The Shark Curtain

by Chris Scofield

  “Ahhh-CHOO!”

  “Gesundheit,” Jamie calls from the kitchen. “Did you know that means healthiness in German?”

  Yes.

  The mantle above Aunt Jamie’s fireplace is covered with framed photos: Jamie in cutoffs, holding a fishing pole; Jamie hugging a gargoyle on the roof of Notre Dame (with the Eiffel Tower in the background); Jamie with her arms around guys with long hair and mustaches; Jamie when she was a little girl, sitting on Santa’s lap, sucking her hair like Lauren used to do when she was nervous. There’s a picture of Lauren and me in the spinning teacups at Disneyland too, and one of Mom and Dad cutting their wedding cake. Even a framed photograph of a chimpanzee.

  “It’s a joke,” Aunt Jamie explains, standing behind me. “We’re all related to the monkey, aren’t we?”

  “What about Adam and Eve?” I ask.

  “If you find me a picture of them, I’ll put it on the mantle.”

  I point at a glossy magazine photograph of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, people cheering in the background.

  “They’ll do,” Jamie says.

  The folk singers smile big, showing all their teeth and the whites of their eyes, and point their guitars at the camera like machine guns.

  “Think they’ll get married?” I ask.

  “That’s what the magazines say,” Jamie laughs. “They won’t get married if they’re smart. If you’re smart, you never get married. Men like to piss on women too, Lily. Don’t forget.”

  Act II

  I should be cleaning my room, but sitting in the kitchen, watching Mom iron, is more fun. “So you never liked swimming?” I ask.

  “I never learned how,” Mom says, pressing the collar of a blouse. “It’s a beautiful sport, don’t get me wrong. It just scares me a little.”

  “But you could take lessons and—”

  “Nope. Not. Interested.”

  I know I’ve asked too many questions when Mom’s answers blink on and off like the little traffic lights at Bert’s Bumper Cars. Mom doesn’t like Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop either. “They give me the creeps,” she said once. “A lamb chop is meat. Shari Lewis is talking to something she wants to eat. I know it’s a kid’s show but it’s creepy.”

  Mom hangs up the blouse, runs her hands under cold tap water, and splashes her face. She’s been cooking and ironing all morning; the kitchen is hot. Sweat drips off her chin as she fills the iron with water from the Pyrex measuring cup, then spreads out one of Dad’s dress shirts on the ironing board. “I guess I’ll have to clean up your room then, huh? I can’t wait to get my hands on that closet.”

  “I’m going,” I say, finally standing up. “Does Lamb Chop still give you the creeps?” I pretend I’m a puppet and stare at her without blinking my eyes.

  Mom points the iron at me, and mists the air. Her cheeks shine. “It’s going to get really creepy around here if you don’t do your chores, Lily. Now.”

  The phone rings.

  I call out, “Topo Gigio gives me the creeps,” touch my doorknob at twelve, three, six, and nine, like a clock face, then turn the knob back and forth making clicking safecracker sounds.

  “All right,” Mom says into the receiver, “I’ll look into it. I’ll make sure she gets back to you. Sorry for the inconvenience . . . Yes, yes, of course. No problem. Thanks for your call.”

  Immediately, the phone rings again. “Uh-huh, yes,” Mom sniffs. Her voice is worried. I stand up and listen. “Yes, we’ll be there as soon as we can. Tell her we’re coming. Please tell her,” she says and hangs up.

  Did Lauren do something?

  “Mom?” I call out. She doesn’t answer but I hear her take a wineglass out of the cupboard.

  Click click click, three to the right. Click click click click, four to the left. I wiggle my bedroom doorknob. Did I forget the imaginary code?

  I can’t get in. I want in. Something’s wrong. I need to get in.

  Mom says hi to Dad’s pretty new secretary on the phone, and asks to talk to “my husband.” Mom always forgets her name (it’s Toni).

  “She went up there this morning,” Mom tells Dad. “I don’t know, Paul. I don’t know. Just come home, okay?”

  What’s wrong? Where are they going?

  “Lauren’s outside playing. We’re all going, of course. We’ll be ready to leave when you get here. Hurry!”

  When Mom’s upset, she forgets things. While she steps outside to yell for my sister, I tiptoe into the kitchen, unplug the iron, and hurry back to my room.

  Dad’s home in twenty-three minutes.

  “In the car, kiddo, and bring a warm jacket. We’re going to the lake.”

  “Peace Lake? Can’t I stay home? Mom said I have to clean my room.”

  He opens my door and scowls. “The car, Lily. ASAP.”

  “ASAP, SWAK, RSVP, PTA, STP, COD, UFO.”

  “Lily!”

  His voice unsticks me. “But I won’t leave the house, or answer the door. I promise.”

  “We’re going. All of us. Lauren’s already in the car.”

  “But Mom said we were never going back.” I grip my book harder. I can’t go. I haven’t been to Peace Lake since Mrs. Wiggins died.

  But there’s no discussion. Dad’s already in the hall closet, changing jackets. A minute later he’s starting the car.

  “Lily?” Mom calls from the bathroom. She’s peeing with the door open; she never does that. “You heard your father. Please, sweetheart. Aunt Jamie needs us.”

  I love Jamie, but I’m scared. “Why do all of us have to—”

  “Lily!”

  Sometimes when Mom gets mad, I turn into a picture Lauren drew of me when she was little. My eyes are big and far apart like a fish’s, and my face is smeared with streaks because she erased my nose and mouth a lot, and her hands were sweaty. My arms and legs are ten-foot stilts and I stand on the very bottom of the page, surrounded by razor-sharp blades of grass and lollipop-shaped trees with beach ball–sized fruit. Overhead is a cloudless sky with a bull’s-eye sun, and a flying mustache Lauren explained was a bird.

  Mom stands in my doorway. “Windbreaker, Lily, and a sweater.” She takes a deep breath. “You remember the old man who rents the boats at Peace Lake, don’t you?”

  I nod.

  “Well, Jamie asked him to call us. She wants us to come get her.” Mom smiles weakly. “We all love her, but you have a special relationship with her, Lily. You want to help her, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I whisper, so quietly Mom doesn’t hear the word that plops, then sinks, to the bottom of Peace Lake.

  “He said he rowed out to Jamie’s boat but she wouldn’t come in and she wouldn’t take a blanket. She was talking in a different language, but she asked for me, for us. I know you’re scared, but I want you to come with us, Lily.” There are tears in Mom’s eyes. “Now,” she says firmly.

  She says something else about killing two birds with one stone, then hurries to the kitchen where she quickly gulps down her wine.

  On the way upriver, I learn that the first phone call was from a reporter for the Oregonian who was writing an article on Aunt Jamie as a “role model for young women athletes.” Jamie was one of the first female swimmers in Oregon to ever earn an athletic scholarship to college. After that, she swam on various city teams, and this year competed freelance to win a spot in the Northwest Regional Finals. Only Jamie didn’t show up for the reporter’s interview, she wasn’t at the pool for preliminaries, and she didn’t call to cancel either date. Not showing up means she forfeits her spot in the finals.

  I look out the car window for Jesus and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, but it’s the regular stuff this time: the forest, the cars, and the painted white line that separates them.

  Mom smokes cigarette after cigarette. “You’re going to make yourself sick, Kit,” Dad says.

  “He had our number already. We’re listed as her emergency contact. He should have called us earlier.”

  “Relax, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be fine.�
��

  “You and your fines,” she mumbles.

  My parents are nervous. They don’t even turn on the radio. They talk about weird stuff, like the Savage Boy who delivers our morning newspaper. Sometimes you hear him in the street past midnight, even on school nights. He drives the neighbors crazy when he leans against their mailboxes or combs his hair in the side mirrors of their cars. Mike Savage is the youngest of three brothers and too young to smoke but he does it anyway. When Mrs. Sheehan left her purse in the front seat overnight, he helped himself to her wallet. At least that’s what everyone said. Dad says Mr. Savage works three jobs, and with a new baby, his wife has “enough on her hands” so he doesn’t blame them for raising “savage Savages.”

  While Lauren holds her transistor radio to her ear, I practice my times tables over and over, reciting every third equation in Pig Latin. Mom turns around, pressing her finger to her lips. “Everything’s going to be fine, Lily. We’ll pick up Jamie and drive straight home, okay?”

  “Nine times fifteen is one hundred and thirty-five,” I answer.

  Finally we turn off the road and drive down to the boat basin. I’m the first one to spot Jamie’s car next to the café where they rent the rowboats. We rent boat number 12 and five life preservers, then row toward the middle of the lake.

  The breeze blows shivering whitecaps against our boat. Mom and Dad take turns with the oars, look straight ahead, and don’t talk. Lauren twists the handles of her lucky jump rope. I hold tight to Mrs. Wiggins’s tooth, and snuggle into the bright orange collar of my life preserver.

  I’m safe on top of the water with my family, and lean into the rhythm of their rowing the way Jamie taught me to ride uphill on a horse.

  A sudden flap of wings overhead makes everyone jump. Ahead of us, a duck runs along the lake’s surface. Lauren points, then quickly puts down her hand.

  “It’s okay, Lauren.” Mom tries to smile. “You’re right. No matter what, Peace Lake is still a beautiful place.”

  A heron fishes in a nearby marsh. A man and a woman sitting on a sun-lit boulder wave at us, but they might as well be on TV; none of us waves back.

  Then something scratches the hull of the boat, under my tennis shoes, right below me, and my heart jumps in my throat.

  They’re snags, I tell myself, fossilized trees holding onto the bottom of the lake, a water forest whose tops scrape the surface. I look at Mom and Dad, their eyes locked on the distant boat with a tiny unmoving figure inside. They don’t hear the scratching scraping sounds that slowly spell out L-I-L-Y, the sounds, the letters, I feel through my whole body the way I used to feel Judy spell out S-E-X or H-E-L-P on my back when I slept over.

  I press the pointed end of the dogtooth into my hand, not stopping until it hurts. Is that you, Mrs. Wiggins? Did you float out of your sandy grave? Are you caught in duckweed, or tied to a tree in the underwater forest?

  I-A-M-S-O-R-R-Y, I write back with the toe of my sneaker.

  “Weirdo,” Lauren whispers.

  The late-afternoon sun highlights clouds of tiny insects around us. The bugs are dinner for the swallows that fly in and out of the swarms, and for the fish I hear splash but never see jump. The oars gently slice the water and the boat pushes a glistening V in front of us.

  The old man told Mom that Jamie has been here since nine a.m. She rented the boat and rowed out, but didn’t go swimming and didn’t come back in. What has she been doing?

  “Jamie!” Mom cries out.

  Alone and hunched up, my aunt looks up.

  Dad finally rows us alongside number 8, and holds the boats together while Mom steadies Jamie so she can board. A dry white bath towel slips off Jamie’s shoulders when Mom helps her step into our gently rocking boat, and I notice how thin Jamie is in her black one-piece swimsuit, her skin as white as Mr. Moon’s. Her long red hair is braided, her muscular legs are covered with goose pimples, and her teeth chatter.

  I’ve never heard teeth actually chatter before, so I listen closely to what they’re saying. It might be a code.

  Mom drapes a wool blanket from the car around Jamie, slips a life preserver over her head, and pats the seat next to her. Lauren and I squeeze together, forcing me closer to the edge of the boat and the water.

  Jamie looks at us self-consciously while Dad ties her rowboat to ours. “It’s the whole fam-damily,” she says and smiles, though her eyes are strange. She’s changed. Dad takes up the oars again.

  “Ah, James,” Mom coos, cupping and rubbing her sister’s hands.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve been trying to get into the water all afternoon. I’m sorry, Kit.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’m always good for a little TLC, aren’t I?” TLC, ASAP, SWAK. “Everything’s going to be fine.” Fine fine bo-vine. Moo.

  “No. It’s not,” I blurt out. A bomb could fall on us at any minute, Mrs. Wiggins is dead, Jesus is a jerk, and now Jamie’s afraid of the water.

  “Lily,” Dad says, shaking his head slowly.

  “You didn’t go swimming at all?” I ask. Why did I have to come back to Peace Lake? Until today, we were never ever coming back. “What about the regionals? And the newspaper interview?”

  Lauren pokes me with an elbow.

  Dad scowls, then looks at his watch. “Listen, the boathouse is closing, and we’ve got fifteen minutes to get in before they charge us for another day.”

  Jamie doesn’t look at me when she answers, “The regionals . . . Lily . . . I don’t think . . . I’m probably not . . .”

  “Sshh,” Mom says, hugging her closer. “Never mind that now.”

  It’s slower crossing the lake without Mom’s help and Dad rows hard, grunting and huffing as we glide through the water towing Jamie’s boat. No one talks again until Jamie says, “The water, Kit. It isn’t in me anymore.”

  The waves stop licking the boat; the lake holds its breath.

  It isn’t in me anymore, either.

  I shouldn’t have been mean to Jamie; I push the sharp end of the tooth into my hand until it hurts.

  Dad clears his throat. “Got your keys, Jamie? Why don’t you ride with Kit and Lily, and Lauren and I will drive your car to your house, okay? I’ll meet you there.”

  Jamie takes a key out of her swimsuit bra and hands it to him.

  Finally docked, Dad tethers the boats, grabs Lauren’s hand, and dashes to the café. Mom heads to the car while I stare at the lake. The water’s a mirror of the “abalone sky” overhead. That’s what Mom calls the fading “blush of pink and robin’s-egg blue” we sometimes see from our porch at dusk.

  “Lily! Your jacket!” she calls, but when I grab it, Mrs. Wiggins’s tooth falls into the bottom of the rowboat where it instantly shines like a polished agate. Does Mrs. Wiggins want it back? I look across the lake at the sandy bar where she’s buried.

  Should I throw it in the lake?

  At the end of the pier, Jesus wrestles His tackle and ice chest out of the boat.

  “Lil-EE!” Dad calls. “Stay with your mother!”

  I wish people would stop yelling at me.

  The Closed sign is hanging in the café window, but the jug-eared old man stands outside waiting for Dad, who hands him our life preservers and a bill from his wallet. Lauren sits on a rock nearby, listening to her transistor radio.

  Jamie leans against her car while Mom threads Jamie’s white goose-bumpy legs through a pair of long pants she brought from home.

  We made it.

  Jesus smiles and waves a long string of fish at me. Big deal. Everybody knows He’s a fisherman.

  I grab the dogtooth and run to the car.

  * * *

  On our way to Jamie’s house, Jamie and I sit in the backseat, staring out the window. “I’m sorry you had to go to the lake, Lily,” she says. “I know it was hard for you.”

  “She wanted to come,” Mom answers. “Lily was worried about you. We all were.”

  I smile.

  When Mom turns away to light a
cigarette, Jamie leans toward me. Her usually bright face is drained of color, just outlined in black like an untouched drawing in a coloring book. “I used to be a mermaid,” she whispers.

  When she says it, I’m mad at Jesus all over again.

  A minute later Jamie falls asleep and pees. Most of it soaks into the wool blanket Mom wrapped around her, but a warm trickle runs along the stitching. I scoot forward to get out of its way. She must have been holding it for a long time.

  I put Mrs. Wiggins’s tooth in Jamie’s open hand, count to fifty backward, and snatch it back.

  * * *

  Dad takes us home while Mom stays with Jamie for a while. She gives her a hot shower, sticks her in clean pajamas, puts her to bed, and arranges for the neighbors to watch her animals. Jamie sleeps for three days. She never tells us what happened on the lake that day, or why, after watching her weight so closely, she left a half-eaten quart of chocolate ice cream melting in the foot well of her car—a white plastic spoon stuck in the middle of it.

  At breakfast the next day, when Dad says his muscles are sore from rowing, Mom kisses his cheek and pours him another cup of coffee. When he complains how Aunt Jamie always needs extra attention, she bursts into tears.

  After lunch, Mom and I sit in a sunny window and draw.

  Even looking upside down at Mom’s sketchpad, I recognize Peace Lake, the rowboat, and a dark figure in the water. “Why did you draw Jamie in the water? I thought she didn’t—”

  Mother abruptly stands up and stretches. She touches her toes and looks out the window at the picnic table where Jamie’s wool blanket is drying in the sun. “She wanted to be in the water, Lily, so I put her in the water. You can make things up when you draw. Imagination is a wonderful thing, as long as you’re the one in control.”