What I Had Before I Had You

by Sarah Cornwell

  Hoots and cheers rise from the ground. I think the noise will draw police, but from up here, I can see that the streets are dark for a mile. I lift my camera to my eye and take a few shots of the view and the drop to prove that I was here. From this angle, the lattice of boards below me looks unfurled, like a swaying length of lace. I shimmy and swing my way back down. I feel dizzy as my toes touch the concrete, not because of the heights but because everyone is looking at me. My sisters are gone. They led me here, to do this. They wanted me to be here.

  The upperclassmen slap my back and ask my name. “Olivia.” They say it like they are going to say it again. They say, “Wow, fucking rad, were you scared?” I flash a smile and say nope. Someone gives me swigs from a flask, something hot and toxic that I will try to find for years afterward but never will.

  Kandy Williams steps out of the crowd and smooths my hair behind my ears with her long black-lacquered fingernails. “You’d look good with bangs,” she says, chewing her lip thoughtfully. “So, what are you, a virgin?” One of the older girls claps her hands and bends over, laughing silently. I stumble backward a step and wish I hadn’t. I don’t speak this language yet. Kandy’s face blooms with pleasure. “You are!”

  A girl with dark curls and pale, finely cratered skin punches Kandy on the arm and tells me, “She’s just fucking with you, she does this to everyone. I’m Pam. You go to Burling, right?”

  “Yeah.” Pam is looking at me kindly, and there is something to the glances of the kids watching, like they have seen this before. Something almost jealous about the girls. Jealousy means you’re getting something good.

  Kandy points at me. “You. The Emerald. Eleven. Friday.”

  “A.M.?” I ask, and they laugh.

  LATER I TRY to sleep, but I am too excited. It infuriates me that my mother should choose this particular moment to be gone. I have things I need to ask her. If I am going to see ghosts, I need to know the rules. She will be so happy, and so proud, to welcome me into my gift. I can hardly wait to tell her. There is her pink bathrobe on its hook; there is her Joni Mitchell in the record player. The shower drain is full of her hair.

  My mother’s genius runs on a schedule. She keeps a chart labeled Divine Energies and amends it constantly, adding color-coded lines of rise and fall: tides, zodiac, holy days. Where the lines converge at the top of the grid, her psychic convictions run strongest. The overall effect is a kind of braided sine wave, the troughs corresponding to her lowest times. Then, I’ll find her in the nursery, staring at the crib, knuckles white on the wooden frame. “Where are they?” she’ll ask me. I’ll make her coffee and sit with her watching TV until she falls asleep, and then I’ll take her sandals off, lift her ankles onto the couch, and leave her.

  She is always adding new factors to the chart, trying to make her patterns of mood into an exact science. When she is most powerful, she doesn’t sleep at all. Gardens bloom in the backyard, stacks of library books appear and disappear on the end tables. Clients come in droves. Sometimes the cycles are slow—a few months here and there—and sometimes they are breakneck quick. A week. A day. This is not to say I haven’t watched her fake a reading a million times. But when she is right—when she feels that shuddering rush of future—she is really right. Once she told a man he should never travel by air, and when he flew anyway, he died immediately of deep vein thrombosis. I have seen her diagnose illnesses that did not show through symptom: tumors, brain irregularities. And throughout the seventies, she had recurring nightmares that made no sense until the Jonestown massacre, and then she described things about Jim Jones and his adherents that she could not have known and which have since been proved true.

  I never doubted my mother’s authority over the world. But when I reached the questioning age of eight or nine and began to come up against the brick wall of her certainty, I realized that I would always be wrong by default. She was right about Jim Jones, so she must also be right about how best to knot fishing line and how to train a dog. She must know the most perfect way to peel an apple; there was no room for any innovation of mine. I could never cast a deciding vote in our house; all our decisions came from above, transmitted to my mother by God or by instinct. Though I practiced for months, she wouldn’t let me sing in my fourth-grade winter concert; she was sure something terrible would happen. I heard no such reports in school the next day, but perhaps my absence prevented some tragedy. I had to trust her intuition. There was no alternative.

  IT IS ONLY Wednesday, and I don’t know what to do with myself. Without my mother telling me what to do, I bolt around, making messes. I spend a lot of time on the boardwalk, dreading ghosts, hoping for ghosts. I spot James at a seafood restaurant with his real family, two little boys with cocktail sauce on their chins, one crying. A wife with short hair and spider veins creeping up her white thighs. They are seated in a chicken-wire-enclosed patio area. I stroll back and forth outside, making myself obvious, clasping my hands behind my back, until James goes inside. The wife eyes me critically.

  James and I rendezvous on the other side of the restaurant.

  “You can’t do that.” I think he might really be angry this time. “You know you can’t do that. You look terrible. Have you eaten? Do you need groceries?”

  “You look terrible.”

  “Is there something that you need?” he asks me, scanning the restaurant parking lot fearfully. There is. I need to tell someone.

  “I saw my sisters,” I venture.

  “Olivia—”

  “And they’re grown up. I mean my age, or a little older maybe. Their names are Laura and Courtney. I talked to them.”

  “Slow down,” he says, maddeningly slowly. He pockets his hands. “Have you been sleeping?” he asks me. “Have you taken a shower?”

  “James,” I say, trying to draw his focus in with my hands, slicing the air with my fingers like he is a plane I am directing down the runway of focus, “I can see them.”

  “How do you know they’re your sisters? Did you ask them?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you should make sure before you get yourself worked up,” James says, backing away. “I’ll come by this weekend, okay? You go home and hit the hay.” He turns and hurries back toward the restaurant. I stand, considering. When I pass the restaurant patio on my way out, James is trying to get the little boys to stop crying. The wife’s cardigan is draped over her empty seat.

  I SEE MY sisters for a third time. Blanche pulls and whines at the end of her leash. I am hanging out with my favorite of the boardwalk junkies, Stan the Deserter, who is full-steam-ahead ranting about Reagan to anyone who will listen. Sometimes I take photos for him and develop them for free, photos of him with upside-down flags and X’ed-out photos of generals, and he sets them up all around him and sits here waiting for audiences. Today he is talking again about the boy he killed, a twelve-year-old Lebanese boy with, he says, the face of Jesus Christ, who follows him everywhere, ten feet behind.

  I am here also because we are at the best spot on the boardwalk, the corner by the central ramp, where everyone passes through on their way to where they’re going. I create my sisters again and again in other girls’ auburn hair, other girls’ lanky stance or sandy limbs. Each disappointment strings my nerves tighter. I clutch my camera. My mother will come back eventually, and when she does, I need to have proof of what I have seen. How sad it is, I have begun to think, that she can’t see how her daughters have grown.

  Stan packs up at four, and I still haven’t seen them. The sky is white and swollen with rain. The boardwalk has cleared out in anticipation. I walk Blanche down past the southernmost stretch, heading out for the dismal private beaches, where the rich people swim so rarely that they don’t note the occasional dog pile, and I let her run free. Just when I have despaired of finding my sisters, there they are.

  They are fighting in the depression just beyond the last turnstile, where feet have trample
d the sand and cigarette butts hard as concrete. Their shorts and T-shirts are filthy. They pull each other’s hair and grind their heels into each other’s stomachs, pound each other down into the sand. It looks more like animal play than like a real fight. They grapple and fall.

  I crouch behind a stand of beach grass in the lee of a sheltering dune, and I take pictures. The click of the shutter sounds so loud in my head that I worry my sisters might startle, but they don’t. I look around for some other witness, someone to tap on the shoulder and ask that craziest of questions, “Can you see them, too?” But there is nobody.

  I make myself stand and approach them. I am going to ask them who they are. My breath comes shallow, my armpits damp. I’m afraid, though I don’t know why I should be, and I’m embarrassed. Now I know what I didn’t know then, that the most frightening possibility was the one I hoped for: that they should say yes, we are indeed your sisters, we are following you through life and you will never be alone. It is safer to live with the possibility that you are wrong than the certainty that you are crazy.

  Blanche sees my intention and enthusiastically preempts me, bounding into my sisters’ fight. They shriek with confusion and come apart, legs and arms flailing, dog everywhere, joyful and unwelcome. They see me. Laura says something to Courtney, something that I can’t hear. They scramble to their feet, sand sheeting from their clothes. They look at me and then turn and run away.

  I’m too surprised to give chase. As they tear off into the distance, I see that they would have outrun me anyway. They are lithe as cheetahs. Blanche trots back to me, pleased with herself. I rub her velvet ears and sit down and cry a little bit; nobody can hear me out here, and it is all too much.

  JAMES GAVE ME my camera on my tenth birthday, and I will never need another. It’s an old boxy Olympus, unbreakable. Even my mother couldn’t have predicted how I would neglect the Casio keyboard she gave me that year, forget to wear the little silver locket, but spend weeks upon weeks buried in photography books. This little black-and-silver box presented a way to make the world my own. I was riveted.

  Over the years, I have converted our basement into a darkroom. I steal the expensive chemicals from the darkroom at my school, where the stained counters and battered old cameras-to-lend indicate that it has seen more popular days. I crave privacy, especially from the art teacher and her terrible critique wall. The photo club kids have to pin up their work for public ridicule, and they would ruin my plain-truth pictures with their technical speak: composition, cropping, balance. I like the solitude of my dirt-walled basement, where I set up a counter made of a door I found in a trash heap and screwed a low-wattage red bulb into the naked fixture that swings from the ceiling whenever my mother slams the oven door above me.

  I buy cheap black-and-white film and crack it out of its plastic shell by feel in the dark, wind it on reels, and plunge it into chemical baths. I watch with reverence as scenes take shape in my tray of developer, first the high-contrast areas and then the mid-values. My photos tell me the truth; when I photograph something, I have proof of it. I have secured most of Ocean Vista in this way: the toddlers leashed to the boardwalk fence, the deep-creased faces of the very old men who sit on benches doing nothing for hours, the cellulite-heavy women who stretch out to dry like caught fish. In a photograph, a person is either present or absent but never in between, and you can stare for as long as you like. In real life, people move so fast it’s hard to see their lights and darks.

  I develop the film of my sisters with held breath. I had taken most of a roll before I found them fighting in the sand. I have heard conflicting things—that ghosts show up on film as streaky orbs of light and that ghosts don’t show up in pictures at all. I clip the film to my strung-up clothesline and stand watching. Slowly, from the eye-ache of a blank, emerge the unmistakable bodies of my sisters, their hands flung out to hit, the spray of sand like a curtain. Their hair is snarled and appears bright white against the black negative sand. Their faces are full of ire and play. They rest taut in midair or curled into the ground. Their hands grip each other’s arms, ankles, hair. My sisters are real.

  3

  SWIMMING CALMS DANIEL down. I spread my palm beneath his small soft chest so he can stretch his limbs out and be Superman. Carrie lies on her stomach on a towel and reads a book about, as I understand it, werewolf doctors. By day they perform open-heart surgeries; by night they ravage the recovery ward.

  Daniel hasn’t given up entirely on crying, but now he must keep his mouth shut if he doesn’t want to swallow salt water, which he hates, and that physical necessity has mellowed his anger. There is new scientific evidence along these lines that smiling makes you happier. Sometimes I try it when I’m alone at home, grinning at the dark windows.

  We wade out of the water, and I towel Daniel off with his big blue pelican towel, then burrito-wrap him. Carrie flips onto her back. “So I guess these aren’t working, either,” she says. She means Daniel’s new meds. I dig a plastic bucket out of our beach bag and get Daniel started on a castle so I can talk to Carrie covertly, in an attitude of sunbathing.

  I lie on my back and turn my face to hers. Her skin is flawless. She has grown tall early, and sprouted delicate teacup breasts, but she hasn’t started in on the greasy or gangly qualities of adolescence. She has my mother’s auburn hair instead of my common brown. She is a beautiful tall child, a nymph. Men look her over before they notice me at her side, and then they look away. I am nervous for her and also, I admit, jealous. The rule is supposed to be no bikinis until she turns sixteen.

  “No, they’re not working,” I say to her. “But we have an appointment with the guy in New York on Tuesday.”

  Carrie groans. “If I don’t kill him by then.”

  “Don’t talk about killing. He picks stuff up from you.”

  “Whatever.” I can see beneath her enormous sunglasses that her eyes are closed.

  The kids wanted to stay with their father, but he preferred that they come with me, at least for now. He meant that until Daniel is returned to an even keel, he is my responsibility, because the gene that makes Daniel bipolar is from my genome and not his. Then he added that he thought we should keep the kids together, and in this he revealed himself. Carrie would love a break from Daniel, and Daniel wouldn’t mind my undivided attention. It is Sam who wanted a break, not just from me and Daniel but from Carrie, too. From all of us.

  Of course, the kids don’t know any of this. All they know is that I’m the divorcer and Sam the divorcee, so they think that I’m the one refusing them a choice, dragging them away to a colorless Yankee life while their father weeps for them, all alone in our wonderful tumbledown ranch house in Austin. I loved that house. I can’t bring myself to tell the kids that their father doesn’t want them, and this makes me a little proud. It seems like the high road. Already, I bet he is not alone.

  Daniel has moved off a bit down the beach, absorbed in the construction of a long winding ridge of sand. The light has cooled, and the beach crowd is thinning out. We should get to Kandy’s; I didn’t call to tell her we’d be late. I stuff the sunblock and the water bottle back into the beach bag and stand to shake out my towel.

  Daniel runs up to me, panting, clutching the bucket, which he has filled with shells. “Mom,” he says, “I made a monster, and it came alive!”

  “Cool!” I say. “Do you want to take those shells with us or leave them on the beach?”

  “Listen!” he shouts. “I made a monster, like a long dragon monster, and when I put in the eyes, it blinked. And then it crawled into the ocean, and look, it’s gone.” It’s true that the long ridge of sand he was building is no longer there. The tide has come in quickly.

  “Did you make him legs?”

  “Her. Yes.”

  “That explains it.”

  Carrie sits up. “He’s thinking of that sea-turtle movie.” She’s right. Daniel is thinking of an IMAX nature docum
entary we saw a few months ago, about the life cycle of the sea turtle. We stared up at the domed screen, and when the baby sea turtles first trundled down the beach and were lifted on the outgoing tide, Daniel reached out for my hand in the dark.

  “No! It’s not from a movie, I saw it! I’m not lying!” His face contorts miserably; his eyes search me for faith. “You don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you.”

  “No, you don’t,” he says. “I can see in your head you don’t.”

  I shouldn’t be surprised that he is so volatile today. He is uprooted, kidnapped, betrayed. His schedules are off. He has been battling carsickness all day. I probably let him have too much sugar. Shouldn’t I be better at this? My own disorder is so slow-cycling by comparison, and so easily managed, that I sometimes forget what it used to feel like. His diagnosis is early-onset bipolar, and comes with a whole host of new and surprising troubles. Psychotic symptoms. Night terrors. Rapid cycling: a demon pulling levers inside my boy, winding him up tight, letting him spin out, and then jamming him up again. No rest for either of us, not one day of rest.

  Carrie grabs the bucket from him and starts going through the shells, picking out the pretty ones. “I saw it, too,” she says, and looks at me sidelong. Though we’re supposed to be flexible with Daniel, nobody has told us to lie.

  “Carrie. Pick up your towel. Let’s go.”

  “No, I totally saw it,” says Carrie, her eyes mock-wide, and now I see that this is an act of aggression. “It walked down the beach and floated away. There it is! A giant fucking dragon Daniel made!” She points at the horizon, where the light is a purple gray, pressing down on the smoggy, striated neon-orange band above the farthest ocean. In the water, nothing but motorboats.

  “Yeah,” breathes Daniel, and looks joyfully back at us, lagging, before he reads his sister’s sarcasm. Before his symptoms began to manifest, he adored Carrie, but she recoiled from him the fastest and most completely of anyone. Now it has been so long since she invited him into a game or took his hand to cross the street that I wonder if he even remembers what that sisterly guardianship felt like. I take this moment to grab the bucket from Carrie and thrust it into the bag, along with our sodden towels. Daniel glowers but puts his shoes on, first the left and then the right, in his normal methodical way. I think, as we head back to the turnstile, that for once, whatever her intention, Carrie may have helped me. Ha! I think, as if we are opponents.