Bodies of Water (34 page)

A
t four a.m., the sky is the color of a bruise as we disappear into the nearly empty garage, and I park in the first space I find. It is quiet here, quiet and cold. We sit in the car for several moments before either one of us makes a move to open our doors.

“Am I making a mistake?” I ask Gussy, without looking at her. I fear that if I look at her face, I will cry.

“No,” she says, shaking her head. I can see tears welling up in her eyes. She looks like she might speak, but she just shakes her head again.

“Do you think he’s angry, Gus? With me? Do you think he blames me?”

I remember the night of the accident, the night I’d nearly fallen apart. I remember the way it felt like I was unraveling; every fiber of my body seemed to be coming undone. The term they used back then was
nervous breakdown,
but it didn’t feel like breaking down. It felt like breaking
apart
. Somehow, Gussy had gotten the girls to stay upstairs as I came undone. When I think of that night now, as I often do, I remember almost nothing except for Gussy’s arms, holding the fragments of me together. I wonder now what would have happened if she had not been there.

Frankie came to the lake the next day and took the children back home. I stayed with Gussy at the camp until I finally could make a decision about what to do next. I barely remember the days that followed. The recollections of those days feel as though they belong to someone else: as though my life were a play and I were a character moving across the paper cutout landscape of that horrifying scene. Eva was gone. Rose, Sally, Donna, and our baby all gone with her. And without them, without Eva, nothing seemed to matter anymore. I didn’t care where I went. I didn’t care what I did. It was over. Everything in the world that mattered was gone. And it was all my fault.

I thought about taking my own life. I recalled that urge I’d felt at the Charles after Eva had first sent me away. I dreamed myself walking into the lake and never coming out again. I dreamed of swimming, of sinking, of allowing the water to fill my eyes, my nose, my lungs.

It was Gussy who finally pulled me out of the murky depths of despair. For three days during which I could not even get out of bed, she took care of me. She fed me as though I were an invalid, pressing the cold, metal spoon against my lips. She held a cool, wet cloth to my fevered forehead. She slept next to me, her arms keeping me afloat. But on the fourth day, she came into the room with freshly pressed clothes in her arms and said sternly, “It’s time to get up. Your children need you.”

 

She drove me all the way back down to Hollyville. I think I knew then that I would never go back to the lake. I whispered quietly, “Good-bye, tree house, good-bye, lilacs and bees, good-bye, lake.”

In Hollyville, she stayed for another two days to help me get settled back into my old life. The girls went back to school. Frankie never stopped working. Everyone else went on, business as usual. It was as though only my world had gone on without me, running its parallel life, and was waiting for me to simply step back into it.

Frankie was surprisingly forgiving. He didn’t even drink for the first week I was back. Despite everything, he understood the power of this grief. And above all, he seemed relieved to have me home, though I wasn’t myself anymore.

“Did you go to the funeral?” I asked him one night as we lay in our old bed.

He shook his head. “Of course not.”

The idea that Eva and her girls had been laid to rest without me there had nearly killed me. But I knew that as much as I wanted to be there, needed to be there, it would only be inviting catastrophe. I could only imagine what the accident had done to Ted, how his rage might manifest now. I worried that he would come to Hollyville to punish me. To make me pay for first stealing his wife and then stealing her life. But I also half welcomed the idea.
Let him come,
I thought.

“Have you spoken to Ted?” I asked.

Frankie clearly did not want to talk about it anymore. His eyes burned red, and his hands shook. “I sent a card.”

I felt my insides churning, burning. I tried to picture Frankie at Woolworth’s picking out a sympathy card to send to Ted: some pastel disaster with meaningless passages of calligraphic scripture that was supposed to somehow express his regret that his wife had single-handedly brought about the death of his wife, three daughters, and their unborn child.

“What did you say?” I asked. “In the card?” My whole body was quaking, and he could feel the seismic repercussions of my grief in the mattress beneath us.

“What was I supposed to say, Billie?” he said angrily. “Sorry my wife tried to steal your wife? Sorry she killed her and your children?”

A blow to my jaw, a bone-crushing fist to my chest, would have hurt less.

He got out of bed then, and like a boxer who had just thrown the knockout punch, he looked somehow both triumphant and stunned.

Downstairs, I could hear him pulling the jug of wine from the cupboard. I could hear him drinking, the radio blaring a baseball game. I could feel the whole house trembling with his anger. Here was my old Frankie: the angry, frustrated man I remembered. And I welcomed him back, this monster. I needed him here to remind me what it was about him that disgusted me, that filled me with anger and self-loathing. But even as all the familiar feelings, of being trapped, of fear and rage and disappointment, mounted, I realized that it didn’t matter anymore. I had nowhere to run. There was nothing for me to run to. No one. Eva was dead. And he was right, I had killed her.

 

“Do you have Johnny’s cell phone number?” I ask Gussy.

She nods and reaches into her purse, pulling out her address book. She undoes the various rubber bands she has wound around the book to keep it together and flips to the
W
section. She reads the numbers to me, and I punch them into my cell phone. I hesitate for only a moment, my finger hovering over the Call button.

He answers on the first ring.

“Johnny,” I say. “It’s Billie Valentine. I’m here. In the parking garage.”

Gussy and I make our way through the cavernous garage to the elevators. I think stupidly that we should have brought something: flowers, a coffee cake. But we don’t know why we are here, and so our arms are empty as we ride the elevator to the third-floor breezeway and then make our way into the hospital.

I have always hated hospitals, always loathed the minty green walls and antiseptic scent, the cheerful faces of nurses and all the closed doors behind which people were sick and dying. Lou died in a hospital, attached to a thousand machines pumping life into her. It nearly killed me to see her there. When I finally go, my one wish is that I die in my sleep. That my heart stops suddenly and irrevocably while I am lying in my own bed. Or maybe during my morning swim; let the water take me. The sharks and fishes.

“Down this way, I think,” Gussy says, pointing to a brass sign on the wall that says 301–313.

We turn the corner and head down the long hallway, our shoes squeaking on the linoleum. There is a waiting area next to the nurses’ station. A man stands up from one of the chairs there and faces us, lifting his arm as if to wave.

“Is that Johnny? He doesn’t look sick to me,” I say.

As we get closer, the man looks so much like Ted it nearly takes my breath away. My mind spins wildly, out of control. I have one foot in the present and one in the past. And for a moment, I am consumed by fear. He has finally come for me, I think. Ted has finally come to punish me for everything that happened with Eva. And I think as my heart accelerates, the engine of my body burning hot and fast, that my wish might not come true. My heart might just stop here in this awful hospital. But when we get closer, and he holds out his hand, I can see it isn’t Ted (of course it isn’t Ted). It is Johnny. Johnny, Eva’s Johnny.

He is in his fifties now, but his face remains the same as that child I knew so long ago. The freckled face, the dark hair and wide eyes. His forearms are covered with tattoos, the inky pictures blurred in blue rivers underneath a mess of black hair. He is large, muscular. His jaw set firmly, his eyes sad and tired.

“Billie,” he says, and he holds my hand, studies me as if looking for the woman he knew in my wrinkled face, in my wild silver hair. “Thank you so much for coming.”

“Why are we here?” I say. I feel tricked. Cheated. We have just driven three and a half hours through the night, and Johnny is not on his deathbed. As far as I can tell he’s as healthy as can be. “I thought you were dying.”

Johnny shakes his head and smiles sadly, motioning for us to sit in a couple of chairs in the waiting area. Gussy sits down and immediately pulls her knitting from her purse. This is what she does when she doesn’t know what to do with her hands. I envy her this mindless task, this busyness.

I sit down, readying myself for whatever it is that Johnny plans to say, and he sits across from me. He takes both of my hands, and looks at me intently. He smiles.

“I remember your face,” he says. “It’s the same. Your eyes.”

I nod. I don’t want to interrupt him, but I’m also hoping he’ll tell me what’s going on.

“Can I get you some coffee?” he asks. “Tea?”

I shake my head. “Why did you ask me here?” I ask.

“Gussy might have told you about my troubles,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. “She said you’ve had some problems with drinking.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” he says, laughing a little. “I spent a lot of years trying to erase what happened that day with booze and pills and other shit. Excuse my language.” He blushes.

My eyes sting. But really, what did I expect? I brace myself for his accusations.

“Losing them felt like the end of the world.”

I nod, trying hard not to let those pictures in, the ones of water. The ones of them trapped. My heart is racing.

“But it
wasn’t
the end of the world. I grew up. I became a man anyway. I got married anyway. I had children, houses, jobs.”

I know he intends for this to make me feel better, but there is little consolation here, because I suspect he may have lost all those things as well. I can read it in his weathered face, his rheumy eyes.

“I’m not sure how you think I can help,” I say.

“I didn’t see you afterward. I had no way of talking to you . . .”

“I couldn’t go to the funeral, you know that, right? Your father would have murdered me with his own hands. I had no choice. . . .” I feel myself coming undone again. I was reassembled that night, as Gussy held the pieces of me in her hands. But these fissures have made me weak, fragile. I worry that I am about to shatter again. I look at him, and know that he probably wants to hear my apologies, to hear that I am sorry for what I did. That little boy needs me. He needs me, and finally, here I am.

“I am sorry,” I say, feeling all that sadness and remorse rising to the surface. I feel like I am swallowing sorrow, gallons and gallons of sadness filling my throat and chest. My voice breaks around the deluge. “God, Johnny, I am so sorry.”

“Billie,” he says, squeezing my hands and willing me to look into his eyes. “You don’t understand. That’s not why I asked you to come. That’s not what this is about.”

I look at him, peer into his face, seeing nothing but his heartache, the anguish I caused.

“You didn’t say anything?” he says suddenly to Gussy, who doesn’t look at us, only shakes her head.

“Gus?” I say.

Johnny clears his throat. “I need to tell you something, and I’m not sure how to say it. I’ve practiced this a half a million times,” he says. “But there’s no good way. No way to make it okay. No way to undo it. To change things.”

“What are you talking about?” I say. I am aware suddenly of how bright the hospital is. Outside the sun is only now beginning its watercolor undoing of the night, the light bleeding through darkness.

Johnny’s hands are trembling. “It’s about my mother,” he says.

I nod. Of course it is about Eva. Eva is why I am here.

“Donna and Sally and Rose all died in the accident. They were trapped in the car when it went into the river.” His voice is cracking.

“I know,” I say, shaking my head. This feels cruel already. “I know that.”

“But my mother . . . Billie, oh, Jesus . . .” Johnny is starting to cry now, and my first impulse is to hold him, to comfort him. He could be an eight-year-old child again. But he isn’t; he is a grown man. He takes a deep breath and squeezes my hand again.

“Billie, my mother and I were both thrown from the car before it went into the water.”

The fluorescent hospital lights are blinding. My head pounds, and my heart pounds, and I squeeze my eyes shut. On the back of my eyes is the image of the river, the car, the children and Eva stuck inside.

“No,” I say. “She and the girls were all in the car. They drowned.” The air seems suddenly thinner. “Frankie told me. Your aunt explained everything that happened. Frankie talked to your father.” I feel vertiginous. All of the blood is rushing from my face to my hands. Everything is numb and tingly.

“Billie, listen to me,” Johnny says, willing me back. Pulling my hands to him as if he can save me now. “Mary had to tell you that. She had to tell you my mother was gone. My father made her. Don’t you understand? It was the only way for him to finally put an end to it.”

I hold on to the edge of the plastic seat, and Gussy’s arm finds me, ready to catch me.

“It was a lie, Billie,” he says, his eyes filling with tears.

“Gus?” I say, waiting for an answer.

Gussy reaches for me, her eyes wet. “Billie, I didn’t know. When Johnny told me, I couldn’t believe it,” she says. She squeezes my hand. She looks frail now; her hands are trembling and her voice is shivery. Like a child. I feel lost in time. I feel lost. “You have to know I had no idea. Frankie either. If we’d had any idea, we would have told you. I would have taken you to her myself.”