The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  EDITH (1997)

  I wake up with a splitting headache. Mom is gone. Where is she? She is already up. She and Charlie are sitting on milk crates in the backyard under the plantain tree, passing a cigarette back and forth. I watch them from the kitchen window as I rinse my mouth out in the tap. I come outside and Mom stops talking and looks up at me like I’m interrupting. The morning sunlight is too much. A sharp pain pierces the inner corner of my eye. I rub it with one hand and my forehead with the other.

  “Good morning,” Mom says.

  I bury my head in her neck the way I did when I was little. She tenses for a moment, then strokes my hair. “You smell like a distillery,” she says. “If I lit a match you’d burst into flames.” Her voice is odd, words over-articulated.

  “I drank too much,” I say. I start to tell her about a dream I had where a doctor was ramming an icepick into my eye, torturing me, but why? He was giving me a lobotomy. I trail off once I remember these details.

  Mom keeps stroking my hair, mechanically. She’s not listening, or at least she doesn’t acknowledge anything I’ve said. “I was just telling Charlie about your grandfather. We’d come into the city for the Krewe du Vieux. He’d help build the floats.” Going to that parade with Mom was always my favorite part of Mardi Gras, my favorite part of the year. The fact that she hadn’t done anything for it this year, that she hadn’t even gone to watch the parade, I should have taken it as a sign.

  Charlie comes up and crouches next to me.

  “You f-f-feeling okay?” he asks me.

  I manage to sit up. “Sure.” I shield my eyes from the light. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  Charlie goes to get me some sunglasses out of the truck.

  When he’s out of earshot, Mom says: “Ribbit, you need to take better care of yourself.”

  The irony of this isn’t lost on me. “I’m fine.”

  “If I’m not around, I need to know that you’re okay. That you aren’t doing stupid stuff.”

  “But you are around. So I can be as stupid as I want.” I put my hands on her shoulders and stare into her eyes. It’s a game we used to play when Mae and I were little. Mom looks away. She’s watching Charlie and the truck. I keep staring though, so finally she stares back.

  This is the game: we read each other’s thoughts. Mae was better at it, but she hated playing.

  “Okay,” Mom says. “Fine.”

  “I’ll go first…” I concentrate hard on her eyes, try to see what’s there. “You want coffee,” I begin.

  She smiles because she always wants coffee.

  “You’re happy to be out of the hospital, with me. You’re thinking that you are feeling much better, and that maybe, what we need is to go on a trip.” Something flickers in her eyes at this word, trip. “And, you’re thinking about Mae, probably, because you’re always thinking about Mae.”

  Mom rolls her eyes. “You’re too old to get jealous of your sister. Of course I think about her. She’s not like you. She’s more…”

  “Whatever,” I cut her off. I don’t want to talk about Mae. “Your turn.”

  Mom looks into my eyes and I feel like she is reaching her long fingers into my brain and squeezing my thoughts, checking each of them for ripeness. My ears are ringing so I try to think my thoughts loudly so she can hear each one above the din.

  “You’re thinking that you’re having a nice time with your boyfriend. Your head hurts. You’re thinking you shouldn’t have drank so much last night. Shouldn’t have drank at all! You’re only 16.”

  She’s not even trying. I’m disappointed.

  “Do it for real,” I say. “Like you used to.” Climb into my head. I grip her shoulders harder and stare at her more intensely. I can feel my eyes bulging with effort.

  “Hey,” she says to Charlie, trying to shake me off. “You ready to go for a walk?”

  Without looking away from her, I say: “Charlie, can we have a minute?” In my peripheral vision he takes a step back.

  “What am I thinking, Mom?” I say again. How can she not hear?

  I’m thinking: Thank God you’re back. I’m thinking: Don’t go anywhere again. I’m thinking: Stay this way, you’re fine right now, stay fine. I’m thinking: Love me without all the stuff you put up. Love me without distance.

  “No,” she says. “I’m done.” She turns towards Charlie and smiles like a little bird, asks him for the rubber band around his wrist. She uses it to put her hair up, the way she wore it in the summers, off her neck, but the strands are too short and escape at weird angles. And she looks different than she used to. Her face droops like it’s been stretched and then deflated.

  God, I’ve been selfish. The game was too much for her. She’s still fragile. I shouldn’t have pushed her. Now she’ll just withdraw even further.

  She strokes my arm and says, “Let’s go for a walk. An adventure.” And the way she says it, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it fills me with despair because the real her has burrowed away from me. This is all just scaffolding. I try not to show my disappointment. I need to be agreeable and then maybe she’ll come back.

  MAE (2102)

  Once, Mom and I were driving through the swamps near where her old house used to be. I was so tired. Nothing seemed real. The windows were down. The humid night surrounded us. We looked like two ghosts, our white nightgowns flapping in the breeze. Suddenly, she stopped the car. There, illuminated by our headlights, lay a dead raccoon in the middle of the road. We watched as three birds of prey descended on its body and eviscerated it. The sound of their wings was deafening. A beating and flapping that stayed in my ears for days.

  This was the sound I was hearing as I watched Amanda and Dad on the couch, their knees touching. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Rose’s face was in my face, obstructing my view. Her lips were moving. She was talking to me.

  “Are you all right?” I finally heard her ask. People only ask this when they know you aren’t.

  “Fine, fine,” I managed to say, but it wasn’t convincing.

  Dad came over and put his palm against my forehead. I was so grateful for his touch.

  “She’s still burning up,” he said. The three of them talked about me like I wasn’t in the room. Rose wanted to take me to a doctor. I knew that if I left with her to the hospital I would never come back. Dad finally extracted his hand from my grip and agreed to wait and see.

  Rose brought me a chalky pill and a glass of water. She tilted it for me as I drank it. “She should lie down,” she said. As Dad led me to bed, Amanda turned and there it was: her sharp hooked beak, her round, unblinking eyes and oily feathers. Nobody else seemed to see her for what she was. I tried to tell him but none of the words came out. He tucked the blanket around my feet and closed the door.

  As I lay immobilized in Edie’s bottom bunk, my fever gathering heat, I could hear the front door close behind Rose and then the sound of Amanda, flying heavily through the small rooms. She squawked as she descended on my father. I could hear the sound of her talons tearing open his belly, and the slippery sounds as she pulled out the wet ropes of his intestines with her beak. Through the wall I could hear him moaning. It took all of my strength to rise from the bed and crawl to them. I was ready to offer myself instead, but his door was locked. I was so weak. I know he must have carried me back to my room at some point in the night because I woke up in my bed to him patting my sweat-soaked head and giving me another chalky pill to bring down my fever.

  He never loved Amanda. Even later, even after he married her, she was never anything more than a convenience.

  EDITH (1997)

  The bars all have their doors propped open to air out from the night before. Stale smoke, booze, and vomit waft faintly as we pass. Or is that smell coming from me?

  We stop outside the R Bar. I’ve been here once before on Mardi Gras, I think. Charlie goes in to get a drink and Mom and I lean against the building and watch a boy ride back and forth on a bicycle with a girl balanced on the
handlebars. I’m facing them, but watching Mom out of the corner of my eye. She’s humming something quietly, eyes on the kids. Charlie lent her his clothes—men’s work pants, several sizes too big, and a shirt that used to belong to a gas station attendant named “Maury.” They make her look like a stranger. I don’t like it. When I was little she’d let me dress her. Well, not let, I’d have to dress her, I guess. But I didn’t mind. She was like my big doll. I’d try to get Mae to help me pick the outfits but Mae never wanted anything to do with it. Mae was scared of Mom when Mom wasn’t well. Mae was selfish like that. We can stop and get Mom some clothes in the Quarter. Or, no, maybe it’s best just to leave it. If the hospital is looking for her, Charlie’s clothes can be her disguise. She does look like someone else in them. A character from Reality Bites or something.

  Charlie comes out with three Bloody Marys in to-go cups.

  “Hair of the d-d-dog,” Charlie says, handing me a cup, but Mom intercepts it.

  “Hair of the dog my ass,” she says and I laugh and Charlie smiles politely. I don’t argue because I’m glad she’s in a good mood, and anyway, the smell of the drink is enough to make me queasy again.

  She takes a sip from both cups, then sets mine down next to the head of a drunk sleeping on the sidewalk. “Good morning,” she says, shaking him by the arm.

  “Angel,” the man calls after us. And she does look sort of floaty. It’s because the pants are too long on her and she has a light step. Mae would have things to say about it. I hear her voice in my head: too light, she says. But so what? And who asked her. I take the celery stick out of Charlie’s Bloody Mary and crunch down on it. Hold it for him as he takes a bite too.

  I realize after crossing the street that Mom isn’t with us. She’s standing on the edge of Jackson Square in front of a man playing the accordion. I watch her from the other side of the road as she sways to the music with her eyes closed. The man finishes the song, and she keeps swaying, not seeming to notice that the music has stopped.

  “Is she…” Charlie starts, but trails off.

  The accordion player starts the next song. A family pauses to listen, looks at Mom, then moves along. Should I cross back and get her? Mom finally stops swaying mid-song and opens her eyes. She looks startled when she sees us staring at her, as though she can’t quite place us.

  As soon as she crosses the street I take her hand. “Should we go up to the river?” I say quickly to change the subject and smooth things over so she doesn’t have to be embarrassed.

  Up on the levee, we find a place in the grass and take our shoes off to dangle our feet in the water. A barge full of orange shipping containers floats by. This is the spot Mom used to take us to when we were little, near the bend before the ferry terminal. The water level is high today, I guess because of all the snow melting up north. Last time I was here it was much lower. This part was all rocks.

  “I’ve missed music,” Mom says, scrunching her face for emphasis. “Oh, music remembers it better.”

  “Remembers what?” I start to ask her, but she turns to Charlie and takes his hand.

  “Thank you,” she says to him.

  He blushes a little and tries to say the word “Sure,” but gives up. She watches his mouth as he does this and her mouth twitches silently along with his. For a moment I’m seeing her real, unguarded face, and she’s showing it to him and not to me. Of course this makes me jealous. It’s stupid but it does. Mom must sense something because she lets go of his hand and turns to me.

  “Are you having a good day?” she asks.

  I say, “Of course,” because I am, really. It’s stupid to be jealous. I’m happy just to be with her again. And then I say, “Really good,” so that she’ll know that I mean it.

  “We c-can go see some music tonight,” Charlie offers.

  She nods, but she’s not really there anymore. Her eyes close. Something is hurting her. Maybe my hangover is contagious. I massage her temples. She smiles like she’s tolerating my touch.

  “It’s all right,” she says. “It’ll pass.”

  Charlie moves my hands out of the way and does these strange cupping gestures moving his fingers over her face without touching her.

  “Is this h-helping?” he says. I can tell it isn’t but she nods her head “yes.”

  “It’s the medication they had me on. Missing a dose gives you headaches.”

  It makes me want to cry, the idea of them pumping this poison into her. Of course she’s been acting a little strange, but who wouldn’t be?

  Charlie and I are both staring at her. She opens her eyes and puts her hands on each of our shoulders.

  “I’m fine,” she says, “I’m fine,” and kisses our foreheads with her dry, chapped lips. Then she lies across our laps. I get her head and Charlie gets her legs. She really is our baby. I stroke her face and watch the boats float down the river. A fishing boat, a ferry, a cruise ship.

  “Do you want to go s-s-swimming?” Charlie asks.

  I shake my head. “You can’t here.” I rip a handful of grass and throw it in the water. He doesn’t look convinced.

  I’d say more but then the calliope starts playing in the steamboat. God. That sound. Joy itself.

  “W-w-what is that?” Charlie asks, squinting at the steamboat.

  “That,” I say, “is the ghost ball. Remember the ghost ball?” I ask Mom, poking her in the shoulder. She smiles faintly but keeps her eyes closed.

  That’s what she’d told Mae and me when we were little. Can’t you see all the men and women in their fancy dresses, dancing on the river? she’d said. Look at them waltz, and then her eyes had moved over the water like she was really seeing them. And for a second I would see them too. Pirates and outlaws and ladies with big powdered wigs.

  CHARLIE

  Edie’s mother was frankly a little repulsive to me and yet there was something hypnotic about her. Marianne would talk in this odd way, talk at me, making it clear I didn’t matter at all as the subject, and then something would shift, and it would be electrifying—this moment of connection. I don’t quite know how to describe it. It must have been part of the mental illness, the boundaries around things and people would shift, would be revealed briefly as being illusory. I understand why, if I were a person who made art, I would have found her compelling.

  As it was, though, I found being around Edie’s mother barely tolerable. She was always coming on to me. One night, I slept in the truck because she wouldn’t stop fondling herself and me as Edie slept on the other side of the room. I didn’t tell Edie that her mother was doing these things because it would have hurt her and she would have blamed me for it. Her mother could do no wrong in Edie’s eyes.

  Her mother’s suffering was so huge it was like its own person: it needed to be constantly fed and tended to. I don’t know what it would have done to me to grow up with a mother like that. My parents had always been so in control of all their faculties. Seeing Edie with her mother made me only love Edie more. To still be so protective and sweet.

  MAE

  Dad finished the book and my fever finally broke, though I didn’t get better. Still, to celebrate, Dad took me to Coney Island. What an odd place to take someone who is in the midst of a psychotic break, though of course he didn’t know this was happening to me, didn’t want to know.

  I remember being on the Ferris wheel with him. The sun had just set and the lights of the fair glittered below. Amanda was in the gondola behind ours. She was always nearby. I could smell her even from that distance, the spongy smell of rotting meat.

  The Ferris wheel stopped when we got to the top. Amanda waved at us. Dad waved back. He was trying to seem cheerful. I stood up and leaned over the edge. The ocean below looked like it was made of tar. The night felt like a swarm of insects. How had I ended up inside this nightmare?

  “We could dive in the ocean and swim to the edge of the earth. Nobody would know who we are,” I said. Maybe the voice was mine. Maybe it was Mom’s. I couldn’t tell anymore. “W
e could run away together.”

  Dad yanked me back into my seat by the hem of my shirt, hard enough to make the whole gondola swing under us.

  “Stop it, Mae” he said. He said my name constantly now, as though it would be enough to remind me of who I was.

  “I want to be with you,” I said and started to cry.

  He pressed me into his chest. “Poor Mae,” he said. “You are with me.”

  “No,” I wailed. “I’m not. Not really.” I knew that he had stopped loving me. He was done with his book and done with me.

  “I’m right here,” he tried to soothe me.

  “No,” I cried. “You know that’s not what I mean. I want to be with you.” I bit his chest through his shirt. “I want to be your wife. I would do anything you wanted.”

  I was a wild animal and he was trapped with me a hundred feet up in the air. He had to restrain me finally, using his knees. It must have been horrible for him to create me and then lose control of the narrative in this way.

  AMANDA

  Dennis told me he thought that book was his most potent work to date, and I don’t doubt this. I saw the intensity of feeling that went into writing it, even if I never got to read the actual manuscript. What an enormous honor it was to be in the room when he finished it. I had just brought him his lunch and I got to watch him type the last word and take the sheet out of his typewriter. He seemed shocked. He let out a whoop. “I’m done!” He twirled me around, pulled me onto his lap.

  Oh, how we celebrated! To finally possess him, to hold his life force inside of me… It was magnificent. I don’t think we could have had such a meaningful physical relationship if I had not been given the opportunity to show him the depths of my devotion. Writing that novel seemed to have purged some darkness from him, and he was suddenly available to me in a way he never had been before.