“Where’s Lizzy?” I said, to no one in particular.
No one answered.
“Lizzy?” I called. I paused to reach between my legs and pull a hanging thread from the back of my shorts. It was tickling my calf. “Did you see where she went, Claire?”
She shook her head, her straight black hair flouncing from side to side. The older girls were under the table, whispering. “Emma,” I said, “make sure Claire doesn’t put pennies in her mouth while I look for Lizzy, will you please?” Emma was jeering at me. I would have liked to pound her. I lifted my hand and brought it down on my own thigh and then I picked up Claire and started through the house. “You’re heavy, Claire, too heavy for me to lug around.”
“I know,” Claire said. “I like pennies because they taste cold.”
“Oh Christ,” I was about to say, but I remembered that Howard had
recently given me a short talking to about swearing in front of the children. “Lizzy, where are you?” I bellowed. “Make a squeak noise.” We looked in the utility closet and the pantry, the bathroom and Howard’s office. We went upstairs. We peeked in the closets expecting her to be crouching with her hands at her face. It was only when we came back downstairs to the kitchen that I noticed the wide open screen door. I stopped because my feet suddenly felt like two flabby pink erasers. I knew what I had to do. If you are on an airplane you are supposed to give air to yourself and your own kind before you help someone else. “Do not move,” I said, turning on the TV, putting Claire directly in front of “The Frugal Gourmet.”
“Do not leave this house,” I ordered. And then I was out the door and across the garden, down the wooded lane to the pond. I suspect that when animals, a deer or a fox, run from their predators, they are governed by a keen intelligence. They do not waste their movements, and because they know the depth of the woods, the breadth of a field, they flee anticipating the curve of the land, the perfectly situated thicket. I ran like a blind person, stumbling over my own heavy limbs.
When I came to the clearing I couldn’t see past the single glaring point of sunlight, dancing on the water. I put my hand to my forehead, to make a visor, and still it took me a minute to find the pink seersucker bottom just beneath the surface, about fifteen feet from the beach.
When I am forced to see those ten minutes as they actually were, when I look clearly, without the scrim of half-uttered prayers and fanciful endings, I am there, tall and gangly and clumsy and slow, crying out unintelligibly, splashing through the water to Lizzy. I had nothing of a hero’s elegance or pace. As I moved I was thinking, She’s fine! She’s fine! People don’t really drown in shallow places—that’s an old wives’ tale! She’s probably looking for minnows or stones or snails so far from the shore.
I pulled her up and slung her over my shoulder, tripping through the water, screaming then, screaming for help. I didn’t know how to make enough noise, to be heard. I was shrieking with so much force I felt as if I might split, and yet all the world was placid, still. The leaves in the trees hung limp like palsied hands. I lay Lizzy on her back, that was right, and then I tilted her chin and put my ear to her cold chest, and tried to listen.
It was impossible to hear anything but the noise of myself, panting and dripping, and the bamming of my own sturdy heart. Lizzy’s skin was rubbery, her face the gray of an old carp, her lips dark as blueberries. Her wide, unblinking eyes were the color of mud. I opened my mouth and screeched again. I’m sure I felt for her pulse before I tore her jump suit and began pumping wildly on her chest; if I was remembering, I couldn’t think, I did it just as if the twenty-four-pound two-year-old girl with a chest as insubstantial as a moth were a full-grown adult, although you were supposed to use one hand instead of two. You were to ventilate every—I didn’t know exactly. CPR was scientific and specific! They kept changing the rules because their understanding of the human body was growing more and more detailed and complete. I stopped pumping to give air to Lizzy. I am a licensed practitioner nurse, and I could not remember how to do CPR properly. I had never had to actually resuscitate a living or dead person and I had not had the refresher course since the year before. Children at school did not fall into sinks and drown; they did not have heart failure. Howard was at my side, his hand on my back for an instant. I kept my mouth to Lizzy’s mouth. I couldn’t recall the cycle and the numbers and yet my hands and my mouth were pumping and forcing air down Lizzy’s throat, of their own accord.
I don’t remember stopping or looking or breathing until a man in navy pants hauled me up and pushed me to Howard. I could see now, that the ambulance was in the lane, that the paramedics were as thick as thieves.
“What happened?” Howard was shaking my shoulders. “What’s happening? How is she?”
In all the time that has passed we have never once talked about those moments, when I called and called, and he heard me and came running, and saw, and went back to the house, phoned the rescue squad, waited for their arrival, held the girls at bay. I do not know if I tried to resuscitate Lizzy for five minutes or five hours. The scene is always with me, shimmering in the distance. When I least expect to have to look I find myself seeing: It shines right in my eyes, the pond, the lifeless girl on the ground, Howard standing over me. He hadn’t shaved yet, and his hat was covered with bits of clover. He had white creases around his eyes, where the sun had been unable to penetrate. Take Howard’s nose or eyes or chin and
tack it on any matinee idol and his movie career would be ruined. Still, the cumulative effect of all of his irregular features is a handsome man. I love how he looks. In those days he was rugged and tanned, belying the fact that he is unusually sentimental. I thought him an alarmingly good person, solid, beautifully silent, thinking, working through problems and ideas, his mind humming with thought.
Lizzy seemed to be dead. But she couldn’t be, with her eyes open. She couldn’t have died in our pond. Emma used to stare at the wall at night. She didn’t know enough to close her eyes and go to sleep.
“Tell me, Alice. Say something.”
I put my hand to my mouth and bit down hard across my second and third fingers. Without moving my lips I said, “She’ll be fine.”
The men would save Lizzy. They would find her pulse with no trouble because they were calm and well trained. Howard shook me, trying, I thought afterward, to shake the truth from me.
“Don’t,” I cried. I didn’t want to tell him, had to get out of his clutches.
“We need to call Dan,” he said.
He meant that I should. “I know, I will,” I panted. Anything to wrench myself from his grip.
“If she’s hurt—”
“I’ll call him,” I puffed, “I’ll go now.” I was already tearing past the ambulance in the lane, running and tripping.
Audrey and Emma were standing on the porch, watching me come. The song, “Cruella Deville” was drifting from our bedroom window, from the tape recorder, along with Claire’s piping voice. I had never gotten around to closing up the house.
I knew what I had to do first. The air was no good for breathing. It stung, like the dry, pricking heat in a sauna. I thought of tall Dan, Lizzy’s father, with his stomach rolling over his swim suit, and his maroon and blue-framed glasses. City Dan, whose claim to fame was building a dairy exhibit for the museum in Blackwell, “the Dairy Shrine,” it was called, to commemorate the dairy industry that had once been so strong in the southern part of the state. Dan made birthday cakes for the family, and canned bushels of sweet corn to the music of his favorite CD,
The Great Ladies of Jazz
. Lizzy had run to the pond and splashed in. It had felt good
on her hot feet and she kept running and then she was pedaling and pedaling. She tried to grab hold of the water, pawing for the metal bar, a ladder rung, her mother, but there was nothing. She clutched and flailed. She opened her mouth to cry “Mama.” Her lungs filled with water and she sank. Maybe she saw the great white light and felt the intoxicating warmth of God, like some say happens before death. She sank. The trout that Howard had stocked in the pond swam along through the dark water. They noticed Lizzy out of the corner of their eyes. They had inherited the knowledge of that look, and they knew it by heart.
Dan, with his crooked smile, would come to the house and stab me with his pocket knife. I put my hands to my face and whispered, “Lizzy, don’t do this.” I fumbled with the phone, trying to make the sticky rotary dial turn.
“Dan Collins,” he said, before the first ring was complete, as if he was sitting in his office waiting for a thing he feared.
“Dan.” A choking noise came up my throat and went down the receiver.
“Hello? Is someone there?”
I didn’t want to tell him, wouldn’t tell him, would make something up. I put my head against the dirty kitchen window. I saw myself taking Lizzy from Theresa, instead of the box of pea pods, the rummage sale clothes, and the diaper bag. After Theresa goes I latch the door. There we are looking out from the screen, out to the yard and the lane, where Lizzy wants to go if I would only let her down. Emma shouts from the bathroom while I stand at the door and stand at the door, breathing in the unbearable sweetness of Lizzy’s sweaty head.
Chapter Two
——
T
HE MORNING
L
IZZY FELL
into the pond stretched through three calendar days. In the hospital, in the lounge that had no windows, there was no signal to distinguish day from night except the sound of the meal carts coming and going, the smell of eggs, or broth, or breaded veal cutlets. Now and then, with the need to mark time, I listened for a change in the steady hum of the fluorescent lights. I thought I might hear a clue about where we were in the circadian cycle. When there was no fluctuation, I put my ear to the carpeted wall, straining for the night sound of crickets, the possible day sound of cicadas. It was too early for cicadas, I knew, and yet it was hot enough to perhaps fool an insect that lived most of its life underground as a nymph, as a sightless mass of white protoplasm. I clutched my ribs to warm myself as the chill air blew up from the basement heating ducts, up from what I assumed was the archetypal morgue with its neat rows of surgical tables, cold gray feet sticking out from the sheets with labels around the toes. Time and seasons were for others, for bankers and bus drivers, teachers and storekeepers. We would wait. We would wait, hour after hour in the subzero maroon-and-blue enclosure, with a rubber plant for oxygen.
On the way to the hospital the sheriff asked me how many minutes
Lizzy had been missing. I couldn’t think how long I had dug in the freezer for the butter, how long I had looked at my map of the world, how long I’d called through the house. Was it possible that I’d been moving through the brittle heat in slow motion, without realizing, and that it had actually taken me hours to find my suit? As I called for Lizzy I had been thinking of Claire, wondering if Claire had swallowed pennies, if her stomach was like the tiled bottom of a wishing pool that is littered with coins. I had no idea how long I had labored above Lizzy’s clammy chest. I knew, with a certainty I didn’t often feel, that Lizzy had been dead. Then, by the pond, the paramedics had performed a wondrous mechanical feat, something quite like the jump start. They had given Lizzy life again, and to us they gave a dazzling hope. Doctors could fix everything, they could and they would, and it was wildly impossible that they wouldn’t have her up and about in a day or two. I was sure they would revive her, despite the fact that medicine had failed to save my mother and my Aunt Kate and my father. The staff would rise to the occasion for a two-year-old because there was so much at stake.
“Ah, Ma’am, how long was she missing?” the sheriff had had to ask again.
Ten minutes? Could it have been longer? I turned to him and whispered, “Seven?”
I was told to stay in the lounge when we got to the hospital. I remember glancing across the room and noticing Robbie Mackessy’s mother. Robbie was a kindergartner at Blackwell Elementary, one of the few children who paid regular visits to the nurse’s office. He was frequently sick, because of his mother, I thought, because of her negligence. She was leafing through a magazine looking, not at the print, but at me. She was squinting, as if she couldn’t stand to have her eyes wide open, to see all of me at once. I should have known then, that we were as good as tumbling down a hill, that at some point far off we would come to the bottom, broken and finally at rest. It was her ugly mouth, her sneer, that made me feel like crying. My hair was still dripping down my back and my wet T-shirt clung to my stomach and defined my breasts: And I didn’t have graceful little button nipples. They were circles the size of small saucers, with the pimply skin of a plucked chicken. I crossed my arms
over my chest and found I was shivering uncontrollably, that it was cold, cold like the meat locker where Howard took the lamb carcasses.
What had Claire said to me at breakfast, about wanting to die together, at the same time? I could think of any old thing in that lounge because the doctors would fix Lizzy and then we could go home. I had sometimes been on the verge of believing that Claire had had other lives, although I’m not anywhere near the sort who is prone to Tarot cards or herbal remedies, or astrological charts. Still, Claire more than her sister, knew things that I doubt anyone had taught her. She was quick to understand the natural order and the rules of society. It was tempting to think of her in foreign lands, with strange parents and an array of siblings, riding a camel down the avenue, speaking a language that is long since dead. I could think of anything, anything at all. Theresa always reported that the girls got along so well when they were at her house. I’m no good at mothering, I had said to myself, more often than I cared to admit. I didn’t feel that I had instincts to guide me. I liked Theresa’s children, of course I did, but I was always at a loss when I had them, our children and hers, four of them, together on Monday mornings. First one demanded a glass of milk, and then another, and then the next and the next, and then one of them spilled and the others followed. They’d want the modeling clay, and five minutes later the watercolors and a pretzel and more milk. They outnumbered me, and to tell them all no, and to listen to them carry on about their hunger and thirst was not worth it. I poured the milk. I told myself on those Mondays that I wouldn’t look at the clock. I tried to build a beautiful and impressive structure out of blocks, but one of them would smash the tower and trip and bump her head and need a Band-Aid, and then her blanket, which couldn’t be found in the mess. In the end there the five of us were, glazed, licking our wounds in front of the television.