Cumberland. Megan Gannon

especially not at school. After the accident, Izzy was in the hospital for so long no one at school over in Fort Harmon even knew I had a sister, and when the hospital released her and she still wouldn’t talk, Grand decided it was easier for Izzy to just stay home and every night I’d teach her what I learned that day in class. It’s gotten harder and harder. Once I know something it’s impossible to trace my brain back through the dark of not knowing, the murk of beginning to understand, then the bright knowing. Most of the time she already knows the things I’m supposed to teach her—I don’t know how. But sometimes she doesn’t, and these are the things I wait to tell her. She still had a baby’s handwriting at the beginning of seventh grade, but when I finally taught her cursive, it didn’t take more than a few days for the tilted fence-posts of H’s and N’s to bloom looping tendrils of climbing vines.

      Many other decisions were made by Grand, and by the Carson brothers who live on the other side of town. At first they’d arrive every Friday night under the porch light, hats in hand, shirtsleeves rolled, ready to lift Izzy into the tub so I could scrub her down. Then every two weeks, then less, once I was old enough and strong enough to lift my sister myself. Sometimes I let the tub fill a little, making sure the water level isn’t high enough to reach her stoma. She laughs to watch her feet float up and turn out like a ballerina’s first position, and we play battleship, sinking her feet with shampoo bottles and big bars of soap. When her feet bob back up we both laugh. “Unbelievable! Certified indestructible Mackenzie craftsmanship! The Navy wants to know, Ms. Izzy, what’s your secret ingredient?”

      It was Grand’s turn to mind Izzy when I was at school, but that didn’t last long. I try to imagine Grand tearing herself away from the TV in regular intervals to climb upstairs. One day after a few months, Grand said Izzy must have rung her little bell twenty times an hour, sometimes before Grand was halfway back down the stairs, sometimes when she’d just gotten settled back on the sofa. Izzy got a bladder infection and had to go back in the hospital for a month. After that the little brass bell with the flat-cast canary on top disappeared, and the next time she had an infection the doctor gave me lessons on how to change Izzy’s catheter and diaper and how often. Now sometimes I just have to change Izzy’s sheets when I get home. If it’s only a matter of the bag leaking, Izzy and I make a game of that, too. I lift one edge of the sheet, then the other, rolling her back and forth. “Isabel Ailene! Have you been drinking? Where do you get off rolling around like a drunken sailor?” When the sheets are more than wet, we can’t play that game.

      I follow the C-shaped cliff around to an outcropping of rocks, then turn for the flat straight-away crowded by big-leafed trees, live oaks and magnolias that drop scorched petals and grenade-shaped cones in the ocean. It’s a fifteen-minute walk if I’m walking fast, but I take my time, remembering what it felt like to have a pair of white-blue eyes centered on me and everything outside of me blurring. The other girls at school stand in quiet clumps by their lockers as Everett walks by, oblivious to their stares, and they burst into giggles when he’s past. Most of the time they laugh loudly, convincing themselves, ha ha, he’s so weird, ha ha, but sometimes they stop giggling too soon and keep watching. I try to remember if I’ve ever seen him with a girl, a girlfriend, and then the trees open and I start down the sand dunes on a diagonal towards the hotel.

      The air is still sulfurous from last night’s fireworks, the sand littered with the paper casings of the bottle rockets Izzy and I could just barely see exploding from the vantage of our bedroom window. Behind the hotel, the wooden pier is swarming with people, some spilling onto the stretch of beach where young mothers sit under umbrellas. Their children wade at tide line or throw sandwich bits to the gulls that float overhead on updrafts, their shrieks loud in the still air. On really hot days the older kids lie across inner tubes, a rope around one foot tethering them to the dock, but today there’s a breeze and the few teenagers are tan, slack bodies laid out on towels, one girl furtively checking the white stripe of skin under her shoulder strap.

      I keep walking, up the front stairs to the wide white porch clustered with wicker chairs and low tables where waiters whisk in and out of a propped open, leaded glass door, their trays ting-ing. I find a table that hasn’t been cleared yet, pour the teacup dregs out and wipe the rim and insides with a jam-smeared napkin, then top off from the still-warm teapot and loop my legs over one arm of the chair. I make sure I’m laughing loudly behind the comics when a waiter walks up beside me, pauses, then briskly turns back towards the door. I laugh showily the way the only child of rich tourists would laugh. Like any minute my parents will be back from couples’ tennis, and dad will have the bill charged to our suite. Like it’s just me, just me, and two parents revolving around me, real and dependable as planets.

      Violet she calls the nearly magenta rhododendron she must have just plucked on her way home. I was waiting, holding myself inside breathing and willing her coming. I don’t say what I know—how nothing can be violet while the sun’s still up. How it must have coolness and the scent of dusky corners clinging to petals. Go to the same rhododendron now as the shadows lengthen and bring me a blossom—that’s violet. Timing. Like her gaze. I can’t make her stay.

      Three

      Saturday, July 6, 1974

      32 days

      Something is scuttering along the floor and rubbing up against the walls, some somethings so numerous they’re everywhere, arching backs and tumbling into one another. Then my bed is drifting in the dark and it’s water, my bed is a boat and I’m floating idly. I call out for Izzy but she’s in another boat and suddenly there’s a bigger tide, I’m doubly dizzy, the boat is sinking beneath me and I’m floating, a double drifting. The water’s rising and I scream for Izzy. My boat is turning lazily in the water away from her and I jump and hit water so hot it feels sharp as torn metal. I’m going under when I feel her nightgown waving in the dark water and grab it, following it hand over hand up to her, my fingers screaming like bent wire in the twisted cloth. She is sleeping and her boat is sinking with each breath, so I pull her arms over my shoulders and I try to wrap her loose legs around my waist but she’s not waking. I jump again, pushing off from the sinking boat—Izzy’s so heavy, she’s so heavy—and we’re miles out from shore and I know I can’t make it with the both of us.

      I’m awake before I open my eyes. I lie letting the stillness of my bed solidify against my body as the morning sinks in and wonder if this is what it is like for Izzy, sounds always muffled and far off at the edges while she lies still at the quiet center. I try to relax my every muscle and see if I can stop feeling my feet and legs and waist. No matter how hard I concentrate I can’t shake the occasional touch of the sheet against my toes and kneecaps or the weight of my own legs against the mattress. What does she think about? What fresh ideas does she find to run her mind over every day? I practice times’ tables and sing through old songs silently. I lie there trying to bear it when Izzy starts chuckling from her bed.

      “How’d you know I was awake?” I ask. Her hair is spread across the pillow like petals of a withered sunflower, her head too big for the little stalk of her body. She’s staring at me, and then I understand why people sometimes don’t like to meet my gaze. With eyebrows and eyelashes pale as a burn victim’s and no discernible cheekbones, our faces are smooth, upside down tear-drops tapering to a too-pointy chin.

      Izzy gives me a mock-serious stare back, then laughs and shakes her head, raising her hands and flopping them down with a gesture that says, let’s get to it.

      “Oh crap—first Saturday of the month. I have to change your catheter today,” I say. She laughs again. I slide out of bed and tug on my shorts, then pull my arms inside my shirt and fasten my bra.

      “I should take it on the road, huh, Izzy. Only problem is, you’re the only person who thinks I’m so gosh darn funny.” Sliding one arm behind her back, I pull her to a sitting position, then tug her legs over the edge of the bed, hook my arms under her armpits and haul her up so my nose is in her hair, her cheek hot against mine. Like waltzing with a mannequin, I walk backwards to the bathroom, then push the door open with my butt and hold her beside the bathtub. “Okay, right foot first, Izzy,” and she can’t stop giggling. “Oh, whoops, that’s right,” I say, scooping one leg at a time into the tub, then sliding her inside. “I just keep forgetting.”