by Karen Rivers
This summer, there has been a heat wave. It’s September, but the sun seems unstoppable. Maybe it will stay hot forever. Maybe nothing will ever change. The heat shimmers over everything, blurring today with yesterday last week last month and forever. I lift my camera and point it at the sea, looking for whales. No fins break the surface.
I put the camera down.
I look at it.
I spin it on the table.
I think about everything it contains.
* * *
Things happen, or have already happened.
Sometimes I can’t tell if something is a dream or real, if something happened or didn’t.
Look.
A boy and girl set up their blanket on the beach in front of the house where the ground is layered with rocks the size of fists. It doesn’t welcome sitters. It’s lumpy and small and there’s a rip current in the bay that makes it pretty dangerous for swimming. There are a lot of nicer beaches here. The best one is Smythes, with its silky-soft sand. Or Bay Beach, with its concession stand and lifeguards and music. This is a hard beach, alternating sand with surprisingly jagged rocks, rendering it unfriendly and usually empty.
There are also mosquitoes. The smell of decaying seaweed. The threat of raw sewage pushed in by the tide. The rope-and-driftwood swing hanging crookedly from a low branch on a leaning tree.
The blanket is one of those furry wolf blankets that probably smells musty and unwashed. The blanket looks familiar. Something about it makes me shiver, makes me want to climb out of myself and disappear. The girl has long, waist-length blond hair. Pretty hair. The boy has black hair. The girl is in a bright bikini. The boy is in trunks that look French. They are both thin and narrow-hipped, like models in an ad for Abercrombie & Fitch. The girl is barely sitting down before the boy starts to kiss her. It’s hard to tell from here if she’s enjoying it. His tongue is as fat and gross as a sea cucumber launching itself into her mouth even as his hand grabs for her bikini bottom.
The girl pulls away and gets up from the blanket. It looks like she might come toward the house. I hope she does. I want her to. Go, I want to say. Do it. But instead, she runs into the sea, hopping on the rocks like they are hot potatoes, which they sort of are: some slippery, some even sharper than others because they are encrusted with barnacles. She is looking around, almost as if she is looking for help. There is something shimmery about the scene.
Something surreal. It is a mirage or a hallucination or both.
“This isn’t really happening,” I say out loud to myself, and I’m alone on the deck and no one is on the beach.
Am I going crazy?
Maybe.
The girl is so familiar.
It’s like looking in a mirror.
Is it me?
She spins around and she’s laughing in that fake come-and-get-me way that some girls do. It looks like she’s acting, though. Something is off. But she’s fine and it’s a game and she’s in control. I try to exhale.
There are jellyfish—a current from Hawaii that was created by the messed-up weather has brought thousands and thousands of lion’s mane jellyfish drifting into the bay and up onto the rocks, their stinging bloodred tentacles splayed out like organ meat in the sun—which she has to step carefully to avoid. The girl hops over the rocks and kicks the water in the sea up in an arc, like a photo, like she’s moving in actual slow motion and the water drops are following suit. Someone should be filming this or is or isn’t or could be or didn’t.
Then she wades out fast, in a half run, half skip.
The water is always so shockingly cold.
The girl splashes awkwardly in a messy front crawl. She probably used to be on the swim team. (I was on the swim team.) She probably took lessons at the pool, earned badges, tried hard. (Like me. Is it me?)
It can’t be me.
She bobs in the distance for a few minutes and he shouts something and she laughs and goes under, coming up again like a seal, her hair now looking dark and sleek. The boy gets up and stubs his toe on something. Curses, sits down again. Yells something that the girl seems not to hear.
Then, finally, the girl comes splashing out again, safe, still alive, giggling, her body bright red from the cold water. She laughs and wobbles, hopping awkwardly over the rocky shoreline, not letting on how it was so icy it must have felt like needles piercing her skin, how now she probably can’t feel anything at all from the neck down.
Numbness is necessary.
The boy is angry; his body language is clenched.
She laughs, pokes him in the shoulder.
He stands up, grabs the blanket. He throws it down again. She says something.
He pushes her.
Then he’s on her and she’s struggling and she’s waving and shouting and someone is watching but she isn’t coming and why isn’t she going to help and no.
No.
I close my eyes, swallowing something bitter and acidic that’s risen in my throat. My hands are shaking.
There is no one on the beach. The rising waves lap at the green-and-brown line of seaweed on the shore. It sounds like dogs drinking water, the slap of the waves against the stones.
I can’t breathe. I have to bend over and force air in and out, in and out.
It takes a few minutes of concentrating before I feel okay again, before I can sit up.
The sky keeps pressing down on me, blue and judgmental. The angry sun shines right through me and how I feel.
“If no one saw, it didn’t happen,” I tell myself, my voice chopping up the sky into pieces.
“Stop talking to yourself,” Piper would say. “You sound crazy. You’re one step away from being that guy on the corner shouting ‘THE END IS NIGH.’”
“The end probably is nigh,” I tell Piper’s absence. “We’re just too dumb to know it. Ask the whales. Ask the antelope. Anyway, I’m sorry.”
“Too late,” she says. “You’re dead to me.”
“People make mistakes.” I plead my case to a june bug that has rattled to a landing on the arm of my chair. There are certain things I’d never say to Piper, not out loud, but the bug is a safe audience. “I’ll never talk to him again,” I tell it. “He’s just … Soup. He’s not important. Not to me.” The june bug is unconvinced. It spreads its iridescent wings and vanishes, clicking. “You’re right,” I call after it. “I hate me, too.”
It’s easy to hate myself when Piper isn’t here to tell me not to.
* * *
My skin feels prickly. I have goose bumps, even though I’m sweating, the hot wind blowing the sun into me like fire that my lungs can’t quite breathe in.
She’s thinking about me. I know she is. I can feel it.
That’s how connected we are, whether we want to be or not.
I squeeze my eyes shut, tight. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I murmur.
The phone rings on the table, making me jump.
I hold up the phone so that I can see the screen. S Sullivan, it says. So she’s at home, not on her cell. Piper is always losing her phone and never seems to care. She’s like Hansel or Gretel, whichever one dropped bread crumbs in the woods, except what she drops are brand-new iPhones. BlackBerries. Samsungs. None of them upsets her. She claims it’s a Buddhist thing, to not get attached to stuff. Piper is Buddhist when it’s convenient, but mostly the only thing she believes is that everything will work out for her in the end, and it always does.
It’s not really fair.
The phone stops ringing.
If Piper weren’t beautiful, she’d just be another smart geek, relegated to the social backwaters of Physics Club. She doesn’t care about being smart.
She’d rather be me.
This is one of the fights that we’re having without saying anything. This is one of the things that’s come between us, ugly and true.
She wants what I have: a clear idea of what I want to do with my life and exactly how I’m going to get there.
And I get it, because I’ve spent a
lot of my life wanting to be her.
“She’s a bit mean to you, Sloane,” my mom always says. “I think it’s too intense, this thing with you two. You need more friends, a group of friends. I worry about you. You don’t always have to dress alike, you know.”
“She’s not mean,” I insist, even when I know it’s sort of true. “I have plenty of friends,” I lie.
Me and Piper are a thing. Piper and Soup are a thing.
Which means that me and Soup are nothing, like multiplying something by zero. No matter how many times I go back to that equation in my head, the answer stays the same.
The phone keeps singing again in my hand. I’m safe to not answer because she’ll call back and call back and call back and then I can be the one to be mad, a bit standoffish, in control.
My grip is loose and the phone slips out of it and falls to the deck, which makes me think of that time when we were six, in first grade, and I held the class gerbil for the first time. “Don’t squish him!” Piper squealed. She was scared of rodents. (“The way they wiggle,” she said. “Yuck.”)
I love animals, all animals, always, and anyway, he was the cutest. I kissed him gently on the nose, not squeezing, and he looked right into my eyes, like he loved me back a little. I didn’t often feel braver than Piper, but she shivered when my lips touched his and it made me feel bigger and better. But it turns out that I loved that dumb gerbil to death: instead of squashing him, he slipped out of my hand and onto the floor. Piper shrieked and jumped and somehow pushed me, and I stepped on him by mistake. The furry crunch was the worst feeling I ever had.
The phone goes silent.
“Je suis désolé,” I say dramatically. “Es tut mir leid. Barkatu.”
I reach for the silent phone, filling myself up with sorries until I have enough. Swahili and Slavic. They feel like poetry in my mouth. They’ll protect me from Piper’s anger, if she’s still angry.
If.
“Unnskyld,” I whisper. “Samahani.”
I could make a documentary called Sorry: The Piper and Sloane Story. Documentaries often have subtitles. The subtitle of me is Piper.
I would interview people on the street. “Who do you want to apologize to?” I’ll ask. “What do you need to be forgiven for?”
The only time I feel okay asking people questions is when I have my camera in my hand. The familiar weight of it anchors me at the same time as letting me be someone who is not quite me. I pick it up from the table right now—it’s always within a few feet of me—and put it up to my eye. I hit record, and start filming the sky. “What are you sorry for?” I intone, panning the camera slowly across the sun. When I put the camera down, there’s a huge sun spot over my vision. “I’m blind,” I murmur. “I’m blind.”
Is Piper ever sorry? She must be. Besides, everyone wants to get this kind of thing off them, put it out there, save themselves, be forgiven. Even if they don’t believe in God, which I don’t. But I believe in karma.
And everyone is sorry for something.
* * *
The phone screen cracked when it dropped on the deck. I pick it up and run my finger over the long seam of the crack and it comes away with a line of blood. I lick it clean. It tastes like pennies. We are all copper inside.
A seagull flies by, crapping on the deck right next to my foot. I flip him off. “The bird!” I say to him. “I’m flipping you the bird, Bird.” The seagull laughs. “You’re a good audience,” I tell him. “What are you sorry for?”
The phone rings. The seagull circles and then flaps away.
I look at the screen.
Philip Sanchez.
My heart drops all the way through the deck and onto the front lawn and rolls down the driveway like in a cartoon.
“I’m dead,” I whisper.
Soup.
I take a sip of my horrible diluted soda. Mr. Aberley, the old man from the other side of the bay, is slowly rowing his half-submerged dinghy on his first trip to the island. He does it twice a day: at dawn and at dusk. “After breakfast and after supper,” he says. “Keeps my girlish figure.” He laughs his old man laugh, teeth exposed, showing his receding purplish gums. Mr. Aberley keeps himself impeccable, reads Vogue, dresses better than I do. But his teeth give the game away. I hope I never get old. Not that I want to die young, but still, his gums.
The phone rings and rings. My voice mail must be full. My heart is beating so hard, I press my hand to my chest.
No one ever calls Soup “Philip.” He has been Soup ever since third grade when Mrs. Moffat helped everyone to “discover” their heritage and it turned out that he was a mix of every race anyone could even name. You are like human soup, Mrs. Moffat had said thoughtlessly, the racist cow, and it stuck, as things do in small schools, forever.
I slide my finger on the screen to answer, leaving a red smear, but my voice is stuck and nothing comes out.
“Hey,” he says, without waiting for me to talk. “Sloane.” There’s a silence. Then, “Is Piper with you?”
I let the question hang in the air and then I say, more cruelly than I actually feel, “Actually, she’s busy traveling back in time to stop your parents from making the fatal mistake of ever screwing without a condom.” I don’t know why I said it. I don’t know how to unsay it. “Soup,” I say, more softly.
“Wow,” he says over me. “That’s not what I was expecting, I guess. I need a second to digest that. That’s pretty harsh.” He coughs. Then, “We’ve gotta talk, Sloane.”
I can’t decide how to respond, so I don’t say anything at all. I love you, I think, but don’t say. I’m sorry. Anteeksi. Prosti menya. I might be crying, or maybe it’s only sweat running down my cheeks in salty rivers.
It takes him a long time to hang up. He breathes into the speaker, in and out, in and out. The sound of his breathing makes my own breathing slow down. I feel sleepy and warm. I can hear a car going by, then the lower roar of a bus in the far distance. Then finally, he clears his throat and clicks off without saying goodbye.
“Well, goodbye, Philip,” I say to the echo in my ear that he leaves behind.
I pull more and more paint off the chair and drop it onto the shingles of the roof, where it looks like flakes of the sky, falling.
“The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” I whisper.
I put another cigarette into the cigarette holder and light it. I don’t know when I became a smoker for real. The first time, it made me puke, but I kept doing it because Piper did and now I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to, though the truth is, it’s gross. It makes me feel like I’m coated in a sticky dust, the taste of it on my teeth, the scent on my skin. It’s just one more thing about myself that I don’t quite understand. How did it happen? When, exactly? The holder, which I stole from Grandma’s jewelry box when she used to have a room downstairs, is made from an elephant’s tusk. Her room had these white velvet curtains that had turned yellow from the smoke. Mom took the curtains down when Grandma moved out. She replaced them with blinds that go up and down at the touch of a button. She took Grandma’s bed out and replaced it with a stair climber and an elliptical trainer.
Grandma won’t miss it. She’s completely out of it. She lives in an old-folks’ home now, where she sits in a chair with an oxygen tank beside her and stares out her window all day, remembering something she can’t articulate but keeps trying to say, phlegm swirling around in her lungs, her cough keeping her neighbor awake. The veins in her hands droop down like yarn. Sometimes I go there and sit in her room. Grandma doesn’t exactly have conversations. It’s hard. It makes me feel panicky, like I can’t breathe, like I’m going to die.
The only sounds are the rustle of her polyester shirt as she reaches to push her glasses up her nose, the harsh sounds of her breathing in and out of the tank, and the sound of my sneakers, squeaking on the floor as I leave. Being there makes me too aware of my own racing heart.
It’s obviously wrong to use ivory for anything, but it’s not like Grandma went out and k
illed the elephant herself. Maybe the elephant didn’t even die. Maybe someone just found the tusk, lying there, a hapless victim of some kind of elephant sickness or something. Maybe that elephant recovered and now is running around with one tusk, trumpeting at the sky, or whatever elephants do when they aren’t being shot at for their ivory.
Probably not.
Elephants bury their dead. I try to make the fact of that in combination with the cigarette mean something, but I can’t.
The things people are willing to kill for are so stupid.
I take another lungful and hold it in until it burns.
* * *
Then, again, after forever or a few minutes, the phone rings: S Sullivan. I’m flooded with relief. That’s how it is with Piper and me. I clear my throat and I slide my sweaty finger across the screen and take a deep breath.
“Anteeksi,” I say dramatically. I pull the middle syllable out nice and long. Then I exhale, a perfect smoke ring. I wait for Piper to say something back, something sharp and clever but forgiving, like that.
But instead, her mother’s voice comes on the line. It sounds weird, tight, high-pitched. “Sloane, is that you? I need to speak to your mother. Can you put your mother on the phone?”
The way she says “your mother” makes my skin hurt and a ringing start in my ears. She sounds like she did the day she flung open the door to Piper’s bathroom, where the two of us had been bleaching our eyebrows, and calmly told us that Piper’s father’s plane had crashed somewhere over the Atlantic. I couldn’t tell what were real tears and what was the bleach fumes, stinging my eyes. Piper’s dad was pretty much a stranger to me. I’d only met him twice. But it was my tragedy, too, because it was Piper’s.
“There were no survivors,” Piper’s mom said. She sounded like a talking head on CNN, like she was simply delivering news. It took me a minute to understand that I was crying and Piper was crying because Piper’s dad was dead. Piper fell sideways into the bathtub, cutting her forehead on the shower tap, the beautiful bright red of her blood dripping into her golden hair. My head hurt for a week after that.
