by Ann Claycomb
Come home come home come home.
My feet and then my knees snag on the sand and I come up abruptly into the air, exposed suddenly nearly to my waist, my breasts tightening painfully and my hair heavy again across my back. The voices fade, as if the speakers are moving away.
I forgot I was naked. Harry wades out, shaking her head, and wraps me in an enormous towel, half-dragging me the rest of the way out of the water so the towel doesn’t get wet. It comes below my knees and I clutch at it as I scramble up onto the wet sand of the tide line, then stop and turn around, facing the sea again.
“Did you get your fix for the day?” Harry asks.
I shake my head. “Shh . . .” Now that I am completely out of the water the voices have stopped. I wait for the tide. As it surges over my feet, the voices clutch at me—Come home come home—and then wash away with the receding wave.
They are in the sea then. Not in the shell, not in my head. Maybe. But though I want to make sense of them—they were loudest when I was fully immersed, then fainter and fainter as I emerged—they are still impossible, because why can I hear them when only my feet are in the water? Can you have aural hallucinations that only show up—what’s the word?—circumstantially?
“Kathleen?” Harry is saying, a hint of impatience in her voice now. I can’t imagine why, except that she’s gotten her clothes wet, first holding my wet clothes and then coming in after me. She needs to get inside, get changed into dry things, get some dinner. She must be starving. I scoop up the ends of the towel and reach for her hand.
“It was so warm,” I say. “I’d forgotten how warm the Florida ocean is.”
A wave rushes in and I dance out of the way too late.
Come home come—
Harry is amused. “Seriously? You don’t want to get your feet wet?”
The important thing is to make sure she doesn’t know. We’re on our first real vacation together. I can’t be hearing voices in the sea. And even if one were to concede that I am hearing voices in the sea—I dodge the next wave successfully and tug Harry up onto the dry sand, which feels like broken glass under my feet—I can’t let Harry know.
“I’ve had enough of the water for one day,” I tell her. “Unless you count a shower. Or maybe”—I walk closer, deliberately bump her with my hip—“a dip in the hot tub. Isn’t there supposed to be a hot tub on our deck?”
Her hand tightens on mine; her smile deepens. “There is,” she says. “It’s big enough for a party of twelve. And there’s a privacy screen all around it.”
Maybe tomorrow they’ll be gone. Maybe they have the wrong person. I could come back tomorrow and try telling them that. This makes me shiver with only slightly hysterical laughter.
“Cold?” Harry asks. “Is the hot tub calling us?”
If you only knew, I think, and this, combined with the difficulty I am having walking on the sand without crying, makes me laugh harder. “If I wouldn’t shock everyone in sight, I’d race you to it,” I say. “But I think I’d better keep the towel on.”
“It’s a good look for you,” she says. “Sort of half-drowned regal rat.”
This time the laughter loosens something clenched inside of me, so that I remember to walk lightly on the sand, which hurts less. I’m cold and hungry and so is Harry, and if there are voices in the sea they can just damn well wait. For what, I don’t know, but I will stop thinking about them now. I follow Harry up the deck stairs, hitching up the wet towel as it threatens to trip me.
“If we get in the hot tub now, I’m not sure you’ll be able to drag me out,” I say. “Does this place have room service?”
SHIELDED FROM THE beach and the neighboring condos by a curved wall of sun-bleached planking, the tub has the allure of a secluded grotto. The churning of the jets drowns out the sound of the surf, but I can still see the waves over Harry’s shoulder. Closer up, below us and around us, the water is blue-green and gilt in the glow of the lights set into the sides of the tub.
We began on the bench against the wall, but the water wanted us floating, not sitting, and so we’ve given in and slipped into the middle of the tub, where we touch bottom and then push off, touch bottom and push off, turning slowly, legs tangled together. Mine are longer but hers are stronger, our hands clenching and kneading, from thigh to butt to back to breast. I arch backward and grip her close with only my legs while her fingers circle and circle and draw points that she takes in her mouth. I am wet all over, from her mouth and the water and the cloak of my hair. I tug her head up and kiss her, taste salt from my skin on her lips, sink into the melting dance of my tongue against hers, slide down and against her in the tub, down and up again, her hands gripping me tight, fingers tucked into the hollows of my thighs from behind, holding me still. I scoop up water in my cupped hands and pour it over us, between us, against us. The feel of her against me underwater is a friction like pain and the relief from pain together. I touch her hair where it is wet and tightly curled against my own, both slick as seaweed. I feel boneless and liquid, like I have spilled out—we have spilled out together into the water, we are the water, glinting and foaming in the dark.
Afterward, she insists we shower, moisturize, dry our hair so it doesn’t soak the pillows. I can only convince her not to do more kitchen cleanup by promising to do it myself, though of course I cheat. I stuff all the containers of leftover food in the refrigerator and fill the sink with soapy water so she can’t see the dirty dishes. Harry will end up doing it properly herself tomorrow morning, but tonight she is so tired that she is asleep even before I shut off the light in the kitchen and grope my way down the hall.
The bedroom is bright with moonlight streaming in through the French doors and Harry is curled up right in the middle of the bed. She is lovely in her sleep, more softly so than when she’s awake and worried or busy. She is wearing an old T-shirt and no bra; the contrast with her boy’s haircut is delicious. Her eyelashes are surprisingly dark for someone so blond, something I noticed the first time I watched her sleep. I pull the curtains closed, take off my robe, and slip into bed beside her, bracing myself for her to roll toward me as she always does, my body a magnet for hers even in sleep. I love the feel of her, but sometimes I can’t bear any contact, not even her breath on my neck or her hand on my waist. I can tell this is going to be one of those nights, but I wait for her to sink deeper into sleep before I wriggle away.
How did I ever fall in love with a woman like this? So levelheaded, so stable. When she decides to lose five pounds, she loses five pounds. When her voice teacher suggests a certain role or song cycle to her, she doesn’t just read the libretto and find a recording to listen to, she spends a week in the library, researching text, music, interpretation, everything. Even her voice reflects who and what she is in a way mine doesn’t. She has a voice like the inside of a New England church. I can hear her in her voice. And though everyone—especially Harry—loves my voice, my voice lies. I am nothing without my voice, but it lies all the same. I stand onstage, my skin chafing against the fabric of my costume and my feet hurting so much that I can only will myself to stand still by picturing the blood soaking my shoes and seeping through the soles. But when I open my mouth to sing, the sound that comes out is unmarred, a stream without even a pebble to disturb its ecstatic flow.
Even that one morning—the morning when pain was a fire in my mouth and a river of pain poured out of my mouth—
Shit. What was I thinking about? I was thinking about singing. I was thinking about Harry and singing and voices and my voice.
Everyone says, “Such a beautiful voice.” Even that morning it was beautiful.
I try not to think about that morning, or about the dream the night before, of the sensation of someone actually catching hold of my tongue with wet, bony fingers. The nails pinched and I tried to twist away but then there was a quick decisive motion, another arm and hand descending, and my tongue was gone, my mouth full of blood, and I woke up screaming. The scream was like a song. I could
hear it, and the song was incandescent in the air as Robin came running.
I am not supposed to think about that morning, my sixteenth birthday, of all days. One therapist suggested that I found the dream so traumatic that I developed a kind of stress disorder. Even recalling the dream or the pain that followed can trigger another “episode.” I taste wet iron in my mouth, feel it filling with saliva the way I was sure it was filling with blood as I screamed.
Unearthly. That’s what Robin called it. He picked me up out of bed that morning, held my arms in a grip that left bruises, and still the scream went on and on. It only stopped when I began to gag. When I did, I could feel that my tongue was still there, flattening out as I retched. At the emergency room, one doctor said it was swollen and bruised as if someone had indeed pinched it with something sharp, but of course, I must have done that myself, in my sleep.
I swallow the metallic taste in my mouth and shove my feet out from under the blankets. I am clammy the way you are after you’ve just thrown up, too hot and too cold all at once. Stupid voices in the water. If it wasn’t for them I’d be asleep by now, not thinking about things I’m usually good at holding at bay. I breathe deeply and carefully, in through my nose, out through my mouth, using my stomach muscles as if I’m warming up to sing.
Harry tries to snuggle closer again. When I flinch away she sighs and rolls over. Then of course I immediately want her to come back to me, though I can feel that finally, lying very still without anyone touching me and my feet kicked out from under the covers, I am beginning to sink toward sleep. I hate the conscious knowledge that I am Harry’s weakness, that she’s abandoned her rational approach to the world to love me as she does, without questioning the stuff that doesn’t make sense, pain and nightmares and phobias about having my tongue cut out. And I hate that she is my weakness too, that she has gotten not just past the lies I’m so used to telling about my physical symptoms, but inside the struggle to hide them from everyone else, that she loves me more because she thinks I’m brave and strong. Hardly. A few months ago I began to feel her swimming beside me in my dreams. They are the same dreams I have always had, dreams of deep water and shifting blue light, but now Harry is there too. I point things out to her as we pass them: shimmery schools of silver fish, the flat shadow of a ray or an eel that swims away before you can be sure of it. But then I turn to face her fully and she’s gone, of course she’s gone, and when I wake up, weeping as always, it’s because I’ve lost both Harry and the sea.
I WAKE THE next morning from one of these dreams and lie quietly for a moment, feeling the slight warmth and weight of Harry’s hand, which has again found its way onto the curve of my hip. I dry my eyes with the edge of the sheet.
Then I hear the surf and I have to know. I shrug back into my robe, let myself out the French doors onto the deck, and run down to the beach and into the surf. It laps around my feet and ankles, deliciously cold against my skin, and for a moment it is just the sea. I grin and walk in up to my knees. Then a wave knocks me over and as I struggle to untangle the belt of my robe from around my thighs a woman’s voice snaps at me—Kathleen! Come home!
I am still so shaky from the dream and so angry at the damn voices for ruining what was supposed to be a perfect vacation that I scream back.
“What do you want?”
A wave rushes me and I swallow a mouthful of seawater, which feels wonderful in my dry mouth but seems to make the voices slide right down my throat, murmuring comehomecomehome. I stagger to my feet and smack the surface of the next wave. “Stop it, do you hear me? Stop it. Leave me alone!”
But it’s just more of the same, murmured urgings to come home trailing me as I stalk back up to the beach and sit down just out of reach of the surf. I pull my knees up and press my face so hard into them that I see spots. I need Harry. I need Harry to help me with this one, and I can’t let her help me. The trouble is that I’m not levelheaded or reflective or logical—not about much of anything, really, and certainly not about my, ugh, my problems. When I first told Harry about all the weird pain, she immediately started asking what the various doctors had said, what medications I’d tried, the questions I guess it makes sense to ask. And somewhere in between answering her and stifling the urge to scream at her to stop asking me these stupid questions, I realized that she wasn’t doubting me, which was what I’d assumed she’d do. She was asking because she believed me. It didn’t make the answers any easier, since no one has a good explanation and nothing has ever helped, but it made it easier to give them to her.
But what if I tell her about this latest development? Honey, I’m hearing voices in the sea. Whenever I touch seawater, I hear women telling me to “come home.” What do you think that symptom means?
Nope. Uh-uh. Can’t tell Robin either. Because what if this was what finally made Moira crack, hearing women in the water whenever she soaked her feet? Can psychosis, or whatever, be so specific from one generation to the next?
On the face of it, just as a simple fact, hearing women talking to me while I’m swimming isn’t so bad. It’s better than feeling like your tongue’s being cut out. But—try to think logically here, Kathleen—voices in the water are not real, they can’t be real. Yet I’m definitely hearing them. And that pretty much squashes flat the whole shaky thing I’ve built, with Harry and Robin’s help, out of all the other symptoms, the idea that somewhere there’s a medical condition we just haven’t found, a syndrome or an allergy or an autoimmune disease that causes flaring pain. Add in hearing voices but only while touching seawater and only saying one thing, repeatedly, except for occasional use of subject’s own name, and there’s nothing left but, well, Crazy. With a capital C.
A particularly enterprising wave reaches up and circles my ankles: come home. I put my hand down as if I could pin it there, get the sea’s attention that way.
“You know,” I say out loud, “for the record, part of what makes me mad here is that I hate to be a cliché. I mean, voices in my head . . . for God’s sake, it’s not even original.”
Another wave makes a foray, soaking my butt this time. The tide must be coming in.
Come home.
“And if you’re trying to get me to drown myself, you’re not going about it well at all,” I tell this one while it is still foaming around me. “I may be crazy about the ocean, but it’s not home.”
The wave recedes, still murmuring, and I wonder if it, or they—the voices, I mean—know that I can’t come up with someplace that does feel like home, not our apartment in Boston or my beautiful bedroom outside of Philadelphia that’s meant to trick you into thinking you’re sleeping at the bottom of the sea.
WHEN I COME back up to the condo, Harry is sitting out on the deck with a book and a cup of coffee.
“I made a whole pot,” she says. “Did you have a good swim?”
“One of these days I’m really going to have to consider a bathing suit,” I say. “Let me go change.”
When I come back out in dry clothes, she has lowered her book and is watching a scene play out down at the beach. There’s a little girl down there now, hardly more than a baby, sitting in the wet sand at the water’s edge and shrieking with excitement whenever a wave washes over her. Her father dances from foot to foot behind her, ready to snatch her up.
Harry turns to smile at me. “That poor father! He’s so nervous for her and she’s having a ball. And I love her pigtails. My mother used to put my hair in pigtails like that, sticking right out of the top of my head. They were completely ridiculous.”
“But cute,” I say. I nudge her foot with my toes. “Admit it, you were very cute.”
I’ve seen pictures of Harry as a little girl, her face puffed out with baby fat, dimples in her elbows and her knees. To hear Harry talk, she went from being an “ordinary” person, a little girl with dimples, to being an artist. She still finds it strange and wonderful to call herself a singer. It’s a transformation that most singers talk about, even the ones who claim to have been born
with perfect pitch or whose parents swear they sang before they walked or talked. But it’s something I can’t understand.
I’ve had rapturous moments of progression in my singing, like when Robin and my voice teacher explained to me that I could make singing my job. And there was that terrible day when my voice was forged—all in an hour, apparently, all in a scream. My voice teacher was absolutely baffled the next time he heard me sing. Since my voice changed, there is always a moment when I’m singing when I feel the music itself settling like a web around my voice, holding it in. If I’m singing with another person, the sensation is different; the other voice is a weight pulling mine down. I don’t think that without the weight or the web of constraining sound that I would necessarily sing higher. I would just sing something more. There is song rising in the back of my throat at that moment—I can feel it there and I can hear how it might sound. But I can also hear how it would overwhelm the music around me. So I swallow it back.
But the sense of being a person separate from your voice and then gradually becoming the person who can lay claim to that voice, by virtue of hard work and strenuous vocal exercise and study: I can only imagine how that feels. When Harry and I moved in together, her mother sent several boxes of Harry’s books from her parents’ house, including a photo album. I sat beside Harry on the floor in our new living room and stared hard at those pictures—at HARRIET, 3 YRS., AT THE FAMILY CLAMBAKE, a chubby blond baby in a green and white gingham dress with a wide pink collar embroidered with black to look like two slices of watermelon framing her face. Her face is scrunched up in what she must mean to be a smile for the camera, and she is smudged and sticky with sand at the ankles and wrists.
I searched for the shadows of her voice around her, for a glimpse of it in her dirty little sunburned face. There’s a capacity for wonder there already, the wonder that’s in her face and in her voice when she talks about the great mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. But the voice itself, what I would have thought had always been Harry’s voice—it’s not there yet. It’s floating somewhere outside of her, waiting to be a part of her sometime later.