Breathing Water, page 25
Tess arrived for Colette and Yari’s party before anyone else.
I was taking sheets down from the clothesline. I had Maggie’s laundry too. I told her I would take care of the things that she was still too weak to do. I used lavender soap and collected the end of summer in the crisp cotton. I couldn’t wait until she buried her face in the clean sheets and smelled this rare scent of sunshine.
“Effie Greer, my dear,” Tess said, skipping to me across the front lawn. I smiled at her knobby knees and cutoff shorts. I smiled at her braids. “Wanna catch some crawdads for supper?”
“Tess,” I said.
“I’m serious.” She smiled. “I’ve got a trunk full of hot dogs.”
She hugged me, and I could smell the Teaberry gum that only Tess chewed.
“So Colette’s getting married. She pregnant?”
“Doubt it,” I said.“Too hard to get en pointe with a big belly.”
“What’s he like?” she asked, helping me fold the sheets.
“Yari?”
“Yeh,” she said.
“He’s nice,” I said. “He lets Colette boss him around.”
“A match made in heaven.” She smirked. “Let’s go swimming,” she said.
“Okay, let me get finished here,” I said and made a tidy pile of sheets in the wicker basket at my feet.
Fall had come early. Usually, leaves stayed green until late September. But as we walked through the woods to the pool, the green of summer foliage was interrupted every so often by the sudden explosion of orange or red. Sunlight streaming through the empty spaces made the color even more brilliant. Like small fires amid all that green.
When we got to the water, Tess untied her shoes, peeled off her socks, and laid them across a smooth gray stone. She unbuttoned her shirt and unzipped her shorts. And then she was inside the water, her beautiful head floating across the top of the water.
I put my clothes next to hers on the rock. Our empty clothes like ghosts. I looked at Tess floating in the water, her body easy and careless. Naked, I climbed up onto a large rock that hung over the pool, a small cliff. Trees shaded this place from the incessant sunshine. I curled my knees to my chest.
Through an opening in the leaves September sun burned on my shoulders as I whispered to the beat of the new drums. The steady cry of the bagpipes, strange melody of blues. Of each bruise. Of each bruise.
Below me, Tess floated in the water, a pale votive. Eyes closed. And while she swam, perhaps mistaking my song at first for the sound of water or wind, I told the story of the first time. Of the first time he bruised my shoulders, in the spring when lilacs bloomed and cherry blossoms exploded in white bursts all over campus. Of the next morning when the floor of my dorm room was covered with the snow of cherry blossoms, sweet and white. Max had left no note, no pleas, just this. How all day his apologies filled my head with the smell of spring. And how when I turned on the hot water and sank into the shallow bathtub, there was no evidence of the night before on my skin. There were no bruises. I told her I thought I only dreamed his fingers. That I only dreamed the violet stains of fingertips. That I only dreamed this color because of the way the lilacs looked that spring against all of that white, white snow.
Tess spread a towel across the flat rock. She motioned for me to join her, and I crawled down from my strange perch and lay next to her under the strange mix of green and red and orange leaves. The sun was warm, but her hand was cold when it found mine.
I closed my eyes and listened to the creek running gently into this warm, still pool. I listened until I heard the low moan of the bagpipes, the low moan of a woman’s voice looking for love, and I recalled all of that blue. Of each bruise after that day, of each bruise. I imagined each bruise from the needle, and wondered if he was only trying to become me with each prick. If maybe, after I was gone, he finally felt sorry for everything he had done.
That afternoon, Colette and Yari arrived. In their wake was my parents’ station wagon and Gussy. While Tess and I stretched the badminton net between two trees in the front yard, I watched the strange ritual of my family. My mother scurrying about with bags and Tupperware. My father muttering behind her. Gussy’s slow, steady movements, singular and strong. The odd exchanges between Yari and my father, handshakes and awkward hugs, pats on the back. My mother’s arms like fleshy vises, insistent embraces. I watched the strange choreography, the familial dance, changed by the years and distance between us. And I felt as though I were waiting in the wings. That I was waiting for some cue to make my own entrance into this peculiar performance.
It came in the form of my mother’s waving arm, noticing me finally, sitting with my back against the trunk of the tree.
“Effie,” she hollered. “Come help me with the cake.”
My knees were the knees of a child, rising at the sound of my mother’s voice, carrying me to her, my feet dragging behind.
“You bought a cake,” I said in disbelief as I stared at the enormous pink box in the back of the station wagon.
“It’s a carrot cake. Cream cheese frosting. Colette’s favorite.”
“What does Yari like?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “I didn’t think to ask him.”
Of course not, I thought. “Ready?” I asked, lifting one side of the box.
She nodded and lifted the other end.
The temptation was strong, but I did not let the box fall, not even when my mother stumbled a bit over the threshold. The kitchen counters were covered with grocery bags. My father had already put all of the Styrofoam packages of meat in the fridge and had escaped to the backyard where he was lifting the dome lid of the barbecue, peering at the gray charcoal that had been there since the Fourth of July.
I escaped through the crowd in the kitchen to find him in the backyard.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“Hi, honey.”
“You need some help?” I asked, sitting down at the picnic table.
“That’s okay.” He smiled. He pulled the dirty grill out of the barbecue and set it on the grass. “Your mother is in her element.” He laughed.
“This will be nice.” I smiled. “For Colette.”
“He’s a nice guy,” he said. “Lets Colette boss him around.”
I grinned.
“You’ll find someone someday too, I imagine. Then we’ll have to do this all over again.”
As my father busied himself with the barbecue, I watched how careful he was. How meticulous he was with this ritual. Precise. Certain. I found here something I had seen in Colette, the perfection of even simple movements. Grace.
“Dad, when did you know that you loved Mom?” I asked.
“When?” he said, reaching for the wire brush. “When she first brought me here, I suppose. I had just finished my last final, medieval history, and she pulled me out of the classroom. She was standing outside the classroom door waiting for me to put my pen down. She dragged me out of there so fast I didn’t know what hit me.” He started to scrub the blackened grate.
“She didn’t tell me where we were going, and I trusted her in that stupid way you trust people you are just starting to love, and she brought me here. She got two lawn chairs out of the shed and set them facing the lake. We sat there all afternoon. She told me exactly who she planned to be and that person fit exactly with who I planned to be. And she had this way of making everything feel okay. Even though I knew I had failed that exam and I would have to go to summer school to graduate, she pretended that it didn’t matter. It’s hard not to love somebody who can do that.”
He turned on the hose and started to spray the grate. The water made a small river at my feet.
“She doesn’t want to hear things sometimes,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, maybe she needs to stop pretending everything’s okay sometimes and listen. She doesn’t know about Max and me. About how bad he was.”
I waited for his surprise. I had been practicing this moment, rehearsing this part of the dance, again and again.
“Yes she does, Effie,” he said, turning off the hose and laying it gently on the grass. “She was listening, you just weren’t telling her anything. She was only waiting for you. We were both just waiting for you.”
The rust-gold-orange-purple of the woods behind him blurred through the spray of the hose, the water in my eyes, the thickness in my throat.
“It’s done now,” I said. “You can tell her that, if you want.”
“Good.” He smiled.
I nodded and stood up from the picnic table. I started to walk toward Tess in the front yard. She was trying to get the birdie out of the tree with her racquet.
“Effie?” he said.
I turned around. “Yeh?”
“I’m glad you’re staying.”
“Me too.” I smiled.
Maggie brought Alice with her. Alice and Tess played badminton until both of them had grass-stained knees. Maggie and I sat at the picnic table, while Colette and Yari took a walk and everyone else cooked. Through the window, I could hear the sound of Gussy and my mother as they prepared the salads. The air smelled wonderful, the scent of stolen summer.
Maggie and I had brought a bottle of cold pink wine from my mother’s reserves and were drinking it out of plastic cups. My tongue was dry, my head pleasantly fuzzy.
“When does Devin go back to New York?” Maggie asked.
“Monday morning,” I said.
“Is he coming tonight?”
“Later,” I said. “He’s still packing.”
“You’ll miss him,” Maggie said, picking at a piece of red paint peeling away from the wooden tabletop. “But, I’ll be around. Me and Alice. To keep you company, you know.”
“I know,” I said. I reached across the table for her hand. Most of her bruises were gone now. Faded away like so many summer afternoons.
Colette and Yari came back soaking wet and giggling. I found them clean towels in the closet and helped Colette dry her hair. Yari changed into some dry clothes and we started carrying everything outside.
My mother had strung Chinese lanterns all over the backyard. She turned them on as the sun began to fall. Magoo waddled over just as we were all sitting down to eat.
“I was wondering when you’d get here,” Gussy reprimanded Magoo.
“Just finishing up a book.” He smiled at me.
“They’re history books,” Gussy said. “You already know what’s going to happen.” At the picnic table, we were illuminated by the lanterns’ strange yellow glow. Gussy moved with absolute grace, passing the colorful dishes until everyone’s plates were full. Laughter rose from the table in small crescendos from the steady chatter and the sound of forks and glasses clanking.
The faces of my family, animated by conversation, by lanterns, and by moon suddenly made me feel strangely content. The smell of Gussy’s lavender soap. Maggie’s fire-hair. My father raising his plastic champagne glass to meet the rest of ours as my mother cut into the sweet white frosting on the cake. The smell of Magoo’s pipe after the dishes were all gone. This is home, I thought. Right here.
Devin rode his bicycle up as I was wiping off the vinyl tablecloth, and Tess was trying to roast a marshmallow on the barbecue.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi!” Tess smiled, dropping the gooey marshmallow into the fire. “Oops.”
“This is Devin, Tess,” I said.
“Pleased to meetcha,” she said and shook his hand.
I had planned to keep him a secret, not to subject him to my whole family. But something about the way he shook Tess’s hand and smiled triggered something in me.
“You want to meet the other Greers?” I asked.
“Sure.” He smiled.
I took his hand and led him inside, into the bright kitchen where the after-dinner dance had already commenced. Gussy washing, Colette drying. My father trying to make the reception on the radio clearer by moving the antenna back and forth, up and down. Yari sitting in the kitchen nook, Magoo asleep on the couch.
“Everybody?” I said.“This is my friend, Devin. He’s been living over at that house with the swing this summer.”
Heads turning. Synchronicity of surprise.
“Hi,” he said. He looked so big next to everyone, except for my mother, who was coming down the stairs with a blanket for Magoo.
“Hi,” Colette said, wiping off a soapy hand and reaching for his.
“Effie’s told me a lot about you,” Gussy said, smiling, nodding.
My mother stared at his large hands, fumbling for a place to go. “Did Effie get you anything to eat?” she asked.
“I had a late lunch.” He smiled. “I don’t need anything.”
“Of course you do,” she said. “You like carrot cake?”
“We’re going out in the boat,” I said.
“Oh.”
“Bring a sweater,” my father said. “It’s cold out on the water.”
“It was nice to meet you.” My mother smiled.
“You too,” Devin said. “All of you.”
We untied the boat from the tree stump and I got in first. Devin stepped in after me, the boat dipping first to the left and then to the right with his weight. When he took the oars and spread his arms out to row, he was as wide as the boat.
“It was nice to meet them,” he said.
“Sorry if it was overwhelming,” I said.
“I’m not easily overwhelmed.” He smiled. “I grew up in a house with seven kids. You can only imagine what dinner at our house was like.”
I looked up at the starless sky. The water was calm beneath us. I thought of his family around a table. Children’s elbows and knees bumping, his mother trying to get some control over all that noise. I imagined him, the second oldest, trying to help her. How he might have shushed his brother and then tickled Keisha under the table to make her giggle.
“Why did you come here,” I asked. “The first time?”
He pushed the oars forward and they rose out of the water like birds.
“I came to see this lake,” he said. “I guess I imagined it was like a giant black hole. Sinister or something. I knew that if I could see the lake that pulled her under, then I might be able to fight it somehow. Beat it, you know?”
I nodded and pulled Gussy’s sweater around my shoulders. My heart was beating steadily, hard and insistent.
“But when I got here, it wasn’t like I’d imagined at all. It was beautiful. The first day I got here I spent hours just looking into the water. For some sort of monster to show his face. But the water was perfectly blue. There was nothing hiding in there.”
He stopped rowing and the boat remained still in the water.
“After a while, I guess I realized that there wasn’t any battle to be fought. Nothing was going to bring her back anyway. You can’t punch water, you know? It doesn’t offer any resistance. It’s weak.”
He started rowing again, slowly. “And so I stopped fighting. It wasn’t easy, of course. I’ve had my share of temper tantrums. Finally, I realized that it had taken my sister, but it was giving me something in return. It’s the way the world works, I think. You look for something you’ve lost, and you wind up finding something else. That sound stupid?”
“No,” I whispered.
“And then, it gave me you. The first time I saw you, I knew you were a gift.”
My heart, my head pounded with the sounds of the drums.
“Why didn’t you tell me she was your sister?” I asked, the moaning of bagpipes, the moaning of something lost. Or stolen.
“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t know how. I made my peace with Gormlaith a long time ago. I didn’t want you feeling sorry for me, I guess. People around here feel bad about it. I know that’s the only reason why they welcomed me here the first time. I didn’t want that from you.”
“I loved her,” I said, covering his large knuckles with my hands. “She was my friend.”
“I know.” He smiled.
I ran my fingers across the peaks and valleys of his knuckles. He moved ever so slightly, dipping the oars in and out of the water. I moved from the seat then and stretched out on the bottom of the boat. I fit neatly under the seats, my legs between his on the bottom of the boat.
“When I was little,” I said, “my grampa and I would come out here sometimes and I would fall asleep on the bottom of the boat. He would paddle me around for hours like that.”
I lay on my back and turned my head to the side. I pressed my ear to the wooden bottom and waited for the drums. I listened for the signal to begin my story, the cue to tell him, to let go of Max’s secret.
But the music was gone. There was only the sound of water beneath me. Only the gentle rocking of the boat. Only the sound of Gormlaith at night. And, quite suddenly, Max was gone too. That night dissolved into the sound of the oars dipping into the water. The sound of Devin’s low hum. It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t protect her, save her. But the lake was giving me another chance. The secret didn’t matter, because it didn’t belong to me. And the bruises Max had left on Devin’s life had already begun to fade. Blue turning slowly from indigo to black.
EPILOGUE
Time does not heal wounds. It’s a body’s ritual that does. The instinctual cleansing with rain or other waters, the application of salves. Despite the sting. Even neglected, the body begins to take care. To repair itself. Blood clots, tissues regenerate, flesh scars. Soon, the thin white line is the only evidence of the pain. It is the body, not time. Time does nothing except create distance between the body and that which caused it harm.
Recollection of fear can be stronger than the original fear itself. Similarly, bliss is sometimes more vivid when recollected. How else do you explain longing? Longing for what has already passed. That’s the real pain.
