by T. Greenwood
“I worry about you,” he said, and suddenly I felt stupid sneaking a joint on my parents’ porch. My baby brother looking at me with such pity.
“Well then, we’re even,” I said.
While I was thrilled he’d found something he was good at, could make money at without breaking the law, I worried about him every time he went to work. Just a year ago one of the fires he was fighting caused the building to collapse, and two of his coworkers died.
“Are you ever scared?” I asked him.
“All the time.”
“Seriously, who runs into a burning building?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes, running into a burning building is the only way to save it.”
* * *
“Trick or treat!” A little girl dressed up as an Egyptian princess stood with her plastic jack-o’-lantern bucket outstretched. I quickly stubbed the joint out in one of my mom’s mums.
“Trick or treat!”
One family after another arrived: Disney princesses and superheroes, homemade costumes and plastic masks. So many kids. It was unbelievable. And every time a mother and father came up the walkway holding their child’s hands between them, I felt an ache deep inside my gut. Was I doing the right thing leaving Gus? Was I crazy?
By the time Avery came back, skipping up the sidewalk with my parents close behind, the candy was gone; we’d snuffed out the jack-o’-lanterns and turned out the porch lights to signal we were closed for business. Only my mother’s ghosts remained, dancing across the yard in the darkness.
My father had to carry the pillowcase Avery had used for her candy. He disappeared into the bathroom and came out beaming. “Ten pounds!” he said.
“She can’t eat all that!” I said.
“Oh, they’re just baby teeth,” my mother said, smiling.
I couldn’t sleep in my old room, which had been converted into my mother’s studio five minutes after I left the house. Even though it no longer resembled my childhood bedroom, the shadows were the same. The daybed she’d put in there for guests was lumpy, and the Windsor chimes kept going off every fifteen minutes. Ding, dong, ding, dong. I yanked the battery out of the clock and still tossed and turned for nearly an hour. Finally, I crept downstairs and hung out on the couch in the living room while Mark watched SportsCenter and I ate up all of my mother’s leftovers and pilfered Reese’s Cups from Avery’s stash.
* * *
In the morning, I woke to eyelashes brushing my cheeks. Butterfly kisses from Avery. I felt thick and droopy. A weed hangover. I also had eaten way too much candy.
“Morning, sweet bean,” I said, and she curled up under the blanket with me. Her body was small, her skin hot. “So are you ready to go to our new house today?”
She nodded and burrowed in deeper.
“Pilar will be there, and Daddy will come to visit in just a couple of weeks,” I said, feeling that pervasive sense of unease, of uncertainty.
She was quiet for so long I figured she’d fallen back to sleep.
“Maybe he’ll want to come live with us,” she said softly.
And I just held her. What else could I do?
As we were both dozing off again, my mom’s voice rang out from the kitchen. “Wynnie?”
“Yeah, Mom?” I said, slowly extricating myself from Avery. I tucked her back in under the blanket and sat up. I stretched and rolled my head, my neck cracking.
I padded into the kitchen, where she was making coffee. She was wearing a huge, puffy, hot pink robe and Cookie Monster slippers.
“What’s up?” I asked, grabbing a mug from the cupboard.
“Pilar called earlier while you were still sleeping. She said something’s come up—something with a TV program? An interview?”
“What?” I said.
“I don’t know exactly. She just said she’s sorry and she can’t leave New York yet. She’s going to have to meet you guys in Maine in a few weeks. Thanksgiving, I think. You need to call her to get instructions for getting into the house. She said she already gave you the key though, right?”
Beautiful Disaster
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. I needed Pilar. We were going to Maine together; I would never have agreed to do this alone. Part of me considered just getting in the car and driving back to New York. But then I thought of his voice on the other end of the line and I knew I had no choice. We weren’t safe in New York. Not anymore. I worried a little he would call the house again, but unless I answered what could he say? Besides, he’d made his point. He’d delivered his message. We had a deal, he and I. An understanding. His call really was just a friendly reminder, wasn’t it?
Avery and I left my parents’ house just after noon. I calculated it would take four hours to drive from Haven to Portland, not including pee stops, of which I was sure there would be many. In the off-season, the ferry that would deliver us from Portland to the island ran only a few times a day. We couldn’t make it for the noon ferry, so we’d have to plan on the evening one. While it did seem strange to be arriving at the house after dark, we didn’t really have any other choice.
There was only one main road heading east toward Maine. In order to get to Portland, I had to take Route 9 out of town. There simply was no other way. But that meant driving right past the Rousseaus’ house. Of course, I didn’t know how many of them still lived there. Robby’s father had been in and out of jail. Roxanne had been removed from the home not long after Robby went to prison. But Rick likely still lived there.
I gripped the steering wheel with both hands as I saw the small yellow farmhouse in the distance. I glanced quickly in the rearview mirror at Avery, who was babbling to her stuffed donkey, having an animated private conversation.
This was the road where the police had found Robby walking home that night as the sun fell. I had often imagined what they would have seen as they approached him from behind. His gangly, bowed legs, his high-water pants. Chin to chest, gaze at the ground, hands shoved into his pockets. When they pulled up next to him, rolled down their windows, did he know what would happen next? Did he understand this was the beginning of the end for him?
Son? You hurt? they might have asked.
Did he shake his head?
You get yourself in a fight or something?
How long did it take before they realized it was not his own blood that drenched his shirt?
I was jarred back to reality by something dashing in front of the car. A dog, a Doberman, I think. It was chasing the Honda, forcing me to slow as the Rousseau house came into focus. The dog was barking, jumping at the driver’s side door.
“Go away,” I hissed, tears filling my eyes. I glanced up quickly and looked at the house. There were several cars in the driveway. The screen door was hanging by one hinge. The yard was overgrown and littered with rusted barrels, old tires, and some sort of wire coop. There was a washing machine sitting out on the porch next to an old recliner.
The dog finally moved to the side of the road, standing erect at the edge of the yard, still barking. I pressed my foot on the gas and accelerated as quickly as I could. I glanced back only once, certain the dog was chasing us again. In the rearview mirror, as the house slipped into the distance, I saw the door open and someone come outside.
Feeling like I might vomit, I raced forward, intent now on reaching our destination.
* * *
Avery fell asleep as we crossed over from New Hampshire into Maine, and slept almost the whole way to Portland. My heart finally settled back into its regular rhythm, and when Pilar called, I put her on speaker, so grateful to hear her soothing voice. We talked for over an hour. She said she felt just awful she wasn’t able to be with us, but CBS Sunday Morning had called and wanted to do a feature on her. Since she would still be in town, her manager had set up several interviews with gallery owners over the next few weeks as well. She wouldn’t be able to come until Thanksgiving.
“So you still have the keys?” she asked for the hundredth time.
&
nbsp; “Yep,” I said. Thankfully, she had made sure I had a set of keys before we left. It was pure luck.
“The electricity is connected, but you’ll need to turn on the breakers. The panel is outside on the left side of the house. The oil tank is full, and the furnace should be working. Don’t use the fireplace yet, because the chimney still needs to be cleaned. I’ll have somebody come out when I get there. What else, what else . . .”
“Is there a hot water heater that needs turning on?”
“Yep. That switch is in the downstairs bathroom. And just a heads up, the water smells like rotten eggs. It’s sulfur. They say you get used to it.”
“Okay,” I said. When Gus and I lived in Colorado, we used to go to the hot springs, soak our naked bodies in the steaming, sulfurous baths.
“You have groceries with you, right? The basics?”
“Yep.”
My mother had taken me shopping earlier that morning the way she used to when I was in college. She’d filled a cart with all the essentials: milk, eggs, flour, and oats. Then bread, fruit, vegetables, canned soups and sauces, boxes and boxes of pasta. I’d tried to pay at the register but she’d shooed me away like she would have an annoying bug. I was embarrassed but grateful. At thirty-three years old, it would be nice to be able to afford my own groceries, but the $200 receipt had caused me to catch my breath.
“There’s a very small main street on the island, with shops where you can get some things, but it’s a total rip-off. For the tourists mostly, and for emergencies. You’ll want to go to the mainland and do a big trip after you get settled in. There’s no Wi-Fi. But there’s cell service, so if you have your phone, you can go online, deal with your e-mails and stuff.”
Frankly, I was looking forward to being disconnected. The idea of a world without the Internet seemed like something out of a storybook.
“I know you’ll say no, but I’m going to pick up another iPad.”
“I don’t need an iPad,” I said.
“Since there’s no Wi-Fi, I’ll get a data plan. I’ll use it too.”
Pilar has always been terrifically, terribly generous. Even when we all had nothing, she was the one who would show up at our house with giant jars of spaghetti sauce she got at Costco. She’d spend an entire paycheck taking us all out for drinks. She’d maxed her only credit card when I’d found out I was pregnant with Avery, buying us a stroller, a car seat, and a drawer full of onesies. And now that she actually had money, real money, the gifts had become more frequent and more extravagant. For Avery’s fourth birthday, she’d bought her a bicycle. When Gus and I split up, she came over with a cashmere floor-length robe and ten pints of Cherry Garcia ice cream. She’d also bought me an Apple TV to stream movies into my side of the house and gave me a brand new box of paints so I didn’t have to keep slicing open the existing tubes, scraping out the precious little bits of color left inside.
“Pill?” I said as I drove past a very large Paul Bunyan statue.
“Yeah, hon?”
I could hear Avery stirring in the backseat. I looked in the rearview mirror and watched as her eyes flickered open and she slowly oriented herself.
“Is this crazy?”
She paused. And I could picture her, thinking about how to answer this.
“A little bit,” she said. “But the good kind of crazy.”
“Thank you for letting me do this,” I said. “I’m really sad you aren’t going to be there with us.”
“You’ll be fine. And I’ll be there before you know it.” I could practically hear the swelling in her throat. “Love you, hon. Kiss that baby girl for me. And I will see you in like three weeks, okay?”
I nodded.
“Is that Auntie Pill?” Avery asked sleepily from the backseat.
“Hi, sweetness!” Pilar said loudly. “Call me when you get there.”
I followed the Google Maps directions my father had printed out for me to get to the ferry docks in Portland. And we followed a long line of cars onto the deck of the boat. The ferry would stop at two other islands before Bluffs Island.
Avery was straining against the straps in her car seat to see.
“We’re driving onto the boat?” she asked in disbelief.
“I know. Isn’t it crazy?” I smiled at her in the rearview mirror.
We parked the car on the parking deck and then got out with all the other passengers, careful to lock the doors. Everything we owned was in the backseat of the Honda or strapped to the roof. I hadn’t felt this portable for so long. Living in the duplex with Gus had domesticated both of us. Like turtles, or hermit crabs, we’d always been able to carry our most precious belongings on our backs. But having a house to live in, a house that belonged to us, somehow made the accumulation of possessions obligatory. It seemed the more space we had, the more things we needed to fill it. I thought of the closets and attic stuffed now with clothes and books and boxes. It felt liberating for our lives to be unencumbered again, to have pared things down to just the essentials.
“Let’s go see if we can get some snacks,” I said. Pilar told me there was a small café on the ferry.
As we climbed the narrow stairwell to the second story of the boat, Avery clung to my hand, oddly nervous. She was normally the kind of child who greeted life head-on, without reservation or fear. A kid who simply lacked caution—to the point I sometimes worried about her common sense. She was the kid who, after leaping into the deep end of a pool and nearly drowning, came up sputtering, “Again, again!” Gus and I joked she would be the death of us if she was still like this in high school. We’d already been to the emergency room at least a half dozen times with her for stitches and concussions. I seriously feared the next trip to the ER would result in a visit from CPS.
When she was only a year old, she fell down the stairs at Pilar’s house. I remember watching helplessly as she tumbled head over heels down the steep steps. In just a few breathless moments, it was over. Then there was only the heart-crushing sensation, the helpless, horrific fear that filled my body like something liquid. And I stared down at her still body at the bottom of the stairs, paralyzed. She had curled herself into a ball like some sort of pill bug, and when my legs finally complied and I raced down the stairs after her, she slowly uncurled and opened her eyes before squealing a blood-curdling scream. An egg had already risen up on her forehead by the time I reached her, turning black and blue before my eyes. But she was okay.
She later fell off of monkey bars, cut her chin open going face first down a slide at the park, shut her fingers in doors thrown open too wide, and broke her arm when she was jumping on the bed and fell onto the wood floor. In four years, she’d lived her life with a wild sort of abandon that both thrilled and terrified me.
But now, suddenly, she was tentative. Cautious. As we watched the city behind us recede in the distance, as the world around us turned to water, she clung to my hand and wouldn’t let go. It was as though she sensed my terror. But she was only four years old, how could she know? How could she possibly understand?
We stood in line in the little café, and I ordered a cocoa for Avery and a coffee for me. I got us each a sugary donut. Hardly a proper dinner, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to stomach much else. We sat together at a little booth, a Formica tabletop between us, and Avery silently sipped her cocoa and stared out through the glass at the dark, still water.
And while we were finally headed away, leaving everything behind, I felt a bit queasy, uneasy, but I wasn’t sure if it was from being on the water or something else. I’d only gotten seasick once before. When Gus and I were still in Providence, we had a friend at school whose family had a sailboat. He took us out during the jazz festival, and I thought I’d die. I spent the whole day holed up beneath the deck in the cramped bathroom, spilling my guts out. Everyone assumed I was just drunk. But for three days afterward, I still felt like I hadn’t quite gotten my equilibrium back.
“Mama,” Avery said. Her mouth was ringed with chocolate.
&n
bsp; “Yeah, sweets?”
“Isn’t Daddy going to be lonely?”
My heart stuttered.
“The loneliest of lonelies,” I said, reaching across the table to swipe a bit of whipped cream from her nose. “He is going to miss you so much, he’ll probably cry himself to sleep.” I knew the image would make her laugh. “And the tears will soak through the sheets, and the mattress, and fill up like water in the bathtub.”
“Like Alice!” she said, her eyes widening. Pilar had bought her a beautiful illustrated Alice in Wonderland pop-up book. “The Pool of Tears” chapter was her favorite.
“And he’ll have to swim to the bathroom and the kitchen,” I said. “He’ll have to wear his swim trunks and goggles every day, just to make a sandwich.”
She was giggling now.
“But he won’t drown,” she said.
“No, no, of course not. He’s a very good swimmer.” I reached across the table and plucked one long, spiraling curl from her cocoa.
“Tell me about my room again?” she said softly.
Pilar had told me to feel free to make ourselves at home. It had four bedrooms. She said to paint the walls if I wanted. To settle in. “Consider this our house,” she had said.
“Your room will be purple,” I said to Avery.
“Sparkly purple.”
Of course. We had stood together at the hardware store back in Queens and selected the shade of purple from the spectrum of chips. Violet Surprise, it was called. I had a hard time envisioning it on a wall, but Avery was determined. We’d also gone to the craft store and bought every bit of purple glitter they had in stock. I figured I’d just mix it into the paint.
“And there will be a swing?”
“Maybe. When Daddy comes we’ll see if he can put one in.”
“And a big pillow on the floor.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Can there be stars?” she asked.
“On the ceiling, like at home?”
“No,” she said. “On the floor. I want it to be like I’m walking on the sky. Upset down.”