Laughter at the Academy Page 35

  “All expenses paid,” I said soothingly. “My parents aren’t rich—” Lying had gotten so much easier in the time I’d been at Harvard. “—but they own the bed and breakfast free and clear, and if they have to cook anyway, it doesn’t cost them much to feed my friends. You’ll have to bring your own beer. That’s the one thing they won’t be providing. They just want to thank you for being such good friends to me, and meet you at least once before we’re not all together.” I let my voice break, just a little.

  That was all it took. “Oh, Violet,” said Terry, her eyes suddenly bright with tears. “Of course we’ll come. We’d love to meet your family.”

  “Yeah,” said Jeremy. “It’ll be fun.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you all.”

  It might not be fun. But it was sure going to be something.

  The mice ripened in their enclosures, tumors swelling and bursting under the skin. Terry’s fruits ripened on the vine, and she fed them to us, a rainbow of sweet flesh and seeds like jewels, and twice as precious in the eyes of the woman who had nurtured them. She grew black tomatoes and beans the color of bruises, and I stole what I could for the gardens at home. Mama would love watching the black fruits grow and darken, like the water before the storm, and we always needed something new for the table. There wasn’t much variety for the land-locked, who tired of fish, yet still wanted to stay close to home, where they could be helpful if the need arose.

  Presumably Christine and Michael had their own means of marking the passage of time, something involving genetic drift and maggot pupation, but I didn’t care, and so I didn’t ask. What I cared about was that they continued to meet us at the pizza parlor twice a month, and kept pouring powdery cheese over their already cheesy meals. Christine had started licking it off her fingers, a quick, compulsive gesture she didn’t seem to realize was happening until it was over. Michael wasn’t quite so obvious, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him blink. According to my notes, it had been over a month.

  Dutifully, I wrote down the results of the mouse studies I was conducting with Jeremy in one notebook, and the results of the studies I was conducting on my classmates in another. My handwriting was better in the first, and filled with excited ink blotches and misspelled words in the second. It was hard to dredge up much enthusiasm for mice, considering how close my real work was to coming to an end.

  It would have been easy to charter a bus to take us home, but that would have meant leaving all the cars on the campus. Terry didn’t drive, but Michael, Christine, and Jeremy all did. That many abandoned vehicles would point far too quickly to us having left as a group, and might raise questions when classes resumed and half the life sciences grad students didn’t reappear. No. Better to give everyone a gas card and say that my parents wanted my friends to have the freedom to explore the coast at will. Better to lie a little now, and make the big lies easier down the line.

  Jeremy watched as I lugged my things out to his car. His expression was torn between amusement and dismay, finally tipping over the edge when I came out with my third suitcase.

  “You’re coming back at the end of the break, right?” he asked. “I know your funding extends to the end of the semester. You’ve told us that often enough. We might still have a breakthrough that could pay for the rest of your education.”

  “I’m not giving up, Jeremy,” I said, shoving the suitcase into the backseat. “I want to finish my project as much as anybody. But I also want to be realistic. If that means offloading a few things I don’t need to have regular access to in order to make moving out easier, I’m going to do it. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, sounding distinctly uncomfortable. “I just…I really want you to finish your research, that’s all. You’ve got a brilliant scientific mind. You shouldn’t wind up rotting away in some seaside town just because your family didn’t have the money to keep you where you belonged.”

  I had long since learned to see the digs people made at my family as pitiful attempts at complimenting me. I wasn’t “like” the other girls who came from small coastal backgrounds. I wasn’t the hick my background told my peers to expect, and so they heaped praise upon me for overcoming my early limitations. It was insulting. It was wrong-headed and cruel and for a long time, it had been enough to keep my feelings from getting in the way of my work. But they meant it—all of it—in the nicest, least offensive way possible.

  We’re so proud of you for being better than the people who bore you, raised you, loved you enough to send you out into the world when they could easily have kept you home for your own good.

  We’re so impressed that you were able to grow up with a focused intellect and the ability to tie your own shoes, considering the obstacles you had to overcome.

  We’re so amazed that you can speak properly and dress yourself, since you should have been a babbling, half-naked cavegirl.

  I smiled at Jeremy, broadly, showing him my natural, slightly uneven teeth. They had been slanting subtly for weeks now; I was pushing them back into their sockets every morning before I went outside. The signs were there, for people who knew how to look for them; people who hadn’t privately filed the marks as folk nonsense and fairy tales, better left forgotten. Better left to seaside hicks.

  “I promise you, no matter where I wind up, I won’t rot away,” I said. “Are you all packed and ready to go?”

  “I’ve just been waiting for you.”

  “Then let’s go. I want to get there before the others; the last thing we need is for them to wander off into town because they get tired of waiting.”

  Jeremy laughed. Actually laughed, like this was the funniest thing I’d ever said. Hatred kindled in my chest, surprisingly bright given how much time I spent finding ways to bank it back, to tamp it down. “Oh, like there’s that much town for them to wander into,” he said.

  I shrugged, feeling the fluid shift of muscles under my skin. I was running out of time. Soon, I would have all the time in the world. It wasn’t a contradiction. It just looked like one when viewed from the outside.

  I wouldn’t be viewing it from the outside for very much longer.

  “You’d be surprised,” I said. “Innsmouth has a way of sneaking up on you.”

  There was a time when Innsmouth was isolated, unfamiliar, even forbidden, blocked off from the ceaselessly searching hands and eyes of men by the shape of the land, which curled around our coves and caverns like the hand of a nurturing parent, protecting and concealing us. But the cities spread, and the roads reached out in fungal waves, seeking the points of greatest weakness. They grew across the body of Massachusetts, poisoning it even as they connected it to the rest of the continent. My parents liked to talk about the days when it was a long voyage from “civilization” to our doorstep.

  It took Jeremy ninety minutes. It would have taken an hour, but there was traffic. There was always traffic getting out of Boston, which attracted cars like spilled jam attracted ants.

  “This is why you never go to see your family, isn’t it?” he asked, after the fifth time we were cut off by an asshole in a Lexus.

  “One of the reasons,” I said, trying to sound like I wasn’t entertaining pleasant fantasies of murder. The asshole in the Lexus would have opened like a flower after the correct sequence of cuts, blossoming into something beautiful. Best of all, the beautiful thing he could have become would never have cut anyone else off on the highway. Beautiful things had better ways to spend their time than behind the wheel.

  Then we came around the final curve in the road, and the Atlantic was spread out before us like a gleaming sapphire sheet, and I stopped thinking about murder. I stopped thinking about anything but the sea, and how it was already a beautiful thing, no knives or bloodshed required.

  “Wow,” breathed Jeremy, and for the first time, I was in total agreement with him about something that didn’t involve the poisonous kiss of the great god Science.

  We drove down the winding road that led
into Innsmouth, playing peek-a-boo with the shoreline all the way. Trees blocked our view about half the time, keeping us from seeing the waves break against the rocks. My ancestors had planted many of those trees, designing this stretch of road as carefully as Jeremy and I had designed the mazes we used to keep the mice distracted and happy. Men were happy when they could see the sea, as long as they never saw too much. When they saw too much, they began to understand, and when they understood…

  There were realities the human mind was never meant to withstand, pressures it was never meant to survive. Knowledge is like the sea. Go too deep, and the crushing weight of it could kill you.

  “Wow,” said Jeremy again, when the road leveled off and we cruised into town, past the old-fashioned houses and the wrought-iron streetlights that graced every corner. It was like driving into the past, into an age a hundred years dead and buried. He was gaping openly, twisting in his seat to get a better look at the shop windows and the elegant curves of architecture. “Are you sure people live here? This isn’t, like, Disneyland for tourists?”

  “Welcome to Innsmouth,” I said. “Founded in 1612 by settlers who wanted a place where they could live peacefully and raise their families according to their own traditions, without worrying about outside interference. Unlike most of the coastal towns around here, there was never a re-founding. We’ve been living on and working this shore for four hundred years.”

  Jeremy took his eyes off the town long enough to give me a questioning, sidelong look. “Boston was founded in 1620,” he said. “Your town can’t be older than Boston.”

  “No one’s ever told the town that,” I said. “You can find our land deeds and our articles of incorporation at Town Hall, if you’re really curious.”

  “I guess that explains your accent.”

  I blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s just…” Jeremy took a hand off the wheel and waved it vaguely, encompassing everything around us. “You’ve always said you were from Massachusetts, but you don’t have any accent I’ve ever heard before. I figured you might have had speech therapy when you were a kid, or something. If this town is really older than Boston, though, it makes sense that you would have grown up with a different regional accent. This is like, someone’s graduate project, right here. I bet you have linguistic tics so population-specific that no one even hears them anymore.”

  Oh, we heard them. We heard them, and we spent the bulk of our time trying to beat them out of ourselves if we were ever intending to cross the town line, because people gravitated toward strangeness, and so we were only allowed to leave during the brief time when we were normal. Such a pretty, petty, pointless word.

  I said none of that. I only pointed to the turnoff that would take us from the main road to my family’s home, and said, “This way.”

  Jeremy obligingly turned, looking slightly dismayed as Innsmouth dropped away behind us. “I thought we were staying in town.”

  “Technically, we are. The town limits encompass six miles of shoreline. If we ever wanted to sell, everyone who lives here would walk away a millionaire.” Human families living in our homes; human children playing on our beaches, unaware of what slumbered, peacefully dreaming, only a few fathoms away. It was a charmingly terrible thought, the sort of world that could never be allowed to exist. The consequences of a few brightly-colored shovels and pails would be too terrible for words.

  I leaned back in my seat, still smiling. “There are three bed and breakfasts in town. My parents are generally believed to operate the nicest one. We certainly have the best view. But you’ll see for yourself soon enough. Keep driving. We’re almost there now. We’re almost home.”

  Jeremy said nothing, sensing, on some deep, primate level, that there was nothing for him to say. The road twisted beneath us like the body of a great eel, like a tentacle reaching out to take what it wanted from the world, until we came around the final curve, and there it was, standing beautiful and bleak against the skyline. My home.

  Relaxation came all at once, so profound that I could feel my muscles soften all the way down to where they brushed against the bone. I was back. Finally, after years of care packages and quiet refusals, I was back where I belonged.

  “Holy shit,” said Jeremy. “Does Dracula live with you?”

  “Only on summer vacation, and he tips well,” I said blithely.

  “Holy shit.”

  Normally, I would have called him on his failure to come up with something better. He was a scientist: he prided himself on always knowing the right words to describe a situation. But I had to admit that it was nice to have him so impressed with my childhood home, which I hadn’t seen in so many, many years. We had all known that if I came back, I wouldn’t leave again. The longing for the sea would have been too great.

  It already was. “Carver’s Landing,” I said, swallowing the sudden thickness of my voice and hoping he wouldn’t notice. “Built in 1625, after the original house burned down in an unfortunate candle incident. My ancestors wanted to make a statement about how we didn’t die in fire; we only died in water, and we refused to fear it.”

  Jeremy didn’t say anything. He didn’t even tease me about having a house with a name. He really was in shock.

  Most New England bed and breakfasts were quaint things, suitable for the cover of little pamphlets intended to be distributed at local bus stations and airports. Not so Carver’s Landing. Our family home was a glorious four-story monstrosity, built right up on the edge of the cliff, so that any shift in the tectonic plates would send us tumbling down, down, down below the waves, where anyone who saw us fall would presume we had gone to a watery grave. The wood was white, weathered by wind and coated in salt; the architecture was Colonial, with striking Victorian influences. It was the sort of house that should have been the topic of thesis papers written by wide-eyed history students. It had grown organically under the hands and hammers of generations; it had seen a nation rise. And we rented rooms for fifty dollars a night to tourists lucky or foolish enough to make a wrong turn and find themselves in Innsmouth for the night.

  Jeremy drove slowly down the shallow hillside separating us from the house. A small paved lot cupped the left side of Carver’s Landing. Three cars were already there, all more than twenty years old, their sides pitted and rusted by saltwater and wind. I wrinkled my nose at the sight of them. It was time to open the garage and pull out something a little newer. Caution was important, sure, but so was having a car that would actually run. So was not attracting attention for driving a junker.

  Jeremy pulled his shining silver hybrid into a space a safe distance from the other cars, like a gray shark sliding past whales, and I realized dimly that I was ashamed of my family’s choices. I was ashamed of the rust and the salt and the decay, of things I’d viewed as natural and right when I was a child, growing up eternally in sight of the sea. I had been out in the world too long. It had been necessary for my work, and I didn’t regret doing as was required of me—I could never regret doing as was required of me, not when the world was so wide, and the landlocked parts of it so dangerous and wild—but I had still been out in the world too long. It was time, and past time, for me to have come home.

  “You unload the trunk,” I said. “I’ll get us a luggage cart.” I didn’t give him time to answer or object before I was shoving my door open with my foot and running for the kitchen door. The curtains were drawn, but I knew that someone was watching us. Someone was always watching at Carver’s Landing. Someone had always been watching at school, too, but there they tried to pretend that they weren’t, that privacy was a thing that could exist on land, even though anyone with any sense would know that it was a lie.

  The door was unlocked. I flung myself through, and there was my older sister, taller than me, straight-backed and flat-faced—poor thing, to be so long grown, and still here—and when she stepped aside, there was my mother, short and hunched and smiling her sea-changed smile, and I threw myself into her arms, and I w
as finally, finally home.

  By the time I finished greeting my family, two more cars had arrived in the parking lot. I collected my sister and a luggage cart, and went out to meet them.

  Christine was uncurling from the driver’s seat of her car, a long, foreign flower trying to decide whether she could flourish in unfamiliar soil. She offered a polite Midwestern smile as my sister and I approached. “Violet,” she said. “I was afraid you’d run off and deserted us. Who’s this?”

  “I’m Violet’s mother,” said my sister, and my heart burned for her, and for the world we had to live beside. She smiled charmingly as she stepped toward Christine, holding out her hand to be shaken. “You must be Christine. I’ve heard so much about you, but I must admit, Violet never told us how lovely you were.”

  “Oh,” said Christine brightly, and smiled as she tossed her hair. “It’s lovely to meet you, Ms. Carver. Your home is…wow. It’s really something.”

  “Wait until you see the inside,” said my sister, and laughed, and kept laughing as the rest of my classmates got out of their cars and began loading their bags onto the luggage cart. They would all be distracted by the sound, I knew, by the bright simplicity of it. They wouldn’t be looking at her cold, calculating eyes, or at the curtains behind her, which twitched as our parents and siblings stole looks at us.

  The door opened. Two of our brothers, both my age, emerged to help with the bags. Chattering, excited, and unaware, the other students followed me inside, ready to begin their seaside escape. Get away from your problems, get away from your woes, get away from the real world—get away from everything except for the sea, which cannot be run from once the waves have noticed your presence. Once the sea has become aware, it can only be survived, and not many can manage that much.

  Despite the fact that spring was often our “busy” season, my parents had accepted no bookings for the month, and every room was open. Christine and Jeremy were settled with seaside views, while Terry and Michael had to content themselves with views of the sweeping cliffs behind the town. None of them complained, at least not in my hearing, and I was grateful. All of them would be able to hear the sea, to smell it in the air, but the last part of my study involved denying two of them the sight of it.