Inland (21 page)

I AM IN THE WATER.

Not the inky liquid nothing where sleep always found me before, but above, over, skimming the surface in the nighttime air. My upturned eyes take in the world, green and black and silver, drenched in the light of a pale, high moon that makes shadows of the trees. I tilt my head back and gaze at its face; it glares back sightlessly, swollen and cold.

I have been here before. I know the creeping silhouettes of the cypress trees, the pale snake of the dock as it stands sentry in the dark. I am floating in my own backyard. The river is motionless in the moonlight, waiting and oh-so-still, the current slowed to nothing as the night world holds its breath. I have no memory of waking, or crossing the lawn, and its quiet expanse is shrouded in shades of gray. The motion sensor is silent and dark, no glow shows through the windowed walls of the house. No lights tripped by a sleepwalker, none lit by a wakeful father, no alarms raised up at the sound of midnight footfalls.

It’s a dream, only a dream.

I breathe and trail my fingers through the water, and watch as they sink into nothing.

There is no panic, not this time. This is only more of the same, a world inside my head and behind my eyelids. Just another midnight meeting, the only appointment I care to keep. One more memory to follow me inland, one last chance to swim in the mouth of the sea.

One last night to search the depths, and find her waiting there.

When I see the pale body rise up in the water, I smile and whisper her name
.

She is different in this dream, in the moonlight, in the shallows. More here, more clear, as I watch her swimming closer. Her skin is silver-white and cold, hairless and slick. I feel long limbs sliding past me, a hand like silk on my back. I catch hold of it as she glides by, and we turn slow circles in the water. She tenses, but doesn’t pull away. There is something stretched between her fingers, a gossamer membrane too slippery to grasp. The oval nails are longer now, skinless, gray, thick, and hooked and glistening at their points. There are fewer of them than I remember.

If I pressed them down against my skin, they would pierce it in three perfect lines.

The high rise of her forehead breaks the surface, water beading on the ridges where her eyebrows used to be. Eyes like black marbles peer back at me, lightless and shining, with no whites at all. The water has washed her features, smoothed them, narrowed them, but her face is still my mother’s. Her hair floats up and fans out all around her, and I think again of Bee scribbling on the dock. Drawing her mermaid, that green-black tangle of hair like reeds, the reaching arms, the body a long, gray bullet. A body made for diving down and cutting through the deep. A body seen in shadowed glass, as I gazed at my own reflection.

Even now, we look so alike.

There is no warmth in the arms that reach up to embrace me, no heat from her body as she pulls me close.

“Mama,” I say, my voice scraping the night.

My daughter,
she says, with no voice at all.

She rests her face against my throat. Together, we go down.

I can see the moon, swimming and distant, licking like mercury somewhere above. We never break the surface. There is no need to breathe in a dream. I lie on my back and kick, kick, grazing the weeds with my fingertips. My mother’s body mirrors mine, moving with silent strength through the black. Her legs are pressed, seamed together; they move as one, long and powerful, her feet curved like scythes in a dancer’s point. Moving like a liquid, river-born thing, flipping and tumbling through the weeds. She sees me watching her, and the slit of her mouth seems to smile.

How did you find this place?
I ask her.
How did you find me here?

You called out to me, and I came,
she says, and before I have time to ask her how, the words roll away into blackness. She reaches out, she takes my hand, and I feel a massive, painless jolt as my consciousness opens wide. I am in the water and in her head, caught up in a memory that isn’t mine, dragged into its whirling center and slipping into its depths. I feel the river shifting around me, opening, deepening. I am someplace vast and endless, a sea inside my mother’s mind, the ocean of her memories.

If not for the water, I’d gasp and cry out at what I see.

Because I am here. I am her, seeing the world through her eyes.

—

I am sinking beneath the shimmering waves, staring up at the belly of the boat that holds my child.

I am alone in the infinite blue of the bay, drifting on currents that run deep, strong, and fast.

I am floating in froth where the waves toss and toss, gazing up at a high cliff whose name I could have said out loud, but I have no words, and no voice to say them.

I am down, way down, in the darkest depths, where we all have sharp teeth and eyes like lamplight, and the sun’s dancing beams do not reach.

I am home, but I still yearn for what was left behind.

I long for it, look for it, this thing that I’ve lost. I search, while the sun rises and sets in the faraway world and the tides go out and in again. My anguished voice calls out to all corners and echoes back empty-handed, as I drift and drift in the dark. I am looking for something in this wide-open place. It never stops. Something dear, something lost. I have cried out for it so many times that the words have lost their meaning. I don’t know why, or how long I have looked, only that I want it. I need it, this thing that is mine.

My daughter, my daughter, my daughter
.

—

I am the thing she couldn’t let go, the only thing she took with her. The sea has worn away her memory as much as it has molded her body, sharpened her senses, washed away all the remnants of her years on land. She is as worn down to the core as the sea-glass necklace, tumbled smooth and essential by the breaking waves. I search her memories for more, for answers, and find only the endless stretch of days, months, years in the blue underworld with its ridged, barren landscape of shifting sands.

Do you remember the house?
I ask her.
Our house?

She answers,
I remember you.

Do you remember the places we used to sail?

I remember you.

Do you remember your husband? Your sister? Our family?

I remember you.

—

Ten years, and more, she had looked for me here. All while I lay coughing in inland beds, in a landlocked world where her voice could not reach. Choking on nothing, putting lies in my letters, while she called out in search of her child. Always seeking, never finding. Until that day, when the voice of the sea made a long-distance call, and we came back to the edge of the earth.

Until the message of longing came back with an answer, a faraway whisper sent through miles of water. A heartbeat carried down the river and out to the open sea. A beacon, blood-thick and made only for her, a connection not even ten years could sever.

Here
, it said, softly.
Here.

—

The images are sharper, now, honed by a knife’s edge of anger and need, as I follow her forward to now. I am hurtling through the blackest deep, guided only by instinct, feeling the pull grow stronger. I am in the green murk of the marshy shallows, where the water flows warm from a narrow mouth. I am hiding in the shadows of the great, gray trees, safe at my journey’s end. There’s a light through the swamp, a box made of glass, with small figures moving inside. She is there, but I cannot reach her.

And then the light changes, and I can.

She is here, in the water, so close I can feel her pulse. I am watching from under the whirling waves as she kicks with the current. A girl, tall and strong, arms slicing and pulling, moving like silver on the tossing surface.

But she isn’t alone. There’s another one, a boy, following, calling. He kicks and sends up spray, he struggles against the will of the water. He flounders, goes under, eyes white all around. Pale-skinned, red-haired, splashing and thrashing. He is trying to reach for her hand.

I can hear his heart, I can feel his desire, and the sea is seething, raging, wanting. She is mine, she is ours, this dark heart beats for her as it beats for all of us, and he cannot have her. We will tear him apart. We will show him she does not belong to him.

My daughter, my daughter, my daughter.

THERE IS GRAY LIGHT FILTERING IN
through my curtains when I wake, tangled in sheets so soaked with sweat that they’re chafing my skin where they touch me. The phone in the kitchen is ringing, insistent, shattering the silence of the sleeping house. My hair is stuck in sodden curls to my neck, my back, my chest. I groan and throw off the heavy bedclothes. My feet tangle in them and I curse. My body is stiff and aching everywhere, my mind still fogged with the remnants of my dream, as the answering machine clicks on and whoever it is hangs up.

When the phone begins ringing again, shrill and insistent, I kick off the sheets with a final thrust and swing my feet to the floor.

What I see makes me gasp.

There are streaks of mud at the end of the bed, gray and gritty. There’s more between my toes, and curling up my bare, white legs. My skin puckers in the chill of the room, and panic begins to stroke its crawling fingers up and down my neck. I’m naked. Dirty. The pajamas I’d worn to bed last night are in a crumpled heap on the floor.

I struggle to remember if I locked the dead bolt, realizing at the same time that even if I could, even if I stride up to it now and find it still in place, that it could mean anything and nothing. I tell myself that it doesn’t matter. I tell myself rapid stories, one after another, trying to untie the knot in my gut. The dirt could have come from anywhere, could have been carried in unnoticed on the bottom of my feet. My hair tastes salty with sweat, not brackish river water. I must have grown hot sometime in the night and cast aside my clothes, peeled them off in half consciousness and then falling back asleep. And even if I walked last night, even if I did, that doesn’t mean my dream was real.

Inside me, the sly voice whispers back,
And even if you didn’t, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t.

The phone shrills again, and I rush to cover myself at the muffled curse and dull
thud
that follows as my father’s feet hit the floor. I listen to his path: the whiff of an opening door, heavy steps receding down the hallway, the clatter of sleepy hands lifting the receiver. I hear his grunted hello. I hear him ask the caller, whoever it is, if they have any idea what time it is. I look to my bedside table, and stare.

It is five o’clock in the morning.

Something is wrong.

—

This time, we won’t play pretend with coffins. There will be no trip to the coast. No singing or reading, no open grave, no handful of dirt to throw down in memory. Nessa left instructions, careful and explicit, as though she knew there would be no body. Far away, on the California shoreline, the handful of people who knew her best—who hardly knew her at all—are gathering in awkward silence to have a small memorial service.

Here, nothing changes. There’s no ceremony for saying good-bye, just the hollow place inside me where I know she’ll never be again. It feels unfinished. A conversation on permanent pause, nothing but silence on the line. With the exception of the lawyer who calls just after nine, the phone rings only once; a man with a name I’ve never heard tells me that he had loved her, a long time ago, and is sorry for my loss.

“She talked about you all the time,” he says.

I think,
She never mentioned you at all.

Nessa always said that relationships were just promises you ended up breaking. I wonder now if she did it on purpose, if she always knew that she wouldn’t be staying. I think of the way her voice broke as she sobbed, “I have to go. I don’t want to leave things like this.”

And I think of Lee, coughing bitterly, saying, “You get your time, and then your time comes.”

—

They found her surfboard washed up on the shore, broken in two jagged halves where it had slammed on the breakwater and with seaweed tangled around the leash. Some people remember seeing her on the waves, at dawn or maybe midday, riding with her hair like a wild thing and her long, tawny legs flashing bronze in the sun. Catching the rise, paddling back. Moving as smoothly and freely as the water under her feet. She was beautiful and alone, confident and easy even as the waves grew high and fierce.

“I didn’t know her,” is what they said. “I just noticed her there.”

And of course they did. She was too beautiful. Even in her carefully constructed life with no connections, no one to know her name as they watched her surf, nobody could fail to notice when Nessa was there.

But nobody, nobody at all, noticed when she wasn’t. She left her life behind as quietly and completely as the sun winking out in the western sky. No trace, no good-bye, just gone.

In an article this morning, a coast guard official expressed hope that a body might still be found. That’s the word he used, “hopeful,” as though it were something to look forward to, as though we should all cross our fingers that Nessa might still wind up on a beach somewhere. Facedown, ravaged, an empty horror-show shell for somebody to see, to point at and scream.

But we know better, all of us who’ve been left ashore before. The ocean doesn’t give back its dead. It doesn’t give anything at all. And there is nothing left for me in her house by the sea, not even the start of a last scribbled message.

In the afternoon, my father picks up his briefcase and heads for the door, speaking to me over his shoulder as he goes.

“I have an appointment. I’ll be home late. You should be in bed before I get back. You’re packed, I hope?”

I stare at him. He sees my look, and sets his jaw.

He says, “We need to be at the airport by six a.m., no later. What happened to Nessa is terrible, but it doesn’t change anything. You’re getting on that plane tomorrow.”

When I’m alone, I close my bedroom door, open Mama’s book of poetry, and roll the words around in my mind and in my mouth. Nessa is gone, and the emptiness is sharp and pure and so very real. Everything that came before it seems pale, thin, transparent. Was it only eight hours ago that I woke in my bed, naked and drenched with dirty feet? Was it this morning, this year, this lifetime? I’m no longer sure that it happened at all, and if it did, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if I walked last night, or even where I went. The things I saw in that dream-woman’s memories can’t be anything but the desperate churning of my sick subconscious, a story I told myself while I walked around in my sleep looking for somebody to love me.

Exhaustion is draping itself over my body, making my head ache, forcing my eyelids shut.

I think,
I should check the mailbox.

But there won’t be a letter. Not now, not ever. Nessa’s final wave has taken her home, and I am alone on the shore.

—

The slam of the car door wakes me. I hear my father’s heavy steps, stumbling and uneven up the wooden stairs. There’s the metallic
cling
of a key ring, a louder jangling noise as he drops them. I hear him curse once, fumble, twist the key savagely in the lock, then groan aloud when he steps through the door.

My lips peel back in the dark. I turned off the air conditioner hours before, letting the watery heat drift in through the windows while the crickets sang me into a fitful sleep. The strange, heady scent of the river is thick in every room. If I have to leave this place, then I want to take it with me, let the dampness sink into my pores, drip from my clothes, settle in stagnant pools in my shoes and at the bottom of my suitcase. Or better yet, I wish that it would take me with it—that it would swell and rise and swallow the whole world, creeping across the lawn, drowning the house’s stilted legs, and pouring in through the windows. In the minutes before sleep took me, I’d pictured my father coming home not to a house but an aquarium, green and glowing with the soft lights still ablaze, a pale creature with glittering eyes and long, long hair drifting silently past the glass walls.

I hear the
thud
of the briefcase, the
clink
and
clatter
of heavy-bottomed bottles. He’s pouring himself a drink. Not his first, I think.

In the low light, hunched protectively over his glass of scotch, he looks small and tired and petulant. There are brown shadows in the pits of his sallow cheeks, and dark sweat-stain circles blooming in his armpits. The briefcase is open in front of him, a sheaf of papers and folders splayed out across the tabletop. When I step through the doorway, he startles and hastily pushes the pile aside, then looks at me with narrowed eyes.

“You should be asleep,” he says. “And why the hell isn’t the air conditioner on?”

I gaze back coolly.

“I like the heat. And I live here.”

He shakes his head, and glances at the clock. “For another four hours, yes, you live here. Now go back to bed.”

I don’t move.

“What is all this?”

He glances at the pile and says, “Nothing. Work. And some things from Nessa’s lawyer, for whenever they make it official. She named me executor of her estate. God knows why.”

The grief in my belly sinks lower, gets heavier. For Nessa’s last words, last wishes, to be left in the hands of a man who so utterly failed to understand her feels like a final insult to her memory. Why would she choose him?

“Have you looked through it? Is there anything . . .” I stop. I don’t even know what I’m asking; as if there were anything that could explain this, that would make it all okay.

He doesn’t look up. “Nothing.”

I step forward and reach out, asking, “Can I—” and he swats my hand away.

“No!”

I look at his eyes, shaded and evasive, and the darting of his tongue against his lips. I look down at the mess on the table. I see a lot of fine print, business stationery, forms . . . and something else. The barely curling corner of an envelope, a white point against the tabletop. Not crisp and professional like the rest, but worn and frayed as though it had been passed through many hands. He sees me see it, he reaches for it at the same moment as I do, but I’m faster. My hand flashes out like lightning and I pull it free, feeling the familiar weight of the folded sheets inside, feeling the places where grains of sand have indented the paper like Braille.

It is my name on it, just mine, in Nessa’s familiar swooping script. I clench it tightly, press it to my chest, and look up at the man across the table. There is no hiding the guilt in his eyes. When I speak, the words uncoil from my mouth as smooth and deadly as a snake.

“You were going to keep this from me.” It isn’t a question, and he doesn’t give an answer, only sighs and turns away.

“You were going to keep this from me,” I say again, louder this time. “You had no right to keep this from me.”

He turns at that, and fires back, “Actually, I have every right. Not only that, I have the responsibility. It’s my job decide what’s best for you. And yes, if I’d had my way, that letter would have gone straight into the fire.”

The rage rises up in a white-hot instant, and my hands curl into fists.

“How could you?” I cry. “This could be important, there could be something—”

He sees my face, my trembling hands, and slowly shakes his head.

“You can relax,” he says. “I’m not going to take it away from you. But whatever it says in that letter, you need to understand, it doesn’t change anything.”

I look at the way he’s looking at me and feel the last sliver of hope leave my body—a tiny, glimmering thing that I didn’t even know I’d been harboring until the moment it disappeared. Tears prick at my eyes, and I take a step forward.

“Dad, would you just—”

“This is not a discussion,” he says, cutting me off.

“It’s never been a discussion!” I cry. “When have you ever given me a voice in any of this? When was the last time you talked
to
me instead of about me? You never asked if I wanted this. You never asked me anything! You never even asked me what happened at the beach that day!”

He smiles, but there’s no humor in it.

“You’re right, I didn’t. I can’t. I can’t stand here while you tell me another lie, and I wonder where I went wrong that I couldn’t see this coming.” He shakes his head. “No, honey. All I can do now is try to get you the help you need, and hope it’s not too late.”

He stands, pressing his palms against the table, and looks at me mournfully.

“I’m not asking what you want because you are too young, and too sick, to make decisions for yourself, and every word you utter about staying here makes me that much more sure that I’ve made the right choice. I’m your father, and I’m going to make sure you can’t hurt yourself, or anyone else, ever again.”

I swallow twice before I can find my voice.

“What are you talking about?”

I watch him slump, watch his jaw soften, as he thrusts a hand into his hair and grimaces. His face is full of pain and pity. Our eyes meet, and he holds out his hands.

“Callie,” he says, and peers into my face. His voice is pleading. “Do you really not understand? Did you think that you’d just go back to school in Laramie and it would be like none of this ever happened?”

I don’t answer, but I feel pink patches of shame coloring my face and neck, my stupidity and shortsightedness suddenly thrown into sharp, painful focus. In my mind, I’d thought of this as a step backward. Back to the barrenness I’d lived before, back to hospital stays and loneliness, my life like a flower that bloomed briefly and then closed, shrank, and grew backward into the ground.

But that’s not the way it works, it’s not. There’s only forward motion, the next thing, another step and another. Whether you want it to or not, life only moves in one direction.

My father’s composure is back, his voice as even and assured as if he were speaking to a board of directors. He says, “It’s a facility for children like you, who suffer from mental illness and who need to be monitored. It’s not far from the university in Laramie, and Doctor Frank has agreed to oversee your entry. Your intake is on Wednesday.” He spreads his hands, and looks at me helplessly. “I’m sorry, Callie, but I have no choice. I can’t take care of you. I can’t watch you all the time, I can’t deal with the lying and the hiding. Christ, I can’t even make you take your pills.”