Inland Read Free Page A

conveniently located for a visiting professor’s walk to campus and with two bathrooms, not one. A private space for the man’s sick, pale whale of a daughter and her rattling boxes of pills. We moved first to get away—from the house, the shore, the memory of my mother. Now, we move toward the promise of wellness. Toward this doctor, that study, this university with full health coverage and then some, attached to that research hospital with access to cutting-edge technologies.
    We live in desert places, arid climates, landlocked states with broad, flat horizons and the dry, unsaturated air that is all that my lungs can handle.
    It’s been this way, every day and every year, since she died. Since the day that I left the hospital, when he carried me in a blanket to the car and laid me in the backseat and drove me back to our seaside house, now full of closed cardboard boxes and bare surfaces and empty walls.
    He’d been packing away our old life while I healed, giving it away to neighbors and charity, preparing to move us east.
    With no rugs, no photos, no furniture, the sound of the Pacific was louder than ever; the surf, always a soft rushing sound track as it washed the cliffs far below, was so urgent and deafening that it sounded as though it was going to crash through the door. The lines in my father’s forehead deepened with every wave.
    In my parents’ room, the bed was stripped bare and the closets were empty.
    He’d given away her clothes.
    That my mother was gone, I could understand. They’d told me in the hospital, gently breaking the news. As though I didn’t know. As though I’d already forgotten, as though I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life closing my eyes and watching her vanish beneath the sea. But I’d still expected to find her there—not alive, not in person, but I thought that something, some piece of her, would still be there. In that house, our house. In closets, on tabletops, in the shelves crammed full of books and scattered with shells. In the sea-smell of the sheets, and the damp-curled papers that lay on her desk.
    When I fell against the doorjamb, the ointment they’d rubbed on my sunburn left a greasy spot on the wall.
    The next morning, he caught me digging through a charity box and shook me hard. I’d pulled out Mama’s books, the three nearest the top, and clutched them weakly to my chest.
    “You have to stop this,” he said, then fell to his knees. He pulled me in, held me as close as I held the books, stroking my hair. When he said it again, his voice was the battered, beaten whisper of an old man. “Please, Callie, you have to stop this.”
    “I don’t want to go. This is our house.”
    “You don’t understand this now, but I’m doing this for you,” he said. “We’re going to have a new life, honey. Staying here, with all this stuff, doesn’t make sense. We have to move on. It’s better, for you and for me, if . . .”
    If we don’t remember.
    He didn’t say it out loud. But three days later, with the last bag packed, my father took us inland.
    The following year, I collapsed at school with one lung flattened and sagging uselessly in my chest.
    —
    The air has gone thick in the office. My throat is beginning to close; I clutch my inhaler and will my lungs to fill, pull hard, sucking and gagging while white spots cloud away my peripheral vision. The side of the chair that I’m sitting in punches against the limp flab of my stomach as I sag toward the floor. Halfway there. There’s a tabletop under my forehead, cool plastic against my face, Mr. Thicke’s binder, a makeshift pillow.
    Somewhere, I can hear the sound of long limbs carving water, the shrieks of the girls who breathe so easily and have all the time in the world to care about being pretty. I listen, crumpled in the airless space, wheezing and waiting for it to pass.
    I miss another four days of school.
    When I come back, Mr. Thicke is subbing my chemistry class.
    “Last name is Morgan?” he