Inland (8 page)

IT’S AMAZING,
how quickly you can miss things. You only need to have something for a moment—just for a day, for an hour, for the length of time it takes to hold a single breath—in order to want it back when it disappears. I’ve been without my mother longer than I knew her, but the hole where she’s supposed to be still howls with echoing emptiness. I can no longer remember the placement of the rocks on the battered coast of my childhood home, but my dreams are full of the crashing sound of surf.

And though I swam in the river only a dozen times, I ache to be back in that black, slow water.

But I didn’t fight Nessa’s choice. The truth was, even as I felt the loss of the river—
my
river, with its lazy current, its untraveled path to the deep blue gulf—sink into my bones and settle there, aching, it was tinged with an acid hint of fear. I imagined things hiding, sliding along the river bottom and kicking up clouds of rank, filmy mud, lurking just out of the reach of the light. Even the night creatures seemed spooked; the chirping frogs and unseen rodents, who usually rustled in the shoreline brush as the sun disappeared and the world dimmed down, were silent as the dark crept in. The yard was quiet, the reeds all still. With no sound to distract me and no breeze to cool my face, the heat was unbearable, unmoving. A strange, heady smell rose up from the slow, black water.

There are other ways to swim.

It wasn’t hard for her to keep her word. Not here, where the world is full of water and pools can be found in every third backyard.

—

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Can we just talk about the part where this crazy woman had you swimming in the freakin’ river?” Shanika squawked as I explained that my swimming lessons were getting a change of venue. “Forget the gators and snakes, that’s just gross. There are
things
in there. Amoebas and stuff. People don’t go in there!”

Mikah crossed her arms and looked indignant. “That’s not true! Uncle Joe used to swim in there.”

“Uncle Joe was a hillbilly,” Shanika shot back, and managed to match her sister’s look of righteous annoyance until they both began to shake and then collapsed against each other in mutual hilarity.

“Whatever,” said Jana, raising an eyebrow at the giggling pair. “Callie’s got the hookup on a nice, clean, non-alligator-infested place to swim, hooray.” She looked at me. “I just hope your aunt didn’t have to, y’know, clean the swim coach’s filter to get you pool privileges,” she added, and then waggled her eyebrows suggestively until Corey choked on his hamburger, and everyone was giggling too much to talk.

—

They didn’t know Nessa, and so they couldn’t understand: she didn’t need to trade a thing to get something she truly wanted. Not Nessa. She was, after all, my mother’s sister, with the same deep blue eyes and bright laugh as the woman who’d once shattered the hard shell of the most determinedly impermeable of men. All she had to do was ask. When we passed the swim coach on our way to the pool, padding side by side in our matching black tank suits and hair roped into long, tight braids, he didn’t even blink; just stared at her with his frog-like face and said, “Hello,” and nothing else.

For the first few weeks, Nessa joined me there in the afternoons. She would wait for me in the shallow end, calling instructions while I paddled up and back, while the combination of stroking and kicking and breathing finally went from a clunky collection of hard-to-fit pieces to a smooth, intuitive ballet. I carved long lines up and down the pool’s painted lanes, arriving back out of breath, lungs aching, with arms as limp as crepe.

“You’re looking great, baby,” she said, squeezing my shoulders. “Look at these muscles!”

I didn’t answer, except by rolling my eyes and flicking water at her before pushing off again for another lap.

But something is happening. Has happened. Even I can’t deny it, the way that my body seems to have lengthened, tightened, as though my fleshy knees and neck and the jiggling cheese on my thighs have been squeezed and lifted by invisible hands. The legs of my jeans are too short and have buckling pockets of fabric where the extra flesh used to be, and my waistband keeps slipping southward. But more than anything else, it’s the way it moves: this body that never obeyed me, that bucked and stalled like a run-down car whenever I tried. Everything that made me flat-footed and ungainly in my old life is different in the water. My double-wide shoulders, my gangling arms, and the things I’m missing, too; the waist and hips and womanly curves that nature didn’t give me. Even with my newly smooth skin and toned muscles, I will never be a teenage dream of sinuous, delicate femininity. Not on land. But swimming, even my large hands and feet seem streamlined. Flat and powerful, knifing and kicking as I relearn how to move below sea level.

—

Today, I’m alone in the water. Even the lifeguard has disappeared, leaving me free to flout the rules. I cut back and forth and under, deep and deeper, sinking like a stone to the flat, gray bottom and then cutting like lightning to the opposite wall. It’s not the same as the river—no scent, no sounds, no playful movement underneath my bobbing head and shoulders as the current slinks by—but there’s nothing hiding, either. The water is clear, sharpening some things even as it dulls others, turning the world above into a shifting, shimmering nowhere and its sounds into barely there whispers. I push up, breathe in, dive down. I like it better here, suspended in the depths like a butterfly trapped in a Lucite grave. There is only me, and this weird blue world, and the silver colonies of bubbles that collect on my skin before breaking away toward the surface. I can be alone down here for what feels like hours—a privacy beyond even the most firmly locked door.

I know my time is up when the overwater noise becomes the
thunk
of entering bodies. The first few swimmers jump in, one of them noticing me and startling. I watch his pale legs disappear up the ladder, as long and white as a cadaver’s. In the low and eerie blue-light fluorescence down here, everyone looks a little bit dead.

I’m squeezing the water from my hair when someone speaks, just over my shoulder.

“Where did you swim before this?”

I turn around.

Eric Keller, dressed for practice in nothing but a pair of goggles and a strip of streamlined spandex, is standing there. And though I keep a straight face, keep my mouth closed and my gaze impassive, I have the vague sense that an alternate-reality version of me—the girl I might have been if not for the hospital visits, the draining needle, the endless hours alone and wheezing in my succession of beige, bland bedrooms; a girl whose first and only kiss didn’t happen in a pediatrics lounge—would, at this moment, be having trouble breathing for the first time in her life.

“I’m sorry?” I say, because I have to say something. I will myself to look at his face, studiously avoiding the rest. He shrugs—I watch his bare shoulders go up and down, rising and falling above what seems like a mile of muscled torso, and think,
Oops,
and then,
If Jana were here, she might actually faint—
and gestures at the pool.

“You look good in there,” he says. “I just wondered where you swam before you moved here.”

My mouth isn’t closed anymore.

“Oh. I mean, I didn’t.”

He raises his eyebrows, and I suddenly think of my first conversation with Mr. Strong and blurt, “Wyoming is more like a horseback-riding kind of place.”

He shrugs again, and pulls his goggles into place. The mirrored surfaces hide his eyes, but he grins at me.

“Well, now you’re here, maybe think about joining the team. You’ve got a real swimmer’s build; we could use you.”

Over his shoulder and on the other side of the room, the door to the girls’ locker room opens; Meredith Hartman comes through and stops short, her face going from neutral to pinched as she sees us together. Her eyes are uncovered, and not hard to read. I can see the way they narrow, suspicious and annoyed, as she examines the distance between me and Eric—the way her mouth twists as she concludes that I’m way too close.

I should feel ashamed. I should take a step back. I should hate this, the feel of her eyes on me, the way I’ve always hated it; I should duck away, like I’ve always done when people begin to stare.

But I don’t.

Something is changing. Something has changed.

I take another step toward him. I smile back, and say, “I’ll think about it.”

And as I do, there’s a whisper in my head: cold, confident, a thought so alien I almost can’t believe it’s my own.

Let her watch.

I AM IN THE WATER.

Under it.

So deep, I cannot see the surface.

—

I wonder how I could have ever failed to see what this place is, this cold and shifting darkness where she waits to take my hand. Where else would I find her but here, in the lightless deep, where her body sank and settled and slowly came undone? Where else would she be but drifting on the underwater current, carried by the will of the capricious sea? Her voice is everywhere and nowhere, singing in the ether, bleeding and blooming in my head. The darkness around us keeps changing, shifting, getting lighter and darker in blue degrees. She takes my hand. She shows me a world like nothing I’ve ever seen.

We are in a deep, midnight-colored nothing with no bottom and no top, drifting in infinite space.

Then a shift, the sound of surf, and we’re swimming in aqua-colored waters, a shallow place, with pale, drifting sands and a gnarled shelf of rock, where small fish dart and hide.

We huddle together in a place without light, watching a field of jellyfish, a city of pink electric clouds with tendrils that dangle like golden filament.

We watch from a distance as huge, monstrous shadows glide through a wreckage of rusted ships.

In this world, there is no starting or stopping point, no destination. Down here, beneath the surface, the sea goes on forever. And so do we.

In the end, we always return to the coldest, darkest place, where I always seem to find her. We kick in perfect symmetry, side by side, hair floating behind us in undulating clouds. I can feel, rather than see, her pale, long hand as it brushes my hip or shoulder; the glint in her large black eyes when they appraise my body’s movements.

Come home,
she says.
Come home.

Her hand is on my shoulder. Lightly at first, then gripping, slipping in its quest for purchase on my sodden skin, a hand that is sinewy and strong and so, so cold.
I feel myself losing direction, steered deeper into the frigid dark, and twist away in panic.

I’m afraid.

The hand disappears from my shoulder and she whirls to face me, body snapping soundlessly like a long, pale whip. Stark and white and right in front of me, even as the deepening blue-black presses in all around us, and I realize with equal parts horror and wonder that the light I see is her. Somewhere inside her, an ice-white glow that seems to originate in her bones and then seep upward, brightest at the curves of her shoulders, the jutting breastplate, the pulsing, papery skin of her cheekbones, her forehead with its creeping spiderweb of veins.

My daughter,
she says.
My daughter
.

I reach for her.

When my hand finds hers in the dark, the glow from my tapered fingers is as cold and strange as starlight.

—

“Callie!”

I startle awake with my hands overhead—hands like I’ve always had, no luminescent skeleton bleeding through—and lunge for the bedside lamp before I realize that it’s daylight. Sunlight is streaming through the oversized windows, high-angled and bright and warm. Only my skin, clammy and damp and strangely slick, tells me I’ve been having a nightmare.

There’s another rap on the door, and Nessa calls my name louder. I cross the room in three long strides to open it, noting with relief the loose tumble of hair on my shoulders and the feel of dry, soft carpet between my toes. The dreams may not have stopped, but at least I’m having them in bed.

When I open the door, my aunt looks unusually flustered—frizzy-haired and red-faced, with circles like bruises under her eyes. As though she slept poorly and woke early to walk hard in the sweaty outdoors.

“Callie, there’s a boy out here. He says he knows you.” Her voice is accusatory. “He says you’re going somewhere with him.”

My gaze flies to the clock—it blinks back insolently at me, changing as I watch from 10:01 to 10:02—and I groan while dashing for my dresser.

“Why didn’t someone wake me?”

“Why should we, if you’re inviting strangers here and not even having the courtesy to warn us?” Nessa snaps back, and my jaw drops. I’ve never heard her angry like this, and definitely never angry enough to suddenly make herself part of an insulted “we” that includes my father. I close my mouth, open it again, can’t even stutter a response before she exhales with a huff and walks away. I hear the door to her room close with just enough force to feel like a final harsh word.

I race around the room, pulling my hair into a messy knot and swapping my stretched, rumpled nightclothes for clean underwear, yesterday’s jeans, a hoodie that smells faintly of chlorine. I slip on my sneakers, three years old and just recently scuffed for the first time, and then—with another pang at the memory of her cold eyes and inexplicable irritation—Nessa’s sea-glass necklace. Its weight is comforting even as I wonder what I’d done that was so wrong, and even as the last lingering cobwebs of sleep clear from my brain enough to think again about the strangeness of her sudden defection.

Why should we? she’d said.

We.

We.

The realization hits me at the same moment that my father’s voice, barely a mumble through the concrete and drywall, floats back through the house.

I’m out the door and down the steps in what seems like a single panicked leap, the door banging to announce my arrival as Ben looks up with a grin and my father—
Home for the first Saturday morning in what? Weeks?—
snaps to attention and stares at me like he’s never seen me before.

“For God’s sake, Callie!” he gasps as I take the stairs three at a time and land heavily on the driveway. He’s looking everywhere—from me to Ben to the still-reverberating door, back to me again, looking frantically up and down the length of me as though checking for injuries and looking still more frantic at the realization that I’m fine. That I’m more than fine, I’m different. How many times has he passed me in the kitchen with his eyes on his BlackBerry, stopping long enough to ruffle my hair but never really seeing me? How many times has he looked past me, through me, assuming that everything was still the same?

I force my lips into a normal-kid grin, a hi-dad-nothing-to-see-here smile, and pray Ben hasn’t been here long enough to ask too many questions. Or be asked. I can picture him, grinning cluelessly and blowing my cover in one fell swoop, saying, “Hey, did you know the swim coach asked Callie to think about joining the team next year?”

“Dad,” I say. “This is Ben. He’s, uh, my lab partner. Sorry, I should have—”

“Alan Twaddle,” my father says.

“It’s nice to meet you, sir,” Ben says, proffering a hand, and shoots me a look full of so much unspoken reassurance that I feel every muscle go limp with relief. He gets it, or thinks he does. “It’s great to meet you.”

“Likewise,” says my father. “I’m sorry, Callie didn’t mention . . .” He trails off, looking to me for an explanation, when Ben jumps in.

“Sir, I was interested to see that you joined the Maxx-Foster project this year, are you working on an anchoring mechanism for the windmills?”

I stare. Ben smiles. Alan Twaddle, PhD, sputters twice and then covers it with a cough, saying, “Excuse me, the pollen in this place,” and Ben just keeps going: putting a thoughtful finger to his jawline and blithely unleashing a full paragraph of jargon, one in which the only word I understand is “sediment.” And then my father has gathered himself enough to answer, and the two of them are off and running, not leaving so much as an opening for me to speak.

Which isn’t so bad, when the only clear thought in my head has to do with how much I like the way Ben’s forehead wrinkles when he’s thinking really hard. And how much I like just about everything Ben does, even when what Ben does is ask about my family with what seemed at the time like simple polite curiosity, and then go home and geek out on my father’s rock-related research.

“Forgive me,” my father is saying, “but I’m a little surprised to find someone your age who’s even interested in what we’re doing in the gulf, let alone understands it at such an advanced level.”

Ben shrugs and grins. “I’m kind of a nerd, sir.”

My father chuckles.

There’s a cough from above, and three chins tilt skyward, three hands rising to shield their eyes from the climbing sun. Nessa is on the porch, her hair falling forward to brush the railing in front of her.

“Hello again,” says Ben.

She ignores him; her gaze is aimed at me, just me.

“Callie, come here a moment?”

“Sorry,” I say, “I’ll be right back and we’ll go,” leaving Ben to explain our plans and knowing that at this moment, he could say we were off to a heroin-smuggling operation in Mexico and that my father, dazzled and disarmed, would probably only ask if I needed any cash for tacos.

But not Nessa. If he tried to engage her with California knowledge or surfing-related trivia—and, I think, he probably did—it’s had no effect. She’s crossed to the other side of the porch, looking out toward the river with her shoulders hunched protectively around her core. I approach tentatively, not speaking, until I’m at her side. Our shadows fall in ribbons over the rail and pool in dark blotches on the patchy lawn. Even here, I can smell the strange, heady scent rising off the oozing water.

“I don’t—” I start, but she turns toward me and pulls me close, gripping my shoulders hard enough to bruise.

“Don’t misunderstand, I’m not angry,” she whispers. Her lips move in to brush my ear, and her voice is low and urgent. And then she’s gone, flashing past me in a noiseless blur of long skirts and damp hair, vanishing into the cool, sterile comfort of the house.

—

We keep the windows closed; the breeze coming in still has a bite, raw and cold despite the humid morning. I had imagined Florida as a place that never changed, seasonless and stagnant with no sense of the passage of the months, but the light of the winter sun is ever so slightly different: slender, shyer. Nature is subtle in her shifts here, as quiet about the seasons as her children are loud and proud. In town, there are evergreen wreaths on front doors and obese inflatable snowmen sitting in ironic celebration on lawns that haven’t seen a single frost this year. Twinkling lights sway from eaves and balconies; reindeer appear on roofs. It’s three weeks to Christmas.

A real Christmas, I think. I have only the dimmest memories of the last one that qualified as “real,” the one before my mother died, with a white-lit tree and the
clink
of glass ornaments, my parents laughing as I tore paper from presents. The decorations disappeared somewhere between Nevada and Wyoming, forgotten in an attic or basement, left behind for a family who might actually bother to unpack them and put them up. By the time I started high school, we had officially traded carols and cocoa for Chinese takeout and old movies, or sometimes for the try-too-hard holiday spirit of the pediatric ward, where hyper-happy nurses, exhausted parents, and shuffling kids wearing bathrobes and sick smiles all try hard to pretend that they’re somewhere else. Sometimes, like last year, I would wake up to find that I’d missed the day entirely: I’d slept all the way through December 25 after I forgot my inhaler and fainted in a Walmart parking lot when my father, in a rare festive moment, suggested a last-minute run to buy
A Muppet Christmas Carol
on DVD.

But with Nessa here, it would be different. We’re a family. A thrown-together one, still taking baby steps toward trusting each other, but a family all the same. Last weekend, my father wordlessly disappeared for three hours and returned with a box of gold glass globes and a synthetic white tree, with scratchy plastic needles and lights already built in. He plugged it into the wall by the living room windows. And in the past few days, as though through unspoken agreement, a small pile of packages has appeared at its base.

—

Ben is quiet, staring straight ahead as we made our way back out the narrow private drive, the tires thrumming on the endless straightaway of the county road, but now his voice interrupts my thoughts.

“So, I guess your aunt isn’t my biggest fan,” he says. When I look over, he’s giving me a lopsided smile that’s halfway between amused and confused. “It feels like a personal failure; parents usually love me.”

“Well, she’s not my parent,” I say, “so I guess your record is still intact.”

He laughs, and I feel myself flush with sudden guilt. Like I’ve betrayed Nessa and marked her as less-than—not my parent, when she’s been more there for me than anyone, when she left her entire life behind to help me make one here. Ungrateful. I shake my head, trying to clear the heat from my face, then feel a colder flare of jealousy when I instead start wondering how many other girls’ parents Ben has won over.

It must show on my face, because he hastily adds, “Not that I’ve had a lot of practice. You know, just the odd parent here and there.”

I force a laugh.

“Well, you charmed my dad, anyway. I’ve never seen him so excited. What did you do, memorize flash cards about wind farms and seabeds? Or is this just another thing that you’re a random expert in?”

“I happen to find sustainable energy very interesting,” he drawls. “It’s the future, you know.”

“That’s what they say.” I shrug.

He looks at me.

“You know, it’s actually really amazing what they’re doing out there? They’ve got funding, publicity, the best people working on it . . . I mean, your dad is kind of a big deal.”

I sigh, and think,
Leave it to me to have a crush on the guy who’s got a crush on my father
. I rest my head against the window; the glass is cool against my scalp.

“I know. But I’d rather talk about something other than the fascinating world of sediment.”

Ben takes his hands off the wheel just long enough to make an apologetic
okay, okay
gesture, then hits his turn signal and swings the car through an opening in the trees. A small road, that becomes a smaller one, until we’re rolling down a dirt drive that’s densely shaded by tall, lush trees. Even with the windows closed, I can hear the
click
and chatter of birds, unseen and high up in the tented ceiling of close-knit branches.