Unfurled

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

But then it stops working. The intensity we would usually move toward shifts further and further away until I’m like a swimmer who’s lost her breath and I just want to get up and out of the water but Neil is holding me under. I’m pulling on his shoulders and pushing him away at the same time. My body angry and closed down. I need air. I need space. He stops. We wait. I hear him shudder and he could be crying, or maybe he’s made his way to his own solitary climax.

  It may be minutes later or hours later, but I become aware again of how chilly the room has grown, how crisp and rough the sheets feel against my legs and arms. Neil is a weight to my left, but I cannot detect his body heat. Has he been sleeping? Have I been sleeping? I cannot perceive a change in the darkness outside.

  His voice is quiet, seems to come from a fixed distance. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m keeping my carry-on stored safely under the seat.”

  His head rustles its agreement against the pillow and I sit up, wracked again by yet another wave of nausea. I breathe through its highest point until it breaks and settles but the last forty-eight hours compress and I think hard.

  “Got your own footprints, Ella?” Caroline teased me the day before yesterday when I turned down her famous carrot cake because the smell made me gag. Footprints. What I tell farmers and other clients when an insemination of one of their animals has been a success because the ultrasound of the early embryo, no matter the species, often has the shape and form of the sole of a shoe. I waved her away, apologizing, speculating a stomach bug. The bug, of course, has not materialized and I count backward now as if this might help. I try to remember my last period, but can’t because sometimes my periods don’t come for months, then they come for weeks at a time. I tap a fingertip to my belly and I think, no, it can’t be that. There’s really no chance because it couldn’t have worked. It shouldn’t have.

  I open my mouth to say something to Neil but I close it again. I jump out of bed and race down the stairs. Shivering, shaking with cold. The dogs leap up from their beds in the office and race after me. Trapp nips at my heels. I shoo them away. Find my coat. Take out the photos. I stand in the living room and I look at the photos, all three of them. My mother. My mother. My mother. I have to hold one hand with the other to stop my trembling. She is not smiling. Or maybe she is. A small curve to her mouth. Her hair is still very dark red but streaked with gray. Neil calls to me from upstairs but I ignore him, go into the downstairs bathroom and lock the door. I do not turn on the light, leaving myself in the blue of the streetlamp light that angles in from the outside window. I drop the photos on the floor but I can see the same thing in the mirror. My hair the same dark red. Long like hers. Our mouths unsmiling. Our eyes open, staring. I’m still shivering hard so I pull open the glass shower door and turn on the hot water. Neil is calling from outside the door and I call back that I’m freezing, that I need to warm up. My voice sounds normal to me. How on earth have I managed this? I still haven’t turned the light on and I step on one of those photos as I reach for a towel in the closet. I step on her face.

  The shower is far too hot but I don’t adjust it, I just stand there under the water. My skin burns, my feet start to prickle, but still I don’t move. The spray from the shower hits me full on the neck and I concentrate on the pain, tilting already, wondering if I make it any hotter would I get an actual burn?

  “Ella, you must see this,” she whispered, and I see her again, pointing at a person on a boat two slips over from ours at the marina. The man’s skin is pink and brown, stretched too-tight over the nose, wrinkled around the lips and eyes. “He’s been burned,” she continues, still keeping her voice low. “Someone burned him.” Really? Did someone burn him? Why would someone do that? What if it was just an accident? But no, she is adamant. She is always so sure of what she says. “Someone must have burned him. Someone must have been really angry.”

  It’s so hot in this shower, the steam is choking me and I have to sit down at the far end of the tub because I’m going to throw up again. I retch and I retch but nothing comes up. There is nothing for my body to let go of.

  I rinse my mouth anyway, rinse myself one last time and get out. The room is immediately cold again and my towel is an old one, patchy in places, the trim frayed at the bottom, a relic left over from my childhood. It doesn’t do its job so I must rub and rub to dry every single inch of my body. I stand wrapped in the towel in the middle of the room and I close my eyes. I wait. I wait. I wait. It starts to work. It isn’t even difficult. There comes to me from somewhere across the house the sound of my dad’s footstep, of his voice. I hear each footfall on the hardwood, coming closer. I hear the half-clearing of his throat, the way he always hesitates before raising his voice to call out. I know that I could open the door and he might be standing right there, ready to ask me what I’d like for breakfast. All I need to do is reach for the doorknob and open the door and everything will be just fine.

  Keep level with those pylons, Captain.

  Nah, we’re in the clear. Sail on.

  But then I’m shaking with another thought. How easy this was, how easily I have conjured him up.

  “She makes things up,” he told me once. “She’s always done that. She makes things up about people and what they’re doing. It’s like a game. Your mom has the wildest imagination.”

  I remember asking him if she was wrong sometimes. I remember how quiet he grew, how he put a hand to my head, smoothing back my hair. His hand is so warm; he’s been out on the boat all day. His face is glowing from the sun and the wind. In my memory we don’t speak for a long time and the temperature of our skin where it touches—his hand, my forehead—slowly becomes exactly the same.

  I know how to furl the sails, Captain. I pull on my jeans and my shirt, then I reach for the photos. Stare hard. They must be old photos, I think, stashing them in the bathroom drawer. They have to be. Aren’t they, Captain? I finish getting dressed, taking deep breaths and panting out my lingering nausea like a dog. Then I do what I have been trained to do—I evaluate the state of the animal in my presence. I reduce myself down to my heart beat and my blood pressure and my fluid levels. Do I feel better? Maybe I should cry? Would it help? But my face won’t seem to scrunch up, everything stays contained. I put two fingers to my wrist, try to follow those tiny little beats, I take deep breaths. But I can’t seem to concentrate on the idea of what makes something better or what makes something worse; my mind just slips away to another kind of cataloging—the rasp at the back of my throat, the dripping of wet hair down my back, the ache around my jaw. And I think that this particular animal needs someone else’s attention, someone who will know what to do.

  I leave the bathroom to the sound of a chair scraping in the kitchen. I go to find Neil, arranging my face along the way. I can tell he’s been waiting for me, the way he’s sitting, the slope of his shoulders. He turns as I walk in and I can see the words that will come, the questions. I know how understanding he will be at first, but then one day when he sees it all more clearly, when he sees what might happen, he won’t be understanding anymore.

  “We need to make a list,” I say before he can start, running a hand along his shoulder and sitting beside him. His mouth closes, and I take his fingers in mine and look into his eyes for a long minute. “How are you doing?”

  He’s staring at me, his mouth inverted in a frown. He looks terrible—unkempt, blotchy skin. He’s been crying. Then I see what he’s got in his hands. It’s a piece of petrified wood.

  “I found it for you,” he says. “Yesterday.”

  He places it in the palm of my one hand. It’s a beautiful piece. A solid chunk, all rust-colored and sharp-edged. Opal glints in the thin round cross-cut.

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “Up Swakane, with the class. It was just lying there, in a creek bed with some wash-out gravel.”

  This is his way. On our first date he handed me a barred owl feather with a split quill. Several times a week, he hands me things as he walks in t
he door: a frozen crocus, a piece of snakeskin colored a vivid green from mineral deposits, a rock covered in fish scales—he has a knack for finding exceptional objects while at work.

  While I admire the petrified wood, I can see it building up inside him again. The need to talk, to go over the evening, to ask me what’s going on. He runs a hand through his hair, eyes darting around the kitchen, from sink to window to the back door. His hand muscles tighten in my hand. His arm trembles.

  “I’ll make us breakfast,” I say.

  “It’s all so awful,” he says, ignoring what I’ve said, spilling over. “I had my mom on the phone, and I had to tell her. And she was asking how you’re doing.”

  I nod at this. Neil’s lovely family and their comfortable emotions. If they lived closer they would swoop in and take care of us, of him.

  “And then my dad came on, and there was this moment that I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” I say.

  His voice breaks, “Ella, how can you stand it?”

  I shake my head because I can’t stand it. All I can do is hold his hand with one of mine and clench the piece of petrified wood with the other, letting its spiky edges dig into the soft flesh of my palm.

  “And we need to go through his stuff, and figure out what’s what. About your mom.” He pauses then, looks at me, looks down, looks back up, and I know what’s coming. He can’t help being curious. This past of mine I’ve been unwilling to share. “Clearly they’ve been in contact. Maybe we need to get a hold of her.”

  “I know, Neil. Okay, yes, I know, we do need to figure out what’s what,” I say. “There’s so much to think about. Yes. And we need to figure out what to do with the dogs. Do you think Daisie will have any trouble? Sometimes she doesn’t get along with Trapp. Should we consider asking George about Daisie?”

  He blinks. “No. We’ll take Daisie. Of course. But, El?”

  “I know what you mean. I want to, I do. I just think we have to be smart about it. Trapp is trained for the clinic. Daisie isn’t.”

  Neil is nodding slowly, I’ve shifted his attention an inch. Just enough. He’s watching the dogs now. Remembering the times when Daisie growled at Trapp or vice versa. “We don’t have to decide right now.”

  The dogs become aware of our focus on them, and then they’re both nosing my leg, whimpering and twisting for attention, and whether it’s because they’re hungry or they have to go outside, I don’t care, it’s a chance to get out, get away. I wrap my arms around Neil’s neck and hug him tight, say I’ll just run them around the block, that the fresh air will do me good. I grab the dogs’ leashes and whistle softly, calling them to follow me and then I’m stepping out onto the sidewalk in the dim dawn light. What will this light feel like? Surely not like any other day.

  8

  THE STREETS ARE EMPTY AND I RACE THROUGH them to the nearby pharmacy, leave the dogs outside and in less than five minutes I have what I need, and in less than three more I am in the public toilets at the neighborhood lake. The light is green, the room is cold and smells of stale urine, but all I care about is ripping open the box of the pregnancy test. I pull out the plastic tester, I stand over the toilet and I pee so hard on the stick that I splash my fingers and the bowl. There’s nowhere to set it and I have to wipe my hands on my jeans, trying not to drop it and trying not to get pee everywhere.

  I wait, holding the tester away from my face, counting out the seconds and thinking how ridiculous this is. How awful. I’m in a public toilet with a pregnancy test, my kind and gentle husband in a warm house a few blocks away, ignorant of who I really am, and all I can hope is that the second line won’t appear and I can just forget about this mess. This was not supposed to happen. I am a woman with irregular periods, with uterine fibroids. We discussed this. That it might take years, that it might not work at all. The thought rises up—dark and secret—that I only agreed to try because I assumed it would never work. A second thought rises up, what an idiot I have been, forgetting the most important rule of the ocean: never turn your back on the waves. I thought I was safe. When I look down at the test and see that it’s positive, I throw it into the garbage and slam the door behind me, choking on the icy dawn air.

  The lake looms black and still at the end of the path, itself shadowed by the bony fingers of the winter-dead oaks and maples and the drooping branches of the fir trees. Close to the water, I let the dogs off the lead and watch them race forward. I wish I could get my body moving like that, fast and low to the ground, taken up with the smells of the earth and the feel of only the rocks and leaves beneath me. None of this was supposed to happen.

  When I reach the lake and see George sitting on the bench, it isn’t really a surprise. I’ve even maybe come here to find him. He and my dad met at this lake after dinner or on the weekends, near the small pier to fish, or to just sit on a bench and talk. He’s wearing his fishing waders and is wrapped in a blanket instead of a coat. In one hand he’s holding a cigarette while the other rubs the top of his hairless head like the answer to everything that’s happened could be read like Braille beneath the skin of his skull.

  He sees the dogs first, turning fast at the sight of Daisie. The disappointment on his face is brief, then he waves me over. He sucks hard on his cigarette.

  “I thought you quit,” I say.

  “Fuck I care about cancer right now.”

  The dogs hover nearby, hunting insects in the brittle light. Behind us the stiff branches of a monkey tail tree support the thin limbs of a weeping willow that has overgrown its allotted space. George drops his hand from his head, adjusts his glasses and gives me a tired smile.

  “Well, then,” he begins, as if we have planned to meet up this way, as if we have something important to discuss.

  Trapp flies at a group of clustered swans, chasing them into the lake. The shock of their flapping white feathers beats against the air around us. I don’t have the energy to reprimand him, and he races farther along, riling them over and over again. Daisie is busy sniffing George’s waders.

  “How you holding up?” he asks, which I know means, I am not holding up, and I think the expression apt, as though our shock might be lodged deep inside our spines.

  I say nothing, and George leans his head backward, stretches his arms across the back of the bench and closes his eyes. He doesn’t move for so long that I think he might actually fall asleep like that. His breathing deepens and I look out across the lake. None of this was supposed to happen. The only thing visible is the murky shape of a rowboat, anchored off shore about eighty yards. I imagine the boat has no bottom, that it isn’t simply sliced out of view by the water but that it’s really just a floating shell and I think, nothing to it, I’m just seasick. That’s all this is. I can be tough, make it all go away.

  George’s head snaps up. His voice is brisk. “Well, I didn’t think I’d feel this angry.”

  I think about Neil. How he held me so gently while we tried to make love, thinking I would need to cry. But what I most wanted to do was bite into the flesh at his shoulder. Tear a piece away with my teeth if I had to.

  I grip the bench near my knees. “A client told me once that anger’s optimistic,” I say, thinking, what utter bullshit, what crap.

  George looks at me through a squint as he smokes his cigarette down to the filter, throws the butt into the lake and lights another one. I scoot away from him because I’ve never seen him throw anything into a lake except a fish he won’t keep. And I’m right because he’s jumping up then, throwing back his blanket and flinging his half-smoked cigarette onto the ground. His arms jerk with frustration. “I didn’t even get to see him. Why is that so goddamn important?”

  Neither of us got to see him at the hospital. This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to be angry about.

  He stomps around the bench working out his nervous energy. He reminds me of the older farmers I know in Wenatchee. Their gruff pride. Their unwillingness to admit how sad they are when a dog di
es in their arms.

  He throws his hands up to his face. “I saw him nearly every day of my goddamn life.”

  “You did,” I say.

  “It isn’t fair,” he says.

  “You’re right,” I say. “It isn’t.”

  “And now your mother of all things.”

  I turn away. “Anyway, Neil and I will make a list of everyone to call.”

  He takes in a breath, his energy spent. “The Ferry Service already knows. From the hospital. Something about policy for state employees. When I identified him, they said they would have to do this.”

  “Wait—what?”

  He shakes his head. “It was a photo, El. A photo on a clipboard. I don’t know, they took it in the ambulance. Before I got there, before you got there. Said they would need it if you had to make resuscitation decisions before you could see him.”

  We are silent. No one had a chance to make any decisions.

  I remember now that the woman in the blue sweater told me this and about George identifying the patient when he was still a patient and not a body. That she thanked George for doing this job, that I said thank you, too, although why I would say this makes no sense to me anymore. Then the woman suggested we wait to see his body at the funeral home. When it would be easier. Why didn’t I ask her what that meant? Why easier?

  Trapp comes alongside me and I rub the scruff of his neck, letting him lean into me. I turn to George, make up something to say, “Do you want to help with the memorial service?”

  “Yeah,” he says, rubbing his head again, and then, “Thanks,” and then a swift intake of his breath. “Goddammit all to hell.”

  The light has changed while we’ve been talking. My dad’s ferry will be captained by someone else today.

  George turns to me. A small vein pulses in the skin beneath one of his eyes. “I think we should contact your mother.” When I say nothing, he continues, “Now there’s a sentence I hadn’t expected to ever say.”

  I stand up and walk to the water’s edge. The little rowboat out on the lake has drifted closer to us. I turn to see if George can see it too, but he’s got his hands over his eyes. We are both trying to block the sun striking the water. I focus my eyes on the line of trees just behind the park benches, and I clasp my hands together until the rising wave of fear in my belly crashes and disappears with the pain that blooms between the knuckles of my right hand. I want to walk over to those trees and hide myself among the branches.