Cerulean

By Ashley Clifton

---

I had just emerged from the subway station on 57th Avenue when I got the text from Ben Fuller. —BIG STORM. LANDFALL IN 24 HRS. YOUR DAD WON’T LEAVE. CALL HIM. 

I walked to my apartment, opened my laptop, and checked the Weather Channel. Sure enough, a hurricane was spinning like a saw blade on the radar, just off the Gulf coast and not far from Maynard Key. With my heart pounding in my chest, I skimmed the article. Then I got out cell and called my dad. 

“Deacon!” he said, his voice booming in that way it did when he’d had a drink or two. “What's shaking?”

“You tell me.”

A TV blared in the background, gunshots popping as Marshall Dillon whacked some bad guy.  

“Fuller called you, huh?” he said.

“He texted me. Told me there's a storm.”

“What a drama queen.”

“The Weather Channel says there’s an evacuation order for the Key.”

“Yeah. The cops came by a couple of hours ago.  I told them to buzz off.”

“What? What the hell are you doing?”

“Calm down.” I heard him swallow as he took another slug from his drink. “It's not even a big one.”

“It’s a Cat 4. How big does it need to be?”

“It’s a small Cat 4. It'll veer off.”

“And if it doesn't?”

A silence followed. When he finally spoke again, his voice had brightened. “Hey, I got some good shots of a Kestrel today. I’ll send you a link.”

This was his new passion: photography. I had bought him a digital camera the year before, and to my surprise he really got into it. He called photography his Last Great Passion, and he took pictures of everything. The sea. Old houses. Rummies at the bar. And birds. Lots of birds.

“Why don't you show me in person?” I said. “I'll buy you a ticket. You can fly up.”

“Can’t. The Tampa airport is closed.”

I clenched my teeth and thought: Crap. 

“Okay,” I parried. “You can drive up. Take the back roads. I’ll meet you in Atlanta.”

“Can’t,” he said. “Truck’s in the shop.”

I gave up. Clearly, he would have a pre-planned excuse to counter any suggestion I might make. But this begged the question: Why? My father was a smart man. He had once managed the biggest engineering firm in Florida, going in every morning, clean-shaven and dressed in a crisp blue suit identical to the one he’d worn the day before. He had measured his life, not in teaspoons, but in square footage. Concrete and steel. He lived by the numbers, the percentages. The idea that he would ever wait for an evacuation order, no less refuse one when it was given, seemed impossible. That was not my old man.

Then I realized something.

“Dad,” I said. “What’s going on?”

He sighed a huge sigh—his own mini-hurricane, of a sort, straight from his leonine lungs a thousand miles away. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Well, we’ve got all night.”

“Don’t sweat it, Deke. This house is solid. I can get on the roof if I have to.”

His statement left me speechless for some time. That was his plan? To get on the roof?

“Dad,” I said again.

“What?”

“You're frigging crazy.”

“Don’t worry about me, kid,” he boomed, then hung up.

#  

I turned on the TV that I shared with Dan, my roommate. Once again on the Weather Channel, the storm was still spun in its lazy radar loop. My father had lied—it was now a Cat 5, and headed straight for the mid-point on the eastern side of the Florida peninsula. Straight for Maynard Key. It was expected to hit the next day, perhaps as early as mid-morning. 

I turned off the TV and faced the yawning silence of the apartment. By Soho standards, it was huge, but it felt like a college dorm to me, especially since I had to share it. Fortunately, Dan was a consultant, as I was, and he was gone a lot. That week, he was on leave back in Denver, his real home. I didn’t have a real home. Ever since my wife, Susan, took a job in Orlando without telling me first, I had moved to New York and become a free-lancer, working computer gigs for firms on Wall Street. Although Susan and I never explained it as such, we both understood that this mutual action—our respective retreats to opposite ends of the eastern seaboard—was a stop-gap maneuver, our last chance before divorce. I still called her every day or so, and we would chat for an hour or two. We were even watching the same TV show, a horror drama called The Wraith. On our calls, we rehashed every new episode, ending the conversation with a tentative "Love you." But that was as far as our reconciliation had progressed. I was prepared to stay in New York indefinitely, and nothing from my former life had intruded.  

Until now.

I went to the fridge and took out one of Dan’s beers. I held it for a moment, then put it back. Still standing in the kitchen, I got out my cell phone once again and called the ticket counter at J.F.K. I was lucky. I booked a seat on the last red-eye to Jacksonville. As we took off, the pilot announced that all the other south-bound flights had just been canceled.

#

The plane touched down just after four a.m. The Jacksonville terminal was packed with stranded passengers, sleeping on plastic chairs or wandering around with a dazed, insomniac expression. The rental car booths were empty and dark. I convinced a kid on Uber to take me across the state for four hundred bucks, and we bounced down Highway 301 in his tiny car, fat raindrops splattering against the windshield. Two hours later we stopped at the bridge to the Key. Barricades blocked across both lanes, flashing their orange lights ominously. I grabbed my shoulder bag from the back seat, and the kid muttered “Good luck, Bro.”  

I leaned forward into the wind. It was steady and strong, like a river. But the rain bothered me even more, little bullets of ice shooting into my face. I was wearing my best outdoor gear, an L.L. Bean slicker and hiking pants, but by the time I reached the other side of the bridge I was completely soaked, so wet and chilled that it was difficult to remember ever having been dry. Dry, at that point, was just a hypothetical concept, like Heaven or the Free Market. The air must have been almost 80 degrees, and yet a chill seeped through my clothes and into my skin, then my blood, and finally my bones. My lower jaw started to clap against my upper. How much of the clapping was due to the cold and how much to fear? It was an academic question. I pressed on.

Finally, I reached the house. A yellow light burned in the second-story window, but the rest was dark. I rang the bell. A minute went by. I rang again. My emotions flashed from fear to hope. Maybe the old man had come to his senses and left. But then, over the howl of the wind, I caught a faint sound. Rock music. Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.” My Nikes squished on the lawn as I trudged to the back gate. It was unlocked. I went through. There, on the porch, stood my father. He was smoking a cigar with one hand and holding a yellow umbrella with the other. When he saw me, his eyes widened for an instant, then settled back into their usual, stony indifference.  

“Now who’s frigging crazy?” he said.

#

We went inside. He gave me a bathrobe and took my wet clothes to the washer in the hall. The tile floor was cool beneath my feet as I sat at the dinner table. The platinum rims of my mother’s china winked in the cupboard as the TV played its light over everything. The only change to the décor was an expensive-looking metal tripod standing in the corner with a new Nikon flash kit.  

He handed me a cup of coffee. “How did you get here?”

“Flew to Jax. Got a ride to the bridge. Then walked.”

He nodded, wrinkling his chin. Almost impressed. 

“How’s work?”

“Okay.”

Our conversation went on like this for a while, both of us pretending that nothing was wrong. I knew it was pointless to remind him that a massive hurricane was spinning just off the coast.

“Still talking to Sue?” he asked.

He was the only person who called Susan “Sue.” Fortunately, she never seemed to mind. That was my dad. People liked him. He got away with things.

“Some,” I said.

“You think you can fix that up?”

“Anything's possible.”

“Man, you got that right.” 

It was the kind of remark that, though off-hand on the surface, had been uttered with a kind of knowing sneer, Clearly, it meant something. But before I could ask him what, he got out a big accordion file full of photographs and spread them on the table. The pictures fell into two categories. The first was a catalog of Maynard Key. Shots of Mr. Fuller's welding shop, with Mr. Fuller himself standing in the middle with his helmet under his arm. Shots of the harbor, a forest of masts, the shrimping fleet waiting at anchor.  Shots of Eddie’s Diner by the bridge. The second type was a collection of in-door shots, many taken right there in the house. Portraits of his friends, mostly, all smiling out of the frame, as if they just stopped over for a drink. A few showed empty rooms throughout the house, like a still-life exercise.

I set the last print down. “Not bad. Why don't you put them all in a box and we'll take them with us?”

He ignored me. “You hungry? I'll make eggs.”  

He went into the kitchen, leaving me with the old guys in the photos, grinning up at me with their sad toothless smiles on their old drooping faces. I pressed my fingers to my temples. I was exhausted, more so than I had been in many years—since high school, actually. Cross-country practice. Fridays were the worst, the fifth run of the week, when my muscles felt like spaghetti and my bones like soap. That’s how I felt now. Depleted. Spent. I wasn’t sure I even had the energy to get myself out of the house, no less my large, intransigent father. I needed help. I thought of Susan, but she was two hundred miles away. And even if she’d been closer, I couldn’t call her. Just couldn’t. 

I put my attention back on the photo directly in front of me. Another shot of another old man, Mr. Harrington, the only butcher on the island. He must have come over to visit for he was standing in our dining room, not far from where I now sat. A big man, grinning out of the frame, like all the rest. But something behind him was out-of-place. In the background, a kind of blue electrical spark was squirting up from the floor to some indeterminate point in the air. If it had been a real spark—and not just some digital glitch in the camera—it would have been located over by the dining room window.  

I looked up and stared through that same window. The crepe myrtle tree in the yard was leaning over, bowed in the wind, its branches whipping violently. I picked up another photo from the pile, and then another. I had to flip through five more of the in-door shots before I saw the spark again. This time, it was over by the nook, beneath the stairs, where my mother had sat for hours on Sunday afternoons, paying bills. Again, I turned and looked. The nook was exactly as she had left it. I could almost see her there, in her faded dungarees, her gray hair pulled back with the pearl-white barrette I had given her for her birthday. I could still smell the lemony brand of shampoo she used, three bucks a bottle from Eckhart's Drugs.  

I flipped some more. The spark appeared at least four more times, always the same blue color, but manifested in slightly different shapes and in different locations. Once, by the couch. In the kitchen doorway. Then in the hallway, near the mud-room door. I picked up the last print and held it two inches from my nose. The spark was jagged but otherwise featureless, thin.  A wire of energy zigzagging from nothingness to nothingness.  

All the places it appeared had one thing in common. Just one.  

“Cerulean,” my dad said. 

He was standing at the edge of the room, holding plates of eggs and toast. 

“What?”

“Cerulean. The spark is cerulean. Her favorite color.”

I put the picture down. 

“You’re kidding,” I said.

He set the plates on the table. “Let's eat.”

#

I chewed slowly. My guts felt curdled, with that dank queasiness a person gets when they’re scared of something but pretending not to be. Dad gathered all the photos into a neat, rectangular stack and put them on the corner of the table, with the brightest instance of the blue spark left conspicuously on top. Cerulean, he’d said. As a kid, I had been endlessly fascinated by the fancy oil crayons Mom kept at her easel. Stubby, congealed bullets of color, each wrapped in its jacket of black paper with a magical name printed lengthwise:  Emerald. Thalo Yellow. Victoria Sepia. Russian Blue. Ultramarine. Vandyke Brown. Cerulean. Burnt Umber.  

“This is ridiculous,” I said.

He smiled, chewing his eggs with a wistful expression. “That’s what I thought. That there must be some rational explanation. A problem with the camera. Something like that. But then I looked closer. I realized that she only appears here. In the house. In her normal places.” 

I almost gasped. She.  

“You would have laughed at me,” he went on. “I started taking shots all over the place. Looking for her. I must have snapped a thousand.” Dark creases appeared on his forehead as he chuckled. He had lost weight, I suddenly realized, his face thinner. But his shoulders still bulged under his polo shirt, and he looked like he could do some damage if he got ahold of someone. Even so, I had the overwhelming urge to punch him in the mouth. To stop the vile, mad words he was uttering.     

Instead, I puffed out my cheeks and said, “Okay. Maybe something weird is going on. Who am I to argue? But we don't have time to discuss it. We've got to get out of here.”

His mouth formed a little pink O as he forked in another bite of egg.  

“You haven’t heard the rest.”

I swallowed a mouthful of toast in one painful gulp. 

“The rest?”

“It was just little things, initially. I'd lose my keys. Search the whole house for them. Then, in the morning I'd find them right there on the table in plain sight. Then I lost my favorite pen—the Mont Blanc, the one they gave me when I retired. I searched everywhere for it, high and low. Went to bed, pissed off. But guess what? When I got up the next morning, there it was. Right in the center of the table.” He tapped his finger on the spot.  

“Great,” I said. “You found your pen. That’s wonderful.”

“And you know that fishing trip I go on every June? With Marty Balsom and the guys from the firm? Well, I was packing my gear that morning. Then I smelled smoke from upstairs. I ran up and followed the smell to your mom's studio. There was a little pile of her papers on the desk. Burning.”

Several seconds passed before I could reply. “You mean actually…on fire?”

“What else would I mean? It was a stack of her sketches. Exactly where she left them on the desk. Only they were smoldering now, as if someone had shoved a match underneath. I threw a blanket over them and smothered the fire. But I was scared. I was so shaken up that I called up Marty and begged off.”  He stopped for a moment, as if even he couldn't quite believe the next part.  

“And then?” I said. Daring him.

“They got hit by a freak wave, just past Seahorse Key.”

“Crap.”

“They were okay. They didn’t capsize, but the batteries went dead. No engine, no electrical.  They were adrift for three days before the Coast Guard picked them up. Marty got so dehydrated he almost died.”

With great deliberateness, I looked down and resumed eating. What else could I do? How does one make a rational argument against a supernatural force?

“Can I see the sketches?” 

For the first time, he seemed taken aback. “The burned ones?”

“Yeah.”

He went upstairs and came back with a small box. Inside were some familiar leaves of paper, my mother's sketches. Most were still intact, the fire having eaten around the edges with its black mouth. I recognized them. Birds. Flowers. Ben Fuller's old truck. All in her style. Mom had taught art at the community college for forty years, and she had always been a master of the simple sketch. Even now, the sight of her work pierced my heart like a sudden, silent knife. Before I realized what was happening, tears began streaming down my cheeks.

My father took the drawings from my hand.  

“Want a drink?”

“What time is it?”

“Who gives a damn?”

“Okay.”

#

He fetched a bottle from the cupboard. I took the opportunity to go to the bathroom, where I washed my face and pulled myself together.  I still had my cell phone in the pocket of my father's bathrobe. I dug it out and tapped a text to the only person I could think of who might be of help.

—Mr Fuller?

—Hey, Deke, did you call him?

—Yeah. Actually I'm here

—Where?

—On the key

—ARE YOU FRIGGING CRAZY???

I didn’t reply.  After a long while, he texted again.

—The old bird won’t leave huh?

—Nope. Where are you?

—Tally

I took a deep breath, then let it out. He was too far away to help. 

A moment later, he added: —Can you knock him out?

—You mean like konk him on the head?

—No. I mean drug him. If you can knock him out I will ask the sheriff to come get the both of you. He’s an old friend. Can you do it?

I wracked my brain, trying to figure out whether this plan was brilliant or idiotic. 

—I'll try.

I opened the medicine cabinet and searched through the usual assortment of over-the-counter drugs. Eventually, I found what I was looking for: a small Rx bottle. HYDROMORPHONE. Mom had been taking it during her last round of chemo, and just the site of the bottle gave me chills. I opened it. A dozen or so colorless tablets were left. I shook two into my hand and dropped them into the pocket of the robe.

Back in the dining room, Dad had picked up the dishes and gotten two whiskey tumblers down from the cabinet. “Your clothes are almost done,” he said, placing one of the tumblers before me. He filled it with two fingers of Maker’s, and then filled his own.

“Thanks.” The whiskey burned my throat, but I gulped it down nonetheless, like a character in a noir novel. He turned on the TV. A montage of disturbing images flowed across the screen. Oak trees tipping in the wind. Vast panoramas of grid-locked traffic on I-75, stretching to the horizon. A chiron at the bottom heralded the storm's wind speed: 185 miles per hour. As my father stared at it all, I took the tablets out of my pocket and crushed them under the heel of my whiskey glass.

“I know it all seems crazy,” he said, still not looking at me. “But once you think about it, the idea seems kind of…natural.”

“The idea of what?”

“Life after death.”

“If you say so.”  

He took two swallows of his drink and then went down the hall. I refilled both glasses and, with a quick furtive motion, swept the white powder into his. I swirled it around until it vanished like smoke. When he came back to the table, he carried something in his hands. A framed picture of my mother, the same one he had used to keep on his desk in the den. He placed it on the table between us and dared me not to look at it. I looked. The photo had been taken in the mountains. Asheville, that summer when we had gone hiking. She smiled out of the frame, sitting on a rock in her white jacket, her hair pulled back with a scarf. The scarf was bright blue.

“It's just like we learned in Physics class,” he said, running a finger around the rim of his glass. “Energy is never created or destroyed. Just transmitted.”

“What’s your point?”

“Well, how can the energy of the mind be any different? How can a person be here one minute and gone the next?”

“Maybe that's just the way things are.” 

He thought about this for a moment.

“Bull.”

I thought he might punctuate this statement with a slug from his drink, but he didn’t. He’d been drinking for almost twenty-four hours. Now, he demurred to take even a sip. 

Suddenly, an idea came to me.

“I'll make you a deal,” I said. “We'll ask Mom to give us a sign.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“If she tells us to leave, we’ll go. Right now. On foot. Across the bridge.”

“And if she doesn’t?” 

“Then we drink the rest of this booze and hunker down.”

His eyebrows climbed even higher, like the bar on a barometer. 

“You're really desperate, aren’t you?”

I raised my hands, surrendering.

“All right,” he said. “You’ve got a deal. But if we're going to do this, let's do it right. Take my hand.”  

He laid his leathery, workman's hand on the table, palm up.  I put my soft, livid, computer-nerd hand into it. He squeezed, hard.   

“Lydia?” he said. The sound of my mother’s name went off in my head like a thunderclap. “I know you're listening. You always did like to eavesdrop, so don't shine me on now. As you know, our boy is here. Deacon. He wants us to leave the house before the storm comes. Is this what we should do? Do you want us to leave the old house, Lydia? Do you want us to leave our home?”

A sudden pain throbbed in my chest, like a nascent heart attack. A full ten seconds went by before I realized that I was holding my breath. I tried to think of the answer to my father's earlier question: how can a person just disappear? Recede back into the same infinity of darkness from which it had emerged, all too briefly? 

Even with the wind howling outside, the silence of the house was palpable. Velvety and still.  

Then came a sound.  

A furtive little knock.

My father and I stared at each other. Still holding hands, we stood up. 

The sound came again. Another knock. Louder this time. From the front door!

My father let go of me and ran. I flew after him, my lungs still bursting from lack of oxygen. We sprinted to the front of the house. He threw open the door and a river of air rushed in, whipping our coats off the hooks in the foyer like dry leaves. We leaned into it. There, on the porch, a small, slight woman stood huddled in a gray raincoat.

“Sue!” my father said.

“Hello, Mick.”

“Susan?” I said, dumbly. I had been expecting my mother’s ghost. And the only thing in the world that could have surprised me even more was the sight of my almost-ex-wife, Susan, standing there on the porch. She grimaced as the wind whipped the tips of her brown hair. When she finally saw me, standing behind my father, her face broke into a wry smile. 

“Hey, you.”

“Hey.”

With one arm, Dad pulled her into the house. I put my shoulder into the door to close it. Once we were safe from the wind, I put my arms around Susan and hugged her. The solidity of her slender body was like a revelation. A life-line. The cold raindrops on her coat seeped through the robe and into my skin.  

“I was worried about Mick,” she said, her voice muffled into my shoulder. “I called him yesterday when I saw the forecast.” She pulled away from me and shot him a look. “You're a crazy old bastard, Mick.”

He looked down at his boots and said nothing. She was the only person who called him “Mick.”

I peeked out the Judas hole in the door. Her little faded Honda was parked at the curb, and I knew that she must have driven right between the barricades. Typical. She never gave a damn about rules.  

My father saw the car, too. “Can you drive us out?”

He was talking directly to her, but I broke in. “You'll go? You’ll really go?”

He narrowed his eyes at me, as if I’d said something very stupid. “We asked for a sign, didn't we?”

If Susan was confused by all this, she didn’t show it. As my father swept away down the hall, she put a hand on my cheek. “You've gotten thin.” 

Dad fetched my clothes from the dryer and threw them at me. I got dressed, right there in the foyer. Then, we opened the front door again. I held Susan's hand as the wind hit us like a bouncer, bum-rushing a Rummy out of a sea-side bar. My father shoved his way past us and went first, taking the brunt of it. Together, we walked out to the car. 

We had just reached it when Susan yelled, “Mick! What about your camera?”

His face turned white.  But I was the one who spoke, muttering “Damn” as I ran back inside, leaving the front door open behind me. The first, tremendous thunderclap shook the air as I pounded up the stairs two at a time. In the master bedroom, I found the camera on the chest-of-drawers, next to my father's laptop and amidst some educational books on Photoshop. I threw the camera, the laptop, and a couple of lenses into my shoulder bag and took off again. As I ran down the hall, I passed the open door to my mother’s studio. Something caught my eye, and I stopped in the doorway. 

Her drawing table was in the same place, right where she had left it, with one of her sketches lying there. I stared at it for a moment before the paper fluttered and rose into the air. A thrilling sort of terror shot through me as the sheet halted midway to the ceiling and began to spin—a wobbly sort of spin, like a dish on the tip of a magician's cane. Then it shot sideways and flattened against the window, its edges fluttering madly as if trying to escape. Somehow, I knew what this meant. No, it was not my mother’s ghost. It was rising air pressure. 

The house was about to be blown apart.

I ran downstairs and out the door. Susan was already behind the wheel of the Honda, with my dad in the back. I had barely climbed into the passenger seat when she gunned the tiny engine, tires crunching over the fallen twigs and pine cones that now carpeted the road. All the traffic lights were out, swinging dead against the pewter-colored sky. When we reached the bridge, ten-foot waves were crashing over the rails on either side. 

My dad put his hand on her shoulder. “You got this, Sue.”

She took a breath and drove forward. White spray covered the windshield, and the wind bustled the car back and forth. With her hands at ten-and-two, she white-knuckled the steering wheel, struggling to keep us in the center of the bridge. An especially big wave came over the rail and hit the Honda’s side like a shopping cart full of bricks. A crack appeared in the window next to me, zig-zagging its way down the glass. Susan never wavered, never flinched. She held the center line and kept her foot on the gas. 

When we reached the other side, my father reached into his backpack, which he had thrown on the seat beside him. He pulled out a silver flask, took a swig, and passed it to Susan.

“Where to?” she asked.

“Just head east,” he said.

She nodded. “My place, then. If we can make it that far.”

My heart leaped. “Have you got room?”

She glanced at me. “Please.” 

Highway 221 was clear in both directions, and she took the southbound ramp. Ten miles later, the storm still covered the world like a gray dome, but the wind was a bit weaker. I looked in the back and saw my father sleeping soundly, a contented look on his face. Susan was still driving with remarkable calm. She hated driving in bad weather, and I wondered again what could have compelled her, really, to come all this way in a hurricane. Then, without asking, I knew.

“He told you about the spark, didn’t he?”

She nodded. “He sent me one of the pictures.”

I thought, Of course he did.  He trusted her to believe him. But not me.

“Pretty friggin strange,” she said. “You think it’s for real?”

I was about to say, no. It wasn’t for real. The old man was just delusional. Crazy, from age and boredom and loneliness and grief. This was the simplest explanation, and the only one I could handle. 

But there was another explanation—an idea that had struck me in the brief moments I had seen the books on Photoshop in my father's room. The fact that he was learning Photoshop was not surprising. He had always taken to new things. The only weird part was that he hadn't told me about it. He always told me about his latest obsessions. He liked to brag about those kinds of things—what new things he was up to. But not this time.

So, the next, inevitable question occurred to me: Did he use Photoshop to fake the spark in the pictures? Was all of this—his refusal to evacuate, his secret call to Susan, and even his belief in my mother's ghost—nothing more than an elaborate ruse to get me and Susan back in the same place, at the same time? 

As crazy as it seemed, this explanation made the most sense. Except for one thing: the fire. I couldn't bring myself to believe that he could actually do that. Burn Mom's drawings. Not even a few of them, around the edges.

“I don't know,” I said at last.  

We reached I-4. A slit of golden sunlight pierced the horizon, although the sky directly above us remained dark. We came around a bend and saw a half-fallen oak tree, its branches entangled in some power lines, which sagged under the tree’s weight. Despite the drizzling rain, the top of the tree was ablaze, engulfed in bright orange flame. We rubbernecked as we drove us past it, the dying tree. Its big ancient branches were being consumed before our eyes, turning to ash. The tree had probably stood there five hundred years, only to reach this sad, lonely death. We were the only witnesses.  

A thick ribbon of reddish-brown smoke rose up from the tips of the fire and into the sky. I looked back and was surprised to see my father watching it, too.

“Burnt Umber,” he said, and closed his eyes once more.