The Ocean Inside Page 4

  When he saw she wasn’t going to offer an opinion, he began to explain.

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. According to the Internet, there’s a big demand for classic powerboats. If she cleans up good, I could get a pretty penny for her.”

  “You’d sell your grandfather’s boat?”

  Lauren was glad he couldn’t see her clearly behind her sunglasses.

  “Well, it’s my boat now. Our boat I mean. We’re talking maybe thirty grand in good shape.”

  “That’s what we’re going to do? Sell off our lives one piece at a time until there’s nothing left?”

  “You’re being a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

  “Am I? You really think working on that old boat is going to be a windfall for our financial problems? I think it’s just an excuse for you to spend time downstairs away from everything going on around here.”

  “That’s blatantly unfair and you know it.”

  “Oh, really? You take up this new hobby, try to say it’s for money, when what we really need is a good insurance policy. It just seems like screwed-up logic to me. Your time could be better spent.”

  He stood stunned for a moment, then he said, “I’ll bring up the rest of the groceries.”

  Was she unfair? Lauren could see the future; he’d be working on his pet project and she would be holding back her child’s hair while Ainslie rested on her knees in front of the toilet bowl. There. That’s what Emmett would call bitter. But she wasn’t bitter. She was exhausted, both mentally and physically.

  He said she had changed—well of course she had. Her life had become doctor appointments and medicines, Internet searches and worry. Her days were filled with her daughter’s struggle to home school on par with her peers, those fortunate children whose brains were not racked on chemotherapy.

  Emmett would never voice his opinion of her personality in crisis, although he made sure she was aware of it in subtle ways. But Lauren believed that if she were truly bitter she would be asking why her child, why their family? She’d turned to God for answers, but none had been forthcoming. That was another place where she and Emmett parted company. While she tried to have faith, Emmett seemed to have very little. Where she wanted to believe life had purpose, he believed things were simply random.

  Did she believe Ainslie was sick because God wanted to teach their family some sort of lesson? No. Of course, she’d thought about it, but she’d finally come to the conclusion that God didn’t directly affect physical things here on Earth. If a child and a bowling ball were both tossed from a high building you couldn’t pray for God’s hand to catch the child and spare her. Both child and bowling ball would hit the ground at the same time with very different results. Lauren had decided that praying was for comfort. Hope was necessary. She didn’t expect God to spare her child when other children died. That was too self-centered. She had never asked why her child, but she had asked why any child.

  Emmett thought she had unexamined faith, that she believed blindly, but that was simply not the case. The people with blind faith, the ones who assured her God had a plan for Ainslie and it wasn’t up to her to question His plan, made her want to scream. In Lauren’s opinion, those people were simply too weak to face the fact that life can be shit sometimes. They want to think that ultimately they are not responsible for their decisions, for their lives.

  Faith for her was not about turning over responsibility for her child. It was about comfort and mental health. She knew God was there, and how anyone couldn’t feel this was a foreign concept to her. Her faith was basic in her bones, a truth she felt as solidly as she felt her own fingers, but it wasn’t an excuse to be blind to life’s darker moments.

  Still, her faith hadn’t translated to the rest of her family. It seemed that very little God shine, as her oldest daughter called it, had rubbed off on any of them. The girls had both been raised in a church family, but neither girl ever sought the church or any type of faith when they had problems. They never gravitated to the young Christian clubs at school nor wanted to spend a week of their summers at Bible camp.

  Where Sloan and Emmett were openly disdainful of organized religion, Ainslie continued to be the only one willing to attend services with Lauren. Still, as soon as Ainslie left church, she left that train of thought behind. After lunch, when they arrived home on Sunday, Ainslie immediately went on the hunt for bugs and lizards, and all thoughts of God vaporized. Lauren tried to inject the beauty of God’s creativity into her nature talks with Ainslie, but doubt always hovered behind her daughter’s eyes.

  So of course, Ainslie had taken a scientific approach to disease. She’d asked doctors if she could look in the microscope to see what her cancer was like. Ainslie had expected it to be moving and was surprised to find the cells were dead. She told Lauren that the slide looked like tadpole eggs or a pink-and-purple polluted river, but the pathologist had told her the color was from dye used to stain the slide.

  Lauren had prepared herself for the questions Ainslie would have about God and why he allowed her to get sick. Lauren had spoken to her minister, but Reverend Michael had been vague and less helpful than she had hoped. He certainly hadn’t equipped her with the solid answers she was seeking. Presbyterians were a contemplative bunch, independent of thought and questioning. Reverend Michael had simply said that times like this tested us all and that she needed to show Ainslie how strong faith can ease pain and give meaning to life’s struggles.

  But Ainslie hadn’t asked many religious questions. Instead, she watched Animal Planet and movies. She read the wildlife books people sent her and made beaded jewelry and ragged potholders. Lauren had prayed with Ainslie, but she guessed that her daughter just saw it as another thing she was required to do. She wasn’t as questioning or as angry as Lauren had expected, although Lauren could see anger building in her other daughter each day.

  Some sort of faith could help Sloan deal with what was happening to them, but Sloan was deep into the independent-teenager phase. She was never without white earbuds snaking down from her head to block conversation. Sloan pulled her sunny hair into elastics and let it spew angrily from her head. She wore jeans with artfully placed holes, and unusually feminine baby doll tops. And the flip-flops, the ubiquitous things she wore most of the year, even on days when Lauren was sure her toes would freeze. No. Sloan was her own person and she had used Ainslie’s illness as a source of freedom. Ainslie had felt the sting of her sister’s long absences, but who could blame Sloan? It was hard to watch these terrible things happen to a person you loved. It was wearing on everyone’s psyche, this daily reminder that doom lurked around the corner.

  Luckily, the girls had a special connection. Last week, Lauren had been coming around behind the house with a bag of trash when she’d heard the girls talking inside the latticed carport. Ainslie asked Sloan what she thought getting an MRI would be like.

  Sloan said, “Like this.” And she had climbed into the old fish sink where three generations of Sullivans had cleaned their catch.

  “And they’ll take a picture of your insides,” Sloan said.

  Ainslie said, “Duh. I know that. What I mean is, will it hurt?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Move over.” Ainslie crawled into the tub beside her sister.

  Lauren stood there, waiting for them to talk more, but they didn’t. They just lay beside each other, dangling their feet over the edge of the tub.

  Sloan had successfully hidden this part of herself since she hit puberty, and sometimes Lauren forgot this side existed. She was such a moody little thing, Lauren feared she was on the verge of being one of the pitiful goth kids who lurked in bookstores and outside hamburger joints around their little town of Litchfield. But she hadn’t gone over that edge yet. Sloan had rejected nearly everything Lauren had suggested as far as clothing, hobbies, or social graces. Still, she made good grades and kept out of trouble. She wasn’t drugged out or pregnant and she hadn’t run away. Now she was
eighteen, so technically she couldn’t run away. For all intents and purposes she was an adult—able to vote and get married, hold a job and pay taxes. She was more independent now than ever, with all of Lauren’s energies focused on Ainslie. Emmett had said to let her go, that it was unnecessary to try to keep track of her anymore, and Lauren had decided he was right. She had held on longer than most parents do these days.

  But it was hard to let go. Lauren had wanted her girls, had never even blinked when Sloan came along unexpectedly. She and Emmett were married, and they moved into this house, and Emmett started his company, and life was good. Along came Ainslie, and life got even better. Lauren had never really regretted dropping out of college after her sophomore year. There hadn’t been any one thing she’d been passionately interested in. But once her girls came along, she finally knew who she was. She was a mother, and to Lauren, that was the perfect job. She took selfish pleasure in being able to bake cookies with the girls and give them elaborate birthday parties and take them to Brownies and church. She’d been dedicated to photographing them every year. Her favorite image was one of the girls in matching white dresses, barefoot on the beach, big white bows in their wind-tossed hair.

  When the girls were small, Lauren had taken them to ballet lessons. She loved their cute protruding toddler tummies, and little bottoms in pink tights. Their tiny feet were so sweet in dainty ballet flats. She’d collected Sloan’s curls on top of her head, but in mere minutes Sloan always found a way to have her hair tumbling around her shoulders. Her little redhead had been only six when she told Lauren ballet “wasn’t her thing.” Yet, her grace of movement was apparent still. Of course, Sloan would never admit to the benefit of her dance background, but Lauren enjoyed the way she glided rather than walked.

  Ainslie’s ballet days were spent peering through the giant glass window at the butterflies lighted in the garden there. She had stayed with ballet longer than Sloan, not wanting to upset her mother. But Lauren had realized one day that her little girl was miserable. She would never be the graceful, long-limbed swan other girls seemed to be, nor did she even care. On the day Lauren asked Ainslie if she wanted to quit ballet she saw relief wash over her child’s face. This second failed ballet experience made Lauren vow never to force her own agenda on her girls again. While Lauren was neither artistic nor scientific, she was supportive of her daughters’ interests. She let them choose their own paths, although she was chagrined she would not be getting even one ballerina out of two girls.

  Sloan hadn’t liked swimming lessons either, but the pool had been Ainslie’s passion, at least for a while. Her younger daughter had taken to the water and moved up through the YMCA’s program from Guppy to Porpoise in no time. From the kitchen window, Lauren watched her tomboy daughter saunter to the end of their boardwalk, pocketknife and plastic critter box in hand, bug net thrown over her shoulder like Huck Finn. It comforted Lauren to know that if Ainslie fell into the creek or onto the muddy bank she wouldn’t panic, she’d more likely find a clam to examine before she hauled herself out.

  Occasionally, Lauren would climb to the widow’s walk to check on her if she couldn’t see her from the kitchen. Sometimes she would join her, this daughter in cutoffs smeared with pluff mud, a favorite snake T-shirt, flyaway baby hair escaping her ponytail. Ainslie was always eager to share her finds, and sometimes they would sit for hours on the dock examining shells and gory bits of animals her daughter found fascinating. It had never occurred to Lauren that she would find rocks and animal bones in a daughter’s pockets, but she was constantly amazed by the mysterious dead things that crumbled from Ainslie’s clothes.

  Emmett banged into the room carrying the balance of the groceries. He deposited them on the counter, and then, before she knew it, he had disappeared. Of course, Lauren thought, it would be too much to ask for help putting the groceries away.

  She heard a squeal of glee from upstairs. She left the groceries and sneaked up the steps, following the happy sound. The bathroom door was ajar and easy to nudge open. Straight brown hair pooled on the tile floor and Lauren sucked in a shocked breath. The girls had taken the matter of Ainslie’s thinning hair into their own hands. Lauren knocked gently on her daughter’s bedroom door expecting to see a distraught girl buried under the comforter. But her girls were perched on the bed, books strewn around them, permanent markers tossed thoughtlessly on the pale sheets. They turned to her, wide smiles across their beautiful faces.

  “Mom, look what Sloan did for me!” On Ainslie’s deathly pale scalp, her sister had drawn a colorful, undulating Chinese dragon.

  “It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” Ainslie said, checking herself in the mirror. “Thank you so much!” The girls embraced and fell over on the bed, giggling.

  So here it was, one of those times when hope renews. When Lauren was forced to reevaluate. It was this occasional glimmer of optimism that kept Lauren going. Just when things seemed most bleak, when thoughts of losing their home, wrecking her marriage, or Ainslie’s illness were foremost in her mind, something miraculous would happen.

  She heard Emmett push into the room behind her and turned in time to see him whip off his white running cap.

  “So what do you think?” he said, running a hand over his own bald head.

  The girls kicked their feet in the air with laughter, and Emmett climbed onto the bed next to them.

  “Let me pick out one,” Emmett said.

  “Here,” Sloan said and handed him a book of tattoos. Lauren recognized the book. She’d found it in Sloan’s room a couple of years ago and had talked to her about how tattoos were tacky and not acceptable.

  Perhaps that was another thing Lauren had misjudged. Emmett pointed to a tattoo of an Indian elephant and Ainslie clapped her hands. Lauren settled on the bed too. This was what she prayed for, that her girls could find some happiness each day, that her husband would come back to them, and that her family would be strong enough to live through this.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Black Fountain

  Everybody had to have a favorite place, was what Sloan thought. Her mother’s place was the bathroom, where she steamed and creamed and conditioned, a flowery funeral smell trailing her for hours afterward. The beach held a special allure for her little sister. Ainslie would hunch over tide pools for hours, her toes digging sea stars from under faint outlines. Her dad had The Pub, although he thought nobody knew how much he hung out there, but his happy, cigarette-tinged demeanor gave him away.

  Sloan’s place was Brookgreen Gardens, and on occasion, the remaining shell of Atalaya, the Spanish-style mansion across the road. She never knew when she drove there which way she would choose to turn. To the right lay Atalaya, the salt-crusted walls and empty stone rooms cool even in summer. The front opened to a sand path leading through a thicket of crusty cedars to a beach scattered with shell fragments.

  To the left, America’s oldest public sculpture gardens, as Sloan had learned early in life. An independently wealthy couple, Anna Hyatt Huntington and her husband had created the gardens, now the pride of the local community. He was a poet, and she made the garden’s more dramatic sculptures. Sloan’s favorite Huntington sculpture marked the highway entrance—horses as big as cars locked in writhing combat with a snarling lion, a rider clinging to one horse, tossed and feckless, another rider thrown to the ground at the feet of the massive animals.

  It was February, and plants were beginning to leak buds. By March, the gardens cascading down to the Waccamaw River would blaze with azaleas like a Valentine’s Day parade. Today she headed back through the gardens, past stone animals and an allee of giant live oaks to the black fountain, Ainslie’s favorite place. There was something creepy and disturbing about the water oozing from the foundation of the original house, which had burned in 1901. The corner was always cooler, a breeze up from the river constant and welcoming even in February, when short-sleeve days were frequent.

  On the outside of this raised pool, lusty ferns grew, and in
this tiny tropical paradise anoles thrived. Sloan imagined how they must recognize Ainslie by now and run to hide from her. Her sister took some notice of the various animal statues in the gardens, but her main focus was always a huge game of catching every anole unlucky enough to be within reach. She would hang lizards from her earlobes, their fragile limbs flat to their bodies, paralyzed with the effort of biting. Ainslie always put her friends back carefully, saying they had favorite places. It seemed even tiny reptiles had spots of reprieve.

  Sloan dropped down onto an ancient millstone and found her drawing pad and pencils in her satchel. She eyed the sculpture atop the black fountain, a stocky man with large feet and hands wresting an alligator backward into a U. Both man and beast were straining, but the man was on the winning end, perpetually compressing the beast in upon itself. She loved the Alligator Bender for its symmetry and contemporary lines.

  Ainslie loved this sculpture because it reminded her of her hero, Steve Irwin. She thought of the statue as an ancient crocodile hunter. As Sloan’s hands jumped across the paper, she envisioned the smile Ainslie would give her for this sketch. Sloan had drawn starfish, seashells, birds, fish, and every manner of creepy-crawly thing her sister had ever requested. It was the only thing she could think to do to help her sister now. She wasn’t allowed to even breathe in Ainslie’s direction if her mother was hovering around.

  Both Sloan and her father found it easier to simply stay out of the way. “You know how your mother is,” he had said. They were on the beach watching leggy sandpipers skitter away from a dog’s awkward advances. “She’s focused on Ainslie, and that’s the way it should be. It’s what’s best for your sister that matters right now.”

  He hugged her to his side, making it awkward to walk. This path of least resistance suited Sloan, and when her father slipped her the keys to the old battered Jeep, she had known without it being spoken that he was giving her the vehicle. Previously a point of contention between her parents, it was quietly dismissed, ignored really, like everything else where Sloan was concerned. She floated around, standing always on the outside of conversation, like a ghost on the periphery of her family. After she got the Jeep, she’d come to Brookgreen so frequently her father finally told her to keep the membership card.