by Sarah Bruni
The girl waits, she is thinking. Être sans histoire—again. How awful it feels to be without a story, to exist between stories, in this terrible netherworld where she isn’t one thing or another.
Look, the coyotes explain, gentler now. We don’t have all day. They eye one another nervously, and it’s clear that they do have all day. They are always down here treading water. It is Sheila who doesn’t have all day, is what they mean by this. It is Sheila who has been underwater for longer than would be advisable already and who is running out of stored air from above.
Then they lean into her ear and Sheila can feel the tough wiry fur around their snouts scrape the edges of her face when they whisper. She is trying with everything she has to concentrate on what they are going to tell her.
AND JAKE SAID, “It was our father’s name first.”
Peter felt his throat tighten, and he felt the impulse to swallow but could not. He said, “Our—”
“—father.” Jake nodded. “You have his name. Mom didn’t know how to talk about him after he died,” he said, “but someone should have told you.”
Peter could feel all the air in the room behind his ears, building pressure there, like tunnels under water. He said, “How did it happen?”
Jake shook his head. “I know it was an accident. I know he was in a boat. There was a storm and no one survived it.”
Peter was thinking of water. He was thinking of swallowing water, of the enormous and awful bodies of water that always exist in dreams.
On the television, the weatherman was chatting with the anchorman. The five-day forecast evaporated from the screen as they went live to local coverage. The water of the lake continued to float behind them, black and giant as a piece of carbon paper.
EXPLAIN IT, IT starts simple and gathers speed fast. There are always entire worlds that exist alongside the one you think you’ve chosen to live in. Sometimes you chose the worlds, and sometimes they chose you. Here is Paris. Here is Iowa. Here is a story you couldn’t stop reading as a child about a girl who cut off all her hair into the kitchen sink in the middle of the night and ran away from home. Here is a list of all the dirty words you knew at twelve. Here is the same list at fifteen. Here is the first boy you ever kissed. Here is the one who wants to become your family. Here is your family, same as always: your mother, your sister, your father with a hold on you so firm your feet start to lift off the linoleum of the kitchen floor.
Slow down, Sheila implores of her underwater lecturers. I can’t keep up.
You want to keep up? ask the coyotes. So these things matter to you?
There’s no more time left to be anything but honest.
Yes, Sheila says. Please.
The coyotes are speaking slowly now for her benefit. One at a time, they’re listing the names of places where stories begin, places where choices start to make landscapes appear one way, or another.
Welcome to Paris, the coyotes begin again. Welcome to Iowa. Welcome to Chicago. Welcome to Montreal. Welcome to Kathmandu.
Kathman-what?
But it seems the places are irrelevant, their names arbitrary. They all exist. Flights can be purchased between them. This is evidence enough.
Enough!
Sweetheart, the coyotes conclude, there’s nothing stable about it. If you’re reading the signs, you’re writing the signs—they say what you see in them.
Wait, thinks Sheila. Like action curious fear?
Duh, say the coyotes, but they say it sweetly. Of course, action curious fear. Isn’t it obvious? When action curious fear, être san histoire isn’t an option.
Please, says Sheila. In plain English!
Congratulations, say the coyotes, it’s your life. You can do what you want with it. This sounds suspiciously like something her father said to her once, and it’s difficult to say whether the coyotes have selected these words to produce this effect, or whether it is her own brain forging tunnels to make meaning where none exists, but as her foot makes contact with a stone at the bottom of the lake, she bends her knees and pushes off against it, and already she is looking up to the surface of the water now, and her body is rising to meet a light that seems to float there. For a moment, she sees into the next world and what is waiting in it. It’s not that she sees a place, the details of the life that she’ll construct of little odds and ends. What she sees in the moment is this. There will be consequences to every action. Also spoils.
Then there is the prodding and pulling and a strong light moving over the surface of the water. Helicopters drone above. Search lights and voices. The impossible prodding and pulling. The harsh taste of air.
THEN PETER SAID, “Jake?”
“Yes,” Jake said.
“What was he like?”
Jake was quiet for a while, and Peter repeated the question. Finally Jake said, “He had a beard that was every color at once when he let it grow in the summer. He knew how to tie a hundred different kinds of knots. He loved our mother.” Then he felt his brother push something into his hand and when he looked down there was a gold round thing sitting there, smooth as a pebble and on a long weathered chain.
“He used to show me how to use it,” Jake said.
Peter closed his hand around the thing.
“It always points north so you know how to keep moving even when everything looks the same.”
Behind his brother’s head was the lake on the television. He was thinking of his father, the man he was named for but never would meet, when he saw the same cameras, the same microphones, the searchlights.
One of the cops said, “Well, I’ll be damned,” and everyone turned at the same time to witness the place that was being lit up in the water.
SHE WAS STILL COUGHING to adjust to the difference, blinking away the din of the light, when she felt someone lean in close to her ear and begin to speak.
There were news crews and cameras. There were reporters and microphones.
The paramedics were yelling, “Clear a path! A little space here!”
To her, they spoke quietly, so only she could hear. They asked her to answer things they thought she should know, answers to questions that would be important if they were going to let her back into the known world outside the water. They asked for her name and for the names of her parents, the day and the year, they asked her the name of the city where she was born, and what was the last thing she remembered. She could see she was doing well, she was answering all their questions correctly, because they were smiling as they were strapping her down to the stretcher, they were saying yes, good, very good, as they were fastening the tiny needle to her wrist with white tape and moving something cool and steel around where her lungs would be waiting beneath the skin of her soaked dress.
PETER SAT UP in bed and leaned into the television. He looked at the water and watched the same sequence of events he’d seen a thousand times in his sleep. There was the footage of the men in orange vests diving in the water. It seemed impossible that there could be more to witness. It seemed impossible that he should have to witness it again.
“The story is still unfolding hours later,” the man with the microphone explained. “Details are beginning to surface since the Coralville, Iowa, abduction victim, Sheila Gower, was correctly identified by a witness who recognized her from a photo being circulated by the Chicago Police Department. The witness claims to have tried to approach Ms. Gower upon identifying her, but a struggle ensued—which ended abruptly with Ms. Gower, according to the witness, ‘jumping into the lake.’ The witness’s allegation is still under investigation as police continue in their efforts to determine how exactly Sheila Gower ended up in the water.”
Peter closed his eyes against the rest of the story, against the part he knew was coming, where her prone body would be pulled up from the rocks. He took his brother’s hand inside his own. He waited for it to get quiet, the respect that was due. But the quiet didn’t come. It started with a question, and then another, and then there was a cacophony of them, questio
ns that came so fast they started interrupting those that came before, gathering speed.
Did you lose hope you would be found?
What do you want to say to your family?
What message would you send to your former captors?
He looked at the television then, and he saw her. She was in the center of all of it, the fixed object around which all the cameras and questions were rotating, and her long hair was still half-wet like a hundred small ropes that hung around her face. But her eyes were open. Her eyes were following the lights of their cameras.
Could you describe the feeling of being rescued?
Any words for the witness who identified you?
Any words for your rescuers?
Sheila blinked at the camera.
Their cameras hovered between her and the viewers at home who waited to hear her say something.
Sheila coughed. She leaned into the microphone.
SHE TRIED ONCE TO SAY IT, and it surprised her how difficult it was to say anything, how her lungs stung to make herself heard to all the things that flashed around her. She breathed in and out and heard the air pull and whistle into the microphone.
She looked into the eye of one of their cameras for the place where he would be, where she understood he would be waiting for word of what they were going to do now that they had survived this thing together. She said his name slowly, loud enough so he could hear it, and then she closed her eyes again against the noise of so much light.
“SETH.”
At first it was only a whisper. It was gravelly and dull as a stone underwater, but there could be no mistake: now she was speaking to him alone. He began to laugh, loud and full and from the pit of his stomach. He laughed like a crazy person—this observation did not escape him, surrounded as he was by city authorities in his hospital bed—but a crazy person at the moment in which desperation became something else, something more akin to hope, and the laugh grew fat and fast, picking up speed, and still he did not stop. Even as the cops grew short-tempered, as he watched them escort his brother from the room, as they advised him to lose the grin, as he was read his rights—to remain silent among them—and handcuffed to the guardrails of his hospital bed, he felt the laugh grow in his stomach and spread to every expanse of his body, until it filled him like the first fully formed truth; and how good it felt to accept this fate as it was offered: to be an ordinary man—a criminal perhaps, a madman maybe—but a man like any other, with a certain past and the rest unwritten, trying with what he is and what he is given to deserve the love of an ordinary woman.
SHEILA CONTINUED TO CLOSE her eyes against all of it. She felt the air shift from the wind to the still and steady circulation of the ambulance, and their voices began to trail off and get quieter until she could hear only the regular beep and blink of the machines around her. She allowed herself to drift off and be carried across town to the hospital room somewhere that was waiting, a room she had never seen, a room toward which her father and mother would also begin to navigate now, this place where she would open her eyes, confront this living world again and start to forge her place in it. The machines continued to mark the time; they monitored the fluids that moved around inside her, even as she was so still, they advised her of the general stability of things that continued on course, things that knew what to keep doing even when you paused at an impasse and looked up for help from elsewhere, they kept moving for you, around you, inside you, they knew how to exist in any home you could fathom, how to get you to the next thing without your even knowing it.
Acknowledgments
This book was written over many years in many cities. The list of those whose influence was necessary to its writing has been growing for a while.
I am indebted to my mentors during my time in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis: Kathryn Davis, Marshall Klimasewiski, and Kellie Wells, as well as my talented peers and readers. Thank you to Anton DiSclafani, Tim Mullaney, and Eileen G’Sell; to Eric Lundgren, who helped me find a way to begin again; and to Teddy Wayne, who read this book more times than anyone.
Thank you to my agent, Susan Golomb, for her belief in this book in all its various forms; to my editor, Jenna Johnson, whose direction restored energy and sanity to the revision process; to Anne McPeak for her meticulousness.
Marvel’s CD-ROM collection 40 Years of the Amazing Spider-Man provided an introduction to the first decade of Spider-Man comic books. Digital scans of each original two-page spread, including readers’ letters and advertisements, simulated a tactile reading experience and helped situate each comic book within a larger social and historical context.
Many of the French lessons that appear in fragments throughout are modified from the Living Language All-Audio French series. Thank you Gaia Bihr for extra help with the French. Thank you Katerina Meza Breña for help with the Czech.
For assistance and asylum, thank you friends and readers: Brian Gilman for always believing; Scott Polach for his faith in me during the toughest year; Claudio Gancedo Guerra for being a closer reader in his second language than I am in my first; Rob White for making lists with me; Stefan Merrill Block for his steadfast enthusiasm and advice; Isidoro Duarte for his solidarity and patience. Thank you Luther Moss, still one of the best storytellers I know; Christine Mladic for countless readings and for her insight as a photographer and designer; Sarah Ferone for her artistic collaboration and for allowing me to include her illustrations in this book.
Thank you Tim White and Leslie Wiedder for early encouragement. Thank you Tom Simmons, whose classes were an incredible refuge my first years writing in Iowa.
I’m grateful to my family for invaluable guidance, confidence, and love, especially my grandmothers, Rosemary Buishas and Eleanor Pignotti; my brothers, David and Michael, allies and really smart readers; my parents, Jeanine and James, without whose constant conviction and support this book would not exist.
About the Author
SARAH BRUNI is a graduate of the University of Iowa and the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. She lives in Brooklyn. Visit www.sarabruni.com.