Mom boarded a one-way flight from Swan Isle the morning after Dad said that before he grew old, he wanted to be eaten by sharks. You’ve always been embarrassed by it, even grossed out, but Mom never explained, never even said goodbye. When he said it, you searched Mom’s face for a reaction, but couldn’t find one. When you were going through school, learning about marriage, you guessed it had something to do with the way so many other partnerships end: Dad got lost in his work. One time you heard her say, “I’ve never even seen a swan on this god damn island.” Maybe that was it.

Every time succeeding, “I want to be eaten by sharks,” conjured up this vague pang of something like emptiness, if it was even possible for a presence to feel like absence. But that’s what your relationship with Mom was, wasn’t it: an ever-lingering sense of absence. You suppose it’s been the same with Dad, though; after she left, he didn’t come back from work for days. A part of him never came back at all.

Then, on a Tuesday morning, he returned, brushing caked sand off his wetsuit and asked, “Do you want to come with me to the beach?”

And you did, because you’d rather share in his pain than be a stranger to him. On the car ride over, you steadied your eyes on the horizon through a blur of bamboo and decided that’s pretty much what most kinds wanted was to not be a stranger. But there was no way for you to know for sure.

The bamboo dissolved to tall grass, then to rocks, then to ancient rocks, dust at the mouth of the ocean, and there you grabbed onto a clear view of the place where the sea meets the sky. That’s where Mom went, you thought, and somewhere deep down, so deep it almost existed somewhere else, you decided you wanted to go there, too.

But when you looked over, Dad was smiling, so guilt reduced the thought to little more than a whisper.

///

You’re in the driver’s seat today. Dad can’t drive anymore.

Mist swirls up onto the shores this morning. With your fog lights on, the edge of the ocean before you looks instead like a candle stifled under a mason jar. Had it not been for the countless visits over what you can’t believe has been all these years, you would not be able to successfully negotiate the rocky beach. Especially with a wheelchair.

You wrench the keys from the ignition and turn to your dad shriveled in the passenger seat.

Ready? you ask. He says, “I’ve been—“ coughs and start again, “I’ve been ready.”

The wheelchair fights you on its way out of the trunk, and it slips from your grasp and clatters onto the gravel as you slam the trunk. You look around for any of the local fishermen while you unfold the chair, surprised to find the land silent. As you push to the passenger side, open the door, and lean in, you catch the cross dangling from the mirror and remember it’s a Sunday. Catholicism is genetic for natives of the island. But you and Dad aren’t from the island, are you?

The air is fresh enough. The sun hasn’t baked the salt into the nautical corpses on the shore yet. The sun hasn’t even come up. Back up the road, rock formations on either side loom, watching with infantile curiosity as Dad trembles his way into the chair. You open the back door and grab the cutlets from the blue and white cooler sitting there. Beef cutlets, tied together with parchment string. No one’s here, but you can’t ignore that nape of the neck reminder accompanied only by a voyeur or guilt of being seen doing something you shouldn’t be.

Do sharks prefer beef or chicken? You slam the door.

Dad laughs, “They don’t really have a diet of either, do they? They want blood. The source is minutiae.”

You come around to face him and slip the beef necklace over his head. You clip his oxygen tank to the back of the chair. It was his idea to recycle his diving gear for geriatric purposes. He takes the credit constantly.

“Too bad I don’t fit into my wetsuit anymore!” He says. Today is no exception.

That reminds you! You lean past him and pull open the glove compartment. Under the car manual is the assortment of goggles. You grab the round, black ones but toss them back. Those are for the duster. There they are: the ones with the plastic nose under the box frames.

“What changed your mind?” He asks.

He’s asked you so many times, but not about this. He’s asked you about the piano lessons you cancelled with Mrs. Shi, about the friends who invited you to the peak for sunrise, about all the times you said you’d spend less time training and more time living, about all those moments you know look back on and wished you had a story for. He always asked it with strong and open arms, an embrace without a need for an answer. You turn to him now, sitting there in his wheelchair. Could he hug you that same way? Before I grow old, I want to be eaten by sharks.

I don’t know, you say.

Dad coughs as you slip the goggles over his eyes. Good to go?

“Good to go.”

So you heave him down the path toward the edge of the water. Sinking down the lip of the sand, you watch his hands grip the arm rests. You remember how he never knew how to wrap your birthday presents well: stubby colored pencils under white tissue paper, almost see-through. He tried, he really did.

“Kelpy.”

You search the water for the head of a horse and you search the rocks for some kind of serpent. Sometimes you forget your own name.

“Kelpy.”

Yeah? You ask.

“I don’t know if we’re going to get any today. Look.”

He points to the stagnant waters tangled in the stray rocks near the jetty. A stream used to run to the sea, but thick algae sucks on the stones, and the creek seems dry.

“It’s run off into the ocean now,” Dad says. “Funny how nitrogen and phosphorus are key ingredients for life. Too much of a good thing, I suppose…”

You don’t say anything. Keep pushing.

When the wheels sink into the rocks and sand, you know it’s time. Ready, Dad? You ask. Who are you asking, really? You know he’s ready. He’s sitting there in his goggles and his oxygen tube, his cutlet collar and twine. He looks up at you with a smashed, youthful smile

So you sort of just dump him into the water. You’re in street clothes. You grew out of your wetsuit many years ago and never bothered to upgrade. So you kiss his clammy cheek, lift up on the handles, and shake until he slides out and splashes onto the tiny surf cropping the shore.

You unclip his oxygen tank and walk off to your right, carrying the tank in one hand and tugging on Dad’s tube with the other.

The waves muffle his words, and you wonder when the tide changes each day. Dad would know, but you don’t ask him. He says, “Go over there past the outcropping. If we’re lucky enough to find any, that’s where they’ll be hunting.”

You drag him along, a whitefish hooked in the nose and dead on the line. He spits the salt water out of his mouth and wipes his face as you continue to pull him along.

The rocks are slick. If you aren’t careful, you could easily fall in with him. Dad, you say, I think I’m going to have to push you out from here.

“What?”

You say again you think you have to push him out from here.

“But I think the whites are around that bend.”

Then you’ll push him that way.

Something whiter than the mist emerges from around that bend. At first, it looks like a great wave breaking, but as it comes closer, you discover it is, in fact, a swan spreading its wings. What’s a swan doing out near salt water?

You reel Dad in. Hey.

He’s looking at the swan. Hey, Dad.

He turns to you. You love him.

“Don’t you want to see? Please come with me out there.”

You don’t think you can bear to watch. But you love him, and want him to be happy. And you’re happy he finally got his wish, and that you came around. You shove him.

He keeps pointing at the swan, but you turn your back to him, and focus instead on navigating the slick rocks on the return journey.

Back on the sand, you turn around and strain to see him. The tide must be changing, because Dad is much further out. You search for shark fins, think you see them chopping through the water. The swan moves on him, keeping close by.

They say right before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. Maybe with family members, their life flashes before your eyes, too.

You were born on this island, and your first memory is of Dad painting the last of the letters on the wall, spiraling and golden against the green hills of the mural on the wall opposite your crib, and it says Swan Isle, but you never did find out what real name actually was, and your second memory is of Dad and Mom arguing, she’s trying to paint a blue sky over the island and Dad doesn’t seem to understand and he asks you what you want the wall opposite your crib to be but you’re too young to answer, even though the open sky your mom has invited into this space is appealing in a way you can’t really place, and then mom is gone and it’s just you and dad and the island and everyone on it, hardly anyone on it…

And out on the water the swan flaps its wings and you think, swans don’t eat meat, it must be keeping him company-

So you grow out of the crib and into a bedroom and dad makes all your lunches before school until you’re old enough to tell him it's embarrassing and please not to, and so instead he asks what you want to do after school but doesn’t give you an option, he takes you to the beach where he works with the sharks, doing research, studying birth…

He’s so strong when he tags them, flips them over by their fin and checks their stomach, the sun glows on the water and on his skin and you never see him look like this anywhere else, completely in his element…

But now you’re sure the sharks have found him, because the swan is right by his side in the water and he’s flapping his arms, splashing in the water, the sharks must be pulling him under-

As you grew the sharks got old, and you started to remember even more that painting your mother proposed of open sky so you decide to be a pilot and Dad says the only kind they have on this island is agricultural and he doesn’t really have the money but he’ll work more if that’s what’s important, though, and so you learned how to fly while he was out in the water, and from overhead the sharks looked a lot smaller, and he couldn’t die while he was young because he had to provide for his daughter…

And dad waved to you then like he’s waving now. Is that swan keeping him company or comforting, and would it even know how?

But no, you don’t know, won’t ever know that there are no sharks in the water today, that there haven’t been since last year, and the swan’s just dismayed-

Because as you learned to fly you learned to drop the crop dust with all its nitrogen and phosphorus on land, but everything on land runs into the water, and the fresh water fish die and the plants shrivel smaller and the swan population falters, so they spread out to the shoreline in search of more food, and the sharks choke on the algae like glue, so they leave the island and they leave your dad, and he has to work more hours just to meet the demands of having a family and having a daughter with bigger life plans…

So today when you watch your dad thrashing around, you think he’s splashing, excited and well, but the swan instead is pecking his head, its breaking the skin and stabbing his eyes and he’s screaming because he knows it’s him or the swan’s babies who will die-

And every year you grew older, Dad said he wanted this all to go over peacefully, “Let them take me down,” but you don’t really want anything to do with it, so you ignore it and hope if he goes through with it that you will already be gone…

Oh, and here you are on the shore, watching as dad gets what he wanted, even thirty years older, but you don’t know, won’t ever know, that he’s screaming in pain and he’s screaming in pain and he’s screaming in pain.

You never wanted to watch him die. But now, you’re realizing it’s time, isn’t it. Have you helped him?

He just wanted someone to stay with him, and all you see is the swan that could fly any time but sticks by his side, and if you’re being honest with yourself and no one’s watching, it maybe brings a tear to your eye.

I won’t fly, you think, not today.

And across the water on the wind, high and alive, he cries, “Help me! Help me!”

And this is the end of your youth in Asia. Only as he pleads does your old whisper turn into a scream, you’re free! you’re free! and you don’t realize that no one on the other side of the sky will share as much in common with you as your father does. And the loneliness of your past will be nothing compared to the loneliness of your future. Because he cries it again, “Help me, help me!”

But all you hear is and was,

Kelpy. Kelpy.

He loves me, he loves me.

Until the screaming stops, and the swan floats away, and all the cutlets of meat and his skin torn like sheets spread across the water red as coral and clay.

You stand there for a time, trying to decide when you should leave and how long you should stay. Sometimes we think that we’re helping. You gave him what he wanted, you think, you didn’t want this.

You didn’t want this.

Waves crash on the sand now, and the church bells begin to ring in the day. And there at the point between sea and sky, your dad takes his last breath and you find yourself wondering how far swans can fly.