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Threes
“Your mother is the ocean,” Dad said when I first asked him about her.
Is. Not was.
Later, when I told Em-n-Jen, they said I was lying. Our mother wasn’t the ocean because she was dead-dead-dead in a box deep beneath the earth, and even though the coffin had been closed during the funeral, they knew she was in there because everyone had said so. I was only four, but I knew then that Em-n-Jen would always take someone else’s word over Dad’s.
#
A month ago there had been children playing on this street. There had always been kids playing road hockey along this stretch in the summer. Em-n-Jen and I used to play ourselves. Em had actually been a pretty good goalie until she discovered boys. Now all the children were indoors, playing video games or surfing the internet or watching TV. They didn't care about what was happening as long as their parents weren't yelling at them to get off the couch and play outside.
I braked slightly when I saw white figures in the distance, shimmering under the heat. A clean-up crew wearing surgical masks and latex gloves picked starlings off the pavement. The city said that the birds that didn't survive the fall were being brought to the University of Toronto for tests. But so far nothing conclusive had come back.
I almost expected the workers to shout “Car!” and scatter as I rolled by, but they lined the curb and waited indifferently for me to pass. It was just another street in another Toronto neighborhood and another flock of birds who had given up on flying.
Most houses in the Beach neighborhood were too old to have garages, only makeshift driveways at the owner's discretion. The antiquated family station wagon sat out front, so I found a spot on the street. When I turned off the ignition, even inside the car I could hear a dull drone from the backyard. I climbed out. The summer air slapped me in the face like a wool blanket, thick and hot and suffocating.
I drew an umbrella out of the trunk and opened it over my head. The gate to the backyard was unlatched, so I walked through without ringing the front doorbell. Something small bounced against the side of my umbrella and fell to the ground with a soft thunk. I didn’t look. There was nothing I could do anyway.
Dad was maneuvering a piece of plywood through a table saw. I stood back, not wanting to surprise him. The backyard was even narrower now that he had turned it into a workshop. The patio furniture had been moved to one side, the chairs stacked, and the table strewn with power tools. A carpet of sawdust covered the patio stones.
After a few minutes he turned off the saw and peered at the wood from behind dusty goggles. “Hi Sara,” he said without looking up. “Come inside.”
He slid open the screen door to the kitchen. I ducked inside and closed the umbrella. He followed. “What’s wrong now?” he asked.
“The neighbors are complaining,” I said. “You’re using power tools twelve hours a day when everyone's supposed to keep the A/C off to save energy.”
Dad pushed the goggles up his face. A sheen of dirt and dust dulled his ruddy cheeks. “Who’s complaining? Mrs. Weller? The Kims?”
“I don’t know. Em-n-Jen just said that the neighbors were complaining about you.”
“Then why didn’t Emily and Jennifer tell me themselves?”
My eyes flickered to one of the photos on the fridge. The colors had faded under the sun, but my father was still resplendent in his family’s tartan, and my mother willow-slender in a red cheongsam patterned with gold curlicues that resembled waves. She barely spoke English when we met, he’d told me once, but we understood each other perfectly.
When one looked closely at the pattern, one could make out dragons peeking out from beneath the waves. I knew this because Dad had given me the dress last year on my twentieth birthday. “Don’t tell your sisters,” he'd said, not because they would be jealous, but because they would think it strange that he’d hung onto our mother’s wedding dress after all these years.
The dress smelled like sand and surf. They were married on the beach where they'd met, the beach that would one day swallow up my mother and spit her out on its shore.
“He has fewer memories of you with her,” Em had said once, and only once, as it was the kind of statement that resonates for a lifetime. We had both been very drunk and very bitter at the time, she because I was Dad’s favorite, and I because she and Jen believed that I was.
Dad shook his head and slipped back outside. I was always surprised that he was on speaking terms with any of us. My little changelings, he used to call us when we were kids. It certainly must have seemed that way to him. How could a ginger-haired giant of a man have spawned three pale and almond-eyed little girls?
Myself, as a child I’d always thought of Em-n-Jen and I as being princesses, like in the stories I read. Fairy-tale princesses always came in threes. They never had mothers, and the youngest was always the king’s favorite.
“What are you building?” I shouted from the doorway as he fired up the table saw again.
“A boat,” he said.
“What do you need a boat for?” I shouted. To my knowledge, he’d never even been on the ferry to Centre Island.
“To take me to your mother,” he said.
#
“He’s crazy,” Jen said.
“He’s always been crazy,” Em said, “but it’s gotten worse since you moved out.”
As if it were my fault. Next they would divide up Dad’s property and I'd be married off to the King of France, as if we were a dysfunctional family of Shakespearean proportions.
“He thinks Mom was a Chinese dragon,” Em said.
“He thinks Mom was a shapeshifting water-spirit,” Jen said.
“Because that’s how they met, and that’s how she died.”
“By water. Oh my God!”
Jen jerked back in her seat as a seagull tore through the awning and smacked onto the table. The bird’s wings spread and flapped, their tips grazing Em’s shoulder. She shrieked.
The seagull staggered to its feet, snatched a heel of garlic bread, and hopped to the ground. “Get lost!” Jen snapped, kicking at it. The bird flapped its wings again but did not fly away.
A gaggle of apologetic waiters rushed us inside. “I told you the patio wasn’t a good idea,” Jen said to me.
“I thought there weren’t any birds left in the sky,” I shouted over the whirr of a ceiling fan. The A/C ban was in full effect for businesses as well as residences.
“Christ. This bird thing is nuts,” Em said.
“I bet it's because of climate change,” Jen said.
Em nodded. “Yeah. You have to wonder, what's next? The oceans rise? The dead walk?”
“You’re right,” I said. “Everything always happens in threes.”
“That’s silly,” Jen said.
“Is it?” I said. “Look at us.”
