“Sure, I’m sure.” Maybe I imagined it. His face looks completely blank now. His makeup is smeared on the side he must have slept on. I let go of his boat. “Good luck,” he says and disappears into the fog.
DOREEN
As soon as I heard Edith’s voice on the phone, I knew there was trouble. What now, I thought. I’d just gotten home from working a double. My feet were swollen so bad I had trouble taking off my shoes. Edith asked me if Marianne was at my house. “What do you mean?” I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Marianne was in the hospital. I wondered if Edith was beginning to lose it too. First, she appears out of nowhere, then she disappears without a word, runs off and doesn’t even tell me.
“We found her clothes,” she said. “In a pile by the river.” The clothes she described were not Marianne’s. I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying until finally she told me the whole story. The story of her stupid albino boyfriend trying to be a hero and them thinking they could play house.
“What did you think was going to happen?” I kept asking her. She’d been the one to cut her mother down from the rafter. What did she think was going to happen this time around?
I said her boyfriend should be arrested for what he did. But then I thought about it. What good would that do? Marianne got what she wanted. And the Mississippi, it’s not the worst way to go. The hospital administrators are the ones who should be arrested. They hadn’t even notified me. Who knows how long they were hoping to keep this quiet.
Edith told me that she didn’t think her mother had drowned. “Maybe she went for a swim,” she said, like the river we were talking about was Denial, and not the Mississippi. You don’t go for a swim in the Mississippi. Not down here. Not in June. Not with the riptides. Marianne knew that as much as anyone. People drowned in that river all the time and quick. Then Edith started talking about some drag queen in a boat and how Marianne hadn’t left her shoes. I’d had about enough. “You think she got naked and hitchhiked on a boat with her sneakers on?”
“Maybe she went for a walk,” Edith said. “Maybe she’s in Alabama by now.”
“Go back to New York,” I said and hung up the phone. I didn’t have anything else to say. She must’ve known as well as I did that her momma was dead. I knew the call would come about Marianne sooner or later and I was prepared for it. Well, as prepared as you can ever be for something like that.
When we were girls, Marianne told me a story about walking from my house to hers at night through the pasture. It’s the Lakeview Plaza now, but then it was a pasture. And she said that she heard someone next to her, someone breathing.
It was probably a horse, I said. They left them out to graze at night sometimes.
No, she said. It wasn’t a horse.
Well, who was it then? I was expecting her to say it was a boy from her class, or the town drunk. Someone a little dangerous, who might’ve tried to bother her.
Not who, she said. What. It was death.
Death? Well, then why aren’t you dead?
Oh, she said, it just wanted to let me know that I’d been marked.
Everyone’s been marked, I told her. All of us.
God, I thought she was dumb sometimes. It was just like her to think dying was special. Dying is not special. Everybody does it.
But then why does it always feel like such a surprise, no matter what, no matter how marked, no matter how much everybody’s expecting it?
At least she’s finally at peace.
I thought about organizing a second line. It would have pleased my momma, and I think Marianne would have liked that too, but then my brother died right after and I didn’t have it in me to deal with arranging anything. It was also complicated by the fact that her body was never found. The current swept it out into the Gulf of Mexico.
Chapter 9
MAE
I was in the hospital for a long time. I needed eight skin grafts. The nurses changed my bandages and bathed me in a special steel tub to clean out my wounds. This was a gruesome process and one medical student even fainted at the sight of me unsheathed. The burns were extensive, covering much of my face, arms, and chest, but they were mostly first and second degree, and I was on enough drugs that if I lay very still, it was bearable. It was the itching as my skin healed that was hard to take. Still, I didn’t regret what I had done. I was faceless and bald, but I felt more like myself than I ever had before. I was a new person after the fire. I had performed an exorcism and Mom was gone.
When Dad came to visit me, I was surprised by how much smaller he was than I remembered. He wasn’t a giant. He looked old. He came with Aunt Rose and cried while Amanda rubbed his shoulders. Tears streamed down his cheeks and got lost in his beard. I felt tenderly towards him, but he didn’t really matter to me anymore.
“Don’t cry,” I told him. “There’s nothing to cry about.”
Rose fussed around the room, pretending to give us privacy, but when he took my bandaged hand and brought it to his lips, she was on us immediately, gently pulling his mouth away from my hand. That was the only indication I had that Rose knew about what had been going on between Dad and me. Amanda didn’t say a word the entire time she was there, and I tried not to look at her.
I knew it was really over because Dad had brought all my things from the apartment, including my grandfather’s Leica. My fingers had just healed enough for me to use it and I held that camera between us. I didn’t even check if there was film in it—it was just a way for me to keep him at a distance. Our past and my madness was a sealed-up object now, scary but also beautiful. I wanted to hold it and look at it often, but it had nothing to do with me in the present.
After that visit, the camera and I became inseparable. When the hospital finally released me, I went to live with Rose on Long Island. I remember Dad standing across the street on the edge of the sidewalk, a few steps in front of Amanda, waving at us as the nurse helped me into the station wagon, and Rose and her husband loaded in my luggage and the crate with Cronus. I thought Dad must have felt relieved to see me go, though when I printed the pictures from that afternoon, he did not look relieved at all. The relief was all mine. I remember lying across the backseat, taking pictures of the sky blurring past the window and feeling blank, empty, and light.
AMANDA
Mae was delusional. She’s still delusional. The things she claimed her father made her do—utter lies. And that she has made a career out of this… out of humiliating us. She was so cowardly she had to wait until he could no longer defend himself. Well, I’ll defend him. I was there! And it wasn’t like that at all. Painters use live models all the time. Nobody accuses them of perversion. The creative process is delicate and geniuses are allowed their eccentricities.
I don’t mean to sound unfeeling, but for me the tragedy of his burnt masterwork far surpassed what that girl did to her own face. Dennis blamed himself, unfairly, for the fire. He stopped writing. I offered to be his amanuensis, to help him reconstruct what he had lost, but he was not interested. For weeks afterward he’d wake up at night coughing, convinced he could smell smoke. Add to that the news of his ex-wife’s death and he was not himself. It was good timing when Bard offered him a teaching position upstate.
I was glad to get away from the city and from his daughters, and even from Rose. I was grateful that she brought Dennis back to me, but after the fire she behaved strangely. It was noble of her to take in the girls, but she seemed to blame Dennis for what had happened to Mae. It was odd. This devastating tragedy had befallen him and his sister did not seem very supportive. When I said something about this, he was quick to snap at me so I let the matter drop. Their relationship is their business, and in some sense, the fewer other people he had to rely on the better for me, since it allowed for the construction of our own newfound closeness. It helped with our fresh start.
I told myself he would eventually return to writing, if not to the lost book then to something else, but after his stroke this no longer seems possibl
e. It kills me to think of the beautiful novels his daughter has robbed from this world.
EDITH (1997)
“TICKETS!”
A man dressed like a Civil War re-enactor in a blue wool suit and cap is standing over my seat.
“TICKETS, PLEASE!” he barks, then sucks on his nicotine-stained mustache as he waits for me to take the sleeve of Mom’s coat out of my mouth and dig through all my pockets. I find the ticket in my shorts. I pass it to him and he hole-punches it, then tucks it above my head under the luggage bin.
“Tickets!” He continues down the aisle and into the next car. “Tickets, please!”
The only other person in this compartment is a woman reading an US Weekly. I wonder if Mom is riding on a train somewhere right now too. Naked, wet hair, reading a book. She doesn’t read trashy magazines. Could I have been too hard on Dennis? Mom is definitely a difficult person to be with sometimes. Even she would agree with that. Why else run away from her own life?
And yes, she ran away. I don’t give a shit what Doreen thinks. What does Doreen know? When has Doreen ever been right? If she’s so smart, then why does her husband hate her? If she’s so smart and knows everything, then why did she have my mother locked up in that shithole in the first place? All Doreen could talk to me about was funeral arrangements. She was so eager to finally be done with my mom, it didn’t even matter to her that Mom wasn’t dead, that they never found her body. Just hand Doreen a shovel and she would have buried my mom alive. Happily.
If you see a suspicious package, please notify an agent. Thank you for riding the Long Island Rail Road.
Doreen and Charlie. My two Judases. I think of Charlie telling me with his struggling fish lips that my B.O. smells like P-pp-p-p-pears… Ugh. How romantic. If I could just hook my fingers in his gills and pull until his eyes popped out.
But iit wasn’t his fff-ffffault!
It was his fault enough! He did something, said something. He spooked her. What had I seen in him? Walking up and down the riverbank, pretending he was looking just so he could keep fucking me at night. This was him helping me search, you see.
P-pp-ppp-ppppears, I spit on the floor of the train. Rub the puddle in with my toe. I lean back in my seat and a tangle in my hair rubs unpleasantly against the headrest. I didn’t bring a brush. I didn’t bring anything. I got on the bus with nothing but Mom’s coat. I try to comb the knot out with my fingers but it pulls too much on my scalp. I leave it. When I get to Rose’s I’ll cut it out with scissors.
When we were little, Mom’s depression would lift suddenly, the door to her room would swing open, and there she’d be, looking like a broken arm that just had its cast removed. Stunned, she couldn’t stop blinking as she tried to get the house and us back in order. She would spend the day cleaning, giving Mae and me baths. Mae’s hair, she’d be able to brush out, but mine was finer, so the knots had to be cut with scissors. She would let me keep the balls of hair. I would line them up on the win-dowsill like they were dolls. No matter how long, or how dark the depression was, she always emerged—maybe not exactly the same as before, but close. Why would this time be any different?
Amagansett. Thank you for riding the Long Island Rail Road.
Oh, that’s my stop. I look down at the back of my hand where I’d written it. Amagansett, yes.
I was expecting to see Mae waiting for me, but the platform is deserted. The air feels heavy and wet. I can smell the ocean. Then at the end of the platform, I see Rose waving. She’s wearing flat shoes on her huge flat feet and a long floral skirt that whips around in the wind.
“Where’s Mae?” I ask once I’m close enough for her to hear me over the wind.
“She’s at the house.” She hugs me. “I don’t know how much you know about her… condition.”
“What do you mean, ‘condition’?” Dennis’s girlfriend hadn’t mentioned it over the phone and I haven’t talked to Mae in weeks (or has it been months?).
Rose’s face starts to twitch. “Well,” she says, and starts walking to the car so she won’t have to look at me. “Your sister is doing much better now. She was released from the hospital on Wednesday.”
Prickling fear. We stop in front of Rose’s old Saab.
“Where are your things?” she asks.
I shrug away the dumb question. Who cares about my things. What happened to Mae? She gestures for me to get in, but I don’t.
“Something happened? She was hurt?”
Rose nods, avoiding my eyes.
“But she’s okay?”
“No,” Rose says, tapping her key against the car. “She’s not okay. She set herself on fire. But, she’s alive. Miraculously.”
We drive down the main street in silence. I feel like I’m waking up from one nightmare into another one. If I fall asleep again will I be plunged into something even worse? Will it save Mae? Will it bring back Mom? What am I talking about?
“I have to stop and get some bread for dinner,” Rose says, pulling in front of a bakery with a striped green and white awning. Mae was almost burned alive and we are buying bread at a cute bakery. None of this makes sense.
My tongue feels dry and too big in my mouth. A fly got in through Rose’s window and is buzzing around inside the car. Rose has left the keys in the ignition. I can see her through the plate glass talking to the baker. What if I just took the car and fled. But where? I have nowhere to go. And what would it change?
CHARLIE
After her mother disappeared it all fell apart. She blamed me for what happened. Though it probably couldn’t have lasted no matter what I’d done. Edie would have grown up, gone off to college, and become a different person. And yet, even now, thinking about her gives me an erection, as much for her as for youth, for freedom, for love.
I imagine what might have been if we’d kept driving across the country, across the Badlands, the desert, the Grand Canyon, down through Mexico and South America and then up to Alaska. We could have slept in the bed of the truck under the stars in Texas, or lived on a farm in the Pacific Northwest, or a houseboat in the Florida Keys. We could have found a stray dog along the way, an abandoned pit bull maybe. We could’ve built a house together by hand. I would’ve cooked her anything she wanted to eat over an open flame. I would’ve taken her anywhere she wanted to go. We could’ve had a kid. Edie would have been so beautiful pregnant, soft and round. I could have delivered the baby myself at home. We would’ve taken the kid with us everywhere as we rode the open rails or sailed the open sea. I would have fucked her into old age and I never would have gotten tired of it.
EDITH (1997)
We pull around a circular driveway to a green Victorian house. Rose’s husband is sitting on the front porch, waiting for us with a pitcher of iced tea. He pecks Rose on the lips.
“Edith,” he says, extending a hand. “Welcome. Welcome to the grounds of Montauk Academy. I’m your Uncle Stewart. It’s good to finally meet you.” His hand is weirdly soft.
“How was your trip?” he asks and pours me a glass of ice tea. “I assume long. Rose told me you took the bus and then the train.”
I chug the tea, spilling some down my shirt. He passes me a napkin but I pour myself another glass. I drink it the same way. Not stopping for air.
“Thank you,” I say breathlessly and set the empty glass on the wicker table.
“More?” he offers, but I shake my head.
“We were worried,” Stewart says. “It’s awful, everything that’s happened.”
“Uh huh,” I say. I notice he’s got a small piece of toilet paper stuck to his cheek. A rusty little splotch. He must have cut himself shaving. He should grow a beard—it would cover his pitted skin. I wonder why Rose never bothered to tell him this.
“Did you give Mae the pills I set out?” Rose asks him.
“I did.”
“Is she awake?”
“She was 10 minutes ago.”
“You want to go see her now?” Rose asks me. “It’s up the stairs, second door on
the left.”
It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark foyer. I’m glad Rose hasn’t followed me in. The house is quiet like it’s holding its breath. Each step creaks.
“Mae!” I call from the bottom of the stairs. “I’m here!”
No response.
Along the banister are framed photos. Rose in a white dress next to pockmarked Stewart. A blond boy in a sailor suit, it must be Dennis. Oh, weird. There’s one of Mae and me, from when we were very little. Mae is a baby and I’m holding her. Dennis and Mom’s legs are in the shot also. Mom is barefoot. She has such beautiful feet. Why would Rose put this up in her house? What other people have photos of me hanging on their walls?
“Mae,” I say, once I’m outside her room. Through the closed door I can smell something strange.
“Mae,” I say again. “It’s Edie.”
“Edie,” I finally hear her repeat.
When I open the door the smell is overpowering. Greasy and medicinal. It makes my eyes water. It takes me a moment to find Mae in the room—lying on the bed, propped up with pillows, wrapped in gauze. She’s holding a gun. No, of course not. Why would I think that? It’s the barrel of the camera.
Click. Click. She takes my picture. I cover my face with my hands. “Oh, God,” I say. “Wait at least till I’ve showered.” I try to act like I’m covering my face from the camera and not from her. I don’t want it on film, that moment of horror before I was able to hide it.
“You look like a mummy,” I say when she finally tilts the camera down. I force my voice to sound light. She doesn’t look away or blink, so I try not to either. Her pupils are huge and black.
“Can I sit?”
She nods, a tiny movement of her head.
I sit on the edge of the bed. I try to breathe through my mouth so I don’t have to smell the ointment.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
She shrugs, her gauzed shoulders barely lifting.
I can see in the small slots around her eyes and mouth that her skin is pink, shiny, and raw. “It must hurt.”
The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish Page 20
