Free The First Time She Drowned by Kerry Kletter

a meaningless abstraction; there is only this moment and then the next. Sweating and then freezing, a stabbing so violent in my chest and ribs that I sometimes lose consciousness.
    I get my food from the vending machine, slipping past other students who look at me strangely as they give me a wide berth, making me feel even more like an outsider. The rest of the time, I flit in and out of lucidity, one minute imagining I’m getting better, another so disoriented that at one point I wake thinking my mother is here. I hear her voice clear as glass. “I’m sick,” she says. “Take Cassie to the hospital.” I am confused by this, then angry, then mywhole body disintegrates like light snow on pavement. Finally I realize that I’m still inside a nightmare, that I never woke up at all.
    When I actually do awaken, I long for the comfort of a mother, an ache as physical as the illness itself. I do not long for a father, mine or even an imaginary one, although I suppose in some way they are the same thing. My father is a shadow person, a chalk outline of a body, nothing inside the lines—or at least nothing accessible. I know in my heart that he doesn’t agree with all the things my mother did. But we both know that if he dared voice his opposition, she wouldn’t listen or care, and then his irrelevance would be confirmed. So he went along.
    I lie drenched in my bed, my wet lungs sucking for air that comes like little breaths through a straw, and like a sense memory, it pulls me into a particular moment in time, the moment that we all—the whole family—started going under. I close my eyes and slip down down down into blackness. Cars and landscape whiz by me. I feel the jerky rumble of the old station wagon. My father’s voice comes into my head, loud and jarring. And all at once, I am back there on that fateful vacation, the one my mother demanded my father take us on, the one I begged for, the trip that marked the beginning of the end.
    • • •
    It was just days after my near drowning in my grandmother’s pool. My father, eager to get on my mother’s good side, had arranged everything at the last minute. Our luggage had been packed and piled into the back of our car in such a hurry that we reached the end of our block before I realized I had forgotten my favorite doll, Betty—a plastic Jamaican girl with a basket of fake fruit on herhead—and screamed bloody murder until my father agreed to turn the car around and go get her. Once Betty was safely in tow, we were off again in our station wagon, aptly named the Blue Bomb for the explosive grunts of its tired engine. My mother had promised Matthew and me a nickel for every time we spotted a license plate that was not from Pennsylvania, and I’d never seen anyone so thrilled to lose money as we moved farther out of state and away from her family.
    Meanwhile, my overly eager father, who might have been a taxi driver for all the attention we paid him, was shouting out every single sign that we passed along the highway.
    “Boston! Ten miles ahead!” his voice boomed through the car like a train conductor.
    “Stay alive. Drive fifty-five!”
    “Slow for construction!”
    “Who’s he talking to?” Matthew finally asked.
    “God only knows,” my mother said with a sigh.
    The two were discussing the various ways they might dispose of his body without drawing suspicion when at last my father called out the one sign that everyone was waiting for.
    “Welcome to Maine!”
    My mother clapped like a little girl, and Matthew threw his head out the window and howled into the warm summer air.
    “Just wait till you see the house!” my father said. It was clear he’d been merely biding his time, waiting until he could pull out the trump card that would win my mother over. “It’s practically on the water. I’ve heard it’s almost impossible to get a house like this so late in the season. Okay, everybody, keep your eyes peeled. Oursis going to be the red one, number