Or Not

by Brian Mandabach

“But this is the righteous make-out grove,” said Quill. “That’s why we come here.”

  “I know you guys have the same problem,” Liz said. “There’s no place to be alone.”

  I didn’t think, with all four of us here, that it was all that private, but she had a point. And I didn’t want to be a wet blanket, but it was kind of weird to be there when they got so intense.

  “I think,” said DJ, “Cassie and I don’t feel all that alone when, like, we’re here together with you guys.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “But it’s okay. I know what they mean.”

  “No, that’s cool,” said Quill. He sat up and shook the pine needles out of his hair. “What do you want to do? We could tell stories. I had this one I wanted to tell anyway.”

  “I don’t know,” said Liz.

  “Come on. It’ll be fun. Once upon a time, a few years ago, in these very woods, a girl was on her way to school.”

  “Not that one,” said Liz.

  “But this is the pines, Lizard.”

  “And don’t call me Lizard.”

  “I think I know this story too,” I said.

  “I haven’t heard it,” said DJ.

  “Lizzy-bith?”

  “Okay,” said Liz. “Get it over with.”

  “So this girl, we’ll call her Susie, was on her way to school. But she didn’t ever get there. Didn’t actually plan to get there. She told Mother that she was going early, to do homework, to see her friends, to get help from a teacher. Strangely, she didn’t bring her books. But her backpack was full. With a long rope.”

  “No, stop it,” said Liz. “This really happened. It’s horrible. My sister saw her. I won’t listen anymore. Let’s go to the track meet—I don’t like it here anymore.”

  “Sorry, Lizzy-bith, I thought you were cool with it.”

  “Well, I’m not, all right?” She was already on her way out of the glade. We followed, Quill catching up to her, putting his arm around her only to be shrugged off.

  “So, what happened?” said DJ.

  “She hung herself,” I said. “From a pine tree by the path, so that everyone saw her on the way to school.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So,” DJ said, “do you ever think about it?”

  “Well, after my story—which I want you to read, by the way, I’m working on the third part—everybody thinks I’m about to go out and do it.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “Me too,” he said.

  “Really?” Somehow I thought it was just me, but of course it wasn’t.

  “After my brother left. You know how I said that he was such a jerk and everything? Well, I still missed him. He wasn’t all bad. And I was pissed that he left me to deal with Mom all alone, and I don’t know, I was just freaking out, I guess. For a while there, I thought about it all the time. There was all this pressure, like my mom was always at me.”

  “She seemed okay when I met her.” I felt stupid for saying that, like I was telling him that he was wrong, or shouldn’t feel the way he did. It’s funny, but I wanted to tell him all the clichés that I hated so much: that he had his whole life to look forward to, so much going for him—all that stuff.

  “She means well and everything,” he said.

  I took his hand. “That’s something, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  “But not enough.”

  We walked along quietly for a while. It was a perfect Indian summer afternoon, so warm that I stopped and pulled off my hoodie, and DJ’s jean jacket, too. I was just wearing my Indian top with the spaghetti straps, and the sun felt great on my shoulders. I waved the jacket at DJ.

  “Are you ever going to let me give this back to you?”

  “Never,” he said.

  “I’d like to let you take it home and have your mom wash it, and have you wear it for a while. It’s losing your good smell.”

  “I told her I lost it.”

  “Mad?”

  “Nah, she’s used to me losing things.”

  Finally I thought of something that, though corny, wasn’t too cliché: “Well, I’m glad you didn’t cash it in, man. I like this jacket.”

  We laughed and hurried to catch up to Liz and Quill.

  The track meet was all right. I saw my nemesis, the modesty cop, and though the school dress code is supposed to be in force at all extra-curricular activities, she looked away when she saw me in my skimpy top. I guess even she gets tired of bossing people around. Then for the hell of it, I put on my sweatshirt hood and draped the sleeve over my face like the veil of a burqa. It was a little warm, so it didn’t last, but I enjoyed the strange looks people gave me.

  Thanks to his new watch, DJ and Quill were right on time meeting Mommy. Liz and I hung back so she wouldn’t see that I had DJ’s jacket, then we walked home.

  Liz complained about Quill, who knows she hates the story he was telling, but likes to freak her out.

  “I’m getting a little tired of him, to tell you the truth,” she said. “I hope we haven’t fucked up our friendship.”

  “Interesting choice of words,” I said.

  “As if.” She gave me a sideways look. “What about you and DJ?”

  “He’s the best. Can you believe I got to spend the whole day with him on Saturday? Maybe his Mom isn’t so bad.”

  “What did you guys do up there?”

  “He learned how to fly fish, we went hiking, you know.”

  “Did you take him to your special secret place?”

  “Get out. You are way too nosy.”

  “Come on, tell Lizzy. You’ve got to tell someone.”

  “Let’s just say that the relationship is progressing.”

  “How far?”

  “Not too far, but just far enough.”

  Sister III (cont.)

  Back at the house after their cold and misty walk, Cassie listens to her Nirvana record—just the last song, over and over again.

  In the pines, the pines,

  Where the sun don’t ever shine,

  I would shiver the whole night through.

  It was like the rhyme that kept turning up in the pines near school, stapled or taped or weighted with a rock by the tree where Susie Conners hung herself a few years back. There were lots of stories about her, how kids walking to school on the path through the pines found her hanging in a shaft of bright morning sun, the rhyme tacked to the bark of the tree:

  Where is the voice of Susie Sioux,

  the banshee black and blue?

  In the pines, the pines, in the sunshine,

  she’ll shiver the whole day through.

  Some stories said she was a punk-obsessed freak, that she wrote the rhyme herself, and made herself up in black and blue before she swung. Some say she wanted to join her beloved Kurdt, others that it was a goof gone wrong when her safety knot slipped, and she slowly strangled, clawing the vanilla-scented bark of the ponderosa pine with her black nails. Still others said that the rhyme appeared after she died—that she was a perfect little overachiever who couldn’t take it anymore and was turned into a martyr by the gothic faction. They made up the verse and kept planting it to keep their myth alive.

  How awful to die that way, Cassie thinks, how public like a frog, discovered by the hideous and hated herd. Give me a bristlecone high on a peak, eight-hundred years old and lightning-twisted, where the ravens will come and the wind will blow me into a pile of bones in the shade—my hard-won calcium that might have prevented a stooped old-age put to better use—nibbled by deer mice, dropped in the pellets of owls, scattered.

  Or give me the sea; give me to the sea.

  Cassie refuses dinner but suffers the
comforting visits of Ally and Sean to her room. Ally plies her with soy protein shakes, ibuprofen, and ice for her headache. Finally, they go to their separate beds, and Cassie lies listening to the ocean. She pulls her comforter to the window seat and sees that the fog has blown away, and the stars are back, and fishing boats move up the coast like chimeræ of hope. Will-o’-the-wisp. Foxfire.

  She thinks that now she’s beyond her heartbreak over Sean and Ally, which is good because she doesn’t have to hate herself for being so pathetic as to be driven to despair by something so common. And she might be beyond DJ, too: sweet DJ with his waves of dark hair and his brown eyes and his wide shoulders. (Where do those shoulders come from on a skinny boy when he becomes suddenly big, substantial?)

  Distance, though. There is already distance between them.

  Fast forward, time is video. Skip scenes, time is digital.

  She will not live in realtime, she will not wait for the download to buffer realaudiorealvideorealemotionalrealspiritual.

  Time is fluid.

  Time is a river.

  Time is current, rushing her away.

  She won’t be a fly, cast and reeled

  by God,

  by destiny plucked

  and placed

  again and again.

  Time is liquid. Time is the sea.

  Sweet by and by, sweet bye and bye—

  the poetry of death like the sound of the sea.

  The elegance and logic of the undertow has taken her.

  Cassie pulls on a pair of jeans and climbs the stairs, silent and barefoot on carpeted floors that don’t betray her with a single creak. A bottle of red wine waits on the kitchen counter, almost full, the cork jammed back in after Ally’s last glass.

  “Drink me,” it says, and the corks slides easily out, so she takes a pull.

  Back down and out the sliding glass doors to the steps to the sea, she wraps a big woolen blanket around her shoulders, trailing the wine, light in her left hand.

  Just above the high tide mark, she sinks to the sand, pulls the cork again, and tilts the bottle back. Warm red wine slides down her throat, then she shivers and wraps the wool more tightly around her.

  Sheep, Cassie thinks. Why shouldn’t she enjoy their wool? Or eat them, even? But at that, her stomach turns, though she sees that it’s all the same: lambs nibble grass and humans nibble lambs. But not Cassie. She won’t eat them, but she will cherish the wool.

  Ebb tide breakers wash gently, surge weakly over the sandy flats. Behind her, clouds slide away from the moon, and the smooth sea goes silver and the sand glows. Cassie takes another long slug of wine, corks it, and rises to walk the beach. She angles down to the water, the sand firm and wet, the waves washing at her feet, soaking her dragging jeans. Her feet go numb, but inside she is warm, wrapped in wool and heated by wine. Alcohol is supposed to make you vulnerable to cold, she thinks, but, mmmmm—it makes her feel so warm.

  Down here, she can’t see the lights of the boats, only the stars, so bright despite the moon, and she walks, the dippers swinging before her, pointing the way to Polaris, who leads her up the beach.

  Here, she thinks, she can let it all slip away. Even in the still of low tide and low wind, the sea is ever loud, dulling her mind while the moon gives everything a clear, crisp definition—colors washed out, leaving only shapes: smooth planes of sand, breaking planes of water, and the sky a dome overhead with the moon hanging and a few clouds floating. Houses on the beach are like those in a make-believe village, the lights dim and comforting, speaking of home and warmth. Someone has a wood fire, and a cedary scent mingles with the saltiness of the sea.

  For one moment, though, a small cloud covers the moon; a rushing shadow from the sea, stealing the silver from the water and the light from the sand. In that moment, she feels what was hidden behind the glint of the moonlight—something sinister and unnamed that has no beauty, no love … nothing. A nothing that almost knocks her to the sand.

  And for all her brave insistence on the purposelessness of the universe, her denial of a God that wills and guides it, Cassie is afraid, for here is something different from anything she’s known. Even in the shadow she can see the workings of nature: the ecological web that doesn’t need a god because it is beautiful and terrible and right just the way it is, and even people cannot, in the end, harm it. But within it somehow—nothing.

  Then the shadow passes. The moon again scatters pale radiance over everything.

  But the nothing thing is still there.

  She places the wine bottle, still not empty, at the tide line, anchors it in the sand so she can pick it up on her way back. She wasn’t sure that she was coming back, but now she thinks she might.

  Cassie continues northward, back to the surf’s edge, striding strong on the hard sand. She feels a bracing wind on her bare head, her eyes are strong and bright, and as she walks she’s connected, aware, and alive.

  This different thing that the shadow showed her meant that she was wrong about death. She’d heard the whispering of death in the waves. She’d heard it as a call, and she’d let herself think that since living was pain, death was relief, “this fever called living is over at last.” And she thought there was logic in her equation: problem = life, solution = death. But death was not the point. Just because it always came to everyone and everything didn’t make it so damned special, and just wanting to end, wanting it to end, wanting to get out didn’t mean anything more than anything else.

  Death is only part of it. That’s what the shadow showed her. She knew that before, of course, but she had been, what? In love with death? She thought death would save her? She thought death was more spiritual than life? She laughs at herself as she walks and thinks, and she’s aware of herself walking and thinking and how the walking helps her think and of the rhythm of her strides and her heartbeat and the waves and everything. She laughs and thinks, what? Was death my Jesus? Was death my saving Jesus?

  Because death is nothing.

  Pain is something, and fighting the world is something, and having friends and love, and not having them—

  My mind’s going too fast. It’s too full, she thinks.

  But I know I don’t want nothing. Why did it seem so sweet before and so sinister in the shadow? It’s nothing—no thing. But it can’t be no thing, everything is some thing. She laughs again because now she is playing games. But she likes it.

  The shadow scared her, and that’s good. Everything that’s alive is scared of death. Survival. She never valued it before.

  Cassie’s getting winded now, and hot from walking, and tired of thinking in these circles. She lets the wool fall loosely from her shoulders and slows to a stroll. The low tide has left a kind of lagoon, a clear pool separated from the ocean by a strand of sand. Farther up the beach, the lagoon opens and flows out into the waves so that there is a slight current. Larger waves break over the sandbar, and waters leach out of the beach, flowing through and out of the lagoon.

  She wades into it, holding the wool above the icy clear water, numbly feeling the gravel and bit of shell beneath her feet.

  Suddenly, she steps into a hole, instinctively holding the blanket above her head as she drops to her waist and struggles to keep her balance.

  Should’ve known better, she thinks, after all the rivers I’ve waded. And this is cold as a snowmelt creek.

  The blanket is almost dry, though her jeans are soaked. Testing the bottom before every step, she wades over to the other side, and cuddles up in the blanket on dry sand.

  Now what? The moon sails high, and Cassie feels, surprisingly, still warm and good inside, though her legs are chilled. Well, why not take a moonlight dip? She knows the rules on this beach—NO SWIMMING! But she is not going into the ocean, just the lagoon. She strips off DJ’s jean jacket and her hoodie, but leaves her T-shirt, and
runs into the water, making a shallow dive.

  Mistake. The moment she plunges into the water, it sucks the heat out of her body. Breathless, she surfaces, gasping, staggering through the shallows out onto the sand. Shivering already, Cassie removes her T-shirt, wrings it out, and uses it to sop up as much water as she can. She pulls on the hoodie and can barely button the jean jacket.

  Got to get moving, she thinks, already taking off down the beach, pulling her hood over her head and wrapping herself in the blanket. Teeth chattering, she begins a chant:

  Wool, wool, wonderful wool,

  Warm, warm, wonderful wool.

  Still only early hypothermia. If she keeps on moving, she’ll generate heat, and the wool will hold it—even if those wet jeans continue to suck it out of her. Stupid. How could I be so dumb? I was so happy with myself, getting scared out of my wits, and then thinking I had everything figured out.

  She walks on dry sand until her legs burn, and the shivers calm to an occasional shake. She moves closer to the surf, and the walking is a little easier, but the rising tide keeps her from going down to the firmest sand.

  Cassie walks. She walks for warmth, for the house and hot tea, for goose-down comforters and Ally and Sean warm in their beds. Maybe she’ll climb into Ally’s bed to get warm. She’ll get a scolding for going out alone, and for drinking the wine, but she doesn’t care. Just to get back and get warm. She walks.

  She’s getting more and more tired but has walked herself out of the shakes until she’s warm in her core, when she starts to scan for the shape of the house. Just after the dunes begin to rise toward the bluffs, she should see it.

  But they don’t rise.

  How far north did she go?

  Cassie’s legs ache and her jeans are chafing horribly, shrinking tight and hard against her so that every step is constrained and the skin of her thighs feels rubbed raw. Even the cuffs are grating against the tops of her feet. Since she’s warmer, she risks wetting her feet and ankles again, just to avoid fighting the soft sand with every step. It’s better down there, the sand is hard and not so steep. But the jeans are torture. She’s got to get them off. She could walk all night, set a pace just easy enough to get herself home and keep herself warm—if only she could stop this chafing.