Irene went to the window and watched him stagger down the back steps, walk across the lawn to the car. She screamed down at him to get out. She went over to the desk, picked up a stack of papers, old bills, letters, and flung them out the window. They showered the lawn. She kept screaming for him to get out, get out, even while he was reversing the car. Helen looked out the window and said, “He’s left.” Irene didn’t hear. She pulled his clothes from the closet, shirts and pants tangled together, and threw them after him. Tom came and put his arms around her but she pushed him away. My sister Joanne ran out of the room, down the stairs, and out onto the back lawn, in the direction of our father’s car. But Helen and I just stood there, watching in shocked silence. Helen turned to our mother and said, “What have you done?” Irene sat down on the bed, unmoving.
That night, we climbed into Tom’s car. I was sitting up in the front seat, between Tom and Irene. Tom turned out of the driveway and I looked back at the house, all the lights left on.
Behind us, my sisters stared straight ahead, exhausted from the arguments and the yelling. They clutched their backpacks to their knees. “Mom?” Joanne said, when Tom pulled onto the highway and the city vanished behind a corridor of trees. “Mom?” Joanne said again.
“What is it?”
“Where are we going?”
Irene smiled, her face gentle. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m worried.”
“Don’t worry. We won’t get there tonight.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“How long are we going for?”
“Just a few days. I promise. Just a little while. I didn’t think it would happen this way. But it’s okay. I’m not angry.”
Joanne leaned back rigidly in the seat. Beside her, Helen reached her arms out and held on to her.
Irene turned and watched them in the side mirror, her fingers tapping absently on the passenger-side window.
II
Irene was leaving our father because she was in love with Tom. In the car, she explained to us how she had married our father when she was nineteen. He was a good man, she said. He loved her very much and she had loved him. But now she was thirty, and he was thirty, and they had changed. She wanted to do what was best for us. “It’s nobody’s fault,” she said, turning to look at me. “Everything will be okay.” Tom drove straight ahead. On a winding road, he pulled over and Irene jammed her body out of the passenger door. She leaned over and threw up on the gravel.
My older sisters fidgeted in the back seat. Helen had a habit of biting her lips until they bled. She chewed her fingernails raw. She was forever picking at herself, pulling loose bits of skin from the corners of her mouth, her elbows and cuticles. Irene always said to let her be, she’d grow out of it one day. In the car, Helen nibbled angrily on her fingers. “Where are you taking us?” she said at one point, kicking the back of Irene’s seat with her sneaker. Tom glanced at her in the mirror but no one answered. Joanne stared grimly out the window and I fell in and out of sleep, lying tipped over on top of Irene’s legs. None of us spoke.
The clock on the dashboard read 1:00 by the time we got to Long Beach. Tom drove right up on the sand and parked the car. We couldn’t see anything but the moon and the stars. Tom explained about the moon and gravity, how the tides were pulled in and out.
He turned to look at us. “Why the glum faces?” he asked. “You’ll see. In the morning it will be beautiful.” I had moved into the back seat by then, and my sisters and I were huddled together. Tom smiled. “Oh, I see,” he said. “I can see what it’s going to be like. You girls are a team, right? Triple Trouble.” He laughed out loud.
“Why don’t you just shut up?” Helen said.
Irene stretched her arm out and touched him. “Not now. It’s too late for jokes.”
Tom lowered his chin. He got out of the car by himself, a gust of wind tearing through the open door, and began unloading the trunk. There was a big orange tent with metal poles that Tom assembled in the dark. Irene shone a flashlight out the car window, the beam tracing circles across the trees and the sky.
She spoke to the dashboard. “Don’t tell anyone your names. Not for a little while yet, okay? Not until we sort things out.”
Tom built a fire, tramping off into the night and returning with an armload of wood. We fell asleep in the car and Irene woke us, half dragging and half carrying us inside and tucking us into sleeping bags. We slept side by side all in a row: me between Irene and Tom, then Helen and Joanne. Tom had left the fire burning. Helen spoke up in the darkness. “That’s a fire hazard. You better put it out.”
“Enough,” Irene said.
Tom turned over and faced the tent wall and all of us lay in silence.
We hated them so much it hurt. Helen kept a journal and she wrote: Irene is not our real mother. Our real mother is living with our real father and we’ve been kidnapped by these hooligans. When the time is right, my sisters and I will run away. We walked in single file along the beach, Joanne rushing ahead, Helen staying back to wait for me. Together, we poked at sand dollars and starfish, combed the sand for unbroken shells. Helen said to me, “Do you understand what’s happening?”
I nodded.
“We’re moving. Do you know why?”
“Yes.” I knew all too well.
“Don’t worry,” Helen told me, shaking her head. “We’ll stick together. I’m going to take care of us.” In front of us, Joanne ran in circles then collapsed into an angry ball. We sat beside her, watching the tide move in.
That first night on the beach, Tom shook his head at us, said, “What have you been up to all day? I was going to take you swimming.” He showed us how to crouch down on our hands and knees and blow the fire so smoke rose thick from the wood. After dinner, Irene washed our hair under the cold-water tap, her fingers rubbing circles. She told us to go and dry by the fire and we stumbled away. Tom poked at the embers with a tree branch.
“How long will we stay here?” Helen asked.
Tom shrugged. “Who knows?”
“You shouldn’t have brought us, then.”
Irene stood behind us with her hands on her hips. “No,” she said. “But it was either that or leave you altogether.” Tom looked at her and Irene looked away, embarrassed.
Our mother slipped off her sandals and sat cross-legged on the ground beside us. She held out her arms for us but we just stood there, watching. She took hold of us and crowded us into her lap. We resisted at first but the smell of her seeped into our noses and her hair swung around and wrapped us in a dark cave. We held on to her too, our six hands grasping her wrists, her arms, anything we could reach. “It’s only temporary,” she said, kissing our hair. “Just to see. We’ll wait a few days and then go home.”
Tom said, “Wait a second, Irene —”
“They’re my kids,” she snapped. “They’re mine, okay? I just want to wait and see.”
Tom leaned towards us and touched her face with his thumbs. Irene shook her head and held us tightly. I wanted to run at him, stop thinking and push him down, fill his mouth with sand, push it up his nose until he stopped breathing. My whole body could be angry, mad as when Irene pushed the television over and the screen cracked and broke.
Tom unzipped the tent and crawled inside, Irene staring after him. The wind blew smoke from the fire all around us. “Wait for me here,” she said, gently removing our hands. She crawled after Tom into the tent.
We watched smoke from the fire drift above our campsite, no sounds from either them or us. Every so often Joanne scratched at the dirt with her feet to say that we were still there. By the time Irene came out again, the trees were indistinguishable from the night. She poked at the fire with a branch, sending a gust of embers into the air.
We paced the beach. With the tide out, it seemed possible to walk forever. Other kids played with plastic shovels, dumped out bucket after bucket, ran ocean water through the moats of their castles. We wandered circles around t
hem, taking stock of their clothes and their toys. I wanted to go home, even if it meant more of the same, Irene picking up the dishes one by one and throwing them out onto the back porch. Our father read the paper at the kitchen table. Sometimes when Irene screamed and screamed, he looked at her with complete incomprehension, not knowing why her face changed like that, why she scratched welts on her arms and then slid down against the wall like she was falling. Coming home from school, one of our friends cried when she saw the spoons and knives all over the floor, the bottles and the cracked dishes.
My sister Helen was the most pragmatic of us three. She said, “When we’re sixteen, we can go home again.”
Joanne stared morosely at her feet. That afternoon, she lay down in her shorts and T-shirt and we slowly buried her in sand.
During the days, my sisters and I avoided swimming in the ocean. Years ago, our father had taught us to swim. In a green lake, we floated on our backs, our bodies losing buoyancy. Our mother stood knee-deep keeping watch, pointing out to our father which one of us was going under, and he would pop us up as if we were weightless, keep us floating on the surface.
On our second night at the beach, we heard strange animal noises. Helen said it was a bear, pawing at our tent with his paws. Joanne tried to wake Irene but she just rolled over and sighed in her sleep. I dreamed Tom was sitting in the bathtub and I pushed the electric radio into the water. His body slapped against the bathtub. I watched in disbelieving silence until he died, his chest gray and shiny, sliding slowly underwater.
The next day, Irene forced us to go on a picnic. They took us to an outcrop of giant, black rocks where the tide came up in towering breakers. Tom said, “That’s a whale,” and pointed to where none of us could see. We sat at a nearby picnic table, chewing cold chicken and looking off into the distance.
Tom said, “Shall we go out a little farther?” Hand in hand, he and Irene walked up to the rocks, then climbed out on their hands and knees. At rest, they looked like seagulls, perched and waiting.
“Jerks,” Helen said, her eyebrows tensed.
Behind us, Joanne walked silently through our picnic site. She was gathering things one by one — the glass bowl of potato salad, the two-liter bottle of orange pop, Irene’s sunglasses.
“Are you making a run for it?” Helen asked.
Joanne ignored her. She climbed up onto the rocks above a shallow pool. Turning her back to us, she held the glass bowl out. Irene had just bought it, along with our groceries. It shimmered in the air. Joanne turned to look at us and her hands opened. The bowl tumbled down, cracking hard on a rock. She let go of the pop bottle. It fell upright, bouncing as it went. Then Irene’s sunglasses.
I turned and saw Tom running towards the picnic site.
Joanne waved her empty hands. “Goodbye,” she said. “Goodbye.”
Tom was standing there, his mouth open. “What has gotten into you? For Christ’s sake,” he said, shaking his head. “For Christ’s fucking sake.” He picked up what was left and pushed past us to the gravel parking lot.
“For Christ’s fucking sake,” Joanne said.
Irene just stood and watched us, her expression calm. There were drops of water on her skin and the sun caught on them and made them glitter. She started to move closer but we stared her down. She stopped walking, brushed her foot in the dirt, and drew a line. Her voice was low. “You don’t believe me now, but it’s better like this. I know you think it couldn’t be. You think nothing is worse than this. But believe me, there are worse things.”
She put her arms around our shoulders and took us with her, back to the car.
Off the rocks and onto the gravel, I tried not to hear anything, not Tom or Irene or my sister’s shoes on the rocks or the wind on the ocean or the rain starting to fall. We got into the car and Tom pulled roughly away from the parking lot.
After the car hit the highway, we were going fast and smooth. Tom said, “This is what I think. I think we should leave tomorrow. You don’t think he’ll follow us, right? You said so yourself, he doesn’t give a damn. Four days is long enough. If he doesn’t care, let’s just go.”
Our bodies fell together as if the car were tipping, one body slumped to the next. Irene’s voice was barely audible. “Yes,” she said, nodding. “Let’s leave tomorrow.”
Joanne was crying in the back seat. “How do you know?” she said. “How do you know he doesn’t care?”
Helen put her hand on Joanne’s head and stroked it back and forth. “Mom left a note. I saw it. He could come if he wanted to.”
Tom looked sideways at Irene then back at the road.
“You have to tell us where we’re going,” Helen said. “It isn’t fair to keep us in the dark.”
“To stay with my sister,” Tom said. “She has a cottage, right beside the ocean, just like here.”
Irene’s voice was barely audible. “Tom and I will take care of everything. When it’s warm you can swim in the ocean. I’m going to get a job. In a store maybe. You’ll meet all new kids.”
“We already have friends,” Helen said.
“New kids,” Irene said, smiling stubbornly. “You’ll make new friends.”
Joanne shook her head. “We don’t want new friends or a new school. You said we’d go back. You promised. You said we’d stay here a few days and then go home.”
Tom cut in, “Look, it isn’t easy for any of us.”
“I don’t know,” Irene said.
“How come you can’t keep your promises?”
“Don’t talk to me that way.”
“You lied to us. You said we’d go home.”
“I didn’t say that. I said maybe. Maybe isn’t the same thing. And anyway it’s too late to go back now.”
“Why is it too late?”
“Because I’ve decided, okay?”
“You never asked us,” Joanne said. “Maybe we would have stayed with him. Maybe we wouldn’t have missed you. Do you understand? I miss him, maybe we wouldn’t have missed you.”
Irene didn’t move. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.”
She leaned towards Tom and then she half turned and her face was against his sleeve. We were waiting for her to lash out, to bang her fist against the window or throw something, smash the cassette tapes on the floor. But she stayed where she was and Tom patted her shoulder steadily. My sisters and I held still, as if we could change things by refusing to move.
The car hit eighty, ninety, one-twenty, and Tom looked sideways at Irene. He was nothing like our father. Tom’s face was handsome and strong, and his hair, light blond, curled in tufts. Our father’s face was dark and sad. Our father combed his hair with Brylcreem until it shone. He smelled of eucalyptus and cooking and warmth. But he and Tom looked at Irene with the same expression, mixed-up sadness and love and strange devotion.
Our last night on the beach, we listened to them breathing, the heaviness of it like their bodies were emptying out. We listened for animals, for a bear to come crashing through the trees. It could hear that breathing, we thought, and it would be drawn to us.
They said words aloud, mumbled like they were whispering secrets. She said, “Tom,” and he started awake, put his arm around her.
Joanne complained that her stomach hurt. She pressed it with her fingers, wondered aloud if she had cancer, or if she were dying, slowly, in the middle of the woods and no one around. We heard other campers walking by, saw the finger-probe of their flashlights sliding across the tent, heard the trudge-trudge of their feet on gravel. I lay with my forehead pressed against Helen’s neck. Every so often she would loop one arm across my shoulders, as if to reassure me.
Still Irene and Tom slept. Even when the ocean sounded so loud it seemed like it was coming right at us, all the land pushed under like a broken bowl, they slept, breathing heavily. We fell in and out of dreams, finally waking hours after they had risen. Tom slid the metal poles smoothly through the loops and the tent came down, the orange f
abric floating like a parachute towards us.
III
On the fourth night, we arrived in North Bend. One by one, we climbed out of Tom’s car. I remember Irene standing in the motel parking lot looking over us. Tom had gone into the office alone to sign for the keys. The wind fanned Irene’s hair out around her face and she looked at us, then down at her shoes, then back at us again. Standing under the motel lights, I thought none of this was real. Even then, I thought Irene would change her mind, she would take us home again and all of this would end.
They were standing in the motel room, their coats still on, when Irene broke down. Tom was walking from room to room, testing the light switches. “What will I do?” she said suddenly, raising her voice in desperation. “What have I done?”
Tom’s voice was muffled in the background. Irene screamed that he had tricked her, he had made her come with him.
“Irene,” he said. “Irene.”
My sisters and I crept out the motel door, into the concrete parking lot. We stood beside Tom’s car. Truthfully, I can’t say that we were angry with her. Only that everything she was no longer surprised us. From where we stood we could see the ocean. If we looked down, we could see where it met the sky in a thin white line. The air smelled salty and cold. Finally, our mother came outside. “We’ll go home,” she was saying. “Tomorrow morning. We’ll pack everything up and go home.” She was looking past us, as if directing her words to the lights across the courtyard, to other people in other motel rooms. We didn’t even bother answering. Helen reached over and held our mother around the waist. The top of her head was level with Irene’s elbow. Joanne and I kicked at the gravel with our sneakers, sending the little rocks pinging off the cars. We heard the far-away whistle of a kettle going off and when we looked back, we saw Tom standing there, an outdoor lamp lighting his face, drawing fireflies to the air above him.
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