Breathing Water (14 page)

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Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #General Fiction

BOOK: Breathing Water
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I walked back to the car with Billy, leaving Tess standing stubbornly on the front lawn. He reached for the door handle, but I stopped him before he could open the door. Then I reached for his face with both of my hands, gently touching his sharp jaw, pulling him close to me, and kissing him the way we usually reserved for the woods. I could feel Tess's hard stare on my back. I squeezed my eyes shut.
When I left Billy and turned back toward the camp, Tess was gone. I watched Billy's car slow down and saw the faint silhouette of Tess on the road near the access area. I assumed she would get in and accept a ride home, but after just a few moments Billy drove away, and she was still walking.
My temptation was to let her walk home. She'd abandoned
me,
after all. But I knew that Tess was afraid of the dark. That she never went outside alone at night. So I started walking toward her, quickly, to catch up.
“Hey,” I said, breathing heavily by the time I reached her.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Slow down,” I said. Her legs were long, her strides nearly twice mine.
“I thought I'd do something nice for your birthday, you know,” she said. “But I guess you don't have time for me anymore.”
“Time for
you?
You're the one who took off to camp all summer.”
Tess stopped and turned around. I stopped too, relieved to finally catch my breath. She stared at me, and I jutted my chin out as defiantly as I could.
“You're just jealous,” I said.
“Oh, is that right?” she asked.
“Yeh. You went off to your damn poetry camp, and I got a boyfriend.”
“At least the people I spent the summer with were
intelligent.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I asked, kicking a giant rock, stubbing my toe. I winced softly.
“I mean, that Billy Moffett is one of those boys who'll wind up working at the Cumberland Farms. Pumping gas, if he can figure out how to read the numbers.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“I mean, think about it. He's seventeen and a sophomore. Even
he
could do that math.”
And then it felt like all the times with Billy in the woods, swinging sticks at ovens and washing machines. I hurled my body toward her, pushing her shoulders until she fell backward into the middle of the road.
I waited for her to get up, to come back at me with greater force. I braced myself for her. But instead, she blinked and looked down at her hands, studded with dirt and small stones. The shorts she was wearing were the ones she saved all of her babysitting money for. When I saw the tear in the soft fabric, my throat felt thick.
“I'm sorry.” I stumbled, reaching to help her up.
She didn't take my hand. She stood up on her own and said, “No problem.”
“I didn't mean—”
“It's okay,” she said. “Don't worry about it.”
We walked back to the camp quietly. I handed her a rusty spray can of Bactine when she went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. And later, when her breaths had finally slowed into the rhythms of sleep, I buried my face in her hair.
Now, the last night before she returned to Boston, I realized that I'd never gotten over that. Not that she left me to go to camp or the things she said about Billy. Not that she was able to sleep that night while I stayed awake. But that she wouldn't let me help. That rather than take my hand, she used her own bloody ones to raise herself up. I could never forgive her for her independence.
 
“I'm coming back, you know,” Tess said as she brushed her teeth the next morning. “And you could come to Boston.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise.”
“I don't believe you.” She scowled at me in the mirror over the sink.
“
I will,”
I said and started to braid her hair.
“I'm sorry about yesterday, Effie,” she said and wiped her mouth on one of Gussy's hand towels.
“That's okay,” I said. I looked at her reflection in the mirror. We had always looked similar, Tess and I. But not anymore. I looked tired.
She left later that day and I felt strangely happy, not because she was gone but because I had survived her visit. It wasn't so terrible, I thought. She'd come see me again.
 
When I was six years old, I didn't sleep for an entire year. Of course, I must have slept, but my memories of that year are of lying in my bed awake watching the glowing hands of my Cinderella clock spin slowly. Of watching headlights coming down the road until they flashed across my ceiling in strange shadows. I watched ice form on my windows that winter. I watched the moon acquiesce to the sun. But what I remember the most about my childhood bout with insomnia is the terrible loneliness of being awake in the middle of the night. It didn't matter that I could hear my parents as they tossed and turned on the other side of the wall. It didn't matter that Colette was sleeping beneath me on the bottom bunk and I could hear her breathing.
Tonight, I wandered from the comfort of the featherbed and quilts in the loft to the lumpy daybed on the porch to read myself to sleep, and I felt lonely. Perhaps that is why I could sleep in Seattle. My apartments were on busy streets where there was always someone awake. Even at four o'clock in the morning I could hear people stirring beneath my window. I could hear people walking purposefully through the rain. There were always passengers inside the glowing buses. There was always someone lonelier than me.
I love my grandfather's books. I believe that he is the sole reason why I wound up first in the university's libraries as a student and later in another library as an employee. But it wasn't for the same reason most people become librarians. It was never the order of the library that I loved. It was never about the categorizing and alphabetizing. It was never the Dewey decimal system. It has always been because of the books. The weight of a book in my hands, the gentle yielding of a new spine, the sound of the pages meeting callused fingers.
My grandfather's books took up almost the entire living room of the camp. At my grandparents' house in Quimby, they spilled from shelves onto floors. Gussy gave up trying to keep them contained years ago. She said she had come to respect their reckless behavior.
At the camp, the characters were not the only inhabitants of my grandfather's books. For more than twenty years, the books have housed a family of bookworms. Generations of them. When I first learned to read, my grandfather showed me the pencil-sized holes like tunnels through all those words.
I pulled down two books from the top shelf and ran my fingers across the dusty covers. Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry Finn. I imagined that the childhood friends I read about to keep me company might come alive again tonight and make me feel not quite so alone. I lit the oil lamp on Grampa's desk and curled up on the daybed. I had learned how to lose myself in other people's words. I had taught myself how to burrow tunnels and crawl into the pages.
Suddenly I heard someone walking down the road. The sound was faint but familiar. It pulled me from the storybook river back to my tired shoulders. The shades were still up, making me visible, I'm sure, to whomever was coming. I had almost forgotten about the gifts while Tess was here. But now, someone was coming toward the camp again, in the middle of the night. I reached over to the oil lamp and turned the brass key, extinguishing the flame and making the room completely dark. I set the book on the floor without marking my page.
The footsteps were coming closer. I held my breath. I strained to see out the window, but the clouds had obscured the faint sliver of moon, and I couldn't see anything. Soon, though, I could make out the outline of someone. A man, I thought. The shadow was too tall and thick to be a woman. He was illuminated by very tiny bright lights, four or five of them like pinpricks of sun swimming in front of him. I struggled to see what he was carrying, how he was managing to hold the stars.
When the sound of pebbles and gravel crushing disappeared, I felt a drop of sweat trickle down my side. He was on the lawn in front of the camp. I slithered off of the bed and onto the floor. It was him, the night visitor. I had finally caught him. The window was open. When he knelt down to leave the gift, I leaned against the unused door. We were so close now, separated only by the door, by darkness. I was afraid that he would hear me breathing. I was afraid I was only dreaming and that when I saw his face, it would belong to Max. I was afraid it wouldn't be who I hoped it would.
But the familiar scent I was waiting for found me, and I was intoxicated by its incense sweetness. He must have carried that smell in his skin, that sweet tobacco darkness, the smell of smoke. Of ash and fire.
 
Fireflies' luminescence is saved for the night. To communicate, to attract. I imagine they must gather light from the sun, from the moon, from a candle's flame, until they have enough to glow through the night. But when morning comes, they look like any other insect. Like any other winged creature: a gnat or a fly. I found the jar sitting on the doorstep, cheesecloth stretched carefully over the top and fastened tightly with a rubber band.
P
ART
T
WO
E
ach hand that has touched me has made me who I am. In your hands, I am something new entirely. I allow this. I can even forget for a moment that there was before. That there is cruelty. That I am capable of terrible negligence. I can forget. But while I am reborn in your palms, it is the remembrance of hands that haunts me.
If you insist that I recollect, that I collect again and again the gestures, I will. (The single curve of thumb, the flick of a wrist, hands cradling, or fist, fist, fist.) But you must remember that touches linger, and it often becomes difficult to tell them apart. I may mistake tenderness for malice, your fingers for knives. I may misunderstand the stroke of my cheek for dismissal, turn
grasp
into
gasping
for air, wonder what differentiates this hand from that hand.
I can only truly know my own hands and the power they have to hold or to break. I can only offer you this and ask that you trust. I may hold you for too long. I may crush you. I may seem gentle and then turn on you in a moment and leave you desperate and longing for something that I can't give you, or won't give you. Or shouldn't.
Do not ask me for haunted. Please, do not ask me to collect the gestures like stones or shells or bits of colored glass and try to make sense of this. Because fragments and slivers are not what you are looking for. I watch and listen to your hands and know that there is something beyond wanting here, something beyond need.
Breathe. And trust. And try. Because all that matters for now is your hands on my spine.
July 1994
I
searched the antique shop for a gift. I wandered through the cluttered rows of the converted barn, looking for something to leave on his doorstep. There was no order to these items: red wooden-handled egg beater, cigar box, rusty stamp dispenser, and rhinestone-studded eyeglasses. I let my fingers run across the kitsch and the dusty treasures, the trash and the discarded remnants of someone else's history.
“What are you looking for, honey?” Gussy asked. She was studying the underside of a Blue Willow plate.
“I'm not sure. I guess I'll know when I find it.”
“Do you still have the tea set?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said. It was probably in one of my boxes. I used to throw tea parties for my collection of stuffed dogs. Colette buried the creamer in the backyard once when I broke her Etch-a-Sketch. She denied it until the end and blamed it on Blink, the German shepherd with a missing eye.
I peered into a glass case at the dizzying patterns of costume jewels and silver cigarette cases. A Tiffany lamp rained pink and orange across a white velvet clutch.
“Would you like to start collecting these dishes?” she asked. “I'll help you get started if you like them.”
“Sure,” I said. I have never owned matching dishes. I have rarely owned more than two dishes at a time. Everyone in my family collects things. Colette has a collection of toe shoes that used to belong to famous ballerinas, my mother a collection of tea kettles. My father has a shelf in his office at school filled with Buddhas of all shapes and sizes. Gussy has her clocks, and Grampa his books.
Gussy smiled. “Well, let's get you started. I think I can talk 'em down on this one. It's a little scuffed.” As she gathered four plates and carried them to the woman at the register, I found an aisle I hadn't traveled down yet.
I walked around a rusty birdcage to find a box spilling over with
Life
magazines. I moved it carefully and pushed aside a yellowed wedding dress hanging from a shelf to find a small box. It was a shallow wooden box, and when I turned it over I found the butterflies. Three perfect butterflies, behind glass, fragile wings pierced gently by silver pushpins. The glass was smudged, and the parchment behind the butterflies yellowed and old.
Erynnis bap-tisiae. Aptura iris. Glaucopsyche malanops.
Wild Indigo. Dusky Wing. Black-Eyed Blue. I lifted it carefully from behind the stack of suitcases and held it to my chest, imagining I might somehow feel the beating of their wings. The last flutters of their short lives.
 
While Gussy and I ate lunch at Dunphy's Pub near the mountain, I kept touching the wooden box under the table. Gussy ordered homemade turkey pot pie. I order baked Brie with transparent slices of Granny Smith apples and perfect cubes of sourdough bread.
“My mother used to have a whole set of these dishes,” Gussy said, pulling one of the pretty plates from the bag. “We lost them in the fire.”
“How old were you then?” I asked.
“Five,” she said, examining the delicate blue bridge in the center of the plate.
I remembered her stories of the fire. I imagined her helplessly watching her mother as she hung precariously from the burning second-story window. I thought about her mother's blackened palms and the scars on Gussy's own legs. No one in her family died in the fire, but nothing was left. They lost everything they had ever owned or loved: china dishes, photographs, love letters. Even her mother's fingerprints were lost.
“What did you do after that?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean it must have been so terrible. How do you start over when you lose everything?”
“We didn't have a choice. Billie and I were so little. Daddy still had the farm to run. His neighbors helped him build our new house the very next week. You just go on, I suppose. That's all you can do. It certainly could have been worse,” she laughed. “I do miss those dishes though.”
I filled my mouth with warm Brie and bread.
“Your mother is worried about you,” Gussy said, spearing a steaming carrot with her fork. “I'm supposed to tell you that.”
“Tell her not to be,” I said.
“I already did.” Gussy smiled.
We sat eating silently. Celtic music floated to us from an unknown source.
The pub was new. Since the new ski resort was built, the town had metamorphosed. In an effort to make Quimby more appealing to the ski tourists, the entire downtown was renovated to look more like Burlington. A street blocked off to traffic, storefronts filled with expensive ski equipment, folk art galleries. The five and dime of my childhood was gone. Frisky's Stationers where I bought construction paper and pens had become a coffee shop that looked more like Seattle than Quimby, Vermont. This was the first time I had been to Dunphy's. I was used to the menu at the diner. Maggie and the other waitresses knew what to bring you before you sat down. Here, the waitresses were disinterested. Faces I didn't recognize behind perfect haircuts. Mostly daughters of the summer people, too old now to spend their days playing in the lake or woods.
“Do you mind going to the library with me before I bring you back to the camp?” she asked.
“Not at all. I'll pick up some books. I think I've read the ones at camp at least two times each.”
“Your Grampa's granddaughter,” she said.
“Do you ever dream about him?” I asked.
She looked at me and frowned, shaking her head. “No.”
“Really?”
“I wish I did.”
I thought about the ways Max invaded my dreams. He'd tap me on my shoulder when I wasn't expecting him. He'd surprise me by being gentle again. In my dreams he didn't hurt, and I even felt longing. Longing for something and I didn't know if it was for him or for something I never had.
“I miss him,” I said.
“I know.” She nodded.
Through the window, I could see the gondola rising up the mountain, the ski trails like fresh scars.
 
The Quimby Athenaeum smelled like Christmas trees. Pine floors warped with time, five generations of feet had traveled across them. It was the oldest building in Quimby, one of the few that remained untouched by developers. It was attached to the Quimby Museum by a marble-floored walkway. The displays never changed at the museum. The same moose and nearly naked Cree Indian have stood in the entrance since my third-grade field trips. The same spectrum of birds (ruby-throated, yellow-bellied, and bluebird) has remained perched on the shelves gathering dust. Grampa used to take me to the library on Sunday afternoons to gather as many books as I could hold, and then up the winding staircase where we would sit down in the planetarium theater seats and stare at the ceiling as a recorded voice boomed:
Andromeda. Cassiopeia. Orion.
Gussy returned her mysteries, the brightly colored paperbacks that looked more like candy than books, and I wandered downstairs to the children's room. Mr. Woods, the children's librarian, sat behind his desk like one of the museum displays next door. Preserved, intact, dusty.
“Well hello, Effie.” He smiled, standing to greet me. He was smaller than I was and gray like a mouse.
“Hi, Mr. Woods,” I said, offering him my hand.
His skin was cold, his hand small inside mine.
“You got your degree in English literature, I hear from your grandmother,” he said, nodding his head knowingly. Little white tufts of hair sprouted from his ears like cotton.
“Quite a while ago, actually,” I said. My life seemed frozen here since the last time I lived at the lake. “I've been working at a library in Seattle.”
“Wonderful.” He sighed.
I used to rely on Mr. Woods to help me choose my books. I could depend on him to fill my days, to find the books that would pull me inside until the date on the red stamps arrived. Now, we stood awkwardly next to the rolling cart of returned books for a minute. He was looking at me sadly. He had nothing to offer to fill my days anymore.
“It was nice seeing you,” I said.
“And you. Please stop by and visit us again.”
“I will.”
Gussy had run into a friend and was talking quietly in the reference room, so I wandered into the museum and found the stairs to the planetarium. There was a faded velvet rope stretched across the entrance. It didn't look as though anyone had been there for years. It smelled old. The air was thick and stale.
I peered into the darkness and then ducked quickly under the rope. I sat down in one of the uncomfortable seats and leaned my head back. In the darkness, I soon lost my sense of direction and depth, and waited. But there were no artificial stars, no sonorous voice to explain the cosmos. There was only darkness and the sound of mice stirring in the old walls.
It took Maggie and I almost an hour to blow up the plastic swimming pool that I had bought for Alice's birthday. Alice was afraid of the lake, but I thought that in this terrible heat she might be persuaded to cool off in the safety of a swimming pool.
My cheeks were sore from blowing. I put my finger over the hole and exhaled.
“It's not filling up,” I said, exasperated.
Maggie was spread out on a big green blanket on the grass in front of her house. Her bikini strap was undone, revealing a thin white line of skin on her back. The ice had melted in her glass, and her shoulders were turning pink.
“You just don't have good lungs. You need to smoke more,” she laughed. “Watch.” She retied her bikini and sat up, motioning for me to hand her the lifeless swimming pool. She blew and blew, and slowly the pool began to take shape. She covered the plug and gathered air. When the pool was solid and standing, she laughed. “What doesn't kill you will only make you stronger. Even cigarettes.”
“Where's your hose?” I asked.
“Around the side of the house,” she said.
There were toys all over the yard. Alice's rusty tricycle sat abandoned by the gas tank. Headless Barbies, plastic romper stompers. Maggie's Siamese, Angel, slithered out from underneath the porch and wound her tail around my legs as I crouched to find the hose in the overgrown grass. I pet her and she purred like a small motor, pleading for more with her persistent head. I struggled to uncoil the hose. It was knotted and bent. I finally got it untangled, and stood up.
“Alice!” I said loudly, startled.
She was standing next to the gas tank in her ballet costume and cowboy boots, holding Angel like a baby. Her face began to crumble.
“No, honey. It's okay. You just scared me. I didn't know you were there.” I reached for her, but she shrank away.
My stomach sank. “Can you help me?” I asked. “You probably know how to turn this on, don't you?”
She looked at me, waiting it seemed to make sure I could be trusted, and then let Angel wriggle free from her arms. She found the rusty spigot and turned the knob with both hands. The hose came to life, spitting water on the thick grass at our feet. As the water sprayed across her toes, she ran around the side of the house, nearly tripping on boots that were at least three sizes too big for her.
As I filled up the pool, Maggie tried to convince Alice to change out of her tutu into her bathing suit.
“Come on, Alice. Effie bought this swimming pool just for you. For your birthday. Don't you want to get your toes wet?
Alice shook her head.
“I'll get in there
with
you,” Maggie suggested and stepped into the pool. She looked silly standing in the tiny pool, and I stifled a laugh.
“I'll teach you how to do the doggie paddle,” she said. “The crawl?”
Alice stood stubbornly by the front door.
Maggie squatted down in the pool and then eased herself onto her stomach. Her legs were sticking out of the back. Her chin was resting on the edge of the pool. “The back stroke?” She flipped onto her back.

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