The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  We see each other every weekend now and our rendezvous often take place outside.

  Georgia in the springtime is magnificent, everything lush and green, magnolia trees and daffodils, weeping willows and thickly hanging wisteria. I feel the crush of my hips against a bed of tulips one day, and the thick thrust of sharp pain, signaling the very moment of my deflowering, my legs spread, taut under the quilt in Henry’s bed one warm afternoon.

  When I am with him, I think of nothing else. Not the look on my father’s face when he returns home from another dejected job interview, not the sound of my mother retching into the toilet after chemo. I don’t think about Ms. Cusak’s class or the shadows that fall across Zoe’s face.

  Henry and I stand in the rain after cross-country one day, water streaming, gleaming down our pressed-together bodies. Another afternoon we wait in Ethan’s yard for him to return home. We sit on the grass by a honeysuckle bush, and I show Henry how to find the honey, that careful pulling out of the stamen, that golden drop heavy and translucent on the tip of your tongue. Soon the sweet taste mingles back and forth between our mouths.

  The spring goes on like this, each week like its own year.

  One night I come home from a date with Henry and find my mother in the living room, white wine on her breath.

  Sit down, she says.

  She looks at me for a long moment, and I know that she is trying to see into me.

  Are you having sex with Henry?

  My first impulse is to lie.

  No, I stutter, my cheeks burning.

  Are you lying to me?

  I shake my head. No.

  Although lying to her has become a familiar thing, a sick feeling comes over me.

  But these things I’ve discovered about my body? They are mine. Not hers.

  All I know, she hisses, is that I hope you are still a virgin.

  I stand and, without looking at her, walk away.

  We are tense for days after that.

  If only we had known how near the end was. It arrives swiftly, taking all of us by surprise.

  ALL I KNOW is that there is a coming to, a waking up, as though I’ve been asleep or dazed. I have been, I suppose.

  When I come to I am standing in the bathroom at school.

  I have just walked in on Zoe. She is hunched in a stall, the sleeve of her sweater pulled up to reveal a smooth, pale forearm. She sees me and instantly hides whatever she is gripping in her other hand. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s a razor. I grab her hand and pull her toward me, my heart pounding, breaking, but she shoves me off, her eyes those angry slits, and she bangs her way out of the stall and past me.

  She is closed. No matter what I say, no matter how hard I try, she has closed herself off to me.

  At night we sit silently on the phone.

  It isn’t hard to see that during these last months with Henry, while I was losing myself in my body and in his, she was drowning. I picture her underneath the water, the slick green weeds reaching up to her ankles, her ebony hair spreading out around her face.

  I have failed her.

  I instantly turn my anger and my frustration onto Henry.

  Suddenly I hate the way he stares at me in class, hate the way he presses himself into me so pliantly. I ignore him completely at school, trying to prove to Zoe how much I love her, how far I am willing to go for her.

  I turn cruel in my desperation.

  Henry is suffering now too. His eyes grow wider, more pleading by the day. I let his phone calls to my basement room go unanswered. We said that we loved each other, and now I want to take it back.

  I want to take everything back.

  SCHOOL IS ALMOST over for the year. Summer has come and with it, Georgia’s intense humidity. My skirt clings to the backs of my legs now as I follow Zoe down the path to English class.

  Henry and I see each other a few more times. We walk out in the middle of an English class one day and drive to the park. Into the woods a ways we fuck on the ground, dead leaves and twigs digging into my back, leaving little red indents along my spine, scratches against my shoulder blades, and bruises on the insides of my thighs.

  It is one of the last times I will see him. School lets out for the summer a few weeks later.

  A month into the summer break I go to Michigan with Zoe and her family. We had arranged this trip long before she started the cutting, long before Henry and everything that followed.

  I am determined to follow through with it even though Zoe is hardly speaking to me.

  We’d had big plans for Michigan. We’d plotted to sneak out in the middle of the night, to go into the town, to meet boys, to drink. We’d planned to lie by the lakeside day after day, our feet in the warm brown water, our necks long and girlish, turned to the sun. But Zoe still hasn’t come around completely; she still hasn’t opened back up, and I don’t know what to expect.

  I officially break up with Henry a few weeks before the lake trip. We go to the park, near the same place where we have so recently fucked. It is too much, I tell him. I’m drowning, I say.

  I can see the tears in his eyes. His throat moves up and down. I feel empty inside.

  At home my mother is sympathetic when I tell her the news, but I can sense the relief in her voice. She finds me in my room later that night. I can smell wine on her breath, but her tone is soft and she is loose.

  Can we look at the stars?

  I have covered my bedroom ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars, and I push my homework to the side and turn off the light. My mother lies down beside me.

  We have been doing this for as long as I can remember.

  You are so much wiser than I was at your age, she says to me.

  I don’t look at her.

  I look at you and I can hardly see the little baby I held in my arms all those years ago. You’ve become a young woman before my eyes.

  I can hear the tears in her voice.

  There is so much more to come, kiddo. Trust me.

  She takes my hand, and I let her. We lie there looking up at the stars, and I cannot decide if I want to be like her when I grow up.

  HENRY CALLS EVERY DAY after I break up with him. I scoff at the whispered messages he leaves, push my finger hard against the delete button. He leaves letters in my mailbox, hand delivered, filled with drawings, dried flowers. I make fun of him to Zoe. A small smile starts to crack the corners of her mouth.

  The night before we go to Michigan, Zoe and I stay up late in her room. I want things to be the same as before, I tell her. She turns her eyes away. The wind blows outside and branches scratch at the window.

  Our talk turns to Henry. He is so weak, we say. Why can’t he see that I don’t love him anymore?

  We devise a plan.

  It has been a couple of weeks since I’ve spoken to Henry. With Zoe listening on one phone, I call him on another. His voice is soft, careful about revealing its surprise at hearing from me.

  I tell him I still love him. I tell him that I am going to Michigan in the morning but that when I return we will press into each other as though there had never been any space there at all.

  I can almost hear the tears of relief slipping down his cheeks.

  Zoe grins at me from across the room, and I gently replace the handset.

  It is a three-day drive to Michigan. Zoe and I sit in the back of the van. We feed her little half brother Dramamine in a Coke bottle so he’ll stop bothering us, and we roll our eyes at her parents, who are listening to a book on tape. We stare out the back window, at the road disappearing away from us, and I can feel her arm, soft and warm against mine. We stretch our feet out, and she puts her head on my shoulder.

  When we finally arrive at the lake house, Zoe leads me upstairs to her grandparents’ bedroom. She hands me the phone. The numbers come easily; I have dialed them so many times.

  It was a joke, I say when he answers. Henry doesn’t understand.

  I can feel my throat swelling as I repeat the sentence.

&n
bsp; I don’t want to be with you anymore, I say.

  Leave me alone, I say.

  I hand the phone back to Zoe, and she clicks off the connection. We walk downstairs and out to the lake. I lift my face to the sun and can feel Zoe beside me doing the same.

  SHORTLY AFTER I return home from the Michigan trip I realize that my period is late. I panic and count the days, backward and forward, coming up with the same terrible number over and over.

  I sit, knees pulled to my chest, on the edge of my bed, rocking back and forth. I hate myself. I hate how cruel I’ve been, how desperate and confused and self-centered I’ve acted. I want to take it all back.

  But I don’t know how.

  Finally I go upstairs and find my mother on the couch. I’m crying so hard I can hardly get the words out.

  I think I’m pregnant.

  Instead of meeting me with the fury I expect, her whole body softens. She folds me against her and lets me sob for long minutes, whispering over and over into my ear that it will be okay.

  When I am done, she takes me into the kitchen and I stand there next to her desk as she calls the doctor to make an appointment.

  Everything will be okay. We’ll figure this out, she says, and sends me downstairs for a nap.

  When I wake up, the world is warm and hazy. Summer is almost over. School will be starting again soon. I lie on my bed, staring up at the ceiling thinking about Zoe and Henry. When I finally get up and go to the bathroom, I realize that I have gotten my period.

  Upstairs, when I tell her, it is my mother’s turn to cry, and when she is done I lean back into her on the couch and we watch afternoon television like that, neither of us speaking for a long time.

  BY THE TIME school starts again, in the fall, that day feels far away. The months with Henry are like a strange dream. We avoid each other in the halls, and I press closer to Zoe, until I can feel the wisps of her hair against my shoulder.

  That fall Zoe and I discover drugs and careless make-out sessions with the boys who supply them. We lean back into the seats of the old red Saab my parents have bought me, and we blow cigarette smoke up through the sunroof while we skip Ms. Cusak’s class.

  My relationship with my mother becomes both closer and more distant. Some nights I wake her in the middle of the night, sitting down softly in the darkness on her side of the bed. She is sleepy and warm and her voice is husky when she asks me what is wrong. It is past two in the morning, but I haven’t gone to sleep yet.

  Nothing, I say. I wanted to read you a poem that I just finished.

  She clicks on the light and pushes herself up in bed until her back is resting against the headboard.

  Okay, she says, I’m ready.

  When I am done reading, she tells me all her favorite parts. She pulls me close to her and then pushes herself back down beneath the covers.

  Turn off the light, will you?

  I click it off and sit there next to her in the dark until she is asleep again.

  In the fall of my senior year her cancer comes back. For months she is in and out of the hospital. Operations and chemo, doctor’s appointments and more bills scattered across the dining room table.

  In the morning, as I get ready for school, I can hear her throwing up in the bathroom. She is pale and gaunt and more careful with her movements. Her hair falls out little by little.

  We have passed through whatever destructive phase of our relationship we went through. The anger and resentment have softened.

  I have softened.

  Henry and I still avoid each other at school, and my friendship with Zoe won’t last through junior year, both of us finding circles of friends who aren’t as complicated. Sometimes I want to call her and tell her about my mother, but I never do.

  The day my college acceptance letter comes I open it quietly in the kitchen. Tears fill my eyes as I read the words written across the page.

  I have only applied to one school. A tiny liberal arts college on a mountain in Vermont, far away from my mother and my father, far away from Atlanta and everything it ever meant to me.

  I find my mother in her bedroom and hand her the letter. The late afternoon sun skates over the hardwood floors, and we stand near her dresser. She has a pair of earrings in her hand but takes the letter anyway. I watch her read the words, and then she looks up at me, tears brimming in both of our eyes.

  This is the beginning of the end.

  Part Three

  Bargaining

  We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt.

  —Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

  Chapter Seven

  2003, I AM TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

  A TAXI IDLES, waiting for me in the circular driveway of a hotel in the Philippines. I take one last look at my companions, a motley crew of seasoned travel writers with whom I’ve spent the last seven days, and hand my pack to the driver, who tosses it lightly into the backseat.

  I’m on assignment for Student Traveler magazine in Los Angeles, and I’ve been part of this group of journalists, all of us guests of the Filipino tourism board. But after seven days of touring Manila and the island of Cebu, I have yet to really generate anything worthy of a story for my publication.

  While the rest of the writers are getting comfortable in their business-class seats, heading home to LA, I’ll be making my way to an island I’ve only read briefly about in my guidebook: Malapascua.

  The Philippines is a large and notoriously dangerous country composed of more than seven thousand islands flung carelessly across a corner of the Pacific Ocean. Before I left on this trip my friends and family expressed concern.

  You could get kidnapped, my aunt said.

  You could get, like, typhoid or something, my friend Lucy said.

  You could get kidnapped, Liz said.

  I’ve already learned a lot about the Philippines, and while those things are indeed true, they are unlikely. That said: it’s been an intense experience. I’ve never been to Asia, or the third world, and the Philippines is definitely both.

  There are very few Western travelers in this country, and for days I have been privy to the kind of treatment usually reserved for Hollywood celebrities. At every temple, every open-air market or on every bustling city street I have walked down, local Filipinos have grabbed one another, gesturing wildly at me: the tall white girl in their midst.

  The cab driver peers at me, with interest, in the rearview mirror.

  The bus station, please, I say firmly.

  He puts the car in gear, and we leave the four-star hotel behind.

  Where are you going?

  Malapascua.

  Malapascua?

  I watch his eyebrows go up in the mirror.

  According to my guidebook, the island of Malapascua is located in the Visayan Sea, just across a shallow strait from the northernmost tip of Cebu. Traveling there requires an eight-hour bus ride through the jungle, then a boat ride to the island.