Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

As John Berry turned from the loose sand driveway onto the gravel road, he watched the boy in the rearview mirror. Eddie was leaning against the cottage, sliding down like a water drop on glass, his arms wrapped around himself.

Feeling sorry now, John Berry pushed the horn and raised his hand. He waved, waited, but Eddie would not look up. He felt angry at Eddie. His face reddened, he pressed the gas pedal and spun out, throwing up pebbles into the morning sky.

I t was too early in the day for mosquitoes, but Emily could see the rain puddles quivering irregularly with the laying and hatching and hovering of them. All night it had rained, at one point so hard she'd been sure water would puddle around Birdflower's door, and she'd gotten up heavily, still tired from the drive back from Norfolk, and stuffed rags underneath the edges. The mosquitoes sometimes got so bad after a storm that the park service sprayed. A ranger drove around a truck that shot out intermittent streams of pink smoke that settled on everything and smelled like a mix of perfume and ash.

She walked up the beach road, toward the spot where the vegetable truck parked. She wanted strawberries, had wanted them for months. Each week the man promised he'd have some next time, and would try selling her blueberries or bruised raspberries. Once even a stray bag of cranberries. Emily leaned up against the farthest end of the pony pen, near the road. She put a leg behind her on a rung. Haze was burning off the highway and she could see triangles of sun on the water at the horizon.

The vegetable man always reminded her of Daniel. To her he looked like the actor in the movies who was always the leading man's best friend, the one with more integrity and sensitivity than the lead, just a bit sloppier and more vulnerable.

Daniel had stayed in bed late on the weekends and drank wine with her. Once he made her a necklace out of tobacco seeds and he always dried some rose petals from the front bushes for her bath. He said that it was only because of her that he could farm, that otherwise he would have been a teacher or a minister.

She half believed someday it would be Daniel asking her if she wanted green grapes or red ones. Maybe that was why she was always the first, able to choose the loveliest of everything. Though sometimes, self-conscious of the island women whispering around her, she'd intentionally buy bruised peaches, browned bananas, lettuce that would soon be worthless. She knew what they were saying, in their patterned housedresses and awkward hairdos. That she was a poor mother and untrue to the people who were stupid enough to love her. The kinder ones might say she was confused, scattered, that she had been disillusioned early, and that this life was the best she could manage.

Every few years there'd be a guy who thought he could really figure her out. “You seem like a person who's been hurt badly,” he'd say. And she told him, no, she'd just come to the conclusion sooner than most, that absolute happiness wasn't possible. The husband, baby, house formula didn't figure and she'd decided that if she couldn't be happy she'd at least do what she wanted. Emily would further explain that absolute despair wasn't possible. They'd always relent for a while before telling her she seemed distant. Not distant physically, they never meant that. They just couldn't understand her lack of interest in their educated intellects, in their world travels. She could count the Indo-China stories she'd heard, Malaysia with a French girl who wore her hair short and had a pair of little round John Lennon glasses. The tattered children in Costa Rica, the way when you were robbed in Latin America they even took your half bar of soap, and how in Berlin the Germans yelled at you to get back if you attempted to cross before the red walking man changed to green. She remembered how she would block them out by listening to her irises knock thickly against the house.

The ferry horn sounded, and minutes later, the vegetable truck appeared, small and blurry up the highway. It looked good beating back the telephone poles. Today there would be strawberries and she would walk back with them along the beach, stopping at a stretch across from Sugar Creek. There the water swung up in a half ellipse and smoothed the sand to a curve as fine as skin. These highs and lows reminded her of the hip, thigh, and stomach of some contorted giant. And she would sit there, snuggled into that lovely passage between groin and upper thigh, and eat her strawberries, cut them thin as petals with the pocket knife she carried and lay each slowly on her tongue.

P ouring rain . Emily held a newspaper over her head. It sagged at the edges like a nun's habit and gray ran off in lines down her fingers. As she walked barefoot back from the beach through deep puddles, sand stuck to her ankles in delicate, lace-like patterns. In the drier inner landscape of her mind, Emily thought about lies. Rain shook the leaves. She had always lied easily, switched fact for fiction, embroidered stories with her own thread. It wasn't really lying though, just her physical knowledge of cycles; a vague familiarity with events that had yet to happen. She believed in omens and often waited before doing things for signs of weather. It was important to recognize an indigo sky, the few clouds at noon collecting into definable shapes, or the late afternoon mist, which reminded her of time, lapse film of seeds sprouting and most specifically that moment when seedlings threw off the dust on their new leaves and grew toward the sky.

Emily let the paper fall to the porch. Through the rain she saw the beach towels and bathing suits soaked on the line outside and water pounding down from the gutters. In the kitchen she turned the spigot on, bent down, and drank. Water blown through the screen door had gathered in puddles around the floor.

He had been here. She looked into the bedroom. Below the windows, rain dripped into drawers dumped out and scattered.

“Eddie,” she called, then ran to his empty room. She walked quickly back to her bed. A car lumbered past. She pressed her spine against the wooden headboard, drew her knees to her chest.

Evening was coming on fast. The rain beat a hectic rhythm on the roof. Shadows of water melted and moved like a lava lamp over the walls. She ran her tongue over a childhood scar on her knee. It tasted oddly tinny and the tissue was pinker, the color of cooked salmon and slightly raised like braille.

She lifted her head and looked around the room. In her closet, a triangle was torn from the crotch of a pair of pants. Emily carefully walked over and turned on the overhead light. It made each scattered object impossibly real. Flipping the light off, she stood in the doorway and watched the shifting shadows.

“Mom,” Eddie yelled from the kitchen.

Emily moved toward him. “What did he say to you?”

“Nothing,” Eddie said. He placed a hand on Emily's back. He hummed from deep in his stomach to try to calm her.

“Tell me what he said.”

“I don't want to talk about it,” Eddie said, moving his hand up and into her hair. Emily pulled away. “Tell me.”

He shook his head. Emily saw the deep circles under his eyes and that he hadn't changed clothes since yesterday.

“I don't know. Crazy stuff.”

“What was that?” Emily thought she heard a hand on the door and a breath against the screen.

“Wind,” Eddie said.

She covered her eyes with a hand.

“You know, with my friends it's their mothers that worry about them,” he said.

“I worry about you,” Emily said.

“Then why do you do shit like this?”

“You know I didn't do this.” She motioned to the tattered room.