Safe Distance

It’s the end of July and this place is something like the beach. A glacial lake owned by the state with enough sand to convince Marina that this is salt water and there are fish waiting at the bottom. She surveys the area hoping to find it beautiful but instead she finds conflict. Two girls fight over a pair of sunglasses. A child sprints and falls into a sand crater. A group of boys pile onto a float that sinks under their weight. 

A month before, she moved in with Carter and his older sister, Grace. They’ve mostly kept to the house or gone on less crowded day trips. But now the heat is at its peak, and this is the first time Marina has been to this lake and spent a summer anywhere else but back home with her mother. She wishes she could go back to the house—not the one in Ohio, but to Grace’s, which is a thirty-minute drive north. It’s quiet there except for the children who sometimes throw toys and tantrums. She never used to be this sensitive to pain. Any conflict now, no matter how small, reminds her of what she’s left behind.

Marina needs to find something that doesn’t hurt to watch. She focuses on Grace. Grace is wearing a bikini, and her lower stomach hangs like a stretched shirt. She kicks waves into the air while her children squeal and slap open palms against the water. They try to run away but then come back for more. Marina looks down at the one-piece that hides her torso. She pulls her knees to her chest and finds an ingrown hair on her thigh. She picks at the skin and considers the facts she’s learned about Carter’s niece and nephew. Charlie has a crescent-shaped scar below her lip from a tooth puncture; she fell on the driveway and needed two stitches. Sullivan believes there’s a man in his closet and needs to sleep with the light on. She knows there are lighter things she’s learned about them but what she’s witnessed on the beach has already shaken her into a state of fear. To distract herself, she presses her thumbnail into her leg and tries to take deep breaths.

Carter uncaps a bottle of sunscreen. The clack of plastic snaps over the sound of the children and their laughter. Marina crosses her arms on her knees and rests her head against her wrist. She closes her eyes and wishes the volume wasn’t so violent.

“Do you want some of this, Mars?” Carter says. 

His arms are doused in white paste.

“Yes, please,” she says. “I think I’ve already burned.”

He moves behind her and extends his legs alongside her own. His swim trunks scratch against her lower spine. The cold splat of sunscreen on her shoulders turns warm with the friction of his palms moving up and down her arms. Then he tilts her head into his hand. An oily film still coats his skin, but she keeps her cheek there and closes her eyes. His thumb grooves into her neck while she watches orange light pulse behind her eyelids. When she realizes how easy it would be for him to hurt her in this position, she puts a hand on his knee and thanks him as a gentle cue for him to stop. He removes his hands. Before he gets up, he kisses her temple.

She wants to say that he shouldn’t be this nice to her; she’s already accepted too much from him. But as he inches back to untangle their bodies, she touches his knee. She says, “Do you think you could do the other side?”

Carter picks up the sunscreen bottle and says, “Come here.”

She shuffles into him and exposes the other side of her neck. She watches his shadow on the sand and considers how well she knows the man behind her and yet there are moments in which she still can’t believe he’s real.

Marina transferred from a community college in her hometown to a four-year university in New York last year. To satisfy her missing science credit, she opted for an Introduction to Geography course on Tuesdays and Thursdays from five to seven. Her mother, Elise, said that Marina didn’t belong anywhere other than Ohio. Elise drinks every day, abuses her sleeping medication and fails to show up for work on time. She also beats Marina. Marina decided that if she was going to survive, she needed a safe distance between them. On the day Elise discovered that her daughter was leaving, she punched her in the head. Marina attended her first class with a black eye. She told people in her dorm that she fell while moving her bags into her room. But when Carter sat next to her on the first day of geography and offered her an ice pack from his lunch box, she decided to tell him the truth.

They began to see each other regularly, and she started to sleep in his bed. For shorter breaks, she was allowed to reside in the dorms, but according to the university, summer was too long for her to stay. When they were a few weeks out from it, she confessed to him that she had nowhere to go. He told her that she did. For a couple of months, he’d be staying with his sister because she’d recently gone through a divorce. She and this man were on good terms, but Carter wanted to help. Their parents had recently moved down the coast to live in warmer weather and were making regular trips to visit, but he thought it would be nice for her to have some family around. Marina didn’t understand how a family could be that kind to each other. She packed her bags and they drove three hours upstate to Grace.

*

When Carter finishes with the sunscreen, he uses Marina’s shoulder to balance himself as he reaches for their tote bag. He yanks it too hard and some of the remnants escape: his gold watch which was a gift from his father; her strawberry ChapStick with the label peeled; his metal tin of mints; a fist-crushed can of Fanta she’d finished, and her phone. She catches her reflection on the black screen. She rarely checks her messages because there rarely are any to be checked. She blocked her mother’s number, but she still keeps her phone close. Carter places the sunscreen and the fallen remnants back into the bag and then nudges it upright. He leans his chin against her shoulder and fingers the ridge of bathing suit at her hip.

He says, “Are you having a good time?”

She says, “I’m a bit hungry. Should we get some food?”

Grace walks towards them with Charlie stumbling behind, a heavy bucket of lake water in her tiny grasp. The water sloshes side to side and slaps against the hot sand as it escapes the rim. Her mouth is like a knot as she tries to carry the weight. Marina holds her breath. Charlie could drop the bucket. And what would happen to her if she did? She could break a toe and the course of their lives would change. They’d spend the rest of the day in a sterile room as the doctors X-ray the damage that’s impacted her bones. Marina looks away and finds Sullivan. He’s sitting in a puddle near the edge of the lake. He tries to toss handfuls of the water out of the puddle, but he doesn’t understand. The hole was dug by a child who wanted to create another pool. His eyes dampen with tears, but he’s smiling.

Grace sits on the adjacent towel. "No, no,” she says to Charlie. “Bring that over there, yes. Go there.” Charlie pouts, sand sticky at the corner of her lip, but she obeys and walks off with her bucket. Grace slides her sunglasses further up the hill of her nose. “Hey,” she says.

Carter responds, “We’re going to grab something to eat. Do you want anything from the shack?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “I’ll have a hotdog. The kids have sandwiches. Oh, and a Diet Coke.”

Carter stands first and offers his hands to help Marina up. When she takes them, she notices the pale-yellow towel below her has a maroon stain.

Grace notices, too. “Oh my,” she says.

Marina has known her long enough to understand that Grace doesn’t mean to sound alarmed. There’s a natural chirp to her tone. But most days her voice still shoots Marina with a strong dose of adrenaline, as if something horrible has happened.

Marina says, “I’m so sorry. I’ll clean that for you when we get back to the house.”

Grace swats at the air. “No need. I’m happy to take care of it. You don’t want one of these anyway.” She points to Charlie, who’s just dumped the rest of the bucket over her head.

“I don’t,” Marina says, and then she wonders if that’s true. She always thought she’d be a bad mother if she ever were to be one.

Grace hesitates before smiling at her. She says there must be a tampon in her bag somewhere because she’s not that old yet, thirty-three. She still gets those pesky bleeds. Carter hands Marina a stack of napkins from the straw basket where the children’s sandwiches rest in their containers. Marina knows that a divider separates the fruit salad. She watched Grace pack their lunches that morning in a blue fuzzy robe. Her peach painted toes looked like candy against the checkered linoleum. When the sun speared a ray through the window and onto the counter where the lunches sat, Marina thought that it was as if God agreed that Grace was a good mother.

Marina takes the napkins from Carter and wipes at the blood splotches on the back of her thighs. Grace sings “found it” when she spots a tampon. She hands it to Marina.

“Thank you,” Marina says, her voice sunken like a marble thrown down a well.

Grace tilts her head to the side and looks at Carter. “Be a cheery boyfriend and give her a massage later,” she says. “Maybe buy some chocolates, too. Doesn’t that sound nice, Marina?”

Marina forces a smile. “That does, yes.”

Carter looks at Marina and laughs. “I’ll do all of that, if you want.”

Marina holds his hand and starts to walk towards the shack. Carter tells Grace they’ll be back soon. Marina digs her feet when she walks and sends sand clouds into the air. The plastic around the tampon turns slick from her palm sweat. She can tell Carter is waiting for her to say something, but when she doesn’t, he says,  Grace called me your boyfriend.”

Marina nudges his shoulder. “I heard. Let’s just find a bathroom.”

*

Marina spreads her legs in the stall to insert the tampon. It doesn’t have an applicator, only a string attached to a wad of cotton. As she pushes it in, the dry texture scrapes against her flesh and she stops for a moment. The bathroom smells of urine and sunscreen and the door is covered in handwritten messages. One of them says everything is going to be okay. There’s a heart on the end. But an arrow descends from the heart to a rebuttal. It says that’s bullshit.

Marina doesn’t want to read any more of them. A woman and a child are in the adjacent stall. The woman is wearing navy blue flip-flops. The girl wears purple sandals.

She says, “But I don’t want to go home, Mommy. No! No home.”

Marina can hear the splash of the mother urinating.

“I won’t hear another word,” she says. “We’re going.”

Marina situates the tampon inside of herself, but her fingers are smeared with blood. She pauses and stares at them. Then she yanks the roll of toilet paper, wipes them clean and flushes. She listens to the girl beg her mother to stay a little longer and Marina expects the mother to smack her. But then the mother sighs and says, “Fine. You have twenty minutes.”

When Marina was that young, she accidently shattered a frame in the living room with a ball she was kicking around. Elise bought the frame months before, but the stock photo of a smiling family hadn’t been swapped for their photograph. Marina stared at the glass shards, panicking as she tried to think of what to do. Elise bolted into the room and began picking at the glass. She said, I wish I could leave you somewhere. Then she called Marina stupid and told her to help. Marina protested, saying she might get a cut. Elise moved to hit Marina with her free hand, but Marina managed to escape. She ran to her room, slammed the door and hid in her bed. She expected her mother to chase after her, but she didn’t. When the windows were black, Elise came into the room with a peanut butter and chocolate chip sandwich. She sat on the edge of the bed and said, “It’s your favorite.” Marina smelled the alcohol sweating from her mother’s pores and pulled the blanket over her head. She said, “I don’t want it.” Elise placed the sandwich on the nightstand and rubbed her thumb over her daughter’s knee. Marina lowered the blanket, but she didn’t want to look at her mother’s face. Instead she looked at her mother’s hands and saw many small cuts. Marina sat up and asked if she wanted half. They ate in silence, and when they finished, her mother said, “I would never leave you. Got it?”

*

When Marina emerges from the bathroom, the sun is trapped behind a cloud and the air is cooler. Her skin doesn’t burn but tingles when the wind blows. There’s less noise because people have started to leave the lake. Carter is leaning against a brick wall, Grace’s Diet Coke in one hand, three hot dogs balanced in the other. Marina notices the relish and knows that one is hers. She walks towards him and softly tugs on the edge of his bathing suit trunks. She kisses his cheek and then they make their way back to the towels and sit down beside Grace and the children. Grace suggests that they do something easy for dinner. She could order a pizza. Carter recalls being thirteen and baking brownies in the middle of the night when the oven caught fire.

He says, “Mom came running in those fancy pajamas to put it out. She was half asleep and screaming for the fire extinguisher. She left a pizza box on the top rack, and somehow I didn’t notice. I had to keep myself from laughing when she found the extinguisher but stubbed her toe on a chair while making her break for the flames.”

Grace laughs while feeding a bite of her hotdog to Sullivan. 

She says, “God, I remember that. She thought it was me who started the fire and called me a reckless dumbass. Then I said it was you and she corrected herself. She sprayed down the oven and said you were a twat. When Dad woke up in the morning he was like—what the hell happened to the oven? Mom said she was going to divorce him.”

Grace and Carter heave with laughter while Sullivan whines for another bite. Marina tries to join them, but her laugh sounds flat. Grace is tearing up and moves her sunglasses to wipe beneath her eyes. She makes a comment about how their divorce would have been gnarly because they love each other like children. She adds, “Mine was easy. We loved like adults.”

Sullivan reaches for the hotdog and Grace hands the rest to him. She’s still laughing but Marina thinks there’s some sadness in the way her eyelids lower like partially closed blinds.

Carter reaches for Marina’s hand, and it takes him a few tries to get the words out but eventually he says, “You’re going to love my parents.”

The sun hasn’t reappeared yet and there’s bumps on her arms. Despite the chill, she says she’s going to take one last dip.

Carter’s laughter peters out. He says, “Do you want me to come with you?”

Marina says, “I’ll only be a minute.” 

Then she walks towards the lake and doesn’t hesitate to submerge herself. The water pops in her ears and she holds her breath. A strand of slimy seaweed grazes against her ankle, but she lets it stay there. She wishes she didn’t have to resurface. She wishes she could talk to her mother.

When she comes up for air, Carter is standing on the shoreline, waving.

He shouts, “We’re going home.”

Marina raises her voice too and says, “Is everything okay?”

“The kids are getting tired. Nothing’s wrong.”

She nods and expects him to turn back but he stays on the shore using his hand as a visor. As she wades through the water, kicking seaweed out of her path, she thinks that neither of them had to yell. They weren’t that far away from each other.

*

Back in their room, Marina lies on her side against the chilled pillows. A glaze of heat lingers on her skin. She presses her finger into her arm and watches the slight pink turn pale. She hears the sink turn on in the adjacent bathroom. Carter is washing his hands. She adjusts herself to face the garden beyond the opened French doors and uses her foot to pull the throw blanket from the end of the bed. She twists the fabric between her legs and tucks one edge under her neck. She observes the last of the day. The air smells floral with a smidge of burning wood. She can faintly hear the children running around upstairs. They both napped in the car.

Marina lays her hands on her stomach and imagines a baby inside. For nine months, she’d have to lug around another body and then push it into the world. And then there’s helping the child survive until it can do so on its own—feeding it, cleaning it, making sure it doesn’t die. Marina moves her hands to her chest and thinks that, one day, she’ll tell her mother that it’s okay.

Carter appears in the doorframe. He sits on the bed, strokes the top of her head and says she looks pretty. Then she slides down the pillows as he moves on top of her. He puts his hands on the mattress beside her ears while she presses her fingers behind his neck. She can feel the tightness of a muscle and reaches to put her teeth there. Her shorts and bathing suit hook around her ankle and they laugh as he manages to release them and drop them to the floor. She reaches down and pulls out the tampon. Carter offers his hand and he places it on the nightstand. She sticks her fingers into his trunks and pulls and he curls onto his side and then the other to loosen them from his waist. He’s inside of her, looking at her with his lips crushed together as he moves. Then he bows his head to her shoulder, and she focuses on the sun as it goes until her eyes lose focus and she can only see red. He says her name and she puts her palm over his mouth to repress the sound. He pulls out and comes on her stomach. For a moment, he stays on top of her and then he takes a deep breath and removes himself. When he lays back, Marina notices that his pubic hair is spotted with blood. She reaches her hand towards his without looking and he reaches back.

He brings her knuckles to his mouth and says, “I know it might be superficial, but I want to be called your boyfriend.”

She turns her head and finds that he’s looking at her. She says, “It’s not superficial.”

“If you understand,” he says, “then why can’t we do it? You know sometimes I think about the rest of my life with you. Maybe that’s stupid. Because we’re basically children. Grace says that to me. I’m still a child. But so what if I am? I love you.”

She says, “I’m sorry I’ve been cold to you about that. I’ve never had anyone in my life that cares for me like you do. I don’t know what I’m doing.” Her eyes turn pink with tears and one of them comes loose. He wipes it away with his thumb.

He says, “Do you want a list of reasons why I love you? I’ll even sing them if you want.” He clears his throat theatrically and raises a hand in the air and she starts to laugh.

“Oh god,” she says. “Please don’t. I’ll say it. I love you.”

“Can I start calling you my girlfriend now?”

Marina nods. Carter pulls her towards his chest. She can hear his heartbeat slowing as she watches the sun vanish. He begins to lightly snore, and she’s tired too, but she doesn’t want to close her eyes just yet. Beyond the open doors, the leaves shimmer with the fading light. A bird flies from one branch to another and when it lands again, it sings. The children are playing upstairs, their feet pattering against the floor. Marina starts to doze off, but she continues to combat the exhaustion. A bit longer, she thinks. 

But after a few minutes, the phone rings. Carter startles awake to the shrill sound and her heart shoots into her gut. The room is dim. Mosquitos are beginning to enter through the doors. Carter leans over to turn on the lamp and then grabs a tissue. He wipes away the blood on him. Then he tosses it and the tampon into the trash while Marina walks towards the tote bag and scratches at her shoulder. A red bump swells on her skin. She opens the bag and extracts her phone. She recognizes the caller ID as the hospital she was born in.

“Who is it?” Carter says. He pulls on a pair of basketball shorts and then sits on the side of the bed nearest to her. There’s a mirror hanging on the wall, but she can hardly see her face. It’s too dark without the day. When she looks down, she sees blood across the inside of her thighs. She needs to take a shower, but her phone is ringing in her hand. The hospital is calling.

When Marina answers the man will say that her mother took too many pills this time. Marina will drop the phone and turn towards Carter, latching onto his hand as if he’s a raft. He’ll hold her with one arm and pick up the phone with the other. He’ll call himself her boyfriend and say they’ll come when she’s ready, soon, but she needs a second. Grace will hear Marina’s sobs from the kitchen and walk downstairs to ask if everything is all right. Carter will whisper the events to her and then Grace will get down on the ground and wrap her arms around Marina. The children will be upstairs laughing until they hear the cries of someone who no longer has a mother. The two of them will hide behind the door and peek through the crack. When Sullivan asks, “Did something happen to Mommy?” and Charlie says, “No, she’s right there,” Grace will hear their voices and instruct them to go upstairs. Rather than obey, they’ll push the door back and wait for their mother. But Grace will snap for them to get out and they’ll run away. Marina will listen to the children pounding on the steps as if they’re climbing the back of her head. For a while Marina will keep her eyes shut.

But for now, the hospital is trying to reach her. She says to Carter, “It’s probably my mom.”