Inland (18 page)

A wave slaps my face, hard and angry, shoving me underwater. I don’t see Ben. I don’t see anything. I’m not being swallowed by the sea, I am being smothered by it. Chewed. Eaten alive by the frothing water with the sounds of screaming coming from somewhere nearby.

The waves push me down again, and this time, I cannot fight back.

There’s no weightlessness, no serenity, only pain and panic and no air and my body, too heavy to float.

And then I see him.

I see him for only a moment.

Ben is suspended in the water. Mouth open in a wordless shout, eyes on me. It’s only when he reaches for me that I know, for sure, he’s still alive. I stretch my own hands toward him. The distance between us closes, and I feel my fingers brush his. I want to tell him to fight, to kick, to get above water where help is coming. I want to tell him that I’m sorry, that I was selfish, that I should never have dragged him into my life or into the sea. I want to press my mouth against his, and fill his lungs with whatever air I have left.

And though I can’t say any of it, though my voice is silenced by the weight of so much water against my lips, his eyes widen as he looks at me. As though he understands. As though my thoughts are loud enough to travel through the shifting shades of green between us, to find their way to him.

For a moment, I still believe it all will be all right.

And then something moves past me, quickly. I feel it brush my shoulder. I feel it touch my face. My hair swirls over my eyes, and behind it, I see shifting shapes, a flash of movement, the slow curl of something dark.

There is something in the water.

There is blood in the water.

And from somewhere, a sly voice that sounds so very much like mine whispers,
Breathe.

I open my mouth, and the sea rushes in.

MY ROOM IS FULL OF DOCTORS.
Doctors who look like doctors, faceless nameless bodies wearing stethoscopes and knee-length coats. One of them looks at me, and then looks away just as quickly. Sharp is here somewhere; I hear his voice stabbing through the air and his pen jabbing at my chart, but everything is out of focus. Bleary, dreamy, drifting. I open my eyes, then open them again not knowing when I closed them, not knowing how much time has passed. The light in the hospital never changes. It is always bright, white, blaring.

They say that I came close, so close, to drowning. They say that when they pulled me out, my lungs were like wet paper bags in my chest, my skin like ivory ice. They don’t say anything about the boy, the one who was with me, the one who vanished before my eyes and left his blood in the water.

—

My father stands away from the bed, cold and motionless among the whirring machines, and doesn’t look at me. I can feel his anger, though—feel it humming through the floor, up the silver length of the IV stand, down the translucent tube that disappears into the bruising crook of my elbow. It shimmers in the air and makes the bed tremble, makes me shiver so violently that the nurses think I’m cold, bring me blankets, and tuck me in up to my chin. His face is gray, grave, motionless. I ask if he’s called Nessa, if she knows that I’m here; he shakes his head and looks away.

I ask if Ben is here, if he’s all right, if I can see him.

When I say Ben’s name, the nurses exchange glances and press their lips together. I ask again, and again, begging, until my breath begins to wheeze and whistle and my father steps out of the background. He fixes his obsidian glare somewhere just over my head. His voice floats out from between teeth clamped hard together.

“He’s alive,” he says.

“There was something in the water,” I say.

The nurse says, “It’s the drugs. She should rest.”

My bed tips back of its own accord, my eyes roll back toward unconsciousness. Away from the hissing and beeping, away from the vibration of my father’s disappointment, away from the too-bright lights that never turn off. And they let me.

Nobody demands that I tell them the truth.

Nobody wants to know if I remember what happened there, under the churning sea.

And it’s just as well, because I won’t tell. Not this time. I won’t hammer at their indifference, won’t insist on being heard. I will keep this secret, the one whispered to me from the black space within, the purring awareness that opened wide as I sank into the water.

Because in the movies, drowning is the most undignified of deaths. Flailing, panicking, thrashing, and fighting. It’s a victim caught under the surface, a frantic Saint Vitus’s dance in the deep, one that goes on and on until there’s no air left. No choice but to try to breathe, and then to die trying. It’s terror, torment, a mouth open forever in a silent scream.

But that’s not how it happens at all. I knew then, and I know now. And when I slip down into the dead warmth of sleep, I feel my lips curl in momentary bliss. Because this is how it happens. A slow descent, and then a moment of darkness.

In the silence under the tossing waves, it feels like going home.

Somewhere, a machine hisses and beeps; somewhere, two people mutter quickly in conversation. Their voices cut through the fog: tragic tones, but blurred at the edges by breathless excitement. Something terrible has happened. Terrible and thrilling. I close my eyes and focus on their words.

“A shark?”

“We thought so, at first . . . the boy’s wounds . . .”

The boy. There was a boy. Behind my closed eyes, I see his pale face, his open mouth. I see the crimson spread, drifting dark in the undersea currents, curling like spilled ink. I try to say his name,
Ben
, but my lungs sear with pressure and pain and nothing comes out but a croak. Unconsciousness swims up around me and I collapse back into it, thinking, I’ll try again when I wake up. When I wake up, it all will be okay.

The muttering is moving. My eyelids are too heavy to see who it is, to follow them where they’re going. The voice drifts near to my bed and hovers in the darkness.

“Watch her,” someone says. “Something’s not right.”

When I wake up, nothing will ever be right again.

IT TAKES THEM THREE DAYS
to expel me from Ballard.

The headmaster folds his hands in front of him and gazes at me. His mouth pulled down at the corners, his eyes glazed over with shallow disapproval. We’ve met once before, when I first enrolled, but I can tell that he doesn’t remember. It doesn’t matter now. I can see him looking at me and seeing something else. Not a person, just a problem—trouble without a name, just one more kid who broke the rules and doesn’t belong. My file is open beneath his palms; he keeps looking down at it, frowning, as though he expects it to explain what happened. As though somewhere, among the yellowed transcripts and my last semester’s grades, there was a hidden prophecy of terrible things to come.

Beside me, my father presses two fingers into the place between his eyebrows, and sighs into the cover of his palm. The headmaster looks at me but doesn’t see me; my father doesn’t look at me at all. In the hour that we’ve sat here, side by side in stern chairs, through discussions and debate and then this—the decision that will see me out of this office, through the front door, armed with a black mark on my record and a warning never to return—I have seen him only in profile.

The headmaster clears his throat, and I watch the sound as it travels through his face. He’s a tall man, built thick through the shoulders and neck, with skin that wags and sags beneath his disappearing chin. It quivers when he coughs, and he glances down at my file again, then up at the clock on the wall. Wanting it to be over. Somewhere behind the tired eyes and grimacing mouth, I can see shades of the athlete he might have been once, back before the passage of time and a desk-bound job padded his body with flesh, before exhaustion and the endless parade of troubled teenagers through his air-conditioned office made puffy, sallow pouches underneath his eyes. Somehow, I know that once we’ve left, he will pull a nearly full bottle of brown whiskey from its hiding place in the corner of his desk drawer, press his lips around its small, round mouth, and drink until the memory of this meeting goes fuzzy around the edges.

He spreads his hands—the ones he says are tied in this matter, bound up by protocol and procedure, zero tolerance, no exceptions—and says, “I’m sorry, but in cases like this, our policy is to expel the student even if no criminal charges are brought. We have to be consistent.”

My father’s voice is cold and tired. “I assume we have the option of contesting this decision.”

The man clears his throat again, looks again toward the clock, looks longingly toward the drawer that holds the bottle.

“There is an appeals process,” he says, and coughs nervously. “But, sir, if I may—I think it might be advisable if you don’t, er, what I mean to say is, the boy’s parents have suggested that it would be best for everyone . . .”

“If Callie doesn’t come back,” my father finishes flatly.

The headmaster spreads his hands again, and for a moment, he looks almost sorry.

“Let’s just say that David and Eliza Barrington aren’t the type to let something like this stand. I know Callie may not be charged, but there could still be a civil suit.”

I cough, and his gaze settles on me. He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, the apologetic look disappears, the flat mask of disapproval returns. But before it does, I see it: I see him see me, and just for a moment, I see fear. I watch it flash in his eyes, dilate his pupils, press his lips into a taut, tense line.

And then it’s gone, and he looks out at me again from within the safe cocoon of his authority, his place as disciplinarian, his power to make me go and never come back.

He says, “And frankly, Ballard isn’t an appropriate place for someone with your daughter’s . . . tendencies.”

“I didn’t hurt him,” I say, and my father sighs. “Callie, please be quiet.”

The headmaster looks at the drawer again, and this time, he licks his lips. I watch his pink tongue dart out once, twice, and think about leaping across the table, reaching into his mouth, and tearing it out at the root.

He says, “You don’t really expect us to believe that.”

When we stand to leave, he opens the door to his office and then puts it between himself and us as my father leads the way out. One more barrier, one more inch of distance, one more vestige of separation put between me and a world that believes the worst. My friends are gone, my messages go unreturned. They all think it’s true, too. In the hallway, Eric Keller and Meredith Hartman are coming around a corner when I pass. They see me and stop short, breaking off midsentence as suddenly as if an invisible shield had come down between us. She whispers quickly to him, and they step back in wary unison, hugging the wall. She meets my eyes and smirks; he keeps his gaze glued to the floor. If he was on my side once, he isn’t anymore.

When they think you’ve tried to kill someone, nobody wants to get too close.

—

It was the Barringtons who marched into my hospital room, swooping down like black-suited birds of prey, turning a hushed conversation between my father and several doctors into a squawking melee. I woke to the sounds of chaos, the doorway to my room crammed with people, an explosion of clutching hands and shouting mouths, so many people at once that I could see only body parts, hospital scrubs, somebody’s watch cracking hard against the doorjamb. With my vision swimming, I had tried to remember which hospital this was, thinking desperately,
Where am I,
until my frantic brain reeled backward and I found myself believing that this was Laramie, that we had never left, that I had slept too long in the dreamless, drugged-up sleep of Dr. Frank’s pediatric ward. That the raised voices and rushing feet all around me were the nurses, rushing to the side of someone who had coded in the night.

And then the flickering awareness, that nesting, purring blackness, came awake inside of me and the memories slammed home.

You know where you are,
it said.

And then, so slyly and quietly that I wondered if someone had crept up behind to whisper it in my ear:
And you know what’s coming, don’t you?

When the couple in black broke through the crush at the door, I felt my guts twist like coiling ice. Everything else in the room disappeared; it was only them and me, the man glaring down as I shrank into the thin bedclothes, his wife by his side. I knew without asking that I was looking at Ben’s parents. I could see him in their faces, in his father’s pointed chin and deep-set eyes, in his mother’s patrician brow line, her auburn hair, her forehead dotted with freckles. But it wasn’t their familiar features that filled me with dread; it was the familiar way they were knit together, full of the anger and exhaustion I’d seen in the faces of so many hospital parents. The same tired skin around the eyes, the same deep lines carved by worry and fear. I knew without asking that they’d been here for days, sitting by the bedside of someone they loved, sleeping in shifts on two chairs pushed together and struggling not to break down when the doctors used words that they didn’t understand.

Ben was alive, that was what they’d told me.

For the first time, I wondered what they hadn’t.

When I moved to sit up, the woman raised her hand to stop me. I watched her fingers float into the air, saw her wristwatch slide down a delicate, small-boned arm toward the wrinkled cuff of her shirt. It had been rolled up hastily, but I could see the coffee stains peeking out here and there, the product of shaky hands and anxious pacing in the hospital cafeteria.

“So you’re Callie,” she said, quietly.

“You’re Ben’s mom,” I said, the words tumbling out. “Aren’t you? Please, tell me, is he—”

She raised her hand again, this time a soft request for silence. For a moment, she only stared at me, breathing softly through her mouth and swaying ever so slightly on her feet. I had the time to peer toward the floor, to wonder if she was still wearing heels or if she’d already made the hospital parent’s pragmatic decision to wear only soft-soled shoes, the kind that didn’t
click
angrily against the linoleum and wake up the resting patients. I had time to imagine her in a chair, stocking feet tucked beneath her, leaning forward to hold Ben’s limp, cold hand as he slept in a bed just like mine.

Above me, Eliza Barrington’s lips curled in the barest suggestion of a smile. She leaned forward, gripping the rail of my bed.

“I thought you’d be prettier,” she said, and spat in my face.

—

My father appeared then, a firm hand coming up and over the woman’s shoulder, whirling her to face him with teeth bared and mouth contorted in rage. Raised voices echoed in the close space as I reached up to feel the slick wetness on my cheek, as all eyes in the room turned to the jumbled cacophony of competing shouts and someone dialed security and a passing nurse appeared in the doorway saying, “What in the hell?” then gawked, turned, and ran. For a moment, their angry voices were a wall of sound, nothing but froth and nonsense syllables—and then, suddenly, fragments began to break loose and make their way to my ears:

“—attacked our son—”

“—you’ve got some nerve—”

“—witnesses said—”

“—mean to press charges—”

“—don’t understand—”

“—have to question her—”

“—been searched for a weapon—”

—Until somewhere, inside my head, a terrible understanding began to take shape. An image that was clear and bright and horrible, that made no sense and at the same time seemed like the only answer, the only possible reason that these people could be here and be so angry. The shouting rose to a crescendo, and I thrust my hands over my ears and screamed.

“Stop it!”

In the silence that followed, I could taste blood on the back of my tongue. My voice was like nails on slate, echoing back off the walls and windows and scrolling screens of the monitors. Someone gasped and the knot of people by my bed stopped moving, stopped speaking all at once; all their black eyes, in all their pale faces, turned to look my way. When I spoke again, it was half whimper, half hiss.

“I didn’t hurt anyone,” I whispered, and felt my voice break. “I didn’t mean to swim out so far. I was helping him get back to shore. Ask Ben, he’ll tell you! I know he’ll remember!”

Ben’s mother appeared again, stepping forward to the side of my bed. She looked at me and laughed, a high, hysterical giggle that twisted her lips into a sneer. Her voice, low and smug, floated out from between her teeth.

She said, “Who do you think told us what you did?”

But it’s not just Ben; the men who pulled us from the ocean all agree on what they saw. They say that they slowed the boat at the place where the water still rippled, peered into the churning depths where Ben and I had disappeared, that they looked through an ocean like clouded glass and saw a swirling mess of blood and hair and limbs. They say I was clawing at him, pulling him down, that I glared out from the curtain of my drifting hair with eyes gone cold and angry. That when they reached for him, I grabbed him by the ankle and tried to drag him with me, down into the airless, drowning deep. That when they hauled him up and away and onto the deck, they wondered whether they shouldn’t just leave me. It was only one man, whose conscience couldn’t take it, who saw me drifting there below the surface and decided to reach into the water once more. He pulled me out by my hair. My scalp has swelled in the aftermath, with plum-colored bruises blooming just under the surface and bald patches near the crown where the hair ripped out at the root.

—

On the morning that they released me from the hospital, as we drove to the meeting where the headmaster would tell us that I’d been expelled from Ballard, my father handed me a shopping bag with a scarf in it and said the first words he’d spoken to me in nearly two days: “Put this on.”

Now, he slams the car door and twists the keys in the ignition. He stays silent as we pass out of the parking lot, around the single lane that circles the oak tree, under the dappled shade of the leaves and the gentle, swaying overhang of Spanish moss. He takes the turn with precision, his hands in perfect ten-two position on the wheel. We take one road, and another, until the school is long gone behind us and a red traffic light commands the car to stop. It’s only then that he looks at me, and I realize that he’s been steeling himself for this moment. Working up the nerve to turn and truly see me, sitting here. I shudder at what I see: something beyond disapproval, something even more cold and removed than the smug authority of the man who called me a liar. I thought he’d be angry. This is worse.

“Dad, please believe me, I didn’t—” I begin, and I see a muscle twitch in his jaw. He shakes his head so hard that I hear the bones pop.

“I don’t care whether you did it or not,” he says, and his voice makes my hair stand on end. “All this time, I told myself it was going to be okay. I told myself you were okay.” He shakes his head, and his voice breaks. “I told myself you hadn’t inherited whatever it was, whatever made her so reckless, so obsessed. God, I’d even started wondering if the problem was me! If I was being too overprotective!”

At first, I don’t know who he means; my mind casts out in search of the woman he didn’t want me to become, and I think,
Nessa
? But inside me, the darkness is awake and whispering. It’s there all the time now, eyes wide-open, curling like a snake against the warm, close curves of my mind. And though I fight against it, though I struggle not to know what it knows, I feel another name rise unbidden to my lips. I press them together in horror, in protest; I think, I won’t say it, you can’t make me say it.

And I don’t. I don’t have to. He does it for me, turning his eyes back to the road as the light turns green, as we roll away through a landscape of strip malls, tire warehouses, check-cashing storefronts blinking neon in the late-morning sunshine.

“But I was wrong,” he says. “You’re just as sick as she was. It’s my fault. I should have seen it before. It was a mistake to bring you here, Callie. I should have known better.”