The Blue Girl (12 page)

I go inside. Colin is sitting with the Nerf ball in his hand, tired from the end of his game. He doesn't ask what I am doing up or why I've been sitting out in the cold air. He never asks where I've gone when Magda and Libby and I go to the girl's house. He never asks about the smell of chocolate and vanilla. He never asks why the dishes remain in the sink after midnight, or why I slip onto the sofa bed out on the porch and lie alone under woolen blankets, smoking cigarettes ten years after quitting. But I imagine him asking, in the quiet way he had in the early years of our marriage, and I imagine turning to him and saying,
I need to feel it, Colin, I need the smoke to fill me. The air is not enough
.

I think about what it was like in July, how Colin sat for three weeks in front of the television in a crash position, arms locked over the top of his head, his body curling into itself the way school children are taught to shield themselves if a bomb were ever to fall. For three weeks he would not leave the television unguarded, until I called the ambulance, and they took him away, and the doctors threw him into a haze of medication and half-dreams of men who feel things too deeply, only to end up not feeling at all.

Now he plays his private games in the living room with a Nerf ball and a hoop screwed over the door. He shoots, misses, shoots again. Sometimes he catches me watching him from the doorway and turns his back to me, sitting in a chair and moving his hand up and down with the ball, pretending to dribble, and then hoisting the ball over the couch, sending it sailing above the pictures of our children on the end tables, and scoring.

I used to think, when he first came home and the sun was still hot, about walking across the living room to him, taking his hand, and walking together out the back door all the way to the edge of the lawn where the lake shimmers in the distance at night. I used to imagine sitting on the lawn with ice clinking in our glasses of Scotch and soda, and then, slowly and methodically, without hurt
or recriminations, retracing our steps into the past to find out how we got here. I'd tell him about that day in the lake, about the light on the water, about the blue girl almost drowning, about all the blueness I've felt since that day. I'd tell him that the blue girl is really here, and so are we.

As I stand in the doorway and watch him there with the Nerf ball, I know that it's not how we got here that matters. It's that we are here, now.

Colin
, I say,
how was your game?

Of course Colin doesn't answer. Colin never answers.

I think of telling him they took his car, the car he no longer drives. But I don't. I think of driving out to find them. But I don't. I go to the kitchen and start separating egg whites, mixing in sugar and butter and cream and vanilla. I look out the window at the street lights and think of how I have become the kind of woman who does nothing, how I have become the kind of woman who bakes strange little pies, who knows her daughter has gone out into the woods but has done nothing to stop her.

The moon pies were finished by the time Audrey came home. Colin had started a new game. When Buck coughed several times, I stood in the doorway of his room for a while, looking down at him in his sailboat pajamas.

Audrey?
he said, but when he saw me standing there watching him, he says,
Oh, I thought you were Audrey
, and went back to sleep, turning his back to me.

When I heard the car, I turned off the kitchen lights and stood by the window. After I'd spooned the melted chocolate over the pies, I'd opened the window to release the smell, and for a while I just stood there with my arms folded against the chill of the night air, trying to hear the singing.

My mother would not have understood. I could feel her disappointment leaking over me in a thick film, even over my hands, sticky from the filling and chocolate.

I let Audrey slip into the house and head to the bathroom, while I stood in the dark listening to the sound of her washing, the sound of her opening and closing her bedroom door, and the sound of her small television warming up. For a long time I waited, and then I tapped on the door.

I said her name, low. She opened her eyes and stared.

I'm up
, she said.
I'm always up
.

She rolled away from me. I saw her clothes, balled and wet on the floor, but I said nothing. What was there that could be said?

The next morning, I make a sandwich for Buck to take school while he and Audrey whisper in the dining room.
Audrey will not bring lunch anymore, and I've given up trying to feed her.

Hurry up
, I hear Audrey say,
before Mom comes
.

I see Buck balancing a bag of sugar on the top of his head and moving from side to side, back and forth, side, back, side again. Here is my eight-year-old son holding his arms out in front of him as if holding the body of a woman.

Doing the waltz, again?
Audrey asks.

Buck smiles.
You'll make me lose count
, he says, as he dances around the room.

I turn back to the kitchen, wrap his sandwich in cellophane, and stuff it into a paper bag.
Time to go
, I call.

Bucks straps himself into the backseat, and Audrey sits beside me in front. Her eyes are heavy lidded, the sockets deep and lined as if she's been bruised. I don't ask why the undersides of her eyes look so blue. I know where she's been.

Didn't you sleep well?
I ask.

She keeps her face averted. Buck kicks the back of my seat.

I didn't sleep
, she says.

We stop at the traffic light in front of the grammar school. Boys with heavy backpacks rush across the street as the crossing guard holds up her white-gloved hand.
She smiles at me and waves as we pull forward into the school driveway.

I'll see you at three o'clock
, I say to Buck, already halfway out the door. I roll down the window when I see the paper bag on the front seat.

Buck!
I call.
Buck!
and as I call his name I feel a knot in my throat, a tightness so deep I think I might lose my breath. He looks so small against the brick building and the open sky above it. I want to ask for a kiss, I want to pull him back into the car and drive away with him, but I don't. I dangle the bag and say,
Don't forget your lunch, honey
, and he says,
Thanks, Mom
, in a voice so sweet my ribs ache.

He holds his sandwich bag on top of his head and twirls around. Audrey laughs.

I say nothing. I let them have their secret. Now, I think, we all have them.

We drive past the road to the woods where the blue girl lives. Audrey doesn't look at me, not once, though I watch her as we wind our way through town, past the lake, past the place where the girl drowned. The only thing she ever told me, the one thing she allowed herself to say that night when it was all over, when we were home again, when we sat together on the sofa drinking tea, was that her lips had been warm.

Who would ever think
, she'd said,
that lips like that could ever feel warm?

I think of the feeling of the girl's lips when she licked the filling out of my hand. The lips were so warm.

Audrey, my beautiful Audrey, who is getting so thin, who saved a girl from drowning when everyone was too frightened to move. Audrey, who saved the girl who eats secrets too terrible to share. Audrey, who gave the girl her own breath as if it was a blessing.

Everyone asks her
, Magda tells me.
Everyone wants to know. So many questions, but she won't tell
.

Are you making your moon pies again?
she asks.

The question startles me. I adjust the rearview mirror and press my lips together to blot my lipstick.

For the bake sale
, I lie,
to help raise money for scholarships so those summer kids don't end up running our town
.

In all the years I have lived in this sorry town, I can't remember a single a bake sale, not one. We've certainly never set up tables at the lake to sell to the summer people, who flee as soon as the days grow shorter and who leave us with our husbands, who no longer look at us in our bathing suits in the summer or pour us cocktails in the early autumn evenings.

I wish she'd allow me the tiniest of lies. I wish she would not try to know my secrets. But Audrey is wise. Wise
enough to jump into the water and pump water out of a blue girl's lungs. Wise enough to smile at her father and his basketball games and pick up his Nerf ball if he misses. Wise enough to hold her brother when he can't get to sleep and I am too distracted to help. Wise enough to take her father's car and go to the blue girl without me.

O.K
., Mom
, she says.
For the bake sale.
O.K
.

She opens the door and slides one leg out, letting the toe of her shoe touch the ground. She swings her foot back and forth against the pavement, making a soft scraping sound that makes me think of my mother and her hope that I would hear the singing trees. The branch of a tree casts a shadow over us. I hear my mother urging me to listen, but it's as if my ears have been stopped up. Audrey's eyes shine as she looks past me, past the parking lot and the school and all of the things that make up this town.

She could do it again, you know
, she says without looking at me.
I think she wants to do it again
.

I want to lay my hands on hers and squeeze them, squeeze the fingers that are ringed with my mother's freckles. I want to close the doors and hold her hands and lift them against my heart so she can feel it beating. I want to tell her that I know where she's been and that I have been there too. I want to tell her about the nights I've gone
out to the lake with Magda and Libby, about the girl's lips warmer than I'd ever have imagined, about the smell of the sweet pies and the way we've fed her. I want to squeeze her hands and lead us into a song for my mother, a song we'll sing with the windows closed, a song we'll sing past the lake, down the long road and away from this town.

Audrey gets out of the car. Before she turns away, she looks back at me with her eyes red and swollen, the irises clouded by lack of sleep. I open my mouth to sing out her name as I watch her move away, but as I do, I feel my throat turn thick with a sadness that will not allow me to speak. I sit in the driver's seat and watch her walking farther and farther away from me, until the doors of the school open and close, and she has gone inside, in her world free of all this blueness.

Audrey

M
Y MOTHER KNOWS
.

I can see it just by looking at her, the way she stares at me, the way she came in my room last night and stood there like I didn't know what she wanted. When she says good-bye to me in the car, I think of just saying it to her. I think of telling her that we “borrowed” Dad's car and that I found her, face down in the lake, just like I knew I would. I think of telling her that I jumped in and put my mouth right over hers and breathed into her. Again.

Again and again and again.

Just like the nights of not sleeping, of lying there and thinking I can't take it another second, that I'm going to jump out of bed and run all the way out to the road and into the woods where no one can find me, not even her.

Her. Her. Her.

She's all I think about. If I ask myself why should I get in the car and go to her again, when I know what I'll do once I get there, I don't have an answer. Except that there's been something connecting us since that day, since I breathed into her mouth and she breathed back into mine. And that's all I can say about it.