Blue Water (5 page)

“Can't you understand,” I said, “how hard it is to be here without Evan?”

Toby's hair had fallen in a tangle over his eyes. “Won't it be just as hard somewhere else?”

“I don't think so.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing,” I said, “we won't have to deal with Cindy Ann anymore.” I waited for him to nod, agree. “I mean, seeing her. Seeing her kids. Watching her going about her life as if nothing even happened.” Again, I waited. “For Pete's sake, Toby, she's driving the same damn car. She killed someone, a human being, and it hasn't made the least bit of difference. She's still a reckless drunk.”

“Mallory says she's not drinking anymore.”

“Mallory would say that.”

“She says there are days Cindy Ann doesn't get out of bed.”

“I've had some of those days myself.”

The bubbling sound of the aerators filled the silence between us.

“But you
knew
her, Meg,” Toby finally said. “You knew all those girls. You, of all people, know how hard it was for them, growing up in that house.”

Now I was angry. Of course I knew, as everyone else in town knew, that Cindy Ann's stepfather had shot himself in the shed
behind the veal pens. It was the excuse people always gave: for Cindy Ann's failed marriages, for Mallory's shrill politics, for the middle sister, Becca, going door-to-door for the Jehovah's Witnesses. Cindy Ann's mother was barely in her sixties, and yet she was living in a nursing home, disabled by early Alzheimer's: hunched, forgetful, smiling. The only child she'd had with Dan Kolb—born when Cindy Ann was twelve—had been what was then called
mentally retarded
. He'd eventually died in his early teens. This, too, was blamed, implausibly, on Dan Kolb's suicide.

“So the family had problems,” I said. “So what. That doesn't give Cindy Ann the right to drink however many bottles of wine she drank and then get into her car, the hell with everybody else.” I wanted to shake my brother, slap him; my neck and shoulders actually hurt with the effort of restraining myself from doing it. “
She
had a choice in all this, remember? Rex and I had no choice. Evan had no choice.”

“I know, I know all that,” Toby said, and at last, he was angry, too. “Evan was my nephew, remember? You think it doesn't matter to me, too? You think I don't wake up every single day and think about how awful it is? I'm just saying I feel sorry for her, that's all.”

“Sorry?”
I spat the word from my mouth, and then I told him what I'd told no one else: how I'd sat in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, hands gripping the wheel, waiting for Cindy Ann and her ice cream.

“Maybe,” I said, “you'd feel sorry for
me
if I'd actually run her over.”

“I would feel sorry, Cowboy,” he said. “Sorry for you both.”

I turned, walked out the door. Hurrying past the front window, I caught a glimpse of him standing between the tanks: one side of his face stricken as my own, the other half lost in darkness. The neon
dartings of the fish all around him seemed like sparks flying out of his body. I understood I was losing something else, someone else. Someone precious.

I didn't go back.

And then.

Crossing the parking lot toward my car, the sky growing dark over the lake, I saw—not Cindy Ann Kreisler, but Cindy Ann Donaldson, sixteen years old. Hurrying straight out of our childhoods, out of the single, charmed summer we'd been friends. There was her Dairy Castle uniform. There were her regulation shoes, the white bib, the hairnet and curved paper hat. I'd often met her at closing time, and together, we'd walked to the beach, where we sat on a slab of pale sandstone, sharing still-warm burgers she'd crushed into her purse. Looking up at the stars, the moon. Wisps of her hair flickering, soft, against my cheeks. Abruptly, I remembered the smell of her uniform: tomato ketchup and grease. I remembered, too, the odor of the shampoo she used to lighten her hair. She was struggling to pin her hat into place. One earring dangling, the other hung up in her hair.

Want to come to my house sometime?

Ducking our heads to step up into the attic. A double mattress in the center of the floor, a twist of pink sheets, a floral comforter.

I get the whole attic. It's because I'm the oldest.

I'd forgotten about the attic. They were dirt-poor, the Donaldsons. At the time, I thought it was cool. Shirts and dresses on a clothesline strung between the eaves. A cardboard box for underwear, socks. The thrum of Dan Kolb's voice from below, affectionate and warm, roughhousing with Cindy Ann's younger sisters. The slow, strained sound of Ricky Kolb's speech, incomprehensible to anyone outside the family. The smell of the veal pens behind the shed where, eventu
ally, Mr. Kolb would fire two shots: the first opening a hole in his chest, the second passing through his head.

I blinked. It wasn't Cindy Ann Donaldson, of course. It was Cindy Ann Kreisler's oldest daughter, Amy, late for work at the same Dairy Castle where her mother had worked thirty-five hours a week during the school year, fifty-hour weeks in the summertime. Same swing shift. Same wheat-colored hair. Why was a girl like Amy Kreisler working at DC? Amy was the daughter of Cindy Ann's first husband, the older man, the one with all that money. It was said that she'd never have to work a day in her life, if she didn't want to.

I knew the moment Amy recognized me because she lost her grip on the paper hat. It kited away in the cool lake breeze. She turned, hesitated, let it go.

We passed each other in silence.

 

When I was pregnant, I took a course on hypnosis, in which we learned to say
surge
instead of contraction,
breathe
instead of push,
pressure
instead of pain. Once a week, we met at the hospital, in what was clearly an unused supply room: four pregnant women plus the instructor, an older woman who positively glowed with her good wishes for us all. Her low, beautiful voice led us through scene after imagined scene.
You are in your mother's kitchen, there's a warm, baking smell in the air. You are at the beach, the sun in your hair, the sound of the water like a song. You are breathing your baby down out of your body, and each surge fills you with excitement and strength.

My favorite exercise involved imagining everything we'd ever heard about childbirth, all the images, positive and negative, as if they were painted on a tall, wide mural filling the walls. In our hands, we held a paintbrush and a bucket of black paint. Our job was
to blot out the negative images, one by one, then fill the black spaces with whatever we pleased: an easy delivery, a healthy baby, our hopes and dreams for the future. I painted a baby with dark brown eyes, a thicket of curls like my own. I painted a bowlegged toddler, riding on Rex's shoulders, shrieking with delight. I painted family sailing trips, picnics on Lake Michigan aboard the
Michigan Jack,
birthday parties, Christmas dinners, high school graduation. College and career—what would it be? Maybe some travel before settling down. A wife and children. Grandchildren. Rex and I blustering through the door, arms filled with overpriced gifts, just as our own grandparents had done.

Again and again, during the course of my labor, I returned to this exercise, forcing myself to open my eyes, to concentrate on my mural. Even when faced with the physical fact of my pain—which was, indeed, pain, and nothing like pressure at all—I was able to step over it, again and again, the way, walking along a city sidewalk, you step over patches of broken glass.

I boarded
Chelone
believing it was possible to step over Cindy Ann the same way, given enough distance between us. To blot her from my thoughts with imaginary paint. I did not yet understand that we'd been forever bound to each other like sisters, like lovers, like people who have known each other in the glimmer of some otherworldly life. That Cindy Ann had been woven into my heart like a violent act, or a secret child. That she, in her turn, carried me: a bumping beneath her ribs, a fluttering deep in her abdomen, an acid burn that bubbled up after meals. This, despite the old sleeping pills, the new high-tech antidepressants. Despite the drone of the court-appointed therapist's bored voice. Despite the guilty bottles of wine she still downed in the evenings, defiantly, helplessly. Or so she would admit to me later, much later, when I was able to hear.
Her beautiful face twisted, transformed. Stricken with utter self-loathing.

The face from which, at sixteen years of age, I'd turned away.

 

One morning at dawn, a warbler fluttered into Chelone's cockpit, perched on the rail, then slid, exhausted, onto the bench. It was my watch; I called out to Rex, who poked his rumpled head out of the companionway.

“What?”

Then he saw it, too.

For a moment, we just stared at it, stunned, disbelieving. We were hundreds of nautical miles from the nearest piece of land. I don't think we could have been more surprised if an angel had appeared.

Rex tipped freshwater into a bottle cap, nudged it as close as he dared. To my surprise, the bird drank immediately, lustily, tilting back its head to reveal its yellow throat. Within a few hours, it had revived completely, and by the following day, it flitted comfortably between us, pecking crumbs off the cockpit floor. We assumed it would stay with us, our mascot, our darling—after all, where else would it go? But all of a sudden, without any warning, it simply took off.

It was gone.

A small loss and, yet, how easily it swelled to fit the exact dimensions of each familiar, empty place. I sat in the cockpit, hugging my knees. Rex paced the deck, oblivious to the sun.

“What was the point?” he finally said.

“There's always a point,” I said.

He passed a hand across his eyes. “I wish we'd never seen the goddamn thing,” he said.

f
or the first days after the squall line
passed, Rex and I were grateful to find ourselves becalmed. The ocean barely breathed beneath us, a dreaming animal, rumbling with content. We huddled beneath the shade of the bimini, slathered ourselves in sunscreen and zinc. We played cards. We read books. I polished all the ship's brass—pump handles, grab rails, the post supporting the mast—while Rex oiled the teak hatch covers, rubbed down the engine with grease. He was still moving slowly, babying his shoulder, taking prescription painkillers from the medical kit. The dark bruise had transformed itself into a bright tropical flower: a whorl of lavenders and purples, burnt umber, pale green.

After a week of stillness, we began to grow uneasy. We ran our refrigerator thirty minutes a day, just enough to keep things cool. Ice, of course, was impossible. We were out of fresh fruit and vegetables. We were down to six eggs, a stick of butter, a half block of hard cheese. Plenty of rice yet, thank goodness. Plenty of chickpeas,
black beans, kidney beans. I knew, exactly, what we had left, balances ticking inside my head. The last of our bread had sprouted an extraordinary halo of bright, blue mold, and though I'd brought along flour and yeast, it was too hot to think about baking fresh loaves. Besides, operating the stove—like running the refrigerator—drained power from
Chelone
's batteries. Charging the batteries required running the engine. Running the engine required fuel. Already, we'd used roughly half of the one hundred gallons we'd brought on board, we agreed it was best to conserve what remained. We started using hand pumps to empty the bilge, the toilet. We switched from DC lights to kerosene.

Still, every afternoon, we turned on the single sideband radio. I'd discovered, by accident, a call-in show for offshore vessels, run by a slightly impatient-sounding man who called himself Southbound Two. One by one, captains across the Atlantic radioed in their
lats
and
longs,
then stood by, waiting for Southbound Two to advise them about potential storm systems, wind patterns, fluctuating currents. Despite repeated hailings, we were never able to make contact ourselves, but we overheard other vessels in our vicinity, all of them becalmed, all of them asking pretty much the same question: when can we expect wind? Southbound Two's response was not encouraging. We'd been caught within a sprawling high pressure system. Calm, clear skies reigned for over two hundred nautical miles. Rex marked our locations on the master chart with a lightly penciled
X
and, as the days passed, we kept track of everybody's progress—or, lack thereof. In a strange way, the people aboard these boats became our friends, though we knew them simply as disembodied voices, identified them only by the names of their vessels:
Reflections, We Did It, Clear Sailing, Easy Street
. We talked about them obsessively. We gave them nicknames, invented personal
histories. We listened hard for background noises that suggested the slightest details about their lives.

One afternoon, a new vessel,
Rubicon,
hailed Southbound Two with
lats
and
longs
that were nearly identical to our own. The man's voice was distinctive, rough. “Popeye the Sailor!” Rex said, looking up from the chart. That morning, he'd been back in the medical kit, rummaging about for more codeine. Now, his pupils were huge.

Popeye hailed again, crisp and clear, as if he were sitting between us. A series of high-pitched squeals rose and fell behind his words.

“They've got a dog aboard,” I said, emptying a can of chickpeas into the three bean salad I was making.

“Either that, or it's Olive Oyl,” Rex said, and he laughed at his joke a little too hard.

“I wish we could contact them, let them know they've got neighbors.”

“I'll try hailing after the broadcast. You never know, maybe we'll get through.” Rex scratched another faint
X,
representing
Rubicon,
onto the master chart. “Seriously, that guy sounds like Popeye. Remember that show? And the one with the moose. Bullwinkle. Did you ever see Bullwinkle?”

Codeine made Rex chatty, nostalgic, the same way he got whenever he drank scotch whiskey. Which he'd been drinking a lot of, lately, after his evening watch was done. It helped the codeine, he said. It soothed his shoulder so he could sleep.

I covered the three bean salad, wiped down the counter with salt water. “Do you think,” I asked, “we could see them if we climbed the mast?”

“I'm in no condition to go up the stick.”

“Well, I am.” I grabbed the binoculars from their hook, slung them around my neck.

“You?” Rex said. “You get dizzy going up a stepladder.”

His offhand laughter annoyed me all the more.

“Good thing this isn't a stepladder, then.”

“Meg,” he began, but I hurried up into the cockpit, worked my feet into my salt-stiffened shoes. I could hear Rex clambering after me, but I'd already scrambled forward, mounting the first of the narrow mast steps, trying not to consider what would happen if I slipped. Three-quarters of the way up, I stopped, raised the binoculars. There was no one else out there, nothing else, aside from our shadow like a dark slick of oil, floating lightly on the water.

“Anything?” Rex called. Looking down, I saw he was cupping his right elbow, relieving his shoulder from the weight of his arm. For the past few nights, despite his extra nightcap, he'd moved uncomfortably from the cockpit to the V-berth, from the V-berth to the settee, from the settee to the double berth. Suddenly dizzy, I pressed my cheek to the mast, hugged the firm bulk of it against my chest. I was worried about Rex's shoulder, what was clearly a constant, grueling pain. I was worried about the weather. I was worried that, along with
Rubicon
and all the other vessels, we were doomed to remain exactly where we were, drifting for the next hundred years in a kind of Twilight Zone. We were, after all, on the edge of the horse latitudes, the Atlantic's notorious dead zone. Named in the days before steam, when becalmed sailing ships ran low on supplies and jettisoned their cargo of horses, cattle, whipping them up out of the holds, driving them into the sea. Farther south, the slave ships languished, generations of Africans dying of hunger, thirst, disease. Suddenly, I imagined all those skeletons below, an entire lost civilization: women rocking babies, men building shelters, livestock
moving in slow, deliberate herds, picking their way across the ocean floor.

“Meg?”

I forced myself to scan the horizon one more time, careful not to squint, keeping both eyes open. The edge of the sea blended seamlessly into the edge of the sky, leaving no sense of where one ended, the other began.

“Nothing,” I said, and I started climbing down.

“You sure?”

I stopped. “I
know
how to look.”

“Sorry,”
Rex said, in a tone of voice that told me he wasn't.

I wished we had a crow's nest. I wished I could climb into it, curl up in a ball, out of sight. I wished I didn't have to continue my descent, which, of course, I did, one reluctant step after another.

This was the hardest part of each day: the hours of light remaining after we'd shut down the single sideband, after Rex had attempted, in vain, to hail any one of the half-dozen vessels all around us. The sudden silence—augmented by heat, confinement, monotony—left us irritable, snappish. We picked at each other, sulked, avoided each other's gaze. Below, in the cabin, the temperature rose past one hundred degrees; topside, the teak decks licked our heels like flames through the thin, rubber soles of our deck shoes. There was nothing to do but wait for dusk beneath the thin shade of the cockpit bimini, sipping tepid bottles of powdered Gatorade, sopping ourselves with seawater. Later, in the relative coolness of evening, we'd emerge, hunched and stiff, like bears from a cave. We'd apologize wearily, sheepishly. We'd put on our nightshirts, nibble trail mix and dried fruit. We'd nose through the galley lockers, the salon bookshelves, looking for an unopened package of crackers, a fresh magazine, the least thing we might have missed.

“Are you happy?” Rex asked, surprising me one night. “Happier, I mean?”

The truth was this: I was thirsty. My tongue lay thick in my mouth. Hours often passed during which I didn't think of Evan even once.

“I'm all right,” I said.

Rex bit his lip. “I don't miss him as much, out here.”

Had I wanted to weep, it wouldn't have mattered. My dry, burning eyes were incapable of tears.

 

In college, I took a public speaking seminar in which we studied mnemonic devices used by the Greeks. How had the great orators been able to remember long histories and speeches, seemingly endless panegyrics, without writing anything down? The professor explained that, instead of composing pages of words, the speaker created an architectural structure within his mind, then walked through the rooms and corridors, placing key points he wished to remember in windows and doorways, on ledges and hearths. Later, while giving his speech, he'd simply retrace his steps, collecting each item from its place, until he'd reclaimed them all.

Even at the time, this made sense to me. If I wanted to remember my tenth birthday party, I simply returned, within my mind's glassy eye, to Ooster's Restaurant and Ribs, inhaling its odor of popcorn and barbecue, peering into the display case with its assortment of sweet, frosted cakes. If I wanted to remember my grandmother, I imagined myself at St. Clare's, settled into the pew beneath the statue of St. Augustine, the place where she'd always sat. I'd kept Evan alive in the overstuffed chair where we'd read bedtime stories; in a spatter of stains on the living room carpet, where he'd managed
to open a pen; in the garden, where he'd knelt to pat damp earth around the roots of trembling seedlings. Melons sprouted in eggshells. Pepper and tomato plants purchased from Wassink's Nursery. Marigolds to ward off rabbits and gophers and deer.

Now here I was, adrift in a place where he'd never lived, lost within a landscape that, during his lifetime, neither one of us could have imagined. A seascape, in fact, free of ledges and doors. Without angles, definition.

Without history.

That night, while Rex was on watch, I wriggled my way into the V-berth with a flashlight, opened the locker where I'd stowed the small, waterproof box that contained our passports and traveler's checks, cash, prescriptions, emergency numbers. At the bottom of the box was a plastic sleeve of photos: I slid them out, studied them deliberately, guiltily. My parents, arm in arm, on a Florida golf course. Toby at the fish store, grinning. Our house with its fieldstone walls, its watercolor views. And, finally, a single picture of Evan, taken a few weeks after Halloween, dressed up as SpongeBob SquarePants. He'd caught me out in the garage, slipping the costume into the Goodwill bag.

“I want to wear it next year!” he howled.

“But you'll be too big for it by then,” I said. “And you might not even like SpongeBob SquarePants anymore.”

In the end, we'd agreed that he could put it on one last time. I would take his picture. If, by next Halloween, he still wanted to be SpongeBob SquarePants, I would travel to the ends of the earth, if necessary, to find him a costume just like it. Now, studying his face, enclosed by a corona of bright yellow cloth, I could see everything that had always amazed me most about his character: his determination, his methodical persistence, his insistence on the justness, the
validity, of his ideas. If I told him “We'll do it tomorrow,” he'd remember. If I said “Let's save that for next week,” he'd never forget. He would have reminded me, come October, about this photograph. He would have considered earnestly, leisurely, all sides of the question of whether or not he still wanted to be SpongeBob SquarePants.

No photos, Rex and I had agreed before setting sail from Portland. No sentimental charms or mementos. Why subject ourselves to the inevitable questions? Why re-create, wherever we went, the same painful circumstances we'd hoped to leave behind? If anyone asked if we had children, we'd tell them the truth.

We'd tell them no.

 

On our twenty-first day becalmed, something white flashed on the horizon. Gradually, a ragged-looking motor sailer, single sail luffing, chugged into view. She was nearly twice the length of
Chelone,
though not much beamier, giving her the scrawny, raw-boned lines of an alley cat. Jerry cans of fuel formed a gypsy necklace around the edges of her deck. Two solar panels gleamed above the cockpit like dark, expressionless eyes.

Rubicon
.

Rex eyed the vessel doubtfully. “Looks a little like a plague ship,” he said.

Still, he hailed, first on the VHF and a few minutes later, when we got no response, on the single sideband radio. Nothing. Hurrying below, I found what had once been a white T-shirt. This I carried out onto the bowsprit, waving it like a flag.

“Are you trying to surrender?” Rex asked.

I ignored him.

“Even if they're looking our way, they won't be able to see you. They're too far off.”

“So let's motor after them.”

When Rex shook his head, I wanted to throttle him. Here, less than a mile away, were real, live human beings, people other than ourselves. Maybe he didn't care, but I certainly did. I was sick to death of talking about Bullwinkle.

“C'mon, how much fuel can it take?”

“It isn't only that, Meg. What if they don't want company?”

“Who wouldn't want company in the middle of the Atlantic?”

“We're not in the middle,” Rex said, and there was a weary edge to his voice. “Nowhere near the middle, believe me.”

With that, our VHF began to crackle, and
Chelone
's cockpit reverberated with the cartoon voice of Popeye the Sailor: