Blood in the Water and Other Secrets Read online

  We sit on a bench in the park. He doesn’t like it that I can’t drive. He doesn’t like it that Mama won’t cooperate. He’s ready to blow off the whole idea, when I mention we just gotta have a settlement cause Mama’s a cancer patient, fifth floor, Central Oncology unit. I don’t know why I added all that— guess it just made it sound more official, as if there’s anything more official than cancer.

  He gets interested at that. “Sympathetic victim,” he says. Then he asks a lot of questions about what kind of car and when she goes out.

  I said for a regular schedule of radiation. And Mama was always, always on time.

  “Better if you was driving.”

  “I’m not old enough.”

  “Not even for a learner’s permit?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll think about it,” he says. “But we do this, I want 25%— of everything.” He reaches out and takes hold of my shirt in a way I don’t like, but I know we have no choice. This’s our one chance and we have to take it.

  Well, I start seeing him around our street and get so I recognize his car— a big heavy Chevy Caprice, practically vintage. More than once I see him parked on a side street near the hospital. Then one day, just before Mama finishes with a round of radiation, the Caprice is idling at the curb as I walk home from school. The passenger side door opens. “Get in,” he says. “We gotta set this up.” Just like that.

  I get in. It’s dead simple. Mama’s radiation appointments are set at 3 P.M. She’s always on West Walnut heading for the hospital lot by 2:45; Mama hates to be late. Victor’s in the Caprice on Chapel Street and the accident goes down at that intersection. “Very tricky,” he says. “Thirty percent.”

  “You said twenty-five,” I says, but I already sensed there isn’t much point in arguing.

  “Mid day,” he says. “Traffic. Cops. Very tricky.”

  I can see that. “But nothing’ll go wrong,” I says, half wishing I was home and had never met him.

  “Thirty percent and nothing goes wrong.” He smiles and I swear he had pointed teeth.

  “When?” I says.

  “Today.”

  I hustle home and get ready to go with Mama. I’m all the time watching the clock, nervous she’s going to be late— or worse— early. It’s not one of her good days; she sits in the car for a minute, kinda collecting herself. She says radiation softens your brain and she is sometimes forgetful. She looks awful, too, pale in that soft doughy way old people get, which scares me when I let myself think about it. But this is why we need a settlement, so Mama isn’t all the time worried about bills and paying the pharmacy, and so I don’t have to live with Aunt Rita and her son Brian.

  “We gotta go,” I says. “You want me to drive?” I don’t know if she knows I can, thanks to Kev’s older brother who lets us practice with a junker down on the river road.

  Mama shakes her head and puts the key in the ignition. “You worried about something?” she says. “You got them big tests coming up at school?”

  I wish. “No, nothing’s wrong. I just wish your radiation was over and you were all better.”

  She puts her hand on my knee for a minute, just a minute, but it tells me everything I don’t want to know and a few things I need to remember. Then the car pulls away. I look out the window, counting down the streets. I wish this was over. Washington, South Adams, Jefferson; Chapel’s next. I gotta be alert, cause Victor’s gonna pull out in front of us and swerve and clip the rear on my side. I repeat that to myself a couple of times. I’m thinking how very cool it will be, the crash and all, when suddenly Mama hits the brakes and jerks the wheel so she misses the gray green Caprice that’s suddenly filling my window.

  Our Fairlane swings into the oncoming traffic; Mama’s struggling with the wheel, trying to get us back in the right hand lane. I shout ‘cause there’s this oncoming delivery truck, and Mama, who’s about got no muscle left between the chemo and the radiation, pulls the wheel but can’t get it round before the impact. Squealing tires and brakes, shattering glass, twisting metal. Not the crash I’d imagined, not a video game crash, but a shock that unhooks all your bones and wets your jeans and brings blood into your mouth where it sloshes around with your heart.

  I realize I’m yelling and moving, but Mama’s not. She’s leaning over the steering wheel and her car door is caved in. I start struggling to get my seat belt off and unhook hers and I’m starting to pull at her to get her out, when someone yells, “Leave her, leave her. You’ll hurt her worse.”

  I don’t know what to do, but I keep talking to her, telling her she’ll be all right. There are sirens and a cop comes, and I’m telling him she’ll be late for her radiation, Memorial Hospital, Fifth Floor, Oncology Unit. The cop gets on his phone and calls for an ambulance, though we’re only two blocks away, and I’m thinking I can walk, we can walk, when the cop comes and puts a blanket around me, though I hadn’t realized I was cold, and has me sit down on the sidewalk. That’s what a real crash does to you and I guess why they call it a bullet car.

  They keep me in the hospital overnight. I keep saying I need to see Mama, but it’s the next morning before they take me down to her room, which isn’t a real room at all but a glassed in place like a big fish tank full of monitors and machines. This is worse, ten times worse than the oncology waiting room. A doctor’s there, not the intern we know, Dr. Patel, nor the gray haired oncologist, but another doctor, a short African with an accent. He says I can talk to her for a minute. Only a minute.

  “Mama,” I says, taking her hand, “Mama, I’m so sorry.”

  She opens her eyes and though she squeezes my hand, I can see she’s already gone a long way off. I want to tell her about the accident, about the settlement, about the biggest mistake I ever made, but she shakes her head slightly. She has something important to tell me; she opens her mouth, struggles and finally whispers, “Hall closet, your birthday.” Then she presses my hand again and closes her eyes.

  The doctor puts his hand on my shoulder. Only a minute.

  I see Mama several times after that but she doesn’t speak again, and I don’t feel right telling her anything that would upset her. The day she died, the doctor sat me down the day and said she could not have survived, anyway. Her cancer had metastasized. I knew what that meant from reading the little pamphlets in the oncology waiting room. All the radiation and all the chemo in the world would not have saved her.

  A week later, I’m packing to go south, when I remember the hall closet and what was so important that Mama told me that last, instead of anything else. I open the door. There’s a rolled up quilt on the floor and underneath it, a shoe box. I know what’s inside before I lift the lid, and it makes me feel sick and glad and sad all at once: a pair of Nike Zoom LeBron II’s. My size.

  I keep them under my bed now and the only time I’ve ever hit Aunt Rita’s boy Brian was when I found him with his feet in them. I feel funny about those shoes. I can’t bear the thought of putting them on and playing in them, and at the same time, I can’t bear the thought of her saving up for them and giving them to me, and me not using them. So they’re in the box and ‘bout every night, I lift the lid and push aside the tissue paper and take a look at them. Sometimes that’s all I do; sometimes I put them on and even lace them up. Whenever I do, my old life with Mama and Kev and Mitch and Billy J and settlements comes back to me, along with my short life in crime.

  Lying

  Three days before finals, I’m trying to catch up on stuff I would of read weeks ago if it wasn’t for the unreal stress I’ve been under. It’s 1:30 A.M. and I’m falling asleep over Emerson. He’s going on the way he does about self reliance and individuality and living your own life and lots of similar ideas that are pretty unreal at the moment, when all of a sudden I read that lying is a ‘sort of suicide in the liar,’ and before I can stop myself I’ve run my highlighter over the text so that it glows the vivid yellow of caution lights, safety clothes, and police barricades. Bad things.

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sp; I wasn’t always so impressed with Emerson or so hung up on lying, but now I have a more than academic interest in whether or not he’s right. That’s because everything started with a lie, not even a serious one, nothing personal, more like a disguise. “Like a party mask,” Bren said, as she stood in the door of my room wearing a t-shirt and cutoffs with her hair wrapped in a towel. She was dying her sandy hair red and some of the brownish dye was dripping down her face like blood.

  “You gotta live a little,” Bren continued. “You gotta go on Spring Break at least once. I’ve told you these tickets are dead cheap. I know you’ve got the money.”

  That was when we were digging out from under the great northern winter. Snow that started in early November was still piled two and three feet thick on campus, and the walks were ankle deep in slush. The dorm heat hadn’t worked right since we came back for spring semester, and when Bren mentioned Florida and the beach, I could almost feel the sunshine.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I was thinking of tuition and next semester’s books and of what to tell my parents.

  “You deserve a break,” Bren said, shifting her long legs impatiently. It’s a bit hard to describe Bren, because after all that’s happened, I naturally see her differently. If I look back to that afternoon, I see she’s tall and rather thin, not pretty, exactly, more interesting looking. Her nose is too big and her face is bony. But she’s got terrific hair and big, dark, wild eyes that she paints up with blue and brown eye shadow, and there’s something about her, something in the eyes and in the easy, loose jointed way she walks, that really gets men going.

  At least, that’s what I thought. Now, I’d say it was something else, the edge she carried of irresponsibility and danger. Maybe that’s what attracted me to Bren, as well, so that against my better judgment, I agreed to room with her and then to share an apartment with her and then, that day in early March, to part with $119 for a special cut rate, spring break flight to Florida.

  “It’ll be great,” Bren said. “Travel gives you another soul.”

  “I thought it was language,” I said. “I thought it was learning a language that gave you another soul.”

  Bren laughed. “You just kill me, Jen. Learning a language teaches you a lot of words. Travel’s immediate. Mind expanding. You just gotta go with it. You just gotta get into the whole experience.”

  My idea of travel was to get somewhere equipped with warm water and cool guys. Bren’s was somewhat more complicated. She was in favor of the warm water and the guys, all right, but she wasn’t kidding about getting another soul. The first thing she said we needed was vacation names. I thought that was a dumb idea, but she brought it up again later, when we were in the plane. Our seat backs were upright and the tray tables closed for the queasy, stomach dropping final approach, when she says, “So what’s your vacation name?”

  “Nom de vacance” drops into my mind, courtesy of three semesters of French. Maybe Bren was right, all I’d learned was words; or maybe not, cause the idea sounded better in French, where it carries echoes of nom de guerre and nom de plume that make it seem kind of legitimate. I said to her, “Sabine.”

  “Sabine,” she said in this phony francais accent, “woman of mystery. Sabine What?”

  The image of my faithful dictionary came to mind, and I said, “Sabine Garnier.”

  “Great. And I’m Danielle. Danielle— give me a French surname.”

  “Belleville,” I said.

  “Danielle Belleville,” she said, excited by the idea and enthusiastic the way she gets. “And we’re students from Montreal. We’re English majors down to practice the language. How’s that?”

  “Terrible,” I said. I could see embarrassment and misunderstandings, but Bren was going on about what a neat idea this was, and I had difficulty convincing her that there was no way. As we whooshed along the runway, she reluctantly agreed we’d be UMass students.

  “Since you’re too chicken,” Bren said. That was always her way when she was trying to do something crazy: make like it was somebody else’s cowardice rather than her own stupidity. I see that now.

  By three o’clock, we were on the beach: white sand, bright sun, blue water— not too warm, but pretty nice. Across the road was a strip of motels, interspersed with McDonalds, Taco Bells, and Burger Kings, where seedy little clubs played punk and metal, and souvenir shops sold tacky Spring Break t-shirts and over-priced sun oil. The scene was already packed with guys in college t-shirts and baseball caps, and the smell of beer mixed in with the salt spray and the perfumed sunblock. Bren and me flopped on the sand and gratefully soaked up the rays after five solid months of winter.

  When the high rise shadows started fingering across the beach, we hit the Tiki Huts back of our motel, where they were selling draft beer and margueritas. I think somewhere along the line we got a burger, or maybe pizza slices, before we left the brilliantly lit strip for the dark night shore where boom boxes were thumping like electronic thunder and guys were dancing around a little bonfire and couples were making out on the damp sand.

  I wound up talking with a guy from Penn who was big on environmental science. I guess I wasn’t really cut out for having another soul, especially after beer and margueritas, because I had trouble keeping my name and story straight. Bren was high on the whole thing, though. She was dancing on the sand in her bare feet with her long red hair down around her face, and Penn couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  I momentarily wondered why she asked me along. Moral support? Company? Not likely. If you’d asked me then, I’d have guessed that it was because I set her off nicely: pleasant, conventional, pretty Jen to complement wild, original, irresistible Bren. Right now, sitting with Emerson, I think it was something else. I think I let her know what ordinary and normal were; I think I maybe helped her find the boundaries, which, otherwise, she wouldn’t have recognized.

  So that was spring Break: your basic budget saturnalia, party all night and recuperate on the beach come morning. After a couple days, I had burned shoulders, a sour stomach, and a semi-permanent hangover. Bren was flying. She was up all night, slept all morning, swam all afternoon. She was in her element, the permanent party. But though she kept saying that everything was fabulous, I sometimes noticed that her eyes were strange, as if she was reflecting the sea and the night beach. I’d like to know what Emerson would of thought about that.

  After four days of excess, I was ready for moderation, but not Bren. We were on the beach this night, about one A.M. I guess, and I said, “I’m wasted. I’m going to bed.”

  Bren began teasing the way she does when she wants something, and as I started toward the street, she came running after me. “You gotta have a last drink,” she said. “A beer with Doug and Pete.”

  I said that I was already seeing in triplicate, and Doug, disappointed in Bren and hanging with me as compensation, said he was ready to call it a night, too. Doug was a quiet, good looking guy who liked rollerblading and wanted to get into the magazine business.

  Bren insisted he really did want a drink, and as she went on about it, laughing and leaning on his shoulder, pally, pally, I could see that he was going to agree. His friend, Pete, short and cheerful in a kind of alcoholic and unfocused way, always wanted a drink: no problem there. We went over and bought a last round of beer.

  I knew this was a mistake almost instantly: I could feel my teeth starting to fur and perception becoming uncertain. But though my focal point had been shifted, I somehow made it up to our “efficiency suite,” a concrete box no bigger than a dorm room— designed to make students feel at home, Bren said. “Efficiency suites” come equipped with a bath, a fridge, a hotplate, and a balcony. The latter is the chief tourist brochure selling point.

  Not too much later, I heard voices on the balcony and then Bren banged at the door because she’d lost her key and had to use the john. I got up, pretty well blind, to let them in, then collapsed again, totaled by that last Bud. I don’t remember else anything until Bren woke me.
r />   “Sabine!” I didn’t respond. ‘Sabine’ was a lifetime ago.

  “Sabine!” She was shaking my shoulder. No response from me.

  “Jen,” she tried, and this time I found myself facing a big, dangerous blank.

  Bren was about to fill it up. “You gotta help me,” she said.

  All quiet, but the street lights were on, which meant maybe 3:30, 4 A.M. Maybe 5. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. My head was throbbing and my burned shoulders itched. “Leave me alone.”

  “You gotta get up, Jen!”

  Bren’s voice was remote, but persistent. Also sober and that came through as scary, somehow, because I finally opened my eyes and sat up. What I saw was a guy lying on the floor near the door. It took me a minute to register that I knew him, that I’d seen him before, that it’s my sort of friend Doug.

  “You gotta help me with him,” Bren said.

  “What’s the matter with him?” But I already knew it was something bad, that it was more than just alcohol.

  “He’s dead,” Bren said.

  I can tell you I just freaked out. Death was impossible on general principles; that was the first thing. But I also had in my mind that Doug didn’t belong there. That he’d had been on his way to his motel. He’d told me that. And so I’d gone to bed and later I’d opened the door for Bren and someone whose name I couldn’t remember but who was not Doug. I knew that much; my problem was that my thoughts were kinda like one of those swirl desserts. I had bits of ideas and images all mixed up, coming together at surprising points and drifting apart in odd, unexpected ways.

  I thought that I might be dreaming, that I was in one of those dubious states where you’re tempted to things you wouldn’t normally do because you’re almost— but not quite— sure you’re dreaming. That’s what I thought, but it didn’t stop me from screaming— or trying to, because Bren got her hand over my mouth before I could get out more than a squeak.