The Color of Water in July (14 page)

Mamie stood and neatly pushed in her chair, then clasped her hands in front of her. It was clear that the conversation was done.

“Now, it’s time for me to get to my correspondence if I don’t want to miss the post. And I suggest that you start packing. That trip to Austin, my dear, is just a few days away.”

Time to pack up—hard to believe. Jess stood next to the bed, folding her white T-shirts and stacking them in perfectly symmetrical piles, pressing her jeans on the ironing board into sharp creases. White underwear, bleached and smelling like the dryer, folded, piled, and tucked into a corner. Jess loved packing, had always loved packing time, when all the complexities of her life, wherever she and her mother happened to be, got reduced down to this: neat categories, clean and fresh smelling, each item in its place. Life was never so untidy, Jess always thought, that it couldn’t be stowed neatly in a suitcase, taken to the train station or airport, and carried away. She was leaving the next morning, and she felt ready to pack up her things and carry them away to this new place, her baggage clean, well ordered, and spare, and her mind a blank slate.

She had not seen or spoken to Daniel. Mamie had taken to answering the phone first, and when she saw his white pickup out behind the cottage, she let Mamie open the door and send him away.

Jess’s mother was an untidy packer, jamming things into suitcases at the last minute, clean clothes tangled up with dirty, notes and papers for deadline articles stowed in wrinkled piles. Jess remembered one time in particular, in the train station in Milan. They had flown out of the apartment that they had lived in for two years, rushing haphazard, no time even to make a final round to see if anything had been left behind. Her mother, as usual, had jammed any number of crumpled things into her suitcase at wrong angles, then sat on it, bouncing up and down to try to get it to close. When they got to the station, the train was late, as Italian trains often were, and her mother had dragged her off to a phone booth. Her mother’s battered black Samsonite was precariously closed, and to Jess’s extreme mortification, there was a bit of nylon stocking, the foot part with its homely darkened toe, hanging out of the suitcase, flapping along like an intimate flag as they walked. Jess sat outside the booth while Margaret made two frantic calls, one to her editor promising that her article would be along very soon, another to Giovanni, an ardent but hasty leave-taking conducted in broken, tearful Texan-Italian. That was Margaret.

That was not Jess, who was always packed two days ahead of time, neat and tidy, with no loose ends.

It did not seem right to her to leave it like that. Not speaking to Daniel was like leaving a loose end.
See him, don’t see him, see him, don’t see him
. It was a chant that went on and on in her mind, a litany coursing along underneath everything, underneath her folding and ironing and washing, her list making and floor sweeping. Clean. She thought,
just leave,
with the sterile finality of Dr. Coggins’s
against the laws of nature,
the antiseptic, biological, unlived quality of those words. Or
see him,
the tears, the good-byes, the swimming in it.
Just stand still and let yourself get wet,
as Mamie had said. She had to leave without seeing him. She knew that she could not bear to see him again.

“Daniel.”
Jess knew from the sound of her own voice, which startled her with its breathless urgency.

“Jess.” She knew again from the sound of his voice, like a waterfall, a waterfall of sorrow pouring down.

“Pick me up at seven.” And then it was done. He had said okay. He had hung up. She stood there staring at the phone in her hands, amazed at the way she had rushed headlong down the stairs, picked up the phone, and dialed the second she heard the screen door screech and knew that Mamie had gone out. No forethought, no plan, just pure action.

The Docksider was a townie joint. Nobody from Wequetona used to ever go there, and then some of the kids found out that they never carded anyone, and that the townies didn’t chase them away. You could smoke there, eat burgers, and drink beer. They had those little jukeboxes that hang above the table, “Hotel California,” “Cherokee Woman,” “Midnight at the Oasis.” Jess had not found a way to talk to Daniel yet. They had ridden out past the moonlit cornfields in silence. Daniel, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, nothing different from usual. Jess, fiddling with the radio dial, switching it around, first country then gospel, lots of static, nothing decent, lots of Bible shows.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Jess said. The only thing she managed to say during the ten-minute ride into town.

“I know when you’re leaving,” Daniel said. Then silence. Jess kept fiddling with the radio dial.

It was a chilly night. Fall came early up in the north part of Michigan, and there was a damp chill in the air that spoke more of autumn than summer. Most of the summer people had already left town; the sidewalks were mostly empty, and a cold, damp mist swirled around the lampposts that lined Main Street. Daniel was wearing faded blue jeans and a navy-blue sweatshirt whose sleeves were a little too short, as though it had been washed in hot water too many times, and his strong, bony wrists protruded from the sleeves. On one wrist was the woven sailor’s bracelet, slightly grayish, that he always wore, couldn’t take off. His ankles were bare too, as his feet were barefoot in an old worn-out pair of Bass Weejuns. He walked briskly, a step or two ahead of her. As he pushed open the door of the Docksider, an acrid odor of smoke-filled air spilled out into the street.

Jess and Daniel made their way toward the back and sat down in a booth with a scarred-up old wooden table. From where she sat, Jess could see out to the bar, where a few fat, bearded guys wearing lumberjack shirts were smoking and drinking beer. And beyond that to the door, where the neon
O
PEN
sign was flickering, appearing backward, the top half of the
E
not lit up. Jess pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

“It’s over,” Jess said finally, simply, letting smoke out of her mouth as she spoke.

“I know,” Daniel said, flat, miserable. For once not looking up at her, looking at the table. She had thought that maybe he’d be relieved, but she could see the regret that shadowed his face, making him look somehow older.

“You all right now?” he said.

How to answer?
She felt light-headed, and there was this horrible roaring sound in her ears. She inhaled hard on the cigarette, blowing smoke rings up at the ceiling. She could catch a look at the side of her face in the smoky mirror—the pallor of her face took her by surprise.

For a few minutes, they just sat there, taking in the scene around them. Jess finished her cigarette and stubbed it out. Daniel ordered a pitcher of beer, and they sat, fingering their glasses, flipping through the racks on the jukebox, like it was any other night.

Jess was cold. She was hunched down low in the booth, with her nylon parka’s collar still pulled up around her cheeks. Her head was edgy from the nicotine. She was feeling her way around what she was going to say.

“Daniel,” Jess said finally. “I have a question. It’s about your grandfather.”

“My grandfather?”

“Your grandfather, Thomas Cleves.”

He looked at her, quizzical. Clearly, this was not what he had expected her to say.

“Did you know him?” She could feel that she was still hoping,
even now
, that there was some kind of mistake.

But the moment he opened his mouth to answer, Jess felt the rest of the air suck out of her with a whoosh.

“Who, my mom’s dad? No, I don’t know anything about him, except I heard he was a war hero, or something. He ran off on my grandma when my mom was still a baby. I think he was kind of the black sheep of the family. Why do you ask?”

“Because he was my grandfather too.”

She saw the look on his face, like the words she had just said were completely separate from their meaning.

“Your mother and my mother are half sisters,” she said.

“My mom has a half sister?”

“We’re first cousins.”

They sat like that for a moment. The stunned silence that hung in the air between them was thicker than the haze of smoke.

Finally, she said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “That’s why I . . . ”

Jess felt the courage leaking out of her, air out of a pricked balloon. Like the self inside her had become slightly, almost imperceptibly smaller. Like her soul didn’t quite fill her body and there was a little space that echoed in between.

Daniel leaned forward, reached across the table, reached out to her, like he wanted to steady her, to hold her there. He put a hand over her hand; she felt the warmth of it. Hers were like ice.

“What is it?”

“Why I . . . ”

She opened her mouth to speak, but the words were stuck down in her throat somewhere. She inhaled on her cigarette again, slouched a little lower. Tried again to force herself to speak.

“Lost it . . . ” she said.

Daniel had tears in his eyes. She could see them shining in his eyes, could see him willing them not to spill over.

When she opened her mouth to speak again, her voice was louder, more insistent, almost shrill.

“It’s because we shouldn’t have been together at all! Because we’re genetically incompatible. We get together and make little freaky genetic accidents. That’s why! Because cousins don’t screw!” As she spoke, her voice was getting louder, and as she finished uttering “screw,” she was closer to yelling, and a couple of townies from the bar turned around and looked at her.

Daniel’s face had flushed a deep crimson and he was looking down at the table; his wrist, with the sailor’s bracelet, was curved where his hand was gripping the ridged plastic beer glass. Jess stared at him, feeling a volatile mix of emotions, a deep, hot flashing anger combined with the visual images, his wrist, his hair, the curve of his chin that left her light-headed with desire. They sat there like that, frozen together in silence, until Daniel spoke.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Dead sure.” She felt the word
dead
buzz on the end of her tongue a little.

Daniel’s face turned from crimson to ashen.

“It can’t be,” he said. “It makes no sense . . . ”

She thought of Phelps Whitmire, of Doc Coggins, of the little pink cross, of the red tint of the sinking sand. He was right—it made no sense. But something didn’t have to make sense to turn out to be true.

They sat there for a while, still unable to keep their eyes off each other, separate miserable bubbles on either side of the scarred-up table.

“So I’m off to Texas then,” Jess finally said.

“I’ll be driving back to Ann Arbor in a few more days.”

“Right.”

They sat looking at each other for a few more minutes, Daniel wearing that same look that Jess couldn’t read.

“So I guess this is it . . . ”

“Jess, I’m going to wait for you,” he said simply.

She responded with the barest shake of her head.

“I can wait for birds to alight in trees and for a cloud to pass behind that tree when the sun is at a certain spot. I can wait until the sky is a certain color and the wing is at a certain angle and the light is coming from a particular direction. I’m a guy who knows how to wait, Jess. Maybe you think I can’t, or I won’t, but I intend to. And I know that I can.”