The Blue Girl (4 page)

Buck was cute, curled up like that. And he's cute when he dances, even when he tells me his dreams, which are mostly annoying, except for the one about my dad getting trapped in a giant net. That one scares him.

Anyway
, I told him,
Magda was standing there screaming, and I wanted to scream back at her, at all of them, to tell them all to stop looking at me and to run into the water and go get her themselves. I thought that was what mothers were supposed to do. I didn't think it was up to me. I was on my towel and then I wasn't, I was on my feet running toward the water, which was freezing, so cold I could barely feel myself breathe. The girl was way out there. I dived in headfirst and swam as fast as I could, my heart racing, my arms getting heavier with every stroke as I tried to get out there to get her. All I could see were her arms, blue as the night, coming out of the water and pounding back down again, and she was making all sorts of noises in her throat. Just as I reached her, my hair got caught in the cable between the buoy and its anchor. For a minute, she looked right at me and opened her mouth, but no scream came out, just a fistful of water. I was moving my arms as fast as they'd go, but they felt so heavy until I got my
hair untangled from the buoy cable and managed to wrap my arms around her waist. She kept pounding the water with her fists, and she wound up punching me in the face
.

Did it hurt?
Buck asked, yawning while scratching the sailboats on those crappy polyester pajamas Mom keeps buying him.

Did what hurt?

He stopped scratching and closed his eyes.

The blue girl
, he said,
when she punched you
.

Yes
, I told him,
of course it hurt, it hurt for a long time—remember the bruise I had? She didn't mean to punch me
, I explained,
she was fighting to live. That's what people do when they're drowning, when they feel their lungs being crushed inside their chests and the water burning in their throats. Yes, it hurt, but the pain wasn't enough to stop me, and once I had her and started dragging her in, she didn't feel heavy, she seemed to just float
.

Like she was dead?
he whispered.

Yes
, I said,
like she was dead
.

Dead man's float
, he said.

Once I had her and she was floating along with me, I could see Mom crying at the edge of the shore through the water splashing in my eyes, and Magda, too, and Libby and Rebecca and Caroline, they were all crying when I flopped her down on the sand, on her back. Everyone was crying except me, me and the blue girl, because she wasn't breathing. Maybe right then, she was really dead
.

I was about to tell him how I pressed my mouth down on hers and took in a huge breath, the biggest and longest breath I ever took, and for a minute I just held it in, all that air, kept it down inside my lungs and I was never going to let it go. I was about to tell him how huge I felt with that breath inside me, how everything expanded, not just my chest and lungs but everything: my blood, my nose, my hair, and all the things deep inside that I'll never see. I was about to tell him the best part, how when I breathed into her mouth I felt as if I just kept getting bigger, as if I could somehow keep expanding forever. But then I heard Buck's breath slowing, and I kept the rest of the story for another night—a night that might never come, because every time I've told him this story, he's always fallen asleep, and always at the best part.

Mom has been driving us to school lately. She always drops Buck off at grammar school first, and then winds through town the long way, past the woods, the woods that lead to where the blue girl lives. She never looks at me during that part of the drive, but I know what she's after. I know she wants me to talk about her. I know that's what she wants, but I know that if I stay quiet, then she won't ask.

This morning, when we get to school I hunker down in my seat watching the others file in, kids I've known all
my life in this stupid town, kids whose mothers don't drive them in a station wagon and talk about the kind of nonsense that comes out of my mother's mouth. Although maybe I'm wrong, maybe they all talk the way she does, I don't know. I like to think other mothers are different, not like mine, staying up late, baking strange pies that she keeps in the refrigerator and says she's saving for a bake sale that never happens. You know, I've lived in this town my whole life, and I don't remember a single bake sale, not even for band uniforms or books for the school library.

Are you staying after school today?
she asks as I gather up my backpack and unlatch the seatbelt that's been choking me the whole ride.

I shake my head, and she says,
Well, I just want to tell you that we're having chicken tonight with baby carrots and squash. You know that squash is your father's favorite
.

I don't know this. If anyone asked, I'd have to say that I couldn't name any of my father's favorite foods, or his favorite colors, or his favorite anything.

I thought Nerf balls were his favorite
, I say over my shoulder as I close the door and walk away.
Maybe you should bake some Nerf balls. He might even eat them
, I add.

She opens her eyes wide when I say that, and looks at me as if she's about to reach over and slap me. Part of me wishes she would. Part of me wishes she'd hit me in the
face, in the cheek, right here, right below my eye and next to my nose, right where the blue girl punched me.

But of course she goes home to de-bone her chicken and do whatever it is she does during the day. Tonight we'll sit at dinner, heads bent over her squash, listening to my father swallow. Maybe she'll bake more of the pies with the chocolate and the sugar and the things she thinks we don't see. They seem to make her feel better, those pies, and I don't want her to feel bad, I really don't. It's not my fault that she's the way she is, or that my father is afraid of the television, or that I was the only one who wasn't afraid to save a girl that everyone thought was dead. Or maybe it is.

In biology we're studying the epidermis and the three layers of skin that coat our bodies. Caroline and Rebecca and I sit at a table together so we can both copy Caroline's notes. I don't really need Caroline's notes, or at least I didn't used to, back when I still slept at night, and Rebecca tries to be dumb, because she thinks being both smart and pretty are too much. The guys in our grade all lean against their lockers and make a big show of watching Rebecca walk when we pass by, and Caroline and me, too, but only because we're with Rebecca. Most of the guys are still tan from the summer, but it's not an improvement, and the teacher,
Mr. Davis, makes Greg stand up and uses his freckles as an example of whatever it is he's trying to teach us.

We're all laughing at Greg because Greg's not even supposed to be in the class since he's a year ahead of us and because Greg is making faces at Mr. Davis when he isn't looking; Mr. Davis, who lives out of town and never gets any sun. I'm drawing circles in my notebook as big as Greg's freckles and lean over to watch Caroline writing “epidermal pigmentation” in big letters across the top of the page. I write it down too, because if I know one thing, and I don't really know all that much, I know that whatever Caroline writes has to be important.

Sometimes I want to ask her about my father's brain, because Caroline knows a lot about the brain. Once, at a sleepover at my house, she told me all kinds of things she knows about the brain, about the stem and the synapses, the things that make Ethan so slow because his are all broken. I wonder if my father's synapses are broken now, too. I reach over to write a note in Caroline's notebook when I feel my breath go cold in my throat. Cold. Like hers.

Mr. Davis calls on Caroline because he knows she's the only one worth calling on. I think he must feel sorry for Caroline having a brother in the same class, a brother who failed his class last year. He hardly ever calls on me or Rebecca, and if anyone has a brother they should feel
sorry for, it's Rebecca, but she doesn't feel sorry for Ethan because to her, he's just her brother, not someone to be pitied. I understand that. I think about my dad, and I remember how I feel at night when I'm alone in bed and I smell my mother baking those pies in the kitchen and the smell of the marshmallow seeps under my door. I think of those nights when I see blue in the insides of my eyelids, when Buck doesn't come to tell me his dreams or ask me to tell my story one more time. And I admire Rebecca for not feeling sorry for her brother, but I can't help feeling just a little bit sorry for all of us.

What about the girl?
Caroline asks Mr. Davis.
The one who lives out by the lake. The one who's supposed to be blue?

Rebecca drops her pen on the floor, and I can hardly breathe. Everyone turns to look at Caroline, but she doesn't look away, she just keeps staring at Mr. Davis, who's gone whiter than any of us have ever seen him, white like someone who's about to pass out right then and there.

Rebecca grabs my hand under the table.
It's
O.K
., she mouths to me, but I know how not
O.K
. it is. My hands are cold, but Rebecca's fingers feel hot against them. Mr. Davis is saying something about the girl—that she's just a rumor, an idea, that girls with blue skin don't exist and certainly don't live in this town and that if we know what's best for all of us, we should study for the test. I look up at him for
just a minute, and he looks away as I think of the water on my face and the feel of the girl's lips when I was breathing into her as hard as I could. I try to remember how it felt to take in that breath and hold it, and then give her that breath, and how good it felt, how big. That feeling is gone now, though, and I can't get it back no matter how hard I try.

Magda

T
O WATCH A GIRL DROWN IS A TERRIBLE THING. TO
watch her being revived is even worse. To watch a girl stay blue even after she breathes again, this is the worst thing I can imagine.

In all my years at the lake as a child, I never saw anyone drown; I never saw anyone fall into a deep pocket or even cough up swallowed water. In that lake I learned to swim, when the water still looked like glass. I taught my own children to swim in that lake when they were babies.
Don't be afraid
, I said, as they kicked their little legs.
It's only water
.

I go over that day when the girl started drowning, over and over it, and still I can't think why I didn't help. Why I didn't jump in, why I didn't swim out to her, why I didn't even try. I've never been afraid of water, never, not for even a minute. I knew I wouldn't drown. If there's one thing I've known all my life it's that I won't drown.

I used to be one of the summer people. Used to be, but no more. I stayed. Only a few of us stay, and I am one of them. I used to love this town when I was one of the summer people, but now it's just a summer getaway town that becomes dull when the summer people leave, like any other small town with a lake not too far from a big city. Except for the girl, who's made everything different, even the lake where I swam as a child.

My parents came from Russia and made money in textiles. They told me,
Magda, marry well, marry safe, forget happiness; there is no happiness in marriage
. Although their marriage had been arranged, they seemed happy enough endlessly playing durak, but when they took their children to the beach to watch them swim in the quiet lake, they hoped we would meet the children of privileged people. They said the kind of people who could summer in a cottage were the kind of people we should know. I remember sitting on my mother's lap while she rubbed lemon in my hair to bring out streaks, my brothers throwing stones into the lake to make ripples and how I liked to step into the largest ripple just before it broke apart.
If I could only stay inside that ripple
, I used to think,
anything would be possible
.