The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  “Marianne,” I yelled to her. I yelled and I yelled, just her name, for about a minute, but she couldn’t hear. That’s when Donald started yelling—he is a performer, and he has a good strong voice. He sang her name across the water.

  Finally she opened her eyes, and I saw something there, but not helplessness—something fiercer than that. The water was up to her waist. The wind was so strong, it had started taking down more trees. Donald yelled to ask if she was okay, but she didn’t answer.

  I pointed up and she nodded, that look still in her eyes, and started to climb. She hauled herself up that post inch by inch, until she could reach the shed roof. The water helped her a little, rising as it was, floating her. She had to lean sideways to grip the side of the shed’s roof and pull herself over and on top. When she climbed on top, she just lay there flat for a minute. She must have been exhausted.

  She couldn’t stay there—we knew that, and she must have known it too, because she sat up and looked back at us, as if we could tell her what to do. The shed was wobbling with the force of the water all around it. Tom’s motorcycle was clanking around, bashing at the walls.

  Then a big limb came down in the rushing water; it just rolled down the hill. Donald and I had to scramble to get out of its way. It was a half-rotten live oak limb, gnarled and twisted. The leaf ends caught in the mangroves, and the broken end, maybe a foot thick, caught the side of the shed.

  The water changed then. The limb was so big it acted like a dam, and the current was faster and stronger before the limb, and slower after. It was clear that the force of that strong water would take the shed down, then everything—the posts and roof, the oak limb, and Marianne—would be washed out to sea.

  She saw this, understood it at the same time I did.

  “You’re gonna have to jump,” Donald yelled. The rain had let up a little, but the wind was worse than ever, and the raindrops stung like needles. I didn’t know how strong a swimmer she was. It was possible she could still get swept out, but it seemed like her only chance. I suppose I could have gone after her, like you said, but I didn’t. You want to say that I’m a hero, but all I did was yell and point. I kept thinking about my daughters, how much I missed them, how much I wanted to see them again.

  Marianne jumped, grabbing for the limb, and got one arm across it. She clung to it on the calmer gulf side, pulled herself along, bit by bit, the rough bark scraping her bare arms, her neck, her cheek. Those were the scrapes she had when you saw her. Donald helped her up when she made it across.

  She was delirious. She kept calling Donald Eric, and asking about her sister, but she was strong enough to stand—no one carried her, though she leaned on Donald. The rain wasn’t as bad then, but the water was still rising. We were all the way to the dining hall before we could walk without a current pulling at our ankles. That’s where we found Eric and Tom, sitting inside at one of the tables in the dark, eating those little boxes of cereal from the breakfast buffet like a couple of teenage boys while the water came up over the steps and through the doorway. There I go again with my editorializing.

  We told them about the flood. I was sort of holding on to Marianne then—she’d gotten scraped up and her clothes were torn and she was dazed. I sat her down in a chair. Eric had parked the van in the Kangaroo lot, which was higher up, and we decided to get everybody together and evacuate. That was one smart thing he did, moving that van.

  Lilian meanwhile was yelling that the water was coming into the rooms. We couldn’t find any rope, but there were long-handled mops in the dining hall, so Tom and Donald grabbed those and held them out while Lilian scrambled over her car and into the rising waters. It wasn’t deep but it was swift, and if you weren’t ready it could knock you off your feet. One at a time, they grabbed the mop handle and Donald pulled them in, passed them to Tom. We scrambled for the van. We got out of there.

  I understand that the Ranch was badly damaged in the flood, and that you are moving to a new location, partnering up with a school of social media, or something like that. It sounds nice, and the possibility of more online classes sounds convenient too. I just don’t think it’s for me.

  Partly, to be honest, this is because I can see that you are already rewriting my story. Take the ABC News interview with me and Donald: why just us? We are two people out of six, and while some of them (your staff members) did not make the best decisions, everybody was part of that experience, and we made it through together. And Donald did not save Marianne, not the way you described it. Though he might remember things differently and might be interested in the opportunity, it isn’t the truth. I don’t blame him—I understand that, as a novelist and an entertainer, he may have a different relationship to the truth—but I am not comfortable with that. What really happened is complicated and messy. Like you told me, if you want to sell a story it has to be simple.

  Thank you again for what you tried to do for me. I’m sorry that I’m not up for it, but I’m not.

  Please don’t put any more words in my mouth. I am working on a book of poems, and I can tell that it will be slow going. But when it’s done, every word will be my own.

  Sincerely,

  Janine Gray

  22

  “Hallelujah!” Janine said to Marianne after they made it up the hill. She kissed Marianne’s forehead, whispered that it didn’t matter, the things Marianne said and did; she was alive and God loved her. Marianne said nothing, but allowed herself to be half carried into the passenger van that Lilian had waiting for them on the street. In the backseat Janine covered her with a raincoat and let Marianne rest her head on her lap like a child. The rain pounded the ceiling and splashed the windows. Marianne shut her eyes tight; it felt so good to be covered, prone, silent. She was hoping she might have a bad concussion, brain damage, something to free her from dealing with everything that had to be done. Why had she held on? Why hadn’t she let go? It would have been easy to drown, but she could feel the soreness in her arms and legs, bruised and scratched with the effort of clinging.

  They made it to Ocala, found a seedy motel with a single vacancy. Tom thought this was funny and began calling them—Tom, Davonte, Eric, Marianne, Janine, and Lilian—the Motel 6. “Hey,” he said, “at least it has hot water and electricity.”

  They took turns in the shower. Marianne went last, standing under a jet of lukewarm water. She ran a sliver of soap over the dirt-encrusted scrapes on her shins and inside her arms, pulled leaves and twigs from her hair. When the water ran mostly clear she turned it off, stepped onto the soggy bath mat, pulled her torn dress back on, wrung and knotted her hair at the nape of her neck.

  The room glowed with charging devices, the only valuables they had had time to grab. No one talked much, not to each other. Everyone was texting and making phone calls—Janine to her husband and her daughter (Beth was fine, triumphant actually), Eric to Regina and Mark, Lilian and Davonte to their families. Tom acted like the whole thing was no big deal—no cell phones in Panama or Nicaragua, et cetera—but Marianne suspected he didn’t have anyone wondering where he was. She called her father, who wasn’t aware of the storm’s severity, and Ruth, whose phone went to voicemail. She texted with Sophie, who had made it to a friend’s house.

  “Hey,” Eric said, touching her shoulder after they turned off the lights. “Let’s take a walk.” Marianne’s heart pounded as she followed him down the dingy carpeted hallway and through the heavy exit doors. It was barely raining in Ocala; it was hard to believe the sky could be calm again. It was late, past one o’clock, but the parking lot lights burned bright as day.

  “You should have told me,” Marianne said. “You brought me here on false pretenses. Frances told me—she told me everything.”

  “I thought you knew,” he said. “I was going to tell you.”

  “Which was it? You thought I knew, or you were going to say something? It can’t be both!”

  “It is both. I wanted to talk to you about it, to clear the air, but I also was sure that you k
new. When we talked about it, it seemed like you knew.”

  “I didn’t know. I almost died.”

  “Why didn’t you stay in the room? What were you thinking?”

  “I was looking for you,” she said. “I was going to save you! Why didn’t you come back?”

  “It was raining too hard! Tree limbs were falling! Even Tom saw that we couldn’t make it to the shed! Any reasonable person could see that it wasn’t safe!”

  “I am not a reasonable person! You know this about me!”

  “I know,” he said finally, defeat in his voice, maybe even remorse. “I’m sorry. That’s the difference between us.”

  “It is,” Marianne agreed. She could tell they felt differently about what they were agreeing to, felt the admission diminished the other person. What it meant was: they could not be together. What it meant was: she’d been wrong about him.

  It took three days to get back to the Ranch, there was so much damage to the roads. All the classrooms and dormitories were flooded, the water line halfway up the walls, and there were big tree limbs everywhere. Lilian found a small, hand-sewn notebook, the pages splayed and waterlogged. “Dear Ruth,” she read, “Here I am, trapped in a motel with my ugly bear list. Serves me right.”

  Everybody knew it was Marianne’s, but they were so glad to be alive they weren’t even mad—they thought it was funny, no hard feelings, back to business as usual. No one talked about her newspaper admissions, the fact that the school was founded dishonestly, although Eric and Regina were already on damage control, offering reassurances and refunds and scholarships. No one blamed Marianne outright, not Eric, not Regina, not Lilian or Davonte or Janine. But the Christians among them—Marianne guessed that was everybody but Eric—could not miss the message that God destroyed what she built, that her arrogance was being punished. She knew, once they got away from their own mortality, that their forgiveness would be temporary.

  And it was.

  So she went home—not to New York, but to Virginia. Her father knew, by then, about the scandal and the storm, but he didn’t ask many questions, and they fell into a mostly silent routine: up at dawn, coffee, a long walk, more coffee, work. Marianne felt a little bereft, watching him grade the stack of papers that was always on the dining table, a little naked without her own admissions folders to cart around. She read; she worked on poems; she sent texts and emails to Ruth, all unanswered.

  When would Ruth see her? she asked Howard one morning on their walk. She couldn’t shut her out forever—could she?

  Marianne had to jog to keep up with her dad’s pace. “I almost died,” she said.

  “Maybe you need to reach out again,” he said, slowing slightly, “in a different way. I’ve been doing some gardening at the church. Maybe there’s something you can do. Something to help.”

  Finally Ruth agreed to a meeting brokered by Howard—Marianne could help put together the new nursery and playroom at her church. Marianne showed up early, but her sister was already there, struggling to open a box with dull scissors. “Here, let me,” Marianne said, slicing open the box with her house key. On the side of the box was a photo of the finished play set—Noah’s Ark, modern but unmistakable, made of smooth bentwood. “You don’t have to put that together,” Ruth said.

  “Because of the flood?” Marianne said. “Or the Bible? Or maybe you think I’ll screw it up.” She reached inside to find the assembly instructions, opened a lengthy booklet written in German and pictographs. “Which I probably will.”

  “Sorry,” Ruth said. “I’m sure you can handle it.”

  “You can ask,” Marianne said. “About what happened. It’s okay.”

  “Well,” said Ruth. “You can tell me.”

  “I didn’t mean for things to go the way they did,” Marianne said.

  “Which things? The part where you humiliated me in front of everyone at your school? The part where you went to the press and talked about how it was all a con? Or, let me see, the part where you recklessly endangered people’s lives?”

  Marianne wanted to argue—it was her school, and Ruth and Tad humiliated her—but remembered what Howard told her, she was here to help, maybe to listen. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean to endanger anyone’s life.”

  “Did you really just want to punish people, for believing? And take their money?”

  “No,” Marianne said.

  “But you did take their money.”

  “I think I just wanted a change, I wanted to see if I could go back in time a little. Some of the experience was actually good. For me, and for the writers. I think.”

  “I’m sorry that things didn’t work out with Eric. You loved him.”

  Marianne sighed and turned the booklet in her hands upside down. Here was the thing about coming home to family: even after years spent mostly apart, Ruth and Howard knew her better than anybody, and it felt good to be understood by people who would still let her in. That was how she’d once felt about Eric.

  Their breakup, or whatever it was, still hurt, but the dull ache in her chest lessened a little every day. “It wasn’t meant to be,” Marianne said. “I think things should work out quickly if they’re going to work out. You should know. Like Mom and Dad. Or you and Darryl.”

  Ruth smiled, and it struck Marianne how easy it was to please her sister, to make her happy: like anyone, she needed to be seen, to have her choices recognized and supported. She stood, and Marianne thought that she would hug her, but instead she retrieved something from her purse—a series of abstract black-and-white images in a long roll. Marianne gasped when she realized what it was.

  “Eleven weeks,” Ruth said. “That’s from eight weeks, so you can’t see much.”

  “It’s beautiful!” Marianne said, not looking up from the fuzzy, television-static image. She wasn’t sure what was baby, and what was Ruth. “Dad knows?”

  “You’re the first person we’ve told.”

  Marianne sat down amid the boxes, still holding the sonogram. Ruth unbuttoned her pants and sat down next to her.

  “I found out not long before we went on the Tour of Life. My first sonogram was at one of GWGW’s schools.”

  “Not this one,” Marianne said quickly.

  Ruth shook her head. “We were at this sonography school in Alpharetta, on the way back from the Ranch. I’d had a blood test by then, and Darryl said, why don’t we ask them for an ultrasound? He was really proud and excited. It seemed like an okay idea to me, but when they got started, they looked worried. The sonographer couldn’t find anything. Darryl took me to the hospital in Atlanta, and they found the baby, and the heartbeat, and everything was fine. But I was so scared—the whole ride there, in that awful traffic, I thought I had miscarried. I thought it was my fault—for traveling, for putting myself in a stressful situation.”

  “Oh Ruth, I had no idea—”

  Ruth shook her head. “But that wasn’t what was happening. I was fine. And it would have been one thing if it had been a student, a new student, but it was a teacher who did my ultrasound. We went home after that.”

  Marianne reached to take Ruth’s hand, but Ruth crossed her arms. “I was so mad at you, Marianne.”

  “But you waited to tell me first,” Marianne said quietly. “Why, if you’re so mad at me?”

  “You don’t get it. I look up to you, Marianne.”

  “I’m sorry. I really am. If I could take it back, all of it, I would. But the baby’s okay? My niece? Or my nephew?”

  Ruth nodded, a little teary, and Marianne said she’d be right back—she needed to get something from the car.

  Marianne had brought something for Ruth too—she had enlarged some of the sketches she’d saved from their mother, and bought simple pine frames for them, for the church nursery. Roadside daisies, a lady’s slipper in the woods, a frog on a lily pad. She came back with an armload and held them up, one by one. She told Ruth about the lady’s slippers, how an editor had confused them with irises. Sh
e left out the part about their mother’s willingness to play along.

  “The children will love these,” Ruth said, standing and rubbing her back.

  “Mom would be happy for you,” Marianne said. “She’d be really proud.” Marianne held the lady’s slipper against the wall, at eye level.

  “Lower,” Ruth said. “We want the kids to see them.”

  Marianne told her, again, how their mother in her last months had lunch with Ruth every day, how they both picked her up after school and sometimes early, walking to the playground so Ruth could swing—she was obsessed with swinging, as high as she could. That was the time of these drawings.

  “Tell me another,” Ruth said, one hand on her stomach, after Marianne finished each story. And just when she thought she’d exhausted her store of memories—it was a long time ago—her mind, miraculously, presented another.

  “Maybe I’ll stay,” she told her father at dinner. “I could get a job at the community college. We could be coworkers.”

  “They’re not hiring. Only firing, unfortunately.”

  “Somewhere else then—in Williamsburg or Richmond. I could get a car.”

  “You can’t stay here,” Howard said. He softened when he saw her stricken face. “I mean you can stay with me as long as you like, but it wouldn’t be good for you to live here.”

  “I don’t have anywhere to go,” she told him. “I lost my job.”

  “I remember you had a job before you went down to Florida,” he said. “I remember they wanted to hire you—that elementary school? You’ll get bored here, Marianne. You’ll never meet anyone. Trust me.”

  “But what about the baby?”

  “I’ll buy your tickets. Before the baby’s born and after.”

  “You’re that eager to get rid of me? After I almost drowned?”

  “You need to go back to your life,” he told her.

  He was right—it was as if she’d lost her path. She needed to go back to the place she’d been before she got lost.