The First Time She Drowned (24 page)

I look up at the sky.

James,
I think, and the loss breaks over me again.

I take a deep breath and pick up the phone one last time.

IN THE PITCH
blackness I wait, holding my stomach as if my insides will fall out. I rock back and forth, trying to escape my own mind, to push everything away. There are footsteps in the hallway. I squeeze tighter, worried that she’ll be angry that I’ve called her, angry that I need her. A sudden light and she is standing in the doorway.

“Cassie?” Liz says. Her face is creased with concern.

My legs wobble as I stand.

We move into the office and she switches on the lamp in there as well.

I put down my suitcase, sink into the couch.

She watches me worriedly as she takes her seat. “What happened?”

I stare at the floor by her feet, dazed. I want to talk, to get it out, but I’m out to sea, can’t find the way in.

“You found this out today?” she says softly of James. The only thing I managed to get out on the phone.

I nod, slowly swimming back. I don’t want to swim back to this.

Liz inhales deeply, shakes her head. “It’s awful,” she says. “I can see how much he meant to you.”

Something chokes at the back of my throat. The word
meant
—past tense. Pressure builds in my temples, in my chest a dull
scream. I look up at her. “He had just been released from the hospital. He had just gone home.”

Liz makes a small, sympathetic sound. Her eyes are round and soft and reaching. The flood pushes against me. I press my arms into my stomach, holding it back.

“I don’t understand. He was the one who always talked about getting out. He was the one who said we’d be fine. And then he didn’t even try. Why didn’t he try?”

“I don’t know,” she says helplessly. “I wish I knew.”

She moves her chair closer. A tightness yields in my chest, allowing her nearness. The sobs come from a place so deep, it’s like they’re deeper than my body, older than my life.

“It’s just . . . we were the same, you know,” I say, and my whole body trembles. Something pushes at me, some dark, underwater thing, like the bump of a shark.

“No,” she says. “You weren’t.”

I wipe my tears with the back of my palm, but they keep coming faster. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have called you.”

“Stop!” she says fiercely.

“I know you have better things to do.”

“Listen to me,” she says. “There is nowhere else I’d rather be right now. I am honored that you called me.”

I roll my eyes, rub my nose on my sleeve.

“I know you can’t possibly understand that. Your mother couldn’t or wouldn’t be with you. And now you think that no one can, that you’re too much. But you’re wrong. I can. I will.”

I glance up at her, try to take it in, but it’s only words against a lifetime. I look to the window, helpless, drowning. “But you don’t
know me. I screw everything up.”

“I know that you’re here. I know that you’re sitting with me and you’re talking about this and you’re alive. And I’m so glad for that.”

“But what’s the point? Don’t you see? What’s the damn point if I push everyone away?”

“You haven’t pushed me away.”

“Not yet.” I lean back, suddenly wanting distance.

“Then who?”

“Chris! Zoey! My mother!”

“What happened with Chris and Zoey?”

I put the palms of my hands to my eyes and shake my head, not wanting to relive it. At the same time, I want it out of me, want the relief of confession. I take a deep breath and tell her everything, the whole story from the hotel room with Chris until this morning with Zoey.

“I told you this would happen. I told you everything would go badly. But you didn’t believe me! You said to trust that the world was different!”

The rage is right there, so easy to get to, so much simpler, less painful than the grief. One goes out, the other in.

“I never should have listened to you. I never should have trusted. I knew better and now—”

“And now what?”

“Now everything is ruined! Everything is ruined and I—” I shake my head again, trying to push back the feelings.

“And you what?”

“No! I’m not going to do this!”

“Cassie—”

“
FINE.
I FUCKING HATE YOU FOR IT, OKAY?”

The trembling starts immediately, internally, the old familiar rattle. The room shrinks, the air between us a taut wire. I want to move, to get up and leave, but I am fixed here, frozen, waiting. I cannot back down now, no matter the cost.

The shock of energy dissipates, and I dare to look at her, dare her to challenge my right to this fury. Her eyes are sad, without anger.

“Okay,” she says. “You can hate me. I don’t like it, but I accept it. I’ve disappointed you just like everyone else.”

I sag into the couch, flattened by the sudden siphoning of rage. The tears return. “I know it’s not fair, though . . . to hate everybody, it’s not fair. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I act like this, why I got so crazy with Chris.” I look at her pleadingly. “What’s wrong with me?”

“You were protecting yourself.”

“From what, though? He didn’t do anything wrong.”

I lean my head against the armrest, too exhausted to even think. All I want is to curl up in a ball and sleep, wake up to find it’s all been a bad dream.

“I’m so tired. Can I just lie here for a minute? I just need to close my eyes.”

She nods, and I let my lids go heavy. I think of James. His face is right in front of me, that mischievous smile. Always happy, always joking. I think of the funny made-up stories he used to tell about his life. I remember what Meeks said about James being afraid to let anyone know his true self and I wonder if he was right. I hate the thought of that asshole being right about anything,
especially James. But what could be so awful that he couldn’t let anyone else see it? That he would rather die than reveal it. If he even knew himself.

“He didn’t sleep,” I say, my eyes still closed.

“What?”

“James. Whenever I had one of my nightmares, the aides would let me come out and watch TV. James was always there. Every time I woke up in the middle of the night, there he was, smoking cigarettes and shooting the shit with the nurses like it was happy hour. I never thought about it.”

At the mention of my nightmare, I feel it rise up again, swimming beneath the surface, its dark shadow circling. The familiar footsteps, the sound of someone counting,
“twenty-six, twenty-seven,”
my mother smiling as she invites death in. It nags at me once again.

I open my eyes. “I wonder if it means something,” I say. “That he didn’t sleep.”

Liz is watching me with a soft look on her face, the way a mother might watch a sleeping child. I let my eyes close again and something shudders deep within me, a tiny sigh, like the creaking open of a door, letting in some light, some small sense of safety. I’m tired to my bones, could fall asleep so easily.

Then a flash in my head, again like the zap of a bug light. The woman’s voice.
Caasssieeee.

I sit up suddenly.

“What?” Liz says, looking at my startled face.

“I don’t know.” I try to shake it away. “This voice. I keep hearing it. The same one from my nightmares.” A wave of nausea rolls
through me.

“What’s it saying?”

Images come at me. Standing in the driveway of my childhood home. My mother’s car disappearing around the bend. Matthew and the neighborhood kids playing in the backyard as I walk toward the house. The sense that I could not let my mother down again.

I look up at Liz. “Dora,” I say, and the sound of her long-unspoken name still carries a child’s electric fear around it.

“Dora?”

“That’s the voice. My great-aunt. My mother’s best friend. She came to visit us once when I was, like, seven.”

“Okay . . .” she says.

“And . . . I don’t know. I . . . It’s nothing.” But my head feels lit up, racing.

“What are you seeing?”

“Just this memory. From when I was a kid.”

I’m in my childhood bedroom waiting for Dora. She comes in saying, “Caasssieeee” in her singsong voice. The neighbor’s dog is barking. The burn of fall is in the air.

“My mother wanted us to be friends. She made me promise to be good. So I asked Dora to read to me.”

I can see Dora beside me, her gray hair like a cloud on top of her head, her powdery makeup settling into the creases of her skin. I’m in my favorite dress, the one with the rooster. She flips open a book of nursery rhymes.

Georgie Porgie puddin’ and pie

Kissed the girls and made them cry

When the boys came out to play

Georgie Porgie ran away.

I look up at Liz. Tears start forming in my eyes, but I have no idea why they’re there. It’s as if my body knows something my mind does not.

And then I remember something else, something new. “I wanted to know why Georgie made the girls cry. I asked her that.”

“And what did she say?” Liz asks, leaning forward.

“She said something like, ‘Maybe they were bad little girls.’ But they didn’t look bad. So—”

I lurch back, feeling like I’m standing too close to the edge of a steep, dark canyon. “Forget it,” I say to Liz. “This is stupid.”

“It’s not. Stay with it,” she says.

“No.” I shake my head.

“Okay then,” she says, looking at me intensely. “Just breathe.”

But I don’t want to breathe. I want to run, to open the door and just run for my life. It feels too dark and threatening, like whatever is there will break my brain apart.

Something comes, a quick picture that appears and then disappears just as fast. I shake my head again, instinctively, involuntarily, like I’m trying to shake it away.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know! It’s— I’m afraid,” I say. But then I think of James. I imagine him, my James, my friend, alone in his house with a gun. And I know that I have to look. That as terrifying as this is, there is more danger in not looking.

I close my eyes. An image flashes in my mind: Dora’s face swooping down suddenly. My neck jerks back as her lips mash
against my mouth. They are soaked with spit.

“Ucck! Gross! Don’t do that!” I say to her.

She laughs innocently. “I’m just being Georgie Porgie,” she says.

I wipe my mouth as my whole body shakes with disgust.

Her face changes. “I thought you were going to be nice,” she says.

I remember the sense that something was wrong. Everything was spinning, snapshots firing off too fast, the way the world flashes past the window of a speeding car. Dora’s big face. The closed door. Red lips, puckered and angry.

Blood surges in my head, both then and now. My heart flutters in my chest like a rabbit’s.

“Twenty-six, twenty-seven . . .” It’s Matthew counting below my window. Shouting boys scatter like geese, looking for a place to hide.

I try to move away. Dora’s hand grabs my wrist. The book of nursery rhymes falls to the floor with a thud.

“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine . . .” I know Matthew is standing in the driveway, his eyes squeezed shut, giving everyone time to hide. I will him to open his eyes. To come inside. To save me.

“Thirty!” he says. “Here I come!”

Dora pushes me back on the bed, pinning me by my shoulders. My thoughts spin wildly, like I’m on a ride going too fast.

She climbs on top of me, pushes up my dress. Her old, wrinkled face is close to mine, watching my terror, enjoying it.

“No!” I say.

Every muscle in my body strains to get away. But she’s too
strong, too heavy, burying me beneath her. I am trapped, my own body a coffin. I scratch against the seams of myself, clawing to escape.

“Gotcha,” Matthew shouts, and whoever he catches groans.

“Be a good girl,” Dora whispers with a gruesome smile.

My body kicks and flails and thrashes, but my mind is somewhere else. Way back in a cramped and tiny space in the base of my skull, hiding.

• • •

“Cassie,” Liz says.

“I’m sorry,” I sob. Everything is a jumble. Pieces of recollection fly faster than I can keep up with them. New images and sensations flood me: sharp stabs of pain, her hand over my nose and mouth, a soundless scream,
I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.

“What are you sorry for?” Liz moves her chair closer.

“I don’t know!” I say. My breath comes hard like I’m hyperventilating, my body still trying to expel something, throw it up. “Whatever I did!”

I can’t look at Liz, won’t open my eyes, it’s all too awful.

“Cassie, listen to me.”

I keep my head down, my hands over my face. The shame is too great.

“Look at me!” she says.

But I can’t.

“You did nothing wrong. She was sick! Do you understand me? This is not your fault.”

“I know,” I say, “I know.” But the shame is bigger than my knowing. It is a dark and formless slithering in my body,
unchanged by words or logic. It is in the complicity that it was my body that it happened to. “It’s just . . . there had to be a reason. If I hadn’t been such a nuisance, my mother wouldn’t have needed to get away. Or if I just hadn’t gone upstairs—”

“No!” she says forcefully. “Sometimes bad things just happen. You want there to be a reason so you can have control, but what happened to you, Cassie, was not your fault.”

“But then . . . why me? Why did she pick me?”

“Because you were there! And from everything you told me, it sounds like you had no protection.
That’s
the reason!”

Her voice is so fierce and so sure that I dare to look up at her. Liz’s presence seems huge, her energy both encompassing and shielding. I feel like an abandoned cub in the face of a lioness. My breath comes in gasps, a child’s gulping tears.

“I tried to tell my mother not to leave me with Dora. I hated her. I sensed something. But my mother thought I was just being selfish.”

“Listen to me, Cassie. I wish she hadn’t left that day. I wish like hell this hadn’t happened to you. But I’m here with you now and I’m not going anywhere.”

A small sound escapes me, a last mournful yelp. I look into Liz’s eyes. They are soft again, holding. Something shifts in me. I can almost hear the click of it in my brain, some internal computer updating, some small bit of suffering released like a balloon. It’s hard to process or accept but some part of me recognizes with relief that I am not alone with this anymore.