Blue Water

by A. Manette Ansay

  “They could take this on a picnic,” she’d said to the bored cashier. “Wouldn’t it be romantic?”

  The cashier nodded glumly, but Cindy Ann kept on talking. Everything she did these days was done with an eye toward what it might look like to someone outside herself, watching. Apparently, the Van Dorns’ investigator had followed her every day for a week, snapping pictures, asking questions, sifting through her trash. Cindy Ann felt the way she had after a date had taken her to a Milwaukee bar where (she’d learned afterward) the women’s room mirror was, in fact, a long panel of one-way glass. What had she done as she’d stood before that mirror? Reapplied her makeup? Checked her teeth? Adjusted her boobs? It wasn’t the thought of what she had done so much as the idea of someone watching her do it as she stood there: clueless, ridiculous, shamed. The way Dan Kolb had watched her, years before. Not that it mattered anymore. Once, before Mum went into assisted living, Cindy Ann had gone up to the attic—vacant now, the mattress infested with mice, swallows looping in and out through the broken windows—and there was the gap leading into the crawl space, plugged with her algebra homework. She tugged the yellowing pages free, unfolded them like a map. Theorems, proofs, a few lines of correction in Mr. Hector’s back-slanting hand. She’d loved algebra and, especially, geometry. She’d signed up for trig, which was college track, too, but then switched to vocational after she accepted the DQ promotion. Sixteen years old and already night manager, complete with a grown person’s salary, benefits, talk of her own franchise down the line. Dan Kolb bragged about it to everyone, how smart she was, how responsible, and there was nothing fake or forced or sly in the way he spoke of her then.

  That was what made it so hard, even now. The sense that he’d admired her, loved her, as a real father should. The nagging feeling, wrong as it was, that, perhaps, she was the one who’d misunderstood.

  Cindy Ann lifted the gym bag back into the trunk. At the kitchen door, she paused, listened again—but no. It was fine. The girls were sleeping, all of them. She was safe. She was free. Somehow she’d made it through yet another day: an hour at the gym with her personal trainer, another hour of Pilates, followed by her daily visit to Mum, doing Mum’s nails, washing her hair, taking her to lunch in the cafeteria. “Life goes on,” Mum said with a sigh when Cindy Ann showed her the menu. Every day, the same seating arrangements, the same salad bar, the same choice of soups. No wonder people got confused. “Have you been here long?” Mum asked as Cindy Ann got up to go. “Would you have time to wash my hair?” And then, community service, the flying shoe, the hot sun. Off-loading bags of trash at the dump, raccoon-size rats rustling through the scraps, a flurry of seagulls rising and falling like a single, sentient creature. Cindy Ann pushed herself hard, harder still, the same way she pushed herself at the gym, flinging the bags as far as she could. It was important to be fit, to be strong, to be ready—for what, she couldn’t exactly say.

  It was the readiness that was important.

  But all of that was done for the week. The younger girls had been picked up from school. There had been the stop at the video store, the carryout pizza, paper plates in the den. The slow migration upstairs, the brushing of teeth, the one-more-book bedtime routines. And, finally, Amy’s key in the door.

  Now Cindy Ann wanted to whoop, to laugh, to lie down on the floor and sob. Instead, she opened the first chardonnay and sipped directly, neatly, from its small, cold mouth. The other she placed in the cupboard beneath the sink, leaving the door ajar. It would only take a second to tuck the open bottle beside it, close the door, reach for the ginger ale. Not that this would be necessary. Lately, Amy came home so tired that she slept in her clothes, on top of the covers. The way Cindy Ann herself had once slept. She knew firsthand what it meant to stand in front of that Frialator, hour after hour, the swift spats of grease that transformed themselves, over the course of your shift, into a single, excruciating itch. The gradual, rising ache in your calves. The hot coins of pain in your heels. Not that she couldn’t do it again, if she had to. And she probably would. The truth was that David’s trust was exhausted, most of the principal gone. Once a month, she wrote a check to cover Mum’s resident fee, her medical care, her prescriptions. And then there were the girls’ various lessons, her own club membership, her personal trainer. There was Mrs. Railsbeck and her tidy habits, her thick casseroles, her thin-lipped smile. There were credit card payments, car payments, insurance payments, the rising cost of living. There were payments on the equity loan she’d taken on the house five years earlier. And, of course, there was that goddamn court-appointed therapist, a girl who looked no older than Amy and, frankly, had no more sense. Dr. Cantreau, for this was her name, thought Cindy Ann should go back to school, and because Cindy Ann wanted a good evaluation, she pretended she believed this was actually practical, possible.

  Have you thought, Dr. Cantreau had asked, about what you might like to study?

  Landscape architecture, Cindy Ann had replied.

  Remembering this now, she laughed. She wasn’t even sure, exactly, what the hell a landscape architect did. The phrase had simply popped into her head. But perhaps, she thought, raising the bottle again, she could work for a landscaping company, trimming hedges, mowing lawns, planting flowers. Eventually she might even go into business for herself—why not? She liked being outdoors. And she definitely needed the exercise. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be, toning her abs, taming her thighs, despite running fifteen miles a week, lifting weights, going to Pilates, Spin, Jazzercise. She’d been lucky, she thought, to get assigned to the highway crew instead of, say, a hospital, or a prison, or a place like the one where Mum lived. Or a morgue. There was this group of mothers that wanted anyone convicted of DUI to work so many hours in a morgue.

  But Cindy Ann hadn’t been convicted of DUI. She hadn’t been convicted of murder, or manslaughter, or even reckless endangerment. She was guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Involuntary. Because that’s what it had been. How could the Van Dorns or anybody think that she’d meant to kill an innocent child? She’d been hungover, yes, but there was nothing illegal about driving with a headache, driving when you were tired. For Christ’s sake, half the damn state of Wisconsin would be in jail if this were the case! She’d had coffee to drink for breakfast, black coffee, nothing else, nothing in it, and she’d taken a lie-detector test to prove it. And as long as fingers were pointing, who was to say the whole thing hadn’t been Meggie’s fault? She’d been running late, too, after all. She hadn’t seen Cindy Ann either. And now, this whole business with leaving Fox Harbor, moving onto a boat, sailing around the tropics. Hardly the actions of grief-stricken parents, and plenty of people around town agreed, although Carla Gary assured Cindy Ann that a judge wouldn’t see it that way. Especially when he or she was shown the photos of Cindy Ann, drinking wine—three bottles, glass after glass—alone at her kitchen table. Cindy Ann standing in the checkout line at Lifetime Liquors. Cindy Ann, in her robe and slippers, lugging the recycling bin to the curb, dark green necks poking up from beneath the girls’ cola cans like periscopes.

  No. The Van Dorns’ attorney would argue the Van Dorns had been driven to extremes by the force of their grief, unable to live in the house, in the town, in the community where they had lost their only child. And Cindy Ann, in fact, understood what they’d done. She herself would have moved to a cave in Siberia if it meant that she’d never have to think about any of this ever again.

  The first bottle of wine was gone, but that was okay, the first always went that way. It was the second that Cindy Ann savored, sipped, until her mind slowed into reason, each thought glowing singly, like a firefly, beckoning, easily caught. She would not be going back to school to study landscape architecture, computers, education. Forget about the money it would cost. Forget about the time. How could she go back to school, read all those books, take all those tests, when she couldn’t even write a simple letter like the one she’d been trying to write for more than a year? She’d started it, for
the first time, just after the accident. She’d started it again after the sentencing. She’d tried, yet again, after she’d run into Meggie in the freezer section of the grocery store.

  The last time she’d tried had been the night Mallory phoned to break the news of her engagement to Toby. That night, writing in fat, angry scrawls, Cindy Ann had filled six pages, top to bottom, telling Meggie how she hoped that she was somewhere at the bottom of the ocean by now, that her house and its tenant would burn to the ground, that her brother would go off on one of his dive trips and never come back, leave Mallory alone.

  I wish I had never met you, she wrote. I wish that you didn’t exist.

  But, of course, you couldn’t send a letter like that, even if you did know where to send it, particularly since the purpose of your letter was to say something utterly different. I’m sorry, was what Cindy Ann wanted to write. Good God, I am so sorry, I am so goddamned sorry I just don’t know what to do. The very letter, she knew, that Carla Gary was afraid she might write, even now, even after what the Van Dorns had done. Afraid that it would end up in the hands of the Van Dorns’ attorney. Afraid that it would appear in court alongside those terrible photographs, which would leave no doubt that Cindy Ann wasn’t honoring the terms set down by the criminal court. She was, in fact, in violation. She could end up actually going to jail.

  Cindy Ann wiped her eyes. The second bottle of wine was gone, but it hadn’t taken her far enough in the direction she wanted to go, leaving her stranded by the side of the highway, cars passing by in a long angry blur, her nose and forehead starting to itch with sunburn, sweat, dust, the orange vest like a carapace, holding in the heat. The smell of exhaust and the moist, stagnant ditch. The heft of the grab-stick. The bump of the trash bag against her hip and thigh. Wads of newspaper, magazine subscription cards, waxy cups with leaking plastic lids. Crushed cigarette cartons, torn panty hose. Random socks, scrunchies.

  A child’s faceless doll.

  Condoms. Blood-soaked maxi-pads.

  A flea collar. A gutted purse.

  But mostly, fast-food wrappers: fat bags filled with rotted Mc-Nuggets and the gooey remnants of Blizzards, slimy salads, exploded pies, desiccated fries like bits of human bone. These days, there were at least half a dozen chain restaurants, sprouting in clusters, mushroomlike, at the edges of Fox Harbor. Not like when Cindy Ann was in high school. Then, everybody just ate at DC. Not only high school kids or tourists heading north on their way from Chicago, but families, old people, bachelors. No matter what shift you worked, it was always busy, people standing in line. Not like nowadays. More than once, she’d taken the younger girls for dinner, timing their arrival with Amy’s break, and they’d been the only people in the restaurant. Looking around, you could see that the place was getting run-down. The doors and window frames needed painting. Some of the floor tiles had cracked. Still it was hard to believe that so much time had passed. There was the booth, over by the window, where Mum and Dan Kolb liked to sit, sipping like sweethearts from the same cup. The love of my life, Mum liked to say. The narrow table, by the stack of high chairs, where Meggie waited with a book for the end of Cindy Ann’s shift. The pay phone Cindy Ann had used to call Meggie, the only time she’d called anyone, ever, while she was supposed to be working.

  “I caught him this time.”

  “Caught who?”

  “My stepdad. In the crawl space.”

  Listening to Meggie breathe, Cindy Ann could picture the look on her face, the one that meant she was trying to erase the lines connecting the dots. She was like that, Meggie. If you told her something bad about someone, a teacher, for example, she’d defend them, make excuses. It was something Cindy Ann liked about Meggie, usually. It was what made her think of Meggie as a good person, somebody to be trusted.

  “What was he doing?” Meggie said, and Cindy Ann had wanted to reach through the phone lines to slap her.

  “What do you think?” she said, hating the way her voice shook. “Spying on me, that’s what. Watching me. With his dick out. He made me touch it.”

  Meggie said, “Oh. God.”

  “Meet me after my shift, okay? I need to figure out what to do.”

  A bag filled with hamburger buns. The broken neck of a beer bottle. Plastic wrap. Fish sticks. Endless cigarette butts. A cup of soft serve ice cream, still capped; Cindy Ann lifted it, gingerly, with the grab-stick and discovered that it was frozen, fresh. She wondered why someone had thrown it away. It crossed her mind to save it, but no. Of course not. Still, what a shame.

  How she’d loved that soft serve ice cream, especially the Dairy Castle specialty, Twist: half vanilla and half chocolate, the two flavors swirled into one. The night she’d phoned Meggie, she filled two extralarge beverage cups with Twist—one for each of them—layering them both with cherries, nuts, crumbles of brownie, chocolate sprinkles. They’d walked to the beach, the way they always did, only tonight, neither of them spoke. Instead they ate doggedly, deliberately, tongues cupping the cold, smooth surface of their spoons.

  “I suppose I should tell somebody,” Cindy Ann said, and Meggie said, without looking at her, “Nobody’s going to believe you.”

  Even before she’d finished the sentence, the clarity between them, the good understanding, had started to soften, fade. The summer of their friendship like a photograph dropped in water, its decomposition accelerating as each minute passed. So that by the time school started one week later, it wasn’t surprising to either of them that Meggie had opted out of study hall, though they’d signed up together only last May. Meggie elected to take a class, instead, to help with her college applications, she’d explained. Cindy Ann started carrying her bag lunch to the home ec. lab, rather than joining Meggie in the cafeteria. And then, the DC night manager quit, and Cindy Ann was offered the position. She left college track for vocational. After that, she rarely saw Meggie at all. When she did, in the halls, they both smiled and waved, as if nothing whatsoever had happened.

  At least, Meggie never told anyone at school, though she’d told her brother, of course. Cindy Ann had seen it in Toby’s face, that time he’d asked her out. Probably Meggie had told her parents, too, because Meggie was the sort of girl who told her family everything; who turned in all her homework on time; who believed in things like hard work and good manners. More than once, over the years, it had occurred to Cindy Ann that she herself had wanted to believe in these things, and Dr. Contreau had even suggested her relationship with Meggie had had far more to do with this longing than it did with Meggie herself. But what did it matter? The friendship had been over now for—what? Thirty years? It had ended as quickly, as cleanly, as it had begun. There’d been no reason to think about it.

  Until Mallory got involved with Toby Hauskindler.

  Until the accident.

  And, now, this fucking engagement.

  “Why wouldn’t they believe me?” Cindy Ann had said, her voice sounding thin, young, unreliable, even to her own ears. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  “Maybe he didn’t mean it,” Meggie said, and she was speaking rapidly, breathlessly. “Maybe he thought you wanted him to.”

  And Cindy Ann had gulped the Twist from her spoon, bit at it, swallowed it down so fast that a fist of pain blossomed in her forehead, as if Meggie had struck her there. There were times, like tonight, when it seemed as if her head still throbbed from the force of that blow. All those times she’d come home late from work, undressed, lain down naked in the heat. Reading with the light on—five minutes, ten. Sounds behind the walls. The click of a door at the top of the stairs. Was it just her imagination? A couple of squirrels in the eaves? And then, the night she’d caught him, how he’d pleaded with her, begged her, tears streaming down his face. But even as he’d wept, his hand was closing over her own, pulling her back into the ringing of hangers, the crumpling of shoe boxes as they wrestled and fought. Suddenly, he was angry. Come on, you can do this for me. Small, tear-shaped Christmas ornaments skittered around their shoul
ders; a ribbon of tinsel glittered in his hair, catching the distant light from the hall. For a split second, everything seemed normal again. He was, after all, just Dan. She laughed, and he rolled on top of her, trapping her hand between his penis and belly, her body between himself and the floor.

  I didn’t really do anything, he said afterward. And I could have. Remember that.

  She was cursing aloud now, furious, filled with immense self-loathing. Of course, Toby would have told Mallory. Mallory, too, would be wondering what Cindy Ann had done to encourage a guy like Dan, a man so devoted to their mother. There simply would be no putting this behind her: not now, not ever. Easiest simply to avoid them both. The way she’d avoided Meggie—no, it was Megan, Meg—year after year, chattering too brightly when they happened to meet at the Cup and Cruller, on the jogging path. And then, one day at the playground, who should appear but Meg herself, looking flushed and fat and pleased, a two-week-old baby strapped to her chest.

  “Our miracle boy,” she said.

  That day Cindy Ann happened to have all the kids: her own three girls, plus her sister’s boy, Harvey, everybody playing on the swings. At the sight of the baby, they came running over, crowding close to see. Carefully, Meg lowered herself and the baby onto a bench. Still sore, Cindy Ann could see that. Still raw and shocked and tender. Something within her softened, made room, and she lifted her own baby, toddling Monica, into her arms, kissing her buttery cheeks.

  “Congratulations,” she’d said, and she’d meant it.

  And Meg had said, “It doesn’t feel real. None of it seems real.”

  “That’s just the way it is for a while.”

  “I’ve wanted this for so long, and now it’s like I’m not really here.”