I knew my father was in the hospital for a long time, and I knew we visited, but I didn’t remember any of it. I didn’t remember the transplant, or how long the new kidney worked. I didn’t remember my father going back into the hospital when his immune system rejected the kidney. I’d been told all of this. I knew it happened. But the memory was like a lost balloon. I let go of the string and it flew away.
What I did remember from that time was that we went to Sea World a lot. This was back in the days when tickets were cheap, and no one worried about a couple of kids wandering around an amusement park unattended.
I’d pack lunch for me and my brother, Andy. Sometimes cheese sandwiches, sometimes peanut butter and jelly. Grapes were a must. There was a grassy area next to a pond, where we’d eat our lunches and feed grapes to the swans. They swallowed them whole, and we’d watch the lumps make their slow way down the swans’ long necks.
I remember Shamu the Whale splashing the crowd. The dolphin trainer accidentally-on-purpose falling into the water to be “rescued.” Seymour the sea lion sliding across the stage to blow a party horn. It makes me sad now to think of those animals, taken from their ocean home to perform in corny shows. But I didn’t see it that way until later.
My favorite thing at Sea World was watching the pearl divers. They were the main attraction in a section of the park called the Japanese Village. Tourists bought tokens and leaned out over the water to hand them to the divers, who placed the tokens into floating wooden buckets. Then, the divers would glide across the water, bend at the waist, and, kicking their legs into the air, swim straight down. When they surfaced, they had oysters for the people who had paid for them. Afterwards, a man shucked the oysters and announced the size and color of each pearl, and the crowd applauded.
I never had money to buy a token, but I could have watched the pearl divers all day. I’d imagine myself in a white diving suit like theirs. I’d glide across the water and then swim down, my pointed toes a last salute as I dove down and down, into the silence, into the dim rippling light, searching, searching for the most-prized oyster, the one that contained the rare blue pearl.
Andy thought the pearl divers were boring. But we had a deal: he’d wait in the gift shop while I watched the pearl divers. After that, we’d do whatever he wanted.
In the gift shop, there were delicate fans, origami paper, miniature tea sets. But what I liked most were the earrings. Looking back, they were cheap souvenir earrings, but they were beautiful to me. Little shells, seahorses, tiny dolphins. I used to linger in front of the earring rack, trying to decide which I would choose if I had the money. Even though my mother had told me I couldn’t get my ears pierced until I was sixteen.
It’s funny, the things you remember. Once, I was looking at the earrings and a girl about my age came to look at them, too. Her ears were pierced with simple gold studs.
The girl was standing next to me, and her father came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. He was tall and wore a light blue polo shirt. He looked like the kind of father you’d see on a TV show.
“See anything you like?” he asked his daughter.
The girl picked out a pair of silver earrings shaped like little shells. Nestled inside each shell was a tiny pearl.
I watched them walk to the cashier, and I can still see the girl’s face, the way she beamed at her father as he paid for the earrings. I remember watching the father hand the money to the cashier, and noticing his arms. How muscled they looked. How strong.
I don’t remember reaching for the earrings, just that when I looked down, they were in my hand. Little silver shells with tiny pearls. The same as the ones the girl had chosen.
I remember, too, the moment I slipped the earrings into my pocket and saw Andy standing there. His mouth frozen open, his eyes wide.
“Let’s go,” I said, and my voice seemed like it belonged to someone else.
We walked past the tourists. Past the man who sliced the oysters open. Past the pearl divers, who kept diving and offering up their treasures to smiling families.
I remember how the earrings burned in my pocket. How my eyes burned and my face burned and my ears — my unpierced ears — burned.
I forgot about those earrings a long time ago. Then, we were packing up my mother’s house to move her into assisted living. In the back of the closet of my old room, there was an old shoebox filled with photos of my father before he got sick. And at the bottom of the box I found the little shell earrings, now tarnished. And then, I remembered everything.