THE UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF THE BODY by Alyssa Knickerbocker
Evette lived on one side of the island and her mother lived on the other. The island was shaped like a horseshoe. On a map it looked like a raindrop splitting in half.
She liked to think of each of them as having their own territory – Evette didn’t cross into her mother’s territory, and her mother, in kind, stayed in hers. Their long-standing joke, ever since Evette moved back to the island six years ago, was to call before they ventured across the border.
“I’m infiltrating your side today,” Evette would say. “I have to. Work-related.”
“My snipers will shoot you on sight,” Elaine would reply.
They met in the middle every day, in the town that sat in the crook of the horseshoe. They drank coffee at the Italian café or beer at the tavern, or sat at the diner eating soup, ice and mud melting off their feet. Their bodies warmed, releasing the scents of soil and fish – her mother the earth, she the sea – and wet wool and cigarettes. They were occasional smokers. After lunch, they sat on the damp, swollen picnic tables in the park, butts on the table and feet on the bench, legs crossed, Carhartts rolled up over the tops of their work boots, wool socks and unshaven legs on display. Rain fell on their American Spirits, hissing, freckling the cigarette paper with soft grey patches. Before each headed back to her own territory, they wandered the aisles of the supermarket and the hardware store, Elaine hoisting bags of topsoil for her gardens and greenhouses, Evette piling bricks of frozen squid into her basket for the aquarium.
“Look at this color,” her mother said, rifling through the nail polish at the pharmacy. Evette needed Windex, but her mother was easily distracted. She held up a sparkling red bottle, twirled it by the cap. She liked contradictions in women – work boots with lipstick, a tool belt and dangly earrings, a nail-polished hand wrapped around a hammer. “This shade would be brilliant on you.”
“I do not wear nail polish,” Evette said, “and I will never wear nail polish.”
Elaine was shorter than her daughter, sturdy and sleek as a pony, still dark-haired, with two streaks of silver that streamed from her temples. Evette supposed the same thing would happen to her hair, in time, but she would not have a daughter to tease her about it, to call her the Bride of Frankenstein and lurch toward her – after a few drinks – with arms stiff and eyes rolling.
Elaine picked up Evette’s hand to examine her fingers and shrieked.
“My god!” she cried. “Your nails!” A man staring at the toothpaste shelves down the aisle looked over, alarmed. Evette tried to pull her hand away, but her mother held on, jerked Evette’s hand up to her face. She had freakishly strong fingers. She was always noticing something about Evette’s face or body, grabbing her chin in the middle of dinner to examine her skin or teeth, as though Evette were one of her horses.
“You shouldn’t keep them so short,” Elaine said. “You could get an infection.”
“I like them this way.”
“Oh. Is it some kind of gay thing?”
“No – Jesus, Mom, shhh! It is not some kind of gay thing!”
Evette lived alone in a cabin on the beach. It was a cheap kit cabin, built from what looked like Lincoln Logs. There was one large room that served as both living room and kitchen, a bedroom the size of a closet, and a bathroom. There was no insulation. The cold beat through the walls like heat from a woodstove – a hard blue chill.
At the foot of the wooden steps that led down from her front door, the grass turned silver-black with frost, squealed under her sneakers like steel wool. And beyond the grass, a strip of rocky beach, massaged all night by the waves – the playful and ominous sound of fingers rummaging in a jar of marbles.
She spent her days at the aquarium, a spacious, one-room building made of stone and steel and glass, filled with the thin light that seeped through the cloud cover. She loved the solitude, the absence of human voices. The only sounds were the rushing of water into and out of tanks, water seething in the walls, and outside, the roar of the waterfall that poured from the big saltwater tank, cutting an artery down the coarse sand of the beach and flowing back into the bay, silver into silver.
On the west lobe of the island, Elaine lived, still, in the house Evette had grown up in – a one-story 1970s ranch house with purple shag carpeting and avocado counters. Over the years she had built up quite a farm on the property, starting with a small backyard garden and expanding it acre by acre, building a stand of chicken coops by herself, then later a barn with the help of her middle-aged hippie friends. By now she presided over seven acres of crops, a menagerie of horses, chickens, goats, and the occasional batch of turkeys, which she slaughtered and sold each fall, keeping her favorite for their two-person Thanksgiving feast. “This is Margot,” she’d say one year, and then “This is Stevie,” the next, bringing out the platter of sliced white meat and oily thighs, and Evette would roll her eyes.
Secretly, though, she admired her mother’s pioneer spirit. Elaine got up before dawn to begin feeding and mucking out coops and stalls. She spent her days tearing up soil and giving horseback riding lessons to local girls. She owned a whole herd of dogs. It was a loud, raucous existence at her mother’s house, full of screaming chickens and crashing pots, one radio station blaring in the kitchen and another in the barn, the overwhelming smells of manure and rotting hay and wet dog. It was an assault on the senses.
Evette preferred the silence of the aquarium, the gorgeous spiny animals locked behind glass windows. Her cabin sat right next to it on the Foundation’s property, so that she could respond quickly if there was an emergency. There were frequent emergencies. If the tide got low enough, the main water pump would shut off, and the water would slowly drain from the big tank, threatening the rockfish and sea stars, the tiny urchins that cruised across the expanse of window. The big tank could lose a lot of water. It held eighteen thousand gallons of fresh salt water pumped in from the bay. The exact size of a blue whale’s mouth, Evette told the school groups that visited on field trips. Evette would have to shut off all the valves, wait for the tide to rise, cart in fresh buckets of seawater for the tanks if the water grew too warm. The urchins were delicate creatures. If they got overheated they would die, dropping all their needles in a neat, sad pile around their naked shells..
During the winter months, though, these sorts of incidents were rare. The tide stayed high, the bay water clear, so cold it could kill a person in less than fifteen minutes. When the time came, Evette decided, she would go down to the floating dock at the end of the pier, remove her shoes, and slip into the water. Swim out into the channel, the cloud of her breath appearing and disappearing rhythmically as she executed a clean, efficient breaststroke, until she could not swim anymore and sank. By then she would be numb, senseless; she wouldn’t know what was happening. Her body, with its mass of dark hair, would sink slowly into the Salish Sea.
* * *
She liked to think she would be so graceful, in dying. Because there was a family history, a gene – a mutation – passed down from woman to woman through the maternal line. If you had it, it caused cancer, the kind that bloomed in the soft female places: the breasts, the uterus, the ovaries. Evette pictured her women ancestors: a long proletariat line stretching back through the decades and across the country, across the Atlantic and back into bleak, dark Eastern Europe, each carrying in her cupped hands a blighted seed. Evette had never been there – those countries they used to call Bohemia, Moravia, even the names sounding black and bloody.
“Just go down and get the goddamn test done,” her mother said at lunch. It was January, just after New Year’s Eve. Chilly particles of water hung in the air like a curtain. Up on Mount Constitution, the glacial, slow-moving clouds caught on the evergreens like ships stuck on rocks and stopped moving, frozen in place. Before Christmas, Elaine had gone in for a pelvic exam and ended up with an abnormal Pap smear. This, she told Evette, led to further tests, which led to the discovery of the gene. Since then, she’d been haranguing Evette to get tested herself.
“Abnormal,” Evette had said when her mother first told her. “Is that bad?”
Her mother waved her hands impatiently. “My Pap smear is not the point!” she’d said. “The point is, I found out about this mutation-thing, and now you need to find out if I passed it on to you.”
“So . . . maybe you didn’t.”
“But maybe I did.”
“Are you sick?”
Her mother sighed. “Not necessarily. But you’re not listening. We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you.”
“I’m pretty sure we are talking about you,” Evette said. “We seem to be talking about the goings-on inside your vagina, and how they pertain to me. So now I’m supposed to waste a whole day going in for a test that I don’t even want? I don’t think so.”
Evette’s point was that she would rather just live her life. If something came up, she would deal with it. Until then, she didn’t need to know. Elaine knew, and now she had to be going off-island all the time to get her breasts smashed in a machine, to have her cervix scraped at, and what was the point? She was in great shape, especially for a woman her age! Look at her, sitting right there, healthy and perfectly fine, and now she had to worry all the time for no reason.
Elaine’s point – which she was now making again, for the millionth time, over lunch – was that Evette should take advantage of this information that she, Elaine, had not had earlier. She should gain the upper hand. She should seize the bull by the horns.
“I know it’s scary,” she said. “But Evie, it’s time.”
“It’s not scary,” Evette said, full of disdain.
“Fine. If you’re going to be stupid as a goat, then I won’t say another word. I wash my hands of you.”
“Come on, Mom. You never wash your hands.”
* * *
At night, Evette wrapped herself in blankets, played music, drank wine. She drank until her mind quieted. If she drank enough, she would be in the mood to answer the phone when it rang.
“Drinking alone again?” This was her mother, alerted by the low, liquid tenor of her voice. “Get a dog, Evie, this isn’t healthy. I’m coming over. I’ve got a nice puppy here for you.”
“No,” Evette said, lying on the floor in an old sleeping bag, wine in a coffee mug by her splayed-out hair, pooling like a stain. “Absolutely not. You stay on your side, and I’ll stay on mine.”
Evette didn’t want a dog. She did not like to be licked or cuddled or watched. She did not take comfort in the idea of a warm-blooded creature trapped in the house, waiting for her, depending on her for food and water and love. Her mother seemed to enjoy these things so much that sometimes Evette was surprised she had never remarried.
Evette’s father died long ago, when Evette was only a baby, of being an idiot. This is what her mother told her when she’d gotten old enough to be curious. She’d approached her mother in the kitchen, where she was rolling out pasta dough with an empty wine bottle.
“He was a moron,” her mother said, continuing to pound the dough, her hair a tangled curtain over her face, “and it turned out to be fatal.”
Evette searched for her father’s name in the paper’s microfiche archives at the library. She was twelve, maybe thirteen. An old article popped up: he had been drinking and cliff jumping with friends at Mountain Lake. He’d gone off a high cliff, one nobody had tried before, hit the water with a crack, and never came up.
It did seem moronic, especially to teenage Evette, who hadn’t tasted alcohol and did not yet understand its lunar pull. She felt no sadness over her father’s death, though she did not like to think of him. Elaine, not one for sentimentality, did not speak of him or keep photos around. But once, when Evette was home from college and going through her old kid stuff, purging her closet, she came upon some old VHS tapes. When she played them, she mostly found old TV shows, recorded along with commercials for Kool-Aid and Princess Cruises. But on one there was a grainy video of a man with shaggy brown hair and a scruffy beard. He was spindly, with a sweet face. He was very young - almost as young as Evette was as she watched the tape. Maybe even the same age. He sat perched at the edge of a chair, rocking a car seat on the floor with one foot, strumming a guitar and singing in a thin, slightly off key voice. Come on baby, don’t fear the reaper, baby take my hand. There was some banging and crackling and the video shook – someone laughed. Her mother. You have a terrible voice, Elaine was saying, you’re going to scare the baby, and then her father was putting down his guitar and grinning, getting up and coming towards the camera, and her mother shrieked, and Evette pushed Stop.
“If you’re not going to get a dog,” her mother was saying, “then you have to find yourself another girlfriend. You haven’t dated anyone since that redhead, and that was over a year ago.”
Evette resisted hanging up. She hated it when her mother brought up Caroline. That redhead. The only woman Evette had ever introduced to her mother, violating her own rules about keeping her private life private. A huge mistake, one she would not make again.
“Look, Evie,” her mother continued. “You’re not the only lesbian on this island, that much is painfully obvious.”
“Mom, please.”
“Although you probably wouldn’t want to date any of those obvious lesbians, anyway. They have obnoxious bumper stickers, and they’re all too old for you. And too ugly.”
“Mom.”
“Okay, my god, I’m sorry. I thought I was supposed to be supportive.”
After they hung up, Evette would stay on the floor in her sleeping bag until the wine ran out, or until the album ended, or until she fell asleep. She often woke up on the floor like that – in her sleeping bag, a couch cushion for a pillow, swirls of hair etched into her cheek and jaw and temple. A raw, bloody sunrise scratched into the sky, the room slowly inflating with light.
* * *
In the winter there was no fresh bull kelp for the urchins, so she fed them flesh.
Each day she prepped food for the next, tearing open the frozen, mail-order bricks of squid and herring and krill, pressing with her butcher knife through the icy flesh. For the purple and green urchins, the smallest ones, she crushed krill into a pink goo, let it fall in clumps on their bristly spines. For the red urchin, the large one, with his long, knitting-needle spines, she chopped larger bits – whole slices of herring, silver skin wrapped around white flesh wrapped around the thick maroon of the guts. This red urchin liked to fondle the herring chunks with his slender, mobile tube feet, passing them under his body to his mouth, one by one. When she slipped a finger among those long spines they moved instinctively towards the invasion, closing around her hand with a satisfying pressure.
The red urchin used to be her favorite, but not anymore. Now it made her think of Caroline. They had met in the summer, at the farmer’s market on the green. Caroline had come up to Evette, smiling and friendly, carrying a fragrant basket of mint and basil, wearing fingerless gloves and leg warmers, her freckles like the spatter of gold on a Golden Delicious apple. She was one of those people who could strike up a conversation effortlessly, with anyone, even Evette. Caroline was a summer person, a farm intern, only on island for a few months. She had been so impressed when she found out that Evette lived on the island year-round, that she was a marine biologist, that she ran an aquarium, and her eyes went wide – the bright, organic green of a pond when the sunlight hits it just right.
She touched Evette on the wrist.
“Come to the bonfire tonight at the farm,” she’d said. “It’s a potluck!” After a long pause during which Evette looked away, searching the grass for an excuse, she added, “Please?”
And so Evette went, bringing as her potluck contribution the majority of a fifth of Jack Daniels that she had in her cupboard, taking a few searing sips in the cab of her truck before she got out and slogged through the damp field to the fire, the tent strung with Christmas lights, the throngs of people talking and laughing, her heart a tiny aching pinprick, like a spider bite. Caroline saw her, came right to her through the crowd and kissed her on the cheek, so close to the corner of her mouth that Evette spasmed, jerked away weirdly. But Caroline was not put off – she kept her hand on Evette’s back as she steered her through the party, her hand lingering, lingering, the slight gentle motion of her thumb making a tiny, suggestive circle.
At the end of the night Caroline kissed her, suddenly, as she was about to get into her truck and drive home. She tasted of barbecued meat and beer. Evette slipped her hand up under Caroline’s shirt to touch her bare back, and the skin there, to Evette’s cold fingers, felt startlingly hot. She pulled away, climbed into her truck, and fled.
Embarrassed, she avoided the farmer’s market, not wanting to face Caroline again. But soon after, Caroline showed up at Evette’s cabin uninvited.
“Where’ve you been?” she said when Evette answered the door, and stepped up into the doorway, entering in a familiar way, as if Evette’s house belonged to her. Evette moved aside to let her enter, which she immediately regretted. She never invited anyone in.
And so she had had to endure it, gritting her teeth, as Caroline wandered her living room, unwrapping her scarf, peeling off her gloves, shucking her coat onto the sofa. She examined Evette’s books and CDs, ran her eyes over the washed-out wine mugs drying on the wooden rack, the wall calendar filled with Evette’s precise, tiny printing. It was awful. It was like lying naked under a fluorescent light while someone examined you.
Caroline picked up a framed photograph of Evette and her mother. A young Elaine with bright water behind her, her hair black and shining, her skin smooth and tanned. The little girl on her lap with a serious mouth, two blue mittens clasping a handful of shells.
“Oh, wow,” Caroline had breathed, her hand flying to her heart in an embarrassing – Evette thought – display of emotion. “Is this you? And your mother? Oh, Evette, it’s beautiful. It’s just beautiful.”
“That’s just the picture that came with the frame,” Evette snapped. “What do you want to drink? Wine? I have red.”
She uncorked the bottle with one hard yank, the sound of an aggressive kiss. She couldn’t fathom why she wasn’t driving Caroline away, like she drove most women away after one encounter – one night of breathy intimacy, hands under shirts, jeans unzipped. It was always so difficult to see them again, afterwards. It was like cold air on a broken tooth – it made her wince. But some part of Caroline seemed to like it when Evette was caustic and prickly. And after the sun dropped behind the sea like a quarter into a slot machine, they ended up in the pitch black of the tiny bedroom, the darkness filling the window like black paint filling a canvas, layer after layer after layer, so that it seemed to barricade them in. Caroline raked her fingers through Evette’s hair with a steady pressure that Evette found hypnotizing. She pinned Caroline’s legs open like butterfly wings, tasted her. She was surprised. Because of the way Caroline looked, with her peachy hair and glowy cheeks, she had somehow expected her to taste lush and sweet, like a cut-open cantaloupe. Instead she tasted metallic – your tongue on a knife, the tang of iron.
* * *
But that was before, and this is now, and Evette was tired of thinking about it. She wiped Caroline from her mind like fingerprints from glass.
She focused on her animals, on the feeding ritual. She used a watercolor palette to sort the chopped fish, filling each well with squid or krill or herring, a spectrum of white to pink to grey, glittering with ice shards, melting into a pungent fishy slurry. She sprinkled the purple mash of herring guts over the anemones and they swirled into themselves, greedy and reactive, their soft fleshy fingers collapsing into a fist – first the mottled anemone, the color of a woman’s thigh, and then the brilliant Christmas anemone with its vicious streaks of red and green. It was an illusion – the anemones were not dangerous, as she was always telling the littlest children. Touch them and their gentle tentacles stick to your finger for a moment, then pull away. Like Scotch tape, she told them, but still they regarded her warily.
Evette liked the children sometimes, when they were quiet, when they were amazed. Mostly, though, they frustrated her with their absent-minded scuffing of the floor, their whisperings, their bumbling questions. Um . . . um . . . um . . . how much longer till lunch? They poked the soft anemones and the shy, rubbery sea cucumbers too hard, though she had hung up plaques everywhere that read, Touch the animals as gently as you would touch your own eyeball. She had to remind herself constantly that the children were her reason for being there – they were why she got a paycheck each month, why she got to remain day after day in her watery refuge.
But the school groups had stopped coming for the season – the ferry ride from the mainland was long and grey and rough, and once they got here it was too cold for walks on the beach, for wading around in the shallows, dragging nets through the eelgrass beds for flatfish and flounder. For the whole winter, Evette would be alone with the silent fish and invertebrates, the microscopes lined up on the counter, shrouded in their cloudy plastic covers. At night, she turned on the lights in the big tank and watched the colorful rockfish – copper, orange, pink – sway lazily by, propelling their bodies with the slightest flick of their fins. Rockfish could live to be sixty, eighty, one hundred years old. Most of them would still be drifting here long after she was dead, their gills heaving open and shut, open and shut.
* * *
“Let’s do something special for lunch today,” Evette’s mother said over the phone. “Meet me at the tower.”\
She meant the tower on the top of Mount Constitution. Sometimes they went up there, Evette and Elaine, for special occasions, such as birthdays, the Fourth of July – you could see three different fireworks shows in three different towns – and New Year’s Eve. It was freezing on New Year’s Eve, but they had gone, with a bottle of champagne and a bunch of grapes. Elaine had read something about eating twelve grapes at the stroke of midnight. Each grape was supposed to represent a month of the coming year. It had something to do with luck, or good fortune – the usual New Year’s Eve nonsense. Elaine had swallowed her last grape too fast and choked; Evette had had to whack her on the back until it came flying out, right over the stone turrets, and plummeted into the darkness below.
“Well,” Elaine had said, laughing, “I guess I’m fucked. That’s a bad omen if I ever saw one.”
She was waiting when Evette arrived, sitting on the steps toward the top of the tower, looking out. The view from up here was breathtaking – the best view in the islands, people said. You could see for miles in all directions. You could see mountains, ocean, mainland, Canada. Everything seemed misty and faraway, like a painting.
Elaine had a flask of whiskey and a bar of dark chocolate with her, set out on the stone step like an offering.
Evette picked up the flask. “This is lunch?”
“Take a drink,” Elaine said. “I have something to tell you.”
Elaine spoke evenly, not looking at her daughter. She had not been totally truthful about her health situation, she said, not exactly. She had gone to the doctor not to get a routine Pap smear, as she had claimed, but because of some symptoms she’d been having. A heaviness in her abdomen, pain in her lower back – “Sounds like you’re pregnant,” Evette said, trying for a joke, but her mother pressed on – and a sense that something was not right. Then there were Pap smears and scans and tests, and finally the revelation of the bad gene, hiding inside of her.
A gene, Evette knew, was a section of your DNA sequence. She pictured the DNA images from her college textbooks – the twisted ladder stretching on and on – and then she pictured her mother’s ladder, with smashed rungs or a broken railing. Her mother had stopped talking. She seemed to be waiting for Evette to respond.
“Okay,” Evette said. “So, what are you telling me? Are you sick? Are you dying or something?”
She was in the middle of unwrapping the chocolate bar, peeling back the infuriating silver paper that stuck to the chocolate in shiny strips. It was very good chocolate – seventy percent cacao, with almonds. She knew her mother was not dying. Now, she figured, Elaine would break the bad news – she was going to have chemo or cut off a boob, she was going lose her hair. Or maybe it wasn’t even as bad as that – she would have radiation, it would go into remission, she would be fine in a month. Evette had known several people who had had cancer of various types – it always played out like that.
“Yes,” Elaine said. “Yes. I’m dying.” She said it stiffly, formally, and then she laughed.
Evette laughed, too – her mother! Dying! It was absurd. Her mother sat right there, breathing and talking, looking ruddy and healthy, with her strong thighs and her thick, wild hair.
“No, seriously,” Elaine said, catching her breath. She wiped a tear from her cheek. “I don’t know why I’m laughing. I’m not kidding. They told me six months. Maybe less.”
Elaine explained the rest swiftly: it was ovarian cancer, stage four, which meant that it had spread through to her organs, her bones. She had decided against chemo because even though it might give her a few more months, it would probably make her life a living hell.
“Oh,” Evette said. “All right. Okay. Do you want another piece of this chocolate, or can I finish it?”
And then she burst into tears – loud, noisy tears that came out of nowhere, like a softball to the head. Elaine started to cry, too, and tried to put her arms around Evette.
“You can’t cry!” Evette yelled, batting her mother away. “You can’t cry while I’m crying!”
She leapt up and ran into the glassed observation room at the top of the tower, which had a heavy door you could lock behind you by throwing a bolt. She stood in the corner of the tiny, bare room, surrounded by windows, by the misty panorama of the islands. Her mother appeared at one of the windows, peering in with desperate eyes. They both stood there, weeping, on opposite sides of the glass, glaring wetly at each other, until Elaine started to laugh, and then Evette started to laugh, and they both stood there laughing, clutching their faces, breathless and hysterical.
“Open the door,” Elaine said, muffled. “Let me in.”
“No,” Evette said.
And in fact, she did not open the door until a tourist couple appeared, red-faced and huffing from climbing the tower steps. They queued up obediently behind Elaine, cameras dangling from their necks, hands clasped in front of them, and waited, as if it were perfectly normal that each visitor should have a turn locking themselves in the observation room and weeping, visible but unreachable, like a strange sea creature on display behind glass.
* * *
They drew the sample on Valentine’s Day, at the clinic on the island. It would be sent over to St. Joe’s in Bellingham for screening. Evette flexed her arm for the nurse, popping the blue vein up to the surface, watched her own blood rush blackly into the long narrow vial, and knew she had the bad gene.
Of course she did.
“What’s the point of this?” she said out loud, not really meaning to. The nurse moved her mouth into a smile, pressed a cotton ball to Evette’s arm as she withdrew the needle.
“It’ll be a week or so,” the nurse said. Evette didn’t know her. She thought she knew everyone on the island. “They’ll call you.”
The nurse watched her clipboard as she went out the door. People in doctor’s offices never looked at you, really. You were just another pale, mushy body under a sheet.
* * *
She did not cry again like she had in the tower. She thought of it as a brief lapse in judgment, an out-of-body experience. She understood that her mother was dying on a certain level – her brain understood, with words that scrolled across the screen of her mind in typewritten letters. Her mother was dying. This was a true statement. And yet it did not seem true. Her mother continued to appear at lunchtime, to eat sandwiches and bowls of soup, to smoke American Spirits in the park and make caustic comments about the people walking by. If the symptoms she had mentioned before were bothering her or growing worse – if she had any pain or fear or doubts about refusing treatment – she did not mention it. Evette and Elaine settled into a sarcastic sort of normalcy. They were not sensitive, emotional people – they were tough, no-nonsense women who understood that everybody dies. As if to prove this, Elaine took to joking about the situation at any opportunity.
“Just think,” she said, blowing her cigarette smoke out her nostrils. “I’ve been feeling myself up for decades, doing those stupid self-breast exams, and then wham! It comes at me from the crotch.”
As she worked – feeding, cleaning, polishing the Plexiglass of the jewel tanks with a mixture of rubbing alcohol and baby shampoo – Evette would fall into a kind of trance, the hours flooding past her like the sea through the channel. At four, the thin light drained from the bay, from the beach, from the silver-grey cobblestone of the aquarium, and she turned on the tank lights, dragged a stool over, and sat gazing into the soft green water. She started bringing her bottle of wine and her mug down to the aquarium; she started finishing the bottle there. It was so calming, so lovely the gentle light from the tanks, the fish moving in synch with each other, a flickering ballet, the wine cool in her mouth, warm in her stomach, spreading delicately through her body like the long, unfurling tendrils of a brittle sea star, reaching all the way to her fingertips.
When the wine was gone, she walked the pitch-black path to her cabin, weaving a little, drunk and warm and floating. She had learned to navigate the roads and deer paths by looking up instead of down: you followed the thin line of starry sky visible between the tree tops, which, like the Milky Way, was easier to see if you didn’t look directly at it. On either side was perfect darkness – this is what you avoided.
* * *
The hospital called. They wanted her to come over for a “talk.” She wasn’t upset. On the back of a ripped envelope, she carefully wrote down the directions they gave her from the parking garage to the correct wing and hung up.
“I knew it,” she said when she hung up, though there was no one there to hear.
She drove onto the ferry, the gangplank rattling, the man in orange with the dirty fingers waving her forward. It occurred to her, parking her car between two delivery trucks on the lower deck, the air full of sea salt and diesel, that she couldn’t remember the last time she had left the island. She tried to avoid it at all costs. She did not like the way she felt on the mainland – exposed, like a minnow in a wide, shallow bay.
She had, of course, left the island for college, and graduate school, and her post-doc research position. She had not been unhappy, exactly – she had just been treading water, gathering up her degrees patiently, like shells brought in by the tide and deposited at her feet, waiting for the moment when she could return to the island. Sometimes she would have to keep herself from panicking, imagining the slow disasters that were, almost certainly, killing her island as she slept. The rising seas chewing at the beaches, the pollution drifting up from Seattle; huge dead patches of ocean, entire continents of water without oxygen approaching the San Juans from across the Pacific. The invasive tunicates, those pale, globular tumors, spreading over the sea floor, feeding on sewage, suffocating the plants and the bottomfish and the shellfish. Her island under siege, and she absent.
She dreamed of it, all those long years away: of kneeling on the beach, falling face-first into the stiff, sparkling sand, digging her fingers into the flesh of the land and feeling it hold her – that island in the middle of the ocean on a spinning planet. It was the island she had longed for as a homesick college student, not her mother. But now it seemed to her that the island and her mother were synonymous – rocky and sturdy and always there, surrounded by water.
The ferry jostled out of the slip and floated free, and it felt like falling.
In the oncology wing of the hospital, they were brief and efficient, which she appreciated. They used a lot of medical terminology – being a biologist, she could keep up with some of it but not all. She went over it all in her mind, memorizing phrases as if studying for a test: Specific mutations in the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. Fifty-six percent chance of breast cancer. Sixteen percent, ovarian. Percentages go up significantly if mother has/had breast/ovarian cancer. Percentages go up with detection of mutations.
Percentages go up, up, up.
Her options were these, as far as she could decipher from the slippery doctor-speak: Do nothing, and wait for the bomb to go off, if it was going to, which it might not, though it probably would. Or: preventive mastectomy. Or: preventive hysterectomy. Or: preventive mastectomy plus preventive hysterectomy.
“I know this is a difficult decision,” the doctor said. “Some women elect to have their eggs harvested and frozen. Knowing you can still have children down the road makes it easier.”
“Children aren’t an issue,” she said. She adjusted her paper robe, which buckled and gaped. She crossed her legs. She felt like a piece of meat, poorly wrapped in butcher paper.
The doctor said, “There’s no rush.” He put various glossy pamphlets into a plastic bag with the hospital’s logo on the side and handed it to Evette with a flourish, as though she had made a wise purchase at a department store. “Take your time. Think about it.”
* * *
She did not tell her mother about the test results, though Elaine asked each day at lunch. “Nothing yet,” she’d say with a shrug. She did not make a decision, and the hospital didn’t call to force her to do so.
She woke up cold, stayed cold all day as she worked in the aquarium, feeding and cleaning. Her fingers numb, her body chilled. She didn’t mind. She began to feel it was her natural state, to be cold, her blood sluicing chilly and blue through her veins. Perhaps, she thought, if spring never came – if she stayed this cold, this deeply chilled – her body would be preserved the way it was, and would never turn against her.
But lying on the floor at night in her sleeping bag, dizzy with wine, Evette was sure she felt an ache in her belly, in her breasts – the tight, creepy feeling that buzzes in a muscle just before a cramp. She kicked out of the sleeping bag, staggered to the bathroom, crashing into the wall once before making it to the light switch, and pulled off her shirt before the mirror. She held each of her breasts in her hands. They looked and felt perfectly normal. But she could not help but picture them as apples, rotten on the inside. How would you know until you sliced them in half, saw the melting, brown, sugary rot?
She felt hot spots light up inside of her, sparks where her ovaries should be, and imagined the bad gene melting her flesh like plastic – the horrible smell of the hand-me-down Barbie she’d once left on a heating vent by accident. A panic seized her – Get it out! Get it out, get it out! – and the decision seemed clear. A bad thing was inside her, a killing thing. There was really no question. Would she leave a live bomb under her bed if she knew it was there? Was she stupid? Was she a fucking moron?
No, she was not.
But she imagined the scalpel opening her up, the layers of skin and muscle and tissue – the fat, the fascia, the blood. She was flooded with surreal images: a hand reaching inside her, palming her uterus like a pear, lifting it to a mouth, biting. Scars where her breasts were supposed to be, a neat red line like a minus sign. She thought about what would happen to her body parts – her body parts! – that had been cut off. Would they be buried, burned? Wrapped in plastic and left in a dumpster, slowly melting down to a hot stinking jelly?
She cried – just once – open-mouthed, arms crossed tightly across her ribcage, walking through the house purposefully from room to room, though she had no business in the bedroom or the kitchen or the living room. She ended up in the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror, fascinated by the ugliness of her gaping mouth, the way her spit shone in puddles on her tongue.
* * *
She went to the bar alone. She drank several beers and then struck up a conversation with a woman she had never seen before. The woman was thin, tall and hard as a dock piling, with a buzz cut and a lip ring. She said she was “visiting a friend on the island.” Evette was aware of her own eyelids at half mast, her body loose as warm oil. She flirted. She felt like someone else. In the bathroom, she sat on the toilet and the floor twirled like a record spinning.
“Fuck,” she said out loud. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
She had never let Caroline see her drunk. She had never gotten this drunk, back then, in the summer of Caroline. She had been good for Caroline, even if Caroline didn’t know it, even if all Caroline saw was a stubborn, solitary, unpleasant woman who could not say I love you, who could not say Stay, move in with me, share this life. Of course Caroline had left. Of course she had left without saying goodbye, assuming, probably, that Evette didn’t really care whether she stayed or not. After all, Evette never called Caroline at the farm to say, Come over. She never responded – too nervous and uncertain – when Caroline dropped hints about wanting to stay for the winter, about the canvas tents at the farm growing cold. When Caroline turned up on her porch like a stray cat, she’d opened the door. That was all.
One night Caroline just hadn’t shown up, though Evette waited up with her mug of wine, hoping, making sure the porch light was on. She didn’t turn up the next night, or the next. Evette finally drove out to the farm to look for her, and found the tent dismantled, the interns gone.
She tried to think back to the last time they had been together, if Caroline had said anything, had acted strangely. But everything smudged together in the pitch black of her bedroom, the only place they touched each other. She had never really let herself think about Caroline, about what the relationship could become. If she comes she comes, she told herself each evening as she walked home, and left it at that. Lying next to her she once thought – a loud, passionate thought that burst into her brain like a siren – Your hair! Your lips! Your breasts! – overwhelmed with the desire to gather Caroline up and squeeze, to crush her into something tiny, something she could clench in her fist and keep forever. But she could never say such a thing out loud.
Evette brought the thin woman back to the aquarium. Evette drove, somehow, the truck drifting along the road like a boat caught in a current, like a running horse taking itself home. On the cold stone floor of the aquarium, the thin woman unbuttoned Evette’s shirt and ran a sharp fingernail from her breastbone to her pubic pone, like a scalpel. They kissed. The thin woman put her fingers inside Evette as clinically as a gynecologist, as if she intended to check each organ, as if at any moment she might start murmuring, The cervix, yes, good. And there’s the uterus. . . .
Evette closed her eyes. She waited for the crackle of a paper sheet, for the finality of wheels rolling away from her, the whisper of a pen making terrible marks on paper.
* * *
She woke up before dawn, feeling strange. Something was not right. There was the sound – too close – of water moving lazily at slack tide, like a tongue moving inside a mouth.
She was lying in the sand, somewhere between the aquarium and her cabin. The sand was cold, molded to her body like a wet cast. Her head was downhill and it was heavy, filled with cement. The water was reaching for her, it was in her hair like hands; her hair was chilly and heavy and soaking up the tide like a sponge.
“Oh my god,” she said out loud and her tongue felt like stone, hard and huge and bloody. “Oh my god, oh my god.”
She lifted her head and her hair drained water down her back. She rolled herself over. She wanted to throw up but she could not. The aftertaste of alcohol was in her mouth, antiseptic and harsh, like turpentine. Her arms were so heavy. She asked them to go one way and they went another. She tried to remember: the bar, the aquarium, the thin woman’s face hovering above her. And then she’d been alone in the aquarium, had gone to the cabinet where she’d started keeping liquor so she didn’t have to go back to the house for it. She’d sprawled half dressed in front of the big tank, each mouthful exploding through her body like a firework of pleasure, like the orgasm she hadn’t had. She felt like she couldn’t stop. She felt like if she drank enough, she could scour herself out, kill anything bad inside her.
She could not stand up. She crawled away from the water, toward her cabin. Blackberry thorns dragged across her skin, but she felt nothing.
When she woke up again, she was in bed. She had lost huge swaths of time. There was blood on the sheets. On her legs, on her arms, there was a black crust on them that came off powdery. She rubbed it between her fingers and it turned soft and colorful, like rust.
She got up, her limbs jerky, like a marionette; she took her clothes off and threw them away. She wadded them up – fabric soaked with water and mud and shit and urine – and stuffed them down into the depths of her garbage. She took a shower, hotter than she could stand, and her skin lit up. Her legs looked like they had been clawed by wild cats. The bloody streaks were an incredible neon color, and she ran her fingers over the long thin welts – like whip marks, like some kind of Braille – amazed.
She drank water and threw it up, a thin green bile that burned her throat, poured like acid from her nose. She cried while she vomited – not out of sadness, but out of some physical, animal response. She felt empty, clean, like a rinsed-out bottle. She had drunk enough to kill herself, she knew that. She recalled the water licking at her scalp, its chilly fingers raking her hair. She felt immense regret, incredible relief.
She lay in bed, noting with pleasure the way her chest lifted and fell, lifted and fell, without her even having to think about it. She ran her hands up under her shirt and over her breasts – small and pointed, warmer than the rest of her, the skin thin like the delicate fabric of a parachute. She listened to her own heartbeat, filling her ears and draining back out, rhythmic and regular as the washing tide. The body was an amazing machine. It was a shame you only got one.
* * *
She drove to her mother’s house. Her hands on the steering wheel turned instinctively, the strip of sky between the trees a ridiculous spangle of stars. She was sick of the stupid sniper game, the separate lives she and her mother pretended to live, both of them so anxious about becoming dependent on someone else. What was so bad about it? They only had so much time.
Her mother was still up – through the black lace of tree branches that filled the yard, she could see the lighted square of the front window, where she had lounged as a child, making patterns and pictures in the delicate frost with her fingers. A handprint, a sea star, a rolling, wave-crested sea. Then watching the splinters of ice reclaim them, leaving behind only a faint seam, like a scar.
“Mom,” Evette said as soon as her mother opened the door, but then she stopped. Her mother stood blinking, swaying on her feet, bleary and still asleep. Her face, bare of makeup or expression, looked shockingly naked. It was pale and slack and exhausted-looking – it was the face of someone in physical pain. On the couch behind her was a nest of blankets; the living room was bathed in the blue light of the television, which was on mute. There were piles of dishes on the coffee table, muddy towels strewn all over the floor. The dogs did not even get up to come investigate – they only lifted their big heads and regarded Evette dully before settling back down to sleep. Before, this house had always been psychotically clean. The dogs had been frisky and energetic, mirroring her mother’s vigor. Her mother looked sick. She looked thin and small. She did not smell of the earth – she smelled of something disintegrating and chemical, like a mothball. Evette knew, suddenly, that if she were to go around to the back of the house, she would see the gardens grown over, untended. It hit her like a wave, a wall of cold water.
“Mom –” Evette started again, but Elaine interrupted her.
“You got the test results,” she said. She stood there, frozen, gripping the knob.
“Yes,” Evette said. She took a deep breath, and then she lied. “It was negative,” she said.
Elaine threw her arms around Evette, pressed her lips to her daughter’s cheek. For a brief moment, Evette hugged her mother back. It was strange to be the larger one, the stronger one, to hold her mother like she was the child. Evette could not remember the last time they had embraced. They used to swim, long ago, on the beach nearby, in the freezing salty waves that Evette could hear even now, whooshing through the trees like a heartbeat. They would race back through the prickly brush to the outdoor shower at the back of the house, strip off their bathing suits, and stand naked together under the spigot. Her mother’s strong neck, smooth haunches, muscled and rippling like one of her horses after a run. The silky dark hair in her armpits and crotch that fascinated Evette; the surge of strength in her arms when she lifted her daughter and tossed her onto her shoulder.
“Do you want to come in?” her mother was saying. “We could have a drink – a celebratory drink – I’ll get out the whiskey –”
But Evette was already leaving. “No,” she said. She jingled her keys, backed toward her truck. “No, I have to get back.”
“I can’t believe you came all the way over here. So silly,” she called after Evette. “You could have just called!” She waved as Evette backed out of the driveway – just a silhouette against the bright doorway, like a shape cut out of the air.
Evette pointed her truck toward her side of the island and drove. At some point she had made her decision – she would have the surgeries, of course. She would cut off smaller parts of herself to save the whole. She thought of the sea stars in the touch tank who would crawl away from a fight without an arm. An animal would survive, no matter what. An animal would do whatever it took.
A wall of hemlock trees rushed by her on either side, high and pointed like a turreted fort, and as she approached the halfway point between her mother’s house and hers, she could almost see snipers in the trees, shadowy figures with her thin windshield in their sights. She felt them tracking her with their scopes until she crossed that invisible boundary, and once again was safe.
Alyssa Knickerbocker is the author of the novella Your Rightful Home (Nouvella, 2011). Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, The Carolina Quarterly, Brooklyn Magazine, Sou’wester, and The Best of the West 2011: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri.