How to Drown in a Puddle
By Emily Clemente
Mom had plans for me. We were leaving the Hi-Ho on a Wednesday afternoon and she looked me in the face and said, “You’re not just going to be some boy in a gas station.”
Her hand was on my shoulder and I thought about melting into the carpets and disappearing forever, like that wet ice cube that fell off the table when I spilled my entire glass of 7-Up just because I saw Carlie Mills biting down on her straw two booths over.
“You hear me, Rodney?” Mom said. She had to lift her chin to look at me because I was already a head taller than her by then.
The woman at the hostess stand sort of snorted at us, rubbing maple syrup off her stack of paper menus. Maybe she felt bad for me. Or maybe she had a son, too, one who worked at a Union 76, and maybe he liked it there. Mom could really embarrass me like that sometimes. But how was she to know. I could feel Carlie Mills watching us from the back of the restaurant, her ears sticking out from the strands of her flattened hair. Her straw was a press of crushed plastic.
“Yeah, Mom,” I said. “Okay.”
—
Mom said she named me Rodney because she thought it sounded like a movie star name. I was supposed to be different from Mark, who worked construction in Nebraska and sent us Kodachrome pictures of the tornadoes he followed on the side of the highway.
“He’s going to get himself killed one day,” Mom squinted as she opened one of his envelopes. That was her favorite thing to say about him. Either that or the fact that he and I looked more like each other than we looked like her, the same mousy eyes and ridged noses. Mark was better looking than me though. When he was in high school, girls would always talk about him near the checkout counter at the Circle K, smacking his name around in their mouths like wadded strawberry bubblegum. It was kind of disgusting. Maybe they didn’t realize I was his little brother, but if they did, they just didn’t care.
“He’s a hotcake,” I’d heard one of them say once, as if hotcakes weren’t the things that came in sticky Styrofoam trays at McDonald’s. “He’s a fox.” Then she smiled at me, the way people do sometimes when they think you don’t understand, but I did. I knew.
“You done looking at these?” Mom asked, lifting the lid of the trash can.
“Sure,” I said. I glanced down at them one last time. The tornadoes looked like angry tails, the skies a brown-tinted haze of grain.
—
Mark and I used to share a room, but now it was just mine. Most things were still the way he’d left them because they didn’t really need to change. The H-K encyclopedia was still propped under the wobbly leg of the writing desk. The blinds were still slanted from where we used to stick our fingers and pry them apart. I was still sleeping on the top bunk, the one that intersected with the higher half of the window. The bottom bunk probably would have made more sense for me now that he was gone, but I’d gotten so used to being where I was that anything else felt like it was supposed to be temporary.
I’d been hiding all of Mark’s tornadoes by the bedroom window. When I wanted, I took them out and thought of him standing there on the side of the road with his camera. Sometimes I imagined him how he was when he mowed lawns, with his arms all out like he was smiling when he squinted at the sun. But today, I thought of him against the window, his elbows propped on the sill, his thick bangs plastered across the glass, that day when he told me that the weeping willow in the yard looked like it was crying real tears. He hadn’t said it exactly like that; Mark never said things exactly the way I knew he meant them, but I understood. He just said, “Look Rodney, the tree’s drowning,” and he let me put my chin on his shoulder. It was raining hard that day and after that it became my favorite secret, because he never let anybody else do that, not even the girls at the Circle K.
I couldn’t look at his pictures for too long. When I’d had enough, I’d cover them with a crumpled blanket and shove them back under the window so they looked like they weren’t even there. It terrified me sometimes, to think sometimes that I didn’t know what it must be like for him, to be so close to destruction and to capture it in all its finiteness at the same time. It wasn’t so much the thought that scared me, but the fact that I didn’t know. I couldn’t know.
“Rodney,” a voice yawned. I looked up. Mom was standing by my door with the cordless phone in her hand, all dressed in her big bathrobe, the one that made her look like a tiny string bean inside of it. “Somebody called for you.”
“Who?”
“Some girl named Carlene,” she sighed.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
“Keep it down if you want to call her back, okay? I’m going to bed.”
—
Ellie Hilcox came over once a week so she and Mom could eat mixed nuts and watch reruns of The Newlywed Game together on the living room couch. The two of them first met as teenagers, back when they both hated each other for being too oily-faced and pretty. Now they liked to wiggle their toes on the coffee table and laugh like leaky helium balloons and slosh orange juice on the carpet while they made bets over which couples were going to get divorced first.
“You wanna watch with us, kid?” Ellie asked me over a mouthful of cashews. Ellie called everyone “kid,” even her ex-husband, the one whose last name she never got rid of when he left her for that dental hygienist in Sarasota ten years ago.
“Nah,” I said. “You guys have fun.”
“You sure?” she shouted again. “I think you’re missing out.”
“I’m sure,” I said, turning to Mom, who glared at me over the rim of her glasses.
“Are you going somewhere, Rodney?” she asked.
“Yeah.” I grinned. I straightened my back, waiting for her to ask me where. I was going to the Circle K to get Bit-O-Honey because Carlie Mills had told me it was her favorite candy. But Mom didn’t ask me anything.
“Say, look at him, he’s getting handsome, Kay,” Ellie said, a big grin plastered all over her face. “They could put him on the cover of 16.”
“Oh, sure,” Mom rolled her eyes.
“I’m serious. Rodney!” she yelled. “Rodney, come here!”
She grabbed my arms and posed me like I was a doll, some sort of boy-mannequin.
“Yeah, kid,” Ellie grinned. “Yeah. Look at him, Kay! He’s gonna break a lot of hearts.”
Mom smiled at that but I could tell she hated the way Ellie said it. Like it was something to be proud of. Something that was just going to happen.
“Okay, Ellie, that’s enough,” Mom said.
“Now, see the people in the middle?” Ellie said to Mom, shoving a peanut into her mouth. “I’m betting on them. I know the first couple said they eat dinner at different times. On different colored plates. But that’s not so bad, Kay. You can do that if you love someone.”
I was still waiting for Mom to say something else. She just looked at me, the same way she’d stared when we were looking at Mark’s pictures, but no words came out.
“Mom?” I said.
She waved a hand in my direction. “Get out of here, Rodney,” she said, and she crunched down on an almond. “You’ve got somewhere better to be.”
—
I thought of Mark on my way to the Circle K. Petrified wood, that’s the way I always thought of him. He was a totem pole. My tree. With all the teeth he needed already grown into his mouth. He understood why sometimes it was easier to take things because you could have them, not because you wanted them, and I don’t think Mom wanted him to know that. There were things she wanted to keep from us boys, keep for herself, and she hated him for that.
She was angry the day he left. She didn’t yell with her voice, she just made a lot of noise. She hit plates against the drying rack, slammed the vacuum across the floors. She left the kettle on the stove until all the water evaporated out of it, just to hear it scream.
When Mark left, he smelled like campfire and backup refrigerator. Sometimes I wondered what I smelled like, but I understood that you had to be someone else to know those sorts of things. I guess Mom never realized she smelled like peppercorn and Febreze.
Carlie Mills smelled like candles and tracing paper. She smiled when I gave her the Bit-O-Honey. “Want to eat them with me?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
—
We started walking uptown toward the Hi-Ho, but we ended up in a circle, somehow making our way back to the gas station.
“Let’s just sit here,” one of us said. I don’t really remember who.
Then we were cross-legged against the back wall of the Circle K, opening the wax taffy pieces into each other’s hands. I liked the way the wrappers sounded, their papery crinkles filling all the silences between us.
“I like your hair, Rodney,” Carlie whispered, and she placed her pointer finger halfway down my neck.
“I like yours too.” I said. I wanted to tell her I liked the way her ears stuck out of it, but I didn’t know how to say it without her knowing I was telling the truth.
Then she ate her candy and I ate mine and we just sat there in comfortable silence, staring at all the greasy puddles in the parking lot.
—
When Mom saw my school picture that month, she said I reminded her of that kid on TV with the white pants, and I said, “Yeah, Mom. Okay,” even though I didn’t know who she was talking about.
“Don’t wear pants like that though, Rodney,” she said. “You’re too sweet for that.”
I gave Carlie Mills one of my wallet-sized portraits, and she gave me one of hers. I kept it in the pocket of my jeans.
I started thinking about weird things now when I saw her, and I didn’t know what to do. Mark would have known what to do.
I thought about taking her hand and shoving it into a waterfall and watching the water disperse in all different directions.
I thought of her sitting with me up on the top bunk of the bed Mark and I used to share, us staring out the window and making circles with our fingertips on the texture of the ceiling. I’d seen Mark do that once behind the Circle K, just staring at some girl’s red mouth while she talked, tracing the patterns of the wall with his hand.
I started thinking about the two of us walking over to one of those little oil spots by the gas station and drowning, turning a bunch of different greasy colors in the sun. That’s how I wanted to think of love. That dripping, suffocating kind of love. That sad kind of love, me and Mark watching the tree crying from the bottom bunk window.
“Rodney?” I wanted her to ask. “What are you thinking about?”
“You at the Hi-Ho,” I would say, “and your chewed-up straw.”
But she didn’t ask me that. She asked me other things, like what were the parts of myself I’d never told anyone about before.
“Well, I’ve been hiding pictures my brother sends. Of tornadoes. My mom doesn’t know. She thinks they’re all in the trash can.”
“That’s not really a secret.”
“Sure, it is.”
“Rodney, tell me something else.”
“Fine, here’s my biggest secret,” I said, and I looked at the oil puddles again and tried to think of what I was going to say, how I was going to tell her.
“Carlie,” I said. “Sometimes, when I think about you, I think I want to drown. That’s how much I love you. I want to drown with you.”
Carlie was quiet for a long time. She stared at the ground, expressionless, and then I realized how awful that was. I shouldn’t have said that.
“Rodney,” she frowned, and all she said was, “I don’t want to drown.”
—
When I came home later, Mom was watching The Newlywed Game in her string bean bathrobe. She looked like she was configuring something on the wall, her eyes not really meeting the TV set. Her gaze didn’t even move when I walked through the front door.
“Mom?” I asked, but she didn’t say anything. “What’s going on? Where’s Ellie? Where are the mixed nuts?”
“Ellie had a date tonight.” Mom said.
“Oh,” I told her. She was looking at me now, and her eyes were soft. The angry kind of soft. The kind of soft you only get from a lot of hardening first.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Rodney, Mark came by,” she told me.
“He did?”
“He came by for rest of his stuff.”
“When? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell him to wait for me?”
“I told him to do what he wanted,” Mom said. “And then he left. He said to keep everything. I went upstairs to the bedroom to try and get his things for him. But when I came back, he was gone.”
“Did he say anything about me?” I asked.
Mom sighed. “Rodney, listen, you’re going to leave me one day.” she said. “And I just want you to know that you can. Do you understand? You’ll leave me and you can.”
“I’m not going to leave you, Mom,” I told her.
“Yes, you will,” she said. “And I won’t try to stop you. If you don’t know that now, you’ll never come back. You’ve got to learn what it’s like to miss somebody.”
“Mom,” I said. “You really think I don’t know what it’s like to miss somebody?”
“Not really,” she said. “Not yet.” She folded her arms and looked at me. “Mark told me he thinks you have a girlfriend.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend,” I said, a bit more acidic than I intended. “Why would Mark think I have a girlfriend?”
“He said someone told him they saw you with a girl behind the Circle K last week. Is that the girl who called the other day?”
“Did Mark say anything else about me?”
“No,” Mom said. “Just that he loves you, Rodney. Nothing else.”
I frowned. “I’m going upstairs.”
“Rodney, hold on before you go up there,” she said, but I didn’t.
I walked all the way up the stairs and into my room, and when I opened the door, I saw them all over the floor. Mark’s tornado pictures. The box was opened and the pictures were scattered everywhere, in angry piles everywhere, strewn under the bed and over the desk and below the windowsill. Mom knew. She’d found them.
I sat on my top bunk alone now, watching as the tree-tears formed deep welts in the yard. It was raining and the weeping willow was still there by the window, crying ugly tears for everyone to see. How embarrassing. It was Mark’s fault, I decided, that I saw him now every time water dripped from the ends of its hanging leaves. It was Mark’s fault that I’d told Carlie Mills I wanted to drown, that Mom said I could leave, that saying nothing was the only way I could understand how to love. It was his fault that I saw him all the way into the puddles, the endless ones that collected around the place I once believed was called my heart.
I tried to take all of his pictures and arrange them on my bed like a puzzle, but they weren’t one, no connections, just a fragmented collection of disrupted sky.
THE END
Author Bio: Emily Clemente is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill majoring in English & Comparative Literature. Her work has previously been featured in literary publications such as Star 82 Review, Carolina Muse, Deep South Magazine, The Roadrunner Review, and Every Day Fiction.