Breathing Water (27 page)

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Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #General Fiction

BOOK: Breathing Water
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P
ART
T
HREE
S
ilence falls in the empty spaces between before and now. There is no hush, no prelude; there is only the abrupt end to the words. But in this space is memory, and in this memory is unbearable pain.
If I do not speak, if I slip into this white space like a sheer cotton summer dress, I may be safe. Because where there are no words, there is no danger. In this summer dress, there is nothing but the empty where
before
resides as memory and
after
is not yet born.
It is quiet here, without words. I could almost sleep. I could almost lie down in this white forest, lay my head across a bed of white needles, and rest. But I know that in these trees are ghosts, clinging to the branches, stirring in the transparent leaves. And if you listen closely, the ghosts' voices are louder than horns, louder and more seductive than Sirens, beckoning sailors to shipwreck.
And so I look for a way out of these white trees, out of this terrible playground. I stumble across the white ground, tripping on invisible rocks and scraping my legs on invisible branches. I know from these ghosts that silence is deceptive. That it isn't safe at all.
But what you are forgetting when you ask for words is that breaking silence is like breaking glass.The consequences are sharp, draw blood, leave slivers of pain in your fingers. The words may not be what you wanted at all. They may lodge themselves like broken glass under the tender skin of bare feet on pavement. They may crack open old wounds, make an old bruise blue again.
Do not ask me for haunted, because the slivers of haunted are sharper and more exacting than swords.
August 1994
I
tried to make it not true. Inside the patchwork cave I made, I dreamed his words explaining everything undone. As the late summer sun descended outside my window, I dreamed his hand pressing mine, his voice saying,
No, no. I knew of her, of course, but no, no.
When night fell, I willed it untrue with remembered childhood prayers and wishing games. In the soft cavern of quilts, I pleaded like a child for it to go away. I considered every explanation, every possible coincidence, every discrepancy. I imagined them together and then separately, as I knew them, until I couldn't tell the difference between them anymore.
But at the library I had pulled out the yellowed newspapers from that summer, bound in a large leather book. I had found the article about her, tucked into the center of the newspaper where people might be less apt to find her.
Fresh Air Fund Child Drowns in Lake Gormlaith.
And as I stared at the words, smudged and precarious on the page, I realized that I hadn't known her at all.
Keisha Jackson.
Hadn't even known her last name.
When Devin called later that day I told him that I had errands to run, groceries to get, that I would be busy all day. I told him the weather would be blue again tomorrow, that the lake was warm, so I would not have to tell him the other things.
I drove back toward town, blinded by sun. I drove blindly around the lake reciting the shopping list like a mantra:
bread, milk, eggs, rice.
But when I got to Hudson's, I didn't go inside. Instead, I walked past the trucks and station wagons. Past three children with runny noses and dirty feet playing soldiers while their parents shopped inside. Then I walked through the tall grass into the woods where I first loved Billy Moffett.
The rusty trash was still there, in piles of knobs and doors and glass windows. I stepped carefully across the metallic hills, through the rivers of broken glass. The sun reflected in an oven door, and I felt my blood, hot and liquid inside. I yanked a metal pipe out from under the debris and started to swing. I smashed the cold metal against anything that was not already broken.
The sound of metal on metal made me grind my teeth together. It felt like chewing on tinfoil, the metallic pain of tin on silver fillings. But still I pounded the pipe into everything that was still whole. I hit until nothing was intact anymore.
And then I sat down in the grass and looked at my destruction. Sweat ran down my arms in small rivers. I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead, felt the cool sweat under my hair. I sat there until my heart had stopped pounding so hard, until my breaths were regular and steady again.
My hands were sore, my palms already beginning to blister.
Instead of returning to the camp, I drove all the way into Quimby. I drove across the covered bridge and up the winding hill to Quimby High. School was in session again already. I imagined all of the restless kids inside, peering out the windows at the sunshine. The smell of chalkboards and new pink erasers.
I parked near the cafeteria and walked to the cemetery fence. I opened the gate and wandered slowly, winding my way through the stones, to my grandfather. The dominoes had moved. The white dots dizzying in this intricate game of aligning and matching. Gussy had also been there recently. There were fresh flowers in the jelly jars; the water clear. His pipe still lay on the cool granite, the grassy tobacco loose inside the hollow wooden bowl. I ran my finger along its gentle spine.
No one else was in the cemetery. There wasn't even the familiar hum of the groundskeeper's lawn mower. I lay down on the ground on my back and stared at the sky. Clouds moved like white phantoms across the expanse of blue. Beyond this there were no birds, nothing but brightness. When I closed my eyes, I could still see the sun, like a black glowing ember behind my eyelids.
Behind my eyes, I saw Max waiting for me at the kitchen table. Perhaps drifting off to sleep and then waking, realizing that I was still gone. I watched him slam his empty glass on the table and look over his shoulder as if I might suddenly appear. I saw him stand up, one of his legs asleep, perhaps, numb and needles. I watched him walk through the dark living room turning on light after light, lighting every corner where I might be hiding. I saw him walk up the winding stairs, his pace quickening as he found each corner empty of me. I watched him panic then, his expression becoming uncertain. Scared, even, I watched him rub his hand across the top of his head, pressing down his hair, ruffled from sleep.
Outside he may have looked to the woods. He may have looked for the moon on my pale skin through the trees. He may have muttered my name, called me back home. He may have figured I'd only gone for a drive. That I would be back soon. That I only needed to ride with the windows rolled down, that I only needed a little night wind on my face.
Because then, on the back of my eyes, he walked calmly to the water and untied the boat from the tree stump. Breathing steadily, he crawled into the boat and pushed himself away from the shore. He dipped the oars into the water and slowly headed for the center of the lake.
He must have drifted off out there, because when he woke up he was disoriented, couldn't tell where he was in all that water. Remembering my absence, he must have shuddered a little and picked up the oars again to go back home.
There were no lights. No lights at all near the Foresters' camp. But if he could find the outline of the shore then he could find his way home. So he rowed toward the red dock, bobbing, making sounds like hands clapping. And when he was close enough to see the shadowy outline of the Foresters' camp and the edge of the water, he must have sighed a little, leaned back a little on the seat.
When he hit the piece of wood in the water, he worried first about scraping the bottom of the boat. He pushed hard against it to move away from it. But instead of resisting, the wood yielded and then disappeared. Dizzy and drunk still, he realized that it wasn't what he had thought. When she floated to the surface and he saw her skin, the same color as the dark water, he must have believed that this was a dream. That soon he would wake up, wrapped around me again, safe.
She was heavy, I imagined. Heavier than an eleven year old should be. The weight of her sleep, the weight of water. He touched her for the first time, and she felt cold. He thought that her dark skin would collect warmth like a dark shirt collects sunlight. Like pavement or charcoal. But she was cold, and heavy. It must have seemed that she had appeared in the lake like an apparition, a ghost child who had lost her way.
The story was easier than the truth.
He found her, found her, found her.
Floating like a piece of driftwood in the night water. He and she were alike then. Both lost in the lake, both drunk and dizzy, both already dead.
I opened my eyes and stared at the sun. I stared until my eyes fought and blinked. I rolled over and stared at the stone.
True,
etched in granite above my grandfather's name.
I pressed my ear to the ground. Listened for something, anything. The low aching wail of bagpipes. The sound of drums. The signal, the cue.
It began with blue. Blue sky, blue lake, and white paper sailboats. I whispered into the ground, whispered into waiting ears. I uttered the first blue. Of the small flowers Max picked for me and taped all around my dorm room door so that when I came out, I was surrounded by forget-me-nots. Of the ink he used to write my name, so he could conjure me when I was not with him. Of the walls in the small bathroom of our first apartment. He tried to paint me the sky, but it came out the color of turquoise stones.
It's okay. I love it. It reminds me of my mother's Navajo ring.
Of the bowl he filled with sliced peaches and sugar when I was sick and sad one summer afternoon. Of the broken cobalt glass in the sink. His hands working quickly to stop mine from bleeding.
I whispered the secrets of how this began. Against drums. I whispered until my words became their own rhythm, their own melody, until they became music instead of pain. Until each recollection became a small note, strung together on threads of blue.
Later, I returned to my cave. I returned to the bed where I hoped sleep would erase this. And that night, while Devin tapped at the door and later threw pebbles at my window, I dreamed them apart. I separated her face from his in my memory, tore the thread that bound them with trembling fingers. I dreamed him with pale eyes first, eyes that looked nothing like hers. And then I slowly dreamed the rest of his color away to make all of this impossible. In my mind he became transparent, water beneath the memory of my fingers.
But it
was
true. True. Because inside the box was Gormlaith at night, and above it, her moon.
 
“You told me that you were from D.C., that your family lived in D.C.,” I said as I stared at his dark shape behind the screen door. “You said that your father worked at the Smithsonian.”
“I am,” he said. “He did. But my family moved to New York about ten years ago. My father works at the Guggenheim. Are you okay?”
“No,” I said, my eyes hot and wet. “You should have told me. Why didn't you tell me?”
I pushed the screen door open and he stood there, his hands in his pockets, his eyebrows raised and waiting for an explanation. When he didn't speak, I felt a pounding in my throat and chest. When he closed his eyes, he disappeared into the backdrop of night. And I lunged into the space that was him, pounded my fists into his chest to bring him back. Like a child, I cried and pounded my fists.
When the strength in my arms was gone and I couldn't hit anymore, he carefully, tentatively, put his arms around me and pulled me into him. My eyes made his shirt wet, and I listened closely to the damp sounds of his fear.
We stood like this in the darkness for a long time. Finally, I looked up into his face, reached with my hands for his face and pleaded with my fingers for him to make this not true.
But his color, her color,
were
the same. It could not have been a coincidence here in this colorless place. I hated myself for trying to pretend that his color and hers had nothing to do with each other. That he was in any less danger just because he was larger, stronger. They were the same. My fingers pleaded but only found the same cavernous dimples, same insistent chin, same gently bowed lips.
Inside the box was Gormlaith that night. The night I broke my promise. A broken promise made of paper or glass. The night I went back when I promised myself I would never return, only to find that Max could do more damage when I was gone than when I was there. That night was captured in Devin's box. And above the water was her futile moon.
“You knew her,” he said. I felt the words with my fingers. “My sister.”
And I realized then that I loved him in the beginning and now because they
were
the same. I loved her first when I found her swimming at night, disappearing into the night. And then I loved him, for his darkness, for his resemblance to her, to night. I loved him
because
all of this was true.
We moved into the house like ghosts. He may have been carrying me. I could not feel the floor. Pressed into him, I couldn't feel anything except his heart beating like drums against my chest. There were no lights, nothing to guide our bodies through the rooms. The small fire I had built to keep the camp warm was just a pile of glowing embers in the fireplace.
He led me through the darkness to the porch. Moonlight shone blue through the glass. I did not feel my feet leave the floor, did not feel anything but the rhythm of the drums in his chest. The tentative rhythm of his fingers, of his hands, on my skin. In the cave he made over me with his body, I felt nothing but the beating of our blood in veins, taut and trembling. The gentle beating of blood like birds' wings. Like loons lifting out of Gormlaith and rising up into the night.
In this foreign country, this place of drums, I listened for the signal, the cue to begin. I waited for the rhythm to change, for the melody of the blue black of his skin, of her skin, to change. But the drums were insistent. I did not speak, did not sing, did not break.
The darkness enclosed us like hands. His body enclosed mine like night. His skin, her skin, covered me. I was invisible now. I had finally disappeared. I was only water in his hands.
Then, the silence of breathing. The silence of blood beating. The silence of this moon in the window, and that moon in her hair.
“I'm sorry,” he whispered. “I should have told you.”
I pressed my fingers to his lips to keep his words inside. I wanted nothing anymore except for the rhythm of his breath on my neck, like bird's wings or a child's flickering eyelashes.
We fell asleep this way, the harmony of our breaths new and strange. I awakened only when I heard the sound outside the kitchen door. The small motion of my waking woke Devin, and he sat up, startled by me and this unfamiliar place.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don't know,” I said. I pulled on my dress, which lay empty on the floor, and slipped my shoes on my bare feet.
Outside the sound was louder. It sounded like a cat crying, like one of Mrs. Olsen's cats screaming. My heart quickened as I walked around the side of the camp. It sounded horrible, wrong.

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