Inland (16 page)

THE CAR IS FULL OF NOISE
as we roll southward, with the wind tugging insistently at my hair, the sky looming low and heavy with cloud cover. Ben’s eyes keep darting in my direction, but he doesn’t try to talk, only looks at me like he’s hoping I’ll speak and then looks at my hand like he wants to hold it. I close my eyes and feel grateful and guilty all at once.

I reach into my bag, feeling for the edges of the paper I retrieved from my locker, the one I’ve already covered halfway with hurried scrawl. I’ll finish it when we reach our destination, I think. It’ll be the reminder Nessa needs that I’m still here. That she needs to remember me, to write me, to not leave me all alone like this with a growing chasm at my center and things falling apart all around me. This letter, she won’t be able to ignore.

Not when she sees what’s on the page. Not when I tell her that something is happening, had already happened, that I’ve heard the call of my life, like she said, and I’m afraid of what it might mean.

Not when she sees the telltale scatter of sand that’s sure to find its way into the folded, careful creases on the page.

When she left, I’d almost believed that I’d never get there. That as close as we’d come, the stretching sands of the Panhandle coast would still be just beyond my reach. Not without Nessa there to guide me, not with my father still telling me,
No, not yet, be patient
. Not when I couldn’t bring myself to defy him. Alone, I was a coward.

But I wasn’t alone. Fate had delivered a surprise gift; it had given me a boy who cared for me, cared for me so much that he’d take me there, and hold my hand all the way to the water’s edge.

What was it that Nessa had said? When destiny wants you badly enough, it gives you a way to get there.

—

The first tease of longing inside me has become a steady throb of want: the growing, insistent urge to find my way to the coast, to sprint with him over the cakey sand, to not stop running until the water breaks in lace-tipped waves over our burning feet. I feel that something is waiting for me where the ocean meets the shore—even if it’s only memories, longing, my own desperate desire to get back a piece of what I’ve lost. To understand what my mother and Nessa seemed to know implicitly, without a doubt.

During those three fevered nights, I lay awake and snatched at splintered fragments that came floating out of the past, from the days before my father took us inland, trying to form a picture that makes sense: the sunlight on the water, Mama’s legs draped long and white over the edge of the boat, the way her hair fanned out around her as she lay in the arms of the sea. How many times had I seen her like that? In my memory, she doesn’t look like a woman who’d abandoned herself to the dangerous whims of the waves and current. She doesn’t look like a woman at risk. In my memory, my mother’s face is serene and smiling, comfortable and happy. The water breaking against the hull sounds like delicate laughter.

And why not? She was always in the water. And she had always found her way back to the boat, to me, to our house high up on the coast.

Nessa told me once that the sea had a voice. Could it have called out to my mother, too? Could she have believed that it would keep her safe?

—

My focus dissolves when Ben makes a grunting noise; there’s a lurch and thud of a pothole beneath the tires. I force myself back to the present and gaze out at the passing landscape. The car has slowed; the wind has lessened. The highway has narrowed to a winding stretch of pale, white road, pocked here and there by deep holes filled with stagnant, filthy water. Trees crowd in on both sides, palms and pines that are hidden at their bases by a crush of close-knit green. On the right, a hand-painted sign advertising BOILED
PENUTS points to a brief opening in the trees; I see the flash of a road curving away before the forest closes up and obscures it.

“Hey, boiled peanuts,” he says, speaking for the first time. “You’ve probably never had those. Should we stop?”

I force myself to smile. “No thanks. Maybe on the way back.”

He smiles back, and this time, he does reach for my hand. I watch him pick it up, seeing my fingers intertwining with his as though from a distance, as though the hand he’s holding belongs to someone else. Even the pressure of his freckled fingers seems to be lightweight and far away. For a moment, our destination is forgotten. I bring myself back to this little anchored life. I close the empty space inside of me, I cover it over with promises of sunshine and conversation and lazy Saturday dates with this boy, who sees something in me and refuses to give up. Who loves me, I’m sure of it, and who will keep loving me—no matter how strange or how sick I get, no matter how uncertain my future. I focus on the weight of his hand, the heat, the remembered sensation of his lips against mine.
I could choose this
,
too,
I think.
This could be my life.

I come close, so close.

But then he drops my hand, he says, “We’re here,” and the trees fall away from the road and the wind grows stronger again and the car is rolling to a stop while my breath dies to nothing in my throat.

From somewhere below us comes the sound, one I know from my memory and from my dreams. And in my head, the lines of my mother’s hidden poem emerge to beat their rhythm against the inside of my skull.

Water, sucking the hollow ledges.

Even here, in the protected shallows of this Gulf Coast beach, I know this place. The smell of salt, the sound of water. The sea unfurls as far as I can see in every direction, an undulating blanket of blues and greens and browns, until it all blends together and then breaks, vanishing at the far-off meeting where the sky dips down to kiss the earth’s curve.
Even here, where the waves are not the crashing beasts of the Pacific coast but delicate, tentative overtures against the sand, it is as deep and endless as I remembered.

Tons of water, striking the shore.

It’s not until I feel Ben’s hand on my shoulder that I realize I’m no longer in the car, that I’ve fallen to my knees in the sand. Through swimming eyes, I see the pale ovals of strangers’ faces turned in my direction.

“Let’s take a walk,” he says.

I don’t answer, but let him take my hand. My eyes stay ahead, focused on the horizon, as my heart opens wide, wider, bursting in all directions and vanishing into the rush and whisper of the never-ending surf.

What do they long for, as I long for, one salt smell of the sea once more?

WHEN I GAZE OUT
at the sprawling surface of the ocean, the light ripple of that undulating blue answers back like a thousand tiny, waving hellos. I press my eyes open against the wind, brace my palms against the rough wooden platform under me, lean forward to feel the salt spray in the air and on my face. How could I have forgotten the way this feels? This was how we sat, tangled together in the afternoon sun, my mother’s chest against my back and our legs splayed ahead in identical Vs. She’d held me close as we watched the ocean flirt its way up the smooth brown beach, kissing our feet with playful foam and then burying our heels in the sand. She would hold me there for hours, letting the water lick high and higher, laughing with me when the rising tide began to run up the insides of her thighs, shrieking and scrambling to hold me aloft when a big wave came rushing up to slap us and knock us down.

Behind me, there’s a grunt as Ben moves to sit beside me. He’s trying to brush away the grains of sand that are clinging to his feet, beating at them with his peeled-off sock. His toes are knobby and bone white, sprouting here and there with wiry red hairs that grow in a line toward his ankles.

“I guess this would be a good time to mention that I’m not actually much of a beach person,” he says, giving up and tossing the sock aside. I look at him—glasses smeared with salt spray, the part in his hair already reddening with sunburn.

“I’m shocked,” I say, and he smiles. When I turn my eyes back to the gulf, he moves up to sit beside me, letting the length of his leg press against mine. I had taken his hand and let him lead me here, while I kept my gaze on the sea and felt the sand shifting underfoot. The broad, flat beach, and the people on it, are out of sight beyond the coastline’s curve; we’re alone here, back from the water and with a cluster of tall pines at our backs. The sand is littered with cones and needles. It’s not until I see a condom wrapper, half-buried and with one torn corner wagging in the wind, that I realize: this sheltered wooden platform with its peaked roof—a structure that might have once served as a lifeguard stand but now sits abandoned and covered in graffiti—is a make-out spot. A couples spot.

I feel frightened without understanding why.

I look up, sharply, to find Ben staring at me. He’s waiting for an answer to a question I didn’t hear him ask.

“Sorry?”

“I asked if this was anything like the ocean where you grew up. The place you told me about.” His tone is casual, but his eyes flick sideways, and I feel a sudden surge of impatience with this game—the one where he hints but never asks, where he tries to draw me out like a skittish cat.

“It was rougher there. And rockier,” I say. “There were cliffs.”

Beside me, he nods and resumes brushing at the sand that clings to his feet, his arms. The grains are stubborn; for every one that loosens and scatters, ten simply shift positions, transferring themselves from his arms to his hands and then back again. I watch him for a moment, then turn my gaze back to the sea. My lips curl back in a wry smile, and when I speak again, it’s more to myself than to him.

“That’s the same though, anyway,” I murmur. “No matter where you are, the sand gets into everything.”

And I would know. Oh, I’d know. I think of Nessa’s letters, spilling California earth from their dog-eared creases. Or her car, the one with the salt stains on the seats, the gritty upholstery. I remember the entrance of our onetime house, the dark, warped floorboards that creaked hello, and the way a hundred sweepings couldn’t stop the ever-present sprinkle of sand. Nobody’s feet could stay calloused for long when we paced back and forth across that threshold, burnishing our soles on the stray remains of the beach until the grains turned small enough to sift down through the floorboards.

I remember thinking that all that sand would grow there, under the house, sprinkle by sprinkle. Small bits of shell and rock, fish bones and driftwood, piled millions upon billions until the foundations were buried and the house sat atop its own dune, and until the dune became its own beach. That one day, we’d be able to fling open the door, leap, and slide—down, down our own self-made hill of sand, smooth and steep and soft, down and down and down to the place where the powder-fine earth met the sea.

I remember.

Something rises up, suddenly buoyant, breaking on the surface of my mind so swiftly that my vision swims before me.

I remember.

Because sometime in that year before she died, something had changed. Our long afternoons at the beach became less frequent, sporadic, then stopped altogether. Instead, my mother would press her finger to my lips—
Shhhh
,
it’s our secret, I’ll be back soon
—and leave me in front of the television while she vanished for hours on end. And not long before the day she disappeared forever, there had been a day when my mother banged into the house at a sprint, and hauled a never-before-seen vacuum cleaner from a closet under the stairs. I remember it: the way her hair hung water-logged, coiling on her neck. The frantic pass of the whirring hose with its gaping plastic mouth, back and forth, back and forth, over the crunchy floorboards. The way her dress clung to her body, soaked and sheer and clutching at her legs, until she suddenly stripped and flung it aside, letting it smack heavily against the floor. Her skin, taut and pale, puckered with the sudden cold like a plucked goose, and there were marks on her body: slender welts that must have stung when they touched the water, three long lines of hurt that rose from her thighs, her back, from each forearm, and that she ignored even as they flared an angry red. Her eyes, darting to the wall clock and back to the floor, as she cursed the intractable sand and then turned, grasped her dress, and fled up the stairs, with water pattering down behind her. She never saw me standing there.

She never even looked.

I remember the way that the windowpanes in my bedroom tapped and clattered in their moorings as my father’s voice scraped down the hallway like cold, gray steel. The wind on the coastline is tricksy and sly; in our house, it bounced our would-be private dialogues up the stairs and around corners, keeping us from keeping secrets.

“You left her alone again,” he said.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “I know you did. I always know. Did you hurt yourself again?”

I couldn’t hear her, only him. Only that metallic, emotionless drone, the voice that was a solid dam through which no emotion could pass.

“How can I trust you?” he said. “After the last time, you promised me! You promised me you’d stay with Callie! And then the moment my back is turned . . .”

The sly wind buried Mama’s voice, but his came back stronger than ever.

“You’re goddamn right, I don’t understand! This isn’t just about you! Maybe the harm you do to yourself doesn’t matter, but don’t you realize you’re putting your child in danger?
Our
child?! Now give me your word that you’ll stop this, Maera!”

The wind stopped, then. It rushed against my windows and died in a drawn-out sigh, a low note that sounded like sobbing. And in the silence that followed, I heard my mother’s anguished cry.

“I promise,” she’d sobbed. “I promise, I promise.”

And my father began shouting, then, but I heard her scream, all the same.

“I still have time,” she cried, in a voice that wailed like the wind beneath the eaves, ragged and raw, and full of terror. “But you have to promise! Swear it, Alan! Swear that you won’t ever, ever go down there!”

—

“What are you thinking about?” Ben asks. He’s moved closer to me, his leg set firmly against mine and his fingertips creeping around to grip my waist. I can feel his breath close to my ear, dry and hot. I can feel him pressing into the shrinking space, obliterating the distance in between us. And when he does, I think, he’s going to kiss me, and pull me down in the sand. His want is as loud and unignorable as the shrieking of the gulls that glide and swoop overhead and scream for scraps from the far-off crowd.

“Nothing,” I say, and sigh. I turn to let my lips meet his. I lie, and lose myself in the taste of his mouth.

I’ve gotten good at keeping secrets.

She kept her secrets too, my mother. But my father knew. He knew the way that people who love you always know, the way that makes them dangerous. Because there is no hiding, when your lover is the sea. It leaves its scent in your hair and its taste on your skin. It tiptoes after you, following the salty trail of your footsteps, spilling behind you through the door, and nestling in the floorboards. It is too big, too bold, too changeable and brash to keep a confidence. And though somewhere, a girl named Callie Morgan is being kissed, and kissing back—though her pulse is racing at the touch of his lips, though she sighs and puts her hands in his hair and lets gravity pull her down—I don’t hear his whispered words. I don’t hear the rustle of fabric under eager hands. I don’t hear the beating of my heart, or his, or anyone’s.

My head rolls to the side, my open eyes look out toward the wind-tossed, churning water. My ears are full of the sound of breaking waves. They will crash against this place forever, never changing, never ceasing, while people live and love and die here on the shore. And somewhere, even as my voice whispers its own response to the promises of a love-struck boy, I know better than to believe myself. Nessa was right: there’s more to life than love. So much more. How could I not realize, when the true meaning of forever is right before my eyes?