My Not-So-Still Life by Liz Gallagher

Author:Liz Gallagher [Gallagher, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2011-05-09T20:00:00+00:00

I don’t feel like going home. Standing outside Palette, I shut my eyes, smell the salt water, listen to a motorcycle go by.

I’ll pedal to Golden Gardens, to the beach. There’s time before dark.

The bike ride is like some other life; I’m drifting between eras. I’ve traveled this same path so many times, out of the shopping part of Ballard, past the rock-climbing gym, closer to the water. Up ahead, there’s the marina, where boats live, majestic. The fish-and-chips shop with the huge soft-serve ice cream cones.

But now I ride this route as someone with a job. I picture a film in my head, showing me as a little girl, brown-haired, wearing a sweet dress that my mom found at Kidz Consign. Then the film switches to me during my Ocean Tides days, with my first bleached streaks and a string around my wrist, wearing jeans and a black tee. Then the film focuses in on me now, in brighter contrast, with my pink hair and my white boots.

I add on to the film: me, looking like Maye. Turned up a notch or ten, like a living doll.

I ride past the parking lot for the Ballard Locks, where fresh water from the ship canal mingles with salt water from Puget Sound. The canal and the sound are kept apart by huge gates on either side that reach all the way to the bottom. Boats traveling the canal have to stop between the two gates before being let out the other side. Inside the gates is the only place where the salt water and the fresh water mix.

Salmon run at the locks. The enormous schools of sock-eyes come in July, scales shimmering, returning to the place where they were born, now to spawn.

But what I love most at the locks isn’t the boats or the salmon. Those are what Mom loves, for sure. For me, it’s all about the flower garden on the grounds.

I remember being a kid on a summer day, wearing a white dress. We passed through the garden on one of the walks Mom and I used to take. The roses were the prettiest things I’d ever seen. Looking back, I feel almost as if, in that moment, the roses could have become to me what water is to my mom. The thing that beats inside my chest. The thing that fills me up.

I plucked the top off one, right at the blossom, where there were no thorns.

Mom said, “Not for you!” It sounded harsh. She softened and said, “The flowers are here to feed the bees. We don’t pick them.”

It’s one of my earliest memories: feeling guilty for killing a flower that belonged to the bees, and not to me.

I tried to reattach the flower to its bush. I petted the petals, stroked them, willed them to reattach.

My mom got teary. She bent down, arm on my back.

“The bees, Mommy,” I said.

“They’ll be all right,” she said. “Look. More roses.”

I looked. The garden was glorious. “More flowers,” I said.

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