Soaked
A Short Story by Ellen Keane Graham
Most creators carry their instruments at their chest or their torso--in their hands, over their heads, to their lips or perhaps stacked sloppily on a shelf somewhere until made useful. Laine stood on hers, stomped it, flattened it out. She hated art, she hated her talent. She wished it would fail her, but she triumphed steadily. She hoped to be a mathematician or a geographer, an oceanographer…anything but an artist, anything but someone who had to create.
Laine grew up watching waves of people create. Her parents and all of their friends were drenched with creativity. She watched them with their violins, their guitars, their pencils, paintbrushes--wooden carvings that seemed to release just a piece of something that used to exist--driftwood memory moments to cling to. She watched everyone around her shape their years with creations, and it was often expected that she would do the same. Laine did not want this responsibility.
Her elders hoped that as they began to lose touch with their crafts, when age became a hindrance to them, that she would take their places in society as a creator. This sounded maniacal and useless to Laine. She just wanted to do her homework and learn something real--why the earth moved, how it kept going and why. But, as much as she resisted, she knew that this buoyant creativity would eternally surface.
Laine’s little fish eyes sat tucked back on their shelf like emergency candles. Her noodley, sliding shoulders barely supported the bulky knapsack that rarely left her crooked back. She developed late, slowly fumbling into womanhood after high school was already over. As a result, she watched jealously as groups of emerging, breast-bearing ladies dagger heels pricked the hallways of her school, giving her all the more reason to stay hidden behind her math book, burying her talent away deeper with each turning page. When Laine’s parents died, in the spring of her seventh grade year, it was willed that she live with her godparents, Marco and Vivian. They were the very best friends of Laine’s parents. At one point in their past, they were the reflection of each other--their ideals and comforts lain in the same cradle. This familial moment passed before Laine’s parents had time to make the proper changes to their will, ultimately leaving Laine in their care. Laine’s surviving family fought ardently to take her in themselves, but their efforts were unsuccessful. Viv welcomed Laine gladly, genuinely and full of hope for her new family. Laine always felt her family’s disapproval of her new guardians, the people who took her in, folded her into their lives…shaped her from then on, but because Laine knew it was what her parents had once wanted, she searched their lives daily for the reasons.
Marco was a small, scarf-wearing, sterile man whose own feet rarely fell upon the floors of his house. He was an aspiring rock star who sadly called the music he played “Adult Alternative Americana,” or “Triple A.” His entire weekends were spent touring with his band, “The Country City Dogs,” while Viv stayed home alone with her own creations. To make matters worse, he’d spent most of the little money he did earn to fund studio sessions while attempting to record an album that would never even be released. This was perhaps part of the reason why his elegant wife, Viv, was already sifting through the grains of insanity upon welcoming Laine into their home.
Viv dressed dramatically in black, flowing robes. Her appearance was oddly but consistently put together, cohesive…always ready for an unprompted performance. Her perfectly formed curls could mesmerize Laine for hours--each one with their own bouncy enchantment. Most of all, Laine loved Viv’s smile--the warm cranberry helping that Laine knew well, a familiar comfort among months of cold confusion.
Viv was still coherent when Laine moved in at age thirteen. Viv made everything she touched turn into something beautiful. Laine’s old clothes were turned into proper gowns or teatime attire. Viv could even turn Laine’s hair into a work of art--magically bringing drab, bone straight strings to life.
When Marco was there, he would take Laine onto the front porch with his guitar, he handed her a conga drum. “Lainey, doll, I need you to come and keep the time for me.“ So she beat the drum and stomped her feet contently while he strummed and picked away until his hands were red & calloused with joy. An orange light screened them in, his strings shining lowly under his fingers. These times reminded her of her father…his rough hands. She had always wished they were rough from something more, from building something, from work.
When the front porch show was over, Marco would leave again and Viv’s face would fall. She crawled back into her studio and draw or paint wildly. Laine watched sneakily from the doorway, studying her face, her eyes…the walls.
It was only a year or so after Laine moved in that she began to notice a stranger in her new mother. She always notcied the lost, hectic, carnival look in her eyes when she was really caught up in a piece. Laine often grew impatient, even, with being ignored during these times, as much as it did remind her of her real mother’s behavior throughout her childhood. Laine learned at an early age to tiptoe. But, after a while, something was very different in Viv. That icy chaos that Laine had just begun to forget was building its way back in.
Marco was only present once a week at the most by this time, and for very short visits…to do laundry or to pick up some forgotten items. His belongings were slowly disappearing like little circus magic tricks. Viv’s grasp on reality followed a similar pattern.
Laine arrived home from school on a Tuesday to find Viv hidden beneath the kitchen table in a puddle of watercolors, seemingly trapped, sobbing. Her salted face was streaked with purple and green--water thin, so thin it was not quite pastel, almost colorless. Wet paint--her knees, heels--Laine remembers them shiny--slipping, splashing like a drowning fish. This is a moment Laine can feel herself swimming under, everything clogged, her eardrums on the verge of explosion.
Viv snapped out, the thick glaze evaporated suddenly from her wintry eyes, then climbed up to scramble an explanation. She saw Laine’s impressionable face--freckled with fear and desperate for amnesia. “Sometimes it swallows you.” Viv’s hair moved in chunks and stuck around on her face and neck, clumpy and colored--the ivy she grew that day. “It’s the price you pay,” was all Viv said as she plowed into her bathroom to clean up for supper. Laine sank into her room, shivering even in her eyes, barely able to close while she wished herself to sleep that night.
Laine woke up still cold the next morning to the smell of banana pancakes, her favorite, a scent so charming that, for a moment, the memory of the night before did not surface right away. She sat in bed, locked for as long as she could stay there, in a wonderful uncertainty--foggy-minded until she noticed her wall. The wall was blue, so blue it looked wet but too cold to jump into. The wall she hoped to see would’ve been a warm, pale yellow. The color her mother picked out and painted as a surprise for Laine’s tenth birthday--a sunny yellow. Banana pancakes flooded Laine’s senses again and since she was aware now, she crept out of her water blue room and to the breakfast table with Viv.
It rained all day and Laine thought often of her walls when it rained. School was unusually kind that Friday. She made a friend for the first time in her life. Her years of hiding from her peers finally paid off when she met another girl who was forced by social law to have her lunch in the bathroom along with Laine that day. Normally, Laine was alone, which she actually preferred, locked in a stall and lifting her tiny, flat feet each time the big, wooden bathroom door creaked to open. Laine dreaded the sound, as it meant she would not be able to move or breathe loudly, or chew, for at least a few minutes. But when a few minutes had passed and the last two feet to enter were being just as quiet as Laine’s, she knew something had changed. She heard the ever so slow uncrinkling of a paper bag just two stalls down, then an apple bite--surely the most dangerous food to bring if you wanted to eat something successfully while hiding. But those two feet did not know she was there or she would’ve never taken that bite, slowly though she did. Laine decided to take the chance and emerge. The other girl gasped, so surprised she nearly choked on her apple bite. Laine waited against the sink until the girl, after peeking through the stall cracks, finally came out, giving herself up.
Maggie was her name, fitting, Laine thought because she’d once had a dog named Maggie who quite resembled her new friend.
“Why are you eating in here?” asked Laine accusingly. “No one else but me ever does.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I just felt like it.” Maggie answered vaguely and defensively. “Why do you eat here?”
“Nowhere else to go, I guess. It’s quiet here, except the creaking and flushing, you know. No one bothers me. I like it, I think.” Laine realized halfway through her reply that she was telling the truth. Maggie did not believe a word. She reached out.
“Maybe we could sit together in the lunch room next time. Maybe you could come to my house for a sleepover tonight.” Maggie beamed, speaking anxiously so Laine could answer sooner.
“A sleepover?” Laine remembered whispers behind her in class…girls planning these parties like they were preparing for batter, or a power outage. “Will I need to bring a flashlight then, and popcorn?” Laine wanted to sound experienced and made sure to ask the right questions.
“If you like.” Maggie answered. “Go and get your things after school, and…” she took a piece of paper from her backpack and wrote on it in big, important letters, and, handing it to Laine, “have your parents drop you off at this address at six o’clock.”
Laine’s throat slid down into her neck like a salted slug. Her parents. She remembered the paint, which she knew would be all cleaned up and forgotten--covered up with something besides the banana pancakes, when she got home.
She walked in from the rainy Friday. “Viv…guess what!” Laine called out from the front door immediately. Then grazing in the foyer for a moment or two, “Viv…” Her steps were light and thoughtful…nothing would ruin the night. One more unanswered yell and Laine’s throat tightened quick and somberly.
She heard the drip and echo from the tub in Viv’s room as she got closer. She slowed her steps with each drop she heard. Her body tensed like razor blades. She paced her discovery this time, waiting in the hallway, at the door. She even sat nimbly on the bed for a few seconds of rest and calm before she entered. She noticed Viv’s sand-colored walls, warmer than her own, but still reminiscent of the ocean. The door opened and Vivian was fast asleep in a porcelain puddle, her skin pruned, and shades lighter like melted wax floating from her body in layers. The excrement and urine explained she’d been there since just after Laine left for school. Laine drained the tub, tried to wake her caretaker and gently lifted her frail body from the tub, scared she may slip out of her gluey shell as she carried her to the bed. Viv’s carousel eyes rolled back in her head as Laine tiredly dropped her in her bed.
She thought to call for help but instead she stayed the night staring at Viv, checking her every so often for a pulse and breath. She wondered where her bones were. How many layers were they hidden under? Why couldn’t they straighten her up? The skin, heavy, weighed down Viv’s face and for the first time, she looked old to Laine. A rusted anchor, Viv slept through the night.
When they awoke in the morning and Viv wanted to know why Laine was in her bed, Laine told her. “You fell asleep…” Laine hesitated. “in the water. You could have drowned. I thought your skin would fall off. I thought you would die. I made sure you didn’t.”
Viv turned over, her cloudy skin still slightly pruned. She thought for a moment, felt her still damp hair, “We must have been soaked.”
“Well, you were.” Laine replied gently, “I got a little wet but I tried to dry us off as much as I could, I didn’t want to…” she stumbled, “your skin, I said, was hardly hanging on.” Viv rolled those eyes and explained she’d been up the night before with her sketch pad--that she’d been designing some new clothes for Laine to wear and that she would show her later. As Viv prepared breakfast, Laine snuck into her studio and found the pad--as blank and white as her face.
She threw the pad on the breakfast table before Viv could put the plates down. “Where are the sketches?” She asked angrily. “I made a friend, you know.” She kept on when Viv did not answer. “She was my first friend.”
“That’s wonderful, Laine, let’s have her over today. We can make jewelry. I just got these wonderful beads…” Viv spoke quickly, in her high-pithced, apologetic voice, avoiding Laine’s question.
“She won’t come. I was supposed to go to her house for a sleepover last night. She’ll think I missed it on purpose.” Her voice was unfriendly. She had never spoken to Viv this way before. “What should I tell her? That the crazy lady who is supposed to care for me nearly drowned in the bathtub?”
“I told you it can swallow you, Laine. I’ve told you that before.”
The creak of the front door stirred them both. Marco swaggered in, guitar case in hand, stubby-faced and smiling. He whistled his way to the bedroom and then to join them for breakfast. He saw the sketch pad. “Lainey, you been sketching?”
“No one has.” Laine responded bitterly, her eyes daggered at Viv. Viv kissed Marco’s prickly cheek and he sunk into his seat. She returned to the stove to finish breakfast. The bacon sizzled and popped grease onto her fragile skin and she jumped back.
“You okay?” Laine asked.
“I’m fine, dear.” Viv kept going, hoping Marco would not notice and Laine would not share the events from the night before. “So, Laine, your birthday is coming up. Next Saturday, right?” She diverted.
“I’ll be sixteen.”
“How will you celebrate, Lainey?” Marco thumbed the pages of the near empty sketch book as he spoke.
“I’m going to my grandparents’ house. They’ve invited me up for the whole weekend and I think I’ll go,” her voice still stinging. “You won’t be here anyway. Right, Marco?” she added.
“Got a show up the road a few hours. Can’t miss it, darling.” He said casually, Viv rolled her eyes and tended to the eggs.
“I had a fun day planned, Laine. I thought we could go to the art museum.”
Laine stood up like a soldier and marched into her room. She gazed at her wet water walls until she almost cried. She wanted her reason back Laine truly loved Viv on a normal day, she enjoyed watching her create things and loved the life she carried with her, and Marco‘s gentle strums could lullaby her to sleep…but most of all, she wanted to carry out her parents’ wishes. If they thought that she should be with Viv and Marco, then that was where she felt she belonged. She believed that her parents sent her to live there for a reason, that they wanted her to learn something from these people. Where had the reason gone?
A heat rushed over her and she slept the day away, catching up on the lost sleep from the night before. Viv checked on her from time to time. Laine woke up and caught her once…Viv was sketching in her doorway. She heard Marco on the porch outside playing and she felt that familiarity again, for a brief moment--sharp chords from the strings and the wisp of Viv’s pencil on the pad in her doorway.
The next week was quiet. Marco did stay around and even picked Laine up from school one day. Viv did not say much, she rarely left her studio for five days. Laine felt her disappointment seep through the walls between them but she stuck with her decision to spend her birthday weekend with her grandparents.
When she returned she felt rested, ready to learn something, ready to discover or uncover Viv. Little did she know, everything in both of their worlds would crash and a new life begin in its place. Laine thought many times that weekend about telling her grandparents about Viv. She also wanted very much to call and make sure she was okay. Unfortunately, she did neither.
Her grandparents carried her overnight bags to her bedroom while Laine carried the birthday bags filled with treasures of pink--frilly skirts, her first makeup kit, sparkling jewelery--she glanced down at them as she walked inside, wanting to truly love them like she knew she should. She wondered if Maggie would like them. These were things a girl would want to have in order to be a girl. But Laine felt an old numb feeling in her cheeks, strained smiles and embarrassed blushes (she had no need for makeup).
She set the bags down beside the bed, noticing another bag, a brown paper bag, on her pillow--her name painted colorfully on the gift--Viv’s gift--she knew her artwork anywhere. The present was threefold--a sketch pad, a journal and a pencil. Laine peeked inside. She felt so grown up--sixteen. She hid it behind the pillow from her grandparents and focused on the makeup once again. They smiled, happy that their little granddaughter was safely growing from a girl to a woman, and stood up to say goodbye.
Laine froze for a moment, the pressure streaming through her cheeks and mouth. She knew this was the time to tell them about Viv. “Aren’t you going to say hello to Vivian?” She asked politely.
Her grandparents looked at each other heavily and sighed together like old couples should… “Ahh, Vivian,” her grandmother replied quickly. “Of course we are, of course.” They all walked into the living room together, alone.
The stifle of the room filled Laine’s body, ears, eyes--she felt the flames again, heating those body parts--scaring every nerve into hiding. Numbly, she walked towards her guardian, leaving her grandparents in the walkway to drool and pant. Laine moved naturally, as though each piece that fell from her was ready to fall--her skin slowly shedding. She grabbed Viv beneath the arms, drug her backwards across the charcoaled carpet, her hands black, smudged and paper-cut.
In the kitchen, she cleaned the blood gently, like a kitten bath, from Viv’s ears which she had scratched to the cartilage (The Country City Dogs music played low on the stereo in the next room, skipping on a CD knick), then from her hands, she cleaned the black and red only to reveal the black and blue and purple. Her grandparents stared together, approached slowly together and knelt down and wept.
Out of Viv’s final episode was born (what Laine thought to be) her most beautiful work of art. It was dark, blood-ridden and sad, but Laine carried it with her from then on. She showed it to Viv when she visited her and Viv was proud and smiled at first, but drawn back into the life that made it, she became insane again and was sedated.
Laine was too young to understand what terrible current could cause such a disaster, and thankfully so, however, this did not stop something a little disastrous from swelling up inside of her, too.
Visiting Vivian became a weekly routine for Laine after that. Her obsessive, submerged need to understand it all became more encompassing with each new episode. Vivian would create an amazing portrait each time she lost control. “It’s the price you pay,“ Laine recited and began encouraging her disease. She told Viv that her pills were preventing creation, which was true… so Viv started hiding them away like pebbles. Laine helped her, sometimes swallowing the pills herself. This began after her favorite portrait was created. It was called “Soaked,” Viv said. It was honest, it was alive and it wasn’t hiding. It depicted Viv and Laine asleep and sopping wet--the lines were everywhere, the color--grim but awake…their eyes were perfect replicas--Laine saw Viv as the definition of talent. She was the person that Laine was not strong enough to be and she was dying quickly because of that.
After a while, this sparked many concerns within her grandparents. She began acting so subdued that it scared them. Her eyes were glossy and tired. She sometimes could not wake up for school. They thought she was bored so they insisted she begin musical lessons and banned her from visiting Viv.
She then became destructive with her instructors. She acted disinterested and rude each time she was led to his “magical musical minds” room (as he called it). She would pick up his guitar and play classical renditions before excusing herself to occupy her “magical musical mind” with something “a little more challenging,” as she put it. He was in awe that she had never taken a formal lesson before and insisted she stay, begged her grandparents to make her stay. They could not make her.
They tried again with art lessons but Laine refused to do any of the assignments. Out of boredom, however, her doodles became what her art teacher called “near masterpieces.” She requested Laine stay and come up with the assignments for the whole class but Laine reverted back to destruction again when no one listened to her pleas to drop out of the class.
After choral class, creative writing, pottery and ballet all ended with the same result, her grandparents finally gave up. As hard as Laine tried to bury her skill--to cover it up however she could, her hands were marked and molded, her voice too polished, her body too graceful to ignore. Everyone around her plead with her to continue on with it but she steadfastly refused. She pushed herself so far from everything they wanted for her that she lost sight of what she was pushing toward for herself.
When everyone gave up on her, when her grandparents were tired with despair, the beach became Laine’s solace. No one followed her there to see what she could make. Nothing there noticed her. Not the soaking sand or the hot, dry sand--not the massive waters, not even the warm-bodied students on multi-colored towels and surfboards.
So, she sat and watched wave after wave as each breath stroked the sand newly, the face for each arc was different--strangers floating, never caring who Laine was or what she would become. Consistently there, but never familiar, that ocean never dried up when she wasn’t looking, but, like the friend she always wanted, it left her alone in front of it, amazed by its ability. As she watched she dreamt of beginning a real life but realized she had no plan. She wondered if she could even return to her grandparents. Were they through with her?
She walked down to the water’s narrow edge in the wet sand and picked up a broken seashell. She carved tiny pictures into the thick, soaked sand and then stacked sand on top of sand, made piles larger than herself--shaped them into structures. Some people walking by began to notice, stopping sometimes to watch…commenting on her fine craftsmanship, they’d never seen anything like this. Some spoke of how angry she looked as she pushed the hard sand down and patted it roughly into the ground. Laine did not notice them.
When everyone had gone home and the sun began to go down, Laine sat alone with her sand sculptures, watching each chunk fall and soak into the sea…grain by grain.
Was she really this unhappy because she was undersized? Had the genes she had gained from her parents honestly doomed her to despondency forever? She thought of her petite mother standing straight with perfect posture, a frown placed deftly across her childlike face.
Miller’s patience was wearing thin,
“Stand up a second and you’ll feel better.” Miller proudly suggested as though he understood what it was like for a four foot eleven girl to stand up, filling up with nothing but stains and surly inside.
******
Earlier in the day, Miller had left
Shiloh’s father, Barker Bunting, told her when he left that he bought a small business in
“I guess,” she nodded, confused by the way he had started the conversation and curious as to how her father could have to do with something that shines.
“Well, I’ll be making that happen very soon…” he smiled, pleased and content with his explanation, “but…” he continued, “I have to move to
“You’re thirty-five, almost thirty-six years old, Shiloh…” many conversations between she and her father began this way, “it’s time to start your life already, and this house,” he paused to assure there were no tears yet, “well, I think it’s holding you back anyway. It’s holding you back from marrying Miller. Isn’t it?”
“He hasn’t asked me, father. We’ve never even discussed it.” She looked down at the floor and spotted an ant carrying a grain of salt, her father’s foot nearing it with every pace he took.
“You’ve been together for almost ten years and you’ve never spoken the word ‘marriage’ in your relationship? What the hell is going on with you two then? I mean, he is your boyfriend, correct? I mean, at least give me that. Tell me you have sex with him or kiss him or at least hold his hand every now and then.” His voice was loud and the ant had crawled safely into the crevice beneath the kitchen counter.
“We need to call the exterminator, father, you have ants. Did you know that?” It was at this point in their argument that her father would walk away, too frustrated to continue and to sad to encourage his daughter.
The front door slammed. The truck backed out of the driveway.
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