Inland (3 page)

THERE ARE MORE LEFT ASHORE
in the Morgan family. That’s our legacy: more stranded survivors, more mourners, more people throwing dirt onto coffins that hold nothing but trinkets and empty air. Even we, my father and I, stood above a hole in the ground and tossed our handfuls of earth onto the box that didn’t have my mother in it. Just to have something to bury, just for the finality of watching the coffin disappear. The ones left ashore get left with nothing. The ocean doesn’t give back its dead.

—

Nessa says that there are Morgans scattered up and down the coasts of a dozen countries, near and far, north and south. She says that we’re drawn to the sea, answering a voice as inescapable and patient as any faithful man’s call from God. My granddad was a Navy man, she tells me, sure-handed and strong, who would’ve stayed aboard another tour if not for the daughters waiting for him in their clapboard house on the bay. There is a cousin many times removed, a renowned painter, whose seascapes hang in galleries in London and whose studio looks out on the Celtic Sea. There are swimmers, sailors, divers. There are lobstermen, fishermen, marine hunters, and aquatic biologists. Even Nessa, always a drifter and still so young, has found her calling in the surf, teaching children to paddle out on their oversized beginner’s boards and stand up proudly on the waves. She says that when the sea has given our family so much, it only stands to reason that it takes some of us, too, at the end.

Nessa. The only living person in the world who I miss. The only one who will ever miss me.

We left her behind on the second move, the one that took us over the border of eastern California and put the dry, dull landscape of the Mojave Desert in between us. She had driven out to see us off, surprising me as I struggled to cram the last of my belongings into a bulging cardboard box. She’d swirled into my room, all whirling blue linen and bright, clinking bracelets, her sun-streaked hair tumbling over both our shoulders as I leaped squealing into her arms. Nessa’s visits were always planned-out, the result of endless phone calls and bitter negotiating and shameless begging on both our parts. We pleaded and cajoled until my father was too exhausted to do anything but agree—just as long as it was a short visit, just as long as she had somewhere to stay, since we weren’t set up for visitors.

Not this time, though. This time, there had been no plan. The look on my father’s face, as he stood dark and silent behind her, said as much. She’d called in sick to work and left before dawn, she told me, breaking the speed limit all the way there. Racing across California in her boxy old Volkswagen, the one with a bent fender and a surf rack on the roof and grains of sand buried in the upholstery.

It wasn’t until years later that I understood: when we moved inland, no amount of pleading could bring Nessa to our doorstep. We had moved beyond a line she would not cross.

—

That day was the last time I saw her. We said good-bye in the heat of the afternoon, outside the house with a FOR
RENT sign already sunk in the yellowed yard, where I clung to her waist and sobbed, “Come with us, come with us.”

“I can’t, baby,” she said. “I wish I could, but I can’t.” Her long fingers stroked my hair, untangling it, smoothing it against my sweaty neck. She has the same graceful hands as her older sister, the same bronzed skin and calloused palms, the same tapered fingers with the same smooth, oval nails. When I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine that it was my mother holding me, my mother’s hands cupping my cheeks. I cried harder, pressing my face into the draping linen of her skirt, feeling it grow rough and wet while she made comforting sounds.

Shhh. Shhh.

I knew he had appeared behind me when her back stiffened and all the music went out of her voice. I kept my face in her skirt, hearing only the creak of the warped porch boards as they shifted beneath my father’s weight.

“This is wrong, Alan,” she said haltingly.

“It’s not your business, Nessa,” he replied, directing his gaze toward a spot near her feet. Since my mother’s death, he couldn’t bear to look at Nessa, this woman whose eyes were as deep and treacherous—the same almond shape and azure shade—as those of the wife he’d lost.

“Not my business?” Nessa snapped. “Callie is my family, too! And do you think
she
would have liked what you’re doing? Do you think
she
would have thought it was right, taking Callie away from everything she knows, everything familiar? And think hard before you lie to me, because I know for a fact that Maera made you promise never to do this. She wanted Callie raised right, by the ocean, with people who love her.”

My father flinched when she said the name, and his dead, heavy gaze moved from the sidewalk to the old porch rocker. His voice was flat and cold.

“I’m her father,” he spat back. “Which means I love her, in case you’ve forgotten. And you’re right, it’s not what Maera wanted, and if you think it’s easy for me to break that promise to her . . . well, I wouldn’t expect you to understand. But she’s gone, and somebody has to do the right thing here. Somebody has to pick up the pieces.”

She laughed at that—not a real laugh, but a humorless, toneless bark.

“Pick them up and take them a million miles away,” she snapped.

My father turned away.

“I have to do what I think is best,” he said. His voice floated back to reach us as the door creaked open and he disappeared into the dark, clean interior of our soon-to-be-former house. “Callie, say good-bye and come inside.”

Nessa had been glaring, daring him to meet her eyes. Now she sighed, swallowed hard, and looked away to the west. She muttered under her breath, eyes on the horizon. For a moment, she looked much, much older than twenty-four.

“This is wrong,” she said again, more quietly. Her hands began to move again, combing through my hair. “God knows how your daughter will suffer before you see how wrong it is.”

Over the rattle of the little VW’s engine, she embraced me for the last time. I’d dried my eyes long enough to say good-bye, swallowing down my sobs in an effort to prove that it was all okay. When she lifted one of her own jingling necklaces over her head and placed it around my neck, I did my best to smile. The chain was a linked line of golden fire in the afternoon sun; the sea-glass pendant, smooth and opaque, played its light green glow against the white of my shirt.

“That’s to help you remember,” she said. A deep line had appeared between her brows, and stayed there even as she tried to smile. “Until you come back.”

“He won’t bring me back.”

Her smile disappeared, and for a brief moment, a shadow seemed to move in the deep, troubled blue of her eyes.

“He has to,” she said. And then the darkness lifted, and her forehead smoothed, and her smile—the real one, the one not full of worry—came back. “And if he doesn’t, I guess I’ll just have to come steal you.”

—

But she didn’t. She hasn’t. And though I used to wish that she’d come to take me back—hard wishing, with my eyes shut tight and the cool, smooth green of the sea glass in my hand—I don’t do that anymore. I no longer want to be rescued; there’s no home for me, not there and not here. I belong nowhere, and I don’t want Nessa, the only one who will ever miss me, to see the shuffling, wheezing creature I’ve become.

I still wear her sea-glass necklace—buried in my worn T-shirts and baggy robes, where my father can’t frown at it the way he frowns at everything. And her letters find me every month, long after she stopped bothering to call our ever-changing succession of phone numbers, long after I gave up teasing her for not having an e-mail address. I like it better this way. It would be easier, but it would also be a shame, to have her voice come filtered through a screen; to lose the way her handwriting swoops across the page, all flair and flourish. The way the paper smells, like sunscreen, salt, and perfume.

She writes to me about my mother. My father, too. She tells me how they met and married. How they made a life. How my mother loved the sea, how its voice filled our house with sound, how there used to be a time when the two of them found happiness in hearing it. She reminds me of what we used to have, and paints with her words all the things she believes could still be mine. She writes to me about a tiny beach town south of LA, a stucco cottage, a day spent teaching children to paddle out on their bobbing boards, to watch the ocean move. She says that if you’re patient, a wave will come to take you home.

She tells me to hold on, to be strong, to believe no matter what that things won’t always be this way. And because I love her, I give her what she wants. I write about the future; I use the word “hope”; I spin the pathetic highlights of my lonely life into something that looks nearly normal, and trust that she won’t read between the lines.

I pretend that I believe it. That somewhere, far away in the center of the sea, my homeward-bound wave is being born.

“Aunt Nessa says the ocean has a voice,” I said once.

It was a mistake; I could see it in the way he looked at me, like I’d said a bad word. It had been a good day. I had made it through school, had come home feeling well enough for dinner, and the two of us had made a roast: chopping vegetables side by side, letting the deep, rich aroma of browned beef and red wine fill the chilly house, passing the meal in warm and quiet comfort. There was a dish of crisp green beans on the table and a pint of ice cream waiting in the freezer, and he had smiled when he told me it was there. But now he stiffened, staring at me over the rim of his water glass and then placing it carefully to the side.

“Aunt Nessa does a lot of drugs,” he replied, and cleared his place.

The ice cream went uneaten.

—

I keep her letters, all of them. A growing stack of small rebellion, hidden in a book. I know better than to mention them now. But I keep them, and the trinkets in them. She sends me shells with scarlet ridges; a shard of printed pottery that made its way to shore; a piece of driftwood like a bony finger, knobbed and polished smooth, bleached white by the sun.

“We’ll see each other again,” she writes. “Remember where you come from.”

In the crease of every folded sheet of paper, there are tiny grains of sand.

AWAY FROM THE UNPREDICTABLE COASTLINE,
in the wide, flat expanses of the Midwest, everything begins to look the same. The neighborhoods we settle in are identically designed, abutting college campuses that boast the same broad lawns and low brick buildings. Even the houses are alike; they’re squat and nondescript, perched like small beige boxes on their parcels of yellowed grass, evenly spaced and all painted the color of eggshells. Moving from and to these places doesn’t feel like going anywhere at all, and sometimes I wonder if we’ve packed a truck and driven for hours only to come back to the same house we’d left, on the same street, where the same neighbors watch our comings and goings with curiosity.

For nine years, we’ve drifted in this sea of sameness. My bedrooms are always painted a restful shade of neutral. The schools, when I am in them, all smell of the same cheap tomato sauce and are tiled in the same institutional green. The hospitals are their own world: all fluorescent-lit, chemical white, with chrome accents and movable plastic parts on the beds.

This is Laramie. We’ve been here six months. Before this came one year in Elko; before that, two years in Grand Junction. There’s more beyond that, a half-dozen houses in the past nine years, but it’s all the same to me: four walls, a small window, the glow of my laptop, and the pills on the nightstand. The beige paint on the walls, the clean, dull carpet that covers the floor. The box houses and peering neighbors. If not for our address written on Nessa’s envelopes, I’d never know. To have a sense of place, you need connection. An anchor. Something, or someone, whose very presence says “You are here.”

Connection, in my airless, four-walled world, is harder and harder to come by.

I stopped trying to make friends after the fourth move. It was almost a relief; I’d never been good at it, had always lingered and hovered near groups of kids in the hopes of attaching to one who walked too close, latching on like an unnoticed burr and coming along for the ride. It rarely worked, or when it did, an attack and a missed week of school would leave me back where I’d started. My almost-friends, seeing me coming, would look at me curiously. Not with malice, but confusion, the way you squint at a stranger who stands too close and shouldn’t know your name.

Drifting was easier. Attached to no one, comfortably alone, unnoticed and undisturbed.

Sarah Garrison was the last “friend” I’d had, the last to seek me out and make me her personal project. The golden girl of Grand Junction, who swept me into her social sphere with the same self-satisfied display as if she’d been scooping up a wounded animal from the side of the road. I was the broken-winged bird in need of nursing; she was my selfless savior, blond and bubbly and wanting to help, eagerly rescuing me from the social purgatory of the chronic invalid.

I like to remember how it was, early on. Comfortable—a different kind of comfortable from the one I was used to, alone in my room with my headphones on and my laptop open, the keyboard growing hot under my hands. It was friendly. Cozy. To have someone to sit with, to talk to, to make this place stand out forever as the one where, for a little while, I was just like every other girl with a backpack and a bobbing ponytail and a best girlfriend at my side. Even if her very presence, her silk-smooth skin and her easy movements and her healthy, shiny hair, were always a reminder of the things I couldn’t do. Even if she insisted on walking me to every class, and made too big a show of carrying my books, and took a little too much pleasure in informing perfect strangers just how many pills I took each day. Even if I once caught her doing an impression of my last bad attack, with bulging eyes and flailing hands and an exaggerated
hnnnnnngh, hnnnnnngh
sound to mimic my breathless gagging, while a dozen people laughed long and hard and loud.

You are here
, I thought, and smiled through tightly gritted teeth. When Sarah stood and said too much about the details of my body’s defectiveness, I would watch her lips move and drown out her voice with the strength of it.
This is home. You are here.

Because being someone’s pet is still better than belonging nowhere, to no one. Nobody tells you how lonely it is to be sick, how reality shrinks down to you, and the space around your bed, and the sound of your whistling breath.

—

For a while, with Sarah as my anchor, I wasn’t so lonely anymore. She was the tenuous string that tied me to a normal life, a sense of belonging, an uninterrupted string of weeks when I slept well, and woke up rested, and felt my breath come easier. I was sick less, tired less. My self-appointed advocate, Sarah proudly collected class notes and homework assignments on the few days I missed, presenting them to me and waving away my thank-yous with practiced selflessness. She visited me in the hospital, joked with my doctors, held my hand with all the elevated, professional affection of a Mother Teresa or Florence Nightingale. She was especially solicitous when there was someone else to see it—fluffing my pillow, giving me a shoulder to lean on, all patient smiles and only the occasional backward glance over her shoulder to see who might be watching.

Until the day came, six months after my father had said, “This Sarah girl has been good for you,” and three months after the doctor said, “We may be seeing an improvement,” when Sarah grew bored with being giving. The novelty of her role wore thin, and then wore off, until I was no longer an exotic charity case, but simply the slow, doughy, boring, and unlikable thing that I had always been. She was impatient, annoyed, always walking too quickly as I coughed at her heels. That spring, she joined the track team; my next hospital visit, I made alone. I couldn’t even blame her.

“This is so boring,” she moaned as I lay panting on the couch with a bad TV movie playing in the background. “Why can’t you ever do anything?”

I saw her less after that—and then only from a distance, running with the track-girl pack, ponytail bobbing behind her as they all ran past, a flash of chatter and laughter and long, lean legs. Until the day, sometime later, when she raised her hand in the middle of a final exam, in the wide-open silence of our crowded classroom, and—sweetly, smiling, without so much as glancing my way—said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Manning? Could Callie take this test in another room? If I have to listen to her wheezing for one more minute, I’m going to go insane.”

You are here,
I thought, desperately, as my throat began to constrict and the sound of snickering filled my ears.
You are here.

When I arrived back at school the following week, empty-handed and left behind, Mrs. Manning coolly told me that if I knew I was going to miss so much class, the least I could do was get a friend to take some notes for me.

Clinging to an anchor, as it turns out, is also a good way to drown.

—

Since then, there’s been no “here.” No connections, no rescuers, nobody looking to salvage my limping carcass from the side of the road. Nobody takes my hand, or asks me out, or urges me to participate. My father, after the disaster and aftermath of Grand Junction, is kind enough not to ask if I’ve made any friends at school. I drift with his permission.

The neighbors know I’m here. I can tell from the way they peer at the house, the exposed slice of their eyes winking out from a body bundled tight against the cold, slowing their steps to catch a glimpse of the professor’s indoor daughter.

“My daughter isn’t well,” he tells them. He’s doing it now, caught on his way home from work by a passing neighbor; I can see his shadow where he stands politely on the porch, waving away the well-meaning old woman who showed up with a smile and a pie. Her lips purse with concern: in a moment she’ll start clucking, and then she does, all fluttering hands and bird-like head, bobbing her worry and sympathy. Nessa’s letters sometimes ask if I’ve met new people, if I’m making friends. When I write to her next, I’ll tell her about this woman. I’ll pretend that I saw her right up close and not from behind a drawn blind, spoke to her face-to-face instead of eavesdropping through a window.

“We met our neighbor,” I’ll write. “She brought a pie.” And I’ll make up a name—Myrtle, a good old-lady name—and an afternoon of conversation, and a granddaughter my age who sounds very nice and might stop by from time to time.

But Myrtle, or whatever her name is, has already gone. We’ll eat her pie later, perhaps, but we’ll never be friends. There is no granddaughter, and there are no afternoon visits. And when I come outside, she’ll look at me like they all do, with the same sideways stare that people use to ogle amputees, the homeless, the people who have babbled conversations with voices only they can hear. I’m none of those; my damage is all on the inside, but they don’t know, and their sidelong eyes crawl over me to find the defect.

They don’t know yet that they’ll never get close enough to see it.