Crash Into Me

Chapter 1

One

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.”

Karen Blixen wrote that. We studied her Seven Gothic Tales short-story anthology in one of my last creative writing classes at Sky Valley, and maybe the quote had only stuck with me because I’d gone from having never in my life seen the beach to living at one just two weeks before classes started my final semester.

There had been so much going on at the time, I could barely process seeing the ocean for the first time, but I sort of understood what she meant.

The smell of salt in the air carried with it something intangible and unrecognizable—almost hopeful.

I’d told myself I’d find time to appreciate it later.

That was six months ago. Since then, I’d finished my last semester of college, submitted poetry and an anthology of short stories for various finals, and then skipped graduation because my mom had found my sister, Nikki, unconscious in the bathroom after dinner one night.

Nikki had always been slim, but this was nothing like when we were in high school, when she’d skip meals to fit into a pair of jeans she wanted to wear or stay late after soccer practice to run more.

It had seemed so fine. So normal. But maybe we should have treated it like it wasn’t.

I tried not to let those thoughts scream like sirens in my head as I went at least twenty miles per hour over the speed limit the entire four-hour drive across South Carolina from Sky Valley to Dahlia Point.

So with all due respect to Karen Blixen, I’m not sure I buy into it. All the salt water in the world wouldn’t have helped my sister. She was drowning out there, and I hadn’t seen her flailing until it was too late.

I had gotten to the hospital downtown around 3 a.m. to see my sister asleep in bed, monitors beeping and tubes sticking out of her frail body like she was some kind of science experiment.

Tears stung the backs of my eyes, but I kept it together for Mom, who held Nikki’s limp hand in hers, her gray-streaked dirty-blond hair piled into a mess on top of her head and her old Carolina Panthers sweatshirt on inside out.

I sat beside her, swallowed my salty tears, and decided I wasn’t going to let this happen again.

Nobody prepares you for what to do when your sister has an eating disorder, but it didn’t change how aware I was of my unpreparedness.

After Nikki had been admitted to Otter House for rehab, I checked ten different books about eating disorders out from the local library, including memoirs, self-help books, and novels (and definitely was over the limit of books you could check out at once, but I could be persuasive when I wanted to be).

I became an expert overnight, and I visited Nikki as often as I could (unfortunately, I couldn’t persuade my way into being there outside the allotted visiting hours)—sometimes alone, and sometimes with our mom.

In the meantime, I tried to finally appreciate the ocean more during my morning runs.

I’d only been in Dahlia Point full-time for two weeks, instead of the occasional weekend home to do laundry and have Mom’s homemade lasagna, and it had taken me some time to carve out a new running route in my new home.

We lived two blocks in from the beach, and at the end of every street was a pathway that led to a wooden boardwalk that took you over dunes dotted with colorful flowers and onto the plush beige expanse of beach.

I wasn’t enough of a sea-savvy local to pay attention to the tides, but usually in the mornings the tide was so low that there was close to a quarter of a mile between the boardwalk and where the waves kissed the sand.

I ran from the pathway on Sixth Street, past the pier that had supposedly been under construction since last year and one of the jetties that had suck less spray-painted in bright-blue graffiti. Thanks, I’ll try, I usually said to myself when I passed it.

There was typically a middle-aged man running his golden retriever, which shot past me in flashes of blond fur. This time, we gave each other a friendly nod as I passed.

I looped around at a massive blue house—the classic Southern kind with three levels of wraparound porches, and which I had learned the locals of Dahlia Point called the Whale—and made my way back to the Sixth Street pathway.

It was easy to feel small at what felt like the edge of the world, watching the sea glint like diamonds as it melted into the vast horizon.

My whole route was about two miles there and back, and for those two miles, I was okay with feeling small.

It made everything feel so much less daunting than it really was.

Broken seashells crunched underneath me as I slowed to walking pace and made my way back up the beach and to the boardwalk, down to where the base of the stairs met the faded concrete of the street.

I kicked around bits of sand that dusted the pavement the way stars would dot the sky on a clear night.

As I trudged up the street, passing cute little bungalows in a myriad of vibrant colors, I realized how much our house stuck out.

It somewhat resembled the others on the street, with the same raised foundation and screened-in front porch, but white paint peeled off the shutters and front stairs, exposing a layer of worn, splintering wood.

Grass and weeds grew tall against the siding, and two palm trees brushed against the faded gray of the roof.

The previous owner had been a shut-in, and now that school was out, Mom’s priority was “getting the house to look like a home”—her words, not mine.

I made my way inside and winced as the screen door closed behind me with a loud creak.

“Nat?” My mom’s voice carried from the kitchen to the front of the house, followed by the sound of clattering dishes. “You back?”

“No, it’s Neal Caffrey come to steal your replica of Saint George and the Dragon.

” I chuckled as I kicked off my sneakers onto the welcome mat in front of the door.

It was the first thing Mom had bought for the new house when we were getting ready to move—she had to have it when we saw it at HomeGoods because it said oh shit, not you again. She found that hilarious.

“Neal Caffrey would know it’s fake,” she called back.

“Good point,” I said as I heaved out a sigh.

Gracie, our aging Borzoi, lifted her head off the old paisley couch in the front den by way of greeting me. That had become her new spot in the house since she could easily play security guard from the front window. I walked over and gave her a quick scratch on her long snout.

“Speaking of,” Mom continued as I made my way into the kitchen, “we’re overdue for a White Collar rewatch.”

Mom and I binged a lot of older shows and movies, but White Collar was the one we kept going back to.

There was something deeply comforting about watching a show where you already knew the ending—there were no surprises or tricks or unexpected scenes that made you emotional, and surprises and I were not natural cohabitants.

I sat down at a stained-glass bar stool at our tiny kitchen island and watched her lean forward on her toes to put a stack of bowls in the cabinet beside our aesthetically vintage baby-blue Smeg fridge.

Mom treated our new house like her own canvas, doing things she never would have done back in that standard-issue townhouse we grew up in.

Here, she insisted upon a retro theme for our new kitchen—we had half of the matching Smeg appliances, like a toaster and a coffee maker, and she was almost through painting the trim around the white cabinets the same blue as the appliances.

Painter’s tarp covered our kitchen table and the entire left side of the counters by the sink, so we’d been eating dinner on the couch and watching a variety of comfort shows.

“And deviate from our nightly Bake Off episodes?” I feigned offense, clapping my hands to my chest. “Blasphemous.”

She finally spun around to face me, leaning back against the counter and pressing her hands onto it.

The sleeves of her deep-green workman’s shirt were rolled up, revealing her paint-speckled forearms, and she softened her gaze on me.

When you’re a child, your parents do their best to shield you from emotional turbulence, including their own.

But as an adult, I’d grown to know that look.

She was contemplating saying something about how I should be taking it easy, or that she was worried about me, or some combination of the two.

But instead she said, “When are you leaving?”

“As soon as I get sand out of uncomfortable places,” I replied, plucking an apple from the ceramic bowl Mom had made a few years ago in the center of the island.

Silence settled between us, and it was only then I realized she had all the windows open, and even from a block away the sound of the ocean could be heard faintly in the distance.

Maybe one day I’d believe salt water could cure all things, but not today.

>> <<

I was halfway to Otter House when a text from Nikki’s attending nurse appeared on my Jetta’s dashboard screen.

BECK (OTTER HOUSE): Nikki’s begging for a peanut butter and jelly cream cold brew from bad beans. She says “pls pls pls (sabrina carpenter voice)”

BECK (OTTER HOUSE): I’m okay with it—she’s doing well