The Isle of Youth: Stories (22 page)

Authors: Laura van den Berg

BOOK: The Isle of Youth: Stories

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My lip was bleeding. I was sweating underneath my pajamas and robe. The back of my head ached. I pressed my face into the grass, not looking up when I heard footsteps or voices. I imagined A and B trying to explain this to their boss: she was there and then she wasn’t.

“There is something very wrong with you,” A said.

I rolled onto my back. Blood had pooled below my bottom lip. I swallowed a mouthful of liquid and grit. The sky had that smudged look again. If my husband knew I’d gone over a balcony, would he come for me then?

B kneeled next to me. He pressed two fingers against my throat.

“The good news is that you’re going to live,” he said.

“What’s the bad news?”

They were going to have to take me back upstairs. I nodded.

“We have to keep you safe,” B said. “No one will be able to make you do anything if your bones are already broken.”

I nodded a second time.

“Why did you do this?” he asked.

“I had to do something.”

A kneeled on my other side. He rested his palm on my forehead. “What hurts?”

* * *

In the apartment, A and B helped me down the hall and into Sylvia’s bed. They put a pillow underneath my left ankle, which was already swelling. They cleaned the dirt and grass from my face and hands with a warm washcloth. Using a Q-tip, A swabbed blood from my bottom lip, then peered into my mouth.

“It’s just a cut.” He held out a coffee mug and I spat blood into the white bottom. “You don’t need any stitches.”

“I feel like I’ve been shot,” I said.

“No, you don’t.” B picked leaves from my hair.

They bandaged my ankle and brought me two pills from Sylvia’s supply and a glass of water. I took the pills and gulped the water like it was the last thing I would ever drink. They turned out the lights. They told me that tomorrow was a new day.

The door opened. I knew they were about to leave. I asked them to wait.

“Why did you drop out of graduate school?” I asked. “Why didn’t you become mathematicians?”

“What do you care?” they said.

“I want to know something about you.”

The room was dark. I blinked, trying to find their silhouettes. I listened for their voices.

“It’s not a very interesting story,” A said before closing the door.

* * *

I woke in the middle of the night with a violent energy inside me. I had to get out of my sister’s room. I limped down the hall and locked myself in the bathroom. I padded the tub with towels and eased myself in. I pulled the shower curtain closed. I uncapped my sister’s gels and shampoos and sniffed the liquids. Everything smelled like a bad imitation of something else. My elbow was bruised. My cut lip throbbed. The back of my head still hurt. I wondered if my brain was bleeding. I heard A and B snoring in the living room, where they’d taken up residence for the night.

I fell asleep in the bathtub. In the morning, I woke to the sound of A and B shouting. Finding my room empty, they thought I had slipped out of the apartment. I got up, using the tile walls for support, and splashed water on my face. There was a greenish bruise on my cheek and dried blood around my mouth. I imagined the previous day repeating itself over and over and that sick feeling returned. When I opened the door and hobbled into the living room, the men stopped yelling and stared.

“I was in the bathroom,” I said.

“The bathroom?” A said. “What were you doing in there?”

“Who cares,” B said. “She was just in the bathroom. We didn’t lose her after all.”

They looked at each other and laughed until they were red-faced and doubled over. I sat on the floor and leaned against the wall. I felt a strange pressure in my cheekbones.

“How are you feeling?” they finally asked.

“My sister is coming home tonight,” I said.

“I’ll put on some coffee,” A said. “Looks like you need it.”

I told them I wanted to make a call. They glanced at each other, then handed me the phone. I lay on my side and dialed my husband’s number. I thought of the stories I’d heard about adversity bringing couples back together. When the machine came on, I repeated his name until the line went dead.

* * *

After the sun had been swallowed by a phosphorescent night, I waited on the balcony for Sylvia, a vodka sweating in my hand. My ankle was still wrapped and I couldn’t put weight on it, so I stood with my foot slightly raised, like a flamingo. A and B stood with me, of course, complaining about the heat and the mosquitoes and all the trouble I had caused them.

“Who are we waiting for again?” A asked.

“My sister,” I said. “The person you’re really supposed to be following.”

B slapped at a bug on his forearm. “Lady, has anyone ever told you that you have a reality perception problem?”

I watched the street. A car parked in the shadows resembled the Lincoln, but it was too dark to know for sure. I thought of the last fight I had with my husband. It started in the kitchen and progressed to the bedroom. In a fury, I’d climbed out the bedroom window and onto the roof. My husband stuck his head outside and called to me. I ignored him. A little while later, he walked down the driveway and got in his car. He left and didn’t return until morning. I stayed on the rooftop for hours, watching the black sky. Once, a plane passed over me. I wanted badly to be on one and a few weeks later I was, bound for Miami. And even with all that had happened, with everything that had gone wrong, there was still a part of me saying,
Please don’t send me back to where I came from.

Before my sister appeared, a little black briefcase in hand, there were several false alarms—women who had the same slim silhouette, who walked with the same kind of swagger. It was startling to see how many people I mistook for my sister, stopping just short of leaning over the balcony and shouting her name; it was even more startling to realize that to mistake someone for Sylvia was to mistake them for myself, that there were so many women who, in the dark, could pass for me. And so when the real Sylvia got out of a taxi and moved like a shadow across the street, I didn’t call to her. I didn’t wave. Instead I remembered watching her run down that beach in Carmel, looking radiant and weightless, filling me with terror and awe.

Sylvia stood on the sidewalk, beneath a streetlamp. The light fell on her in a perfect yellow dome. She looked like she was posing for a portrait. She bowed her head. Her body heaved with a mammoth sigh. “There she is,” I whispered to A and B just before she disappeared inside.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you:

To the people who first supported these stories: Jill Myers at
American Short Fiction
; Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies at
Glimmer Train
; Pei
-
Ling Lue and Maribeth Batcha at
One Teen Story
; Cara Blue Adams at
Southern Review
; Bradford Morrow at
Conjunctions
; Dewitt Henry and Ladette Randolph at
Ploughshares
; the Julia Peterkin Award committee; the Writer’s Center.

To the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and the Munster Literature Centre, for helping me keep the faith.

To Spiro Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, for the great gift of time.

To the communities at Gettysburg College, especially Fred Leebron and Kathryn Rhett; Gilman School, especially Patrick Hastings and John Rowell; George Washington University, especially Tom Mallon; and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, especially Michael Collier and Noreen Cargill.

To Baltimore, for being the place where so much of this work got done. To the Baltimore lit gang, the best any city could hope for.

To Joe Hall and Cheryl Quimba, for lending me 3036 Guilford, where this book was finished.

To Don Lee, Elliott Holt, Mike Scalise, Nina McConigley
,
Jessica Anthony, Jane Delury, Shannon Derby, and Meghan Kenny, for their faith and friendship. To Karen Russell, for her luminous e-mails and support.

To those who read early versions of these stories and helped me find my way out of the forest of the first draft: Josh Weil, James Scott, Matthew Salesses.

To my agent, Katherine Fausset, for being brilliant and loyal and fearless, always with the utmost grace. Thanks as well to Stuart Waterman and everyone else at Curtis Brown.

To my editor, the genius Emily Bell, for taking a chance on me and for shepherding these stories into their final form. To everyone at FSG who helped bring this book into existence. To Nayon Cho. To Gregory Wazowicz. To anyone who did anything to help. I will be in your debt always.

To my family, immediate and extended. To my parents, Egerton and Caroline. To CJ. Every book is for you.

ALSO BY LAURA VAN DEN BERG

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

First edition, 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Van den Berg, Laura.

[Short stories. Selections]

The Isle of Youth: stories / Laura Van den Berg. — First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-374-17723-2 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-0-374-71061-3 (ebook)