Inland (5 page)

THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE WATER.

It bobs in the shallows where water meets weeds, riding the barely there roll of the current. The thing is strangely shaped and out of place, a spot of orange plastic in a palette made of browns and greens. When I get closer, I can make out the curve of a tiny foot, a shock of waving, bright blond hair. A pair of painted eyes with unlikely azure lids glare blankly skyward, peering out above pinkish lips that are set in a permanent pout.

A Barbie, set adrift without her dream house.

Or her swimsuit.

—

I’m crouching to get a better look when fast footsteps thud against the dock and fifty pounds of chubby child flings itself against my back. I stumble and veer toward the edge, my feet thudding like ungainly clods, then catch myself against the short wooden post that anchors the dock in the riverbed.

“Bee!” I shout, whirling on my attacker, more sharply than I mean to, and the little girl drops away with a wounded look. Her lip begins to jut, a pink, pouting shelf between the pudge of her rounded cheeks. It doesn’t quiver; she’s angry, not hurt. I stand, face burning, guilty even as my heart pounds an adrenaline-fueled warning in my chest. She glares at me, eyes full of accusations. I swallow hard and consciously drop my voice down to a soothing pitch.

“Sorry, Bee, I didn’t mean to yell. It’s just that—” I take a deep breath, look back over my shoulder at the slow ooze of the river, the naked Barbie bobbing brightly in the water.
Bitch
, I think.
You make it look so easy.

“I know!” says Bee, brightly, her pout disappearing in a happy flash of recollection. “Your daddy said you can’t swim.”

“It’s not a question of what he says,” I mutter, but Bee isn’t paying attention; she’s already back beside me, the brief rebuff forgotten, showing me the reason for Barbie’s lonely abandonment in the soggy depths. A length of fishing line is looped around the doll’s neck, invisible in the water, tethering her to one of the metal cleats that sailors might use to moor their boats. When we first got here, the sight of them—that familiar metal anchor with its overhanging lip—filled me with sudden sadness before I could understand why. Before I remembered, all at once, that our sailboat’s slip on the Pacific coast was studded with those same small, sturdy mounts.

—

It was one month ago when we arrived, in the dark, a damp, pitch-night in late July. A few hours in the air and another two on the road, as our chauffeur cursed his way through six wrong turns and my father cranked the cool air high, and higher. He doesn’t like the heat. All those years spent inland were supposed to be for me, but I understand now that he might have always gone there, given the choice—to those dry, cool desert places, where the winter works with cracking viciousness at the earth and the sidewalks and your bleached, raw skin. He liked that arid harshness. Now, he growls at the air conditioners, twisting their knobs to the limit, making disgusted faces as a V-shaped sweat stain blooms below his shirt collar. He says that the wetness breeds bacteria, that amoebic life is sprouting in all that damp. His greenminded, earth-worshipping, carbon-counting coworkers would be horrified to hear that he showers at the environmentally unconscious rate of half an hour per day, until the bathroom is thick with steam. He tells me not to laugh at him for powdering his armpits.

I was warned, too, that the humidity might hurt. That my lungs might kick up a fuss, grow thick with mucus, shut down against the alien moisture in the air. The first time, stepping out of the car into the loamy, scented darkness, I choked on the thickness of the night. It was soupy, nearly solid, full of the thick and fetid smell of living, and dying, things. The sweetness of decaying leaves. The wet, warm smell of river water. The strange perfume of joe-pye weed and the low, dank notes of mildew.

It was too much, and I doubled over in the driveway, until my father hauled me into the wide-windowed house with its artificial climate.

“You’ll need to stay indoors,” he said. “And watch out near that dock. I don’t have to tell you to be careful and stay away from the water, do I? It’s not safe. I’ll be working late most days. I don’t want to have to worry about what you’re doing here while I’m gone.”

At the time, I’d simply nodded. And I did stay in at first, wandering through the chilled expanse of the house with its clean white walls and cool countertops, everything smooth and stainless steel, conspicuous in its expensive newness. The private retreat of an oil company executive, rarely used and all for us.

“It’s the finest property we have available: quiet, private, a perfect haven to come home to at the end of the day,” Mike Foster had crowed, eager and fast-talking, anxious to see my father pleased. “We’ll deliver your car later today, and in the meantime, there’s a great little motorboat down by the dock if you’d like to explore the river. All gassed up and ready to go. Good fishing around here, you know. And there’s a handyman to maintain the property, no need to mow the lawn or trim the trees; that’s all taken care of.

“And best of all,” he’d simpered, “no city traffic or polluted air to bother your little princess!”

He stood in the polished kitchen on the morning after our arrival, a thin and fidgety man whose darting eyes and shaky smile were a perfect match for the high, nervous voice on the phone. He was far too fussy and focused on my father to notice or care that the princess in question wasn’t so little, was in fact sitting lumpily at the breakfast bar just past his elbow and wheezing with the effort of pulling herself onto the stool. The house was three times the size of our last beige box, with miles of plush carpeting and too many stairs.

“Thank you, Mike,” my father said drily. “I’m sure we’ll get used to the fishy smell.”

Mike’s smile faltered by several degrees; he reapplied it with conscious effort as he pushed a brochure across the countertop.

“This is Ballard, an excellent school, they’ll be expecting your call . . . er, that is, if you plan to enroll her,” he stuttered. “I understand your daughter has, ah, some spottiness in her academic record . . .”

“I have a three-point-seven GPA,” I said, and this time, Mike’s smile disappeared in a wince at the scrape of my voice and didn’t return. “It’s my attendance that’s spotty, not my record.”

“Ah, of course, yes. Well, good then,” said Mike, looking everywhere but at me. “Well, you can enroll her as soon as you’re settled in.”

“We’ll see,” my father had said, and resumed grimacing out the unblemished expanse of the window.

—

The never-used appliances, never-slept-on beds, newly laid laminate flooring without so much as a footprint to mar its sheen. Until I realized the similarity, I couldn’t understand why I felt so instantly at home here. The white, the chrome, the lack of human grease: inside, on that first day, our house felt like a hospital. Only better; the soft white rooms were comfortable, not clinical. Clean, but not sterile, and with recessed lighting that made everyone’s skin look soft and dewy. Even mine.

But as July stretched into August, I began to peer outdoors. I pressed my nose against the endless windows, leaving oil on the glass. I looked to the shadowed drop-off, the dock’s dark wood steps, the tall trees and the openness beyond them. I began to open the door and cross the porch, venturing out a few steps and then farther as the sun dropped down behind the trees. And eventually, my bare feet found the wooden steps and carried me—along the dock, above the water, until I sat on its tip in the orange, fragrant evenings, and gently dropped a foot into the river. I found, after the initial shock, that the air is so very smooth. Lubricated, draping like liquid velvet over my outstretched arms and legs.

When I inhale, it slips down my throat as gently as a summer breeze.

—

This is part of the promised package: the house on stilts, the yard, the trees, the staircase and the dock, the small, bobbing motorboat beside it. Our piece of brackish riverfront in private isolation—follow it for fifteen winding miles, and it brings you to the sea. They’re gifts of the funding company, along with my father’s six-figure salary, a leather-seated Lexus, and the handsome, poised physician whose number we have programmed on speed dial.

“The best care,” Mike Foster had said, and I’m getting it. My doctor’s name is Sharp, and he is—incisive and quick and no-nonsense, with dark eyes that miss nothing. He wields his needle precisely, with the same practiced assurance as Dr. Frank but none of the joshing and grinning. Dr. Sharp is all pointed questions and focused attention. I saw him on the second day. I am taking a host of new pills, per his instructions. I hope, more than anything, that I won’t be seeing much of him.

Because I like it here. I like the humid dampness in my sheets, where Mama’s poetry book is hidden underneath my pillow. I like the smooth heat of the sea-glass necklace, resting against my skin. And I like this place. The fecund banks, choked green with weedy growth. The cypress trees that rise like sentries straight from the depths of the water. The pale stripes of sand on the river bottom, the waving, tangling hair of reeds and algae. And the dock, its limber legs sunk deep and fast. The posts are made from the trunks of young trees, slender but sturdy, dark and polished, and punctuated here and there by the twist of a sudden knot. My father cautioned against splinters, but they’re as smooth as waterworn stone, buffed by the passing touch of a hundred different hands. At its farthest point, it sits surrounded by dark green water. Look down, and you’ll see fat, slate-colored fish making urgent paths through the forest of underwater weeds. Turn back, and the wooden path seems to emerge straight from an enchanted bowery, draped with the sweet breath of honeysuckle and decorated with the dusky lace of Spanish moss.

I have never seen anything like it.

—

“I’m making her a mermaid,” says Bee, pointing at the drifting doll. Barbie is on her back, her molded plastic breasts gleaming obscenely in the sun.

The girl is our neighbor, the child of a mother who works with my father but whom I never see. She’s like him, a hater of the heat. I know her only by her silhouette; at night, she sprints from her carport to her front door with her high heels in one hand, trying to beat the first light lick of non-conditioned air. She doesn’t even wait for Bee, who dawdles by the car until the soles of her shoes start to melt against the driveway, dangling a doll or a worn stuffed animal by one tenuous leg. I know that she’s been playing in our yard when I find doll parts in the grass, little arms and hands and feet, a single googly eye, or, once, a Barbie head staring insolently up at me from the corner of our driveway. The doll in the water is the same one, which means that Bee’s mother, safe in her palace of central air and chilled chardonnay, must have spent an evening performing a lifesaving recapitation procedure.

Bee spotted us our first week in, padding across the quiet drive to where we stood unloading groceries.

“Let me know if she bothers you,” the shoeless silhouette called, and my father shrugged and looked at me, and I looked at Bee. Even in the deepening evening and the shadows of the overhung street, I could see missing teeth in her little-girl grin. I shrugged back at him.

“It’s fine,” I called across the street, but got no answer—just the satisfied click as her front door sealed shut.

Bee is the first person that I’ve ever known who’s lonelier than I am.

—

“See?” she says, and grabs my hand. “She’s a mermaid. She’s beautiful. Did you ever see a mermaid?”

“I see one now,” I say, and point at the Barbie. Bee laughs and tugs on my hand again.

“You’re silly!” she giggles, and the sound echoes down the river. “She’s not a mermaid, she’s just for pretend!”

“Oh, I see,” I say. “Well in that case, no, I’ve never seen a mermaid.”

Bee bends down and grabs the doll’s tether, leaning into the water so precariously that my heart jumps into my throat. I’ve reminded her too many times that if she falls, I can’t come after her, but she says that she can swim.

“I did. I saw a mermaid,” she mumbles, reeling Barbie in.

“Oh yeah? Where’d you see that?” I imagine a south Florida seaside carnival, women with flowing hair and sequined seashell bras, sucking discreetly on air hoses while they cavort in chlorinated pools.

“Just here,” says Bee.

“Here, in Florida?”

“No, silly.” She wheels around, the Barbie in her fist, and points downriver. “Here! Just right here.”

I stand, looking out, peering into the shadows under the trees. Searching—not for mermaids, but for what Bee might have mistaken for one, the long, gray body of the manatee they’ve told us we might see. They swim upriver, they said, sometimes lost, sometimes in search of warmer water. I desperately want to see one, to glimpse as much as I can of the underwater world, while we’re here and while I’m healthy. I never thought I would be so close to the sea.

There’s nothing, though. I’m disappointed, and then disappointed in myself for being such a child. Bee comes to stand beside me.

“She’ll come back,” she says, and I shrug even though I hope she’s right.

“Where was it, exactly?” I ask. She points again, and answers.

“Just there,” is what she says.

And then: “It was right next to the dragon.”

And suddenly, I’m laughing—laughing because of course there was no mermaid, and probably no manatee, either, and certainly no dragon. But there is this little girl. And the dock, and the silky air that exits my lungs in a lightweight whirl of sound that’s so ringing and unsullied that I can’t believe it’s me who’s making it.

DR. SHARP WIELDS HIS PEN LIKE A WEAPON,
not so much writing on the paper as punishing it. He stabs and slashes so furiously that if the needle were coming next, I’d be terrified.

Only it’s not. There’s no need for the needle, he says, and though there’s no warmth in his words, I could hug him all the same. In my crackling paper gown, with the ice-cold stethoscope traveling over my back, I take a deep breath—a real one, with no coughing or wheezing or sandpaper drag—and feel briefly sorry for Dr. Frank, who had wanted so badly to be the one to help me. Who had bet a steak dinner against his ability to make me well.

But only briefly.

The pen is attacking my chart again.

“How about side effects? Have you had any nausea, headaches?”

“No.”

“Mood swings? Trouble sleeping?”

This time, I pause before answering. “No.”

“Anything unusual?”

I want to tell him that there isn’t. I want to say that nothing’s changed, not a thing, except the sudden, sensationless movement of the air through my lungs where before there was only struggle. But after all these years, I know better than to hold anything back. They’ve told me, time and time again—that if I do, if there’s something strange and I choose not to tell, I’ll be the one who pays the price.

I take a deep breath.

“I’ve been having . . . dreams.”

His eyebrow moves up, but not his eyes; they stay on my chart, where the pen has paused against the page.

“Bad dreams?”

I shake my head, cautiously. “No, not bad. More like . . . vivid.”

“And nothing when you’re awake? No thoughts of suicide or self-harm?”

I shake my head again.

“Vivid dreams can be a common side effect of the beta-blockers,” he says, and snaps my chart shut, without even making a note. “And your last attack, when was that?”

I look through my memory and come up empty, and then feel giddy: there’s nothing to remember. It’s been weeks, at least. I grin. Dr. Sharp doesn’t.

“Callie, you need to pay attention. If you can’t be responsible enough—”

“No no no,” I protest, and do my best to set my mouth in a straight line, make my face a mask of maturity. I also think, petulantly, that I was wrong: well or not, I really do miss Dr. Frank. “I had one on the night we arrived. In July.”

“And since then?”

“Nothing big. There’ve been a couple times, maybe? But not bad. Not recently.”

“And the minor attacks, what triggered them?”

I flush. “Um. I don’t know, I mean . . .”

He snorts, impatient, and I think again how glad I am that he won’t be coming near me with anything sharp—not today, at least. And, I hope, never again. He seems to want our meeting over as much as I do.

“There’s no need to hem and haw,” he says, clipping off the words with disdain. “Here, I’ll make it easy: Was it exercise? Stress? Allergy?”

“Stress, I guess,” I say, and think,
But not mine
.

If I had hoped that my father would mellow here, that the warmth of the sun and the slow pace of the South might make him looser, relaxed, and more malleable, I’d been wrong. The nearness of the ocean, the coastal breeze, the sound of the river as it slurps along our property line: he hates them all. At night, he glares out the window in the direction of the coast, as though warning the water to come no closer. My last attack had come on one of those evenings—just after dinner, when I asked without thinking if I might go to the beach. The immediacy of his response—“Absolutely not!”—had startled me so badly that I choked, first on my own spit and then on the dry indoor air.

“Callie, please,” he’d sighed, head in his hands, as I scrambled for the inhaler. “After everything that’s happened, I can’t believe you’d even ask.”

But that’s just the sort of superfluous detail that Dr. Sharp doesn’t need. Just like he doesn’t need to know about my dreams.

They’re not like the ones I used to have, the drowning ones, the wall-clawing nightmares that scared me out of sleep and into the airless world of my identical inland bedrooms. In those dreams, I was always lost in endless nothingness. In those dreams, I was always alone.

Now, when I close my eyes, there’s somebody waiting for me in that liquid dark.

The air between us is always full of murk and mush and shadows, her face is hidden behind her hair. But she knows I’m there, and she knows I know that she is.

Who she is.

How did you know I was here?
I’d asked, behind the safety of my eyelids. I asked without moving my lips. My words swirled inside my head and then all around us, echoing back at me from corners unseen. Out of the blackness, so did hers. An answer, drifting in space.

I’d know you anywhere.

My mother is always waiting for me. In the night, in my bloodstream, carried on the wings of Dr. Sharp’s pharmaceuticals. Waiting, in the ether, to see me again. When the wreath of her tangled hair moves closer, and her long fingers with their oval-shaped nails float out to brush against my cheek, I close my eyes and breathe in deep.

Sometimes, when I wake up, my pillow is soaked with tears.

—

My father is quiet as we drive the hour home, chewing on whatever he’s been told behind closed doors. The move, the uncertainty of a new place and new faces and new regimens of drugs, has evaporated his confidence in me. Whatever Dr. Sharp tells me, my father insists he say again in private, behind the closed office door that the two of them shut in my curious face. Now, he flicks on the radio—an unspoken kibosh on conversation—turns it up, and stares straight ahead at the hard-baked highway stretching away in the distance, while the sun slinks away at our backs. He stays like that all the way home—humming tunelessly, answering my questions in distracted monosyllables, lost in the world inside his head. He’s too preoccupied to notice the strange silver car parked just beyond our driveway. Too preoccupied even to notice that the doormat is askew, that the key doesn’t turn in the lock. That someone is already here.

The whirling dervish of my aunt sweeps me up before the door can even close behind me. I’m wrapped in it, buried suddenly in a jangling rush of fabric and bangles and long, long hair.

Nessa
, I try to say, but the word is so huge and ungainly, swelled with feeling, that it sticks in my throat and I can only make a croaking sound.

“Callie!” she yelps, right into my ear, and I realize suddenly that she’s no longer taller than me. The last time I hugged her good-bye, I had pressed my face into her stomach, against the crinkly linen of her swirling skirt, and heard her voice shushing from somewhere overhead. Now, her cheek is soft against mine and my arms wrap around her neck.

It has been almost ten years.

She sees it, too, throwing me out to arms’ length and taking in the whole of me. Brittle hair, pockmarked skin, so much pale, pale flesh. The look of unhappy surprise is there only a second, not more than a momentary crease of the forehead and a dark, angry flicker in her eyes, but I see it; I was looking for it.

“Holy shit, you’re practically a woman!” she cries, and grins so hard that her nose crinkles, hard enough to erase the last lines of disappointment from her face. She’s different, too. Older, with creases at the corners of her eyes, courtesy of the California sun. The skin on the backs of her hands is looser, weathered, studded with splotchy freckles.

My father has appeared from behind me, scowling, as though Nessa’s use of the word “shit” set off a silent alarm. Only that’s not it, I know.

“Breaking and entering, Nessa? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” he says drily, and looks pointedly at me. “Although it’s a bit strange to find you in our house, considering that I don’t remember telling you that we were here.”

I try to look puzzled and shrug, but my thoughts go straight to the mailbox—the one at the end of the street, drab green and rusted at every joining, where only two weeks ago I’d placed an envelope emblazoned with our new return address. I had loved writing that letter, two closely spaced pages and not a single lie between the lines. I told her about the house and the dock, the dappled river and thick, gray trees. I didn’t even have to invent a neighbor—not when I had Bee, with her pudgy cheeks and mistreated toys and stubborn insistence on the presence of mermaids in the river.

“You can take it up with the university,” says Nessa lightly. “You may not like to tell me when you’re moving, but your assistants always seem happy to fill in the blanks.”

I do my best not to stare. The lie is pitch-perfect, a made-up bit of music plucked deftly out of the air. Only the pressure of her hand on mine tells me that she’s covering my tracks. I squeeze back, and feel her slender bones move beneath my fingers.

—

Nessa says she was on the next plane out, that she was headed for the airport before she’d even reached the last line of my letter, barely pausing long enough to pack. I’m not sure I believe her, except that the evidence of her hurry is everywhere; she’s got no underwear but the pair she has on, doesn’t even have her toothbrush. We’ve barely said hello before she shoves me back through the door, silencing my father’s objections with sheer momentum, and bundles me into the shotgun seat of her rental car. As the sky turns violet and the trees roll away in shadow overhead, she presses the accelerator and heads for the drugstore, to pick up all the things overlooked in the moments between the letter and the plane.

“I wish I’d known you were coming,” I say. I pluck self-consciously at my clothes—drab and dingy, wrinkled and rumpled, scuffed and stretched. The kind of thing I’d have hidden away at the bottom of a hamper if I’d known that my glamorous aunt was about to appear, in the flesh, right next to me. I’d have combed my hair, painted my nails. I’d have worn soft whites and deep blues, with the sea-glass necklace lying lightly against my clean, smooth skin. I would have transformed myself, somehow, into the kind of niece she should’ve had—would have made myself look like my mother’s daughter, and not a dull and unwashed invalid decked out in grimy grays.

“I couldn’t wait, baby,” she purrs. “I had to see you!” The grin has softened but won’t leave her face; she keeps stealing glances at me, as if to check that I’m still here.

“You didn’t have to wait nine years,” I say, and wish right away I could snatch it back. Her smile falters just enough that I know the words had teeth. I had sometimes written to Nessa, suggesting she find her way out to Grand Junction or Indian Springs or wherever we’d chosen to unpack our lives. Her replies, pages and pages of looping, long scrawl, always said the same thing at the end:
I wish I could.

I never asked what had happened, what he had said to her, that made her decide not to come. At first, I was afraid he had told her some terrible lie to keep her away; later, I was afraid that there had been no lie at all. That Nessa knew the truth about what I’d become and couldn’t bear to see it.

“You know I would have been there if I could,” she says.

—

The canopy of trees peels away, the road smooths and softens, as we draw closer to civilization. They’ve planted palm trees along the road, spaced so evenly that I can time their appearance in the window down to a tenth of a second. Neither one of us speaks, and I count thirty-five palms—thirty-five, so still in the last gasp of light, with their fronds punching the sky like a shadowed fist—before the lights of the pharmacy loom up ahead and she leaves me, wordlessly, in the running car. But when she comes back with a paper bag, settling back in the driver’s seat with her long skirt hiked up above her knees and out of the way, she squeezes my hand—all okay, all forgiven.

“Let’s not worry about the past, okay? The important thing is that we’re together again, and you have to tell me everything,” she says. “Everything! Do you like it here? When does school start? Do you miss your friends in Laramie?”

I take a deep breath. I’m wondering if I can do now what I did in my letters, if I can pick my words just so, create the skeleton of a not-quite-lie, and let her assumptions fill in the rest. But as we turn the corner, and the humid air touches my face, I never get the chance to find out. My tongue has other ideas. And when the words come out, the voice saying them is clear and unapologetic. The truth rings like a bell.

“I don’t miss anyone,” I say, “because I don’t have anyone to miss. I don’t have friends, Nessa. Not in Laramie, or anywhere else we’ve been. I said I did, but I didn’t. There’s no one. There’s never been anyone.”

When she answers, she doesn’t look at me. I don’t know whether to be stung or relieved.

With her eyes on the road, she replies, “I know that, baby. I know.”