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Taylor Carrere

101 Stadium Drive

Chapel Hill, NC 27514

Troubled Waters

Black mixed with gray to complete the darkness of the sky. Electricity illuminated the

rolling clouds. The waves tossed and collided into one another until they rushed towards the

shore. Their greedy hands grasped at the pebbled sand, flinging it into the salted air. The last

shriek of the seagull could be heard as it sought to escape the impending torrent of rain. It went

out to find shelter under some abandoned food shack, or perhaps, it would just keep flying until

there were no storms left to be had.

I wish I could do the same.

Lena pulled the strings to her hoodie tighter and picked up speed towards home. Her

mother would be upset with her if she knew that she had been out running when the weatherman

had forecasted strong winds and heavy rains for the afternoon. She shouldn’t have gone out, but

she couldn’t really help it. Running was her escape. With the sand underneath her feet and the

wind lifting her dark hair from all its tangles, she felt free. Sometimes, she would start without

ever thinking she would stop. She would never stop. Sometimes, she convinced herself of that.

All of it would eventually become swirling sand left in her wake.

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Besides, running gave her an excuse for her smallness. I’m a runner, she would say to the

girls that commented on how skinny she was. Normally, a girl could consider that a compliment,

but these girls pronounced it more like a curse. Their eyes narrowed. Their already formed hips

cast to one side before they tried to straighten things up and tie them all together in a pretty little

bow the way catty girls do. Their benedictions, I’m sure you’ll get tits eventually, honey, were

laced with so much sugar and coldness that they reminded Lena of the way her molars ached

after she had slurped down sweet tea too quickly.

It’s true. I am nothing but twigs glued to a popsicle stick. At sixteen, Lena’s body had

edges and points but no curves or softness. Nothing to pronounce womanhood, only compiling

evidence to stamp her as a girl. A girl with a woman’s problems. Boys looked past her. Always

had. Even though they now lived in Emerald Isle, Lena was too afraid to wear a bikini on the

beach. Too afraid to go up to any of them as they skidded across the sand on their boards and

laughed at the ruffled older women they sprayed with their salty mist. Too afraid to do anything

other than watch and wish.

The back view of the light-green house came into Lena’s sight as the thunder cracked

over her head the way she pictured a ruler coming down on the desk of some unsuspecting

school child in the days of Little House on the Prairie. She used to watch reruns of the show

with her mom late at night. But that was when her mom still noticed her long enough to sit down

an hour with her.

“Lena! Lena!,” her mom’s worried call carried over the echoing rumbles. Lena looked

up to see her mother’s auburn hair blowing in her face. She was standing outside on the white

wooden deck. Her prized plants had already fallen over in their pots, but she scarcely noticed

them in her frantic head-whipping.

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Lena’s heart squeezed and her feet felt lighter at the concern she heard in her mother’s

voice. It had been a long time since she had felt that her mother missed or worried about her.

“I’m right here, mom. I’m sorry. I forgot about the…” Her mother’s eyes latched onto

her for only a second before they scanned back over the horizon and halted the rest of her

planned excuse.

“Ben is outside. I need you to go find him. Now.”

Of course, she’s worried about Ben. It’s always Ben. Her mother hadn’t noticed her

absence. Didn’t care that she had been running across the sand while lightening streaked the sky.

Ben was outside when it was windy and raining, and that was all her mother cared about.

“I’ll go find him.”

She dashed across the sand and headed for the rock pile just a small distance from her

house. She felt the rain begin to splash against her face as she crawled up the hard surface of the

rocks. Her brother loved tide pools. He loved to watch the tadpoles and minnows as they

splashed and squirmed about in the small water pits located among the craggy edges. But as she

looked over the top of the pile’s jagged edges, she saw no sign of Ben. Nothing but a lone

minnow or two swimming in the murky water.

“Ben! Ben, where are you?” She looked out towards the ocean and barely managed to see

the red hat bopping along with the wind. She climbed over the rocks and intercepted her brother

as he walked hunched over towards the waves. Cupped in his hands was a tiny tadpole in vastly

evaporating water.

“What on Earth are you doing?”

He didn’t look up but continued treading slowly until Lena grabbed his arm, jerking him

and scattering the tadpole onto the sand. Ben frantically tried to scoop the tadpole back into his

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hands. As he did so, the red cowboy hat he insisted on wearing because he said it looked like a

Texas Ranger fell sideways revealing the white baldness of his head.

‘Why did you have to do that? If I don’t get the fish out of the tide pool, they will be

smashed against the rocks when it all floods.”

“That is ridiculous. You can’t be out here in the middle of a storm trying to rescue frogs!

Mom will have a cow.”

He straightened up and managed to toss the tadpole into an on-coming wave before

turning to look at her. “You’re out here too. What’s the difference?”

“There is a world of difference between me and you, and you know it.” Lena regretted

the words as they left their mouth, but Ben just shrugged his bony shoulders and started walking

back towards the house.

“You’re right. I’m muscular and tall and do cool things. You’re a stick figure that does

nothing but run.”

It was like Ben to defuse a topic he didn’t want to talk about by saying something utterly

crazy, which Lena wasn’t a hundred percent sure he didn’t believe. The truth was that he was a

seventy pound scarecrow that just reached 4’8.” The chemo had not been kind to his growth

rate.

“Well, come inside before mom kills us both.” Or more likely me, since she would never

touch you without gloves and a toothpick, since you’re so precious to her. She blinked hard.

She didn’t mean to be that harsh. Not even in her thoughts. Bitterness sometimes felt like the

tide coming in on her heart. It seeped in inch by inch and before she knew it, she had been

swallowed whole and all of her love and empathy went down with the rest of her.

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Her mother had gone to pieces when they learned two years ago that Ben had acute

leukemia.

“There must be some mistake,” her mother had said when the doctor came in and told

them both. It wasn’t like in the movies where a cold doctor walks casually in the room and

pronounces the news like he is ordering his steak medium-well. He wasn’t clinical or blunt in

what he said. He took the marble fixture that had become her mother’s hand and told her it a

second time. He bit the side of his jaw and his glasses fell forward on his angular face when he

spoke to her in soft tones Lena could not hear him over the rioting sobs that rocked through her

mom.

“But that can’t be! He just has a flu bug. He has been throwing up with a fever. It has to

be the flu!” Her mother had begun to shake visibly in the seat. Her face had drenched to the

color of Lena’s grandpa’s magnolia bushes.

Lena had always thought her mother like a firefly. She was light-hearted. She shined.

She was invincible to a fourteen year old who didn’t know any better.

That day, though, the doctor had to give her a sedative. Their grandmother was called

and stayed with her and Ben while her mother left for several days. When she came back,

nothing felt the same. She couldn’t continue working and caring for Ben, so they had to give up

renting their home in Greensboro and move into their grandparents’ vacation home. Before that

day, Lena’s world had felt like one of the oyster shells she used to collect as a child: safe and

whole in its sanctuary. It cracked wide open the day they learned Ben was sick. The day she

disappeared in her own mother’s eyes.

As they climbed up the back porch steps, the screen door flung open, and her mother

pulled Ben inside. The screen snapped shut in Lena’s face; its rusty springs creaked with

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finality. As she stepped in, her mother was already towel drying her brother and saying,

“Goodness gracious honey, you shouldn’t be outside by yourself when it is raining. Mama was

worried about you.” She talked to him as if he were five and not twelve.

It was like she thought that his brain cells had vanished along with his hair. They hadn’t.

Ben was anything but stupid or naïve. It wasn’t that he was extremely mature, either. Ben was

just Ben. He did stupid things like try to save minnows in the middle of a thunder storm or wear

a red cowboy hat in the dead of summer, but he also had almost old person taste. He was an old

movie fanatic and loved anything called a classic. After he learned he was sick, he made their

mother buy him the latest addition of A 1001Movies You Must See Before You Die and a Netflix

account. Some of those movies were too old for him, but their mother could deny him nothing.

Lena stood on the kitchen’s linoleum for a few more seconds as she waited for her mom

to speak to her. She looked around at the dinner her mother had going on the stove. Completely

healthy, of course. She missed the days when her mom would pick them up from ball practice

and speed through the drive-thru as they tried to beat each other at who could find the most out-

of-state license plates. Her mother’s laughter at their squabbles reminded her of the wind moving

the chimes of their old house. It was airy and translucent, and it told her that everything would

be okay.

Her mother never laughed anymore.

After making a puddle by the back door and deciding her mother wasn’t going to notice

what she did next, she stripped off her hoodie and headed for the door with the keys in her hand.

“I’m going to Sandie’s.” Her mom didn’t pay her any mind, but Ben heard her.

“Wait. I want to go. I want to get a shake. Come on, Mom. Can’t I go?”

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She hoped her mother’s sense of health and her aversion to the downpour would make

her keep him home, especially since she had already been cooking dinner. No such luck.

“Okay, you can go, but make sure to drive careful.” She looked at Lena for the first time as she

said this, and Lena couldn’t help but feel a jealous burn with the knowledge that it wasn’t her

safety she was concerned with. She would have let her go without a word, but with Ben, she had

to be careful.

They ran to the car through the large rain drops that her mother used to call angels’ tears.

As a little girl, she would wonder what it was that could make angels sad. Now, she was pretty

sure that no one could be immune to pain. It saturated everything so that no one could escape it.

Maybe not even God’s angels.

She made sure Ben fastened the ragged gray seat belt of her paint-chipped Honda. It was

a late 90’s make, and Lena was not sure how much longer it would keep chugging. But with

Ben’s hospital bills, there wasn’t any money for repairs, much less a new car.

The pink and white striped diner rested at the end of the beach strip. The sign that said,

“No Manners? No Service” clanked against the rust covered door as the wind battered it back

and forth. Sandie claimed she used to have one years ago that lit up to reinforce the point to

rowdy beach bums, but it became too expensive to replace with every bad hurricane that tore

through town.

“Hi y’all. I was hoping you two come in today. You’ll want an Oreo shake, no doubt?”

Sandie grinned at Ben. She was a woman of about forty and moved briskly behind the glass bar

as she wiped down the counter top and clunked a few dishes into the drain. There had been

rumors that she was offered a dance scholarship years ago to a Northern liberal arts college but

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had turned it because her mother was ailing. Looking at her then as she moved gracefully about

the cluttered diner, Lena could believe the rumors.

“You bet ya, Sandie. Make it a double.” Ben gave her a cheeky grin as she clucked her

tongue. He moved over to the old-fashion juke box in the corner and fished around in his torn

khaki shorts for spare nickels and dimes to play it. As she said, Ben was attracted to old things.

“You want the BLT, hold the mayo, side pickle, and a Pepsi, right shug?” Lena loved the

way Sandie called her shug in her sweet southern lilt that always managed to turn the last half of

the word into an upper twang. She loved that she remembered she didn’t like mayo on her

sandwiches. She loved that she could remember what both she and Ben liked. That was more

than her mother could do anymore.

“Thank you, Sandie.” The older woman twisted the left corner of her lip upward as she

patted her thin hand before she moved to fill the order.

The diner was empty because it was late summer and even the tourists who wanted to

catch a last bit of summer sun before school restarted wouldn’t drive all the way to the beach on

a weekend that was predicted to be a wash-out.

Slow musical strains of the piano filtered into the quiet of the diner. The Pepsi burned in

her throat as Lena recognized the song, and the images that came with it blared in her mind. Ben

loved old bands just as much as he loved old movies. Their grandmother had always said he was

an old soul. After watching the Graduate, another film her mother would not have approved of,

Ben fell in love with folksiness of Simon and Garfunkel. His favorite song was “Bridge Over

Troubled Water.”1

Lena hated it because the musicians seemed to wail sadness into the very particles of the

air as it played, and it reminded her of all the things that had changed for the worse in her life.

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_a46WJ1viA (A YouTube video of the song)

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You would think a boy who had been told he had cancer would despise anything that spoke of

suffering any more than his blood tests did, but Ben had a strange reason for connecting with the

song. A reason she just couldn’t believe in. Was too afraid to believe in. She didn’t like being

let down.

“Ben, what are you doing up this late?” Lena saw the gentle glow of the armchair light

that her brother rested beside. He had a book in his lap and in the background that song played

from one of their mother’s old records of her college days.

He didn’t answer her, so she moved closer to view what he was reading. She didn’t need

to read the whole thing. The words “leukemia,” “cancer,” and “possibly fatal” were enough

for her. Her mother had changed the internet password a couple months before when they found

out about everything, so he couldn’t get scared. That wouldn’t stop Ben, of course. If he wanted

to know, he would.

“Ben, you shouldn’t be messing with that book.” She tried to move it but he clung to its

edges and wouldn’t let it budge. His long lashes clumped together, and his eyes looked like a

state highway map with all the red lines crisscrossing through them.

“I’m not going to die, Lena.”

She felt as if she had been rooted to the ground by a strike of lightning, Her tongue rolled

uselessly around in her mouth as she tried to think of the right thing to say. In the end, it was the

determination in his voice that had made her blurt out the thing she shouldn’t.

“How do you know that?”

“I can’t really tell you how. I was just listening to this song, and the man was saying that

he would be with his friend when he passed through troubled waters. Pastor said that Jesus was

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our friend. I just know that He is going to help me. He is my friend, and listening to the song, I

just know He won’t let me die … Right, Lena?”

“Sure, Ben. Let’s go back to bed before Mom comes down.” She knew she had told him

what he wanted to hear, but the only thing she could think was, “What kind of friend gives you

cancer?” But this, of course, she did not say.

“Hey, you going to eat that?”

The deepness of the voice, along with its amused tone caught Lena off guard as she spun

around in the stool and knocked over her glass of Pepsi.

“Shoot. Sorry, Sandie.” She tried to stop the dark liquid dribbling across Sandie’s clean

counter but halted when she a large brown hand began to mop it up, as well. She turned to see a

boy with dark brown curls and eyes stretching over the counter to wipe up the stickiness.

Lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t notice that others had trickled into the diner. Mostly

locals trying to escape the rain. Ben was still in the corner listening to the juke box.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I was just curious seeing you stare off into space like

that and not touch your sandwich.” He grinned to reveal bleached white teeth lined a little

crookedly in a wide mouth. “If you’re not hungry, I know plenty of stomachs that are.”

She stopped herself from checking around to see who he was talking to. As insane as it

felt, she was pretty sure the conversation was directed at her. She didn’t know what to do, so she

chomped into the sandwich before realizing that she this was probably what a rude mute would

do.

“I was just thinking,” she said in between chunks of tomato. Maybe, this is why you

never get guys? She then recalled that he said he was hungry, so she grab the pickle and thrust in

towards him. “Wanna pickle?” Definitely why you don’t get guys.

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He just laughed and took the pickle. He said they were his favorite. He studied her as

she continued to try to eat less like a starving mongrel. She could feel the blood rising in her

cheeks and silently cursed herself for having the manners of a barn yard cat.

“By the way, my name is Silas. I don’t suppose you want to take time between your

chewing to tell me yours?”

“My name is Lena. Sorry about throwing my pickle at you.”

“That’s ok. As I said, they’re my favorite.”

“I thought you were just being nice.”

“Being nice to a pretty girl isn’t hard.” She tried hard not to be over-flattered, but he was

the first person to call Lena pretty since her mother. Really, her mother had called her beautiful,

but she never expected to hear that word again. As it was, she felt like a horse dying for the

relief of water, and this boy’s words were like the fresh September rain.

“You live around here?”

“My family moved here from Greensboro about a year back.”

“Man, it’d be great to live here year ‘round.” He ruffled his curls releasing sand particles

to litter the floor. She could see him fitting in here in the way she never could. With his deep

tan and easy manners, he seemed to belong to the beach much better than she did.

“Yeah, well, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

She figured he would eventually give up on having any type of conversation with her.

But he didn’t. He asked her about herself, but that was the one path she didn’t feel like traveling

down. He didn’t care. He told her about his life. His family was down for the summer. They

owned one of the bigger houses on the sound side, and he went to a private school back in

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Raleigh. He didn’t like it. He seemed nice and genuine, and one of the few people she felt gave

her the time of day. She never wanted him to stop talking.

But he did. He stopped midway in his story of catching what he claimed was the biggest

fish this side of the Mississippi and began to smirk at something behind her. She turned to see

Ben at the back of diner swaying to Elton John’s “Benny and Jets.” His bony knees knobbed

back and forth like two chopsticks slapping together while his arms swayed like willow branches

in the wind. The other diners had stopped eating and were watching him with amused

expressions. Lena felt her cheeks turn as red as a turnip. Why couldn’t he just like George Strait

if he wanted oldies?

“That kid is really something else. A definite chick magnet, wouldn’t you say?” Silas

jerked his thumb towards Ben. His laugh was carefree, but his eyes held enough ridicule to turn

Lena’s lunch sour in her stomach.

She opened her mouth to say something in her brother’s defense but stopped. It wasn’t

that she liked what Silas had said. She didn’t. But had she been any better? He didn’t

understand Ben, but he also knew nothing about him. She was his sister and had loved him her

whole life, yet she didn’t understand him either. She was too worried about her own problems,

her own identity to see that. Sure, Ben was weird. He listened to Elton John when most boys his

age were into rap and punk rock. He kept a cowboy hat fixated on his head like they were in

Texas instead of the North Carolina coast. He believed in divine messages from God and

appointed himself the sole keeper of every tadpole and minnow he could find. He was crazy, but

he was still her brother. It was time she stopped pitying herself and staying mad at her mother

for her overprotective worry and her inability to handle what many cracked under. She wasn’t

just a daughter. She was a sister too, and Ben deserved better.

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“I got to go.” She left enough money on the counter to cover what she and Ben ordered,

and preempted Silas from saying anything else by calling out, “Ben, it is time to go home.” She

didn’t look back to see Silas’ stricken face.

The storm had come to a lull, and the salt and the sweet smell of grass hung in the air.

Overhead, the sky had lightened to the powdered blue of a baby’s room, reminding Lena of new

beginnings. She and Ben drove home in silence. One because he didn’t know what was wrong.

The other because she didn’t know how to say what was right.

Her mother appeared as they pulled in the gravel driveway and wiped her hands on the

front of her calico apron. “Come on inside, you two. Lena, I made snicker doodles, your

favorite. I realize I haven’t made them for you in a while.” Her mother’s faded green eyes rested

on her, and her lips crept into a shy smile. Lena noticed the deep lines etching her face. The

firefly had lost a lot of its glow, and she couldn’t help but feel that she hadn’t helped any.

“I am just going to check on something. I’ll be back soon.”

She felt the newly cooled sand between her toes as she walked and, for once, didn’t mind

that its wet clumps stuck underneath her toenails. The rock pile came into sight as she moved

away from the house. She was probably crazy to even come out here again and think she was

going to find anything. She wasn’t Ben. She didn’t hear God. Yet she still had to check.

When she peered over the cragged edge, she saw it: a lone minnow swimming among

the enlarged tide pool. Water prickled the rims of her eyes as she watched the small helpless

creature dart about, searching for its companions who had gone. Others would take their place

soon enough. It was so insignificant and tiny, yet it had endured the rough waters.

Maybe, Ben would too.

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She didn’t feel like running on her way back. She had run too much and for far too long.

She was tired of trying to get away from all her problems, only to find that she carried them with

her wherever she went. She felt the warmth of the sun soak into her skin as it finally pulled itself

free of the lingering clouds.

She didn’t notice him approach until she felt the warm, bony hand entwine with hers.

She felt the red cowboy hat poke into her shoulder as he leaned in towards her. They didn’t say

anything. They just walked. The tide was coming in, and the water slithered in coolness against

the bareness of their feet. The waves no longer looked to be battling one another in chaos, but

moved rhythmically to the shore.

Lena wasn’t sure she believed in divine messages from God. She wasn’t even sure that

her brother would beat the cancer, yet it felt right to think that he could. It felt right to believe in

the impossible if only for a moment. She squeezed his comforting warmth and decided that it

didn’t matter what happened. This moment mattered. Nothing else.