Laura van den Berg - The Isle of Youth - Stories

“As soon as you walk through the door, I’m gone.”

“You don’t care about what happens to me?”

“You said everything would get straightened out.”

“Wouldn’t you want to be sure?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Change of subject. What’s my life like these days?”

“Lonely,” I said. “Very lonely.”

“Tomorrow night.” She inhaled sharply, as though she was about to say something else, then hung up the phone.

“See?” I said, turning to the men. “I’m not Sylvia. I’m her sister. I was just talking to Sylvia on the phone.”

“Bravo,” A said.

“Nice show.” B applauded.

“You two should have stuck with math,” I said as we walked back to the car.

* * *

I drove around downtown Miami in a daze. The sky was clear; it was hard to believe a hurricane had blown through only a few days before. We kept the top down. A and B were bickering over the radio again. They finally agreed on NPR.

“We like The Infinite Mind ,” B told me. This week’s program featured a woman who, after brain surgery, woke up believing she was a nineteenth-century monk. Formerly a fifth-grade English teacher, the woman now recited details of her ascent through the order and her life in the monastery, all of which checked out with religious scholars. Soon her speech and motor skills began to decline, and the last word she spoke was megaloschemos , Greek for “great schema,” a term used for a monk who had reached the highest level of spiritual enlightenment.

After the program ended, B said the story illustrated how speech is an inauthentic form of communication.

“Think about it,” he said. “She reached, symbolically speaking, the highest level of enlightenment just before she stopped talking.”

A countered that it was a commentary on inborn knowledge, on how we hold inside ourselves ideas and experiences that exist on a plane far above our conscious minds.

“For example,” he said, “the first time someone asked me to take a gun apart and put it back together, I did it automatically, even though I’d never been taught how. I’d been holding this knowledge inside me without knowing it.”

“Maybe it’s a commentary on how badly this woman’s surgeon fucked up,” I said.

“That’s just cynicism,” A said. “That’s too easy, too shallow.”

“To look away from mystery is to look away from life itself,” B added.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Why are you talking like that?”

“It’s what distinguishes us in our profession,” B said. “Our thoughtfulness.”

We passed kids riding low-slung bicycles and a bus full of nuns. I wondered what kind of inborn knowledge I might have inside me. I imagined a silver spiral sitting in my chest, waiting to be utilized. I had just turned onto Eleventh Street when the men began to criticize my driving.

“You’re just driving around the same blocks,” B said. “You should be getting it together, sorting things out.”

“I don’t know where to go,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Figure something out,” A said. “We’re getting bored back here.”

I steered the car toward the one place I knew my sister stayed away from.

* * *

Sylvia never liked water. When we were twelve, our parents took us on a trip to Carmel. At night, in our resort room with dolphin-printed wallpaper, my sister was kept awake by nightmares about being swept out to sea. I had enjoyed the trip because it was one of the few times I was better at something; I swam with abandon, ducking underwater and holding my breath until I felt my lungs would burst.

After parking the Mazda on the edge of Miami Beach, I took off my sandals. A and B lumbered along behind me. The beach was a great sweep of cerulean water and white sand; when I looked into the distance, I saw the peaks of boats. Striped umbrellas jutted from the ground. Yellow and lavender lifeguard towers dotted the shore. Girls lay facedown in the sand, their bronzed backs and legs gleaming. Since leaving Coco’s, there had been no sign of the woman and her beige Lincoln.

I left my sandals in the sand and went in up to my ankles. The ocean was warm. I continued until the water reached the ragged hem of my shorts. I looked back at A and B. They were standing on the beach, in the shade of a palm tree, their arms crossed. I only needed to go a little farther to feel the bottom disappear, to feel nothing but water beneath me, but I liked the firm boundary under my feet. I stared at everything that lay beyond: blueness, escape, certain death. It felt strange to know that behind me stood such an immense and troubled city.

I remembered once trying to convince my husband and Sylvia to spend a weekend at the beach, but he said he didn’t like the ocean, and Sylvia looked at him and smiled and then commented on how alike they were. I had been grating carrots for a salad. I put down the grater, confused. My husband and I had gone to the Eastern Shore all the time during the early years of our marriage. I’d never known he didn’t like the sea. Since when? I’d wanted to ask him. What changed? It seemed clear to me that my sister’s fear had infected him.

I went back to that fear, to that seaside trip with our parents, which revealed a side of Sylvia I had never seen before: shivering, small, vulnerable. She always looked so unhappy when she emerged from the water, with her slicked-down hair and blue lips, like a cat that had been sprayed with a hose. On our last afternoon, Sylvia suggested we play a game where we held each other’s head underwater, to see who could stay down longer. Her only condition was that we didn’t go out past our waists. I agreed, certain I could win. Sylvia lasted twenty seconds before she pinched my leg, the signal to let go. I still remembered how slim and pale her limbs looked underneath the water, and the silken feeling of her wet hair between my fingers. When it was my turn, I made it forty seconds before running out of air, but when I pinched Sylvia’s leg, nothing happened. Her hands bore down against the back of my head. I swung my arms and legs, dug my fingernails into her knee. By the time she released, I was gasping, openmouthed, like a fish stranded on land. You didn’t follow the rules , I shouted, but she just went back to shore and ran down the beach, the shallow water spraying around her ankles, her power restored.

Clouds were thickening along the horizon; the boats had disappeared from sight. The ocean looked choppy and gray. I wanted a jolt, something that would snap me back into a world I recognized. I bent over and dunked my head into the water. The salt stung my eyes.

* * *

When the sky dimmed, I trudged out of the water and drove home. In the lobby, I checked the mailbox. There was a postcard of the Isle of Youth: a photo of a turquoise sea and a white sailboat. The back of the card had gotten wet and the ink had bled. I held it up to A and B.

“Sylvia sent me this card,” I said. “She sent it from the Isle of Youth.”

“I can’t read the message on the back,” A said.

“You could have sent that card to yourself,” B added.

I put the postcard back into the mailbox, then turned to the men and asked why they weren’t making me do whatever work Sylvia was supposed to be doing.

“That’ll be someone else’s job,” A said.

In the apartment, the men asked if there was any pizza, so I ordered one. Later we ate and watched Die Hard on TV. After the movie, I didn’t wrap the extra pizza in tinfoil and put it in the fridge, like I would have at home. I left the box on the kitchen counter, our glasses and plates and crumpled paper napkins on the coffee table.

I slipped into the bedroom, where I changed into a pair of Sylvia’s pajamas and called my husband.