The First Time She Drowned (6 page)

I DON’T GET
better, I get worse. I sleep. I wake. They seem like the same thing. Days exist in a blurry, subaquatic state, separate from the college life outside my dorm window, the moving light and the sounds of voices, louder as they near, fading as they pass. Even my usual nightmares are underwater and without the serrated edges that typically wake me up gasping.

I have a vague recollection of having heard knocking one night, of my RA asking me from behind my closed door if I was okay, of me telling her I was fine. But I don’t even know if it was real or a dream.

Friday becomes Tuesday becomes Friday again, announced by the late afternoon keg party breaking out on the campus lawn. Time has become a meaningless abstraction; there is only this moment and then the next. Sweating and then freezing, a stabbing so violent in my chest and ribs that I sometimes lose consciousness.

I get my food from the vending machine, slipping past other students who look at me strangely as they give me a wide berth, making me feel even more like an outsider. The rest of the time, I flit in and out of lucidity, one minute imagining I’m getting better, another so disoriented that at one point I wake thinking my mother is here. I hear her voice clear as glass. “I’m sick,” she says. “Take Cassie to the hospital.” I am confused by this, then angry, then my
whole body disintegrates like light snow on pavement. Finally I realize that I’m still inside a nightmare, that I never woke up at all.

When I actually do awaken, I long for the comfort of a mother, an ache as physical as the illness itself. I do not long for a father, mine or even an imaginary one, although I suppose in some way they are the same thing. My father is a shadow person, a chalk outline of a body, nothing inside the lines—or at least nothing accessible. I know in my heart that he doesn’t agree with all the things my mother did. But we both know that if he dared voice his opposition, she wouldn’t listen or care, and then his irrelevance would be confirmed. So he went along.

I lie drenched in my bed, my wet lungs sucking for air that comes like little breaths through a straw, and like a sense memory, it pulls me into a particular moment in time, the moment that we all—the whole family—started going under. I close my eyes and slip down down down into blackness. Cars and landscape whiz by me. I feel the jerky rumble of the old station wagon. My father’s voice comes into my head, loud and jarring. And all at once, I am back there on that fateful vacation, the one my mother demanded my father take us on, the one I begged for, the trip that marked the beginning of the end.

• • •

It was just days after my near drowning in my grandmother’s pool. My father, eager to get on my mother’s good side, had arranged everything at the last minute. Our luggage had been packed and piled into the back of our car in such a hurry that we reached the end of our block before I realized I had forgotten my favorite doll, Betty—a plastic Jamaican girl with a basket of fake fruit on her
head—and screamed bloody murder until my father agreed to turn the car around and go get her. Once Betty was safely in tow, we were off again in our station wagon, aptly named the Blue Bomb for the explosive grunts of its tired engine. My mother had promised Matthew and me a nickel for every time we spotted a license plate that was not from Pennsylvania, and I’d never seen anyone so thrilled to lose money as we moved farther out of state and away from her family.

Meanwhile, my overly eager father, who might have been a taxi driver for all the attention we paid him, was shouting out every single sign that we passed along the highway.

“Boston! Ten miles ahead!” his voice boomed through the car like a train conductor.

“Stay alive. Drive fifty-five!”

“Slow for construction!”

“Who’s he talking to?” Matthew finally asked.

“God only knows,” my mother said with a sigh.

The two were discussing the various ways they might dispose of his body without drawing suspicion when at last my father called out the one sign that everyone was waiting for.

“Welcome to Maine!”

My mother clapped like a little girl, and Matthew threw his head out the window and howled into the warm summer air.

“Just wait till you see the house!” my father said. It was clear he’d been merely biding his time, waiting until he could pull out the trump card that would win my mother over. “It’s practically on the water. I’ve heard it’s almost impossible to get a house like this so late in the season. Okay, everybody, keep your eyes peeled. Ours
is going to be the red one, number 377.”

“Look at these gorgeous homes!” my mother said, and in a moment of clemency, she gave my father’s arm a quick squeeze. He was so pleased with himself that if he’d had a tail it would have been wagging.

“Number 377,” he shouted. “Here we are!”

My mother squealed. The house was small but lovely, hugged by a sprawling porch and surrounded by wispy green grass that lay down in a breeze.

“It’s not red, though,” I pointed out.

“That’s because you’re looking at the wrong house. It’s just behind this one.”

We all leaned forward.

The dread in the air was palpable.

“Where?” I said.

“Right there!” He pulled down the driveway and pointed to a second house that sat directly in back of the first.

I could barely bring myself to look. My father was famous for his “Reverse Midas Touch”: Everything he touched turned to shit. I wrapped my arms around Betty and dared a glance out the window.

“Oh my God,” Matthew said for all of us.

We all gasped. The house was amazing. It was a huge, sprawling place, the red color of a barn with white clapboard shutters and windows that opened almost onto the beach.

“The original renters bailed at the last minute, so I got it at a great price. Talk about good old-fashioned O’Malley luck, huh, kids?” He turned to my mother, his eyes hungry for her joy. “What
do you think?”

She got out of the car and stood silently before it, her hair blowing against her face as she stared, stunned and agape, at my father’s miracle. We all held our breath as we waited for her reaction.

“It’s beautiful,” my mother said finally. She turned to smile at all of us. Then she looked back at the house and her smile faded. “There’s no porch, though.”

• • •

We had barely unloaded our bags into the house before Matthew grabbed my hand and pulled me out the back door.

“Come on,” he said, dragging me behind him into a wind that lifted the back of my dress like a kite. “I’ve got something to show you.”

“Matthew, wait!” my mother shouted.

But we were already gone, running, running away from the house and over the sand dunes. I had no idea where we were going, only that I was with my brother and released into wide-open space, taking flight. The air was thick with the sea I’d never seen, so salty I could taste it when I breathed. Then all at once, it rose up before us, or we rose up to meet it, and I was standing for the first time before the deep blue waters of the Atlantic.

I gasped. Its enormity stunned me, ripped me out of the small ecosystem of my family and propelled me into a world far larger than I’d ever imagined.

“What do you think?” Matthew said, smiling proudly as if he had built the ocean himself.

I turned to my brother, seized and silenced by the beauty of this other realm, and it was then that he pointed out the sailboats,
brilliantly colored triangles that square-danced against the sky. I watched them, captivated, watched the seagulls rise and fall with the waves, squawking into the wind.

Matthew led me gently down to the ocean’s edge, where, in a small cove with shallow pools, we kicked off our shoes and let small fish scoot around our ankles. I felt that I had come home. I never wanted to leave.

We must have been out there for an hour, wading in the water, watching tiny crabs scatter and trying to scoop up fish with our hands when my mother appeared on the sand dunes, my father trailing behind her.

“Come on, Matty,” she called, waving. “Let’s walk down to the harbor.”

Matthew raced up to her while my father and I followed, carrying between us the awkward silence of those who are left behind. We came upon the docks, where rows of sleek powerboats and boats with majestic fruit-colored sails
thwapped
in the breeze, and the voices of happy men shouted to one another over water that smelled like fish and gasoline.

“What do you think, Matthew?” my mother said. “Should I tell your father to rent us a boat?”

“As long as this one floats!” Matthew said.

“And no pirates,” I added.

My father disappeared inside a ramshackle shop that sat as wobbly legged and filmy white as a seagull on the edge of the pier. When he appeared again, he was below us and teetering in a rowboat so tiny and old and tired that it seemed to be drowning beneath his weight.

“Ahoy, maties!” he called as he maneuvered the boat to the dock’s edge.

My mother groaned.

“Sorry—it was all we could afford,” my father said sheepishly.

Matthew and my mother climbed in, and the boat rocked and drifted under new weight. My mother shrieked, laughing nervously like a young girl on a Ferris wheel. Her face was flushed and happy when she turned to me. I stood on the dock and watched as a thin highway of murky sea quickly opened up between us.

“Looks like you’ll have to jump,” she said as the boat continued to move away.

I glanced down at the water, hungry and lapping against the docks. I couldn’t see the bottom, only the vision of myself tumbling into the depths.

My father struggled to steer the boat closer to me, but, as in all situations involving my father, the opposing current was stronger.

“I’ll catch you.” My mother held her arms wide. “Now hurry up before your father manages to steer us to Cuba.”

“But I don’t want to go to Cuba!” I said.

“Believe me, we’d be dead before we ever reached Cuba,” my father said, chuckling.

“You’re not helping,” my mother snapped.

“Think of it this way,” Matthew offered. “If the boat sinks, at least we’d all go down together.”

I started to cry.

“Oh for God’s sakes,” my mother said as I blubbered. “Ed, do
something.”

“I’m doing everything I can.”

They all looked at one another, my father rowing against the current, my brother in the middle, my mother with her arms now folded angrily across her chest.

“Just jump!” they all said at once.

“Do it for me.” My mother held out her arms to me again. “Do it because you love me.”

I closed my eyes and willed myself to jump. It was an act of faith, and all I had to do was trust that my mother would catch me. But my legs felt like they belonged to someone else the way I couldn’t stop them from shaking.

“One, two, three,” she counted.

I opened my eyes. I was still on the dock.

“Oh, thanks a lot,” my mother said. “Now I know how you really feel.” Then she turned to my father. “Just return the damn thing. We’ll do something else.”

“But it’s already paid for!” my dad said. The only thing he loved more than my mother was his money.

She stared at him hard. “Seriously?” she said. “Nice.” She half stood, wobbling as the boat rocked and creaked with her movement, forcing my father and Matthew to grip the sides for dear life.

“Mom, wait,” Matthew said. “We can figure out a way to get Cassie.”

“Forget it,” she said, lowering herself off the side of the boat and swimming to the ladder at the far end of the dock. She climbed up, came over to where I was standing, glared at me and then turned expectantly toward my father, waiting to see what he would do. It
was clear she expected him to go and return the boat despite his protests, but instead he just dug in his oars and the boat slipped away. My mother and I stood there for a while in silence, watching them shrink into the distance, Matthew waving to us as they went.

“It’s okay,” my mother said to me finally, her eyes still on the water. “I didn’t love my mother either.”

“But I do love you!” I cried.

She turned her back to me and headed for the shore.

• • •

For the next few hours my mother sat on a plot of sand and stared out at the water, waiting for Matthew’s return the way a prisoner might keep a longing watch over the outside world through a small cell window. She swatted at the big green horseflies that surrounded us. She sighed repeatedly and looked at her watch. Even in her agitation, she was beautiful, her pale knees tucked small to her chest, her sand-colored hair glistening like the bounce of sun off the ocean.

I set to combing the beach in small circles around her, approaching every now and again with broken shells I’d collected. But each time my advances were met by her angry profile, I retreated to my pacing. It must have been over an hour before I came upon a shell so pristine, I gasped when I saw it. It was white and tan and looked like a small tornado. I ran back to my mother. I had never seen anything like it.

“Ooh, it’s perfect,” she said, brightening. She put it first to her ear and then to mine. “It has the ocean inside. Can you hear it?”

I shook my head.

“They say the farther away you are from the beach, the louder
it sounds. That way it’s always with you and you can always find your way back.”

I put my hand over hers and pressed the shell harder against my ear, wanting to hear what my mother heard, to have access to the same magic she did. I thought that if I could hear it too, there would be something special between us that no one else shared and then I would matter to her like Matthew did.

“Hear it now?” she said.

I looked up into her face and smiled. “Yes,” I lied.

• • •

That evening, my father left the house abruptly and then reappeared in the doorway a short while later with a foolish grin on his face, holding two large, see-through bags.

“Guess what we’re having for dinner,” he said, and there was so much pride on his face, you’d have thought he had scooped them from the bottom of the ocean himself, and then using only his teeth. “LOBSTER!” He stood there for what seemed a long time, the lobsters wiggling as he hoisted the plastic bags in the air as if he were flagging down an airplane. When no one said anything, his arms dropped, but slowly, as if someone had stuck a pin in them. “I know they’re your favorite, Bev.”