Drownby Kelley Eskridgea novel in progress |
The drowning began the way it always does, with the overwhelming need to breathe. The final choice; to accept or rage, to think no I won’t or will it hurt as the lungs heave and change rushes in. Eventually, everyone breathes.
Breathe, honey, he told her in the sweat of midnight when the hospital’s air conditioning was broken and it seemed the baby would never be born. Breathe.
- - -
Jane went out to get the mail and look at the sky. Slow clouds had built all afternoon until the world seemed blanketed in wet wool, the trees already slumped under the weight of the water to come. She hoped for a big storm, liquid light and hard thunder to distract her from the work she wasn’t doing, so she did not go back in to her sketchbook and the pile of broken pencils. Instead she tucked herself into the bench on the porch, and sorted through the post while she waited for the weather to become. Catalogues, bills. The Weekly Cents-Ible: Super Savings From Local Merchants! Then a postcard of Times Square at night, neon and naughty, Manhattan Nights in bright red letters across the top like a lipstick scrawl. On the other side, familiar handwriting: I can never resist these. We’re fine, hope you are too. Come visit sometime.
She let herself imagine a Manhattan where night was full to bursting, sizzling like a kielbasa on a sidewalk vendor’s grill. Tapas and sushi with Sara and Paula in restaurants with alley entrances and no prices on the menu, mojitos in clubs with preferred lists and VIP rooms. A SoHo gallery exhibit of Shanghai Art Academy graduates whose work would be steeped in history and hints of cultural criticism. A party at the west side apartment of a documentary filmmaker just back from Sundance or Venice. A big apple full of crunch and juice that she would never eat the whole of.
But all her clothes would be wrong. And the washing machine had a rattle in its throat like an old man with a lungful, and there was Teddy’s college fund. She put the card in the recycle pile with the Cents-Ible.
The last thing was an ecru envelope.
Jane Francisco Harris
3609 Rome Avenue
Manhattan, Kansas 66502
From someone named Amy Miller in Connecticut. Lovely paper, heavy with linen fibers. Manhattan, New York paper. An unexpected thing. She made a hmm noise in the back of her mouth as she opened the flap and pulled out the card inside. And became still.
Save the Date!
Kenton School 20th Reunion!
Memorial Day Weekend on the Kenton campus.
Details to follow.
And in still-recognizable handwriting on the bottom: Jane, I hope you can make it! It would be wonderful to see you. All best, Amy Swann (Miller).
Jane breathed and found no air, only memory. Kenton, pouring in. Amy Swann’s maple-syrup eyes on the cusp of running over as she said Anything, anything! The broad green lawn of River House, Jane’s heart levered open, astonished with longing. The first class, the strangeness of the oval table and her tremble when the teacher took the chair next to hers and said Let’s begin.
Rain spat in fat random drops. Her hand trembled on the card. Reunion. To join again. The sky rumbled and opened and fell down.
- - -
She still sat there an hour later when her family came home. Teddy was first up the driveway in a flurry of wheels and flapping rain slicker, long brown hair wet against his cheekbones and neck. He dropped his bicycle in a clatter and banged onto the porch. “We got ice cream and chicken for dinner and Mrs. Pearson almost ran over Dad. I told him we should drive.” He shook off his raincoat like a puppy. “You look weird, Mom,” he said, and went dripping into the house.
“Go around the back,” she said, too late: he had disappeared in a rumble of hi-tops on the oak floor, and she sighed, imagining the water on the wood. But no, this was Teddy. He’d be back in a minute to wipe up after himself, even if he did use a clean bath towel to do it.
And here came Hack, pedaling slowly, three plastic bags of groceries lumped into the carrier basket. If Teddy was a puppy, then her husband was a hunting hound, mostly quiet, mostly self-contained, mostly focused. And looking as patiently miserable as a wet dog. She watched him park, open the garage, put both bicycles away, take a careful grip on the groceries, close the door again. As he came toward the porch, she said, “Around the back.”
He hitched his shoulders. Water ran off them. His eyebrows and earlobes dripped. He looked wistfully at the dry space. “Okay,” he said, “I guess I can’t get any wetter.”
He hunched his way along the small walkway between the house and garage, and through the back yard gate, hating the feel of water in his ears. He didn’t like swimming or baths or these vertical floods. Frog-stranglers, his Florida grandparents called them. He remembered being seven at the kitchen table with Grumpy, recovering from a mountain of breakfast while Grummy took a basket to the back yard to pick peaches for lunchtime cobbler. The doors and windows were open, the day already blue and blistering, no hint of the thunderstorms that came every afternoon.
“Those clouds let go, catch the frogs with their mouths open in mid-croak, and fill ‘em up like a coffee cup,” Grumpy said. Hack ate one more bite of French toast, even though his stomach felt like a basketball, and thought about this with the serious consideration he gave to everything Grumpy told him. His father’s father was a big man, an old soldier whose body remembered being young and still radiated easy authority under the knobby bones and shrunken muscle. Grumpy drank another swallow of coffee the way he did everything, with calm relish.
“No joke?” Hack said finally.
“Absolutely. Happens every day. Now pass me one more biscuit before your grandma gets back.” A big wink, their secret; Grummy kept him on short rations. They went on to baseball and Florida alligators and the best peach cobbler anyone ever ate, and after it rained Hack searched two square blocks for strangled frogs. It was a perfect day.
It seemed strange not to like storms now, especially in Kansas where they usually had the courtesy to announce themselves. Even twisters rarely came out of a clear blue sky. Nothing stays seven, he thought, and took his shoes and slicker off in the mud room.
Teddy shot into the doorway from the kitchen and slung a towel in his general direction. He’ll be as big as Grumpy. “Thanks,” he said, but Teddy was gone. He smiled and began to rub the rain out of his hair.
“The human tornado,” Jane said. She stood in the doorway where Teddy had been, and Hack saw, as he occasionally did, not Jane or my wife but the mother. Her expression, as she turned her head to follow Teddy’s wake, was the dispassion of the woman who holds a human future in her hand, who will someday exercise her power to smother or let fly. Hack thought the closer Teddy got to college age, the more often the mother might show up in their kitchen.
“What?” she said, and it was Jane again.
“Nothing. How did your work go?”
The corners of her mouth and eyes tightened, and she said nothing. Hack nodded and went to work drying his feet. After a moment, she stepped into the small room and sat next to him on the backless bench. She parked herself on a wet spot, but she didn’t seem to notice. She handed him what she held.
He read the invitation three times because he didn’t know what to say. She hunched next to him, gone silent, right hand rubbing the back of her neck.
He said finally, “You expecting this?”
She shook her head once.
He sighed. He didn’t understand her nonverbal place. He thought of it as dark mud into which she lowered herself until only her eyes showed, like a crocodile.
“Do you want to go?”
She shrugged.
“Okay.” He was cold, he was tired, and he could tell he would be putting the groceries away by himself. He handed the invitation back, stood, put his hand gently on the top of her head. “Let me know if you want to talk about it.” He went into the kitchen and left her with Kenton in her lap.
- - -
By Monday morning the card was grubby from being turned over and over in her restless hands. Her husband was being patient. Her son had ended Sunday evening by saying, “God, Mom, take a Valium!” and grumping upstairs to bed.
It was early, the light like lemon juice, when she dressed quietly, left Hack sleeping, tiptoed down the creaky hall past Teddy’s closed door, and took herself downstairs. She made a pot of coffee and a half-sandwich from the remains of last night’s chicken. Clyde the cat pushed in through the back door flap and rowled at her, squeezing between her ankles as she opened a pouch of cat food and put it in his dish. He sniffed it and gave her a Queen Victoria look.
“I know it’s packet drool,” she said. “You’re a cat, Clyde, this is your life.”
I’d like chicken better, he told her in cat-blink code.
“I’m sure you would,” she said, and ate the last two bites while he watched. Then she took her cup of coffee out to her small studio off the mud room.
She and Hack had stretched to buy this house: Teddy was barely walking, and Hack was still waiting for his first promotion at the paper. But she’d seen the bright wanting in his face when they walked through. Then she had stood in the southern light of the back porch and felt the possibility of refuge: when Hack stepped out beside her and said, “Wow, art light,” she loved him for taking as much joy in that as he had in the upstairs rear bedroom that would become the office he’d always wanted. That quickly, it was impossible to imagine life in some other house, with no room for the parts of herself she had put away when Teddy was born.
Joe Newlin helped make the studio that summer. For two weeks, the three of them spent their days in each other’s pockets: coffee, lunch on the fly, dinner at the kitchen table with the sawdust hastily wiped onto the floor. Hamburgers or deli or Chinese takeout washed down with wine in water glasses. Teddy wobbling in and out of the danger zone until Jane remembered to unpack the baby gate. Building a room and a friendship.
She felt closest to Joe then, amid the laughter and upheaval. In daily life he had become more Hack’s friend. That was how it turned out sometimes. Hack and Joe saw each other at work, and Joe’s daughter and Teddy had grown up friends, although Tess was older, off to college in the fall: given these days to silence and speculative stares, as if watching the slow opening of a door. She reminded Jane of Sara’s freshman and sophomore years at Kansas University. Topeka was the world away, and Sara was an explorer who returned home increasingly reluctantly, with eyes like miles of one-way road, until she had finally gone the distance, all the way to New York City. Jane had been home from Kenton for only four or five days, and she and her parents were still getting used to each other again, when Sara phoned. I’m moving to New York with a Girlfriend. The capitalization in her voice was so clear that Jane understood instantly. Her parents did not, and Sara didn’t explain, which made her twice a coward just when Jane believed she might become, at last, an ally. She thought Sara would understand her helpless adrenaline love for Kenton, the bitter joy of becoming someone who didn’t live in Kansas anymore. And maybe Sara had: maybe that’s why she called instead of coming home.
Jane did not see her again until the wedding, and the prodigal return of one Manhattan to the other made her feel overshadowed, provincial, her marriage to Hack only a backdrop for the state visit and the re-establishment of diplomatic ties. Then Sara went again and Jane became someone’s wife, mother, neighbor, best friend, and found herself rooted in what she had always thought would be only the next stop on a life in motion, a dot on the map she was making of herself.
You are here, she thought, and stepped into the small space her husband and his friend had made for her.
The morning light puddled in the room, smelling of linseed paint and yesterday’s rain. She reached across her small desk to push open the windows along the southern wall and the shorter east wall. Scattered sketches riffled in the breeze.
— Ms. Francisco, our readers are always interested in the working process. Where do you get your ideas?
— That’s a great question, Jon.
— That’s a really lame question, Jon.
— There’s a guy runs an idea farm down near Skiddy, he brings me a box of whatever’s fresh every two weeks. Ha ha.
— Ideas are a dime a fucking dozen, Jon. Like something sparkly you see on the side of the road and think, well, maybe I could use that, so you pick it up and take it home. The smell of cut grass. Or a conversation in the next dressing room at Penney’s. Or watching a woman hit a child, the look on her face… And you think, great, here’s something for show-and-tell the next time someone asks what you’re working on. Except it’s not enough. You have to take the shiny thing into your own backwoods and drop it in the well, and then haul up a bucket of whatever gets stirred up down there. Otherwise it’s like…
Like the tide going out and out and out until there was nothing but sand as far as a person could see, and beyond the horizon the water gathering to throw itself back: a person would drown if they never learned to swim in their own deep places. And when you stood on the widening beach of yourself, all you could think to do was defrost the freezer or bleach the wine stain off the good tablecloth as if these acts were some kind of flotation device. And maybe you thought about going to New York or Chicago or even just Topeka, but you never did. You went to work and soccer games and the grocery store and sometimes the Italian restaurant with the good cannelloni, and in the moments between you watched the tide run out. And then you got mad and kicked your family out of the house and tried to find your way back to the well. And then you got scared.
And then what? She sighed and began to tidy her desk, setting pencils aside for sharpening, stacking the jumbled sketches. At least paper could be recycled, become new again. Recycled. She frowned. A woman. In a sleeveless housedress, faded green with small white flowers. Sweaty neck and armholes in spite of the small fan on the work table, which is really a flat hollow-core door painted white and nailed onto square legs. Jane breathed. Okay. An idea. Okay. Is there more? The woman sits in the left foreground, one-quarter profile, chair positioned so she can see her clothes dryer as it spins. Her face leads the viewer’s eye to the whirl of clothes and then beyond to… Something coming up now. Jane pulled. Looking out an open back door to the fence that is the boundary of her world, and beyond it a field and a small cemetery, and her face…
She set her coffee on the window sill and forgot it as she scattered the careful pile of pencils, looking for one still whole, as she turned a discarded sketch over and began to work.
- - -
Hack pushed the intercom button when the croissants were five minutes from ready and said, “Come eat.” He disconnected without waiting for an answer. After sixteen years, they had systems. If she wasn’t in the studio, she would have started breakfast when she heard water through the pipes, or the morning jolt of what they privately referred to as Teddy’s fuckahmusic. And when she was in the studio, he tried to give her as much time as possible. Especially today. He hoped the full pot of coffee on the warmer stand meant she was actually working, rather than still banging her head. She made such labor of beginnings. In these times he did all the right things, made sympathetic noises and stronger coffee, and walked carefully until she had moved into a stable rhythm with a new project, but he was more practical than empathetic. If he made it easy for her to get into the heart of a thing, she came back to him sooner.
Jane came into the kitchen with charcoal on her fingers and the vaguely startled expression she wore when she was on her way back from the art zone, as if she’d woken in a place she didn’t quite recognize. She stopped in the middle of the kitchen floor and blinked at him.
“You’re working,” he said.
She nodded, didn’t speak, but that was okay; this was the silence of coming up, not going down. Words were a channel that didn’t run to the deeps of her. There were things she talked about only in paint. The real beginning of their love affair wasn’t the first time they slept together, all those years ago. It was four hours before that, when she first showed him her work. Two dozen canvases in a makeshift rack. The rack charmed him with its amateur bravado, and he understood that she had built it herself because her work was that private. He took his time with the paintings while she stood behind him, and then began to fidget, and then backed into her small kitchen to open some wine, peering anxiously around the door jamb every so often. When he came to the last piece, he opened his mouth in one of those moments when something is so true and essential that it just comes out, as if language lived in the stomach instead of the brain. “I didn’t know you were so angry with your family,” he said, and when he turned he found her with huge hot eyes looking at the painting. Yes, she had said then, and again later when he put his hands on her.
She washed the charcoal away, poured a fresh cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table, breathing in the steam. Hack thumbed the intercom setting to Teddy’s room and leaned on the buzzer until he heard a faint Okay! seep through the bass-and-guitar stew upstairs. Then he pushed Teddy’s frozen waffle into the toaster and set out a plate, a fork, and the jar of strawberry jam.
“He should have more vegetables,” Jane said.
The overhead rumble of music died, and he enjoyed the heartbeat of silence and the smell of warming croissants; then the small thunder of Teddy on the stairs, talking before he was in the room. “Hi Dad, hi Mom. What’s food?” Knapsack on the floor by his chair. “Waffle, cool. Do we have juice?” Refrigerator door, juice carton, glass from the cupboard. “Mom, did you do art? Cool.” At the counter now, next to Hack and nearly as tall, jam jar open, jiggling the spoon and peering into the hot mouth of the toaster. “I’m going to the lake with Mark and Jared after school, Mark’s mom can take us but can you pick us up? Cool.” A creak as the old toaster hauled up the weight. Teddy pinched the waffle’s corner and slid it onto the plate, topped it with a giant helping of jam, licked the fork and kept it in his mouth as he eeled into his chair, plate in one hand and glass in the other. He ate his food in five bites. He was beautiful, a tall-stemmed sunflower of a boy. Big hands that were learning grace. His father’s smile, and his mother’s ancient eyes become young again, looking out instead of in. Hack stood at the counter with his hand in a potholder, counting down the seconds to the perfect croissants, and thought God, I love him.
“Is that all you’re eating?” Jane said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s not enough. Your father can make you some eggs.”
Hack raised an eyebrow at her, but she didn’t see, or didn’t choose to.
“I’m okay.”
“You’re growing. Eat something.”
“Mom, I’m fine.”
“Your mother thinks you should have more vegetables,” Hack said, with a sober face. Now she looked at him. He winked; she didn’t. Sometimes her sense of humor was the first thing to go.
“Strawberries are a vegetable,” Teddy said, and rose to carry his plate and glass to the sink. Jane sighed and used the hand that wasn’t wrapped around her coffee to rub the bridge of her nose, and Hack could see the moment when her jaw relaxed and her shoulders shook in a silent laugh. He opened the oven door, and was leaning into the hot breath of the croissants when she said, “I think you’re a mutant. The boys at my school ate their body weight for breakfast.”
His internal radar that constantly swept her and Teddy, that marked their quality of silence or the set of their shoulders, and knew where they were in crowds, gave a squawk. Carthage High was CH, and college was K-State. Only Kenton was my school. Something was coming up, like a bubble or a bruise.
“Not just football jocks. Little guys. Slide-rule-toting freshman four inches shorter than me with mountains of eggs and bacon.”
Hack could see Teddy about to ask what a slide rule was, and he caught his son’s eye and made the smallest no he could with his eyes and a tiny movement of his head.
“Two of those little boxes of cereal. An orange and a banana. Three glasses of milk. Hot chocolate. Their trays sagged in the middle.” And she was there. The smell of bacon and the wet hair of the boy ahead of her in line. The fluorescent light on the cafeteria’s white tile walls that turned the room into a tidal pool, a liquid bowl of bright creatures. Jane is becoming bright herself as she swims among them. She’s wearing her favorite shirt, the many-times-washed Brooks Brothers red pinstripe that she found at the Salvation Army in town. It looks like something a brother at Andover outgrew and passed along one summer on the Vineyard, and it puts an East Coast swing in her step. She takes her tray to the condiment table in the dining room and spreads just the right amount of peanut butter on her toast before she layers it with bacon, her own creation, an identity badge. Then the essential pause to chart the currents of the room. Amy Swann gives her a wave. There’s Nan Corning sitting near the enormous windows with the view of the river. Or she could be brave and share a table with Toby Mann, lick her teeth after each tiny bite in case he asks if she’s finished reading Heart of Darkness. She would die of embarrassment if she smiled at Toby Mann with peanut butter on her teeth—
Teddy’s cell phone snorted like a pig. It brought her right back.
Teddy opened the phone and said, “Speak,” and “Ah-ight,” and closed the phone and in the same breath, “Jared’s on the corner.” Just like he was every school morning right about now, but she didn’t say it. Teddy clearly loved his phone, even if he never actually had a conversation on it. Dude, where are you? Okay, 3:00. The phone was for planning and for keeping tabs, the equivalent of casual touch between these boys whose bodies were suddenly unsure of each other. But oh, the ring tones. She supposed the animals were better than last month’s horror movie shrieks, but the pig was already getting on her nerves. She imagined the Aggieville Pizza Hut packed with high school kids every Friday night, their pockets and purses barking and howling like some deranged zoo. She bet working weekends there was a special hell.
Teddy kissed her cheek, and she wondered for a moment which fifteen-year-old girls might watch her son today wondering about those lips. “Bye,” Teddy said. “Three o’clock, Dad, okay?” And he was gone out the kitchen door, leaving a huge quiet behind.
Jane took a bite of the croissant she found in front of her. She said, “I find it extraordinarily creepy to imagine some high-school girl wanting to have sex with my son.” Or some high-school boy, Sara said from the Vault of Family Voices in her brain.
“If he’s anything like I was, he imagines every high school girl wanting to have sex with him. Why do you think he’s started doing his own laundry?” He smiled at her expression. All this time, and she still didn’t know a damn thing about boys.
She went back to her croissant, pulling bits off and rubbing them across the top of the butter before she ate them. Don’t ever let anyone see me do this, she’d said often, but when she was in the art zone she did it without realizing. He’d never mentioned that at their last anniversary dinner she’d eaten most of her salad with her fingers. Harry’s was full of people in their best clothes, some of whom had watched her with a certain wistfulness behind their stolid social masks. He fell in love with her all over again. He let her think it was because of her excitement at finally landing a teaching gig at Art People, smiling as she waved a bit of green leaf lettuce for emphasis. But he had seen a woman two tables over notice the vinaigrette jump from Jane’s fingers, Jane behind it like a lightning strike, made momentarily angular by her own intensity. The woman stopped eating and watched. The silent man with her pincered a shrimp, chewed, swallowed, reached for the next, as if the world were no bigger than his plate. Eventually the woman put down her own fork with its carefully managed burden of greens and red onion slivers uneaten. She no longer seemed to see it. Hack withdrew his attention from her gently, like letting go of someone he’d been holding while she slept.
He thought now, as he had then, how harshly people punished themselves when they came face to face with something they could not bring themselves to be.
He ate his breakfast, and loved Jane for all the years of food on her hands, and waited until she sighed and said, “This Kenton thing.”
- - -
“You’re going,” Annie said, leaning forward, almost vibrating, rubbing her thumb across long fingernails. Any second now she would excite herself into an urgent click click click, a unconscious Morse of tell me, tell me, tell me.
Jane perched on the edge of the metal-and-vinyl visitor’s chair, straining away from the kinetic balance of binders and bulging files piled on the seat, topped by a ceramic dish of paper clips canted a millimeter away from a silver spill. Annie’s chair shouldered the work of an In basket so that Annie could make room on her desk for the important things: pithy sayings in calligraphy on index cards, some with ribbon frames; postcards of paintings by Monet and Munch, The Scream prominent over the computer monitor with the handwritten caption, Ask me about my day! Windup vampire toys and chattery teeth that hopped on little feet, invariably over the first available edge. Annie was often to be found on her knees, short-skirted bottom in the air, rescuing the plastic undead.
“Annie, I got so twisted up, I couldn’t sleep….Sunday night I sat in the kitchen and drank four mugs of instant hot chocolate with little marshmallows. I know, it’s disgusting, but….it reminded me of school. The whole time I was remembering. It was —”
Click click. Annie’s eager face. “I knew something was going on. Are you going? You have to go. Tell me you’re going.”
Jane bit her lip.
Annie squeezed her eyes small and puffed out her cheeks like a giant fish. It was an expression that said Oops, I was bad but please forgive me because I’m so cute. It had in fact been cute the first time, and perhaps even the first hundred. She said, “I did it again. I’m sorry. Finish your story.”
But Jane no longer wanted to talk about cradling her cocoa while the cat prowled the dark kitchen and then, satisfied that the corners and cracks were empty, came onto the table, butted his head against her cheek, cleaned his paws and ears, and tumbled warm and heavy into sleep against her arm. How it would be easy to say it was so quiet, but only because the voices and machine rumblings of everyday had given way to the subtler soundtrack of deep night: the scurrying of small creatures, the whirring of large wings, the vertebral creaking of the house that seemed more awake now that its people were asleep. How the firehose of memory stripped her of family, expertise, adulthood, until she was once again Jane Francisco arriving at Kenton with a single suitcase and a heart so full of fear and longing that her chest ached for days. How in the shelter of her shadowed kitchen, with the cat’s heartbeat against her skin, she had cried slow cold tears that she couldn’t really explain. She wasn’t going to tell Annie about any of it, Annie who could not listen well enough to hear the heart of a matter.
“I’m going,” Jane said.
“Girlfriend!” Annie raised her hand and smacked the Cowbell of Triumph that hung on a string of crystals from the rectangular light housing on the ceiling overhead. People in the office looked up at the clank. Jane thought, I will kill you now.
Carolyn Diamond came out of her office toward Annie’s desk in a welter of batiked fabric and too much hair. She reminded Jane of a ceremonial arrow, overburdened by decoration, unable to fly true.
“The Chamber of Commerce contract?” she said, her voice bright and angular.
“Nope,” Annie said. “You know as well as I do it’ll be a miracle if Harve Johnson lets us anywhere near that job, unless you fire me.” She made the fish face.
“If I’d known it was that easy, I’d have done it a long time ago,” Carolyn said, and smiled with no teeth showing. But it didn’t worry Jane. Carolyn would rather pee down her own leg in public than lose Annie. For one thing, it would be too much like change.
It didn’t seem to worry Annie, either. “You just let me know when to pack my desk, Carrie,” she said, with an offhand wave and a peek up from lowered eyes to watch the other woman’s jaw tighten at being nicknamed.
That’s rude, you know, Jane had said once.
I sure diminuated the shit out of her, didn’t I?
Jane wanted to leave Annie’s cubicle while her night in the kitchen was still only hers, and before the bloodletting began in earnest. But Carolyn blocked the cubicle opening and there was nowhere for Jane to go that didn’t involve breaking some balance.
“What are we celebrating?” Carolyn said.
Don’t don’t don’t Jane thought as Annie said, “Jane’s going to a reunion at her snottypants east coast boarding school.”
“Well, how nice,” Carolyn said.
Jane stood up fast and forward, startling Carolyn out of her way. Behind her, a waterfall of paper clips began. “I have to get back to work,” she said. She heard them talking in low voices as she walked around the corner to her own cubicle at the end of the row, Carolyn saying, I didn’t know she went to boarding school as if she were talking about Monaco or the moon, and Annie saying It was only for a year as if Jane had gone nowhere at all.
Carolyn watched Jane’s back until she was out of sight. “You’ll have to pick those up,” she told Annie. “They’ll clog the vacuum and I’ll get complaints from the cleaning service.”
“Whatever,” Annie said. And then, more quietly, “Look, Carolyn… Give her the time off, okay? I’ll pony up some of mine if she doesn’t have enough. It’s important to her.”
Carolyn nodded. As she left, Annie was lowering herself to her knees, sighing and tugging at her skirt.
- - -
Jane spent the three hours until lunchtime trying to focus on her priority project, a spectrum of customized student and instructor materials for Simons Farm Equipment — Diamond Business Resources’ Gold Series training, serious and expensive, for all employees of the corporate office in Manhattan and the fourteen company-owned retail outlets around the state. There was a possibility of a second contract to offer training to sales representatives at key distribution accounts, if the employee sessions went well. Diamond would conduct all the video-based training, as well as a full-day train-the-trainer workshop for the company’s Human Resources team. The Gold Series included ADA, EEOC, and OSHA regulations along with a variety of cover-your-ass topics: employee evaluation procedures, diversity in the workplace, and the one Jane was working on today, to which, given the client, Annie had taken to referring as Sexual Harassment and Ewe.
Most of the customization was routine, and Jane did it all –- design, illustration, and typesetting. Today’s checklist included a global search-and-replace of the client’s name, personalizing the “Message From the President” at the beginning of each workbook, and dropping in the industry-appropriate federal and state regulations provided by Jim Westrick, the regulatory compliance officer. She also needed to create a design template that ensured consistency in page layout, fonts, illustrations, and color palette. Usually, that was where she found her fun, and she knew that Carolyn and Annie appreciated her flair for design elements that appealed to the client employee median psychographic. But today she couldn’t seem to make a single interesting choice, and one more line drawing of a rowcrop cultivator would surely make her insane. Why was she spilling an drop of talent, an ounce of artistic energy, into this sandbox of a job? People hated this kind of training. They would sit for it because they had to, but none of them would ever again open this manual and appreciate the user-friendly layout or the visual through-line that subtly supported key aspects of the text.
Her touch on the keyboard and mouse became more rough. She began letting her right ring finger rest on the delete key, since she found herself using it so often. Farm equipment was stupid. When a co-worker appeared at the entrance to her cubicle, Jane said, “What?” in a way that made the other woman shift uneasily.
“Um,” she answered, “I heard some news, I was just curious…”
Oh, here we go, Jane thought.
- - -
Usually she and Annie ate lunch together in the breakroom with Dr. Phil for company on the small color television that Carolyn had brought in more than ten years ago for the Space Shuttle liftoff, and never got around to taking home. That poor teacher, Jane had thought that day: heart pounding, eyes bright, the mind leaping up and up so that when the trouble begins it is the body that understands it first. Jane had cried, imagining the enormous shuddering, the lightning fear, a last bright hot moment. She learned later it had instead been darkness and the long fall, eating their death cold all the way down to the sea.
She didn’t know why she was thinking about it now, but she didn’t want to be in that room with the buzzing fluorescent lights, the small stained sink and sour sponge, the microwave whirl of package soup and diet meals and Jim Westrick’s inevitable re-warmed pizza. And that television.
She called Del. “Hi, do you want to have lunch?”
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll meet you at CoCo’s.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
She pulled on her jacket as she left by the side door in a way that wasn’t really sneaking, just a little hunched. She cut across the parking lot of the realtor next door with her hands in her pockets and her collar up, then fast-walked over to Poyntz Avenue and into City Park. Only then did she slow.
Johnny Kaw beamed at her, his concrete and plaster face full of Kansas pride. It pleased her to live in a town that was guarded by a thirty-foot-tall statue of a wheat farmer in giant work boots. She liked to see Johnny surrounded by admiring tourists; it made the world seem warmer when the small suns of their smiles shone up at him, when they so clearly found him bold and cheerful and dear. But there were also those whose faces twisted around their mouths, who managed to make Oh my God! mean Are they serious?, who wondered out loud if he was anatomically correct. Manhattan, New York people.
Like me, said Sara from the Vault.
If the shoe fits, Jane thought, and walked on feeling obscurely cheered.
She headed north, brown cloth jacket held closed by the angle of her pocketed hands, brown hair fluttering in the damp breeze, face upturned to the western sky where clouds looked ready to rumble. She felt at home in these amiable, watery springs. As a sun-browned three-year-old she had loved to wobble into the clothesline surf of cotton bedding still wet from her mother’s washing machine, chortling while the wind snapped the sheet corners and bellied the cloth to spread like cream over her face and outstretched hands. The prairie toddler grew into a lean farmhouse child with eyes of turned earth, a rawboned far-seeing girl with sky-sized dreams, and then, without warning, a university-town woman of medium height, a little heavy in the hips, fluent in paint, a life narrow and deep like a core sample of soil and rock. And sometimes the shoes of her life fit well, and sometimes they didn’t, but she was wearing them.
In the ten minutes it took her to cross the park, she let herself drift through the gathering gray that carried the faint sugar smell of early-blooming roses, past lawns and trees and young plants in a thousand shades of green. By the time she crossed Fremont Street into Aggieville, her shoulders were no longer hunched around her ears, and she thought she might be able to eat lunch after all.
She found Del at a table at CoCoBolos. In the single patch of sunlight, of course. He looked as if she’d come upon him at the golden moment of waiting, adrenaline settled from his own journey here, territory staked, not yet restless at being alone. His plain, pale face was relaxed around the eyes and mouth, his hands open and still. She realized with a pang that it was a luxury to see him without an audience; and even as she thought it, he saw her, and stood, and changed. “Jane,” he said, in his public voice, as if bestowing upon her the perfect name that he had just discovered. He opened his arms and she stepped his warm and impersonal embrace, as if an oak tree drew her out of a cold rain into the hard shelter of its heart.
A waiter brought an enormous glass of milk to the table. “Here you are, Father Del.”
Jane could feel Del’s shoulders shift as he turned his neck, the subtle vibrations of muscles moving in his face. He would be smiling, because that was what he did. “Thank you,” he said, “That looks great.”
Then he put his hands on her shoulders and set her back from him. “This is such a treat. I’m glad to see you.” He stopped and his eyes narrowed, and Jane felt the sting of his professional assessment, so quick that a parishioner in pain or a student with a private burden perhaps would not have seen it, would be aware only that somehow Father Del always knew the right thing to say.
“Sit,” he said, canting a chair for her. “Let’s get you some food and you can tell me how you’ve been. You want some milk?”
“No,” she said, in the old way that meant Milk is disgusting and you are evil and insane. They smiled together, and Jane bent her head to the menu.
Del waited. They had surely been here a hundred times. She would read the entire menu as if she’d never seen it before, perhaps say I should try something new, mutter about her weight, unconsciously rub her right thigh, agonize over the black-and-white pizza, and then order the half-size tostada salad with chicken. A familiar, comfortable ritual.
He drank his milk, at ease in the silence, conscious of being watched by Deanne Funderberk two tables over. She was lunching with a new woman in the congregation, what was her name? She attended service for the first time two Sundays ago, clothes well-kept but not new, strong perfume with a patchouli note, smelly…Mellie Garner. He imagined their low-voiced conversation between forkfuls of pasta.
- Father Del seems like a wonderful priest.
- Really wonderful. He’s practically a legend here.
- The other week, Paul and I introduced ourselves in the reception line and told him that we were new members, the way you do, and he took my hand and said, “Settling into a new place can be a challenge. You just let me know how I can help.” We said on the way home that he really seemed caring.
- He is really caring.
- It’s nice to see that he gets out into the community.
- He says it’s important to stay connected.
- Is that a relative with him?
- No. (A quick shake of the head.) No, not that either… that’s Jane Harris. She and Father Del were best friends growing up.
- How nice.
Another bite of pasta as an excuse for silence, while in the hot dark unacknowledged spaces Melanie Garner was thinking I wish he would hug me like that, not knowing that on Sunday he would, as he did any woman or man from whom he felt tacit permission; and that she would feel not the frisson of an unattainable body, the small wickedness of her breasts against a holy man, but rather the knowledge, like a bell tone deep within her, of love and responsibility and clarity; and she would step back and begin to understand that Del was the staircase she could climb to reach those things within herself.
“Can I take your order?” the waiter said.
“Ready?” Del said to Jane, who looked up as if surprised, and then scanned the room as if she’d never been in it before.
Aha. “Are you working on a new piece?” he said.
She nodded. So did he. “Do you want the tostada salad with chicken?”
Another nod.
“Half size,” Del told the waiter, “and the barbeque shrimp po’ boy for me.”
The waiter said to Jane, “Can I bring you something to drink?”
“Water’s fine,” she said after a beat.
“She’d really rather have milk,” Del said, as if sharing a great secret, before his grin got away from him.
“Milk is gross,” Jane said, sounding so like Teddy that Del wondered again what it must be like to have a child. They all laughed, and the waiter left the table feeling better than he had since he’d made such an fool of himself in statistics class yesterday. He’s here, he would tell a phone caller in just another minute. Yes, I think so. Okay. You want chicken or beef with that? Sure, I’ll let him know. And then he would add, inexplicably, He’s a really cool guy, and hang up blushing without getting the caller’s name.
Jane settled more squarely into her chair. “Sorry about that. I was lusting after the black-and-white pizza and made this connection about my new piece.”
“Do you need to write it down? I have a pen.” He patted the empty chest pocket of his pepper-red shirt. “Somewhere.” He reached his right hand behind him to the jacket hanging on the back of the chair.
“It’s fine. It’s here.” She made a cup of her hand and put it to the side of her head. “If it’s just an idea…” She frowned. She wished she was better with words. “If it’s words, then I have to write them down. But it’s like the piece and I are always talking in the back of my brain, and sometimes it says, Oh, by the way, look at this… If it actually shows me something, then…” She stopped, made again the gesture that bucketed it in her brain. “Does that make sense?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “The pizza connection is a little unclear.”
“I was thinking about how good the black-and-white pizza would be, and the painting showed me how I could use black and white all through. So I had to make sure I looked at everything carefully. Sometimes I only get one chance.”
“I was right,” Del said. “I don’t understand.”
“Most people don’t.”
“Excuse me,” the waiter said, pausing in front of their table with a tray of someone else’s food. “There was a call, someone’s on their way here to see you.”
Del looked puzzled. “Did they give a name?”
The waiter looked down for a moment, working his jaw. “Umm, I forgot to ask. I’m sorry, Father.”
“It’s fine. Thanks for the billboard.”
Billboard, the waiter thought as he wound his way through the tables, that is so cool.
“Billboard?” Jane said. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea. I was so busy wondering who needs to track me down that I got my words mixed up. I don’t know why they didn’t just have Laura page me.”
“I hope you have time to eat.”
“Me, too.” He felt already wistful for the sandwich. It was his favorite, but it was so messy that he only ate it with close friends. He’d worn this shirt especially to hide the evidence. And who knew when lunch with Jane would come around again? Which prompted him.
“So,” he said.
She sighed.
He waited while she measured the depths of her water glass, adjusted her napkin to an invisible meridian. Then she reached to the floor for her bag and began to root through it. He set himself to patience. He could sit all afternoon if it took her that long to find the words. There were times he had.
Silence. Attention without intrusion. Some scrap of genuine love for anyone God saw fit to place in the world. These were the responsibilities of ministry, and also the terror and joy. In the moments of struggle to bring some part of themselves into light, people showed their layers, the striations that choice and chance laid on their souls. The glossy rationale and revision, the fears and yearning that bubbled underneath. The myriad motivations that drove a person to dive down into those deeps and do the searing work that waited there: despair, desperation, determination. Love. It had become part of his everyday experience to stand in awe of people and their possibilities. Human fear and courage touched him in a place that even God did not reach so directly.
Jane said, “I got a twentieth reunion invitation to Kenton. From Amy Swann.” She handed him the card, limp from its thousand foldings.
Oh, he thought, my poor Jane.
“I’m going. At least, I think I’m going. I change my mind every ten minutes.”
“I’ll bet it’s brought up some things.”
She nodded slowly, head bent, and when she raised it, he saw that she was only one deep breath from tears. I will not cry with Deanne Funderberk in the room, she thought, and pressed her lips together while she scratched geometric designs into her napkin with the edge of her fingernail.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I’m dying to talk about it,” she said. “And you’re the only person who really understands. You know what it meant…”
He nodded.
“Hack’s been great. Wonderful. But….” She turned up the hand that had been tracing mazes, opened her fingers. But. Long, thin fingers, brown with sun, mottled with age and use and years of paint and solvents. Rough hands, farm hands, mother’s hands, artist’s hands. The hands that had clutched his shoulders all those years ago, more than half their lives, while she hid her head in his awkward shoulder and broke into liquid pieces. He’d never seen anyone weep like that. He had never seen anyone take a loss so much to heart.
“But he doesn’t really get it,” she went on. “He’s never wanted to be anywhere but here. And I think he imagines Kenton as some kind of jumped-up summer camp for rich kids. Plus he still gets a little nervous about Amy Swann.”
Del raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve been stewing about it all week. And I decided to talk to Annie about it today, but she was in Terminator mode…”
“Ah,” Del said.
“Exactly. She rang that damned cowbell. And she told Carolyn. And now everyone knows. They’re already asking me about it. You know what people are like. ‘Wow, you went to boarding school?’” As she spoke, she became the office mate, curious and avid, for whom boarding school was right out there with psychic fairs or parties where women took turns looking at their cervix with a mirror.
“What did you say?”
What could she say? All of the choices were bad. Say yes and shoulder the lead weight of disapproval disguised as questions: Did your parents make you go? Don’t you think that’s a little young to leave home? I’ll bet you were the first Kansas farm girl those people ever met. Tell the truth and find herself back in Carthage High, making herself alien all over again: I went and the last thing in the world I want is to tell you about it because it’s special, it’s precious, and all you want is to tap your Strawberry Seduction fingernails on it once or twice to see if it cracks, you don’t give a shit about how it felt to have my heart carved out when they took it away from me. Or say no, or yes but it was no big deal, give it up before they could chip away at it with their careless callous curiosity. But she hadn’t given it up to her parents or Hack or even her work, and she damn sure wasn’t giving it up to Sally Strassmore at the office.
“I said, ‘Everybody’s got a past,’ and then I hid in the bathroom. And I was so pissed that I just left Annie waiting in the break room. Screw her.”
Del said, “Trust me, it doesn’t help.”
Jane’s mouth hung open until she put her hand over it, and began to giggle. “I can’t believe you said that. What if someone heard you?”
“I’ll tell them everybody’s got a past.”
They were both quiet.
“Anyway,” she said, “I was wondering…. Maybe I could come for dinner soon, bring the yearbook…I don’t know, it sounds dumb now.”
“How about Tuesday? I’ll make chicken and cornbread.”
“Yum.”
“Bring the yearbook. You only ever showed it to me that one time. I’d love to see Kenton again.”
“So would I,” she said, and smiled with such well-ordered sadness that he would have reached his hand across to hers, but a shadow fell across the table and something large and soft nudged him, knocking his arm and putting the milk at risk.
“Hi, kids,” Annie said. “Thanks for waiting.”
Everyone looked at each other. Annie shifted her hip from Del’s shoulder. “Didn’t that sweet young man tell you I was on my way?”
“He didn’t get your name,” Del said.
“Hah!” Raucous and abrupt, a crow’s laugh. “Too busy crushing on you to pay attention to the details.” Then, to Jane, “He probably doesn’t even know you’re at the table. Hope he gets your order right.”
“Annie,” Del said.
“He will,” Jane said. “Del ordered for me.”
“Hah!” Then Annie held out a green tissue twist of gerber daisies to Jane, and they took were all still in a single breath of silence, resolving themselves without words. Del looking to Jane: Are you okay? Annie somehow smaller than she had been, softer: I really am sorry about before, I get it if you’re still mad. Jane putting her chin in her hand and shaking her head as if to say What can you do? and then waving to the empty space beside her.
Annie thumped her bottom into the chair. “I love you guys,” she said, and kissed Jane’s cheekbone. Jane took the flowers. Del thought, Friends have their own communion.
“Our lunch is coming,” Jane said, “I hope you still love us when we’re eating without you.”
The waiter appeared with a great weight of food, which turned out to include a giant burrito and a Mountain Dew for Annie. “You’re an angel,” she said. And, to Jane, “You can always trust me to take care of myself in matters of lunch.”
“What was I thinking?” Jane said.
“I don’t know. Del, what are you eating?”
“It’s a barbeque shrimp po’ boy.”
“That’s gross,” Annie said.
“With milk,” Jane said.
“I’m not watching you eat that,” Annie said.
“Can I bring you anything else right now?” the waiter said.
“A screen for him.”
“Pray for this woman,” Del said. “I think we’re fine, thank you.” The waiter went away with a smile.
They made preparatory movement of napkins and forks and salt. Del peered at Annie’s plate. “Is that chicken or steak?”
“Yes,” Annie said, and took a large happy bite.
They ate in a small bell of silence while lunchtime burbled around them: the tinkatink of forks on plate, the clank of cups on saucers, the ceramic thunder of dirty dishes in bus trays as the host readied a table for a waiting pair of businessmen. People bustled. Del spattered sauce onto his shirt. Jane thought she probably would have enjoyed the black-and-white pizza. Maybe next time.
“So, since you’re still speaking to me, speak to me of Kenton,” Annie said. “When do you leave?”
“It starts that Friday evening, but I want to get there early. Get settled in, maybe see someone for lunch. I don’t know.” Del bent his head to negotiate a bite of his sandwich; he might as well have said, I’m not looking at you now. Annie had known them since college, but she didn’t know everything. She didn’t know about Amy Swann.
“But I’m thinking about maybe flying out Wednesday. Maybe to New York.”
“Really?” said Annie.
“Sara?” said Del.
“Maybe,” Jane said. “I’m thinking about it.” Although what she was mostly doing was feeling about it. She had yearned so fiercely for Sara in the interminable dusty days of Carthage High, where every hallway look branded her and every sight of the tall grass prairie through a classroom window was a body blow. Right now Sara’s on Fifth Avenue in her duster and sunglasses and people think she’s someone famous. She’s with two friends in a real New York deli ordering roast beef and Russian dressing on pumpernickel and water from Europe in a bottle. She’s drinking martinis with a stockbroker or an actor or a political refugee. Jane sometimes let herself write the begging letters, but she always tore them up, because she understood how things worked. Sara had escaped and she wasn’t coming back, not even for a sister.
And so Jane was left alone with a hot wind twisting in her. She had tried to help herself. She took a job at Beth’s Cafe. She refused a new dress for the homecoming dance. Can I have the money? she said, but when her parents asked What for? she could only shrug. How could she say They’ll have to take me back if we can pay. Then her father brought home a second mortgage and the keys to the Blue Sky Bar and Grill, and her hope withered. Winter stubbled the fields and the implacable press of everyday life shortened her vision until she could no longer see anything beyond a report on the Trail of Tears and next week’s biology test. Kenton became memory, and her inner weather whirled into thunder and lightning. Jane Francisco, daughter of storms.
One spring night she had blown herself out of the house with her own fury, the shouted words echoing underneath the slammed screen door, and taken her father’s truck out to the local swimming hole. She turned the radio up loud and bellowed ‘Free Bird’ into the night while she took all the curves too fast. It was late; the good children of Carthage were tucked up with television in the living room and Jesus on the wall, while the Francisco girl shucked her sneakers and jeans and shivered her way into the water. She swam out into the middle and put head up to the sky. So many stars. So many places no one would ever go, especially a dime-a-dozen Kansas kid whose daddy ran a bar, whose momma daily stitched her own mouth into a line of disapproval as straight as the seams she sewed on the alterations and fittings she did to make extra money. As many stars as New York City lights on taxis, in subway cars and apartment windows, in the eyes of people with somewhere to go. And the girl who wanted to go with them could only tread water in the heartland that was like living on the moon, that held you in its vacuum until your legs were tired, and it was hard to breathe, and you wondered if it would be better to stop hanging on so hard to something that could never be, if it would be better to just let go.
And then she saw herself, weeping to the stars, her legs weakening, about to go down. What an asshole. She smeared a wet hand across her wet nose, spreading snot, and told herself to go home and grow up and get the hell out of Carthage.
Her mother referred to it now as the Bad Time. Jane had rarely referred to it at all except in paint, until the day Hack Harris came into her apartment and saw more than she expected. And here was another unexpected thing: a sister who had become an icon of angry desire, of twisted pride. What did it mean when the one who got away was there in the airport to meet you, to give you a guided tour of the escape you didn’t get?
“Wow,” Annie said. “New York. Need someone to carry your bags?”
Jane put a hand on Annie’s arm. “Thanks, kiddo,” she said. “Sometimes a girl has to go it alone.”
“Hack’s not going?” Del said.
Jane shook her head, and began to pick the chicken out of its bodyguards of greens. “I talked to Carolyn,” she said. “I’m going to do that painting for her.”
“Keyser Soze?”
“Mmm.”
“You’re making a picture of a dog.”
“I’m making a plane ticket and a reasonable size bar tab, which I’m sure I will need.”
“She’s paying that much?”
“Didn’t even flinch.”
“People are strange,” Annie said, as if it were still a surprise.
“So I guess dog is your co-pilot,” Del said.
Jane and Annie looked at each other. “He made a priest joke!” Annie said. “He’s so sexy when he does that.”
“He’s a regular jokepot.”
“But holy,” Del said.
“Holy fuck, Batman.”
Now it was Del’s turn to cover his mouth and try not to snort milk out his nose. “I should know better than to play this game with you,” he told Annie, and they all laughed, and then it was time to pile money on the table and send the waiter off with a generous tip. They were laughing again as they gathered their jackets and Jane’s flowers, and Melanie Garner thought, They look so happy. Here she was, effectively demoted with her husband to a state she’d only ever flown over, and the closest current thing she had to a friend was this woman across the table, with the very bad highlighting job and the idea that going to lunch meant that everyone paid exactly for what they had eaten. Deanne was calculating the dollars and cents of pasta primavera and lemonade versus pesto alfredo and a slice of cheesecake that they had shared “about sixty-forty,” Deanne was saying, “so that would be…”
“Hello, Father,” Melanie said.
“Hello, Melanie, Deanne. How nice to see you. I hope you’re enjoying your lunch.”
“Yes, thank you, Father,” Melanie said, and blushed.
“How do you do that?” Annie said when they were out on the corner. “You’re not even that good-looking.”
“God has given me power over women,” he said.
“Just another reason to be pissed at him,” Annie said, with some asperity. “But you, I love.” She hugged him.
“Bye, heathen,” he said.
“See you soon, I hope. Back to the training mines, kiddo,” she told Jane, and stepped back to give them a more private goodbye.
“You okay?” he said.
“Better. Thanks.”
He nodded, and blessed them secretly, as he always did. He prayed that his friends might be saved. Jane, from the riptides of her artesian soul; Annie, from her bright emptiness.
8 Responses to “Drown”
Got something to say?
Thanks for reading. If one day there’s more, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, feel free to comment.
It passes my test for narrative fiction. I want to know what happens!The best hook is past love and unfinished business. I can’t believe anybody thought Jane was whining. She’s spent all this time making her current life, but is that ever all there is? Any way, I like it.
Well there’s definitely an amazing amount of stuff in that story that connects me to myself. Wow.
Holy Plan B.
Wow, again. Lots of things that touched me in there.
I’m extraordinarily curious what you will have Jane do, how things will turn out for her in the end. I can think of a couple (most) likely scenarios that I’d maybe just as soon not read about, but of course, I would read it. Would have to. Too close to home maybe. All of the possibilities that come to mind which seem actually possible come with difficulties and hardships — in my mind, but what life doesn’t? I think I’d be riveted to the book no matter what, but hate it if the ending didn’t turn out in a way I’d like. But maybe you could make me see it in a way that I could learn to like it.
Sounds like there is no telling what you are going to do anyway - ghost story?
I can see where the ‘in-dwelling’ and ‘whiny’ (not really whiny so far) comments come from, but I haven’t seen enough of her to make up my mind yet. Anyway, some people like ‘in-dwelling’ novels, don’t they?
I think it has the potential to be a life-changing kind of book, if you ever decide to go back to it.
All I can say is — Thanks for sharing that, and…. more please.
When you say mainstream fiction, what do you mean? And am I the only one who hears darkness in the title?
I mean not genre. And yes, “drown” is a loaded word, very evocative. That’s why I used it. Lots of lovely metaphor potential.
Someone above said something about the ending turning out all right? I turned the word “Drown” all around in my head but I can’t see how it could turn out all right?
The dialogue and interplay amongst the three friends and the side play from the watcher’s point of view felt like the start of something.
Actually what I said was, ‘in a way I’d like.’ That could mean anything.
Clearly the drown word is very evocative.
I have no doubt ’something’ will happen. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see where the writer decides to take it/us.
I turned the word “Drown” all around in my head but I can’t see how it could turn out all right.
The ending hasn’t been written yet, so we don’t know how it turns out. Although I have my notions. I always start a work with an emotional destination in mind — I always know how the character should feel at the end, even if I’m not sure what the actual ending event is.
I guess it depends on what “all right” means to you. To me, it means that by the end of the book Jane has become more herself rather than less.
Drown includes an accident, an actual drowning, that plays a strong role in the book. Very interesting that all three novels I’ve worked on so far have included this emphasis on the accidental. It’s the accident, and Jane’s response to it, that may take the story across the “mainstream” line into speculative fiction. Or maybe not.
The friendship between Jane, Annie and Del is important, and whether it will survive is a big part of the story. Whether any of Jane’s relationships will survive the changes that are coming to her.
But I’m particularly focused on the friendship because that so often gets short shrift in fiction (and movies and TV and music…) We focus on lovers, spouses and family as if those relationships were intrinsically more powerful and meaningful than friendship. But friendship isn’t lesser, it’s just very different, and I would like to see writers explore it more. I do it myself in many of the stories in Dangerous Space, and it’s also one of the primary concerns of Drown.