Heart of Palm (16 page)

But it had been too late for her feet. Bunions!

Up the hill, the hulking shape of Aberdeen crouched in shadows. Arla was in bed. Sofia was alone. A mosquito buzzed at her face, and she dipped her head under the water again.

A fit. A freaking
hissy
fit is what her mother would have, if she could see this, her daughter swimming in the dark, half naked and putting herself in all kinds of unnecessary danger. Outboards. Snakes. Even sharks, the ones that got themselves confuzzled and ass-backward in the inlet at Matanzas or Porpoise Point, bumping along the banks of the Intracoastal for the rest of their shark days instead of out in the open ocean where they belonged. But she wasn’t afraid of them. She didn’t know why, but swimming here in the Intracoastal at night was one of the only times Sofia wasn’t afraid.

She reached the center of the channel and paused for a moment, floated on her back, and looked at the moon. She imagined her own image, from above—the long rust-colored tangle of her hair spread out around her shoulders, her skin always in such shocking white relief and especially tonight, against the black cotton of her underwear. Floating. Drifting.

Just like Ophelia.

Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny.

The painting, a reproduction of it, anyway, had hung in Professor Gervais’s office. In
Todd’s
office. When you’re sleeping with your professor, she reminded herself, you’ve earned the privilege of calling him by his first name, at least at the moment when his pants are around his ankles and you are kneeling in front of him and his hands are rough, shoving, on the back of your head.
Todd’s
office. Ha! But the painting. In the office. Housed in a fussy gilt frame that belonged in a library or a drawing room, not the mildewed third-floor office of a visiting state-school undergraduate professor, a mediocre scholar of Shakespearean theory, and clichéd Shakespearean theory at that. She remembered the first time she’d seen it. Millais, that was the artist; Millais’s
Ophelia
.

It was a beautiful painting, it truly was, and Sofia had had plenty of time to study it, given the number of times Gervais (Todd!) led her into the damp confines of his office, the number of times she had clutched his thin shoulders to her breasts and held her breath, looking up at the painting and thinking, so this is it. So this is love.

She was a first-semester freshman at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, still living at Aberdeen and being dropped off on campus every morning by Dean, on his way to Rayonier, then picked up late in the afternoon for the long ride back to Utina. She’d seen Shakespeare on the schedule and had registered immediately for the course, though when she’d first met her new professor she expected him to be a bore. Tall, hair thinning on top, a disconcerting mole on the side of his nose. But on the second day of class he looked at her, really
looked
at her, and she saw a light flicker in his eyes that portended danger and desire. She went home and looked at herself in the mirror, searching for what he saw. When she recognized it she acted on it. They’d been covering
Hamlet
the week he finally seduced her, and she lay on the floor in his office with her jeans in a clump under his chair, staring at the painting of Ophelia on the wall above his desk, while he panted and whispered again and again,
I love you, I love you, I love you. Sofia.

But of course, he didn’t.

In the painting, Ophelia floated on her back in a clear narrow brook, her right hand clutching a bright red poppy, her voluminous skirts borne up through the water as though inflated. Her eyes stared upward, unfocused, and her lips were parted and slack, her teeth a bright white row above her tongue.

“She’s singing,” Todd had said that first day, when she asked him about the painting. He was standing now, buckling his belt, and the sweat still glistened on his forehead and neck. “It’s the moment before she drowns.”

“Are you sure? I don’t think so,” Sofia said. She was sitting back against the wall, and the taste of Todd was still bitter in the back of her throat. “I think she’s already dead.”

Todd shook his head, impatient. “No, no. Scholars have studied the work. She’s singing.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go, Sofia. We’ve got to get your sweet ass out of here.” He was thrusting student essays into a worn leather satchel. He smiled at her. His pants had a sharp crease down the thigh, all the way to his shoe. She wondered if his wife had ironed it in.

“She’s dead,” Sofia said. She stared at the painting. “I know she is.”

Why did she ever sleep with that man? She’d asked herself a million times. She scarcely enjoyed it at all while it was happening, and the memory of it as the years ticked away had become distasteful to the point of revulsion. Mysteries abound. Why did she do it?

Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?

Ophelia. Damn, girl! All for Hamlet? You let that man drive you crazy, didn’t you?

Once, at the office of one of the psychiatrists Arla had taken her to, the doctor left the room to get a prescription pad, and Sofia leaned across the desk and picked up her chart. A cover sheet pinned in with a metal clasp listed her diagnoses: (1) Moderate depressive. (2) Anxiety disorder. (3) Borderline OCD. She ran her finger down the list, loving the organization of it, the tidy cataloging. So precise! It was beautiful. She carefully tore the sheet from the chart, folded it up, put it in her purse. She still kept it in her bureau upstairs, and when the tendrils of thoughts in her head became too wild, too uncontrolled, she took the list out, looked at it, rolled the wayward thoughts back into spools around those lovely clinical words, and put them back in the drawer.

And then it started. Prozac! Zoloft! Paxil! Xanax! It was like a parade march. She’d like to set them all to music. She pictured herself in a majorette’s outfit, high white boots and a short skirt, maybe twirling a baton, marching down a bright sunny street crowded with pharmaceutical reps.
Bom, bom, bah! Bom, bom, bah!

Did you take your pills? Arla would ask, over and over and over.

Yes. Yes.
Yes!

I’m only trying to help you.

Then leave me alone. That would help me.

In the water, Sofia extended her arms out on either side of her, imagining a scale. She’d rebalance herself again tonight, recalibrate. What a day. Fourth of July, the most wretched day of the year. Starting with that disgusting piano first thing this morning, ending with fireworks at Uncle Henry’s, that rotten little spat with Arla in the kitchen. It had been unsettling. Breathe. Rebalance. Recalibrate. In her left hand (and here she wiggled her fingers, slicing them through the water): sanity, so bright and hard and cruel, like an emerald, she imagined it. And here in her right hand (again, wiggling), the soft and comfortable aspic of withdrawal, where she’d dwelt so much of her life, sometimes whole days, weeks, months, until Arla would pull her back out again. It was lovely in the aspic, really. She’d go there for good if it wouldn’t have finally broken Arla’s heart.

But now here was the secret. She hadn’t taken her pills. Hadn’t taken them in almost two years, in fact, though Arla had the prescriptions filled every month and toted them up the stairs, left the little vials pointedly on Sofia’s bureau or on the counter in the bathroom. Every day Sofia took one pill out of the vial and flushed it down the toilet. Because what was the point, after all? What was the benefit? Going around fuzzy-headed and plodding and chemically lobotomized? The days passing by in tapioca tranquility, weeks and months rustling away like dry leaves through the scrub, faster than she could contain them? She was forty. And then she was forty-one. And then she was forty-two. And no memories to distinguish one year from the next. The meds made her feel blunted, not better. She didn’t want them. She didn’t need them.

Did you take your pills? Yes.

Did you take your pills? Yes.

Did you take your pills?
No.

She wasn’t crazy. For God’s sake. She knew she wasn’t crazy. On the contrary, she was excruciatingly lucid. But it was so hard to convince everyone else of this fact, so exhausting to constantly, incessantly protest one’s own soundness of mind, that sometimes she just couldn’t be bothered trying. The audience, they never suspended their disbelief.

Still on her back, she bent her elbows and pulled her arms in, angled her wrists so her hands dipped upward and out of the water in a gesture of entreaty. She’d practiced this pose before. Open the mouth, stare upward. Exactly like the painting. Exactly like Ophelia.

I did love you once.

Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

She’d found out she was pregnant on the day of the final exam, and she waited until after she’d written her essay on
Troilus and Cressida,
had filled up the little blue exam book with a beautiful, magnificently structured argument about conquest and ambiguity and tragedy. Then, at the end of the booklet, she wrote the words, shocking herself with the sight of them there on the page: “I am pregnant” she wrote. She underlined the word
pregnant
. She walked to the front of the room, handed Todd the essay, then walked out past the other students, went home to Aberdeen, and waited.

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember.

At the end of the second day he still hadn’t called, so she went to his office. His hands shook when he handed her a card with an address for a clinic.

“And that’s that?” she said.

“Well, what did you think?” he said, incredulous. “Sofia. I mean, for God’s sake.” He gestured at the photo of his wife and children on his desk, but Sofia wouldn’t look at it. She stared over his head instead, at the Millais. Ophelia had red hair, thin arched eyebrows. My God, she looked just like her. The water crept around her breasts, pulling her down. “I’ll take you there,” he said. “I’ll stay with you until it’s done.” But what he didn’t say:
I love you, I love you, I love you. Sofia.

Two nights after it was done she spiked a high fever, started vomiting in the bathroom at Aberdeen and couldn’t stop. Arla fretted over her and Dean paced outside the bathroom door, and finally they loaded her into the Impala and drove her to the hospital in St. Augustine. Her brothers stood on the porch watching them leave, and she remembered their faces, frightened and confused.

“You don’t know what brought it on?” Dean kept asking. “Is it a stomach bug? Did you eat something bad?” Sofia shook her head, could not speak, though in the hospital, alone in the waiting room with Arla while Dean parked the car, she came clean and told her about the abortion, about Todd, about everything. Arla sucked in her breath but then put her arms around Sofia and stayed with her, through the blood work and the painkillers and—finally—after the surgery. “It happens, unfortunately,” the doctor said. “The hysterectomy was our best option. The initial D&C was incomplete, and then you had the sepsis, and then . . .” He spread his hands out, shrugged lightly. “It happens.”

Sofia named the baby Ruby. It had been a girl. Not that there was any evidence of that. The abortion had been early, and the baby had been just an unformed mass, faceless and vague. But Sofia just
felt
it had been a girl. She didn’t want the baby until after she was gone, but then the loss felt almost unbearable, and she wept for guilt and for shame and for the terror of this unbidden mortality that had visited her. She whispered the name to Arla—
Ruby, Ruby, Ruby
—and Arla nodded, stroked her daughter’s hair. “She’ll always be yours, Sofia,” she said. “You’ll always have her.”

But Arla was wrong. She didn’t have her. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Gone means gone. She’d never have her.

She never returned to college after that. She got a cashier’s job at the Winn-Dixie out near the beach and kept it for almost a year. She enjoyed it, to a point—enjoyed the satisfying electronic blips of the UPC codes over the scanner, enjoyed the deli fried chicken she’d buy every day for lunch, even enjoyed the blue polyester uniform, so official it was, so wonderfully valid. But then came the night when her register till wouldn’t balance properly after closing and the manager, a horrible woman named Diane, made her stay late and keep counting the money, keep cross-checking it against the register tape, to locate the error. Sofia counted the money and counted the money and counted the money and still it kept coming out wrong. Seventeen dollars short!

“Keep counting,” Diane said. “Until you find it.”

Sofia counted the money again. Again. Again. Wrong. Wrong.
Wrong.
Then she had a sensation that felt like choking. The money was wrong, and Ruby was gone, and everything was ugly and sick and dirty. She fell to the floor and hyperventilated until Diane called Aberdeen.

“I didn’t know she was crazy,” Diane spat. “I got a store to run here.”

Arla sent Carson to come and fetch her from the Winn-Dixie. At Aberdeen she threw up in the bathroom and then took off the blue uniform and put it in the trash.

Six months later, Will died. The night of his funeral she dreamed he was in a claw-footed tub, holding baby Ruby in his arms, and there were flames and smoke all around. The void was expanding dangerously, and Sofia stood at the edge, looking down, feeling the cold rush of time and eternity there beneath her feet, beckoning. And that’s when Dean left.