Blue Water Page 4

  “Rex said it was okay to let you know,” I said. “If Cindy Ann hasn’t been contacted yet, she’ll be getting a letter soon.”

  To my surprise, Toby shook his head. “Rex will never withdraw that suit,” he said.

  “I told you he just did. We did.” I was annoyed. I’d expected—what? Not thanks, exactly, but some kind of acknowledgment. The decision, after all, couldn’t help but affect his relationship with Mallory, ease what I could only imagine was an awkward situation for them both. “Look, we’re leaving Fox Harbor,” I said. “We just bought a sailboat. Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  Of all people, I’d assured Rex, Toby will understand. After all, whenever he wasn’t in the fish store, he practically lived aboard the Michigan Jack: trawling for coho and sturgeon, netting smelt in season. He traveled to national breeders’ conventions, fish shows, tournaments. He’d been on snorkeling and scuba-diving trips all over the world. He also knew what it was like to stand out, to hear people whispering in your wake. He’d been born with a birthmark that covered his cheek, pinned his ear to the side of his head. His eye didn’t open fully. His left nostril didn’t match the right. It was, I’d often thought to myself, the reason my brother lived the way he did, drawn to things that lived silently, simply, under water.

  “Tell me you’re kidding,” Toby said, now.

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  “Jesus.” He carried the angel, dripping, to the counter, where he held it beneath a UV light. Rough white patches appeared along its sides. “You’ve got no offshore experience, and Rex is hardly any better off.”

  “Rex has experience—” I began.

  “Working on a cruise ship? Sailing with his dad? Come on.” Toby flicked the angel into the sick tank, where a stunned-looking molly already swam in circles. “This is the big, bad ocean, Cowboy. People die out there.”

  I glared at him, the age gap between us swelling—a deep, dividing stream—from a trickle to a roar. He wasn’t taking me seriously. He wasn’t being fair. As a child, I’d idolized him, longed for his approval, blushed helplessly at his rare, lasting compliments. Cowboy, he’d called me then, called me now whenever he wanted my attention, and the sound of his voice gliding over the word made me long to curl up again, young and small, swinging in the strong, snug V of his arm. Always, I’d been secretly, shamefully happy that Toby never dated, never seemed to have friends, beyond the distant correspondence of his breeding clubs and dive teams. Even after Rex and I were married, I’d often walked over to the fish store after work, joined him for a snack of summer sausage and cheese from a refrigerator crowded with fish heads, bone meal, bait. It was actually cleaner—and more wholesomely supplied—than the ancient, leaking fridge in his apartment over the mill. There he’d lived, alone, since he’d left my parents’ house at twenty-five, accumulating miles of plastic tubing, broken aerators, aquarium pieces, artificial grasses, stacks of fishing bulletins, brochures, magazines. A table saw stood in the dining alcove. The bedroom held buckets in which he bred mice, mealworms, brine shrimp; the kitchen housed his dive gear and assorted boat parts. Somewhere beneath all the rubble was the broken-backed couch where he slept. The landlord, Mr. Dickens, turned a blind eye to the lifestyles of his tenants, provided they turned a corresponding eye to the boarded-over windows, the broken appliances, the fact that the temperature seldom rose above sixty degrees in winter.

  That hellhole, my mother called it. I myself hadn’t seen the inside of it, now, for several years.

  But I’d always loved spending time at the fish store, watching Toby putter about with his tanks, traffic passing by outside the window. “How about a splash of something?” he’d say, pouring us each an inch of Maker’s Mark. The two of us sipping that good amber fire. Feeling myself to be first and always chosen. The truth was that Toby knew me better, loved me better, than anyone, even Rex—Rex, who’d accepted this from the start, with remarkable, generous grace.

  All of that had changed after Evan was born. And then, the year before Evan started kindergarten, Toby had begun seeing Mallory. She’d rented, it turned out, the efficiency across the landing from his place, four hundred square feet that had stood, unoccupied, for as long as I could remember. Through the open door, I’d seen the cracked walls, the ancient gas stove, the bathtub sitting in the middle of the kitchen, and I worried about her—or anyone, for that matter—trying to make the place habitable. Though Mallory, it turned out, was remarkably resourceful. She borrowed Toby’s hot plate while she, herself, refurbished the stove, stored goat’s milk in his fridge while she scoured the dumps for an antique ice chest. Soon there were reports that he was dropping her off for work at the Cup and Cruller. Shortly after that, Anna Schultz—my parents’ former neighbor—phoned my mother, in Florida, to let her know she’d seen them at the Dairy Castle.

  Together, you know, Anna had said.

  I figured it was time to ask.

  “I’ve been helping her out, that’s all,” Toby said. “I suppose the grapevine has us married.”

  “No,” I told him. “Just sleeping together.”

  To my amazement, he’d blushed, blood rushing into his birthmark, leaving the other side of his face as pale as naked bone. I phoned my mother immediately.

  “Well, you’ve got to admit, she’s brave.” My mother spoke in her usual matter-of-fact way. “Tackling a seasoned bachelor at her age. What is she—thirty, thirty-one?”

  “Thirty-six,” I said. “It isn’t quite that bad.”

  “Which makes her twenty years younger than your brother.”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Somebody’s doing her math.”

  “I’m an accountant. Math is my job.”

  “Of course, it is,” my mother said.

  Now, I turned to face Toby slowly, deliberately, keeping my voice steady. “People die anywhere and everywhere,” I said. “Driving to school at eight in the morning, for instance.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Meg.”

  I bristled. “You’re damn right, it wasn’t my fault!”

  “So why do this? It’s as if you’re trying to punish yourself. I’m just trying to understand why.”

  It was like being fed a precise, round pill. Tears filled my eyes, but I swallowed it down, swallowed and swallowed until the ache in my throat was gone.

  “If I really wanted to punish myself,” I said, “I’d be trying to figure out what you see in Mallory Donaldson.”

  “Okay.” His voice, unlike mine, had stayed even. “I guess it’s none of my business what you do.”

  “It’s none of my business what you do, either,” I said, staring at the chunky silver ring on his third finger. It was one of Mallory’s peculiar designs, something she’d hammered and soldered into being. It surprised me, surprised my parents, too, that Toby would actually wear it. Then again, nothing about the relationship made sense, unless you considered—as Rex pointed out—that, before Mallory, Toby had always been alone. He’d seemed self-sufficient to me, perfectly complete, but perhaps this had never been true. After all, I’d seen the stares people gave him, women gave him, not to mention kids my own age when he’d pick me up at school. Arriving home from Madison on fall break, freshman year, I myself had been startled by the sight of his face. Try as you might to pretend otherwise, it would always be the first thing strangers noticed.

  Suddenly, I was tired. I’d spent the whole day working on the house, steam cleaning rugs, recaulking the bathtub, getting the place ready to receive a tenant. Evan had been dead six months. Driving into town, I’d seen Cindy Ann’s three daughters bicycling along the J road in tank tops and bright, summery shorts. Amy, Laurel, Monica. Each of those names a poisonous flower.

  “Can’t you understand,” I said, “how hard it is to be here without Evan?”

  Toby’s hair had fallen in a tangle over his eyes. “Won’t it be just as hard somewhere else?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  �
��Well, for one thing,” I said, “we won’t have to deal with Cindy Ann anymore.” I waited for him to nod, agree. “I mean, seeing her. Seeing her kids. Watching her going about her life as if nothing even happened.” Again, I waited. “For Pete’s sake, Toby, she’s driving the same damn car. She killed someone, a human being, and it hasn’t made the least bit of difference. She’s still a reckless drunk.”

  “Mallory says she’s not drinking anymore.”

  “Mallory would say that.”

  “She says there are days Cindy Ann doesn’t get out of bed.”

  “I’ve had some of those days myself.”

  The bubbling sound of the aerators filled the silence between us.

  “But you knew her, Meg,” Toby finally said. “You knew all those girls. You, of all people, know how hard it was for them, growing up in that house.”

  Now I was angry. Of course I knew, as everyone else in town knew, that Cindy Ann’s stepfather had shot himself in the shed behind the veal pens. It was the excuse people always gave: for Cindy Ann’s failed marriages, for Mallory’s shrill politics, for the middle sister, Becca, going door-to-door for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Cindy Ann’s mother was barely in her sixties, and yet she was living in a nursing home, disabled by early Alzheimer’s: hunched, forgetful, smiling. The only child she’d had with Dan Kolb—born when Cindy Ann was twelve—had been what was then called mentally retarded. He’d eventually died in his early teens. This, too, was blamed, implausibly, on Dan Kolb’s suicide.

  “So the family had problems,” I said. “So what. That doesn’t give Cindy Ann the right to drink however many bottles of wine she drank and then get into her car, the hell with everybody else.” I wanted to shake my brother, slap him; my neck and shoulders actually hurt with the effort of restraining myself from doing it. “She had a choice in all this, remember? Rex and I had no choice. Evan had no choice.”

  “I know, I know all that,” Toby said, and at last, he was angry, too. “Evan was my nephew, remember? You think it doesn’t matter to me, too? You think I don’t wake up every single day and think about how awful it is? I’m just saying I feel sorry for her, that’s all.”

  “Sorry?” I spat the word from my mouth, and then I told him what I’d told no one else: how I’d sat in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, hands gripping the wheel, waiting for Cindy Ann and her ice cream.

  “Maybe,” I said, “you’d feel sorry for me if I’d actually run her over.”

  “I would feel sorry, Cowboy,” he said. “Sorry for you both.”

  I turned, walked out the door. Hurrying past the front window, I caught a glimpse of him standing between the tanks: one side of his face stricken as my own, the other half lost in darkness. The neon dartings of the fish all around him seemed like sparks flying out of his body. I understood I was losing something else, someone else. Someone precious.

  I didn’t go back.

  And then.

  Crossing the parking lot toward my car, the sky growing dark over the lake, I saw—not Cindy Ann Kreisler, but Cindy Ann Donaldson, sixteen years old. Hurrying straight out of our childhoods, out of the single, charmed summer we’d been friends. There was her Dairy Castle uniform. There were her regulation shoes, the white bib, the hairnet and curved paper hat. I’d often met her at closing time, and together, we’d walked to the beach, where we sat on a slab of pale sandstone, sharing still-warm burgers she’d crushed into her purse. Looking up at the stars, the moon. Wisps of her hair flickering, soft, against my cheeks. Abruptly, I remembered the smell of her uniform: tomato ketchup and grease. I remembered, too, the odor of the shampoo she used to lighten her hair. She was struggling to pin her hat into place. One earring dangling, the other hung up in her hair.

  Want to come to my house sometime?

  Ducking our heads to step up into the attic. A double mattress in the center of the floor, a twist of pink sheets, a floral comforter.

  I get the whole attic. It’s because I’m the oldest.

  I’d forgotten about the attic. They were dirt-poor, the Donaldsons. At the time, I thought it was cool. Shirts and dresses on a clothesline strung between the eaves. A cardboard box for underwear, socks. The thrum of Dan Kolb’s voice from below, affectionate and warm, roughhousing with Cindy Ann’s younger sisters. The slow, strained sound of Ricky Kolb’s speech, incomprehensible to anyone outside the family. The smell of the veal pens behind the shed where, eventually, Mr. Kolb would fire two shots: the first opening a hole in his chest, the second passing through his head.

  I blinked. It wasn’t Cindy Ann Donaldson, of course. It was Cindy Ann Kreisler’s oldest daughter, Amy, late for work at the same Dairy Castle where her mother had worked thirty-five hours a week during the school year, fifty-hour weeks in the summertime. Same swing shift. Same wheat-colored hair. Why was a girl like Amy Kreisler working at DC? Amy was the daughter of Cindy Ann’s first husband, the older man, the one with all that money. It was said that she’d never have to work a day in her life, if she didn’t want to.

  I knew the moment Amy recognized me because she lost her grip on the paper hat. It kited away in the cool lake breeze. She turned, hesitated, let it go.

  We passed each other in silence.

  When I was pregnant, I took a course on hypnosis, in which we learned to say surge instead of contraction, breathe instead of push, pressure instead of pain. Once a week, we met at the hospital, in what was clearly an unused supply room: four pregnant women plus the instructor, an older woman who positively glowed with her good wishes for us all. Her low, beautiful voice led us through scene after imagined scene. You are in your mother’s kitchen, there’s a warm, baking smell in the air. You are at the beach, the sun in your hair, the sound of the water like a song. You are breathing your baby down out of your body, and each surge fills you with excitement and strength.

  My favorite exercise involved imagining everything we’d ever heard about childbirth, all the images, positive and negative, as if they were painted on a tall, wide mural filling the walls. In our hands, we held a paintbrush and a bucket of black paint. Our job was to blot out the negative images, one by one, then fill the black spaces with whatever we pleased: an easy delivery, a healthy baby, our hopes and dreams for the future. I painted a baby with dark brown eyes, a thicket of curls like my own. I painted a bowlegged toddler, riding on Rex’s shoulders, shrieking with delight. I painted family sailing trips, picnics on Lake Michigan aboard the Michigan Jack, birthday parties, Christmas dinners, high school graduation. College and career—what would it be? Maybe some travel before settling down. A wife and children. Grandchildren. Rex and I blustering through the door, arms filled with overpriced gifts, just as our own grandparents had done.

  Again and again, during the course of my labor, I returned to this exercise, forcing myself to open my eyes, to concentrate on my mural. Even when faced with the physical fact of my pain—which was, indeed, pain, and nothing like pressure at all—I was able to step over it, again and again, the way, walking along a city sidewalk, you step over patches of broken glass.

  I boarded Chelone believing it was possible to step over Cindy Ann the same way, given enough distance between us. To blot her from my thoughts with imaginary paint. I did not yet understand that we’d been forever bound to each other like sisters, like lovers, like people who have known each other in the glimmer of some otherworldly life. That Cindy Ann had been woven into my heart like a violent act, or a secret child. That she, in her turn, carried me: a bumping beneath her ribs, a fluttering deep in her abdomen, an acid burn that bubbled up after meals. This, despite the old sleeping pills, the new high-tech antidepressants. Despite the drone of the court-appointed therapist’s bored voice. Despite the guilty bottles of wine she still downed in the evenings, defiantly, helplessly. Or so she would admit to me later, much later, when I was able to hear. Her beautiful face twisted, transformed. Stricken with utter self-loathing.

  The face from which, at sixteen years of age, I’d turned away.

&nb
sp; One morning at dawn, a warbler fluttered into Chelone’s cockpit, perched on the rail, then slid, exhausted, onto the bench. It was my watch; I called out to Rex, who poked his rumpled head out of the companionway.

  “What?”

  Then he saw it, too.

  For a moment, we just stared at it, stunned, disbelieving. We were hundreds of nautical miles from the nearest piece of land. I don’t think we could have been more surprised if an angel had appeared.

  Rex tipped freshwater into a bottle cap, nudged it as close as he dared. To my surprise, the bird drank immediately, lustily, tilting back its head to reveal its yellow throat. Within a few hours, it had revived completely, and by the following day, it flitted comfortably between us, pecking crumbs off the cockpit floor. We assumed it would stay with us, our mascot, our darling—after all, where else would it go? But all of a sudden, without any warning, it simply took off.

  It was gone.

  A small loss and, yet, how easily it swelled to fit the exact dimensions of each familiar, empty place. I sat in the cockpit, hugging my knees. Rex paced the deck, oblivious to the sun.

  “What was the point?” he finally said.

  “There’s always a point,” I said.

  He passed a hand across his eyes. “I wish we’d never seen the goddamn thing,” he said.

  Three

  for the first days after the squall line passed, Rex and I were grateful to find ourselves becalmed. The ocean barely breathed beneath us, a dreaming animal, rumbling with content. We huddled beneath the shade of the bimini, slathered ourselves in sunscreen and zinc. We played cards. We read books. I polished all the ship’s brass—pump handles, grab rails, the post supporting the mast—while Rex oiled the teak hatch covers, rubbed down the engine with grease. He was still moving slowly, babying his shoulder, taking prescription painkillers from the medical kit. The dark bruise had transformed itself into a bright tropical flower: a whorl of lavenders and purples, burnt umber, pale green.