When I come up, I’m wailing. Not just because I’m hurt, though I am, but because my dramatic attempt to retake the lost territory has been so indecorously thwarted. A military disgrace. I’ve smacked my ribs and swallowed water, and the raw burning sensation makes my eyes leak. It’s hard to cry and tread water.
“What did I say?” Nadine asks calmly, not lifting her eyes from her magazine. “Someone always ends up crying in your games, Marlon.”
Our father doesn’t give any sign of having heard her, though he does collect me sympathetically. “C’mon, let’s get out of the water, Little A,” he soothes.
“Nooo!” I wail. “I want to keep playing!”
“Maybe in a bit.”
“I guess I win,” Zelda says, smug, her hands on her hips.
“No, you don’t!” I spit out. “The game’s not over.”
“You lose,” she taunts. “I’m Queen of the Dock.”
“Zaza, don’t tease Ava,” Marlon says.
“What? I got hurt too. At least I didn’t cry like a ba-by,” she chants.
“Ava, c’mon,” Marlon says, dragging me toward the beach. I’m thrashing uncooperatively, desperate to stay in the water.
“Look at my splinter, Dad,” Zelda says proudly, acrobatically extending her entire leg to show him the sole of her foot. There is indeed an impressive splinter lodged in the ball of her foot, already pulsing red. She displays it to compare our relative toughness, a competition I have also just lost by falling apart in the water. Not only has she won the dock, she withstands pain better too. I slink back to shore in humiliated defeat. And Zelda, though gleefully victorious, limps back to where I sit sniffling on the rocks. Marlon and Nadine bicker beneath the umbrella. (“You’re a child.” “And you’re a shrew.”) Zelda sidles up to me and leans against my shoulder.
“We can rule jointly,” she says. “Two rulers are better than one.”
I snivel at her, not wanting to accept but knowing I will.
“Okay,” I finally say. She tugs me by the hand back toward the dock, away from our parents and their disagreement. We sit on the edge, toes dabbling in the lake’s surface, and decide on the rules for our kingdom. Zelda appoints me Lady of the Lake, an honorary position.
—
Looking at my father now, stretched out on the beach, I wonder if Marlon is also remembering those games, if he recalls the feel of our slippery brown torsos as he flung us into the water, shrieking with pleasure. I wonder if he plays the same games with his other daughters, if he takes them to the pool and launches them by the feet into a half-airborne dive, over and over again until their eyes are tight with too much sun and water. If he laughs raucously and romps like a child himself when he is with them. If he ignores his wife as she sits unhappily nearby, if he lets her fester in her despair and averts his eyes whenever she tries to signal her need for help. Does Maria try to tell him how miserable she has become, in the only inadequate language she has at her disposal? Do his daughters pretend it’s not happening, putting on a performance of their happiness, hoping to detract from the desperate gloom that settles over them every time they’re together? I look over at Marlon, trying, not for the first time, to divine what might be going on behind his relaxed and unconcerned fa?ade, delicately cracking at the edges but firmly, implacably maintained. Surely he can’t really be so indifferent.
Nearly dry, I stand up and wrap the sarong around my waist. Then I squat to top up my plastic cup.
“I’m heading back to the house,” I tell my father.
He cracks open an eye that might have been sleeping. “Oh? Okay. Do you want to take the tractor? I could stand to walk some of this off,” he says, patting his belly good-naturedly.
“You rode the tractor down?” I ask, amused. We loved to take the tractor down to the lake when we were little, perched above the axle, on either side of the driver’s seat. Nadine used to roll her eyes, but after Marlon left us, she would sometimes drive down herself. She had taught us how to use it when we were fourteen.
“Thought I’d see if she’s still running. You know how to start her up?” he says.
“No, the tractor has just been sitting here waiting for your return. None of us know how to operate it without your masculine expertise.”
He doesn’t say anything, just shuts his eyes again. I think he might be quite drunk. I wonder if he’ll be able to make it back up to the house. The walk will help sober him up, I reason, and he’ll be less likely to drive the tractor into the lake or flip it over and kill himself. That would really be Zelda’s crowning glory; maybe she could dispose of both of our parents in a single weekend.
17
Quietly, I slide open the door to the living room, not wanting anyone to know I’m back. I plan to sneak around silently before hiding in my room for the rest of the night. I’ve resolved that yesterday’s excesses have determined that I can eat only apples for dinner. This is something I feel has been objectively decided, as though it’s a mathematical equation: yesterday, falafel AND wine? Today, only apples. I’m thinking this logic through when Opal interrupts me.
“Ava, sweetie, is that you?”
I consider scuttling away but sigh in resignation. There’s no help for it. “Yeah, it’s me.”
Opal reaches for my hand, enclosing it in her own damp palm. “Ava, how are you doing?”
“Just fine,” I answer brusquely.
“Because your father and I…we’re worried about you, sweetie. We’re not sure you’re processing everything that’s happened.”
“Everyone grieves in different ways.”
“You just seem so distant. And sort of, well, as though you’re in denial. We were thinking maybe you wanted to talk. About your feelings, that is,” she adds, as though there were some ambiguity, as though maybe she had been suggesting that we talk about the economy or fashion. She wants me to feel that she is available. She is reinforcing the message that her wrinkled fingertips are insisting on as they go to work on my wrist, on the back of my hand: I’m here, I’m not dead, I’m alive, I’m here. I can sense her frantic unwillingness to disappear. She squeezes me tightly around my shoulders, kneading my deltoids with her searching, hungry hands. I wonder if her desire for physical proximity has always been so obviously linked to her desire to escape eradication. Zelda and I are her living iterations, her small sip of immortality, and she has covetously massaged and fondled our bodies since our birth, taking tactile comfort in the knowledge that her flesh has been extended. I dislike being deployed this way. I dislike her desperation.
“Listen, Grandma, I’m beat, and I have to get Nadine something to eat, get her ready for dinner, you know,” I say, and move away, not waiting for her to release me. Her hands paw at the space where my body was.
“Of course, of course, I’ll be fine down here. Don’t worry about me. I don’t mind being alone.” She waves me off.
“I’ll be back down in a bit.”