Laura van den Berg - Find Me

What kind of upbringing does it take for any part of being hospitalized in the middle of nowhere during an epidemic of historic proportions to feel at all familiar?

Her kind.

Something else about this girl: when she is older she will forget the cautions against the burning stove and the steaming soups and the busy streets and being outside after a certain hour of the night; instead of warnings she will remember heat singeing her fingertips and the tip of her tongue. She will remember the whoosh of the car coming around a corner, into the space that held her seconds ago. She will never wait for cross signs or for anything to cool or put her seat belt on. She will stand on the edges of T platforms, in easy reach of a homicidal pusher or a suicidal impulse. She will forget her coat in the dead of winter.

She will forget all the warnings, because another small part of her is always thinking, What else can you do to me? Who knew how important all these small parts would turn out to be.

Another thing: one evening, when this girl is all grown up, she will see a woman with a child on the T. An ordinary sight, but it is rush hour and the passengers are all pressed together and somehow this woman has put herself between the child and the bodies of these strangers. The child’s face is pressed against the woman’s stomach. Her tiny fingers are hooked around her belt loops. The T stops and more passengers get on and the woman pulls the child closer and covers her with her coat.

The grown-up girl will see this and feel a rage that could shake the train right off the tracks, into the river below.

* * *

Once he takes the girl to Revere Beach. It is warm outside, but not yet summer. May. She is supposed to be in school, but he explains that he talked to her teachers and got permission. He says that he knows all the teachers at her school.

In the car, he lists the things they will find at Revere Beach: kites shaped like dolphins, chocolate ice cream, roast beef sandwiches, hungry seagulls.

They keep the windows down. They listen to a baseball game on the radio. The thunder of the crowd. The clink of a bat striking a ball. He does not say why he is bringing her to the beach, if it is a reward or another part of his experiment or if it has something to do with her changing brain.

“Will Plácido Domingo be there?” she asks.

He laughs and changes the station.

A folk song comes on. The rhythm is soothing but there are words like “ax” in the song that are not soothing at all.

Through the windshield, the sky has that faded look.

On the way, they stop at a drugstore and he buys her a purple bathing suit with a ruffled waist, the first bathing suit she has ever owned.

At the beach, he tells her that he doesn’t want to go into the ocean. He doesn’t like to swim. He just wants to watch her out there, in her brand-new bathing suit. He sits in the hot sand, in his pants and one of his sea-colored polos. He wraps his arms around his knees.

She swims out. The farther she goes, the more his figure looks like a small, sad lump, like something forgotten on the shore. She can only see the vague shape of his body. She can’t see his face. He begins to lose his power over her.

She’s treading water when she gets the idea to escape. This is her chance. The water is calm. She is a good, strong swimmer. One of the best at her school. She just needs to slip past the buoys and keep swimming until she finds a boat or a coast guard or divers. Anyone who can help her.

She swims the breaststroke. She counts her breaths. She gets past the buoys. The sun is hot on her back. The chop picks up. Her arms start to feel heavy, like someone has tied bricks to her wrists, but she doesn’t stop. She knows this is the kind of chance that doesn’t come twice.

She hears a shrill whistle. She turns in the water. There are figures standing on the beach, waving. She keeps swimming.

She hears the whistle again and again. By now there is nothing but water around her. She treads and looks. There are no boats, but maybe if she keeps going.

She keeps going.

The ocean turns icy. The waves start rolling over her. She comes up for air and gets a mouthful of brine.

When the lifeguard hooks his arm around her, she says “no, no, no.” She bites his wrist. She plunges underwater and pretends that she is hidden, that the ocean is camouflage. She watches his legs kick at the darkness below.

He came from land, so he cannot be trusted.

The lifeguard hooks her again and they start swimming back to shore. His chest is hairless and cool. Her arms are jelly. She can’t get away. She knows this is the end. There is not and there will never be a woman to cover her with a coat.

He keeps bringing her in. She feels like a fish on a line.

On the beach, the Psychologist is waiting with a soft towel. He wraps it around her shoulders. Sweat is rolling down his cheeks. His gaze is murderous. He thanks the lifeguard for saving his little girl. He even tries to give the lifeguard money, as though to demonstrate how valuable the girl is to him, but the lifeguard turns it away.

“The kids never swim where you tell them to swim,” the lifeguard says. He looks at the money and then down at the girl. He shakes a thick finger at her. “You might have an Olympic swimmer on your hands there.”

“I’ll bet you’re right about that,” says the Psychologist, tucking the money back into his wallet. “I’ll bet you’ve seen it all.”

The girl shivers under the towel. She knows they will never come to the beach again. She knows she should apologize, but she has not yet learned how to apologize for things she is not sorry for.

The girl rides back to Allston in the trunk.

* * *

Again they are home alone. This time skinny black wires — they remind the girl of snakes — connect the Psychologist’s laptop to the TV in his bedroom. The familiar sound comes on and the Psychologist tells her to concentrate on her happy thing, to concentrate harder than she ever has before, to not let other thoughts trespass into her mind. She listens to the bellow of the whales and thinks as hard as she can and then one appears on TV. A whale! Right in front of her! Blue and massive and crashing through the water. The eye of the whale is small and savage and its body is crusted in white shells, a deep-sea monster for sure. The whale disappears and the Psychologist tells her that she lost her concentration, that she made it leave.

She’s naked again, the white electrodes stuck all over her body.

She gets back into the right headspace. It’s like standing on one foot and fixing your sight on a specific thing until you find your balance, except the balancing is happening in her mind. She wants to stop and listen to the whale. She wants to see it spout water and gulp fish, to see what it’s like to be a fearsome creature of the deep (could she ever learn to be a fearsome creature of the deep?), but this time she knows the whale is not there for her.

This girl stays awake at night remembering the sensation of swimming out, away from the sandy coast of Revere Beach, into the cold dark of open water. She keeps rewriting the endings. Keeps telling herself stories.

In one, she joins a band of pirates. In another, she grows gills and learns to breathe underwater. In another, she is picked up by a wealthy couple who have always wanted a child. In another, she drowns.

She stares down at her bare toes. She digs them into the carpet. In his bedroom, these alternate endings are the happy thing she thinks about.

When she looks up, she sees Mr. and Mrs. Carroll, which is not possible. She blinks and they’re still there, frozen in the doorway in their gray guard uniforms. She didn’t hear them come home. She didn’t hear anyone coming up the stairs. Mr. Carroll is holding a six-pack. His shirt is untucked. Mrs. Carroll is reaching for the wall. Her lipstick is a red smear on her mouth. They are still wearing their museum nametags.