On Such a Full Sea (24 page)

And soon enough, the feeling was right; it seemed Fan had found the necessary position. They all chattered back and forth about how they would color a panel of their wall with this activity, about what they might eat. Seven kept talking about craving
oden
, Miss Cathy finally asking what that was. It was as if nothing were awry, which was obviously what Miss Cathy and by extension the Girls wanted most, especially in this uncertain moment, and surely in every other moment, too, the primary dream of keeping being the dream of consolation, of feeling at last solved and right, for kept and keeper both. And doesn’t that dream, in truth, endure for the rest of us, too? Perhaps in this regard we B-Mors—and perhaps your people, too—are merely the Girls writ large, our leagues, clustered for best use and sanctuary, at last achieving a modest state of grace that for too long has been our lone, secret pride.

After Miss Cathy had painted the last of Fan’s toes, she rose and sat before the basins and the mirrored wall in the swiveling salon-style chair, one of the girls automatically ready to brush her hair. The rest of the girls as well as Fan gathered about her, and the picture of them grouped thus was something one might imagine in a catalog for the strangest kind of institution, this most bizarre and intramural of schools. But their number did seem off. Something flashed then in Miss Cathy’s face, as though she had just finally reached an ancient mountaintop ruin that she had half feared was a fantasy, the shadows breaking over its tumbled ramparts, darkening all. She now asked the girls to go check on Four and Five, which was cause for gleeful sighs all around, everyone immediately curtailing whatever she was doing and stowing the mani-pedi paraphernalia. It was as if the whole time they had been awaiting such word, whereas Fan was just beginning to think how mistaken her strategy had been, that she should have taken harder, more extreme measures right from the start. But as they made their way back out, Miss Cathy asked Fan to stay. She had Fan sit in the salon chair, standing behind her and regarding her as a stylist might, even weighing the ends of her hair in her palms. She took up a brush and worked it through the straight, thick tresses. The tines sometimes grazed Fan’s neck and she tensed for the strokes to become harder, harsher, but they stayed steady and full, the sound like heavy threshing.

Finally Miss Cathy said: When I was a girl, my mother brushed my hair every night. Yours must have, too.

Fan shook her head; sometimes she and a cousin might sit up with each other, but more for play than in some familial bonding.

But it’s wonderful to brush hair like yours, Miss Cathy said to the mirror. My mother would have admired it. She would have said yours was a pony’s mane, sturdy but still tender and lustrous. She would complain that my hair was too fine and broke and tangled too easily, which is why I had to go to her each night before bed. I think she hoped to train it to grow thicker and straighter, but naturally it never did.

Fan said it must have been a good feeling, to have such a ritual.

Miss Cathy smiled weakly. She unfurled the towel from her head, her hair damply clumped in fraying ropes. Fan moved to hop down from the chair but Miss Cathy placed her hand on both of her shoulders, bending so that their faces were side by side.

I know you can’t see it, so you don’t have to agree, the woman said, her eyes wide and focused. But I see a lot of me in you. Not me now. You’re so fresh and alive, and I have nothing more of those things. But when I was younger, even younger than you, you would be surprised by the girl I was. I used to walk to the edge of the village and wait for the gatehouse guard to take a bite of his lunch and then slip out between the bars. I was that skinny! And you know what I did?

Fan shook her head.

I would run.

Fan said, Where to.

Away! Miss Cathy cried, her face, in fact, suddenly alive. I would just run, at first as fast as I could so the guard wouldn’t see me, but when the road started getting rough, I would slow down and try to stay out of sight. I’d keep going the whole day. Sometimes I saw cars and people but then I hid. It’s amazing that I didn’t get hurt or lost.

Fan asked if her parents got frightened or angry.

They never knew, Miss Cathy said. My father only came home after supper, and my mother was busy all day with her projects in the garden and with her friends. Our helper was terrified for me, but I made her promise not to tell.

You must have traveled far.

I don’t know exactly. You should tell me. How far can a little girl really go? Miss Cathy paused at this notion. One time I was caught in a thunderstorm and I wasn’t sure anymore where I was. I had to hope the sun would break through so the rainbow from the village’s sky screen might reappear, which it must have. Otherwise I might not be here now. I’d be someplace else.

Fan, no doubt sensing the woman’s yearning, said: Where do you think?

Not a Charter, probably. Though I’m not sure I would have lasted out in the counties.

I think you would have, Fan replied, saying it as if surely believing it.

Miss Cathy seemed to gleam with this notion. She then said: Sometimes I wish I could see myself like I was then, but from above. Out there.

But you can, Fan told her. You can see it.

How?

You can see whatever you want.

And it was then that Fan did a funny thing. Without asking, she clasped Miss Cathy’s hands, which were still resting on her shoulders. Miss Cathy instinctively pulled back—she might touch you, but it was never the other way around—but Fan held them firmly, Miss Cathy looking alarmed in the mirror. And before the woman could say or do anything else, Fan closed her eyes. She asked Miss Cathy to do the same. She could feel her pulling, but Fan could be very strong physically when she needed to be. Miss Cathy shouted for her to let go. But she wouldn’t. Then Miss Cathy was thrashing against her, their hands locked together while they boxed at Fan’s ears, her temple, her jaw. The blows, dense and mean, fell heavily on her, and though she wanted to cry out or groan, she kept as still as she could, as if she were not made of flesh but the oldest stone. And just at the moment that it seemed Fan might yield, when tears began to wet her cheeks, when she felt her clutch finally giving way, the woman relented. She could hear Miss Cathy breathing miserably behind her. And it was then Fan described the scene she wanted Miss Cathy to picture: a counties landscape, mottled sage with dense growth, and run through by gravelly roads, and pocked with the rusted shanty-tops of cottages with the smoke from cooking fires spiraling forth, and there, in the shadows of the underbrush, a wispy, pale-shouldered child with fine strawberry-hay hair stepping sprightly through the thickets, almost dancing, skipping free.

When Fan peered again in the mirror, Miss Cathy’s eyes were still shut, though barely, her face slightly uptilted, as if she were taking in a rare gentle spring sun. She might have stayed that way, and Fan no doubt would have let her, had a commotion outside the bathroom not dispelled the reverie. When they stepped out, the Girls’ door was flung open, as were the double doors of Miss Cathy’s suite. Had all fled?

But inside the room everyone was assembled, the large space suddenly feeling much smaller for all the new and different people; it was not just the other girls who were there but also Mala, and then Tico, who stood alongside a pair of EMTs almost as hulking as he; and to Fan’s particular surprise, and what must have been a small burst of happiness in her, there was also young Dr. Upendra, too. He had come back. He had not abandoned them. He caught her eye but just as instantly went back to Five. She was in distress. No one was making a sound, not even Miss Cathy, because it was clear there was not enough time to take her back to the medical center. And as we regard the moment and all and sundry gathered, we suppose that they must have figured the doctor would certainly save her, that this whole situation, if deeply fraught and shocking, was one in which a state of normalcy would prevail, or would at least be reverted to. That however stunted and peculiar these girls’ lives were, their days would inexorably string along, if only adding up to a thickening in the torso and the flowing colors of their intricate mural work that no one but they and a few others would ever see.

Five stirred in her bed, her feet finally moving, if in shivers. Then she hiccuped, or spasmed, pivoting onto her side, pushing out a sound that her dear sisters would later hear as something like
I can
or
My Fan
. Spent, she rolled onto her back. Tears trickled down her tensed-up cheeks. She was smiling widely and the tears seemed to be only those of joy. But Miss Cathy gasped, hands over her mouth. Upendra dropped onto his knees and listened to her chest. Then he used an air bag, next his own mouth, as well as compressions on her chest. Her pupils stretched wide, space black, the whole of her looking as if every drop of her blood were turning to plainest paint.

There is always something entrancing about an image on a wall. Perhaps it’s because it’s frameless, threatening to break wider, maybe free. From the youngest to the oldest we know its purpose, which is to inspire and incite and celebrate, maybe question and even criticize, and then, of course, simply to record a version of what has happened, or should have happened, were our world a more genial place. And seeing those splashes of color along with others (or the thought of onlooking others) is totally different from seeing the same images alone, the former sensation, when it is right, akin to sharing a long-harbored secret.

What we have perhaps not considered enough is the maker and why she’s done what she’s done, whether it was some unexplainable artistic urge or else an impetus of conscience, and then, most important, what the making made her think and feel, whether back in an alleyway of B-Mor or deep inside a Charter villa. For did it allow her to feel larger, more connected? Did it settle a self-quarrel? Did it offer her liberty from some private boundary that heretofore she had not understood or even noticed?

Because when we look at the final great work of Six, as well as the broader field-coloring efforts of the others, that ended up completely covering not just the white space of the partly finished wall but the entire blank run of the remaining others, we can conclude whatever it signifies is no more important than that they did it without pause, hardly eating or sleeping or much concurring with one another, caught up as th
ey were in the virulent bloom of a fever. Yes, poor Five had nearly succumbed before their eyes. Yes, both she and Four would be hospitalized for more than a week. Yes, Miss Cathy had fainted from the shock, striking her head on the corner of a night table, her blood blotted all over Mala, who insisted on cradling her while Dr. Upendra stitched up the scary but luckily superficial wound. And yes, Fan had exited the house and climbed into the medical center van with Four and Five and Dr. Upendra, all in full view of Miss Cathy, who didn’t protest or say another word. These moments might have been rendered as always in the flow of connecting panels, with attendant realistic detail and texture, and maybe even in the larger scale of the underwater image of their pushing up Fan to the surface. Or they could have been depicted expressionistically, as was sometimes done before, some exuberant spray of spectral colors or surely, given the mood, a panel microscopically crosshatched in a dread hue.

What Six conceived instead was literally the biggest thing she’d ever done. In fact, it wasn’t a panel at all, but a panorama, the work beginning where she’d left off and stretching not just to the corner but onto the next wall and the next, wrapping the whole way around to where One and Two had begun the mural many years before. In a single immense stroke the project was complete.

And what was this last image? It was at first difficult to tell. Six started penciling the whole thing soon after the medical center van departed, working steadily and purposefully all night. The others even watched her, no one talking under the pall of what had occurred, though each wondering what it was they were seeing. Six was clearly energized by the work, rapidly mounting and dismounting her stepladder and shifting it by herself as she went along the walls; she refused any help. Her motions were unfamiliar to them, as they were accustomed to painstaking rendering, the scribing out of one tiny section at a time. Her hand now swept across the wall in wide arcs, slashes, the furious action of her arm looking like she meant to deface the surface rather than decorate it, the scrape of the pencil raspy and sharp. She labeled the colors to be done as she went, though in fact it was mostly just black, and some grays, and then a few skeins and patches of brighter colors here and there. These were filled in with the especially thick poster markers they already had on the racks but rarely used, the four others coloring while Six directed them from her perch atop the stepladder in the middle of the room. Then she’d come down and join in. By the end, they had gone through a half-dozen additional sets of the markers, their hands and fingers inked, their cheeks smeared by stray smudges and flecks, their lungs so numbed by the sweet vapors of the markers that they felt they were hollowed out, floating with the lightness.

What they made was a portrait. Or a portrait of sorts. Seven said she wished Fan could see it, no doubt assuming it was of her. And maybe it was. It did look like her or, at least, like the curtaining sway of her hair; there was great movement in the work. For what you saw was merely a swath of a much larger image, running the height and length of two and a half walls, a banded glimpse of a girl’s head angled up in quarter profile, such that only the ends of her black hair (flashed by electric glints of violet), a line of cheek, a nub of chin, could be seen. The full portrait, were it apparent, would have been billboard-sized, as tall as the villa itself. And while it surely could have been Fan—Six just shrugged when asked—when you stepped to one corner of the room or another and took it all in, you could also think to see Five’s fullish lips, or the most solid set of Three’s cheek, or some distinctive notation of each of the Girls, and maybe Mala, too. Naturally, Miss Cathy was a presence, if only in the watery rays of sunlight that the girl was craning up to and catching, the blurred streams of them the exact color of her auburn-dyed hair, a shimmering penumbra of the gray-green of her eyes illuminating the field.

That Fan did not see any of this is not so ironic, for all along her journey we’ve observed more of her than she’ll ever know. She moves on, she pushes forward, this her guileless calling, and we have to remind ourselves that it’s perhaps more laudable simply to keep heading out into the world than always tilting to leave one’s mark on it.

And surely this is how it was that she ended up leaving the villa that day with Dr. Upendra, who had noted to himself, with great surprise, that he had returned to Miss Cathy’s not strictly for her, but at least to close the loop of his piqued regard. For we know he had gone back to the medical center after that first visit to pick up his things—it was long past the end of his shift—but instead of heading home to his condo, he chose to chat and joke with some of the nurses and even began reviewing the past month’s charts, a chore that had to be done but rarely until the last possible moment, and then lingered in the staff lounge over a vending-machine coffee and pastry, something he would normally never do, given his dining standards. As he bit into the gelid, ungiving muffin, there was a certain notion about Fan that kept circling back to him; not that she was
fresh
or
virginal
—he had no such coiling for her that way—but rather the sense that he had come upon an arbitrary plant or small tree in a section of counties bush, the specimen mostly ordinary, except that it was in its own unassuming way superbly formed, despite surely not having had much room to be.

It was not exactly that Upendra yearned for such spaciousness, as Fan would soon discover. The issue of his state of being was not stunted or malformed. If anything, he was as highly evolved as any successful young Charter could be, the elements of his existence rigorously tuned, as were those of all his peers, with “best practices” in mind, those ever-optimizing metrics that we in B-Mor know as well as anybody, though ours are, of course, designed ultimately to smooth our unitary workings. Charters, on the contrary, are always striving to be exquisite microcosms, testing and honing and curating every texture and thread of their lives, from what they eat and watch and wear to whom they befriend and make love to, being lifelong and thus expert Connoisseurs of Me.

As the youngest chief of emergency medicine the Charter medical center had ever appointed, Vikram Upendra seemed to have already attained an enviably advanced status. He lived in a smartly outfitted two-bedroom apartment in a top condo development in the village. He spent liberally on hi-tech athletic clothes and specialized kitchenware and the globals he took for long weekend vacations with his girlfriend, Ludmilla, a crack management consultant who literally never stopped working and whom he practically only saw on late-night calls from her hotel in some far-flung locale, the padded headboard behind her ever different but enough the same, too, for him to feel comfortable if they felt like getting intimate.

The last time they were physically together for more than a few hours was in the private sleep suite they got upgraded to on the global back from Angkor Wat, this a full two months before. And although they agreed and understood that they were committed to not being serious, quite recently she had recommended that if they were to get married it should be in the near to mid term, if only, as most other young professionals did (he was thirty-two, she twenty-seven), to pair up and pool resources early in order to borrow enough for a starter villa and begin accumulating wealth for the countless expenses a typical Charter family must incur. Charter property and income taxes are curiously negligible but everything else, from refuse pickup to primary school tuition to the neat bundles of kale and rainbow chard, carries a dear price. He didn’t disagree with her assessment but both were too busy to pursue the issue, tabling it for their next holiday.

It was the fact that Ludmilla was never actually around that allowed Vik to even consider Fan’s startling request, which she made after the tumult of Four’s and Five’s admission and initial treatment at the medical center. The two of them had watched the girls get rolled through the doors of the intensive care ward, and Vik, now ready to go home, casually offered to give Fan a ride back to Miss Cathy’s or wherever else she wished—he’d noticed how the woman had literally looked the other way when Fan left the villa with him and the EMTs. Once they were in his coupe, he waited for her to speak and in the awkward pause he must have been unconsciously hoping for some nearby direction because when she said, May I stay with you today? he didn’t even flinch, clicking the car into gear and pulling away.

At his condo he showed her the full bath and the linen closet by the front door and how the loveseat in the study/second bedroom pulled out into a bed, and even though it was still daytime, he then simply retired to his bedroom for a nap; he had been up for two days. Fan sat in the living room, taking in the rest of the place, which looked to her just like the Charter homes in the evening programs, lined by burnished wooden and metallic and stone surfaces with hardly anything else in the way of decoration or objects. She heard the shower in his en suite bathroom start and cease and then a murmur of his quick conversation with someone and finally his snoring, which was wheezy but low and chesty.

She then washed her own face and hands and feet, pausing to examine herself in the mirror before pulling on the nightshirt one of the Girls had packed for her. Her belly looked fuller, but the rest of her had filled out ever so slightly, too, which made it seem less prominent. She certainly felt a thickening, as if she were lined inside with dense icing, and as oddly healthful and happy as this made her feel, she was also struck by how suddenly drained she could get for no reason at all. Her body now had its own aims, flipping on and off new switches. She quickly made up the loveseat bed. She wasn’t planning to sleep, but lulled by the steady saw of the young doctor’s snoring, she drifted off—she had not gotten much sleep herself—without any dreaming, at least until she was sure she was back at her row house in B-Mor with the scent of cooking from down in the kitchen funneling straight up to her room via the air shaft of the stairs.

When she awoke, she was drooling. It was now dark outside, the only light coming from beneath the study door. When she opened it, Upendra was at the prep space of the open kitchen, where he was now preparing some food. She came out and sat on one of the stools set before the counter cooktop. She could see he was making mapo tofu, something he no doubt figured a B-Mor would like. He had also steamed some jasmine rice and had a small pot of chicken broth on simmer.

Are you as hungry as I am?

Fan nodded.

He ladled broth into a coffee mug for her. It was rich and chickeny, gingery and salty, too, and although it was hot, she couldn’t help but take full sips of it, not caring that the soup was half scalding her tongue. She wasn’t scared that he might have laced it, either, for of course she was the one who had asked to be here. But it wasn’t simply that. She had seen how forceful he had been at the medical center in commanding the staff, who at first were confused and perhaps even reluctant about what to do with such keeperless patients. He had them care for the girls like they were any deserving Charters, glaring at one of the doctors who seemed to balk, ordering batteries of tests for Four, then hooking Five up to a breathing machine himself.

He’d even assured the sour-faced medical director that he would cover the costs, which at that moment was still a possibility, for Miss Cathy had merely deferred in having them transported, never specifically agreeing to anything, and of course had not accompanied them. The medical director said she would hold him responsible, and it impressed Fan how unstinting Vik was, how duly fixed—an appreciable tilting of his head, an upcurl of his bottom lip. Aside from his studious, painstaking manner, he was otherwise, from what she had witnessed, squarely decent and kind. He did not seem devious or sneaky or lecherous, signs of which she was by now extra-vigilant for, given all she had endured.