The Girl in the Well Is Me (8 page)

Mom's so far away, staring down at me, like she can't believe what she's doing, lying on her belly in a field, staring down a hole at her second-­born child, deciding whether to be mad or sad. She's so tiny up there, I don't even know if I can see her or if I can just imagine her there.

“HOW MANY TIMES . . .” she starts, then she stops. She's shouting into the microphone! Isn't she afraid of it? My mom is afraid. So you are not my mommy. The person who is not my mommy is crying rain. I know she is because it's raining on my head. It can't be. I'm out in space and tears dissolve in space or they float the wrong way. They go up. My tears are splashing Mom's face. I look past her face and into the night, searching for stars, only they are gone. “I LOVE YOU, OK, BYE,” she says finally, and then she's gone to stir some more hopes, and there is a man who I don't know and he's saying, “We're dropping a hose, this one has water, you need to drink water.” I nod and smile, yes, thank you! Water! This idea is terrific! I am so thirsty!

The hose bounces down and dribbles water on me. My eyes start to leak, tears all blurred with the rain because my body doesn't know that I don't have any water in me to spare. I grapple around with my mouth for the end of the hose. I'm getting shockingly good at that.
Throw the rope now
, I want to say.
I'll catch it in my mouth.
I drink and drink and drink, like I'm filling myself back up, but then I stop because what if I overinflate? Then they won't be able to pull me out if they try. I'll be too big.

The water tastes like when you are outside playing, too lazy to go inside, and you gulp water from the hose. It tastes like rubber and metal and dirt and something like swimming pool chemicals, and it tickles the back of your throat in a way that makes you not quite feel sick. I wish I was drinking from the hose with Tracy Kelliher and getting water all over our clothes and then laying out towels on the lawn to lie on so we get hot in the sun before plunging back into the ice-­cold pool. Sometimes our moms would sit out there too, on lawn chairs, slathered all over with SPF 1000 suntan lotion so they didn't get skin cancer and die. That was back when avoiding cancer seemed smarter than smoking, for Mom. Summer smells like SPF and pool chlorine and lawn chairs and pages of magazines stuck together with damp hands. But it
tastes
like water from this plastic hose. I start to cry again. It's so dark. I'm so dark. My stars have clouded over. I'm my own raincloud.

They
are up top, being busy.
They
are going to do something.
They
are going to save me. I don't know if I want that. Grandma was going to do it. I hope she comes soon. Maybe I could go to her instead. Heaven sounds like a warm place with counters low enough that I can stir the batter. With a fancy mixer, of course. Mixing is hard on the arms and I don't seem to have any. Grandma and I will make cookies. Chewy and chocolate-­y. Yes, please. Peachy keen. The edges kind of crunchy and hardened from the oven and the middle bits still gooey and hot.

I go back to the air and breathe deep. I pretend that I'm snorkeling. Look at that piece of coral! Look at that turtle! I have never been snorkeling, not even once, but Tracy Kelliher went to Hawaii at Christmas last year and didn't invite me. She fed bright yellow fish frozen peas and they nibbled at her fingers. When she told me that, I started screaming. Still, Hawaii sounded fun with all the hula dancing and a big pig roast where people played the ukulele and juggled with fire, turtles snapping at your ankles.

“KAMMIE?” the voices above me boom. They are God. God is booming at me. I croak out a sound that sounds like “Frrrg” and the voices say, “ARE YOU THERE? STAY WITH US. WE ARE GOING TO START DIGGING, OK?”

“OK?” What do I know about whether digging is a good idea or not? Doesn't God have a good handle on their own good ideas? Or bad? I want to go home. I want to get into my bed. I want Robby to fart in his bed and then fan it at me so that I can squeal and throw something at him and he can throw something back and Mom can come and stand in the doorway, leaning sideways, her eyes not quite focused because she's so tired and we should just let her sleep, but for some reason we can't. And she'll say, “Stop that. You guys. Come on.”

It doesn't sound that great, but trust me, when compared to being stuck in a well, it's paradise.

The water keeps pouring out of the hose and down my back. I'm so cold. I feel like even if I could move, I couldn't. I wish, I wish, I wish I was warm.

When Dad used to work, he worked at a place called Dreams Come True. It was where sick kids submitted their wishes and then people donated money, and the money bought their wishes for them. It worked best when the kid wished for Disneyland, which pretty much every kid did. The thing with all the kids is that they had cancer and they weren't going to live. I guess some of them did, but not all of them. If they lived, it was a miracle and they got to be in the ads for Dreams Come True talking about how they were sick and got a wish and then they got better. It sort of implied that the wish made them live, which made me feel weird, because it was a lie. What made them better was medicine and good luck and maybe a miracle. Not a ride on Big Thunder Mountain. They got better because they were lucky.

I didn't like to be around those kids too much because I felt bad for being so alive, for feeling good, for not looking like I was going to just keel over and flat-­out die right then and there in the front office of the foundation. And my Dad was taking money from those kids! He was doing that! At least, that's how people saw it, the ones who saw the story on the news, everyone who read one of the kajillion articles on the Internet, anyone who loves to get morally outraged about someone else's terrible mistake. In other words, everyone.

One day after that first front-­page article was printed, Mom and I were at the Shop Rite buying eggs and butter and milk and a new box of laundry soap, and an old lady came up to Mom and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” She said it so casually it was like she was saying, “That brand of butter is better than this one.” Like she wasn't going to cripple us with her words—or kill us, really. My mom already mostly dead from the heartbreak of it all. Like this lady wasn't going to be the last straw.

Mom held the laundry soap in her arms like she was cradling a baby and then the lady really lit into her. She grabbed Mom's arm and the laundry soap-­baby fell screaming to the floor and the box split open, so all this white soap powder was everywhere, smelling so strong that my eyes stung, or maybe I was crying. “My granddaughter died!” she yelled. “She died! She had the cancer in her blood and she died! And before she died, she made a wish, she wanted to go to Disneyland! But she didn't get to go! She didn't get to go because she died! Your husband took that money from my granddaughter. You are terrible.” Her hand was so white against Mom's denim jacket and the veins in her hands looked like a map, where if you started tracing them, you could easily follow them all the way back to that lady's broken heart.

By then I was crying, because it's so sad when kids die of cancer, especially when they didn't get to go to Disneyland, after all. I went to Disneyland. Why did I get to go? Dad probably paid with the money this woman's grandkid could have used. The lady whirled around on me and she said, “Is this his kid? The child of that devil? She's evil, too, I'm betting. She's evil because she has his rotten, no-­good blood flowing through her veins. It should be kids like her that get cancer, that die. You should die!” she yelled. She yelled it so close to me that I could see the bumps on her tongue, the way her too-­orange make-­up had fallen into the creases on her face.

“I'm sorry,” I whispered, and Mom pulled me into her body, clutching me against her belly.

“That is a terrible thing to say to this child, this innocent child. This child didn't do anything! I'm sorry about your granddaughter but you can't say those things!” she shouted back at that woman, stomping her feet a bit so the soap rose up in clouds.

The woman blinked, like she'd just woken up from being asleep. She didn't say anything, just let out a slow hiss like a balloon breathing out all the exhalations it was holding in. She hated me. I know that. I know she was looking at me and seeing her poor dead granddaughter, and all over again, I hated my dad so much, more than anything, more than anyone. I was passing on the hate, like pass the parcel. The music is playing. Open the present! Here is some hate.

My mom's body was shaking behind me, an earthquake I couldn't pull away from. We went home without the groceries. Mom drove slowly, clutching the steering wheel so hard her fingers were white as the bones that were in them, right there under her skin.

“We'll pay it back,” she murmured, her teeth clenched so hard I could hardly understand her. “I'll pay it back.”

But I know she can't. She can't ever. It was so much money. She'll never be able to make it right.

And neither will I.

Not ever.

Not even if I get cancer and all my hair falls out and I die.

Not even if I die right here in this well, the sandpapery walls of it scratching at my skin like they are coming to life and rubbing the layers right off my shivering body. I am suddenly remembering to be scared. And I am scared. I am so scared.

“Mom?” I say, but she can't hear me. “I don't want to die.”

But boy, if I do die, that old lady will be happy, I think. That old lady will be able to sleep at night, knowing that balance has been restored. But I guess it still wouldn't be fair, because I
did
get to go to Disneyland. I did get to live that dream.

8

N
orth Dakota

Mandy is at the top of the well, talking into the microphone. I'm allowed to call her Mandy now, I guess. But I don't want to call her Mandy. I don't want to call her anything. I want to hang up the phone, but it isn't a phone. I can't hang up.

I stare at the well wall in front of me, which is like looking into a shadow to try and find a light. There's nothing there. Well, there's something there. Grains of dirt, squashed together to make clay bricks. I picture them each individually, floating apart and setting me free. There are probably people who could do that with their brains, like ESP, but different. Those people are probably monks. Monks probably very rarely fall down wells in Texas.

I close my eyes. Mandy keeps talking. “So, like, in the club, we have rules? And you have to know what they are? So while you are down there, you can memorize them? I'll tell you that the first rule is that you aren't allowed to tell anyone that this is a club and that this was, um, part of anything.” She's sort of whispering, sort of shouting. I hope there are crowds of firemen up there, eavesdropping. I hope Robby hears her and punches her in the nose. I hope my mom hears her.

“Um, the second rule is that you have to wear only Smash Hit perfume, OK? You have to also do your hair in a certain different braid every day, like Monday is fishtail and Tuesday is French . . . Oh, um, forget it. Your hair is too short. You'll have to, basically, grow out your hair.” Her voice is sing-­songy and strange. Is she talking about braids?

My head is shivering. My head is a baby bird without any feathers, all pink and vulnerable to eagle attacks. What if an eagle swoops into the well and begins pecking at my head? I don't like birds much more than fish, if I'm being honest.

“. . . Um, and then we can dip the ends of our braids in Kool-­Aid powder to make colors, but we only do that on Fridays because it's fun day on Friday.”

Between Mandy's sentences, I can hear the
chukka chukka chukka
sound of shovels hitting the dirt and then a bigger sound, like an engine roaring, the ground caving in under its weight. Something is caving in. I am caving in. Mandy's voice is caving in. There's another voice. It's Mandy. No, it's Robby. It's Robby. Robby is saying, “Shut up, Mandy.” Robby is saying, “Hey, Kammie? Mandy is a freak. You shouldn't be friends with her. OK, I'm going to tell you a joke now. This is the joke. Knock knock.” He pauses. The pause stretches over me like a bubble gum bubble. It's all around me. Then it caves in, just like everything is caving in right now. The cave! The cave!

I was in a cave once. I forget where we were. Camping, I think, in Upstate New York. Dad used to like to just drive and drive and we'd be looking down, watching movies on the iPad or playing our DS3s and then before we knew it, we'd left New Jersey somewhere behind us in a cloud of Costcos and Bed Bath and Beyonds, and we were somewhere with forests or fields or beaches or lakes, and it felt like we'd driven right off the planet and landed somewhere better. This time I'm thinking of, it was crazy hot and the cave was dark and cool. Robby and I were hiding. We could hear Mom and Dad calling us and then we heard Mom swear and Dad laughing and them deciding we were either dead or joking, and Dad saying, “Well, if they're dead, I call the top bunk!”

We used to share a bed on trips back then, before Robby started bringing a tent and putting it beside the truck so he didn't have to get anywhere near me. He said I farted in my sleep, which wasn't even true. He said I drooled. He said he wouldn't be surprised if I peed. He said I was gross.

Mom said, “Don't worry, sweetie, he's a teenager.”

And I said, “I'm never going to be a teenager, then, because teenagers are lying liars who lie.” That was before I knew that everyone lied, everyone over the age of 11, anyway. And even then, I'm not so sure. Mandy, Kandy, and Sandy aren't exactly paragons of the truth. They aren't grapes. They are raisins.

“Kammie,” Robby yells. “You have to say, ‘Who's there?' or else this joke doesn't ever end.”

“Who's there,” I say, but my voice is flat coins that clink to the bottom of the well. “I wish I was free,” I say, but it's just more coins, falling on the goats and all around.

The cave we found on that trip was cold and the walls sweated this cool water that was really salty if you tasted it, which I did, not because I'm gross but because Robby dared me. The top of the cave was so high that it looked like the black night sky, even though it was day. It wasn't until after that I found out that it was black because of the bats. The ground was thick with gunk. I should have guessed what that was, but I didn't. Instead, Robby and I just pressed our backs against that wet cave wall and crouched behind a stalactite or a stalagmite, I forget which, and giggled. Then I accidentally stepped on his foot, so he pushed me and I landed head first on the stalactite/stalagmite and he had to run and get Mom and Dad. Right up until this exact second, I thought that those ten minutes I was alone in that cave were the most terrifying ten minutes of my life.

Wrong.

“INTERRUPTING CHICKEN,” yells Robbie now, scaring me. “That only works if you had said ‘Who's there,' ” he says. “You wrecked the joke.”

I had to get three stitches in my forehead from the stalagmite/stalactite wound. I wonder if they'll be able to sew me up again after this. I wonder if I'll look like a rag doll. I wonder if all my blood has leaked out.

I slip again. See? I'm shrinking.

“I'm shrinking,” I say to Robby, but Mandy is talking again.

“Your brother is a pig,” she says.

“Robby?” I say.

“He's the worst. Anyway, in the summer,” she hits that word hard, like it matters, “we're going to use lemons to dye our hair blonde, all of us. I guess you could do that, too, even though your hair is so short.”

No,
I want to say, but don't.
No, I'm not your friend. No, I won't be blonde. No, in the summer, I won't know you anymore because I'll be gone.

Where am I going?

Where do dead people go?

Am I dying?

I've forgotten. I'm feeling funny again, confused. There is more grinding and the earth is giving way.

I wish there was music. Someone needs to pipe in music. If I could have music, I think I would pick Simon and Garfunkel. Record Shop Dave played me their music last Tuesday when I stopped by on the way home from school. It was really good music. Their voices were like metal, twisting together and rising up, washing all over me and cooling off my hottest heart. I felt like I never wanted to stop listening to those songs. Dave gave me the album and I took it home because I was too embarrassed to tell him that I didn't have anything I could play it on. I'm saving up for a record player. Dave has one for sale in his store that I love—it is red and shiny and has a handle. From the outside, it looks like a perfect, square suitcase. But on the inside, there's that needle with the diamond nestled inside, waiting to sing.

In the meantime, I stuck the record under my mattress, and sometimes I dream the songs. Maybe Robby will find it. I guess it will probably be cracked, two black pieces of plastic that can't be glued back together again to make the sound of the song that could have saved me. I hope he puts it under his mattress. I hope he dreams my old music dream because then he won't think I'm gross anymore and he'll like me again like he used to. And maybe when he's dead, too, he'll find me in Heaven or wherever and it will be like it was before, when there was nothing better in the world than jumping off an old wharf into a cold lake on a hot summer day with his kid sister, who he didn't hate yet.

“And every Tuesday, you have to bring the snack, like maybe something nonfat or diet because we don't want to get fat,” Mandy says.

I hate Mandy. The hate is in a parcel that I'm passing, but when I feel my hands, there is nothing in them, so I must have dropped it. Maybe Dad caught it. Maybe he hates Mandy, too. Was it Mandy or Kandy or Sandy who thought falling down a well was a good idea? Let's just gather round and hate them all and their nonfat snacks. I don't have any money. Mom doesn't have any money. I don't want to go to Mandy/Kandy/Sandy meetings! What might they do to me next? They will feed me to the fishes. Will there be a record player that I can use in Heaven? I hope it is red.

The walls below me are sweating with my blood. It's creepy. I want to go home. The bats are starting to stir.

The machine opens its mouth and takes a huge bite of the ground somewhere above me or beside me, I can't tell which. It chews and chews. Mandy is wearing a hard hat. “I have to go,” she says. “They say it's, like, not safe. Bye for now!” She talks like she is hanging up the phone.

“Good-­bye,” I say, and my invisible voice is a ghost of smoke. Smoke is fire that has died. It makes sense. Think about it.

Mandy, Kandy, and Sandy are going to want to be my best friends after this because I will be famous. But I will say, “No” if I get to live and make the choice. If I don't live, they will answer questions on the TV news. They'll lie and say they loved me, even as they shrink into raisins.

If I die, they'll put teddy bears at the top of the well. They'll sprinkle flower petals down on me and the goats like rain, and the fleas will catch them and eat them, and the coyote will say, wisely, “These girls were never your friends!” And I will nod, sagely, in my white ghostly dress and say, “Yes, yes, yes, but now I can haunt them.” I will haunt them with bad hair. I will stick things in their perfect braids while they sleep, like chewed gum and the poop of a goat.

If I get to be alive, I am going to be best friends with the girls with the glasses and bad hair and weird clothes and the limps. I am going to find the kids who are like me, skating champions who happen to love the sounds of silence and music playing loud in a car roaring down a highway toward a place where it snows, a place that is real, not a dusty, dry dream.

I wish I wasn't so sleepy. Once before, I was this sleepy. I can tell the story now because I have time and because no one is listening. It happened in September. September, last year. What happened was this. I'll summarize the whole thing in case you weren't paying attention to details before. Mostly, people don't pay attention to details until after something happens, then they look back in their memories for details, but memories are often pretty faulty, so if you're making up my story, you're going to get it wrong. Here it is again, in bullet points. (I don't know what bullet points are, but dad used to say it a lot: “Bullet points: chores are beds, baths, boogers.” That meant, make your bed, clean the bathroom, and never leave the house without checking your nose for boogers.)

Bullet points of my life: My dad went to jail for robbing sick kids of their chance to have breakfast with Mickey Mouse, and my mom got two jobs in Texas, and my brother stopped talking to me, and our dog, Hayfield, got run over by the number 12 bus right in front of the house, and my former best friend, Tracy Kelliher, said loudly to Sarah Moore that that was karma. That's the end of the bullet points.

Here are the details: After that happened, the thing with Hayfield and Tracy and what she said, I started peeing in my bed every night. I don't know why I did that. I'd go to bed thirsty and wake up in a puddle of pee. I had to wear a diaper. “Diaper baby,” Robby would hiss at me, over our microwaved dinners. “Princess Baby Diaper of Diaper City, Diaper State, Diaperland.” The house ran out of air and nice smells. We were turning moldy, like a loaf of bread left somewhere wet.

I didn't want to be me anymore. It seemed like it would be better to just not
be
at all. I wanted to die. That's what I'm saying.

So I did this thing. I'm embarrassed now. Even thinking about it makes me feel funny and light, like that time I plugged in the Christmas tree lights and didn't notice that the dog had chewed the cover off the wire and I got a shock that glued me in place, filling me with a trembling light, like my heart was feathers.

This is the thing that I did: I waited till everyone was out of the house. Mom was picking up Robby, who had been caught shoplifting at the Shop Rite. I wanted to know what he stole but I also wanted to be dead more than I cared if it was a Coke or a Pepsi. Lately he'd started saying he liked Pepsi better. We'd always been a Coke family. Maybe he took one of each. Maybe he couldn't decide and took a Dr. Pepper instead. I cared, but I also didn't. Not enough.

Anyway, I didn't want to live in a world that would run over Hayfield. I didn't want to have chafing on the top of the insides of my legs because I was always peeing in my bed. I wanted a mom. And a dad. My mom and
my
dad, the way they were before everything happened and their souls raisined and they went bad. The bad guys were my parents. You have to understand.

I called a number. I used the phone in Mom and Dad's room. It was a really super old phone that Mom had had in her house when she was a kid. She used to be a very sentimental person. Our house was a museum of her life. Dad happened to live there, too, but everything that mattered was Mom's. Like that phone. And my water bed. The phone plugged into the wall and the receiver was separate from the phone and really heavy. It made it feel real and solid, what I was doing. I pressed the numbers one at a time and it made a very satisfying
BEEP-­BEEP
sound each time. The number I called was a help line, said the ad on the wall at school. You could call it and ask for help. I wanted someone to help me un-­be. I wanted someone to get that. No one I knew would get it. I mean, they wanted me to un-­be, too, but probably not in an easy, painless way. Definitely not in an easy, painless way. They wanted me to get cancer, specifically. And then radiation and chemo, and then a bald head. Well, if they could see me now, I guess they'd be happy.