Flow

a short story by eileen kelly

Notes on “Flow”: the following story was written in November of 2019. It was nominated for and is set to be published in the 23rd Annual Café Shapiro Anthology, an anthology featuring work from outstanding undergraduate writers, at the University of Michigan in the spring of 2020, and an excerpt from the story will appear in the Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts (LSWA) Arts and Literary Journal in the fall of 2020.

Maybe it was a sign- getting expelled from Westshore High made Charlie reevaluate every detail of his former plans for the future. He was going to graduate somewhere smack-dab in the middle of his high school class, go to whatever college offered him a scholarship, and get an arguably safe, predictable degree in computer science. He’d probably end up working in a windowless lab for the rest of his life, and that was fine with him.

            But it was like this: Charlie hadn’t meant to hack into the school district’s network security system. Well, maybe he had meant to, but he definitely hadn’t planned on getting caught. It was just for fun, some lighthearted Friday night experimentation, until he was called down to the principal’s office over the PA system during second period on Monday.

            To say that his father had been upset was an understatement, like saying that the universe was “big” or that the ocean was “deep”. He had given Charlie two options: transfer to the military prep academy that he himself had graduated from, or get a job and move out.

            And Charlie, though quiet and nerdy and the kind of kid to sit in the back of class and never say a word, was nothing if not stubborn. He had spent his whole adolescence avoiding and opposing even the very idea of going to the school, and he wasn’t about to back down now. So, he had done what any other teenage delinquent would do: persuaded his uncle to take him on his annual spring fishing trip to Alaska and hadn’t come back. He had been picking up sandwiches for the two of them to have for lunch when he’d seen the sign at the local deli counter, pinned to a corkboard on door that looked ancient, more holes than cork. “Help Wanted”, it had read, scrawled in forward-slanting black ink. “Steward- Commercial Fishing Vessel. Starts Immediately.” Charlie had torn a slip from the bottom of the advertisement without a second thought, dialing the number listed at the payphone down the street.

            As it turns out, “Starts Immediately” was a pretty good way to get out of that return flight to Florida and the military school acceptance letter that he knew his father had paid good money to ensure was sitting on his desk at home. The next morning, while the sun was just starting to creep above the horizon, Charlie found himself aboard an emerald green fishing boat that looked like it should have sunk in the last century.

            The remaining weeks of Alaskan summer were spent getting his sea legs, learning the ins and outs of life on the ship. Charlie’s only previous experience on the water was one singular airboat ride in the Everglades when he was five. The way the Alaskan sea was so different to the Florida coastline surprised him, even after a whole year- the ocean here was cold and dark and lined with evergreens and rocky mountains, a shadowy contrast to the sandy shoreline he had played on as a child. Early one morning, an older deckhand- well, they were all older, to Charlie, who had faithfully told the captain that he was eighteen on his first day- had asked him over oatmeal about his life back in Florida.

            “Well, do ya got a lady down there? Are ya going back to visit her for the winter?” The man had asked.

            Charlie had almost spit out his cereal- a little stale, now that the crew was nearing the end of their trip. He had shaken his head, violently. “No, no. Nothing like that. I’m not going back this year. I’m going to get a factory job, if I can.” He knew that the other men on the boat worked canning fish in the winter.

            The man had rolled his eyes. “‘If I can.’ Charlie, these days, they’ll pay ya just for walkin’ in the front office of them fish cannin’ factories. If ya want a cannin’ job, ya’ll get a cannin’ job.”

            And so it was settled. Charlie had spent all fall and winter cutting open and gutting fish in a crowded assembly line with other out-of-season fishermen, wearing blue gloves that reached to his armpits and a yellow latex rain coat that did the best it could do protect him from the sprays of briny water that shot out when he sliced into a fish.

            Working in the canning factory wasn’t nearly as bad as Charlie thought it might be, all things considered. The worst part wasn’t getting covered in stale seawater every day or even the smell of fish guts that he could never quite wash off of his hands. It was sharing the tiny one-bedroom apartment that accounted for half of his weekly pay with Mark and Olly. The only time Charlie wasn’t sandwiched between the two other boys was when he was on the toilet, and even then, he could hear every movement that was made in their apartment, and the one above it, and the one below, and the ones on either side. Their twin beds were pushed so close together that every time someone rolled over in the middle of the night, Charlie woke up. He missed the bunk beds on the ship, the white noise of the boat’s engine that masked any other sounds. They were shoulder-to-shoulder at the assembly line, too, Mark yelling over the chatter and clank of machinery in Charlie’s right ear and Olly shouting right back at him in his left.

            Charlie had grown up being crowded, sandwiched between little cousins and neighbors on the merry-go-round at the local playground and in the backseat of his mom’s rusty burnt-orange pickup truck, hot and sticky and sweaty in the humid Florida heat, rolling the windows down and sticking their heads out like dogs until his mother noticed and reached back to pull them in. She always had little kids running around- she had owned a daycare when he was little, and so he had always had built-in friends.

            Charlie’s mother had been a stark contrast to his father. She had been friendly, almost never without a smile, with crooked teeth and a face covered with freckles, framed with curly ash-blonde hair that reached to her mid-back. His father was always stoic, strait-laced, an Army veteran with a chip on his shoulder, always thinking that he was entitled to the final say in any family decision. What had always surprised Charlie, from the moment he was old enough to notice, was how much his mother still loved his father. She’d pack his lunch every weekday with a colored-pencil heart on the bag, she’d fold his laundry while he watched Saturday football. Looking back, maybe she hadn’t really loved him at all. Maybe she’d just been doing what she was told.

            Eighth grade had come with the dawn of “Important Decisions”, a phrase that his father always said like it had capital letters, decisions about Charlie, not decisions for Charlie to make. There had been an argument, raging on like a hurricane for weeks and weeks on end. His mother said that military school was no place for a boy like Charlie- like Charlie, meaning quiet and crafty and unobtrusive, who would hide in the locker room to get out of gym class and always turned in his math homework a day early. His father had been mad. So mad that his parents had had the biggest fight that Charlie ever remembered- his mother stormed out wearing nothing but a blue sweatshirt and some pajama pants, bare feet, and drove her rusty truck off down Mango Lane, just to “get some air”.

            And she’d gone and crashed the thing right into the Spanish-moss-covered tree at the end of the road. No airbags. The doctor had said she’d been dead on impact. Charlie had never been able to get the image out of his head: his mother, the most alive person that he had ever met, imagining what her wild hair must have looked like as she flew forward, propelled towards the steering column as it forced itself through her chest.

            Charlie hadn’t realized how much his mom had been the rubber band that pulled him and his father together until she was gone. She had been their interpreter, the commonality that had allowed them to coexist under the same roof. After that day, Charlie didn’t even know how to talk to his father. It was as if they spoke different languages. Everything that Charlie said made his father angry, and everything that his father said to Charlie made him feel like screaming, blowing up, throwing a fist through the drywall.

            Of course, he never did. Because, like his mother had said, he was quiet and unobtrusive and couldn’t stand to be an inconvenience to anyone. But that didn’t mean that he wasn’t appalled and frustrated over and over and over again at every mention or threat of military school if Charlie didn’t get his grades up, win his heat at the swim meet, get up and try harder. How could his father hold it over his head like this- the very reason that they couldn’t communicate, the reason, really, for his mother to have driven off that night, became the only topic of conversation that he would have with him.

            Charlie hadn’t talked to his father since the day he left Florida. Charlie doubted that his father even missed him at all.

           He was happy when summer finally came around again. Happy to get back on the ship, happy to meet the captain’s stern stare from across the deck as he collected his crew uniform, even happy to receive a few friendly punches in the arm from his cabinmates.

            On the first day back on the ship, Charlie met Marie. Marie was the captain’s daughter. She was young, pretty, dark-haired, smiley- and Charlie was viciously warned about her the first time one of his crewmates caught him even glancing in her direction.

            “That’s Marie. She’s off-limits. She’ll try to draw ya, in talk your ear off- but you can’t do that. Ya hear me?” the man next to him had hissed in Charlie’s ear.

            And Charlie heard, but the warning, although well-intentioned, was unnecessary. Charlie didn’t want to get with Marie- he was just fascinated by her, the way she managed to fit on the ship like a puzzle piece and yet at the same time look so out-of-place, always carrying a laptop and a clipboard and at least three notebooks, her glasses sliding down her nose and a pencil tucked behind her ear.

            In mid-June, Charlie approached her for the first time. She was sitting on the deck, legs crossed, and he attributed his sudden bravery to the fact that it was three in the morning- the captain had the crew working nearly around the clock this time of year, when the sun never dipped below the horizon for long.

            She had looked up as he approached, smiling. “Hello!” She stuck her hand out towards him. “I’m Marie. As I’m sure you know.”

            He nodded, shaking it. “Charlie. What are you working on?” he asked, gesturing to the computer and notebooks that lay in an array around her.

            “Oh, it’s just research. For school. I’m studying the ocean. Last summer, I went to Greenland to study.” she paused to hit a few keys on her keyboard, and Charlie got the impression that even while she was talking to him, her mind was on her work. “Charlie, do you know anything about entering data tables?”

            “Oh, um, yeah. Yes. I do.”

            “Great. You can help me, then?” Charlie went to look over her shoulder, glancing up at his fellow crew members dazedly winding nets, half asleep. They didn’t seem to have missed him yet.

            Helping Marie with her research became a regular occurrence, much to the disdain (and jealousy, Charlie presumed) of the other men on board the ship. He’d sit with her in the dining room after dinner when he was off, plugging in numbers that didn’t really mean anything to him into data tables. It felt a bit like the coding he’d done back home, plugging in letters and numbers and crossing his fingers that everything worked out the way he hoped it did when he pressed “enter”. Or, in this case, the way that Marie hoped they did. She’d actually clapped with delight as they made the final click, making a series of lines and colored boxes appear on the screen.

            “What does this mean, exactly?” he asked her.

            “It’s a map of all the ocean currents.” she explained, already enthralled in her notebook once again, her pen scribbling furiously.

            “Oh. Nice.” Charlie watched the map on the screen move, feeling the ship sway from side to side as he followed the lines- the currents- as they swirled and wove their way around continents.

            It was a few days before Charlie truly spoke to Marie again. They’d pass in the corridors, sure, and talk between mouthfuls of dinner in the dining room, but they were always rushing off in opposite directions- Marie was working on a project that she just simply couldn’t tell Charlie about just yet, and Charlie was always just working`. He was rigging nets, laughing on the deck with his crewmates, long conversations fueled by boredom at repetitive tasks, punctuated by aching arms and exhausted backs.

            He finally saw her again after dinner one night, lingering at the table across from one another. She had gotten up to go to the bathroom, or to sharpen her pencil; looking back, he didn’t really remember. All he knew was that something made him reach for that notebook, the one with the purple cover that she was always scribbling in. He flipped the pages: charts, graphs, vertical columns of color-coded numbers that he couldn’t decipher. He wasn’t sure what he was even looking for- “secret project” she’d said, and what did that mean he would find? A magical, gold-foiled map? He was about to slide the book back across the table, flipping the pages back to where he had found them, when he came across a note, paper-clipped in.

            It was a list, scribbled in a pen that looked like it might have been almost dry, a list of items- food, water, blankets, a raincoat. Quantities- one can of coffee, seven cans of tuna.

            Marie came back, then, squinting at him over the glasses she wore when she was reading. She asked him what he was doing.

            “Nothing. Just looking at what you’ve been working on. Sorry.” And he wrestled with his brain for a moment, trying to squash the nosy curiosity. He was unsuccessful. “What’s the list for?”

            Marie sat down on the bench next to him, her back to the table, her ankles crossed. “Okay. Well. I have this, well, this idea. It’s for my research. But you can’t tell anyone, alright?”

            Charlie didn’t know what he was agreeing to, really, but he nodded anyway, reflexively.

            “Okay. So. I want to take a lifeboat out. Tomorrow night. And if all my mapping is correct, and the currents are where they should be and going the right speed and the right direction, I should make it back to port at the same time the ship does at the end of the week.”

            Charlie raised his eyebrows at her. “You’re serious?” Marie nodded. “You know that we’re, like, in the middle of the ocean, right?”

            She rolled her eyes at him then. “Oh, really, Charles? I had no idea.”

            “What if your map’s wrong?”

            She shrugged. “The lifeboat has a motor. I’d be fine.” A pause. “I’ll leave my dad a note. But I need to do this. I need to show him that what I’ve been doing is more than just data and spreadsheets.”

            Charlie studied her face, dead set on this plan, not even willing to consider the possibility that this might not exactly be the best idea she’d ever had.

            “You’re not kidding, are you?”

            She fixed him with that same look she’d given him when they’d first met, when she’d asked him if he knew how to make spreadsheets, all steely and serious and making him feel like she knew what he would say before he’d even opened his mouth.

            “No.” And she’d picked up her notebook and her computer and left. 

            Charlie lay awake that night, thinking about Marie and her plan. How did she know that the weather would be alright? What if she slipped and fell and hit her head and got knocked into the water, unconscious?

            But when morning came- slowly, and then all at once, as it always did on the ship, with the stamping of feet in the hallway and whoops of the early shift headed up to the deck, Charlie had made a decision. He passed her in the corridor, giving her a steely look of his own, one that he hoped looked the way that it had when he’d practiced his line in the mirror that morning. “I’m coming with you.” he said.

            She didn’t even protest. “Alright.”

            And so that night he met her on the upper deck, with a bag that held a rain jacket and some clothes, waiting for Marie with the supplies that he’d found out she’d been hoarding under her bed in her cabin. He could hear the voices of the crew on the deck below and hoped that nobody would glance up and see his rubber-boot-clad feet sticking out from under the stack of lifeboats. Their shift would end soon- Marie had memorized the timetables. They were to slip away while everyone else was at dinner. This was Charlie’s last chance to get out of this- he should call the captain now, preserve his job- and probably his life, if he was being realistic.

            But maybe he should have heeded the warning that was given to him on the first day. He couldn’t say no to Marie if he tried.

            Then she appeared- out of nowhere, with a bulging backpack on and carrying two blankets. She was smiling, grinning, even, and any thought that he had of backing out was gone. She tossed one of them to him. He had to reach out over the edge to catch it, making him stumble a little. “Shhh!” she said.

            The voices dwindled from below them, finally ceasing with the slam of a heavy metal door. “Okay.” Marie said, sitting down inside the boat. “Let’s go.”

            Charlie wondered when the lifeboats had been tested last. He and Marie pulled themselves downward, hand over hand on the rusty chain, pulling it over the pulley system, staining his palms and making them ache. Finally, the boat hit water with barely a ripple. Marie unclipped the hooks, letting the cable fall away. Charlie looked up at the ship, at the circles of light that illuminated the dark water from the portholes above. The boat was silent- nobody seemed to have missed their presence at dinner yet. He and Marie sat silently as the ship slowly drifted away.

            “Alright. Now what?” Charlie whispered, foolishly. Nobody was around to hear them now except some mayflies that had gathered on the edges of the tiny orange boat.

            Marie smiled. “That’s the beautiful thing about currents, Charlie. You don’t have to do anything for them to work.”

            “So we just…sit here?”

            “Well, I’m going to sit here. You’re going to go to sleep, so that when I wake you up you can take a turn recording data.” She pulled out that same purple notebook, encased in plastic wrap, and a tiny navigation device out of her bag- Charlie thought that it looked like nothing more than a glorified compass. They were out here, floating in the middle of the ocean, with nothing but a compass, and Marie wanted him to sleep?

            He thought that it would never happen, laying there on the hard plastic bench of the lifeboat, the waves rocking and making his stomach churn in ways that it never had in his time aboard the ship. But he must have drifted off at some point, because he woke to Marie nudging him with the toe of her shoe, the sky lighter on the horizon.

            They went on like this for a full twenty-four hours. Marie would sleep while Charlie was left with strict instructions not to take his eyes off of the compass- as long as it was pointing east, towards the mainland, she was happy. Charlie wasn’t sure how she knew where exactly they would end up on said mainland, but she was so sure of herself, not to mention asleep, that he couldn’t find it in him to ask.

            The second time Marie woke him up, it was to pull him over to the edge of the boat. Charlie gazed down into the dark blue water, penetrated by the early morning sunlight. “What?” he asked, half-awake and irritated, rubbing the sleep from the corners of his eyes. She had just pointed in response, a hand in the center of his back pushing him to look over the side. And suddenly he wasn’t asleep at all. A huge dark grey shape moved under them. “What is that?” Charlie breathed.

            Marie smiled. “It’s a whale.” And they had stood there at the rail watching it under them, easily six times the size of the boat they were in, moving through the water as smoothly as birds glide through the air. Suddenly Charlie understood, a little, why Marie cared so much about the ocean in a way he never had, even growing up six minutes from the beach. Here in the open water, the ocean wasn’t just a streak of blue on the horizon or a place to pull fish from. The water was alive and breathing and here they were, just floating on top of it, tiny and so, so ordinary.

            It was on the second night, when they were both awake together, staring at a distant light spot in the sky that Marie claimed was the port. A wind had started blowing, making her dark hair whip across her face- they’d laughed about it. A few raindrops fell, then, the big, fat ones that land on your head and almost hurt, announcing that a storm is coming.

            Marie waved them off- just a sprinkle, she said. But for the first time, Charlie saw a flicker of what could have been concern dance across her face, gone as soon as it was there, making him wonder if he’d even seen it at all.

            Marie was right, as usual, about the rain. It didn’t do more than leave some circular prints on the thick rubber of the boat, not even enough to make them dig around to find their raincoats. But the wind didn’t leave, didn’t lessen- in fact, it only picked up as the sky got darker. Charlie soon found himself sitting across from Marie on the floor in the center of the boat as it whipped around them, making her black hair twirl in the air, up and blending with the night sky.

            There was a flash of yellow out of the corner of his eye, and Charlie turned his head sharply. It was Marie’s jacket, flying through the air on a gust of wind. He stood, reaching for it as it drifted towards the edge of the boat. His fingers had just closed around the slippery material when a second gust hit him, propelling him forward, over the railing, the weight of his boots dragging him down

                                                down

                                                                                    down.

            He thought he heard a muffled yell from above, although it was impossible to say- his ears were filled with water, and he had gulped a mouthful of liquid instead of the air he had intended before plummeting below.

            The saltwater got colder, and he wondered, paddling furiously towards a surface that only seemed to get further and further away, if this is how everything would end. His body would sink to the ocean floor, decompose and become food for tiny fish, and maybe there wouldn’t even be a funeral for his father to attend and not cry at.

            He thought of his father, how he’d taught him to swim as a kid, and how it certainly wasn’t much use to him now, sinking slowly towards the bottom, his lungs burning. He hadn’t thrown him into the pool like most dads did, hadn’t watched him struggle and gasp for breath until he inevitably figured out how to doggy paddle. He’d held him, instead, when he couldn’t have been more than three, in their backyard pool, telling him to kick as his mother sat on the edge with a huge straw hat and a glass of lemonade.

            And so Charlie kicked.

            Something grabbed his arm, then, and he was pulled upward, his head breaking the surface. He coughed, finding himself clinging to the edge of the boat, Marie climbing in beside him. He absentmindedly noticed that she was barefoot. Smart.

            She pulled him in, throwing a blanket at him. “Don’t you ever do that to me again.” she said, angry on the surface, but it was Charlie’s turn to see through her and extract the relief that he saw behind her eyes.

            “Sure. ‘Course.” he said, wrapping the blanket more tightly around his shoulders and pulling off his boots with numb fingertips. She turned towards the helm, then, the navigator held in her hand tightly with white knuckles. Charlie caught her glancing back at him every few minutes, to where he was now laying on his back on the floor of the boat, as if to make sure he was still there. Charlie was sure that even if everything inside the boat decided it was going to blow away, he was going to stay put.

            They reached the port that night. The storm had pushed them back out to sea, but Marie had been right, as she always seemed to be, the current leading them almost directly into a slip near the land.

            A spotlight shone on them from the shore as she was tying them to the dock. “Marie!” someone bellowed. She looked up, confused.

            “Dad?”

            The captain barreled down the dock. “Marie! What did you think you were doing? You could have drowned out there, you could have sunk the boat.” And he pulled her into his arms, hugging her even as she tried to squirm away.

            “It was fine, dad. I knew what I was doing.”

            Charlie looked on at them from where he stood in the boat, hearing Marie, the way she wasn’t even realizing how worried her father sounded, his graying hair tangled as if he had been running his fingers through it since she left three days ago.

            And he pulled on his still-damp boots, tip-toeing around the reunion that was happening behind him, unobtrusive, up the dock to where an ancient payphone was mounted in the ground on a tilted metal pole that looked like maybe someone had backed into it with their car.

            He picked up the receiver and dialed, listening as it rang once, twice, three times.

            “Hello?” said a voice from the other end, crackly with static.

            “Hi, dad.” he said. “It’s me. Charlie.”