Thrust: A Novel

“The girl loves her father. She loves him and loves him, but it is not a love she has ever heard of anywhere else, not in the world and not in any story that she knows. She loves her father like she loves history and animals and plants and fossils and, most of all, lost objects and water. She loves her father because she understands how deeply the love of a daughter can make meaning in the world, even when the meanings in the world seem to be shutting. Without daughters, fathers are dead. It’s not that any daughter can save a father, ever. All fathers are doomed, the girl knows this with her whole body. We’ve made a wrong place for fathers in the world, so they throw their lives at heroisms and braveries and wars, and winning and owning, and desire poking out of their pants in a way that is desperate, and then they die with a want inside them that is larger than a body.”

“My god, that sounds terrible,” Bertrand says. “Turtles are not like fathers. In Africa, we’re considered the smartest. In Egypt, we’re understood as part of the underworld, which makes sense to a certain extent — but then the whole concept of evil… what the hell is that all about?” He casts his eyes sidelong, then continues.

“In ancient Greece, we showed up on their money, their seals. And there’s that story about Aeschylus, the playwright — killed when a bird dropped a tortoise on his head. What a hoot. The Chinese consider us sacred — to them we represent power, tenacity, longevity. They think a tortoise helped Pangu to create the world. The Chinese used to inscribe all kinds of ancient stories on our shells. The Chippewa, the Menominee, the Huron-Wyandot, the Abenaki, Shawnee, and Haudenosaunee put us into their stories too. Look at my shell — shaped like the land, even like the dome of the universe, see it?” He twists his neck slightly, then turns back to her. “Our backs are very important in India too. In Japan, the tortoise is a safe place for immortals. In the Mohawk tradition, earthquakes are a sign that the World Turtle is flexing, turning beneath the enormous weight that she is carrying.”

Laisvė listens until the turtle finishes.

Bertrand stretches his head all the way out from his shell. “Now, what about this daughter girl?”

“What daughters can do is carry new meanings into the world. Like a beacon.” And with that, her story emerges fully:

Once there was a water girl who lived in the belly of a whale.

Her father feels like a gun. Laisvė knows that the sentence is true and untrue. She knows that her father did not harm her mother or disappear her brother, but she also knows that her father is hopelessly and forever tethered to their deaths. As fate played out, their deaths ended up bearing her into the world, giving her a life.

The last image she has of her mother lives between worlds. She sees the shore of the northeastern edge of a land of mostly snow — her father has pointed to the map on the kitchen wall a hundred times, saying, This used to be Siberia—and she sees the lip of a boat in the Bering Sea and she sees her mother’s body between the land and the boat. Her father already on the boat that will take them away to safety with her infant brother. She sees her mother stepping, as if to board the boat, and then her mother is not; her mother is shot; her mother falls into the water in the most graceful slow-motion death in the world, more beautiful than any other death; her mother’s long and languid beautiful arm reaching out to them, her too-white hand held out toward daughter or family or something of them. Her mother’s outstretched arm and hand then rising toward the sky then slowly sinking, beginning to go to water. The last image is of her arm and hand, sinking.

Then whoever was shooting at her mother — Do we ever really know who does the shooting? — was directing their fire at the people left on the boat, and the boatmen hurried to move the boat away from the shore. All the people crowded down onto the floor of the boat, which wasn’t much of a boat in the first place, some kind of used-to-be sea fishing vessel that had been repurposed for the kinds of people who might be fleeing the shore of war or poverty or punishment from boat to boat out into the vast unknown of the ocean.

Once there was a water girl who lived in the belly of a whale, but really, she rolled over onto the floor of the save-your-life boat and looked at her father’s face, her father gripping her swaddled infant brother. The two of them looked like a single organism caught in anguish. In that moment, as she watched, everything about life and love in her father drowned. For an instant, her father’s eyes looked dead, then the shooting sounds brought them back to life, as the boat created distance and wake, and when she locked eyes with her father, she understood that the rest of his life would be about his children not dying. She also understood that she was a piece of the dead and drowned mother in a way that her brother could never be.