“Okay,” she answers, clearly worried. What is there to discuss? I am sure she is wondering.
A monitor on the wall to the left of me comes to life. I stand up and walk nearer to it. On screen appears my stark seaman’s bedroom: hard captain’s bed, bolted metal furniture, pictureless, windowless, clean. Prudencia’s wall camera pans and zooms closer to the one unusual feature in the room, the crib.
“Don’t get any closer, please,” I say to Prudencia.
The camera stops moving. “Why, Nádano? I can’t see Ela from this angle.”
“Call to her, please,” I answer. “Call to her, wake her up gently, and get her to stand. You’ll understand why as soon as you see her.”
The crib sprouts like a mushroom from the floor. It’s made mostly of antibacterial white plastic and looks like a model of a water tower. But the top half of the dome is clear.
“May I have permission to open the crib?” Prudencia asks me, neutrally, dubiously.
“Yes.”
The clear dome of the crib retreats like a nictitating membrane into the bottom of the mushroom cap. “Ela,” Prudencia calls. “Ela, darling, wake up. It’s Tía Prudencia. Rise and shine, mi vida.”
At the sound of Prudencia’s voice, I see my baby girl struggling to sit up in her crib. A blanket rises and falls. Her little hand grips the edge of the rim of her crib. And then another hand, and then she’s pulling herself up, and the blanket falls away, and she’s standing in her crib, wearing her yellow, chick-fuzzy onesie. My beautiful baby girl.
Whose head has been replaced by a coconut.
Dry and brown and shaggy now, my baby girl’s head. Like all coconuts, her face is composed of three dark spots. Two are for the eyes. The one for the mouth, a near-perfect O, always looks surprised, astonished, questioning.
My baby girl turns her coconut face to the camera and tips her head to the right, like a puppy struggling to understand its master.
“Nádano,” says Prudencia. “I . . . what is . . . Nádano . . .”
I look into a camera. “I needed you to see her stand up and look at you. That way, you could see for yourself that she is alive. More than just alive, actually. She’s not crying anymore. You see? She’s happy again. She’s at peace, finally.”
“I don’t understand,” says Prudencia.
I head for the door. “We should continue this conversation in Sick Bay, Prudie. Be there in a flash. Just need to collect my beautiful baby girl.”
El Cuento de Cómo Nádano Ended Up in the Middle of the Ocean in the First Place
I’ve been cruising the Pacific ever since Connie asked for a separation a half year ago. “Good for both of us,” she told me, taking my hand as we sat on a San Diego park bench near the water.
“The three of us,” I corrected. My baby girl was with the babysitter Connie’d hired so we could have this little talk on my lunch break outside of the NOAA research center where I worked. “Just say it, Connie. You’re worried I might hurt Ela.”
“That is completely untrue,” said Connie, angry and hurt. She let me know by squeezing my hand, hard. “You adore that little girl. I know that. This is about you, Papi. This is about this.” And she thumbed the scab on my right wrist.
I jerked my hand away.
But Connie took it again, and I let her. Her grip had just as much love in it as it had on our first date, back in college. “Separation isn’t divorce, Nádano. I am not abandoning you. I swear it. Now,” she said, tears suddenly rising on her lids, “if you want to divorce me—”
“No.”
Sometimes you say a word and it has your whole soul in it.
“Good,” she said, erasing her tears with the back of her free hand. “Okay. Good. So we try this. Yes? You’ll go to therapy. Right?” And then, suddenly mistrustful, “You’ll go for real?”
I’ve had my BPD diagnosis since I was twelve. But I haven’t attempted suicide since my teens, so, you know, I didn’t think I needed therapy anymore. Over it, I thought. Done with that part of my life, I thought. And anyway, nothing in therapy that I haven’t heard a million times before, I thought.
Some things, I now know, you can’t hear enough. Some things you have to hear over and over.
Connie wasn’t supposed to notice the scab.
An Important Aside to El Cuento de Cómo Nádano Ended Up in the Middle of the Ocean in the First Place
We’d had a fight, Connie and I, because I didn’t want to be left alone with our beautiful baby girl, whom I love with all my heart. I was scared, for her and for me. Scared to death of fucking up. I need so much help just to not be a weirdo all the time. And now I was going to be left to care for a child?
Connie begged me not to be so selfish for once in my life. She didn’t mean it how it sounds. Connie is a saint. She is literally the best person I have ever met. I couldn’t have created a better partner for myself if I were given a mound of clay and the breath of God.
So I did a 180. I said yes, go, have fun, I love you. And once she left, I cut myself.
I ran a knife over the thick-as-a-slug scar on my right wrist. I wasn’t in any danger, and neither was my baby. It was just one cut on a horizontal scar. Just the slightest, the briefest little reprimand. It barely even bled.
And nothing bad happened. Connie got her night out. She more than deserved one. Such a good partner and mom.
With such keen eyes. She noticed the cut and quietly, tearfully, expertly dismantled my excuses. “I can’t go on like this,” she told me. “Too much. It’s too much.”
The next day, she met me on a park bench during my lunch break. And here we were.
Now Back to El Cuento de Cómo Nádano Ended Up in the Middle of the Ocean in the First Place, Already in Progress
“Therapy,” I replied to Connie. “I promise.”
“How do I . . . ?” she started, and stopped.
Her full, unspoken question was, “How do I know you’re not just lying to me?” She never would have said it that harshly, though. She couldn’t even finish the sentence.
I was ready for it. I had the perfect answer, in the form of a brochure.
She took it with an unsure smile, studied the cover page: “NOAA Mobilizes to Clean Up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Flipping through the rest of the pamphlet, she asked, “What’s this?”
“They’re accepting applications,” I said. “Boss says I’d be a shoo-in. It’s important work, Connie. I’ll be helping to make the world a better place.”
“Of course cleaning the ocean’s important,” she said absently, reading fast, absorbing information as quickly as her eyes could move. “That’s not the issue. A fifteen-month tour . . .”
“Better pay. A lot better. We could afford to send you back to school. You could work on your master’s like you’ve always wanted.”
She looked up at me. Underneath her face, happiness and worry fought a war to control her mouth and eyes and eyebrows. “I mean, Miami’s application period must be over for the Fall—”
“Remember when you graduated, how Dr. Molina said she’d love to work with you again? She adores you. She’d make an exception. She’d help you get into her program in a heartbeat.”