The First Time She Drowned (7 page)

“That’s nice of you,” my mother said with a tight smile. I could tell she was still pissed about the boat, but at least she was trying. “I hope you asked someone how to cook them.”

This was enough positive feedback to send my father into new heights of loud cheerfulness. He turned to Matthew and me. “Apparently your mother doesn’t realize you have a master chef in the house. Watch and learn, kids,” he said as Matthew
poked at the bag and started naming the lobsters as though they were his pets.

My father put a pot full of water on the stove and then yanked the rubber bands from the claws of the first lobster.

“Murderer,” Matthew whispered as my father dropped the first lobster into the pot.

My father gave him a look and then dropped in two more.

“Serial killer!” Matthew shouted, making my mother laugh.

My father dunked the last lobster in with such an overdramatic flourish that my mother wondered aloud if my father might not fit in the pot as well. She and Matthew giggled at this as they strolled out of the room.

My father sighed. He’d been sighing a lot lately, and when he did, he put his whole body into it. His whole body was a sigh. “They just don’t know true talent when they see it, do they, Miss Cass?”

When I noticed he was waiting for a response, I shook my head no in agreement.

“That’s right,” he told me. “See, you understand me.”

Instantly, I regretted my collusion. I did not like being considered an ally of my father. It seemed a dangerous role to take on in light of how my mother treated him. I felt as if I had been recruited, against my will, onto the losing team.

I was about to make my own exit when I saw the top of the pot jiggling up and down ever so slightly. I turned back to my father, who, with his head now in the refrigerator, whistling as he searched for butter, saw nothing. The lid moved again. And then it appeared. From out of the depths. A dark wet claw emerging like
a hand from a grave in a horror movie.

It groped blindly, searching for escape and then clipped itself upon the rim of the pot and pulled behind it another menacing claw and two angry bulging eyes staring right at me. I wanted to run. I wanted to point to my father and say, “He did it!” But I couldn’t move.

It stopped there, wearing the lid on the back of its head like a beret. Then in a flurry of spindly movement, the lobster extracted itself from the pot and scampered to the edge of the stove.

Stunned, I looked at my father and saw that he was setting the table for a dinner that was presently escaping. When I turned back, the second lobster was climbing out. And then the third and fourth. They pitched over the edge of the counter to the floor. Their claws snapped threateningly above their buglike little faces.

“Holy shit!” my father said, turning.

“Holy shit!” Matthew echoed as he strolled back in through the swinging kitchen door.

My mother wandered in. “Holy shit!” she screamed, and pushed me in front of her as a shield.

“Run free, little sea creatures!” Matthew yelled with delight as we all watched my father chase the lobsters around the kitchen, grabbing at their backs and then pulling away when they snapped at his hands.

In an instant the entire house had spiraled into madness. My mother’s screams met my brother’s entreaties and the lobsters’ smacking claws and swelled into a wild, ear-splitting chorus of chaos. My father looked around helplessly. He was breathless with humiliation and effort, and his face was as red as the lobsters would
have been had he succeeded in cooking them.

“Jesus Christ,” my mother said with disgust.

It was Matthew who finally managed to round them all up. He must have taken pity on my father, because at some point he gave up his Save the Lobster campaign and took charge of the situation. With the expertise of an old fisherman, he moved a steady, fearless hand toward each creature and clasped his strong little fingers around their backs.

The room became strangely quiet, like the still, reverent hush after a snowfall as we watched my brother capture the last lobster and put it in the pot. We were witnessing, after all, a moment of great significance, a moment far more important than the event itself: It was the moment my nine-year-old brother took over the role of man of the house. It was a changing of the guard made final in one singular act, and we all seemed to know it whether or not we could have named it as such.

“Well, that does it then!” my father said with a too-big smile. “Guess I should have boiled the water first, ha ha! But I’ve taken care of it now.” Then realizing the water was still not at a boiling point, he quickly but nonchalantly reached back his hand to hold down the lid. He kept it there until we heard the lobsters’ screams echoing within the stainless steel walls, and then long after the screams had ceased.

I stood in the corner and wept.

My father tried to explain that the lobsters were not actually screaming and that the air escaping from their shells was the real cause of those piercing cries. But the distinction made no difference to me. I was hearing the sounds of death, of a life that had
fought for itself and lost. I only ate the corn.

• • •

Tension was palpable throughout dinner, and Matthew and I tried to break it by hurling peas at each other every time my mother turned away from us to glower at my father.

“By the way, Ed,” she said, eating quickly, as if she couldn’t get away from him fast enough, “I think Matthew should sleep in my room tonight. I’m concerned he might sleepwalk.”

“He hasn’t sleepwalked in years,” my father said, his jaw clenched.

I looked at Matthew, who, in turn, began walking around the room with his arms outstretched and his eyes closed, bumping into the refrigerator and stove.

“That’s not fair!” I said, angry that she was taking my brother away from me, angrier still that it was always Matthew she wanted to be with. “What about me?”

“You can sleep with your father. Forgive me if I don’t want to find my son’s bloated body washed up on the rocks tomorrow morning.”

My brother paused, opened his eyes wide and then collapsed in a dead man’s float on the floor.

My parents continued to argue over my brother’s body while I marched right past them and dramatically dumped the magic shell I’d been carrying around all night—the one with the ocean inside it—straight into the trash can. I watched as the perfect shell chipped against the bottom, and I felt a disproportionate sadness and regret about it, as if it had been me that had broken. When nobody paid me any mind, I made a big production of storming off
to my bed, punishing my family with my absence.

A short time later, my father came and stood near the side of the bed where I sat staring out the window, clutching Betty in my arms. The sky was black and without stars.

He cleared his throat.

He sighed.

I kept my face to the window. The silence sat between us like an uncomfortable bystander.

He moved closer and placed beside me the shell I had so ceremoniously dumped.

“I think you dropped this,” he said finally.

“I don’t want it,” I told the window.

“But you said it was magic! You spent half the night holding it!”

“It didn’t work,” I said.

“What didn’t work?”

I turned to look at him, searching his face for the possibility of understanding.

“Just throw it away,” I said finally. “It’s stupid.”

“I don’t think it’s stupid,” he said.

I wanted to smile, to give him the illusion that his efforts had succeeded. I knew he was trying, he was always trying. But it was her that I wanted. Her that we both wanted. I yanked the blankets all the way over me and did not uncover my head until the sound of his defeated footsteps shuffled away from me.

Minutes later, in the hall, my parents continued their argument.

“I’m your husband, goddamn it. Quit acting like you’re married to Matthew and not me!”

“He’s more of a man than you are, that’s for sure.”

I pulled the covers over my face again just as my father stormed back into my room. The last thing I heard before drifting off was the sound of a sigh that could have been my father or could have been the rain that started falling outside my window.

It rained the rest of the week.

• • •

We left Maine two nights early and the weather cleared just as we hit the freeway. My mother made me sit up front with my father while she sat in back with Matthew.

I dozed in and out of a light sleep, the one-eyed sleep of dolphins, listening to the engine of the Blue Bomb rattle like cans beneath the quiet sighs of my father.

Occasionally I sat up to watch panels of light from passing trucks streak across the windshield and disappear. My mother and Matthew slept deeply behind me; both could sleep through anything. It was my father and I who were restless custodians of night, joined in a molecular fear of the darkness and what it might bring.

After seemingly endless hours of driving, my father finally pulled over, woke up my mother and broke the news. He had gotten us lost, for, of all things, missing a sign. In the backseat my mother wept as if she’d lost a child. Matthew tried to calm her but she was inconsolable, wildly, frighteningly so as if the trip itself had robbed the last of her hope.

“I don’t know where I am, Matty,” she sobbed, rocking back and forth. “I don’t know where home is.”

A few months later, my father took a new job that required him to be out of the country for weeks at a time. He didn’t want to take it, but my mother insisted. I remember the day we dropped him off at the airport for that first business trip, how I kept thinking a bus was going to hit us as we parked there on the side of the terminal. It was like I could hear the wheels of something big and unstoppable rumbling toward me—a terrible, irreversible crash. It was only a few months later, through no coincidence at all, that Great-Aunt Dora showed up.

I DON’T KNOW
how long I’ve been lying in my bed, entrenched in memory, descending into a thick, heavy unconsciousness, when suddenly, a sickening shiver runs through me and I swim up from the blackness, fighting against its pull. It takes me a moment to place myself in time, to recognize my dorm room and remember where I am. With great effort I manage to sit up, and immediately cough a gross amount of blood into my hands. I have to get help. Right now. I go to stand and find myself facedown in a sea of thin blue carpet.

I can’t get up. The pain in my ribs is so bad, it blurs my vision. The door looms at a terrible distance. I eye it with the certainty that if I don’t get out now, I will fossilize here. Slowly, I crawl toward it, have to pause and gather strength before I can reach up to the knob and successfully turn it. I fall back dizzy and light-headed.

It takes another lifetime to move into the hall. Dimly, I understand that this is all very bizarre and certainly not the best way to introduce myself to the community. I knock on the door opposite mine so weakly that I wonder if I’ve made any sound at all. Finally it opens and there is the girl who dropped the picture frame on the first day of school, her thick blond hair haloed by the light behind her. She looks out, confused, and then glances down and puts her
hand to her mouth.

“Hospital,” I say, surprising myself with how much effort it takes to get the word out.

“Holy shit,” she says, and then she is helping me to my feet, letting me put all my weight against her as she half carries me down the hall. She is round and soft and smells of gum. Soon we are in her car and she is looking at me saying, “Oh my God, you’re green!” and I am trying to apologize for it all, for needing her help, for being so sick, for looking so ugly. She glances at my oversized jeans and old baggy sweatshirt. “Just don’t croak on me,” she says with her funny Long Island accent. “You’re the first girl I’ve met in this dorm who doesn’t look like a sorority chick. You’re not a sorority chick, are you?”

“God, no,” I manage to say.

“Oh good. I’m Zoey, by the way.”

Then the world goes black.

• • •

I open my eyes to fluorescent light and the murmur of people moving down a nearby hall. I blink several times. When I look down and find myself in a hospital gown, I am instantly wide awake.

“She lives!”

I look up, surprised to see the blond girl from my hall.

“I wasn’t sure you were gonna make it, so I ate your Jell-O,” she says with an unapologetic grin. “I’m Zoey, in case you forgot.” She plops down in the chair beside my bed and leans in. “By the way, I think the guy in the next room has the plague, so maybe don’t breathe while you’re here.”

I lift my head to try to glimpse through the curtain, and immediately start coughing. I turn back to Zoey. “You didn’t have to stay here with me.”

“Um . . . hello? Free Jell-O!”

“How long have you been here?” Her presence is both comfort and threat, knowing that I have burdened her with myself, and for that, there must always be a price.

“Relax! Not that long,” she says. “By the way, it’s pneumonia. They said you had water in your lungs.”

For a moment this makes a peculiar kind of sense, as if whatever foreign and contaminating thing I’ve always felt inside me has now been named. I imagine the relief of having it snaked out, watching it empty black into a bucket. Then I remember my recent near drowning, how I swallowed half the sea, and am disappointed to realize that my entire life can’t be explained with a simple diagnosis, resolved with a week’s worth of antibiotics.

“The good news is that it’s curable,” she says. “The better news is that I bought you cookies from the gift shop.” She waves a bag of chocolate chip cookies in my face and then peers closer. “Gotta say, you’re looking better already. You were completely green when you showed up at my door. Literally. Like Kermit the Frog green. Oh, and I called your mother.”

“What?” I sit up so fast, my ribs shriek with pain. “How?”

“You gave the nurse her number when you checked in. I know my mother would want to know. Anyway, she was very nice. Very worried.”

I wonder if it’s true, if my mother was worried.

“You can call her if you want,” she says, offering me her cell.

“Maybe in a little bit,” I lie.

“Ooh, here comes your doctor. Who is hot and also mine, just so we’re clear.” She sits back with a big grin and fluffs her hair. “How do I look?”

The doctor walks in, brown and handsome, with thick eyebrows and dark, deep-set eyes. He gives me a prescription for antibiotics and lectures me about how I should have seen a doctor sooner, how I need to take better care of myself, how easily I could have died. I nod and nod and nod and then ask him if there’s a place in the hospital I can go to smoke. He stares at me.

“I’m going to assume that was a joke,” he says. “I know you’re smarter than that.”

When he leaves, Zoey says, “Okay, so maybe he’s a little controlling, but it’s only because he cares.” She stares after him with exaggerated dreaminess.

“So listen,” I say, looking around with a growing unease as I consider how long they might keep me here, imprisoned in this room. “I kind of hate hospitals.”

“Say no more,” Zoey says. “I’ll lead the way.”

• • •

Back at the dorm, we part ways in front of our respective rooms, where I thank Zoey again for all her help and she gives me the bag of cookies to keep.

“You can come in and hang if you want,” she says. “It’s just me.”

“You don’t have a roommate either?”

“No, I transferred here at the last minute. Technically I’m a
sophomore, but all the sophomore dorms were filled. You looking for a roommate?”

“Oh no, no,” I say quickly. “I’m good.” I know I should accept her offer of company, take the opportunity of having a friend here. Instead we both linger for a moment and then say “bye” in unison and watch each other disappear behind our doors. The stale, germy air of my room hits me the second I walk in. It smells like death.

A moment later there is a knock on my door and I fling it open, relieved to see Zoey again, hoping that she has returned to insist that I hang out with her. Instead she holds out her cell. “Your mother is on the phone.”

“Oh . . . uh . . . okay, thanks,” I say, trying not to let my face reveal anything. “Can you tell her I’ll call her back on the pay phone?” I don’t want Zoey to hear this conversation.

A moment later, I’m in the hallway calling home.

“Cassie!” my mother says when she picks up the line. “Where are you? What happened?” I can’t tell if she’s worried or angry. “I got a call from some strange girl and—”

“That was Zoey,” I say. “And I’m fine.” Even as I say this, some stupid part of me wishes she would hear the lie of it, wishes she would say, “Come home and let me take care of you.” I know it’s the last place I should want to be, and yet the allure of home always holds promise even when it never existed. I stare at myself in the mirrored surface of the pay phone, my face distorted and grotesque in its warped finish, and I hate myself for this moment of need.

“How’s everything else? I can still remember how excited I was my first few weeks at Dunton.”

“Fine,” I say. “Like I just said. So . . . is there anything else you want? ’Cause I have stuff I need to do.” I light a cigarette, feel the scorch of it on my raw, aching lungs.

“Actually, yes. I have good news! I’m coming to see you.”

“You are? Why?”

For two and a half years my mother stuffed me away in a hospital and could barely bring herself to show up for a visit, and now she wants to see me? I don’t get it.

“We can pick up some nice things for your room when I’m there.”

“There’s no need to come,” I say. “And I don’t need anything.” I think of my bare living space, all the ratty old clothes in my closet.

“Of course there is, Cassie. College is a huge milestone in a young girl’s life, and everybody needs their mother for that.”

I stare at the phone, wondering who has inhabited my mother’s body.

“Oh, and by the way, let’s keep this little trip between us. I’ll let you know when I’m coming.”

I want to ask why a trip to see me would need to be secret, but she’s already hung up. I stare at the receiver for a moment and then go back to my room and lie down. It takes a while to fall asleep but when I do, I get pulled into a dark and feverish dream, the same one I’ve had for years. I wake with a start in a cold sweat, left with a residue of terror and a long-ago name in my head.