Up Through the Water (14 page)

NINETEEN

SUMMER ROOMS

E
mily gave
Lila a chunk of cake for her parents, and after bandaging Eddie's ear, told him he could stay out till 2
A.M
. John Berry kept circling. Each time the truck turned, Birdflower looked into the lights. He wanted to protect Emily and would fight if he had to. Finally, she asked him to go. He got up and started pacing. The porch floorboards creaked and she urged him again. “Okay,” he said, grabbing his jacket. “I won't stick around if you don't want me.” Outside on the walk, he looked meanly over his shoulder and muttered, “I hope you get what you deserve.”

She sat down on a porch chair and tried to lock eyes with the truck's lights. It was like looking into the sun.
It has to happen,
she thought. Between two people, things could be bad for months, even years, but there was always one thing that signaled the end, that made any future connection impossible. Sometimes it was violence or burlesquing an earlier time, an encounter that meant something and was important to the beginning of the relationship. For some reason, the bottle wasn't enough.

On his twentieth revolution, he slowed and Emily focused on his face folded into the angles of the dark truck. He leaned out the window. Emily held up her hands to show that everyone had left. He went up the road, rounding again. Soon the truck lights grew brighter and moved to her neighbor's house, her own bent cedars, quick over her bedroom window, and then straight to her. He pulled up the driveway and switched off the lights. The truck hummed down.

For a long moment he sat there looking at her through the windshield, then got out and walked up the stairs.

“I need to talk to you,” he said. He leaned back against the porch rail and crossed his arms.

She noticed how long his hair had gotten and that, without her to shave them, the hairs on the back of his neck had grown and curled into ringlets. His body had thinned, and there was a ravaged and bruised look about his mouth.

“All I want to know, I guess, is if you love this guy or not.”

“I don't know,” Emily said.

“Well, decide,” John Berry said. ‘'I'll wait.” He walked to the porch swing and sat down. The chain creaked back and forth.

“What do you want from me now?” she said, looking over the yard at the shaded window of the neighboring house.

“What I want is a yes or no answer,” he said.

“I never think like that,” she said. She looked down to her hands resting in her lap. Her fingers curled toward her palms and she deliberately flattened them. The truth was, it was her moods, tonight, tomorrow, and a few weeks after Eddie left, that would motivate her one way or another.

She stood and leaned against her white porch pillar. “The part I like is when you can still buy the future.”

“Buy the future?” John Berry asked.

“Yeah. Because it's easy: an empty house on some street, not a specific one with a guy's lifetime of junk spread out like guts in every room.”

“None of this had to happen,” John Berry said, shaking his head. “You could have told me anything.”

The night breeze was deepening and Emily heard the metal mobile chime delicately.

“You know that's not true,” she said.

“It is true, damnit.” He pulled at the hair on the back of his head, as if to lengthen it.

“You threw a bottle at me,” Emily said, and turned. She shivered and felt goose bumps rise on her legs and arms.

“Emily—” his voice thickened. “I'm sorry.”

She walked across the porch. “Look at these,” she said, turning her head to show him the scars scattered all over her face.

“It was a crazy thing.” He grabbed her hand and tried to pull her down to him. The chair swing rocked jaggedly.

Emily freed herself and stepped back. Even in the dark she suddenly seemed to see everything with perfect clarity—the shingled edge of her cottage, the clay pots of jasmine against it, the glints of light off the chain suspending the porch swing, the railings and the bits of bush that reached through them. And him, in the middle of these shapes and angles of wood, looking at her face, counting the places he'd marked her.

John Berry sat on the floor lighting candles. He moved from one short fat candle to the next. They smelled of honey, elderberry, or lemon. Hot wax gathered in puddles on the floor; flame shadows pulsed and jumped on the ceiling. He found shapes: animal bones, starfish, and whales. The poster women seemed to have joined hands in a circle, showed an occasional lip, earlobe, or thigh. Emily ran the spigot in the kitchen. John Berry surveyed the pans and bowls filled with water and arranged around the whole room. Together they sparked like the sea under light. The water stopped running and she carried two long aluminum cake pans into the bedroom. She moved quietly. “One at our feet,” he said, lying longways on the oval rag carpet in the center of the candles. “And the other at our heads.”

“Lay down with me,” he said. He smoothed his fingers on the inside of her wrist, then outlined her inner thigh. Her breathing changed. “Take your shirt off.”

She pulled her blouse over her head in one motion. Her loose breasts swayed. John Berry traced the blue veins branching like delicate road maps. He moved his face down and made his mouth and the movement of his tongue the center of the room.

John Berry unzipped her jeans, loosened her underpants, and with two fingers felt for wetness. Emily murmured. He was distracted again by the wineglass near the curve of her lower back. He reached over, lifted it to his lips, then tossed it into a nearby wooden bowl. Water flew up high and landed in droplets on her back. One wick sputtered, made a noise like a soul lifting from a body, and sent the thinnest line of smoke up into the room.

Emily watched the play of bluing crimson flames from inside closed eyelids. His hands were settling on her hips, every finger sending off silver. There were stretch marks there, like water, peachy currents crossing and connecting, moving under the skin then reappearing. She opened her eyes. The candle wax gave in the way mud does around high rivers and gathered on her wood plank floor.
This shouldn't be happening,
she thought, and pulled herself up. John Berry fell back as she rose. “Come back to me,” he said.

“You're just doing what you always do, and so am I.” John Berry sighed.

“Get up and lay on the bed,” Emily said. She watched his loose sex darken with shadow as he stood and walked in the thin passage between fire and water.

Emily took a deep breath and blew toward him. The air made everything in her room flicker with liquid light.

“Limitations,” Emily said. “I know mine better.”

“That's too bad,” he said.

“It's not bad. It's okay.”

They never touched except for once when he brushed the tips of her fingers with his lips.
This summer is broken no matter what happens now
, Emily thought, very late, as she listened to John Berry's breath widen with sleep. For the first time in a long while she felt
still.
For better or worse, the patterns of the island were taken into her completely now. Emily got up and moved about the room, nudging the water containers toward the walls with her feet. She swayed her hips; her hair twirled out. This night she had returned to herself. Spears of flame and shadow flickered over the walls as she moved, and she confused them into men and women and spirits.

TWENTY

TIDES

T
he screen
windows of the restaurant dining room gave a garbled picture of the world outside.
This is like being in a beehive,
Eddie thought, as he sipped champagne and listened to a slow tune called “Almost Blue” that played over the restaurant sound system. The name of the singer eluded him, reminding him that on the island he seldom collected facts as he did in Tennessee. When “Almost Blue” was nearly over, he decided that sad songs were okay on a night like this. The kitchen door swung wide and Neal strutted out with a second bottle of champagne.

“It's all downhill from here,” Neal said, holding up the bottle like a trophy.

“God save us,” Eddie's favorite waitress said. She sat down next to him and began rubbing hard at her temples, as his mother sometimes did late at night.

Neal poured out the rest of the first bottle and they raised their glasses. Eddie tried to imagine his life at home: what a place was like without a breeze off the water. He watched the waitress tracing a birthmark, one shaped loosely like an S, on her arm. She made a sound like moving water while she did this, and Eddie recognized it was the same sound she made when the boss yelled at her. The dining room screens quivered with cool air. “You go on the 6
A.M
.?”

Eddie nodded. “Yep. You know, this year I don't seem as anxious to get out of here.”

“It's Lila,” the waitress said, looking up. “Will you miss her terribly?”

“Naw,” Neal said. “Life goes on—he's not going to hang his head over some girl.”

“I think It's sweet,” the waitress said. “I remember my first love.”

Neal rolled his eyes. “You breeders can certainly get sentimental.”

The waitress didn't answer. Lazily, she fingered figure eights over her arm, onto the table, then into her champagne.

Eddie said, “If you'll excuse me.”

“Stuff goes right through you, doesn't it,” Neal laughed.

The restaurant men's room had blue roosters all over the wallpaper and a basket soap dish. As he peed, Eddie tried to figure out what he should be feeling and how he'd say good-bye to everyone. He thought it was kind of pitiful how Neal always lessened certain moments. You got the feeling that nothing meant any more to him than anything else.

This morning in bed, Eddie was thinking of the lighted buoys bobbing in the channel between Hatteras and Ocracoke, and how much like his annual spring going-away dinner they were. Both marked a path to be navigated: one through a royal blue light, the other by a grilled steak.

Eddie watched the yellow mix around with the flushing water. He'd known for a while that things you didn't know had a way of eating at you, but now he also knew that things you did know could stay with you. In some ways, the things he knew about his mother and Lila and the ways of the island were even more worrisome than the vagueness he'd felt before. He flipped the light and walked back to the dining room.

“Did I tell you,” Neal said, “that the other waitresses said they would have stayed, but they had to get back to their fat fishermen husbands?”

Eddie poured. “Dig these things,” he said, holding up his plastic champagne glass. “You guys are great.”

“I was thinking this is a weird place,” Neal said, lighting a cigarette and swishing the bottle to see how much was left. “People never seem to get what they're looking for.”

“Same as anywhere,” the waitress said.

Eddie said, “But here it's worse, because people expect more. They come here to find answers. Life is supposed to be easier to handle on an island like this one.”

“You should be relieved to go,” the waitress said. “I know I will.”

“You all don't know shit,” Neal said; his profile tightened quickly. “This place is a dream in the fall when the days are cool and at night you need just one blanket.”

“It's a dream now,” Eddie said.

“Yeah,” Neal said. “Come December, you'll find some sand in the pocket of a pair of pants you never wear and you'll think about this place.”

“Everybody gets nostalgic,” the waitress said.

“You act like we don't exist when you all leave. Every day you're gone we get up in the morning. I don't even like the summers really,” Neal said. He drank one of the last few swigs from the bottle and passed it to the waitress. He looked at Eddie. “You'll be back here. I can always tell when this island has a hold of someone.” Neal drank up what was in his glass. “We better get out of here; the boss could blow in anytime.”

“I hope he does come in and see us,” the waitress said.

Neal shook his head. “You may be leaving, but I need this job.”

Their destinations seemed to rise up, separate and scattered, and for what seemed to Eddie like a long while they were quiet. The waitress passed the last swallow to him. He closed his eyes and gulped, thinking that he knew everything right now.

“This is the last time we'll be like this,” Lila said as she settled herself on the linen tablecloth Eddie'd taken from the restaurant. The ends fluttered like moths.

“No way,” he said. “You'll come to see me. I'll come down at Christmas. Then we can—”

“You're so stupid.” She turned her head away from him, back toward the houselights scattered around the inlet. “You'll never know what I mean.”

Eddie felt that warm sensation behind his eyes and knew that he might cry. “How late can you stay out?” his voice rose. Lila moved her face close to his and looked at him carefully. With her fingers she brushed his eyelids to check for tears.

“Not much longer,” she said.

Eddie nodded. She put her hand on his neck. “Want a butterfly kiss?” she whispered, and put her eye less than an inch from his cheek. She fluttered her lashes. Eddie closed his eyes—it felt odd, but somehow familiar, like that feeling he had sometimes of wings hidden and moving inside of him.

When she stopped, he leaned up and said, “We could get high. Neal slipped me a good-bye present.” He pulled a joint from his back pocket.

Lila nodded. He lit it, breathed in, and passed it to her. She sucked in, then coughed.

“Let me,” Eddie said. He drew, touched her lips slowly, and filtered the warm smoke into her mouth.

“I like that,” Lila said, turning to watch a slow shrimp boat troll its way into Silver Lake.

Eddie watched the island pass in a long jagged line of beige beach and dark brush from the car window. He had the hopeless sensation that even if he decided now to stay, this summer would be over for him.

His mother, her eyes on the dark road, looked sleepy and blank as cross-country drivers do.

“Maybe one whole year you'll stay with me,” she said.

He said, “Maybe I will,” though he knew the months were forever delineated and that he was too old for life with his parents to change.

“I got you something,” she said. With one hand she reached under the seat and handed him a flat package.

She turned on the car light. The cover was black with millions of white spots and
THE HEAVENS
written across the top. “I look up a lot here,” she said. “You know how it is, wide-open spaces and all that. And I thought maybe if you knew the sky better, if you had a few points of reference, you'd be more likely to turn your head up.”

“Thanks,” he said, watching his mother's face under the harsh light. “I don't have one for you,” Eddie said.

Emily smiled. “I'm the mother, remember?”

“You know, it seems like what's between us doesn't have that much to do with that,” Eddie said. “I'll tell you something. Starting this fall, starting now, you've got to take better care of yourself.”

Two birds rose from the swamp grass, their wings a smudge against the black sky.

She didn't answer, but she did glance at him, and he noticed how her eyebrows rose slightly and her features had an alert look as if she was seeing something new.

He knew that John Berry and she had come to an understanding of sorts. Eddie set his eyes on the small blue lights at the end of the approaching ferry dock and began worrying about what he'd actually say when they got there.

“How'd it go with Lila?”

“Okay,” Eddie said. It seemed as if they shouldn't talk about Lila. He had been unable to say the right thing, and then she had to be in so early. On her porch, she'd said good night without even kissing him and ran into the house. He half thought she'd come back, and he'd stood there a minute or two waiting.

At the docks, his mother stopped the car but left the heater on to warm their feet. It was scrappy down here. A toilet shack, a pavilion with picnic tables underneath, a snack machine that sold moonpies and kettle chips, a Coke machine and a telephone booth, the old-fashioned kind, spots of sandburs mixed with rough yellow grass and a scattering of fishy metalworks. They watched the ferry weave awkwardly forward.

“When you were a baby,” Emily said suddenly, “every night after dinner you'd cry and the only thing that made you stop was a drive in the car. Even at the red lights you'd cry. Your father drove and you'd lie between us on a blanket, looking up through the windshield at the sky.”

Eddie watched an old scrap envelope topple across the ramp in front of them.

“But it's not a bad thing,” she said, turning toward him. “I want you to understand that.”

Eddie nodded. “I want
you
to like your life,” he said evenly.

Eddie took her hand lightly. He saw the slightly worried set of her lips, the pupils of her eyes milky and anxious in the dark.

“You mean everything to me,” she said, running her fingers over his inner wrist.

The ferry backed into the dock. A battered pickup truck pulled onto the nearby shoulder. It was butter-colored and tingled the way shades of white do in the dark.

“That's Lila,” Eddie said. The truck was her father's; he'd seen it a million times, but he never thought he'd see her driving it. He couldn't believe it. He let go of his mother's hand and opened the door.

“You came,” he shouted over to her. He realized how his voice had risen and he blushed.

“Of course I came,” she said, leaning her head back on the rest.

He heard the ferry bump shore. Emily leaned over the passenger seat and shouted out the window, “You want to take him to the bus station?”

“Wait a minute now,” he said. His mother's face was shadowed and unreadable in the dark, and he leaned closer.

“I could,” Lila called.

Emily said, “Why don't you then?”

“You wouldn't mind?” Lila sounded surprised and she looked at Eddie. He shrugged his shoulders.

“No,” Emily said, “I really wouldn't.”

Eddie stretched farther through the open window and kissed his mother's cheek. “I'll call you in a few days,” she said.

She smiled at him as she started the engine, then she pulled out and followed the tourist cars up the beach road. The sight of her car getting smaller and smaller pulled at him.

“You kill me,” he said to Lila. He got in and the truck began to climb the ramp. He felt relieved and happy that Lila had come for him, and he watched her thin fingers curled around the wheel.

“I could take the wheel on the road to Kitty Hawk.”

“No, I want to drive you all the way.” She looked over at him. “Last night was weird.”

Eddie pried one of her hands loose and pressed each fingertip to his tongue.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking your fingerprints in case I lose you.”

This was the period to the long rambling sentence of the summer. The dawn. His mother. The starbook. Lila and the truck. All these were packed in behind his eyes. He knew the last thing would be he and Lila soaring down the early morning road. They pulled on and the ferryman secured the big chain at the back. Eddie felt the quick tug off the island and then the first few moments of floating between shores.

His mother had told him a few nights ago that she wouldn't be going anywhere with Birdflower. She'd said she was going to rest for a while. And though he still felt anchored to her, the weight was not half what it had been.

Lila got out of the car. Her hood blew back from her jacket and she held her hands up to the gulls. He watched the many wing tips brush her, knowing they must feel like breath. In this way she was like his mother. They were more alive than most people, and this gave them power to draw things to them. For a moment it seemed the birds would lift her above the ferry. He rested his eyes. And when he opened them, the birds were gone and she was making her way through the pressing wind back to him.

From her car, heading back along the beach road, Emily could see the truck's rear lights as they inched over the ramp onto the ferry. It seemed right that her car and Lila's were bookends to the wide mile of beach and lavender sky.

After he left, her mood always varied; sometimes she was light-headed, other times more somber, even teary. Every year she swam. Last summer there'd been a host of Medusa jellyfish sending off green light. The year before she'd stroked straight out, so far that when she turned, the shore looked like a mirage. Once she tried to stand on a sandbank. Barnacles, like white teeth, cut the fleshy part of her foot and blood dribbled into the sand.

The car passed the campground. Tents and trailers looked emberish and exotic in the dawn. The pony pen clattered by. She pulled over, got out, and walked the path that led to the water. The sea smelled of living things, and it reminded her always of her own scent.

Just above the horizon was a thick purple, and above that, a halo of lemon. She slid out of her loose jeans and pulled her sweatshirt over her head. Her toes made twirling ropes in the water behind her, and when the sea was to her breasts, she dived in. Emily saw dark shapes in the water and thought of the weird fish, sea grubs, and mole crabs that lived underneath. She rolled onto her back. The moon was fragile as a paper nickel and the rising sun sent a snake of light across the water toward her. Nobody swims much past autumn, she thought, but I do.