Nothing was normal about the way we lived the year I was five.

Not the way Mommy slept on the pullout couch in the living room, sometimes with someone, sometimes alone, often past breakfast. Not the way the long-haired couple who lived in the back behind the beaded curtain made us breakfast when Mommy slept in. Not the way the world grew larger and more peopled, but somehow more lonely than the years before.

     When I was five, I spent hours alone paging through a tall stack of MAD Magazines that someone had left in the corner of my baby brother’s bedroom. By the time I finished the stack, sounding out words as I went, I found I could read other things, too.

     One day, my aunt picked up a hitchhiker on the road into town. She brought him by our little house just off the plaza in Sonoma, and he took the upstairs bedroom as his own. He tacked two posters on the wall: one a psychedelic lion with a swirling celestial mane wrapped around the word “Leo,” and the other a picture of a place where all the roads were water.

     “What’s Venice?” I asked, reading the word on the watery poster. It was lunchtime, and I had come upstairs and peered into his bedroom to look for Mommy, the maker of lunch. I knew by now that I wouldn’t find her in the usual places. I had learned to look for her where I didn’t expect she would be. I found her in bed beside the hitchhiker; her long blonde hair spilled across the pillow. If this had been home, like the one we left in New York, I would have crawled in beside her, like my sister and brother and I did on weekends when Mommy and Daddy slept in. But this home wasn’t like that home, so I stayed in the doorway. 

     She held a cigarette in one hand, over her head. The covers were pulled up to her bare shoulders. The hitchhiker was lying on his side; his head propped up with his hand. His furry chest and beard were all of a piece with his sideburns and thick, wavy hair. He gazed at my mother with a kind of electric awe that I knew from other men and other gazes, because my mommy was beautiful. People rearranged themselves when she entered a room. The weather changed. He took the tiny cigarette from her hand, held it to his lips, and inhaled. Leaking air, he said to me, “It’s in Italy. Far from here.” He handed the cigarette back to my mother. 

     “The streets are water?” I asked.

     He nodded.

     “The cars are boats?” 

     He exhaled.

     “The cars are boats,” he said. 

     “I want to go there,” I said, and felt for the first time the pull of the promise of somewhere else. When I was five, I knew how to long for things I had lost. How to miss the home we left in Yonkers. How to miss Daddy; how to miss the way the house came alive when he was home. But longing for the unknown was new.

     Mommy exhaled and said, “Venice is sinking into the sea, Honey. It’ll be gone before you get there.”

     My mother would have known then what I would learn years later: that Venice was still digging out from the Aqua Granda of 1966 when the city was submerged, with all its treasures, under six feet four inches of water.

     My dad was six-foot-four, I think, as I read this strange coincidental metric and imagine its depth. I read of the great flood of Venice long after he was gone, and long after she was gone, and long since I’ve paddled through the ocean that rose between them during that year when I was five. Long since I’ve found dry land.

     It was a convergence of misfortune that flooded the ancient city. I read in LIFE Magazine: unrelenting rain, unforgiving winds, and, some say, an unrepentant moon that pulled the high tides higher and refused to let the lagoon empty out before the tides rose again. The rain continued to fall, and the city was drowned. 

     That afternoon in the hitchhiker’s bedroom, Venice became the first place I grieved for, almost as soon as I began to long for it. When I grew older, I would stumble again into more of those thin places between hope and grief. They're nearly the same, I would come to understand. All that divides hope from grief is the precarious belief that there's still time to put things right. That there's still somewhere to go. 

***

Not long after that, my sister and brother and I boarded a plane for Denver, where we would live with our dad and his new wife (we learned to call her Mom) and our new baby brother in a house that was just the right size and felt like home. If we spoke of Mommy (and we learned it was better not to), we called her Mom-in-California. For seven years, we did not hear from her. 

***

At last we do, and we fly giddy to California to see her again. I am twelve. She arrives to pick us up in a VW bus that looks like the one we had as kids, before we left New York. But this one doesn’t have a pop-up top. Where the back seats might have been, there is a plywood platform and a foam mattress. The bumper sticker reads: Divers do it deeper. 

     I don’t have language for the change in her face, the way the skin hangs on her bones, pools above her cheeks. Her skeletal smile. Her blue eyes rheumy, as if sinking into the sea. I am twelve and I don’t yet know how to read the debris that cocaine makes of the body when the dopamine ebbs away. How to recognize the eyes of an addict; how they stay hungry and forever scan the middle distance for the next rising tide. As she scans me now, I imagine she strains to recognize this gangly kid with her failed Farrah Fawcett flip, who is so much changed from the little girl who left. It is in this moment that I regret my pants — high-water pants. I have grown so fast, I am so tall, that all my pants are too short, and hover above my ankles. 

     “Floods,” the kids at school call them; the kids whose pants are long enough; the kids who laugh at mine as if they are ridiculous, as if they can’t imagine a world underwater.