But then my mother claps a hand on my shoulder, puts her flushed face up to mine, and yells, “You have no idea what you’re getting into, you think you know but you’re a child, what makes you think you can sleep with dogs and not get fleas?”
Dogs. Pam has moved back slightly. The look of doubt on her face breaks my heart. Is that the drug or just my head, everything feeling so powerful? My mother’s hand on my shoulder is like doom; I can feel her nails pressing crescent cuts into my skin through my T-shirt. I have a thought, and I do it without thinking.
“Who are you?” I ask my mother. She gapes at me like a drowning fish. I turn to the cop. “I don’t know this lady.”
The cop groans. “Okay, kid.” He puts his hand behind my shoulder as if he is going to push me closer to my mother. He doesn’t, though; I guess cops aren’t supposed to push. His hand just floats there, and I look him in the eye and try to look confused, which is not hard because the drug makes his face seem more like his face, which is sagged and bristled like an old cartoon hound dog’s. Sleep with dogs, she said.
“I really don’t know her,” I say, and there is some credibility to the rise in my voice. He stands back and looks at my mother, who is stamping with frustration.
She yells, “I can’t believe this bullshit! You’re all bullshit!”
The officer cocks his cartoon head and says, “What?” just under the volume of my mother’s continued indignation.
“She absolutely is my daughter, Olivia Reed, born November second, 1972. She is in danger, these kids are in danger, and why am I the only one who wants to stop this danger?” She bites her lip. The cop eyes her, considering. I can see the kind of rage she has cooking, a beloved-of-God, towering rage.
The cop can see it, too. “Okay, then, what’s your name?”
I give the name Desiree Kandinsky and a fake address, and he writes it down. He turns to Pam. “Name?”
My mother surges forward. “She’s lying! Can’t you see she’s lying?” She is crying in frustration, and she lets her fist come down on the officer’s chest. Pounding on the chest of a police officer in grief is something I have seen women do in movies, but real police officers don’t like it. He takes on a deeper voice to say, “Ma’am, I need you to step back.” Everyone stares at my mother to see what she’ll do, or that’s how it seems, though I know there are other cops taking down other kids’ names, making kids sit in different chairs, calling their parents.
“I’ll complain,” my mother starts, and I take the opportunity to retreat toward the next room in the suite, where the tall windows look out over the ocean-facing side of the Emerald. “You fucking pigs, I’ll complain. How can you trust a liar and a child, I will give you her birth certificate, she is absolutely mine.” Then she dashes forward, toward me, and the cops move to block her, and that is the last thing I see: her hair snaking out as she whips her head around, trying to wriggle past the giant cartoon police dogs, her eyes huge with horror as I disappear around the corner.
Somewhere, I can hear somebody puking. I grab Pam’s hand and pull her over to the window. We peer out. There is a drop to the slanting roof and dormer windows jutting from each of the floors below us. I can do it. “Kandy?”
Pam gestures toward the other room. Kandy is passed out on the bed, her golden hair spread out like a sun. Behind her, all of our small paint selves stand watch. “Don’t worry, she gets arrested all the time.” Pam looks at me, flushed, one eyelid twitching. “Don’t drop me.”
I swing down to the roof and slide the few feet to the top of the highest dormer window. From there, I talk Pam down to me: Hang, straighten your body out long, now drop, get low, take my hand. We do it four times, down to the ground, Pam shaking all over. When her feet hit the ground, she crumples like a dropped cloth and sits like that with her hands fisted. I feel elation when I hit the ground after a climb; she feels only a release from fear. I hold her head to my chest and tell her she is all right, and she seems so very slender and fragile, like a wounded bird, and I can feel her trust and her love all through my body, and I think this is the thing. We turn to go.
Someone calls, “Wait!” from the window, and Jake swings out, graceful tonight, his long body compressing and releasing like a spring. Behind him, kids spill out one after another after another, some of them very close to falling. I move beneath them instinctively, my arms held out to catch. When the last one grounds, I hug him out of relief. The moon is gibbous and grave, and we can hear the boardwalk even from here, the distant lights garish: some other careless world.
“Let’s go,” I say, and we run like hell until we are behind the dark pilings on the beach.
“Did they follow us?” somebody whispers.
“No, they don’t care,” says Jake. He throws out his elbows to crack his back. “They don’t care where we go.”
So we go swimming.
We leave our clothes wedged between sandy boulders and swim in our underwear. I am wearing a white cotton bra, no underwire, the only kind I own. The water feels like cold silk to my switched-on brain, as if I am rolling tangled in the long silk skirts of a crowd of giantesses. I try to convey this to Pam, and she asks Jake what he gave me. They murmur low and watch me swim. I am so angry with my mother that it feels like part of me rather than an emotion that might come and go. I thrash and dive. The salt water in my mouth is like food.
“Don’t swallow.” Jake holds me by my shoulders, and his hands on my bare skin feel incredible. “Olivia. Don’t swallow so much, okay?” I spit out the water in my mouth and let Jake carry me like a weightless baby through the waves. Someone yells, “Marco!” and the echo, “Polo,” rings back multiply.
I look up at Jake’s face against the star-exploded sky. “You picked me,” I say. “Why me?”
He is more Jake than usual tonight. His skin is white and his mouth is dark and the water is the color of the sky. “I just like you,” he says. He is larger and larger, and then I realize larger is only nearer, and he is kissing me. The breeze is prickly cool and the heat of his lips so ecstatic I wish I could crawl inside of it. Oh, I think. Oh.
I dive away, and when I come up, Pam looms over me darkly. “Do you realize what you’re doing?” she whispers, pulling me back toward shallow water. Her face is very close, gleaming wet and desperate. “This is Jake. This is not just anyone.”
I giggle and dive, resurface. “How long has it been going on?” she asks, so I dive again. This time she grabs me under the armpits and hoists me back up.
“Fuck you,” I say—in a friendly way, like “thank you,” like we say it all the time—and she drops me and walks back to the shore, rising streaming from the waves. Her back is narrow and pale as the moon, and her underwear clings invisible. She is a goddess, I think. She is a Vermeer girl. She is a mermaid’s first time on land. I turn around and swim to Jake, but by the time I reach him, we are all getting out, and when I call for Pam, she isn’t there anymore.
7
WHEN I EMERGE from the Emerald, Carrie has already called the police. She is sitting on the steps, hugging the beach bag to her chest. “Are you mad?” she asks.
“No, you’re right, it’s the next thing to do.” We are both thinking, I suspect, that it was the first thing to do and that I am doing badly at this. I feel guilty as we drive to the station house. One count of aggravated carelessness. One count of poor mothering.
The station house is just as I remember it, a squat brick building full of blond benches and fluorescent lighting. Distance from the beach sharpens my panic, my sense of the real, and Carrie seems satisfied to see me properly fretful, drumming my fingers on the front desk. A policeman shows us to a small office, where we sit on black plastic chairs as I fill out the missing persons report. Height: four-three. Eyes: brown. I rest my head on my hand. Carrie is texting, and I don’t say a word.
A man with a gelled wave of brown hair enters and introduces him
self as Detective something. Something Polish. I am not really listening. I am seized by imagery: Daniel cowering in a peeling green rowboat, the salmon man reaching for him. Daniel clinging koala-like to a piling as the water rises around him. Daniel in a basement, in a dog crate, rocking back and forth to clank the metal on the ground. Terrible, unstoppable, these thoughts. I am suddenly afraid I will cry.
The detective puts down the missing persons sheet and leans across his desk, crinkling his eyes in a practiced show of sympathy. “I have no doubt that we’ll find him. It’s only been an hour. First thing I’m going to do is alert my guys.” He pulls a radio from his belt and gives a short description of Daniel: nine-year-old white male, lime-green swim trunks. Officers respond in crackly code. The only thing I catch is 10-4.
“What about the father?” the detective asks me.
“What do you mean?”
“Would your son’s father have any reason to come looking for him?”
“Oh. No.”
“I understand it’s uncomfortable to consider, ma’am, but it happens.”
“No,” I say again. “His father didn’t come for him. That’s one thing I’m sure of.” Carrie gives me a spiteful look.
“Any other family members you think might want to . . .” He draws circles in the air with his hand. Dot dot dot. “Grandparents, maybe? Aunts, uncles?”
“No.” I feel like he’s fishing for something, like maybe he thinks I have kidnapped my children and there are sane, responsible people out there tracking us down. I have broken out of the asylum, stolen street clothes from a clothesline, something like that. I’m getting carried away. Why would he think that? I let an hour go by without calling the police, is that so unusual? I thought I could find him myself.
“It’s a possibility we have to consider.”
“All of his grandparents are dead.”
“That rules them out, huh.” The detective chuckles and then looks at my face and stops. I have lied a little bit; Sam’s mother is alive but poses no such threat, sucking oxygen from a tube in a retirement village in Arizona. It’s hardly a village. Whenever we visited, she said they were making her play the tambourine, and couldn’t we speak to someone about that? She would weep with frustration. Sam would read his father’s letters out to her, old letters she kept in a Velcro giveaway binder from a car dealership, and she would fall asleep and never remember which ones he had read.
In my family, grandparents go faster. My great-grandparents dropped like flies before my mother turned ten, two in a car crash, one of cancer, and one simply vanished, crawled, perhaps, beneath a porch like a cat would, to avoid a fuss. I never met my grandparents. My mother told me how they died, he of adrenal failure, and she of love, ten days later. My mother only ever showed me two pictures of them. She was in one of them, a chubby kid in a white dress with a frilly smock, blowing out birthday candles. My grandmother, her dark hair bobbed and waved, leaned over the cake, too, with a close-lipped smile, ready to blow out the last candles if her daughter didn’t have enough breath. My grandfather stood behind them in suspenders, with a dark beard, his expression unreadable due to photo glare on his glasses, like crazy neon bug eyes. The other picture was black and white, and in it my grandparents were younger. They were skating on a frozen lake. He was behind her, holding her around the waist, and she was clutching his arms for balance. They both wore earmuffs. Other people were skating behind them, a blur of motion against which my grandparents looked frozen.
I DON’T HAVE a single picture of my mother as I remember her. I never took one. The only pictures I have are the ones in my head. She didn’t have a camera, herself, so neither are there pictures of me as a baby. It pains me now that, while I snapped away at everything else in Ocean Vista, I didn’t take a picture of her lounging on the sofa in a square of light or kneeling to garden, kerchief-headed, a drop of sweat eking along her jawline. She was always with me. I didn’t think I needed any proof of her.
Later, I came into a stack of photos from her childhood, and these are what I’ve shown my kids. How strange for them to see a grandmother their own age, grinning toothless from the back of a horse. I told them that she died before they were born, and this satisfied them. She is gone and will not impose wet geriatric kisses or send preppy Christmas sweaters like Sam’s mother used to. They know that she is the source of my moods and of Carrie’s red hair, and that she and I fought, and that I left home young. Though I have been very clear that they may ask me anything about our family or about my past—that I had a withholding mother and they do not—they have asked me little. When a teacher directed Daniel to draw a family tree, in the branch that sprouted the Mom twig, he wrote: Grandmother. Red hair. Missing tooth. Rode horses. Mean.
I am sorry that he will never know her as she really was: a burning star, a tigress, a prophet. The heartbeat that fills the house.
THE DETECTIVE DRIVES us to the boardwalk in his squad car. We sit in the back, and I’m embarrassed. Carrie is enjoying it. She crosses her arms and sets her jaw, and I can tell she’s playing out some bad-girl daydream in her head.
We stand on the boards amid the happy throng and show the detective just where we lost Daniel, beside the snack stand. “I thought he was watching the grill cook,” I tell him. “I thought he was right there.” I think I see his green trunks through the crowd, but it’s a girl in a green sundress. Two cops mount the turnstile and turn onto the boards. On the street behind us, I see a cruiser stopped at a red light. I feel hunted, even though I know they are supposed to be helping me.
“Ms. Reed?” the detective is saying.
Carrie is glaring at me. “Mom!”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. Where were you folks headed tonight?”
“That’s our business.” There is something droopy about his face, some irritating sitcom goodwill that can’t be for real. I picture him with a three-day beard, and there he is, the cartoony hound dog, holding my mother back as she whips her hair from side to side and shrieks, reaching for me, as I back toward the great window of the honeymoon suite, toward the night sky and the promise of freedom. But of course he can’t be the same cop. I stumble backward a few steps, and my calf hits the seat of a bench. As I fall, I try to make it look like I am purposefully sitting down, but I can see in Carrie’s expression that I am acting weird. She crosses her arms over her chest and looks away. She hates me. She is wishing for her father.
The detective sits down beside me and engineers a moment of respectful silence. I could strangle him. “Do you need a hotel for the night?” he asks. “We need to know where you’re going to be in case we can’t get you on the phone.”
“We’ll be with you until you find him. Since you’re so confident.”
He sighs. “Ma’am, did your son know where you were headed?”
You can almost see the lightbulb blink on above Carrie’s head. “He could have read Kandy’s address off the GPS!”
The detective nods gratefully. “Then that’s where I need you to be, in case he’s on his way there. All right? You ladies had some dinner?”
Carrie shakes her head. The detective stands and holds out a hand to help me up. “I’ll escort you on over there. We’ll find your son.”
I stand up without taking his hand. As we walk to the squad car, I reach for Carrie, and she skitters away from me. We duck into the backseat and roll quietly through Ocean Vista. We are going to the station house for the car, but it feels for all the world like I am being driven home, contrite, to be escorted along the crooked flagstone path to my mother’s door, where I will hang my head and say, I’m so sorry I lost Daniel, I don’t know how it happened, and she will walk back into the house and never speak a word.
8
FOR THREE DAYS after the Emerald bust, I don’t go home. We can’t go back to the Emerald, at least not so soon, and our world is splintered, centerless. Certain kids look at
me with dislike. Pam watches me closely when Jake is around, but she hasn’t breathed a word to Kandy. I spend nights writhing sleepless on Kandy’s sandy sofa and days hanging out on the beach. I hear nothing from my mother. Every moment, I expect her to come barging into the arcade or into Kandy’s living room, pushing aside all the lazy, smelly brothers to get to me. Her failure to do so wears me down, and soon I am yearning for my sun-and-moon bedsheets, a plate of good food. A fresh strawberry. Sleep.
I leave Kandy’s sofa in the early morning and bike to my house, half-pretending that I’m sneaking in after an Emerald party and nothing has changed. There is a hose tap under my bedroom window that I use as a toehold so I don’t make telling footprints in the garden soil. I pop the screen inward and swing myself up with unusual gusto to get out of the lukewarm prickling rain that has begun to fall. I am halfway through and wriggling my hips over the ledge before I see my mother. She is lying on my bed, wrapped in her pink silk bathrobe, sad-eyed, cheek to my greasy pillow. An empty wineglass on my bedside table and a thumbed copy of Great Expectations speak to her vigil. I tumble in and replace the screen behind me.
She looks at me, but I don’t seem to register. I wait. Maybe she wants me to speak first. After a few minutes of standoff, she says with a chilling lack of affect, “I know you’re not stupid, so I assume that you are choosing to throw your life away.” She swings herself to a seated position and finds her slippers with her feet. “Everything I’ve ever done is for you. My whole life.”
She stalks out of my bedroom and slams the door behind her. It makes a huge wooden crack, and then there is the turn of a key I didn’t know existed in the antique iron lock below the doorknob.
This is not the first time she’s caught me sneaking out at night; last year there was a fashion among the youth of Ocean Vista to visit the bakery at four in the morning, when the baker would sell hot pastries for a quarter—the broken ones, the ones with burned edges. I heard about it at school and decided to go myself, not in a giggling group, like other kids, but alone. I loved it: the otherworldly feel of the night bakery—the yellow light and the smell of bread, so rich you forgot there had ever been another smell. The baker told me knock-knock jokes and let me sit on the floured counter. He knew my mother but wouldn’t say how.
What I Had Before I Had You Page 9