Inland (7 page)

I AM IN THE WATER.
Chest-deep, T-shirt blooming underneath my armpits, with my legs disappearing into the blackness of the river and my bare feet kicking in empty space. Above me, nothing moves—the night is motionless, heavy, humid. The stars are hazy between the still, sagging leaves of the trees. Somewhere behind me, the motion-sensing light mounted above the garage door is still blazing in recognition of my journey across the lawn—it casts my shadow, spidery and monstrously long, across the oily water and onto the opposite bank. Weeds are tangled around my arms and woven between my fingers. In the dark and sluggish depths below, something brushes against my ankle. And though I’m fully awake now, from somewhere inside my head, I can still hear that whispering voice.

Come away. Come home. Come down.

I kick helplessly, my scream breaking and becoming a ragged, airless sob, flailing in the indifferent water as my throat begins to close. Black spots cloud in at the edges of my vision, I sink deeper, choking and coughing and struggling for purchase.

And then behind me, there is a shout.

A splash.

Two hands, quick and deft with strong and tapered fingers, grab my shoulders and haul me backward. Back, my feet pedaling and sliding on the uneven river bottom, back and back, until my head knocks against the familiar heft of the dock and my panicked hands fly out to grasp its edge.

At my side, Nessa spits out a mouthful of river water and her own wet hair and gasps, “Oh God, oh God,” then fills her lungs again and grabs me by the collar, pulls me bodily from the water and hauls me onto the shore.

My head knocks against a tree root. My throat is knotted, locked, paralyzed. Weakly, my hands move up to brush away the thing that’s on my chest. The heavy thing. The thing that won’t let me breathe.

There’s nothing there.

There’s no air.

The last thing I hear before I pass out, in a voice full of terror and urgency, is my name.

—

Twelve hours pass before we break the silence.

I am sitting on the dock, toes kissing the river. Nessa is beside me, unspeaking. Behind me, a few feet back and furiously scribbling, is Bee. Silently, I remind myself to remember to replace the ballpoint pens and scrap paper I unearthed in my father’s office; he can’t know that I stayed home today, can’t know what happened last night. I also wish, silently, that Bee would get bored and leave. At least the pen and paper were enough to make her stop asking us, begging and whining in a voice pitched high enough to shatter glass, to play hide-and-seek.

My aunt and I are twins in tiredness, with matching shoulder slumps and the same plum-colored circles beneath our puffy eyes. At seven o’clock this morning, we had both turned blearily to watch the first blush of color in the lightening sky, curled in silence at opposite ends of the cool leather couch while the last of the dampness evaporated from my hair.

“I’m going to call you in sick to school,” she said. “And then, I’m going to bed.”

At the time, I’d been too tired to argue.

Now, in the heat of the afternoon, she turns to me and finally asks. I knew it was coming, but I still feel sick as the words come out, unignorable and out loud.

“Was that the first time?”

I sag against her, as much with the sheer weight of my suspicions as with exhaustion.

“I can’t be sure,”
I whisper,
“but I don’t think so.”

—

All those nights I dreamed of my mother; all those nights I woke up to dampness in my bed and on my shirt and touching the ends of my hair. I had thought it was sweat. Or tears. Something that came from inside of me, not somewhere out there. How many nights had I slipped out of bed, down the porch stairs, and across the yard? How many times had I walked, unconscious, into the water?

She only nods. Behind us, Bee pauses in her scribbling. Nessa waits until the sound starts up again before she speaks.

“This is a problem,” she says, her voice low. “I know it’s not your fault, but I can’t even think about what might happen—what could’ve happened already if I hadn’t been out here. My God, Callie.”

“I’m going to start locking my door at night,” I say.

“He might notice.”

Only months before, I would have agreed. But something has changed—in me, in him, between us.

“No,” I say, “not anymore.”

—

Behind us, Bee drops her pen on the dock and shouts, “Done!” then thrusts her finished masterpiece at me as I dutifully turn to look. She was drawing a mermaid, she’d told me—unlike most little kids, Bee’s favorite subjects never seem to change, her enthusiasm never flagging—and I take the scribbled-upon paper, ready to exclaim over its originality, even though I’m sure it’ll just be a crude variation on the emaciated Disney princess in her seashell bikini.

Instead, I find myself staring. The thing she’s drawn is something else, and it isn’t wearing a bikini. Long and white from head to tail, with skeletal stick-hands and an unsmiling mouth and a scribbled mass of green-on-black sprouting from its scalp. My memory flashes back to last night’s dream, to that hungry gape and tangled hair, and I shudder as I hand it back.

“It’s great,” I say.

Beside me, Nessa strokes my hair and sighs.

—

When my father gets home, he doesn’t even finish saying hello before his eyes seek out and settle on the damaged kitchen drawer. The one with a fresh, angry dent in the place where my aunt forced it open with a screwdriver in order to find my inhaler, the one piece of last night’s drama that we can’t hide.

“Did you have an attack?” he says, and his voice is that much more terrifying for its evenness, its quiet. As though he’d been waiting all this time for it to happen, as though it were just a matter of time until I started getting sick again.

“Let me explain—” Nessa begins, but he cuts her off.

“I’d like to hear this from my daughter,” he says, and the set of his jaw goes tighter by a degree. The bottom drops out of my stomach at the way he’s looking at me. Suspiciously, like someone he doesn’t quite recognize.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” I say, and think,
That’s true, at least.
Even in his wildest dreams, the thought of me sleepwalking into that black and sullen water has most likely failed to cross my father’s mind.

“Did you have an attack?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “But not like before, okay? I swear. It was something else. A panic attack, I think. Totally a mental thing. But Nessa didn’t realize, she thought I needed the inhaler, so she broke it open.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I sneak a glance at Nessa—to see if she’s following my lead, to see if she sees the careful line I’m walking. The one where, if I choose my words just right, I won’t have to lie to my father at all. Not really.

“A panic attack,” he repeats, and I can see the tenseness go out of his jaw, see the veins in his neck relax back against the skin. The worry line appears between his eyebrows. “From what?”

“I had a bad dream,” I say. Beside me, Nessa nods almost imperceptibly.

“And what happened?”

“I woke up and I was scared, I couldn’t calm down. But it stopped. On its own.” I shift my weight, thinking as I do that this is still technically true, even if I’m leaving out the intermediate steps of being pulled from the water and then passing out on the lawn.

“It’s true, Alan,” Nessa interjects. “She calmed down on her own. It’s just my fault for panicking; I’ll pay for the damage.”

My father makes a
pffft
sound, rolls his eyes, and mutters, “I’ll believe that one when I see it,” but the anger and suspicion are gone from his voice. He gives me a last, long look.

“I’m sorry about the drawer,” I say.

His hand reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. He sighs. “It’s all right. I guess I’m a little on edge, myself. I’m going to take a shower and a nap.” He looks from me to Nessa, then back at me. “Be ready for dinner at seven, both of you. And when I say ‘dinner,’ I mean actual food, not the all-cereal diet.”

Somehow, I manage not to collapse.

—

It’s after dark when I find my way out to the water again. There’s one more thing that we still haven’t talked about. One more secret I need Nessa to keep.

She’s there, with a few wisps of sweet-smelling smoke drifting from her nostrils and out across the river, when the wood creaks slightly under my bare feet; she flicks her joint into the water as I approach, then shakes her head and laughs.

“I keep forgetting that you’re not six years old anymore,” she says.

I settle next to her, gazing out at the patchy, shadowed forest on the opposite bank. “After last night, you smoking pot on our dock would probably be the second-most-awful thing my dad could find out about.”

She snorts. “A
distant
second. Those were some amazing verbal acrobatics, Callie. Really, inspired.”

“At least it was all technically true,” I say, and she reaches out to squeeze my hand.

“You’re so like your mom,” she says. “She was a good actress, when she wanted to be, but she never liked lying to people.”

I don’t answer. Next to me, Nessa drops my hand and sighs.

“It was so strange, last night. When you passed by me, in the dark, I could have sworn you were her.” She reaches out again, this time touching the loose ends of my hair where it curls near my waist. “You look so much like her.”

I swallow, thinking again of my dream—of the thing my subconscious has given me to fill in the blanks where memories of my mother should be, a collection of parts, fingertips and hair and freckles, pieced together with other things out of a nightmare.

“I don’t remember what she looked like,” I say. “I don’t even know where he keeps the pictures of her. Maybe he doesn’t even have them anymore.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

Nessa rubs small circles on my back, and for a few minutes, we’re quiet. Above, the trees are full of frog-song. A bat flashes across the dimming space over the river, and there’s a splash from somewhere in the water as something breaks the surface and then sinks back below.

“Do you remember anything?” she finally asks. “About the day she died?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. Pieces, maybe. But there are things—I remember them, but I don’t know if they’re real. And some of them can’t be real.”

“They can’t?”

I shake my head again, angrily this time. Remembering that moment in the hospital, the story I’d tried so hard to tell, the sharpness of my father’s words.
It’s better if I don’t remember.

Nessa stops rubbing my back and turns to look at me. Out here, with the light from the house throwing her face into ghastly contrast, her eyes are too buried in shadow to see the expression in them.

“You should trust yourself, Callie,” she says. “You have more strength than you think.”

I wonder how she does this. How she knows just what to say. Whether she knows what I’ve been thinking since I woke up in the water, and whether she knows, even before I say it, what I’ve followed her here to ask.

Behind me, a door slams; when I look back, my father is on the porch, peering out at the place where we’re sitting, his arms folded across his chest. He stands without speaking for a moment—looking, I think, for the joint that my aunt is no longer smoking—then calls, “Callie, dishes, please!” and walks back inside without another word. For a moment, my heart races and my throat constricts, but I breathe, and it subsides, as I turn back toward the water. I breathe deep, and think,
In the scheme of things, one more secret won’t make a difference.

“Nessa?”

“Yes?”

“I want to learn how to swim.”

I AM GETTING GOOD AT KEEPING SECRETS.

I can line them up end to end, a succession of half-truths and lies of omission, each one putting that much more distance between my life and my father’s watchful eyes. The truth about that night, in the dark, by the dock; the scent of river water in my hair, washed clean and covered up by the time he gets home from work; the sneaking, almost-silent click as I carefully lock my door at night. It was three weeks ago that we installed it, down low at the base of the door, a position that various websites claimed would thwart even determined sleepwalkers. From dusk till dawn, my room turns from a sanctuary into a prison, my aunt from a giddy ally to a watchful warden. I spent the first week waiting—for him to notice, to visit, to see the lock and ask me why.

He didn’t.

I’ve stopped listening for his steps on the carpet. I don’t wait for the sound of his knuckles against the door. It has been weeks now since he came to say good night, since he stood in the doorway and noted the rise and fall of my chest, and said, “You’re really looking better. Much, much better.” Without the constant threat of illness to keep him close, we’ve drifted. Him, into endless sheafs of scrolling data, later and more nights away, the constant thrum of conversation behind his study door. And me, into solace, solitude. The privacy that experts say a girl my age needs now. I’m left alone.

Just like any other sixteen-year-old with no-more-than-ordinary problems. And working lungs. And a busy, important father with so much on his mind.

I wonder what they do, other girls, with their long hours alone behind a closed bedroom door. I imagine they look in the mirror, studying, scrutinizing, tracing thick lines of shadow on their eyelids or filling the fullness of their lips with color. Or indulge unspoken dreams of boys, bodies, the rough backseats of cars. Their fingertips tracing circles like they hope his will do, in the dark. Or do they do nothing—nothing at all, stretched on their backs in the ice-cold silence of All By Themselves, letting their minds drift away from people, places, future plans, to settle out there in the careless wherever for a much-needed rest.

I wonder if this is what I should do, too. Now that I’m one of them. Normal, or nearly there. The battle with my body used to dominate everything, a ceaseless struggle, begging without end for me to pay attention to its demands. Ever since the airless pain subsided, the inside of my head feels huge and empty. Illness was a constant companion. Without it, the evenings seem to stretch on forever. How do people fill so many hours? How do I? There’s a sixty-minute spot on the couch with Nessa, a rerun of a show I watched while sick last year. There’s a thirty-minute dinner—with its stilted conversation, my father only half there if he’s there at all, paging through e-mails and data at the table while we talk over his head. There are ninety minutes of work, two hours on a busy night, assigned reading or essays or redundant sheets of math problems—and that’s even though I do it in fits and starts, cramming it in between conversations with the friends I suddenly have. The girls, Jana, Shanika, and Mikah, have looped me in on their Thursday-night ritual of group-watching horror movies over video chat. Ben sends me messages most every night, rapid-fire windows that bloom on my laptop screen, riddled with transposed letters and missing periods. I love the way he thinks, so much faster than his fingers can move.

And still, there’s time to kill behind my bedroom door. Time to breathe. Time to read. I lie between the cool sheets at night and let the words form, whispered, in the hollows of my mouth. I trace the lines in my mother’s book—the old one, its pages untouched by water but marked with the initials of strangers. The one she left for me to find, the one for the ones who are left behind.

I wonder if other girls, when they close their eyes and curl in for a catnap, can hear the sound of rushing water in the ear pressed against the pillow.
Water sucking the hollow ledges, tons of water striking the shore.
When I push the long, damp rope of my hair back over my shoulder, I can smell the dark, wild scent of the river underneath the cover of shampoo.

These days, I don’t even feel guilty anymore.

—

In the end, it was easier than I’d dared to hope: the first, furtive lessons in the river, my hair draping over Nessa’s wrists as she held me on the surface. First with her hands pressed firmly on my back, then only her fingertips, and then nothing at all but the coolness of the water as it broke over my shoulders and against my feet, the sense of her palms floating somewhere just below my shoulder blades.

“Before you learn to swim, you have to learn that you can float,” she’d said. “Even when you’re tired, weak, when you get a cramp, you’re still safe in the water. Lie back and breathe, and it will hold you.”

It took me by surprise: the rhythm of floating. The way that my hips grow heavy on the exhale, hinging backward below the curve of my back, the bottoms of my feet slowly dangling toward the deep. And then the air, filling my throat and breast and belly, calling my body back to the surface. My hip bones pop briefly, buoyant; my sternum rises up to touch the world above the water. In the sun, the droplets glisten and glide on my long, white body like little living things. I have never felt so alive.

“You’re a good teacher,” I say.

“It’s easy, here. Usually I’m doing this with someone half your age, in between waves rolling in,” says Nessa, and stretched out beside me on the river’s surface. She has been teaching me to stroke, slowly, scissoring my legs with a rubber-band snap and breathing in the hollow of my armpit; now, we rest side by side, fingertips touching. Her long hair fans out and drifts down, tickling my wrist. “Did you know that your body floats better in salt water?”

“That’s what we should do, we should go to the ocean,” I say, and suddenly, there’s nothing I want more than exactly that. To drive at full speed down the county road, flanked on each side by its stiff forest of stick-straight pines; run across the sand, casting my shoes off with a kick; dive through the breaking waves and lie breathing on the undulating sea. Or, better yet, to skip the drive entirely—to plunge forward into the barely there current, slip beneath the river’s surface, let myself be carried away. Down the narrow alley, beneath the cypress trees, through the marshy watershed and into the open gulf.

My pulse throbs in my wrists and ears, beating with insistent invitation. Urgent.

The sea is waiting for me.

Yearning.

Calling.

I’ve never wanted anything more badly in my life.

—

Nessa just gazes toward the sky, nodding in a faraway way, and then gives me a smile full of clueless patience. “We’d better not, baby. The ocean has undertow, rip currents. We’ll go one day, but you’re not a strong enough swimmer yet.”

—

NO.

—

I don’t say it out loud; the word snaps out of a dark place inside my head, with so much ferocity and anger that it takes my breath away. Nessa, of all people—my mother’s sister, the one who lives for wild surf, who sent me seashells in the mail—she should understand that I don’t want condescending platitudes and vague promises. She should understand that I’ve waited long enough, that I’ve done my time and then some, that the sea is mine, it’s waiting for me, and I won’t be patient. I won’t. I wrench away from her touch, and snarl, “I don’t want to wait. I want to go.”

I should throw myself into the water right now, and let it carry me away to the sea.

Her eyes grow large as she looks at me, then downriver, as though she’s read my mind.

“Callie,” she says, and her voice is low and urgent. “Get out of the water.”

“No!”

I’ve never seen her move so fast. It seems impossible, how quickly her hand snakes out to grasp my shoulder, hard enough to bruise, how strong her slender fingers are.

“Get out of the water!” she shouts. “NOW!”

The space inside my head—so full of the beckoning call of the ocean—seems to snap in the center, a jagged rift that splits my thoughts apart and sends them spinning away, replaced by confusion and panic.
Is this me, who’s so desperate to lose herself in the open sea? Is that my voice, demanding to go?

Nessa pulls on my arm again, and I tread clumsily in the water, and she’s behind me, pushing me toward the dock and shouting again that I need to get out,
out
, and then something else that I don’t understand, until she says it twice more and the torpor evaporates and I flail my way toward safety.

—

Later that night, we stand together in the gradual dusk—accompanied by the pattering, chattering back-and-forth movements of Bee, who’d cheerfully come up behind us to announce that
duh
, of course there are alligators in the river, and that one of them had even crawled into a lot down the street last year and eaten somebody’s cat. We scan the shadowy coastline, slapping away hungry mosquitoes and looking for the telltale mottled heads of sneaking predators, while she prattles on.

“Gators run fast,” Bee chirps. “But if you run away special, they can’t catch you. Here, see?”

I turn to look as she flees, zigzagging on diagonals back along the dock and into the yard.

“Like that!” she yells. I give her a weak smile and hold thumb to forefinger—
Got it—
and she waves before running the rest of the way home. Still zigzagging away from an imaginary gator, while I turn my attention back to the dense and shadowed coast across the way.

“Do you see it?” I ask. “Was it really there?”

Nessa is quiet and grim, the color drained from her cheeks. She stares out at the water with a taut, haunted look, and shakes her head for the hundredth time.

“It’s gone. But it’ll come back.” She shudders. “I think I’m done swimming in this river. And you are, too.”

—

And she is, and so am I. Not even when, in the end, the sun goes down without illuminating the hiding place of any sharp-toothed or scaly creature. The scariest thing we see is a dead, unthreatening fish that bobs past, belly-up, on its way to the open sea.

But whatever Nessa saw or heard—whether it was something in the water, or maybe something in me—has made her frightened. Cautious. When she looks at the river now, her face is a mask of anxiety, her eyes flitting up and down the bank and the small hairs on her neck all on end. But her hand is warm in mine, and she squeezes it reassuringly even as she gazes at the river.

“It’s okay, baby. There are other ways to swim.”