The First Time She Drowned by Kerry Kletter Page B

it was always Matthew she wanted to be with. “What about me?”
    “You can sleep with your father. Forgive me if I don’t want to find my son’s bloated body washed up on the rocks tomorrow morning.”
    My brother paused, opened his eyes wide and then collapsed in a dead man’s float on the floor.
    My parents continued to argue over my brother’s body while I marched right past them and dramatically dumped the magic shell I’d been carrying around all night—the one with the ocean inside it—straight into the trash can. I watched as the perfect shell chipped against the bottom, and I felt a disproportionate sadness and regret about it, as if it had been me that had broken. When nobody paid me any mind, I made a big production of storming offto my bed, punishing my family with my absence.
    A short time later, my father came and stood near the side of the bed where I sat staring out the window, clutching Betty in my arms. The sky was black and without stars.
    He cleared his throat.
    He sighed.
    I kept my face to the window. The silence sat between us like an uncomfortable bystander.
    He moved closer and placed beside me the shell I had so ceremoniously dumped.
    “I think you dropped this,” he said finally.
    “I don’t want it,” I told the window.
    “But you said it was magic! You spent half the night holding it!”
    “It didn’t work,” I said.
    “What didn’t work?”
    I turned to look at him, searching his face for the possibility of understanding.
    “Just throw it away,” I said finally. “It’s stupid.”
    “I don’t think it’s stupid,” he said.
    I wanted to smile, to give him the illusion that his efforts had succeeded. I knew he was trying, he was always trying. But it was her that I wanted. Her that we both wanted. I yanked the blankets all the way over me and did not uncover my head until the sound of his defeated footsteps shuffled away from me.
    Minutes later, in the hall, my parents continued their argument.
    “I’m your husband, goddamn it. Quit acting like you’re married to Matthew and not me!”
    “He’s more of a man than you are, that’s for sure.”
    I pulled the covers over my face again just as my father stormed back into my room. The last thing I heard before drifting off was the sound of a sigh that could have been my father or could have been the rain that started falling outside my window.
    It rained the rest of the week.
    • • •
    We left Maine two nights early and the weather cleared just as we hit the freeway. My mother made me sit up front with my father while she sat in back with Matthew.
    I dozed in and out of a light sleep, the one-eyed sleep of dolphins, listening to the engine of the Blue Bomb rattle like cans beneath the quiet sighs of my father.
    Occasionally I sat up to watch panels of light from passing trucks streak across the windshield and disappear. My mother and Matthew slept deeply behind me; both could sleep through anything. It was my father and I who were restless custodians of night, joined in a molecular fear of the darkness and what it might bring.
    After seemingly endless hours of driving, my father finally pulled over, woke up my mother and broke the news. He had gotten us lost, for, of all things, missing a sign. In the backseat my mother wept as if she’d lost a child. Matthew tried to calm her but she was inconsolable, wildly, frighteningly so as if the trip itself had robbed the last of her hope.
    “I don’t know where I am, Matty,” she sobbed, rocking back and forth. “I don’t know where home is.”
    A few months later, my father took a new job that required him to be out of the country for weeks at a time. He didn’t want to take it, but my mother insisted. I remember the day we dropped him off at the airport for that first business trip, how I kept thinking a bus was going to hit us as we parked there on the side of the terminal. It was like I could hear the wheels of something big and unstoppable rumbling toward