Of course she had taken Ela to the doctor, and the doctor found nothing. So she’d tried a stricter sleep schedule and a looser one, three different diets, holding her more, classical music—still Ela cried. She tried dozens of other things—still Ela cried.
“I haven’t slept in weeks,” Connie concluded. “I’m kind of at the end of my rope.” A beat. Then: “Except I can’t be. My rope doesn’t get to have an end. I have to pull more rope out of the air like a magician and give that to Ela, too.”
I wanted to tell her I loved her and I would rescue her and we are a family and I really was better now. But that would be too manic, too much. So, rubbing the back of my neck, I picked my words very carefully. “So. Well. Maybe it would help if I took our baby girl for a while?”
The quiet before she answered was as big as the universe.
But when she answered? Big Bang. “Yeah, Papi? You feeling up to that?”
“I am,” I replied. “I mean, you keep calling me Papi. Maybe I should start acting like one.”
Her voice, desperate for hope, tried to hide how desperate for hope she was. “Can you even take her on your boat? NOAA would let you?”
“Oh, yeah!” As cool as I wanted to be, I couldn’t help blurting, “NOAA has this whole initiative called ‘Babies on Board: Support Services for New Parents.’ I can send you the brochure.”
“NOAA has a brochure for everything, don’t they?” she laughed.
“I know, right? But listen: they’ll bolt a crib right in to the floor of the boat that will turn into an escape pod if there’s any trouble. Seriously, it’s from the future. And they’ll give her an RFID chip in her ear, so we’ll always be able to track her. They’ll provide age-appropriate food based on what we tell them. We tell them she’s allergic to walrus butts, boom! No walrus-butt baby food.”
“Ha!” she said. But she didn’t say anything else. She good-humoredly waited for me to go on. She wanted so much to be convinced.
I did my best. “The breachdive is the safest boat in the world, full stop. It’s because of the AI captains. It’s like what happened when computers started driving cars: accidents dropped almost to zero. There’s never been a single accident on board a breachdive more dangerous than someone bumping their head on a low doorway. And I’m short! I’m so short, Connie! I can’t even jump high enough to bump my head!”
She laughed. Then she stopped laughing and thought. Good vibes still poured through our connection. “I’ve never been apart from Ela.”
I was still in blurt mode, so I said something I instantly wished I could take back. “I have.”
Connie didn’t take offense. Instead she said, “Yes you have. You’ve been working hard on yourself. Remind me to kiss your AI psychologist.”
“She’d like that,” I chimed in. “She’s saucy.”
“And NOAA has a program to help new parents. And breachdives are very safe. And you are Ela’s papi as much as I am her mami.”
I didn’t want to say anything wrong, so I said nothing. I just sat there and hoped as hard as I could.
“But it’s not fair to you,” she said finally. “You’ve never had to take care of her by yourself back when she was a good baby. And now?”
“And now,” I said, “I will dry my baby’s tears. Like any good father would.”
She sucked breath. “You’re gonna have to dry my tears first, you keep talking like that, Papi.”
El Cuento de Nádano Traversing Uncharted Waters
Though the coconut leads us, it keeps pace with us. We gun the engine, we slow to a powerless coast—it doesn’t matter: the coconut stays exactly the same distance ahead of us. As an experiment, I ask Prudencia to change course. When we turn north, the coconut stops moving and, floating placidly, waits.
When we get behind it again, it heads off to wherever we’re going as fast as we’re willing to go.
We’re still offline, so no GPS. But our backups have failed, too. The compass spins in its bowl. For a while we could sound the bottom of the ocean and know our position, but the ocean floor has descended to aphotic depths, unreachable.
We can’t even use the stars. It’s daytime. It’s been daytime far too long, according to all the clocks onboard. But the sun refuses to move from its perch in the sky. It isn’t going to let any of this happen in the darkness.
My headless baby girl’s sleeping in the captain’s chair. I have her covered in my jacket. I need nothing else in life than to watch the rise and fall of her breathing.
“I don’t want to be anyone’s papi if I’m going to act like my parents,” I say to Prudencia, out of nowhere.
“You love Ela so much,” she replies. “You’re nothing like your parents.”
Don’t want to wake my baby girl. I sing my response to Prudencia softly, like a lullaby: “Don’t lie to me, Prudie. You saw me, you saw me. Don’t lie to me, Prudie, you saw it come out. The monster, the monster. Don’t lie to me, Prudie. You saw it, you saw it. The monster came out.”
El Cuento de La Canción de la Honor Freezer
This is the freezer.
Where we keep the corpses.
When seamen at sea go.
To Davy Jones’s locker.
Inside here I can’t hear.
Like sound’s just as frozen.
As all my compassion.
For my baby’s tears.
She’s weeping she’s weeping.
Oh no I can hear her.
My baby my baby.
I’m freezing I’m freezing.
Rage do not come here.
Rage you’re unwelcome.
Rage go away now.
Don’t scream in my ear.
El Coco you saved me.
From Papi and Mami.
Please one more favor.
For everyone’s sake.
I’d rather be dead.
Than be cruel to my baby.
Coco please give me.
A coconut head.
El Cuento de Una Isla Muy Extraña
Such pity in Prudencia’s voice. Such fierce, protective gentleness. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Connie had programmed her. “There is no monster in you, Nádano. You locked yourself in the honor freezer. You would have let yourself die in there rather than put Ela in danger.”
“So you admit she was in danger.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth!”
It’s a heck of a time to laugh. “You don’t have a mouth.”
Prudencia softens. “You overreacted, Nádano. Big surprise.”
“Sarcasm,” I say, boggled and not unamused. “From you?”
“Yeah, well, I’ve learned a lot today. But don’t change the subject.”
“And what is the subject?”
“This: every single parent in the world has been driven over the edge by their children’s crying.”
If she had said something I could have in any way found funny, I would have laughed myself into a coughing fit. Instead, I split like a coconut, and my milk pours out. “What if I had died in the freezer, Prudie? My baby out in the middle of the ocean, no one to take care of her.”
Back to herself now. Back to the Prudencia who always knew how to talk to me. “I would have taken care of her. And you knew that. And you knew I would take care of you, too. You knew you weren’t in any danger, and neither was your daughter. You just needed a break. Of course, sticking yourself in the honor freezer was an overreaction. But you only did it because you could. Because you trusted I would take care of things.”