“Where are your parents?” Beth asks Kelli at the door.
The girl winces at the question.
How like Steve. Nowhere to be found during a crisis.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Dan says. He would have tried to explain, would have launched into the excuses he has at the ready—that he only stopped here in hopes that the rain would let up, that Kelli’s parents just stepped out—but the look on his mom’s face makes him shut up.
Beth finds herself transported, feels a stirring until she pushes Eliza back down.
The house smells exactly the way it used to. Too many animals, not enough care cleaning up after them all. Two big dogs jump on Beth. The walls are still bare, primed but not painted, a white that has yellowed with age. Looking past the kitchen, she can see a bare concrete slab where the living room carpet has been removed.
“Get in the car,” she says. “You, too,” she nods to Kelli.
In the living room, she can hear a parrot squawking. She swears it sounds just like the bird Steve had all those years ago, but that can’t be right. That bird has to be long dead.
“What about the dogs?” Kelli says.
Each dog is about eighty pounds. Beth really doesn’t want her car to smell like those dogs, like this house. Still, it isn’t their fault their owners have abandoned them. It’s Steve’s fault, and Steve’s mess, which she will once again clean up.
“And the cat.”
Beth sighs, pinches the bridge of her nose. “Where’s the carrier?”
“She doesn’t have one.”
They rummage the house looking for a box to carry the cat. As soon as Beth steps into the living room, she sees it, that horrible bird, its feathers ripped out.
“Colored,” it says.
The little fucker remembers her.
They find a box, wrestle the cat in. When they open the back door, the dogs burst out, snapping at the rain. This is great! The rain! New people! A new car to ride in!
“What about the bird?” Kelli says.
“It’s up off the floor,” Beth says. “It won’t drown.”
In the car, the dogs jump around in the backseat. Kelli tries to restrain them, to at least keep them off her lap so they don’t crush the box the cat is in. Beth can tell that she already smells like that house, a stink that will travel with her all day.
“Do you have somewhere I should take you?”
Kelli directs Beth to her grandma’s farm.
* * *
• • •
The dirt road has turned into a river of mud, but Beth’s car somehow manages to pick its way up the hill. Grandma Dinah’s house sits at the top, protected from the river, from the town. When Beth pulls into the long gravel driveway, she sees a figure hunched in a raincoat, waving down the truck in front of her. It seems the whole family has turned up at Dinah’s. Beth sees the driver of the truck—Steve’s truck—in front of her get out, hand her keys over to Steve, and make a dash for the house. Steve is about to get into his truck when he realizes he’s blocked in the driveway.
He comes back to Beth’s car.
“Pull around back,” he shouts, winding his arm in circles over his head. When he gets close enough to see who the driver is, he stops for a moment, looks between Beth’s car and the house. Then he comes to her window. She rolls it down, and the rain pours in. His face, wet and shaded by the hood of his raincoat, looks old, his forehead lined, his mouth sagging.
“I don’t have time,” he says. “I need to find my daughter.”
At the sound of Steve’s voice, his dogs go crazy in the backseat. We’re in the car! Back here! We’re in a new car with new people and it’s raining! The smaller dog, the brown one, tries to climb into the front seat with Beth, tries to poke its face through the open window. Jeanette does her best to muscle the dog down. Steve looks into the back then, and Beth watches the tension wash off his face. He leans toward Beth, intent on kissing her, but he catches himself. Instead, he goes around to the back of her car, opens the door, and pulls Kelli into a wet hug. He kisses the top of her head. The dogs shoot out of the car, jump up with muddy paws onto Kelli and Steve. Deb comes running out of the house, shoes unlaced, no coat. Steve holds Kelli at arm’s length, as if to make sure she’s real, that she’s unharmed, then hands her over to her mother. Deb hugs her, too, and over Kelli’s shoulder, she and Beth lock eyes through the windshield. They look at each other only for the briefest moment. It’s enough.
When the Brody women go off inside the farmhouse, Steve comes back to Beth’s window.
“Come inside. Dry off.”
But she will not. Even if it is the safest place right now, Beth will not go inside that house. She hopes Deb felt how sorry Beth is when she looked at her. She tried to convey that she regretted everything, that things will be different starting now, starting with her leaving this place. She backs her car out of the drive quickly and makes her way back down the hill, only to find a lake forming in the road. She sits in her car, positioned on the brink of submersion.
“What do you think?” She turns around in her seat to look at Dan. Instead of a response, she hears a meow. The box with the cat is still in her backseat.
* * *
• • •
Ernest DeWitt is dreaming of water. In his dream, he is aboard a large fishing ship on the open ocean, hauling a net laden with slick, shimmering bodies up from the water, the pull of long limbs, of trapezius and deltoids, the salt spray and gray skies blurring the horizon. He’s had this dream since his boyhood, a child’s vision of an adulthood he would never know. He watches himself work from a small remove, across the deck—that battered wood expanse flaked with fish scales—and he becomes aware that he is quite comfortably alone on this ship. There were other people, he is sure, but now they’re gone, and how easily he could let go of the net, the fish, and slip overboard. His body would melt the moment he touches the water, his boundaries dissolve—yes, how naturally he integrates with sea, horizon, sky.
In her car out on a flooding dirt road, Beth feels him go, feels him slip beneath the surface.
In his last seconds, Ernest DeWitt is unaware of the hospital bed with its gray blanket, the woman in the chair beside him, dozing with a book in her lap. She will waken, stretch, take his hand, still warm, feel for a pulse, and know that he is gone.
* * *
• • •
Where’ve you been?” Mandy says when her sister walks in. All afternoon, all anyone could talk about was where Kelli was. You’d think the world were coming to an end.
“Go on upstairs and find some dry clothes in Grandma’s room,” Deborah says. Mandy follows her sister.
Upstairs, while they rummage through Grandma Dinah’s dresser, Kelli shakes silently.
“It’s really that bad out there?” Mandy says.
“No,” Kelli says. “I don’t know. Maybe.” She pulls off her wet clothes and shimmies into a flannel shirt and jeans, still wearing her wet underwear.
“What’s your problem?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kelli says, throwing herself down on Grandma’s bed, burying her face in a pillow.
“Hey,” Mandy says, shaking Kelli by the foot. “What’s your deal?” It isn’t like Kelli to be such a drama queen.
“Leave me alone,” she mutters. At least that’s what it sounds like. It’s hard to hear Kelli with her face stuffed in a pillow.
“Is it Dan?”
Kelli only hiccups.
“What’d he do?”
After a time, Kelli pulls her face out of the pillow. She gulps down air like she’d been suffocating.
“Beth DeWitt’s sleeping with Dad.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mandy says.
“She drove me here. I saw them together.”
“So?”
“The way they were with each other.
You could just tell.”
There have been rumors around town, rumors that Mandy had dismissed. But now Mandy is on her mom’s side. Beth was bad news, just like Dan. “I’m telling Mom,” she says on her way out of the room.
“Mom already knows,” Kelli calls out behind her.
* * *
• • •
Kelli stays in Grandma’s room all afternoon. Her dogs scratch at the bedroom door, whimpering to get in, but she ignores them. Her phone dings with texts, but she ignores those, too. She doesn’t want to talk to anyone.
Eventually, Mandy comes back in the room. “Dan and Beth are here,” she says. “His sister, too.”
Kelli sits up. Looks at her phone. Dan has sent her several messages.
We need to talk.
I’m here.
Please come down.
“What are they doing here?”
“I guess they’re flooded in,” Mandy says.
Kelli shoves her phone in her pocket. “How’s Mom seem?”
“Strangely normal,” Mandy says.
They hear footsteps on the stairs, a knock on the bedroom door.
Mandy opens the door to find Dan and Skyla on the landing. “What do you want?” She stands in the doorway, blocking their entrance.
“Can I come in?” Dan says.
She hesitates, but Skyla walks in without invitation. After a second, Dan follows.
“They’ve already closed school tomorrow,” Skyla says.
“Go away,” Kelli says from under her pillow.
“Hey,” Dan says, sitting down on the bed next to her.
“I don’t want you here.”
He looks to Mandy, who busies herself with her grandma’s jewelry box on the dresser, sneaking glances at them out of the corner of her eye. Skyla just shrugs.
“We could use your help rounding up the cattle,” Skyla says to Mandy. Her cousins aren’t strong riders, but she figures Kelli and Dan need some time.
When they’ve left, Dan puts a hand on Kelli’s back. He knows what this is. He saw it, too: the closeness between his mom and her dad. “Can we talk?” he says.
Kelli sits up in bed, holding the pillow in her lap like a shield. “What’s your mom thinking, sleeping with a married man?”
“What’s your dad thinking, stepping out on your mom?”
They stare each other down. Finally, Kelli says, “Go away,” and buries her head again. Dan grabs the pillow off her.
“My parents are probably going to split because of your mom,” Kelli says.
“Yeah?” Dan says. “It takes two to screw.”
“Fuck off,” Kelli says, and shoves him off the bed. How could he even take Beth’s side? Kelli knows her dad has a history with Beth—and her mom must know it, too, must have already known that Beth and her dad were sneaking around again. Kelli heard from kids at school that her mom had started the fight, that it was your typical redneck brawl. But now she understands that her mom must have been fighting for her husband, for her family. Maybe her mom is right. Maybe the Hansens are no good.
Kelli hears the door and peeks out from beneath her pillow to see that she is alone. Good, she thinks. He could just go home and drown for all she cares. Mandy comes in a while later to tell Kelli that Beth is leaving for the hospital because Ernest DeWitt has died; Dinah has directed Beth out to a back road.
“Good riddance,” Kelli mutters from under her pillow.
“Damn, bitch,” Mandy says. “That’s cold.”
“Get out,” Kelli says, and to her surprise, her sister doesn’t argue. Mandy can go drown, too, Kelli thinks as she hears her sister leave the room. Anyone who takes the Hansens’ side is dead to Kelli. Linda is a sucker for getting involved with that family, for being roped into taking care of a dying old man. At least Mandy has saved Kelli the humiliation of dating Dan.
When the sky outside grows fully dark, Kelli hears the bedroom door again. She lies very still, hoping whoever it is will think she’s asleep and go away, but then she feels the weight, the heat of someone sitting down on the edge of the bed.
“Supper’s ready,” her grandma says, rubbing Kelli’s back.
“I’m not hungry,” Kelli says.
“That may be, but you have company waiting for you.”
“I don’t want to see him.”
“Look,” Grandma says. “I know what you think you saw, but it’s very complicated.”
“It seems pretty simple to me,” Kelli says, pulling the pillow off her head. “Dad’s sleeping with Beth DeWitt.” She waits for her grandma to deny it, but Dinah does not.
“And don’t think he’s not going to hear from me,” she says instead. “But right now your friend is downstairs, and he needs you.”
Kelli doesn’t answer, doesn’t move. Eventually, Dinah gives Kelli one more pat on the back and leaves the room. When her grandma is gone, the silence in the bedroom is somehow emptier, more complete. It lets the sounds of the rest of the house intrude: Kelli can hear people moving through the rooms downstairs, plates being filled with food, silverware pulled from drawers. Her mother and father, her sister and cousin and grandma, sit down to dinner together. Jeanette Hansen is there, too. She sits down with a full plate, and, apart from them, Dan sits in the living room, alone with his grief.
Kelli finds Dan in a chair by the cold fireplace, with her cat curled up in his lap. He has his book open in front of him, but his eyes aren’t moving across the page. For a second, Kelli thinks she can hear his mind, too full now to even read: She can feel his loss, his grief, not only over his grandfather, but over his mother as well, the same loss she feels for her dad, the loss that comes with realizing that parents are profoundly human and helpless, pitiful even. Dan’s pain is so palpable to her that she can’t help herself. She goes over and hugs him.
Elizabeth DeWitt
28
After Greg moves out, the house seems impossibly large. It was too big when we bought it, with four bedrooms and high ceilings, but now those sunny rooms seem swollen with space, grossly obese with excess. The ceilings are too high for me to dust the cobwebs. When I sweep the floors, the corners always recede from my broom, and I can never catch all the crumbs. With an infant and a three-year-old, the light carpets are a nightmare, stains so big and dark they seem like they might rear up and swallow my children.
I take them to visit my father, up in Michigan. He hasn’t even met Jeanette yet. We stay in a mid-tier hotel, one with two king beds, a cramped bathroom, a microwave hidden in the television cabinet. People come clean the room while we’re out visiting my father, a chore made even more awkward by the latest tramp he’s dating—a woman in her forties with frizzy blond hair, too much eyeliner, sun-damaged cleavage, and jeans so tight her tiny belly hangs over the top of them. I swear, his women keep getting younger.
Cooped up in his house, drinking his coffee, trying to keep Dan entertained. I laugh when he gets ahold of one of my father’s Civil War books, tearing it to shreds, and cringe when Miss Thing wants to hold Jeanette—can she even hold a child with those fake-ass nails? In these moments the divide between my father and me feels insurmountable. I count the days until we fly back to our sunny house in Charlotte.
FOR FEAR AND LOVE
Linda watches other families, at the store, in the park, for clues about how to behave. When to hold a child, when to scold. How to talk, how to coax. If she had stuck around, she could have spent some time with her nephew. As it is, she knows only what she sees on TV and in movies, what she reads in books and gleans from people watching.
It’s been three weeks since Ernest’s death, and she can finally admit that she’d had her doubts about what kind of father he would be. Beth seemed so broken, and Linda can’t help but wonder what part Ernest played. Derek, though, has a nurturing side that, she realizes now, she’s never really experienced before. Not
from her mother, not from Nathan. Derek will make a good father. But what kind of mother will she make?
And so she watches people, everywhere she goes. At a basketball game, as her cousins and sister play in the pep band, she sees parents scold their young children for not sitting still. In line at the bank, a young mother blows raspberries on her baby’s cheek, and the baby in its kangaroo pouch squeals and squirms. At the hardware store, a father comes in to buy his ten-year-old a hunting rifle to shoot mourning doves, and grabs the boy’s wrist when he reaches for candy at the register. At the grocery store, where a mother shoulders her cellphone to give her whining toddler a swat on its diapered butt. At the hospital, where she brings Derek a cappuccino in the middle of a double shift, and sees a father rocking his daughter in his lap, gently guarding the leg she broke riding her horse. Linda watches these moments, judging them as only a person who is not yet a parent can, with the certainty that comes only from safe distance.
And because she is watching a mother (scolding her daughter for not using the restroom before they left the house), Linda doesn’t see the little shoe, a baby shoe kicked off and lost, on the stair in front of her as she’s leaving the salon; she steps sideways on it, and her ankle, already strained from her pregnancy, gives out, and then she’s clawing at the railing, trying to slow her fall. She twists severely at the waist, and thuds on her side down the stairs.
Back at home, Linda finds blood, a bright red spot on her maternity pad—not a lot, but enough to visit the hospital, where they admit her and place her on bed rest. Linda suspects it’s nothing, that they are being overly cautious because Derek has insisted, and yet later that night, she wakes in her hospital bed with a slick hot wetness between her legs.
The House of Deep Water Page 26