The First Time She Drowned (4 page)

I START DOWN
the hospital drive, glance back one last time at James in the window. Then off I go, rolling my suitcase behind me through the high gates and onto a main thoroughfare where the loud whoosh of cars is startling after so much time spent inside. All at once and shockingly, I am back in the world.

The bus stop is on the corner. A large woman is spread out across the bench, two shopping bags at her feet. She stares straight ahead and clutches her purse when I sit down on the edge beside her. I wonder if she knows where I’ve come from, if she can smell the hospital on me the way certain dogs can sniff out a tumor.

“Do you know if the twelve thirty to Newport has come yet?” I ask. She looks at me and then away. I am suddenly certain that I will get on the wrong bus, find myself in some strange place—Siberia, maybe, or worse, New Jersey—where I will be forced to cap bottles in a hair spray factory, never to be seen again. I think of James hopping a bus from this very spot yesterday, hopeful and free and full of dreams before something made him change his mind, go back in.

The bus arrives with a squeal and a hiss. I step up to it. “Is this the one that goes to Newport?” I say. The driver grunts something that I can only hope is a yes and then sighs as if the effort to deal with such an idiot has taxed him tremendously. I climb aboard and hand him a ten from the large wad of guilt-money that my dad gave me on his last visit. It’s a struggle to get down the aisle with my suitcase, and I feel the need to apologize for my presence as the other people on the bus stare miserably at me. Finally I make my way to an open window seat, the bus lurches forward and we are
in motion.

For the next two hours, I watch the moving landscape provide proof of my freedom as the hospital, the town, the city, the state all fall away behind me. I stare at myself in the window glass, trying to recognize the girl reflected back at me, to make a friend of her, to make the hope stick. But worries bully their way into my brain, insisting that I am not equipped for this adventure, that I will be completely lost amid a world of strangers with no one to offer direction or guidance, that I will ultimately collapse and break apart beneath the unsupported weight of myself out here on my own. The absence of love, that barren, hopeless place revisited, will destroy me once and for all. I’ll end up back in the hospital. Or worse, on the wrong end of a looped rope.

“Next stop, Dunton College,” the bus driver says, jolting me from my thoughts.

I grip the seat in front of me as if bracing for a crash. The moment I have been both waiting for and dreading is finally here, only now the roar of terror that has reared up completely trumps the excitement. All at once, it’s way too real and I just want to stay on this bus with these harmless strangers, close my eyes and go to sleep, wake up when life no longer feels exhausting.

Suddenly, the Atlantic Ocean comes into view. “Can I jump off here instead?” I ask, standing abruptly. The bus driver sighs again, pulls to the curb and deposits me on a street corner across from a beach. Then the bus is gone and it’s only me.

It’s windy and cold for August. The air is different here, dense and heavy with the sea. I walk up to the small, rocky beach, eager to answer the call that pulled me here. It all comes back to me
like a once-elusive dream: the welcome of the ocean, its wide arms reaching. I breathe the whole of it, the smell and the size and the melancholy beauty of it into my lungs. The Atlantic has had a hold on me since the first time I saw it many years ago. I am drawn to its detachment, its mercurial nature, its violence. In these things I find a comforting familiarity.

The coastline is empty except for two homeless guys sitting shoulder to shoulder on a nearby bench, sharing a drink from a paper bag. Their friendship makes me think of James, of how connection can lift people out of their circumstances. They ask me for a cigarette and I give them two. Their gratitude is so genuine, their two rotten-toothed grins so drunkenly cheerful and thrilled that I immediately hand over the entire pack.

Then I start toward the water. The sky is stone gray and sunless, all the light wrung out of it like wet from a cloth. In front of the empty lifeguard stand, a few surfers zigzag up and down the waves, black as birds against the gloom. I watch them for a moment with yearning, imagining that graceful unity with the world. In the distance, I recognize Dunton’s famous clock tower from the college brochure, its stately brick buildings sitting high on a cliff. I keep walking down the shoreline until I’m far enough away that no one should be able to see me. At any moment kids from school could show up, and I don’t want anyone to see me with my makeup washed off. After all, if I have one hope for my first year of college, it’s that I can rid myself of my ugly past, maybe even find love. Not that I’d ever openly admit that I want it. Or that I have the remotest clue how to get it.

The sea is the color of metal, the white waves disheveled and sloshing in a tantrum. The ocean calls to me with its baptismal promise. I shed my jeans and sweater. Today I leave my history behind. Make the past the past, as James always said. Today, right now, I start over. A new me. Or something like that.

The water is a shock of cold. It knocks the breath out of me before it reaches my knees. I look out at the wild, breaking ocean and take a deep breath, summoning all the hope I have in me for what is possible. Then I charge the surf and launch myself toward a wave about to crash. The instant before it does, I dive. For one moment my body is anesthetized. My thoughts frozen. Everything still and cold and silent. I emerge on the other side like something new, whooping with the rush. A second wave follows, mountainous and fast, and I rush into that one too, laughing as I go, the child in me released by the sea.

I move a little farther out where I can still find the bottom. My tiptoes are attuned for the brush of a crab as I lean my head back, let the water rinse my hair, rinse everything. I imagine my old self pouring out of me like octopus ink, black ribbons slipping into the current, disappearing into the depths.

There is no one around in any direction as far as I can see, and there is so much peace in that, in the absence of human voices. Sometimes it seems like everybody wants to put their noise into the world until you can’t have enough quiet to even know you exist.

A spot of light peeks out from the gray sky, and I close my eyes and push onto my back to bathe in it. The chop splashes in my face and stings the back of my throat, but I don’t mind. It’s this total merge with the ocean that I love so much: its tingling touch, salt
taste, smell of fish, yellow underbelly, the sound of its roar and of its nuzzle. It is a return to the state of indistinguishable bodies, the gurgle of breath and heartbeat, the sense of being home. I tell myself I’m washed clean now, made new, that the flailing and wailing is over. I float for a long time.

Then suddenly, a flash in my head as if sparked by this new quiet and stillness. The voice from my nightmares. Reciting a nursery rhyme. “Georgie Porgie puddin’ and pie.” Startled, I gasp and flail, taking in water as I come back to the present.

I look up to realize that the shoreline has moved, the brick buildings of Dunton seeming much farther away and small. I go to stand, but the bottom is long gone. I recognize instantly that I’m in really big trouble. After all, I have been in this state of drowning before. So many times before.

THE FIRST TIME
I drowned, I was six years old. It was July and we were in the middle of a monthlong heat wave. I was dragging ass behind my family, already wearing my life preserver and tripping over the too-long beach towel in my hand as we approached my grandparents’ house.

All morning my mother had been quiet. The last few weeks she’d been strained, probably because of the heat, and had been wearing an increasingly wilting smile. My father, who never noticed anything, had also not noticed this. But I was exquisitely attuned to my mother, needing the security of her steadiness, aware of its fluctuations, anxious when I felt it slipping. I raced to catch up to her, reached out my hand and grabbed hers.

“I’m so sick of having to come here like this,” she said, dropping my hand to yank at the hem of her sundress and then pausing to smooth down her polar blond hair. She glanced back at our old beat-up car on the street and then up at the mansion before us. “I feel like Cinderella returning in her pumpkin.”

My father seemed to register this as the accusation that it was, tucking his head into his shoulders like a turtle. We never visited his parents. My mother claimed they lived in an armpit (Cleveland). But her parents lived just on the other side of town and, unlike us, had air-conditioning and an in-ground pool, so we saw them often
in the summer.

“Don’t let them get me,” my mother said. She took a step back so that my father could enter first, and Matthew and I gathered on either side of her like chess pieces to the queen. As always, my mother had the ability to pull people around her, compelling them to protect her no matter the cost to themselves.

My father sighed and pushed open the back gate as if it were heavy, which it was not, and we followed him through it.

My grandmother was in her usual habitat by the pool area, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. She looked like an aging movie star, with hair the color of sharkskin that swooped away from her forehead and stayed put in a poof with at least one can of hairspray. Even in her bathing suit, my grandmother wore all of her jewels: twenty-four-karat bracelets that jangled when she smoked and gold earrings that sat like fat snails on her lobes.

When she saw us, she gave a small patrician wave to my mother and called out, “Bevy, darling,” in her thick British accent. My grandmother was not actually British, and the details of how she acquired this accent, having never left the state of Pennsylvania, remain a mystery.

Posed like an antonym beside her, in jeans as old and wrinkled as my grandmother’s knees, was my uncle Billy, my mother’s younger brother. Billy weighed in at over three hundred pounds but was also tall, so my grandmother liked to say that he was not fat, “just big.” He was big and also fat. And he lived in my grandparents’ basement. As soon as Matthew and I were old enough to walk, he took us down there to see his porno magazines and his bong. He
was our favorite uncle.

“Hello, Mom. Hello, Bill,” my mother said with a hopeful smile. She bent over the lounge chair to give her mother a hug, but my grandmother held her at arm’s length like a dirty diaper and blew air kisses at her cheeks. My mother drew up abruptly. Her beautiful smile twitched. She stepped back toward us, and I was shocked at how someone so large to me could be made to look so small, how one person could shrink another so easily.

“This bloody heat is awful, isn’t it?” my grandmother said. “But I guess you would know that better than me, considering that little sweat box you live in! Your father is hiding out in the den with the air-conditioning turned up so high, I’m afraid we’ll find him frozen solid in there. Thank God you have us to come to.”

“We are lucky indeed to have you!” my father chimed in with petlike eagerness. My mother gave him a withering gaze and he slunk into a plastic chair, removed his glasses and rubbed some sudden speck of dirt off of them with his shirt.

My mother nudged Matthew and me, and we both mumbled hello to my grandmother, who insisted we call her by her first name—Leigh—lest anyone within screaming distance hear that she was old enough to be a grandparent.

“Hello, children,” she said with a sigh.

Sometimes we called her “Pee” behind her back.

Uncle Billy complimented me on the pretty sundress I wore over my bathing suit and then took a hand out of his pocket long enough to ruffle my hair and call me “sailor” for the life preserver around my neck. Then he pulled a quarter from behind my ear and handed it to me before jamming his hand back into his jeans.

Suddenly, the back gate swung open again.

“Ohh, my darling!” my grandmother exclaimed. She leaped to her feet and pushed past my mother to envelop her other son, Paul, in a warm embrace.

Paul was a soon-to-be divorcé who declared everything was “magnificent.” “It’s a magnificent day, isn’t it?” he’d say. “I’m going to take a dip in this magnificent pool. Won’t that just be magnificent?” Even as a child, I knew he was full of shit and sensed that whatever was underneath all that magnificence was entirely unmagnificent and very, very angry. I avoided him.

“Come! Come!” my grandmother said. “Would you like something to drink? Bevy, why don’t you get the men something to drink?”

“The men have legs too,” my mother said as she headed toward the pool.

My grandmother ignored her and linked her arm in Paul’s. “I’m so glad you came! Billy and I have been
dying
for some good company.”

My mother perched herself at the water’s edge and dangled her bare legs into it. “Cold,” she said to no one in particular.

I plopped down beside her on the concrete. Behind us, my father was chatting up Paul with the loud please-don’t-hit-me voice he used in all social interactions.

My mother glanced over at him, shook her head and sighed. She stared deeply into the pool as if she were seeking her reflection in it, her face blank and still as the water itself. I wanted to say something to break the spell of her unhappiness, which I could feel heavy inside me. I looked down to see what she saw, but there was only the bottom.

“Cannonball!” Matthew cried suddenly. For a moment he was tucked and suspended like a home run, catching the light before shattering the surface.

“How many times have I told him not to do that!” my grandmother yelled as she stood to wipe the splash off her lounge chair.

But my mother just smiled wide as a day as the emptiness into which she had been staring was replaced with the happy, wet face of my brother, appearing like a newborn from the depths.

“Oh!” she giggled, flicking water at him with her toes. “That was a good one!”

“Did I get you?”

“You know you did!” she said, pulling her own wet shirt away from herself. “You always get me.”

Her whole demeanor changed as she beamed into Matthew’s face, and she was still laughing, high and bright, when I slid off the ledge to join him. I gasped. The water was February-cold and sharp with too much chlorine. The life preserver pushed against my jaw and half strangled me as I bobbed by the neck like a buoy. But I was happy, so happy with my mother laughing and the sun in my face and the water so cold but so clean.

“Look, Mom!” Matthew said, treading water by the diving board. The rest of my mother’s family retired to the upper patio for drinks, and my father shuffled uncertainly behind them. My mother stayed with us, watching Matthew.

“My God!” she said as the minutes passed. “Aren’t you getting tired yet?”

“Nope!” Matthew gurgled. “I could go for hours.”

“All right, I’m timing you. I bet you can’t go five more minutes.”

Even I knew he could go five more minutes.

“Piece of cake,” Matthew said.

“It’s not that hard!” I called out, eager to show that I could do it too.

“It doesn’t count when you have a life preserver on,” my mother said, with a roll of her eyes.

• • •

Forty-five minutes later we were out of the pool and my mother was presenting Matthew to her family as if he were made of gold. “Can you believe that he just now finished treading?” she bragged happily. “I’m telling you, Mom, my son is going to be an Olympian.”

I was jealous. I wanted to be an Olympic water-treader too.

My grandmother finished off her Scotch in one gulp and sized up my brother. “Big deal,” she snorted, lighting a cigarette and exhaling smoke through her nostrils.

My mother winced. She wrapped her arms around Matthew like a second towel and looked toward my father, who stared with sudden interest into the bottom of his glass.

“Jesus, Mother,” she said. “Why do you have to be like that?” She glanced once again at my father as if he might stick up for her, then spun around and marched toward the house. Matthew and I followed her.

She slammed the kitchen door behind us so hard that I could feel the slap of its wind, her fury—the house and I both shuddering with it.

“Don’t you listen to her,” she said to Matthew. “Your grandmother just doesn’t want me to have anything good in
my life.”

She bent over the sink and splashed cold water on her face.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I’m a woman.” She shut off the faucet and stared out the window. “And she doesn’t like women.”

“Why?”

“Because they remind her of her mean, miserable self, that’s why.” She turned to us then. “You kids love me, right?” she said, and she said it like she hadn’t asked us a million times, like we hadn’t shouted a million times, “Yes!”

“More than anything!” I cried, throwing myself at her legs as if I could fill her whole being up with myself so that my love would be inside of her. I wanted nothing more than to be the good in my mother’s life.

We headed back out, and the first thing I noticed was that the air had taken on the peculiar smell of Billy’s basement. We came upon my relatives collapsed over the patio table, pounding their fists and laughing so hard, they were crying. Even my grandmother, whose expressionless face was locked in by one too many face-lifts, was doubled over, killing herself with giggles, which she somehow managed to do with a British air. But the weirdest thing, the positive indication that the world had flipped on its axis, was that they were all laughing at a story my father was telling. No one ever laughed at my father’s stories.

“What’s going on here?” my mother demanded.

“Oh, Bev,” Uncle Paul replied, wiping tears from his eyes, “you never told us that Ed was such a magnificent comedian.”

“See, Bev!” my father said. He turned to Paul. “I’ve been trying
to tell her!”

“Shut up,” my mother said. She faced the rest of the group with her hands in tight fists at her side. “I can’t believe you assholes are smoking pot with my children here!”

Suddenly the laughter stopped. Uncle Paul coughed out a mouthful of smoke. They all looked at each other with eyes wide and spooked, as if they were staring into the spotlight of a police car.

“And I,” my grandmother declared finally with haughty indignation, “can’t believe that your children are here while we’re trying to smoke pot!”

Of course, that did it. They howled with such glee that Uncle Billy choked briefly on a martini olive and Uncle Paul fell backward in his chair and cackled all the way down to the concrete. Even my father, who couldn’t have had more than a contact high, laughed eagerly as he always did when other people laughed—happy, I think, to have been given a recognizable social cue. And the sight of everyone laughing and falling all over themselves made me laugh too, even though I had no idea what was going on.

“Relax, Bev,” my grandmother said through her giggles. She pulled out what looked like a lit cigarette that she’d been concealing under the table. “Here. Have a pull. God knows you could stand to chill.”

“It really is magnificent stuff,” Uncle Paul added.

“Go ahead,” my grandmother said. “Spark it up.”

There was even more laughter, so much laughter and such contagious laughter that I became swept up in it, overcome by anxious hysterical giggling. I did not notice at first that Matthew
was not laughing. As soon as I saw the seriousness of his face, I looked to my mother and realized that there were tears in her eyes. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t mean it, that I didn’t even know why I was laughing, but I couldn’t stop. She looked at all of us with a sad knowing smile, lingering on each face, as if recording us. When her eyes landed on my father snickering into his hand, she watched him for a long moment without blinking, and as she did, her sad smile dropped slowly and something else came over her. It was an expression that I’d never seen before, a frightened look, a panic even. She took several steps back, wrapped her arms tightly around her shoulders and squeezed. I had seen her mad at my father a million times but this was something else, something worse, something animal and desperate. It was as if she saw all the chess pieces had come to life, they were all on the other side of the board and they were gunning for her.

I moved toward her with a sickening feeling in my stomach.

She stepped back as if afraid of me and pulled Matthew close like a shield. Her frightened eyes darted between me and her family and my father as if we were all one, all the enemy.

I think, looking back, that that was the moment. I didn’t know it then, but I felt it happen. I felt the Atlantic break.

And I had to do something. I had to fix the thing in my mother’s face that looked broken. The thing I felt that
I
had broken. The solution was obvious to me. I turned and headed for the pool.

“Mom, look!” I shouted over the laughter as I threw off my life preserver and climbed onto the diving board.

The sun had taken its own dive behind the trees, and the water looked darker without it. I took a big breath before pushing off
from the tips of my toes. My knees went up to my chest. I was going to be the something good in my mother’s life.

I sank like a quarter. I don’t remember being scared. Only that it was quiet. So quiet. And I was swimming, treading water at the bottom of the deep end in a wet and quiet room that felt like God. I looked to the surface, through all that trembling blue and the diluted sun overhead, and I waited for my mother’s smiling face to appear.