This Is the Story of You

by Beth Kephart

  I gave Sterling a kiss between the ears, ran my hand across her back, over her tail. I whispered truths into her ear. I said my best friend Deni needed me.

  She settled back quick. I gave Gillian a look. I told Old Carmen I’d be back as soon as I could and she said:

  “No shenanigans.”

  We left Old Carmen there, by the beach with Gillian, Sterling in charge of them both.

  “It’s Eva,” Deni said. “Eva’s been found.”

  “Tell me. Everything.”

  But it was hard for Deni to start, hard for her to get the sequence right, and now she was running, and I was, too, following behind in her footsteps, catching the words that flew.

  “She’s not dead,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” Breathing out. She’s not dead. The story’s only good part. The clouds seemed to be dropping to earth. The waves and the gulls were crashing, too. The sand was squish. We ran.

  “Slow down,” I told Deni, but now her story came out in a rush, pieces of it out of order, erased and replaced and starting over. Eva had been found out at the lighthouse beneath a ripped-from-its-own-bolts bench. Unconscious. Broken. The bones in both legs snapped. The twins, Deni was saying. Becca and Deby, who had gone out in the night. Said they couldn’t sleep. Maybe they were scavenging, Deni didn’t know. They were the ones who’d found Eva. Thought she was just some pile of clothes at first, but then there was Eva’s hair. Glowing gold.

  Deni herself, she hadn’t been sleeping. She had been lying there in the dark and then she heard those jingle bells that Becca wears and she stood up and went to the window and knew. Saw Becca running. Heard Becca calling. Turned around and said, “It’s Eva,” and everyone was on their feet in minutes, up in the dark—out of their broken houses and into the dark and some of them rushing to the lighthouse, running behind Becca, leading the way with her jingle bells, toward Eva, Deby, the lighthouse. Some of them getting ready to triage on a porch.

  “Eva’s not dead,” I said.

  “No,” Deni huffed. “She’s not.”

  But Eva wasn’t talking, either, not opening her eyes, and what she needed, Deni said, was the mainland hospital, where Jasper Lee and Mickey were—a broken bridge and two hours away and nobody knew, besides, how the hospital had fared in the storm. Eva needed care and she had the brigade but that wasn’t enough. No X-rays. No anesthesia. No sterile environment. Hardly enough clean water. Two nurses and a doctor and the First Aid and Rescue instructor, Rosie’s sister, who had taught us counting with blue Slurpees.

  My stomach sickened. I couldn’t catch my breath. I wanted to stop and cry, but Deni was all-out running now, the clouds on her head, and I was running, too. We had a long way to go. Eva wasn’t dead.

  “One more thing,” Deni said, calling back to me, the gap between us lengthening, and I needed my skates more than anything. I needed a straight stretch of asphalt.

  “Yeah?”

  “She was wearing Shift’s hoodie. She had her binoculars back.”

  “What?”

  “We have to hurry.”

  I couldn’t hurry any faster than that.

  Like an open-air camp. Like a Civil War scene. Like M*A*S*H, the TV show Mickey would watch in late-night reruns, when, after four jobs and us, she still couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know the nurses or the doctor, but I knew Rosie’s sister, Andra—her long blond hair up in a ponytail and her eyes so blue and her hands busy unwinding and rewinding gauze, as if she didn’t know what else she could do.

  Chang and Mario and Taneisha were there, like a mirage. Becca with her jingle bells and Deby, with her eyes behind her bangs, and Ginger, who had lost her tiara and the orange burnish of her hair. It was some kind of miracle, lost and found, the O’Sixteens reconstituted, who knows how. They’d found the warped plane of a dining room table that still had two of its legs. They’d set the legless end down on the shoulders of a La-Z-Boy chair and wedged some roof shingles beneath the table legs to help the horizontal—all under the guidance of Deni, I’d find out later. Deni, who always knew what she could do. By the time I arrived, Deni had cleared away room, asking Becca and Ginger to step aside, so that I could get up close to Eva, hold her right hand, which weighed nothing, as if the sea had leached her bones. Then Taneisha stepped away from the other side and gave Deni Eva’s other hand and we both stood there, breathing hard and out of breath and looking down at our best friend.

  Don’t let go, I thought. Eva. We’re here.

  “We’re hoping she can hear you,” someone said, and I looked up and there was Dr. Edwards. His beard had gone shaggy. His bangs were in his eyes. The dark part of his hair had turned a sudden white. He had on somebody’s Christmas snowman sweater and his neck seemed swollen, his Adam’s apple huge, as if he hadn’t swallowed once since the monster blew. I thought of class, a lifetime ago: I believed that I was perishing with the world, and the world with me.

  But that guy, whoever he was, had not perished, and Eva had not perished, either, and now, when I looked away, past Eva, across Deni’s shoulder, I saw Cinnamon Nose in the corner of the porch, his legs cut free of the rope and wrapped in gauze, his snout down on his paws.

  “Eva,” I said. “We were looking everywhere.”

  I tried to play back what I knew, put the story together, figure out just what had happened here. Eva had gone out with Shift. She was found in his hoodie. Her binoculars were there, around her neck. They had gone to the lighthouse, and she’d been found alone, and where the hell was Shift?

  Eva, beautiful Eva, heart-too-big-for-the-world Eva. It was as if a shadow had crept in under her skin—all those worlds she saw that none of us could see all stacked up high and dangerous inside her. Her eyes seemed stung—two purple welts, thin broken lashes. There was seaweed stitched into her curls, the broken leg of a starfish, the bones of fish. They’d drawn a sheet up to her chin, and I was glad, for I couldn’t bear to imagine her legs.

  “Eva,” I said. “Wake up.”

  I looked up and there was Dascher, now, with her anchor healed. There was Tiny Tina blocking the sun that was starting to climb above the clouds, and there was Becca beside Deby, the two unalike twins who, standing side by side after the night they’d had, looked suddenly like sisters. Straight across from me Deni stood, Eva’s hand in hers, her dog behind her, a big tear rolling down her cheek. None of us on Haven could afford to lose another thing.

  “We’re all here, Eva,” I said, and maybe I imagined it, maybe you will say that I did, but I felt a tremor in my hand and I believed that it was coming from her, and now, when I looked up again, I saw Deni untangling the curls of Eva’s hair. I saw Taneisha and Tiny Tina at the opposite end, rubbing the soles of Eva’s feet, the decals all gone from her toenails. Hung from a makeshift post, I saw that hoodie and those pink binoculars.

  Down the street, I saw the blown-apart living room of some poor person’s home—only two walls up, the floral wallpaper dripping. I saw people dressed in February clothes and garden gloves, a working unity. It was the food brigade, I realized, turning its attention to the meal of the day, to the cartons of things taken from McCauley’s, the cans of things that had rolled around, then back, with the tide, the things they could do to make a difference.

  I thought of Old Carmen down at Mid, and her own brigade. I thought of Gillian, who said she could fish, the fake-crystal toe rings on her bare feet, no boots, her crab bright as a clown fish. I thought of Sterling, patient and respectful and learning not to be jealous. I thought of Mickey and Jasper Lee and the bridge of light between us.

  Only thing not replaceable is people. Order. Family. Genus. Species. We were the kingdom unto Haven.

  I leaned down again to kiss Eva’s pale forehead. I combed a fishbone from her curls with my fingers. I looked over my shoulder at Dr. Edwards and Andra and the doctor whose name I didn’t know, who were hovering near, who had done wh
at they could—cleaned the wounds, set the bones beneath the sheet, made Eva comfortable.

  “Wake up, Eva,” I whispered again. “We’re all here.”

  There were four of us on the rock that night. From up above we might have looked like the starfish that had left one tip inside Eva’s hair. From below we looked like the lucky ones. The extra sweaters, towels, and sheets I’d hauled from home had gone only so far—Old Carmen handing them out earlier in the day to whoever needed them most. That’s what she had said, just a few words, when I’d returned, late, from North. I’d stayed until dusk fell, until Dr. Edwards said that it was time to let Eva rest, even though all she had done that day was rest and rest, listen to the stories we told her, the cities we found, Wake up, Eva. Wake up. Her heart beating and her lungs breathing but her thoughts so very far away, all those layers that she kept inside, the past and the eternal, a coma or a dream. We didn’t know. We needed help. A hospital.

  Gillian’s earrings ran like a black tear down her neck. She sat on the rock wearing one of my aunt’s old sweaters like a cape and a pair of damp, ribbed socks on her feet.

  It was cold. The heavy clouds had returned. Someone began to cry, and kept on crying, the saddest sound, and I sat up, found my doublewide, shined its light on the huddles, the blankets, the sheets, the awning canvases, the umbrella fabric under and over which the beach people slept, but the crying stopped, as if the light had shamed it, and now someone began playing that stuck song on the piano and someone tapped up the beat on the Maytag and Old Carmen snored through it and Gillian lay silent, not saying a word. Gillian, the castaway, on Old Carmen’s rock.

  Up at North, Deni and the brigade were taking care.

  “I’m coming back,” I said. “I promise.” To Eva. To Deni. To Cinnamon Nose and the brigade. To Dr. Edwards, who had found James Joyce in the wreckage and was reading it out loud. I left him holding our best friend’s hand:

  “‘Once upon a time and a very good time it

  was there was a moocow coming down along

  the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named

  baby tuckoo. . . .’”

  “Don’t let anything happen to Eva,” I’d said.

  “We’re all right here,” the others said.

  “Hey,” Deni said, just before I started back. She put out her hand, the one still caught in the sling. She asked for mine. There, on my palm, lay her brother’s glory medals.

  “He’s giving you his strength,” she said.

  I woke to drops of rain near the edge of dawn. I woke to the sound of Old Carmen’s snores and to the silent sleeping of the girl on the rock, Gillian, who had stolen in and stayed, whose story sounded strange—a lie or the truth, I didn’t know. She’d been given a place with us: Old Carmen’s choice; Old Carmen making room.

  I pulled the trench coat over my head, held it up, like a tent.

  “Here, Sterling,” I said.

  That cat, nesting in.

  I slept.

  I slept again.

  I dreamed or I did not.

  Mickey was near, and she was not.

  She had news, or there was silence.

  I slept, or I dreamed, or I did not, and now I was remembering something from long ago, my mother’s words: I don’t know what to do.

  What was I? Nine? What was my brother? What was Mickey? I never knew—her birthday slipping by each year without candles, without any kind of cake. I was dreaming or remembering, and there we were in the ghost of the cottage, on the second floor of that attic that was newly my room, though the life my aunt had left behind would always be bigger than the life I’d live, her things more present than mine, those closets full of her empty skirts and sleeves, her cracked-sole shoes, her straw hats, some of them with strands of hair inside. I was nine, and Mickey was crying, and we were side by side on the bed my aunt had left behind, and Jasper Lee was downstairs, Jasper Lee and his missing iduronate-2-sulfatase, his diagnosis. That was the news.

  “It isn’t fair,” Mickey was saying. Words thick between tears. “My son. His whole life. A goddamned enzyme.”

  She took my hand and squeezed. She lifted my chin with her other palm. She shook her head no, and the tears fell again.

  I was nine—that’s right—and my mother was near, on the bed beside me, with her impossible news.

  The sea was beyond us, gray and green. The rise and the crash and the colors and all those monsters. I could see the sea through the window, past the deck, across the sand. On top of the curio cabinet, in a silver frame, I saw the face of Mickey’s sister, my aunt with her glamorous hair and her eyes stealing away from the camera snap, already gone. Mickey reached for the frame. She held the photo on her lap. She let the sea do its business on the shore.

  “I always longed for a sister,” she said. “Someone to talk to.”

  “You have a sister,” I said.

  “Not a real one,” Mickey said. “Not someone I can talk to.”

  “Maybe she’s different now,” I remember saying. “Maybe she would talk if you called.”

  “No.” That’s all my mother said. “No.” The definitive answer.

  I woke, and it was dawn. There was the flapping of the No Surrender flag above our heads. There was the patchwork quilt on the place of that rock where Old Carmen had spent the night snoring. She was down by the shore now, up to her knees, in the tide, the line of her fishing rod casting way, way out.

  The fire was low.

  The rain had stopped.

  Sterling and Gillian slept.

  I walked down the rock stairs toward her.

  Maybe I’m medium everything, but beside Old Carmen I was tall. I smelled like the days that had passed, the dreams I had had, and my teeth and my tongue were peach fuzz. My jeans were rolled to my knees, stiff as cardboard. My underwear was gross. My many layers were like many arms. My hair was clouds.

  Old Carmen had stripped to her flannel shirt. She’d never changed her pants, and in her face were the first pokes of sun, and the hook at the end of her line was catching nothing but some of the things the storm had run off with. One half of a pair of green tube socks. The zebra wrap of someone’s phone. A package of seeds no one had planted. A bright pink disk, like the sun.

  “Chang’s Frisbee,” I said as she reeled it in.

  She unhooked it with one gesture.

  She shook it dry.

  She slid it toward me and cast again.

  We stood there, side by side.

  The giraffe from the Mini Amuse was bobbing on the horizon, nicking the beginning of the sun. Alice in Wonderland had sailed to Atlantis. The tide was sucking hard, urging us forward, crinkling our knees, sinking our feet deeper in. I leaned down, troweled into the sand with the Frisbee and tilted it toward the sun. I thought of all the ways that sand had been made, each speck the end of something that had lived and died and crumbled. Crumble. It would have been the name of Jasper Lee’s Project Flow, had everything that happened never happened.

  The dolphins were in the near beyond, their fins slicing the waves, easy, easy. They had come from the south. They were headed toward North. They began to swim a circle right before us. There are forty species of dolphins. They come in black and white and pink and gray; they are the size of dogs or the size of cabooses. They swim the rivers and the seas, they dream in every language, they find their way through the music they make, they know if you are pregnant. The dolphin is the heart of the sea, I’d written for my Project Flow, seemed like forever ago. In many tales, in much of science, the dolphin is the savior.

  Between the human and the shark, it has swum circles of protection.

  Beneath the drowning girl, the drowning boy, the drowning ship, it has risen, it has buoyed, it has rafted.

  Toward the fisherman’s pole it has sent the brightest fish, along the banks of som
e beaches it has harvested its dinners, in the deep of the sea, it has made its own kind of love, and it has played, and it is this love and this play that makes dolphins almost human.

  Apollo was a dolphin once.

  Aphrodite rode a dolphin’s back.

  Dionysus turned a band of pirates into slick and silvery dolphins. He set them free.

  And, once, in a fresco painted thirty-five hundred years ago, dolphins and deer were the “great leaping” things. They were the best beauty man had ever seen.

  Project Flow. I will finish it someday. I will finish it for you, Ms. Isabel.

  Old Carmen and I stood watching the silver fins slice, the bottlenosed snouts, the sun still rising. There was so much to say and so much to ask and so we were silent, saying nothing. She’d reel in, reel out, relieve her hook of its vagabond collection. I’d stand there with her bucket in one hand, waiting to stock up the community pantry.

  “Have you heard the story,” Old Carmen finally asked, “of Pelorus Jack?”

  “No,” I said. I hadn’t.

  “Pelorus Jack,” she said. “The dolphin. Years 1888 through 1912. Guided ships traveling the strait between Wellington and Nelson. Waited for them. Led the way. Led them again on the way back. Pelorus Jack,” she said. “Mark Twain traveled all that way to see him for himself.”

  “For real?” I said.

  “It’s history,” she said.

  Not a myth. Not a dream. Not a memory.

  We stood there, and the dolphins came nearer. We stood there, and they circled closer again, and now Old Carmen began to sing a song from a long time ago, words by P. Cole, she said, music by H. Rivers, a song like a lullaby, not the words, maybe, but the way she sang it, gentle and understanding and slow.

  “A famous fish there used to be, called Pelorus Jack

  He’d always swim far out to sea, when a ship