blindly on their own slow business. Turtles sailed past, heavy with majesty. Ocean creatures had no eyebrows, no mobile mouths, so each face was set forever in a single shape. Every dolphin smiled, every eel looked faintly angry, every seahorse seemed surprised to see me. They all had such blank, unjudging gazes, and the deeper blues beneath me felt like an infinity. The truth was in the water with us, but it didn’t matter; the sea could swallow anything.
In that beauty, so vast and varied, I felt my own smallness in the wide, wild world. It let me forget myself and yet be wholly present. It let me stop trying to die. If I hadn’t ever stepped off that first boat, truly, truly, I would not be breathing now.
My life on land got better, too, though it didn’t come like a lightning bolt. It was more like the turning of a long, slow tide. I practiced letting any thought about the past sink out of my brain, slide down my spine, and disappear into my own deeps. My history lived below my words, under my thoughts, even lower than my knowing, though it was still as much a part of me as the red-meat organs in my abdomen. I never thought about my liver, but it was always there; it did its silent, dirty work in the dark of me, necessary, unexcisable, but not a thing I thought about. Not ever.
Now when I saw certain news stories, or sometimes on Ash Wednesday, I’d remember it was there, but that was all. I never went down deep enough for words or images. Not even when I found myself inside an echo of my past, like the night that we told Maddy I was pregnant.
Davis was anxious about it. Maddy’d been an only child for thirteen-plus years. Still, she said the right things and smiled. I don’t think he saw the worry flash across her face.
Afterward I couldn’t sleep. I went down to the kitchen for hot tea, and there was Maddy. She was framed in the open door to the backyard, her feet still on the righteous side, touching the tiles. The rectangle of night I saw around her was teeming with regrets that could last her whole life long, and she was walking right out into it, fearless and young-stupid and so dear.
She looked over her shoulder with the caught face of a small animal, frozen in the center of the road. But I wasn’t headlights. I was only her Monster, who loved her so. I went to her, took her hand off the knob, closed the door. I could feel my worst things, sunk deep, yet still alive inside me. I wanted to dredge it all up, show her, and then ask, Do you see how high the stakes are, every minute? But she was just shy of fourteen. She had every wild young animal’s faith in its own immortality. The only thing my history had the power to change was the way that she saw me.
“Who are you meeting, girl-child?” I asked instead, quite stern.
“Just Shannon,” she said, and I believed her.
I said, “Go text her. Tell her you got busted and she better get her butt in bed or I will call her mother.”
“Are you going to tell Duddy?” she asked, nervous.
“Of course. I tell your father everything,” I said, and this was almost, almost true. “But I’ll also tell him you and I had a good talk and that you won’t do it again. Because you won’t, right?” She nodded, but she still looked worried, so I gave her a line from The Princess Bride, our favorite movie. “‘Buttercup doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time.’”
She grinned and kissed me, saying, “You are the best monster,” before running, light-footed, for the stairs.
I let the mass inside me sink and settle, unexamined. Just as I had three years ago, when Char came down with the flu while her husband was out of town. She had a fever over 102 even on Motrin, and she was sweaty and so shaky she could hardly stand. I moved into her house, minding teeny-tiny Ruby, keeping Char hydrated with juice and broth. When her fever finally broke, she grabbed my hand and said, “You’re my best friend. Isn’t that stupid to say out loud? We aren’t nine.”
I looked at our clasped hands, and I thought, Char, you have no idea what you are holding. The urge for confession was