The Bookshop at Water's End

by Patti Callahan Henry

  That was when I found Mod Podge—the glue sealer that dried clear and let me make collages. I covered everything in images—notebooks, dresser tops, frames, boxes, or anything wooden I could get my hands on and Mom wouldn’t be upset about. Then I painted on top or added words. Who ever knew that what I did then to quell the anxiety—and what got me in trouble—would turn out to be how I made my living?

  Finally, one June morning a year later, we packed for Watersend and I filled a box with my clippings and artwork. I wanted to show Bonny. Before boys gave me butterflies, before I dreamed of someone saving me with a ring and a white horse, I wanted Bonny to love me as much as I loved her.

  So I packed the box and I picked out my cutest sundresses and the polka-dotted bikini Bonny’s mom bought us all last year so we could match and sing the silly song (“Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini”). Our station wagon was parked in the driveway and Mom stood leaning against the car, smoking her millionth cigarette of the day. Owen was hanging all over Polly, his ridiculous girlfriend, and they were making out while she cried about him leaving.

  “Mom,” he called out. “Come on. Just let her come for a week.”

  “Don’t ask again,” Mom said. “It’s family only.”

  Mom’s voice had that recognizable slur to it. I could gauge our family fun by the way Mom pronounced words. Slurred: a nice quiet trip. Staccato like a tap dance: arguments from here to there, wherever the “here” was to wherever the “there” was. Singsongy: watch out because cursing was next and flung at anyone who crossed her path. I planned my hours on her tone. This should be an okay trip.

  I stepped forward to help Dad, who swore under his breath. I knew the words, but I’d never heard him say them out loud, only mumbled, which was how I came to learn: if you have something awful to say, mumble it.

  “Let me help,” I said, always the mediator. I wanted nothing, absolutely nothing, to ruin this trip. We were finally on our way. I wanted the calendar to pause. I wanted to fold Donny Osmond up and tell him to stop the days because it was finally summer.

  “Don’t worry, pumpkin,” Dad said. “I’ve got this, but thank you for always being the helpful one.” He tossed Mom a wry, mean glance as she stood there in her huge sunglasses and flowered dress. He hates her, I thought again. I’d thought it a lot lately, but it was one of those thoughts that couldn’t even be mumbled.

  When Dad was finished, the back of the station wagon was a puzzle with all the pieces in the wrong place, but still it fit into the frame. Except for one piece—my art box. He set it on the lawn like discarded trash.

  “My box,” I said and pointed to it.

  “It won’t fit, sweetie. Do you really need it?”

  “I do,” I said. “Take out my suitcase.”

  He pointed to my round pink case, the one Nana had given me for Christmas with the little kitten on it. “That has all your clothes. You can’t leave that.”

  “Yes, I can. I’ll wear this the whole time,” I said. “I don’t care.”

  Mom ambled up then and pulled her sunglasses off her face so we could see her hooded eyelids covered in so much blue eye shadow that it creased with every blink. “Do not be ridiculous, Lainey. Please can we just go before the summer passes in this godawful driveway?” She kissed both my cheeks and then sidled around the car and opened the passenger-side door to sit. She propped her legs through the open window. “I’m ready.”

  “Dad, I’ll put it on my lap. I’ll carry it. I don’t care. But we aren’t leaving it here.”

  “Leave me here,” Owen called from the yard, where Polly had him wrapped like the kudzu vines on our fence.

  “Get in the car,” Dad hollered in a voice that made my stomach flip over.

  And we all climbed into the car. I plopped the box on my lap; Dad turned on the talk radio station and Mom closed her eyes immediately, her head lolling back on the seat.

  “Clara, put your feet in and close the window,” Dad said.

  She didn’t answer and a soft snore escaped.

  He mumbled curse words and then leaned over her sleeping body to yank her feet down and manually roll the window up before backing out of the driveway.

  “What is that?” Owen pushed at the box on my lap.

  “Stuff,” I said. “What do you care? All that matters to you is Polly.”

  “Oh, Bug, that’s not true.” He moved closer to me and wrapped his arm around me, then shook me with a little hug. “I love you best.”

  “You do not.” I pushed him away. I made kissy faces and he laughed. He always laughed. No one was happier than Owen. It was infuriating. Didn’t he feel the way the world could fall apart at any minute? Didn’t he know Mom was crazy with whatever pills she took? Didn’t he know Dad hated her? Didn’t he feel the sadness in the world that clouded everything?

  “I do, too, love you best,” he said. “Cross my heart.” He let me go and scooted to the other end of the bench seat, where he dropped his head onto the window. “I’m glad Polly can’t come.”

  “Then why did you pretend you wanted her to?”

  “So she’d stop crying,” he said. And he patted the empty space between us. “I don’t care if you put your box there.”

  Eventually we all fell asleep, except for Dad, of course. I was lulled into and out of a half sleep by the radio turning to static and then Dad finding a new station, or by the sway of a turn or stop. I woke once to Dad’s whispered words, ones I’d heard before but knew he never meant. “Clara, if you can’t stop, I’m going to have to send you somewhere to get help. You have to stop.” I kept my eyes closed and slowly drifted back to sleep.

  It wasn’t until we took the sharp left into Watersend that I fully woke. My little bag of snacks and the Thermos of lemonade that Dad had given us rolled untouched on the floor.

  Owen and I stirred and rubbed our eyes as the car pulled in front of the house. Bonny sat on the front porch reading a paperback. When she saw us, she jumped up and ran down the pathway toward our car. She reached us just as I climbed out and we threw our arms around each other and screamed, “Summer is here!” as if we’d planned it, as if we’d known what we’d say when we reunited.

  She looked like those girls in Teen Beat magazine. Her curled eyelashes and almost purple eyes; her long legs and straight brown hair; her round lips and—oh, my God, she had little boobs now. I tried not to stare, but there they were, two tiny bumps under her halter top.

  Owen crawled out of the car in his rumpled, stony way and stretched like he was unfolding. He let out a loud noise like a tiger waking up and then popped his sunglasses on before turning his gaze to Bonny.

  “Hello, little Bee,” he said, which was what he’d called her that last summer after hearing her parents call her the same. But that was when she was littler.

  “Hi, Owen.” She turned away as if he’d said something weird to her and went to my mom and dad as if she were the mistress of the house.

  “Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. McKay. It’s so wonderful that you came back this year. Mom is at the market, but she said to tell you to take the same bedroom.” She grabbed my hand. “Lainey is with me in my room.”

  The first night of that summer we didn’t sleep. We stayed up and I showed her my art and we read our Girl Detective notebook from the summer before and she told me that she still hadn’t kissed a boy. Those were the things we talked about; those were the things we cared about.

  Until later.

  I parked in front of Sea La Vie but didn’t pull into the driveway at the side. Both Daisy and George had fallen asleep in the backseat, and I didn’t want to wake them: it was my prerogative to have five more minutes of peace, right? We’d colored and read and watched movies across the country and my eyes burned with fatigue. A five-hour flight from San Francisco to Atlanta, with a three-hour layover before the quick thirty-minute flight here. The rental car. The
forty-minute drive. And finally we were at Sea La Vie.

  I pumped up the air conditioner in the car and stepped out with the car doors open. The world was brighter in Watersend, too bright; it always had been. How had I forgotten? The light was sharper, razor edged. It bounced off the river and the ocean, doubling its glare. I reached for my sunglasses and realized I already wore them. With a couple deep breaths, I leaned against the rental car, a compact that had felt like a tin can on the drive from the Savannah airport.

  I took out my cell phone to try Owen one more time. I hadn’t informed him that I was coming here—I wanted to tell him on the phone, not by voice mail or e-mail. The phone rang the obligatory six rings and then his voice told me to leave a message. There were plenty of messages that I wanted to leave, but I hung up without saying a word.

  The last time I’d heard from him—three months ago—he’d been in Wyoming, climbing in the Teton Range and doing something so awful that when I Googled it, I felt sick. “Freebasing” it was called. It sounded like a drug thing, but I knew Owen would never touch them. When your mom destroyed her life with drugs, you definitely found an alternative. Owen’s addiction was adventure sports, extreme sports where death was the result if the tiniest thing went wrong. He owned an adventure company that coordinated this for others. And freebasing—jumping off a cliff and opening a parachute that has wings (freaking wings!)—was his latest offering.

  He wouldn’t like it that I’d flown across the country with my two little bundles and without Tim. He would never, under any circumstance (his words), step foot in Watersend again. It was a town full of ghosts and crazy (again, his words).

  After that last summer, when Mom had been released from jail, and Owen from the hospital, Mom had left us. We’d stayed only another week in Watersend for the unrelenting search, but eventually Dad had packed us to leave. The police had been called and the beaches combed and the tears shed, and the press notified, and without a clue where Mom had gone, we went home. Maybe, as I’d thought before, death would have been better than disappearing. At least there was an ending to death. This wondering never ended.

  Once back in Atlanta, Dad had decided that what with his travel schedule and all the childhood duties, it would be best if we moved in with his sister Anna-Marie until Mom reappeared. So we shoved our favorite things in boxes and bags and moved to Anna-Marie’s little house in midtown Atlanta, where she lived her single life. And although she was as sweet and kind as could be, it was about the same as being raised by an adorable golden retriever. Owen and I figured out how to raise ourselves, and then when he graduated from high school and threw his childhood room into the back of a beat-up pickup truck for the University of Georgia, Dad sold our house in Atlanta and shipped me off to boarding school in Connecticut. He moved to Arizona, which meant that any break I had at school, I didn’t go home because I didn’t have a home or a mother. I slowly, through the years, learned to make a home wherever I was.

  Dad had never remarried because technically he was still married, but the slew of women in and out of his life made me believe he’d never have done so anyway. Freedom was salvation to my dad. Freedom was disastrous for my brother and for me.

  I’d gone to college in San Francisco and had never left. I couldn’t, even if pressed, tell you how many places Owen has lived since he left Georgia. Always out saving someone or skiing something or backpacking somewhere. It didn’t matter whether he would approve of me being here or not. If he wanted a say in anything of my life, he should answer his phone.

  The house in front of me seemed the same but updated. The doors and shutters still that brightest blue, meant to scare away anything evil. So much for that little fable: evil had arrived anyway. Valium and vodka.

  I’d promised myself that when I arrived at the house, I wouldn’t think about Mom, yet there she was—a mirage wavering on top of the present moment. The house was offering me a memory montage and I didn’t want it. I refused. What pains and energies was that old house still carrying? Or maybe the worst parts of our summers had been burned off with new families, new memories and the scorching heat of many Augusts.

  I shivered in the heat and spoke out loud. “Stop, Lainey. Enough. It was a long, long time ago.” I peeked into the backseat at my sleeping children, took a sustaining breath and opened the door. “Wake up, sleepyheads. We’re here.”

  They stirred slowly until Daisy let out a squeal. “George. Wake up. Wake up. We are here. In the South!” Daisy unsnapped George’s car seat buckle and then her own seat belt and together they tumbled out of the car, falling first to the ground and then popping to their feet. This was my family now. The one I’d made and the one I’d keep.

  “Look,” she said to her brother. “It’s just like the picture.”

  George’s sleepy face broke into a smile.

  The three of us walked to the front door, which was ajar with the screen door closed. We entered and stood in the hallway. Even as a kid, I could have been blindfolded and known what friend’s house I was entering just by the aroma. Homes were extensions of the souls that lived in them, and I could feel Bonny everywhere. Each room held its own personality. Bonny had made the place her own again.

  She’d sent me a layout of the house and I’d divided it into the guas of feng shui, giving her little “cures” to set in each section. I noticed she’d placed a piece of artwork, a charcoal drawing of an antique medicine bottle, in the “Life Purpose” section. I smiled.

  Through the hallway and into the kitchen, my littlest loves trailed behind. My sight wandered slowly across the shiplap walls, which she’d painted white, the dark hardwood floors covered with scattered rugs. One of my favorite art pieces, which I’d given to her on my last visit to her in Charleston, hung in the hallway: a photo of a mother-daughter pair painted in wax with the mom’s face partly blurred out and the daughter staring out with a wide-eyed expression. I ran my hand over the corner of the canvas. Bonny had even hung it in the “Family” gua, as if I’d been there to tell her what to do.

  The kitchen, which had once been secured off from the rest of the house like an embarrassing relative, was now open to the living room, the wall gone and a large exposed hardwood beam above. I picked up a red candle and moved it to the table running along the back wall in the “Fame” gua.

  Bonny had pasted a little note on the door of each of the two back bedrooms—Lainey on one and Kids with a heart on the other. Mine was our childhood bedroom and just so happened to be in the “Creative” corner of the house—middle right side. In the days when I’d shared it with Bonny, it had two single beds with pink chenille bedspreads and baskets that slid underneath to hold our clothes. In a flash, I saw the three of us—Bonny, Owen and I—knotted together in one bed, waiting to discover if Mom was okay. In a way, we were still there knotted together, forever not knowing. I blinked away the image.

  I needed to leave. I shouldn’t have come.

  I could throw my suitcase back in the car, buckle the kids in their seat belts, speed back to the airport and jump on a plane. Tim would be waiting for us, joyous.

  Then the back screen door slammed its summer song and Bonny’s voice called my name. The chance to escape had come and gone.

  “Bonny?” I called out. And then there she was in the doorway of the bedroom, her hair wild about her face as if she’d run there, her smile radiant and her arms spread wide for a hug. I loved her so. I always had. Even in memory, and now in person, she always seemed surreal, a living painting.

  She took me in her arms and I held her so close, feeling her tremble below her thin T-shirt. She released me and yet we held our arms out, our fingers still entwined.

  “Look at you, just look at you!” she exclaimed. “Here.”

  “I’m so glad I am,” I said, and I let go of her hand to wipe away a quick tear, shocked that I suddenly really did feel happy to be back.

  “I know it’s all mixed,
Lainey. The good, the bad, the fun and the terrible. I was so afraid you’d change your mind.”

  “I almost did,” I said. “If you hadn’t shown up right when you did . . .”

  She threw her arms around me. “You can’t go anywhere. I’ve already decided: we are going to remember the good stuff, and there was so much of it! We are going to make all new and wonderful memories.” She then leaned down to the kids, who hung back holding hands with each other and watching us.

  “Hi, Daisy. I’m Aunt Bonny. I know I haven’t seen you since you were four years old. Hi, George.”

  They both stared at her until she ruffled Daisy’s hair. “You hungry?”

  “He’s always hungry,” Daisy said and pointed at her brother. “Always.”

  “Then let’s get something to eat. And then we can go to the beach.”

  “The beach?” George asked. “Let’s go there now.”

  From the far side of the house a door creaked and then a voice, so like Bonny’s but raspier, called out. “Mom?”

  “Back here,” Bonny said.

  Piper took hesitant steps into the room as if trying not to be seen, a slip of a girl but tall. So like Bonny that I expected to see a 1976 puka bead necklace around her neck and a neon peace sign embroidered on her jean shorts. She smiled at me, but there was reserve in that smile, something essential held back, and I didn’t know if that was her way or her way with me. It had been four years since I’d last seen her, and now she stood there, a woman instead of a young child.

  “Hi, Lainey,” she said and reached back for her ponytail, yanking out a rubber band and letting her hair fall over her shoulders.

  “Hello, darling,” I said to her. “You are so grown-up I can’t stand it.” I hugged her and then she bent to smile at the kids.

  “Hi, I’m Piper. You must be George and Daisy.”