“I didn’t think Lexie drank,” I said, picking up the bottle. Lexie didn’t like the way alcohol slowed down her thinking, said it was like putting on a thick, fuzzy bear suit that was hot and uncomfortable and made the world seem muffled. She claimed that marijuana leveled her out, helped slow her racing thoughts so the rest of her could catch up. I noticed a pack of rolling papers on the coffee table, a few spent joints at the bottom of drinking glasses.
Aunt Diane looked at the bottle in my hand now. “I’ve never known Lexie to drink either. She always hated the stuff.”
Sooner or later, I’d get used to Lexie being referred to in the past tense.
“Now this, on the other hand,” Diane said, picking up a baggie half-full of weed, “was totally her thing.”
I watched in total disbelief as my aunt began to expertly roll a joint. “What are you doing?”
“Baking a pie, Jax. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
“You know me: full of surprises.” She licked the edge of the paper and smoothed it down.
“What on earth is this?” I asked, heading over to the antique sideboard that ran half the length of the room. It was where our grandmother had kept the silverware, the place mats and napkins, and all the fancy serving dishes and bowls we used on holidays. Now there were about thirty glasses and jars resting on top of it. The finished maple was stained with ghostly watermarks. Each glass was resting on a scrap of paper with numbers written on it. 6/1, 6/6, 6/11. I picked up a glass. The water—if it was water—was slightly cloudy but had no odor.
“Heaven knows,” Aunt Diane said, pushing aside a pile of papers so she could sit on the couch with her newly rolled joint tucked between her lips. “I was here two weeks ago. The place was a little messy, but nothing like this.” She reached forward, grabbed a lighter on the table. I set the glass down and picked up a sheet of loose-leaf notebook paper:
F9: 6/11 6 a.m.—7.2 meters
F9: 6/11 1 p.m.—7.2 meters
F9: 6/11 10:20 p.m.—over 50 meters!!!
*** Must get more rope tomorrow
There were other papers—backs of envelopes, Post-it Notes, torn bits from brown paper grocery bags—but most were loose-leaf, lined with three holes for keeping in a binder. Lexie had kept a journal this way for years. A haphazard combination of diary, shopping and to-do lists, and a place to capture random thoughts and ideas. I once bought her a fancy leather-bound notebook, but she never used it, saying she was intimidated by how permanent the pages seemed. “With my journal, I can go back through and remove anything I don’t like later on. Or restructure things,” she’d said. Like she could keep her life in some sort of order by rearranging a journal. Many were covered with similar codes, dates, times, and measurements: J2; A7; D10. It reminded me of Battleship: calling out coordinates, sinking each other’s submarines. Damn you, Jax! You sank my destroyer!
I picked up one of Lexie’s journal entries:
May 13
Deduction.
Reduction.
Redaction.
How much has been redacted from the carefully curated version of our story?
The story of we. The story of us. The story of THIS PLACE! The story of THE SPRINGS!
GRAM KNEW! Gram knew the truth and said nothing.
Another paper held all the details Lexie had been able to find out about Rita’s drowning.
Facts I know about Rita’s death:
Rita was 7 years old.
Mom was 10. Diane was 13.
Gram found Rita FLOATING facedown in the pool that morning. Rita was wearing her nightgown.
Gram, Mom, Diane and Rita and Great-Grandma were all at home. They’d had dinner the night before—beef stew, had watched some TV and gone to bed. No one heard or saw anything. At some point in the night or early morning, Rita must have gotten out of bed and gone down to the pool. Gram’s screams woke Mom and Diane the next morning. They ran down to see what was the matter. There was Gram with Rita in her arms, pulled from the pool, soaking wet.
I found the death certificate.
Cause of death: ACCIDENTAL DROWNING.
Like it was really that simple.
Like that was really what happened.
I let the papers fall back to the floor as I sank down onto the couch beside my aunt. She held out the joint to me, and I shook my head; pot was the last thing I needed. She took another hit, held the breath, then let it out slowly. “Two weeks ago she seemed fine.”
“How do you think it happened?” I asked. “She was the best swimmer I know. How did she drown? I mean, do you think…”
“That it was a suicide? That she drowned herself on purpose?” Diane’s shoulders hunched. “I guess we’ll never know. Maybe she just did too many laps, got tired, got a cramp, thought she was a fish. We’ll never know. We’ll never know what led Lexie out to the pool that night, or what was going through her head in her final days. Trying to figure it out, guessing… it’s a fool’s errand.”
My sister the whirling dervish, I thought as I looked around the trashed room. The cyclone leaving ruin in her wake. She’d go on massive shopping sprees, start a renovation by sledgehammer, or decide she wanted to delve into her Scottish roots by taking up the bagpipe—then she would decide everything was complete shit. She’d call me sobbing, despondent, and suicidal. I’d spent a good part of my life helping Lexie clean up her messes, coaxing her back on her meds.
I glanced at the floor, saw an old photo of Lexie and me as kids. We were standing in front of the pool she had just drowned in. Lexie looked to be about twelve, which would make me nine. We were wearing bright bikinis, arms around each other, squinting into the camera. Behind us, the dark water shimmered obsidian, our reflections watching to see what we might do next.
Closing my eyes, I sank back into the cushions.
The smell of the pot reminded me of Lexie and, with my eyes closed, I could let myself imagine, for a half a second, that it was her beside me, not Diane.
I could almost hear her: Hey, Jax. Long time no see.
Something brushed against my left calf, a tentative touch at first, then firmer, more sure.
My eyes flew open, and I screamed.
Diane jumped, dropped the joint.
“What the hell was that?” I asked as a small black blur raced across the living room floor.
“Pig,” Diane said. She sounded relieved.
“What? That was so not a pig,” I said. But it occurred to me that at this point, I wouldn’t be too shocked if Lexie did have a pig living in the house.
“It’s Lexie’s cat,” Diane explained.
“Lexie had a cat? Since when?”
“A couple of months now. He was a stray who just kept coming around, and she kept feeding him. They kind of adopted each other, I guess.”
I shook my head in disbelief. A cat. Lexie had a cat.
“She called him Pig,” Diane said.
I stood up, looking for the cat. He had hidden underneath the antique sideboard in the dining room.
“Who names a cat Pig?” I asked, getting down on my knees, peering at the little black cat. His golden eyes glared back at me. I’d clearly scared him as much as he’d scared me—he was up against the wall, flat on his belly, ears back. “Come on out, big guy,” I coaxed.