Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #General Fiction

Breathing Water (4 page)

BOOK: Breathing Water

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The store used to be a one-room schoolhouse. There was still a bell on the roof, and inside there was a desk near the freezers that they couldn't get unbolted from the floor. As I walked through the familiar yellow door, I noticed a big green Megabucks machine near the counter. An ATM machine and a self-serve espresso machine. But the postcards in the stand by the door were the same. They had probably been there since the fifties; not many tourists come this far into the woods.

The girl behind the counter was terribly pretty, probably no more than fourteen. She was watching a soap opera on the TV mounted on the wall by the window. She was sitting on a stool absently swinging her legs, speckled with scabby bug bites. The color of her skin was like the color of early summer itself. Sunshine and hope.

I grabbed a red plastic basket and picked up a few things that I knew I would need later. An economy-size can of Off, chocolate Kisses, half and half. I found the vinegar next to the diapers and motor oil. The price tag said $3. I counted the crumpled bills in my pocket and put the can of Off back on the shelf. Things at Hudson's have always cost more than in town. The Hudsons started a tradition of jacking up prices back in the seventies when the first tourists discovered Gormlaith. They were used to city prices, willing to pay $4.50 for a gallon of milk. The old schoolhouse store was
quaint,
and the tourists (the Hudsons quickly discovered) were frivolous.

A man came into the store as I was trying to get the girl's attention. The sleigh bells hanging on the door jingled. He had to lower his head to avoid bumping it on the doorway. He looked like Sidney Poitier, only much taller, and I forgot for a moment where I was. In Seattle, there were so many different kinds and colors of people. Japanese ladies in the U-District, black children playing in the streets, Muslims and Hindus. Clothes like costumes. Faces like dreams. But here, in the northeast corner of Vermont, his dark skin made him look transported from a foreign land. Even his clothes and posture looked like a magazine cutout. Definitely a tourist. He grabbed a newspaper from the stack by the counter.

“Excuse me,” I said to the pretty girl whose mouth had fallen open as she stared at the screen. She absently scratched a bug bite on her shin without looking away from the TV.

“Melissa.” He reprimanded her. His voice was thick and deep, like gravel and molasses.

She looked away from the screen and scurried off the stool to the counter.

“Sorry, Mr. Jackson,” she whined and blushed. “But it's my
soaps.”

He grinned at me.

“Thank you.” I smiled.

He tipped his baseball hat and disappeared behind the giant display of charcoal and lighter fluid.

“Twelve ninety-five,” she said and turned to look again at the TV.

I handed her the bills and she reluctantly made change.

“I don't need a bag.” I smiled and grabbed the awkward items to avoid annoying her further.

On the way back to the camp I thought about how I used to wait for Billy to get done with work that summer. He would watch basketball while I pretended to be shopping for Gussy. I read all of the magazines that summer. Even
Good Housekeeping
and
Sports Illustrated.
I felt sorry for what I did to Billy.

After dinner, Gussy started to clear the dishes.

“Stop,” I said and pulled at the sleeve of her cardigan. “I'll get them later. Sit with me.”

“Just let me get them in the sink,” she said and pulled away, balancing the salad bowl and the plates laced with transparent fish bones.

I went to the porch and turned on the small lamp by the daybed. It wasn't dark outside yet, but the sun was starting to fall slowly into the water. I took off my sandals and lay down on the bed. It was as soft and lumpy as I remembered. The blanket was pilly; I tore absently at the pills as I waited for Gussy. I could hear her running water, washing dishes. She has never been able to leave a mess. She can't rest until everything is clean and tidy.

From the porch you can see the ragged shore of the island. As the sky grew dark, the edges blurred, and it looked like an inlet rather than a separate place. While Gussy wiped down the counters and dried the dishes, I began to plan a trip to the island to see if my tree was still there.

“Would you like some tea?” Gussy's voice swam to me from the kitchen.

“No thanks,” I said, and then realized it might settle my stomach. “I mean, yes. Please.”

I put my face into the blackberry steam, and smelled other evenings. I supposed this tea bag came from the same tin I had sent Grampa two Christmases ago.

“It's quiet tonight. The summer people haven't come yet,” Gussy said and raised the teacup to her lips. Her hands were remarkably steady. Grampa's hands hadn't been steady for several years before he died. His fingers trembled with even the smallest gesture: holding a nail steady, grasping the slender handle of a teacup.

“Do you miss him, Gussy?”

She set her cup down on his desk and leaned back in the wicker chair. She pulled her cardigan around her and held her breath. When she breathed again, her chest fell gently. “Did I tell you how I met your grandfather?”

“I think so, but tell me again,” I said and looked away from her to the sun that had slipped away without my noticing.

“I was seventeen then. A girl.” She smiled. “Not much younger than you.”

I didn't interrupt. I was far enough from seventeen now to be sentimental.

“He had a brand-new car. A Dodge he bought from his uncle's shop. It was beautiful.”

“What color?”

“Black,” she said. “Dark as night and shiny.”

“What happened?” I realized I hadn't heard this story. I didn't remember there being a car.

“I was walking to school with my girlfriend, Jessie. It was springtime. I think we were thinking about skipping school and coming up here to go swimming.”

“Did he give you a ride?” I asked.

“Oh lord, no.” She laughed. “I stepped off the curb to cross the street, you know where the pet shop used to be?”

I nodded.

“Well, before they put in the stoplight there weren't even any signs or anything. People were just slower then, more careful. But your grandfather, in his brand new Dodge, comes down the road and doesn't stop. Just as I'm stepping off the curb he hits me, knocks me to the ground.” She pulled her sweater tightly around her and picked up her tea again.

“He hit you with his car?”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded. “And he drove me all the way to the hospital in that car too. I was out of school for two weeks. He came to see me every afternoon, parking that monster in front of my house so everybody knew he was there. A year later we were married.”

“Jeez,” I said.

I looked at her for some sort of nostalgia or melancholia, but she was concentrating on a run in her stocking.

“The fish was good, wasn't it?” she said after a while, tracing a thick blue vein underneath the sheer hose.

“It was good, Gussy.”

After Gussy left, I took my suitcase upstairs to the loft. The sheets were pulled back, waiting for me it seemed. I opened the curtains and let the moon fill the room. The ceiling was slanted, and I bumped my head as I leaned over to pick up a crumpled piece of paper from the floor. It looked as though it had been through the wash, and crumbled as I unfolded it, disintegrating before I could read the blurred ink. I lay down in the bed and wondered if it was a grocery list or a note. I wondered if it belonged to Max. If it had somehow avoided years of Gussy's meticulousness only to arrive and crumble in my hands.

October 3, 1987

I
find Max when I am only looking for a quiet place to read.

I lock the door to my dorm room and wander down the concrete corridor to the stairwell. It is Sunday morning, and the air is still thick with the smell of cigarette smoke, spilled beer, and the fading perfume scent of hopeful girls. Last night I listened to them dancing and flirting. For hours, I eavesdropped until the sound of their laughter inevitably turned to the violence of vomiting and toilets flushing. One girl was crying, and on the other side of my wall were the faint squeaky rhythms of making love. I hate this place. I hate this limbo between adolescence and whatever is supposed to be on the other side.

My backpack is heavy, the hard spine of
The Riverside Shakespeare
digging into my tailbone as I make my way down the stairs, holding my breath against the stench. When I open the door, the autumn air is clean and brisk. The sunny sky through my sliver of a window was deceiving; it isn't summer anymore. But the sharp wind and the cloudless sky make everything beautiful today.

The trees on the quad of my building look like they are on fire. I can hardly see the pavement walkway for all of the colors littering the ground. I would study under one of these trees, but the same voices from last night will burst through open windows soon enough. Frisbees and Hacky Sacks will make it impossible to concentrate. There will be too many distractions here for Shakespeare.

I walk through the park, my feet crushing the brittle leaves, leaving a trail of fiery dust in my wake. The library isn't open yet, so I walk down Main Street, down the steep hill from the campus to the lake. I walk past Victorian houses whose widows' walks are strewn with beer bottles and boxer shorts. Whose gingerbread trim has been replaced by painted Greek letters.

The bakery next to the movie theater is open, and inside the scones are still hot from the oven. The girl behind the counter smothers mine with raspberry jam. Outside, the brown paper bag is warm in my hands. The sun follows me out of the bakery, past the shops and restaurants to the park at the edge of the lake.

I have found the only truly quiet place in this town. The only noise here is the shrill arrival and departure of the ducks. It may very well be the only spot that remains unmolested by students. Undiscovered, except by an occasional child who has wandered from his mother. You have to be small to find this place. You have to think like a child to get here.

Behind an old brick wall strangled with ivy is a tunnel of leaves. The foliage is thick, camouflaging the entrance. You might not know that you could crawl into its green darkness unless you were looking for a place to hide. The cave of ivy and shrubbery must be six feet deep. I crawl on my hands and knees through the leaves. The smell is deep and green. Branches tickle and scratch my arms and face. This is the only way to get to this particular inlet of the lake. The only entrance and exit. When I emerge on the other side, I am startled to see someone standing at the edge of the water.

I don't know what to do. I am frozen at the opening of the tunnel. Part of me thinks I should go back, crawl backward through the dark cavern to the park, try to find a quiet bench, forget about solitude today. Part of me is curious. How did he get here? He could never have fit inside the secret entrance. And so, for several moments, I just watch.

He is turned toward the water; I can't see his face. He is tall and thin, his straight dark hair falling over the back of the collar of his faded denim shirt. His khaki pants are rolled up, his feet bare. He is holding a stack of papers; it's hard to see what they are. He kneels down, setting the papers next to him on the grassy shore, and begins to fold one of the pages. His hands are tan, his fingers long and thin. He is careful, methodical in this task. Soon, the page has become a boat, the paper boat a child makes. He sets it in the water, and a small current carries it away from the shore. He keeps folding the pages until there is an entire fleet of paper ships.

I watch until there are no pages left at all. I am quiet, and he is quiet, and the pages look like white leaves instead of paper as they drift away. I wait to see what he does, and I don't move from the mouth of the cave.

“I hear you,” he says, standing again.

I think for a second that he is only talking to the water, certain that I am obscured by the leaves.

“I said, I hear you. You can come out now.”

“Excuse me?” I say softly.

He turns around, and I fall forward onto my hands, the weight of Shakespeare on my back pushing me forward. I can feel the gravel and dirt making pinpricks in the palms of my hands. When I look up, he is reaching out to help me. I accept his hand, and he pulls me up. His eyes are wet, his eyelashes glistening as if drops of rain had fallen there. But his eyes are strangely dimensionless: flat, black circles without light.

“What are you doing?” I ask. It's easier to ask this stranger why he has launched those pages like small ships into the water than to ask about his tears.

“Do you have a mother?” he asks.

“What do you mean?” I ask. “Everyone has a mother.”

“I mean, is she alive?”

“Oh. Yeah, of course. Why?”

“My mother is dead,” he says. “Today.”

“She died today?” I ask in horror.

“For me, she's dead. I
decided
today.” His voice is soft.

I am quiet.

“Letters. From my psychotic mother,” he says, gesturing toward the lake. “Every day since I left home, pleading with me to come back. All the guilt in the world is in those letters.”

“I know what you mean.” I smile. I think of the care packages my mother has been sending me. The boxes of my favorite cookies, the aspirin and coffee beans and Tang. About her silly reprimands to write more, call more. Collect, if I need to.

“You do, huh?” He laughs, shaking his head. His expression tells me there is more to this story. That I am a little foolish, maybe.

He sits down next to me at the water's edge. He smells clean, like wind and grass. I open up the bag from the bakery. I take the scone out and split it in half, handing half to him. Quietly we eat the sweet scone, watching the water carry his mother away.

The next day I arrive after my Shakespeare class, and he is already there folding more paper boats. This time I bring him blueberry muffins. Coffee. The day after that, I offer him a chocolate croissant and freshly squeezed orange juice in a plastic cup. Every day for six days, I meet him there after a stop at the bakery and watch him let go of another piece of his mother. But each day, I get a sense that it is not as simple as this. That setting sail to her letters is only a gesture. That she is still with us on the shore, between us as we share another breakfast. His flat dark eyes suggest that his sadness is heavier than Shakespeare on my back. Heavier than the dark clouds that move across the sky when I hold out an apricot danish and he refuses.

Instead, he sits next to me on the grass without saying a word. For a half an hour we sit like this. When he finally speaks, he tells me about what happened after his father left them.

“You have to understand a few things,” he says.

I nod.

“This is who I am. That won't change.”

He tells me about the boy who cowered inside the locked closet, when she put him there to teach him about darkness. About the way her dresses enclosed him and the heels of her shoes bruised his ribs. About the boy whose legs bled from the belt she swung to remind him that no one is immune to pain. Not even children. About the boy who stood at the edge of the road as his mother drove away to teach him a lesson about how it feels to be left behind. About the smell of gasoline and the way her hair looked as it blew out of the driver's side window.

When he rests his head in my lap, I stroke that little boy's hair. I touch the pulsing vein at that little boy's temple. Each touch, I think, might help to erase the scars. I run my finger along the thin line of his lips, across the ridge of his chipped tooth from the first fall.

The next day, he brings me a present. He hands me a pocket watch on a silver chain as delicate and fragile as a spider's web.

“For being patient.” He smiles.

He puts the watch in the palm of my hand, closes my fingers around it. His hand is strong, larger than mine, pressing my fingers against the cold, smooth silver.

“Thank you,” I say.

I don't know until later that it is broken. That the hands don't move. That time is frozen inside this gift from Max.

BOOK: Breathing Water

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