by Deborah Reed
Kate dropped her hands, leaned back onto her heels, eyes squinting toward the ocean when she said, “I’m not done.”
“Too bad.” Elin came to her knees.
“I’m not done.”
“It’s time to go,” Elin said.
Kate jumped to her feet and kicked in her castle. The feather slumped sideways in the sand.
“What’d you do that for?” Elin asked, but she knew.
Kate bolted toward the water, and the air had the same sharp feel as the time she ran away into the woods behind their house where their father died. Elin and her mother found her slapping at mosquitoes in the fork of an oak tree. By then they were all smacking mosquitoes, which was enough to shove their mother’s temper straight into what Elin and Kate called code red. She jumped to grab hold of Kate’s foot. She pulled her, kicking and screaming, and Kate fell to the ground, the wind knocked from her chest. She couldn’t speak when their mother raised her to her feet by her hair. Not even when she walked her home across the field the same way.
And what had Elin told her shortly before she ran into the woods that day? To the one place Kate knew their mother refused to go? What words had Elin whispered so crisp and clear, pure as truth, even as the whole of it spun straight from her imagination? Mom killed him. Out there, in the woods. The blood on the dog’s head. He must have been standing right next to Dad when she shot him. That’s the real reason she gave Big Boy away. The real reason we aren’t allowed to have another dog.
Elin yanked the feather from the sand and crushed it inside her fist. It might not have been blood on the dog. He was always running off, dragged around by his nose, tearing into neighbors’ garbage, into rabbit holes, bitten twice in the face by a snake. Or maybe that was it, real blood from a snake he’d lashed to death between his teeth.
You can’t tell or we’ll all go to jail, Elin had told her.
“Where do you think you’re going?” her mother now yelled after Kate.
Kate didn’t slow.
Her mother held her hands like a megaphone. “Get back here!”
Elin twisted and snapped the feather until the barbs were tangled as hair.
“There’s sharks and stingrays out there!”
Kate’s long hair whipped down her back like strands of a shredded cape.
Her mother pulled her straw hat off and scratched her hair free. “Go get your sister,” she said.
Elin jerked her head up.
“You heard me.” She pointed to the water. “Go on.”
Elin threw the broken feather into the sand and stomped toward the waves. Kate had already hurled herself over the surf and disappeared. Elin stood on shore, thinking she could still turn back, that her sister couldn’t stay out there forever, so what was the point? The warm, frothy tide lapped at Elin’s feet. Not far down the shore a dog with speckled paws and white-tipped ears rose onto all fours and barked in Elin’s direction. He licked the stiff hairs around his mouth and barked again. A man in cutoffs told him to shut up.
Elin glanced at her mother behind her. “What’d I say?” she yelled, and Elin waded forward and then dove in.
Saltwater tightened her face when she popped up and squinted against the sun. From the corner of her eye a flurry of her sister’s hair swirled and disappeared beneath the water. Elin’s arms and legs dangled in the nothingness, the tips of her toes journeying farther from the bottom than they’d ever been.
Her mother gestured from the shore like a coach signaling players to move faster, move that way, go!
Elin groaned through sideways strokes, a talent she’d perfected through years of swim lessons. Kate had disappeared again, and Elin’s chest began to ache against the bone. When she stopped to catch a breath the water’s depth was colder at her feet.
Her mother hollered some kind of threat and it sounded as if she and the speckled dog were now miles away, both barking at the same time.
Then something fleshy, something long and stringy brushed her arm and she screamed and jerked, but it was Kate, appearing on the surface, her slick hair clinging like a shiny black veil down her face. She blew water in Elin’s eyes when she let go of her breath.
Elin rubbed her lashes and spit. The muscles around her elbows burned. She shoved water at her sister with the heel of her hand. “Stay here for all I care, Miss Freak. I’m going back.”
Kate’s laugh bounced off the water. Before Elin could say anything, her sister gulped a mouthful of air and dropped her body beneath the surface.
Elin’s hand was quick as a trap. She caught Kate by the ankle and refused to let go, even as the strength of her sister’s long leg pulled her beneath the water, where a heel struck Elin’s jaw, making a crack inside her head, a streak of hot pain in her ear. She threw punches against the weight of water as if they were fighting at home or in the backseat of the car. The skin of her sunburned shoulders tore beneath Kate’s nails and burned in the salty water. Tangled beneath her sister, Elin did not know which way was up, and swallowed gulps of water every time she screamed.
Then nothing. Nothing between her fingers, nothing against her skin. Only water rearing and shifting like a giant, angry eel. Kate was gone, replaced by a riptide, twisting Elin even farther into the dark and gushing cold. Her head struck the top of a sandbar as the ocean rumbled like thunder past her ears. This was it. This was all her life will have amounted to. One last fight with her sister. Her throat clutched in the middle. How long did she have? What did they say in swim class? Don’t panic. How would she find the surface in all this darkness? Don’t panic. Her heart would burst into a hundred pieces. Her skin shred into fish food. Don’t panic. Any moment her fingers would claw into sand.
When the freshness of air rushed her chest it burned like wildfire throughout her whole body, and at first she thought she’d opened her lungs to the ocean. But it was air. Air! She sucked it in and coughed it out past the lining of her throat with a force that caused her teeth to ache.
She hacked and burped what felt like a rubber ball from her throat, then another, retching, spewing flecks of potato chips. Her body sloped, floating toward the shore, her mind registering nothing but the expanse of blue sky, the lap in her ears.
A man in a white paper hat appeared, hobbling out toward her. He swam in shorts and a T-shirt, hustling to scoop her into his arms. The paper hat slipped off his head and floated like a handmade boat across the water. He was the man from the Snack Shack.
For a moment there was only the sound of his breath in her ear, water sloshing her shoulder, the ocean billowing her hair.
Elin’s legs finally came down in the shallow water, wobbling on solid ground. She wanted her mother. The other mother, the one who cared for them when they were sick, the one who put washcloths to their faces when they puked, who smeared ice on their fevered lips. She wanted the mother who brought them blankets, tucked pillows at their backs, and watched them as they slept.
The man held onto her shoulders as she walked. He loosened his grip only after the ocean was a good ways behind them.
“You’re all right now,” he said, smelling of relish.
Her stomach hung inside her like a bulging bag of dirty water. She was going to be sick.
“Do something!” Cords of her mother’s brown hair in the wind, the round shape of her body came into focus. She was kneeling, urging the dog’s owner, his cutoffs dripping wet, to do something, do something! The dog whined and yelped as the man’s body made an arc over something in the sand.
Sticking out beneath him were feet.
Kate’s bare feet.
Elin’s vision tunneled. She ran and didn’t stop until she barreled into the man, knocking him sideways in the sand.
Her sister lay motionless, a string of kelp clinging to an eyelid. Elin snatched it away. No one tried to stop her when she plunged into Kate’s chest, and no one stopped her when she plugged Kate’s nose, put her mouth to her salty lips, blasted air from her lungs into her sister’s—another and another, stopping
only to shove her weight onto Kate’s chest in a constant, steady rhythm.
“Where’s the lifeguard?” her mother yelled.
Kate’s face was pale and glassy beneath the layer of tanned skin. Her lips more violet than pink. Her mouth hung open as if her jaw had come loose.
Elin plunged into the soft, spongy give of her sister’s breastbone as if she were burying Kate with every thrust meant to lift her back up. She gripped Kate’s face, felt the edges of her jaw, lumps of molars under the skin. She pressed into her lifeless lips and blew.
“Please, God,” her mother said. “Doesn’t anyone else know how to do this?”
Elin raised back and slapped Kate’s face, knocking her head to the side.
Her mother grabbed her arm. “What’s the matter with you!” Her mouth a twisted tremble of lips and teeth.
Elin knocked her away. The man in the cutoffs yelled “Come on!” and thrust Elin’s hands back onto Kate.
She bore down harder than before, harder than they taught her at the pool. Elin would take back what she’d said in the car, if Kate would just wake up, she’d take it back. It’d been nothing more than revenge for Kate hiding Elin’s paintbrushes that morning, for calling Elin’s teeth ugly, her drawings stupid, her face so disgusting a boy would never kiss her without puking out his guts. For this, Elin had waited an hour, waited until Kate appeared unguarded, laughing at a kid making a pig face in a station wagon passing on the freeway. Elin had leaned into her ear, whispered hotly that Kate was the reason their mother had killed their father. Kate had driven her to madness, Kate was just that bad, and wasn’t it clear by now that this was true? Or was she too dumb to see how everything was ruined the minute she entered a room?
“Uhn!” Elin clobbered her fists into her sister.
“Stop it.” Her mother curled forward. “Just stop.”
Strangers had gathered. Voices blended into a single gasp. Long shadows darkened Kate’s face.
“You’re nothing but a mean—uhn!—rotten little—uhn!—bitch!”
Kate’s mouth turned tense and round. Her throat jerked upward once, twice, three times, and seawater sprang into Elin’s eyes and nose.
Kate rolled onto her side with help from their mother, whose eyebrows rose in astonishment, mouth gaping as Kate spewed stringy grey liquid into the sand. And then she coughed and choked and even said something in between that wasn’t clear.
Her mother let loose a round of hysterical laughter.
Elin’s ears ached. She wiped the goop from her face, and backed away through strangers’ greasy arms and legs smelling of baby oil and coconut creams. Her temples felt crushed by fiery sharp jaws. Scratches covered her arms and hands from Kate’s fingernails and there must have been more near her eye and scalp where Kate took a chunk of her hair. She braced her knees and stared into the sand. She held the pain in her head, her whole body trembling.
When she looked up between the bare legs of men and women who’d come to see what was happening, her mother was kneeling over Kate’s vomit in the sand, saying, “That’s my girl.”
Elin shuddered.
“Oh!” Her mother’s laughter was short, detached, stagey as an actress in a televised play. “You see?” she said. “What did I say? That’s my girl. Everything’s all right now. She’s going to be just fine.”
And with that Elin didn’t feel the need to take back what she’d said. They were alive, and being alive made it seem as if nothing had happened, as if all the rest had been canceled out. To be alive was enough. It was everything.
PART TWO
TWENTY-TWO
KATE’S LIDS CLOSED, HER MIND trapped beneath the weight of her skull, but she could see “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” as clearly as if the form still lay on the kitchen table before her, the physician’s sharply scrawled signature still wet with ink.
Billowing ghosts swam the length of her bed. Shadows recast sunlight, throwing it back like lamps flipping on and off, on and off, on and off.
“DO NOT RESUSCITATE” on the yellow sheet of paper, signed by Kate, her physician, attached to her living will.
This was all Kate’s fault. She should have planned a better suicide. A Better Suicide, collected poems by Katherine Fenton.
If only she could laugh.
She wasn’t dead. Not yet. I Woke Up Alive, by Katherine Fenton. I Woke Up Dead, by Katherine Fenton.
Her daughters were meant to find her asleep at the table, nothing more, no drama, no choking to death while they stood by helpless, just a call to Mrs. Pearl, the neighbor, or to 911 when they couldn’t rouse her. She’d taught them to call 911. Kate was meant to be toted away on a gurney, neatly—her daughters never having to look at her again.
But…
Time had lost all shape.
Her mother’s voice in the hospital. “She’s not breathing on her own?”
Kate had clawed her way up to the surface. The dreary leaden weight of gravity, her lips dead minnows, her tongue and eyes thick black slippery pools of nothing. “Get it out, get it out.” Her mind cobbling together the pieces. Survived. Hospital. Her inability to speak, not the disease, not yet. Just yesterday, was it yesterday? She could still form words, slurred past a charley-horsed tongue. A respirator in her mouth. Lungs whooshing. Frankenstein. Get it out. Get it out. She did not want her mother to see her like this.
Someone corrected the course, put her life, her death, back on track. The nurse? “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” Kate had told her, told someone. Maybe it was understood. Someone somewhere had understood.
The respirator now gone, Kate breathed in feathery wisps on her own. Air, a strange and spectral matter, the final substance she pulled from the world, nothing.
If only she could speak. This close to leaving for good, there were things she wanted to say. And laugh. She was dying to laugh. That was funny. It all seemed funny now. Crack up over a crackpot attempt at rushing herself out when she was already so close to leaving. What had been the point? Oh. She remembered. Believing she could control the world, a fool’s mission, right down to the burning desire to manipulate the memories inside her daughters’ heads. Play God. Leave them with visions of her own making. Infuse meaning into the murkiness of confusion, recalling a childhood from decades-old conversations. Painting the past was as futile as it was necessary to get right, which one could not, ever, get right. How many versions were there? Everyone attached to her own.
Still, Kate had planted the seed. Her daughters would look back someday, remember their mother was ill, and it would be tragic, yes, but at least Kate died in her sleep. Give them that. The peace of it. A died-in-her-sleep story. Kate was lucky, then, so would say friends at dinner parties, spouses, psychiatrists, her children’s children, someday. She had not suffered long. No better way to go.
What pain had these doe-eyed daughters of happiness known before Kate became so ill? How had they suffered? A bad day at school? Wanting a toy, a dress, a book Kate could not afford? Never knowing their father, perhaps? No. Even there they were still better off. All the fighting had gone on when Averlee and Quincy were too young to remember it. This too was something she had spared them.
She’d spared them everything, but in the end the world had other plans. The world said, Take it in doses along the way, or get it all at once, but get it, you will. And what a grand finale it shall be.
Days, hours, minutes left for her, and if one were to ask, if only she could speak, she’d say her spirit was already pulling away like reams of red and yellow silk. Like flames. It didn’t hurt. Not to worry. It didn’t hurt at all.
Elin appearing at her bedside, her deathbed, like the start of a parable: Life, just before opening a door marked “Death,” cracks the window and in rushes Purpose on a dazzling, shimmering wind, whipping together a razzmatazz of ten thousand threads until an entire picture is projected on the wall right next to Death’s door, so that the dying might see what it all meant, might understand that this, this is what it was all for.
See.
What a gift. Elin’s likeness to Averlee, like the grown daughter Kate will never see, but did see, today, at her bedside, her deathbed, a grown woman come back from the future to say good-bye.
Kate and Elin, a set of trapped birds, each in her own cage. Kate would release Elin if she could. She’d been trying for six years, disappearing so that her sister could continue to move forward through life, a life new and separate from Kate’s. And yet, in Elin’s face, her voice, Kate had seen what remained, the traces of misery.
Where had Elin, an eleven-year-old girl, found the courage to save her? Retrieved such presence of mind? Kate had yanked Elin’s hair, shoved her underwater with the madness of a child who did not understand consequences, did not understand that death was death, did not understand finality, wanting only relief from Elin, relief from her life, from their life. And yet, if it hadn’t been for Elin, Kate would have died that day, would have never given life to Averlee and Quincy, would have never saw them into being. Where had that eleven-year-old girl found such forgiveness? Kate had tried to kill her, and minutes later Elin had the capacity, the clear-eyed grace, to solder Kate back among the living.
TWENTY-THREE
TWO DAYS LATER ELIN AND her mother brought Kate home. There was nothing in her directive that said they could not, only that no one interfere in the natural progression of her decline.
Now Elin wandered the crisp, spare rooms of Kate’s white clapboard house at the end of Caldicott Street. She drew back the drape and gazed onto the meadow next door. Meadow, so Midwestern, so pastoral. Never had she thought of a grassy open field in Florida as a meadow. But the side-by-side rope swings dangling from the twisty, monster-thick branch of the live oak, the swing’s silvery driftwood planks, and behind them tall grasses, violet wildflowers, two identical leathery-leaved orange trees, evoked an easy idyll of Averlee and Quincy scissoring back and forth in the shady mornings before the sun was too hot, chattering aloud all they would share only with each other, in this meadow.