Cerulean Blues

By Ari Baum-Hommes

 

Jack always expected his daughter would return in the darkness of night. She arrives, instead, in the harsh heat of afternoon, almost three years after her departure.

When he opens the door, she is waiting outside. The house is boxy and blends into California suburban streets that stretch endlessly in every direction. She stands on the dull concrete; tufts of dry crabgrass push out around the corners.

In the glare of the sun, Lizette is nearly translucent, each vein running railroad tracks across her arms and legs. Her pale skin pulls tight around the corners, exposing her joints as boney knobs.

Jack guides her inside. Her skin is damp and cool, despite the sun.

“Let me get you something to drink.”

***

The kitchen is small and bright. A bay window juts out of the back wall, facing the yard. The summer sun drenches the purple table Lizette’s mother painted before she ran off, and the two matching chairs sit on either side. Outside, the parched lawn and in-ground pool hide from neighbors amid fences overgrown with vigorous vines.

Lizette sits, elbows on the table. Jack keeps busy, rummaging in the cabinets for a plate, dull with scratches from cheap silverware, a glass. The fridge is nearly empty; he selects a slice of bread from the bag on the counter and smears it with peanut butter. He drops one, two, three ice cubes into the glass, then pours cold tea. Before he sits, he places them in front of Lizette, careful not to spill. She picks up the tea without even glancing at the plate. The only sound is the whirring of an air conditioner and the clinking of cubes.

At the table Jack counts. How many days since she stopped writing. How many pounds she’s lost. How many nights she’s gone without sleep.  He should be surprised how bad she’s gotten, but he isn’t. Three years could devastate a person. Instead he wants to feed her, protect her.

Lizette sits across from him, gazing outside. Lizette the skeleton. She holds the sweating glass of iced tea in front of her, but does not drink.

“There are leaves in the pool.”

“I’ll clean it for you.”

***

When she was young, she would take running leaps into the pool. Hurling herself headfirst, she would soar out over the pristine turquoise, arms and legs and fingers and toes spread as wide as possible.

Jack has a photograph of her like that – of the moment she was parallel to the blue – caught the instant before the inevitable smack of flat surfaces hitting still water. The pool glistened, deceptively calm beneath her.

And then, right before flesh slapped against a liquid barricade, she would tuck, roll upon herself, and, round as could be, cannonball into the chilly blue.

***

Lizette lies on a lounge chair while Jack cleans, arms and legs perpendicular to the strips of plastic cradling her. He is scooping the leaves out of the pool as he did when she was small.

“I didn’t have to come back, you know.”

The statement hangs over her frail body. Jack pretends he believes her. Perhaps if her mother hadn’t left when Lizette was only eleven. Perhaps if he’d been home more – not out drinking with construction boys from work, avoiding the angsty teenage cloud settled over his house. Perhaps if they hadn’t kept to themselves. He on the couch with a beer, she, doodling in the margins of a textbook she had yet to read. Days passing in relative silence.

It wasn’t until the end that they fought. He had threatened her, tried to punish her for skipping school so often. She had screamed at him and struggled, spit in his face. It ended when he slapped her; she’d gone to her room quietly, then.

She snuck out of the house the next morning. At eight, when Jack shuffled downstairs, he found only her note, I went to see her.

“I’m glad you did.”

***

The week after Lizette left, Jack was a madman. He didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, paced the kitchen with short steps and quick turns. He called Lizette’s friends at odd hours and pawed through her desk drawers for more numbers to dial. Tucked in the back he’d found crumpled bits of paper, old names Lizette had scrawled in high school. Not one of them had heard from her.

Jack waited another week before he dialed the number he’d known he would call all along. In the kitchen – the note Lizette had left stuffed into his pocket – he walked restlessly, paging through a worn address book. Penned between the numbers of a neighbor and a former babysitter, Jack found Lizette’s mother. That Sunday, in evening’s gloom, he phoned her.

Her voice was gruff when she answered the phone, not at all like he remembered, “Who’s this?”

A few seconds of silence, then, “Is Lizette there?”

“Jack?”

Silence. And again, “Jack, is that you?”

His breathing was uneven. He stared out at the yard. “Tell her to come home.”

He stood at the table, barely listening, distracted by the cloud his breath left on the window, running his finger in designs across the dusty sill. He looked up when she said his name, unsure if she had been talking to him all along or if they had been waiting in silence.

“She’s fine here. She’ll come when she’s ready.”

That night Jack fell asleep in the couch, phone in his hand. When he woke to the pale blush of dawn, the house was empty. Barefoot, across the yard in dewy grass, Jack walked to the pool and dragged the plastic across clear water, covering it. Inside, his feet tracked wet grass across the carpet.

***

In the glow before sunset, Jack watches her, his forehead pressed against the window, white hair illuminated by the golden light.

Lizette is swimming, a bony fish. Each stroke of her arms is jagged, pulling her head up for a desperate breath.

***

That night Jack dreams of the dawn Lizette left. He awakens, hand trembling. Above him he hears the desperate pace of a girl who cannot slumber.

The stairs creak as he climbs. It reminds him of her childhood, when he would steal upstairs to watch her sleep. Or when she was sixteen and would sneak in late at night, reeking of cigarettes. Or the morning she left, duffle bag thumping softly behind her.

At the top of the stairs, Jack pauses. He used to stand outside her door, listening to the heavy breathing as she slumbered. Even when she was older, he would check on his sleeping daughter though he knew she was alright. Now she’s grown, but he thinks what he thought every night he watched her then: just once more, just once more.

Her door is open a crack. Peeking in, Jack sees Lizette open a tiny Tupperware half-filled with white powder as she circles her childhood room once again. She scratches her thin skin urgently and scoops a small bit of white onto her pinky.

He walks in. “Don’t do that.”

She puts her pinky to her nose and sniffs. Her body relaxes and wide eyes lift to meet her father’s. Jack crosses the room, takes her hand. Walks her to the bed.

Lizette curls – a little cannonball – her sharp edges rounding. Prepares to enter the cerulean blue. 

 

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