The First Time She Drowned (11 page)

I DASH OUT
of class the moment it is dismissed to avoid further impulsive acts that will cause me to look bat-shit crazy and stand in the cover of a shaded tree waiting for Zoey. A happy couple walks by, holding hands as if it’s the easiest thing in the world to be somebody who can be with somebody else. I light a cigarette just to appear occupied and at last Zoey arrives, looking fresh and young and collegiate in her bouncy ponytail and university T-shirt. She is so happy to see me, a big Labrador, like we’ve been apart for years instead of hours. It’s mystifying.

“How was class?” she says.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“You can’t afford to not pay attention! You’re already so far behind!”

“Screw it,” I say as I stamp out my half-finished cigarette. “It’s all such a bore.” I start walking fast, like I’m being chased, and she scrambles on her short legs to keep up. I want to tell her about Chris, but it’s too embarrassing.

“Hold up,” she says. She motions to a building at the top of the hill. “Can we stop over there first? I need to talk with one of my teachers real quick. Two seconds, I swear.”

I look up. It’s the Department of Psychology.

“This isn’t a setup, is it?” I smile to cover the sudden irrational anxiety, the memory of ropes on my wrists, the sound of the hospital’s blaring alarm.

She laughs. She has no idea.

We climb the hill and enter the building’s empty corridor. “You can wait there,” she says, pointing to an open room lined with chairs and a table with some magazines on it.

Above the door are the words “Counseling Center.”

“No!” I say, but she is already starting down the hall.

She turns, looks at me quizzically. “What’s the matter?”

I stand stupidly for a moment. “Nothing, never mind.”

“Two seconds, I promise,” she says, and then adds with a grin, “Watch out for the crazies.”

“Right. Right. The crazies.”

There is no one in the waiting room or at the reception desk. I take a seat on a pale yellow couch, pick up a campus quarterly and bury my face in it, flipping through pictures of students smiling so big, it looks like it hurts. I arch my neck and glance at my watch repeatedly in order to appear like someone who is waiting for a friend rather than one in need of “help.” My nerves have not settled since I left class, and every time I think of Chris saying that he likes my face, they reactivate like I’m being chased by a bear. When I revisit the part where I give him the finger, I want to disintegrate into the couch. I move between these two states—panic and self-hatred—until some woman pokes her head out of an adjoining door and looks at me. She has large round glasses, brown hair, pale skin. There is kindness in her face.

“Are you here to see me?” she says.

“No!” I say too loudly.

“Oops, my mistake.” She smiles and turns and disappears behind the door.

I go back to my magazine and my self-loathing. A few minutes later, she pokes her head out again.

“Still not here to see you,” I say with a smile.

She nods, steps farther out the door to get a better look at the room. She is clearly waiting for someone who is also clearly not here. She goes back inside.

I check my watch, wish Zoey would come back.

Five minutes later, the woman pokes her head out a third time and I have to climb over my obvious paranoia that Zoey really has set me up, that I’m the person this woman is looking for.

“I don’t think they’re coming,” I offer.

She nods in agreement.

“Rude,” I say.

She shrugs and smiles. “It can be hard for people to admit they need help.”

“What isn’t hard?” I say with a laugh.

She tilts her head and studies me with a soft look on her face. Then she gives me a wink and goes back into her office, and for one strange second, I feel like following her. Instead, I decide I can’t stand to wait another minute in this place, so I get up and start back to my dorm, leaving Zoey behind. I am almost at my dormitory when I see my mother standing out front with a man I do not know.

I STOP DEAD
in my tracks at the sight of my mother, my whole body braced like I’m caught in the crosshairs of a sniper’s gun. I don’t know why she is here, who this guy is, what I should do. The last time I saw her was on a rare hospital visit where she sat on the very edge of the couch like it was dirty and bragged about Matthew and glanced repeatedly from her watch to the exit. I consider turning around and running, but just at that moment she spots me.

“Cassie!” she calls out. Her smile is spontaneous and wide, her arm lifting toward the sun to wave at me as if I’m someone she is thrilled to see. I start cautiously toward her.

“What are you doing here?” I say when I reach her. Her hair, streaked with bright highlights, is pulled back, elegant and sleek.

“I told you I was coming!”

“You said you would call first.”

“Well, surprise!” she says, and glances up at the guy beside her with a nervous laugh. For a second I think she is actually going to hug me, and I tense up, not just because I don’t want it, but because my body feels instinctively confused by it. She places her arm lightly on my back instead. I move away.

“Pete, this is my lovely daughter, Cassie,” she says, and then turns and beams at me. I wonder when I became her lovely
daughter and why no one informed me of this sudden change.

Pete looks around my mother’s age, tall and tan with hair the color of tinsel. He shakes my hand quickly, does not quite meet my eyes.

“Pete and I were just reliving our glory days. We can hardly believe how little everything has changed.”

“You went to school here too?” I say for the sake of being polite.

“Pete is a very distinguished alumnus,” my mother jumps in. “Also a very large benefactor.” She looks up at him and beams. “He wrote your letter of recommendation. I believe you have him to thank for getting you in here.”

“Oh,” I say. “Thanks.”

I suppose I should feel grateful, but right now I just feel uncomfortable.

He nods distractedly and then turns to my mother. “I should let you two catch up.” To me, he adds, “It was nice to meet you, Cassie.”

“Tonight then?” my mother says.

He glances quickly at me and gives her a small nod. She watches him go and the light in her face dims as if she’s stepped into shade. Then she turns back to me, and the light returns at half-mast.

“Oh, it’s just so perfect seeing you here,” she says, taking me in. “It brings everything right back. I was thinking we could do a little shopping. Pete and I saw a bunch of cute shops on Main Street and I’m dying to check them out.”

I stare at her, trying to make sense of why she is acting so weirdly happy to see me. I’m sure it’s just another game she’s playing, but I can’t figure out the purpose of it.

“No, thanks,” I say. “I have another class to go to. Maybe if you’d called first like you said you would . . .”

She squints at me, a small frown, which passes quickly. “Don’t be silly. I’m paying for this school and I can take you out for the day if I want to.”

I’m desperate for new clothes, but I remind myself that I don’t want or need anything from her. “I can’t lose another day. I missed a bunch when I was sick.”

“Oh, you’re a smart girl,” she says. “You’ll catch up.” She puts her hand on my back and leads me toward the car. “Besides, I’ve got your father’s credit cards, so it’s going to be a really good day for you.”

I look down at my dated clothes again, remember the way I felt when that girl looked at me quickly and then away like I was nothing.

Screw it,
I think.
I’ll get some stuff and then bail.

• • •

As soon as we get into the car, my mother stops and looks at me again. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately,” she says. “Ever since Matthew up and went to school halfway across the country . . . and Gavin is growing up so quickly . . . you can’t imagine how empty the house feels. And now you’re here and it got me remembering my own time in college—the best years of my life—and I was thinking how nice it would be to relive those times through my daughter’s eyes. My mother was never interested in my experiences. I was the only girl in my sorority whose mother didn’t come to graduation. She was in Miami. Never even sent a card. She’s dying now, you know. I don’t know if I mentioned that
on the phone. Breast cancer. Stage four.”

“No,” I say. “You didn’t mention it.” I think of Leigh, wonder if it’s bad that I feel no sadness at all about this news.

“She’s going to die without ever having really known me,” she says, choked. She starts the engine and pulls out of the campus parking lot. Then she turns to me. “I don’t want that to be us. I want to try again. Do you think we could do that? I never wanted things to be this way, you know.”

I let the silence be my response. Then I turn on the radio. She turns it off.

“Cassie?”

“What do you want me to say? That I forgive you for having me locked up in a mental hospital?”

“I did what I—”

“That I can just forget about it and start over?” Even as the righteous anger in me speaks, I can hear the tightness of tears at the back of my throat. I hate that she can hear it too. I don’t want to give her that.

“I was trying to protect you,” she says. “To protect all of us.”

“Oh, bullshit!”

“What was I supposed to do? You were so angry—”

“I wasn’t angry! I was in pain! I wanted you to love me!”

“It was impossible to reach you.”

“You didn’t even try! You lied to have me locked up!”

“I know it must have been awful to feel like we abandoned you.”

My throat swells with the truth of this.

“I knew that once you got control over yourself, life would be so much better for you, for all of us. And we could start over.”

I stare out the window. Houses and trees whirl by as we pass them. Every time I think I have a sense of where I am, my mother takes another turn that disorients me, makes it harder to trace my way back, and I am left dependent on her sense of direction rather than my own. I think about what she said. It’s true that I had gotten a little out of control, that I had done desperate things in an attempt to get her love and attention. But that didn’t justify what she did. Did it?

“I feel like we’ve missed out on so much mother-daughter stuff,” she says. “And that’s very sad to me.”

I glance over and see tears forming in pools beneath her eyes. The expression on her face is so open and intimate that I can only meet her gaze for a moment before I have to look away.

“I always dreamed that you and I would have the relationship that I never got to have with my mother,” she says. “I don’t even know where it went wrong anymore. But so much time has passed now.”

I wrap my arms around myself, trying to keep everything locked in, trying to keep everything locked out. I fight to hold on to what I know, to what she did. I hear James in my head saying, “Don’t do it. Don’t trust her.” But her tears and her words are so confusing, proving that she loves me, which is, after all, all I’ve ever wanted from her.

“Anyway,” she says, wiping her eyes. “I can see that you don’t want to talk about it, so enough. Let’s just try to have a nice day, okay?”

“Fine,” I say, keeping my eye on the prize of new clothes.

“So . . . what did you think of Pete?”

I shrug, pick at my fingernails. “Whatever. He seemed okay.”

She watches my face. Her own is suddenly youthful and glowing, a strangely quick shift in her mood. A giddy sort of grin appears to be fighting to break free. I can almost see the college girl still in her.

“What?” I say.

Her eyes widen with delicious mischief. “Well, I finally took your advice.” She pauses for dramatic effect. “I’m having an affair.”

I stare at her. “I advised you to have an affair?”

“You don’t remember?” She looks wounded. “I asked you once, when you were much younger, if I deserved to be happy. You were adamant that I did.” Her smile is wide and prompting.

“Well, yeah, but I didn’t mean—”

“You know your father was never the one for me. Even on our wedding day it was all I could do to keep from running out of the church.”

My head feels thick and pressurized. I fumble in my purse for a cigarette, roll down the window and light up.

“I don’t know why I didn’t. Why I was so afraid to be alone. But you were so right—”

“But I never said—!”

“And now I’m so happy. Pete’s the only man I’ve ever really loved.”

And now I remember which boyfriend Pete was: the one she had kissed for so many hours that she wondered how it was possible to go that long without breathing.

“I knew he was still heavily involved with the school, so when that nurse mentioned you wanted to go to college, I thought,
Here is my chance to finally be happy.
So I picked up the phone and called him.”

“That’s why you got me in here? So you could start an affair?”

“No! Of course not!” she says. “How can you say that? I did it for you. This was just a bonus. Anyway, it turned out he was somewhat newly divorced. So I drove up last week and got a hotel room.”

I turn to her, take this in. “You were here last week?”

When I was so sick?

“Just for a few nights.” Her eyes are shining, her happiness so big that it takes over everything else. My own thoughts become slippery, impossible to hold. “I’m telling you, it was as if no time had passed. Can you believe it? We’re taking it slowly, of course. But I’m thinking eventually I can move here, maybe get an apartment nearby. Wouldn’t that be fun?” She stops and her eyes mist over. “You know, I owe it all to you, Cassie. I really don’t think I realized when you were growing up how much you really saw me.”

I stare at the dashboard, trying to keep my resolve. And yet it feels true, this sense of being attuned to my mother in a deeper way than my brothers were. To hear her say it feels like a seemingly hopeless battle has finally been won. She finally sees me, recognizes that I was the one who really knew her, that only I understood her despair with my father and her clawing sense of loss in having a mother who could not mother.

“It’s proof, isn’t it,” she says, “that second chances are possible?”

“I guess,” I say, surprised to find some small part of me wanting to believe—despite everything that has happened, despite memory, which even at this moment taps insistently, warningly at my shoulder—that there could be a second chance for us, too.