Girl in Landscape Read online

  Caitlin took a sandwich, then lifted her cone so that the bag was out, exposed on the blanket. “A castle is like a town. People live there, not just the king, or soldiers. It’s permanent. A fort is a war thing, it’s just for being attacked. But if you’re building them in the sand maybe the difference is the castle is small and detailed, like a dollhouse, and a fort is like a big wall that you hide behind as if you were under attack.”

  “That’s what I meant,” said Raymond conclusively.

  “Okay, fort,” said David. He moved his cone to cover the bag of supplies and pulled out the spatula Caitlin had packed, for digging.

  “Be careful of the sun,” said Caitlin.

  “We know,” said Raymond, as they set to work.

  Pella leaned back with her mother on the blanket, got as close as the cones would allow, and squinted through the far-off cyclone fence, at the waves.

  Pella’s first period was a glob of brownish red, as though some tiny animal had died against her body. It ruined a pair of underwear and sparked a fever of shame, and left behind a bland but dogged ache that woke her in the night. It was only then, as she lay awake in the dark, that she decided to tell Caitlin. Which led to a garish lesson in tampon insertion and a trip to the UnderMall for a shopping splurge, as if Caitlin wanted to confirm Pella’s private guess that this advance was a burden and required compensation.

  “Raymond,” said Caitlin, “get your hands inside the cone.”

  Clement’s election was something worse, a collective shame, the family entombed like mummies in a sarcophagus of denial, imagining the polls weren’t saying what they were, pretending not to overhear the phone calls, not to feel Clement’s radiant dread. Then a truly pathetic night spent milling in a shabby ballroom, eyeing monitors, enduring sympathies first masked then slowly unmasked, like a party with the guest of honor gradually dying. Caitlin got drunk at the end, and Clement, unforgivably, didn’t, instead stood clear-eyed and patronizing with a hand in Caitlin’s hair as if to steady her, gazing self-pityingly off toward some imaginary frontier.

  Not imaginary enough, it turned out.

  Pella watched the boys play in the sand, saw them discover how hard it was to collaborate on a project from inside their separate cones. The cone rims kept slicing through towers and walls. As Pella watched, Raymond twisted his arm down into the sand up to the elbow.

  “Tunnels!” he said.

  David followed, and soon they’d built a tunnel that connected the space of their cones under the sand. “Look, Caitlin,” said Raymond, as they triumphantly passed spatula, driftwood chunk, and plastic cup safely between them.

  Pella thought of the tunnels through the bedrock of the city. The decline of the subway was part of what cost Clement his seat, he’d explained. The people blamed his party for the collapses. The deaths. So they’d swept his party out of office.

  And now were sweeping their family to the Planet of the Archbuilders. Or was it Caitlin who was doing that, with her talk?

  “You can’t do much at the real beach,” complained Raymond when their tunnel pancaked, burying the tools in sand.

  “ ’Cause of these cones,” said David.

  “Soon you won’t have to wear cones to go outside,” said Caitlin. “That’s one reason we’re going.”

  “There’s no sun?” said David.

  “There’s a sun, but it doesn’t hurt you. The Archbuilders didn’t ruin their ozone.”

  Pella looked involuntarily at Caitlin’s bared arms through the translucent cone, at the three scars where cancers had been taken off.

  “So why’re we even here?” said Raymond. “If it’s not as good as where we’re going? Why didn’t we just go to ’Scapes?”

  “I wanted you to see the real beach, before we left. To look at the ocean. The Planet of the Archbuilders doesn’t have an ocean.”

  “Huh,” said Raymond.

  Pella rose to this occasion. She saw, as Caitlin couldn’t, that it was useless to try to inspire Raymond and David to certain feelings about the life of the family, about their own dawning lives. As useless as trying to inspire those feelings in dogs. Whether they would grow into such feelings or not, they were numb to them now.

  And, though she was less clear on this, she thought Clement was half-numb to them too. They issued from Caitlin, and Pella was their only sure receptor. “Caitlin means that this is where she came when she was a kid,” Pella said. “She used to swim here, come here all the time. So when you’re doing that kind of stuff outdoors on the Planet of the Archbuilders you’ll think of what it was like for her.”

  Though she spoke patiently, a part of Pella wanted to knock them down, to hold their eyes open and say, Can’t you see the sky? Can’t you feel the change coming, the horizon growing closer?

  Clement was a coward not being here for this dry run under the sky. For Pella saw it now: This trip was on Clement’s behalf. Caitlin was saying goodbye to her own Coney Island.

  “Why do they have the fence in front of the water?” said Raymond.

  “People were drowning themselves,” said Caitlin.

  “You mean that lemming thing,” said Raymond.

  “Yes,” said Caitlin.

  “That’s stupid though,” said Raymond. “ ’Cause they always find a way. The fence won’t stop them.”

  The lemming thing was another reason Clement and his party had lost the election. Pella had watched it on the news, bodies in water, massing and rolling like logs. Soldiers roaming afterward, aiming floodlights, pointlessly.

  “That water’s no good anyway,” said Caitlin. “You can’t swim in it. You barely could when I was a girl.”

  “But you did,” said Raymond.

  “Yup. And this beach was covered with people.” Caitlin saw Pella glance at her scars again, and said, “Arms are so brave, don’t you think?”

  “What?” said Pella.

  “Don’t you think arms are brave?” She pistoned her right arm back and forth under the cone. “They just go on, they never get tired or give up or complain.” She kneaded her bicep with her other hand. “It’s the same arm I’ve had all my life, the same skin and muscles. It just goes pumping on into the future. Brave.”

  “I don’t know,” said Pella. But she looked at her own arm.

  “You’re crazy,” said Raymond.

  “Caitlin’s not crazy,” said David.

  “I’m going to go look at the water anyway,” said Raymond, getting up suddenly. “Maybe I can crawl under the fence.”

  “Stay where I can see you,” said Caitlin.

  “I’m going too,” said David.

  “You can see all the way to the rocks,” said Raymond.

  “Right. So don’t climb on the rocks.”

  “Couldn’t with this stupid cone anyway.”

  They pounded off through the sand, and Caitlin and Pella were left alone in their place, surrounded by a litter of digging tools and sandwich wrappings. The breeze dashed the tips of Pella’s hair into her eyes.

  Just a beat of silence passed between them, then Caitlin spoke.

  “There’s another thing about the Planet of the Archbuilders,” she said. “It’s something Ray and Dave might not understand.”

  Don’t tell me, Pella thought instantly. She avoided her mother’s eyes.

  It was surely something peculiar and terrible when Caitlin had to begin by flattering her.

  “We aren’t going to be just any family moving there,” Caitlin went on. “Clement is going to do Clement stuff wherever he goes. I mean, that’s one part of why we’re moving, so that he can.”

  “What’s he going to do?”

  “Nothing, at first. We’re just going to move there. There’s only a few settlers. We’ll practically be the first. It’s a chance to be there at the start of something, something very important.”

  Hearing her mother talk in circles, avoiding subjects, Pella suddenly wanted to be beside her, to move inside her cone. She wanted to protect and be protected at once.<
br />
  “The thing is, for people to really live there, they have to live like the Archbuilders used to. There’s this thing that happens to Archbuilders, young ones, and it would happen to people too. Except the people there now take a drug to keep it from happening.”

  “What thing?” said Pella.

  “It’s called becoming a witness,” said Caitlin. “It happened to young Archbuilders, which there aren’t so many of now. But it still happens.”

  It’s going to happen to me, thought Pella. By telling only me she’s going to make it happen to me.

  “Nobody in our family is going to take the drug,” said Caitlin. “Clement’s looked into it, there’s no danger. Just a chance to learn. It’s something Clement and I feel strongly about.”

  Pella hated that policy talk, that Clement talk. Feel strongly. It was like Clement speaking out of Caitlin’s mouth. Pella relied on her mother for words that were an antidote to Clement’s.

  “What does it do?”

  “Well, what happens to Archbuilders is that the witness learns things about adults. I mean, the adult Archbuilders. It’s a way of growing up. What happens to people we don’t know, because nobody’s tried it.”

  Caitlin said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. But why should Pella want to learn things about adults, let alone Archbuilders?

  Why should she necessarily want to grow up?

  After a pause, Pella said, “So how do they know anything happens? To people, I mean.”

  “Because it started to happen, a few times. But people panicked.”

  “What makes it happen?”

  “It’s something the Archbuilders created with their science. They made viruses, special ones. Only so long ago that it’s like part of the planet now. Like a lot of things they did. Like the weather.”

  “So the people take drugs. Because they don’t want to get an alien virus.” This didn’t sound exactly unreasonable to Pella. “That’s what you mean by panicked.”

  Caitlin nodded, suddenly distracted. She squinted up the beach at Raymond and David, and said, “Something’s wrong.”

  Raymond was at the corner, near the rocks, on the other side of the fence. David was halfway back, running toward them, and as Pella looked up he tripped over his cone and tumbled forward. He landed on his knees in the sand, his cone flattening up around him.

  Caitlin rose and started out to meet him. Pella followed. They ran, cones wobbling around their ankles, to the place where David knelt.

  He struggled up, his face flushed. “Raymond found something,” he gasped.

  “Let’s go see,” said Caitlin. She reached under his cone, exposing her own arms, and brushed the grit from his knees. “Come on.”

  “I’m scared,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” said Caitlin. “Let’s go have a look.” She nudged him along.

  Pella got ahead. She could see something black, high on the rock barrier; Raymond was climbing toward it, on all fours, hampered by his cone.

  Pella rushed closer, and the black thing grew clearer: It had an arm, which hung brokenly in the joint of two boulders. Three steps more, and it gained a head with blistered, purple cheeks. Pella stopped running, just short of the fence, then stepped forward, hypnotized, and put her hands on the mesh.

  Caitlin and David came up behind her. Raymond was still climbing. Caitlin yelled his name, but the sound was almost swallowed in the surf’s crash.

  Again: “Raymond!”

  He stopped there, a few feet below the body on the rocks, turned, and looked at them. Caitlin motioned with her hands. She couldn’t wave, under the cone, but she pointed, first at him, then back, to the ground at her feet.

  Raymond paused, then reversed, and picked his way back down the rocks, as slowly as he’d climbed. The waves smacked again and again just short of his path.

  Pella gripped the fence and stared at the twisted black body on the rocks. So did Caitlin and David, now that Raymond was safely headed back. The man was purple and black and ruptured in places, and it was impossible to think of how he’d looked, alive. The sun and the ocean had each taken their blows.

  As Raymond came off the rocks and started toward the fence David began weeping.

  “I’m scared,” said David again.

  Raymond came up, the fence still between them. “What?” he said, to David. “Nothing happened.”

  “Come back under the fence,” said Caitlin.

  “The guy’s dead,” said Raymond. “He can’t hurt anybody.” But Pella saw that Raymond was trembling, actually.

  “It’s okay to be scared,” said Caitlin. “It’s scary, what you saw.”

  “He did the lemming thing, I guess,” said Raymond. “The fence didn’t stop him.” He kicked more sand away from the place he’d scooted under, and squatted, crablike, holding the edges of his cone.

  “It’s not the lemming thing when it’s only one person,” said Pella. “It’s just suicide.”

  “I want to go home,” said David.

  “We’ll go home,” said Caitlin. “But Raymond’s right, nothing’s going to hurt you.” She turned David in his cone away from the fence. “It’s just upsetting to see that, but nothing is going to happen. Be brave.”

  “Like an arm,” said Raymond, laughing, nudging his brother’s cone.

  “Shut up,” said David, sniffling.

  “Anyway, Pella, he could have been part of some big lemming thing somewhere else and only his body washed up here,” said Raymond. “The others floated—”

  “Enough about that,” said Caitlin.

  “Shouldn’t we report it?” said Raymond. They trudged together in a line, leaving the body on the rocks, and the adamant surf, behind them.

  “We will report it,” said Caitlin.

  “Well that’s all I was doing,” said Raymond brightly. “I was checking for I.D.”

  “Okay, but I didn’t want you to touch it, or get in the water. Come on.”

  Pella could hear that Caitlin was upset. They were all upset. But Pella felt only she knew it was a warning: dare to go out under the sky, dare to enter the sky, and trouble will touch you. Your tunnels will collapse. A body will fall.

  Two

  Pella showered first, rinsing away the grit that had found a place between her toes, letting the rain of drops on her eyelids batter away the vivid, scorched-in impressions of the dead black body and the high malicious sun, letting the whine of the hot-water pipe erase the echo of the ocean’s crash, its awful hissing as it drew back over the sand. She soaked in her share of the hot water and more before blanketing herself in a towel. Then David took over the steamed-up bathroom, then Raymond. Caitlin waited until last.

  Afterward, Pella would crazily think that if the order had been different, it would have happened to someone else, to the one who showered last. Someone besides Caitlin.

  Pella and Raymond and David gathered, in their underwear, T-shirts, and wet hair, on the edge of their parents’ bed, to watch television while Caitlin took her shower. A pile of fresh laundry lay in the center of the bed, and Pella folded it while she watched. The show was David’s choice, cartoons, which made it irksome that David wandered away in the middle. He went to the bathroom door and opened it, and the sound of Caitlin’s shower obscured the voices coming from the television.

  “David,” said Raymond.

  “I heard something,” said David. He went into the bathroom, left the door open.

  Where was Caitlin’s voice, shooing David out of the bathroom? Wondering absently, Pella turned to see, just as David emerged. Not rushing, not panicked like on the beach, but puttering, his hand near his mouth, almost as if he were looking for something on the floor.

  “Pella?”

  “What?”

  “Caitlin made a funny face and fell down.”

  Pella went to the bathroom door. David tagged after her, but Raymond stayed at the television, ignoring them. Remembering later, it would seem to Pella a kind of protest, as though Ray
mond already knew and was registering his objection.

  Pella went in. The shower poured down, but where was Caitlin? Pella moved the shower curtain.

  Her mother lay splayed naked, filling the tub, slack, her eyes closed, mouth open, knees up, elbows jammed awkwardly at her sides, the surface of her stomach and breasts alive with the rain of water like a screen with static.

  Pella stood shocked. The shower, curtain thrust aside, was wetting her T-shirt. She reached out dumbly and turned the shower control; the water poured out of the faucet instead, a gush over Caitlin’s shoulder and neck. Caitlin’s mouth was soft, as if she were speaking, forgetting a word. Her lips were beaded. The water rushed under her chin.

  “Caitlin?” said Pella softly.

  There was no reply, no response.

  “Caitlin?” she said again. Then: “Mom?”

  Nothing.

  “Tell Raymond to call the hospital!” Pella shouted back at David, as she turned off the hot and cold. David ran away, mute. Pella had no idea if he’d heard.

  The water drained away, droplets rolling off Caitlin’s edges, leaving her wedged there. She lay still, but breathing, Pella saw. Her naked body seemed terribly big, a kind of world itself, a thing with horizons, places where Pella’s gaze could founder, be lost.

  Pella ordered her thoughts. Caitlin must have slipped, and hit her head.

  The dead body at the beach—

  No. No relation.

  Where was Clement?

  She put her hand in her mother’s soaked hair, but couldn’t find a gash or lump. Nothing, she thought, maybe this is nothing. She fell, she’s okay, she’s asleep, she’ll wake up, she fell, she’s okay, went Pella’s little song of anguish. She touched her mother’s chest, feeling the heartbeat, the dewy skin, the edge of her mother’s breasts. Caitlin was so massively helpless, so impossible to protect.

  She ran out to find David and bumped into Raymond, who’d been peering around the door’s edge.

  “I called 911,” he said in a small voice. “They said we just have to get her into the subcar, and it’ll go right to the hospital. They make it come, they have the address from the call.”

  “She’s naked,” said Pella. “Anyway, we can’t move her.”