The First Time She Drowned (12 page)

IT’S THE THOUGHT
of second chances that takes me back in time to an afternoon several months before my mother was due with Gavin. I had just come home from school when she called to me from the room where she had once done her art. The last time I had been in this room, the last time I had been alone with her at all was the day she told me she didn’t love my father. Now all of her beloved brushes and paints had been tearfully stored away in the attic, replaced with a crib and a changing table and a rug with trains on it. I went over to where she sat rocking in a creaky chair. There she surprised me by putting my hand on her stomach so I could feel the baby move, its feet tapping at her insides like a goldfish bumping its nose against the glass of its bowl.

“Maybe things will change once the baby’s born,” she said.

I looked up. I had forgotten how blue her eyes were.

“I think they will. Don’t you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, because I saw too much, because I was never that good at pretending.

Her eyes widened with surprise and then something else. She pushed my hand off her belly. “Maybe you don’t want things to be different.”

“What?”

“Is that it?”

“No!”

“I don’t know,” she said, her face darkening as her thoughts gathered momentum. “Maybe you don’t really want me to be happy. Maybe all that crap about me deserving happiness was just a way to turn me against your father. That way you can have him all to yourself.”

“What are you talking about?” My mind twisted to understand what I’d said to make her turn on me so quickly. “I don’t even like Dad!” This wasn’t fair or even true, but in the moment it felt true, like the mere suggestion that I would want him all to myself filled me with disgust toward him. I wanted her to see how wrong she was, to know that my allegiance was with her.

“I suppose it’s normal for a daughter to want to replace her mother in some way. I’m just kind of surprised I didn’t see it before. To think you actually had me considering leaving him.”

I stared at her, too confused and stunned to speak.

She stood up and went downstairs.

It was not long after that, not long after the baby was born and nothing changed at all, that my mother stopped looking at me altogether. She was busy taking care of Gavin, of course, and Matthew as always captured much of her attention, but whatever she had left she withheld from me, the way one walks past the reaching hand of the homeless as if there isn’t a human being sitting there. I had made the mistake of telling the truth, and the truth was the enemy, the truth was the one thing my mother could not bear to see.

• • •

Something happened to me after that, right after Gavin was
born and my mother stopped looking at me. It was more than the sense of disappearing I had become accustomed to feeling. It was when I discovered that there are two kinds of death. There is ceasing to exist, usually accompanied by a funeral and loved ones in mourning. And then there is emotional death born out of necessity and measured solely by the absence of grief it causes: the turning off the lights of oneself in order to shut down the feelings of being alive. Eventually I just checked out of the world altogether, leaving behind only my body, like a snail abandoning its shell. Sometimes I would catch myself in the mirror, surprised to see someone staring back at me, a stranger whose face I struggled to connect as my own, whose body was visible and intact despite the feeling that I moved through the world as a ghost.

Nobody noticed that I was gone. Everybody went on, in fact, as if I had never been there at all. Life continued, and I watched it like a television show through the window of a stranger’s house. I was outside. I watched.

Most people are afraid of death. They shield their eyes, pretend it’s not there. But sometimes, unwittingly, they bump up against it. And when they do, they get angry.

Like my mother, for instance. Most of the time she looked over my head or turned her back, but sometimes when I caught her off guard, she looked startled to see me there, as anyone would upon seeing a ghost.

In these moments she would rear back at the sight of me and
then grow taut with sudden fury. “Goddamn it,” she’d say. “Stop skulking around here like a zombie. You’re making me feel like a bad mother.”

Nobody likes to be haunted.

As for Matthew, he was in middle school by then and so might not have noticed me even if I had been fully present. Most days he would saunter into the den after a day out with his friends and, in typical older brother fashion, change the channel right in the middle of my favorite TV shows. It was nothing new, really. The only difference was that I didn’t bother to protest anymore. I just sat there and let him do it and didn’t say a word about it because I wasn’t really in the room anyway. For the most part, he seemed happy with this arrangement, but every once in a while he would take sudden notice of me sitting there so quiet and shut down, and he would lunge forward and wrestle with me, something we used to do when we were younger. Only now when he threw me into a headlock, or pretended to pile drive me into the carpet, or maneuvered me onto the floor and sat on my back, there was an added element to it, a too-hard twist of the arm, a too-deep knee into my ribs. It was anger disguised as fun, torture devised to get a reaction, and maybe that’s all he really wanted: some kind of response, some indication of life, like a dog shaking a dead animal in its jaws.

But when I finally gave in and screamed bloody murder, my mother would come running into the den and say, “Stop all that yelling! You’re giving me a headache.” She’d look at me with my face in the carpet and Matthew sitting on my back and say, “Quit bothering your brother.”

“Exactly!” Matthew would say, smiling smugly, victorious.
“Quit bothering me.”

He was getting the message loud and clear.

That was when I pretty much moved into the basement. I began to spend all my time there because there was a TV that no one else cared to watch because our basement was so cold and damp and made of concrete. But I didn’t mind. Everything sort of had that feel to it anyway, no matter where I was.

That’s the weirdest thing about being cut off from life. Everything gets washed out or muted or recedes into the background except for other people’s laughter. Other people’s laughter gets very loud and jarring. It penetrates. It is a reminder that other people live.

It was pretty quiet in the basement except for the laughter that seeped down from upstairs when my mother and Matthew would watch television together in the den. That was very loud and it made me feel lonely.

But there was one good thing, one reason to slip upstairs sometimes and visit the world. There was Gavin. Gavin with his small body and eyes as round and blue as the Earth, who would rest, without judgment, in the crook of my arm. Gavin, who was immune to the opinions of others. Gavin, who, years later, would watch my parents tie me up and drag me away to a mental hospital with tears in his eyes, knowing it was all a lie.

I AM JERKED
back into the present when my mother overshoots a parking spot and hits a curb.

“Oops,” she says. “Good thing it’s a rental!”

We have arrived on the quaint and beachy Main Street, which is lined with small boutiques and outdoor cafés where students and beach bums and the last of the summer people gather. Many of the shops are geared toward college-aged girls like me, with Dunton sweatshirts in the window beside mannequins in cute jeans and flowing tops. I start toward one of those stores, but my mother steers us to the small shop next door.

“Ooh, look at that adorable skirt!” she says, stepping up to the window. The clothes on display seem more geared for her age group. “Let’s go in there.”

“I’m not going to like anything in there,” I say.

“You can’t keep dressing like a bag lady,” she says. “You’re in college now. Besides, I’m the one with the credit cards, remember?”

We enter the store and my whole body tightens as she beelines for the dress rack. She still refuses to accept that I don’t wear dresses. She still refuses to accept me as I am. I can feel the rage bubbling up.

“I haven’t worn a dress since I was, like, seven!” I say. But as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know they aren’t quite true. That in fact, I can remember very clearly the last time I was
made to wear a dress.

• • •

I was fourteen, it was late August and so hot that the air felt boiled. School was just about to start and I was resentful that I had to spend one of the last days of summer stuck inside a stuffy church that smelled like lemons and old people.

The dress was way too tight from all the weight I’d been gaining, and I found it hard to breathe between the squeeze of fabric against my skin and the sharp sounds of my mother weeping uncontrollably over Great-Aunt Dora.

The service began. The low metallic sound of the organ played. The pallbearers walked up the aisle, and Dora’s coffin passed by me so close I could almost reach out my hand and tap on its wood. An image flashed in my mind of her trapped and panicked and suffocating inside. At that moment, something came loose in me and broke free, kicked out involuntarily.

I turned to Gavin, who had just turned four. “Dora’s in there,” I blurted out gleefully. “She’s stuck forever in that box.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, the loose thing retreated like a worm back into a fruit, and I didn’t know what had made me say that or why it had seemed so important. I watched Gavin, small in his suit, and waited for his reaction, but he just looked at me with eyes wide and blue as sky. Then Matthew leaned forward from the other side of him and punched me in the leg.

“What the hell?” he said.

“What happened?” my mother asked, leaning over.

I stared at Matthew, willing his silence with my eyes, asking him to see me, to cut me a break, to not throw me under the bus
just this once. He stared back at me, studying my face. I was sure he had received my message, that he understood, that he would keep silent.

Then he turned to my mother and repeated what I’d said, and I realized in that moment that I had lost Matthew to my mother, that he had been lost to me for some time, only I hadn’t let myself believe it.

My mother looked at me, eyes full of shock before they turned to anger. “Dora was like a mother to me. You must really despise me to say something like that!”

“No!” I said. “That’s not true!” But because I could not even explain to myself why I’d said such a horrible thing, I looked down at my lap and wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

• • •

Now my mother piles an armful of dresses and blouses and skirts into my arms. “Just indulge me for once,” she says. “If you don’t like them, then we’ll talk.”

“Whatever,” I say. The sooner I can get this shit over with, the sooner we can go to the other store, and the sooner I can get what I need and go back to my dorm.

I head to the fitting room and throw on the black low-cut blouse and pencil skirt she has picked out first. The clothes hug my body and something about the intention behind the outfit makes me queasy, makes me want to cover myself up as fast as possible. I yank the blouse upward toward my neck and step out. I put my arms out and look at her miserably.

“It’s gross,” I say. “Can we go now?”

“Oh my God!” she says. “You look gorgeous!”

“What?”

She steps back to take in the whole of me, her eyes shiny with approval. It shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t care.

“I’m so jealous of your figure,” she says. “I wish I could wear clothes like this.” She steps forward and adjusts the blouse back to its original position. “It’s supposed to hang like that. You want to show off your cleavage.”

I turn and look at myself in the mirror, trying to see me as she does right now. I’m surprised to see that I actually do have a pretty good figure, that I never noticed it until my mother pointed it out. Still.

“It’s a little grown up, don’t you think?” I say. “I’m sure there is better stuff next door.”

“No, it’s perfect. Trust me.” She steps back and looks again. “Absolutely gorgeous!” she says, and somehow when she says it, it feels like it could be true.

“I don’t know . . .” I say. But even as I try to resist her power, my mother’s is still the only opinion that matters, the only person who can say with authority that the ugly, unlovable thing in me is now gone.

I try on three more outfits and several pairs of shoes.

“Isn’t this fun?” my mother says. “This is what I always wanted—a daughter who would let me dress her up.”

Yeah,
I think,
just what you always wanted—for me to be someone else.

But then she says, “I can’t even decide. You look so amazing in
everything! Let’s get them all!” and I wonder if maybe I’m being too hard on her, that if I could just find it in myself to forgive her, maybe we really could find a new beginning.

We bring the clothes as well as two new pairs of shoes up to the salesgirl, a tall smiley redhead who looks a few years older than me. “Lucky you,” she says when we pile the clothes onto the counter. “I wish my mom would take me on a shopping spree!”

My mother laughs happily, enjoying the role.

We leave the store with three huge bags in tow.

“What a perfect day this has been!” she says as we climb back into the car. “I’m so glad we can finally be gal pals!”

I catch myself thinking that the day did end up being kind of nice, and quickly swallow the instinct to say so. Instead I look out the window, guarded again.

We reach the campus and she pulls into a parking spot. “I really did have so much fun with you,” she says, and she sounds so sincere that it really feels like the mother I knew has been replaced with the mother I always dreamed of having.

“Well, thanks for the stuff,” I say. I get out of the car and am about to head toward the dorm when I stop, reconsider. “Do you maybe want to see my room? And meet my roommate, Zoey?”

She looks at the clock on the dashboard and grimaces. “I’d love to, but I have to get back to the hotel. Pete is taking me to Le Chateau tonight. I hear it’s
très romantique
.”

“Oh.” I look down at the shopping bags at my feet. “No problem, whatever.”

“Maybe sometime later in the week.”

“How long are you going to be here?”

“I’ll call you,” she says.

I give her mine and Zoey’s room phone number and she punches it into her cell phone.

“Great. Oh, and I told your father I was staying with you, so he might ask me for the number. If he calls for any reason, cover for me, okay?”

Then she pulls away and is gone.