by Cat Thompson Wyatt

She was especially pleased at how she’d used the word physique, which she’d learned reading Teen Magazine, purchased the previous summer during a visit to Aunt Winifred in southern California. Barely a teenager but advanced for her age, Kate thought the magazine would give her some sense of what was to come.

​

Mr. Renner, her seventh grade English teacher, advised his students to incorporate emotion into their work and so Kate wrote:

While the Japanese planes were bombing the decks of the ships in Pearl Harbor, my father hastily finished writing a letter to me, telling me how much he loved me.

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As Kate scribbled these details, she imagined how her efforts would be received at school. Her desk—middle row, middle seat—was in the direct line of sight of Mr. Renner, a short, balding man with piercing eyes encircled by black, horn-rimmed glasses. Judy, who’d been Kate’s nemesis for as long as she could remember (nemesis was another word Kate had learned from her reading), liked to peruse Kate’s papers as they were passed forward.

Kate pictured Judy standing to read aloud the part about her father writing of his love as the bombs fell. “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Judy would say. She was so unoriginal.

Naturally Kate would defend her honor. She would never back down. Terry, Kate’s best friend in all the world (even if he was a boy), would step between them, and that would shut Judy up.

Then Mr. Renner’s cheeks would puff out, and he’d threaten all three of them with detention, and Kate would say how she and Terry had done nothing wrong, that it was snoopy, loud-mouthed Judy who’d caused all the trouble.

And then, of course, Mr. Renner would send a note home requesting a conference with Kate’s parents. Kate had gotten pretty good at signing her mother’s name and making up reasons why she couldn’t attend meetings with her teachers when, in fact, her mother was tied up with Jim Beam and Captain Morgan. For this note her mother would write that she was headed to southern California to visit Aunt Winnie, who was ill.

No. She’d say she was headed to Pearl Harbor to visit the watery grave of her one true love, Kate’s father. That was a much better excuse.

In her mother’s place Aunt Opal, who ran interference on Kate’s behalf, would meet with Mr. Renner. She’d point out that Kate’s writing had such creative flair that it hardly mattered whether the details were true or not. Her niece was a free spirit, and by the way, what did Mr. Renner intend to do about Judy and her nasty bullying?

None of this happened. But Aunt Opal did read the essay because Kate worked on it while staying at her house one snowy weekend. Opal knew as well as anyone that twelve-year-old Kate’s biological father couldn’t possibly have been killed in the attack on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor seventeen years earlier.

But when she finished reading, Aunt Opal only wiped her hands on her apron and hugged Kate close. “It’s hard when people go missing,” she said. “Like there’s a hole you can’t fill, no matter how hard you try.”

Opal was wise about many things, but in this case she was wrong. Kate knew how to fill the hole. She was convinced her writing—call it storytelling—was enthralling, intriguing, and detail-oriented. Whether true or not, she believed it was believed.

Judy and Terry and Kate grew up. Kate didn’t know what became of Judy—didn’t know, didn’t care. Terry went off to fight, as did pretty much all the boys from Kate’s neighborhood. In the stories Kate told herself, they all came home safe and sound. Especially Terry.

After high school Kate moved to southern California to live with Aunt Winnie. In college she studied journalism but had no patience for it. She dropped out and found work as a copywriter for The Military Digest, where she wrote upbeat stories about Bob Hope visiting the troops and Presidential Unit Citations and Medal of Honor winners. It seemed a good use of her skills, and it made her feel better, somehow, about Terry and the rest. She hadn’t been in the “theater,” of course, but her work was thorough, and the times were full of lies and half-truths as well as great loss.

Before Terry shipped out, he’d been stationed in California, which was why Kate had gone there to live. Awaiting his deployment, he’d spent as much time with Kate as he could. When they were young, he’d called her Jughead after she’d knocked heads playing Kick the Can and got thirty-seven stitches. When Terry’s older brother knocked her down on the playground, bloodying her palms and tearing holes in her already frayed and snagged leggings, Terry helped her up, then planted his feet in a boxer’s pose, raising his fists to his brother. He’d heard the whispers, the snide comments, the belittling, the bullying, the unkindness by schoolmates and neighbors, even his parents. He wanted to right these wrongs. He wanted to protect her.

That’s how she remembered it.

Their last night together Kate told Terry he’d better get acquainted with the grunion. He had no idea what she was talking about, but he went along with the plan, good sport that he was.

His dress uniform wouldn’t do, so Kate disappeared into Aunt Winnie’s multi-sectioned walk-in closet, emerging with an armful of men’s clothing fit for the beach, including wellies—rubber boots—that had belonged to Winifred’s late husband, Kate’s Uncle Heinz.

“The khakis you can roll up,” Kate said. “Use the belt to hold them up. Long-sleeved flannel shirt, not just your average socks, but argyles, and, well, you’ll have to supply your own underwear.”

“What’s so funny?” Terry asked after dressing, as if it wasn’t obvious. The wellies were size fourteen—two sizes too big—and the khakis were slipping down because he’d refused the belt Kate offered.

At the bottom of the steps that led to the beach, Terry removed the wellies and the argyles. She led him across the sand, watching in the moonlight for his reaction as he stepped with bare feet into the slimy, wriggling mass of fish. He lost his footing, slipped, and slid face first into the grunion, which were only doing what grunion do, coming in on the high tide, the lady grunions digging their tails in the sand and the males wrapping themselves around the females. Undignified, yes, but the species survives.

Kate laughed so hard she lost her balance and slid into Terry. After several minutes of laughing and pulling each other into the ebbing tide, Kate was covered in wet sand and salt water, a few grunions wriggling down the front of her shirt. Each time she tried to stand, she slipped and slid, and her giggling caused more slipping and sliding. Finally she managed a serious, deep tone. “Terry, meet grunion. Grunion, meet Terry.”

He gave her his grandmother’s ring, the center stone a black opal displaying all the colors of the rainbow, surrounded by tiny, round-cut diamonds. It’s an opulent ring that encircles the vein that runs directly from the third finger of her left hand to her heart. Vena amoris, vein of love.

She sent him letters in care of his platoon in Vietnam. Writing these involved something of a ritual. It began with plucking dandelions from the vacant lot next door to Aunt Winifred’s house—dandelion bouquets were a joke between her and Terry. She’d stuff the weeds in her backpack and head to the precipice, a two-hundred-foot, anvil-shaped basalt outcropping jutted out over the Pacific, accessible only at low tide. Slick with sea spray, it was no easy climb.

When Kate reached the top of the precipice, she’d trace the shape of a heart with a crayon on red construction paper. Crayons were a reminder of a time when make-believe was the norm and no one expected the colors to be real. Inside the crayon heart she’d write her letter.

When Terry could, he wrote back. Mortar and ammo dumps. Mosquitos big as B-52 bombers. So hot the guys were sweating purple Kool-Aid. A close call with a mortar landing thirty feet away. Two guys got the worst of it, and he’d had to look them in the eyes, tell them everything was going to be all right when it wasn’t. Counting the days until he got to come home. The tour extended. Mixed signals, no one seeming to know who was really in charge. Couldn’t tell the good from the bad, what with sweet young kids and pregnant women armed.

Kate saw photos and film clips, everyday reminders of battlefield horrors. The massacres, the bombings, the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners. She scanned the faces, looking to see if she recognized anyone, hoping she didn’t. The wounded, legs or arms missing, skulls mangled and worse.

His last letter was dated New Year’s Eve, 1969. Light at the end of the tunnel, he wrote. Tunnels everywhere here, filled with North Vietnamese. A couple more hours on the ground and then his transport, a Huey, would pick him up and ferry him to the airfield for the flight home. Can’t wait to hold you in my arms, he wrote. Just remember that inside this tanned and ruggedly handsome Marine there’s a heart of gold.

A heart of gold. Promise, he said that.

For a long time she still wrote him letters, though there was no point in sending them. Terry was nowhere he could receive them. He was nowhere anyone knew of. He was maybe nowhere at all. One of those soldiers who went into the jungle and was never heard from again.

Weeks after Terry didn’t come home, as part of her duties with The Military Digest, Kate attended an Admiral’s Dinner and Ball. The magazine sent a car for her, the windows of the glossy, black Lincoln tinted so dark you couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. The car smelled like new leather and Old English lemon furniture polish, which must have been used on the wood inlays, nothing like her mother’s car that smelled of stale Lucky Strikes, Jim Beam whiskey, and Korn Kurls.  

Inside the car Kate breathed deep, leaning into the black leather. The tinted windows shielded her from the outside world, the neon signs that glided by one by one. Caldwell Art Gallery, Catch A Wave Books, Nona Amelia’s Pizza, Cafe O’Lait. Outside rain fell, drops plopping on the sunroof.

Set with stemware, china, and silver, the round table to which she was led had as its centerpiece a cluster of votive candles and white camellias floating in a crystal bowl. Taking a seat, she joined five uniformed men and four women in cocktail finery. A commotion ensued as a woman hurried past, bumping Kate’s chair, and for a moment she thought the woman was Judy because of her high-pitched voice.

By the time the first course was served, Kate had polished off two martinis and had a third in hand. Around the table there was talk of vacations in faraway places, bringing to mind how Aunt Winnie, a photojournalist before she was married, had returned from the Orient and the Middle East bringing trunks filled with teas, funny-looking slippers with curled-up toes, gold- and silver-threaded cloth, bells on braided gold and silver cording, curved horns, photos of veiled women and men wearing odd-looking hats with tassels dangling from one side. The trunks smelled of cedar and incense and exotic spices. There was fine bone china—almost translucent when held to the light—plus a variety of rare butterflies inlaid under glass on a rare Koa wood tray and lamps with brown bulbs that tinted everything golden.  

The woman to Kate’s left nudged her elbow. “You all right?

“Oh…sorry. Off in another world, I guess.”

The woman clutched her husband, sitting to her right. “David was asking about your work.”

Kate’s face flushed. “It’s nothing, really.”

David had more medals—salad is the lingo—than she’d ever seen on one officer’s chest. He must have seen a lot of action in the theater, the two stars on his epaulettes indicating a rank of major general. “The Military Digest is a top-notch publication,” he said. “An encouragement to our soldiers in uniform.”

“And to their families,” said David’s wife.

​

Kate thought not of encouragement but of the mortar and ammo dumps, of men sweating Kool-Aid, of not being able to tell the good from the bad. She thought of the ones who’d never come home.

* * *

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Another New Year’s Eve, thirty-five years since Terry’s last letter. Kate’s getting old and her knees aren’t what they used to be, so the climb to the top of the precipice takes more out of her than she cares to admit. But from the top she enjoys the illusion that she can see everything—Catalina Island, the setting sun, the rising moon, all of it.

​

“A man asked me to marry him once,” she says.

She’s made the climb, bad knees and all, for the purpose of speaking these words to her cousin’s daughter, Talley, age fourteen. A boy has just broken her heart, and Talley believes she’ll never recover. In her head she’s writing a story of love that’s forever lost, a story that her Aunt Kate would never understand, old maid that she is. Talley has dyed her hair a hodgepodge of colors that defy description, and she assumes the sullen expression of the Lover Wronged, but otherwise she’s a good kid and worth setting straight.

“Who asked you to marry him?” Talley asks, shedding a layer of self-absorption.

“A friend. Smart. Handsome. Kind. Loved me to pieces.”

“What happened?”

Kate twists the opal ring, her gaze on the water. “It didn’t work out.”

When Talley makes no response, Kate changes tack. “You know about the grunion? They’re fish. Come in on high tide, spawn in the sand. By the thousands. It’s amazing.”

“If you say so.”

“Aunt Winnie was in love once too.”

“Duh. To Uncle Heinz.”

“Before Uncle Heinz. A childhood sweetheart. He’s the one that carved the toeholds we used climbing up here.”

“Childhood sweethearts are a dime a dozen,” says Talley. “That’s what Mom says. She thinks that makes me feel better. But I’m not a child.”

“Aunt Winifred and this boy were planning to marry, but before they got around to it, he got shipped off to war. He was on a submarine that went down in the Pacific, off the Aleutian Islands.”

“That sucks,” says Talley.

“The USS Grunion,” says Kate. “Named after the fish. No one knew exactly what went wrong. It was there and then it wasn’t. No trace of it. No trace of any of the men onboard.”

​

“Huh,” says Talley. “You think Aunt Winnie still thinks about him?”

“Maybe. You could ask.”

“She kind of gets messed up sometimes in what she remembers,” says Tally.

This is true. Winifred is now cloistered in a place where paid staff fill in the gaps. “Memory Care” is the euphemism.

“The family of one of the guys who was lost kept searching for the Grunion,” says Kate. “Last year they finally found the sub, way deep in the ocean.”

“Aunt Winnie’s boyfriend too?”

“They don’t bring up the bodies. The ocean is their grave. You remember last year, when I was on assignment up in Alaska? That’s the story I was working on, about the Grunion. The family hired a marine survey firm from Seattle. We all went out on a Bering Sea crab boat. It was August but the wind was bitter cold, and the seas—you get seasick, don’t you?”

Talley nods.

“You wouldn’t have liked it. It took days but the sonar finally picked up this long object wedged on the steep underwater slope of a volcano.”

“You never sent me the article,” says Talley. Ever since Talley announced that she, too, wanted to be a writer, Kate’s been sending her clippings, though. Talley says she herself wants to write fiction. She seems to know the difference.

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“I’ll send it,” says Kate.

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Talley seems to have perked up. “You’d better. And I still think you should have got married. It must have been lonely, being single your whole life. And now you’re old.”

Kate loves this about Talley. She speaks truth.

She wants to tell her: Love is yours to give or not. Don’t go looking for it in the wrong places. Don’t equate being valued with being loved. Don’t go imagining that one thing leads to another.

But it’s never that easy.