by Meghan Powell
I grew up in Massachusetts, by the ocean. My grandparents raised me, for the first few years of my life. I think of it as a happy time.
My father's letters were cause for celebration. Roosevelt's updates about the war were good for our morale, too, but we didn't really care about the rest of the world. Just my father, who was off making sure that bad people couldn't hurt us.
It didn't occur to me to ask about my mother. My grandparents never mentioned her; later, I learned that they had never met her. I suppose I must have known that I had a mother, that everyone did. But life is different when you're a small child, different during wartime. And I didn't really have friends my own age, with whom I could compare my family situation. My grandparents discouraged me from playing with other children, and made sure that there was always an interesting supply of toys and games around their house.
"Did you rape her?" I once demanded, in a teenaged fit of anger. "Is that why I've never met her?"
My father just looked at me, with such sad eyes. "No. I didn't rape her."
I never truly thought he had. If nothing else, it would be quite illogical for him to be the one raising the child. I was ashamed, having made such a serious false accusation, and that just made me angrier. I didn't want him to be in the right. "Then I guess she just didn't like you out of uniform."
He actually thought about that, seriously considering the possibility, which should have defused me but didn't.
"Life is very complicated. I think you know that. Love doesn't conquer all. Sometimes you...we knew it wasn't going to last, wasn't meant to last-"
"But it was wartime so why not?"
"Something like that."
My father usually went out of his way not to be judgmental or argumentative. I can still remember how surprised I was the first time I heard him arguing with my grandparents. "You can't keep her locked up like some kind of freak," he said. It was the first time I ever heard him take that tone with anyone. I remember being disturbed, but it was late and I fell asleep soon after, and the next morning my father and grandparents acted as if nothing had happened. So I assumed nothing was wrong.
He sometimes told me a bit about what it was like on the ships. How close you became with the rest of the crew. How the remoteness of the enemy allowed you to feel a special kinship with them. They were sailors, too, after all.
"We'd pull the survivors out of the water, and expected that, if we ever went down, they would do the same for us," he said. "I remember when we heard about a British ship that didn't do that; her captain heard rumors of a submarine and left the Germans to die. It was so...."
"Wrong?" I prompted.
"I knew a man from Indiana named Bill Jackson," he said slowly. "He got...torn apart by shrapnel, right next to me." He thought a moment, and gave up trying to find the right words. "You can't just say something's right or wrong. Not when your crewmates are depending on you, when your men are trusting you'll make the right decisions and keep them alive. It's just not that easy."
I never heard-or asked-about Bill Jackson again. It was the most graphic war story I ever heard from my father. He fought to protect me, and one of the things he fought to protect me from was the knowledge of evil.
"You're beautiful," my grandmother used to tell me. "My beautiful little girl." And, after my father came home, she used to add: "Don't listen to what anyone else says."
She used to brush my hair. It was something of a chore for me to sit through, but she did it so often that it wasn't very painful. I remember how she would pick the seaweed out, and brush away the knots before sending me to take a bath after I'd been swimming.
"Such beautiful hair. Don't ever cut it," she said.
I never have cut it short, but not because of that.
My father was a very wise man. I think, even when I was younger, I appreciated that. I didn't quite understand it on a conscious level, but I still felt it. I suppose that, more than anything else, is why I never ran away from the bleak Midwestern town we moved to after the war.
"The heart of the nation," he said. "Never forget that."
I was young, unhappy to be away from my grandparents, away from the ocean. I cited the thirteen original colonies, none of which had been located in the Midwest.
"But Americans moved inward. They didn't start out having the plains, but they longed for them."
"They wanted another ocean. They just had to go over the plains to get to it."
I watched a lot of movies when I was growing up. What else does one do, feeling trapped and isolated and misunderstood by adults and contemporaries? I watched as filmmakers struggled with issues that they were not intelligent or visionary enough to handle; filmmakers whose work is now, at best, considered campy. I saw the alien invasions, the genetic mutants, the ancient creatures emerging from lost jungles. I watched the fear of the Soviets and the bomb and the other played out on the screen.
And I began to understand my father a little better.
"The bomb was a terrible, terrible thing," he said.
"I thought right and wrong weren't that simple," I replied. I was in high school, just far enough in that I could see the end, and was contemplating my future as an adult. "Suppose we hadn't dropped the bomb. You might have been killed by the Japanese."
"I didn't say that dropping the bomb was a terrible thing. I said the bomb itself was a terrible thing. Is."
"It's just a thing," I countered. "Morally neutral. It's the people that give it power."
"And people do terrible things."
It was such a wonderful day, when the war ended and my father came home. I helped my grandmother make a cake, and I drew pictures and made a big sign to welcome him home. He smiled and hugged me and called me his wonderful, special girl, and I was so happy.
Life was good, and then a few months later he said we were going to move away.
My grandparents died when I was in my early teens. I saw them only twice in the intervening years, during short and uncomfortable visits.
"I wish you wouldn't fight," I said. "I love them, too, you know."
"So do I. But I love you more," my father said. "And some things...just can't be resolved."
I remember the black gloves I wore to their funerals and then again, years later, to my father's. I still have them in a box somewhere. When I first put them on, I remember thinking how much I liked them, how I liked the way my hands looked wearing them. Sleek, undamaged, elegant.
I remember hearing the fights, after my father came home. She's-my-daughter, We've-raised-her, that sort of thing. I just wanted it to stop. I remembered life before my father as a peaceful, happy time. I forgot the petty annoyances, which paled in comparison to the battles I overheard. I didn't understand. My father was home. Everyone should be happy.
I remember leading him out to the beach. "Watch me swim!" I instructed, so proud of my skills. And he watched from shore, and smiled and laughed and waved and seemed happy. Later I realized that he'd been faking, that he'd been sick and terrified the whole time, afraid that something would happen to me.
That may have been my last real swim. It's certainly the last one I can remember clearly.
Days or weeks later, my father took me into the bathroom. "I'm very sorry," he said. "I don't expect you to understand, not yet, but please remember that I love you."
And then he took out his knife, and began cutting away the webbing between my fingers and toes.
I screamed, and cried, and begged him to stop. I called for my grandparents, even though I knew they weren't at home. I managed to twist free and ran outside, trailing blood in the sand. I made it into the water, crying even harder at the sting of the saltwater.
I didn't get very far before my father came out and got me. He held me as I thrashed, said soothing things as he carried me back onto the beach, back into the house. I hurt, and I was tired, and just gave up. He'd already done so much damage. I didn't have the strength to do anything but cry while he finished cutting away the rest of the webbing. He bandaged my hands and feet carefully, and then took a cigarette and seared away the vestigial gills behind my ears. I remember howling, but I also remember how distant it seemed.
There was one final fight with my grandparents, and then a tense calm.
And then my father and I moved away.
"You're still beautiful," my grandmother said before we left. I wasn't talking much at that point.
Many years later, I remembered something that happened during the first few days after my father came home. He had a big scar across the back of his hand; he said a piece of metal had cut him. Maybe one of the pieces of metal that killed Bill Jackson, though I never asked.
He said: "There's no shame in having scars."
He'd had a long time to think about me, think about what to do.
No shame in having scars. Easy to say, less easy to believe. Especially for a girl, or so it seemed to me. I always felt different, branded.
But I never got teased a lot. I was never ostracized because of the way I looked, though I myself tended to be a bit cool toward other people. I got sympathy, the occasional closer look or politely curious inquiry about the scars. I wore my hair down, and wore gloves at every opportunity. At the time, it seemed a hideous, undeserved punishment.
And later, after watching the movies about aliens, mutants and monsters, I began to wonder what would have been said about a girl with gills and webbed fingers and toes.
It took me many years to digest that. To realize that my father was a wise and kind man, in his own way. He saw the paranoia to come, and wanted his daughter to grow up safe and happy and normal. Parents have to make difficult decisions, and I came to understand his.
I could never forgive him, not entirely. He maimed me. He never gave me a chance to make up my own mind.
"What was my mother?" I asked him once, and only once.
"Beautiful."
Was she human? Was she a mutation? Something ancient or something new? Why didn't she want me? All the things I wanted to ask, wanted desperately to know.
Would she ever have wanted me, if I were still whole, if you hadn't disfigured me? All the answers I feared so much.
"You look a lot like her," he said.
"Even now?"
"Even now," he nodded.
Sometimes that comforts me.
About Meghan Powell: "I have a degree in History from Bryn Mawr College, which I never expected to be useful, so I was not shocked upon graduation. I live in suburban Philadelphia with my husband Larry and our two cats, Groundskeeper Willie and Cynwr. Larry and I are incorporators of M3IP, a nonprofit founded to do good works on the web. I'm the editor of the e-zine Fables. I've had fiction, nonfiction and art published (or accepted) by several zines, including Twilight Times, Quantum Muse, Dark Planet and Weird Visions. "