This Is the Story of You (15 page)

Once, a very long time ago, I was drowning.
I'd gone out for a swim. I was nine years old. It was dark, and I should have been sleeping, and Jasper Lee was just a toddler then who cried at night; there was no name for his disease. Mickey was four part-time jobs and exhausted and she had sung him to sleep, like she always sang him to sleep, and on this night, I remember, she fell asleep beside him, on his bed.

The ocean was right there. Down the stairs, through the Zone, over the lump of the dune. The tide was high. I'd been sitting on my deck chair listening to the lather foam, my skin sticky with sea-salty sweat. I only wanted a swim. It didn't seem so wrong. My bathing suit was dry on the deck rail, and the sea was right there, and I pulled my T-shirt and my underpants off, put my tank suit on. Mickey didn't hear me on the stairs going down, didn't hear my feet out in the Zone, over the Dune, on the night sand. I felt the first foam on my toes and waded deeper in.

A cool splash.

A knee dip.

Ocean to my thighs.

The moon was a few days after full. The stars were bright as planets. I lifted my chin to see the million pinpricks, and then I lay on my back to count them. It was so easy, lying there on the pulsing waves, easy as sleep in a cradle. My medium hair swimming from my medium face. My arms and legs wide, like a starfish.

I was too young to know the power of the tide. I was too in love with the magic of the stars to think about the shore, to gauge my place in the sea. I was too slow to realize that the depth beneath me had changed and the waves were riding higher and now there was something up against the flesh of my neck, something nipping at my hair, a tug. I stood to shake myself clean, but there was no sand beneath me. I was out too far, suspended like a puppet from its strings in the bob of the sea, and the waves were drawing me out, farther.

Farther.

Farther.

There was no one near to save me.

I flung myself toward the shore, but my body tugged under. I dove, I rose, I drifted. The more I tried, the worse it was—the water pulling me down, the lights along the beach growing tiny as the stars, the picket fence, the dune fading from view. I screamed, and I was sinking. I called out and my words were bubbles. I batted my arms and kicked my legs and my body pulled me down.

Waves breaking.

Waves over my head.

We die backward. That's what I learned that night. We die looking over the length of our own lives, floating through time. I saw Mickey singing to my brother in his bed. I saw Mickey stacking the plates in the sink. I saw Jasper Lee with his blue bucket on, king of the tidal parade. I saw the day I'd moved into the attic room—
It's yours now, sweetie, all this and the view, too
—and the birthday party with the sequined wings. I saw me at three and Deni at three, Deni with long, glossy hair, no aviators; I saw Eva blowing out candles. I heard Mickey saying,
You're a big girl now,
and I heard her crying, and the last thing I remember is feeling very sad, feeling sinking, feeling sad, and everything bobbing up and down and the stars losing their light and I wasn't afraid after that.

All gone.

All done.

Good night.

And then it was all dark and all right until my back was thrown hard against the sand, until my lungs exploded with salty air, until water poured like fire through my nose until I thought I heard, somewhere far off, a song. Time changed direction. Mickey's fists were pounding my lungs, her mouth was feeding mine air, I was sicker than I'd ever been.

“Don't you ever do that again,” she sobbed. “Never. Ever. Ever.”

I looked up, and Mickey's hair was like yarn. Her tears were like dewdrops. Far away I thought I heard the sound of someone leaving.

“Don't ever,” she repeated. “Again.”

I looked down the beach, in the direction of the footsteps and thought I saw, never knew if I saw, a shadow trailing off.

Mickey would never speak of it again. She blamed herself.

“Come back,” I whispered to Ms. Isabel. “Please.”

But there on the pine-needle ground our teacher did not move. There with the feathers woven into her hair and her coat buttoned so that she wouldn't grow cold and Sterling watching over her, batting the insects away, and a single dragonfly had come, and from somewhere I couldn't see, a bird had started to sing, and beside that song was the
whoosh whoosh
of the heron. The survivors of the sanctuary. Us.

Home of the brave, I thought. Home of the brave. I wrote Ms. Isabel like my brother would. I wrote her down, for Eva's eternal ever.

Stuff: The black bird with the red wings.

The blue heron in the green shade.

The swan that wanted to save you.

We wanted to save you,

Too.

Bird chirp, wing beats, owl lullabies,

Kites and nightjars, hummingbirds,

Also dragonflies.

Source: Every song that played the skies was

Something

You knew.

We knew,

Too.

We'll know

Always.

Lost: September 20, 2015

Fact: This is the story of you.

“The story of you,” I whispered.

I kissed her cheek.

I watched her sleep.

“Don't be afraid,” I said.

“We won't forget you,” I promised.

That night, on Old Carmen's rock, I could not sleep.
I closed my eyes and it was all right there. The lavender coat. The shattered limb. The broken shade. The dragonfly. The heron. Ms. Isabel, the story of her. Deni returned, but I don't know when. She returned with the people she had gathered—Miss SaraBeth, Mr. Samuel Brown, Darlene Daniels, Jeffrey Bean, one of them a lawyer and one of them a friend and one of them, Darlene, in a big straw hat and a quilt in her hands. It took all of us to shove the fallen limb away. All of us to lift Ms. Isabel's body into the sling of the quilt, and to carry her one final time through the hovering trees.

Respect. Preserve.

Like a dream.

Like a death.

I couldn't sleep.

The fire on the rock pressed its heat against my back. My clothes stunk of tears. Sterling's fur was in my pockets. The trench coat was tucked to my chin. I nested my head on the walrus pillow. I told Sterling to come, and she did. Put the motor of her heart alongside mine. Raised her tail.

“Come with me,” Deni had said, before she'd turned north for her house, for the brigade. “Come with me. There's room.”

I shook my head.

“Brigade up there,” she'd said, all those tears still in her eyes, her skin pale, her bones shaky, her arm and her heart in a sling. “My mom. There's room.”

“Eva needs you at North,” I'd said. “She needs me at Mid. We still have to find her.”

Because we hadn't, not yet. We'd found the story of Ms. Isabel, the story of Haven in the smashed-in pools and the twisted teeth of silverware and fishhooks. We'd found new beards on old men, and women whose hair frizzed like bad wigs, and people we knew wearing other people's coats, and Steffy Gomez with a sled behind her, pulling her perfect microwave like it was her one and only possession. We could not lose Ms. Isabel and we had. We could not be apart from the people we loved, but some of them were distant, some of them were far away in a hospital, where everything depended on the generators working, the water being clean, the doctors staying on call, the mother and the brother willing. Where everything had to be all right—it had to be. I couldn't go on if it was not, so I assumed what had to be.

We needed Deni at North and me where I was—both of us scanning the huddles, watching the tide, looking for a sign of our best friend, her big, good heart, her capacity for seeing. Tomorrow I'd get up and step down and walk into the sea and wash off everything that hurt me. I'd walk south toward the ruin of the cottage and climb the rope. I'd fortify, keep hunting.

Nobody else was allowed to die.

No more losses.

Period.

I'd be the hope. I'd be the heron. I'd do a goddamned something.

We had to find Eva.

The lights of Atlantic City were still dark. The stars were bright as planets. The moon was a little smaller than it had been. On Old Carmen's radio they were telling the news like they had it—calls coming in from battery radios, helicopters flying overhead, White House sorrows. There were numbers and percentages. There was desperation along the coast. The power was down, the water was mucked, fires were burning, buildings had fallen, people were trapped, and the governor would be a long time coming. The barges, medics, firemen, the National Guard, the bulldozers that could dig us out, the armada we needed—it was all far away, still. It was
en route
.
Patience, the voice on the radio said, and someone just beyond the big rock groaned, and nobody—no reporter, no eyewitness, no passing bird or cloud—had a word to say about Memorial.

Old Carmen turned the dial.

The voice went dead.

I fed Sterling. I ate some peanut butter. I heard that strange song on sticky keys. I lifted my head and squinted into the flickery dark. I could see the armchair that had been dragged across the sand and left by the piano. I could see the outline of a person sitting there, hands like light rags at the end of dark sleeves. The song sounded like boots walking through rain, like no song I'd ever heard. I stared at it hard, listened. I heard the heartbeat of a heron flapping in.

“Best thing for you would be some sleep,” I heard Old Carmen say.

I turned toward her, the fire between us, the pink bow on Eva's cactus getting singed. Old Carmen's knees were up, her fingers laced beneath her head. I could see the crab traps on the rock behind her, the metal cubes she'd tossed into the sea all afternoon, standing there with the tide up to her knees. She'd put the crabs into a cast-off iron pot and carry the pot up the rock steps to her fire. She'd boil the crabs in seawater, snap off one leg, test the taste, agree with it, until soon there were others working the crabs with her—finding pots and pot lids, dishes and forks, ways to feed whoever had come to live and sleep near the rock. She had listened to the news about our teacher. She had put her powerful arm around me. She had shaken her head and a tear had fallen down and she had said, “Take this rock. Do your grieving.”

Then she had climbed down the four stone stairs and called out to the others, as if Ms. Isabel's death had left her even more resolute to do more to save Haven at Mid.

You all have something,
Old Carmen had said,
that you can contribute.

We can't do this
, she'd said,
alone.

She talked until the people stopped what they were doing. Until they looked up and listened. Until they were persuaded. Until they stood. Boxes of Pop-Tarts. Jars of jam. Granola bars. Containers of raisins. Planks of wood found steaming in the sun. Washed-up tablecloths that had caught the breeze and dried. It was as if Old Carmen were the mayor, the superintendent, the chef. It was as if her rules were the only rules—her instructions on crab, her arrangements of things, her ideas on barter and trade—a crab for a box of salt, a crab for a bunch of bananas that had washed up, ripe, a crab for something somebody needed more than the person who had found it—except that Old Carmen was keeping nothing for herself.
Community pantry.
Woolgathering for the days we'd have ahead, and she had the fire, she had the radio, she had the ideas, and they said yes.

She'd left me on that rock. She'd left me, let me be, watched, I think, I know for sure now, as I curled into a fist and sobbed. We had to survive because others hadn't. We had to grieve the countless losses. She'd form the brigade at Mid, she'd do what she could, more than she was already doing. I heard her up on the rock, felt the stoking of her fire, heard her No Surrender flag rippling the breeze. I felt her touch my shoulder. I turned.

Best thing for you would be some sleep.
I almost asked her then why she had come for me, why she had shared her rock with me, why I was the one out of everyone who had a fire to sleep with, her rope to climb down, her ration of bottled water to share. We had ignored her for all those years. She'd been as invisible as a larval blenny fish. We had left her to the weather and to the sea and she hadn't been a Vacationeer and she hadn't seemed a regular Year-Rounder and some had said that maybe she was crazy and all of us had called her old, but she had to have been young once, she could not have been, forever, Old Carmen. She had come to me, she had waited for me, she had saved me, and I could not save Ms. Isabel. And I might have asked her right then:

Why me, Old Carmen? Why?

What is the logic of rescue?

But I had Ms. Isabel's dying on my mind. I had Eva missing and Mickey and Jasper Lee gone and somebody stealing from the cottage that had broken apart, and if I'd asked her, she might have told me, and I might not have been strong enough for the answers she had.

Sleep.
That's what she said. There was the song like the boots-inside-the-rain and the tapping of fingers on the Maytag. There was the sound of the fire on the rock. There was the crash of the waves against the sea of broken wings and the heartbeat of a heron.

If I slept, I dreamed. If I dreamed, my dream was Ms. Isabel, high up now, and flying, the bright beam of my doublewide pointed toward the sky, connecting dots from earth to star—a doublewide Haven-to-Heaven highway.