The Ocean Inside

by Janna McMahan

  “You have no idea how proud I am of you,” he said.

  “I know, it’s awesome. I can’t believe I got in.”

  “It’s a testament to your talent.”

  Emmett headed for the kitchen. The wind lifted Sloan’s hair as she closed the door behind them and shut out the ocean’s drone. In the kitchen, she watched her father get a bottle of bourbon from under the counter and pour himself a shot. He rarely drank liquor, was mostly a beer guy.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked her father. “Did you have a bad day?”

  He shook his head. “No, baby. No worse than usual.”

  “Then what’s the matter? You don’t seem happy for me.”

  “I’m just…trying to work things out in my head. That the only school you’ve heard from so far?”

  “I don’t need to hear from any other schools. Savannah School of the Arts is the only place I want to go.”

  “But you’ll get accepted at USC I bet and…what were your other choices?”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere else.”

  “I understand, but Sloan, I’ve got to be honest with you. I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. You may have to pick a less expensive college. Isn’t school around twenty grand a year for tuition alone?”

  Sloan crossed her arms and considered what her father had just said. Didn’t they have the money for her to go to college?

  “How much money is in my college fund?”

  “I’m not sure. Your mother takes care of your school savings, but that sounds about right. It would only pay for one year. You could get two or more years out of that money if you went to a state school.”

  “This is unbelievable. Are you telling me I don’t have a college fund? That I don’t have enough money to go to Savannah?”

  “Maybe.” He hung his head like a little boy being scolded, but she wasn’t moved by his display. Anger was building under her excitement.

  “What about Grandmother and Grandfather? Wouldn’t they help us out?”

  “They haven’t sent any of your cousins to college, so I don’t know if they would be willing to help us or not. I mean, it would be kind of unfair to the other kids in the family.”

  Sloan sat at the kitchen table and began to sweep together the crumbs from the cookie she had mindlessly pinched while considering her bright future only moments before. She struggled to keep her lips from quivering when she spoke.

  “You’ve had eighteen years to save for my college education. How could you let this happen?”

  “According to your mother we saved nearly a thousand dollars each year for you, but education is just so expensive now. There are loans and grants and all sorts of things we can look into. In a school that expensive there has to be scholarships for kids in need.”

  “Hardship cases like me?”

  Her father opened the refrigerator and leaned against the machine’s door as if that were all that was keeping him upright. He finally found a beer.

  “Want one?” he asked her. “Time to grow up.”

  She shook her head. “Mom would kill you when she got home.”

  “Not much more I can do to disappoint her. Guess I shouldn’t take you down with me, though.”

  Emmett slumped into a chair and they both sat quietly. Sloan understood that he hadn’t meant for things to turn out this way. She knew he wanted her to go to school in Savannah, but she couldn’t find it within herself to reach across the table to touch him. She was too upset to offer him comfort.

  The phone jangled them out of their stupor.

  Sloan pressed the cold receiver to her ear.

  “Sullivans,” she said flatly.

  “Sloan? It’s Mom. Is your dad there?”

  “He’s right here.”

  She handed the phone to her father. Sloan could hear her mother’s voice pouring into his head.

  “Okay, I’ll be right down,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?” Sloan asked when he’d beeped the phone off.

  “Ainslie’s not doing so good. They’re going to admit her again. It’s apparently nothing to get alarmed about yet. Looks like they’re just going to give her fluids and hold her overnight for observation. I’m going to the hospital now. You stay here. You’ve got class tomorrow, so don’t worry about going with me. This could take all night.”

  Sloan watched her father drag himself through the house and out to the car without even looking in the mirror to see that his hair, long overdue for a cut, was sticking out in tufts around his ears. Sloan sat at the table until she heard the engine start, then she went up to her room where dirty clothes covered the floor and every other flat surface. Her mother no longer tidied her room or picked up her panties and crumpled jeans.

  Chip bags littered her desk, her bed was unmade, a trail of discarded clothes led to her open closet. She knew the bathroom she shared with Ainslie was a disgrace. Shame caught up with her then. Her father was right; it was time to grow up. There would be no more mother to do her laundry or clean her room. She was eighteen and reality had just smacked her in the face. She had her entire life before her and it was possible Ainslie wouldn’t even make it to eighteen. So what if Sloan didn’t get to go to her hoity-toity art school? What did that matter when her little sister was lying in a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of her?

  Sloan was suddenly ashamed. She’d been mean to her father, distant with both her parents really since Ainslie fell sick. She’d make it up to them, she’d be a better person, the daughter they needed her to be right now. As she bent to pick up her dirty clothes Blondie sang from her pocket and she flipped her phone open.

  “Hey, Cal.”

  “Zup?”

  “I don’t know. You called me.”

  “You sound weird.”

  “Mom took Ainslie to the hospital again. Nothing serious they say, but who knows.”

  “I can cheer you up.”

  “You can try.”

  “You got a passport?”

  CHAPTER 12

  Comfort Zone

  Emmett finished his run to the end of the island and was on his way back when he considered what awaited him at home. He was slightly ashamed of his decision, but he took a left over the bridge and didn’t stop running until he made it to The Pub.

  His heart pressed its rhythm into his ears. His intention was always to exhaust himself to the point where he was too tired to think anymore, but today there was no escape, his fears jangling between each pause in his blood’s flow. Sloan called this inability to turn off thoughts monkey mind. Today, he had an orangutan bouncing around inside his head.

  He wasn’t supposed to stop at the bar. He was supposed to return immediately to cherish each second he had with his daughter, since each could be her last. At least that’s what Lauren thought. She didn’t believe the doctors who said Ainslie was getting better, and she expected him to have the same crazy obsession with Ainslie’s every twinge and behavior change. But Emmett didn’t think she was going to die today while he was on his run and he wasn’t ashamed of that. He’d always been the more positive of the two in their marriage.

  But when Emmett searched deep inside himself, he knew. Lauren was right, he was hiding from them, but not for the reasons Lauren thought. He could carry the guilt she heaped upon him for his financial failures and what she viewed as his lack of enthusiasm for the family. He could handle his older daughter’s look of derision as she cut her eyes at him in her disappointment of the moment. But what he couldn’t take was simply looking at Ainslie, his once robust child, now withered and pale. Each time he saw her frail limbs, each time he carried her upstairs, her body as light as when she was four, he wanted to be somewhere else. He wanted to be single again with no children at all, nobody depending on him, nobody he would miss if they were gone.

  The Pub was his comfort zone now. It called to him with the chink of pool balls and the stench of stale beer. He settled onto a stool and waited for Vonda to walk his way. Behind her there were one hundred
and twenty-four liquor bottles (he’d counted many times). The most expensive stayed in the same spot, a soft ring of dust growing on the shoulders of those bottles. His bar mates, friends all, sagged on their own stools. The group always kept movement and conversation to a minimum, only the occasional lift of a mug to lips or flick of a wrist as ashes settled into brown glass.

  “Better quit that running,” somebody said as they smoked. “I hear running’ll kill you.”

  Emmett smiled. He felt most at home here, with these men he’d known all his life. Women seldom graced The Pub. There was nothing here for a woman, a sparse atmosphere with hard-bench booths and bar stools for leaning. There was plenty of booze, though, and a sympathetic ear if you cared to talk. But most men didn’t. Most guys kept their wounds to themselves. They could sit for hours, burdens heavy on their minds, but discuss nothing but the ballgame on the screen mounted high in the corner.

  “Here. This one’s on me,” Vonda said and slid a shot and a beer in front of Emmett. He nodded, threw the bourbon back and chased it with beer. As if on cue, Larry walked through the door and slid onto a stool next to Emmett.

  “Well if it ain’t Tweedledum,” Vonda said.

  “How do you know I’m not Tweedledee?” Larry asked.

  “Just a hunch.” Vonda placed a beer and a shot in front of Larry.

  Larry said, “And another one for him.”

  Vonda refilled Emmett’s stubby glass.

  “How’s every little thing?” Larry asked.

  “Shit.”

  “Okay, then.”

  They drank for a while, contemplating the baseball game on the tube.

  Emmett wiped a drop of sweat from his forehead.

  “Been running?”

  “Yeah, helps me think. Supposed to help me not think. I don’t know. I can’t tell anymore.”

  Nobody at the bar ever asked after Ainslie. They all gave him space, waited for him to broach the subject.

  “Sloan got into Savannah,” Emmett finally said.

  “Sweet.”

  “I guess. She’s pretty excited, but excited is about all she’s going to get. I can’t afford to send her there. That damn school’s like twenty grand a year.”

  Larry shook his head. “Law school wasn’t near that much.”

  “Isn’t it bizarre,” Emmett said, “that all my creative thoughts at work end up as every bite of food my kids put in their mouths? Every opportunity they have or don’t have is based on somebody paying me to design something.”

  “Pretty scary. One reason I don’t have kids. Couldn’t handle the responsibility.”

  “She hates me now.”

  “Didn’t you say she hated you before?”

  “That was just speculation. Now I’m sure of it.”

  Larry motioned for another round.

  Emmett waited until Vonda walked away, then continued.

  “Lauren thinks I’m a dimwit. She thinks I should be able to just snap my fingers and fix all this. I don’t know what to do. Guess I’m Tweedledum. Maybe I’ll just pack up and move us to France or Canada or someplace where they have universal health care.”

  “You could,” Larry said. “But I bet they got requirements to keep you from doing that. Or else everybody in your situation would do it.”

  Emmett guzzled his beer. “Hey, you remember that movie with Denzel Washington where he took a hospital hostage to force them to give his kid medical care?”

  “Never saw it.”

  “Well, he just kept saying he had insurance, but nobody would help. His insurance was no good for some reason. I know just how he feels. I feel like taking a gun right up there to Raleigh-Durham and going on a rampage.”

  “That’s why we have laws.”

  “To keep me from killing somebody?”

  “To keep good people from doing stupid things they can’t take back.”

  Emmett had to admit that at times the impulse to strike out was so physically strong he got sick to his stomach trying to control himself. Wasn’t that how all men felt sometimes? You know better, but you still can’t help wanting to punch something or, even better, somebody. This fruitless, wasted emotion even haunted his dreams. His unconscious had repeatedly conjured a massive building for Common Good’s headquarters. In his dream world, Emmett plowed his truck through the front plate glass window and came out guns blazing like a cowboy in a Hollywood movie. He blasted his way into the boardroom where men in black suits lined a massive table. Emmett always walked up to the guy in charge and grabbed him by the tie and dragged him across the shiny surface, all the while yelling, “My daughter is not a claim number!” Emmett always awoke with his hands balled into fists, ready to strike.

  This compulsion for violence was usually wild in youth and something that mellowed as you grew older. But this part of Emmett had come alive again and he’d even involuntarily formed a fist one day when Lauren was on one of her tirades. The frustration. The sheer desire to destroy. The times he’d had to check himself were becoming more frequent.

  He’d held his fist and held his tongue more times than he cared to remember. Lauren had a way about her that could stab a man, undermine him with only a word. He’d never been the major breadwinner she’d wanted to marry, but now she viewed him as a miserable failure. That was Lauren’s way—always setting the standard, expecting everybody to live up to her version of the perfect life. She still carried an imagined idea of what her life was supposed to be like. She’d never picked a major in college because the only degree she really wanted was an MRS. He knew Lauren had dreamed she’d marry a doctor or a lawyer and have a boy and a girl and a Labrador retriever named Scout. Why she had chosen him instead of holding out for that dream life was a mystery to him. She hadn’t seemed unhappy at the time, but now, when the chips were down, she had turned on him.

  Couldn’t she give him at least a little credit for busting his ass building a business? Lauren didn’t understand what it was to be the responsible party, at least financially. It wasn’t as if he had only his own family to be concerned about. He also had employees who depended on him, so they, in turn, could take care of their own families. And it wasn’t as if he spent his days in the rapture of designing beautiful public spaces. No, most of his days were spent on meetings or spreadsheets or employees who dragged their personal problems into the office. He had taxes to pay, both personal and business, and all the other business burdens that Lauren never thought about.

  While Lauren only cared that their daughter had medical insurance, Emmett had to look at the larger picture and figure out how to keep insurance for both his family and his office. Every day he wondered if Common Good would raise rates beyond his ability to pay or simply dump his office and he would be on the search again for yet another insurance carrier. If that happened, he was certain no new company would take on a child in the middle of cancer treatment. If that happened, they would truly be out of luck.

  Was he doing his best? Would another man have made different choices? Worked more weekends? Had a more cutthroat approach to business? Worked for big developers with deep pockets but few principles? Or perhaps he should have chucked the idea of his own company for the security of a firm where he could have traded autonomy for a steady paycheck and benefits.

  Life was all about choices. Choices made you. Choices broke you.

  So his choice to buy cheaper health insurance had resulted in this financial disaster for his family. But worst of all, Emmett feared there might be a time when no money meant no help for his daughter. That was Lauren’s ultimate fear.

  It was a widely held belief that divorce comes to families with seriously ill children, particularly when children die. And Emmett could understand why divorce was the standard reaction to this situation. The stress was so great, the guilt so monumental, the emotional toll so heavy that nobody came out unchanged. Suddenly, the two people who gave life to a child were strangers battling to keep themselves from imploding. He’d heard that times like this were when all sho
rtcomings were revealed and resentments came pouring out like lava, to scald and smother.

  “Give us the good stuff this time,” Larry said to Vonda.

  Vonda poured the men another round. Emmett’s vision was blurry as he raised his shot glass to her and then to Larry. The bourbon burned a swath down his throat. When had he taken to drinking in the afternoons? What did it matter? Ainslie was just a child, she’d never smoked a cigarette, never taken a drink and look where it got her.

  “Ha.” Emmett breathed a listless laugh into his beer mug at the thought.

  “Ha?” Larry mimicked.

  “I was just thinking about my grandfather who lived to the ripe old age of ninety-one. He smoked and drank right up until the state took his driver’s license away. He was about eighty when that happened.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So why is it that he got to booze it up and smoke for nearly a century, but my kid, who has never done anything bad in life, has to have cancer. There’s no rhyme or reason to who lives or dies.”

  “No truer words were ever spoken, my friend,” Larry said.

  There was no talisman to ward off illness. Not good genes or religion or plain ole clean living could guarantee a long and healthy life. No. Life was just one big crap shoot.

  CHAPTER 13

  One More Time

  Sloan had a boyfriend. This realization hit Lauren as she slid pizza into the oven. It had happened while Lauren wasn’t looking. Thank goodness he was a good boy from a good family. He wasn’t sporting face piercings or black disks in his ears, so he seemed much safer than some of Sloan’s previous choices. Lauren felt as if these prior paramours had only been play acting, trying on a tough façade for the effect it had on adults. Sloan always insisted that these boys were only friends and that they were strongly antidrugs, but then what else would she say?

  Cal Wannamaker had the oily smoothness money cultivates, a façade of its own, but he was still preferable to kids who looked as if they hadn’t bathed in three days.