The Rules of Inheritance

by Smith, Claire Bidwell

  We glide right up to the sand, the shallow water a shade of pale turquoise that most people only ever see on vacation billboards. The captain offers me his hand again and helps me step down off the boat. I hold my sandals and wade through the warm waves. He points up the beach a ways to a series of thatched huts.

  My aunt’s, he says gesturing to them.

  I follow him, my backpack hooked over one shoulder and my flip-flops in my hand. The sand is warm between my toes and the only sound comes from the waves breaking on the shore.

  I’ve done it, I think. I’ve unmoored myself.

  I GET SITUATED in my new abode, a small, pleasantly decorated hut just steps from the water. And then I head over to the island’s only diving shop, Bubble 07. It’s late afternoon, but the sun still seems high in the sky.

  The divemaster is an affable British guy named Duncan, and I explain to him that although I haven’t been diving in years I’d like to arrange to see the thresher sharks. He raises an eyebrow and leans back in his seat.

  I give him the same look I gave the estate lawyer when he glanced up from his documents to ask why I had been chosen as executor over my three much-older half siblings.

  Duncan sits forward again, pulling a form from a drawer.

  Here you are, then, he says with a wink. Sign your life away right here.

  We’ll dive first thing tomorrow morning, he says. We’ll leave at dawn. The dive is eighty feet, and we’ll just descend and kneel on the sand and just watch the sharks go about their morning cleaning session. You’ll probably see about fifty to sixty of them.

  I swallow thickly.

  Duncan looks at me expectantly, and I nod in return.

  I’m in.

  As I get fitted for the next day’s dive I glance around at the photos papering the shop. Thresher sharks and giant manta rays, their enormous bodies gleaming in the deep-azure eighty-foot depths.

  I haven’t been diving in almost a decade.

  For the first fifteen years of my life, we spent every Christmas on Grand Cayman Island. It had become such a ritual for my small family that even after my father lost his business and we moved to Florida, we still managed to go for a few more years.

  My parents rented the same condo every year, and along with several other families who returned each December, we celebrated our Christmas on warm sand beaches, beneath rows of whispering palm trees.

  Each morning my mother woke me at dawn so we could wade out into the shallow ocean, the water so clear that you could see your toes kicking up the sand below. She would bring with her a little bag of bread, and we would hold out bits of it to the gently orbiting sea turtles.

  My mom was an avid diver, and each morning after feeding the turtles she tossed her gear onto a dive boat and would be gone until lunchtime.

  When I was fourteen, I got certified too, and I became my mom’s dive buddy on those early mornings. We held hands as we floated by the reefs, thirty, forty, fifty feet under the water. She pointed out all kinds of things only an experienced diver would notice: little anemones shaped like pine trees; fish that blended in to look like coral; long, silky eels lurking in dark crevices, their jaws opening and closing patiently.

  It was some of my most favorite time ever spent with my mother, both of our eyes wide in our masks as we grinned at each other awkwardly around the regulators in our mouths, the bubbles rising to the surface like sparkling jewels.

  But that was ten years ago. That was before I’d developed panic attacks, before I’d made friends with anxiety and depression, before the heart palpitations and the crippling fear of my body.

  I scribble my signature on Duncan’s form anyway.

  I LEAVE BUBBLE 07 and set out on a walk across the island. There is only one dirt road and it leads straight through the center of town. According to Duncan there aren’t more than a few hundred people living on Malapascua.

  The road is lined with shacks and huts, smoke rising from some, naked children playing in front of others, roosters strutting everywhere. I make my way carefully, wishing I could be less conspicuous but knowing that is impossible.

  After a few minutes people start to emerge from their huts to stare at me. Little children run up and touch my leg or my bag, before darting off again.

  Suddenly someone calls my name. A woman’s voice, husky and inviting.

  Claire! Claire!

  Could I possibly know someone here? I spin around, trying to pinpoint the voice, and my eyes finally land on a robust woman with dark skin, her eyes dancing with light, a broken-toothed grin floating across her wide face. I’ve never seen her before in my life.

  Claire! Claire! Welcome to Malapascua!

  I smile at her and give a little wave, but before I can decide what to do next the kids start in on it too, calling my name and running circles around me.

  Claire! Claire!

  I will later find out that the boat driver and his aunt were the ones who spread the news, passing my name along on a whim, but this moment immediately becomes one of the most magical experiences of my life. I just give myself over to it, standing there on this little dirt road in a tiny village on an island in the Philippines.

  Claire! Claire!

  The name my mother gave me the day she first held my warm, slick body to hers.

  THE NEXT MORNING, true to Duncan’s word, I am awakened at five thirty by a cacophony of roosters outside my window.

  When I step outside, it is still dark, but I can see a light on in Bubble 07. I put on my bathing suit, underneath some shorts and a tank top, and make my way groggily over to the dive shop.

  Duncan and a young Filipino boy are busy loading the dive boat with our gear. I stand for a minute, looking out at the dark ocean and trying to determine how I feel.

  I have been thinking of my mother all morning. Although she has been gone for seven years I realize that I am waiting for her to show up. Waiting for her to stop me before I go any further.

  Mom, can you see me?

  The only answer is a soft breeze that blows across the beach.

  Before I know it, I am seated in the front of Duncan’s little boat, and we are streaming across the dark, choppy ocean.

  I am filled with cold fear. Mom, Mom, Mom, I chant in my head. Where are you?

  There is no answer. The boat just keeps plowing forward.

  Duncan and the boy are behind me somewhere, piloting us into the deep, unknowable sea. When I can no longer see land in any direction, Duncan finally slows the boat. We moor at a little buoy that I am amazed he found at all, and I shakily begin to pull on my wetsuit.

  Mom, please.

  It is still fairly dark out and the water looks ominous.

  Duncan repeats his instructions from yesterday. We’ll simply descend to eighty feet and then kneel on the sand to watch the sharks. Fifty to sixty of them.

  My heart is racing and I am silent as Duncan straps the heavy oxygen tank to my back. I sit on the edge of the boat, like I have done so many times in the past, my mother beside me, and I fall backward into the black, roiling water.

  I tread quickly, swiveling my head in every direction.

  Mom, where are you?

  Duncan falls in beside me, and we make our way to the buoy line. My heart is beating so fast. I don’t know how to slow it down.

  You okay?

  I nod at Duncan, even though I’m not okay.

  I think about one of the major rules of diving. How you can descend at any speed but must ascend only as quickly as your tiniest bubbles, a rate as slow as fifteen to twenty feet per minute.

  I think about how long it would take to get the surface from eighty feet.

  I think about what it would be like if something happened to me in the middle of the ocean in the Philippines.

  How long would it take for word to reach the States?

  Who would be the first to find out?

  Who is left to really care?

  I take one last look across the choppy surface of the water, and then
we begin to descend, both of us gripping the buoy rope. The regulator is awkward in my mouth, and my breath comes in giant gasps, the tanked oxygen cool in my throat.

  The ocean current is strong, and I peer below me, trying to make out the sandy bottom, but I see nothing but darkness. I picture the massive school of thresher sharks waiting below.

  Wait.

  Wait.

  Wait!

  I thought she would be here by now. I came this far.

  Here I am, Mom. Can’t you see me? Can’t you reach me?

  And then I look at Duncan’s face in front of mine and I realize that she is never coming.

  I cut my finger across my neck, signaling to Duncan that I’m calling it off.

  On the ride back to Malapascua I sit at the helm of the boat again, sipping warm coffee from a thermos that Duncan brought with him. I am wrapped in a towel, but still cold, and am thankful that there is no one to see the tears dripping down my cheeks.

  Duncan was kind about it, had probably even expected it, but I still feel guilty. There was no need to inflict my stupid grief process on an innocent stranger.

  I will tell the story of this trip many times in my life, and it will never cease to be anticlimactic. Except that for me, this is the climax. This is the very place—with my tear-soaked face, at the front of this little boat in the middle of the great Pacific Ocean—where I find a truth that I will test over and over in my life.

  Nothing is ever going to bring either of them back.

  Chapter Eight

  1998, I AM NINETEEN YEARS OLD.

  IN THE BATHROOM I pee on the little plastic stick and then place it carefully on the back of the toilet. I button my jeans and walk back into my bedroom, where I pick up the phone.

  Colin is on the other end of the line.

  Did you take it?

  Yeah.

  Well?

  You have to wait, like, five minutes, I say.

  Oh.

  It is January, late at night, and the deep banks of snow outside the windows glow in the dark. Colin is in Atlanta and I am in Vermont. My mother has been dead for exactly one year.

  I am back at Marlboro, picking up after a one-year hiatus following my mother’s death. I’m living off campus, in a subsidized two-story condo in town, with a classmate named Tricia.

  Like me, she is a poetry major.

  We’re like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, she declares that first weekend. You’re Anne because you’re more glamorous, and I’m Sylvia because I’m more depressed.

  As the ensuing months wear on we’ll actually compete for the role of most depressed, both of us spending the same amount of time behind the closed doors of our bedrooms, both of us crying late at night in the other’s doorway.

  I have been back at Marlboro less than a week when I realize that my period is late. I count the dates backward and then forward again, give it a few more days, and finally buy a test kit at Walmart.

  I call Colin that night. We had been seeing each other for less than six months when I left Atlanta to return to school. I had taken a year off from school after my mother’s death, but my father and I both decided that it was time for me to get back in the swing of things.

  I think that’s the actual phrase he used. The swing of things.

  It was around New Year’s Eve when Colin and I realized that we were in love. The confessions came drunkenly, both of us left unsure the next day, not of how we felt, but of whether we had really said the words aloud.

  Nothing could change the fact that I was moving back to Vermont though.

  The plan was, and is, to see what happens. Colin is moving to New York City in a few months, to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. I’ve calculated that it’s only three and a half hours from New York to Marlboro.

  We’d talked for a while before I mentioned it offhandedly.

  I bought a pregnancy test today.

  What?

  A pregnancy test.

  I heard you. Why?

  My period is late.

  Do you really think you’re pregnant?

  No.

  Did you take the test yet?

  Not yet.

  Well, maybe you should take it now.

  While we’re on the phone?

  Sure.

  Fine. Hold on.

  And that’s when I went in the bathroom to take the test.

  Don’t worry, I tell him, when I get back on the phone. I’m sure it’s fine. I took a few of these in high school and they always turned out negative.

  During my senior year of high school it seemed like every week one of us was taking a pregnancy test. We usually went to Lucy’s house to do it. Her parents were divorced and her mom worked late. We had the house to ourselves for several hours after school let out.

  Me, Lucy, Laura, Holly, and Sabrina.

  I don’t remember which of us was the first to lose her virginity, maybe Sabrina, but by senior year we were all sexually active. Some of our parents knew; others didn’t. It’s not even that we were particularly promiscuous. In fact we all had some form of serious boyfriend.

  We were young though, and by proxy stupid.

  Whenever one of us thought we might be pregnant, we would convene at Lucy’s house after school. The rest of us would wait, whispering in hushed, respectful tones on Lucy’s bed as the panic-stricken girl entered the bathroom alone.

  Lucy had painted her room a deep, dark purple and posters of Robert Smith covered the walls. She dyed her long hair raven black on a regular basis and carefully maintained a ghostly pale complexion. Years later, when she is a bright and cheerful yoga instructor, I’ll sometimes have trouble reconciling the Lucy I knew in high school with the radiant woman she has become.

  None of us ever emerged from Lucy’s bathroom with a positive test.

  I tell Colin all of this and then I set down the phone and walk into the bathroom alone. The little plastic stick is exactly where I left it five minutes ago, and I peer into the plastic display window at the plus sign that’s waiting there for me.

  I am pregnant.

  MY EXPERIENCE BEING back at Marlboro is completely different from my first go-round. Even though it has only been a year since I was that freshman girl angrily stomping the recycling cans with my boots, pining after Michel and Christopher, and mourning the pending loss of my mother, it feels as though decades have passed.

  I feel worldly and abused, fragile and desperate.

  I’ve been avoiding the dining hall, the parties in Howland, even my old roommate Christine. I hurry to my classes and then back home again, where I curl into a corner of the bed, pulling the quilt tight around me.

  Michel graduated last year. Christopher is in San Francisco.