The Brink (11 page)

“Write,” I said. “Tell me. What did you see?”

I noticed, then, his wound: a deep gash at his right wrist that ran through to the other side. Inside, the tissue was gray. Every time Diego rotated his hand, the flesh opened like a mouth and did not bleed. He looked at it queerly.

His letters were feeble and wrong-handed. “DEAD?”

I felt a kick to my leg. “What'd he write?” the English conscript asked, peering on the page. “What're those letters?”

“He's weak,” I answered. “We need to leave him alone.”

The conscript sized me with cold eyes. “I served ten years for my crime. And you, for yours?”

At the sound of oars in the water, I pushed him off. I stood to see Alfredo and Armando in the fishing dingy. They approached the woman with a small skin of fresh water—their Christian duty—and a crossbow aimed at her chest. Coralito joined them. The dory held still at thirty strokes from the longboat.

“Fernando, why do these men hold their weapons at me?” she called out, nervously.

“Where have you come from?” Coralito asked. “I buried you.”

Her hand went to her chest. “What?”

“You died in our bedroom in Aragon, in my arms,” Coralito said. “We fell asleep and when I awoke you were gone, Isabela. This was six years ago.”

Isabela shook her head. “I don't remember, Fernando. I don't remember any of that.”

Armando and Alfredo rowed the dory closer and closer until it knocked the side of the longboat and Coralito stepped over to attend to his wife.

She was fed and given a swath of tarpaulin for shade. While Coralito comforted her, Alfredo and Armando rigged a small shelter with a split-bunk post and cord fixed to the prow. They left Coralito and rowed back to the
Elena
.

“I felt her breath,” Armando whispered. “It was cold, like a winter draft.”

“Her eyes are black,” Alfredo added. “But her pain is as real as any.”

By nightfall, Coralito called for the dory. Back on ship, he steadied himself at the mast. “She is no dream,” he said.

“What does she know of the captain, of the others?” I asked.

“Where did she come from?” Armando asked.

“It is a peculiar story,” Coralito began, chewing his nail. She told him that one day, she awoke on a shoreline crowded with people. The sea there was tideless and still. Inland, trees loomed over the shore, a forest so dense it seemed like a wall. People there wandered along this shore as far as she could see, men and women of many ages, colors, and costumes, speaking in strange tongues. Each appeared to travel alone, and they often stopped her and asked for things, but she was afraid and pulled away. Eventually, she said, she began walking too. She never saw the same face twice.

At one moment, a moment that she could not separate from other moments, Isabela moved into the sea, knee-deep. She had never thought to enter the water before. But something called to her. From the mist, the longboat drifted into her sight. She got in. The crowds from the shore saw and rushed at the water. The fathom line snapped taut and she found herself pulled out to sea. She held tight as a mist enveloped her. The sound of the voices faded until it was replaced by a rumble and the sense of vertiginous turn. The next she knew, she could make out the
Elena
.

Coralito stopped and ran his hand across his face, wiping the disbelief. Armando the Taller crossed himself.

“I asked for her hand and made a cut along her finger,”
Coralito continued. “Her blood is red and real.”

“Lie. She doesn't bleed,” said the conscript, nodding to Diego. “Just like the mute. They're both wraiths now.”

The crew stared at Diego. He did not look up.

I said, “Come morning, we return her to the ledge.”

Coralito tugged his tunic taut against his chest. “Then I go with her,” he answered. “I will not leave my wife.”

“Diego goes too,” Armando said.

His brother stepped toward him. “But what if there are others, abandoned over the ledge? Are we to leave them in purgatory?”

Armando shook his head. “Anything else would defy God's will.”

Alfredo's face lost its softness. He seemed to rise up his whole length. “You speak of God's will?” he shot back. “Was it God's choice to take our brother? Or yours?”

The brothers leapt on each other and wrestled to the deck. They fought, equally matched, like a man with his reflection. If no one stopped them, it was because we felt we were watching the war within us playing out. Each man aboard—Coralito, the conscript, Diego, Marco, and the other deckhands—understood that the ledge was now among us. We could pass over the edge or we could plunder it, but we could not escape. We watched in silence until the two brothers sat across from each other, exhausted and bruised. Blood ran from Alfredo's nose and his brother rubbed his jaw.

“I remember him,” Alfredo said. “He was our brother. And if he is still alive, I will go and get him myself.”

That night, there was no reversing of the sand clock, no order to the
Elena
. Coralito boarded the dory and was rowed out to his wife. The men drained the wine casks and fired all the supplies in a noisy feast. Diego stood at the prow, ignoring me, even more pale, like alabaster. He paced, the way a wife grooves a path of anticipation on a widow's walk, and stared out at the ledge. I could find no consolation in the riot around me and the chill air had me missing the simple heat of my mother's bakery. Why had I ever left? Why is it that men are always leaving? What is this hunger for what we can't see? I ached for the Calle de la Mar, for the sounds of the fruit carts jostling, and to see one more time my mother at the doorway and to smell her honey cakes rolling out into the street. I called to her in a prayer. I wanted to see her face again and feel blessed, but I could not summon the whole of it. It remained blurred, like smoked glass, and the knowledge that I had forgotten it filled me with a clawing emptiness. The night wore on. The crew's exuberance faded into melancholy, and they keened for their families and home cities, for those they would never see again. I fell asleep in a curl of loose sail.

I woke to a jerk. Under the first kindling of clouds, the fathom line was already strung out to the ledge and Alfredo, Diego, and others, with a great cry, pulled together.

“What are you doing?” I asked. None turned to answer me.

Armando shoved his way forward, shouting, “This is blasphemy!” But before he could fight, the longboat returned over
the ledge and came through the spray, laden with three new figures.

“Armando? Alfredo?” yelled a young man, standing in the boat. “Is that you? I felt you calling me!”

Armando stepped toward the gunwale, squinting, his mouth open.

“Brother!” Alfredo called back. “We're both here! Come to us!”

The longboat knocked alongside the
Elena
, and Alfredo lifted the young man to the deck with a stevedore's strength. He looked just like the brothers, though youngest, and his skin had no pigment. He hugged Alfredo with genuine pleasure.

“You seem so old,” he said. “Have you been away?”

“No, no,” his brother said beaming. “It's
you
who left
us
.”

Armando made the sign of the cross. “You are dead,” he said. “I took your life.”

A laugh shot out of his brother. “You took nothing.”

A boy followed up the rope ladder, unkempt, in tattered trousers. He was not more than five or six years old, and a swollen lump rested at the base of his neck. It had been years since I'd seen a mark of the plague. The boy stood bewildered by the unfamiliar faces until the ship's gimbaling startled him and he began to shake and cry. Diego pushed his way forward to face the child.

“My son,” he said, collapsing around the boy. “My son.”

Diego's voice. The sound of it shattered me, the deepest chime of the closest, celestial sphere.

When the final figure boarded the
Elena
, holding her head
down in humility, I knew that I had called her. Those who crossed the ledge did so because we summoned them with yearning. Her shirt was soaked, a damp rag giving no warmth, though none was needed. When she looked up, I understood why the crew had mutinied: Death is the tyranny. To conquer the ledge was a conquest over this. The greed of time.

My mother stood before me, wet and shivering in her resurrection. Her black eyes studied me in a bloodless face.

I embraced her, and as I did, I noticed the odd twist in her body, her neck stretched. An angry, red indentation wrapped around her throat. My fingers sought it out and ran these ridges where rope had once been.

“I told you to never leave,” my mother said.

My strength left and I buried myself in her hair. “Forgive me,” I said. I remained there until I felt a lock of it brush against my face in a breeze.

From where I sit, I watch the crew busy with lines. Every one is now strung over the ledge. In time, each snaps taut and the deckhands pull first the longboat, then a handful of crude rafts around the ledge, heavy with people. Soon, the
Elena
is crowded with men and women, in all kinds of dress and colors, my mother among them. I write in the ledger, “Many new souls.”

By afternoon, the crew sends the longboat one last time over the drop. This time, they cut free the sea anchors and raise the mainsail for a broad reach. A westerly favors us, and even before our sails are half-raised, the
Elena
heaves forward
with life. An enormous weight drags on us and hemp lines split, some tear from their braces.

Finally a Portuguese galleon crests through the spume, with dozens of people clutching to its deck. The
Elena
has towed it over. The white faces look as if they have survived a squall, as if they are amazed to be alive. Eventually the men of the galleon set its sails and drop more lines back into the roar.

They pull over a strange ship, this one low and open and driven by oars, with a high wooden dragonhead fixed at its prow. The two ships repeat this, and before long, the sea here becomes busy with boats, many unknown to me, and far outnumbering the
Elena
. The water carries the noise of weird cries. This motley army of the dispossessed, recovered from the ledge, soon fills the ocean as far as I see. At evening, we depart east together, toward home, sails bellied in the new wind.

My mother calls. “I have lichen,” she says. “On my vagina.”

What can be done? I am her daughter. I accept.

“Lichen is a woods thing,” I answer. “A hiking thing.”

My mother lives on the tenth floor of a high-rise that overlooks New York Harbor from a New Jersey bluff. She leaves only to shop, to return half of what she has bought, and to eat lunch at the Quick Check. She has not been hiking or on lichen or lichen-adjacent since before I knew what a vagina was. Her adventures are happy hours in the penthouse bar, where she counts the freighters and container ships in the harbor with Al, a retired sea captain.

“Well, the Internet says I have it inside me,” she says, “and you can't tell a soul.”

It is Saturday morning. I open my garage door, the phone compacted between my ear and shoulder. Inside, the mausoleum of my marriage—the shelves and stacks and piles—greets me with a grim exhale. The papers arrived from the lawyer yesterday. Soon I will be officially divorced from Scott. I'm selling what I can.

“You have to come with me to the doctor,” my mother says.

Except I have buyers coming. I'm expecting to get money for my past life. The pleasure of seeing things go.

“This is your mother speaking,” she says. “This is your mother in need.”

What can ever be done?

I say, “Give me an hour.”

At noon a girl drives up in a pickup with her Mexican boyfriend. They saw my ad on Craigslist and are trying to outfit their life in a day. Already they look numb, zombified by exertion. She sucks the final drops from a Gallon Guzzler, pegging the ice with the straw for more. Her boyfriend wears a sweat-soaked, red and yellow T-shirt that reads “YALE.” I don't think those are the colors, but things get random on the boardwalk. He massages her shoulders when she stands still. He is shorter and has to reach up a little. In the bed of the truck, a mint green refrigerator is lashed down haphazardly with straps, like an escape trick nobody wants to see.

“How come you want to get rid of so much awesomeness?” the girl asks, her fingers tracing the scalloped rim of a Waterford crystal bowl: a wedding gift that I used for loose change. Her boyfriend picks through a basket of shells and conches, carefully spaced and layered with towels, that I displayed in a glass cabinet at our old place. We lived a hundred yards from the shore, yet I thought we needed reminding about the ocean. My whole marriage felt like that, a reminder that the real thing was close and available but out of view.

“I left my husband four months ago,” I say. “All this reminds me of him. Of us.”

The girl glances over at her boyfriend. “Don't tell him that,” she says, under her breath. “He's wicked superstitious.”

I see their relationship unscroll in front of me—his fears, her fears of his fears, the double braid of accommodation and resentment—I want to tell her:
Run
. The divorced aren't jaded. We're clairvoyant.

The boyfriend presses two conches against his ears and grins. I say, “I give that basket to you. No money.
Mi casa, tu casa
.”

“He's not retarded,” the girl says.

The boyfriend looks surprised, then honored, then seems to see the basket for what it is, which is a wicker container of beach trash, another weight he'll have to carry. He deposits the conches and turns to a shelf of puzzles. I had a jigsaw period.

They leave with the crystal bowl, coffeemaker, nightstand, single mattress, artificial Christmas tree, and miter saw. Without asking, I carry the basket of shells to their truck. I smell the creamy coconut of suntan lotion and a funky undertone, brackish and tidal. Shards of sanded beach glass rumble like fogged irises inside a cookie tin. Scott and I lived at the beach for five years, and if you could watch just our beach episodes, we would look happy. Scott would fish in the surf or play his guitar, and I would read or just listen, jealous of his aptitudes. I'm a librarian at the elementary school; what I'm good at is cataloging. After every good time we had, I had an assignment
for myself. I had to take one shell home, something singular. Proof that I'd felt loved, that I was experiencing what there was to experience. That display case was my own library, a library of moments.

I set the basket down in the truck bed and wonder what the girl will make of it. Will she see the bounty of the Jersey coast, or just me, a forty-one-year-old woman, alone and childless, her diseased mother for a best friend? I am her future. I want to tell her that after their marriage ends—after he cheats, or spends his days stoned, or gambling, or gets up from the table when she asks him for a child—she should pass the shells right on down to the next girl. Souvenirs from what happens later.

She peels the money from a roll as thick as her fist. “We don't want your basket,” she says.

“Good,” I say, taking it back. “Because I don't like your look.”

Dr. Stecopoulos is Greek, in his midthirties, and my mother adores him. Every time we've met, he seems as if he's just come from an exam that he knows he's aced. He patiently allows my mother to pry into his parents' immigration, his years of school, his new marriage. After every detail, my mother throws a look in my direction:
Thessaloníki! Isn't Thessaloníki wonderful?
He is my mother's ideal man at a time when her interactions have become transactional. He has warm hands, walks her to the reception desk. He wears patent leather Italian shoes (“He doesn't skimp,” my mother said), and tolerates her jokes, the signal flares of her personality.

She has her legs up in the stirrups, holding her breath, with her hands crossed over her belly. Dr. Stecopoulos probes indistinctly under the paper gown while I perch on a stool by his desk. A bluish plastic model of a uterus rests next to the computer monitor, and it looks drained and baleful, as if it doesn't belong in the light. A little door is open in the front, a dollhouse entrance. What's inside? A pink secret. I could crawl in and rest.

“Well, you were right,” the doctor says. “This is definitely lichen sclerosis.” He pokes his head up from under the gown. “Do you want to take a look?”

“Ah, no thank you,” I say.

“He wasn't talking to you,” my mother says. He positions a mirror for her to see. I don't want to look, not even by accident. My phone says I have a message from Scott. He got the papers too. The end is here, and I'm sure he wants to talk. I fiddle with the uterus model. The tiny door in front will not close properly, and I want it closed, in place.

“Have you been sexually active?” Dr. Stecopoulos asks.

“No,” I say. “She definitely has not.”

My mother remains quiet, staring up at the ceiling.

“Edith?” the doctor asks.

“Mom?” I ask.

She closes her eyes and sighs. “Yes,” she says.

The tiny door snaps off in my hand. “What? With who?” I ask.

“I don't need to know that information,” Dr. Stecopoulos says. “But you will need to tell all your sexual partners.” He
delivers this line as if it were plausible that my mother had a sexual partner. My mother is seventy-one. She is in menopause; there is no menoplay. Then he tells her she'll need to apply a steroid cream to her labia—I see the zincky, frosted lips of skiers—and he writes her a prescription.

“With these steroids,” my mother asks, dressing, “will my labia become stronger?”

“Gross,” I say, and hand Dr. Stecopoulos the door to the uterus. It looks like the piece that covers a battery compartment on a remote, the part that inevitably breaks. “I think I messed up your model.”

Dr. Stecopoulos has no idea what I'm talking about.

“Your uterus,” I say. “I broke it.”

“Oh, that's all right,” he says. “My uterus broke a long time ago.”

My mother pats his hand. “You're not missing anything.”

In the car, my mother hunts desperately in her purse for Coffee Nips, as though she were the person I remember her being. “I need your support right now,” she says.

“Fine,” I say. “But I'm allowed to say, ‘Ew.'”

She closes her eyes, leans back against the headrest, and sucks on her candy with deep delight. She's wearing the clip-on sunglasses I bought for her and a white sport fleece, collar up. I notice now that she got dressed up for the doctor visit in gold, drapey pants and sapphire blouse from
Shine Daughters!
—a fashion catalog she loves, even though it's for African American women—on the off chance that Dr.
Stecopoulos would run away with her. The poignancy of my mother's life is that she still thinks people are looking at her, for guidance, for fashion tips. On her bureau, she keeps a framed photo of herself as a teenager in the Atlantic City parade: a red-haired mermaid on a papier-mâché splash, gazing upon the crowd with a royal look. When I was a girl, after she divorced my father and went feminist and vegetarian—Oh my God, the lentils, the antinuke walkabouts, the woven totes of my youth—I used to stare at that photo and wish for it to come alive, for her to invite me up onto the float. I ached to be her so badly I made her bookmarks with declarations of love. As a girl, I would watch her leave to go jogging, braless and single and alive, and wait patiently with her pack of cigarettes for when she returned.

Now she uses a cane, tucked next to her in the passenger seat; she's used it irregularly since her foot surgery, and I know it humiliates her. Men seem almost regal with canes. But women are expected to keep their balance forever. Dime-sized freckles blot her skin, the star chart of her body gaining constellations yearly. A youth spent at the shore is catching up with my mother.

She smiles. This doctor visit has given her a sense of drama, an urgency that cuts a path through the hours. Other times, she can spend a day moving bills around.

“What are you looking at?” she asks.

“I'm trying to see you how your lover sees you,” I say.

“Oh, please.” She scratches at the corner of her mouth. “I'm starving, and I need my prescription.”

“I have to get home,” I say. “I have more people coming.”

“Good,” she says. “There's a Quick Check near you.”

When my mother married my father, she was a good Catholic girl, a virgin. “Mistake number one,” she told me once. “I hadn't even been down there yet.” She divorced my father thirty years ago, and somewhere in her apartment is a photo-album of all her boyfriends since: Val, the therapist; Devon, my elementary school teacher; and the ape with sideburns who worked in the anthropology department at the college. As we drive, I'm bothered, I realize, by the thought that someone finds my mother attractive. I feel excluded.

“It's Al, isn't it?” I say. Al, the retired ship's captain, who wears blue khakis and a little anchor pin on his cardigan. Al, who plies her with highballs and Manhattans at dusk. He has furry Popeye forearms and a dimly lit Pacific backstory. I picture him on top of my mother, gritting his teeth and thrusting upward, like a ship cresting a wave.

“Wasn't it funny how you broke the uterus?” my mother says.

“Just tell me if it's Al,” I say.

She adjusts an air vent. “You should know that he is very gentle,” she says. “And appreciative. He understands a woman's body.”

I shiver. My mother can't bend over and instead has to spread her legs and squat. Her skin itches constantly, a side effect of her Parkinson's medication. She keeps a back scratcher in her car and another, the telescoping kind, in her purse for emergencies. She can eat a half gallon of ice cream
for dinner. People like her should not be having sex; sex is the reward for
not
eating a half gallon of ice cream.

“What's your problem?” she says. “You want so badly to judge me.”

“I'm just surprised,” I say. “Surprised and worried about you.”

She gazes out the window as if she hasn't heard me. “It's not too late for you,” she says. “You've been separated from Scott for long enough. It's time to meet new people.”

“I'm not ready.”

“What about that one I showed you?” she says. “The guy from the Internet?” She has taken to trolling the Craigslist personals for me, trying to matchmake. She'll call and read me the postings: “He says he'll be at the Harborside having a drink for the next hour. I'll go by and check him out for you.”
No!
Or: “This one says he likes Bruce Springsteen.”
We live in New Jersey; that's redundant!
She is unable to understand that Craigslist is where people sell their junk, including their personalities. No genuine, non-pot-smoking, non-gambling, non-fucking-a-twenty-five-year-old-teacher's-aide-at-your-school man will let the universe know he's having a drink at the Harborside. It's an SOS from the bottom of the dating pool.

“There is no ‘guy from the Internet,' and there will never be,” I say, my pronouncement punctuated by the speed bump at the entrance to my parking lot. Outside my garage, a man leans against the trunk of a Mercedes convertible. His legs are crossed, and while he talks on his cell phone, he digs at his molars with a pinkie. He's dressed in the Manhattan palette:
charcoal pants, a black short-sleeve dress shirt, and ribbony sandals that make his feet look bloodless. No wedding ring. I park and he finishes his call. “What about him?” my mother whispers as I bound out to meet him.

“You're fifteen minutes late,” he says. “I thought you were going to be a no-show.”

“I'm sorry. My mother had a doctor's appointment.”

“That's me!” My mother waves the palm of the back scratcher from the passenger seat.

“I'm just here for the baby shit,” he says.

I throw open the garage door and point. The “baby shit” is in the back, where I could throw a blanket over it and pretend it was a mountain in the distance. I have a bassinet, baby chair, stroller, and play “environment.” When Scott and I were trying for kids, I made the mistake of accepting all of this from friends who had had their children, who were done having them. But I never got pregnant. Scott refused to get a fertility test because it was “annoying,” then “expensive,” then finally “against his religion,” the religion of morning bong loads, apparently. My fallopian tubes weren't cooperating either; maybe they knew better. When I moved out, I wasn't quite ready to see it all go, not because I hadn't given up on kids—I'm fine, don't pity me. My first night in the apartment, my mattress pinched at the back of the moving van, I laid out the play environment and fell asleep in it. I slept historically well.