Blue Water by A. Manette Ansay Read Free Book Online Page A

sandstone, sharing still-warm burgers she’d crushed into her purse. Looking up at the stars, the moon. Wisps of her hair flickering, soft, against my cheeks. Abruptly, I remembered the smell of her uniform: tomato ketchup and grease. I remembered, too, the odor of the shampoo she used to lighten her hair. She was struggling to pin her hat into place. One earring dangling, the other hung up in her hair.
    Want to come to my house sometime?
    Ducking our heads to step up into the attic. A double mattress in the center of the floor, a twist of pink sheets, a floral comforter.
    I get the whole attic. It’s because I’m the oldest.
    I’d forgotten about the attic. They were dirt-poor, the Donaldsons. At the time, I thought it was cool. Shirts and dresses on a clothesline strung between the eaves. A cardboard box for underwear, socks. The thrum of Dan Kolb’s voice from below, affectionate and warm, roughhousing with Cindy Ann’s younger sisters. The slow, strained sound of Ricky Kolb’s speech, incomprehensible to anyone outside the family. The smell of the veal pens behind the shed where, eventually, Mr. Kolb would fire two shots: the first opening a hole in his chest, the second passing through his head.
    I blinked. It wasn’t Cindy Ann Donaldson, of course. It was Cindy Ann Kreisler’s oldest daughter, Amy, late for work at the same Dairy Castle where her mother had worked thirty-five hours a week during the school year, fifty-hour weeks in the summertime. Same swing shift. Same wheat-colored hair. Why was a girl like Amy Kreisler working at DC? Amy was the daughter of Cindy Ann’s first husband, the older man, the one with all that money. It was said that she’d never have to work a day in her life, if she didn’t want to.
    I knew the moment Amy recognized me because she lost her grip on the paper hat. It kited away in the cool lake breeze. She turned, hesitated, let it go.
    We passed each other in silence.
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    When I was pregnant, I took a course on hypnosis, in which we learned to say surge instead of contraction, breathe instead of push, pressure instead of pain. Once a week, we met at the hospital, in what was clearly an unused supply room: four pregnant women plus the instructor, an older woman who positively glowed with her good wishes for us all. Her low, beautiful voice led us through scene after imagined scene. You are in your mother’s kitchen, there’s a warm, baking smell in the air. You are at the beach, the sun in your hair, the sound of the water like a song. You are breathing your baby down out of your body, and each surge fills you with excitement and strength.
    My favorite exercise involved imagining everything we’d ever heard about childbirth, all the images, positive and negative, as if they were painted on a tall, wide mural filling the walls. In our hands, we held a paintbrush and a bucket of black paint. Our job wasto blot out the negative images, one by one, then fill the black spaces with whatever we pleased: an easy delivery, a healthy baby, our hopes and dreams for the future. I painted a baby with dark brown eyes, a thicket of curls like my own. I painted a bowlegged toddler, riding on Rex’s shoulders, shrieking with delight. I painted family sailing trips, picnics on Lake Michigan aboard the Michigan Jack, birthday parties, Christmas dinners, high school graduation. College and career—what would it be? Maybe some travel before settling down. A wife and children. Grandchildren. Rex and I blustering through the door, arms filled with overpriced gifts, just as our own grandparents had done.
    Again and again, during the course of my labor, I returned to this exercise, forcing myself to open my eyes, to concentrate on my mural. Even when faced with the physical fact of my pain—which was, indeed, pain, and nothing like pressure at all—I was able to step over it, again and again, the way, walking along a city sidewalk, you