On the Border of the Winter Swamp

“Edelweiss” by Tracy Whiteside

The heat, the chlorine, the plastic sticking to the backs of her thighs, the pain. Connie planned to wait the episode out on her pool floatie. No reason not to keep drifting from gutter to gutter, closing her eyes when the hot sun beamed out, and when it went behind clouds, watching anoles dart and stop and dart across the mosquito-screen roof, exactly as though she were fine. The pain shooting up her left leg would stick around for days or weeks, she thought, but the dizziness: a matter of minutes.

She could just get out of the pool. It was silly to worry. She was a fine swimmer and there was nothing wrong with her arms or her right leg and her mom’s pool was small, if deep at one end. The dizziness would not make her vomit. Still—why not wait. She would probably have laid out here all afternoon anyway. There was nothing else for her to do in Florida, unless she went to the beach and did basically exactly what she was doing right now.

There had not been as much in the way of mother-daughter time as she had imagined during her three-month stay here. Her mother, Janet, had bought this place after retiring the year before. It was a salmon stucco number at the edge of a subdivision that backed up to a patch of swampy woods that was visible now from the pool deck. With surprising ease, skipping over the rough transition to leisure Connie had anticipated, her mom had turned it into an old Midwesterner’s idea of a pleasure palace, with a yard full of mixed-media lawn ornaments and mahjong with neighbor ladies every week. Janet was at that moment shopping with one of these ladies at the permanent flea market. She liked to collect decorative masks to hang on the walls. Leering and grimacing from the shadows when Connie went to the bathroom at night, they never ceased to unnerve her. It was like Janet was trapping all the expressions she had banished from her own face and displaying them as trophies.

In just a couple weeks Connie would return to her life in Boston, where she’d been living since she’d left Minnesota to go to college. Since her mother’s retirement and removal to warmer climes, there was no one much left in Minnesota, and she was realizing Boston was as “home” as it got. That was fine. She couldn’t wait to see some people her own age, even go back to work. The company she worked for sold a variant on the heart stent that she trained cardiothoracic surgeons to put into people’s hearts. The day of that last surgery consult, her leg pain had not been so bad and she had had no weakness—the ribcage, yes, squeezed with a band of pain, but she could ignore that—and then the operating room had begun spinning, and she had continued like nothing was happening. She’d moved to point her gloved hand at the open chest cavity and bumped the anesthesiologist as she adjusted the patient’s mask and nothing did happen except that the woman glared at her—but it was easy to see what might have happened.

It was just because of the weather. The cold weather in Boston triggered her symptoms. She’d told her boss the day after the surgery wobble that she was taking a leave of absence and that when she was back she would perhaps be interested in a lateral transfer, if there was a spot open, maybe in Quality—it was all desks over there, and no open chest cavities, and she liked several of those folks quite a bit. Then she felt like she had to go somewhere, perhaps everywhere, immediately. Ideally she would travel the planet, alone; she was recently single; and she did look at the flights, up until three a.m. that night pricing out itineraries to Sydney, the Greek isles, Madagascar, even inexplicably researching how to visit North Korea, until finally her browser froze from all the tabs and she had a quick, stormy fit and fell asleep on the couch. When she woke up she booked a flight to Tampa five days out, which gave her five frenetic days to find a subletter and put her stuff in storage. Living with her mother for three months continued to seem like a good idea until the moment she showed up at the cavernous storage facility to pick up her key and let herself into the empty unit, but by then the ride was going too fast to stop.

Then she had tumbled out into the humid subdivision wilderness and discovered that her symptoms were triggered not only by the cold but also by the heat—or maybe that was a new symptom—at least on the hotter days, like this one, and it was, like every winter now, an unusually hot winter.

She heard the garage opening, followed by her mom walking into the house, and started to raise herself up, the inflated plastic shifting beneath her, but then the dizziness amped up, along with a pressure in her head. She froze. Carefully she lay back down again. Maybe she could dip her hands to either side and paddle herself to the shallow end, where she could take the stairs out. Through the open sliding glass doors came the sound of the dishwasher being unloaded. Well, there was no need to make a big deal. She lay still.

A lizard had paused on the roof exactly above her. Her mom slid open the screen door and came to stand at the pool’s edge.

“Hi, Connie, honey. I’m heading over to the neighbor’s in a little bit.”

“The neighbor?” She had met no neighbors.

“Ed is his name. I was just chatting with him in the driveway this morning and he had the fun idea to grill burgers.” Connie seriously doubted that the idea had originated with Ed. Her mother had almost certainly invited herself over. “I’m sure he’d love it if you joined.”

That meant her presence was expected.

“I’m not feeling super hot today,” she said.

“Oh, we won’t stay long, I’m sure. You can just hang out.”

As in, suck it up. No mercy. It was never totally clear that Janet believed in the concept of illness. Well, she was more than capable of sucking it up, and maybe if they did a better job of spending quality time together Janet would begin to see what was going on with her more clearly, or to look at least. Connie started paddling herself over to the shallow end.

***

Connie tried to ignore the pain shooting up her leg while her mom flirted with Ed as aggressively as Connie imagined she knew how. They had stood around awkwardly in his backyard, until Ed suggested a tour of the boardwalk. Now he was leading the two of them through his backyard toward the swamp. He’d built this boardwalk, which jutted twenty feet or so into the swamp, by himself, two years ago. He had the physique of a shorebird, and was as sun-leathered as a Florida retiree came—maybe that was considered a pro—but did he ever have a nice head of hair. Connie could tell the tour, and especially the admiring audience, were jazzing him way up.

The eyes Mom was making at this guy were making her a little nauseated. Or maybe that was the heat. She was trying to be happy for her. God knew she deserved a little fun after all these years. As a teenager, Connie knew, Janet had had to begin caregiving for her own mother, who was bedbound. Then after briefly breaking away for college and a flash of romance, there were the babies, she and Laurelai, Laurelai’s behavior quickly becoming a constant worry, and then their father had developed early-onset dementia. But it had been more than a decade since she’d been widowed; Laurelai had been pretty law-abiding for years now; and as for Connie, even considering her illness, which had come and gone and come again over the past few years, she was fine as always. After all, as her mom had more than once said, things were different these days, with the treatments they had now, and with Connie being so self-sufficient.

They followed Ed down the boardwalk, and at its end, they found themselves on a viewing platform, with a railing and two benches. He rapped his knuckles on one of them.

“Now see, here, I added these benches so folks can take in the view.” He swept his thin arm out across the expanse of scrubby grass rooted in mud.

The leg was getting to the stage where the burning sensation kicked in. “It’s lovely!” Connie said, trying to sound sincere and focused. “This doesn’t look like a DIY at all. Did you used to work in construction?”

“Never. Sales, forty years.”

“That’s what I do, too.” For now.

Her mom said, “This must have been a lot of work! And standing knee-deep in God knows what in this swamp the whole time!” She was dolled up by her usual standards, in a broad-brimmed hat and flowered sundress, smiling girlishly, with an ease to the way she held herself that seemed new to Connie.

“Oh, just about killed me,” said Ed. “Getting too old to haul lumber.” He laughed at himself. “You ever think about doing anything with your place? Renovations?”

“Goodness! I just moved in. I did think about the kitchen.”

“I could take a look for you, see what needs doing.”

Looking out at the trees that lined the far end of the swamp, Connie shifted from foot to foot, growing more uncomfortable. It was miserably hot. She would not sit on the bench. There was of course the possibility of escaping back to the house—senseless trying to please her mother—and still. Here was her mother, her self-sacrificing mother, in retirement at last demanding enjoyment, and nothing but. Of course she wasn’t going to make a fuss and ruin it.

Ed pointed down to the ground beside the ramp up to the boardwalk.

“Now over here is where I saw that coral snake again.”

“Again!” said Janet, clutching her hat. “You mean you’ve seen it before!”

Connie’s left calf continued to burn, and now patches of her left thigh and glutes. Standing was beginning to require greater effort. Once the butt went and the nausea came, soon it was the dizziness, the needing to crawl into bed until tomorrow. She had to get out of the sun.

She touched her mom’s shoulder. “Pretty hot out here!”

If Janet caught the hint, she deflected it. “Hmm, but you’ll sleep well tonight with all this fresh air, right?”

“You wouldn’t believe it. Big sucker,” Ed was saying.

Connie sat on the bench.

“Good idea,” said her mom. “I think I’ll join you.” She maneuvered herself down by her side, and patted Connie’s knee.

“I don’t know how much longer I have in me.”

“Well, we’ll be in the AC soon enough.”

Ed continued holding forth, her mother listening keenly, until finally he announced, “I think it’s time to get those burgers on the grill.”

Her mom said eagerly, “Sure, let’s head in!” Oh, so when it was Ed's idea she was all over it; Connie could have killed her—and pushed herself up, exhaling heavily. “Still thinking about a knee replacement. That right one acts up.”

Her dress had ridden up. Her legs, Connie noticed as she tugged it back down, were marbled with blue rivers and purple starbursts, her kneecaps nestled within thick cushions of flesh that made them look somehow more fragile.

As Janet and Ed started to walk away she stood up and then, before she could take a step, collapsed back down onto the bench, landing hard. Startled, the pair turned back. For an instant, her mother looked betrayed.

“Nice maneuver,” said Ed, and he came and bent over her as though to hoist her up, but she was already rising, and shooed him off.

***

While Ed went to work grilling and her mother set out the potato salad and fruit salad she had brought over, Connie cleared the couch of its many ancient gold throw pillows—surely holdovers from when Ed’s wife had been alive—and flopped down. When she and her sister were growing up her mom didn't spend money on things like decorative pillows, or if she ever had, her sister must have destroyed them somehow, and they were never replaced. When Connie stayed home sick from school she would bring the pillow from her bed downstairs to the family room couch and lay there while her mom went about her day, the house uncanny in those hours she shouldn’t have been there.

Now she was bedeviled by the fantasy of her mother coming over to the couch right that moment, sitting up against her on the edge of the cushions, laying a hand on her forehead, smoothing her hair. Then she heard Ed’s voice booming from the patio about the burgers being done, and, banishing her vision—so childish, and when had Janet ever been like that—Connie got up and limped into the kitchen. She could tell that she was close to reaching the end of her reserves, the point where she’d be ruined until tomorrow.

She joined her mom behind the counter and leaning close said, “Do you think you’ll stay long after dinner?”

“We’ll have to see.” She gave Connie the kind of smile that could only be answered with a smile. “Having fun?”

“Mm.”

“I just about nabbed it,” Ed was already saying as he came in from the grill. He set the dish of burgers on the table and sat down. She sat next to him, in front of sliding doors that, just like at her mother’s house, opened onto a pool deck with a line of lounge chairs. No breeze came in through the screen.

“Imagine,” he continued. “It could kill you. Arm’s length away.”

Her mother leaned past him to set out a plate of hamburger buns.

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Mom, sit down.”

“Not even a little. And as thick as my wrist.”

Her mom ferried over several bottles and jars of condiments. “Does anyone need anything else? Anything?” Finally she joined them at the table, and began passing around dishes. “Susan Michaels down the street—do you know her?—told me she saw it too, outside her place. Their malamute just about pulled her right over trying to get at it.”

Somewhere Connie had gotten the sense that horrifying snakes were supposed to be normal in Florida, but all these old folks had transplanted from up north. Perhaps if she weren't so exhausted she would be more tolerant.

“Considering the actual level of risk presented,” she said as she served herself fruit salad, “you have more to fear from cottonmouths, or really, your own cardiovascular systems.”

“Oh, Connie,” her mom said, giving Ed an apologetic frown. “She’s too funny.”

“Those dogs’ll go right after it. It’s an instinct,” said Ed. “They know. I was edging the lawn when I spotted it. Snake was in the birds of paradise. Grabbed my snake stick, came up on it, real slow, snake wasn’t moving, had no idea I was there. Nearly had it. Got my arm all poked up by the leaves.”

“Well, and what would you have done with the thing if you had caught it!” said Janet.

“I’ll get it eventually. Matter of time.”

“Connie, how’s your food tasting?”

It took her a moment to swallow. “Delicious. And there could be more than one coral snake in the neighborhood, you know.”

“We’ve got an expert here,” he boomed.

Janet smiled too brightly. “Connie’s always been my big student. She works with medical devices.”

“You must get a lot of vacation, to spend so much time down here with your mom. And there’s gotta be some lucky man just desperate for you to get back home, huh.”

“The last one left when I started having to inject myself every other day,” Connie said, and looked right in his eyes. “Didn’t like needles. I wasn’t going to hide in the bathroom like a junkie.”

“Connie.”

“Oh, come on,” said Ed, “any young man would be lucky to have you, even with your, your—?”

“It’s multiple sclerosis,” she said flatly. Ed squinted at her, as if thinking, she doesn’t look that sick.

Her mom reached across her for the wine. “You weren’t that into him to begin with, right, sweetie? No great loss, huh? More wine, Ed?” She topped Ed off without waiting for an answer. “No one is ever good enough for your babies. Isn’t that right, Ed?”

“As a matter of fact it was a pretty rough breakup, Mom.” She hated how her mother tried so hard to please people even when it degraded her. Why had she even come along? Once when her dad’s parents had come to visit for an evening on short notice, her mother had gone into a furor cleaning the house, and without being asked or understanding why, Connie had cleaned her own room, dug up her seventh-grade report card, practiced her tap routine, and then when they arrived, performed it on the kitchen linoleum, while the adults drank coffee and said she was sweet. Yet she’d gone away feeling deflated and vaguely humiliated.

“Well, I suppose you can’t blame people,” Ed said through food, “my sister’s first marriage was to a man with a fatal degenerative thing and we all thought she was nuts. She was, too. But that’s neither here nor there.”

Connie pressed a hand to her eyes. “Bathroom?” She could make a break for it, maybe from the window. When she looked up she saw, to her surprise, that her mom had gone stiff and was fixing a real look on Ed.

“I read something the other day,” he was now saying, “that said the bite of the coral snake causes paralysis. There are two kinds: rigid and flaccid. The type coral snakes cause is flaccid.”

“I bet it’s just down that hall, honey,” said her mom through gritted teeth.

“What generally kills you is paralysis of the lungs. You can’t move your muscles to breathe, see. But there’s also cardiac arrest as a possibility.”

Part of her felt compelled to stay and monitor her mother, but now that she’d asked about the bathroom she’d have to follow through. She pushed herself up and moved away from the kitchen through the small house, trailing a hand along the wall. She almost could pity Ed, stuck in his little box for eternity doing his routine, though he didn’t seem at all unhappy about it. And maybe that’s exactly what Janet liked about him, that comfortable groove. She and her dad had been a little like that, before, moving through their lives like the ice-skater figurines on the miniature electric ice rink they put out on the coffee table at Christmas, the skaters’ feet glued to magnets that pulled them around, and around, and around, tracing the same figure eight until they were unplugged in January. Even when her dad had gotten sick, after the terrifying dislocation of their suspicions and the diagnosis, they had snapped to a new equilibrium: the more confused and ill he got, the more saintly and unavailable her mother became. Connie’s image of her from those years was her slumping in the armchair next to the sick bed, smiling wanly. 

In the bathroom Connie stood at the sink letting hot water run over her hands, then lingered in the hallway pretending to look at the family photos on the walls. The place had that must, that ancient-carpet smell. Really she should ask for more, from her mother, and in general. Other people seemed to be able to. But what to ask for? The shape of the longing was clear to her, but its object obscure. Anyway, she should be able to take care of herself.

She started back toward the kitchen, but where the hallway had opened back up into the living area and the carpet gave way to hard tile, she felt a sudden give, and crumpled to the floor. At her thump and too-late startled cry the kitchen conversation ceased, then chairs scraped, and she heard them hurrying over.

Her mother stood studying her for an empty instant. Pushing herself up to sitting—she’d banged her hip and elbow hard, but seemed basically fine—she watched her mom’s worry pass into resolution. “Oh, honey,” Janet said finally.

“I’m fine.”

Using a side table for support her mom knelt painstakingly beside her—Connie’s “don’t get down, Mom, your knees” accomplishing nothing—and Ed stood above them, as if he were overseeing the solution, and then somehow the two of them pulled each other up limb by limb.

They followed her to the foyer. Everyone looked off to one side. Then Ed leaned towards her mom, touched her arm. “Have you thought about a wheelchair?” He nodded at Connie.

She didn’t need a wheelchair. That was ridiculous. She could walk.

Her mother recoiled. “That’s ridiculous.” She gripped Connie’s arm, and locking eyes with her, told her, “You can walk just fine.” He had crossed some line. Watching her mother wrestle with an ancient, congenital imperative to guard her rage like a prisoner, she felt herself submerged suddenly in fondness, almost prickly, like a fallen-asleep limb waking back up.

“Just trying,” said Ed, “to help. If she’s falling. I’d be concerned. She could have hit her head.”

With not another look at him, her mother broke the circle and picked up her purse from where it sat beside the front door. Brusquely she said “Thank you so much for having us,” and strode out, leaving the screen door banging behind her. What was that? Janet had never done something like that before. Connie followed her, pausing to brace herself against the wall as she slipped on her sandals. This was as good as she was going to get from her mom, she guessed, but maybe that was all right. From the doorway she saw Ed looking back at the kitchen toward their unfinished dinner, but she managed not to apologize before walking out.

***

Connie caught up to Janet on the front stoop while Janet gutted her purse looking for her keys. There was a wicker statue of a deer next to the stoop that Connie thought was one of the tackiest of the bunch. It gazed down the road expectantly.

“That man,” Janet muttered. This was meant as an opening for Connie. But she couldn’t stomach stepping through it. Watching Janet go through the door, step out of her shoes, look back at her, some little dread began vining up her. She knew she should move in closer, now that she was being offered the chance, but now all she wanted was escape. God, she had to get away. Well, if her mother could stalk off with no warning, so could she.

“I need some air,” she said, already facing down the driveway, and when Janet said “are you sure—?” she waved the words off without turning back.

But where else was there to go? Out in front of her were two rows of bungalows lining the street, a small retaining pond beyond, a figure on its bank letting their dog off its leash and the dog bounding away. Glancing over her shoulder, through Ed’s side yard, she could see the path to the boardwalk. No one would be there. She passed through his yard, forcing herself to ignore the windows through which he might be watching her, and then, gravel crunching under her flip-flops, she passed through the neck of sweet fern, pines, and palmettos. The sounds of frogs and insects were beginning.

All around her, silhouetted against the open indigo sky humming with mosquitos, stood the unwavering trees, their interstices packed with growing things. She could hear creatures creeping around in that thickness, armadillos and moles and toads, maybe even alligators, scampering from partner to partner, making thousands of babies, most statistically destined for an early death. And the sea of grass, once she reached the boardwalk—head buzzing, failing to deny the pain and gathering weakness in her leg, but refusing to sit on the bench, where the railing would obstruct her sight of the tangle of grasses and ferns and god knows what else, all crammed in together, together becoming just one expanse. She slapped a mosquito. The colors were graying out. Janet would be wondering.

She turned back.

Just at the end of the wooden ramp back down to the path she took a step, and felt herself falling forward, understanding midair that the lip of her dragging left sandal had caught on the edge of a board.

She hit the ground. Horizontal, her palms scraped and probably bleeding, pebbles digging into her cheek, she heard something rustling close by, maybe a few inches from the path, in the leaf litter. Did she see a flash of texture and contrast—or was it her imagination? More likely those small noises came from a vole or toad. Could something so brilliantly scaled disguise itself so easily, so nearby? Was it huge, like a wrist, or slender, like a rope?

She wasn’t sure she wanted to try to get up without help just yet, so she held perfectly still. It got dark. No movement. After some time, her attention flowing between the life rustling off in the darkness and the unmoving, unknown creature and her burning leg, a small close sound caught her ear, and she heard it shift, then pause, then move further into the darkened leaves.

About the author

Becca Krock is a writer, scientist, and science communicator. Her fiction has appeared in Carve and was nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She holds a PhD in neuroscience from Stanford University, where she investigated how visual perception is constructed, and she now writes about genetics and health. Originally from Illinois, she has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than ten years. 

about the artist

Tracy Whiteside is an award-winning, internationally published Chicago photographer specializing in creative art. Her art is always meant to ignite the imagination. Tracy wants to open the viewers’ mind and encourage them to examine their own soul and spirit.