Whales

by Tayler Hanxi

 

Mish wonders what it must be like to be a soft girl—a soft, sweet girl with nice, sweet thoughts. Her brain is full of screaming and pine needles. She feels guilty about all of it, the screaming and the rest, but she’s tried to explain that she can’t help it. She wakes up screaming the night it happens, screaming and soaking wet. She goes to the window, checks the bars, and presses her forehead to the cold metal, letting the breeze dry her skin. There’s no oxygen in the Rockies, and she supposes that’s all this is, this summer at altitude, suffocating slowly, her voice dying out of her throat as the final notes get lost to the spruces and the firs. She hears footsteps down the hallway.

Candace walks in while Mish changes her wet, sweaty shirt. “Another one?” Candace asks. She reaches out like a mother would, and Mish takes two steps back. Candace’s fingers are rigid, frozen in place, like they are expecting to wrap around someone who is not Mish; maybe someone who is kinder, their shoulders smaller.

Mish feels that she should apologize, but isn’t sure for what anymore. That their life has become a black hole of all of Mish’s worst habits despite the best intentions. That Candace’s work is frequently interrupted by escaping noises from Mish’s chapped lips. That she is afraid, always—of the dark and mountains and elevation and the security camera and still not being on speaking terms with her mother when her father finally dies. That the most tender thing about her these days is fear.

“I shouldn’t drink before bed,” Mish says.

She catches the clock and it’s 2:27AM when she walks downstairs and into the kitchen, passing Candace’s studio where she’s scoring another Honda commercial. The floor-to-ceiling windows of the living room streak the house in blackness and moonlight, the mountains and trees lost somewhere in the dark, staring at you in secret underneath all the black.

Mish realizes Candace has followed her. Candace’s hair hangs perfectly in waves down her back and Mish is suddenly aware of her own oily, unwashed bangs, misaligned from a summer of at-home haircuts. Mish feels herself being watched. There was a time she would have preferred Candace not know she screamed, let alone at 2:27 in the morning. There was a time they didn’t live with bars on the windows. There was a time Candace’s outstretched fingertips would have been enough. But whether nostalgia is love, she’s not sure, and everything that Candace knows about Mish now feels more like a threat than a closeness, a reminder that the only place they can go is forward, and Mish couldn’t pretend not to care if she tried.

“You gonna be okay?” Candace asks.

“I’ll be fine,” Mish mumbles out. “I just can’t breathe up here.”

It was an experiment, moving here for the summer together, to a vacation home in the mountains once filled with fancy friends, G-Wagons parked in the drive, a Cartier watch waved about as someone told a story about linens and lemons. Mish’s dad would make fun of huge places like this, the ones owned by childless adults. Candace’s house, bought in cash and won in a divorce, has eight rooms and only one bed. The rest are comically vacant.

When she was a child, Mish and her dad would drive these roads together, up I-70 and past Idaho Springs, but never making it further than Frisco, the glowing amber light of Breckenridge too industrial for the woods he wanted her to know. They would listen to Warren Zevon and she felt so small in the backseat of his Subaru, wearing his coat, trying to count all of the mountain peaks like jelly beans in a jar. He would tell her about beetle kill and the death of the pine trees, about the rangers who start managed fires and how they help everything renew itself all over again. When he spoke, his words would dance. She wanted to ride alongside every single one, slipping out and away inside the Eisenhower Tunnel while they both held their breath, emerging from the dark of the concrete feeling faint, lightheaded, and restless. These days, though, he sings songs to himself that no one else can hear.

Candace finally leaves and Mish stands, watching the kettle. There was a time they might have stayed up together, drinking the last of Candace’s bourbon on the floor by the couch. Now she’s afraid to miss the times that might not come again, she’s afraid to feel anything more than lifelessness. Feeling anything might make their slow separation finally unbearable. She feels guilty about the screaming, the things expelled at just a decibel too high.

The whistling. She pours the boiling water into the French press and watches the grounds swirl. Before you’ve said you’re in love, the thing itself feels like it might be a jumpscare, a thing that hits all at once, overwhelms you with compulsion. But once said, pulling yourself out feels like a marathon of waiting, waiting for the coffee and waiting for Candace to finish work, waiting for yourself to feel okay enough to say goodbye, but not so okay that you forget you once loved them the way you did. Waiting, simply, to feel less.

*

From the studio, Candace watches Mish on her security monitor. She doesn’t really have to work, the piece is basically finished. She comes into the studio most nights with a drink to read and go through old boxes on shelves filled with false memories, things she wouldn’t care for if she wasn’t trying to fill time. Old scorecards from Scrabble games with Paul, pens from his dental practice, his Rubber Soul vinyl with a note attached she wrote 20 years ago.

She’s considering selling the place with everything still in it. Maybe they’ll do a blind auction and someone will find the artifacts of a life she can’t believe she once lived. Maybe they’ll buy it with Mish still inside, walking in circles in the bedroom, spinning out about how bizarre it feels that the house is empty. Two summers ago, Candace sold all the beds, all the furniture in nurseries that were never needed, the ghostly reminders of children she and Paul never brought here for a family vacation. Losing a child you never met, it’s something she can’t explain to Mish, all young with limbs and impulses and unrelenting declarations.

There’s a cruelty to how she’s been pulling away, Candace knows. There’s a cruelty to how little she thought of Mish’s age until it finally felt like a burden. There’s a cruelty to how she wants Mish to dive into a curious loneliness every night. There’s a cruelty to her relief whenever Mish wakes from a nightmare, relief that Mish is feeling something besides nothing.

Candace first asked for Mish’s number after meeting at a mutual friend’s birthday party. The friend was Evelyn, Candace’s neighbor in Denver and Mish’s graduate school art history professor who’d taken an interest in this 25 year old’s icy stare and aggressively unforgiving commentary during class discussions about Joan Mitchell. Their first date was in Santa Fe. Mish had never been and, a few hours later, Candace picked her up and they drove south from Denver through the night. She remembers feeling impressed as she watched Mish slip over words and rework them into a personality that might impress Candace. She remembers Mish’s tangled hair that she still never combs.

They ate at a vegan restaurant where Candace ordered a bottle of red, then went back to an adobe Airbnb where she lit a fire, turned on the air conditioning (it was July), and asked Mish about her mother. They talked each other to sleep in a wine-drunk haze of cold sweat.

It’s bizarre to recall herself in that memory, the way she knew how little of herself she was giving, the way she knew she was coaxing Mish into filling the space. Candace remembers when she first felt Mish growing dependent on her, the way she never told Mish no, the way she forgot to tell her she doesn’t believe in forever. It feels cruel to have stopped loving someone who, at your persistence, grew large enough to swallow themselves (and you) whole—and then did, becoming entirely dependent on you living inside their throat because, months ago, you tolerated the misgivings of a young narcissist auditioning a new personality.

In a wild sweep last winter, Mish’s mother put her father into a nursing home without consulting the family, Mish was expelled from the university for vandalism, and Mish stopped taking Wellbutrin. And here Candace gave herself, and enabled them both to stop existing, and co-created a black hole of need and safekeeping.

Months past. The nightmares started. Mish turned one glass into two glasses into half a bottle before bed. She broke a vase in a hotel room they stayed at in Asheville. She threatened to throw herself out of the window. Candace wanted to laugh, seeing the hyperbolic self-destruction laying itself at her doorstep.

So for a few hours each night, Candace removes herself silently, cruelly, waiting for Mish to consider a version of herself alone. The kind martyr, the condescending mother, the whatever. She’s afraid of the person Mish might become if she leaves now, and afraid of the person Mish might become if she never does.

*

Out of habit, Mish taps the security monitor on the smart fridge. She clicks through each camera angle, every side of the house, the driveway, the lake, the shed, the back porch. The lake.

The lake? 

     She taps back.

     There is no lake.

Her fingers hover away from the screen. She blinks. It’s a lake. She’s not sure the difference between a lake or a pond out here, in the mountains by Breckenridge, among the twisting roads by gated mansions that they’re allowed to call “cabins.” But Candace’s home has never had a lake on its property and this camera angle named “LAKE” has never been here before. She leans closer, the pixels of the screen in 1080p definition flickering shades of gray-green-black night vision. It’s water, real water, little frothy white icecap waves.

She takes the keys from the counter and grabs Candace’s ex-husband’s Patagonia fleece from the coat rack. As quietly as possible, she opens and shuts the front door behind her, walking barefoot off the porch and down the long drive to the gate, feeling the pine needles crunch and stab underneath her toes.

*

Mish started microdosing when her dad was diagnosed, when her mom wouldn’t answer her calls. She tried 17 different kinds of probiotics and antacids to get her twisting stomach under control. Years before, a family physician put her on an antidepressant and a court-ordered therapist put her on an antianxiety. When they first arrived and this giant house felt like a horror movie, all windows and hallways and locked doors, Mish insisted Candace install a few more cameras to cover all the blind spots around the property and slept with a hatchet under her pillow.

She looked up Candace online after they met, seeing photos of her and her ex-husband at charity events or galas. He was some East Coast Old Money Monopoly Man, but Candace seemed to drop out of the sky and into the world fully formed, no childhood or history.

Even now, the limbs and branches of Candace’s life feel like a mystery. Mish still, after all this time, searches for loose breadcrumbs of a person Candace might have been, any kind of an answer to lead her back to who she was before Mish, before Paul. At first, the unanswered questions were exciting pieces of Candace’s story. Mish would run her hands all over Candace’s face, count her fingers and eyelashes, try to summon the feeling of someone real, try to bring her down to Earth.

The first few weeks together felt like laying backwards into warm water. Lasting, unquestioned, empty-minded peace. Ecstasy. Mish, prone to both introspection and insecurity, for whom just existing never seemed enough, needed something bigger to follow and be fulfilled by. Something religious in its bigness.

*

On the edge of the lake, Mish doesn’t blink.

She sits, watching the surface of the water break itself open again and again by the curved back and the V-shaped tail of what is, with absolute certainty, a humpback whale. Fifty feet long and not much more than just a silhouette in the mountain darkness, it’s more the outline she can see than the body itself, twisting around as it breeches.

As the waves push out to the shoreline, touch her toes, then run back again, it floods her—relief. Relief to see another creature who does not belong, who is placed into captivity, who was bred to eventually outgrow this world.

*

The weekend after Santa Fe, Mish gradually began moving her things into Candace’s old home in Denver. Suddenly Candace seemed to stop taking gigs for a bit, and seemed to want to spend all her time crawling all over Mish, making her juices, cutting up ginger for her stomach. She introduced Mish to her friends, gave her the down payment for a Prius. It was a funny thing, someone being obsessed with you. Mish suspected she was never going to be able to survive there once it plateaued, as great expectations are prone to do.

*

The whale dances, its body a massive and frightening thing. It dances like Mish’s dad might, it dances like his words did, it dances like the memory of a man who’s forgotten his only daughter.

She thinks of calling Candace to come watch with her. She thinks of jumping on the whale’s back. She thinks of counting the dots in the sky or the rocks on the shore but instead she sits, unblinking, lips parted, watching this whale dance in circles.

Wearing Candace’s ex’s jacket she feels 13 again, in the backseat of her dad’s car, drowning in a grown man’s coat. At 13, she was still a child, but her body was changing and she hated it, lingering in a phase where she wore only boy’s shirts and boy’s pants. You are so angry when you are 13. You are realizing how time owns your body in a way not even God understands. Time sharpens your mind and dulls your spirit.

But unlike time (or God), the whale in the water doesn’t feel like a truth she needs to bargain with. For the first time all summer, she allows herself to be swallowed by the moment. It is her nature to deny, her instinct to ridicule. But here at a lake that might not exist, she is overcome with a sensation at her feet. Curiosity. Fullness.

All this to say, the whale does not come as a surprise.

She knows Candace has been affected by her special brain all summer, she’s not sure what to do with that. Be not depressed? She knows Candace is walking on eggshells, avoiding eye contact like they’re new roommates and not partners of a full year.

         She stands, assuming the coffee is ready, and walks back. Just as she steps into the front door she is struck with an uncontainable feeling of sadness, realizing she already knows Candace won’t believe her. She wonders what might happen if she sets a fire inside her ex’s jacket, if they might be able to begin again.

*

Around four, Mish is asleep on the floor of the living room when Candace comes out of her studio. The unplunged French press is full on the counter. The wine glass in her hand has spilled onto the hardwood and a tiny streak of red drips down her jacket sleeve.

“Hey.” Candace touches her head. “Want to move to the bed?”

“Hi.” Mish rolls over. “I want to stay here.”

Candace turns to leave and Mish grabs her ankle.

“Will you stay?”

Candace hesitates. “Okay,” she finally says. She grabs a blanket and lays down. Both are too tired to hold each other.

         “I’m sorry I’m bad,” Mish whispers.

         “You’re not bad,” Candace says, pulling pine needles out of her hair.

         “I’m sorry I couldn’t have been an easier girl,” Mish says.

         “You are,” Candace lies.

“I saw a whale,” Mish says so softly she isn’t sure Candace will hear.

“In your dream?” Candace asks.

“At the lake.”

Candace strokes her hair like a schoolteacher would and Mish falls back asleep.

*

Candace is sticking her head out the bars on the windows, smoking a lost cigarette found in a drawer, when she hears the doorbell ring. A fight the other night about how isolating the summer has been ended in Candace accidentally inviting the neighbors over for dinner. Stephanie, an Ayurvedic dermatologist, and her husband Charlie, a lawyer. Old friends of her and Paul’s. Boring names, boring people, boring lives. She’d been one, too, once.

She doesn’t particularly like either of them but they’re part of it up here, the ritual of status. Mish sees her life with Paul, this home in the mountains, as a sickening altar to wealth.  She’s not not wrong, but gone are the days of Candace wishing Mish’s youth could bear the burden of nuance. She wishes Mish’s outrage had space for realizing how necessary it can feel, in lost years, to shrug off layers of yourself and find some kind of god. She knows how ridiculous it can sound, to argue for god when you own the church, but meaning is a sparse commodity.

It’s a little after seven when the door opens and Candace stubs out the cigarette. She hears Mish’s voice jump two or three notches up to greet them, she hears the booze-touched wavering of her anxious energy.

Finally walking downstairs, she sees Mish pouring two glasses in the living room from the bottle Charlie brought. Stephanie has cut her hair short and ditched the makeup, Charlie is graying and stopped wearing ties.

“Hi, you two,” Candace greets them with hugs, cheek kisses.

“Look at you!” Stephanie does the arm squeeze. “You are so. Skinny. And your girlfriend is so beautiful.” Everyone in the room knows she just means young.

“You look great, Charlie,” Candace says.

“I was telling him I like his watch,” Mish chimes in. She puts an arm around Candace’s waist.

Mish is wearing layers of bracelets on her thin wrists, giant gold hoops in her ears, a slip dress like she’s auditioning for Atonement. Candace notices she’s washed her hair.

“That smells amazing,” Stephanie moves on, walking into the kitchen. “Do you need help, Misha?”

Mish walks with her, turning on the kind of eye contact she and Candace haven’t shared in weeks. Candace walks over to the windows with Charlie, staring out at the forest, the sunset. The tops of the trees blur over on themselves in a sea of textured, burning endlessness.

         “Where’s the property line, again?” Charlie asks.

         “Where it dips down, kind of. Down there.”

         “Ah. Ten acres?”

         “Eight.”

“So how’s work?” Charlie asks.

“Busier than I thought I’d be when we came up here.”

“You still have a studio here?”

“I do. It’s smaller than at home, but it works. How’s your office?”

“I actually took a sabbatical this quarter. We’re trying to spend some more time at home.”

“How’s that feel?”

“Honestly? I don’t think the Golf Channel has been off once the entire time.”

This conversation about nothing and the boastful kindnesses of status make Candace miss fighting with Mish. Premature nostalgia, she tells herself, the fear of knowing you will be sad later, the sadness of knowing you’ll be sad. She realizes this is why they are together. They have made their own shared toxicity a religion. On their shared, futile searches for god, they strapped themselves to each other.

And right on cue, Mish retches and throws up a red-wine-peanut-butter mess of vomit all over the pan of snapper with a vegan butter and caper sauce.

*

Mish wakes up by the lake and her face is covered in snow. Her instinct is to scream for help, but her voice feels frozen in time. She rolls over and finds herself in a tent with the door unzipped, open to the shore that’s dusted with soft white powder, holding back a perfectly iced-over surface of water. She doesn’t remember setting up a tent last night, she can’t fathom how there’s snow in July. She races out of the tent, running up to the water’s edge and sticking a foot out, testing the surface. Solid.

She steps onto the ice. One foot, then two.

She and her dad went to Echo Lake, neat Mt. Evans, on her 10th birthday. On the car ride, he would say, “Echo… echo… echo…” and she would reply, “Lake… lake… lake…” He taught her how the water would freeze faster at the edges, how they could walk on the ice, but how the ice sealed off the light and oxygen from everything down below.

Now, she looks up at the motionless, blue-gray sky, wondering if she is the below.

She walks lightly across, steady like a baby calf. She feels more sure of her feet than she has all summer, and she begins to move at a careful trot. In an instant and an eternity, she finds herself in the middle, where her dad said it was the most dangerous. She bends down, wiping away the snow from a patch, and waits.

Like they’re stuck together in a snow globe, one that halts time and stops moments in its rotation, the whale emerges, touching its face to the exposed patch of clear ice. Mish doesn’t care if it is real. It sings to her, she sings back, they hear each other, they play. Yes, they play. She is struck with the jolt of wonder, of all the things that are unreal, of remembering that she and her father once shared a life of seeing and playing and driving through the trees, even if her mother always felt threatened by their weightlessness.

As quickly as it came, it’s gone again. Mish stands, her feet numb, the hairs in her nose freezing over. She races back to the house.

*

“This girl throws up on everything,” Candace told her best friend Gail, Paul’s sister, a few weeks after Santa Fe, and after Mish had thrown up in a library garden, a bathroom sink at an art gallery in Aspen, and a koi pond at a ramen restaurant downtown.

“Wait, she does what?” Gail asked.

It was a weird thing to say, Candace knew, but that’s exactly what it was. Most of the time, back then, Mish wasn’t even drunk. Occasionally Candace would see her taking a pill, or drinking pickle juice because she read on Twitter it rebalanced the pH of her gut flora. But, and usually while they were out of the house, a glaze would overtake Mish’s face, her eyes would fog, and in an instant, she’d be throwing up that morning’s breakfast or yesterday’s dinner.

“Do you think she’s pregnant?” Gail suggested.

“Yeah, sure,” Candace half snorted.

When she suggested the idea to Mish, Mish did not rule it out. Months later, Mish would bring up that mistake as one of many brutally obvious signals that Candace did not take Mish seriously, that Candace thought of sexuality as a whimsical phase to pass through on the way to a larger hedonistic pursuit of freedom. Mish was not wrong on either front.

Candace kind of loved the throwing up, though—how easily Mish could expel unwanted things from her life. Mothers. Ex-girlfriends. University teachers. Her body was a tightly sealed fortress, safely kept. There was, obviously, concern about why. Eventually it narrowed down to some combination of ulcers and hormones, and when instructed to stop drinking for a few months to “let her body settle,” Mish took that as a call to action to drink with a vengeful aggression.

It was hard, the line to tow, wanting Mish to come home but fearing she might come home drunk, the impatience of fighting a delirious, angry cartoon character for yet another night in a row. The thrown plates and vases.

“Is there someone that can help her? Someone who isn’t you?” Gail asked at the time.

“Yes and no,” Candace lied. There were plenty of people, but she wanted to see it through—

“To the end?” Gail finished.

“It wouldn’t feel right. She doesn’t make friends easily.”

“Go figure.”

Then the nightmares started, symptoms of a similar kind of bodily expulsion, but one that left Mish feeling more haunted and less relieved, and Candace knew she’d be there a while.

*

“Hey—” Mish races into the house, taking off her icy clothes in the foyer, running naked into the living room. She turns on the fireplace and sits at the hearth, wrapping herself in a Pottery Barn quilt.

“What are you doing?” Candace appears at the top of the stairs and rushes down. “It’s eighty degrees.”

“I swear,” Mish says, teeth chattering. “There’s a whale.”

“Were you asleep?”

 “By the lake.”

     “What lake?”

     “At the end of the drive.”

     Mish hears herself, she hears the way her words tip around Candace’s disbelief.

  “I don’t know that there’s a lake.” Candace turns on the air conditioning. She watches Mish warm up her blue lips, her inexplicably purple toes. “Should I check the monitor?”

Mish feels a sadness creeping, a realization that the worlds between them have expanded into a universe, that they are both holding on to two ends of a splitting rope. A hatred growing, she knows Candace wants to ask if she’s drunk.

It is like trying to scream inside the ocean, wanting someone back who has left you but pretends to stay, begging someone to see your reality after they have decided it is of no use anymore. The whale sings a song underwater that she cannot hear inside the house, too many thousands of feet above ground.

She stares at Candace’s face, at her heavy eyelids and gray eyes, and doesn’t recognize the shape of her cheeks. A million photos of Candace in her phone, the outlines of Candace’s lips and collar bones sealed into fingertips, and her stomach lurches to see a stranger in the kitchen.

Did I choose to misremember? Did I memorize a version of you that never existed? Am I already letting you go?

     “Maybe there’s not,” Mish says. “I’m sorry I ruined dinner.”

*

At dinner in Santa Fe, Candace wore a white button down and Mish came in a leather skirt. In the first 20 minutes Candace learned Mish spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean; she learned she’d wanted to be Catholic as a child and performed Holy Communion for her stuffed animals; she learned Mish had a DUI from high school and was thinking of dropping out of graduate school. They finished the bottle of wine, barely touched the food, and outside in the parking lot Candace smoked a cigarette and watched Mish yell at a man who hadn’t stepped out of her way on the sidewalk.

The next day they went to Meow Wolf and for a moment in the bathroom, Candace found herself looking up Zillow listings for homes in town, places with a garage that Mish could turn into an art studio and yoga space. Candace knew there were habits she was meant to break, going from 0 to 200, diving in headfirst—habits that, since the divorce, she’d been working through.

But later that night, at their second dinner, she told Mish she loved her. She opened a floodgate of impulse and felt the stinging of premature nostalgia when she realized, almost seconds after, the relationship would eventually end not for a lack of love, but from a need to break a sick cycle she’d just begun again.

Once, Mish called her a “groomer.” Mish mocked her age, her career, her performance of a sexuality Candace was never quite sure of. Every day since, Mish punished Candace for starting a relationship she never planned to see through to the end, but not nearly as much as Candace punished herself.

*

Around midnight, Mish stands at the bedroom window, trying to squeeze her giant head through the bars. She thinks it’s strange, the way sometimes you can just decide to love someone or not. Her mom stopped loving her dad, or whatever version of her dad still exists.

Candace asked first, but every day since, it’s like Candace has tried to punish her for saying yes. There’s a chance they can stay friends. A barely there chance.

She goes downstairs and grabs some blankets from the closet. The lamps of the pathway light up when she starts down the walkway. It’s pouring out. Streaks of lightning shoot through the black sky. In the tent, she sits and watches the rain fall violently outside, beating against the lake like rubber bullets, coating the entire world in a dreary, vertical grayness.

 Suddenly Candace arrives, carrying a thermos, and joins her. They sit side by side, Candace’s eyes unblinking, her face unflinching, as the lake in its realness sinks in. She relents.

     “We shouldn’t be this close to water with the lightning,” Candace says.

     Mish wraps the sleeping bag around her head like a bonnet.

     “When did you forget about me?” she asks.

 Candace holds her breath and lets the pounding rain drown out her heartbeat. “What do you mean?”

Mish doesn’t answer. She’s sick of Candace playing dumb so she just sits, silently, watching the sky feed the lake and the lake feed the whale and the whale dance below the surface, refusing to reveal itself so long as Candace is holding her breath.

Mish thinks of how instantly her father would see it, too. How happy he was to play. The things he noticed in the world that no one else ever did, how much he saw and knew.

They wake up hours later, dry and warm, the storm over. Mish turns to look behind her, at Candace who is asleep on her stomach, and feels sorry for her. She wants her, so badly, to see it. She doesn’t know if she ever will. And Mish, above all else, is tired—tired of sharing this place with someone who would prefer it not to exist. 

*

The Airbnb Candace reserved for them was big, bigger than anywhere Mish had ever stayed. The whole night, Candace seemed especially curious about Mish’s mother, aggressively curious, asking questions about her mother’s childhood, and Mish loved being examined. She loved being a specimen, a tiny deity there to entertain.

But she wasn’t sure what to make of this woman, or of her concentrated attention, or why she’d decided to love her so early and so fast. On the drive back, Mish looked over at Candace, decided she felt safe enough to give it a shot, and she said the words back, not knowing then all they would eventually mean in their passage.

*

 Candace stands on the shoreline.

 She watches Mish in the middle of the lake, balancing on a floating piece of driftwood, barefoot and in her slip dress, a bit of vomit crusted to the bottom hem.

Mish turns back and looks at the house, then at Candace. Mistaking the look for someone asking permission, Candace waves, but by the time she lifts her arm, Mish has already turned away. She is ready to wash herself free from the debris on her toes and the mess in her head.

     In a second she is there and in another she is gone, sinking into the water, diving.