Inland (13 page)

BEN KEEPS APOLOGIZING.
He told me that spring came early this year, even for here, that he hadn’t thought they would swim downriver again so soon. I told him that it was okay, that it doesn’t matter. But on the days I would have gone to see them swim—days that have been given over to the not-unpleasant alternative of rented movies, air-conditioning, and painful burns on both our elbows sustained during frantic make-outs on the living room carpet—I still yearn to see them with a fierceness I can’t explain. I had counted on that familiar comfort: the path through the woods, the thrilling first flash of a pale body in the darkness of the water, their peaceful, oblivious tumbling beneath the surface.

The brush of Ben’s lips as they graze my ear, his palm splayed on the bare, sweating small of my back, are amazing and exciting, but they aren’t the same.

“They might be hanging around one of the beaches or boat basins,” he said, the last time I kissed him good-bye. “Maybe we could go take a look.”

His hopefulness made my heart swell, made me grin stupidly in spite of myself. He is so intent in his search for a solution, wanting to make it right. It’s not that he wants to see the manatees; it’s that he wants to see me see them, wants to see me happy. I kissed him again and took his hand, saying, “Maybe.” But when I think of the coast, the sand, the endless gulf beyond it, something twists in my gut. Something equal parts fear and longing.

We should wait until you’re a stronger swimmer,
Nessa had said. And I had always thought that she’d be the one to take me to the sea. I’d imagined us there, maybe even with my father, too, moving forward as a family to look out at the open water. Confronting it, together. It’s silly, I know—and impossible, now, with Nessa gone back to her beachside bungalow, hundreds of miles away.

But when my phone lit up this morning with his text message, an invitation to go searching for them, I wrote back:
Not today.

—

Today, I sit with Bee on the dock. The manatees have all gone home, but some good things haven’t changed.

“She’s so beautiful,” she whispers, for what feels like the hundredth time, and clutches at my wrist with one small, sticky-fingered hand. The other one holds tight to the present I’ve given her, an oversized picture postcard that I picked up at the museum, already dog-eared at one corner from being loved just a little too hard. I look at Bee’s hands, her fingernails like grimy half-moons, caked underneath with a mix of dirt and glittery lip gloss, and wonder if I shouldn’t have bought more than one. The woman in the picture, her silver fishtail wrapping behind her and over one hip as she combs out a hank of her long auburn hair, seems to be peering at me with an I’m-not-so-sure-about-this expression; unprotected like this, she won’t be beautiful for long.

“You might want to put her in a frame, so she doesn’t get dirty,” I suggest, gently prying up Bee’s fingers and trying not to grimace. She’s so excited, she keeps pinching me. “Or an album, like mine—see?”

She looks over at my lap, where my mother and Nessa stare up from under their protective plastic veil. Frozen in time, in childhood, with their knees being kissed by the surf.

“I’ll be careful,” Bee promises, and gently lays the postcard flat on the dock as though it were made of glass. “I’m just looking at her now. See?”

“That’s good, that’s perfect.” I smile at her, and she grins back.

—

The museum had been a weird, belated rite of passage—the first time I hadn’t brought back a field trip permission slip only to have my father sigh, and squeeze my shoulder, and say, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” Not that I’d blamed him; even then, I’d known he was right, and didn’t want to go, anyway. It wasn’t a good idea, not for me, and not for the hapless teacher in charge who would receive such stern warnings in advance that she’d panic and dial the fire department if I so much as looked like I might cough. But that girl, the one who never visited the caverns or the slot canyons or hopped the yellow school bus to the Capitol to see the state Senate in session, is gone. She would have been startled to see me, the new and improved Callie Morgan, right there with the rest of my history class, blithely turning in a signed slip and clambering onto a shuttle bus alongside Jana and Corey.

She would have been even more shocked when Ben bounded onto the bus past our protesting teacher and kissed me good-bye. Deeply, his hand on my cheek, in front of everyone.

I was still flushed, cheeks hot with surprise and pleasure and embarrassment, as we pulled away. Jana, grinning in the seat across from me, leaned over and whispered, “That boy is smitten with you, my friend. That boy is in
deep smit
!”—and then laughed at her own cleverness for as long as it took the bus to reach the highway.

It had been a beautiful day, too beautiful for anyone to sit still even for the half-hour drive to Tallahassee. By the time we reached the outskirts of the city, a concrete mess of greasy roadside restaurants and storefronts offering check-cashing services, the chorus of teenage screeching and singing and shouting out the windows had reached a fever pitch. Ms. Wilkinson, who had moderated dozens of heated classroom debates without ever breaking a sweat, practically threw a sheaf of study sheets at Corey, yelling, “Hand these out!” By the time we had made our way off the bus and through the museum gates, she was furiously smoking her third cigarette.

“My great-great-great-great-granddaddy is in this exhibit,” Jana remarked as we stepped past the registration desk and into a quiet room, the doorway overhung with a red-and-white banner that read, FLORIDA
IN
THE
CIVIL
WAR.

“Really?” Corey replied.

“Mmm-hmm. He was a general in the Confederate Army. His name was . . .” she trailed off, then muttered, “Well, shit. I can’t remember. I’ll know him when I see him.”

“Aren’t you embarrassed?” Corey needled her. “Being descended from a racist traitor to the Union, and all?”

She rolled her eyes. “If your family had lived in the South back then, you’d be descended from racist traitors, too. It’s just your luck that you get to be descended from filthy carpetbaggers, instead.”

Their good-natured bickering went on, but I’d stopped listening, hanging back. This was still one topic on which I had absolutely nothing to say. My friends at Ballard came from families with old money, but it was their deep roots, their well-mapped histories, that made jealousy sink its ugly needles deep into my gut. They knew exactly where they came from, who they were; they could trace their ancestral trees back six generations. They had grandparents, great-aunts, cousins, sprawling families with stories to tell. I had none of that. My father’s parents, already middle-aged themselves when they’d had their only child, had died before he had made his own late marriage to my mother. My mother’s father, too. There was only Nessa, and she was just as adrift without family connection as I was—only she seemed to neither think nor care about anything but the here and now.

Watching my friends trading stories of great-grandparents and long-lost ancestors, walking past walls hung densely with artifacts, photos, papers that held carefully preserved memories of a bygone era, I felt utterly alone. Not the loneliness of an empty room or a phone that doesn’t ring, but another kind. Something deeper, the sense of having nothing and no one to anchor me in the vast ocean of human history. No foundation to stand on, no stories to tell. It was as though I’d suddenly turned in time, peering over my shoulder to see where I’d come from, and found nothing but yawning blackness behind.

—

When Jana spotted her sought-after ancestor on the wall and her delighted shout rang out in the room—“There you are, you old bastard!” she’d cried, loud enough to make heads turn from twenty yards away—I’d quietly slipped out the door, found another room, and finished my note-taking alone.

Corey had found me in the gift shop an hour later, staring at the art print postcard of Waterhouse’s mermaid.

“Hey, you okay?” he asked. “We turned around a while back and you just weren’t there.”

“You guys were having a conversation I couldn’t participate in.” My voice was snappish, louder than I meant it to be, and Corey’s slender eyebrows rose up in alarm. I put a thumb and forefinger to my temples, and sighed. “Sorry, that came out wrong. Are you guys done?”

“Yeah. The bus doesn’t leave for a while yet; I think we’re headed to Publix for food.” He hesitated. “Do you want to come?”

I plucked the postcard from its display, and nodded. “Let me just pay for this.”

He peered over my shoulder as the cashier rang me up.

“Huh. Is it for you?”

“The little girl who lives next door. She’s got a thing for mermaids.”

Corey grimaced, and I laughed.

“What? You’re not a fan?”

“No, I was just remembering this thing Mr. Strong said last year about where those stories come from.”

“What?”

“He said that most guys would rather claim they were seduced by a beautiful half human, half fish than admit that they got drunk and tried to have sex with a manatee.”

I’d laughed, and he did, too. And when we found our way out to where Jana was waiting, I tried to leave the emptiness behind.

—

But now, with the album of photos open in front of me, with Bee chattering on by my side as she gazes at her postcard, I feel it creeping in again. Even the pictures—of my grandfather in his naval uniform, of my mother as a teenager with gangly limbs and wild hair—feel like faded, tattered mementos in an empty house that’s crumbled from neglect. I don’t know what they meant to my family; with no one left who cares to tell their stories, I can never know. I turn the page, gaze into the eyes of people who refuse to look back at me. My parents have eyes only for each other, laughing on the first day of their lives as husband and wife. No matter how many times I peer at the shot of Lee, holding hands with the two little girls that my mother and Nessa had been, her face remains turned away.

I turn another page.

And suddenly, I see her.

It’s a picture I’ve skimmed past a hundred times, dismissing it as uninteresting when there were other ones, better ones to look at. The woman in it—a woman I always assumed was my mother, too close up and slightly out of focus, with a paperback book in her hands—peers into the camera from under the hand that she’s pushed deep into her hair.

But it isn’t my mother. It isn’t.

There are silver strands in this woman’s hair, and age lines etched deep into her forehead, marks of age that Maera Morgan never lived long enough to earn. It’s Lee’s deep-set, almond-shaped eyes that are staring back at me, bright blue and piercing. And when I gently pull the photograph from its sleeve, it tells me as much. On the back, lightly scrawled in handwriting I don’t recognize, is an inscription:

Lee Morgan Deering, 1999, Beardstown.

IT TOOK A HUNDRED FLIPS
through the photo album before I found the photo of Lee, peering over a paperback in someone’s kitchen, a moment captured, almost twenty years ago in a town I’d never heard of.

It takes less than a minute to find her in Illinois, staring out from the website of the
Cass County Star Gazette
. I’m sure it’s her, even with only the two photos to go on, even though there’s only the barest echo in her face of the young woman in my pictures who stood on the North Carolina shore and turned away just as the camera clicked. Her wild hair has gone completely gray, and the years have not been kind. She looks old, so much older than the fifty-something I’ve calculated she must be. Time has sunken her cheeks, sagged her jawline, taken the fullness from her face and lips. She sits at a table, her expression steely and grim between the smiling people on either side, gazing out at me from beneath a headline that reads,
Fellow teachers bid a fond farewell to Alethea Morgan Deering
.

The small article about her retirement is dated last year. I have time to read it and wonder why she quit so early, before I look again and see the oxygen line snaking under the woman’s nose. It’s not only time that’s put the hollows in her cheeks or the bruised-looking circles beneath her eyes. Alethea Deering is sick. The kind of sick that steals your life away piece by piece, until there’s nothing left but you, and a quiet room, and the sound of your rattling breaths, while you wait to take your last one.

But there’s no obituary. And there’s only one white pages listing for someone named Deering in Beardstown.

I don’t stop to think.

The phone rings, rings, rings—endlessly, six times and then seven, until I’m about to give up. And then, midring, it stops. I hear a clatter, a muffled cough, the scrape of something against the receiver.

I clear my throat.

“Hello? May I speak to Mrs. Deering?”

Even in the perfect, crisp space of our connection, the voice that replies sounds like something crawling out from the bottom of an ash pit. It’s frictive, painful, scraping like metal on concrete.

“Who is this?”

“My name is Callie,” I say, and then, cautiously: “Alethea? Lee?”

But I don’t have to ask; I know it’s her. I knew it from the first rattle of ragged breath in the receiver. The hairs have risen up on the back of my neck; my skin is prickling. I clear my throat; on the other end of the line, Lee does the same.

“I’m calling from Florida,” I say. “I found your number on the Internet—”

The gravelly voice rasps impatiently, “Who are you? What are you selling?”

She’s going to hang up on me. I forget about being polite or cautious; I rush to get the words out, babbling, “I’m sorry, it’s just, my name is Callie Morgan. My grandfather was Douglas Morgan, my mother was Maera. We’re cousins. I mean, you were my grandfather’s cousin.”

There’s a long silence, so long that I’m about to check to see if we’ve somehow been disconnected, and then she replies in a voice so cold that it sends chills down my spine.

“I haven’t heard those names in quite a while.”

I don’t have time to reply before she launches into another long, rattling spell of coughing. When it ends, she sighs and in the same icy tone, says, “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m not well, and you surprised me.” She pauses. “And how’s your mother?”

It takes me a moment to find my voice.

“She’s . . . she’s dead,” I reply. “Almost ten years.”

There’s that same eerie silence on the other end, and I find myself thinking, suddenly,
But you knew that. You just wanted to hear me say it.

I don’t know how I know. I’ve also never been more sure of anything in my life.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” says Lee, but her voice is still so cold, so strange. “But I don’t know what you think I can do for you.”

“I don’t know, either,” I reply, and kick myself as I realize how true it is; I dialed without thinking, intruded into this woman’s life without ever stopping to ask myself what I wanted from her, without ever wondering how she’d feel to answer the phone and find me on the other end. It never occurred to me that I might be someone she wouldn’t want to hear from.

Her voice cuts through the silence again. “Well then, Callie, as interesting as this has been—”

“Wait!” I cry, knowing that whatever comes out next will sound pathetic, and deciding that I don’t care. “Wait, listen, I have a picture of you. You and my mom, and my aunt, Nessa. I’ve always wondered about you. About everyone. I don’t know anything about my family or where my mother came from. She died before she could tell me. And when I realized that you were still alive, I was hoping you might—”

Lee snorts, cutting me off in a voice that’s shockingly sharp.

“And why should I tell you anything?”

I open my mouth to reply, but all that comes out is a weak-sounding
Uhh.
I’m beginning to wonder whether there’s a good reason why her name had been buried so deeply in my mother’s past that it took more than ten years to surface. Why Nessa had clammed up when I pressed for details, dismissing Lee’s mistakes as “nothing sordid” but refusing to tell me what they were. I wonder, with unease, just what kind of person Alethea Morgan Deering truly is.

She’s still waiting for her answer. I stammer, “I don’t know. I just thought maybe you could . . .” I trail off again, hopelessly lost, hearing the desperation in my voice and hating it.

But the breath coming through the receiver has softened, just a little. There’s a sigh, and I hear the creak of a chair as she settles into it, and when she speaks again the hostility has gone from her voice.

“Nessa,” she says. “You mentioned Nessa. I guess she’d be in her thirties, now, assuming she’s still around.”

“Yes.” I sense she wants more, and add, “She lives in California. She teaches surfing.”

“Married?”

“No.”

“Ah,” she replies, and I think how strange it is that a single syllable can convey both scornful approval and an utter lack of surprise at once. I wait, letting the silence stretch out, until Lee sighs again.

“I’d like to tell you something. Before you say anything else. Just a little story, but it’s something I think about sometimes. On the subject of family history. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

“There was a young woman, a friend of mine, worked in the office at the high school. Michelle. Probably a lot like you. A little older, of course, but a smart girl, curious about things. She was one of those know-thyself types, always meditating and reading those self-help books about parachute colors, personality types, and whatnot. You know the kind, I suppose.”

She pauses, as though expecting a reply. I murmur a yes while she clears her throat again.

“Well,” Lee says, “a few years ago, she reads an article about that gene, the one they can test for, the one that gives you breast cancer. Amazing, really, the things they can do with medicine these days. Anyway, she decides she wants the test, seeing as she knows it runs in her family. And next thing anybody knows, she’s got a positive result back and she’s getting preventative surgery. Just cuts ’em right off, a double mastectomy at thirty years old. And can you guess what happens?”

“No,” I say, although something in her voice makes me think that yes, I can. I can guess. I think I already have.

Lee chuckles, a low, mirthless sound. “She gets breast cancer. She gets breast cancer in the breasts she doesn’t even have anymore, if you can believe that.” She pauses. “What I wonder is, did it do her any good to know? Did she change a damn thing for the better? Or did it just give her some false hope, some stupid idea that she could control what couldn’t be controlled?”

“I . . . I don’t know.”

“Well, neither do I,” she says. “And we can’t ask her, for reasons you can probably guess. But I wonder about it. And I also wonder whether it all would have happened the same, if she hadn’t known. I wonder if she would still have gotten that cancer, if she’d never taken the test to begin with.” She pauses to cough again; I cringe at how familiar the sound is. My own throat feels close and dry. “Point is, I never met anyone who was better off for sniffing out all the answers. Not my friend, God rest her. Not me. Not any woman in this family, that’s for damn sure. The more you know what’s coming, the more you think there’s something you can do to change it.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing; she sounds like Nessa, babbling about destiny, only harsh and bitter where Nessa is patient and easy. And where Nessa might be prone to New Agey magical thinking, Lee sounds like her grip on reality is shaky at best.

“Look, I think we’re having a misunderstanding,” I say, exasperated. “I’m not asking you to tell me my future, I just want to know a little bit about who my ancestors were. I don’t see the harm in that. Just anything you might know about my grandfather and his parents, where they were from, what they did.”

Lee hesitates.

“That’s it?” She sounds incredulous. “That’s what you want to know?”

“That’s all, I swear.”

Her voice is still cautious, but she says, “All right.” I hear her settle deeper in her chair, and her voice turns more businesslike. “I won’t be able to tell you much. Your grandfather was my cousin—his father was my uncle. He married late, and it didn’t last. I guess you know that part.”

“A little. I know he was in the Navy.”

“Yes, a Navy man. Lots of those in the family.” She chuckles. “You probably have quite a few more long-lost cousins out there, the way the men in our family go port to port. Sowing their wild oats, if you get my meaning.”

This time it’s my turn to cough as I fidget and feel my face turn red. My grandfather died before I was born, but I still don’t like the idea of him “sowing” a bunch of women during his time in the service. If Lee notices my discomfort, she doesn’t say so; she’s already moved on.

“His parents, I never knew. His father, my uncle Ethan, died in the Korean War before I was born, very young. Also a Navy man. They all lived in Norfolk back then. Before that, the family was in Wellfleet. New England. They were in the fishing business, and very successful. That was where it started, as far as I know.”

“You mean, where the family started?”

There’s a long pause on the line.

“That’s all I know,” she says, finally, in a way that makes it clear that I ought not to ask any questions.

“That’s great,” I say quickly. “Thank you.”

—

It’s not great, of course. It’s a pittance of information—but still, I think, a hundred times more than what I had when I called. It’s a place to start. In my mind, I trace backward through this new knowledge of my family tree. Stopping briefly in the Pacific Northwest, just long enough to remember the way the horizon looked from our living room windows, then eastward in a great, sailing leap to Virginia, and up the coast to Long Island. To a place I’d never been, cold and raw in the winter, where my family’s shuttered fishing boats would have bobbed in a biting gray sea.

“We live on the coast,” I blurt. And somewhere, a small, answering voice whispers,
Of course
. Isn’t this what Nessa has always told me? That our family hears the call of the ocean, always has, always will. That we live scattered up and down the coasts of half a dozen countries, connected by the seas that stretch between us, listening to a song that only we can hear.

The hardness comes back to Lee’s voice.

“Not
all
of us,” is the reply, each word bitten off hard at the end. “Me, I’ve been in Cass County twenty years, and I’ll be damned glad if I never see the ocean again.”

I don’t know why it should feel like a slap in the face, but it does. It’s as though the taut, shimmering line I’d been drawing up and down the world’s coasts, the spiderweb that linked me back through time to a family I’d never known, had gone suddenly dull and slack in my hand. When I answer, my voice sounds wounded.

“Nessa told me you lived on an island. She said you were very glamorous.”

“Did she?” she says, and chuckles darkly. “That was a long time ago. I left twenty years ago when my husband died, and I’ll be glad never to go back again. Not that I could, anymore. I’m not well.”

I don’t have to ask what she means; her ragged voice and wheezing breath in the receiver, the glint of the oxygen tube in the photo are answer enough. I know these things; I know how they mark a life full of lost time and loneliness. Instead, I say, “I didn’t know you were married.”

“I wasn’t married for very long,” she replies, and I shudder. Her voice is positively grim.

“I’m sorry.”

She sighs.

“No point in being sorry. What’s done is done. I made my choices. Coming here with my boy, that was just the last of them.”

“Your boy?”

“He’ll always be my boy,” she says, and I can hear the swell of pride in her voice. “He’s all I have. He’s a man now, of course. Lives just across town with his wife. They’ve got a baby now, a boy, thank God.”

“That’s nice,” I say, although an impertinent part of me wants to ask her what’s so bad about girls. But I don’t. I want to end this call. I want to take what Lee has told me, this handful of raw materials, and plug it into a search engine. With luck, I’ll shake something else loose from our family tree.

But Lee isn’t finished.

“You know, I remember when your mother got married. She called me up then, a lot like you have. Asking questions, looking for answers.”

That gets my attention.

“My mother? She did?”

Lee erupts in a fit of coughing that goes on for ten seconds, then twenty. When she speaks again, the warmth in her voice has disappeared, as though she hacked up and spit out her sympathies along with whatever was clogging her lungs.

“Yes,” she says bitterly. “She did, for all the good it did her. She didn’t like what I had to say, and clearly, she didn’t heed it. But I’ll tell you what, young lady: everything costs, and somebody else is fixing the prices. I told your mother that. I told her there’s no negotiating. You get your time, and then your time comes, and that’s that. Ask for more, and you’ll wish you hadn’t. And do you know what she said?”