He stood up. “Forget it, Ma. When I have my Ph.D., maybe you can tell me. But I’m going back now. Gena’s showing me my school today.”
She leapt up and grabbed him before he could take more than a few steps. “Listen to me, Peter Avery.” Her nostrils flared white but the rest of her face was a purplish red, raw and ugly as a slab of meat. “I’m going to tell you what you want to hear, but I’m going to tell you my own way, the only way I know how. Now sit.” She stood over him with her back to the roiling sea. “A man came into that bathroom.” Her voice broke on the last syllable and she looked straight up to the sun behind him, breathing hard. There were streaks down the sides of her face, though he hadn’t seen her crying.
“Whenever I thought about telling this to you I always thought I’d find in that moment some beautiful way of constructing it so that it would seem somehow magical to you. I know that’s crazy but it happens. It can happen. The right words can transform even the grossest brutality. But they’re not …” She dragged her fingernails across the inside of her wrist. “They’re not coming to me now. A man came in. A stranger to me. He came into that bathroom while I was washing my hands.” Her face twisted and she looked at Peter helplessly, as if she herself could not believe what she was about to say. “And he raped me.”
The crumpled paper rocked in the sand near her bare foot. Leda and the Swan. He remembered it now. The Swan was Zeus, swooping down to rape a mortal girl. He’d gotten an erection in class when they’d discussed the poem last year: the loosening thighs, the shudder in the loins.
She dropped back down onto the sand beside him. He wished she weren’t so close. He wished she had the sense to leave him alone.
“A few months later I got in my car and drove away.”
“To Fayer?” he heard himself ask, though he didn’t care, didn’t want the rest.
“Yes, though I didn’t know it at first. I just drove east and that’s where I ended up. At my grandfather’s house.”
If Peter hadn’t just done a similar thing in the opposite direction he’d have thought she was lying.
“And you were …”
She nodded. “I was pregnant.”
He wanted to stop her now. But she was not to be stopped. It would have been like trying to stop one of those waves.
“It was eerie, discovering the house had become a school. I turned around before even going in the driveway. And then that night I saw in the paper they were looking for a substitute. I was so curious to go inside the house. I never thought they’d actually hire me. The faculty then was nearly all male and they were so stodgy. And I was a pregnant woman from Texas. But they did, and I rented an apartment off campus. Then when they offered me a full-time position, I moved into the cottage. Summer school was in session. My water broke while I was walking in the woods with Walt.” She lifted her hand to her mouth to pull out hair that had blown in, but her fingers were shaking so much she couldn’t trap it and gave up. “The pain was immediate. I thought it would be more gradual. It took me so long just to get back to the house. By then everything was confused in my mind. The pain and the fear seemed to trigger it all again. I knew I needed a phone but for hours at a time I thought I was back in that bathroom in Texas. And he was there and there was no phone and I was just screaming and screaming and no one heard. I couldn’t see the phone in my own kitchen with the doctor’s number taped to the wall and then I was pushing and I couldn’t stop myself from pushing, and even when I knew where I was and I could see the phone on the wall plain as day, I couldn’t bear the thought of some doctor coming in, some other man hovering over me, so I just pushed.” He saw the tears now, sliding down quietly. “I remember your warm slippery head in my hands and how I felt like both an animal and a god at the same time and I lifted you up and you were screaming and I was still screaming and then it felt like my whole insides drained out onto the kitchen floor and I lost consciousness. I woke up in the hospital and Carol was in a chair beside me, holding you. I think I always thought of her as an angel after that.
“I used to have these dreams, after you were born, in which he’d come back. To steal you. And I’d fight him off. I’d kill him. I’d wake up standing rigid next to my bed or in the hallway. Every night I stood guard. Then once I dreamed”—her voice was growing thinner and thinner—“he was inside of you, inside of your little baby body, and I killed you both.” He could just barely hear her now. “After that, I was so scared, so scared of myself.” She covered her face from him, and only cracking sounds came out of her throat.
He hadn’t known that the truth would feel like this, like having limbs pulled off. All these things he’d thought he wanted — her marriage to Tom, a night with Kristina, the story of his father — turned out to be corrupt in some way. He had been created by the opposite of love, had been the opposite of wanted. It all made too much sense.
“I dreamt I killed you once. Because you wouldn’t tell me all this.” He put his arms around the little ball of her. Her whole body shook and he shook with it. He thought of the lurching beast they’d been on the field at school. Now they were something else. He didn’t know what.
She was terrified he’d take his arms away. Stay stay stay. He was the only skin she had. Everything else was gone. Stay. She had no more words, no more energy left to push them out. This was the last time he would ever come near her, she was sure of it. He’d never truly forgive. He was Angel, she saw now, like in her dream. He would leave her. Stay, she cried. The sun rose higher and hotter and the waves grew even larger, rising to thin tremulous ridges before smacking the rocks. And Peter stayed.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”
He’d come out of her like a slimy blue fish. She had forgotten her own animalness.
After a while, a group of teenagers came down the path loudly, carrying surfboards to the far end of the beach where there were fewer rocks.
“I’m hungry,” she said, and straightened up, permitting Peter to let go. He would feel embarrassed, hugging his mother in public.
She dragged the picnic basket around. They each ate a banana and a hard-boiled egg.
When they were done Peter said, “Should we go feel the water?” and stood with his hand out to help her up. She was far too depleted to move, but when she placed her hand in his and was lifted to her feet, she felt a rush of life. A wave broke and sent cold foamy water across the tops of her feet.
“It’s freezing!” Peter cried and leapt away.
“It’s the ‘scrotum-tightening sea!’” she screamed and waded in farther, lifting her dress up over her knees.
“What!” Peter said, laughing.
Perhaps it was for this moment that she’d been remembering Joyce all week.
She lifted her feet up off the bottom, her dress billowing in great air pockets around her, her face to the sky and its strange California blue, a blue so deep you could almost see the blackness of space beyond. She’d forgotten how easily a body could float in saltwater. All she had to do was move her hands in nearly imperceptible little flaps below the surface every now and then, to glide along.
Couldn’t his mother feel how cold it was? A huge wave began to swell behind her. The water at his feet retreated, sucking the sand out from under the edges of his feet. The wave grew and grew, hovered, then curled over with a thunderous crash and spray. His mother had gone under, near a cluster of rocks. She could have banged her head. He’d never be able to find her in all the foam, and churned-up sand. He took a few more steps into the surge and scanned the murky bottom. Then he saw her, bobbing in the chaos, her hair pressed down around her face, her mouth open, laughing, saying something to him that the noise of the sea carried off. She was young, he saw now, with freckles across her cheeks. In all his imaginings he’d never guessed that his mother had gotten hurt. Always in his mind there had been love on his father’s side, and sadness when she could not love him back. There had always been that man in his yard, raking leaves and waiting. Peter saw now that maybe that man was himself. Maybe he was the one who’d been waiting.