The Worst Thing I've Done

by Ursula Hegi

  “Not anymore.” She jammed it all into their backpacks, a whirling dervish who seized what was theirs, frantic to get away.

  When they got on a late train to Asilah, Mason began to enjoy the adventure, especially since Jake was so unsettled. From the seat across from them, a man stared at Annie’s breasts. She flushed, blinked, but Mason could tell that, secretly, she had to be loving this, and he felt a fast heat.

  “YES, THAT’S a picture of a diver,” Aunt Stormy was telling Opal. “He’s come to learn all about diving from the turtles.”

  She carried Opal to the refrigerator, poured her a cup of apple juice.

  “Look at all those photos.” She held Opal close to the photos on her refrigerator door.

  “Most are of you,” Mason said. “There you are, see? With Annie. With me. With Aunt Stormy and Pete.”

  Opal patted her hands and cooed, her joy so physical that Mason could feel it.

  “That’s Pete trimming his trumpet vines,” he told her.

  But she was reaching for the photo of the pregnant bride.

  Below that was a photo of Annie’s parents against a sunset. And next to that a flyer announcing a fund-raiser for Amnesty International. Mason and Aunt Stormy often forwarded e-mails to each other, petitions to sign, senators to call. That was where he connected best with her, as he had with Annie’s mother, who’d taught him and Annie—when they were in Boston marching against the Gulf War—that they had the responsibility to raise their voices against injustice.

  “JAKE GOT so upset in Morocco.” Mason seized Annie’s hand, raked it through his hair. “He said you almost started World War Three.”

  “I would have changed seats. But the train was too crowded.”

  “Jake made too much of it,” Mason said, though he too had been frightened when Annie had stared right back at the man—not at his face but at his crotch—kept staring even when the man became infuriated. Then she had motioned to Mason and Jake, held up her thumb and forefinger, about three inches apart, and grinned.

  “Jake was sure the man was ready to attack him and me,” Mason said.

  “For not controlling your woman.”

  “As if we could.”

  “Jake has no appetite for getting even.”

  Mason pushed her hand away. “Jake is better than anyone at getting even.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Jake would kill me—If he could.”

  “I hate it when you come up with…suspicions like this.”

  “I always get blamed for what he does.”

  “Spare me. Please.”

  THEY KEPT postponing their drive home to New Hampshire, waiting for the rain to lessen, but when it didn’t, Mason strapped Opal into her car seat, and Annie started off driving as they headed for the South Ferry. On Shelter Island, the rain got so dense that she pulled in to the entrance to Mashomack. The car smelled of baby and of teething cookies that Opal liked above any other cookies, sucking on them till they were mush and took on her smell.

  Only two other cars were on the North Ferry, and the waters pitched at them. Mason was glad when they reached Greenport. But he wished he were driving because Annie kept slowing down on the road to Orient Point. She used to be such a natural driver, fast with good reflexes, but her parents’ accident had made her too cautious.

  “Just keep going.”

  “Don’t push, Mason.”

  “I’m exceedingly patient.”

  “Hah. Mr. Exceedingly Patient.”

  “We’ll miss the ferry to New London.”

  “So we’ll take the next one.” Neck stretched, she inched forward, wind-shield wipers flying, every one of her fingers hooked around the top of the steering wheel. Like a caricature of some old-fart lady out for her Sunday drive.

  Mason laughed.

  “What now?”

  He sighed. “No reason.”

  Opal was asleep when he carried her to the passenger deck of the Cross Sound Ferry, kept sleeping through the long passage, when he took her down to the car again, and while he drove north, more aggressive than usual, to offset Annie’s slowness. In New Hampshire, quite a few roads were closed due to flooding, and he followed signs for detours. The severe rainfall had saturated the ground.

  “Let’s turn back,” Annie said when they came to a section of road that lay underwater.

  “This car can float.”

  Behind him, Opal was stirring.

  “Opal believes me. Right, Mophead?” In the rearview mirror, he waved at her.

  She flapped her arms, bounced them off the padded bar of her car seat.

  “Do you want to see this car float, Mophead?”

  “Don’t show off,” Annie warned.

  He gritted his teeth. Rolled toward the dip of flooded road. His hands were damp, but as he felt Annie’s fear next to him, he drew courage from that. Now he had to prove that she did not need to be afraid. All at once he knew she believed him that the car would float…then the excitement because, incredibly, he was driving in water—wheels like wings like propellers like wings—churning him forward, forward and across the flood, where, set against a hill, a gray barn and a gray house leaned toward a pond between them.

  Empty. They felt empty to him. A few hurricanes away from propping each other up. Suddenly he was certain that he and Annie and Opal would live here, as certain as he’d been last year about the internship he wanted with New Hampshire Peace Initiative, a nonprofit in Concord. That day too he’d been driving. Away from campus. And just as he’d passed a horse trailer, he’d known he’d get the internship. And he did.

  WHEN THE car emerged from the flood, Mason took a left up the grassy driveway, expecting Annie to ask what he was doing, but she was staring at a scrawny tulip tree, about Opal’s height, that grew in the yard. She got out of the car, touched one of the branches without disturbing the blossoms. Then she walked toward the barn. Mason unstrapped Opal, carried her as he followed Annie.

  They didn’t speak.

  In one corner of the barn was a sauna, cold and musty, nine broken slats in the benches. The house unlocked, empty. Windows bare. Floors cracked linoleum. Bookshelves, gray as rain, on the wall around the fireplace. The faucets dry.

  But Annie brought in a bucket of rainwater, and as she dissolved the pulp of teething cookies that had molded itself to Opal’s hands and face as if part of her, Opal pointed to the kitchen window. It had stopped raining, and in the pond, the reflections of house and barn were reaching for each other.

  “I could see this in a collage,” Annie said.

  “What if—” Mason curved one arm around her waist. “—you had a place for just your work?”

  “My own studio…”

  “Your studio. You wouldn’t have to let anyone in.”

  But she wasn’t talking, just looking the way she got when she was already sketching something inside her mind.

  “It’s only about ten or fifteen miles from campus, Annie.”

  “If we live next to a pond, she needs to learn how to swim right away.”

  “For sure.”

  “I could imagine working here.”

  The following morning, they made an offer with money Annie and Opal had inherited from their parents, phoned Jake, and celebrated with dinner at the nasty fortune restaurant.

  THE DAY they moved into the pond house, Jake fired up the sauna. In the pond, Annie swam and Mason tugged Opal around by her life vest. It was still hot—with the moon yellow, full—and Opal paddled with her legs and feet like some small animal. So much of her was animal, Mason thought, that greed, that instinctive grasp, her quick rage. All now. She had something savage about her. A baby wolf. It embarrassed him, thinking this—if I were her real father, I wouldn’t.

  Slick with sweat, Jake came running from the sauna and jumped into the pond, shot up next to Mason, yelling, “Cold and clean and alive!”

  “Can we have a bit more enthusiasm here?” Mason teased him.

  “Even the scum on
this pond feels clean.”

  “What scum?” Mason swatted at some floating green muck.

  They both laughed.

  Opal reached for Jake, her other hand holding on to Mason’s ear.

  “Ouch, you—” Mason loosened her little fist.

  Jake lifted her above his head. “The-four-of-us again”—

  His love for her was so transparent that Mason couldn’t bear it. Never as happy as when he’s with us…with my family. Wanting what’s mine. It’s all here for him already.

  JAKE HELPED Mason build a studio for Annie in the barn, where the former owners had kept cows and horses, whose smell was packed into the dirt floor, into the walls and rafters. After they raised the floor of her studio with thick boards, they built her worktable from a massive church door that Mason had found for her at Sparky’s Salvage.

  It was Annie’s idea to prop it on a cluster of eight filing cabinets so that she could approach her work from every angle. Mason bid on two flat files when a surveyor’s office closed, and he helped Annie store her paper collection in the wide, shallow drawers. Yellow rice paper. Speckled mulberry paper made from the inner bark. Hemp paper, eggshell-white. Bookbinding paper. Marbleized paper. Porous rice paper. Coated paper that wouldn’t fade.

  He sorted out her critter bits, brushed off the remnants of sand that clung like an extra layer of skin to the shells of mud snails and slipper snails and ribbed mussels; to the claws of spider crabs and fiddler crabs; to the tails of horseshoe crabs. He took bits of a blue claw crab and fit them together like a puzzle.

  “Look what I brought today,” he’d announce when he came home with yet another gift for her studio—a jade-colored pottery jar for her brushes.

  He surprised her with sheets of rice paper. Some had threads in them. Others looked as though they had actual rice kernels in them. He ordered a set of Chinese brushes for her: silky brushes from sable and fox and goat; hard-hair brushes from leopard and badger. Their tips were stiff with glue, and he soaked them in cold water till it softened and washed out.

  For Opal he bought swim toys. He loved teaching her to swim, and she was faster underwater than on land. When he let her loose, she’d instinctively dart beneath the surface toward the edge of the pond, her arms strong as she pulled herself from the water, wiggling, slithering.

  ON ONE of his trips to the hardware store with Jake, Mason noticed a baby monitor. “That may be good to have for the sauna,” he said. “We’ll be able to hear Opal in her room.”

  Jake took it off the shelf. “As a housewarming gift.” He turned it. Checked the price. Frowned.

  “No,” Mason said. “I’ll get it.”

  “I’ve been looking for something to give to you.”

  “It’s expensive—”

  “That’s okay.”

  “—considering how cheap you are.”

  Jake gave him his pale, wounded look.

  “It’s true. You use tiny little pencil stubs. I swear you must go through your friends’ trash to get them.”

  “Quit it.”

  “I’ve never seen you with a new pencil.”

  On class outings, Mason used to feel sorry for Jake because his father doubled whatever Jake didn’t spend from his trip money. It kept Jake from enjoying the trip, reluctant to spend anything.

  When Annie unpacked the monitor—two walkie-talkies with antennas—Jake told her, “We can take the receiver into the sauna with us.”

  We? Mason crossed his arms.

  Jake unfolded the instructions. “The other one goes next to her crib. It says here you can hear a baby breathe from four hundred feet away.”

  “Do you mind testing the receiver, Mason?” Annie asked.

  As Mason walked down the slope of the driveway—at least five hundred feet—he could still hear Annie and Jake in Opal’s room, going on about how wonderful the baby monitor was. Women were always spoiling Jake, though he had an alarming ability for choosing awful clothes. Sort of dapper. They made him resemble an old fart, and even his features would change with the outfits, go flat like his hair, make him look heavy all over though he wasn’t. Only his thighs. Jake’s mother used to spoil him, saving treats for him only, hushing the day-care kids when Jake napped.

  “Can you still hear us?” Annie shouted.

  I could be still and hear what they’re really saying. When they think I can’t hear.

  But this was for Opal. “Yes,” Mason said. “I can hear you.”

  “If it works that far away,” Jake’s voice, “it’ll definitely work in your bedroom, with just a wall from Opal’s.”

  You stay away from our bedroom wall.

  The following day, Mason bought Annie a cashmere shawl.

  “It’s gorgeous.” She wrapped it around herself. “Thank you. What’s the occasion?”

  “To celebrate your new studio.”

  “Then that’s where I’ll keep it.”

  “You can also wear it when you’re in the house. With me.”

  But she hung the shawl over the back of her working chair. “So extravagant…,” she said.

  “BRING A date,” Mason encouraged Jake. “We don’t want to be selfish, and keep you all for us.”

  But when Jake did, it made everything different—no longer the-four-of-us but a new person. Jake would be wearing one of his dapper outfits, smiling too much, talking too much, and Mason would feel like a parent, patient with his hyper kid on a sugar high, waiting for the stimulation to go away.

  Every one of Jake’s dates was scholarly, sexy, and aloof. When Mason and Annie talked about them afterward, they named them Ice Queen 1 and Ice Queen 2 and so on. Even a repeat Ice Queen remained an outsider.

  By then Jake had moved from the dorm into a small apartment not far from the pond house. He reduced his rent by scrubbing the steps and corridors of the apartment building, and when tenants left muddy tracks or cigarette butts in the lobby, he’d get pissy as though they’d trashed his living room.

  A day before classes started in the fall, Mason and Jake completed Annie’s studio. The house took much longer. The Fultons, who’d sold them the place, had painted the woodwork a solemn gray. When Mason and Jake tried to remove the paint so they could stain the wood, it took them two months to scrape and sand the shelves. They agreed with Annie on painting everything white, and the outlines of the rooms cleared, expanded.

  MASON FELT at his best when they were all together. He and Annie and Opal and Jake. At his most possible best. All craving and uneasiness dormant.

  Late evenings when Opal was asleep, they’d relax in the sauna, the baby monitor on the shelf by the door, her sleeping breath quick and light. Annie and Jake would stretch out on the second tier, Mason as usual on the tier above them, where it was even hotter, the air thick with steam from water that Jake would splash on the coals.

  That winter, Mason volunteered one weekend a month at New Hampshire Peace Initiative. But he still took Opal to Sparky’s, where he discovered a crate of wooden slats, just right for repairing the benches in the sauna. Once, when Opal climbed on a heap of heating supplies, it shifted, and Mason found an old tile stove beneath.

  “Probably from Germany,” Aunt Stormy said when they showed her photos. “We had stoves with blue and white tiles like that in Benersiel.”

  They were with her for the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, and Opal was fascinated by the statue. Scooting around in diapers, she sang and pointed at the burning ghost—scary and lovely—but she kept glancing at Mason as if to make sure he was right behind her.

  The following night, at full moon, they paddled their kayaks: Pete and Aunt Stormy in his two-seater; Annie in the little yellow kayak with the picnic stashed behind the seat; and Opal on a foam pad between Mason’s knees in the purple kayak, her hands in the middle of the paddle, his outward from hers. It felt tippy to him. Unsettled. But then—for one instant—it all came together, that sensation of flying from his shoulder blades, causing all movement from that spot, and he knew how it could be if h
e kayaked every day.

  “I’d love to do this every day,” he said.

  “Me too,” Opal cried.

  All at once the water felt heavy. Gelatinous. And their paddles were scooping up light, white-green flickers of light. They cried out in wonder.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What is this?”

  “Sea walnuts,” Aunt Stormy said. “But I call them lumis because they’re luminescent.” She dipped one oar into the bay, raised it. “Lumis don’t sting like other jellyfish.”

  “I didn’t know they were jellies,” Annie said.

  “They’re waterfalls of light,” Mason told Opal, guiding her hands so they wouldn’t lose their paddle. “See? Now your paddle is the lumis’ amusement park.”

  IN THE MORNING, Aunt Stormy grabbed her glass pitcher and took them to the bay to search for lumis. They found dozens on the sand, where the tide had left them. No longer the gauzy creatures that had lit up the sea at night, they felt like globs of clear Jell-O when Mason picked them up. Aunt Stormy filled her pitcher with seawater, a bit of sand, a few shells, and a green clump of seaweed, stem up, arms fanning down like an upside-down tree.

  At the cottage, she set the pitcher on the table by her French doors.

  “Lumis? Where?” Opal asked

  “They’re hard to see during the day because their bodies are almost all water.”

  But gradually Mason could make out their winglike extremities. Elegant. Weightless.

  “Sometimes I think I’d like to get another dog,” Aunt Stormy said.

  “These floaty pets here don’t quite do it for you?” Pete joked.

  “Well…we have to set them free in the morning. And I do miss Agnes.”

  Annie pinched her nostrils.

  Mason glared at her. “Agnes was a sweet old dog.”

  “A very smelly dog.”

  That night, Mason turned off the lights. In the dark, they sat around the pitcher and waited for the white-green flickers. Nothing…until Pete reached in and swished the cluster of seaweeds.