by Karen White
I ran to call my dad, hoping I hadn’t waited too long. By the time he showed up, Mama was gone and so was the piece of paper. And that was when I first began believing in ghosts.
Marnie
Quinn stepped into the jon boat and held his hand out to me. I hesitated, thinking again of the desert and its dry comforts the way a man who’d been lost at sea looks at a small room without windows.
I watched as the creek surged at high tide, muddy brown and astonishingly strong. Despite everything, I still saw the beauty of the marsh and found respect for the strength that underlay its loveliness. My grandfather once told me that our Lowcountry marsh was like a mother to the mainland, buffering the continent from frequent storms like a mother would protect her children, and acting as the ocean’s incubator by nurturing and nourishing the filter feeders at the bottom of the food chain.
I had liked this analogy, assuring me that nurturing mothers did exist after all, and I found comfort in the knowledge that I had been lucky enough to be born in this place of liquid arms and maternal love.
“Come on,” Quinn said, reaching toward me. “We’ll just go for a leisurely ride through some of the creeks, okay? All you have to do is relax.”
I had asked Quinn to take me out by myself first before bringing Gil so that I would have some idea of my own reactions. I was beginning to doubt my decision, realizing that with Gil there, I could be focusing on him and his insecurities instead of my own.
A shadow of movement above me caught my attention, and I looked up to see a blue heron with outstretched wings gliding over our piece of marsh. I stared up at it, feeling the power of the wind beneath its wings and moved by the solitary grace. I looked back at Quinn, then firmly placed my hand in his and allowed him to pull me into the boat.
It wobbled under my unsteady feet and I had to grab Quinn’s shoulders to keep myself from pitching forward into the water. He didn’t seem to mind as he smiled approvingly and helped me sit on the middle seat before settling himself on the rear seat, where he could steer the boat.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
I clung to the metal seat, mercifully kept cool in the shade of the dock, and nodded, too afraid of any more movement. I felt silly acting like such a novice, as if I’d never been on a boat before. But my feet had become accustomed to desert sand, erasing all memory of sea legs.
Quinn kept the boat stationary for a long while and I was grateful for his courtesy. I trusted him enough that I closed my eyes and tipped my face up toward the sun, its muggy heat like a baptism to me. People in Arizona are always talking about the dry heat, which makes the hundred-degree days supposedly bearable. But here in the marsh, the humid air pulsed and sweated like a living thing, like a mother’s heart beating in the womb.
Opening my eyes, I caught Quinn staring at my legs. Self-consciously, I placed my hands over my knees and stared back at him. “What are you looking at?”
His smile didn’t give anything away. “I was noticing how white you are. I thought the sun shone all the time in Arizona.”
Miffed, I tilted my chin. “It does. I just prefer to stay out of the sun. It’s bad for your skin, you know.” I took note of his bronzed face and arms with some satisfaction.
“Pardon me for pointing this out, but all of the pictures of you as a child show a kid with skin dark enough to make her ethnic heritage questionable.”
“How could you have seen pictures of me as a child?”
He regarded me with hooded eyes. “Diana has all of your family albums. After we were married, she put all of your mother’s photographs into albums.”
“And she showed them to you?”
“Not exactly.”
I sat back, not understanding.
“I sort of found them and decided since they were pictures of Gil’s family, it was all right for me to look.”
“Well, that depends. Where did you find them?”
He had the decency to look embarrassed. “In a trunk.” He paused for a moment. “In her studio.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“For the record, it was Gil who found them, not me.”
I remembered the stacks of pictures in our mother’s studio and was slightly touched that Diana had thought to put them into albums. I thought of photographs of our parents and felt a longing to see their faces—faces that had long since blurred in my memory so that I could remember colors and expressions, but not a complete picture. It was like remembering the plot of a book without recalling the title.
“Does Diana know that you saw them?”
“Yep. Which is why the trunk is now locked.”
I was about to say something else when Quinn interrupted me. “Nice legs by the way,” he said as he started the motor, effectively drowning out any response I could have made.
Slowly, he skillfully maneuvered the boat away from the dock, keeping the motor on a low hum as he headed out into the creek. I felt a surge of panic as the boat rocked gently in its own wake.
“Stay on the creeks, okay?” I said. “I don’t want to go anywhere near the ICW.”
He nodded and again I was grateful that he seemed to understand. The Intracoastal Waterway was a three-thousand-mile highway running down the Eastern seaboard for all watercraft that cut through the creeks and marshes and led from the tidal rivers to the great Atlantic. It had once been my playground but now hovered somewhere near my nightmares as I envisioned the tall boats with their white fiberglass shimmering in the sun. I clung to the seat of our little jon boat a bit tighter than necessary and waited until I could become accustomed to the small ripples knocking into the metal side.
“Would you like something to drink?” He indicated a small red-and-white cooler by his feet.
I was thirsty but wasn’t quite ready to relinquish my two-handed hold on my seat. “No, thanks. Maybe later.”
He turned his head but not before I saw the smile on his lips.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, hating the petulant sound of my voice. All of my hard-earned peace and calm had quickly unraveled as soon as I found myself in this watery territory that my mind had forbidden me to return to.
For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then, after kicking the motor up a notch, he said, “Do you remember a Trey Bonner?”
I found myself blushing and momentarily forgetting about the water around me and the breeze teasing my face. “Yes, I think so,” I said, avoiding Quinn’s eyes. “He was in school with Diana and me.”
“Really?” he said, and I could tell that he already knew a lot more.
I could feel my flush deepen and I lowered my straw hat over my forehead. “We dated him.”
“We?”
“Well, not at the same time, obviously. But both Diana and I dated him.”
“Who dated him first?”
I looked down at my lap and at the line where my shorts met the pale skin of my thighs, and remembered my first heartbreak. “I did. I dated him first.”
A flash of orange and a loud cleep caught my attention from atop an oyster bed off to my right. It was an American oystercatcher, a bird that has piercing yellow eyes and that’s about the size of a chicken. I was grateful for the distraction and watched as the bird waited patiently for an oyster to briefly open its two shells to let in water. The animal ignored us as we motored by, and just as we were about to pass him, he quickly inserted his bladelike beak between the shells of an unfortunate oyster, snipping the muscles holding them together and laying open his meal.
“How appropriate,” I muttered, remembering Trey.
“Did she steal him from you?”
I jerked my face toward Quinn, having momentarily forgotten that he was there. “That’s one way to put it, I guess. But yes, that’s pretty much what I called it then.” I looked back to where the oystercatcher had now disappeared behind a bend. “She had everything, but wasn’t happy if I seemed to having something she didn’t.”
“But you were close?”
; I looked into his eyes, now a piercing blue in the bright sunshine. “Yeah, we were. Odd, isn’t it? But it was only the two of us, you know? Our parents weren’t really the type you could go running to when you had a problem. Most of the time, they were the problem.” I smiled to myself. “So, yes, we were close.” I watched as a school of menhaden darted beneath the water’s surface in silvery clouds and remembered Diana’s patience as she taught me how to tie my shoelaces.
“You’re not clutching the sides of the boat like a crab anymore. I guess that means you’re ready to go a little faster.”
Without waiting for me to protest, he increased the speed, creating a spray of water behind us. Two snow-white egrets, startled from their perches by the sudden noise, croaked out their alarm as they took flight away from us. Quinn gunned the motor a little faster and I jerked my head up, knocking my hat into the water. Either he didn’t notice or was too intent on teaching me something, but he didn’t turn around to get it. I felt my hair blow loose from the ponytail and I lamented its lack of order. I wanted to tell Quinn to stop or at least slow down, but I found myself mute. I had felt the wind on my face again—not the hot dry wind of a desert sand storm, but the warm wind of my home, born of sea salt and the ocean’s tides. My breath caught as if I’d rediscovered an old friend whom I long believed gone from my life.
We made our way to wide-open marshland, and I found myself smiling as I recognized where we were, and remembering paddling this way with Diana. And Trey. Cypress trees vaulted skyward along the banks, some wearing veils of five-petaled white blossoms of Cherokee roses like June brides. We passed oyster beds and small terns hugging the sandbars in search of clams. I breathed in the sulfer smell of home, the wind bathing my loosened hair in its aroma, and cloaking me like a skin.
As suddenly as he had quickened our speed, Quinn slowed the boat and then cut the engine. I was out of breath as if I had been swimming instead of riding under the power of a gas motor. My chest rose and fell and I saw Quinn’s gaze flicker to my chest before resting on my face again.
We had entered yet another creek, and we were close enough to the bank to hear the sigh of air escaping from the pluff mud as the water sank down with the tide. I watched with delight as small fiddler crabs raced to their holes as if being tugged by an invisible string.
I glanced at Quinn again and found myself holding my breath. He was looking at me oddly, and his face had paled beneath his tan.
“Are you all right?” I asked, leaning forward to feel his forehead with the back of my hand.
He drew back. “I’m fine. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Maybe I have,” he said, then started the engine.
I watched the dark water churning beneath the boat as we headed toward home, and I soon realized that I had removed both hands from my seat bottom and that I was actually close to enjoying the ride.
We didn’t speak again until we were back at my grandfather’s dock, where we were met by Gil. I was happy to see him, but it meant that I didn’t get a chance to ask Quinn what ghost he’d thought he’d seen.
CHAPTER 11
I seem to have been like a child playing on the seashore, finding now and then a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.
—ISAAC NEWTON
Diana
I don’t know when it happened that I stopped needing sleep. Somewhere after Marnie’s leaving, I think. Marnie’s absence was a tangible thing: a constant reminder that I had failed her. I missed the sound of her bare feet coming to my room on stormy nights and the way she always knew when I needed to talk or when I needed silence. I would fight closing my eyes, knowing that when I opened them I’d still be alone. And I missed her almost as much as I was glad she was gone.
In the years since her leaving, I’d learned to cope. I would put on my nightgown and lie in bed with my eyes closed and wish for sleep while listening to the quiet house and the sounds of night outside my window. I missed my sleep, if only because it meant that I no longer dreamed. But maybe that would have happened anyway since I believed that I had no more dreams left.
Since Marnie’s return to our grandfather’s house, I found it nearly impossible to even lie down and feign sleep. Instead of succumbing to sleep now that Marnie had come home, my body itched to be up and moving, as if tiny bugs crawled beneath the skin urging me up, creating a restlessness in me unfamiliar since the night Gil and I had our accident. I was relieved in a way since the restlessness brought back my need to paint, and I found myself staying up through the night to work on my wall mural.
But sometimes, in the darkest part of the night, even my painting failed me, and I felt compelled to sneak down the stairs and out of the house in search of something—of what, I wasn’t sure. I always found myself at the water’s edge on the dock or the beach, or sometimes I’d drive into town and wander the wharves where the fishing boats were kept at night, their long net-holding arms stretched out in silent sleep against the darkened sky. I stared into the black waters for a long time, imagining the cold, wet feel of it against my skin and wondered what it would be like to step forward until the water covered me like a cool blanket, rocking me to sleep until no more air filled my lungs. There would be no more pain, no more medicine, no more hate. And no more fear. I longed for refuge, but could only stay on the solid wood of the dock, staring at the water as if it were behind a locked door and I couldn’t find the key.
I suppose my wandering to the fishing boats made sense if I stopped to think about it. It was there that I had first learned I could paint, or rather that my mother decided that I could paint. It was also there that I remembered first hating her. She had told Marnie that Marnie’s painting had been of the same quality of a monkey dribbling paint from a brush. It had angered me and embarrassed me, and when I’d seen the lost look in Marnie’s eyes as she compared her work to mine, I knew that something was gone from me forever and I rightly blamed my mother. When I think back to my youth, it is that day that marks the “before” and “after” of my childhood—the first break in the tethers that bound me to my sister and separated us in our mother’s calculating eyes.
I thought my night wanderings had gone undiscovered until a night several weeks after Marnie’s return. I couldn’t find Quinn’s car keys, so I resorted to finding my way in the moonlight to the beach below the house. I sat in the damp sand, glad for the cool breeze against my skin that made me shiver, reminding me that I was alive. I supposed it was for the same reason that I ripped off the bandage on my leg, the dark scab like a gaping hole filled with shadows by the moon and the hot skin cooled by the ocean’s breeze. Phosphorescent fish showed off their ethereal scales in the surf, and I felt the old familiar tingle in my fingers as my desire to paint them began to fill the empty well inside of me.
I was deciding if I should go inside to lie awake in my warm bed, or if I should stay there and watch the tempting waves until dawn, when I felt the presence of somebody walking up behind me. I didn’t turn around.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning, Diana. What the hell are you doing here?”
Quinn’s voice was heavy with sleep and I almost felt sorry for being the source of his light sleeping. “I’m trying to get a tan.” I grimaced as salt water sprayed over my wound and I was glad of the darkness so I couldn’t see Quinn’s recrimination.
He surprised me by sitting in the sand next to me. “It’s not safe to go wandering at night by yourself near the water, you know.”
“Who says?”
“Me, for one. And anybody else who has common sense. And Trey Bonner.”
I looked at him for the first time but his face was bathed in shadow. “I wasn’t aware that you knew Trey.”
“His dog’s a patient. I’ve only seen him a couple of times but he came in today.”
“He asked me to tell you to stay away from the wharf at night. You make people nervous.”
“Do I now? Did you tell him that it’s none of his business?”
“Actually, I thanked him for telling me.”
I didn’t say anything, afraid my growing anger would unleash itself on him and I’d never get the courage to ask the question I’d been avoiding since my last visit to the nursing home.
“People are afraid you’ll jump, and nobody wants to pull your body up with a shrimp net.”
I craved a cigarette and cursed under my breath for forgetting to bring some. Something splashed in the water nearby, and I thought how lucky whatever it was to be able to disappear into the anonymity of the ocean’s depths. I stared down at my wounded leg. Quietly, I said, “I wouldn’t, you know. Because of Gil. Because of what it would do to him. But that’s the only reason.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time as we stared out at the moonlit waves stealthily creeping up the beach toward us. “I’m sorry, Diana.”
“For what?” I asked, craving a cigarette and not wanting to have this conversation. “For the mess I am? You had nothing to do with it. I was born a Maitland, and marrying you couldn’t have changed that.”
Quinn placed his elbows on drawn-up knees and let his head hang forward. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it better for you.”
