by Megan Mayhew Bergman

John’s mother had driven him to the lighthouse in the evenings before she put him to bed. She kept a road beer in one hand and the steering wheel in the other, a cigarette clenched between her teeth. She talked love-talk to baby John while thinking of ways to end her life.

John sat on the stone wall. There were signs up now, the place was a state park. There were trashcans , benches, soda machines, a gazebo thick with graffiti. Gulls picked through a hamburger bun. The lighthouse and keeper’s cabin were chained off like relics. Made of white stucco, they seemed invincible to the winds that ripped the summer sky. A trail of rocks jutted out into the water, dangerous to walk on, but he’d fished from them as a boy anyway. His mother was dead but he could always remember her better here.

If I make bail, he thought, I might could get to Cuba on the Hobie Cat. Snake down the Atlantic coast. Pick up a cook, change my name.

But he had no money and no one to call. He had a savings account at the Credit Union with three hundred dollars, but banks were closed for the holiday weekend. This was what his grandfather meant about life getting mean.

Fuck, man, he said. John grabbed a fistful of sand and threw it into the water.

The sand stuck to his wet legs, his face was dry and salted. There was a gash on his calf. He pictured Lee’s body, face-down in the water, rain hitting the waves. The shattered wooden rudder floating past. He had thought of drowning himself but had pulled her body onto the broken boat instead. The sound of lifting her body from the water had made him sick and he had retched from the side of the boat. He checked her pulse, then swam for shore. He was a good swimmer, but his arms were heavy and he choked on the water. He had swum away from Camp Cooley. He had aimed for the lighthouse. Everything else looked dark, too far away, even as his eyes adjusted to the shoreline.

Here, he was surrounded by myths and stories, shipwrecks under water and Civil War bullet casings in the sand. Waves shoved over the ocean wall. Sharks fed underneath the black skin of the sea. Sand Tigers, Bull sharks, Scalloped Hammerheads.

The night his mother had locked herself in the garage with her ’84 Volvo running, the pawnbroker down the street had posted a new verse onto his twelve-by-twelve wooden sign:

Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my Temple.  If you do, says the LORD Almighty, I will open the windows of heaven for you.  I will pour out a blessing so great you won't have enough room to take it in!  

John had been thinking of the sign when he arrived home and found his mother reclining in the sun-bleached front seat. Billy Joel on the radio. Cup of soda in the drink holder with beads of condensation sliding down, his mother’s lipstick on the rim. Receipts on the dashboard. A check taped to the rearview mirror. He thought of the sign now, and for as long as he could remember, there had been plenty of room in his life for blessings.

*

The sailboat was found at six a.m. by a man checking crab traps. The girl looked as if she was taking a nap on her own hands, face down on the boat deck. One foot dangled above the water. She wore cotton shorts and a halter top, the backs of her legs tan and lean. Her hair and clothes were damp but would dry in the sun before landfall.

A truck hauled the Catalina out of the water for the forensics team. The cement ramp was slick with moss and rain, the windows to the pier shop fogged. Police radios sputtered instructions in a parking lot full of uninspected trucks, rusted-out El Caminos and early model Subarus. Empty fishing buckets lined up along the pier filled with water. The fishermen smoked cigarettes, looked at the blue blanket covering the girl’s body, her tiny curves hardly lifting the blanket to make a human form. As the detectives descended, the fishermen moved inside for lunch.

*

Lee had made John ache with her long legs and freckled nose, her blonde hair whipped into a loop on the top of her head. She was bad at tying knots, blushed when he helped her practice her Carrick’s Bend or tie fast to a cleat. He could smell the swimmer’s drops in her ears when he was close, the sunscreen on her nose. The tips of her lashes were colorless, her eyebrows pale. When she climbed the ladder from the water to the dock, he wanted to touch her wet hair, the caved-in backs of her knees.

At night the counselors drank beer by the pool, made out in the shed next to the kickboards. John wore a faded cap with a fishhook fastened to the brim, a threadbare t-shirt and boat shoes. One night Lee had come to the pool with a question about knots.

Every year there was a girl like this, one that dared him to break rules with the proximity of her body. He remembered feeling that way, as a young lifeguard at the pool. From his stand, he had stared between women’s legs as they reclined in the plastic lounge chairs. He swung his whistle lanyard around his wrist to look indifferent. He yawned and stretched to make his body big and beautiful. He had practiced saying I will do anything you want me to under his breath until the lanyard wound so tightly around his wrist he felt pain. All he could get that year was the quiet girl that washed towels. She had kissed him like a small bird, smelled of chlorine and bleach. What he had wanted was experience.

You’re supposed to be in lock-down, John had said to Lee, smiling, crushing a beer can in his hand. He wanted to cup the back of her neck with his hand, possess her.

My counselor has leave tonight, she said, shoving her hands into the pockets of her white shorts.

John could hear his friends whistling as they walked down to the dock. He felt heat in his body. He noticed Lee’s brown shoulders and skinny arms, the scent of coconut in her damp hair. He looked at her lips as she bit them. There was a pear-shaped opening between her thighs, which did not touch. They seemed to be pulled away from each other by firm muscles. He could see the bones in her back, the uppermost vertebrae between her shoulder blades. She had a dancer’s body, lean, pulled into perfect posture by an invisible string.

We’ll practice a few knots, he had said to Lee, but you’ve got to get back to your cabin.

There were few lights around Camp Cooley at night. The surrounding woods were dark and thick, teeming with deer and black bears. Naked fluorescent bulbs popped in the doorways of the restrooms and kitchen hall. Moths clung to the wire mesh window covers. As they made their way to the water, John knew they were invisible to the rest of camp. His mouth became dry, his heart beat fast.

Pausing underneath a pine tree, Lee had wrapped her arms around his neck and held on. She did not know what else to do, only that she wanted to be pressed up against him, on his skin, inside of his mouth.

*

John convinced himself that Lee was alive. Then he knew that she was not. Her body had been limp, heavy with water.

Raindrops made divots in the sand. Live Oaks snaked upwards from the earth. He kicked in the side of two trashcans and broke the plastic face of the vending machine for some chips. It was a holiday and no one had come to the lighthouse grounds.

He thought of his pick-up truck in the Camp Cooley parking lot, empty, windows down, upholstery peeling, his mother’s CD case in the floorboard. His old hound Blue that a friend was watching. A new pair of skis in the basement. Fresh biscuits. Favorite t-shirts. The afghan his grandmother had made him that he kept under his pillow. He thought of things he would probably never touch again.

He could turn himself in or he could run. Or he would sit here until they found him. Either way he wouldn’t go to college now. He wouldn’t make the sailing team or captain boats in the Caribbean. He probably shouldn’t have left her. He should have steered the boat home, but at the time he couldn’t imagine spending another minute with her body.

What the hell was I supposed to do, he yelled, kicking over a bench. His voice was strained and his throat hurt. He was dehydrated, tired. His muscles ached from last night’s swim.

He knew guys that had gone to prison, guys that had robbed grocery stores with empty pistols or had their way with someone’s daughter. They were boys who had grown mustaches in middle school, had something so angry inside of them they couldn’t keep it in. He wasn’t like that. He didn’t mean to be like that.

There were two things that he thought of then, the smell of his mother’s perfume, the taste of his grandfather’s cornbread and lima beans. His mother had been known for her long legs and white-blonde hair. She had been good on a sailboat. She had been mostly darkness packed underneath a thin veneer of light.

*

Two nights before, Lee had come to him again. She wore no make-up, which he loved. She smelled clean, kept her nails short. He had seen her rubbing lotion into her legs that afternoon.

Sixteen, bro, John’s friend had whispered, watching Lee walk up to the chain link fence around the pool.

I won’t get involved, John had said, pushing his friend away by the chest. John had a way of looking damaged that girls wanted to fix. He had hair that curled up over his baseball cap, holes in his t-shirts.

Lee had said something about cleats he couldn’t understand over the fence. She was embarrassed, looked down at her long toes. John jogged over to her.

I’m sorry, she had said, covering her face in her hands. I shouldn’t have come.

He put his arm around her back. They walked down to the boats, Hobie Cats and Sunfish tied up at the dock. The Catalina 25, the boat the camp used for long sails and field trips, was closest to John. He put one leg on the boat and one leg on the dock and helped Lee climb aboard, his hands around her waist.

He could crush her ribcage, he thought. She was young and bird-boned. Her hip bones jutted out like door knobs through her soft shorts. He had been with girls like this when he was younger. He had always worried he would break them. There were years he had been angry, years when he did not know how his body worked, just that girls would let him do whatever he wanted, and he had done that, pushing them hard into the couch, bringing tears to their eyes.

We’ll practice ties, he had said.

She put her hands on his shoulders and looked up at him, wetting her upper lip with the tip of her tongue.

You know I can’t, he said.

Lee began to cry. She sat on her heels and ran her fingers over her hair.

I thought you were into me, she said.

You want to go out? John asked, looking back at the water.

Lee nodded, wiped her nose.

John put the motor in and shoved off into the dark Albemarle Sound.

*

John lay face-down on the concrete walkway that led to the lighthouse. The concrete was cool on his skin. For six years he had slept on a pull-out couch in his mother’s house. She used her second bedroom as an office. She had gotten into real estate, printed cards with her heavily made-up photo on the front. She sold doublewides to retirees in the neighborhood next to the pier. The business cards embarrassed them both, but they were all over town. Months after she died, John had come across a stack of them at the auto shop. He had put one in his wallet, the rest in the trash.

His mother had a boyfriend named Sam who did little else besides fish for crappie at night, leave cigarette burns on the countertop, drink. He slept in John’s mother’s bed during the day. That last year the refrigerator had taken on a smell, the carpet was stained, the bills were unpaid. His mother was thinner than before but would not go to the doctor.

I’m sick of a lot of things, if you want to know the truth, she had said.

*

Lee had put her head on John’s shoulder and drank a few sips of his beer. The rain made their faces slick.

You shouldn’t worry, she said, touching his back. I know what I’m doing.

John thought Lee was the kind of girl who had grown up in one of those chintz-covered homes with a black nana that made honey and banana sandwiches. Ferns on the porch. She’d had expensive tennis lessons—anyone could tell by the type of racket she used, her pink tennis dress. He figured she’d grow up to be beautiful, drive a white Suburban, make tow-headed children, never work.

Lee wore tiny pearl earrings and John knew they were real, not the fake studs his mother had worn. Her body was small and he knew he could take pleasure from it. But she was about nothing. For nothing. Offered nothing but tiny hips, a chapped mouth, a short rush. The heat in his body cooled.

We’ll need to turn back soon, he said, tapping his watch.

He pointed out the various sandy islands in the distance, where boaters could find wild horses and the remnants of an old fishery. The oyster beds between the islands were dangerous at low tide. John remembered cutting the bottoms of his feet stepping out of the boat when he was a child, how his mother had worried the blood would attract sharks. As he entered high school they had sailed on the weekends like friends, drinking beer, swimming out to sandbars, counting wild horses.

John moved to the center of the boat to get a better feeling for the wind. Lee wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her face between his shoulder blades. He felt indifferent to her touch.

The mast had turned cold in the rain and the wind had picked up. John imagined the daggerboard cutting through the water underneath. They were moving fast. His words were being pulled from his mouth and tossed into the night air. He was not being careful. He knew they were in shallow water and he hadn’t checked the weather.

He had remembered the sandbars ahead. If they ran into sand the rudder would break off and they would be stuck until he pried them loose or there was a change in tide.

We need to turn, he said, moving back to the tiller. Crouch down. Jibe ho.

Lee had hunched down for a moment but lost her balance and stood up. The boom swung across the deck and connected with the back of her skull. Lee was swept into the water. John released the tiller and dove in after her.

At first he could not find her body in the dark. The boat hit sand, the rudder floated past. He climbed back onto the boat and saw her white shorts first. It made him sick. It made him very sick.

*

What was it his mom had said the day before she ended her life? That she was tired of trying, that there was a pot of rice on the stove for his supper, that there were so many acts of hurt in her life she could not forgive. She had stuffed the freezer with frozen lasagnas and left cash on the kitchen counter, the check taped to the rearview mirror, as if that would be enough. Sorry for being selfish, she scrawled across the back of an envelope advertising car insurance.

In the weeks before she died his mother often fell asleep on the couch, slack-jawed and tired. John had lifted her thin body and placed her in bed. She was a boat unmoored, and every night he swam out to bring her back. She had exhausted them both, but he always came back for her.

Once, when the fishing had been good, they had spent an afternoon making shrimp burgers and crab cakes, stacked them in the freezer. After she died, he could not bring himself to eat what was now in the shape of her palm.

The month after his mother’s death John had spent time in the woods in an abandoned cabin, smoking cigarettes on the front seat of a rotted-out Chevy. He had broken the coils in the old refrigerator, pulled bricks from the chimney, kicked in the wood siding. He could go there now, fix the roof. Peel the carpet from the cinderblock steps. Out-wait life.

He had wondered about the man that once lived there, surrounded by trees. What is it that makes some people so goddamn tired of life? he wondered. John had looked for evidence of the man’s life. He found rusted pots and pans in the leaves, decomposing cigarette cartons, bullet casings, an overturned easy chair. Once his dog had run after a deer, and John had run after the dog, stumbling over a giant pile of gin bottles. So that’s what life out here is like, he had thought. And maybe that’s what he’d get up to back at the cabin. Maybe he’d clean up one of those chairs, set it up outside, drink, and wait. Watch the birds, listen to the highway. Maybe they’d forget what he’d done. Maybe they’d see he’d had enough.

But John could feel the target on his back, even though the parking lot was empty.

He thrust the door to the lighthouse open with his hip and climbed the stairs. At the top, the light was blinding, a small sun behind thick glass. He punched out a small window and sat on the ledge, his body a hundred feet above the dark water. John pressed his cheek into the stucco window frame. His bones could be a shipwreck, a story told. The idea of it excited him, pushed him closer to the edge.

Megan Mayhew Bergman has an MA from Duke and is completing her MFA at Bennington College. She is a regular contributor to Bitch Magazine and has been published in the Kenyon Review and Carolina Quarterly. She received a fellowship at Millay Colony for the Arts in 2007.