Inland (14 page)

I don’t reply, and Lee doesn’t wait for me to answer.

“She said, ‘I’m not going to make your mistakes.’ That’s what she called it, a mistake. Oh, your mother always thought she was smart that way. Thought she was tricky. Only I’m still here, and Maera’s gone, and she’s left behind a daughter as ignorant as her mother was greedy. You really don’t have the slightest idea, do you, girl? Nobody’s told you a damn thing, have they?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I say desperately. And I am desperate, aching, to understand what my mother did to make her so very angry. To know the woman I lost, even if it has to be like this, through memories tainted by bitterness. “Can’t you tell me? What did my mother want? What was she trying to do? I don’t understand.”

She sighs, and hesitates.

And I don’t know why she says it—whether it’s to hurt me, or to help me, or maybe both at once—but the darkness in her voice sends chills down the length of my spine. I’ll still hear it long after I’ve hung up, a rasping whisper that won’t stop echoing back through my mind.

Because when I say “I don’t understand,” Lee laughs again.

And replies, “Oh, don’t worry. You will.”

I AM IN THE WATER.

Back and forth in the eight-lane pool, back and forth under the sweeping, silent watch of the lifeguard. Alone, where everything is blue and muted and the only thing that matters is the repetitive rise and fall of my stroking arms, the endless in-out of air in my lungs. I can forget everything down here, drown everything, but especially that rasping echo of Alethea Deering’s strange good-bye. The water blunts the memory, takes away its teeth.

Even my father says that it was nothing, only the delusional rantings of an unhappy old woman who was clearly just trying to upset me.

—

His words had been a surprise, unexpectedly comforting. I hadn’t even meant to tell him; I’d only pushed the album across the dinner table and asked, as casually as I could, whether he’d ever met the woman in the pictures.

“Oh,” he’d said, recognition instantly crossing his face as he looked at the faded photo. “That’s Lee. She was your mother’s first cousin, once removed.”

“You knew her?”

He shook his head. “No. I never met her. I remember her, though, or remember hearing about her. Your mother had asked her to come to our wedding, but she wouldn’t.” He squinted at the recollection. “She was awful about it, actually. Really cruel. Maera was so upset, although she tried not to show it. She said she should have known better than to ask.”

“Ask what?” I said as Lee’s voice echoed back in my head, whispering,
She didn’t like what I had to say
. Had this been the source of their argument? A wedding invitation?

My father looked at me, hesitating, then said, “Ask her to attend a seaside wedding. Lee’s husband had been killed about ten years before your mother and I got married. It was just one of those terrible things. He drowned, along with her little boy.”

I was too surprised to stop myself.

“But her son lives across town from her, with his wife,” I blurted, and my father’s eyebrows shot up as I realized I’d given myself away.

“She had twins,” he said, evenly. “One survived. Now, how did you know that?”

“Uh,” I said. “Um. It’s just that the reason I was asking is that I talked to her today.”

I told him the story, trying to reassure myself as I did that I’d done nothing wrong. People researched family histories all the time, it wasn’t so strange, was it?

But I was still floored when he just nodded, and grimaced, saying, “I’m sorry, Callie. I wish you’d told me. I could have told you that Lee probably wouldn’t be happy to hear from you. But still, scaring you like that . . .” He frowned. “I should really speak with her.”

“No!” I cried out automatically, and then took a deep breath. “Dad, don’t. Please. I’m fine, really. If you call, she’ll just flip out again.”

He looked at me a moment longer, and finally shrugged.

“All right. If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” I paused. I still wanted—needed—to know the rest of Lee’s story, to understand how just hearing from me could make her so bitter, so angry. “You were telling me what happened to Lee.”

My father shook his head. “I don’t know anything more than what your mother told me. It would have just been one of those freak accidents. A sleeper wave, they call it. They were all on the beach together, just sitting there, and all of a sudden an enormous wave rolled in and carried them all out to sea. The boys were just infants, less than a year old. Lee managed to save one of them, but the other . . .” He stopped and shuddered. His eyes looked wet, and I realized with a pang who he must be thinking of, and how easy it had been for a moment to think of this as the sort of thing that happened to other people. Even after everything. Even though we both knew better.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forget it,” I said. But my father just smiled sadly, and shook his head.

“Even I can’t imagine what that must have been like,” he said. “Not just to lose her husband and her child, but to be there when it happened. To have to choose which one to save. Something like that, it changes you. Not for the better.”

I swallowed and nodded, and he patted my shoulder.

—

And I tell myself that my father was right: this woman, whoever she once was to my mother, has become someone else. I tell myself that Nessa was right, too: that Auntie Lee, the one who stood on the shore with her cousins and turned her face to the sea, isn’t around anymore. She disappeared beneath the waves just as surely as her husband and her child, and a brittle, rasping shell of the person she was walked out of the sea in her place.

If I repeat the words for twenty laps, maybe I’ll start to believe them.

I surface for breath and dive down again, finding my rhythm in the water. I push myself to move faster. I imagine Nessa waiting for me at the shallow end, calling out encouragement; I imagine that if I just keep kicking, breathing, pulling, I’ll feel her touch my shoulder to tell me I’ve arrived.

But she doesn’t. Instead, the hand that reaches down and draws me to the surface is larger, stronger, attached to an arm that feels like sandpaper where the hair has been shaved away.

“Sorry,” Eric says as I sputter and swat at my burning eyes. “You okay? You looked like you were about to hit the wall. You were really cruising,” he adds, grinning.

I nod wearily and mumble a thank-you.

“Give you a hand?” he asks, and then doesn’t wait for an answer before saying, “Up you go!” grasping my wrist, and hauling me up to sit on the coping. Even with water still lingering in my ears and dampening every sound, I can hear the indignant gasp from across the room, the muttering of voices. When I turn around, two dozen eyes bore into me. I lost track of time in the water, enough for the swim team to have filtered in unnoticed while I made my way from shallow to deep end and back again. Their impassive faces over their red uniform swimsuits are all turned my way, and Meredith Hartman still has her mouth open, her hands on her hips. Next to her, a girl I don’t know titters and then whispers,
“Who does she think she is?”
loud enough that the words rocket off the tile walls and echo in my ears. The easy familiarity, the way he reached down to pull me up, the smile. They all think they know what it means. I feel a flare of anger.

“Thanks,” I say, looking up at him, studiously ignoring the girls’ stares. “See ya.”

—

Moments later, the door to the locker room slams open behind me hard enough to send a tremor through the floor. I’ve only just managed to pull my underwear on before her voice purrs icily in my ear.

“Would you mind telling me just what the fuck you think you’re doing?” Meredith says.

I swallow, hard, and turn to meet her glare, realizing as I do that I have to look down to do it. I’m taller by half a foot, broader in the shoulders and everywhere else, but she doesn’t seem to care; her eyes are bright green and blazing, the skin around them pulled taut with anger. Behind her, two other girls in red team suits stand with their arms crossed and lips pressed together, identical in pissed-off support.

“I’m not doing anything,” I stammer, and she takes a step forward.

“You,” she says, clipping her words so sharply that I can barely hear the long Southern vowels in her voice, “are flirting. With my boyfriend. You have been flirting with my boyfriend ever since you got here. We’ve all been watching you do it.”

My eyes widen in protest. “That’s ridiculous—”

“We’ve been watching,” she snaps, “and we’ve been waiting for you to realize that what you’re doing is
rude
and
wrong
.”

She looks over her shoulder long enough for the red-suited pair to nod their heads in agreement, then turns back.

“But since that’s obviously not happening, and you apparently think you can throw yourself at every guy in the school, I’m just letting you know . . .”

She takes another step in until I can actually feel her body heat on my puckering skin, close enough that I can see that there’s no makeup on the tawny expanse of her unblemished forehead, close enough that I can smell her perfume and that my brain can supply the involuntary, idiotic observation that it smells really good. I wonder how this girl could ever be jealous of me. I wonder if, now that she’s close enough to see the brief splash of old acne scars on my cheeks and the bloody crack where my chapped upper lip has begun peeling open, she’ll realize what a threat I’m not—could never be—and simply leave without finishing her sentence.

But if she sees these things, she doesn’t care. Her index finger, with its manicured nail, rises up to punctuate her threat with invisible periods.

“Eric,” she says, “is mine. So stay. Away.”

I haven’t moved when the door closes behind her, I stay rooted to the spot until I hear the sound of the coach’s whistle signal the start of warm-up laps.

But something changes.

—

Something has already changed, is happening right now. The rush of blood grows louder in my ears. My heart doesn’t so much beat as thrash, pounding for escape against the wall of my chest. I’m crossing the room, dressed in clothes I don’t remember putting on, passing through the corridor and through the door to the pool and brushing wordlessly past the place where Jana has been waiting, as she throws up her hands and says, “There you are!”

Meredith whirls when I tap her on the shoulder. She says something, maybe; I see her mouth moving, I sense the brassy buzz of Jana’s snappy retort behind me without hearing the words. The rushing in my ears soars and crashes, like hundreds of tons of water on rocks, and then I hear the voice. It’s mine and yet not mine, ice-cold, the words spilling from my mouth as fast as they take shape in my mind. My tongue is flooded with the taste of copper, of salt, of rage and power.

“You stupid girl,”
I hiss. The sound is harsh, ancient, vicious. It is the voice of something with claws, teeth, sightless eyes like clouded milk that see nothing and everything all at once. It grates and spits in a way I never have, not even when I could barely speak without coughing and woke up gasping for air in the inland night. I want to shut my mouth on it, but I can’t stop, it pours forth like acid and echoes back, back, back off the tiled walls.

“You’re nothing. He’s nothing. Your shallow, impermanent life means less than nothing. And when you’re gone, and it will be soon, nobody will even remember that you were here.”

And then it’s gone. Disappearing back into the void that it came from, taking all the air in the room with it. Meredith shrieks, “Let go, you crazy bitch!” and wrenches away; my fingers, curled like claws, fall away from her shoulder, leaving long lines of red behind. Vaguely, I hear the sound of clamoring voices, rising up around me, as I wheel and fall to my knees. The water on the floor bleeds into my jeans; the tile is cold against my temple. There are shimmering arcs cutting through my vision, dark spots throbbing and blooming in my unfocused eyes. My pulse is fluttering like a trapped and dying animal in my throat.

“Jana,” I croak, but no sound comes out, and I hear her answering scream over mine, “Oh my God, get somebody! She’s turning blue!” as a dozen bare feet pound away sideways through the arbitrary place where my pupils are pointing. Pain breaks in spiderweb shatters over my chest. There is no air. There is no time.

But the last thought that the touches my consciousness, as I slip down into the dark, isn’t about the crushing weight inside of me or the circle of frightened faces staring down. It’s that I was right. Meredith Hartman shouldn’t be jealous of me.

She should be terrified.

MR. STRONG IS EYEING ME SUSPICIOUSLY.

“Morgan?” he says. Beyond him, the eyes of the class stay determinedly fixed on their midterm tests—twenty heads bowed in a portrait of concentration, twenty necks resisting the urge to twitch just enough to witness the return of Crazy Callie Morgan, who “had some sort of psychotic seizure” and “said you-wouldn’t-believe-what to Meredith Hartman,” before collapsing in a twitching pile on the floor of the natatorium. Only Ben, sitting still and unsmiling at the back of the room, has risked lifting his head to look at me, and I wish he hadn’t.

Because this part, I know. I know it by heart. I clench my teeth together, thinking that this day will be a success if I can just make it to the bathroom before my throat starts closing and the world begins to spin, if I can just make it home without collapsing. I wait for the disapproval, the sidelong glances, the silent stares. I wait for the disappointment in Mr. Strong’s voice as he quietly shifts my name from the mental drawer marked “Star Students” to the one at the back, marked “Freaks and Fuckups.”

Only that doesn’t happen. Instead, my teacher smiles, reaches out, and tugs gently on my ponytail.

“Welcome back, kid,” he says quietly. “It’s good to see you.”

At the back of the room, just as he did on the very first day, Ben lifts a hand and grins. And though I feel eyes on me, though I hear whispers falling in behind me as I pass, the air ahead stays clear. Nobody sticks out a foot to trip me; nobody glares or gestures. I take a deep breath, feeling my rib cage expand, wincing only a little at the soreness there. When I sit down, he swipes my backpack beneath the table with his foot and pulls out my chair with a smile. He leans in, slips an arm around my waist.

He presses his lips to my temple, and though two dozen pairs of eyes are fixed on him, he only looks at me.

“Hey,” he whispers, “do you need some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”

—

They say it’s no big deal. That it could happen to anyone. That it’ll all be forgotten, that it already has been. Later, with the sun high in the sky and beating down on the sizzling courtyard, I lean against the wall while five concerned voices clamor to assure me that everything is fine.

“Are you sure you should be out in this heat?” asks Ben. He won’t stop hovering, and I close my eyes irritably and nod, turning my face skyward. After a week in the dry, cold hospital and the drier, colder bedroom waiting for me at home, I need this. My whole body is slick with scentless sweat that dampens my cotton shirt, the waistband of my shorts. I’ve been waking up like this every day since the last attack, but Dr. Sharp says that it’s nothing new. That night sweats are another side effect of the chemical cocktail he’s mixed to fix my body, that if I want to be well then I’ll have to be tolerant. I make noises of agreement and don’t tell him the truth: that the sweat doesn’t bother me, that I like the feel of air traveling the length my clammy arms, kissing its way under my collar and down the curve of my spine. The flaking dryness and rough, raised rashy patches that used to make up the landscape of my body have disappeared, replaced by skin as supple and pale and dewy as a salamander’s belly.

When the moist air of the Florida morning moves over me, it feels like my body is breathing. The sunshine is fierce, a physical force against my eyelids, knocking there as though daring me to open them and look directly into it.

“You were gone for a week,” Shanika says, her brows knitting together. “I just can’t believe you didn’t tell us you had this . . .” She gestures, searches, and then gives up on finding a word. She glares at Ben, too. He knew what they didn’t, but he kept my confidence, leaving them all in the dark.

“Sorry,” I say, but my voice is hard. I look at the faces looking back at me, their wondering, wounded stares, I think,
But I’m not. Not really
.
And neither are you.
The way they’re looking at me now, like something breakable and to be handled with care, is all the reason I needed not to tell.

There’s an uncomfortable pause before Jana breaks in.

“All right,” she says loudly. “So there’s good news, and there’s bad news. The bad news is, a certain someone—I don’t think you need me to tell you who—is telling pretty much anyone who’ll listen that you’re a psychotic man-eating whore who’s trying to murder her and steal her boyfriend.”

The answering laughter is weak, but it’s there. She gives the group an approving nod, then continues, “But the good news is, the boyfriend in question told this certain someone that she’s crazy, and you didn’t do anything, and she needs to chill out and stop being a jealous asshole. And because Eric Keller is a golden god of high school hotness, what he says, goes. And actually”—She pauses long enough to throw an
I’m sorry
look at Ben—“actually, Callie, he’s been really worried about you. He asks me every day how you’re doing and if I’ve talked to you.”

Ben rolls his eyes at her and shrugs, but puts a hand on my knee under the table. I wince—it’s too hot, his palm feels like fire on my skin—but cover his hand with mine anyway. I’ve been watching him struggling with the urge to touch me since the moment I stepped into bio class. I’ve been watching him the way they’re all watching me: like something curious and other, something they’ve never seen before. It’s been a week, only a week, but despite their insistence that everything’s fine, none of this feels familiar. None of it feels the same.

“And anyway,” Jana is saying, “the point is, it’s no big thing. Okay? Half the kids in this school are on medication for anxiety or whatever. Everyone has panic attacks. So you having one, that’s no big deal. Especially when, you know, you just happened to call Meredith Hartman insignificant and shallow before passing out cold and being taken away in a motherfucking ambulance
like a hero
, okay?”

Around the table, people are grinning nervously and tittering. The laughter is genuine now, growing in strength. Ben shoots me an encouraging look; Jana nods eagerly.

“Okay?” she says, again.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

And they believe it. They believe it because they want to. My friends, who are determined to pretend that nothing happened—or that, if something did, it was funny and forgettable in the same way as any high school embarrassment. My father, who chalks the whole thing up to stress and anxiety over Nessa’s departure and only spends a handful of days hovering over me like a worried hummingbird before cautiously resuming a life of late nights and distracted dinners; resisting the urge to infantilize me on the advice, I imagine, of Dr. Belcher. Even Dr. Sharp scowled at the fluid he drained from my lungs but allowed me to go home after only a day, admonishing me to avoid stress and cutting off my questions with curt dismissiveness.

“Of course your voice sounded strange,” he’d said, stabbing at my chart with the gleaming tip of his pen. “You very nearly needed a tracheotomy, for God’s sake. Frankly, I’m amazed you could manage to speak at all.”

And though the echo of what happened isn’t entirely gone—people peering at me strangely across classrooms, a boy I don’t know giving me a look of spooked recognition as he passes me in the hall, Kimberly Dunn cornering me in the bathroom and whispering, “I think you’re really brave,” before banging hurriedly out the door—it grows fainter, and fainter still, until the space immediately surrounding my life is as placid and quiet as it ever was. Even if things aren’t entirely the same; even though I had to surgically clip away the piece of Meredith Hartman’s favorite cinnamon-flavored gum that I found mashed into the frayed ends of my ponytail on my first day back at school. In the end, I’d rather be a freak, be feared and hated, than go back to being the sick girl. To being nobody at all.

“Back to normal,” is what everyone keeps telling me. “Now, you can get back to normal.”

As though normal was just behind me, waiting for my return. As if I could just find my way back to a place that I had only barely ever touched to begin with.

But life is like a song that I’ve forgotten the words to; I am out of sync, out of step. The feeling I once had, of slipping effortlessly into a life made just for me, I can’t get it back. I don’t even know if I want it. Instead, I lie awake at night with the uneasy sense that this place, these people, this life, are perfect . . . for some other girl. It has all slipped right through my fingers. A barrier has come down in between me and it; I feel it shimmering there, invisible, impermeable. I press against it, but cannot break through.

They say nothing has changed, but it has. I have. There is an awareness growing in me now, buried deep, dormant, but I know it’s there. I will never forget the feel of it digging in, taking root, something dark and hard and strong. That day at the pool, an ocean opened at my center, black and glittering, wide and infinite and full of rage. It rattled my vocal cords with rasping threats until I gagged and crumpled, but in that moment before I sagged to the floor, I had never felt so powerful.

I’m afraid it will happen again.

I’m afraid that I want it to.

And if it does, no one will herald me as a hero then.

Not if,
something whispers inside of me.
When.