April Bradley: The Promise of Impossible Things • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by April Bradley
THE PROMISE OF IMPOSSIBLE THINGS

The morning her stepdaughter falls through the ice, Clarey loses another pregnancy. As she stands beneath the shower and watches blood swirl pink around the stark tile and down the drain, she attempts to focus on the day ahead and not on her tender breasts, not on letting go of another child, and not on how she has devoted years and her body to conception and loss. Ava’s shriek distracts Clarey from her grief. She hears the six-year-old holler all the way from the kitchen, up the stairs, through hallways, rooms, and doors, into the gentle waterfall, her baby’s private funeral. Clarey has only been awake for an hour and feels exhaustion flood her bones. Her fragile composure is worn so thin, she can touch the raw and tender spots. She closes her eyes, bows her head, and listens to Ava scream the house down as if it were opera.

Ava continues to howl. Clarey watches her stepdaughter and husband from just beyond the threshold of the kitchen. Ava hollers louder and at a higher pitch. She grabs berries out of her father’s palm with one hand and pushes away from the table with the other, scowling and kicking. Lately, Clarey worries more than usual over Ava. Ava has been dropping her Rs in favor of Ws and resorts to “I not” constructions with overwhelm. She snatches things, including food, steals tokens from other children at school and from around the house, squirrels them away in her shoes, in corners of her room, under her mattress. She looks away from a direct gaze more and more lately, and she seems to prefer shouting and yelling to talking—even crying.

Ava growls at Andrew—growls. She looks at a bowl of soggy cereal, and Clarey suspects it’s going to end up on the floor. Before Ava can lunge for the cereal, Clarey steps into the kitchen. “Enough.”

Andrew looks up at Clarey and flashes a cocky half-grin. “Good morning, Love.”

Ava continues to growl at Andrew. Clarey doesn’t blame her. Sometimes, that man doesn’t know when to stop.

Clarey places Ava’s bowl of uneaten cereal into the sink. “Ava, go clean up and get dressed, including clean undies and socks. We’ll have breakfast out at Sunny Side Up, then go to the beach to look for shells.”

“Mercows!” Ava jumps around and wiggles.

“We’ll go to Chaffinch Island—if you get dressed, and we get out of here soon—you can see the big rocks and complete your project.”

“Mercows?” Andrew asks. He joins Clarey at the sink.

Clarey nods. “She thinks the rocks out there look like manatees. That’s what she calls them, and she still has some shells to collect for school—wear your thermal undershirt, Ava. It’s cold out. Get a move on.”

Ava stops jumping and sniffles. “Can I have waffles?”

Clarey nods. “Probably. Go get ready.”

Ava smiles a little, just a little, at Clarey, sticks out her tongue at her father, then darts away around the corner, out of the kitchen.

Clarey looks at Andrew and says, “You shouldn’t provoke her like that.”

“We were having fun.” Andrew slides his arm around Clarey and places his hand just there on her abdomen as he kisses the back of her neck. He smells like apples and sandalwood. Clarey inhales and closes her eyes, attempts to tell Andrew about the pregnancy, “I—” but falters. Andrew doesn’t notice. He talks about—Clarey has no idea what Andrew talks about. She rinses out the sink, repeats some words and makes some agreeable sounds as she tidies up, and offers a cheek for a goodbye kiss. She hears Andrew leave the house for his lab, the sound of his car crunching over gravel in the driveway a few minutes later.

Clarey climbs the stairs to finish dressing. She passes her office, and her thoughts turn to the quilt she’s restoring, a rare whole-cloth one from the mid-18th century, a physical manifestation of what women handed down to their daughters, generation after generation, private histories secreted among layers of batting and thousands of stitches. How many of those stitches were sewn by mothers, Clarey wonders. How many stitches mark the loss of a child? How much sorrow and violence does it contain?

Clarey meets Ava in the kitchen. Ava’s bundled herself up in insulated bibs, a ski coat, and an oversized hat. She’s munching on a powdered doughnut, jumping around in her heavy snow boots, the obnoxious pink ones Andrew bought for her.

“I thought you wanted waffles.”

“Wanted a doughnut too.” She speaks while chewing. When pieces of dough spew out of her mouth and land on the floor, she stomps on them.

Clarey steps over the snowy crumbs and grabs her coat and keys. “Eggs too,” she says.

Ava shakes her head and bellows one long, “Nooooo.”

Clarey insists. “Eggs any way you like or no Sunny.”

“You aren’t my mother. I don’t have to do what you say.”

This familiar comeback of Ava’s crops up every now and then. She only remembers her mother through photographs and videos, facsimile memories of a woman she no longer recalls.

Clarey sighs. Sometimes she wants to say out loud the shameful thing she thinks: “Thank God. Thank God you aren’t mine.” The muscles under Clarey’s left shoulder blade flare into a knot, promising a migraine.

“You will if you want waffles. So, eggs?”

“Fine.” Her response rhyming roughly with “whine.” They walk out to Clarey’s beloved old butter-yellow Volvo wagon, and Ava shrieks again. “We forgot the clam rake and pail!” She runs to the mudroom to find them.

Piles of dirty snow bank the roads. The weather report on the radio promises sunshine in the forties by midday. It had been a bitter Connecticut March, but today was the austere kind Clarey likes: ice slick and glittering on the frozen marsh sprawling out into Long Island Sound. Ava remains quiet during the short drive to the town green, preoccupied with scraping mud off a shovel.

Food improves Ava’s mood. She eats scrambled eggs and bacon, devours a waffle with strawberries and whipped cream, then finishes off Clarey’s blueberry pancakes. Growth spurt, Clarey thinks, as she drives them past a boatyard filled with covered hulls resting in the cradle of their stands and tucked in to hibernate for the winter. She rolls into the park’s small lot, and Ava bolts out of the car before Clarey cuts the engine. She calls out for Ava to wait, but Ava runs off and doesn’t look back.

Clarey catches up with Ava at the top of the trail. Her long coat snags on the brittle reeds and cordgrass as she beats down a path toward the humpbacked rocks of Chaffinch Island. Ava stomps along in her gigantic “princessink!” boots, oblivious to the uncanny stillness in the marsh. Ava prattles on with a lispy gush through the space where her baby teeth once were, about “wetfrozenfairyland” and “mercows.” Clarey grasps one of Ava’s mittened hands and guides her through the overgrowth. When the path turns upwind into a slashing gust, Clarey decides that the quicker they get this done, the quicker they can leave.

“Slow down, Ava. The tide’ll be coming in soon. We need to be careful.”

“I like it here. I can hide, I can play with the mercows. The grass is taller than you. How far? Where are the mercows? Where are they?”

Ava’s fascination that manatees were once mistaken for mermaids was at first endearing, but she refuses to consider that manatees may not actually be mermaids. Clarey fears that Ava will feel emboldened to come down here by herself. “You better not ever come here unless I say so. You need to learn how this place works. And they aren’t manatees. We’re too far north for them. It’s too cold.”

“But they look like manatees,” Ava insists.

They emerge from the reeds into a drizzle of spindrift and step onto a frozen beach. And there they are, Ava’s mercows wearing seagrass skirts at low tide, coated with dollops of ice. The enormous glacier rocks roll out into a peninsula at low tide and form a majestic barrier at the coastline, protecting the marshes and wetlands—land, sea, river, and salt collide here.

“I know they do. Watch out for the tide pools. They may look frozen through, but remember, they aren’t.”

Ava squatted and began digging through the mud and swash for clams with the hand rake.

“Did you hear me, Ava?”

“Yes.”

“Now, what did I say?”

Ava examines a shell and repeats in a monotone, “Watch out for the tide pools.”

“Tell me what we’re looking for again. Please don’t be fresh.”

Ava peeks around from the rim of her hood and gives Clarey some good side-eye. “We need cherrystones and quahogs, some common reeds, and a gull feather. I want to find a seahorse.” The too-big hat Ava plucked from the basket by the back door obscures her dainty brow. A black curl she’d inherited from her mother loops around a tiny version of one of Andrew’s ears. She is a small bird.

Clarey knew Ava’s mother only by sight, a glimpse in a memory of a fundraiser: a vibrant starling of a woman with a captivating presence. She possessed the confidence of a lover in the flush of pregnancy who believed Andrew would leave the life he and Clarey had built to create a new one. Only, Andrew didn’t want a new life. When he learned Anna was pregnant, he turned to his family attorney to broker arrangements for support, then confessed everything to Clarey.

Clarey’s outrage devoured her pain, adulterated her love into blind, ravening fury. She couldn’t settle on which was worse, Andrew’s betrayal or the transactional way he dismissed Anna and the baby. Clarey despised Andrew and ached for him. She remained with him and hated herself for it. This was the relentless way of things for months, even when he begged, even when he cried. Clarey never bothered to contact Anna, and she never asked about her. She despised herself, on occasion, for that too.

There were photos, a life archived by Clarey, put away along with keepsakes, real estate, and money in trust for Ava. The only child of dead, only children, Ava’s mother, a fellow in biochemistry, had sheltered her family’s history in a one-bedroom apartment in New Haven. Police arrived at the front door of Clarey and Andrew’s home late on a winter’s evening. There had been a car accident. Andrew’s infant daughter survived, born on a gurney in the emergency room as her mother slipped away. When Andrew brought Ava home, Clarey placed her in the nursery that had been waiting for one of Clarey’s babies to live.

Ava appeared to hold her breath, waiting for Clarey to answer. “There’s no time to look for a seahorse. You know they’re difficult to find, and we have a lot to do with your list. Next time.”

“I want to take a seahorse to school.”

“It’s colder than I expected, Ava. Let’s get this thing done.” Clarey rubs her hands together to warm them up, then crosses her arms.

“But it’s supposed to be an outing.” Ava stresses “outing” with a little bit of a pout and strikes the beach with her rake.

“I didn’t expect the marsh to be frozen over this far out—change of plans.”

“Change of plans, change of plans, change of plans,” Ava echoes. “I don’t like change of plans.”

“I know. I’m going to find the feather you need for your assignment. Look for the shells, Ava.”

Clarey walks out several yards and stands next to one of the colossal rocks. She looks out over the water towards Faulkner’s Lighthouse. There are no boats out, no sails to break up the slate-colored sea and horizon. She tastes the briny air, and her breath mists when she exhales. The quieter they are, the louder the world’s stillness becomes. Clarey feels uneasy and calls out, “What’s the name for big cherrystones, Ava?”

“Quahog…” Ava’s voice dwindles. Clarey turns and watches Ava bend over a partially frozen pool of tidewater. Several feet away, the ice had thawed, freeing brackish water to splash up and out of the pool through an oval in the ice like a dark, tantalizing mirror. The toes of Ava’s boots hover over the edge. Clarey inhales, and before her lungs fill with enough air to shout, Ava vanishes into the inky, black hole feet-first.

Clarey flies towards the tide pool. She throws off her coat and skids on her knees to its edge, anticipating their lives shattering, imagining the bewildered, damning expression on Andrew’s face when he learns she has killed his daughter.

Clarey flattens out onto her belly, stretches her arm into the water, and strains her reach searching for Ava. Her knuckles skim the slippery material of Ava’s jacket, and she moves her arm frantically, desperate for anything of the child to grasp. She speaks as though Ava hears her, “Come on, baby girl, come on.” Clarey submerges her cheek into the shock of frigid water. Fabric finally brushes against her fingers. She clutches it and drags Ava out onto the beach. Those goddamn boots are still on the child’s feet, filled with water. Her lips are blue and she isn’t breathing.

Clarey soars above her body, above Ava, above the beach and the rocks, above the marsh, and the water. She sees Brown’s Boat Yard and the yacht club, her red clapboard house, the thin strip of Jacob’s Beach, the spire of the Congregational church on the town green, the heavy ropes of Route 1 and I-95, then cars and fields and the waterways that surge toward the Sound, toward the lighthouse that looks out toward New York. Higher and higher, she soars through the stratosphere in a hush. She reaches out to touch stars, to Sirius, to the Pleiades, and then she looks down and observes with telescopic detail: Clarey gives Ava two short puffs of breath. Ava’s chest fills up with air and deflates. Ava’s chest remains still.

Clarey plummets and slams into her body, and dizzy with the shock of sensation, this is what Clarey hears: the relentless slurp and squish of the wet ski coat, her own panting, brittle voice calling out numbers in tandem with compressions, the tide rolling in like a lullaby, and Ava’s terrible silence. She prays, cries out to God. She promises impossible things. She promises to forgive Andrew, to forgive Ava’s mother—to forgive herself. She promises to forgive Ava. She promises easy things, bartering for this one thing. Then, instead of counting, she chants. “Please! I’ll be a mother, I’ll be a mother, I’ll be a mother, I’ll be a mother.”

Ava heaves and vomits, and then she whimpers.

Clarey rushes to soothe her. “Try not to talk, Ava. You’ll be warm soon. I promise. I promise. Got to get you out of those clothes.” What she’d give now for Ava to take her fill of air and scream.

Clarey pries the deadly princess boots off Ava’s feet and attempts to unzip the coat, but it jams. She turns Ava over onto her stomach and grabs a broken beer bottle from among nearby tidewrack. Clarey slices her fingers and palm on the first downstroke. It’s jagged, hacked work to remove the sopping clothes and to massage some warmth into Ava’s frigid, rubbery limbs.

“Hang on, Ava. Got to get you warmed up, be still, be still. Watch your mercows.”

Clarey stands and feels blood run down her legs. She finds her coat strewn a couple of feet away. She lies down on the beach, folds her daughter into the crook of her body, and shrugs the coat around them. She finds the pocket that holds her phone and calls for help. Clarey listens to the sirens’ keen carry over the water and watches egrets wheel across the sky.

Ava’s whisper skims across her ear, “They sing.”

April Bradley is a Durham, North Carolina-based writer and therapist. Her writing appears in such publications as CRAFT Literary, Gone Lawn, jmww, Heavy Feather Review, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Narratively, New Flash Fiction Review, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. April is the publisher and editor of RUBY and the editor of the upcoming Flare: A Chronic Illness Anthology Told in Flash Narratives from FlowerSong Press. April’s work has been recognized by Best American Essays, Pushcart Prize, Best of Microfiction, and as The Best of Small Fictions nominee. Find April online at aprilbradley.com and on Instagram at @aprilteresabradley.