The Color of Water in July (11 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

J
ESS
,
AGE SEVENTEEN

The days had been glorious. A string one after another of sun-drenched days, each twice as long as a winter day, and three times as bright. Daniel had been reading Indian lore out loud to Jess as they sat on the beach together. The Painter cottage had a wonderful library, shelves and shelves of faded leather-bound books with crumbling bindings and fading gold-leaf titles. Someone in the cottage had collected nature lore. The books were mostly from the twenties, and many had Indian legends and stories in them. There were also a number of illustrated botanicals with detailed descriptions of the local trees. Each day, Daniel would bind up one or two of the old books in a blue bandanna, and they would carry them down to the secluded part of the beach next to the sinking sand.

Daniel was stretched out on the flat rock, knees bent and head propped on one hand. He was wearing the same faded red shorts that he had on the first day Jess had seen him, the ones that she thought matched his canoe. He was holding the book at an angle that would block the sun, turning the pages occasionally. Jess was lying beside him, eyes closed, facing the sun.

“Listen to this,” Daniel said excitedly, rolling into a sitting position so that he could hold the book more comfortably. “Listen, Jess, this is about the sinking sand. They call it spirit waters.”

Daniel began to read from the crumbling book:

The local people have legends concerning the souls of lake people, who they say can be seen very rarely at the edge of the lake, only in years when the spirits are strong. They call these years spirit years, when along the water’s edge, cold water, like spring water, bubbles up from under the sand. According to the Indian legend, souls of people who have perished in the lake return, bubbling up at the water’s edge, spitting out the cold water that filled their lungs when they drowned so that they can join their ancestor spirits. According to the legend, these spirit years are uncommon, and some souls have to wait for many, many years for the spirit waters to appear. When asked to point to the location, our brave pointed to a spot well out into the water and said that his people say that it is there. He says that the tribal elder is the only one of the tribe who remembers seeing the bubbles. Furthermore, they say that if people use a branch of the giant pine to reach as far as they can down into the sand, that this helps free up the drowned spirits.

“
Doesn’t that sound like our sinking sand?” Daniel asked. “Have you ever seen the water level this low? Usually, the waterline goes right up to the trees; that’s at least fifteen feet back. Last summer you couldn’t even see the flat rock, much less the spring.”

Jess looked at Daniel’s face, lit from within with delight. She loved that he could be made so happy by such simple things. Jess felt that her mother had raised her to be world weary and skeptical.

“It’s true that I’ve never seen the water level this low. Mamie says that it hasn’t been like this since the teens. When she was a girl, they used to walk the beach all the way around Loeb Point. It’s never been passable since then.”

Daniel continued reading silently from the book, while Jess stood up, refastening her bathing-suit top, and walked over to the spring in the sand; she tentatively pushed one foot into its center. The sand immediately gave way. When she pulled her lower leg out, it was coated with gray clay all the way to her knee. She stared down into the bubbling sand, and then out across the calm blue water toward Hemingway Point.

“You know,” Jess said, “I actually know of a spirit that might need to be released. My grandmother’s sister drowned in the lake, a long time ago. She was trying to swim across the lake.”

“Right, right, the beautiful girl with the long green hair, the footsteps on the balcony, and the sound of dripping water . . . All the kids on the lake know that story.”

“All the more reason to free her. How’d you like to spend eternity dripping water on Miss Mamie’s balcony? Don’t you think it’s high time we let her out?”

“You’re right,” said Daniel. “Let’s emancipate her. I’ll get a stick.”

Daniel, Jess had noticed, was the kind of guy who always had a pocketknife, even in his bathing-suit pocket. He took it out and cut off a long switch from a slender young pine growing up from the underbrush at the edge of the sand. Jess was surprised to see how easily he was able to strip the bark and twigs off the switch to come up with a long, smooth stick. He made little horizontal cuts along its length, and, down where the branch was a little thicker, carved their initials,
J
and
D
.

“Hey, where’d you learn to do that?” Jess said, admiring his effort.

“There used to be an old Indian guy around here, did odd jobs and stuff—he could make almost anything by carving it. Used to make Noah’s arks and wooden blocks and stuff and sell it to tourists in Ironton.”

“Yeah, I remember those.”

“Anyway, I followed him around one summer. He would teach me how to do stuff with the knife if I did some of his work for him. He was weird about the lake too, said one of his brothers drowned and you could hear him screaming in the winter when the ice cracked. Now, that one kind of freaked me out.”

“Maybe we ought to let him out too.”

So Jess and Daniel danced around the bubbling sand, shoving the stick farther and farther down, giggling and chanting, “O spirit of the dead, we liberate you. Spit out your cold water and go to your ancestors.” The sun was high in the sky and the air was still and humid, so finally—hot, damp, and exhausted—they threw themselves into the freezing pool. Because of the underground spring, the sand felt like it collapsed underneath them and they sank as far as their waists. The clay dried on their skin in a layer of sticky gray. Even when they dove into the lake to clean off, the greenish-white powder still stuck in the crevices between their fingers and toes, around the edge of their noses and margins of their faces.

Jess was upstairs, lying across the white bedspread in her room, telling herself she was reading, but the book beside her on the bed was closed. She was tired, so tired that even to open her eyes was an effort, much less to reach over and pick up her book, which felt as though it weighed a thousand pounds. Two days earlier, she had picked up a little test kit in the drugstore, a test kit that showed a little cross.

Was it strange, Jess wondered, that she had to force herself to think about it? That during the normal course of the day, she didn’t think about it at all? In a few days, she was going to be leaving Wequetona, and instead of returning to France, and to her mother, she was going to start college. The whole thing seemed unreal—all of it. She had never visited Texas, and had trouble even picturing it in her mind. She was going to have a baby? Well, it seemed odd, but she figured she would manage—after all, her own mother had done the same.

By contrast, it was easy to think about Daniel, the curve of his back, sliced by the sharp angle of his shoulder blade, the way his hair fell in front of his eyes, his calf muscles so taut that they snapped like rubber bands each time he took a light-footed step. She thought of him standing in the middle of the room with his eyes closed, stereo cranked up, swaying back and forth on the balls of his feet; of the perfect stillness of his crouch as he prepared to photograph a bird far out over the water. She had been avoiding him, telling him she was busy, going into town on pretense, protesting that she was not feeling well, which of course was true. She missed him desperately, with an ache that felt like a bottomless pit. But she did not want to tell him.

But why? This question was gnawing at her as she lay there on the bed, so still that she appeared to be sleeping, because every time she rolled over she felt like she was going to vomit. Why didn’t she want to tell him? She started and restarted in her head:
Daniel, I
. . .
Daniel, I
. . . But she never got to the end of her sentence, and in her heart of hearts, she knew exactly why. Because she was afraid that as soon as she told him, it would be over—because she would see the look of disappointment on his face, and she would not be able to love him anymore. Jess could not bear the idea of not loving Daniel anymore, and she ached at the pit of her stomach, an ache that got all mixed up with the acidy, throw-uppy feeling she had, an ache that never seemed to let up at all, even for an instant. She had thought, he had thought, that they would keep this love going, long distance, while they got through college, and that when they got older—because obviously, they were too young and that was a problem. They had found each other, Jess thought, at the wrong moment. And now this.

But there was no doubt in Jess’s mind that she loved this baby. She loved the baby so much that she didn’t want to give Daniel a chance to say that he didn’t feel the same way. Maybe she would tell him later. But not now. Not until it was too late for anyone to tell her that they didn’t think she should have the baby.

Jess was so lost in her thoughts that she was surprised to hear the tapping of Mamie’s pumps coming up the wooden steps toward the second floor. As a rule, Mamie never approached Jess, but rather, waited until their paths crossed naturally in order to speak to her. So when Jess heard the sound of Mamie’s pumps, she immediately felt uncomfortable, felt as though Mamie’s approach was ominous. A week had now gone by since she’d realized that her period was not going to come. The summer was rapidly drawing to a close. In less than a week, she’d be on her way to college. She was gripped by intense inaction. But, of course, Mamie knew nothing of this. Perhaps, Jess thought, she suspected that Jess was sick. But Jess did not think Mamie would ever guess the truth.

Jess heard three stiff raps on her bedroom door.

“Jess, please open your door. I need to speak to you right now!”

Jess swallowed hard on the acrid bile that she felt rise in her throat as she sat up and opened the door for Mamie, who was dressed in a green-linen suit, pale stockings, and patent-leather pumps. On her lapel was a ruby bumblebee pin. Jess could not read her face—Mamie appeared bent on something, and Jess felt intensely self-conscious, as though she were standing naked at the doorway, although she was fully dressed.

“Jess, I shall not mince words,” Mamie said, making no move to cross the threshold into the room.

“As a woman, I am not unaware of certain laws of nature that govern the way that the female body functions. As we have not discussed the subject, I do not know what the state of your ignorance may or may not be. I have made an appointment for you with my gynecologist, Dr. Coggins. Am I making myself perfectly clear?”

Jess stood in front of Mamie, who was half a head shorter than she, and listened with increasing incredulity as Mamie gave her little speech. Her grandmother was standing square on both feet, looking straight at Jess, without the least embarrassed air about her. Jess’s knees felt weak. She steadied herself.

“But how could you . . . ?”

“Everything that goes on at Journey’s End is my business, even, how to put it delicately, the content of the wastepaper bins. I’ve been very worried about your recent conduct, running around with that Painter boy, and I’ve made it my business to know.”

Bile forced its way up into her throat, and she shoved past her grandmother and ran down the hall to the bathroom, where she slammed the door shut, locked it, upchucked into the toilet, and then lay down on the floor, pressing her cheek against the cool linoleum, which was slightly grainy, always, with traces of beach sand.

Mamie did not, as her mother would have, follow her down the hall and bang on the door, hollering, wheedling, eager to continue the discussion no matter what. No, apparently Mamie thought that she had made her point, and since it was clear that Jess had understood, then enough had been said.

Jess lay there quietly on the floor, and her swirling cauldron of emotions sifted down to just one specific feeling. Anger. She was furious at Mamie. What possible business was it of hers? Jess could certainly not imagine Margaret stooping so low. Her mother would never, ever have dreamed of prying into her affairs in that way. The more that she lay there, in the bathroom, staring up at the white porcelain curve of the toilet, the bright-pink paint that was flaking off the old cast-iron bathtub in places, the more that Jess felt she had been treated unjustly—and the more she bathed in that feeling of having been wronged, the more she wanted to tell her friend about it, her best friend. Surely, he would understand; surely, he would take her side.