I go inside and go to the bathroom and pick a snack—Vitamin Water and pistachios (with shells, because a study showed you eat fewer nuts that way but still feel just as full). Momma comes in to pay, and I meet her at the register. The woman behind the counter smiles stiffly, but her eyes are kind. Then we turn and this older man (sixties, maybe?) scoffs like we almost ran him over, even though we totally didn’t, and he makes a big radius around us on his way to the bathroom.
“Let’s go, Ellie,” my mother says quietly.
The man glares at us as he pushes the bathroom door open. I don’t think we were in his way. No, you know what, I know we weren’t.
If I was by myself, that man wouldn’t have looked twice. People always think I’m white because of my hair and my green eyes, unless I happen to be rocking a really good tan, but even then, I usually just get The Squint and some rude question about what I am. Nothing like what Zakir and Momma have to deal with.
By the time we get back outside, the people at the pumps have downgraded from outright staring to the occasional meant-to-be-covert-but-not glance. It’s not that our family never gets looks in DC, what with me looking like Daddy and Zakir looking like Momma. Sometimes when the four of us are together, people will watch us, and you can see it breaking their brains trying to figure out how we fit together.
I just wish it wasn’t so hard.
Scarlett
We are so completely badass. If Wonder Woman and Beyoncé had a baby together and then that baby got coached in badassery by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she would still only be almost as badass as us right now. See, my dad has this cabin-opening checklist. And usually it’s his job to do all these little things to open the cabin and Mama’s job to open a bottle of wine, so I was kinda nervous as to how today would play out, but nope.
Check the deck, check the house, check the dock. We got this. Make sure the roof is okay and the window screens are intact? All in a day’s work for three badass ladies like us. It’s like Skyler has Dad’s entire check-in list memorized. She even directed us on how to do all kinds of fancy boat stuff to the boat. (She’s about as obsessed with boats as those guys who talk about sailing all the time and wear shorts with whales on them.)
I’m thinking it’s all going to go off without a hitch when I hear a shriek from the living room. I take the deck stairs two at a time and find Skyler jumping up and down on the couch and pointing at a bookshelf.
“Mouse! There’s a mouse! I saw it go under there!”
I peek under the bookshelf.
“BE CAREFUL! IT ALMOST BIT ME.”
I go to the kitchen and grab a broom.
“OHMYGOSH, DON’T KILL IT.”
I give her some extreme side-eye. “Do you want me to leave it there?”
“NO! Just, like, sweep it out of there gently.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
I wedge the broom under the bookshelf (gently, before Skyler has an empathy-induced heart attack), but I still make sure to give the mouse a good nudge, because vermin. The mouse is more than happy to run out the open front door, and Skyler is more than happy to screech at it until the tip of its pink tail disappears.
She steps down from the couch cushions and throws her arms around me dramatically. “You saved my life.”
“I mean, I don’t want to brag, but you would pretty much have rabies right now if it weren’t for me.”
“Truth.” She lets me go.
“But if we see any spiders, those are on you,” I say.
“I’ll take spiders over mice any day.”
“Are you kidding? That mouse was adorable. It was all fluffy, and it gave me this look, like, ‘Hey, Scarlett, what if you just carry me around in your pocket and feed me cheese on occasion?’”
“It gave no such look.”
“Like you would know. You were too busy screaming.”
“Okay, but speaking of cheese—”
“What are you—”
“Speaking of cheese, I think we should go eat some and, like, celebrate how awesome we are.”
I shrug and follow her to the kitchen. I’m an easy sell where cheese is concerned. My sister grabs some kind of hard white cheese with a purple wine-flavored rind. She picked it this morning when the two of us decided we’d better go to the grocery store seeing as how A) neither of us had seen Mama eat anything since before the clothes-pocalypse, and B) there was nothing at the lake house but coffee (Mama took every last bit of it with us and said she hoped like hell Daddy woke up jet-lagged). Skyler plucks a knife from the knife block. She keeps tugging at the plastic packaging on the cheese and biting her lip, but her fingers can’t seem to grasp the edges. I’ve never seen her struggle so hard to open something before.
“Sky, do you—?”
She jerks her hands away and lets the cheese fall to the counter. “Here. I just put on lotion, and it’s super slippery. Do you mind?” She laughs weakly. I pick up the cheese package, but I don’t feel any lotion.
I want to say something to her. She’s silent behind me as I tear open the plastic on the first try.
I pick up the knife. Put it back down. “Sky, are you okay?”
That weak laugh again. “I’m fine. It was the lotion.”
I try to make my voice as sweet and un-Scarlett-like as possible. “Are you sure?”
“Scar, just cut the cheese.”
Cut. The cheese. We both happen onto the double entendre at the same time. We have the combined humor IQ of a twelve-year-old boy, I’m not even kidding. I crack first, and then Skyler starts snickering, and then I snort, and it’s all over. We laugh until my stomach aches and I slap the counter. It takes a good two minutes for us to recover, and then I can cut the cheese (the block of cheese on my counter—get your mind out of the toilet). We each grab a slice and clink them together like they’re wineglasses.
“L’chaim,” says Skyler.
“Cheers to having giant lady balls and knocking out the entire list by ourselves.”
We both stuff our faces with cheese. After a few moments, Skyler tilts her head to the side, listening.
“Is that . . . Mama?”
I freeze and tilt my head too. From somewhere outside, I hear: “Dadgum-fercockt-POS-water-pump-bastard!”
I withhold a snicker (mostly). “Yeah, we should probably go check on that.”
Skyler and I hop up and run outside. Well, first, I put the cheese back in the fridge (priorities). We rush to the shed where the water pump is.
Mama’s hair is a mess, and her clothes are splattered in water and dirt. She sweeps her curly brown hair back into a ponytail, smudging her cheek with her dirty hand in the process.
“Is everything okay?” asks my sister. She makes her patented Skyler-question-asking face. All big blue eyes and blinking lashes, and you feel like you have to say something comforting because she might cry if you don’t. She is really freaking exhausting sometimes. It seems to work on Mama though.
“I’m fine, baby.” She scratches her temple. Another smudge. “I just had to get the water pump going, and it doesn’t work worth a damn.” Da-yum. Mama’s accent stretches all the four-letter words from one syllable to two. “Can you go in the house and turn on the faucet to see if it worked?”
“Sure,” we both say at the same time (twin jinx!) and run back inside.
“I totally forgot about the water pump,” says Skyler.
“Me too, and it’s the worst part.”
I go to the kitchen sink and turn on the faucet. C’mon, we’ve got this. Instead of water, a hissing noise comes out. Okay, maybe we don’t got this.
“Sky, run and tell Mama it didn’t work.”
She nods and runs back outside. After a few seconds, I hear her yell, “Okay, turn it o—”
Did she say on? I think she did. The sink is still hissing in front of me. “It is on!” I yell back.
Or maybe she said off.
The hissing is getting louder. And I think I just heard a clunk. And maybe a rushing sou
nd, like—
Water explodes out of the sink and hits me in the face and soaks me all down my front. I scream some things. And by things, I mean swear words. Footsteps coming my way, Mama and Sky, but I manage to get my act together and turn off the sink. Unfortunately, not before they get splattered with water too. I sweep my wet hair out of my face. Why is there still the sound of water running?
“The fridge!” yells Mama.
The water dispenser on the fridge is shooting out water even though no one is pushing the button. Mama runs over and tries to catch it with her hands and fling it into the sink, but she mostly just gets herself wetter and more frantic.
I leap over and hit the lock button on the water dispenser, so it stops coming out.
“I think we were supposed to turn off the water before we opened the faucets,” I say. Understatement of the year. Then I notice Mama’s face. “But, hey, we did it, right?”
She doesn’t say anything. Tightens her lips until they practically disappear.
“Why does everything have to be so hard?” she whispers. And then her posture goes all to hell.
“Mama?” I do my best to say it in a Skyler voice. It’s the first time I’ve seen her shoulders slump. Maybe ever. I grip the counter.
Her eyes lock on my white knuckles, and she forces a calm smile onto her face. “It’s going to be fine, sweetie. I didn’t mean to get so upset.”
She’s lying. She is not okay, and she’s only saying she is because she thinks I can’t handle it. And maybe I can’t if my own mother doesn’t trust me with the truth.
She turns away from me and walks out of the room.
Skyler chases Mama up the stairs. I cannot go live with Dad. I need her to be okay.
I think of a night last September, right at the beginning of sophomore year. Earlier that day, I had accidentally spilled to my English teacher that I was cutting myself, and she said she’d have to tell my parents, since I was hurting myself. I walked into my house knowing it would be bad. I made Sky go upstairs because she’s a terrible liar, and I didn’t want them to know that she already knew and didn’t tell them.
Mama was reactive and dramatic, as always. She couldn’t sit down, I remember that. Almost like her frantic pacing would take her steps closer to solving what was wrong with me. Daddy was calm. He took my hand and said, “We’ll get you help. We’ll find someone you can talk to.”
But later that night, I heard them talking. Daddy was crying, and I remember thinking it was the scariest thing I had ever heard. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said.
And Mama was all, “I don’t give a damn what you think you can or can’t do. She’s our daughter. You don’t get to pick when you are and aren’t her parent. It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do, and we have to be better people than we are. For her.”
“I just—I need for something to go right. I need a break.”
I could picture him through the wall, sitting on the bed with his head in his hands. I grit my teeth thinking of it now. I wonder if that’s when he started seeing that lady at work.
Mama’s voice was strident in reply. “Well, that’s too fucking bad because parents don’t get breaks. Our little girl needs us right now, and we’re gonna get up tomorrow morning and we’re gonna help her. And we’re gonna do it the next day, and the next day, and every day until she’s okay because that’s what you do.”
Her rage warmed me like a cup of hot cocoa. I had always thought that Daddy and I were kindred spirits. That was the night I knew I was wrong.
And I realized, much as she vexed me, that when they fashioned my mama’s soul out of carpenter nails and lipstick and fireworks and glasses half empty, they saved the blueprint for mine.
I can survive without my dad. But I don’t know what I’ll do if losing him makes me lose her.
The doubt makes an empty space inside me, and all my darkest thoughts rush in to fill it.
We’re not going to make it. I’ve been trying so hard to be strong for her, but I don’t know if I can do this.
I’m fixated, a dog with a bone. Breathing is starting to seem really hard, and there are all these terrible things trying to reach their bony fingers into my brain and pull at my nerve endings until they snap. And the cheese knife is sitting so still on the counter where I left it, and a part of me is very tempted. More tempted than I’ve been in a long time.
Everything is your fault. Mama has to spend so much time worrying about you, and they’re always fighting because of you and your problems, and if they can’t be happy just having you in their lives, then you’re never going to be able to be happy with Reese. You’re never going to be able to be happy with anyone, and you’re never going to be able to figure your life out, and you’re probably going to cut again, and then Reese will break up with you or at least be really disappointed. He’d be so much better off with someone else. Stupid. Ugly. Hopeless. Worthless.
Every bad thing I’ve ever thought about myself, amplified and looping.
Too many and too much and now now now now now.
Do it now.
Make it stop.
I trace my fingertips along the scars that mark my forearms in straight lines, one by one by one. I could make another.
I won’t.
It would end the way I’m feeling right now.
Seven months and six days. Seven months and six days.
I cross to the freezer and grab a couple ice cubes and squeeze down on them as hard as I can, a coping strategy from my therapist that usually works. Usually. I walk over to the knife and pick it up. And put it down. And pick it up.
That’s when I realize there’s a girl standing in the doorway, watching me have this freak-out. I smile and try to pretend that I wasn’t doing what she definitely just saw me doing.
“Hey, Ames.”
Amelia Grace
I was hoping she would be the first person I saw. Only, now that I’m here, I have no idea what to do. I know what she was thinking about doing with that knife—it’s why I stopped dead in the doorway, so she’d have a chance to put it down and paste a smile on her face before my mom could see around my body. But maybe I would have stopped dead no matter what. There’s something about seeing her in person after so many emails that makes me forget how to breathe.
“Scarlett, hi.” Mom gives her a hug. “You’ve gotten so tall.”
She’s definitely taller than I imagined she would be, but I’m only five foot four, so everyone is tall. And she’s even more beautiful than in her pictures, all long red hair and curves and freckles. But somehow different. Edgier or sexier.
I stay on the other side of the room. If I get too close to her, will she know? I feel like my mom would know.
“Is Adeline around?” Mom asks, brows furrowed with concern.
“She’s upstairs.” Scarlett bites her lip, and I have to look out the window. “I think she’s not doing so well. Can you check on her?”
“Of course.” Mom squeezes her shoulder and leaves immediately. There’s something about the way she walks out of the room—her steps are so purposeful. I almost don’t recognize her for a second.
Skyler bounds in just as Mom is leaving. She grins at me, but her eyes are red.
“Amelia Grace!” she squeals, giving me a big, bouncy hug. “I haven’t seen you in forever! You look just like your pictures on Insta!”
And then it feels like it would be weird for Scarlett and me not to hug after I’ve just hugged her sister, and she must be feeling the same way because she takes a couple steps toward me. Her shirt is wet in patches, and so is her hair.
“Are you okay?” I ask. It’s a general Are you okay, but buried underneath is a very specific Are you okay? Because back when things were really bad, with the girls at school and the cutting, she used to email me every day. But that was three years ago, before our emails trickled to every few weeks and then every few months. A part of me wants to pick back up right where we left off, but—
“I’m fine,
” she says.
She hugs me, and it isn’t a big or bouncy one like Skyler’s, and it’s over too quickly, and it doesn’t answer any of my questions. I guess I thought we meant more to each other than that.
There’s the sound of another car pulling up outside, and Skyler runs out of the room to meet them, her chestnut ponytail swinging behind her. Scarlett takes exactly one step closer. She lowers her voice and says in a whisper that’s just for me, “I’m really glad you’re here.”
My heart squeezes in my chest, and I almost choke on my own spit. “Me too.”
The kitchen gets really quiet. I can hear Skyler outside, greeting the new arrivals with some unintelligible bubbliness. A trickle of water from the faucet goes drip-drip-dripping down the sink.
“I should, um, go upstairs and change.” She gestures to her shirt.
“Right. See you.” See you? Of course I’ll see her. We are living in the same dang house for the summer.
Her footsteps echo up the stairs, and I feel like I’m on the cusp of realizing some great truth. Then my phone dings in my pocket. Carrie? I type in my password. Nah, just a bunch of social media updates. Including one from Carrie. It’s a photo of a book she’s reading—she posts those a lot—with a tiny caption.
weekend plans
So she does have her phone. Well, maybe she doesn’t know what to say or maybe she’s feeling really bad about things or maybe she wishes it never happened and she never wants to see me again but she’s too sweet to tell me.
What if you just promised you wouldn’t kiss any more girls or go on dates or anything?
Maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal to promise that after all. If Carrie doesn’t want to talk to me, I mean, I don’t know anyone else in Ranburne who might be interested. And Scarlett, well. She’s in a relationship. I know this. She has emailed me about this. I have pretended to be happy for her on multiple occasions.
I could email Pastor Chris—he’s our youth minister, the one I was going to be serving with. See about being a junior youth minister when I come back in the fall, maybe sooner. I could promise him, like Abby said. I only have one more year of high school anyway. And it wouldn’t be changing who I am so much as it would just be . . . waiting.
The Summer of Impossibilities Page 5