Blue Water

by A. Manette Ansay

  “Iris is a teacher.”

  “I’m going to lose my job over this,” Iris said, and her expression was equal parts desperation and cheer.

  By now we were climbing the rise to the beach; I could see the red haze of the Christmas lights, smell the cooking meat. I was starting to feel better. I was finding explanations. Something had startled me and I’d fallen. Whatever it had been, these people had heard it, too.

  “You going to be okay?” Teddy asked.

  I nodded, pointing to a table by the cinder-block stage where Bernadette sat with Audrey and Pam. Carole Daniels was there, too, and the new girl, Jeanie McFadden. No sign of the twins. At a nearby table, Gaylee took orders, swatting at her ankles with a notepad.

  “My friends,” I said. “Thanks.”

  But Teddy had already turned to Iris, his hand on the small of her back. “How about a nice Frozen Girlfriend?”

  “A what?”

  He steered her past the smoking grills, up the crooked porch steps, toward the bar. By now Bernadette had spotted me; she waved me over, the others twisting in their seats to say hello. Every table was full tonight, packed with groups of cruisers I recognized from Ladyslip, King’s Point, Martin’s Cove. At the edge of the beach, couples were dancing. More couples sat on blankets. Just beyond the surf, sailboats and trawlers were anchored in a twinkling constellation, some with lighted Christmas trees strapped to the tips of their bows.

  “Are you okay?” Audrey said, raising her voice to be heard.

  For the first time since I’d fallen, I allowed myself to look down. My skirt, familiar, but torn. My own legs, streaked with mud and sand. Gingerly, I touched my knee, beaded with crystals of blood. Pain. The sting came as a strange relief.

  “I thought I heard something following me,” I began, but then I stopped, started to laugh. How stupid it all seemed now. “I started running and tripped. I guess if there’d really been anything there, it would have dragged me off and eaten me.”

  “You look as if that’s what happened,” Pam said.

  Bernadette squeezed my wrist; her hand was ice cold, as always. Cold hands, warm heart: it was something my mother said.

  “Little bastards,” Carole said, kicking at the bugs under the table.

  Pam said, “You told us they were in bed.”

  “Not funny.”

  Gaylee came over with her notepad, aimed her pen at my knee. “Good one,” she said, with a whistle of admiration. “Can I get you something for the pain?”

  “One Frozen Girlfriend,” I said.

  Frozen Girlfriends were the Island Girls’ signature drink, the key to the pub’s success. They were made of rum and ginger, pulverized ice, peach liqueur, and a mystery ingredient that very possibly might not have been legal. They smelled of high school, of bubble gum and lip gloss; they were the color of fresh cotton candy twisted around a paper cone. They tasted like what, as a little girl, I’d imagined pink champagne would taste like, and this was what got people into trouble. The drink seemed harmless. Innocent. It wasn’t. You ordered one, paced yourself, nursed it through the night. Only the greenest of cruisers ever ordered them in pitchers. Above the bar, a hand-lettered sign declared: MANAGEMENT NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR FINANCIAL INVESTMENTS OR ROMANTIC PROPOSALS MADE WHILE UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF A FROZEN GIRLFRIEND.

  “Truth serum,” Gaylee replied, whenever somebody questioned her about the secret ingredient.

  Miriam, who’d invented the drink, said nothing, of course, whether you asked or didn’t. She took your cash, made your change, slipped the bills into a lockbox. Nobody could understand how she and Gaylee had gotten together, though every now and then an unhappy rumor lifted its diamond head. Something about Gaylee having been married. Something about a child, a girl, who’d gotten in some kind of trouble. Something about Miriam—Gaylee’s long-time admirer—convincing Gaylee to chuck everything, leave it all behind.

  By the time my drink arrived, the band had gone on break. “You look different somehow,” Bernadette said.

  I took my first sip. It tasted so good that I’d swallowed a third of it before I realized what I was doing.

  “I feel different,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “Different in what way?”

  “I’m not exactly sure.”

  “Easy there,” Audrey said as I took another drink. “You don’t want to end up like her.” She rolled her eyes toward the tractor, where a woman in pink sneakers and a pink fanny pack sat teetering on the seat. Iris. She was singing into an imaginary microphone, belting out the words to “Red, Red Wine.” Below, Teddy swayed a little, calling up encouragements.

  “Why not?” Jeanie said, and she lit a cigarette. “As long as she’s having fun.” She was tall as a basketball player. Skinny. One arm tattooed with a butterfly, the other with a fat bumblebee.

  Carole turned toward Bernadette and me; she’d been talking about the twins, and now she roped us happily, eagerly, into her story. “So we’re just about ready for bed last night, when Jamie crawls out of his berth. Turns out he’s sleepwalking—can you believe it? Before we can say boo, he pulls down his PJs, piddles right there on the floor.”

  “I’m never having kids,” Jeanie said. One bare, coltish knee poked over her plate; she picked at a toenail, studied what she’d found.

  “It isn’t all like that,” Audrey said. She was a graceful, gentle woman in her early seventies, the leader of our morning yoga sessions. She and her husband, Earl, had raised four children, some of whom had children of their own, all of whom descended on the Cove each year at Christmastime, bringing an assortment of friends, spouses, sweethearts. “If it were, then the human race would have died out a long time ago.”

  “The planet would be better off,” Jeanie said.

  Pam laughed. Carole kept on talking.

  “We barely get that mess cleaned up when Joshie appears. Same funny look on his face. Before we can stop him, he’s hosing down the galley shelves, top to bottom.”

  Bernadette nudged me under the table; Audrey caught my eye. Even when Carole left the twins at home, you wound up feeling as if she’d brought them along.

  “I hope you made them clean it up, at least,” Pam said. She and Marvin had no children. Instead, they’d adopted half a dozen dogs: potcakes, strays, hopeless cases of every kind. Every morning, you’d see Marv in the dinghy, motoring them to shore to do their business, fighting for balance in the midst of all those mismatched ears and spotted tongues.

  “But they were sleepwalking,” said Carole. “It wasn’t like it was their fault.”

  “Maybe they were just pretending.” Jeanie blew a jet of cigarette smoke into a hovering cloud of gnats.

  “You can’t pretend to sleepwalk.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “Not like that.”

  Audrey said, changing the subject, “At least they didn’t set the boat on fire.”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Carole said. “I can’t stop wondering what they’ll do next.” Her good-natured smile became rabbity, anxious. “Why do you think they’re doing it? Maybe they’re mad about something. Maybe I toilet trained them wrong and that’s why they’re pissing in my pots and pans.”

  “The subconscious mind will assert itself,” Audrey said.

  Pam groaned. “Spare us the Freud.”

  “No, she’s got a point,” Bernadette said, jumping in all at once, the way you make up your mind to enter cold water. “If Carole had twin girls, would they be pissing all over her house?”

  “It’s biology!”

  “Freud was a misogynistic shithead—”

  “But the stuff about boys and their mothers—”

  There was less than an inch of pink left in my glass, but I didn’t remember drinking it. And I wasn’t feeling the effects of it in the least. This wasn’t like me. It wasn’t me. There, on my index finger, I could still see the shadow of that chunky silver ring. Cindy Ann’s ring. I’d noticed it in court and again, later, a
t the grocery store. Of course Mallory would have made it. It was like the one she’d made for Toby. All of Mallory’s jewelry had that same, heavy look.

  I stood up, bumping the table with my thighs. Everyone scrambled to catch their drinks.

  “Down in front,” Pam said.

  Again Bernadette’s cold hand found mine; this time, I pulled it away. There was nothing on my finger but my own pink skin. There’d been nothing on the sandy path where I had fallen. I signaled Gaylee for another drink.

  “You go, girl,” Jeanie said.

  It was after the band came back from break that time began to dissolve.

  I remember telling someone I’d seen a panther. Someone at a nearby table said they’d seen it, too. Someone else had encountered a herd of wild pigs, complete with yellow tusks and tufted tails, and Jeanie actually stubbed out her cigarette to describe something she’d encountered offshore: dragon-eyed, silver-scaled, rising from an oily pool.

  “Your imagination,” Carole said.

  “I think I know the difference,” Jeanie said, “between water and my damn imagination.”

  Then Carole was gone and we were on the beach, dancing, singing along with the band. The band’s shaggy-headed drummer danced with us. Iris and a heavyset woman danced, too. For a while, I found myself dancing with Teddy; he whooped happily when I stumbled, barefooted, onto his toes. Hadn’t I been wearing sandals? Hadn’t I worn a tank top over my swimming suit? Then Teddy was gone, and Bernadette and I were swimming together like mermaids, like beautiful long-tailed fish, and I was sixteen years old, skinny-dipping with Cindy Ann in the iced clarity of the lake. Afterward, the air felt warm against our skins as we dressed, slapping at mosquitoes, tugging our wet shorts over our hips. How safe we felt in the darkness, screened by the thick stand of trees at the base of the bluff. It never crossed my mind that anyone could be watching. Lying on Cindy Ann’s mattress in the attic, reading, studying, quizzing each other for tests, I felt like a princess in a high, walled tower, the wide fields below like a flowering moat. What did we talk about? School, classmates, what we wanted to do with our lives. I don’t think we ever once talked about Dan Kolb. A couple of times, we tried on clothes, getting ready to go out. A small fan turned its head, side to side. No, it said. No, no. A single wasp buzzed in the eaves. The voices of Cindy Ann’s sisters in the garden drifted through the windows like faint, sweet scent.

  Cindy Ann’s mother off to work at the post office. Dan Kolb below, minding Ricky, his son. Dan had been the hired man, arriving the same year Mallory was born. When George Donaldson walked out on his family, Dan had stepped in: neatly, seamlessly.

  There were two wooden doors at the top of the attic steps. The one to the left opened into Cindy Ann’s room. The one straight ahead led to a narrow crawl space, stuffed with household odds and ends: broken toys, mismatched furniture, snowsuits and sleds and saucers. Mr. Kolb had promised he’d turn that crawl space into a closet for Cindy Ann, an actual walk-in closet with an overhead light and built-in shelves. He’d even started working on this, hauling boxes of junk to the shed; he’d used red marker on Cindy Ann’s wall where he planned to install louvered doors. All this had taken place in spring, before my sixteenth birthday, before Cindy Ann and I became friends. By the time we were up in her room, on that particular August day, the red outline on her wall had become invisible to us, the way that the wall itself was invisible, made of rough, knotted pine. The slats didn’t fit flush against one another; the plaster between them had crumbled away. The paint, too, was peeling off in strips: papery, translucent, like sunburned skin.

  “Did you hear that?” I said.

  “Hear what?” Cindy Ann said.

  But I knew that she’d heard it, too, because she reached over, turned off the fan. What we’d heard had been a cough or, rather, the sound of someone suppressing a cough. It had come from behind the wall, from behind the red outline sketched on the wall.

  “Your dad,” I said, because that’s what Cindy Ann called Dan Kolb, even though, of course, he was her stepdad.

  “He’s downstairs with Ricky,” Cindy Ann said.

  “Maybe he’s working on the closet,” I said.

  She got up, knocked within the outline of the louvered doors as if she believed they were already there, as if she were a child playing house. “Hello?”

  Silence.

  We felt it then, the presence of someone, waiting. Mr. Kolb, it had to be. Only why didn’t he say something? Why didn’t he knock back?

  Cindy Ann sprang toward her bedroom door, catlike. “Wait,” I began, but she’d already flung it open, grasped the cracked glass knob on the crawl space door. This door, like Cindy Ann’s, was badly warped, which meant it couldn’t close completely. Instead it rested lightly against its swollen frame. Cindy Ann threw herself at it anyway, shoulder first, like a TV cop. I saw it give slightly, suspiciously, then spring back.

  “You try.”

  Cindy Ann shoved me forward, and I caught the warm, slick knob in both hands, infected by the same determination. We were foxes on the scent of a rabbit. We were dogs, baying at a treed ’coon. We would flush him out, dig him out, demand an explanation. For several minutes, we fought with that door until, suddenly, Cindy Ann stepped back.

  A high, shrill cry rose from below.

  “Ricky,” she said, and together we turned, thundered down the steps. There he was on the living room floor, sobbing, banging his head against his fist. That was why you had to watch him all the time. When he fell, his walker slipped out of range, so he couldn’t get back on his feet. It took Cindy Ann half an hour to calm him, rocking him, kissing him, peeling his hands from his face. I fixed three glasses of Kool-Aid, washing out the jelly jars I found in the sink. When Becca and Mallory appeared, I divided what was left in the pitcher, and we were all sitting around the kitchen table when Mr. Kolb appeared.

  He hadn’t come in from outside. The kitchen door stood opposite the table, so we would have noticed, if he had. Nobody ever used the front door to the house. The living room TV, in fact, stood against it.

  “What, none for me?” Mr. Kolb said, eyeing our glasses. Then, noticing Ricky’s face: “What happened? Rick, were you hitting yourself? Did something upset you?”

  He looked at Cindy Ann anxiously, curiously.

  “You left him alone,” she said.

  “Jeez, Rick, I’m sorry,” Mr. Kolb said, and he pressed his lips into Ricky’s matted hair. “Did you get in a tight spot? Did you take a little spill?”

  He pulled up a chair, settled close to Ricky’s side, stroked the red plane of Ricky’s cheek with a gentleness that made me think of Toby. Then he scooped up Mallory, settled her onto his knee. I waited for Cindy Ann to ask where he’d been, but she said nothing, so I said nothing, too. We all were going to pretend that nothing weird had happened. Frankly, I was relieved. Probably it meant nothing. Probably he’d just been working back there, with headphones on, or something. Maybe all the crap inside the closet had blocked the door. I busied myself cleaning up the kitchen, washing the dishes, scrubbing the countertops. After a while, Cindy Ann joined me. She dried everything and put it away. She took out the trash and mopped the floors, and we were just starting in on the windows when Mrs. Kolb walked in the door.

  “My goodness, girls,” Mrs. Kolb said. She looked like a police officer in her postal service uniform. “What a lovely surprise.”

  She kissed Mr. Kolb, who kissed her back. They were like that, the Kolbs, and it fascinated me. My own parents never kissed back then—not each other, certainly not Toby and me. It was why I’d always made it a point to kiss Evan first thing in the morning. I kissed him again when I dropped him off at school. I kissed him in the afternoon, as soon as he got in the car. I kissed him when I put on his pajamas and I kissed him when I tucked him into bed.

  Kiss-kiss? he’d ask. Kiss-kiss!

  Not kiss. Never kiss.

  “Don’t take Leon to a hospital,” I told Bernadette. “At least, if something
happens, here you’re going to be right there with him. He won’t die calling for you, wondering where you are.”

  I was trying to explain myself clearly. I was trying to say what I meant. It was difficult, though, because each sentence kept getting away from me. It was like lobbing a ball from the top of a cliff: I simply couldn’t predict exactly where it would end up. So I began again. I began again. The way that it made me feel, seeing Mr. and Mrs. Kolb kiss. Whenever they kissed, they closed their eyes. The love of my life, Mrs. Kolb liked to say. At sixteen, I had never been kissed—at least, not by someone who counted, which meant someone who wasn’t related to me. Neither had Cindy Ann. Cindy Ann and her sisters kissed on the lips. Rex always kissed me before he left for work and again, at night, when I went upstairs. There in his study. His sailing magazines. Peanut butter, crackers. Kindergarten breath.

  Evan’s breath. The last time I kissed Evan.

  That was it. There it was.

  I told Bernadette.

  My voice was hoarse from shouting. I wanted to be heard over the band. Only the band wasn’t playing anymore. The band, in fact, was gone. All of the tables were empty, too, except for the one where I sat with Bernadette. She was stroking my hair, and Audrey, hello, was holding my hands very tightly. Pam was there, too, and Jeanie. Gaylee. I was wearing my bathing suit, gritty with sand, and my skirt, which clung stickily to my hips.

  I realized I’d been talking for a long, long time.

  “So did he keep molesting her—your friend?” Pam asked. Your ex-friend, I mean.”

  The truth was this: I hadn’t wanted to know.

  “That’s hardly the point,” Audrey said, quickly.

  “He’s a bastard, regardless,” Pam agreed. “I didn’t mean that he wasn’t.”

  “Still,” Jeanie said, lighting another cigarette, “that sort of thing happens all the time. It’s no excuse for driving drunk with your kids in the car and everything.”

  “Excuse, no,” Bernadette said. “But maybe an explanation.”

  “I don’t accept that,” Gaylee said. Her voice was soft, strange.