Body of Water by Sarah Dooley

Author:Sarah Dooley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

Seventeen

I didn’t have to ask Isaac. He came to pick me up on the seventh Wednesday, but after the ruins, he turned east instead of west. Thursday through Tuesday, I might have asked him why. Wednesdays were silence, were distance and fog. I didn’t have the right words to ask him why.

We walked through the double-glass doors of Barthrow Community, past a gold visitor’s sofa with no dents in the cushions, past ten mailboxes and not a single piece of mail. My grandmother’s door was number seven, and Jesus hung there on a cross. Isaac knocked firmly, three times, and waited.

The laundry room was off to my left, and I peered in, looking for a place to hide in case I needed it. Olive green washers and dryers sat in rows of three. Somebody had hung a needlepoint sign on the wall that said, “Idle hands are the devil’s plaything,” which seemed like an odd sentiment to hang in a retirement community, where hands were supposed to have earned their idleness. I guess the point was that you were supposed to do your laundry instead of falling victim to Satan’s follies.

I was rescued from my mean thoughts by Jesus swinging slowly past my nose. Behind him stood my grandmother, grim as usual.

I hadn’t seen her in seven weeks, not since she’d dropped Ivy off with us at the shelter. It was startling to see that the grooves in her face had deepened and the stoop to her shoulders had become more pronounced. But the look on her face was familiar. Disapproval.

“Now, ain’t this a surprise.” Grandma moved back half a step to grant us entrance to the cavern that loomed behind her. I stuck close to Isaac, unnerved by the way my grandmother looked me up and down in my dingy sweatpants and my stringy hair. Isaac inched a hand backward, and his pinky wrapped around the edge of my palm, squeezed, released. One tiny tendril of insufficient reassurance.

Once we were past her, Grandma pushed the door until it clicked and began fastening locks. One on the doorknob, one dead bolt, and one long chain. She must have thought the whole sinful world was going to try to get through that door one day.

And yet she let us in anyway, I thought, surpressing what would have been an extremely inappropriate giggle. I scanned the room, trying to decide which piece of furniture looked the least clean and most durable, and finally perched, stiff and awkward, on the corner of the sofa. I tried to imagine Ivy staying here for three weeks after the fire, having the soot scrubbed off her and going to bed without a story, but I couldn’t. Ivy was too tangled and wild like her namesake to exist in this neatly organized space. I was surprised there weren’t broken shards of glass still glistening in the carpet from her wild elbows and knees that were forever knocking into things.

“We were in the neighborhood,” Isaac lied none too gracefully, blushing to his roots and casting his gaze about like he’d dropped a contact lens.

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