Girl at the Edge

by Karen Dietrich

  It occurs to me that I didn’t even ask Dana how Ella died. Was she active until the end, riding her bicycle every day, or did she lie in a hospital bed for weeks, even months, with a terminal illness? Maybe she had dementia and didn’t even know what was happening. Maybe she was prepared for death, getting her affairs in order, visiting her son one last time. Or maybe something stopped her heart unexpectedly, turning her lifeless in an instance. I don’t even know whether she was cremated or buried somewhere. All I know is that she’s dead, and so is my grandfather, and so is my aunt Ruth. All I know is that my father is the only living member of that family, if you can even call him living.

  I unwrap and unwrap until I reach the final layer of plastic bubbles. I can begin to see the dish now through the bubble wrap, the cream porcelain, the octagon shape of the plate, the rounded dome lid. I can begin to see the design painted in the center of the lid, a bird perched on a cherry blossom branch, its feathers long, plumage like a peacock’s tail at rest—my view slightly distorted through the air in the bubbles. Finally, the dish is resting on my lap, the packaging scattered all over the hard, white bathroom floor, material a real bird might break apart with her beak, stealing a scrap for her nest.

  Light catches the gold accents on the dish, making them shimmer. The drawing is so detailed, that it must have been hand painted. I can see the weight of the brush strokes, some thin, as if the artist’s brush barely grazed the porcelain at times. Other strokes are thicker. The bird’s tail flows down like a waterfall, feathers that look fuzzy, fluffy as down or the fur of your childhood monster, the one living under your bed. You fear it will grab your ankle if you dare to dangle your bare foot off the side of the bed for too long.

  When I was younger, my monster was Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. My mother and Shea had to go somewhere one summer day, somewhere I wasn’t allowed to be. So they sent me to a house down the street for the day, where a woman just added me to the crew of children in her charge. There were five of us altogether, two boys, a little girl, and a baby named Jo whose gender wasn’t clear to me. Jo had no hair, no obvious markers of girlhood or boyhood. Jo played with blocks and dolls and a little wooden hammer and nail set painted in primary colors. Jo wore white onesies that snapped between Jo’s chubby thighs, always playing happily and smiling, not weighed down by the expectations of being a girl or a boy. Just being a child.

  Just after lunch that day, the woman, whose name I can’t recall now, had an emergency and had to leave for a while. Since I was the oldest, she left me in charge. She said she’d be gone only a short while, and she took Jo with her. I watched from the screen door as she strapped Jo into the baby seat in the back of her Toyota, the other children peeking through the living room window to see what was happening. I think it had something to do with a boyfriend, as there had been an intense phone conversation that suggested something or someone needed to be picked up immediately or else.

  After I watched the Toyota pull away down the street, I closed the door and locked it and suggested that we watch a movie. I thought that was the best way to keep everyone from fooling around and hurting themselves or catching something on fire, one of the things I still fear might happen when there are no adults around. I’m certain that fire knows when children are alone and most vulnerable. I’m certain that fire is a villain that wishes to consume us, taking pleasure in eating us like candy, like the old woman in the Hansel and Gretel story. Fire is blind, just like the old woman. That’s why it searches and searches, running down hallways and staircases in houses until it finds its prey.

  My movie idea would have been a good one except one of the boys found A Nightmare on Elm Street on one of the cable channels, and suddenly all the curtains were drawn in the sunken living room and all the children were watching teenagers afraid to go to sleep because Freddy Krueger was killing people in their dreams. It’s scary enough to die in a dream, but in these movies, if you die in your dream, you die in reality. We only watched it for about an hour, until the babysitter came home with smiling baby Jo on her hip and a bag of ice cream sandwiches to buy our silence, but I never forgot Freddy, the villain, with his melted skin and bladed glove, five knives instead of five fingers.

  Perhaps my father is someone’s Freddy Krueger now, the murderer whose face continues to haunt even after death. He’s the villain who does things no one can comprehend, although they try and try. They manipulate the puzzle pieces desperately, arranging pieces in every combination, every direction, turn, turn, turning the jigsaw shapes, but the picture will never be complete. There will always be something that doesn’t make sense—a bridge that leads nowhere, a missing section of sky.

  I turn the dish over, and on the back is a small piece of white tape. It looks like medical tape, the kind you would use to secure gauze on a wound. Someone has written on the tape with a blue ballpoint pen, chubby capital letters that say BIRD-OF-PARADISE.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  We watch the sunset on the beach, Shea and my mother on low-slung beach chairs, each with a frozen rumrunner in hand. My mother’s has an orange slice floating in it, pierced with the toothpick end of a cocktail umbrella. The bright turquoise parasol grazes the rim of her glass and must tickle her cheek with every sip she takes.

  Clarisse and I are on a beach towel, digging our feet into the sand as far as we can. As we tunnel with our toes, the sand gets colder and colder, wetter and wetter. The deeper you dig, the more water you find in the sand, as if the sea is trying to escape.

  There are pockets of people scattered around the beach, everyone facing the horizon. They all look straight ahead, not at each other—strangers in an elevator, waiting for their floor, watching each number as it illuminates, waiting for their destination. We are waiting for the sun to sink below the water, waiting for that moment when it looks as though the Gulf of Mexico is eating the sun. It will last for only a few seconds. You can’t blink or turn away or you might miss it. The sun is an orange ball of fire tonight, the sky streaked with pinks and reds. Nature’s light show, Shea calls it. “Even when I go blind, I’ll still love the sunset,” she says. “It’s not just something you see, it’s something you can feel too.”

  I’m looking straight ahead, not wanting to miss the moment, when I spot the silhouettes of three boys in the distance, kicking water at each other and trying to jump over the tiny breakers that lap at the shore. They are the boys from not-Boston, and I gently nudge Clarisse’s elbow with mine to get her attention, motioning toward the boys with my chin, keeping my movements small so as not to alert my mother and Shea.

  Yes. Clarisse mouths the word to me.

  Then I lean over and whisper in her ear, my hand cupped, a passageway through which only we can communicate—our own private channel, our own frequency. “Keep your eyes on them until my mom and Shea leave,” I whisper.

  “Okay,” Clarisse whispers back, her breath warm on the curve of my outer ear. “But what if your mom and Shea want to stay?”

  “They’re getting drunk,” I say. “They won’t last much longer.”

  The boys run out of the water and toward a group of people who have congregated farther down the beach from us. They have claimed their square of the beach by piercing the sand with tiki torches in four corners. They have blankets and folding chairs and a large red cooler on wheels, and I can hear the adults laughing and talking. Many of the sunset watchers will pack up their things and leave once the big show is over. But the boys from not-Boston and their family don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.

  The sun inches lower and lower and then finally crosses the line where water meets sky, a disappearing act that makes you think that, if you just kept swimming and swimming toward it, you would eventually be able to lean over the edge of the earth and see the sun falling, falling, falling down the other side. You can’t blame early explorers for thinking the world was flat. How was anyone to know they were living on a sphere? There were no clues at first, no curved edges to be se
en. We experience everything up close, our collective lens so zoomed in that it’s difficult to get perspective. We march along like ants on a melon. We can’t realize the magnitude of our surroundings, can’t fathom the tiny space we occupy in the context of the larger world.

  I stand up and walk over to my mother, resting my hands on her shoulders from behind. I used to sneak up on her this way as a little kid. I’d place my hands on her shoulders and say “Boo!” and she’d practically jump out of whatever chair she was sitting in at the time. This time, I want to relax her, not startle her. She pats one of my hands with one of hers. “Hi, sweetie,” she says.

  “Hi. Are you having a good time?” I ask.

  “Yes, I am,” she says, sipping her drink and then tilting her head back to look at me upside down. I can’t see her features clearly in the dusky light, but I know her face by memory, know the shape of her eyes and the thin lines that have formed between her eyebrows, parentheses turned away from each other.

  “I’m having a good time too,” I say. “Thanks for bringing me here. I know you didn’t have to.”

  “You’re welcome. And I’m glad,” she says, her voice smooth and lower than usual. The rum has relaxed her vocal cords, turning her voice into velvet. Shea stands up and wraps a blue-and-white-striped beach towel around her shoulders. She’s a little wobbly on her feet in the cool sand, the towel moving in the gulf breeze like a cape behind her.

  “Let’s move this party up to the balcony,” Shea says as a general announcement. My mother kisses my hand and smiles at me, her upside-down position making it look like a frown on an otherwise happy face.

  “Can’t we stay down here for a little while?” I ask. “It’s our last night. And we’ve barely had any beach time.”

  My mother is on her feet now, and she grabs my face, one hand on each of my cheeks. “You can stay for a little bit,” she says, and then gives me a kiss on the forehead. “You too, Clarisse!” my mother says, now sounding excited. She walks over to Clarisse, who is still sitting on the beach towel. She grabs both of Clarisse’s hands and pulls her up to her feet, almost knocking herself backward in the process. Then my mother kisses Clarisse on the forehead too. “I love you girls,” my mother says, as she slings one arm around Clarisse’s shoulder and beckons me to join this impromptu group hug with her other hand.

  “Okay, okay,” Shea says, as my mother laughs. “Let’s get you upstairs before you start singing ‘The Wind Beneath My Wings.’” Clearly the more sober one, Shea checks the time on her phone and gives us instructions. “Just stay on the beach, okay?” Clarisse and I nod in agreement. “No gallivanting around town.”

  “Yes, of course,” Clarisse says, standing up straight and smiling. We’re so close to being free that my insides are crackling with anticipation. Shea and my mother walk arm in arm back to the hotel patio, Shea carrying their shoes in her hand. Clarisse and I stand and watch them become smaller and smaller until we finally see them disappear inside the hotel doors.

  “Come on, let’s go!” Clarisse says to me, tapping my shoulder and then running toward the water, like we’re playing tag and I’m it now. I follow her to the shoreline, where the sand turns harder, packed and wet from the tide washing over it. We wade in to our knees, louder than delicate birds, our legs thicker, making splashing sounds with each step. We stop and stand, staring at the moon in the distance. Its reflection on the water moves in waves—bright ripples of light you can reach into the water and touch. I walk along the shoreline in the direction of the boys from not-Boston and their family, whose chatter and laughter we can hear more clearly as we approach.

  Oliver spots us and begins walking toward us. “I thought that was you over there,” he says. “Gretchen, right?” The skin on his bare chest is taut from the cooler air, his nipples hardened into small, fleshy beads. I nod and smile, remembering my new name. “And Heidi, right?” he asks Clarisse. “Was that your mom with you?”

  “Yeah, our mom and her wife,” I answer. “You should see the pictures from the wedding. They wore these gorgeous vintage dresses, ivory satin and lace. Very old Hollywood.”

  “Oh, that’s awesome,” Oliver says. “My cousin Justin and his boyfriend got married like two years ago, but I don’t remember what they wore.” He grins, looking at me and then Clarisse.

  The tide rushes back into the gulf, toward the dark horizon, and we all look down at our feet for a moment, bare and exposed but slowly sinking into soft shoreline sand. I feel the salt sting the open pores of my ankles.

  “Wanna come hang out with us for a while?” Oliver asks, his dim outline swaying back and forth slightly, his arms folded across his naked chest. “I promise my family’s mostly cool,” he says, gesturing back toward his family’s plot of sand where they now have a small fire going, shadowy figures gathered around the flames. “My one uncle is kind of a dick, but he’s pretty drunk so it’s all good.”

  I take a few steps, getting closer to Oliver. He’s so tall that my eyes barely hit his nipples, and so I tilt my head back to look up at his face. “I think we had something else in mind.”

  Oliver lets out a little ha, a quick exhalation.

  “Yeah, come with us,” Clarisse says.

  “Sure, hang on just a sec. Don’t move,” he says, and then runs toward his family.

  My body buzzes with excitement, the rush of electricity you feel when you’re about to enter the unknown. I am an explorer in undiscovered territory, so many unknown delights about to reveal themselves to me. I know Clarisse feels it too—that pulse of anticipation like the moment a firework shoots into the sky and you hold your breath because you know that, in a split second, the beauty will unfurl, exploding in a burst of color and light.

  As Oliver makes his way back to us, a wide grin on his face, Clarisse clasps my hand in hers, and we start to skip. Our joined arms swing back and forth, and we are two girls creating a breeze with their bodies—a gust, a squall, a gale.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Clarisse and I skip away from the water, Oliver following closely behind. I can hear his excited breathing, a jagged in and out. I can feel his presence, his energy over my shoulder as we make our way toward a playground. The equipment casts shadows on the sand in the moonlight, swings and slides and a metal cage to climb upon or hang upside down from.

  Next to the playground is a small pavilion used as a concession area, its service window closed, a wooden menu board nailed above depicting hot dogs and slices of pepperoni pizza with prices in hand-painted numbers. There are picnic tables and a few trashcans, some seagulls picking around, conditioned to come to this place looking for scraps of food, a chunk of hot dog bun or a stray French fry.

  Clarisse climbs to the top of the slide—a bright blue plastic tube that makes her hair stand on end with static electricity when she emerges from the mouth at the bottom. She lands on her butt, her body making a soft thud on the sand. Oliver runs over and grabs her hands, pulling her to her feet. Then his hands are on her waist, and he lifts her above his head for just a moment before putting her feet back on the ground, a pair of ballet dancers practicing a delicate lift. Clarisse stands against Oliver’s body, looking up at him as he pulls her even closer, his hands resting low on her hips.

  “Your turn!” she says, breaking free from him. “Come on, sis,” she says to me as she sprints past me, running back to the top of the slide. I follow her up the ladder, the bottoms of my sandy feet almost slipping on the metal rungs. Oliver climbs behind me, breathing heavier than before.

  “Let’s form a chain,” Clarisse says, reaching behind to grab my feet so that I’m straddling her now. Oliver sits behind me and does the same, his long legs reaching all the way to Clarisse. I can feel him getting hard through his shorts, and I can feel myself pulsing against Clarisse in front of me. Oliver stretches his arms forward, reaching for Clarisse’s breasts. “Uh, uh, uh,” Clarisse warns. “Bad boy.”

  She lets go of the edges of the tube, and we slide down to the bottom a
s one, landing in a pile with Oliver on his back on the bottom, me on top of him, and Clarisse on top of me. Clarisse jumps up and turns herself around, now straddling my waist so she can see my face and Oliver’s. “If you want to touch us,” she tells him, “you have to follow our rules.”

  “Okay,” he says, “I’ll do anything you want.” His words are staccato from the weight of two girls on his rib cage. “Anything.”

  Next to the pavilion, there’s a boardwalk that takes visitors to the parking lot. It’s built about two feet off the ground, with wooden posts that disappear into the sand. There is tall beach grass all around, so high you can stand within it and blend right in, perfect camouflage. If you remain still enough and barely breathe, it’s like you’re not there at all.

  I’m the leader. I part the beach grass like I’m parting a beaded curtain. I make a diving motion with my hands, a swimmer separating the water, my body becoming a blade. Oliver and Clarisse walk behind me, navigating around pieces of rock and seashell. When we let go of the grasses, they gently snap back into place, and we are hidden in our own cocoon of sand and wood and grass. Then we duck down and crawl into the space beneath the boardwalk. There is just enough room for our three bodies, as if the space were made just for us.

  Oliver lies down on his back between Clarisse and me. He stares up through the slats of the boardwalk, slivers of moonlight making a pattern of light and shadow on his face. Clarisse and I are both propped up on our sides, our elbows sunk into the cool night sand. We face Oliver, but we also face each other. I catch Clarisse’s eyes for just a moment. Even in this half dark, they dazzle me.