The Blue Girl

by Laurie Foos

  I was with Rebecca, he says. No fucks. I struggle to get across the room to Audrey, who’s squeezing her mother’s arms, her face whiter than I’ve ever seen it. She’s whiter than anything naturally white, whiter than the kitchen with the white walls and the white counter and all the white things that help Ethan feel safe. But this is one shade of white I’ve never seen.

  What if she did it? I say to Audrey, as I pull her over to the space between the kitchen and the upstairs landing. What if she took him?

  Who? Caroline asks. I didn’t see her coming up, and for a minute I think of staying quiet, but then I see a look pass between Caroline and Audrey, and I know they’ve been out there. The two of them. Without me.

  Her, I say, and then under my breath, Why didn’t you ask me to go?

  Audrey moves between us and says, O.K., O.K., not now. You’re right, O.K.? There was no time. It was Caroline’s idea, and we made my dad drive. We shouldn’t have. We shouldn’t have left you out.

  Our mothers are calling their names, Buck, Ethan, over and over. They draw out the sounds with their hands cupped over their mouths. The cop is trying to keep them quiet, but they just keep calling and calling and calling. Calling for the boys, all except Greg, who stands in the corner with his hands in his pockets with no one to touch.

  We never should have taken Buck, either, Audrey says. But he begged. Him and those dreams. She looks down at her sneakers and adds, I thought I could make them stop.

  Her blond hair hangs over her face, and I know she’s crying. I can see it in everything, her shoulders, her hands. When Ethan cries, he rolls his hands. I look down at Audrey’s freckled hands and think of my brother’s turning and turning, and how he hates hands, hands that touch, hands that squeeze, hands in front of his face, hands too big, hands too small. As I think about my brother and how he hates hands, for some reason I realize what’s happened. They’ve gone out there, they’ve gone to see her.

  You don’t think . . . Caroline says.

  It’s the first time Caroline and I have looked at each other in a long time, maybe since that day out at the lake when we saw her drowning and Audrey saved her. Before we thought of stealing cars and our moms went crazy making all those moon pies.

  Oh, yeah, I say. I do think.

  We have to get the cop to go, I whisper to Audrey, and she nods and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. She knows that if they’re out there with the blue girl, we can’t let the cop see her, or Buck and Ethan. Who knows what a cop would do to them?

  She tried to do it while we were out there, Audrey says, right before we left. She does it all the time. I heard the old lady say it. Every day she runs for the lake and throws herself in. Then everything is wet, the old lady said, the bed, the covers, everything.

  It was really hard to get her out, Audrey says, almost to herself. I almost didn’t make it.

  Greg, do something already, don’t just stand there, Caroline says. Go get rid of the cop.

  We move over to the door and watch as Greg starts talking to the cop with his hands moving all the time. He points down the road toward the school where Ethan goes in his yellow bus. I watch the cop talking into his radio as he drives away and our mothers stand there. Magda has her arms around the two of them, my mother and Irene, and when I look over at Greg, I think maybe it wasn’t so bad out on the porch. Maybe I can feel something for him, I think, if we can get them back, Ethan and Buck, and her, the girl who tries over and over to drown herself.

  We take my mother’s van. It’s so much easier than I thought, getting our mothers to listen to us once Audrey tells them that we think Buck and Ethan went out there, that the girl ate the moon pies that they brought, her and Caroline. Stole, Audrey says, but she doesn’t say she’s sorry. She tells our mothers that the girl ran into the lake again and that she pulled her out. Again.

  I took Buck with me, Ma, she says, because he begged.

  Irene doesn’t answer.

  I sit in the back between Audrey and Caroline. We keep the windows open so we can see the sides of the road. We made Greg stay behind in case they come back while we’re gone. By the time we left, Greg’s father had shown up and stood in the yard with Greg. I could see he was confused. His father doesn’t say or do much, either, but at least he shows up. Greg kissed me in front of his father, but I wasn’t embarrassed. I told Greg to keep trying my own father until he picked up the phone.

  Forget about your dad, Greg’s dad said to me, leaning in to say it low as I got into the car. Don’t worry about your dad, he said. Just find your brother and that blue whatever-she-is.

  I didn’t think any of them knew, any of the dads, but now I see I was wrong. We were stealing cars, our mothers were making moon pies, we all thought nobody else knew, but maybe the dads knew all along. There’s no time to worry about what they know. There’s only Ethan, Ethan afraid of hands and things not white, and little Buck, who has somehow managed to walk all the way out to the lake to find the blue girl.

  It’s where he has to be. I know it before we can even get there.

  As we drive I feel Audrey’s hair whip against me. I close my mouth against the wind and let her hair and mine sting my cheeks and lips. When we get close, Audrey and Caroline lean back and tell me about the night they went out there without me, how they convinced Audrey’s father to drive.

  Buck and I stayed under the blanket, Caroline says, until we heard the old lady at the door, and she started saying such terrible things about our mothers. She said they were fools, unkind, and that they wanted the girl to starve.

  I fed her, Audrey says, as we pull down the gravel road to the grove of trees that leads to the lake. She ate all the moon pies we had.

  Gravel sprays up through the windows and hits me in the face. I see the outline of the lake beyond the trees as Audrey keeps talking.

  Then, as soon as she was done, she ran for the water and jumped in. I was almost too tired to pull her out.

  Audrey turns to look at me and pulls her hair away from her face. She looks so tired.

  She looked so sad, Audrey says, like she couldn’t believe I’d pulled her out again. Just so, so sad.

  We pull in closer to the lake, and there is Ethan, standing waist-deep in the water. My mother screams. I don’t know who tramples over me, Audrey or Caroline, but the next thing I know I am down on the ground with my knees in the gravel. Somebody pulls me up—Magda, I think—and I feel the cuts burning as I run to the water’s edge.

  I try to look for my mother, but everyone is in front of me, all of their bodies keeping me from seeing past them, from seeing where Ethan is. I brush off my legs and think about how I left him last night when he was still banging, that I got up and went to bed without letting him follow me the way I usually do when he won’t settle down. I think about how I lay in bed waiting for my mother to get home, how I must have fallen asleep to his sounds.

  Only when I get close enough can I see that Ethan is holding the blue girl in his arms. The water comes up to his waist. He has one arm under her neck and one under her legs. Her head hangs back like a doll’s, the neck and face and hands, all of it blue. Even from here I can see she’s not breathing.

  Buck stands by the far side of the lake. Irene shrieks his name. He runs toward Audrey and hugs her hard around the waist, so hard she stumbles.

  Ethan! I call. Ethan’s O.K. now. Ethan’s going to be O.K.

  He starts to rock back and forth in the water, the girl’s blue arms sinking deeper as he sways. I watch as Audrey peels Buck’s arms from around her waist and wades into the water in her jeans and sneakers. Caroline grabs for Audrey, but Audrey shrugs her off and moves forward until the water reaches her knees. She raises both arms above her head, about to dive in, when Buck splashes into the water and pulls her back.

  No, Audrey, he says. The old lady said no, remember?

  He points toward the gravel road where the old lady stands with her hands on her hips and shakes her head at us.

  See? Buck sa
ys.

  Audrey stops. I find my mother and take her hand, and Caroline takes Magda’s, and Audrey and Buck take each of Irene’s. Together we move a bit farther into the water, so cold it makes my breath stop. I look back at the old lady, shaking her head no, and then I look out at Ethan there in the lake. From where I stand, with the light hitting him just this way, he looks the way he was meant to look, I think, without his fragile X. His face looks shorter and less pointed, his ears not so flat.

  Becca? he says. Ethan’s O.K. now. Ethan’s O.K. You see, Becca? Here’s Ethan, here he is. Ethan’s O.K.

  My mother and I turn to look at each other. She squeezes my hand and whispers for me to say it.

  That’s right, I call out to him. Ethan’s O.K. now. Ethan’s O.K. And then, Blue girl is O.K. now, Ethan.

  He pauses for a minute and stands there. The girl’s blue skin glows against the white glare of the sun. He laughs his cartoon laugh and then stops, and when he does, he opens his arms and lets her go.

  Irene

  I SIT ON THE PORCH WITH THE WINDOWS OPEN AND SING along with the trees. I am not sure that what I hear is singing, exactly, but singing is what it seems to be, and singing is what I do. I sing in a voice so soft I can hardly hear my own words or feel my breath that presses down in my chest. I sit with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders and try hard to listen, as my mother had always told me, and to let my voice carry on.

  If you listen hard enough, Irene, my mother used to say when I was a girl not much younger than Audrey, you will hear all of the songs, every one.

  I try to remember the words she taught me, the songs she sang to me when I was a little girl afraid to sleep in a bed too large, when I wanted to be something other than my own frightened self. What was it that frightened me back then, when we lived in this town by the lake, when the woods were not so dark, the lake shining, the summer people not coming in yet to crowd all that had been ours? Had I heard another girl in the night, another girl who coughed and turned blue from wanting? Had I known then, as a child, that I would live in this town with a girl who would do too much saving and a boy too young for dreams and a husband who played meaningless games? Had I actually known all of that back then, that one day I would be this kind of woman?

  Perhaps I had. Perhaps I had known all of it then. Perhaps we all know what will become of us, that one day we will have children who do not or cannot follow what we say, that what seems broken is in fact strongest. Perhaps we know then that one day we will have to release what we are tired of feeding and caring for, when the song of the trees is all we can hope to hear.

  I lie down on the couch and let the breeze from the windows blow all around me and think of the girl sinking down into the water with her eyes closed, not open as they’d been all the other times she had been saved.

  She was so tired, Mom, is all, Audrey said the night Ethan let her go into the lake. She was just so very, very tired.

  I didn’t know whether Audrey meant the blue girl or herself, or both of them. After all that had happened, I could not bring myself to ask.

  The girl had disappeared into the water that glittered in the sun, and Rebecca had led Ethan back to the shore and wrapped him in blankets from the trunk of the car. As he shivered and rocked, Buck knelt down beside him and wrapped his arms around this eighteen-year-old boy who will never grow up. He told Buck in a quiet voice that Ethan was O.K. now, Ethan was going to be O.K., and Ethan leaned his head against Buck’s and kept it there.

  That night, I thought about our last night out in the woods with the girl, how the old woman wiped the girl’s face with a cloth soaked in water from the lake and told us not to come to her again.

  We were only trying to help, we said. Can’t you see? We were good mothers, most of the time, we said, even if we had been distracted while we made the pies and fed the girl. Why couldn’t the old woman see that it pained us to see the girl in such a state? Surely she must have known that we meant the girl no harm.

  Your children came, the old woman said, as she sopped up more lake water with the cloth and wiped the girl’s mouth and forehead. Only you and only at night is what I said. The smell of the lake water had filled the room. At night she cries while you are in your homes baking. How can you not hear the crying? How can you not listen? She gets out of the bed from all the waiting to throw herself in, and only I am here to stop her.

  The droplets rained down into the basin and sent out tiny ripples that spread slowly, rings of water moving ever so slowly across the surface until they collided and burst all at once.

  Maybe now it is time, the old woman said.

  Time for what? Libby asked, but the old woman did not answer.

  The girl moved in the bed, the covers rustling, and turned to look at me from the pillow.

  Irene, Magda said, and then Libby, too. Look. She wants Irene.

  The old woman slapped the cloth into my hand and clomped into the outer room where she began pacing. All night long she paced, murmuring to herself and moving her hands in the pockets of her apron. Every few circles she stopped and peered in, then shook her head and began pacing again.

  I spent a long time looking at the girl before pressing the cloth against her forehead, down over her cheeks, her mouth that had stopped dribbling moon pie filling. Magda moved the lamp from the dresser next to the girl’s bed, and together we stood over her, trying to look as closely as we could at the skin that appeared to become bluer as the night wore on.

  I looked at her and searched my mind for the palette of colors I wished I had in front of me. I wished I could paint her there, with the light throwing itself over her dark shoulders and pulsating throat. I thought that if I were to spend the rest of my life trying to mix the precise color of her skin, and if I were to tell this story to Audrey or Buck or their children someday, I would never find the right word to say how blue she really was. A dark turquoise, deeper than any indigo. The violet swirl of the sky just before dark or of ink spilled and left to dry. It was as if her skin was waging a battle against its own blueness, and was losing.

  She settled back against the pillows and sighed, a sigh filled with longing and phlegm. The edges of her lips were crusted over with what appeared to be purple scabs. I blotted them, first with the cloth and then with my finger.

  When I touched her lips, I nearly flinched from the heat. I raised my hand in a kind of offering and then pressed the back of it to her forehead, her cheeks. Her skin nearly crackled with fever.

  Are you sick? I whispered, not wanting the old woman to hear. Do you feel sick?

  The girl’s eyes closed. She nodded, her head moving up and down, up and down.

  What had the children fed her? I wondered as I stood beside the bed. Perhaps the old woman was right. Perhaps they were responsible for the froth of white filling and the girl’s fevered skin. Whatever they gave her had come from us, from Magda and Libby and me. Maybe all of our secrets had finally taken a toll on this girl who had come from the lake one day only to eventually drown for good. Had we done nothing but keep her alive for our own sake, and not for hers?

  All night we took turns giving her sips of water. Magda and Libby made several trips down the road to the lake. Magda cupped the water in her hands and let the drops fall over the girl’s closed eyes and open mouth while Libby passed the washcloth up and down her arms, arms so dark that there were no visible veins. Finally, when her skin seemed to cool, and she no longer held her mouth open for water to sip, we got in to our cars and drove home without saying good-bye.

  It was not really a surprise when the phone rang with the news that Ethan was gone. This is the kind of distraction the girl brought into our lives, and so that night, after Ethan opened his arms and let her sink down into the lake, I wondered what kind of person I may have become that I would call such a thing relief.

  It is very late as I close the windows against the sounds of the trees. I have grown tired of listening, tired of trying to please my mother who wanted me to have a life of
singing, tired of the blue girl who lived among the trees and ate our moon pies again and again. Last night, as the sun was setting, we watched the old woman disappear into the trees without a word. We kissed each other’s cheeks and hugged each of the children, even Ethan, who hates hands and touch, even he leaned in, with his arms stiff, and allowed each of us to embrace him. I pulled away in the station wagon, the first to go. By the time we reached home, Buck had fallen asleep in the backseat. Audrey lifted him in her arms and carried him to his bedroom while I followed with freshly washed blankets, and pressed my face into his hair, which still smelled like the lake.

  I just want to go to bed, Mom, Audrey said, even though I know you want to talk.

  Yes, of course, I said. Talking can wait. You haven’t slept in so long.

  I watched as she peeled off the jeans and socks she’d worn in the lake in her last attempt to save the girl. I watched as she pulled the covers up to her chin and closed her eyes, then listened for the rhythmic breathing and slight whistle through her nose that always indicated she was in a deep sleep, ever since she was a baby. It was that whistle that had made me think of singing, that whistle that kept me sitting on the porch, singing in a low voice while I wondered about the girl who had sunk down into the water, down deeper than any of us will ever go.

  After I close the windows on the porch and get onto the cot in the guestroom, where I have been sleeping ever since Colin first convinced himself the television would explode, I realize I have not checked on Colin since the morning, when the phone calls began, telling us Ethan had gone missing. Colin had spoken to me that morning. He hadn’t in weeks, not in sentences, not with the kind of meaning that happens between husbands and wives, even in marriages strained by children, illness, or the distraction of baking. When Audrey explained to him that we had to leave right away, he actually seemed to understand, though not at first.