Five years ago tomorrow, a text
from my mom lit up my screen: Come now. Dad’s dying.
In the years since
that fateful morning, I’ve cycled through the usual suspects—my childhood recollections
of Dad—exercising moments so committed to memory they’ve molded into family
folklore, fortified by Kodak prints loose in a drawer, and festooned with my siblings’
iterations. But more and more, I find myself savoring the rare coins, the
treasures you unearth unexpectedly, a souvenir you forgot you even possessed.
It happened today
with The Conch. A shell so special to me it deserves capitalization.
I was standing on
the sofa, searching for a novel on the bookshelf, the living room lamp casting
a soft hue when I spotted it on the top row, way in the back, obscured by shadow.
I was maybe eleven
when Dad found it or stepped on it, rather. A Gastropod foot-skewer, buried
under five feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico.
Dad was drifting
in the current, water lapping at his neck, while I played in the shallows
nearby. I remember the sudden yelp—the surprised high-pitch howl that clogged
his throat and prompted him to dive down to investigate. At first, I assumed he
might’ve stepped on a crab, so when his head disappeared underwater, I
hightailed it to shore, terrified a crustacean army was in hot pursuit.
Seconds later, Dad
surfaced triumphantly, spitting an arch of saltwater like some masculine Tuscan
statue, and holding his prize aloft. He carried the specimen to the beach,
laying it beside his foot to approximate its length. It was enormous. At least
13 inches long, boasting an intricate spire, suture lines blackened with
seaweed. Turning it over, we realized it was already hollow inside—the
abandoned home of something long departed. A creature who’d returned to sand
and salt.
It wasn’t an
especially pretty thing. It didn’t resemble the shell shop’s polished
selections, lined up in uniform rows, pink and perfect as cotton candy. The ocean
had worn its sheen to a dull yellow and a few barnacles clung to its outer lip.
But it was intact and wild and spectacular.
Later, I looked it
up in a reference book. Triplofusus Giganteus. A horse conch, the
largest saltwater snail in North America. Florida’s state shell.
For more than a
decade, it adorned the middle shelf in my parent’s basement bathroom—the one that
displayed a door sign of a silhouetted, naked, peeing boy that mortified me in
grade school when friends came over. It stayed there, collecting toilet paper
dust until I got my own apartment and asked if I could display it. The Conch, not
the pissing adolescent. The shell survived several moves across state-lines and
bouts with bubble wrap, insulated like a priceless Fabergé
egg. Eventually, it earned top-shelf honors in my suburban Georgian but somehow,
I’d forgotten it was even there.
This morning, I lifted
it from its spot, cradling it in my hand like a newborn’s head, honoring its
weight, its heft, like he did that first day. And I was back. Facing the roar
of the ocean, skin warm, eyes squinting up at the cawing gulls. A copse of
palms in the distance. Wet sand. Chapped lips. The slickness of Dad’s suntanned
shoulders as we freestyled to the sandbar.
And as I stood
there alone, savoring the memory, I thought, the things you leave behind.
I placed that
shell to my ear—whorl against whorl—and listened. A thrum. A purr.
The susurration of
water—ocean’s echo. The breath of reincarnation. A dead vessel whispering
beyond the grave—harkening back. Frenetic wings from something alive. Something
eternal. So that thirty years or five years compressed into nothing,
evaporating time into a mist so fine that all that remained was a fleck of salt
on a lip.
If I could’ve inhaled
that sound—swallowing it like an elixir or consuming it whole with the gaping
maw of an anaconda—I would have, but it felt too mystical, too massive to
contain.
And yet, The
Conch.
Perhaps, Dad’s
very own genie lamp. I wish. I wish. I wish.
