The Salt House

by Lisa Duffy

I looked over at her, and her eyes were wide. She said it in a strong voice. But I heard the shake in it. I took her hand off my wrist and gestured for her to walk.

  I heard Finn say to the back of my head, “Thanks for the hospitality.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked Jess when we were in the house.

  I saw Hope in the living room, her back to me. I started to walk toward her when Jess grabbed my arm.

  “Dad. Wait.”

  “Jessica,” I said, exasperated.

  She looked out the door at Finn. I looked past him to the window behind where he was standing. The window in Jess’s room.

  “She doesn’t need you. Don’t be mad,” she said, watching me. “I heard voices and looked out my window, and you looked like you were going to hit him. What were you talking about?”

  “Just business, Jess.”

  She eyed me, not convinced.

  “Plus, I don’t hit things that big.” I tugged her ponytail, trying to lighten the moment.

  She gave me a weak smile, and I put my arm around her shoulders and led her into the living room, away from Finn on the deck. She’d stayed glued to my side the rest of the night, and the party had ended soon after.

  Instead of hitting something as big as Finn, I’d picked a fight with Hope, the one person I was trying to bring back to me.

  I was failing, though. Nothing I said or did made any of it better. She kept telling me it wasn’t anything I could fix. That she needed time. That me pushing her to feel better, to make love, to spread Maddie’s ashes, all of it was too much. So I went to work. Out on the water, where every movement mattered.

  I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my wallet. The light was dim, but I didn’t need it to study the pictures anymore like I used to right after she died. I knew them by heart, every last detail, as if by studying them I could breathe life into them.

  There were two, taken on a rare warm October day when we decided on a last-minute picnic at the Salt House. Hope was lucky and snapped a picture of the girls without them noticing. Kat is six and slight in build. She is holding Maddie, who is in her diaper, her legs ringed with baby fat and wrapped around Kat’s waist. Her head is resting on Kat’s shoulder and she is sleeping. Both arms are around Kat’s neck. She is under a year in the picture but Kat has thrust a hip out to support her weight, and her gaze lands directly on Maddie’s face.

  In the other picture, we are lounging on the blanket, and Hope is laughing at something outside of the picture. She is sitting between my legs with her arms wrapped around my thighs. My face is nuzzled in her long black hair. I’m looking straight at whatever caught Hope’s attention. Jess’s legs are draped over Hope’s feet, and Kat’s fingertip is clearly in the side of the picture. I don’t remember what it was that we were laughing at. But it must have been Maddie. Because we are happy.

  And she is the only one missing.

   4

  Jess

  “Dad’s gone,” a voice said in the dark. I opened one eye. Kat was in front of me. I blinked, sleep blurring my vision.

  She was sitting with her legs folded under her on the edge of my bed, her face invisible under the brown curls tangled around her face.

  “Go back to sleep,” I muttered, and pulled her sideways until she toppled over in a heap next to me.

  The bed dipped and she popped upright like a coiled spring. She swiped at her hair, pushing it off her forehead. Her eyes were two blue circles staring at me.

  “Did you hear what I said? Dad. Is. Gone.” She pulled the pillow from under my head, and the side of my face bounced off the mattress.

  “Jesus, Kat! Knock it off—”

  “Shh! Listen! Mom’s in there.” She pointed at her door. “They had a fight last night, and Mom threw Dad’s shoes out the front door and now he’s gone.”

  She stood in front of me. Fists clenched, the vein on her forehead a bulging dark line. She was a bomb. A four-foot bomb waiting to explode. Or implode.

  We did an experiment in Physics last year with a can of soda and a hot plate to learn the difference between explosion and implosion. How an object that implodes reacts from the inside out, collapsing into itself.

  I looked at the clock. 5:58. On a Sunday morning. This was my family now: an implosion experiment in action.

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up.

  “Slow down. And calm down. Mom and Dad have fought before. They always make up. Big deal.”

  Even as the words left my mouth, I heard the lie in them. I couldn’t remember a night my father hadn’t slept in our house.

  But this was the new us. The post-Maddie us.

  “You didn’t hear this one. Plus, Smelliot on the bus said Mom was over his house and he heard they were getting a deforest.”

  “A what?”

  “A de-for-est,” she said, pronouncing the word so hard, the vein on her forehead pulsed.

  “That’s not a word. And what is a Smelliot?”

  “It’s not a what. It’s a who.” She disappeared into her bedroom. A second later, she returned with a stack of lined white paper, a row of staples running crooked down the side. She flipped through them, paused on one, and thrust it at me.

  I took it, my eyes following her finger to where her handwriting was dark and precise on the thin lines.

  “Read,” she said.

  On bus, minding my own self like mrs. whitley says to do when Elliot jumps to the seat next to me. Hey Ding-dong he says and he pinches my arm so hard my eyes water. Are you gonna cry now, Kat Poop, he asks and his stupid friend in the seat in front of us is laughing. I tell him my eyes are watering from the way he stinks. And then I call him Smelliot. His friend laughs and points his finger like I got him good. Smelliot’s face gets all red and he comes even closer to me and says your mom was over my house talking to my mom about how your dad is never home. Your mom and dad are getting a deforest, Ding-dong. The Big D he says over and over until I put my hood up and he shoves me and goes to the back of the bus.

  I flipped through the pages. There were drawings on some, scribbles on others, but most were filled with her small handwriting. She snatched it away, the edge of the paper slicing my finger as it whizzed out of my hand.

  “Cut it out. I only let you read it so you could see that word. It is a diary, you know,” she hissed.

  I sucked on my finger where a thin line of blood had formed. “It’s a bunch of paper stapled together. Why don’t you get a diary that actually says diary on it so someone doesn’t lose a finger?”

  She reached for my hand, looking sorry now. I waved her away, and her shoulders slumped.

  “I had one Grandma bought for me, and I hid it to keep it safe, but then I couldn’t find it. And when I told her, she bought me another one with a lock on it. Then I put the key in a safe place, and now I can’t find that. And if I tell her, she’ll buy me another one, and then I’ll feel bad when something happens to that.”

  “You’re a mess,” I told her.

  “Don’t say anything to her,” she pleaded.

  I rolled my eyes. Like I didn’t have better things to do than tell on my eight-year-old sister to my seventy-year-old grandmother.

  “Anyway. I told you I didn’t hear him wrong,” she said, holding up the papers.

  “It’s called a divorce. Who is this kid, anyway?”

  She ran over to my desk and grabbed a pencil.

  “Peggy’s son. Spell it.”

  “What?”

  “Spell that word.”

  “Kat. Stop. You’re overreacting. Maybe Dad just went for a walk.”

  “All night? I checked their room. Mom is in my bed, and their bed is still made.”

  I sighed. “That doesn’t mean they’re getting divorced.”

  “And Smelliot? Why would he say that?”

  She was gripping the sides of the chair, and her eyes were wide. A bead of sweat rolled down her forehead.

  Kat never mentioned that she was being picked on by this
kid, but that didn’t mean anything. She was like my father that way. They pushed away the things that bothered them and filled the space with movement. Always busy, always doing something, no time for sitting around mulling things over.

  “How old is this kid?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. He stayed back a grade when he moved here. Wait, that’s it,” she said. “Next time he picks on me I’ll say they kept him back because he was too smelly to go to middle school.”

  “Maybe he picks on you because you say things like that.”

  She twisted her face at me. “I say things like that because he calls me Kat Poop.”

  “Have you tried ignoring him?”

  “Ignoring him? He’s this wide and this tall.” She spread her arms out and up. She looked up at me, and I saw my father’s face. All angles and slopes with the way their cheekbones stuck out. The same deep-set eyes. Full of worry now.

  “Does he pick on you a lot?” I asked.

  She shrugged, as if to say, That’s not the point.

  “Why don’t you tell Mom? She’ll say something to Peggy.”

  “No way. Then he’ll think it bothers me.”

  I eyed her. “It does bother you.”

  “What he said about Mom and Dad bothers me. He only picks on me because I beat him in every race in gym. Then he blubbers to Mr. Scott that I stay behind him on purpose and cut in front at the finish line.”

  “Well, do you? You know how you get.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means you’re little competitive, Kat. And by a little, I mean a lot.”

  She scowled. “I hate when you say that. Mom too. Besides, even Mr. Scott told him to stop whining about it, so it’s not my fault.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it, then. He probably just said it to get under your skin.”

  She looked doubtful. “You didn’t hear them last night. They said mean things. Like Dad told Mom she was killing him.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her, and she nodded.

  “Killing him,” she said again. We didn’t say anything for a minute, and I knew Kat was picturing my father saying those words. Picturing my mother hearing them.

  Kat had her head down, and she was playing with the necklace around her neck, running the locket up and down the chain. The locket was so small, I couldn’t see it underneath her fingertip.

  She’d been determined to put a picture of my parents in it, but by the time she cut the photograph to fit, all that was left was my father’s eye, a sliver of nose, one side of my mother’s face.

  My mother had replaced the locket with one half its size. So little, it would slip down even the tiniest throat.

  Not that I wanted to know this. I didn’t have a choice in it. Kat thought my sister just stopped breathing. But I’d come home from school too early to not know the truth. There’d been an ambulance outside. In her room, paramedics kneeling over her. An arm peeking out, a necklace wrapped around her hand.

  Kat looked up at me now, her eyes on me, looking for some kind of answer, and suddenly my heart was hammering in my chest. I didn’t have any answers. This was new territory for me and Kat—I was eight years older—I’d always had the answers to anything she needed. But it was typical big-sister stuff—how to braid hair, how to do a back flip off the dock without whacking your head, how to change out of a wet bathing suit under an oversize T-shirt or the best way to cook a s’more without scorching the marshmallow.

  This past year her questions were out of my league. Question after question, and not a single one had an answer. Why wasn’t Maddie in a graveyard like Grandpa? Are we ever going back to the Salt House? Do I still say I have two sisters now that she’s dead?

  I’d been angry at first. Angry with my parents for giving Kat the necklace. Angry at Kat for wearing it in the crib. Then all that anger faded away, and there was just the feeling of missing her.

  And then months passed, and little by little, even that faded. I forgot what she smelled like. I had to look at pictures of her to remember the shade of her eyes, the color of her hair, the shape of the birthmark on her tummy.

  My mother was the one I worried about the most right after Maddie died. The way she cried all the time. Seemed like every day, at some point, her face would crumple, and she’d go in her bedroom and lie on the bed.

  My father was the opposite. I’d never seen him cry. Not even once. And now, it seemed like all that not crying had built up and spilled out his pores, changing him on the outside. You couldn’t look at him without flinching.

  It seemed like the only thing that had lived in my mind the past year was worry. And sadness. And more worry. My family was falling apart, and I’d spent the whole year worrying about it, thinking about it, and now it just seemed too much. Where were my parents? What were they thinking, fighting like that in front of Kat?

  I took a deep breath, made my face stay expressionless so Kat wouldn’t see that I was upset. I leaned over and turned on my computer. I never let her play with it, and her eyes lit up.

  “Stay here, and I’ll see what’s going on, okay?” I asked calmly.

  She sat down and took the mouse, her eyes focusing on the screen. I left her looking through my photos and hurried through Kat’s room. My mother was spread out on her back, her long hair fanned out on the pillow.

  In the kitchen, the stench from the mussel shells in the trash turned my stomach. On a regular night, Dad wouldn’t have let them sit inside.

  But we weren’t exactly regular anymore.

  I took the trash bag of shells down the stairs to the backyard. The lawn was still wet from the dew, and by the time I reached the water, small pieces of grass were wedged in the spaces between my toes. Seagulls circled above as the last of the shells tumbled out of the bag into the bay. I put the bag in the outside barrel and headed to the kitchen to start on the piles of dishes.

  I’d just turned on the kitchen faucet when I heard the front door open and Kat’s feet pounding on the floor. I shut off the water and turned to see my father standing in the doorway with Kat’s face buried in his neck. He hugged her, then peeled her arms off his neck and hung her upside down, her legs still wrapped around his waist. He tickled her stomach, and a giggle filled the room.

  “How about a ride on the boat today? It’s a beauty out there,” Dad asked in a voice that sounded like fluff, sweet and thick and sugary.

  I wanted to tell him that Mom was spread out on Kat’s bed like a dead person, but the look on his face stopped me. He looked scared, like the kind of scared when your smile is bigger than it should be and it doesn’t match your face. Like the way I used to make Kat’s Mr. Potato Head. I’d snap in the angry eyebrows with the serious eyes but finish him off with the big, red, shiny smile for a mouth. Kat hated it, said he looked all wrong. Crazy, she’d say.

  He looks like he went crazy.

  “I’m babysitting,” I said quickly. Too quick.

  Kat, who was standing now, looked suspiciously at me.

  Dad said that was too bad, but clapped his hands together and said to Kat, “Come on, Kiddo. I get you all to myself today. Let’s hit it and grab some breakfast.”

  He told Kat to go brush her teeth, and I followed her into the bathroom and closed the door.

  “Where does that kid live? The one that’s picking on you,” I asked. I wet a tissue and wiped a glob of toothpaste from the lip of the sink. Some of it was on her sleeve, and I held her wrist and tried to clean it.

  “I can do it.” She wrestled away from me and stuck her arm under the water.

  “You mean Smelliot?” she asked, and I nodded.

  “I dunno. He gets on before me and doesn’t take the bus home. Why?”

  “I thought you said he was Peggy’s son.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Peggy left a dish here last night. I’m going to drop it off.”

  “No she didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Mom gave me the job of taking pocketbooks and c
oats to the bedroom. She had a big, floppy bag, but that was it. If she had a dish in her hands, I’d have seen it.”

  Who knew if this was true? Maybe it was; Kat’s memory was incredible. She was known for it in our family. Forget what Dad gave Mom last Christmas? Or where we went to dinner after the beach that day last summer? The answer was always the same. Ask Kat; she’ll remember. And she would.

  I grabbed her by the arm and pushed her down until she was sitting on the closed toilet seat.

  “Do you trust me, KK?” I asked. It was Grandma’s nickname for her, and she let her jaw relax.

  “I want to find out what that kid said to you about the divorce. I lied to you because I knew you’d want to come, and you can’t.”

  She started to argue, but I shushed her.

  “Just go with Dad, please,” I said in a hushed voice.

  “Only if you tell me what he says.” She held up her pinkie. “Swear it.”

  I sighed but stuck out my little finger. She wrapped her little finger around mine, and we pinkie swore. She made me hold it longer so she could double-check that my fingers weren’t crossed behind my back.

  After she left the bathroom, I went back to the dishes in the kitchen. I was halfway through the pile in the sink when I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder, his breath on the side of my cheek.

  “Stop, Jess,” he said in a whisper. “That’s not your mess.”

  He shut off the water. “I meant to do them last night. Leave them.” He rolled up his sleeves, took the sponge from my hand.

  “Mom’s in there,” I said, pointing to Kat’s room. He followed my finger with his eyes.

  I waited, but he didn’t speak.

  “Kat thinks you didn’t come home last night,” I said.

  “I’ll talk to her,” he replied, avoiding my eyes, and I nodded, even though I knew he wouldn’t.

  “What happened?” I pressed.

  “We had a little . . . disagreement.” He fumbled over the word, his voice trailing off.

  “About what?”

  “Nothing important, honey,” he said wearily, and rubbed the back of his neck.

  “I’m not a kid, Dad. You don’t have to pretend like nothing happened.”