Surfacing (17 page)

“Oh, my goodness, Don, look. Look at Leah,” my mother said
.

My dad put down the camera. He put his arm around my mom, and they both stood there, thinking I was so cute — but I don’t remember ever hurting as much as I did right at that moment
.

Where were you, Dad? It was a Saturday. Where were you?

What was the truth?

Maggie stood looking at her father. The truth was her dad wasn’t there because he had moved out three weeks before. They had separated. It was Saturday, and their mom was trying to get her errands done before she had to go to work. She left them in the house alone, and all they had to do was stay inside.

“Maggie, it’s going to be all right. You’re going to be all right,” he said. “We both love you. That will never change.”

What was the truth? Was it the memory? If you don’t take a movie of it, a video, a photo — if it isn’t recorded — is it then forever lost to interpretation, to human error? And what if you had? What if you could see a movie? Would that make it any more truthful?

When Maggie closed her eyes, she could see her sister under the water, looking up, pleading. What was she trying to say?

“I
was
there, Daddy.”

The truth is not a single thing, word, event. Memory is more ephemeral than time. It is, by definition, only as valid as its intention — which isn’t saying very much at all. And that was the moment Mrs. Paris decided to walk into the room.

“What do you mean, Maggie?” she asked.

Maggie didn’t answer. She thought she could still smell Matthew on her clothing. She remembered how lonely, how lost, she’d felt when he thrust up against her and how badly she had longed to be with Nathan then. Right now, knowing she had ruined it, lost it all, gotten just what she deserved, it felt just right. Or if not
just right
, well, then, inevitable.

“I was there.” Maggie turned to her mother. “We went to the pool together that morning. It was so hot inside.”

“No,” Mrs. Paris said. “You are wrong. I saw you. I saw you show up. You heard the sirens. You were alone. You came later, Maggie. You came when it was all over.”

Maggie watched her mother’s tortured face twist back through the years that had never passed the way ordinary time is supposed to pass. Certain measures of time don’t move at all.

“I think you
think
you were there, Maggie,” Mr. Paris said. He kept his hands on the kitchen table, crossing and then recrossing his clasped fingers. “We talked about it so much then. You must have heard us. We tried not to talk in front of you, but the doctors . . . Grandma . . . and all the neighbors . . . those three days when Leah was in the hospital.”

“You can’t remember. You were too little. You were too young,” Mrs. Paris said, because it was easier for her that way. “You don’t remember anything, Maggie.”

“I do,” Maggie said. “I was there. I watched her die, Daddy. And I left. I ran for help. I ran to find you, Mommy.”

Mrs. Paris made some kind of noise, though Maggie couldn’t say for sure whether it had come from her mother’s mouth or directly from her broken heart. But it was the sound truth makes when it doesn’t have anyplace left to go, when it forces its way to the surface.

Maggie begged Nathan to come over, just to listen. Just to come over. Even to yell at her. But he would do none of those things.

“Why did you even tell me?” he asked her on the phone.

Maggie was sobbing. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

She wanted his forgiveness. She wanted to have done something really terrible and still be loved.

“I can’t, Maggie. I can’t even listen to this.”

But she wanted him to know and she told him everything. About the car and the parking lot and how awful she felt. “Please just talk to me. Please don’t do this to me.”

“To you, Maggie?” Nathan’s voice was stiff. It was distant and hard. “It’s always about you.”

“Please, please, just come over,” she pleaded.

“No,” he said. He reminded her, “I don’t sell a good thing twice.”

Lucas and Dylan came home that night. They had no idea of anything that had transpired, and somehow that made it easier for everyone to put it aside, as if just as they walked in the door, having been dropped off by Grandma, the talking stopped.

It picked up in bits and pieces over the weeks to come, the next months and years after, but Mr. and Mrs. Paris remained separated, and eventually one of them filed for divorce, though Maggie never found out which one.

That night, after Mrs. Paris got the boys to bed, after Maggie tried and failed to make Nathan love her, even
speak
to her, again, after her dad had driven off, but not before packing up another box or two of his belongings, Maggie’s mother came into her room.

“It was my fault, Maggie, and no one else’s,” she said. She sat on the end of the bed, facing the wall, talking into the darkness. “What kind of mother leaves her kids alone and goes shopping?”

It wasn’t a question, of course. “Leah was always naughty. Always rebellious. There wasn’t a rule she didn’t want to break.”

Maggie thought she could see a breeze that day, a hot summer breeze blowing her mother’s hair. Her daughter standing on the other side of the fence, watching it all in horror.

“I was just so tired. And Leah was such a handful in the grocery store. She wanted everything. She fought me on everything.” Mrs. Paris turned to Maggie. “And you were easy. You were always the easy one.”

Tears formed inside her mother’s eyes and filled them until it seemed to Maggie that no eyes could hold so much water.

“That morning. I don’t know if you remember. I wanted to take you both. You were all dressed and ready, but Leah was having a tantrum about what she would wear. She said she had no nice clothes like everyone else had. She hated everything she owned. So she stomped into her room and pulled out everything from her drawers and dumped it on the floor. Do you remember that?”

Maggie shook her head. She knew that she and Leah shared a room back in that condo, but she had no memory of the clothing, the empty drawers, or the tantrum.

“There were clothes everywhere. She had even pulled her good dresses from their hangers, and I had just spent the whole morning cleaning. I was tired, Maggie. I was so tired. Anyway,” Mrs. Paris continued, “I told Leah to stay inside. I told her she couldn’t come with us, then.”

“Us?”

Mrs. Paris let her head nod up and down very slowly. “Yeah, I took your hand. I said, ‘OK, then. I’ll take Maggie. I’ll take my
good
daughter.’ ”

The water spilled over in ripples and waves and floods that would never end. “But you wouldn’t go. You wouldn’t leave your sister. You begged me to wait. You told me
you’d
clean up the mess. You wouldn’t go; I couldn’t believe it. You were my good one. I didn’t have the strength to fight, so just I left. I left you both.”

“Well, I guess you were wrong about that,” Maggie said after a beat.

“What do you mean? Other than everything.”

“That I was the good one. Now you know. I was sure not the good one.”

“Oh, Maggie. I’m so sorry. You’ll never know how sorry I am.” Mrs. Paris spoke the truth, like filling a bottomless well.

Then Maggie said, after a long beat, “Mom, Nathan broke up with me,” and she started to cry from a depth that she could only begin to measure. Mrs. Paris put her arm around her daughter, and they stayed that way for a long time.

Maggie? Maggie, if I could say one last thing? If I could tell you not to blame yourself. If I could tell you how it all turns out in the end —

You know I am sorry that you lost your boyfriend and that ten years from now, when you show up at the church on Old Main Street at noon, he won’t be there
.

He seemed like a really nice guy. He is a nice guy, and you will always have that memory. No one ever forgets their first love, and you are lucky it was such a positive experience. It might not feel that way now, but you are very lucky for that
.

And I know you are sorry for the way you treated him, and he will always have that pain, even when it becomes just another story. For both of you
.

Like the love we had for each other, and the love we will always have for each other. Because you know what they say — love never dies. It never really dies, Maggie. Little baby Gwen
.

Little Maggie
.

And I’m real sorry about Mom and Dad. But their story began long before either one of us came along. They couldn’t work it out, not then and not now, and there was nothing we could do about that. It’s their crap, Maggie, not ours
.

But if I could be the one to ease your mind ( forgive yourself ) and heal your body (take care of it; guard it more closely) and tell you how wonderful you truly are, tell you how wonderful the life you have ahead of you will be —

If I could —

I would, little sister
.

Believe me, I surely would
.

But this is your journey now, and yours alone
.

It’s going to be OK, Maggie. It’s all going to be all right
.

To Deb Noyes Wayshak, gifted writer and shrewd editor, who read many painful drafts of this story before she kindly and wisely suggested I go back to the source and trust myself again.

To Hannah Mahoney and Kate Herrmann, the most perfect copy editors any writer could ask for, and for proofreader extraordinaire, Martha Dwyer. I know I didn’t make it easy.

To my wonderful literary agents, Nancy Gallt and Marietta Zacker.

To Dal Lowenbein for allowing me to call her up at any hour and ask her things like, “Now, if your sister were drowning . . . ”

And as always, to my Children’s Authors who Breakfast at the Bluebird in Easton, CT, Tony Abbot and Elise Broach (They even helped me with these acknowledgments!) — what would I do without you guys?

To Lauren Border, who patiently answered all my girls’ swim team questions and who was, coincidentally, my very first creative writing student, so very long ago.

To my (grown) boys (both writers themselves), Sam and Ben, always and forever.

Also by Nora Raleigh Baskin