Inland (19 page)

“Dad, please, just listen! I didn’t hurt him, there was something there, there was something in the w—”

He cuts me off, slamming his palm against the window so hard that I’m afraid it will shatter beneath his hand. His composure vanishes. He beats the window and screams, “GODDAMNIT, CALLIE, STOP IT! THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE WATER!”

He shudders and shakes his head. Breathes in, breathes out. I see his composure return, see the roiling emotions settle again in their place beneath the surface. He keeps his gaze straight ahead. He has gone back to not looking at me, will keep on not looking at me all the way home.

He says, “You’ll need to start packing your things. We’re going back to Laramie just as soon as I can make arrangements. I’ve already called Doctor Frank.”

I open my mouth to speak. Nothing comes out. And for once, it’s not my lungs that betray me; my throat is wide open, my breath coming fast and easy. For once, it’s my mind that has gone silent, stopped by the suffocating glut of incomprehension. My thoughts resolve not into words, but a strangled croak, and I grip the door handle to steady myself.

Laramie.

Where the earth freezes solid in winter, where the only moisture in your skin seeps up through the spots where it cracks in the cold. Where my lungs will seize and crumple in the dust-dry inland desert. Where I will wake up, night after night, in an airless hell that scrapes my throat like sandpaper claws.

Far from the seaboard, far from the sound.

My father keeps his eyes on the road. He lifts his chin, with its three-day stubble, and swallows down the last of his reservations.

He says, “I couldn’t stop your mother from taking her own life. But I’ll be damned—I Will Be Damned—if I let my daughter do the same.”

When he pulls the car to the side of the road, I fling myself onto my hands and knees, straddling the faded white line of the curb, and vomit until there is nothing left.

I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO ALONE.
Day after day in the empty house, staring at a phone that rings only when my father wants to test my promise not to stray beyond the property lines. As if I had anywhere to go, as if anyone wants to see me. I didn’t even argue when he took my cell phone; it’s one less way for people to get at me, to sling their accusations. It makes it easier to pretend that none of it ever happened. The last text message I got was from Jana, only three short words, but each one of them like a knife:
I trusted you.

The first day home, I wrote Nessa a letter, telling her everything. It’s signed and sealed, sitting in my dresser drawer. I should send it, but I can’t. Not yet. As long as she still doesn’t know the truth, somehow it seems less real.

Before, I spent my days in solitude and never knew what I was missing; now, I find myself turning on the television just to hear a human voice. I’d forgotten how time blurs and blends when you’re alone, how the days and dates grow meaningless until you simply stop keeping track. Whether it’s Monday or Thursday or Sunday only matters if you have somewhere to go, someone to see. Schedules are pointless with no one to care whether or not you keep them.

The only appointment I keep now is with the whispering blackness inside my head, and the woman who waits there to meet me. I find her there behind my eyes and follow her down into the dark. I won’t believe that it could be true, the terrible thing he told me. I will not think about the way he looked at me when he said, “You’re just as sick as she was.”

Everyone else has abandoned me; I will not drive her away, too.

Some mornings, I wake up clutching my mother’s book in one hand, Nessa’s necklace in the other, and wonder whether I’ll have to leave the dreams behind when I go. Whether it’s truly just the effect of Dr. Sharp’s miracle drugs that opened the door and let her in, or whether it’s something about this place, this house, the proximity of water. Whether something from the sea has found its way upstream, to us, to me. Whether it will miss me, a week from now, when it searches the dark and finds me gone.

Or whether this, the very thought of it, is just more evidence of the same dark madness they say took hold of my mother, that they say is now blooming inside of me, too.

On the morning I left the hospital, Dr. Sharp had pressed a new bottle of pills into my father’s hand.

“This is slightly higher than the dosage we discussed,” he’d said, in the low tones reserved for the private conversations in public places. He thought I wasn’t listening. “But in light of the family history, I think—”

“Thank you,” my father had said, and took the bottle. Later, when I asked him what they were, he shook his head and said, “It’s not important, just swallow.”

Later still, I hid in bed with my laptop and slowly, quietly typed the name from the bottle into a search field. I scrolled results long enough to read the word a dozen times,
antipsychotic
, then closed the computer and turned off the light. I breathed deep in the safety of the darkness. And then, urged on by that small, strange voice inside that I’ve begun to trust more than my own, I plucked the pill out from under my tongue and crushed it to powder against the wall.

ON THE DAY THAT THE PHONE FINALLY RINGS,
I no longer know what day it is.

The interior of the house is frigid as I cross the kitchen floor, feeling my sweat-slicked skin tighten against the chill. Without Nessa to sabotage the thermostat, my father has kept the air conditioner high and the blinds shut tight, blocking out the view of the river and keeping the humidity locked outside. If he could, I realize, this is how he’d live: in a narrow place with no windows, bathed at all hours in artificial light and air controlled by a digital dial. Everything orderly, everything tamed. The sun has gone down, but nobody comes to answer the ringing phone; he must be still at work, which means that it must be a weekday. As I reach for the handset, I watch my own shadowy reflection in the windows of the den. Tall, broad-shouldered, with wild hair spilling over my shoulders, down my back, brushing the waistband of my shorts.

My heart aches with familiarity.

I’ve seen this body before. It used to hold me close as the tide rushed in, used to plunge feetfirst into the shallows and haul the daysailer ashore, used to whirl around our living room and fall in a breathless, laughing tangle into my father’s lap.

Sometime in the months since we came to the gulf, my mother’s silhouette has become my own.

When the ringing shatters the silence again, I jump and scream.

“Hello?”

“Callie.”

The strength goes out of my knees. I slide down against the counter, clutching the receiver, pressing my cheek to the cool of the wall.

“Ben.”

His name comes out as a sob, and there’s a long silence on the line. I can hear him breathing: fast, shallow, hitching and uneven. I hear him gather himself, hear the small
click
as he swallows hard and steels his nerve. I do the same.

“Are you okay?” he says.

“Are you?”

“Pretty much.”

For a while, that’s all there is. The two of us breathe together in silence as I struggle to find the right words. In the end, he’s the one who speaks first.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and his voice is full of pain. “About the hospital, I heard that my parents—I mean, my mom—”

“It’s okay.”

“It isn’t, though.”

“They thought that I’d hurt you.”

“Yes.”

I take a deep breath, and feel grateful, so grateful, that it glides smoothly in. My body won’t betray me this time, not now.

“Ben, I swear I didn’t.”

I hear him swallow again. And again. And then his voice comes, thick with emotion, dragged down a full octave by regret.

“I know.” He pauses, and then he’s talking fast, the words tumbling and crashing into each other as they spill into the receiver. “Callie, I tried to tell them. I woke up in the hospital, I was confused, everyone wanted to know what happened, and I knew—I know you wouldn’t hurt me, I swear to God, I knew you couldn’t have . . . but I was so confused, they’d pumped me so full of drugs I could barely think straight, and they kept asking and asking, and I just . . . I just . . .”

There’s a strangled sound from somewhere deep in his throat; he coughs and falls silent.

“You told them it was me,” I say. “You told them you saw me, in the water.”

“I . . . because I did. But I don’t know . . .”

He trails off. I swallow, hard.

“Ben?”

“I’m sorry.” He clears his throat. “Callie, I just can’t remember. I’m sorry. I know you wouldn’t hurt me, I know that, but . . . I don’t know what I saw.”

I don’t push him. I won’t. I can feel it, how badly he wants to tell me what I want to hear, and how much he can’t unless he lies. I will not make him lie to me. I will not make him lie for me.

There’s another long pause, another minute ticked off by the glowing green numbers of the clock on the stove.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I hate doing this on the phone. This bullshit, my parents threatening to press charges. I told them I absolutely won’t. I’ll find a way to see you as soon as I can.”

I sigh, and fight back tears. “If that’s what you want, you’d better do it soon.”

“What are you—”

“I didn’t just get expelled. My father is sending me back to Laramie.”

I pause, and then say out loud the thing that I’ve trusted to nobody. The one thing that, until this moment, I’ve left unspoken in the hopes that it will go away.

“My dad says I’m . . . sick. Mentally. He says my mom was, too. He told me . . . he told me she killed herself.”

When he answers, the tenderness in his voice is so heavy, so intense, that for a moment, I don’t understand what he’s saying.

And then I do. I do, and I want to scream.

“Callie,” he says. “She did.”

—

My hands are shaking as I hunt for Nessa’s number, as I jab my finger against the phone’s buttons so fiercely that my nail bends back, snaps off, brittle as a long-dead twig. I’ve never felt anger like this, the kind that spikes out from my center, vibrating down my spine, drawing the blood to my head so fast that my hands and feet begin to buzz and tingle. The article, the one dated ten years ago and on a day I’d spent shivering in the hospital with ointment greased over my sunburned skin, is still open on my laptop screen. Not that I need to look at it. I have already memorized the words. I’ll remember them for the rest of my life.

A massive search failed to recover the body of Maera Morgan, who is now presumed to have left her boat with the intention of drowning herself. Alan Twaddle, her husband, told authorities that his wife had struggled with depression for years but that her condition had worsened in recent months, exacerbated by ongoing family conflicts.

In all the years I’d spent with only the computer for company, all those nights tumbling alone down Internet rabbit holes when I was too sick to sleep, I had never thought to read the news accounts of my mother’s death.

And why would I?
I think, bitterly. I had seen her vanish into the blue. I had heard her cry out over the rush of the waves. I had known, better than anyone, that she called my name, and the sea opened wide, and then the wind blew softly across the glassed water as though she’d never been there at all. It had been over in seconds, but even in that last glimpse, she hadn’t looked like a woman who wanted to die.

But she did. It’s here, right in front of me, and Nessa must have known. They’d been close—too close for her not to know, too close for her never to suspect that my mother had climbed out of the boat meaning never to return.

My mother left me.

And Nessa had lied.

“I’m sorry,” Ben had said, over and over, as I stared slack-jawed at the words on the screen. I barely heard him over the rushing of blood in my ears, the first wave in a tide of rage and hurt. That my father had kept this a secret, I could at least understand. It was like him, to try to shield me, to think that I was better left in the dark. But Nessa, I had always thought I could trust. I thought that when I asked if my mother had chosen her ending, I would get the truth, instead of something dressed up and distorted, just to make it hurt less.

Ben was still stammering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I thought you knew! I thought . . .”

Even to my own ears, my voice was low and lifeless.

“How did you know? How could you know, when I didn’t?”

“I . . . I googled your dad,” he stammered.

Of course you did
, I thought, and the voice in my head sounded like a sneer. Ben, who is interested in everything. Ben, who could never let a subject go unresearched. Ben, whose interest in my father’s history would have drawn a direct line from his eager questions to our family tragedy.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I thought you knew it was suicide. I thought that was why you never talked about it, or about her.”

“How long have you known?”

“Awhile. That first Saturday, at your house, I knew then.”

I sucked in my breath, and my voice turned sharp. “That was months ago. How could you lie to me like this? You never even asked about it!”

He cried, “Jesus, Callie, I was trying to do the right thing! You think that was easy for me? Knowing what happened, and pretending I had no idea? How do you think I felt, sitting there at the beach with you, knowing that the last time you’d even been to the ocean was probably the day your mother drowned herself?!”

“That . . .” I trailed off, suddenly lost in the memory of the water licking at my ankles, my knees. Remembering how it felt to drift there, in the hidden pull of the riptide. I had been thinking of my mother in that moment, and yet, I’d felt no fear at all. “It wasn’t the same.”

“Maybe not to you,” Ben had said. “If it had been me, I’d never want to go near the water again for the rest of my life.”

I said, “You have more in common with my father than you know.”

—

Nessa picks up on the fourth ring. I don’t bother with hellos, I spit the words out hard and fast before she even can finish saying my name.

“When were you going to tell me that my mother committed suicide?”

There’s a sharp intake of breath. In the long pause that follows, I begin to wonder—to hope—that I was wrong. Maybe she has an explanation. Maybe the words aren’t coming because she’s working so hard to choose them. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Finally, she speaks. “Is that what you think?”

At first I wait, thinking she’ll say more. When she doesn’t, the full force of what she has said, no denial, no explanation, my question answered with one of her own, has the impact of a physical blow. My vision swirls and swims, my knees buckle under me.

“How could you keep this from me?” I cry. “After everything we talked about? How could you sit there and not tell me the truth? You lied! You looked me in the eye and told me she didn’t leave, that it wasn’t her choice!”

“Dammit, Callie! Do you think this is easy for me?” she shouts back, and she sounds so much like my father that the next accusation I’d planned to fling at her seizes and dies somewhere in the bottom of my throat.

“You’re not the only one who lost something, you know,” she cries. “I’ve made the best of it, I’ve done my best for you, but do you think this is really what I wanted? We were supposed to be—”

Her voice breaks, she catches her breath, and whimpers, “We were supposed to be together. That was why my father wanted another daughter, so that we’d always have each other, so that it wouldn’t be so goddamn lonely. But it wasn’t enough for her.” She stops. I think she’s stopping for good, but then she laughs, and I hear bitterness seeping into her words, poisonous and thick. “She thought she could have more, that she could control everything if she played it just right . . . but not even Maera could get her way on that one. She tempted fate and it called her bluff, and she was a fool to think it wouldn’t. She actually had the nerve to mock me for the way I lived, telling me that if I just tried harder I could have what she had. The husband, the child. But she was wrong, and it cost her—”

She stops, bites back her words so quickly that I can hear her teeth click together. But not quick enough. The last thing she said hangs in the distance between us, settling in, hideous and heavy with meaning.

“It was because of us?” I ask quietly. “That’s why she wanted to die? Because she married my dad, because she had me?”

There’s a long pause, and I can hear the air hiss through Nessa’s teeth as she takes a long, apologetic breath. The energy is gone from her voice; whatever took hold of her a moment ago has passed and left her shaken, deflated.

There’s a tremor in her words as she says, “Baby, I wish I could comfort you. I wish I could tell you all this in a way that would make sense to you and make it hurt less. But I can’t. You have to make your choices, like I did. Even like your mother did. It’s part of the deal, and no matter what, it hurts. If not you, then someone else.”

Nessa pauses, and breathes in deeply.

“You asked me if your mother, my sister, wanted to die, and the answer is no, she didn’t. But she made a choice about how she would live her life, and yes, she knew that choice might have consequences. She might have wanted to believe otherwise, but she knew. Because that’s how it works, Callie. That’s how it’s always worked, and if there’s a way out . . . well, it’s for you to decide if you want from life what it wants to give to you. I can only tell you to do the best you can with the time you have.”

A white-hot flare of rage explodes somewhere inside me. I cry out, “Are you seriously telling me that same useless crap about destiny again, and thinking it’s going to help? My father says she killed herself. He says so. He says she was crazy. And he says I’m just like her.”

Nessa sighs. “And he wouldn’t be the first man to say that to a woman in this family.”

“Because it’s true?”

“Because it’s easier than the truth. And you know that, even if you don’t know yet that you know it. I’m sorry, Callie,” she says. Her voice breaks in two when she says my name. “I’m sorry. Please, don’t be angry. I have to go, and I don’t want to leave things like this.”

I could ask for more, at this moment. I could demand that Nessa stop speaking in platitudes and give me a direct answer; I could ask myself whether she’s right, whether I know enough not to need one. For a moment, I even feel it, as though if I sit still for one more moment, the truth will crash over me like a wave.

But I am not still. I am not patient. I am angry and sick, abandoned and alone. I have nothing left, nothing but bottles of pills, and broken promises, and a plane ticket that will take me away too soon and forever from the one place in ten years that has felt like home, and nothing Nessa says or does will change it.

I snap back, “Oh, don’t let me keep you. It’s not like you can help me anyway.”

She’s crying hard, now, her words turning to mush. I listen to it, the sound of her blubbering, and feel a jolt of revulsion. I cling to it, grab hold. I reel it in close. In that moment, I hate her.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she sobs. “I’ll send you a letter. Okay? I’ll send you a letter.”