Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

“I can't think of anything else,” Eddie said.

Neal put a hand on Eddie's shoulder. “I'll lend you my car,” he said. “You can go to one of those clinics in Norfolk.” He moved closer. “You can have your life just the way it was gonna be.” Neal leaned his head on Eddie's shoulder.

“I have to be there now ,” Eddie said.

“Okay, baby,” the cook said, and as he lifted his head, he rested a dry kiss on Eddie's neck.

The car moved backwards, then forwards toward the ramp.

Eddie held the brown bag to his face and blew his nose.

“These next few nights I'll leave the keys right under the seat,” Neal said.

He drove around the inlet past the lighthouse and finally pulled onto Lila's road. “Just take it and go.”

“Thanks,” Eddie said, shutting the door with his back. He walked fast carrying the bag, as though it was a baby, toward her house. His eyes went to the smoky rectangle of her bedroom window. Neal's car did not move. Go on, Eddie said, swinging a leg over the low white fence. He creeped up to her window and heard Lila breathing slowly inside. Tapping lightly on the screen, he whispered, “Please come out. Or let me in.”

E ddie sat in the parking lot of the gas station waiting for Lila. Gulls swooped around the Dart and it seemed that just that second the first grayish light was tingling up. Like the beginning notes of a song. Different from the verse and chorus because of a deliberate delicate leisure. He picked at the foam leaking through the front seat. Lila had agreed to meet him at five-thirty. To forget waiting, he tried to figure out what qualities he'd gotten from his mother. He looked like a sliver of her, like a cutting that grew differently in height and shape but still had the same hue. But it was characteristics, not looks, he was concerned with. Unlike his friends, but much like his mother, Eddie knew he cried easily and over things that seemed stupid. Like when his mother said she couldn't go to the beach with him, or worse. In school last fall he got teary-eyed when the coach had told him the new sweats wouldn't arrive in time for the first match.

He watched the sky pause before the sun tipped over the water. His stomach growled and he remembered wrestling season when, to make weight, he'd eaten only apples. He could still see them: the morning one that his stepmother set out on a plate, the lunch apple in a brown bag, then the dinner one, sliced thinly and served in a bowl with a few nuts and raisins while his father ladled gravy over his chicken.

Eddie glanced back and saw Lila far down the road: a dot with a small orange satchel.

He felt for the stiff twenties he'd taken out of the little one-teller bank yesterday, then started the car.

She stuck her thumb out like a hitchhiker as he stopped and threw the side door open for her. Lila put a brown bag by her feet and tipped the orange thing into the back.

“What's that?” Eddie thought that it was a parachute and Lila would want them to throw themselves off the highest building in Norfolk. The single parachute would not be strong enough for both but would let them eye the blue smudge of the Atlantic before splattering them on the asphalt.

“A tent,” Lila said.

“I can afford a room,” said Eddie.

“Nope,” Lila said. “I want to be near as possible to the flat dirt during all this.”

He pulled a U-turn and headed for the ferry.

“The cook's wheels ain't bad,” she said, leaning her feet up on the dash.

“Did you leave a note?” he asked.

“It's all set. They think we're staying with your aunt.”

“My mom wasn't home,” Eddie said. He looked down at the gas gauge.

“Figures,” Lila said.

“I wish you wouldn't act like that about my mom.”

“I think I can say anything I want.”

Eddie shook his head and shivered.

“You're cold?”

“No,” said Eddie. “I thought of something.”

Lila said, “It's impossible not to.”

“Not that. Neal made a move on me.”

Lila squealed. “What did you have to do to get the Dart?” She pressed an elbow into his ribs.

“Nothing,” Eddie said. “Don't be so stupid about it.”

“Why?” Lila said. “It's stupid to act so boring and grown-up. We go up there, lay the money down" — her voice thickened—“and it's over just like that.”

She turned her face away.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“What do you know?” Lila said, turning on the radio and flipping the dial from station to station.

On the ferry Lila asked Eddie about heart attacks. Last night she had had a dream: first her heart beating fast as a bird's, then she felt it swell and nudge out of her ears and mouth, encasing her body like a giant soap bubble. “Then,” Lila said, “like a pin pops a balloon, bang. Little pieces of pinkish skin were all over the beach—”

There was a hard rap on Eddie's door; he flinched and saw John Berry's face beyond the glass. He rolled the window down an inch.

“Up kind of early,” John Berry said. His hair was long, past his ears and blowing.

Eddie was silent.

He pointed at Lila. “Does your father know you're out here?”

“I tell my daddy everything,” she said sweetly.

“Is that right?” John Berry said. “I'd like a word with you alone, Eddie.”

“No way,” Eddie said and started rolling up the window.

John Berry pushed his hand on the moving glass. “Please,” he said. “It's nothing bad.”

This will never stop, Eddie thought as he opened the door. Lila grabbed at his shorts. “Everybody says he's a crazy man now,” she whispered. He pressed the door shut gently and followed John Berry up the stairs. Eddie pulled the sleeves of his sweatshirt down against the cold. At the top he saw the island's long rows of telephone lines strung like a lizard's spine down the highway.

He opened the door of the wheelhouse. John Berry, with a hand on the big wheel, was guiding the ferry.

“I wasn't thinking right,” he said quickly.

Eddie didn't answer.

John Berry turned his head from the window and said, “I've got nothing against you. Never did. You stop seeing in front of you when you're like I was. You only see what plays like a movie inside your skull, showing what you were hoping would happen, and spliced between it, I saw the things I'd heard.” He paused to guide the ferry through a pattern of buoys. “I want you to tell her I'm sorry.”

“What makes you think she'll listen to me?” Eddie said.

“You're her flesh,” John Berry said. “She knows that.” He looked at Eddie and then let his eyes fall to his hands. “I need someone.” John Berry blushed. “You have to tell her that I'm sorry and that you want her to come back to me.”

Eddie said, “If that's what you want, why'd you mess up her stuff?”

John Berry said, “Your mother is the only one for me.”

“You know she doesn't have that much,” Eddie said.

John Berry clenched his teeth. “I'm trying to tell you something.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Sure, I'll tell her, if you don't kill her first.”

John Berry said blankly, “I need her with me.”

Though Eddie would never admit it, he was strangely honored that John Berry would talk to him about his mother. It was as if he'd been asked into their bedroom to moderate. Each would tell his or her side and he'd hold up their words, turn them around, examine them like a glass held to light, and decide one way or the other.

“Want to steer?” John Berry said.

“No,” Eddie said, though he could imagine the varnished wood of the captain's wheel under his fingers. “I have to get back to Lila. She's not feeling that great.”