Inland (2 page)

N
I
NE
Y
EA
R
S A
GO

THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE WATER.
A shadow, something dark and long and strong and sinuous. It slides beneath the shimmering waves, and I turn to watch as it comes closer, moving fast, an opaque patch that surges silently forward and slips under the keel of the boat on one side.

I see it first. I see it, and I look away.

—

She is in the water, too; she is always in the water. Treading lightly, feet pedaling and pushing against the endless azure nothing below. She has been telling me, like she always does, that it’s so lovely. So light. That I can’t imagine how wonderful it feels. That the sea is like a cushion, a bed made out of sun glimmer and spray. She is beckoning, coaxing me to leave the little daysailer and come swim beside her. She tells me we’ll float there together, two tiny dots of life on the rippling surface, with light glinting off our slick-shiny hair and our feet fluttering like pale wings in the blue.

I am only half listening. The shadow has disappeared beneath the boat.

There’s nothing else. No splash. No sign. No portent cloud come to cover the sun. There is only the shadow in the water, and there is no time left.

When she sees it, she says only two words.

The first is “Wait.”

The second, full of panic and water and the sudden, swelling noise of the sea, is my name.

The shadow has disappeared.

When I turn back, I am watching my mother drown.

—

In the movies, drowning is the most undignified of deaths. People scream, and flail, and thrash around. They make waves, clawing at the liquid surface and finding no purchase, until their waving arms lose strength and their mouths fill at the corners and they sink, feetfirst and fingertips last, beneath the rippling water.

That’s not how it happens at all.

—

Back on land, there were questions. Why were we so far from shore? Why would my mother, surrounded on all sides by endless, directionless water, strip the sails and leave the safety of the boat? Why hadn’t I thrown out a life jacket or a rope when I saw her struggling, or held out one of the long, light oars that were still suspended, untouched, in their space beneath the gunwhale?

My father, his mouth screwed tight with grief and anger and incomprehension, cast a shadow over my hospital bed. He stood next to the slim, silver IV stand, just as ramrod straight and rigid. Just as cold. He kept the shades drawn, keeping the world out and the fluorescent lights on, until I lost track of how many days I’d been there. No sun to mark the time, only the doctors and nurses and question-askers who came and went in a parade of quiet sameness. Everyone who entered my room was the same shade of blue-white pale, lit in the same sharp relief, the same hollow shadows carving their brows and jaws.

“You’re not making sense, Callie,” my father said, after the last one had left.

“There must be something you’re not remembering,” he said.

“Tell me the truth. Tell me.”

My favorite doctor, the one with crispy, salt-streaked hair and the scent of coconut oil on his clean, dark hands, would usher him out of the room when I started to cry. In the hallway, he would lay his palm on my father’s shoulder—a bronze beacon of warmth in that white, cold world—and bend in close with whispered advice.

“I know it’s hard,” I heard him say as the door swung slowly closed. The words slipped through the shrinking gap, settling in the room, sinking into the chair where people would sit with their pressed lips and endless questions.

“I know it’s hard,” he said. “But a trauma like this, at this age . . . it may be better, for her and for you, if she doesn’t remember.”

My sun-kissed doctor believed that my memory was incomplete on purpose; that my mind was healing itself with a story that made no sense, washing itself white, blotting out what I’d seen and burying it in a place where it couldn’t harm me.

I was glad when the questions stopped.

—

It was easy, pretending to forget. Faking it a little more each day, and more still, until even my father believed that the truth about what happened that day was lost forever. Buried in my unplumbable mind. As hopelessly irretrievable as my mother’s body, undiscovered and slowly unmaking itself somewhere in the depths of the Pacific.

It was easy—easier than trying to explain, through my cracked and sun-blistered lips, how this wasn’t the first time that Mama had slipped out of the boat when the wind went down. How she could stay there, forever weightless in the water, no matter which way the current was moving us. That everything they’d ever believed about drowning was wrong.

Because there were no waving hands, no screams. She was simply there, and then not there. She disappeared beneath the surface without a splash or shout, and not so much as a bubble marked the spot, and the water where she’d been was as smooth and unbroken as dappled glass.

“You’re not making sense, Callie,” my father had said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

What I didn’t say was: Yes, I am. I am making sense. I am making sense, if you just believe that this is how it happened.

—

The wind disappeared.

There was a shadow in the water.

And when it moved beneath our boat, the sea opened its yawning blue mouth and swallowed my mother whole.

THE SUBSTITUTE GYM TEACHER
is eyeing me suspiciously. We’ve met once before, but he doesn’t remember. I can’t even blame him; I wouldn’t remember me, either. I haven’t been in school for three weeks.

“Last name is Morgan, you said?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you’re sure it’s this class.”

“Pretty sure,” I say, and he cringes. My voice is ragged and dry. They say that scar tissue has built up in my larynx, the souvenir of too many intubations. Too many hospital visits, too many times when my body has needed outside assistance to do the supposedly simple job of breathing on its own. When I talk, people flinch as though they want to lay a fast palm on my back—to knock loose that painful scrape from my throat. As though, if they just hit me hard enough, I’ll cough it up onto the carpet.

I don’t talk often.

“I don’t have a file for you. And nothing about an exemption, either.”

“I haven’t been in school. It might have gotten lost.”

His eyebrows go up another notch. They started climbing the moment I walked in; I can mark their movement by the number of folds in his forehead. He’s entirely bald, this man: shaved to the shiny limits, a head like a cannonball. The tag on his binder says MR
.
THICKE, and he is—built wide and strong like a bulldog, with taut, firm skin and a coiled spring of a body. Someone who’s moved all his life with the ease and fluidity and strength of a well-oiled machine. Someone who has never, I can tell just by looking at him, never struggled just to breathe.

I struggle. I wheeze and I pant and I drag the air in, clawing at it with ragged gulps, while it fights to stay out of my lungs.

Mr. Thicke looks at me, at the soft, unmuscled mass of my body, at the inhaler in my hand. I cough, and he winces.

“All right,” he says. “I’ll have to check with the admins, but in the meantime, go on and sit this one out.”

I’m not sure which one of us is more relieved.

—

I can count the number of gym classes I’ve taken on one hand, and they’ve all ended the same way: early, prostrate, with my head against a cot and the bitter taste of albuterol coating my tongue. In the past six years, I’ve come to understand that exercise is a luxury for the healthy. Even the doctors don’t push it. Even they, I suspect, don’t want to see what I look like in sweaty, ungainly motion.

It’s not a pretty sight. I’m not a pretty girl. Not even average, even on my Real Person days—the ones where I successfully get out of bed, and eat cereal, and make it through all eight periods without an attack. I’m nothing like the girls I glimpsed when I passed through the locker room to see Mr. Thicke, the ones who were giggling and shimmying into swimsuits, with lean legs and taut stomachs and skin that still looks kissed by the summer sun.

I can’t swim. Can’t run. Can’t even move, not like they do. My body is pale from disuse, soft and limp and with the flabby consistency of unbaked dough. I have hollows under my eyes and pits in my skin, cracked lips and a rough face. Last year, the corpse of a drowned dog washed out of the sewer near our house after a week of hard rain; the first thing I noticed was how much its bloated, misshapen gut looked just like mine.

When I point to my gravelly ass and loose white flesh, the doctors remind me about priorities. They say that there’s plenty of time to be pretty, but first I have to be well.

“I’m not getting any better,” I say.

“You’re doing fine,” they say.

My father says, “Do as they say.”

—

It’s only us, now. My father and I, navigating our old Subaru like a two-hand ship, moving in one-year increments toward the center of the country. Following orders, seeing doctors, installing ourselves in university housing with the efficiency of frequent movers. They all look the same: classy, cared-for, conveniently located for a visiting professor’s walk to campus and with two bathrooms, not one. A private space for the man’s sick, pale whale of a daughter and her rattling boxes of pills. We moved first to get away—from the house, the shore, the memory of my mother. Now, we move toward the promise of wellness. Toward this doctor, that study, this university with full health coverage and then some, attached to that research hospital with access to cutting-edge technologies.

We live in desert places, arid climates, landlocked states with broad, flat horizons and the dry, unsaturated air that is all that my lungs can handle.

It’s been this way, every day and every year, since she died. Since the day that I left the hospital, when he carried me in a blanket to the car and laid me in the backseat and drove me back to our seaside house, now full of closed cardboard boxes and bare surfaces and empty walls.

He’d been packing away our old life while I healed, giving it away to neighbors and charity, preparing to move us east.

With no rugs, no photos, no furniture, the sound of the Pacific was louder than ever; the surf, always a soft rushing sound track as it washed the cliffs far below, was so urgent and deafening that it sounded as though it was going to crash through the door. The lines in my father’s forehead deepened with every wave.

In my parents’ room, the bed was stripped bare and the closets were empty.

He’d given away her clothes.

That my mother was gone, I could understand. They’d told me in the hospital, gently breaking the news. As though I didn’t know. As though I’d already forgotten, as though I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life closing my eyes and watching her vanish beneath the sea. But I’d still expected to find her there—not alive, not in person, but I thought that something, some piece of her, would still be there. In that house, our house. In closets, on tabletops, in the shelves crammed full of books and scattered with shells. In the sea-smell of the sheets, and the damp-curled papers that lay on her desk.

When I fell against the doorjamb, the ointment they’d rubbed on my sunburn left a greasy spot on the wall.

The next morning, he caught me digging through a charity box and shook me hard. I’d pulled out Mama’s books, the three nearest the top, and clutched them weakly to my chest.

“You have to stop this,” he said, then fell to his knees. He pulled me in, held me as close as I held the books, stroking my hair. When he said it again, his voice was the battered, beaten whisper of an old man. “Please, Callie, you have to stop this.”

“I don’t want to go. This is our house.”

“You don’t understand this now, but I’m doing this for you,” he said. “We’re going to have a new life, honey. Staying here, with all this stuff, doesn’t make sense. We have to move on. It’s better, for you and for me, if . . .”

If we don’t remember.

He didn’t say it out loud. But three days later, with the last bag packed, my father took us inland.

The following year, I collapsed at school with one lung flattened and sagging uselessly in my chest.

—

The air has gone thick in the office. My throat is beginning to close; I clutch my inhaler and will my lungs to fill, pull hard, sucking and gagging while white spots cloud away my peripheral vision. The side of the chair that I’m sitting in punches against the limp flab of my stomach as I sag toward the floor. Halfway there. There’s a tabletop under my forehead, cool plastic against my face, Mr. Thicke’s binder, a makeshift pillow.

Somewhere, I can hear the sound of long limbs carving water, the shrieks of the girls who breathe so easily and have all the time in the world to care about being pretty. I listen, crumpled in the airless space, wheezing and waiting for it to pass.

I miss another four days of school.

When I come back, Mr. Thicke is subbing my chemistry class.

“Last name is Morgan?” he says. There’s not even a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t have a file for you.”

MAMA’S BOOKS ARE DOG-EARED,
the pages pliable from frequent turnings and softened by the sea. Even inland, with so many years between us and the Pacific, I still remember the feeling of water in the air. The moisture got into everything. Warping the worn wooden floorboards, making the wallpaper curl, lacing our sheets with a cool, salty dampness that even the sun could never bake away. The books, with their swollen bindings and bloated pages, spring open of their own accord.

So many moves, the constant packing and unpacking and loss in transit, has left no room for memory. In our landlocked lives, this is what I have left of the sea and of my mother. Two of them are textbooks, hers from another life; they have her notes in the margins, underlinings and exclamation points, scribbled references to related studies, and Latin words that I don’t understand. I used to read them in the hope that I’d somehow feel closer to her—that whatever she found so compelling in these dense, impermeable paragraphs would touch me, too—but a hundred readings later, I know better. The books don’t speak in her voice. The words hold no meaning for me, the pictures even less. They’re only sketches, black-and-white and boring, showing you every which way just what the inside of marine animals look like.

My father has never mentioned them, not since that morning when I dug them out of the charity box and refused to let go, but his eyes go cloudy when he sees me reading. I know he knows them; they were hers, when she was his. Vestiges of the path that led her to him, so many years ago, on the ivy-covered campus where they met.

—

“
It was a scandal
,” she used to whisper, grinning, and Dad would shake his head and smile and pretend to be embarrassed. “You should’ve heard them gossip, Callie! The straitlaced professor, falling for a student? A scandal! And when he married her, well, they all nearly had a heart attack.”

It was my favorite story, our own little routine, and I knew the words by heart. He’d press his lips together, and she’d whirl across the room like a dervish and ricochet off the furniture, making the tabletop lamps shudder and tremble. She’d tumble into his lap and he’d try to scowl, but the smile would break free and spread across his face while his arms came up around her.

“What was it they said, Alan?” she’d coo, burying her face in his neck.

“That nothing good could come of it,” he’d reply, and then they’d both look at me, and he’d cock an eyebrow, and say, “but Callie looks pretty good to me.”

And Mama would say, “That’s only because she’s sitting still,” and we’d laugh, bright and clear and hard, like it was the first time she ever said it.

That’s how I want to remember them: together. Happy and easy and laughing at their private jokes, their favorite joke, the long-ago story of the stir they’d caused by falling in love. He had been a bachelor, serious and solitary, coming up on forty with nothing to distract him from his rocks and his books and his flyaway papers; she had been his student, full of questions and boundless energy, more than enough for the both of them. She was only a few years older then than I am now, but I am nothing like her. My mother was beautiful, graceful like walking water, all elegant long lines and tapered fingers and skin that was dewy and smooth. If we met now, I think, she wouldn’t recognize me.

They were married that summer, on the beach below the house that would be ours. On the wall by the door, there was a photo; it showed her pulling him into the water, knee-deep and with her white dress blooming on the surface all around her, both of them laughing in a halo of sea-spray and golden light. A moment of bliss and beauty and newness, a portrait of a couple who had thrown caution to the wind and who couldn’t care less. Nobody who saw that picture, nobody who looked at those faces, would have tsk-tsked about the age difference, the impropriety, the scandal of their romance. Nothing that beautiful could ever be wrong.

I haven’t seen that picture since. Not hung on the wall in our series of rented houses, not hidden in a drawer, not safely stowed in those boxes that follow us from place to place but never seem to get unpacked. It’s vanished, and so has he. That man in the water is gone. In my father’s eyes, there’s not so much as a trace of the one who laughed and loved so easily, who rolled up his suit pants and followed his bride into the churning sea. That man, the one I called Daddy, is as lost as she is.

Maybe it’s best if I don’t remember.

—

Inland, nobody laughs. Not him, and not me, either. It’s better for me if I don’t find things funny. Laughing means coughing, more often than not. It’s better if I press my lips together and keep my breathing even.

Instead, I flip through the pages of the bloated, boring books. I trace her notes with a fingernail. I wonder what she saw in here that was worth the enthusiastic scribbling and the sharp exclamation points. And I wonder, too, what she saw in him that made her put it all aside. She abandoned her studies the following year, content to simply sit in our high house, on the cliff and above the sea, and wait for him to come home each day. First alone, and then with her baby. Together, we would watch the waves and wait.

My father looks unhappy when he sees me with the books, but he won’t take them from me. There is no danger in
The Physiology of Pinnipeds
or
Studies in Marine Evolution, Volume 4
. The other, though—the slim one, with the old-fashioned binding and the single, well-worn page in the center—I don’t dare read in front of him. Even as a child, as I stubbornly held them close while he shook me by the shoulders, I instinctively turned its title toward my chest so that he wouldn’t see it, or the photo tucked inside, or the page with a crease in the corner.

This book is different.

It’s not like the others. It hasn’t been kissed by the sea. It still closes, tight and flat, as though it was kept in a dry, close place, rarely read and rarely touched. The cloth binding is worn and threadbare, and the gold-stamped title on the cover has grown dull. When I opened it the first time, the photo tucked in as a bookmark had fluttered to the floor: a faded picture of two little girls in skirted bathing suits, standing in the surf on an empty beach. They’re looking over their shoulders, squinting into the sun and smiling. Beside them, a tall woman with long hair and slim hips is turned away from the camera, gazing out to sea. A light scrawl of pencil on the back reads,
M & N with Auntie Lee.

One of the little girls is my mother, and it’s her initials that are the last to mark the flyleaf. “M.M.,” for Maera Morgan. The others, “D.M.” and “A.M.,” are a mystery to me. The second M is present every time, in different hands, as though the book was passed down along with the name. It’s my name, too; that, at least, was a piece of my mother I’d never lose, even after she’d vanished from our lives.

“When I was your age, before Nessa was born, my parents had a little boy,” she said, the first time I asked about it. She was smiling, she was always smiling, but her eyes were sad and serious. “His name was Andrew. He would have been your uncle. But sometimes things go wrong, and Andrew died when he was just a few days old. If he’d lived, he would have carried on the Morgan name. But now, it’s up to me to make sure it keeps going. So you, my daughter, will be a Morgan. And unless your father and I have a boy someday, you’ll just have to make sure that your children are Morgans, too.”

My father, who still smiled back then, looked at me with mock-seriousness and said, “Of course, given the alternative, naming you after your mother wasn’t a difficult choice.”

Mama made a face and said, “There’s nothing wrong with your name, Mr. Twaddle.”

“Excuse me,” my father said, “but that’s Doctor Twaddle to you.”

And I am still Callie Morgan. If I were to write my initials inside, my M would line up beneath hers.

I’ve long since removed the picture, put it safely in a frame by my bed, but the book falls open to the poem all the same. The edge of the page is worn, the corner creased. It’s not hard to imagine that my mother, like me, turned to this page again and again. That she traced each line with her finger, letting the words carve a familiar path on her tongue, until, like me, she no longer needed to open the book at all. The poem is a short one, its rhythm easy, rushing forward and then receding with the gentle cadence of waves on sand. I can picture her sitting in our house, high above the Pacific, reciting it in time to the sound of the surf. Maybe she even read it to me, while the boards creaked and the wallpaper curled and the sea pounded on and on.

People that build their houses inland,

People that buy a plot of ground . . .

I’ve never felt my mother in the other books, the heavy ones that caught her interest and held her excited scrawls in the margins, until the day that she put them aside for love. I’ve never sensed her in those pages, though I sometimes saw her read them, tracing her old notes with a fingernail and furrowing her brow at what she’d left unfinished.

But this book—though it has no margin notes, though I’d never seen it in her hands, though I can’t remember its slender spine peering out from any of the shelves that lined our walls—this book is different.

She’s there, between those lines. I can hear her in the breathless pause at the end of each phrase, the moment of calm before the rhythm rushes back in. I can see her, sitting on the porch in the gray, salty dawn that was full of the sounds of water. And though my initials aren’t written on that first page, though there’s nothing to mark this book as mine, I know, somehow, that it’s meant for me.

Because I know. I know what it is to drown with no water in sight. To wake up at night, strangling in a tangle of sweat-drenched sheets, clawing at walls so close and unforgiving that for a moment, I know I’ve been buried alive and left to die. Not even the sudden click of the light can stop the scrabbling of my fingertips in that airless panic. Not even my father’s hands, thrusting the inhaler into my mouth, and his voice, screaming at me to be calm and to breathe. On those nights, even as the air finds its way back in and my heartbeat subsides to a throb, even as he peels the hair back from my sodden forehead and tells me it’s okay, I know the truth.

I am not going to get better. One day, the air won’t come. One day, I’ll scrabble at the beige-bland wall while my throat clogs with that senseless, scentless, stagnant dark. I’ll die in this room, or one just like it, and there will be nothing he can do. I will drown in this arid inland night, the sea just a distant memory.

And when I do, I will wish with my last fluttering thought that I had followed her into the blue.