Up Through the Water

by Darcey Steinke

  Now she'd come to the highest point of the ramp and looked out to the dim shore. No moon. Just a million pinpricks of light. She heard the roar of water and felt wind mixed with rain against her skin. She turned her back and walked quickly off the ramp and started to run in what felt like long elegant strides up the beach highway.

  Their cigarette tips glowed, moved up to their mouths then down as they sat in bed against the cool wall in Birdflower's cottage. Emily said, “It's always been like this: from one bed to another.”

  Birdflower took a drag. “Does he have a gun?”

  Emily felt the heat and closeness of his legs. “I don't know,” she said, tipping her ashes over the side of the bed. “He's not what I knew.” She flinched at the sound of a car's tires and then saw the lights flash quickly over the wall. ‘'I'm sorry,” she said, pulling hard on the cigarette, trying to make herself, the bed, and the room all into smoke. Her spine was getting sore against the headboard so she slipped down under the sheets. “I have things to think about,” she said, pressing her head to the pillow.

  Birdflower looked down at her. “So do I,” he said.

  “This is me,” she said.

  “I know.” He let his fingers brush her shoulder.

  “You'll never know everything,” she said.

  “I don't need to know but so much,” Birdflower said.

  “There are things—”

  “I don't care,” he said. “Just tell me if you feel like doing it with anyone else.” He rubbed his eyes and tipped his head back to the wall. “I might hurt you.”

  “No, you wouldn't,” she said.

  “We've been up too long,” Birdflower said. “I don't even know what I think.”

  “The light will help,” Emily said. “Everything will change then.” She saw a big pink shell on the rag rug. She held it to her ear. “Do you hear me?”

  The ocean roared and she pressed the big shell into her temple—she knew the trick; her own pulse magnified in the caverns of the conch shell.

  Ten years was a long time, especially on an island like this one. She was familiar with the seasonal routines. Summer heat's steady work, the pause and seep of fall, cedars sculpted by winter, then spring's rustling pulse and the peeling back again to summer. Each had its own grooved ways, familiar as sisters to her. And this was the first time—besides that December years ago when a man had offered to take her to Barcelona—that she had tinkered with the thought of leaving. She knew John Berry never went farther than Norfolk. Emily watched the bars of light on the ceiling; she shook her head.

  Anywhere it would begin again. She held the shell close to her ear and after another hour or so, at the first rise of gray light, let it lull her to sleep.

  AUGUST

  Lets ride a gull's wing. First in the direction of an August moon, then rounding back attracted by movement somewhere in the valley between dunes. It's a nude couple on a white sheet that whips up and molds around them. The man lets his hand rest on her stomach and watches for falling stars; the sleeping woman dreams of the sheet lifting, floating them over the water as if they were some great bird. The man pulls her close. From this vantage, high over the water, the moon is ahead, and the embracing couple hold light like a lantern.

  FOURTEEN

  LILA'S WORRIED

  Lila imagined being inside of herself, watching her tiny baby opening its mouth to the size of a grain of sand, then wider like a penny, a quarter, a rubber ball, a Frisbee, Hula-Hoop—Lila felt her hands go up and a pull at her fingertips. The mouth still opening, the swamp ponds, the round inlet, and then the whole night sky as she watched her feet disappear into the baby's mouth.

  “I'm still talking to you,” her father said as she held her fork, peas quivering, in front of her mouth. “Don't get your heart all sick over that boy.”

  Lila chewed and watched her father push his chair back. Her father looked like a piece of beef jerky from being the focal point of the sun on his boat for so long. His skin was hard and thick, especially on his forehead and at the top of his shoulders. He was skinny, too, and Lila attributed this to drinking whiskey and waking so early every day of his life.

  “You tell her,” he said to Lila's mother, who stood scraping a plate into the garbage, her housedress moving about her knees.

  “No use,” she said, not looking up. “Love is blind.”

  “And deaf too,” Lila's father said.

  Lila watched a thin version of her father's face in the knife by her plate and phrased the way she would tell Eddie tonight. They would sit on his stoop in the light of the porch lantern and she would say it right out, each word solid as apples lined up on a kitchen counter.

  “You meeting him tonight?” her father asked, getting up. He spun a toothpick between his teeth.

  Lila nodded her head and said in a French accent, “Of course, Papa.”

  He shook his head and moved to the screen door. “It's not all as great as it seems now from your angle,” he said.

  “I'll be the judge of that,” she yelled after him. She heard him settle himself in a porch rocker.

  Alone at the table, Lila sipped milk from a beer mug. She was five days late. In the bathroom, twenty times a day, she would kneel on the cool blue tiles, make promises, and ask for favors. “I'll become a nun,” was the latest. “I swear I will,” she'd whisper to the toilet seat, clenching the shag lid cover with both hands. Lila pushed the pork chop bones around and made a cross. She saw herself like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. In black robes, her head bowed to the rail, she would hear the voices of children chanting in a low, holy way behind her. Then a sound like the pump of birds’ wings and she would turn her head to the stained glass window, to the blue sky above that, and thank him for taking it back.

  Lila's mother came from the sink and put her fingers in Lila's hair. “You look tired. Why don't you go lay down?” she said. Lila thought maybe she'd go with him to Tennessee, move right into his room—sleep curled around him in between football sheets. Every day her belly would balloon until her stomach was between them like a hard, round basketball. When her time came, she would know and rise early to walk through his father's field of seedlings.

  “I remember my first one,” her mother was saying. “His name was Dean. He scooped ice cream at the stand they used to have up near the beach road.” Lila watched her mother's body expand with breath. Her face was still flushed from leaning over the dinner pots and her hair was sloppily knotted at the back of her head. “He told me about the lizards and cactus they had in New Mexico.”

  “What happened?” Lila said, hard-pressed to believe her mother had ever had a teenage boyfriend.

  “Not much,” her mother said, moving back to the sink's running water. “After the summer I got a few letters talking about the desert, but he never invited me.”

  “You wouldn't have gone anyway,” Lila said.

  “Who knows,” her mother said.

  There was a thought: She could hitchhike West, a cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, red bandanna around her neck, always resting in the shade of a big cactus, using the tumbleweeds for a bed. Maybe get a job in one of those gas stations two hundred miles from nowhere. She could walk out into the desert and have her baby in the warm sand.

  Lila set her plate near the sink where her mother was rinsing dishes. She walked down the hallway and flopped across the bed. The white furniture still held light in the early dusk. She stared dreamily at the map above her bed, blurred her eyes, then closed them so the shapes of the map were emblazoned on her inner eyelids. There were places where no one would find her, Borneo, Madagascar, Sudan. After it was all over she would come home, her sack of trinkets jingling on her back and her hair shortish like the lady explorers’ she'd seen in books.

  Lila heard her father humming on the porch and her mother opening cupboards to put away dishes. Maybe she would stay with her parents and hide it. Always wear big blouses, and eat doughnuts and brownies in front of them. She would only whisper to
Birdflower. Then he'd help her carry the frozen beef patty boxes. He'd rub her ankles. She'd go alone to a spot on the point, wedge herself into a crevice, grab onto the big rocks, and push till the baby slid out and plopped into a saltwater pool with grayish-blue starfish cleaving to the bottom. The baby would breathe in water, smiling from under the surface at her, and swirl through the narrow mouth of the pool out to sea.

  Her mother and father were whispering about her on the porch. They always had ideas on what she should be doing. Lila remembered when her mother told her to pay attention to the dark McKin boy, to Jacob Whitney, the son of the coast guard captain, and to thin Matt Lumly, because she would have to choose from these. Her mother said to notice their temperaments, how they handled the few dollars their parents gave them. Lila stared. “Do you really think I would marry one of those idiots,” she said. Her mother started to cry. But Lila didn't care. No one would force her to marry a stupid fishy island boy.

  Lila hung her head over the edge of the bed. She could still hear her parents on the porch. A tiny beige arm stuck out from under the white ruffle of the bedspread. She smacked the doll under the bed, rolled over on her back, and watched the shifting willow leaves speckle shadows over the room's walls.

  Things women did stayed with them. Like having abortions, like losing their virginity, like Eddie's mother: no one on the island forgot the things she did. Even Lila would sometimes look at her on the beach in her bikini and imagine the men she'd been with standing around her.

  Lila went to the closet and picked out a blouse to wear, one she had ordered from a catalogue. The blouse had real gold threads running through it that glittered in the darkening room. She put her hands to her waist and stuck out her chest to admire her lean body. She ballooned her stomach, then contorted it all out and arched her back. “That's what you'll look like,” she said out loud into her twinkling blouse. “Like a fat old cow.” Lila made her face look serious. She saluted her image. “Good luck,” she said, then ran out of the house, speeding in a line to her bike leaning against the porch.

  “Be back by eleven,” her father yelled after her.

  Her hair flew back and she took her fingers from the handlebars. She knew this was like flying and that birds didn't have it any better. She passed the lighthouse, rounded the inlet, sped by the Trolley Stop and the gas station. She turned down Eddie's street and pumped hard on the pedals until her front tire slammed into sand. She got off then and walked her bike.

  Daylight was nearly gone and the moon was clouded to a puzzle piece. Faintly, she saw Eddie in a white T-shirt throwing pebbles into the yard. His arm slung sideways. He pitched each stone as if it might skip in and out of the grass. The arcing arm movement let Lila see the scene clearly: herself at the kitchen table and the baby staring at her from a bassinet, watching her face as she took a long swig of a beer. In front of Eddie's house she pushed her kickstand down and watched the metal rod sink into soft sand.

  FIFTEEN

  TALL BOYS

  Ultimately, in relationships,” Neal said as he turned the Dart onto the highway, “everyone is selfish.”

  “I don't know,” Eddie said.

  “This is how I figure it. A person gets bored with their life in general. Not with their lover, wife, or husband. And the cheapest, easiest thing to do is have an affair.”

  “I couldn't tell you any of that stuff,” Eddie said as his hand snaked up and down in the wind out the window.

  The cook looked at him. “How many beers do you want for you and your little friend?”

  “A six is fine,” Eddie said, reassured that Neal remembered the point of the drive.

  “You will drink a few with me first?”

  The Dart passed a kid pushing his bike on the soft sand shoulder. Eddie was uncomfortable. “Sure,” he said. “But I gotta meet her at midnight.”

  “Great,” Neal said, adjusting the radio. “We'll cruise a little.”

  Eddie dropped his cigarette out the window and looked down to see the smattering of sparks. Since she had touched the inside of his wrist—whispered it so close to his ear he had heard each nuance of her breath—all he had thought about was Lila being pregnant. The fact made everything seem too loud: people's voices, the ocean, the dishwashers at work—the volume made him sick to his stomach and he couldn't forget it, not for one second. Though he had promised not to, he wanted to tell, to spread it over as many people as possible so that his solid problem would thin out and begin to disintegrate like an aspirin melting in water.

  Eddie saw Neal looking at the crotch of his pants. Earlier, at work, while sorting silverware, he had noticed Neal staring at his rear. His mother had assured him that Neal would never actually touch him. But still. He'd heard from friends about the queer swim team manager who after meets stared through the steam into the shower room. He worried that the guy at the gas station would see him waiting in the car when Neal sashayed in to get beer. All I need is for people to talk. His eyes teared and he kept saying just under his breath: It would be stupid to cry. Neal hummed with the radio. “Do you have dreams about her?” he asked. “Nowadays I only dream about men.”

  Eddie thought Neal inched his hand across the front seat, but he didn't want to act as if he'd noticed.

  “Can't we get the beer,” Eddie said.

  “In a minute,” Neal said, driving toward the docks. “Tell me what it's like.”

  Eddie thought his mouth smirked slightly as he made a U-turn in the dock lot. “You know what it's like,” he said.

  Neal gave a snort. “I guess I do.”

  They rambled back around the inlet. Eddie slumped against the door and thought of getting so drunk his mind would move without his willful force from one thing to another. Neal pulled into the Texaco. “Tall boys?” he burlesqued. Eddie nodded and watched Neal walk in and get beers from the glass case. He didn't want to quit high school and come live here. Those deep lines would form around his eyes from squinting all day against sun and water. Eddie tried to imagine himself as a fisherman, guts smeared on his T-shirt and his beard uneven as a rag. His foot kicked the bottom of the glove compartment. But if he brought her home, his father's face would redden and he'd call him out to the barn, asking intimate and embarrassing questions.

  His stepmother would put bushels of peaches in front of Lila and have her peel them and then stir till her fingers were sore from moving the big wooden spoon in the huge pots past dusk and into the dark.

  Neal got in and shut the door. “You got some time,” he said. “Let's cruise to the beach and drink a few.”

  “Okay,” Eddie said. “But I got to be there by midnight.”

  “Kind of a late date,” Neal said. He looked over his shoulder and backed up the Dart.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. He rolled his hand to a fist and dug his nails into his palms. Once, while in the bathtub, through the cracked door, his mother had explained how a lover had never come along who treated Neal well and how, as a child, he'd been beaten up regularly for being a sissy. Eddie had sat at the kitchen table listening to his mother explain that Neal had told her he never knew his father and only remembered the broad brim of his brown hat and the calloused upper palms of his hands. Still, Eddie squirmed: No matter how lonely the guy was, how hard his life had been, he better not try some move on me.

  As the car lumbered up the wooden planks of the beach ramp, Neal said, “You're not talking much.”

  Eddie popped a beer; it foamed up and he took a gulp.

  “Your mother told me the whole story,” Neal said.

  “He won't be back,” Eddie said, jolting forward as the car's wheels fumbled over the sand. He didn't want to talk about John Berry's break-in.

  The car stopped, they both settled silently into the dark. The cook lit a cigarette and popped a beer for himself. Eddie swigged his down fast, tossed the empty to the back, and opened a second. This is helping, he thought. This is definitely helping. A few gulls swooped in front of the crescent moon.

  “My mom
, you know, shouldn't do a lot of the stuff she does,” he said.

  “She just comes and goes,” Neal said. “I understand it. Like I said, life gets dull.”

  Eddie watched Neal's cheeks hollow as he dragged on his cigarette. His hair, a brushcut with loose longer curls in the back, was cool. He does it with boys, Eddie thought. He remembered himself staring at his gym teacher back in junior high. Eddie'd day-dreamed that during warm-ups Mr. Graudins came over and kissed him right on the lips while the other boys kept counting their sit-ups in one thunderous voice. It must have been some kind of mistake. Because he liked girls. Just the sight of one sometimes turned him on. He was getting hard now thinking of the way Lila threw back her head and twilled her throat like a bird.

  Odd things could get him going: certain wrestling holds, advertisements, the jagged movement of the school bus—even the slight wrinkles around the eyes of older women.

  Neal reached for another beer. “Does she suck you?”

  Eddie's eyes pooled. He would slam the door and run into the surf, swim so hard he'd quickly be a mile out in the dark ocean. “Stop talking about her,” he said fiercely.

  “I'm sorry,” Neal said. “I thought you might want to talk about it or something.”

  Eddie wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands. What a crybaby.

  “She's pregnant,” he said, the fact out there and living in the air before he could even reconsider. The ocean waves beat back and forth against the sand.

  “So that's it,” Neal said, stretching his legs to the brake pedals. “What are you going to do?”

  “We're talking about getting married.”

  “That's no good reason to get married.”

  “I can't think of anything else,” Eddie said.

  Neal put a hand on Eddie's shoulder. “I'll lend you my car,” he said. “You can go to one of those clinics in Norfolk.” He moved closer. “You can have your life just the way it was gonna be.” Neal leaned his head on Eddie's shoulder.