Inland (22 page)

I startle at that and watch him nod, sadly. I can see it in his face: that he knows he’s caught me, that he wishes he hadn’t.

“You learn from experience. Your mother didn’t take hers, either,” he says quietly. Then he looks at me, his jaw set, hard. “But I’m not going through that again. I can’t. Not with you. You’ll enter this program, you’ll take your medicine and do whatever they tell you. I can’t lose you to this, do you understand? I don’t care how long it takes. You’ll stay there, where you’re safe, until you’re well again.”

I listen to the cadence of his voice, growing more confident by the minute, and realize what I’m hearing under the sadness: relief, the guilty kind that comes from handing off an unsolvable problem to someone else. And I realize something else, too: this was always the plan, even if he won’t admit it. All my life, he’s been observing me, waiting, watching for signs of the sickness that took my mother. Fearing it, yes, maybe even hoping against it, but certainly still expecting it. No matter what the doctors, the therapists, said. And when those first hints of darkness appeared, he was always going to do with me what he wouldn’t, couldn’t, with my mother: hand it over to professionals, put it in capable hands, spare himself the pain and effort of watching history repeat itself.

But I see the grief in his face. Raw, churning, desperate, the grimace and twist of his features at feelings flayed down to their core. My father has never liked to relinquish control, to admit defeat. I see that it hurts him to give up this way. I see that he believes he’s tried, and failed, and it’s killing him. I see that he wants to save me like he couldn’t save her, but he doesn’t know how, he never did.

Because he wanted an answer. A solution he could hold in his hands, hard and tangible and unchanging. He wanted solid ground and sure things, pills and promises, a ten-step plan that would flush the dark spots from my mind and leave no room for error. He wanted to pluck the madness out in pieces, close his fist around it, and pull, pull it free, pull it out by its deep purple roots.

He wanted all these things, never understanding that he could no more take hold of what’s inside me than grip water in his hands. That sometimes, the more you try to grasp a thing, the more it slips slyly between your fingers, until you open your fist and find nothing there but the place where you’ve cut and bruised your own skin from trying too hard to hold on.

And in that moment, like a dam breaking, my anger cracks and shudders and then splinters, shattering, drowning in a surge of forgiveness and pity and cool, deep understanding. Because he doesn’t know, of course he doesn’t, that there’s nothing crazy in what I feel. He has never felt this longing, this pull. He could never understand the comfort of that restless water, the lullaby
shush
of the breaking waves, the way that all the small and petty sorrows of little human lives turn to nothing in its cold and endless depths. He has never seen the joy in the embrace of a capricious and powerful lover, the one who could kill you, but doesn’t, and that’s how you know it’s real. He tried to understand. He couldn’t.

But I do.

The sea is everywhere, in my mind, in my veins, crashing unseen on the rocks in my Pacific memories, kissing the Panhandle coastline that I’m meant to leave behind. It surges inside me with whispers and promises, rushing, hushing. It is full of comfort, knowledge, peace. It’s the dark and patient consciousness that moves beneath my heart. It’s the quiet voice that speaks to me, speaks through me, so old and so cold, a voice I can hear but my father cannot, no matter how hard he listens.

And I forgive him for it.

I pity him for it, the way my mother must have.

He nods, taking my silence for acquiescence, and says, “Get some sleep. We’ll discuss this tomorrow. I’m sure you have questions, and I’ll answer them as best I can.”

I blink away tears, letting my gaze drift over his back, the empty glass, the cluttered tabletop. The envelope in my hand is hot, crumpled. I smooth it against my hip and back away.

His voice follows me back through the shadowed house.

“Just don’t expect any answers from her, Callie. I didn’t get any from your mother.”

Dear Callie,

Fate has a way of believing in people, whether or not we believe in it. By now, I trust you understand.

Yours does not have an infinite reach, and there are places, places like the ones you’ve been before, where it cannot touch you. You can hide there, if you choose to, and live as best you can. But remember this: a thing that cannot touch you also cannot nourish you. You know better than anyone what it will cost you to turn your back on your destiny.

Every choice has its cost. These are lessons everyone learns, and we learn them harder than most. It isn’t fair, I know. But this is what it means to be loved, deeply and powerfully and all your life, by something much larger than either of us. We are privileged to know that love, and to let it guide us home.

I hope you’ll be happy, Callie, wherever you are. I hope I will see you again.

—

The scrawl on the paper is thoughtful, even, with none of the usual sloppiness or swirling, extravagant flourishes. Nessa wrote this letter slowly, and took care with every word. And my father is right: it contains no explanations, no apologies, not even a good-bye. There are no answers here.

What he doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, is that I don’t need one.

Nessa used to say that the sea had a voice. And when I call out in the dark of my dreams, I hear it answering back.

I hear it.

I have always heard it.

It tells me it’s time to come home.

I WANT TO TELL YOU A STORY.

You’ll think you’ve heard it before, because you know the way it begins. Once upon a time, there was a daughter of the sea, a beautiful girl from the watery world who fell deeply, terribly, tragically in love with a man who lived on land. And though she watched him from the shallows, and he watched her from the shore, they knew that they could never be together. And the girl grew pale and lonely, watching as the man she loved lay in the golden sunshine, on the earth she could not reach or touch.

But the sea loved his daughter. He hated to see her suffer. He wanted to give her everything. And so, despite his misgivings, he brought her to the surface, and pushed her to shore on a gentle tide, and drew back as her lungs filled with air. And when her eyes opened and she saw what he had done, she threw herself into the surf and thanked him, thanked him, thanked him. And for a time, the world was full of light and laughter, as the daughter of the sea and the son of the earth were together at last. They walked together in the surf each morning, and slept each night in a cabin on the shore. And when the young wife of Earth’s son bore her husband children, they brought them to the shallows and bathed them in the sun-warmed pools on the incoming tide.

But that is only the beginning. The sea is a changeable thing, never still, never satisfied. Its moods can turn as subtly as the tide, or with the wailing thrashing fury of a summer’s sudden storm. And though the sun warms its surface, its heart is deep and dark.

I want to tell you another story.

This one, you won’t have heard before. A story of women, swept up by the same impossible yearning, all heeding the call of a voice that only they could hear. All reckless, all wild, all believed by the ones who loved them to be in the grips not of fate, but of madness.

Women who live alone by the seaside, guarding their hearts against all others, finding pleasure in their solitude. Women whose boats are one day found abandoned, empty of the captains who steered the course. Mothers who swam out at sunrise and never came back to shore, daughters who dove with arms outstretched from high seaside cliffs, who fell into the churn and froth below and simply disappeared. Women who went for evening walks on the sand at low tide and never came home; women who vanished, car and all, on winding coastal roads and causeways where the surf nips at every passing traveler’s heels.

And others, the ones who turned their backs and ran, who built their houses inland, who languished and shrank in landlocked beds. Who struggled to breathe on their borrowed time, who grew small and weak and sallow as the dried-out years passed by. Women who were loved by men, in sickness and health, but mostly in sickness. Women who, in their final hours, grew delirious and desperate, begging to be taken to an ocean they’d never seen, to be bathed in waters they’d never touched. Women who gasped their last in narrow rooms, surrounded by miles of dirt and forest, dry-drowned in the broth of their own sodden lungs.

I want to tell you the story of a man who the waves had not awakened, and the woman who thought he was perfect and safe. A defiant, wild, idealistic woman who believed that she could sidestep fate by refusing to fall in love. A mother, a wife. Haunted and breaking apart at the seams, losing herself in pieces, until her time ran out, too soon. A woman who tempted her jealous fate and lost, for loving her little life too much.

And I want to tell you the story of a girl who lost her way and lost her breath, while everyone forgot her name. Who grew up lonely and empty, until she came to a world full of water. Who peered into a river that led to an ocean and found something waiting for her there.

A path.

A choice.

A chance to walk out and grasp hold of her fate, to finally go home.

—

I wait two hours in the dark, feeling the house grow icy and quiet, as the steam on my windows disappears. I wait, sitting at attention, rubbing my hands over my long arms, my broad shoulders, my smooth, sweat-slicked skin. I am wearing the swimsuit that Nessa bought for me, her necklace rapping lightly against the smooth, black fabric that stretches over my chest. The voice inside me has gone quiet, but I know it’s there. Only barely moving, lapping gently at the corners of my consciousness, as still as an impatient thing can be. It doesn’t speak, but its will is like a heartbeat.

Go, go, go.

This is what my mother felt, begging, yearning, needing her love. A voice, insistent and growing louder. My father thought it was madness, slinking and crouching in circles around the close, warm walls of her brain. But it isn’t. It can’t be. Is it?

—

It isn’t.

Go.

—

When I step into the hallway, my feet make no sound against the carpet. The door swings open on silent hinges. The boards of the porch stay still as I move over them, no creak from the stairs as I take them one by one. Only the motion-sensing light blares out, awakened from sleep by my passing shadow, a silent alarm in the deep blue of predawn. Nobody stirs inside the dark house, no surprised light casts a warm glow. No animals startle out of the brush as I pad barefoot across the lawn, down the white wooden track of the dock that rises like a phantom path from water shrouded in mist. A cloud has seeped in low along the riverbank. My feet kick through a swirl of ghost-cold gray as I stop and crouch down in the dark.

The cover of the boat slips off as smoothly and silently as a stocking. The motor starts at a single pull, purring loud enough to wake my father, wake the neighbors, but it doesn’t. It won’t. It won’t let them catch me, I think. It will keep me safe, keep my secret, it will shush anyone waking back down into sleep. I’ve listened carefully and done everything right. I’ve made no mistakes, said no farewells, save the one. Just one, just one
I love you,
and it will let me have that.

THE SKY IS STREAKED WITH PINK
and red as I make my way slowly south, under clouds like reaching fingers in the lightening sky between the trees. The cypress loom out of the dawn like gaunt, gray sentries, dangling moss like a ragged cloak. Sleek lilies, still sleeping, bob gently on the little boat’s wake. An alligator, indifferent and half-submerged in the shoreline weeds, fixes one amber eye on me as I pass. The air is cool against my bare skin, cooler as the boat picks up speed, and I wish without thinking that I’d brought a sweater.

Then I do think, I think of where I’m going, and laugh.

It’s not difficult to steer the boat. The water is like glass. Nobody runs out to investigate the sound, nobody shouts at me to stop. Minutes pass, five and then fifteen, and the trees begin to thin and pull back, shrinking from the land too salty to sustain them. I pass an early fisherman, throwing off lines on his own little boat, a thermos of coffee already sitting in the stern. I slow, so as not to rock the boat, and he peers at me and waves. I lift a hand in return.

Hello.

Good-bye.

—

When the marshlands appear on either side, I throw my head back and breathe in deeply. The grasses are yellow-gray in the early light, the smell of mud and brine is everywhere. Miles away, on a wind-burnished outcropping, a lighthouse winks in the pale breaking dawn. I pass down the narrow inlet, between the flats with their fluttering grasses and pale fringe of sand. Ahead of me, the land sinks low, lower, and peels away. I hear surf rushing gently against the coastline as I pass through, out of the river shed, out of the mouth, and into the open sea.

When I finally slow and kill the motor, the land behind me has all but vanished. It’s there, but barely—only an outline, a memory, a long and indistinct shadow between the water and the sky. The wind has died to nothing, only barely moving in my tangled hair. I peer over the side of the boat. The sea-glass necklace dangles between my fingers, its chain a coil in my palm. I watch it swing gently above the blue. When it slips through my fingers and into the water, it doesn’t make a sound. I watch it sink down, out of sight, and look out across the waves.

There is something in the water. A shadow, long and strong and sinuous. It slides along under the gray of the waves, moving fast, an opaque patch that surges forward and slips under the keel of the boat on one side, as sleek and silent as it was all those years ago. And now, as then, there’s no splash. No sign. No portent cloud come to cover the sun.

The boat rocks and tips as I slip over the side.

For only a moment, I wonder if I should have stayed. I lie back on the surface, letting the water hold me, feeling the rise and fall of my chest. So smooth and even, so effortless. I could still turn around, go back there, inland, and find a way to make peace with that landlocked life. Take my medicine. Share my feelings. Make them believe that they’ve cured the illness inside my head, even as my body grows weak and soft and the air grows harder to breathe. I could live as best I can in a place with narrow walls, locked doors, bars on the windows, and pills by the bedside, and pray that when they let me out, I would find him waiting to meet me. I might even discover that they were right. That she was sick, and so am I. That the voice I hear, the desire I feel, is crazy after all. That each whispered urge to come home, come down, is only madness, delusion, a delirious death wish that bloomed like a dark flower in my imbalanced mind and spread its roots down through my veins. Not magical, just chemical, and easily washed away.

I pull the straps down over my shoulders, slip the swimsuit over my legs. I watch it bob briefly, air caught somewhere inside, then disappear below the surface. For one last moment, one last breath, I lie naked in the water and feel the bare heat of the sun, cresting on the horizon. Day breaking over my body. Early morning light paints the sky.

—

In the movies, drowning is the most undignified of deaths. But that’s not how it happens at all. The air leaves your lungs, your body grows heavy, and you slip out of sight without a sound.

It’s so quiet, down here in the blue. I exhale and sink, down past the sun-warmed waters near the surface, down into the twilight depths below. The surface of the sea is alive and restless above my open eyes, playful, shimmering, teasing me with bits of sunshine and refracted sky. But I don’t want to go back there, to that petty, noisy world. I don’t want the passing fancies of earthbound life, small dramas and shallow loves.

I don’t want to become like Lee, atrophied and bitter, clinging to a man who might love me but can never truly understand. And no, I don’t want to try my own hand at my mother’s reckless gambling, the kind that breaks promises and hearts. This is what I want. The deep, endless and unexplored, full of secrets. I want to be held, forever, in the arms and heart of this cold, dark home and the cold, dark people in it.

I want to see my mother again.

My lungs collapse painlessly, one, then the other, as the last of the air bubbles in silver streaks from my lips, flying away toward the surface. I watch them, all the way to the end. I do not need to blink. I do not need to breathe. There is gossamer webbing between my fingers, as fine and translucent as an insect’s wings. There are arms wrapping around me, there are songs inside my head.

—

I am here. We both are. We all are.

And it is so peaceful and beautiful, down here in the blue, where the sounds of the world fade away to nothing, where I can go anywhere that the currents take me, where my body moves with so much effortless grace. And I feel her long limbs cradling me, and I hear her voice all around me, full of love so fierce and wild that it could fill a hundred oceans, could flood the whole world.

My daughter,
she says.
My daughter.

And together, we go down.