and Angel City Review. Her poetry has recently appeared in Okay Donkey.