by Erika Swyler
Betheen leaned out the window for a good look. Beyond the semi, the pavement was covered in thick brush. Trees and growth along the roads always needed cutting back, but this was dense—like the untouched areas in the Everglades. More people got out of their cars. The notebook man yelled at the driver in the semi, arms waving.
She knew the look of space reporters in their wilted shirts and horn-rims, men who still thought it was the ’60s. If he was headed for Canaveral, he’d need another way. The road had vanished into vegetation too wild to see through. The vines seemed to writhe, pulling back at intervals, revealing savannah-like grasses, only to be reclaimed again by kudzu and creeping moss.
“Jesus.” She got out of her car and shouted, “Anybody know what happened?”
“Nope,” Pete McIntyre answered. “I was going over to Mims for some parts, and it’s been like this for at least an hour. I dropped by the police station, to see if they could put a call into the highway department, but their phones are down.”
Police phones were out? Annie was still in her car, Denny wasn’t with her. How long had she been here? “Has anyone tried Satsuma Drive yet?” No one had.
The reporter leaned on his car. “Will that get me to 95 or the turnpike?”
“Both.” She went to Annie’s car. Annie’s grip on the wheel was tight, and she looked through the windshield as if the problem might clear at any second. When Betheen tapped on the window, Annie rolled it down, slowly.
“This is crazy. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Annie said. “I can get Denny later today. After school, I promise. I don’t like putting you out.” There were circles under her eyes, but her hair was perfectly blown out in a dark brown Princess Di. Betheen recognized that exhaustion, when your body didn’t want to work and your heart and stomach melded into a single organ that hurt, but you still had to blow your hair out because someone would see you. Annie had seen her like that.
“It’s not putting us out, Annie. Nedda and Denny were up late, laughing.” Enough to let her know her son was all right, not enough to let anyone within earshot know he might not be.
Annie’s voice barely left the car. “Thank you. It’s silly. Desmond was just blowing off steam. He feels terrible. Denny doesn’t mean to, but he pushes every one of Desmond’s buttons.”
It was impossible to imagine Denny pushing anyone’s buttons. He’d never so much as forgotten to wipe his shoes before coming in.
“There’s no rush. Nedda’s happier when he’s around, and it’s good to have a break from kids sometimes.” She kept her voice light. “If you need him to stay for a bit, that’s fine. It’s nice to have a boy around. They’re so different from girls.”
“I couldn’t put you out like that.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Fine, fine.” Her smile was strained. “Thank you, Betheen. You and Theo both.”
Betheen wanted to say that everything would be all right, but wishful thinking didn’t make it so.
The trucker leaned out his window. “I can’t get around unless somebody backs up.” Ray Villaverde. His daughter went to school with Nedda.
Betheen shouted back, “Does anyone want to try Satsuma? If it’s no good, then John Lee up to Forty-Seven?”
Annie’s car lumbered slowly around and the line began backing up. Betheen maneuvered her car into the thin strip between the road and the canal. They caravanned behind Ray Villaverde, driving into that strangely lit sky, a canopy of twilight.
As they crawled down the roads, Betheen dug her nails into the wheel. When they reached Satsuma, the road was wrong, deeply wrong. The canal on the side was gray-brown slush where it should be warm and teeming with bugs. This kind of cold didn’t come down here, yet frost had climbed the embankment, and ice—actual ice—covered the blacktop in a sheet so dark and smooth there was no seeing its beginning or end.
When the semi hit the ice, it appeared to be dancing on air as it jackknifed. Theo would have seen equations, momentum, friction, and velocity. Betheen saw the inevitable.
The reporter slammed on his brakes and the sedan spun.
She pumped her brakes, pulled the wheel. “Turn into it, turn into it, turn into it.”
The reporter’s eyes met hers.
His nose was short, three lumps like a Cabbage Patch doll. His chin was weak and disappeared into his neck—though perhaps that was because he was screaming. His glasses were dark horn-rims, which flew from his face. He turned and turned the wheel.
She tried to shout “Stop turning,” but couldn’t.
She steered right, hard right, pumpedpumpedpumped the brakes, jerked as the left rear panel of her car hit someone else’s, and watched the man scream.
She saw his eyes. There was no way to tell the color from across the hoods of two spinning cars, not when one was a Cadillac, not with the morning sun so low, but she knew they were gray with the certainty she knew she was watching a man die.
Time stopped.
He saw her.
His mouth closed.
He was in his midthirties, possibly younger if he was from here, where sun cooked you like a peanut. He was thin-lipped. Light glinted off his wedding band, a gaudy chunk of yellow gold. Gold, a noble metal, was supposed to mean purity or steadfastness, but nothing showed wear like gold. Her ring had been her grandmother’s; Theo had smiled about having given her a ring she already owned. There was a pull, tying her to the man across the road.
A fragile bond, van der Waals forces. Butter, softening, melting.
Time stretched. His mouth formed a word. Help.
The moment snapped. His car careened, smashing into the semi.
The flip was fast, ugly, so sharp it pierced her breath. After breaking the guardrail, his car landed on its roof, and tipped into the canal.
Twenty, thirty, forty seconds. Minutes vanished, however long it took for the Cadillac to come to rest, for her to breathe, to unhook the seat belt and fall out the door.
The canal was pulling the sedan into it. Like quicksand but worse. Hands were on her shoulders, dragging her back. She’d climbed the rail.
Help.
“There’s nothing you can do. Stay back.” Grease under the fingernails, freckles and scars up the forearms, a gravel voice. Pete McIntyre. “You’re okay, you’re okay. Mrs. Papas, don’t go down there or you’ll go with it.”
“Someone has to get him,” she said. “He’s inside. He’s in there.”
Pete’s fingers dug into the meat of her arm. “Don’t. Betheen, don’t.”
“He’ll drown.”
“He won’t.”
“How can you watch someone drown?”
“He can’t drown, Mrs. Papas. He’s dead.” Pete loosened his grip. “Here. Close your eyes until I tell you, okay? Then you take one look, real quick.”
It was easy to follow such a calm voice. He was musky like exhaust—N2, O2, CO2, CO.
“Open your eyes,” he said. “Now, look.”
The cold coming off the canal numbed her. What remained of the sedan’s driver’s side window was in front of her. The frame was smashed and resembled a squinting eye. Then she saw him.
The reporter’s head was flopped back, though flop implied motion and his head would never move again. His nose touched the car’s ceiling.
There was blood.
“He’s gone, see? He can’t drown. It was real quick. Close your eyes again, all right, Mrs. Papas? All right, Betheen?” He walked her back to her car. She let him, it was easy to.
She thought of that yellow gold ring, the man’s wife. She stepped over things when Pete told her to, walked around a spray of glass. The Cadillac’s side had a long gouge down it, and a crushed quarter panel.
Ray Villaverde was outside his truck, saying, “We need the cops, somebody get the cops.”
Annie Prater was out of her car too, hands dug deep into the pockets of a blue denim skirt. Their eyes met. There was no connection, no snapping into place, like she’d had
with the man. All she saw from Annie was fear.
That pull, that tug, was for the dying. She’d felt it before. Did the man have children?
Nedda. She should get home to Nedda. Let her know she was all right.
Betheen got her purse from the floor of the passenger side and dug through the glove box for her lipstick. Aubergine, a color that sounded like promise and wine. It was mostly carnauba wax—long strings of esters with a high melting point, hard as concrete—and oils added for softness. The wax she put on her lips was the same she’d use to polish the car. Wax lips, she thought, and bit into her tongue.
He was dead. That poor man had died. Someone would need to get the police. Someone would need to get the highway patrol. Someone would need to be there when Nedda and Denny got home from school. Someone would need to do everything. “I have to go,” she said.
“I’ll drive you home,” Pete said. “I’ll come back, tow the car to the shop, and take a look.”
Her chest hurt. There was ice on the road. Nobody here knew how to drive on ice. She thought of the reporter’s neck, the unnatural angle, like a bent elbow. “No, I need to walk. I need to be alone for a bit. Pull myself together.”
“Betheen?” Annie’s voice. Thin, high.
“I’m fine, Annie. Just get the police.”
When Annie pressed again, Betheen forced down a lump in her throat. “I’m fine. It’s not all that far, just a mile or two, and I need a minute to clear my head. You understand.”
When she began walking, no one stopped her. Betheen ground the heel of her palm into the rib above her breast—muscle, fat, and bone. She opened her coat, pulled down the neck of her blouse, and saw that the seat belt had left a bruise on her chest. It looked like strawberries and felt like someone was trying to take her heart.
She followed the double yellow line, fitting her shoes between the stripes of paint. She pushed at the bruise, and felt the man again, that instant they’d been connected. He’d known he would die. Did his wife know? Did she feel it?
The walk passed quickly. Distances disappeared when you were being pulled to someone you loved. She dug at the growing welt on her chest, grabbing on to what had always been there, the two threads that spun out into the world. The one to Baby Michael still hurt too much to speak about, though for a different reason than at first. After a certain point too much time had passed to tell your child about a sibling they’d never know. The guilt of such a secret brought its own strangely tender ache. The other thread connected to Nedda. It wasn’t like Michael’s, or the one that had connected her to the dead man. Her daughter might not feel it, but it was there. It formed when you had children, and would be there until the day you died. A carbon–carbon covalent bond pulled Betheen and Nedda tight.
1986: Into the Mouth
Her mother’s car was gone, and her father’s wasn’t in the driveway either. Her dad had three places: the basement at home, the armchair in the parlor, and the lab at the college. Nedda rode hard, the wind in her ears. Pop Prater would be awake soon. He’d find Denny.
The thing around Denny was like the thing around the monkey: not hard, but not exactly soft either. There was an elastic feel to it that made her think of molded gelatin. She’d pushed against it and it pressed back; then something that felt like a static charge ran through her. The air around it had wavered, almost rippling.
There was a moment when she swore she could have talked to him, when the air had been almost normal, but then it changed. What could you touch but not see? Air, baby jellyfish, water when you were in it. Smells. Atoms. You were always touching atoms, but never seeing them. The monkey never moved, and Denny never stopped moving. Opposites. The trees in the grove didn’t stop moving either. But they went forward and back. Denny was aging, was going very, very fast. Everything inside him must be moving fast too, vibrating in place, heating up like a marshmallow in a microwave. Boom.
Her dad would fix it.
She squeezed her eyes shut and pedaled, trying to find her insides. Her bike wobbled so she opened her eyes again. It would take too long to get there on the road. She made a hard turn to cut through the remains of Island Paradise. What if Denny grew up before her dad could fix it? She would have to go to school without Denny. He’d have to get a house. A family. She turned toward the park’s entrance, and the shadow cast by the giant tiki head. What if Denny died before her dad could fix it?
The fence around Island Paradise had been broken since almost the day it had been put up. For months, the bank had repaired it, installing new chain link, but after a year’s worth of break-ins, the fence stayed broken and the differences between park and forest faded. Lengths of fence and razor wire poked through creepers and catbrier. Those same vines climbed around the entrance, giving the angry-eyed tiki god a beard. The eyes were empty sockets bored straight through the concrete. Once, gas lights had lit them at night. Now, eerie yellow sky shone through, revealing a bird’s nest housed in the left socket.
She rode through the god’s mouth. It was concrete, poured and cast, same as the Pinocchio on the mini golf course. Nedda felt like it was watching her.
Kudzu enveloped whole buildings, cracking and pulling them to the ground like a living anchor. It had consumed the waterslide, leaving a wall of leaves and vines in its place. Anything that stood still too long in Easter was devoured by forest. If the monkey never moved, the kudzu would eventually claim it.
That would happen to Denny.
She passed the pond that had held outrigger canoes you could paddle with your feet like a swan boat. It had surrendered to algae and mosses, the water a solid green mass. It steamed, clouds wisping off it in the cold. How could it be hot when everything else was cold? Denny said Jimmy La Morte probably bathed in the pond. There were thick bubbles, and something that might have been a pontoon stuck up from the far end.
The trees gave way to grass and sand and North Satsuma Drive, which backed onto the college. She’d biked through Island Paradise alone. She’d gone through the mouth by herself. She’d thought something like that would make her feel proud or brave, but it didn’t. She was terrified.
At the sight of her dad through the narrow window in the door to the lab, she began crying. He would fix it, because he knew everything.
She was panting and sweating, there was grease all over her, her lip had a sore spot where she’d chewed it, and Denny was gone.
“Nedda?”
A tremor started inside her, shaking everything, fast. She couldn’t say how Denny kicked the pruner as it rusted beneath him, how he stretched and screamed and sped like a movie. She felt like exploding into light and heat and thoughts and everything in the universe all at once, traveling, traveling, traveling. All she could do was cry.
Her father’s arms were around her. “What’s wrong? Here.” The in and out of his breath was a wave, like a pump, like an accordion, like the sun—rise and fall, rise and fall. Beard bristle against her cheek.
She was angry, for crying, for not being able to talk. She tried to swallow but couldn’t, and the sobs kept coming. She choked on a bubble of snot.
“Breathe. Breathe, then talk. In, out. Okay?”
She embraced the weight of his arms. He would fix it.
“Something’s wrong with Denny. Dad, it’s really bad.” Then all the words tumbled down. She’d ridden through the mouth of the god in the park and she hadn’t been swallowed, she’d come out a scream—all the words that had ever gotten trapped were loosed from her.
She talked and kept talking. She told her father about the bruise on Denny’s eye, that Pop had hit him because he’d broken a machine, but he’d broken the machine because he’d failed a test and lied about it. She told him about the monkey and how she couldn’t touch it and it seemed alive but also stuck, and about the trees in the grove and how the sky looked sick and was light too early, and that everything in the grove was growing and shrinking and dying and growing again. She told him about the sprinklers going on and the blare of light th
at swallowed up Denny.
“I couldn’t see anything; my eyes went all black and purple and when I could see again he was blurry and moving too fast. I tried to get to him, Daddy. I tried, but I couldn’t, and I think he’s going to die.” She leaned into him and her knees hit the lab floor.
“No one’s going to die, Little Twitch.”
“How do you know?”
“I need you to be specific. What did you see?”
“I told you. The sprinklers went on, there was a flash of light, it was cold, then hot, and I couldn’t get to Denny. He’s stuck, like the monkey. You don’t understand. We have to do something. Daddy, you have to help.”
He wasn’t listening. If he was listening he’d understand and be writing or pulling things apart, or asking her things. Why wasn’t he listening?
“Nedda, breathe.”
She tried to breathe, looked at the shelves in the lab, the boxes with wires for circuitry—the resistors and chokes that looked like little ant bodies with wire legs, and breadboard bases to build things on. One shelf had a stack of straight glass tubes, another a stack of bent tubes. Solder. The room smelled like solder, bitter and sharp, like the good parts of home. Behind her father, Crucible’s legs moved slowly, barely perceptible, but the shadows were different.
Crucible was different from when she’d last seen it. Its insides were now beneath panels of metal and glass, all the open wiring gone. Three ventilation hoses snaked from it, shiny aluminum tentacles. The legs on it were different, heavier, smoother. The door was closed tight with a thick seal around the edge. The room was cold to keep Crucible cold. Electronics overheating was bad. Denny was overheating. Maybe he was cooking from the inside out, like the marshmallows in the microwave, after all. Maybe she’d lied.
“The machine’s on?”
“No.”
“It’s moving.”
“That’s residual motion from a test,” he said. “There were grounding problems after the launch, there was a short. I did some work this morning, and ran a test to make sure I’d gotten it fixed.”
“You turned it on.”
“Of course.” There was something different about him, a glint that seemed wrong. Happy. He was actually happy. “It worked. It’s preliminary, but it works, Twitch. This is good. It’s good for us.”