Under the Water

by Paul Pen

  “I’m nine!”

  With his eyes, the man gestured to Grace at the lines marked on the doorframe, recording Simon’s growth. The last measurement was labeled 9. Grace smiled at him. The boy went out with him, asking him how many boxes he could carry at the same time, whether he’d ever slept overnight in the truck, and something about the possibility of moving to Europe by road. Grace didn’t hear the last question clearly, since Simon asked it as they went down the stairs. She left the room, stopping herself from looking back to avoid sad thoughts about the only bedroom where, for his entire life, her son would ever play with two eyes. She closed the door with more force than intended.

  “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  Frank, who was coming up the stairs, quickened his stride.

  “It hurts,” explained Grace. “It hurts seeing the wound. Physically.” She squeezed her fingers on one hand to illustrate the feeling. “It actually hurts.”

  Her husband lowered his head.

  “I’m sorry,” Grace said. She stroked his face. “I didn’t want to make you feel bad.”

  He emptied his lungs with a sigh. It took him a few seconds to recover his voice. “See why we need the change? I could never erase that memory from this house.”

  “I hope the prosthetic eye really does change everything,” she said.

  “Sure it will.” Frank forced a smile. “I’m certain of it.”

  He handed Grace the framed photo she’d left in the kitchen. When he held out a hand to one side, Grace took it. They went down the stairs together, leaving the past behind, step by step. They walked down the long hall toward the front door they would now use for a final exit. Grace picked up her purse from the floor. She’d left it ready in the usual place, though today it wasn’t sitting on the long sideboard that had occupied the hall for years. It was where they had left the folder containing the ultrasound scan confirming their first child would be a girl. And where they left bags of diapers while they got the stroller ready to take Simon out for a walk. The children had cast their report cards there at the end of each school year, dashing upstairs toward a new summer. And on the same sideboard, they finally signed the papers that handed the house back to the hotel chain that employed Frank, while securing them a new one in Boston. Grace examined the outline of dirt on the bare wall, hypnotized by the ghostly presence of a piece of furniture that could summarize their family’s story.

  “Come on, don’t make a big thing of it,” said Frank, reading her thoughts. “Keep walking—that sideboard’s going to be in our new home, too.”

  Outside, Simon’s squeal of excitement stood out amid the birdsong as he leapt from the moving truck down to the street. The young man in the cap climbed down after him. He and two other men, all dressed in the same company polo shirt, yelled things to one another about distributing the weight of the boxes evenly and securing the cargo.

  Audrey crossed the front yard to one of the side paths. When she waved goodbye to the wooded area behind the house, Grace knew who the farewell was for. The girl then pulled out her cell phone and took a selfie in front of the house, exaggerating her sad face.

  “Right, enough drama!” Frank yelled to everyone. “We’ve got much better things ahead! Starting with Idaho and the hot springs!”

  Grace caught up with her husband, who was signing moving-related documents on a clipboard held by the young man in the cap. Frank was explaining to him that a representative from his own company would receive the shipment at the destination address. He and his family would take it easy and make the most of the move, getting to know the northern states better. He reeled off the names Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore, the Badlands, Niagara Falls.

  “What did we buy one of these for if not to see the sights, huh?” Frank pointed with the pen at the motor home parked right behind the truck. “Now that the weather’s improved at last, it’s the best time to travel with it.”

  It was one of the big RVs, the size of a bus, painted in various tones of gray with undulating maroon lines. They’d bought it a year ago but hadn’t found the time to break it in with a big trip. In the end, the big trip became a move to the other side of the country.

  “Oh, sure. A Class A,” the young man said. “You’re going to be nice and comfortable in there. I bet it has more space than my apartment. You know how to do things right, huh?”

  He looked at Grace cautiously in case he’d made a third misstep, but she responded with a smile.

  “Done,” said Frank, marking a loud dot on the last of his signatures. “We’re off!”

  The man retrieved his pen. “Enjoy your trip.” Then he yelled to the boy. “And you, Simon! You have a great time, OK?”

  “I’ll have fun in two-D!”

  They both gave a thumbs-up. The gesture put Grace in such a good mood that she sent a kiss into the air with her fingers to say goodbye to the young man.

  “Drive carefully, it’s a long journey,” she told him in a maternal tone. “And stop to rest all you want, there’s no hurry.”

  Frank laughed and took her by the elbow to lead her to the RV. “I love how you’re so friendly with people,” he said on the way. “Even some kid from the moving company.”

  3.

  It was the first time she’d manned the desk alone. She’d been with the company just three days, but the boss had decided she was ready to serve customers by herself. He told her not to worry, that first thing in the morning there would be hardly any rentals and that at eight in the morning a coworker would begin his shift to help with the rush. For the time being, the boss had been right: no one had turned up at her desk since she opened up at six.

  She adjusted her shirt cuffs for the umpteenth time so that they protruded slightly from her jacket’s sleeves. Every five minutes she checked that her name badge was straight on her pocket. Each time the screen saver came on, she moved the mouse to make it disappear. She was terrified at the idea of the system freezing. Bored, she invented a pastime that consisted of drawing a dark blot with her pen on a piece of paper and pressing her thumb against it to reproduce her print all over the rest of the page. She’d almost filled it when the first customer arrived.

  A lone woman. Pretty. Dressed in a stretched sweatshirt, her hands barely visible. She now wished she hadn’t stained her thumb with ink. She tried to clean it on the page before the woman reached the desk.

  “Good morning, welcome to Emerald City Car Rental, where your best journeys begin. I’m Holly. How can I help you?”

  She heard the nervousness in her voice. She’d sounded too high-pitched, too cheerful. More like a college student doing an internship than a real professional.

  “You can help me rent a car,” the woman replied.

  She said it in such a way, stressing the obvious, that Holly knew she hadn’t made a good impression. The woman must have disliked the anxious high pitch in her voice. It was to be expected. Starting on such a bad note made her even more nervous.

  “What type of car would you like?”

  Now her voice was at least deeper, but her lip had trembled. For goodness’ sake, she had to calm down. She gestured at two large cards on the counter showing the various car models. The young woman ran her finger over them.

  “I don’t know, I don’t care.”

  Holly saw that some fingers on the woman’s left hand had blackened skin, like an old burn of some kind. An electrical burn, maybe. As a child, Holly had stuck her hand in an electric heater and her hand had been black for weeks.

  “This one here,” said the woman.

  “A standard size, then—perfect. When do you need it?”

  “Now?”

  Again, she used the dry tone that invalidated the question as too obvious. And she was right. When would she want the car if not now? Holly’s lip trembled again. Her gaze escaped to the computer. She entered the details, leaving ink on the spacebar with her thumb.

  “And will you return it here?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll decide later. I’m
going on a, let’s say”—she searched for the right word—“an emotional journey. More internal than external, if that makes sense.”

  “Sure, sure, of course it does,” Holly said, though in reality it didn’t.

  “I’ve been having a rough time, and I think a trip on my own is just what I need. I’ve never been to Idaho, and it’s so close. Have you?”

  “No, to be honest, I haven’t.”

  “Well, it’s right there.”

  “Yes, very close.” She would have agreed with anything the woman said. “You don’t know the return date, then?”

  The woman shook her head. Holly smiled but her back was beginning to sweat. Could she log a rental without a return date? It hadn’t come up in the first few days of work, nor could she remember having covered the situation during her training days. On the screen, a box on the registration form required the information. She clicked with the mouse several times to try to leave it empty, but an error message appeared.

  “I’m going to need a return date,” she said, full of doubt. “I could change it later, I guess.”

  “Well, I don’t know, say I’ll return it”—she waved her hand in the air—“in five days. On July fourteenth.”

  “Are you sure?” Holly asked, and regretted the question right away. How could she have done that, questioned the customer? Her job was to process the car rental, enter the details the customer provided. If the information proved to be false, that wasn’t her problem anymore—the boss, or the insurance company, or whoever, would have to deal with it.

  “I’m sorry. You seemed undecided. I asked to know whether you were completely sure, not because I thought you were lying.”

  Fabulous. Now she’d called her a liar as well. But the woman wasn’t offended. Her lips formed into a strange smile.

  “Can we ever be completely sure about anything?” she said. “Will I still be alive in five days to return the car? Will you still be alive?”

  OK. Now it was clear: there was something unusual about the woman. Her response wasn’t normal, whichever way you looked at it. Maybe that was why Holly had felt so uneasy from the start—her intuition was warning her of something.

  “I hope so,” Holly replied. Her heart had accelerated. “Both in five days and in fifty years, I hope!—I’m pretty young. Would you like me to tell you about the insurance?”

  “Add all the insurance,” the woman answered. Then she deepened her voice: “Just in case.” She said it with exaggerated darkness, verging on parody. So perhaps what she said before was also part of some joke. Maybe the woman simply had an unusual sense of humor and Holly was more nervous than she needed to be. Drops of sweat appeared on her forehead, and one rolled down the side of her face.

  “Are you sad?” the woman asked.

  “Sad?” Holly dried her brow with her jacket sleeve. “Not at all. I’m just nervous—it’s the first time I’ve been left on my own here and I want to get everything right. I was hoping for a normal rental.”

  “And I’m not normal?”

  “Sorry, sorry. See how nervous I am? I think it’s best if I just stop talking.”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t let anyone silence you, ever. We women have had plenty of that already. In any case, I like honest people. And that’s what you’ve been since I walked through that door.”

  At what moment had the woman gone from wanting to frighten her to valuing her deeply as a fellow female? Holly thanked her for her words with a smile but endeavored not to say much more. The customer was always right, and she was going to give her the car, just as she asked. If the car was then found burned out after a drug feud or driven off an embankment with the seats full of bullets, it wasn’t Holly’s problem. Her boss could deal with it.

  She followed the steps to complete the rental procedure. As she scanned the woman’s documents, she saw that the name on the driver’s license was Mara Miller. She also took payment from a credit card. The woman’s signature was rounded, clean, with no lines through or under the name. The simplicity of it made her think of a woman at peace with herself, an image at odds with how troubled she seemed right now.

  “I’ll show you to your car.”

  At last her voice sounded confident, professional. She took an envelope from a drawer containing the keys, went around the desk, and asked the woman to follow her. A door at the back of the hut led straight to the parking area. From there, she pointed at a row of standard-size cars.

  “See the red car with SKY on the plate?”

  “I see it.”

  “Well, that’s yours.”

  Holly handed her the envelope. A print in black ballpoint ink was left on one corner, almost imperceptible because the ink had dried on her thumb. The nervous Holly wanted to say something about the spiritual journey the woman had said she was embarking on, that she hoped she would find whatever it was she was searching for, but the professional Holly of the last few minutes asserted herself and, with a businesslike absence of emotion, just wished Miss Miller a pleasant drive. The woman thanked her and crossed the parking lot in the car’s direction.

  “Please bring the car back,” Holly whispered when she was out of earshot. “I’m still in the probation period.”

  4.

  Frank loved driving in the high motor-home seat. He felt as if he were flying over the road, seeing what was happening on all six lanes, calculating the consequences for them of a vehicle maneuvering far in front. In the distance he saw a rest area that was still several miles away. In the passenger seat, Grace was also looking ahead, but her eyes were out of focus. Frank had seen his wife go in and out of this absent state several times as they drove. Now she was also rubbing the pointed hairs at one end of her eyebrow with her fingertip.

  “Come on, honey.” He pinched her elbow to interrupt the habit that always manifested itself when she was worried. Later she would complain that her eyebrow looked sparse in her videos. “We’re doing the right thing. We need to change our luck.”

  In the rearview mirror, Frank saw Audrey move her cell phone away from her face. She’d spent the last hour lying on the sofa, typing away, disobeying her parents’ constant orders to sit at the table and put her seat belt on as Simon had. Now she sat up and moved to the part of the sofa nearest them, behind Frank’s seat.

  “And why do you think our luck will change on the other side of the country?” she asked.

  “For starters, because your father’s going to earn more money,” he replied. “That’s important.”

  “You must know I’m not materialistic,” said Audrey, before returning her attention to the iPhone X her father had paid for.

  “We’ve only been driving a few hours and I already feel too far away,” Grace whispered. “It’s too soon. I feel like we’re running away.”

  Frank let out a guffaw. “Nonsense. We’re not running away.”

  “That was our home . . .” Audrey gestured at some indeterminate place behind her, at the three hundred or more miles between them and the house they’d left behind.

  “In a month, Boston will be our home. Just like the old one. Or better. And Boston’s that way.” He gestured ahead, to the future.

  “All I’ll say is, my ferrets won’t come back however many times we move. And Simon won’t grow a new eye.”

  Frank let his shoulders drop. Every time Simon’s eye was mentioned, he felt his heart stop. His blood stopped running and stagnated, then putrefied, turning into guilt. Grace tutted. She wanted to give Audrey a smack on the knee but couldn’t reach.

  “Don’t say that,” she whispered. “What if your brother hears you?”

  Frank searched for Simon in the rearview mirror, running his eyes over the inside of the vehicle in its reflection. Behind the driver’s seat, against the wall on the left side, was the three-person sofa Audrey was occupying. Next, perpendicular to it, was a dining table with two benches facing each other. Beyond that was the bathroom and, at the back, the master bedroom. On the other side, behind Grace’s seat, wa
s the main door, the kitchen—which had a double-bowl sink, three burners, a pantry, an oven, and a refrigerator—a large closet space and, at the rear again, the bedroom. Both the living room and the bedroom were modules that extended to create more space when the vehicle was parked. On the road, with the modules retracted as they were now, the motor home’s interior was compressed in such a way that the sink was close to the sofa on the opposite side and the refrigerator almost touched the dining table. That was where Simon was, oblivious to Audrey’s comments, munching on a pack of Flamin’ Hot Nacho Doritos. The entire RV smelled like chili peppers.

  “Dad!” he yelled right then. “The license plates, Dad! They’re changing! Now they’re red and blue. And they say”—he sucked a finger as he pressed his nose against the glass to read—“Famous potatoes?” He wrinkled his nose, doubting his imperfect eyesight, but moments later he confirmed it. “Famous potatoes! Dad, they say famous potatoes.” Simon burst into laughter, then noticed Frank looking at him in the mirror.

  “Look how well you can read even from a distance, Gizmo,” he said. “Of course the plates are changing, we’re approaching Idaho.”

  His son looked back out the window, the patch covering his right eye.

  “It says it on all of them! Scenic Idaho. Famous potatoes.”

  “Each state has its own plates, son. On the ones from here, like ours, it says Evergreen State”—half the cars surrounding them still bore the Washington state design—“but on the Idaho ones it says the potato thing. And wait till you see what’s on the Wyoming ones.”

  Simon’s healthy eye opened wide, intrigued, ready to be surprised, as expectant of life as he had always been.

  “What’s on the Wyoming ones?”

  “You’ll see,” Frank replied. “You’ll have to wait till we arrive.”

  “What is it?”

  Frank shrugged, maintaining the intrigue. Beside him, Grace smiled. Like him, she was happy that Simon was still the same boy he had been a month before.

  Frank saw Audrey in the mirror, showing her cell phone to her brother. And in the reflection of a window, the screen with an image of a Wyoming license plate. Simon opened his mouth when he saw it, amazed. Wow, a cowboy, Frank read on his lips. Audrey shushed him so their dad wouldn’t know she and Google had given away the secret. The conspiracy between siblings touched Frank.