The Inconceivable Life of Quinn Read online

  BEN CUTLER

  Ben sat on his board, legs dangling in the water (shark bait position, one of his non-surfer friends called it), watching his sister and Jesse, completely fucking confused.

  Being a sane human being, Ben knew that “true love” and “soul mates” were bullshit. But, sometimes, Quinn and Jesse made him wonder. You could almost see cables physically connecting them—like climbers, roped together.

  Which made it impossible to understand why she’d been kissing Marco Cavanaugh that night in Maine.

  Ben hadn’t realized it was her until this whole fucked up pregnancy thing, when little parts of that evening gelled in his head: It was at a party at the Cavanaughs’, the Cutlers’ neighbors on Southaven—a good-bye party, since the Cavanaughs had sold their house. A barbeque followed by a bonfire. There were maybe twenty people at the bonfire, and enough of them were girls with long hair that when Ben saw Marco kissing someone on the dock, he hadn’t thought twice. But later that night, Marco had been acting jacked up around him, and Foley Cavanaugh, Marco’s older cousin, had said to Ben, “You got a live one there,” while gesturing at Quinn. Ben had been too high or whatever to really wonder what the hell Foley meant. Now, though, it all made sense.

  Well, not all of it. Not why she would have kissed Marco to begin with.

  Those guys . . . Marco and Foley . . . Ben had been friends with them growing up on Southaven, but they’d never been especially nice to Quinn. Teased her, didn’t let her hang out with them—normal older kid stuff. So it wasn’t like there should have been some hot reunion.

  The only thing that made sense was that Marco had coerced her to kiss him in some way. Which, of course, made Ben wonder what else he’d done to her that night.

  Ben gripped his board. He should have had his eye on her during the party. But she’d been with Jesse, and Ben had been too fucked up to really pay attention. He’d been useless, just like his dad always said. Just like when they were kids. A terrible big brother. And he wasn’t only useless, he was a liar. And he hated himself for it.

  But he was going to make up for it now. He was.

  He’d told a friend of his who was a survivor of sexual assault that something might have happened to his sister but she wouldn’t talk about it, and his friend had said to let Quinn know he was there for her, but not to force her to talk about it if she wasn’t ready.

  Fine. He’d done that. But it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t going to just sit around and do nothing. Not this time.

  QUINN

  After talking to Jesse, Quinn practically skipped down to the water—strangely elated, even though nothing about their discussion changed how messed up her life was. The fact that he wasn’t angry, that he was going to help, that she wasn’t in this alone . . . It changed everything. And just the fact that someone believed her!

  She stood shin-deep in the surf for a moment, easing in. The ocean’s hands wrapped around her legs and pulled. Let’s play!

  She stopped teasing it—let it pull her farther out and dove in, through a wave, sputtering for a moment at the exquisite shock of the full-body cold. Quickly, she swam out to deeper water that came up to her chest. Waves barreled toward her. She flung herself up to the peak of the high crests, plummeted down on the other side. Again and again. Fly up, crash down. The waves seemed to get higher and higher, daring her to keep going, sometimes so big that she had to dive through instead of going over, fists pummeling her back and legs as the water thundered toward shore on top of her. She started thinking about the baby, wondering if it (he? she?) could feel all of this, too. If it was scared. Or maybe even having fun. She was sure a doctor would tell her that it didn’t feel emotions, but she had seen pictures online of what a fetus looked like at this stage, and it totally looked like a tiny—if weirdly big-headed—baby. So it was kind of hard for her to imagine that it didn’t feel anything. Don’t be scared, she said silently.

  She jumped and plunged and dove, forgetting about everything except the oncoming wave, knowing that fall was approaching and this may be her last swim for a while. And just when she was beginning to feel tired, the next waves weren’t so exuberant—more rolling and gentle, as if the ocean were getting tired, too. She treaded water for a minute, catching her breath, then started to swim in slow, easy strokes, parallel to the shoreline.

  She still couldn’t believe she’d stayed out of the ocean all those years. When she took that midnight swim last May, it had been like a revelation. Her fear had been so wildly misplaced.

  She could remember every sensation from that night in Maine. Lowering her naked body off the rock into the black depths, her pulse pounding with the thrill of doing something forbidden and dangerous; not only was she going in the ocean, she was at the very beach—Holmes Cove—where she’d almost drowned. But once she slipped into that ink-black water and her body disappeared, any sense of danger vanished, replaced by sheer exhilaration. Disappearing into that water had been like . . . like slipping out of her own skin into something that was both magical and massive, while still intimate and safe. Like she left her body and was just . . . Quinn. Yes. She’d felt more purely herself than she could ever remember. As if she’d found the part of her soul she’d left behind when they moved away. She’d thought she’d be too cold to stay in—swimming in the ocean in Maine in late spring was insanity—but she wasn’t, maybe because it was so hard to tell where her body ended and the ocean began. The half moon had sparkled on the water, making it look like a whole school of those mysterious deep-sea illuminated creatures—lanternfish—had risen to the surface. Like she was swimming with stars.

  She’d felt so alive. No fear, no guilt, just thrill.

  The exhilaration lasted all the way through running back home on the dark forest path, the moss carpet springy under her feet, the secret of what she’d just done humming inside her. (Jesse was the only one she would tell. If her family—well, her father—found out she’d been swimming alone, at Holmes Cove, in the middle of the night? She’d have been better off drowning.)

  Quinn stopped swimming now and turned over to float on her back. The sky smiled blue above her. She placed her hands on her stomach and closed her eyes.

  Float . . . float . . . float . . .

  Water lapped against her ears, played with her hair, nudged her this way and that. She could almost hear it talking, telling her that everything would be okay.

  This was the best—the most relaxed—she’d felt since this nightmare had started. Even aside from the relief about Jesse, everything felt so much easier when she was floating, weightless. Most people, it seemed, dreamed and fantasized about being able to fly like birds. Quinn hated the thought of flying—had panic attacks on airplanes. Quinn’s fantasy, even during the years when she’d stayed out of the ocean, was to be able to swim like a fish, deep into the hidden world that was right here on the planet. Those lanternfish had always fascinated her—making their own light, thousands of feet under the surface. It must be so beautiful down there among them. She’d done a report on them in sixth grade and learned about bioluminescence; to Quinn, it was still magic.

  She wished she could stay in this weightless world forever. She imagined swimming down to that mysterious place and releasing the baby into the water, watching it swim away, its path lit by those living lights. At the thought, an image appeared behind her eyelids. The baby, rocking inside her, like she was rocking in the swells. She pictured a round belly and tiny limbs, and wondered if being in a womb was like floating in the ocean, if the sounds were similar, and the weightlessness . . . the baby’s own tiny ocean inside her, until it was ready for the real one. It probably felt just as safe as she did now.

  How did you get here? Quinn asked. Who are you? Why are you inside of me? Babies aren’t supposed to be mysteries.

  She listened, trying to hear an answer, but none came, just the sound of the water.

  Still, she had a profound feeling that the baby could understand her words, that it was listening to her just lik
e she was trying to listen to it. I need you to help me, she said. I need you to tell me where you came from.

  She listened again. Water . . .

  She imagined it saying: You know. You were there. I didn’t exist yet.

  I don’t know. Tell me.

  Just the lap, lap, lap of the water against her, and the roar of the waves crashing on the shore.

  I don’t blame you. I just need to know.

  Caaaw, caaaw . . . a seagull crying . . .

  Lap, lap, lap . . .

  It was beautiful. The words were inside Quinn, but weren’t her own.

  Are you Jesse’s? she asked. Because that was the only beautiful explanation that Quinn could see.

  Lap, lap, lap . . .

  Beautiful. It was beautiful.

  Water stroked her skin. Like it was comforting her. She lay so still and let it rock her, listening.

  A still morning sea, deeply asleep . . . That poem again. It was “morning sea,” not “midnight sea.” A morning sea, like the one she was floating in right now.

  The sound of the water was its own type of poetry. The rush and roar . . .

  And inside her, a shush-shush, shush-shush . . .

  A heartbeat. She wasn’t sure whose.

  QUINN

  Hovering at the edge of sleep that evening, Quinn kept hearing the ocean and remembering the sensations from that midnight swim in Maine.

  It had seemed like she’d plugged into the universe’s electrical socket, like you could have powered every light on Southaven with the energy inside her, like anything was possible. She’d been one of those lanternfish herself. She could still feel the electricity now as she floated into sleep.

  Later, deepest night, she woke up wet with saltwater. Sweat, not sea. Images from a nightmare fought to come to the surface. She’d been kissing Marco, underwater, and then . . . then Marco was gone and her father was yelling at her, telling her that it was all her fault and calling her a liar, and she was holding something. A wet—not just wet, drowned—kitten. No, not a kitten. Haven. Drowned. Dead. She felt frantically around the bed to make sure Haven was still there, alive. She was. Quinn lay still for a minute, hand pressed against Haven’s warm, breath-full body, and tried to calm down, to remind herself the fear wasn’t real. She tried to replace the nightmare images with actual memories of Rockaway. Of sand shifting under her feet, briny wind playing with her hair, of the ease of being in the water. And in thinking about it, she was overwhelmed by an urge, a need. Before she could consider the wisdom of it, she crept down the narrow staircase by the dim yellow glow of nightlights and found her mother’s purse in the front hall. She hunted through the mess of business envelopes, tissues, campaign fliers, magazines, make-up, parking tickets. Just when she thought it wasn’t in there anymore, she found the small, manila envelope she was looking for, the one she’d seen her mother put in there at the end of her doctor’s appointment. She brought it back to her room, turned on her desk lamp, and took out the folded strip of paper—the series of ultrasound photos. Quinn hadn’t watched when they were doing it, but after a moment, she could make out the shiny white-on-black image—big head, tiny rounded body, stubby limbs. Exactly like it was in her mind when she’d been swimming. Floating in an inky ocean.

  She stared at the image with a hand on her belly. It was inside her. That baby in the picture. It had been created inside her.

  “If we lived in the water,” she whispered, tracing the shape of the tiny head with her finger, “I’d do this for you. But it would be too hard here.”

  Her entire body was thumping. It felt like fear, but she wasn’t sure of what.

  Maybe the baby was the one who was scared. It knew what was going to happen.

  “How did you get here?” she asked again. “Can’t you tell me? Can’t you tell me who you are? I need to know.”

  The air around her seemed to throb like her body was throbbing. It was waiting for an answer, too.

  “Please,” she begged.

  Nothing.

  After a minute, she took away her hand, put the envelope in her desk drawer, and went back to bed. She turned over onto her side, tried to think about anything else—about how happy she’d be when she was back to normal, when her body was her own again. But she kept seeing the baby in her mind and wondering who it was and why it was inside her. And why she felt like it was a beautiful thing. Whose word had that been in her head: beautiful?

  Mystery.

  Oh, god.

  She didn’t know who this baby was, didn’t know how it had gotten here. How could she get rid of it without knowing?

  For the rest of the night, sleep only came in brief snippets. Shallow and uneasy.

  The stretches between sleep were filled with uncontrollable thoughts, insistent as the tide. A plan: She could keep the baby but have it in secret, go away so no one but her family and Jesse would ever know she was pregnant, come back normal. Give it up for adoption. It would be hard, but she could do it. She had to do it.

  She couldn’t do it.

  The morning light filtering through her blinds illuminated the obvious reality.

  Of course she couldn’t do it. She was a sixteen-year-old in Park Slope with a father who was running for Congress. What the hell was she thinking?

  She got up and immediately went to her laptop, began searching again through those police blotters. Looking for anything she’d missed. Because if she could just figure this out, maybe it would go away, this feeling that was as strong as it had been sudden. But then—god knows how much later, in some sort of Internet search fugue state where she didn’t even recall the chain of links she’d followed—she found herself on some random site, trying to figure out the New York State laws about putting up a baby for adoption when you didn’t know who the father was. No. No, no, no!

  She folded her arms on the desk and rested her heavy head on them.

  A noise made her sit up with a start.

  Lydia stood in her bedroom doorway, hands on her hips, wearing an old fedora from the costume box.

  “Why don’t you ever knock?” Quinn quickly closed the browser window.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Homework. What do you want, Lyddie?”

  Lydia wandered farther into the room, picked up Quinn’s sea glass necklace off the dresser, started fingering the chain. “I know something weird is going on,” she said. “Something with you.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Quinn said. “I need to get back to my work, okay? I’m behind from missing so many days.”

  Lydia placed the necklace down and began fiddling with its cardboard jewelry box, obviously not ready to give up that easily. “I heard Daddy talking like you’re still sick. He was talking about some problem you have. I thought you were better?”

  “I am better,” Quinn said. “I’m totally fine.”

  She still didn’t leave. Kept playing with the box. Quinn opened a homework assignment on her laptop and began reading through it, realizing how far behind she really was. Maybe she should take the semester off entirely, pretend she was going away for some sudden internship opportunity. Or they could pretend her allergies were bad again and she had to leave the city.

  “Who’s Charlotte Lowell?” Lydia asked.

  “Huh?”

  Her sister held out a small, folded piece of yellowed paper that said Charlotte Lowell in scratchy black handwriting. “It was under the cotton. In the necklace box.”

  “I don’t know,” Quinn said, although the name rang a distant bell. “Meryl must have written that.”

  Lydia scratched her ear. “Maybe she was a lesbian.”

  “Dad’s mother?” Quinn blurted.

  “Maybe that’s why she left Daddy and Grandpa. For . . .”—Lydia looked at the paper again—“Charlotte Lowell.”

  Quinn tried very hard to keep a straight face. “Dad would tell us if his mother had been a lesbian. No one cares that Uncle Ron is gay, right? And we know why she left—she had really bad depression.”
Bad enough to have killed herself, something Quinn hadn’t even known until her father had to address it during an interview last year. Apparently she’d had a baby girl who died, before Quinn’s father was born, and had never gotten over it.

  “I’m sure it’s just a random note,” Quinn added. “Or maybe it’s the name of the woman who made the necklace.”

  Lydia put the paper back in the box. “Just because I’m younger doesn’t mean my ideas are stupid, you know,” she said. “Why does everyone think that? Everyone. A reporter guy named Peter from Gotham something called on the house phone and I picked it up, and he didn’t care at all what I had to say. He wanted Daddy or even you—”

  “Lydia.” Quinn cut her off, exhausted. “I don’t think your ideas are stupid. I just really need to get back to work. Now. Okay?”

  Her sister gave an exaggerated sigh and inched toward the door. She was halfway out when she turned to face Quinn again. “I’m excellent with problem solving, you know,” she said. “Maybe I could help you.”

  The earnestness in her expression tugged on Quinn’s heart.

  “Thanks, Lyddie. If there’s anything you can help me with, I promise to ask.”

  Quinn spent the rest of the day trying to remind herself of the life she’d be screwing up if she went through with the pregnancy. She played pick-up ultimate in the park and went for pizza at Smiling and ice cream at Uncle Louie G with the Dubs. Hung out at Sadie’s and planned destinations for the Adventurers club, listened to Isa practice a violin piece for an upcoming audition . . .

  She went to bed as soon as she got home, not wanting to be alone and awake with her thoughts.

  But, again, her mind was swimming too fast to sleep. She tossed and turned for hours, the thoughts overwhelming her brain like waves crashing on shore during a hurricane. In desperation, she reached through the dark for her phone.

  “Quinn?” Jesse said, voice groggy. It had taken four calls for him to answer. “What’s wrong? What time is it?”