It was then that the girl sensed it — a disturbance in the water next to the raft, a feeling of a presence getting ready to move past her and then pausing, sensing her there as well. She could see a glimmer of skin just below the surface, a shudder in the current as the head came up beside her. Whatever it was smelled like fish but also like it had been buried in dirt and was starting to decompose.
She could see where the stories came from. The thing’s eyes were large and lustrous as plums, and when they stared at the girl they were filled with an intention so forceful she knew she couldn’t be imagining it. Until that moment neither one of them had any idea of the other’s existence, like the way a baby is suddenly in the world, or a dead person out of it. The thing’s gaze was fixed on a place right above the girl’s head, the place where she knew her thoughts were visible.
Back on shore no one noticed anything. People were eating hot dogs and burying one another in the sand. They opened her up and there it was, someone was saying in a loud voice. A tumor the size of a grapefruit.
Janice rolled over. You’re probably wondering how those girls got to be that way, she said. Because they started out the same as you and me, just like everyone else.
They were all somebody’s darlings, Janice said. They got tucked in, they got presents. They got Suzuki-method piano lessons. Also My Little Pony and Felicity the American Girl, horseback-riding lessons, religious training, ballet lessons, and pets. Also bedtime stories when the nights grew dark. Once upon a time there was a little girl who could be anything she wanted.
Later she couldn’t remember she’d ever even had a mother or a father.
My mom and dad had me, said one of the little girls.
But what about that other girl? someone asked. The careless girl who got caught in the breaker?
She’s the one who had to watch it happen, Janice said. She saw everything. The bad news is you’re all descended from her. That’s why you have trouble sleeping — and don’t go trying to tell me you don’t because I know what goes on here at night. The bedroom walls are like paper. The good news is it’ll start getting better once you’re older. Cocktails at five — that’s the answer. If those mothers and fathers hadn’t been drinking their cocktails when the wave broke — if they’d been able to see what was going on, the way the first spray was very light, almost unnoticeable, but that it was followed by a disturbance in the air that was everywhere and was a threat to the whole idea of air, to the idea of breathing air instead of water — if those mothers and fathers hadn’t been drinking cocktails then we’d have gone insane long ago.
In our house my dad’s the one who drinks, someone said. My mom drinks soda, said someone else. But my granny drinks rubbing alcohol.
Suddenly the dark-haired lifeguard stood on the seat of his stand and began blowing his whistle over and over again, louder and louder, violently waving his arms, motioning toward shore.
Speaking of cocktails, Janice said. She looked at the sky and then she looked at her wrist. The sun is over the yardarm, she said; no one knew what she was talking about. She began gathering together the things they’d brought with them to the beach. They were all beginning to gather their things together — it was as if a signal had gone off somewhere.
We can’t leave now, said the curly-haired girl’s little sister. Even though she was often embarrassed by her older sister, she didn’t want her to die. She remembered the time she dreamed her older sister died and it was terrible. She couldn’t stop thinking of Cinderella singing “a dream is a wish your heart makes.”
Both lifeguards had jumped down from their stand and were dragging their boat across the sand and into the water.
Janice seemed affronted. The problem with humans is they think their children are theirs, she said. They think because their children came from their own bodies and cells they own them, like where we come from points to the future.
By now most of the people leaving the beach had stopped in their tracks and were turned to face the water. The lifeboat rose and fell as the dark-haired lifeguard rowed it through the breakers, the oars lifting and lowering like wings on either side.
Does anyone know who it is? someone asked.
The stuck-up girl, someone said.
It’s that poetry girl, said someone else.
Of course the girl couldn’t hear them, she was so far out to sea on her raft. My darling, my dearest, she said. She had no way of knowing who she was talking to. How long had she been out there?
The sand at the water’s edge was cold and hard, the galaxies revolving on their horizontal plane like a roulette wheel. From the shore all anyone could see was the lifeboat, getting smaller and smaller.
Believe me, you don’t want to be here when they bring her back in, Janice said. It’s not like I didn’t tell her. You have to watch out for your arms and legs if you go that far out. You all heard me, right? The last girl this happened to had bites out of her.
Through the Wormhole
THE DAYS CAME AND WENT AND MARY KEPT GETTING older. It had been bound to happen. Her ears worked less effectively, one of them devising a high-pitched noise all its own. The noise reminded her of summer nights and the fathers appearing on the porches, each one with a different way of letting you know it was time for bed. Eddie’s father would put two fingers in his mouth and whistle; Mr. Andersen used a conch shell. It would get dark, the street lamps would be lit, the girls would be singing a sad song as they gathered their trading cards together and said goodnight to one another. Romance was in the air, romance and false hope, not exactly the same thing but linked, like love and marriage. It was all the girls could think of.
My ear is driving me crazy, Mary told Walter as they lay together in bed. She knew better by now than to ask him if he heard what she was hearing. She would draw the curtains and he would open them, his shadow draping over her as he turned away from the window. They were in the vacation house he’d bought as a surprise for Mary — there was nothing intervening between it and the ocean. He thought the house would please her since she had fond memories of it from when she was a girl. Mary’s hair had turned to dross, her skin to paper, but even so Walter liked looking at her. What was happening to her was part of his original bargain, including the sorry condition of her teeth and eyes. The sight of Mary still had the power to arouse his desire. Then she would succumb to desire too, panting a little.
While her husband was at work in the city Mary sat staring at the ocean through the large half-moon-shaped front window. In the morning the waves were quite large but as the day wore on they grew smaller, almost too small to break, as if some long snakelike creature was tunneling along just below the surface. The days wore on, all of them; Mary rarely ventured forth into the sun until it had almost set. Sometimes St. Foy girls would march along the strand two by two in their blue uniforms. Sometimes they would run single file in their bare feet at the water’s edge.
After graduation Blue-Eyes moved back to the city. Mary knew because Walter liked to fill her in on their daughter’s exploits. For some time now she had been working with him; as far as Mary could tell she was doing very well. Occasionally there would be a story on the console involving Blue-Eyes. An interviewer would be asking her about Walter’s latest project, the two of them standing together in an undisclosed location. Once Mary thought she recognized the koi pool in the park at the end of the street where she grew up. Blue-Eyes was talking about modern marriage, a subject Mary was sure her daughter knew nothing about. Blue-Eyes was explaining that she and the interviewer were standing not far from where her mother and father had met. “My father always said it was love at first sight,” Blue-Eyes was saying. “What about your mother?” the interviewer wanted to know. “Oh, my mother.” Blue-Eyes stared straight into the camera as if she knew Mary was watching. “You should ask her.” She went on to say that whatever brought two people together had nothing to do with sex. It had to do with the abyss, the face of the deep, with whatever came before people or animals or life of any kind and what would be left after they were gone.