Chapter 19
Someone runs up from above our heads.
“Crusa! Honey! What are you doing swimming at this hour! It’s freezing in there,” my zizi starts out yelling but by the time she’s standing there on my hair and peering at me over her stomach, she’s calmed down to a normal voice. She does it so precisely that it reaches my ears at the same volume from start to finish. She’s amazing.
“My girl, I honestly don’t know what to do with you. Stop laying on the ground. You’ll catch your death.”
Then she’s all over me, rubbing my hands with her hot dry ones and wiping my face, hooking me under the armpits while Lium pushes my bottom up. I whip around and can tell he’s laughing, he’s just too tired to make a sound.
My zizi, meanwhile, hauls me half over her shoulder. My eyes slip from her to the boy still in the sand, back and forth and in between. By the time we get to the seawall, he’s surrounded by my uncles and boy cousins, but he’s still watching us as if fascinated, so I give him a short floppy wave and a smile.
Then my zizi grabs that wrist, too, and stuffs me through the wall. But Lium’s always at the ready, it seems, so I catch his wide, slack answer. It warms me, in the same spots the salt water burned me. I stop thinking about that and go back to the warming.
The whole way through the woods, my zizi goes on and on about the horrible things that have happened to people she knows that have swum in the ocean at night. She must really be mad because she pulls out the story about Mary Grace’s brother Storrs who went out one night and a few days later three pieces of him washed up near Falmouth. What happened to the other pieces, nobody knows for sure, but one of the found pieces contained his lungs so at least they know he’s dead.
My other aunts hover, but she supports all my weight. I hang there as she walks and the rest of the ladies blot me with towels from all sides.
They agree with everything my zizi says, and sweet ancestors, so do I. She has every right to be mad, just like she says. What I just did was really stupid. I say all this and groan through the redoubled shivering that’s racking my bones so hard they’re falling apart at the joints.
“Hush dear, you poor thing. Come on. We’ll get you warm.”
Apparently, when they told my zizi about Eleni and my search party, she panicked. That sent some of my uncles scrambling, to the beach first, then, directed by whoever was left there, out onto the boats to find us. I learn this along with Cassie and Eleni, already wrapped head to toe, as our aunts strip my sopping clothes and bundle me in winter blankets that smell of dusty planks and must. Cassie gets excused first, then Eleni has to go to her house so she gets to leave. Then it’s just me with my zizi. She wraps up my head tightly.
“Crusa, you were there the whole time. How could you let that happen?”
“I don’t know,” is my pathetic answer.
“You worried me. Do you know what could have happened? You are very, very lucky.”
I can’t argue.
“Crusa, you’re my child. I depend on you to look after your cousins. Do you understand that? I want to trust you, out of all of them I thought I never had to worry about you. I knew you would be sensible, that you could take care of things. But this was not smart. Is that what they were teaching you in the Coast Guard? Is it? I hope not. I honestly don’t know what to do with you. I feel like I don’t know you. So careless,” she shakes her head.
Throat hot and thick with shame, I can’t answer. She sees the tears rolling down my face, and says goodnight, I love you, I’ll see you in the morning after I’ve thought about what I did. I shuffle across the hall to my bed, and do a face-plant.
After a while of that, I slide my legs out from the mass of blankets in order to dip my feet into the basin of steaming water she left me. It feels really nice to have blood in my toes again.
Eleni slips in and stands in front of my window. I guess she never went home.
“I’m glad we’re all ok,” she says.
“Me, too.”
Eleni comes over and hugs me. I tell her to sit. She rests her head on my shoulder, and I pet her hair, so soft, raven black. I offer her some foot-space in the basin.
“Me, three.” I start when Cassie emerges cat-like from the little door in my wall. She stands and brushes herself off. I tell her to sit, but she prefers to pad about the room. She seems alright. Having her there is soothing.
Eleni and I lay back, our toes warm, feet and arms and bodies tangled under the accumulation of blankets. I don’t particularly register her touch as other, so falling asleep like this isn’t hard. I think my mind has a special area it uses just for my cousin, taking her body for part of itself. It’s like a phantom limb, only opposite. A phantom cousin. Color-coded diagrams of the nervous system dance in my head.