Water by Julianne Carew

       vivek jena CC



​Water

   It was silent in the car for a long time.
  My mother gripped the steering wheel so tight that her knuckles were the color of bone. After a while I turned the radio on. She immediately turned it off.
   Right at that moment, my mother’s phone rang. We both looked at the caller I.D. Tessa Hebert. My grandmother. Within the span of a heartbeat, my entire body stiffened into a warning, my skin suddenly just a little bit too tight.
   My mother’s finger hovered over the call button.
   “Do you want me to answer?”
   I shook my head, no.
   “Are you sure?”
   “YES!” I yelled, loud, too loud, loud enough to drown out the ringing of the cell phone.
   She jumped. “Geez, okay. I was just asking.”
   Five minutes passed.
   The phone rang again.
   Tessa Hebert.
   My mother turned to look at me. “Do you mind if I get it?” On the window, raindrops bled into one another. It hadn’t rained in Southern California for over a year. The freeways were slick with oil. “What if it’s an emergency? She’s eighty years old, you know.”
   “Whatever.” My breath fogged up the surface in front of me, obscuring my image. “Just pretend like I’m not here.”
   My mother nodded and put a finger over her mouth.
   “Kim?” my grandmother’s voice echoed in the enclosed space. It was old and ragged. Even when she wasn’t speaking there was a wheezing sound that followed her voice in a rhythm.
   “Yeah,” my mother answered.
   “So I talked to Cindy.”
   “Okay…and?”
   “And she’s just hysterical, Kim. I mean, she’s beside herself. She just can’t believe that her son would do something like this. Something so—brutal.”
   My fingernails dug into my forearms so deeply that when I took off my clothes later that night, there were ten bleeding little half-moons.
   My mother kept staring at the screen on her phone. For a second she seemed to forget that she was driving. She slammed on the brakes as we met the fringes of rush-hour traffic.
   “Kim?” my grandmother yelled into the phone. “Kim? Are you still there?”
   “Yeah, yeah, mom—I’m here. I can’t really talk about this right now.”
   “You know what, Kim, what do you mean you can’t talk about it? You and Kathleen drop this bomb on everyone and then just leave, to go on vacation, while the rest of us are left here, not knowing what to think. You know, if this really is true then why didn’t Kat say something before—”
   “Mom, Kathleen’s in the car.”
   For the first time since my mother had answered, the line went silent.
   “Oh…hi Kat.”
   My whole body burned. My mouth opened and then closed, but no words came out.
   “I was just telling your mom,” my grandmother continued, “that everyone is wondering why you didn’t say anything sooner. You know, when it happened.”
   Sooner? What the hell did she expect me to say when I was seven or five or three and a half? 
   Hands?
   “I’ve already answered that question,” I said, my voice far-off, disconnected. It didn’t even sound like mine.
   “Yes, I know, because of Olivia. But you would have thought if the situation was that bad, someone would have noticed.”
   Unwanted images of a little girl screaming. That one time we were at Disneyland and I kept crying, hysterically telling my mother that my panties were wet. Or that one family dinner when I was nine where I was so spaced out my aunt had joked that I was drunk. Or when my mother walked in on me changing out of my Halloween costume and asked me why I had toilet paper wadded up in my underwear and I’d told her, I don’t know. Or when I first got drunk on Thanksgiving and kept asking everyone if I’d been raped.
   “And, you know, Nikki says she can’t even recall a time when Olivia’s been alone with him. Not that that changes what happened to Kathleen.”
   These images, of a self, dying slowly, one piece at a time, they rattled inside my head. They bounced around and around, faster.
   My mother could tell that I was becoming agitated. She saw my twitchy movements, my rigid spine.
   “It’s just that—”
   “Mom, I gotta go, Kat is—”
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   Without asking my mother, I opened her purse and took out the Costco-sized pill bottle I knew that she kept there.
   My mother glanced over at me.
   “I have a headache,” I said, ignoring the relief I saw on her face.
   Inside there was Tylenol, Motrin, Vicodin and Xanax. There was Ativan and Klonopin of all different colors and dosages. There was Prozac and Seroquel and Zoloft and half a dozen other things. I didn’t know all the names.
   That day, in the car, I took two Excedrin and I swallowed them dry. But I also took a handful of other pills. I palmed them and held them in my fist the rest of the way to my parent’s house. By the time we got there, the pills were sticky with sweat, some of them just a little bit melted. I immediately went to the bathroom and stashed the leftover pills in my purse. Then I licked the rainbow of smears on my palm to soak up whatever was left.
   Just then, my mother knocked on the door. I jumped even though it was locked.
   “Kat? Do you want to go to dinner before you leave?”
   I had been planning on hopping in my car and high-tailing it back to San Diego where I lived with a few other flight attendants. I hadn’t had a drink in five days (my mother thought I wasn’t drinking anymore, but in reality, I was just trying to cut back) and I hadn’t had a cigarette in even longer (an addiction which was a flat-out fucking secret.) I flushed the toilet I hadn’t used.
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   At dinner, I drank two and a half glasses of wine, daring my mother to stop me, but she didn’t.
   When I ordered the third, she asked me, “Are you sure you’re going to be able to drive?” and I nodded. What my mother didn’t know was that wine was the least of my worries. What she would have never guessed, was the two pills of what I thought was Vicodin I’d crushed and snorted in the bathroom.
   “Are you kidding me? With all this pasta I just ate? I’ll be totally fine.”
   My vision was starting to feel fuzzy. I blinked heavily and took my glasses out of my purse. I really only needed them for reading, but they made me feel safe, one more layer to my disguise.
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   On the way to San Diego, I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until I passed through Fontana. That was where my aunt lived, the one who was no longer speaking to me.
   Our last phone call had been short. Looking back, I hadn’t really said anything. My aunt had hung up on me before I’d had the chance.
   When I had last spoken to my aunt, I was twenty-one years old. The abuse had stopped five years earlier. Olivia was five years old. Johnny was forty-two. He had just moved in with his new girlfriend, who my aunt loved.
   Adrianna was normal. At least, she appeared to be normal, and this made it easier for my aunt to pretend that her son was normal, too.
   A few weeks earlier, at a family birthday party, I had heard Adrianna say to my aunt, “We would love to babysit Olivia one of these days.     
   Just to give Nikki a little bit of a break.”
   When I heard this, my whole body froze into a warning. No. Oh my God, just say no.
   But that’s not what my aunt said.
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   I kept thinking about Olivia. I thought about the last time I’d seen her. She was in her little black ballet outfit, with pink tights, her curly blonde hair in a messy bun with a giant, matching pink bow.
   I’d picked her up from dance class and taken her to lunch. She’d sat across from me in the booth and swung her little black high-top sneakers back and forth against the booth.
   “So, tell me about school,” I said to her, “I want to hear all about it.”
   Olivia went on and on about how jump rope was her favorite game to play at recess because she could jump forever, longer than anyone else on the playground, higher even than the numbers she knew how to count yet. And how she had two best friends, Amelia and Michael, and how they weren’t allowed to sit next to each other in class anymore because they couldn’t stop talking, and how Amelia had a brand-new baby sister named Reagan that her mother had brought in one day for show and tell.
   “I didn’t get to see her though,” Olivia said.
   “And why not?”
   Olivia looked to her right and then to her left, motioned for me to lean in closer to her.
   “Because I was sick. I didn’t even go to school that day.”
   “What’s wrong? Are you feeling better?”
   For a moment, Olivia looked me straight in the eye, our heads so close together our foreheads were almost touching.
   “I actually wasn’t really sick,” she whispered. “There was just something wrong, down there.” She pointed down to her crotch.
    I was going to ask Olivia more questions, but she started squirming in her seat with an embarrassed look on her face, like she was already afraid she’d said something she wasn’t supposed to.
   I quickly changed the subject, but when I dropped Olivia off I asked her mom what was going on.
   “Oh, she just had a little UTI again, no big deal.”
   My arms immediately sprouted goosebumps. “So you mean, this has happened before?”
   “Oh yeah,” Nikki waved the question off with her hand, “the doctor thinks it’s from taking too many baths.”
   “That’s what they said about Jon Benet Ramsey too, you know, until after she died.”
   Nikki looked up from her phone for the first time throughout our entire conversation. “Geez Kat, you don’t have to be so dramatic. She’s just a little girl.”
   I didn’t say it out loud, but looking back, maybe I should have.
   My point exactly.
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   In the car, I reached for my pocket, for just one more pill. But then I had to let go of the steering wheel for—just—a—second—and as soon as I popped it into my mouth, there was a cop car behind me.
   I swallowed the pill dry. It was long and oval-shaped. Xanax, which was a controlled substance. My breath still smelled like wine. I quickly clicked on the cruise control and stared straight ahead and waited for red and blue lights to erupt in my rearview mirror. I did not move my arms from ten and two.
   Please God, please, just let me off this one last time.
   The cop car sound its siren. It swerved around me and then sped down the freeway.
   I pulled off at the next exit and caught my breath in a Seven-Eleven parking lot. I took two more pills and looked at the clock. 8:15. I had started drinking at six, plus the pills, minus my tolerance, I decided to wait a few minutes before I got back on the road.
   I got out of the car and walked into the convenience store. I bought a pack of Carmel Crushers, even though I didn’t smoke those anymore. They had been my first cigarette. Does anyone ever really forget their first time?
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   The first time I ever smoked a cigarette was when I was ten and a half years old. I was in the fifth grade. It was the day of my aunt’s fiftieth birthday.
   My mom and I went over to my grandmother’s house in the morning to help set up for the party.
   I remember there being a lot of tension and not really knowing why. My aunt was mad at my grandmother and my grandmother was mad at my aunt and my mom was trying to make them both happy, but she wasn’t doing a very good job. But nobody would admit that they were mad, or upset, or uncomfortable, so the morning passed in a long, stormy silence  punctuated by only the most necessary of small talk.
   I remember trying to stay out of the way and failing. I remember trying to help and my grandmother getting mad at me. Then I remember     Johnny walking into the kitchen right when I was eating a grape off of a fruit platter that was supposed to be only for the guests.
   “KATHLEEN! What are you doing?! I’m going to have to redo the whole plate!”
   I just stood there, and swallowed the grape I had in my mouth.
   “You told me I could have a bite,” I said.
   “Yes, but not from the middle! Do you see that giant hole?”
   My grandmother came stomping at me, her face in a rage. For a few seconds, I really thought she was going to slap me, right across the face, just like in the stories my mother told me from her childhood.
Kat! She would say, if I had ever talked to my mother that way she would have…
   But then at the last minute my grandmother turned and lunged at the fruit platter. She grabbed it and she picked it up and she slammed it into the sink so hard that the whole house was filled with the sound of glass shattering.
   My grandmother started to cry in deep, heavy sobs while my mother, my aunt, Nikki, everyone, stared at me.
   I could see the confusion on my mother’s face, not really knowing what had happened, unsure whose side she needed to be on.
   Johnny was watching this scene play out from the doorway. From where he was standing, only I could see him. He smiled at me and rolled his eyes, mouthed the word crazy. A minute passed. Then two more. Then he stepped into the kitchen, unveiling himself in the time it took the rest of my family to speak up.
   “Oh, Johnny, I didn’t know you were here,” my aunt finally said.
   “Where else would I be? I live here,” he answered.
    For the length of a breath, my grandmother was forgotten.
    But then she dried her eyes with a napkin and said, “Johnny, why don’t you take Kathleen with you and go pick up the cake?”
   I looked at my mother, begging her with my eyes to say, no, Kat is going to stay here with me. But my mother wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at her mother, who was scooping broken glass out of the sink with her bare hands.
   “Yeah, Kat why don’t you go with Johnny while we get this mess cleaned up?”
    The way my mother spoke made her request sound like a question, but it wasn’t. It only appeared that way on the surface.
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   Johnny’s car smelled like sweat and beer and smoke. The passenger’s side was covered with empty fast food cups and half-full plastic water bottles. He pushed all of the trash onto the floor and held the door open for me. I got in and curled into a ball, trying to make myself smaller.
   Glendora was a small town back then. There was one grocery store, one bank, one Catholic church standing in the middle of it all. My grandparents had lived there since the fifties. I knew where the bakery was, right around the corner from their house.
   When we passed it I said, “Wasn’t that the turn back there?”
   He glanced over at me and laughed.
   “Yeah, but we’re gonna stop by my buddy’s place.”
   The way he said this, so casually, and with such confidence, the statement sounded obvious, like it was something he’d already told me before.
   “Is that okay with you?”
   My whole body felt cold and sweaty at the same time. I nodded. To this day I do not know why.
   I counted the street blocks as we passed.
   Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, seventeen.
   At a stop light, when I still hadn’t said anything, he reached over and tickled my stomach underneath my shirt.
   I jumped, and tried to push his hands away. But he wouldn’t stop. It occurred to me how strong he was. He was smiling.
   “Geez Kat, don’t be so uptight. Do you really want to go back there? To that shit show?”
   We drove the rest of the way in silence.
   The house we pulled up to was on the outskirts of town. No one appeared to be home. I didn’t move.
   Johnny got out of the car and said, “Aren’t you coming?”
   I shifted in my seat. “No, I think I’ll just stay here.”
   “And just stare out the window?”
   “No, I have a book in my bag.”
   “Ah, come on,” he said as he walked over and opened my door. That’s stupid. I might be a while.” Then he stared at me with eyes that would not accept a refusal.
   I got out and followed him. I did not know what else to do.
   Johnny led me down a narrow dirt path that led into the backyard. He scaled the tall brick wall and opened the gate from the inside. I distinctly remember the hollow click of the latch slamming closed behind me.
   The backyard was taken up entirely with a chalk-white tiled pool that had yellow cracks all along the water line. A stale film covered its surface.
   Johnny bent down and touched the water and initiated a ripple effect that ended at my feet.
   He rubbed his hands against the front of his jeans.
   “Well, the water looks fine. Doesn’t look like I have to do anything.”
   Then he stared at me in a way that made me feel like I had to respond.
   All around, there was complete and utter silence. There were no other houses in sight.
   Johnny walked around the edge of the pool to stand beside me. He made it so that our elbows touched.
   “Do you want to go swimming?” he asked.
   “I don’t have a bathing suit.”
   He laughed. “That doesn’t matter.”
   And before I could comprehend what he’d said, Johnny began taking off his shoes, his socks, his shirt, his jeans, and he jumped into the water.
   He stayed underneath the surface for what seemed like a very long time, so long, in fact, that I was relieved when he came back up again.
   “Come on, jump in,” he said, like what he was asking was the most normal thing in the world.
    No.
   “I-I’m just going to sit over here,” I said, making my way over to a lounge chair that cracked and splintered the second I sat down. I fell backwards, onto the concrete.
   Johnny started laughing, manically. He leaned against the edge of the pool and splashed great big walls of water over my way. I struggled to get up, running away from him, but my jeans and the front of my shirt were already soaked through.
   “Johnny, stop! My mom is going to be so mad at me.”
   Johnny came up behind me and splashed me again. I could feel the water ooze into my sneakers, drenching my socks.
   “Lighten up, Kat. You know she’s already mad at you for that stupid stunt you pulled with the food. Why didn’t you tell me you were hungry? We could have gotten something to eat.”
   All the while, he kept drenching me in water.
   “Please! Stop! I can’t get wet.”
   “Looks like it’s already too late for that.”
   I sat down on the ground and I started to cry.
   “She’s going to be so mad.” How was I going to explain this?
   I could imagine the conversation.
   Why did you get out of the car?
   Why didn’t you tell him you didn’t want to go?
   Why didn’t you just tell him to stop?
   I did not have any answers, but for a moment, what I thought was going to happen outweighed what was happening in that moment.
   Suddenly, his entire demeanor changed. His voice became soft.
   “Oh Kat, it’s going to be okay. Just lay your clothes out in the sun. No one will ever know.”
   “I-I can’t get my hair wet.”
   “You don’t have to,” he said. “Come on. Come here. Let’s forget about them for just a few minutes.”
   I carefully peeled off my pants and then my shirt. My dark purple panties had daisies on them. My hands cradled the flesh of my soon-to-be breasts.
   “Come on, are you coming in or not?”
   I nodded, staring off into space.
   “You don’t have to be embarrassed. We’re family. I used to change your diapers for Christ’s sake.”
   I took my underwear off while my cousin watched. I got in the pool as fast as I could. Nothing but water separated the two of us.
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   Afterwards, he sat down on a chair next to me. He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I shook my head, no.
   “You know, I had my first cigarette when I was about your age.”
   He lit one up and inhaled.
   “Tina, you know my father’s second wife? She gave me one.” He took another long drag. “Never looked back.”
   It felt like I didn’t have a body. I was both there and not there. What if my mom smelled the smoke?
   We both didn’t move for a long time.
   Johnny lit another cigarette with the end of the one he already had. He reached his arm out suddenly and said, “Here. Take it.”
   I shook my head. “I don’t want one.”
   He said, “Yes you do,” bringing the lit end of it closer and closer, until it was less than an inch away from my face.
   I tried to back away but there was nowhere else to go. 
   I reached for the cigarette and inhaled. I remember liking the way my lungs screamed without making a sound.
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   I was surprised to realize that I was already almost home. All of my cigarettes were gone. I stared, unmoving, at the exit that led to my house.
   Whenever people found out I was based in San Diego, one of the things they always said was a variation of, I’m sure you just love being so close to the beach.
   I always smiled and half-laughed and said, sure, because that was the response they were expecting. But the truth was, I hated water. I’d ended up in San Diego on accident. I had never once gone to the beach.
   I continued on the freeway, not knowing where I was going, allowing my mind to follow the impulses of my body instead of the other way around.
   When I finally got out of the car, the wind was salty, the temperature warm. Scattered amongst the rocks were clusters of groups, twos and threes. Far down the beach, some kids huddled around a bonfire, their laughter just close enough to remind me that I wasn’t completely alone.
   I took off my shoes and waded into the water. The little-girl part of me wanted to runaway from the raw feeling of the ocean. She wanted to get back in my car, lock herself in my bathroom and take every pill, in every color, until she passed out on the floor. But my instincts got the best of me.
   I took off the rest of my clothes and I threw them away somewhere behind me. Then I walked into the water, washing away whatever had happened in the before.

​

Julianne Carew is a fiction editor for The East Jasmine Review as well as a Pushcart Prize nominated author who focuses on new adult and literary fiction. She is currently trying to find a home for her first novel, Why Paintings Fall. She lives in the Los Angeles area, but travels all over the world collecting stories. Her work is featured or forthcoming in, Literally Stories, 805 Literary Magazine, Thing, Bewildering Stories, Mental Papercuts and in numerous anthologies. 

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