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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. Perhaps,

it would go 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. For her, running was pulling free. With the smooth clumps of sand

underneath her feet and the wind lifting her dark hair from all its tangles, she felt release.

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. 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. 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 they 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.

Her mother had been a runner. She had run all throughout college and taught Lena to

channel her anger through the burning of her thighs and calves. She could still remember her

mother’s face contort with fierce protectiveness when she saw Lena’s new Mary Kay mascara

oozed into black clumps in the corners of her eyes. She had worn it hoping it would make her

more acceptable to her eighth-grade peers. It didn’t. The girls had called her “Late Lena” and

teased her all that day for not having her period yet. By the time her mom had picked her up

from school, she was a sniveling ball of raw nerves that could only use her new clothes as snot

rags to stop the leakage.

Her mother didn’t take her home and tell her not to worry about it. Instead, she had

driven to Dick’s Sporting Goods, where she had bought them matching pairs of Nikes and thin

pink elastic shorts. She taught her then what running could do for the soul. Lena learned that

running battled the tension and pain colliding in her heart. It gave her release from all the pent-up

emotions. It made her feel capable. She learned to take out all her anger on the dirt beneath her

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feet and to keep her mind clean of anything other than the sky above and the cool air vibrating in

her lungs.

As the back view of the light-green house came into her sight, 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 while smushed together in the crevice of the couch. But that was when her

mother still noticed her long enough to sit down an hour with her.

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

up to see the wind lashing her mother’s auburn curls in her face. She was standing outside on the

white wooden deck. Her prized flower pots had already fallen over and were scattered about the

scarred wood, but she scarcely noticed them in her frantic head-whipping.

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 she 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’ve looked for him and couldn’t find him. I need you to go get him.

Now.”

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

absence. Not anymore. She 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.”

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Lena dashed across the sand and headed for the rock pile a half-a-mile 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 crabs 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, where are you?” The wind picked up her call and carried it out into the distance.

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 minnow in rapidly 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 minnow onto the sand. Ben frantically tried to scoop it back into his 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’ll 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

guppies! Mom will have a cow.”

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

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

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“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 he was a small

12-yr old. Too small. He was 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.

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 physician 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 the

diagnosis 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.

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“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 drained to the color

of the flowers on her 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, she tried to take her mother’s hand from the doctor to give her the same

comfort she had always received from her. It didn’t work. She had yanked her hand loose and

began screaming hysterically. 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. Lena didn’t know

where she had gone during those days. Later, she wondered if maybe her mom hadn’t gone

running. Maybe, she too thought she would never come back.

When she did come back, nothing felt the same. She couldn’t continue working full-time

and caring for Ben too, so they had to give up renting their home in Greensboro and move into

their grandparents’ vacation home at Emerald Isle. 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

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.” Lena hated the way she talked to him as if he were five.

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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 thunderstorm 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 edition 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 she 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 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?”

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. Be back within the hour.” She looked at Lena

for the first time as she said this, and Lena couldn’t help but feel a jealous burn with the

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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 would 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 had turned it down 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.

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“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.

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

patted Lena’s 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.

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.

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

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“Ben, what are you doing up this late?” Lena had seen from the hall the gentle glow of

the armchair light that her brother crammed 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. Thanks to the

public library system, 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

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.

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“Something bothering you, shug?” Sandie’s sweet lilt broke through Lena’s thoughts, and

she looked up to see the crooked tilt of her smile.

“Nothing more than usual, I guess.”

“Honey, I know things have been hard on you, but have you thought about telling your

mama how you feel?”

Lena wasn’t really surprised that Sandie had guessed that she wasn’t on good terms with

her mother. Any kind of terms at this point really.

“I don’t think she is listening anymore.”

“You know, sickness is a funny thing. It can either bring a family real close or it can

break them apart real quick. When my mama got sick, I was so mad because all I wanted to do

was dance. It was my life. I had worked hard to keep up my grades for Cornell, but God just had

other plans for me. I don’t regret stayin’ home with my mama. I regret not being able to go, but

I think in the end I would have regretted that more. The bond between a mother and a daughter

just ain’t something that can be replaced.”

Lena didn’t know what to say to that. She heard quiet snickers behind her and 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 that had filtered in 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?

“Yeah,” Sandie said as she cocked her head sideways and smiled at Ben. Both lips now

curling upwards. “Family is a strange thing. We have to make tough decisions sometimes if we

want to keep them, but I think they’re worth it.”

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She knew Sandie was right. At least as far as Ben was concerned. She loved him. Sure,

he 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

minnow he could find. Through it all, though, he was still her brother. He needed her. She just

couldn’t help but be angry because she needed someone too. Sickness may be something to bring

a family closer together, but all it did for her was leaving her feeling alone like a stranded buoy

with no familiar landmarks in sight.

It was only then that she realized that the sky was too dark even for a stormy day. She

glanced at the clock and saw it read 7:30. They had been there for over two hours.

“Shoot! I’m sorry, Sandie, but I got to go. Ben, come on. We’re late.”

She raced back to the house as fast as the debilitated car and her common sense would

allow, but she could still see the green and white paisley curtains move back into place as she ran

towards the house.

“Mom, I’m sorry. I just…”

“Do you have idea how worried I have been?” Her mother flung down the steps and

rushed Ben inside. Lena followed, still trying to get the rest her explanation out.

“I know. I just lost track of…”

Her mother stopped her with one quick jerk of her finger. Her face reminded Lena of the

look she imagined God to have when her old preacher used to describe His wrath in ominous

terms. She ushered Ben into the kitchen before quietly shutting the door. Lena thought of what

the beach front looked like when the eye of a hurricane passed over it. All would be calm, and

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the worse seemed to be over. Then, all hell would break lose again and shatter the illusion of

peace.

“Ben missed his medicine. What the hell were you thinking staying gone that long?” The

controlled high-pitched whisper of her voice did more to scare Lena than any amount of yelling

could. It also irritated a sore spot in the center of her chest and made perspiration trickle down

her already clammy back. “I trusted you to be responsible one time, and you screwed up! You

know it is important that Ben gets his medicine on time. He has to…”

Ben, Ben, Ben. It is always Ben… Sometimes, it breaks you. These thoughts swirled like

a tempest in Lena’s brain until she felt the familiar tension in her thighs to run. But there was

nowhere to go. All her anger rolled out in one huge crashing wave that was anything but a

controlled whisper.

“I am sick and tired of hearing only about Ben! You may have forgotten this, mom, but

you have a daughter too. You don’t care anything about me. I might as well not be here at all as

far as you know. I may not have cancer, but it doesn’t mean you can just forget about me!”

She ran through the kitchen and tried not to look at the red hat pointed downward

towardthe floor. She really couldn’t think about hurting Ben at this moment, even though that is

not what she wanted at all. She needed to feel the wet coolness of the sand slither against her

feet as she pushed all the breath out of her lungs. She didn’t care that it was still pouring. She

was already drenched.

She made it to Ben’s tide pool before the sharp clinching of her side muscles made her

stop. She heaved herself onto one of the flat edges of the rocks and buried her head in knees.

She wished she were a crab so she could just crawl back into herself when she didn’t want to

face the world. As it was, all she could do was mingle her own salt with the ocean’s water.

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“Lena?” A few minutes later, she heard mother come up behind her as she pulled herself

onto the rock next to her. She involuntarily flinched away from her. She didn’t look at her

mother but stared into the tide pool. One little minnow still managed to squirm about in it

despite the heavy lashing of the rains. She couldn’t help but think of Ben and regretted she

hadn’t held back her temper until he was out of earshot.

Lena’s mother stared forward, as well, and bit her small bottom lip. Her curls flew in her

face like palm tree branches bending under the weight of a storm.

“I know I’m not a good mother. God knows, I’m not.” Slow slips of salt slid down her

face as her entire body began to shiver. With her cheeks and hair soaked, she no longer reminded

Lena of a shining firefly. In that moment, she looked all too human.

“I know I could do this better. I’m trying, but somehow I feel like it’s my fault, Lena.

I’m the one who should be sick, not Ben. It is not that I have forgotten you, baby. I love you. It

is just so hard. I’m sorry.”

Lena tried to focus back on the minnow, but all she could see was the pink and green of

her mother’s Nikes. The same ones she had gotten her that day that felt so long ago. She was

still mad, but she couldn’t help but think that maybe her mother couldn’t keep the family

together. At least not by herself. She looked at the tired lines marking the deep grooves of her

mother’s frequent worries and knew that maybe keeping a family together was more than simply

one person could handle.

“I know it is, Mom.” She inhaled the salt and tried to let out some of her own bitterness

“I’m sorry too…we should probably go back in to Ben.”

She began to get down, but her mother stopped her with a touch to her shoulder. “I think

Ben will understand if we stay out here for a few more minutes.”

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“Thanks, Mom. I don’t think I am ready to go in yet.”

“Neither am I.”