Inland Read Free Page B

says. There’s not even a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I don’t have a file for you.”

C H A P T E R 4
    MAMA’S BOOKS ARE DOG-EARED, the pages pliable from frequent turnings and softened by the sea. Even inland, with so many years between us and the Pacific, I still remember the feeling of water in the air. The moisture got into everything. Warping the worn wooden floorboards, making the wallpaper curl, lacing our sheets with a cool, salty dampness that even the sun could never bake away. The books, with their swollen bindings and bloated pages, spring open of their own accord.
    So many moves, the constant packing and unpacking and loss in transit, has left no room for memory. In our landlocked lives, this is what I have left of the sea and of my mother. Two of them are textbooks, hers from another life; they have her notes in the margins, underlinings and exclamation points, scribbled references to related studies, and Latin words that I don’t understand. I used to read them in the hope that I’d somehow feel closer to her—that whatever she found so compelling in these dense, impermeable paragraphs would touch me, too—but a hundred readings later, I know better. The books don’t speak in her voice. The words hold no meaning for me, the pictures even less. They’re only sketches, black-and-white and boring, showing you every which way just what the inside of marine animals look like.
    My father has never mentioned them, not since that morning when I dug them out of the charity box and refused to let go, but his eyes go cloudy when he sees me reading. I know he knows them; they were hers, when she was his. Vestiges of the path that led her to him, so many years ago, on the ivy-covered campus where they met.
    —
    “
It was a scandal
,” she used to whisper, grinning, and Dad would shake his head and smile and pretend to be embarrassed. “You should’ve heard them gossip, Callie! The straitlaced professor, falling for a student? A scandal! And when he married her, well, they all nearly had a heart attack.”
    It was my favorite story, our own little routine, and I knew the words by heart. He’d press his lips together, and she’d whirl across the room like a dervish and ricochet off the furniture, making the tabletop lamps shudder and tremble. She’d tumble into his lap and he’d try to scowl, but the smile would break free and spread across his face while his arms came up around her.
    “What was it they said, Alan?” she’d coo, burying her face in his neck.
    “That nothing good could come of it,” he’d reply, and then they’d both look at me, and he’d cock an eyebrow, and say, “but Callie looks pretty good to me.”
    And Mama would say, “That’s only because she’s sitting still,” and we’d laugh, bright and clear and hard, like it was the first time she ever said it.
    That’s how I want to remember them: together. Happy and easy and laughing at their private jokes, their favorite joke, the long-ago story of the stir they’d caused by falling in love. He had been a bachelor, serious and solitary, coming up on forty with nothing to distract him from his rocks and his books and his flyaway papers; she had been his student, full of questions and boundless energy, more than enough for the both of them. She was only a few years older then than I am now, but I am nothing like her. My mother was beautiful, graceful like walking water, all elegant long lines and tapered fingers and skin that was dewy and smooth. If we met now, I think, she wouldn’t recognize me.
    They were married that summer, on the beach below the house that would be ours. On the wall by the door, there was a photo; it showed her pulling him into the water, knee-deep and with her white dress blooming on the surface all around her, both of them laughing in a halo of sea-spray and golden light. A moment of bliss and beauty and newness, a portrait of a couple who had thrown caution to the wind and