The Isle of Youth: Stories

by Laura van Den Berg

  I left my sandals in the sand and went in up to my ankles. The ocean was warm. I continued until the water reached the ragged hem of my shorts. I looked back at A and B. They were standing on the beach, in the shade of a palm tree, their arms crossed. I only needed to go a little farther to feel the bottom disappear, to feel nothing but water beneath me, but I liked the firm boundary under my feet. I stared at everything that lay beyond: blueness, escape, certain death. It felt strange to know that behind me stood such an immense and troubled city.

  I remembered once trying to convince my husband and Sylvia to spend a weekend at the beach, but he said he didn’t like the ocean, and Sylvia looked at him and smiled and then commented on how alike they were. I had been grating carrots for a salad. I put down the grater, confused. My husband and I had gone to the Eastern Shore all the time during the early years of our marriage. I’d never known he didn’t like the sea. Since when? I’d wanted to ask him. What changed? It seemed clear to me that my sister’s fear had infected him.

  I went back to that fear, to that seaside trip with our parents, which revealed a side of Sylvia I had never seen before: shivering, small, vulnerable. She always looked so unhappy when she emerged from the water, with her slicked-down hair and blue lips, like a cat that had been sprayed with a hose. On our last afternoon, Sylvia suggested we play a game where we held each other’s head underwater, to see who could stay down longer. Her only condition was that we didn’t go out past our waists. I agreed, certain I could win. Sylvia lasted twenty seconds before she pinched my leg, the signal to let go. I still remembered how slim and pale her limbs looked underneath the water, and the silken feeling of her wet hair between my fingers. When it was my turn, I made it forty seconds before running out of air, but when I pinched Sylvia’s leg, nothing happened. Her hands bore down against the back of my head. I swung my arms and legs, dug my fingernails into her knee. By the time she released, I was gasping, openmouthed, like a fish stranded on land. You didn’t follow the rules, I shouted, but she just went back to shore and ran down the beach, the shallow water spraying around her ankles, her power restored.

  Clouds were thickening along the horizon; the boats had disappeared from sight. The ocean looked choppy and gray. I wanted a jolt, something that would snap me back into a world I recognized. I bent over and dunked my head into the water. The salt stung my eyes.

  * * *

  When the sky dimmed, I trudged out of the water and drove home. In the lobby, I checked the mailbox. There was a postcard of the Isle of Youth: a photo of a turquoise sea and a white sailboat. The back of the card had gotten wet and the ink had bled. I held it up to A and B.

  “Sylvia sent me this card,” I said. “She sent it from the Isle of Youth.”

  “I can’t read the message on the back,” A said.

  “You could have sent that card to yourself,” B added.

  I put the postcard back into the mailbox, then turned to the men and asked why they weren’t making me do whatever work Sylvia was supposed to be doing.

  “That’ll be someone else’s job,” A said.

  In the apartment, the men asked if there was any pizza, so I ordered one. Later we ate and watched Die Hard on TV. After the movie, I didn’t wrap the extra pizza in tinfoil and put it in the fridge, like I would have at home. I left the box on the kitchen counter, our glasses and plates and crumpled paper napkins on the coffee table.

  I slipped into the bedroom, where I changed into a pair of Sylvia’s pajamas and called my husband.

  “It’s me,” I said when he answered.

  “I know,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  I lay on the bed, facing the wall. “I’m in a situation.”

  “A situation?”

  “This is going to sound like a lot to ask, but I want you to come down to Florida tomorrow night. I want you to meet me at Sylvia’s apartment and take me home.”

  “You’ve never had much trouble coming and going.”

  “You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  “I’m being followed by three people,” I said, though my mind was already moving in a different direction entirely, back to certain times with my husband, when the fights were just starting to get dangerous, when every night, it seemed, we found ourselves on the brink of losing irretrievable ground. There were things people could say to each other that brought about a kind of death, in that you never get over it; you apologize and seek counseling, you tell people your marriage is “recovering,” but you’re presiding over a grave. Of course, I didn’t have such ideas back then, when we still had a chance. I thought we were like rubber. I thought everything would bounce off.

  “Who are these people that are following you?” my husband asked.

  “Well, actually, now I think it’s down to two.”

  “Did your sister get you stoned?”

  “I haven’t seen Sylvia in days.” I rubbed my eyes. “She went to the Isle of Youth. It’s an island near Cuba. It has black coral and iguanas.”

  Someone knocked on the bedroom door. I heard A’s voice. He wanted to know who I was talking to.

  “I have to go,” I said. “Please think about what I asked you to do.”

  “What’s that noise?”

  “I can’t go into it right now.”

  “If you think I’m going to drop everything and fly to Florida, you’re nuts.”

  “Do you think speech is inhibiting our spiritual enlightenment?”

  “What?” he huffed into the phone. “What, what, what?”

  The door opened. I hung up. A and B loomed in the doorway.

  “That wasn’t an authorized call,” A said. “I sincerely hope you weren’t calling the cops.”

  “I didn’t know I needed permission,” I said. “Anyway, I was just talking to my husband.”

  “They told us you weren’t married,” B said.

  “They wouldn’t know.” I put on a pink bathrobe and pushed past them, toward the balcony. I leaned against the railing. My hips dug into the metal. The skyline was brilliant with light.

  I recalled what Sylvia said that first night in her apartment, about me wanting to know what her life was like. I turned my head from side to side, looking at the men standing next to me. “Now I know how it feels to never be alone, but in absolutely the wrong kind of way.”

  “We’re probably no worse than most of the company you keep,” B said.

  “You might be right about that,” I said.

  I leaned over the edge of the balcony. The ground below looked dark and smooth, like the surface of another planet. I wanted to touch it, to feel the grass against my cheek. I kept leaning and leaning until I was weightless. As I went, I felt something—fingertips?—graze the bottom of my feet. I hit the lawn hard. My legs were tangled in the bushes, my arms sprawled across the grass, as though I were trying to crawl away from the scene. I wondered if this was where Sylvia had landed when she went over the edge. I pictured a chalk outline and my body filling the shape.

  My lip was bleeding. I was sweating underneath my pajamas and robe. The back of my head ached. I pressed my face into the grass, not looking up when I heard footsteps or voices. I imagined A and B trying to explain this to their boss: she was there and then she wasn’t.

  “There is something very wrong with you,” A said.

  I rolled onto my back. Blood had pooled below my bottom lip. I swallowed a mouthful of liquid and grit. The sky had that smudged look again. If my husband knew I’d gone over a balcony, would he come for me then?

  B kneeled next to me. He pressed two fingers against my throat.

  “The good news is that you’re going to live,” he said.

  “What’s the bad news?”

  They were going to have to take me back upstairs. I nodded.

  “We have to keep you safe,” B said. “No one will be able to make you do anything if your bones are already broken.”

  I nodded a second time. />
  “Why did you do this?” he asked.

  “I had to do something.”

  A kneeled on my other side. He rested his palm on my forehead. “What hurts?”

  * * *

  In the apartment, A and B helped me down the hall and into Sylvia’s bed. They put a pillow underneath my left ankle, which was already swelling. They cleaned the dirt and grass from my face and hands with a warm washcloth. Using a Q-tip, A swabbed blood from my bottom lip, then peered into my mouth.

  “It’s just a cut.” He held out a coffee mug and I spat blood into the white bottom. “You don’t need any stitches.”

  “I feel like I’ve been shot,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.” B picked leaves from my hair.

  They bandaged my ankle and brought me two pills from Sylvia’s supply and a glass of water. I took the pills and gulped the water like it was the last thing I would ever drink. They turned out the lights. They told me that tomorrow was a new day.

  The door opened. I knew they were about to leave. I asked them to wait.

  “Why did you drop out of graduate school?” I asked. “Why didn’t you become mathematicians?”

  “What do you care?” they said.

  “I want to know something about you.”

  The room was dark. I blinked, trying to find their silhouettes. I listened for their voices.

  “It’s not a very interesting story,” A said before closing the door.

  * * *

  I woke in the middle of the night with a violent energy inside me. I had to get out of my sister’s room. I limped down the hall and locked myself in the bathroom. I padded the tub with towels and eased myself in. I pulled the shower curtain closed. I uncapped my sister’s gels and shampoos and sniffed the liquids. Everything smelled like a bad imitation of something else. My elbow was bruised. My cut lip throbbed. The back of my head still hurt. I wondered if my brain was bleeding. I heard A and B snoring in the living room, where they’d taken up residence for the night.

  I fell asleep in the bathtub. In the morning, I woke to the sound of A and B shouting. Finding my room empty, they thought I had slipped out of the apartment. I got up, using the tile walls for support, and splashed water on my face. There was a greenish bruise on my cheek and dried blood around my mouth. I imagined the previous day repeating itself over and over and that sick feeling returned. When I opened the door and hobbled into the living room, the men stopped yelling and stared.

  “I was in the bathroom,” I said.

  “The bathroom?” A said. “What were you doing in there?”

  “Who cares,” B said. “She was just in the bathroom. We didn’t lose her after all.”

  They looked at each other and laughed until they were red-faced and doubled over. I sat on the floor and leaned against the wall. I felt a strange pressure in my cheekbones.

  “How are you feeling?” they finally asked.

  “My sister is coming home tonight,” I said.

  “I’ll put on some coffee,” A said. “Looks like you need it.”

  I told them I wanted to make a call. They glanced at each other, then handed me the phone. I lay on my side and dialed my husband’s number. I thought of the stories I’d heard about adversity bringing couples back together. When the machine came on, I repeated his name until the line went dead.

  * * *

  After the sun had been swallowed by a phosphorescent night, I waited on the balcony for Sylvia, a vodka sweating in my hand. My ankle was still wrapped and I couldn’t put weight on it, so I stood with my foot slightly raised, like a flamingo. A and B stood with me, of course, complaining about the heat and the mosquitoes and all the trouble I had caused them.

  “Who are we waiting for again?” A asked.

  “My sister,” I said. “The person you’re really supposed to be following.”

  B slapped at a bug on his forearm. “Lady, has anyone ever told you that you have a reality perception problem?”

  I watched the street. A car parked in the shadows resembled the Lincoln, but it was too dark to know for sure. I thought of the last fight I had with my husband. It started in the kitchen and progressed to the bedroom. In a fury, I’d climbed out the bedroom window and onto the roof. My husband stuck his head outside and called to me. I ignored him. A little while later, he walked down the driveway and got in his car. He left and didn’t return until morning. I stayed on the rooftop for hours, watching the black sky. Once, a plane passed over me. I wanted badly to be on one and a few weeks later I was, bound for Miami. And even with all that had happened, with everything that had gone wrong, there was still a part of me saying, Please don’t send me back to where I came from.

  Before my sister appeared, a little black briefcase in hand, there were several false alarms—women who had the same slim silhouette, who walked with the same kind of swagger. It was startling to see how many people I mistook for my sister, stopping just short of leaning over the balcony and shouting her name; it was even more startling to realize that to mistake someone for Sylvia was to mistake them for myself, that there were so many women who, in the dark, could pass for me. And so when the real Sylvia got out of a taxi and moved like a shadow across the street, I didn’t call to her. I didn’t wave. Instead I remembered watching her run down that beach in Carmel, looking radiant and weightless, filling me with terror and awe.

  Sylvia stood on the sidewalk, beneath a streetlamp. The light fell on her in a perfect yellow dome. She looked like she was posing for a portrait. She bowed her head. Her body heaved with a mammoth sigh. “There she is,” I whispered to A and B just before she disappeared inside.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you:

  To the people who first supported these stories: Jill Myers at American Short Fiction; Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies at Glimmer Train; Pei-Ling Lue and Maribeth Batcha at One Teen Story; Cara Blue Adams at Southern Review; Bradford Morrow at Conjunctions; Dewitt Henry and Ladette Randolph at Ploughshares; the Julia Peterkin Award committee; the Writer’s Center.

  To the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and the Munster Literature Centre, for helping me keep the faith.

  To Spiro Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, for the great gift of time.

  To the communities at Gettysburg College, especially Fred Leebron and Kathryn Rhett; Gilman School, especially Patrick Hastings and John Rowell; George Washington University, especially Tom Mallon; and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, especially Michael Collier and Noreen Cargill.

  To Baltimore, for being the place where so much of this work got done. To the Baltimore lit gang, the best any city could hope for.

  To Joe Hall and Cheryl Quimba, for lending me 3036 Guilford, where this book was finished.

  To Don Lee, Elliott Holt, Mike Scalise, Nina McConigley, Jessica Anthony, Jane Delury, Shannon Derby, and Meghan Kenny, for their faith and friendship. To Karen Russell, for her luminous e-mails and support.

  To those who read early versions of these stories and helped me find my way out of the forest of the first draft: Josh Weil, James Scott, Matthew Salesses.

  To my agent, Katherine Fausset, for being brilliant and loyal and fearless, always with the utmost grace. Thanks as well to Stuart Waterman and everyone else at Curtis Brown.

  To my editor, the genius Emily Bell, for taking a chance on me and for shepherding these stories into their final form. To everyone at FSG who helped bring this book into existence. To Nayon Cho. To Gregory Wazowicz. To anyone who did anything to help. I will be in your debt always.

  To my family, immediate and extended. To my parents, Egerton and Caroline. To CJ. Every book is for you.

  ALSO BY LAURA VAN DEN BERG

  What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2013 by Laura van den Berg

  All rights reserved

/>   First edition, 2013

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Van den Berg, Laura.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  The Isle of Youth: stories / Laura Van den Berg. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-374-17723-2 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-0-374-71061-3 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3622.A58537 185 2013

  813'.6—dc23

  2013022588

  www.fsgbooks.com

  www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks

  eISBN 9780374710613