Topping From Below (29 page)
Overhead, a seagull shrieks. A small wave pushes her down, covers her head. She feels the water between each toe and finger, forcing itself into every pore and crevice in her body. The water surrounds her, smothering her like Billy’s memory. Seaweed feathers her face, and she sees Billy’s fingers digging and scraping in the soft ground. His last words come tumbling back, the scared voice, crying, begging her not to let him go. She hears it still, in her dreams. It ebbs and flows, his dream voice, not so gentle, like hightide violent waves. And like water on the rocks, he’s wearing her down, pulling her apart, piece by gritty piece. She surges upward, roughly breaking the surface, then treads in a circle, waiting. On the shore, there is a row of drab houses, some of them listing, and some with awkward gapes in between, like a set of crooked discolored teeth. As she drifts out, the houses get smaller and smaller.
She looks over her shoulder and sees a huge wave building up. It rolls toward her, thunderously, then suddenly it’s towering above her head. The wave seems momentarily suspended, like a threat hovering in the air. She feels a knot of fear growing in her stomach just before the wave plummets down. It knocks her under
with a terrible, crushing force. She feels herself going down, falling, falling, then tumbling backward, head over heels, as the ocean sucks her out to sea. This is what she wants. She wants everything to be scared out of her; all her thoughts, all the images, sucked into the bottom of the ocean.
Water rushes around her, jerking and twisting her body, pulling her down. Her chest tightens and all at once she panics, forgetting everything, even Billy, everything but the need to survive. Her leg scrapes the ocean’s bottom and she frantically digs her fingers into the sand, but still she’s uprooted, then dragged along,
toppling over and over as the undertow pulls her along. She tries to swim upward, her arms outstretched, reaching and straining for the surface, but a whirlpool of water keeps pushing her down. Her lungs begin to ache and she flails her arms and legs, thrashing about helplessly. She reaches out to grab something, anything, but nothing is there. It seems to her she’s been reaching all her life. Her eyes sting of saltwater and her body feels bruised. Just as she thinks her lungs will burst, her head breaks through the surface. She gulps the air, panting, her chest heaving. Then she cries out, feeling nothing but fear and pain and still more fear. Her tears fall into the ocean, unnoticed. Water laps around her, slapping at her face, silencing the sounds of her sobs, silencing her pain. Still crying and frightened, she slowly begins to swim toward the beach, somehow feeling better than she’d felt before, with everything almost, but not quite, forgotten.
It’s six o’clock when I get home. I take a shower, hoping the warm water will wash away all thoughts of M. and his training room and Franny’s trips to the ocean. It doesn’t work. In the mirror, I see red splotches on my torso from the hot wax, long welts on my ass from the cane, light chafe marks on my wrists. Much worse than the welts and burn marks, I feel my neglect of Franny. How could I have not known her pain?
I dress in long pants and a long-sleeved blouse, then light up the barbecue in the backyard. I’m not really hungry, but I already invited Ian over for dinner. I hear the phone ring and rush in to answer it.
“Hello,” I say, and wait for a reply. “Hello,” I repeat, when no one answers. “Is anyone there?” Still, all I get is silence. I hear breathing but no one speaks. Then the breathing becomes louder, more deliberate.
“Christ,” I mutter into the phone. “Haven’t you little boys got better things to do?” and I hang up, annoyed. I remember when I was a kid, and when my friends and I amused ourselves with prank calls for hours, doubling over with laughter imagining the irritation on the other end of the line. I turn on my answering machine so if they call back they’ll get a recording.
I go back outside to check the barbecue, then return to the kitchen. Earlier, I’d marinated a pan of chicken breasts and wings, and now I take it out of the refrigerator. On the countertop, a miniature egret in basswood spreads its wings, preparing to fly. It is Ian’s latest wood carving, and I love the feel of it, the tension in the outstretched wings suggesting movement. It reminds me of the many times I’ve seen egrets in the Sacramento area—along the marshes, on the river edges, in the delta.
I’m removing the plastic wrap from the pan of chicken when Ian walks in the door—or maybe I should say rushes in. He has such a springy, loping gait, bouncing just a little on the balls of his feet, that he appears to be swooping into the room, taking it over with the forward motion of his body. I gave him his own key several weeks ago, but not because my feelings for him have, overnight, intensified. I am like a drowning woman scrambling for a lifeline: as M. draws me closer to him, I instinctively reach out to Ian, pulling him nearer for my own safety. He comes up behind me and gives me a big hug, his wrestler’s arms thick and strong.
“You smell good,” he says, kissing my neck. He probably smells the shampoo or conditioner from when I washed my hair. I relax against his body, absorbing the warmth of his embrace, accepting the love he offers freely. He has a trunk of a body, solid enough to give support. He just came from the Bee and he’s wearing a blue suit, rumpled in the back and at the knees, and his tie is pulled loose and lies crooked on his chest. He starts to pull away, but I hold on to his arms around my waist.
“Not so fast,” I tell him. “It feels good just to have you hold me.”
Ian obliges, wrapping his arms around me tighter. Sometimes, I feel that if he holds me long enough and tight enough, he’ll make me forget all about M. I wish Franny had had someone to hold her, as I have Ian.
“We’re having chicken tonight?” he asks, looking over my shoulder, loosening his hold.
I let him release me. “Yes,” I say. “And you’re just in time. If you barbecue, I’ll make the salad.”
“Sure,” Ian says, and he slips out of his suit coat, hangs it over a dining room chair, and takes off his tie. He runs his hand through his blond hair, but it immediately falls back into his eyes. He grabs the pan of chicken and a soda from the refrigerator, then goes outside. While I’m cutting up tomatoes and lettuce, I hear him whistling. It makes me smile. He’s such an easy person to be with, so good-natured and almost always pleasant. Other than his occasional bouts of jealousy, there is no dark or mysterious side to him, no hidden psychological games he wants to play. The whistling stops and I hear him talking to the neighbors over the fence, laughing about something. Then his melody resumes, a cheerful tune I don’t recognize.
After a while, he comes back into the kitchen, gets out the brown dishes, then sets the table while I finish the salad. He tells me what he was working on today, a story on an assemblyman who introduced a bill that would allow the people to decide if California should be split into three states. I listen to him, but his world seems so far removed from mine. I find it difficult to generate interest in state politics when my own problems seem so immediate—and I certainly can’t discuss those problems with him. Instead, when he pauses, I tell him about my project on the violence in Sacramento, what I’ve done earlier this morning.
“I can’t seem to get a handle on it,” I tell him. “There was a man who stabbed his wife, beat her with a rock, then ran over her twice with her own car. And another couple, an older woman and a man, were shot, execution-style, during a bar robbery—for no reason; they gave him all the money in the cash register. And a three-year-old girl was killed when two shoplifters, fleeing from the Payless on Fruitridge Road, crashed into the car she was riding in. I just … I don’t know, Ian. I never had this problem before. I have all the information I need, all the facts, but I can’t put it together. I can’t get a story out of it.”
I don’t tell Ian about the desperation and futility that overwhelms me when I’m working on the story. As I sift through the facts—acts of violence against anonymous people—I think of Franny. I apply each statistic to her. Once, I could read these types of articles and remain unaffected; now I take each offense personally, and it’s crippling my ability to write. I don’t tell Ian about the powerlessness that overcomes me when I sit at my computer. I don’t tell him that I see the world through bloodstained lenses. Instead, I put dressing on the salad and divide it into two bowls. I put the bowls on the table.
Ian, who listened quietly while I was speaking, starts to say something but changes his mind. His blue eyes look at me with concern. He goes outside to check on the chicken, and when he comes back in, he tells me it needs a few more minutes. As I uncork a bottle of wine, he puts his hands on my shoulders.
“Honey,” he says gently, and I’m immediately wary, “maybe you shouldn’t work on this story. You need to get away from these morbid thoughts, not concentrate on them. You’re not keeping things in perspective. The crime rate in Sacramento hasn’t changed much over the last couple of years, and it’s not any worse than any other city its size—it just appears so because you’re paying more attention to it since your sister was killed.”
I hand Ian the bottle of wine and two glasses. “Put them on the table,” I say, and I walk out of the room. I know I should listen to him and do as he says, but I can’t. I wish he was more forceful, more adamant, in his request. If he insisted I stop writing the article, if he demanded it, perhaps I would listen. Imperiousness is the only form of authority I seem to follow these days, and Ian—my sweet Ian—has not a single peremptory bone in his body.
During dinner, he is cautious. We keep the conversation light to avoid an argument. I tell him I saw Maisie last Saturday, and that makes him happy—for some time now he’s been harping on me to go out more, to visit my old friends. We get through the chicken and salad and are eating thawed berries with whipped cream for dessert when Ian looks over at me and says, “Oh—I forgot to tell you. I ran into Philip Ellis today.”
“Who?” I say, not recognizing the name.
“You know—the man at Ding How, the biologist, the one you wrote about who was doing research on frogs. Female choice, or something like that. He was walking by the Bee just as I was leaving. We talked for a few minutes, then went out to lunch at Paragary’s. He’s an interesting man; we had an enjoyable time. Next week, we’re going out to the golf course and hit a few balls around. I told him I hadn’t played since college.”
I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I eat the berries, but don’t taste their sweetness. This afternoon, M. mentioned Paragary’s, but not that he had lunch with Ian. And their chance meeting, I’m sure, was not fortuitous. I listen as Ian tells me of their lunch. I wonder, with a sense of foreboding, what M. is planning to do.
Later that evening, I undress in the bathroom. I put on a long-sleeved nightgown so Ian will not see my marks. The earlier tension has worked itself out with the passage of time, and once again we feel comfortable in the other’s presence. I decide to show him Franny’s stories, “Water Rat” and “Franny’s Last Stand,” omitting that I got them from M. I tell Ian I found them in Franny’s computer. Ian reads each story, silently, his eyes watery from withheld tears. Afterward he holds me, saying nothing, knowing words will not help. I feel very close to Ian, and I wonder why I hadn’t shown him the first story earlier.
During the night, I lie in his arms, thinking of Franny, thinking of M. and the training room. When Ian holds me I feel as though I’ve been given a reprieve, several hours of respite to carry me through my next ordeal with M. I’m on safe, familiar ground with Ian. I know what to expect, and can relax in the surety of his saneness. M. takes everything out of me, drains me of all energy like a battery overused. I need Ian for a recharge. He gives me strength so I can take another dose of M.’s seductive madness, so I can travel on the dark side of his soul.
I’m wearing a flowered cotton skirt, a white sleeveless blouse, and sandals—all in deference to M.—not very sexy, but nothing he could criticize me for, either.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask him, referring to his newfound and, I suspect, beguiling friendship with Ian. We are having a late lunch at Baker’s Square, my favorite coffee shop in town. No one is sitting at the tables next to us, although several waitresses, almost finished with the lunch shift, are rushing through their side work—refilling salt and pepper shakers, clearing and setting tables, wiping down the emerald-green booths—so they can go home. I’m just having coffee and soup, but M. ordered a stir-fried chicken and vegetable platter.
“For my amusement,” he replies, as I knew he would. It is one of his favorite responses. He changes the subject. “I’m giving a recital at the Crocker gallery this Sunday. I’d like you to be there.”
I don’t reply, still angry that he contacted Ian.
M. takes several bites of his lunch, then says, “Oh, don’t look so glum. I won’t tell him about us—your secret is safe with me.”
“Nothing is safe with you,” I say. The soup is vegetable, and it tastes homemade. I know there is nothing I can do to prevent M. from seeing Ian, so I decide to salvage what I can. “Do you plan to continue meeting him?” I ask. When he nods, I say, “Then give me something in return.”
“What?” he asks.
“You said you stopped seeing Franny three weeks before she died—tell me about that.”
M. finishes chewing what is in his mouth, then he sets down his fork and looks me in the eye. I see his pulse in the vein at his temple.
“Why?” he says. “Why should I tell you anything?”
I am taken aback by his answer. “For your amusement,” I say. “The same reason as always.”
M. picks up his fork and resumes eating. After a while, he says, “Not today. The subject is boring me. Let’s talk about you.”
Slowly, he chews his food, thinking. He wipes his mouth with a napkin. “I want you to answer my original question, the one I asked the first time we jogged together.” He smiles and says, “Don’t look so bewildered—you know the question I’m talking about. I want to know why you’re distant with men.”
