Ganymede

Her parents wore cowboy boots and listened to hippie rock. Her mother, as a child, was interested in outer space, growing up watching the attempts to put man on the moon and memorizing constellations from her bedroom window late at night. Every child, according to her, has a list of names that they collect over time—names that they might want to give their child one day. She found the name Ganymede from one of Jupiter’s moons.

I met Ganymede when she moved to my suburbs; we were naive enough to think that we’d be friends forever. She was a tepid second-grader who wore red ribbons in her hair and spent hours pruning her shrubs in her front yard. She had these odd cactus-shaped flowers with little lavender bulbs. Delphiniums, I think they were. She gave me a few of the seeds once—because I asked—and they’re still flourishing in my parents’ backyard. During our summers our families would drive the ten hours down to the coast and rent a house together, and we would share a bedroom. Our room had vast ceilings with intricate moldings in the corners with shiny golden foil. Ganymede said they reminded her of a fantasy of hers, in which she had an expansive rococo mansion (of course, the beach house looked nothing like the gold-embalmed French baroque style). We whispered secrets beneath the covers and giggled at the exaggerated creaks of the bed, imagining them to be footsteps on the staircase. We’d try to paint each others’ lips with our mothers’ thick cosmetics, horribly butchering the delicacy of the vermillion border. We didn’t have such intimacy back at home; there, we were separated by what seemed like endless rows of houses.

It was a late August, I’m sure, when it happened. We were only twelve. It had been time to transition from tanning silently in the heat (a task we deemed mature, as our mothers would do the same) to doing staggered runs on the sand, playing tag, letting the wind fly by us as we tripped on wet clumps. We would listen to the waves crash against the small boulders caressed by waterweed, and failing to mimic the ocean with our shushes. Ganymede loved the salmon pink shade that the driftwood turned as it cooled in its wetness. She always smelt of the beach; I’d look over and see little shells braided into her hair, her svelte legs etched with shimmering sand (even if we hadn’t gone to the beach that day). We had freedom at the summer house; our parents trusted us enough there to explore by ourselves.

There was a run-down arcade next to the beach, but we never went. Thinking the arcade was safer than the water, our parents would give us quarters each morning before we departed together. We’d squander them on popsicles at the beach store. Our parents never asked us whether or not we actually went to the arcade, and we never told them that we didn’t.

There was a large run-down lighthouse that overlooked the sea; it had intricate drawings on its sides, flaking latticed windows, and a crimson viewing tip. It was red from rust. There was a discouraging fence that ran around the border two hundred feet from the entrance on all sides. The lighthouse was a bit of a mystery. We didn’t know who owned it, just that it was owned. We liked to imagine that the owner was a lonely old woman, who yearned for our company. Ganymede loved that lighthouse. She told me over and over that when she finally climbed those winding steps and got to the top, she’d be able to “find the sea.” Her phrasing didn’t make much sense to me; she could very clearly see the sea from where we stood on the beach. Ganymede did not want to be stranded in the sea, per se, but to be so far out she couldn’t see the speckled gray of land. She wanted to be in complete silence, with just the ripple of her paddling feet in her ears. She knew she couldn’t safely attempt that (the warnings of our parents stood strong), and perhaps simply watching the sea from so high up was enough. If she got up there, the beige merging of land and sea wouldn’t taint her elaborate fantasy.

Later that same August, Ganymede got dragged out to sea. Maybe she thought she was slowly swaying towards the grand lighthouse. Perhaps the soporific tendencies of waves drew her in. I had stood still, my mouth quivering—I couldn’t push any words out, they clung so tightly to my throat—and my feet were digging further into the sand. I felt my hair blow over my eyes as I stood, just staring out at her head bobbing up and down. Her little returns were tantalizing. I found my breathing matching her sways. I felt so certain that she was not going to come back to me. She seemed too small and the sea seemed too large.

A few minutes after her last bob, I saw a slight macula in the water. I let myself fall upon the sand and bawled. I watched the waters just in case.