Bodies of Water (35 page)

“Why am I here?” I ask them both, feeling as though I am drowning. My head held under the cold, cold water.

“She’s sick,” Johnny says. “She’s dying. And she’s been asking for you.”

I
am a swimmer. My whole life I have relied on the properties of water. I have trusted it to tell the truth. But water is no different than memory; I know this now.

In my memory that accident is as vivid and real as though I were standing there myself, watching as the car tumbled with Eva and the girls bouncing inside like popcorn in a pan. I can recall the smell of spring mud, frozen under new snow. The sound of the river rushing in its icy current. The taste of snow on my tongue as I opened my mouth to scream. I
watched
them drown.

But water, like memory, is more devious than it appears, becoming exactly what you need for it to be: liquid or solid. Yielding or firm. It capitulates, or resists. And sometimes, it just evaporates. It simply disappears into thin air, steam rising to the heavens and only a screaming teapot left behind.

I struggle for the memories of the conversations with Frankie, with those days after we returned home. But I can’t trust any of them now; they bob and dip and then disappear. The truths are submerged.

“But I would have known,” I say, shaking my head, still denying this new truth, this violent rip in the seamless expanse of my recollection. “If she were alive.”

Johnny shakes his head. “She almost died. She was in the hospital for nearly a month after the accident. She broke both of her legs. Her wrists. One of her lungs was collapsed. And then, when she finally came home, it was like she wasn’t really home at all. She blamed herself for the accident. She . . .”

“What about the baby?” I ask.

Johnny shakes his head.

“But why didn’t she find me? Why didn’t she call? She would have called me.” I realize then that I am being selfish, a child. She must have blamed me too. If I hadn’t asked her to leave Ted, she wouldn’t have been out driving in the storm; her children would not have died. “Did she know what Ted told us?”

Johnny shook his head.“I don’t know. She was only home for about a month when she took the pills. They were the painkillers the doctors had given her. My father had her sent to Danvers, you know Danvers?”

God, I thought. The mental hospital. The one that looked like a castle, a castle in nightmares.

“How long was she there?” I ask.

“Three years,” he says, and I feel like I can’t breathe. All those years, she was locked away only fifteen miles away from me, and I had no idea.

It is as though I am listening to a story about someone else, a made-up story. This, the supposed truth, is so far from my own. So far from what I have lived with for the last forty-eight years. I cannot reconcile any of this with what my heart knows, what my body knows.

“No,” I say, wishing it away, willing it away. I can’t decide which truth suits me. If it is what I knew to be true, that she died in the river that day, then it explains away the last forty-eight desperate years. It justifies the grief that has settled in my marrow, that pumps through my heart with every beat, that lives in my lungs. But this other story, this strange upended version of events, negates it all. If Eva survived, she would have found me. But she
was
alive, and she did not reach out to me, did not try to find me. I am not sure I can take this.

“She was destroyed, Billie,” he says as if I have spoken out loud, by way of explanation. “She was trapped. By her guilt. By my father. There was nothing she could do. She just gave up, Billie. She had no choice.”

I am crying now, tears that have lived inside my eyes for decades. They feel ancient and primitive as they emerge, as they stain my cheeks. I have stored this salty water, this ocean of sorrow inside of me for nearly fifty years. I have spent nearly half a century, half of my
life,
wishing I could unwind the years, unravel the knots, backtrack and undo. Knowing that it all began with me. That I was the one who pushed her to leave Ted. Who left Frankie too soon. That I was the one who asked her to drive through the storm to me that night. That my anger, my impatience, my foolish and selfish desire for something I could never ever have, that maybe I didn’t even deserve, were what drove her and the girls into the river. Sorrow swells in my throat. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”

“It was an accident,” Gussy says, reaching for my hand. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Billie,” Johnny says, making me look at him. Making me look into his little boy’s eyes. See the little boy’s pain in that ravaged face. “For a long time, I blamed you. I did. But she didn’t. My mother never blamed you.”

I look at him, at his eyes that are also filling with tears. And I ask the one question only he can answer. “Then why didn’t she find me?”

“Don’t you understand?” Johnny says. “That is why I asked you to come here. That’s why you’re sitting here right now. She asked
me
to look for you. She
has
found you.”

 

Eva is in this building. Eva is on the other side of the door we have been looking at across the hall. I can barely make sense of this. I am gripping Gussy’s arm, to stay tethered to the earth. What is waiting for me on the other side of that door? Who is she now?

I try to imagine her inside Danvers. Ted had threatened her before; women could be sent there for nearly any reason back then. Defiance, depression. And Eva was guilty of both. Imprisoned for simply wanting independence. Detained for her despair. Treated like an animal instead of a woman, like a lunatic. Danvers was the stuff of childhood nightmares, a place most people went to and never came back.

“They stayed married?” I ask Johnny. “She and Ted?”

“Yes,” he says. “If you can call what they had a marriage. He never forgave her. And she never forgave herself. After I left home, they stopped bothering to keep up appearances. He had girlfriends. He disappeared for weeks, months at a time.”

“Why didn’t she leave?” I say.

“I don’t know,” Johnny says. “I was so caught up in my own troubles, I barely had room for hers, for theirs.”

There are more people in the waiting room now. It is morning, and the orderlies are pushing carts with silver-lidded breakfast trays down the hallways. The eleven-to-seven shift ends, and the morning nurses come in.

“Can I see her?” I ask, my throat swollen and aching.

“Of course,” Johnny says, almost laughing. “That’s why you’re here.”

 

It takes every bit of my strength to stand and take Johnny’s arm, which he offers to me. It is as if the past forty-eight years have finally taken their toll. I can feel every joint protest, every bone, every muscle resist. It is as though I am asking my body to make a thousand-mile journey instead of a simple walk down a hospital corridor.

“I’ll stay here,” Gussy says.

Johnny opens the door slowly. “Mama?” he says, leading the way into the dark room with his head first. I wait like a child behind him.

There is no answer, and for one horrifying second I fear the worst. That she has passed while I was sitting on the other side of this door.

“She’s sleeping,” he says, and I stop moving. “It’s okay. Come in, and we’ll wait for her to wake up.”

We walk into the double room, past an empty bed. There is a pale curtain dividing the room in two. The only light is a dim overhead that gives everything an eerie glow.

Johnny gently pulls the curtain back and motions for me to come with him to the other side, where Eva lies sleeping in the hospital bed.

I
dreamed her back alive again. For years after her first death, I summoned her every single night. I pulled her from the shallow depths of that dream river. I saved her again and again.

She was with me when I fought with Frankie, touching my tensed shoulders as he and I fought, the same argument repeated: a skipping record, a stutter, a stammer, an endlessly repeating tic. She whispered in my ear as I lay down next to him each night, calming me, soothing me with promises that this would not last forever. And I conjured her. I conjured June, the June that never came. The summer that never was. The summer after she arrived safely at camp with her children. The summer we lived together for the first time, not as a secret, in shame, but as a real family. The nights when Frankie tossed and turned, exorcising demons, exorcising Eva, I invoked her. I invited her into our bed. I let her sleep between us.

She was with me as the girls grew older, as I grew older.

She sat on top of the dryer Frankie salvaged from a Laundromat that closed down, the one he offered to me as though an appliance could provide some recompense for everything I’d lost. Her legs dangled off the edge of the dryer, as she watched me do laundry and iron Frankie’s uniform. She was with me in the kitchen as I baked casseroles and cookies and coffee cakes. She sat on the edge of the bathtub at night, as I tried to soak away the sorrow, imagined it swirling in the soapy water down the drain. She wiped away a million tears with the soft pad of her thumb.

She was there at Chessy’s graduation from high school, with me as I drove home after dropping her off at college. I’m fairly sure she took the wheel that night, because I barely remember driving home.

She was the warmth of the sun, the brightness of the moon, the hopefulness of wishing stars.

She was there when Mouse ran away from home the first time, waiting with me as I paced, a dead phone in my hand after calling everyone who might know where she was. She was with me when Mouse came home with a red hickey on her neck and pine needles in her hair and whiskey on her breath and Frankie got drunk and angry and accused her of being just like her mother. When he smelled her fingers and demanded to know who her girlfriend was. When he called her a
dyke,
a
whore
. Together, Eva and I held Mouse in our arms and whispered our apologies into her ears.

She was with me every time I almost left but didn’t.

And she was with me a year later, after Mouse had left for good and Frankie and I were alone: when I woke up one morning and decided I couldn’t live like this for another minute. She was the one who told me that I didn’t have to make his coffee, iron his shirts, endure his hateful glances or his pathetic pleas for another moment. She packed my bags for me, and she was the one who turned the key in the ignition. She rolled down the window, turned up the radio, and I remember (
I swear I remember
), she said, “Faster, Billie! Let’s fly!” as her hair blew out the window.

I
watch her sleep, just as I have watched her sleep a hundred times before. I have memorized her breaths, the shivers of her shoulders and her sighs. Her hair is spread across the stiff, white pillow. It is silver now, but still as long and thick as it always was. Her face is still that quiet dreamy white of youth, though the years are etched in the lines in her forehead and mouth. Her long neck is exposed, the little hollow at her throat. Something about this makes her seem vulnerable, and I have the sudden urge to protect her.

“Please, sit down,” Johnny says, motioning to a chair next to the bed. It looks as though he has been sleeping here. There is a blanket and a pillow he removes to make room for me. He squeezes my arm. “I’ll be out in the waiting room if you need me. Thank you for coming, Billie.”

I nod, never taking my eyes off of Eva.

I reach for her hand. It rests at her side like a sleeping bird. An IV is taped to the back of it, and veins, like rivers, run across the surface of her skin.

Her eyes open at my touch, and she turns toward me, expecting Johnny, I imagine.

“Eva,” I say. Her name feels like something forbidden in my mouth.

Her eyes are unfocused, but slowly, they widen in disbelief. “Billie?” she says.

“I’m here,” I say. I don’t have any other words. Words are clumsy things, inept things.

“I was driving too fast,” she says.“I was so upset. I just wanted to get to you.”

Tears are coming down her cheeks, fat, slow tears. And I feel something so old, so primitive, it’s as though it were the very first feeling anyone, anywhere, ever had. I reach, instinctively, to stop the tumbling teardrop with my thumb, returning the favor, I suppose.

“Well, you finally made it,” I say, feeling warmth spreading into her cold hand.

“I did,” she says, nodding. “I promised I would.”

G
ussy returns to Vermont, but I stay in Cambridge at Chessy’s house. She greets me at her door and lingers when I hug her. When she finally pulls away, her eyes are wet with tears. “Please, come in.”

Her house, like Gussy’s house, is warm and light and filled with books. She and her husband are both biology professors, though her husband, Michael, retired last year. He watches birds now, and he’s in Nova Scotia this week, tracking puffins. I can imagine her in front of a classroom full of students; she was always, always a leader. She is humble about her accomplishments, but Michael has kept me updated over the years on the awards she has won, the articles she has had published. I am swollen with pride for her and all that she has become, despite everything,
because
of it.

There are photos hung on every wall, snapshots and more artful black-and-white photographs that document and preserve her children’s lives as well as her own. After I left Frankie, she staked claim to all of the photo albums, rescuing those artifacts I left behind. Chessy, like her father, is a historian of sorts, and she salvaged these treasures from the wreckage of our family’s life. Frankie had destroyed all of the photos I had of Eva in a fit of rage, and the others, the ones that remained, were too painful for me to look at. When I left, I took only one photograph. It was one Eva had taken of me and the girls at the camping trip to Rippling River. I look so young in the photo, the girls grubby and smiling.

When I called to tell her about Eva, she had only said, “Oh, my God. Oh, Mom.” Now, over tea and my mother’s coffee cake (which Chessy has perfected), we talk. She holds my hands across the kitchen table and listens intently. One thing I have noticed about Chessy in the last few years is that she has become a good listener. Perhaps it is motherhood that has made her this way. She never interrupts, and she has lost that look in her eye that she used to have as a child, the one that seemed to suggest she was constantly assessing, judging, what was being said and who was saying it.

This is the first time we have talked about Eva in years. About running away from Frankie that Easter Sunday. About what happened to Eva and her girls.

“How is she?” she asks me, and I feel as though someone has uncorked me. My throat opens, and my heart spills.

“She’s very sick. She’s had three bouts with cancer since the mastectomy all those years ago. She stopped treatment last month.”

Chessy squeezes my hands.

The cake is sweet.

“Do you remember,” she says, “the time we went apple picking? With the Scouts?”

I start to laugh, remembering Eva running away from the farmer who had caught us poaching his apples. I remember her looking over her shoulder, her dress hiked up, cradling all those stolen apples as she ran. I remember Mouse jogging happily along beside her, and Chessy standing behind, terrified and clutching my hand.

“I remember thinking that she was magical,” Chessy says, her face breaking into a smile. “I was always such a scaredy-cat. I remember wishing that when I grew up I could be just like her.”

I blink hard to keep my tears from falling.

“Me too,” I say, my words catching in my throat.

“I have something for you,” she says, standing up. “A little surprise.”

“I don’t think I can take any more surprises,” I say, half expecting Frankie to jump out from behind the kitchen counter, though he’s been dead now for a decade. “Please.”

“Stay right here,” she says.

When she comes back, she hands me two packages. Both of them are beautifully, meticulously wrapped. “Just open one. The other one is for Eva.”

I carefully undo the ribbon and slip my finger under the tape to reveal what’s inside. It’s a frame, I can see, and my heart pounds as I turn it over.

The photograph is of Eva and me standing together at the boat access area at Gormlaith. It was taken that first summer, before Eva got sick, and she’s wearing her blue bathing suit. We have our arms around each other and are mugging for the camera. We look so young, so beautiful, so happy. For one brief moment I am transported. I can feel the cold water around my ankles, almost taste the breeze. I can hear the sound of a biplane that has flown overhead. This photo was taken only a moment before it flew across the sky, and we all looked up, shielding our eyes from the bright sun. I can smell her skin, feel her hand on my hip.

“Where did you get this?” I ask, my throat swollen.

“After Daddy burned all the pictures, I found the negatives and hid them. There were only a couple of pictures of Eva. But I like this one. Do you remember the biplane?”

I nod, smiling.

“Eva said someday she’d like to ride in one of those. Feel the clouds in her hair, that’s what she said,” Chessy says, laughing.

“I remember,” I say. “Thank you.”

 

Every day for a week, I go to the hospital and visit Eva. I bring her little gifts to make her happy: the photograph from Chessy, maple candies, lilac hand lotion, magazines. I sit next to her and hold her hand as I read from the books we used to love. When she sleeps, I spend time with Johnny. He’s a good man, and he’s trying so hard to get better. His father’s suicide has tested him, has pushed him to examine himself. To examine his life.

“How is Mouse?” he asks one afternoon as we eat lunch in the hospital cafeteria. “God, I was such a rotten little shit to her.”

“Mouse is terrific,” I say. “She lives in New Mexico. In a teepee.”

He slaps his knee and laughs so hard. I think of him and Mouse tearing around the neighborhood in the Indian headdresses Eva and I made, their war cries. Their whooping laughter.

“I’m going to stop in New Mexico and see her on my way home,” I say.

“Well, please tell her hello,” he says.

 

Eva knows I am here, though sometimes she doesn’t know who I am. When this happens, I am rendered speechless and paralyzed until her memory comes back; it’s like the moon, waxing and waning as she grows sicker. Sometimes she confuses the stories we read with real life.

“Tell me that story,” she says softly one morning. It is cold out now; winter is coming.

“What story?” I ask.

“The love story,” she says.

“
Ethan Frome
?” I ask. We’ve just finished this one; it’s sitting next to her on the nightstand next to a blue plastic pitcher of water.

She shakes her head; her eyes are glistening. “No, the one about the artist. The artist and the swimmer. That swimmer with the beautiful long legs.”

I nod, and I lean over and whisper in her ear. “A long, long time ago, there was a very lonely woman who thought she’d never fall in love . . . until the beautiful artist moved into the empty house across the street.”

Eva closes her eyes, and I think she has fallen asleep. I lean over and kiss the fragile skin at her temple, feel her pulse beating underneath with my lips.

Her voice is just a whisper.

“I want to go to the lake, Billie. Will you please take me to the lake?”