Breathing Water (33 page)

Read Breathing Water Online

Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #General Fiction

BOOK: Breathing Water
6.64Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Have you read all of T. Greenwood's novels?
Available in trade paperback and as e-books.
GRACE
Critically lauded “family damage specialist”
(Kirkus)
T. Greenwood explores one year in a family poised
to implode, and the imperfect love that may be its only salvation.
 
Every family photograph hides a story. Some are suffused with warmth and joy; others reflect the dull ache of disappointed dreams. For thirteen-year-old Trevor Kennedy, taking photos helps make sense of his fractured world. His father, Kurt, struggles to keep a business going while also caring for Trevor's aging grandfather, whose hoarding has reached dangerous levels. Trevor's mother, Elsbeth, all but ignores her son while doting on his five-year-old sister, Gracy, and pilfering useless drugstore items.
Trevor knows he can count on little Gracy's unconditional love and his art teacher's encouragement. None of that compensates for the bullying he has endured at school for as long as he can remember. But where Trevor once silently tolerated the jabs and name calling, now anger surges through him in ways he's powerless to control.
Only Crystal, a store clerk dealing with her own loss, sees the deep fissures in the Kennedy family—in the haunting photographs Trevor brings to be developed, and in the palpable distance between Elsbeth and her son.And as their lives become more intertwined, each will be pushed to the breaking point, with shattering, unforeseeable consequences.
NEARER THAN THE SKY
In this mesmerizing novel, T. Greenwood draws readers
into the fascinating and frightening world of Munchausen
syndrome by proxy—and into one woman's search for healing.
 
When Indie Brown was four years old, she was struck by lightning. In the oft-told version of the story, Indie's life was heroically saved by her mother. But Indie's own recollection of the event, while hazy, is very different.
Most of Indie's childhood memories are like this—tinged with vague, unsettling images and suspicions. Her mother, Judy, fussed over her pretty youngest daughter, Lily, as much as she ignored Indie. That neglect, coupled with the death of her beloved older brother, is the reason Indie now lives far away in rural Maine. It's why her relationship with Lily is filled with tension, and why she dreads the thought of flying back to Arizona. But she has no choice. Judy is gravely ill, and Lily, struggling with a challenge of her own, needs her help.
In Arizona, faced with Lily's hysteria and their mother's instability, Indie slowly begins to confront the truth about her half-remembered past and the legacy that still haunts her family. And as she revisits her childhood, with its nightmares and lost innocence, she finds she must reevaluate the choices of her adulthood—including her most precious relationships.
THIS GLITTERING WORLD
Acclaimed author T. Greenwood crafts a moving, lyrical
story of loss, atonement, and promises kept.
 
One November morning, Ben Bailey walks out of his Flagstaff, Arizona, home to retrieve the paper. Instead, he finds Ricky Begay, a young Navajo man, beaten and dying in the newly fallen snow.
Unable to forget the incident, especially once he meets Ricky's sister, Shadi, Ben begins to question everything, from his job as a part-time history professor to his fiancée, Sara. When Ben first met Sara, he was mesmerized by her optimism and easy confidence. These days, their relationship only reinforces a loneliness that stretches back to his fractured childhood.
Ben decides to discover the truth about Ricky's death, both for Shadi's sake and in hopes of filling in the cracks in his own life.Yet the answers leave him torn—between responsibility and happiness, between his once-certain future and the choices that could liberate him from a delicate web of lies he has spun.
UNDRESSING THE MOON
Dark and compassionate, graceful yet raw,
Undressing
the Moon
explores the seams between childhood and
adulthood, between love and loss....
 
At thirty, Piper Kincaid feels too young to be dying. Cancer has eaten away her strength; she'd be alone but for a childhood friend who's come home by chance.Yet with all the questions of her future before her, she's adrift in the past, remembering the fateful summer she turned fourteen and her life changed forever.
Her nervous father's job search seemed stalled for good as he hung around the house watching her mother's every move.What he and Piper had both dreaded at last came to pass: Her restless, artistic mother, who smelled of lilacs and showed Piper beauty, finally left.
With no one to rely on, Piper struggled to hold on to what was important. She had a brother who loved her and a teacher enthralled with her potential. But her mother's absence, her father's distance, and a volatile secret threatened her delicate balance.
Now Piper is once again left with the jagged pieces of a shattered life. If she is ever going to put herself back together, she'll have to begin with the summer that broke them all....
THE HUNGRY SEASON
It's been five years since the Mason family vacationed at the lakeside cottage in northeastern Vermont, close to where prizewinning novelist Samuel Mason grew up.The summers that Sam, his wife, Mena, and their twins, Franny and Finn, spent at Lake Gormlaith were noisy, chaotic, and nearly perfect. But since Franny's death, the Masons have been flailing, one step away from falling apart. Lake Gormlaith is Sam's last, best hope of rescuing his son from a destructive path and salvaging what's left of his family.
As Sam struggles with grief, writer's block, and a looming deadline, Mena tries to repair the marital bond she once thought was unbreakable. But even in this secluded place, the unexpected—in the form of an overzealous fan, a surprising friendship, and a second chance—can change everything.
From the acclaimed author of
Two Rivers
comes a compelling and beautifully told story of hope, family and, above all, hunger—for food, sex, love, and success—and for a way back to wholeness when a part of oneself has been lost forever.
TWO RIVERS
Two Rivers
is a powerful, haunting tale of enduring love,
destructive secrets, and opportunities that arrive in disguise....
 
In Two Rivers,Vermont, Harper Montgomery is living a life overshadowed by grief and guilt. Since the death of his wife, Betsy, twelve years earlier, Harper has narrowed his world to working at the local railroad and raising his daughter, Shelly, the best way he knows how. Still racked with sorrow over the loss of his life-long love and plagued by his role in a brutal, long-ago crime, he wants only to make amends for his past mistakes.
Then one fall day, a train derails in Two Rivers, and amid the wreckage Harper finds an unexpected chance at atonement. One of the survivors, a pregnant fifteen-year-old girl with mismatched eyes and skin the color of blackberries, needs a place to stay. Though filled with misgivings, Harper offers to take Maggie in. But it isn't long before he begins to suspect that Maggie's appearance in Two Rivers is not the simple case of happenstance it first appeared to be.
 
 
 
Keep reading for a special preview of
T. Greenwood's next book,
starring Gussy's sister Billie,
available October 2013. . . .
T
his is what I know: Memory is the same as water. It permeates and saturates. Quenches and satiates. It can hold you up or pull you under; render you weightless or drown you. It is tangible, but elusive. My memories of Eva are like this: the watery dreams of a past I can no easier grasp than a fistful of the ocean. Some days, they buoy me. Other days, they threaten me with their dangerous draw. Memory.Water. Our bodies are made of it; it is what we are. I can no longer separate myself from my recollections. On the best days, on the worst days, I believe I have dissolved into them.
It was the ocean's tidal pull that brought me here to this little beach town forty years ago, and later to this battered cottage perched at the edge of the cliffs, overlooking the sea. It is what keeps me here as well. And while I may not be able to escape my memories, I have escaped the seasons here; this is what I think as summer turns seamlessly into fall, the only sign of this shift being the disappearance of the tourists. During the summer, the other rental cottages are full of families and couples, the tiny porches littered with surfboards and beach toys, the railings draped with wet swimsuits and brightly colored beach towels. Sometimes a child will line up shells along the balustrade, a parade of treasures. At summer's end, the kindest mothers will pack these up as they pack up the rest of their things, slipping them into little plastic bags to be stowed inside a suitcase. The other mothers toss them back toward the sand when the child is busy, hoping they will forget the care with which they were chosen. I understand both inclinations: to hold on and to let go.
But now, in September, the flip-flops and buckets and shells are gone and the children have returned home. The inevitability of fall, the certainty of autumn is like any other textbook fact as they sit wearily in their September classrooms. I imagine they must keep this place, this magical place, somewhere in their memory, pulling out the recollections and examining them, marveling at them, like the shimmery inside of a shell: a place without seasons, as faraway as the moon.Their mothers have returned to their kitchens or offices, their fathers to their lonely commutes. Only I remain, in my little cottage by the shore, as summer slips away soundlessly, and, without fanfare, autumn steps in.
At night, in the fall when the tourists are gone, there are no distractions. No blue glow of a television set in a window, no muffled sound of an argument or a child's cry.There are no slamming doors or moody teenagers sneaking out to a bonfire on the sand below. There is no laughter, no scratchy radio music, no soft cadence of couples making love. There is only the sound of the lapping waves, the lullaby of water. It is quiet here without them.
I don't have a television or a landline. When someone wants to reach me, they call the manager's office, and I return the call on my cell phone whose number only my daughters and sister have. My eldest, Francesca, calls once a week on Sundays, dutifully reporting on her life in Boston, detailing the comings and goings of my grandchildren. Mouse is less predictable, more like me, calling only when the spirit moves her. She sends beautiful letters and postcards and photographs, though, that offer me glimpses into her gypsy life. The wall behind my bed tracks her travels in a cluttered collage. Only my sister, Gussy, calls every day. Since her husband died, she relies on me more than she used to. Growing old is lonely.We need each other.
I expect her call each night like I expect the sunset. “Hi, Gus,” I say. “What's the news?” Though there is never any news, not real news, anyway: a broken pipe, a sale on prime rib, a silly conversation in line at the bank. More often than not she calls to read me one of the increasingly frequent obituaries of someone we used to know.
Tonight, I slip into bed for our conversation, watching the sun melt into the horizon from my window. When the tourists have left, I no longer bother to close the shades, modesty disappearing with them.
“I got a letter today,” she says. “The strangest thing.”
“Who from?”
She is quiet on the other end of the line. I picture her, nestled in Frank's old recliner, cradling the phone between her chin and her shoulder as she knits something for Zu-Zu or Plum.
“Gus?”
“The letter was from John Wilson. Johnny Wilson.”
I feel a hollowing out in my chest, and worry for just a fraction of a second that this is it. I am waiting now, for that failure of my body that will, finally, remove me from this world. But then my heart, this old reliable heart, thumps again, a gong, and my whole body reverberates. “Why?” I ask.
“He's looking for
you
.”
I take a deep breath and study the sky outside my window, looking for an answer in the confusion of colors, in the spill of orange and blue.
“He just got out of rehab or some such thing. Doesn't surprise me at all, frankly. Probably part of his twelve steps, making amends all that.”
It does not surprise me to hear that he's had these sorts of problems, though why he would want to talk to
me
is a mystery. Johnny Wilson would have nothing to apologize to me for; if anything, it should be the other way around.
“He says he wants to talk to you about his mother. But he wants to see you in person. He wants to know if I can help him find you.”
My eyes sting. Suddenly the sunset is too bright. I stand and pull the heavy blinds across the windows and sit down on the bed again. Breathless.
“
Can
I help him?” she asks. “Find you?”
“Where is he?”
“He's still in Boston. But he said he could come up to Vermont if you might be up for a visit. He must not know you're in California.”
Of course he wouldn't know this. I haven't spoken to Johnny Wilson in decades.
“You
could
come for a visit, you know,” she says. “Make a trip of it. Francesca could come up too, meet us at the lake?”
Lake Gormlaith. I haven't been back to the lake since 1964. Johnny was still a little boy then. A child. My heart (that swollen, weakening thing in my chest) aches for him: both the little boy he was and whatever damaged man he has now become.
“I don't know,” I said. “I haven't flown in so long. Doesn't security make you take your clothes off or some such nonsense now?”
Gussy laughs. “Shoes,” she says. “You only have to take off your
shoes
. Come home, come see me. Let Johnny say what he needs to say. And you can see Effie and the girls.”
Effie, my grand-niece, and her family live year round now in the cabin at the lake. I haven't met either of the children, and the last time I saw Effie she was still a teenager. I haven't even seen Gussy for nearly two years now, and she was the last one to visit. I know it's my turn. Still, I am happy here at the edge of the world, where none of the rules, even those regarding the changing of seasons, apply.Why would I leave?
“Please?” Gussy says.
“What did the letter say exactly?” I ask, wanting to hear her name, hoping she will say it.
“It just says he needs to talk to you about Eva.” And there it is, her name, the two syllables as familiar as my own heartbeat. “He says there are some things you should know.”
“What do you suppose that means?” I ask.
“I don't know, Billie. Just come home and find out.”
I look around my tiny cottage, peer once again at that predictable sky. In Vermont, the leaves would be igniting in their autumnal fire, the whole landscape a pyre. There is no such thing as escaping the seasons in New England.
“Let me think about it,” I say.“I'm not too wild about getting naked for just anybody who flashes a badge.”
Gussy laughs again. “Think on it. I'll call you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” I say, committing to nothing.
Surprisingly, I am able to fall asleep. Sleep comes easy to me now, my body practicing for the eternal slumber, I suppose. Even memory is powerless to an old woman's need for rest.
In the morning, I wake to the blinding reminder of daylight through the pale curtains in my bedroom. Outside, the waves quietly pat the shore as though they are only reassuring the sand. Each day begins like this; only the keening of the foghorn tells me that today it is autumn, that the sky is impenetrable.
My whole body aches, though it has for so long now the pain no longer registers as unusual or worrisome. I rise, anyway—what else can one do?—slip out of bed and into my bathing suit, which I keep hanging on a hook on the back of my door. I sleep in the nude, which makes this transition easier: no cumbersome nightgown to fuss with, no pajamas to unbutton or from which to undress. I realized long ago that I'd only ever worn nightclothes as a barrier anyway: a fortress of flannel or silk.
The bathing suit I wear these days is bright green. It complements my eyes, or it would if the cataracts hadn't rendered them this icy blue. My hair isn't the same color anymore, either. That's what I mean about memory being a part of your body. I wake up every single morning expecting to see the red-haired woman I used to be in the mirror, but instead I see an old lady with milky eyes and an untamed white mane. I have, on the darkest days, demanded to know who she is.
Sometimes I try to imagine what Eva would look like now, but she remains fixed in my memory the way she looked back in the summer of 1960 when I first met her. Only I have aged. Only I have watched my body slowly abandon me. I am alone in this slow decay. Nevertheless I do imagine her here, even though she appears as a ghost, and I wonder what her morning would be like. Would she also slip into her bathing suit at the break of dawn? Would she walk with me from the bungalow down the stone steps to the beach? Would she peer through the thick marine layer that hangs like a white stole on the sea's shoulders and then wink at me before tossing her hair back and running headlong into the water, disappearing into the ocean, leaving me to wonder if she would resurface again? Would she leave me at the edge, fearful—an old woman with cataracts and high blood pressure—looking for her through the gauzy morning? Would she emerge from the water, riding a wave into shore, coming home again, or would she simply disappear?
I'm never truly alone on the beach, even in autumn, even this early in the morning.The surfers come in their wet suits, carrying their boards like giant satchels under their arms.They paddle out to wait for the waves, bobbing and dipping like shiny black seals. The bums who sleep under the pier emerge, scavenging for food, for cigarette butts left in the sand. Middle-aged woman sometimes rise early and walk up and down the beach, purposeful in their velour track suits, still believing that the inevitable might be delayed, if not halted entirely. They rarely acknowledge me; to those women, I am a reminder of the one thing they cannot change, the reminder of a future they aren't ready to imagine. But if they were to look, to really look, this is what they would see: an elderly woman in a green bathing suit walking slowly toward the water's edge. She is old and she is thin, but there are shadows of an athlete in her strong shoulders and legs underneath that ancient skin. She is a swimmer, peering out at the water as though she might be looking for someone. But after only a moment, she disappears into the cold, her arms remembering. Her whole body remembering, her whole body
memory,
as she swims toward whatever it is, whoever it is she sees in the distance. If they were to listen, to really listen, they would hear the waves crashing on the shore behind her, beating like a pulse:
Eva. Eva.

Other books

Distorted Hope by Marissa Honeycutt
We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance by David Howarth, Stephen E. Ambrose
Judicial Whispers by Caro Fraser
Entangled by Ginger Voight
The Chateau d'Argol by Julien Gracq
A Place Called Freedom by Ken Follett
Aftermath by Duncan, Jenna-Lynne
Love Your Entity by Cat Devon