Inland (11 page)

It breaks the spell, enough for me to shake away the shock that had begun to cloud my brain, and I reach for the box. We munch in silence, until I realize that I’m dropping crumbs into the binding of the photo album. I brush them away and set it aside.

“Dad?” I say, and realize that it feels like I’m testing the word. I don’t say it often; it feels strange on my tongue.

“Yes?”

“What made you—I mean, the photos. Is it just that I’m not so sick anymore, or . . .” I can’t find the words to finish my question; all I can do is leave the suggestion of it hanging in the air. I take another bite as my father leans back in his chair and sighs.

He begins, “Doctor Belcher says—”

I can’t help myself; I guffaw through the cookie. “Wait, doctor
what
?”

He startles and reddens, looking almost guilty.

“She’s my therapist. Psychologist. I’ve been seeing her—”

I shake my head and swallow, trying to organize my thoughts, feeling warm and confused. I don’t know why I want to laugh, whether it’s the psychologist’s ridiculous name or the fact that he’s seeing one at all. My mind conjures the image of my father, lying on a couch, while some woman—a woman with long, gray hair, one of those loose-fitting caftan pantsuits that look like pajamas, and framed pictures of cats on her desk—leans forward, puts a finger to her nose, and drones, “And how does that make you
feel
?”

My father sighs again, and looks steadily at me.

“Callie, I sometimes wonder if you realize. What happened, when your mother . . .” He pauses, searching for the words. “That happened to me, too, you know. I lost her, too. And there are things I need to do, things I should have done a long time ago, but . . . well. You don’t need to know the details.”

He doesn’t have to say it. The thing that derailed him, that kept him from healing, was me. With all his energy directed into caring for his sad, sick child, how could he find the strength to move on?

But I’m not that girl anymore
, I think fiercely. I’m not. And if I’m not the same, if I’ve changed, then maybe the rest of it can.

He shrugs. “But yes, I’m seeing a therapist. You may even want to see her, too, some day. Maybe it would help you.”

I feel myself shake my head,
No,
without thinking. He holds up his hands and says, “Only if you want to. But to answer your question, she’s the one who suggested that maybe I wasn’t seeing clearly, that I was seeing the daughter I expected to see instead of the daughter I have. She seems to think you’re a lot stronger than I give you credit for.” He pauses. “And I think she might be right.”

I venture a smile. “Does this mean I can go to the beach for spring break?”

He smiles back. “Let’s take these things one at a time. We’ll see.”

He stands up. The conversation is over, or nearly. He looks toward the hallway, the closed door of Nessa’s room, and grimaces.

“I’m afraid I may have upset your aunt. I didn’t think to warn her that I’d be giving you those pictures. I’m going to go apologize,” he says. He reaches down and squeezes my shoulder.

—

When I’m alone, I reach again for the album. I flip through it, backward, forward, but my mind is racing, careening down untraveled paths, spurred on by the warm belly-burn of the eggnog, the quiet gleam of the tree, the low baritone of my father’s voice, too quiet to make out the words. Today is different.

Maybe the next one will be, too.

Maybe this new life is meant to last. Maybe this is where it begins: a cool, rainy day, a baking mishap, the three of us slowly orbiting each other until we find a configuration that fits. Tentative laughter, no offense taken, everyone taking care. A different kind of life, one where we don’t dwell on the past, but honor it. One where it’s better if I do remember, quietly, occasionally, comfortably nestled on the couch, gazing at my memories through the safe remove of their clear plastic windows.

I gaze at my mother’s frozen smile. I memorize her face, the one I’d been so afraid of forgetting. Quietly, I close the cover.

Tonight, I won’t need to dream.

IN BOOKS, IN SONGS,
in stories, love is a floating thing. A falling thing. A flying thing. A good-bye to all your little earthbound worries, as you soar heart-first toward a light pink sky and your dangling feet forget the feel of the ground.

Only I know, now: it isn’t like that at all.

Love is a sense of place. It’s effortless balance, no stumbling, no stammering. It’s your own voice, quiet but strong, and the sense that you can open your mouth, speak your mind, and never feel afraid. A known quantity, a perfect fit. It’s the thing that holds you tight to the earth, fast and solid and sure. You feel it, and feel that it’s right and true, and you know exactly where you are:

Here.

—

In my driveway, in the closeness of the car, his face turns serious. He turns to me. He puts his hands in my hair and tells me he feels like he’s falling. And I wish for the hundredth time that Nessa could see this, see us, and see that it isn’t wrong. I don’t understand why she seems to see something sinister in the way he looks at me, why she narrows her eyes when Ben brings me home after school or on Saturday nights. Sometimes, I’ve wondered if she knows something I don’t.

It’s a chilly night, damp and still too cold for comfort, but I hear Nessa’s voice somewhere down in the dark by the river. It’s an unintelligible mutter that disappears under the sound of Ben’s car pulling out, tires peeling back over wet pavement. The headlights cut misty white swaths through the cool of the night. I can see the swirling beads of water in the halogen glow, suspended in air that feels like a damp cloth on my face. I peer into the blackness of the yard as the sound of the motor recedes. It’s quiet, now, and if she’s there, then she has been for a while; the motion-sensing light on top of the garage is dark, the unlit windows of the house like blank and lidless eyes. There’s nothing inside, nobody, not even the telltale blue-white flicker of the television. I’m about to call out when the voice comes back, louder this time.

“
I don’t owe you anything,
” she hisses, “I know how much time I have, and I haven’t broken any rules. Don’t punish me for your poor judgment. I’ve done everything asked of me, and then some, so leave me be.”

It is a harsh and grating whisper, full of restrained fury. The coldness of the night seems to crawl down my throat and curl an icy tail around the base of my spine, and when I let out the breath I’ve been holding, it lingers like a ghost in the air. The silence that follows fills my gut with dread. Whatever is coming, whatever the next line in this conversation I can only half hear, I don’t want to know it. I launch myself forward and shout her name.

“Nessa?”

My movement trips the light and I see her, and for a moment the terror in my stomach clenches tighter still at the specter of my aunt. She is crouched low at the end of the dock, the last fingers of the reaching light illuminating her skin in the same gray and lifeless shade as the weathered wood she perches on. Her eyes are black pits, her face a mask of gaunt hollows, and as she stands with a jerking stagger I take an involuntary step back.

And then she moves forward, enough to bleed the color back into her hair and skin and lips, and the knot inside me unties as fast as it came together.

“Callie?” She trips her way up the dock, her shadow dragging like a cape behind her. “What time is it?”

“I’m not late,” I say, instantly defensive, then see that Nessa isn’t looking for a fight. She’s wrapped in a blanket from the house, and though she no longer resembles the skeletal ghoul that the light first revealed, exhaustion is painted in every line on her face. Her hair is lank, her shoulders are hunched, the skin under her eyes is bruised and drooping. She gives me a wan smile, but her eyes are cold, bloodshot, glassy.

“I know, baby,” she says. She shivers against the deepening chill of the night.

“Who were you talking to? You sounded so—”

She cuts me off, shaking her head. “My boss. We’re having a disagreement about my leave of absence, that’s all. C’mon, let’s go inside.”

“Are you—”

“Inside,” she repeats, placing a hand on each of my shoulders. The movement makes the blanket fall away, and I gasp. There are three angry red welts stretching the full length of her forearm, raised up and with tiny dots of blood beginning to bead like Morse code where the scratch went deepest.

“What happened there?”

“Hmm?”
She follows my gaze, and I see the briefest flash of anger on her face before she covers the injury with her hand and shrugs. “I must have snagged it on that raw edge of the dock. You startled me, you know. Now let’s go. I want some coffee.”

“Maybe you should just go to sleep, Nessa. You look . . .”

The smile fades and she cocks an eyebrow. Written over her tiredness, the perky gesture looks painted-on and ridiculous.

“Callie, give it a rest,” she says. “I’ll have plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead.”

Inside, I reset the coffeemaker and listen to my father’s apologetic voice mail—something about a dinner with investors that was running longer than expected—while Nessa flips switches, bathing the whole house in soft-lit ambiance. From outside, I imagine, it would look like a box made of ivory light, a glowing object between the trees with the two of us moving behind the glass windows like insects in a terrarium.

There’s a
foom
sound behind me, and I turn to see my aunt crouched by the fireplace in the corner of the living room. We’d made fun of it, back in the humid fall—who could possibly live in this climate and still want more heat?—but now, orange and blue gas-powered flames are jumping through the grille and licking up between the fake logs.

“I think it’s cold enough, don’t you?” she says, and I nod. She settles in on the couch, drawing her blanket in close around her, eyes closed. When the coffeepot stops burping and dribbling, I add cream and sugar to two mugs and carry one to her. She wraps her hands around its ceramic curve and smiles at the warmth of it, sighing as I curl up next to her.

“I’m going to miss this,” she says, looking around the room and then looking at me. Her expression has gone serious, and I wonder again when she became so tired. So thin. Her eyes seem much bigger in her gaunt, angular face, and her lips have lost some of their fullness. When the meaning behind her words hits me, I swallow, hard.
So,
I think,
that’s it.
Whatever fight she’d been having when I came home, she must have lost it. And though, of course, I’d known that she couldn’t stay indefinitely, that Nessa had her own life, a job and friends and maybe even a man, a lover waiting for her return in her pretty town by the Pacific, that hadn’t stopped me from hoping. From imagining a life, a home, that didn’t feel like it was only two-thirds complete.

“Are you leaving soon? I thought that maybe . . .” I trail off. What I’d thought, that she might just leave her life behind forever in order to join our sad, spare excuse for a family, was too absurd and selfish to say out loud. Who would give up Nessa’s life, a carefree existence full of sunshine and surf and bronze-skinned beach bums with six-pack abs, for swimming dates and cereal dinners with a sixteen-year-old girl who had only just recently learned how to breathe like a normal human being?

Nessa sighs. “It’s not right away, but yes, it’s soon. Another couple weeks. It’s time I went back where I belong. I’m sorry, baby. I was hoping I might be able to stay to see you through the school year, but . . .”

She waves a hand in the air, leaving me to finish her sentence inside my head with awful things, hurtful things, the kind of things I know she’d never say but can’t seem to stop myself from thinking.

I force myself to smile, and shrug. “I bet they’ll be glad to have you back.”

She looks at me strangely, her lips curling a little at the corners. “They? They, who?”

“You know,” I stammer. “Your friends? Your . . . boyfriend?”

Her laughter is sharp, ironic, and with no humor in it.

“Ha! My boyfriend,” she says, and then chuckles darkly. “Ah, yes. Of course. That boyfriend, the one I’ve never mentioned because he doesn’t exist.”

She takes a swig of coffee and grimaces, and as I look at her, I realize how little I really know about Nessa. How much of her life is a blank that I’ve filled in with assumptions, projections, with nothing but the confidence that wherever she was, and whatever she was doing, she was wonderful and happy and fiercely loved. That she was living the life I’d have chosen, if I’d been her and not me. But now, I think back on her letters, so many letters, and try to remember even one in which she mentioned another person’s name.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just thought—”

She interrupts, waving my apology off and giving me a real smile. “No, honey, don’t apologize. How would you know? But no, no boyfriend. That’s okay. I like having things my own way. I don’t need some man to come in and throw his socks all over the place, leave dirty dishes in my sink.”

I shake my head, at the image taking shape in my mind—a house standing empty, nobody waiting at the airport to welcome her home. “But . . . I mean, you must have . . .”

“What? Suitors?” she laughs again, genuinely this time. “Oh, you know, there’s a guy from time to time. We go out for drinks, maybe we walk by the ocean, and if I like the looks of him I’ll take him home with me. But that’s that. I don’t do commitment. I don’t have the time.”

I shake my head, unable to believe what I’m hearing. In all the years that I’ve spent picturing Nessa’s life from afar, it never looked like this, a lonely place punctuated by the occasional one-night stand. I know I should stop, that it’s not my place to interrogate her, but the curtain has been pulled back and I can’t keep the questions from coming. My curiosity is like something big rolling downhill, crushing and unstoppable.

“But why? Haven’t you ever wanted to get married, or have kids?”

She pauses at that, staring into her coffee cup as though expecting an answer to appear inside it. Her lips press together and there’s a long silence before she answers.

“I’ve had my moments,” she says, finally, wistfully. For a moment, all the bravado and cavalier dismissal of a love life falls away, and I see exhaustion in her face. Maybe even regret. “There was a guy, a few years ago, and I almost . . . but that wasn’t meant to be,” she shakes her head. “A marriage is a promise that I’d just end up breaking.”

I wince at that, at the finality in her voice. She doesn’t seem to notice. Still looking down, she continues, “Life has plans for me, and I have to trust in that. I have to let destiny be my guide.”

The words are out before I know I’m going to say them.

“I’ll never be like that. I don’t believe in destiny.”

Nessa looks up with concern on her face, and I feel my eyebrows rise up to mirror hers.

“No?”

I shake my head, vehemently.

“My life is going to be about what I choose, not what someone else decides for me.”

She considers that, and then nods, slowly.

“I suppose you would feel that way,” she says. “After the life you’ve had with your father, I suppose you feel like you’ve always been held back by something or someone else.” She stops and looks at me, and I nod back, relieved that she understands.

“But even you must realize that life has limits,” she says. “All paths aren’t open to all people. And even if a path is meant for you, you still have a choice. You can always decide not to take it. Finding your way is up to you. Destiny is just what’s waiting for you at the end, if you do.”

I try to imagine what my father would say if he could hear this conversation, Nessa’s hippie proclivities on full and glorious display, and feel a surge of gratitude that he’s not here.

“And if you don’t find your way?” I press.

“Then you don’t,” says Nessa. She looks impatient. “What do you think? It happens all the time. People make decisions against intuition, or against their better judgment. Or they second-guess themselves until they’re paralyzed, they get scared, they do what’s comfortable and convenient and they never get anywhere. Or they devote themselves to somebody else, a parent, a child, a lover, and they ignore the call of their own life.” She sighs. “Mostly, the only thing they miss out on is their own best future, and a lot of them don’t even know it.”

“But you would know.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She sighs. “Because I’d feel it.” She taps her chest. “I do feel it, already. That’s why I live alone. It’s why I wouldn’t marry a perfectly nice guy. It’s why I keep my own hours at a job where I never see the same faces twice. It’s why I went to the doctor and had my tubes tied at twenty-three.”

I gasp at that. “What? But you could have—”

“No,” she says, firmly. “I couldn’t.”

I shake my head, trying to escape the image of my aunt on a steel table, her abdomen laid bare, sleeping peacefully as a man in a white mask neatly snipped off her path to motherhood. I haven’t even begun to know what I want from life; how could Nessa, only a few years older than I am now, already know so surely what she didn’t?

It’s as though she’s read my mind. She smiles wryly, saying, “You look horrified.”

“It’s just—you were so young. Don’t you ever worry that you’ll regret it? That you gave up that chance?”

Her voice is thoughtful, as she replies, “I don’t think of it that way. I like to think of it in terms of what I’ve gained, by following the path I know was meant for me. However much time I have on earth, I want to use it wisely. There’s something magic about being exactly where you’re supposed to be. It’s peaceful. It feels
right
. Whatever I might have sacrificed, I’ve been given so much more than I’ve ever given up. This life has its gifts.” She pauses, and looks at me slyly. “Material, and otherwise.”

I think of the way people look at Nessa, of the electricity that’s always seemed to surround her, of her charm and beauty and eerie intuition. I think of the way she lives, in an endless blur of sunshine and salt water, with nobody and nothing holding her back from doing what she loves every day. I think of her home, the beachside cottage she’s described so lovingly in her letters, the one my father has wondered aloud how she managed to afford. I don’t have to ask her what she means. She’s the only person I’ve ever seen so content with her life. And yet . . .