Breathing Water, page 22
I stumbled back down the stairs. In the kitchen I found the box as I had left it, hinged door open to the miniature night, and stared inside at the other barrette. At the other moon I had given her that summer three years ago.
Outside, a small wind skipped across the lake, lifted my hair from my shoulders as I walked across the road. Sleepwalking, I carried the box to the edge of the lake. Sleep-touching, I let the other barrette pierce my skin. Sleep-howling, I sat down on the rock and began to moan, stuttering white silent breath into the air. I sat at the edge of the water, trying to breathe, but I could only shiver, her brother, her brother, her brother.
August 24, 1991
A recollection of hands. The way her hand looked like a small piece of chocolate in my own as we walked away from the swing. Hands reaching up to touch the bristles of hair at my neck when Max spoke. My hand reaching for the doorknob. He must have known by the end of the day that I had been rehearsing. He must have known that each movement was a small step closer to leaving.
Outside it is twilight. Orange melting into blue. Remarkably warm. Max is in the kitchen after dinner, still sitting at the kitchen table. I move away from him onto the porch, lie down on the daybed, hold a book to my chest like a shield. But the edges of the cover are too sharp to comfort me, the paper too likely to cut. I close my eyes and listen to the sounds of the summer people.
In the other room, he drinks his mother’s face. Too much mascara and too little patience. When she cried, he said, she looked just like you. Pathetic. And through the ice cube panes, her face becomes mine. She makes him drunk. I make him drunk. She and I identical now. Sisters in this effort to drive him insane.
I recollect my hands tracing the edges of the embroidered sheets, thinking of Gussy pulling flowers from a simple white cloth while Grampa read in the other room. I long for this peace, for something I can’t understand anymore amid this noise. The sun melts orange in the blue water, disrupts the blue with strange fire.
In the other room, he knows that I am ready. I can hear him fighting, staring me down in the rum rust of his drink. Willing me to stay. To wait with him a little while longer. Orange becomes blue. Waking becomes sleep. Day turns into night. In the other room he turns into the tiger behind the door I am trying to close. Hours of silence. Only the clanking of ice against glass.
I recollect my hands working across the bones of my body, identifying, classifying, making sure that all of me was there. Collar, clavicle, rib, pelvis, shin. I must make sure that I still have my bones to carry me.
It is midnight and I am some strange Cinderella, the glass slipper shattering into a thousand gestures. I use each gesture as a reminder that it is time to leave. Open palm across my face, nails dug into my shoulders, fingers laced like a noose around my neck. Fists meeting bone, bone, bone.
The bones of my legs carry me slowly from the porch across the living room floor to the kitchen. I can see the back of his head, bobbing, fighting me still in the melted ice. I pray for the silence of these old floors. Do not moan tonight, be quiet. Let me go.
But as I walk into the kitchen, he stands up and goes to the refrigerator.
“Have we got any more club soda?” he asks.
“No,” I say, my heart pounding dully in my chest.
“Ginger ale?”
“No.”
“Shit.”
“Why don’t you go to Hudson’s?” I ask.
He looks at me, hatred and shame, and I know it will not be this easy. He won’t just leave me alone here.
“Why don’t I just drink something else?” he says and slams the thick-bottomed bottle on the kitchen table.
“Why don’t you just fuck yourself?” I whisper when he leans into the refrigerator.
Pick a door. Pick a door. I am looking for the tiger. I am tempting him with a bloody piece of meat. I am ready for his attack.
“Excuse me?” he says and sways drunkenly away from the refrigerator.
“I said, ‘Why-don’t-you-just-fuck-yourself?’ ” My heart is steady, beating against the walls of my chest.
He slams the refrigerator door and stares at me in disbelief. Threatening me with his silence. His hands are curled into fists at his sides.
“Do it,” I say.
He doesn’t move.
“You goddamned coward.” I stare at him, at his face, and it makes me laugh. “You’re pathetic.”
And then he gives me what I have asked for. Hands curled into fists, striking at my face. The sudden swell of my lip, the metallic taste of blood in my mouth. I feel my heart beating in the place where his knuckles have met my bone. And then I recollect my hand on the latch to the door, the simplicity of the silver hook, the ease. It has always been there, this door. What have your hands been doing?
I can hardly believe that I am moving, that the road is beneath me and that I can go faster now than he could run. I recollect my hands, skin stretched tightly over knuckles, holding the steering wheel tightly. I can see the lake in my rearview mirror. I can see everything reflected in reverse, and it isn’t familiar anymore.
When I park the car in Gussy and Grampa’s driveway in Quimby, I remember Keisha.
She will be expecting me soon. I promised I would meet her there, that I would be there after everyone was asleep.
This is more important, I think. I am here. There is no turning away from this.
I open the car door and run to the edge of Gussy’s garden to vomit. I shiver and vomit, my body heaving and trembling with the poison filling me. The grass is cold and wet under me. My fingers dig into the cold ground as I become empty. I imagine that they would not see me if I went to the door. That there is nothing left at all except bones and that they too will turn completely to dust.
The house is quiet. Gussy’s calico, Franny, is watching me through the window. I imagine Grampa has fallen asleep with a book on his chest. That Gussy is softly snoring next to him on the bed. I imagine the green glow of a digital clock, the smell of tuna casserole or honey-glazed ham and sweet potatoes still in the air. Dishes drying in the wooden rack next to the sink.
I think of his face, his hands, pleading. I see him standing at the edge of the road, watching his mother disappear. The smell of gasoline, and the way her hair flew out the driver’s side window. I wonder if he stood outside as I drove away. If he cried into his hands. If he is only waiting for me to turn around and come back.
I watch my feet moving away from the house. I watch myself reflected in reverse, going nowhere, going back. The pull of the bottom of the lake, the irresistible need to breathe. And I am somewhere in between. This is drowning.
In the car, I can’t feel my hands on the wheel anymore. I am only an apparition. I am already gone. I drive slowly away from my grandparents’ house, through town where everyone is sleeping, and turn onto the dirt road that will take me back to Gormlaith.
When the trees clear, I see a new red and blue. Not sun, not sky, but lights spinning across the water, dipping into the water like transparent hands. I stop the car when I see the summer people standing like ghosts at the edge of the water, white faces illuminated by the moon.
I leave the car in the road and run to the edge of the water. Blue night. Blue lights making patterns on the water, on my hands. It is cold and I am shivering in my summer dress. I am shivering and tearing at my cuticles when they pull her body out of the water and laid her on the moon-drenched indigo grass.
Max pulls the boat out of the water and I hear the scream of the wooden bottom scraping against the rocks. He looks at me as he tethers the boat to the tree stump. He looks at me, and his flat drunken eyes say, Because of you. This is all because of you.
As he walks away, explaining to the officer how he came to find a dead girl in the middle of the lake in the middle of the night, I kneel next to her on the ground. My fingers pull the satin edge of the blanket over her hair, beaded with glistening drops of water. And I envy the way she seems to sleep, warm and quiet beneath a blanket of light. I envy her, because I am colder than water, colder than air. I am colder than this girl who gave me someplace safe.
PART THREE
Silence falls in the empty spaces between before and now. There is no hush, no prelude; there is only the abrupt end to the words. But in this space is memory, and in this memory is unbearable pain.
If I do not speak, if I slip into this white space like a sheer cotton summer dress, I may be safe. Because where there are no words, there is no danger. In this summer dress, there is nothing but the empty where before resides as memory and after is not yet born.
It is quiet here, without words. I could almost sleep. I could almost lie down in this white forest, lay my head across a bed of white needles, and rest. But I know that in these trees are ghosts, clinging to the branches, stirring in the transparent leaves. And if you listen closely, the ghosts’ voices are louder than horns, louder and more seductive than Sirens, beckoning sailors to shipwreck.
And so I look for a way out of these white trees, out of this terrible playground. I stumble across the white ground, tripping on invisible rocks and scraping my legs on invisible branches. I know from these ghosts that silence is deceptive. That it isn’t safe at all.
But what you are forgetting when you ask for words is that breaking silence is like breaking glass.The consequences are sharp, draw blood, leave slivers of pain in your fingers. The words may not be what you wanted at all. They may lodge themselves like broken glass under the tender skin of bare feet on pavement. They may crack open old wounds, make an old bruise blue again.
Do not ask me for haunted, because the slivers of haunted are sharper and more exacting than swords.
August 1994
I tried to make it not true. Inside the patchwork cave I made, I dreamed his words explaining everything undone. As the late summer sun descended outside my window, I dreamed his hand pressing mine, his voice saying, No, no. I knew of her, of course, but no, no.
When night fell, I willed it untrue with remembered childhood prayers and wishing games. In the soft cavern of quilts, I pleaded like a child for it to go away. I considered every explanation, every possible coincidence, every discrepancy. I imagined them together and then separately, as I knew them, until I couldn’t tell the difference between them anymore.
But at the library I had pulled out the yellowed newspapers from that summer, bound in a large leather book. I had found the article about her, tucked into the center of the newspaper where people might be less apt to find her. Fresh Air Fund Child Drowns in Lake Gormlaith. And as I stared at the words, smudged and precarious on the page, I realized that I hadn’t known her at all. Keisha Jackson. Hadn’t even known her last name.
When Devin called later that day I told him that I had errands to run, groceries to get, that I would be busy all day. I told him the weather would be blue again tomorrow, that the lake was warm, so I would not have to tell him the other things.
I drove back toward town, blinded by sun. I drove blindly around the lake reciting the shopping list like a mantra: bread, milk, eggs, rice. But when I got to Hudson’s, I didn’t go inside. Instead, I walked past the trucks and station wagons. Past three children with runny noses and dirty feet playing soldiers while their parents shopped inside. Then I walked through the tall grass into the woods where I first loved Billy Moffett.
The rusty trash was still there, in piles of knobs and doors and glass windows. I stepped carefully across the metallic hills, through the rivers of broken glass. The sun reflected in an oven door, and I felt my blood, hot and liquid inside. I yanked a metal pipe out from under the debris and started to swing. I smashed the cold metal against anything that was not already broken.
The sound of metal on metal made me grind my teeth together. It felt like chewing on tinfoil, the metallic pain of tin on silver fillings. But still I pounded the pipe into everything that was still whole. I hit until nothing was intact anymore.
And then I sat down in the grass and looked at my destruction. Sweat ran down my arms in small rivers. I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead, felt the cool sweat under my hair. I sat there until my heart had stopped pounding so hard, until my breaths were regular and steady again.
My hands were sore, my palms already beginning to blister.
Instead of returning to the camp, I drove all the way into Quimby. I drove across the covered bridge and up the winding hill to Quimby High. School was in session again already. I imagined all of the restless kids inside, peering out the windows at the sunshine. The smell of chalkboards and new pink erasers.
I parked near the cafeteria and walked to the cemetery fence. I opened the gate and wandered slowly, winding my way through the stones, to my grandfather. The dominoes had moved. The white dots dizzying in this intricate game of aligning and matching. Gussy had also been there recently. There were fresh flowers in the jelly jars; the water clear. His pipe still lay on the cool granite, the grassy tobacco loose inside the hollow wooden bowl. I ran my finger along its gentle spine.
No one else was in the cemetery. There wasn’t even the familiar hum of the groundskeeper’s lawn mower. I lay down on the ground on my back and stared at the sky. Clouds moved like white phantoms across the expanse of blue. Beyond this there were no birds, nothing but brightness. When I closed my eyes, I could still see the sun, like a black glowing ember behind my eyelids.
Behind my eyes, I saw Max waiting for me at the kitchen table. Perhaps drifting off to sleep and then waking, realizing that I was still gone. I watched him slam his empty glass on the table and look over his shoulder as if I might suddenly appear. I saw him stand up, one of his legs asleep, perhaps, numb and needles. I watched him walk through the dark living room turning on light after light, lighting every corner where I might be hiding. I saw him walk up the winding stairs, his pace quickening as he found each corner empty of me. I watched him panic then, his expression becoming uncertain. Scared, even, I watched him rub his hand across the top of his head, pressing down his hair, ruffled from sleep.
Outside he may have looked to the woods. He may have looked for the moon on my pale skin through the trees. He may have muttered my name, called me back home. He may have figured I’d only gone for a drive. That I would be back soon. That I only needed to ride with the windows rolled down, that I only needed a little night wind on my face.
Because then, on the back of my eyes, he walked calmly to the water and untied the boat from the tree stump. Breathing steadily, he crawled into the boat and pushed himself away from the shore. He dipped the oars into the water and slowly headed for the center of the lake.
He must have drifted off out there, because when he woke up he was disoriented, couldn’t tell where he was in all that water. Remembering my absence, he must have shuddered a little and picked up the oars again to go back home.
There were no lights. No lights at all near the Foresters’ camp. But if he could find the outline of the shore then he could find his way home. So he rowed toward the red dock, bobbing, making sounds like hands clapping. And when he was close enough to see the shadowy outline of the Foresters’ camp and the edge of the water, he must have sighed a little, leaned back a little on the seat.
When he hit the piece of wood in the water, he worried first about scraping the bottom of the boat. He pushed hard against it to move away from it. But instead of resisting, the wood yielded and then disappeared. Dizzy and drunk still, he realized that it wasn’t what he had thought. When she floated to the surface and he saw her skin, the same color as the dark water, he must have believed that this was a dream. That soon he would wake up, wrapped around me again, safe.
She was heavy, I imagined. Heavier than an eleven year old should be. The weight of her sleep, the weight of water. He touched her for the first time, and she felt cold. He thought that her dark skin would collect warmth like a dark shirt collects sunlight. Like pavement or charcoal. But she was cold, and heavy. It must have seemed that she had appeared in the lake like an apparition, a ghost child who had lost her way.
The story was easier than the truth. He found her, found her, found her. Floating like a piece of driftwood in the night water. He and she were alike then. Both lost in the lake, both drunk and dizzy, both already dead.
I opened my eyes and stared at the sun. I stared until my eyes fought and blinked. I rolled over and stared at the stone. True, etched in granite above my grandfather’s name.
I pressed my ear to the ground. Listened for something, anything. The low aching wail of bagpipes. The sound of drums. The signal, the cue.
It began with blue. Blue sky, blue lake, and white paper sailboats. I whispered into the ground, whispered into waiting ears. I uttered the first blue. Of the small flowers Max picked for me and taped all around my dorm room door so that when I came out, I was surrounded by forget-me-nots. Of the ink he used to write my name, so he could conjure me when I was not with him. Of the walls in the small bathroom of our first apartment. He tried to paint me the sky, but it came out the color of turquoise stones. It’s okay. I love it. It reminds me of my mother’s Navajo ring. Of the bowl he filled with sliced peaches and sugar when I was sick and sad one summer afternoon. Of the broken cobalt glass in the sink. His hands working quickly to stop mine from bleeding.
I whispered the secrets of how this began. Against drums. I whispered until my words became their own rhythm, their own melody, until they became music instead of pain. Until each recollection became a small note, strung together on threads of blue.
Later, I returned to my cave. I returned to the bed where I hoped sleep would erase this. And that night, while Devin tapped at the door and later threw pebbles at my window, I dreamed them apart. I separated her face from his in my memory, tore the thread that bound them with trembling fingers. I dreamed him with pale eyes first, eyes that looked nothing like hers. And then I slowly dreamed the rest of his color away to make all of this impossible. In my mind he became transparent, water beneath the memory of my fingers.
