Part 15 (1/2)

”But it's the Yes that matters,” Cal said. ”It's the Yes she'll come back to in the end.”

I lifted my head and squinted out at the bright blue plate of the sea--a bright blue plate with a dirty rim. A big round gray rock, like the upper half of an egg, poked out of the water about a mile from the stony headland.

”What was she going to kill him with? I forget.”

I hadn't forgotten. I remembered perfectly well, but I wanted to hear what Cal would say.

”Morphia powders.”

”Do you suppose they have morphia powders in America?”

Cal considered a minute. Then he said, ”I wouldn't think so. They sound awfully old-fas.h.i.+oned.”

I rolled over onto my stomach and squinted at the view in the other direction, toward Lynn. A gla.s.sy haze rippled up from the fires in the grills and the heat on the road, and through the haze, as through a curtain of clear water, I could make out a smudgy skyline of gas tanks and factory stacks and derricks and bridges.

It looked one h.e.l.l of a mess.

I rolled onto my back again and made my voice casual. ”If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?”

Cal seemed pleased. ”I've often thought of that. I'd blow my brains out with a gun.”

I was disappointed. It was just like a man to do it with a gun. A fat chance I had of laying my hands on a gun. And even if I did, I wouldn't have a clue as to what part of me to shoot at.

I'd already read in the papers about people who'd tried to shoot themselves, only they ended up shooting an important nerve and getting paralyzed, or blasting their face off, but being saved, by surgeons and a sort of miracle, from dying outright.

The risks of a gun seemed great.

”What kind of gun?”

”My father's shotgun. He keeps it loaded. I'd just have to walk into his study one day and,” Cal pointed a finger to his temple and made a comical, screwed-up face, ”click!” He widened his pale gray eyes and looked at me.

”Does your father happen to live near Boston?” I asked idly.

”Nope. In Clacton-on-Sea. He's English.”

Jody and Mark ran up hand-in-hand, dripping and shaking off water drops like two loving puppies. I thought there would be too many people, so I stood up and pretended to yawn.

”I guess I'll go for a swim.”

Being with Jody and Mark and Cal was beginning to weigh on my nerves, like a dull wooden block on the strings of a piano. I was afraid that at any moment my control would snap, and I would start babbling about how I couldn't read and couldn't write and how I must be just about the only person who had stayed awake for a solid month without dropping dead of exhaustion.

A smoke seemed to be going up from my nerves like the smoke from the grills and the sun-saturated road. The whole landscape--beach and headland and sea and rock--quavered in front of my eyes like a stage backcloth.

I wondered at what point in s.p.a.ce the silly, sham blue of the sky turned black.

”You swim too, Cal.”

Jody gave Cal a playful little push.

”Ohhh.” Cal hid his face in the towel. ”It's too cold.”

I started to walk toward the water.

Somehow, in the broad, shadowless light of noon, the water looked amiable and welcoming.

I thought drowning must be the kindest way to die, and burning the worst. Some of those babies in the jars that Buddy Willard showed me had gills, he said. They went through a stage where they were just like fish.

A little, rubbishy wavelet, full of candy wrappers and orange peel and seaweed, folded over my foot.

I heard the sand thud behind me, and Cal came up.

”Let's swim to that rock out there.” I pointed at it.

”Are you crazy? That's a mile out.”

”What are you?” I said. ”Chicken?”

Cal took me by the elbow and jostled me into the water. When we were waist high, he pushed me under. I surfaced, splas.h.i.+ng, my eyes seared with salt. Underneath, the water was green and semi-opaque as a hunk of quartz.

I started to swim, a modified dogpaddle, keeping my face toward the rock. Cal did a slow crawl. After a while he put his head up and treaded water.

”Can't make it.” He was panting heavily.

”Okay. You go back.”

I thought I would swim out until I was too tired to swim back. As I paddled on, my heartbeat boomed like a dull motor ill my ears.

I am I am I am.

That morning I had tried to hang myself.

I had taken the silk cord of my mother's yellow bathrobe as soon as she left for work, and, in the amber shade of the bedroom, fas.h.i.+oned it into a knot that slipped up and down on itself. It took me a long time to do this, because I was poor at knots and had no idea how to make a proper one.

Then I hunted around for a place to attach the rope.

The trouble was, our house had the wrong kind of ceilings. The ceilings were low, white and smoothly plastered, without a light fixture or a wood beam in sight. I thought with longing of the house my grandmother had before she sold it to come and live with us, and then with my Aunt Libby.

My grandmother's house was built in the fine, nineteenth-century style, with lofty rooms and st.u.r.dy chandelier brackets and high closets with stout rails across them, and an attic where n.o.body ever went, full of trunks and parrot cages and dressmakers' dummies and overhead beams thick as a s.h.i.+p's timbers.

But it was an old house, and she'd sold it, and I didn't know anybody else with a house like that.

After a discouraging time of walking about with the silk cord dangling from my neck like a yellow cat's tail and finding no place to fasten it, I sat on the edge of my mother's bed and tried pulling the cord tight.

But each time I would get the cord so tight I could feel a rus.h.i.+ng in my ears and a flush of blood in my face, my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again.

Then I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash.

I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at all. And when people found out my mind had gone, as they would have to, sooner or later, in spite of my mother's guarded tongue, they would persuade her to put me into an asylum where I could be cured.

Only my case was incurable.