Blue Water

by A. Manette Ansay

  “We’re meeting some friends at Dairy Castle,” I said. This wasn’t exactly a lie. We’d arranged to collect Stacy’s boyfriend there, along with some of his friends, before heading on to the party.

  “Take my car, then,” my father said. It was the first time he’d spoken. “It’s heavier. You’ll be safer.”

  Across the table, Toby grinned. “Good idea.”

  My mother’s car was a Mustang, a two-door with some zip. My father drove a Pontiac nearly as old as I was. Sitting behind the wheel was like piloting a ship. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be home by one.”

  In the past, my curfew had always been midnight. My mother opened her mouth, then closed it. My father sighed but did not object.

  When I stepped outside, Toby followed, walked me over to the remodeled barn where my parents kept their cars. The night was cold and clear, and we could see, in the distance, the lights of the Schultzes’ clapboard house. Our split-level ranch house stood on ten acres, part of a subdivision still known around town as “the old Brightsman farmstead.” In the ditches, in the ponds, in the puddles scattered like coins across the flooded lawn, millions of peepers were singing.

  “I don’t suppose you and Stacy know anything about a big party on the lake,” Toby said. He opened the door for me with the exaggerated gestures of a gentleman. “Somebody’s birthday, from what I hear.”

  I got behind the wheel. “Can’t be much of a party,” I said, sweetly, “if old folks like you know about it.”

  He poked my shoulder. “If you wind up drinking, don’t try to drive. Call me and I’ll get you. No questions asked.”

  “Nobody’s going to be drinking,” I said.

  “Cowboy,” Toby said. “I’m ugly, not stupid.”

  “No, you’re just stupid,” I said, but it didn’t come out right. I hated it when Toby joked about his looks, because, of course, he wasn’t really joking at all. He’d rested his hand on the edge of the window; suddenly, I reached up, placed my hand over his.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  Quickly Toby moved his hand away—embarrassed, I think, as I was. But the comforting flicker of warmth stayed between us. Earlier, as I’d risen from the table, my mother had risen, too. She’d nodded, helplessly, saying, Well. And my father had said, Sixteen years. And I’d understood how much they loved me, how difficult it was to let me go.

  I’d never driven my father’s car before; now I discovered I could barely see over the wheel. Backing down our long, curved driveway, I felt the way I’d felt at nine, trying on my mother’s high-heeled shoes. Still, I was grateful for the Pontiac’s wide seats and deep wheel wells when Stacy and I arrived at the DC. Eleven kids were waiting on the curb. Two couples volunteered for the trunk, while the rest sat, stacked, on one another’s laps. The underside of the Pontiac scraped, sparking, as we pulled away. I drove too slowly, cautiously. I was terrified I’d get pulled over.

  “Speed up a little,” said a voice in my ear. Literally. It was Cindy Ann Donaldson. I realized it was her thigh squashing mine, her foot I kicked whenever I braked. “If you drive too slow, you draw attention to yourself. That’s what my stepdad told me when I first got my license.”

  I nodded. This sounded reasonable.

  “Happy birthday, by the way,” she said. She was the first person to say it.

  “Thanks,” I said, dully. The hell with appearances. I was wishing with all my heart that I’d stayed home.

  By the time we found the party, it was after ten o’clock. Cars lined the dirt road leading to the cottage; more cars were scattered every which way on the lawn, underneath the trees. There was nowhere left to park that wasn’t ankle-deep in mud, so I turned around and dropped people off, remembering, at the last minute, to release the necking couples from the trunk.

  “You could park down at the beach,” Cindy Ann said.

  “I guess I’ll have to,” I said.

  “Want me to come with you? I don’t mind. I’m not big on parties, to tell you the truth.”

  I looked at Stacy’s retreating back, her boyfriend’s arm slung around her shoulder.

  “Sure.”

  Eventually, we wound up at the state park, nearly two miles away. Even before we got out of the car, we could hear the singing of the peepers; as we walked, the sound seemed to shimmer in the air. By now, I was feeling sorry for myself. It was my sixteenth birthday, after all, and here I was, abandoned by my friends. A cold, damp wind blew off the lake; I buttoned my jean jacket up to my chin, my mood plummeting along with the temperature. Unlike Stacy, I didn’t have a boyfriend. I wasn’t particularly talented. I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Cindy Ann glanced at me, but I kept my gaze on the ground. The last thing I needed was to start crying, which was exactly what I was about to do. And it would be worse than crying in front of a total stranger, because, even though we hadn’t exchanged twenty words since grade school, I knew Cindy Ann, and she knew me, the way people know each other in towns like Fox Harbor. I knew that she worked at Dairy Castle. I knew that her family farmed veal. I knew that she had a retarded brother, and that she was good with him, good to her sisters, who were younger than she was by several years.

  She’d stopped walking. I stopped, too.

  “Listen,” she said. The sound of the peepers was swelling steadily, shrilly, as if it were taking physical shape: a flying saucer, a mythical beast, the face of an angry god. The clouds blew back to reveal a sharp-jawed moon. Neither of us moved.

  “Why are they doing that?” I whispered.

  “They’re mating,” Cindy Ann said.

  If Stacy had said the word mating, I’d have giggled. When Cindy Ann said it, I did not. I was struck, instead, by the mystery unfolding all around us in the half-thawed fields. Life breeding life. For the first time that night, I understood that something was beginning for me, rather than ending, and I didn’t feel like crying anymore.

  Gradually, the sound subsided. The wind kicked up, spitting bits of frozen rain. Without speaking, we continued to walk, biting our lips against the chill. By the time we reached the cottage, we were both out of breath, stomping our feet, beating our numb fingers against our hips. Light poured from the windows, cut by the dark, thrash of shadows. The stereo was set so loud I could feel the thump thump of bass inside my chest.

  “Peepers,” Cindy Ann said, and then, as if some spell had been shattered, we climbed up the steps single file, each of us walking alone. By the time I understood what she’d meant, she’d already disappeared into the crush.

  Immediately I understood that the original impulse of the party—all its good-natured naughtiness—had mutated into an ugly, angry destructiveness. Broken dishes crunched beneath my feet as I passed through the kitchen into the living room. Kids were writing on the walls, flooding the toilets, stomping on lampshades. I found myself shoved into the dining room, which held a child’s wading pool, filled with blood-colored liquid.

  “Wapatooli,” a girl said. She scooped up a cupful, handed it to me.

  “What’s in it?” I asked.

  “Booze and Hi-C. Drink it now before the guys start swimming.” She nodded toward a group of seniors, who’d stripped down to their boxers.

  I took a sip, expecting it would taste unpleasant, but all I could taste was fruit punch. I was thirsty from all the walking. I drank. I thought to myself, It’s my sixteenth birthday. I thought to myself, What can one drink do? I stood in the alcove by the entryway, like someone in a dream, watching as boys I’d thought I knew vandalized the family photos, one by one. In the kitchen, girls were spreading pieces of bread with jelly, ketchup, mayonnaise, then sticking them to the walls in elaborate designs. More kids kept arriving. Somebody opened the windows. Somebody pulled the garden hose inside. A water fight broke out.

  “This is crazy.” Cindy Ann had reappeared. “Let’s get out of here before somebody calls the cops.” She looked at the empty cup in my hand. “I hope you didn’t actually drink that.”
>
  I had, in fact. Several times. The cup had seemed to refill itself, again and again, like magic.

  This time, instead of walking beside the road, we slogged along the bluff, following the footpath as it gradually sloped, down and down, toward the state park. Behind us, we could hear wave after wave of sirens converging on the cottage, the high wail blending with the sound of the peepers, creating an otherworldly cry all its own. I was sorry for Stacy and the other kids I’d driven, but I had my own problems. I wasn’t feeling well. The first time I got sick, it utterly surprised me. The second time, I understood. Each time, Cindy Ann waited in silence, holding back my hair, then urging me to keep on walking, helping me, catching me when I stumbled.

  “We’ve got to move the car,” she said, but when we finally reached the parking lot, I locked myself in the outhouse next to the boarded-up Welcome Center. The ageless, frozen stink seemed to issue from somewhere inside my soul. I threw up some more. After a while, Cindy Ann knocked.

  “C’mon,” she said. “You can get sick at home.”

  “My parents can’t see me like this,” I said.

  “We’ll go to my house.” She spoke through the half-moon cut into the door. “Everyone goes to bed early ’cuz my mom gets up at four.”

  “What if she wakes up?”

  “She won’t. My stepdad might, but he’ll just laugh.”

  I opened the door, stepped outside. Even the moonlight hurt my eyes.

  “Give me the keys,” Cindy Ann said, and I stared at her as if she had suggested I give her one of my lungs.

  “It’s my dad’s car!”

  “So what?”

  “You can’t,” I said, speaking slowly, trying to make myself clear, “drive my dad’s car.”

  “Neither can you.”

  I made it out of the parking lot, narrowly missing a tree, bouncing over the frost heaves. Then, mercifully, I pulled over, slid out of the driver’s seat.

  In the end, Cindy Ann drove us to her house, where I telephoned Toby from the kitchen phone. He arrived, half an hour later, in his truck. Cindy Ann followed us home in the car her mother used to deliver the mail—the steering wheel was on the wrong side—and then she drove Toby back to her parents’ house to pick up his Ford. In the morning, the Pontiac was safe in the garage, my mother and father none the wiser, and on Monday, Cindy Ann Donaldson plopped down beside me in the school cafeteria as comfortably, as naturally, as if she’d been sitting there, day after day, since the beginning of the year.

  “Wapatooli Girl,” she said.

  “Bite me,” I said.

  We grinned at each other. I was so happy to see her. I remembered the singing of the peepers. I remembered the way she’d held back my hair. Someone was shaking my shoulder. It annoyed me, because I wasn’t doing anything, I wasn’t bothering anybody, all I wanted to do was sleep. Everything seemed to be moving beneath me, and I opened my eyes to the sharp slap of daylight.

  I was lying at the bottom of the dinghy, one ear plugged with water. I pushed myself onto my knees, shook my head, and everything around me exploded, like dropped glass.

  “Jesus,” Rex said. “Have you been here all night?”

  I couldn’t speak. Every inch of my skin was on fire.

  “I’ve been worried sick,” he said. Even the sound of his voice seemed to cause the dinghy to rock harder. We were being towed; I could hear other voices, a rumbling outboard. Chelone’s hull loomed over us. Then Rex was standing behind me on the swim ladder, using the entire length of his body to keep me from tumbling into the water.

  “You got her?” somebody said, and Rex said, “For God’s sake, Meg, don’t pass out here.”

  The hot touch of his skin against mine was like iron. I forced myself to take another step, just to get away from it.

  And then I was sprawled on the cockpit floor, taking sips of Gatorade from the cup Rex pressed to my lips.

  I was naked in our berth, laid out like a corpse on a clean, white sheet.

  I was staring into the teak-framed mirror on the bulkhead, examining a face that I didn’t recognize, a face even more distorted than the one I’d stared at in the hospital, after the crash. Raspberry boils distorted my cheeks. The bridge of my nose was gone. Purple blossoms wound their way around my neck, and I closed my eyes, let Rex guide me back down onto the berth.

  “What’s wrong with me?” I managed to say.

  “Poisonwood,” he said.

  Gusts of wind spun across the intersection, and I was walking, I was running through the frost toward the site of Evan’s shrine. Trash scattered everywhere. Weeds coiled like snakes. Beneath the tangle: a cracked votive candle, the dampened mush of sympathy cards, notes, a scrap of photograph. How could this have happened? How could the same people who’d erected this cross, who’d attended the funeral, who’d written those letters to the paper on our behalf simply driven on past, day after day, ignoring what they’d seen? How easily any one of them might have found themselves here: unconscious on a stretcher, or cursing at the sky. Attempting by sheer, brute force of will to undo what had just been done. Cindy Ann and I knelt side by side, tearing at thick fistfuls of quack grass, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace. One by one, other women joined us, orange vests burning, a bright circle of fire.

  I awoke, dressed in a long T-shirt, to the filtered light of a kerosene lamp. My skin felt strangely heavy, tight, but there wasn’t any pain. I didn’t know what time it was. I didn’t know what day. I knew only that something terrible had eased; I felt clearheaded, calm, clean.

  Outside it was raining. From somewhere far away came the mutter of thunder, deep, sustained, like the clearing of one’s throat before something important is said. I slid my legs out of the berth, sat up, waiting for the dizziness to pass, and I remembered being a child, Evan’s age, and awakening after a fever. Then, too, it had been nighttime. Everything had seemed extraordinarily still. I’d gone down the hall to Toby’s room, gotten into bed beside him, pinched the backs of his arms until he woke up, bewildered. What? And I’d laughed—not because I had pinched him, as he’d thought, as my parents would tell the story for years—but because I was so happy to see him, so delighted and relieved, a traveler coming home.

  Rex sat at the galley table, writing in the ship’s log. He looked up just as the ship’s clock chimed.

  Six bells. It was three o’clock in the morning.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

  We were speaking politely, the way we did after an argument, mutually embarrassed, shamed. At his elbow sat a glass of scotch and, beside it, a piece of notebook paper, folded into two. Coming closer, I saw my name written on it in Bernadette’s graceful hand. Rex pushed the paper toward me.

  “Rubicon’s gone,” he said. “She weighed anchor a few hours ago.”

  “Gone?”

  He lifted his glass. “Leon had another seizure, I guess. They’re taking him for tests at some hospital in the States.”

  “Miami Children’s?” I said.

  “Audrey didn’t say. She and Earl stopped by to check on you.” He nodded at the note. “They left you this.”

  I opened it and read:

  Dearest Meggie,

  Sorry to say good-bye this way. Despite our differences, I believe you will agree when I say that, mostly, people are good at heart. I will always remember the time we’ve spent together at Houndfish Cay.

  Godspeed.

  Bernadette

  I sat down at the table, closed my eyes, rested my lumpy forehead on the smooth, cool teak.

  “It was Earl who found you, by the way,” Rex said, and his hand moved through my hair. “I’ve never known you to drink like that, Meg. What the hell happened out there?”

  It wasn’t me, I started to say, but stopped. There was no way to explain. Again, I saw the roadside, the weeds, the clots of colorful trash. Evan’s cross. Cindy Ann’s ring. I saw my reflection in the mirror: wounded, disfigured, pestilent. Not the kind
of vision I’d longed for, after Evan’s death, when I’d woken each day to the insult of silence, when I’d lit votive candles, week after week, in the darkness of St. Clare’s church. Then again, nothing was ever the way you imagined. Nothing ever turned out the way you planned, predicted, promised yourself it would be.

  “Rex,” I murmured into the teak. “I need to go home for a while.”

  “This is your home,” Rex said, but when I raised my head to look at him, he took his hand away.

  “This is about Toby’s wedding, isn’t it?” He sat back angrily. “I knew I should have pitched that goddamn invitation overboard.”

  “What this is about,” I said, “is that you lied to me about Arnie.”

  As soon as I said it, I knew that it was true. All those solitary trips to Echo Island. The way in which I’d been manipulated, back in June. I could only hope my brother would believe I hadn’t known, then, what Rex had meant to do.

  “I wanted to give you a break from it, that’s all,” Rex said.

  “So you made the decision for me.”

  “I did. And look at the result. We always knew she wasn’t remorseful, but now we can prove it to a judge. This time, her life will be impacted. She’ll be starting from scratch, three kids, no job, forty thousand left to her name.”

  I swallowed hard. “It doesn’t change anything.”

  “Of course it does. It means she’ll think twice before she goes out and kills somebody else.”

  “Let me get something straight,” I said. “You’re doing this because you want to protect other people? Or because you want her punished, no matter what the cost?”

  “It won’t cost us anything, Meg.”

  “I wasn’t referring to money.”

  He bent his head over the ship’s log again, as if he hadn’t heard.

  For almost twenty years, I’d counted on our marriage the way I’d counted on my heart to beat, my lungs to take in air. Steadily. Thoughtlessly. Through the years of infertility. Through the necessary changes after Evan’s birth. Through the first aching year of his loss. But over the past few months, what I felt for Rex had dulled so gradually that—like a shift in clear weather, the first purple tint in an otherwise bright sky—I’d been able to shrug it away as a trick of the light, nothing more.