“Sorry, sorry,” Sam croaks. His voice sounds like the gravel I tripped up on earlier. He rinses his mouth out with tap water and cleans the sink without once turning to look at us. I am still standing at the table, unsure exactly what to do. My mother puts her head in her hands.
“You don’t come home all night,” she says into her arms. She says it about Sam and Alice, but it’s like she’s saying it to me. “Either of you.” She raises her head. Sam bows his head over the sink. Alice lowers her eyes. I try to back away, but my mother looks up at me and I freeze.
“I get a call from the police at four in the morning about Sam and Alice trespassing on private property.” Alice blushes fiercely, but she doesn’t tell our mother that Bea and I were trespassing too. “Which means that you both lied to me about spending the night at Bea’s house so you could go get plastered at some party.” My mother’s voice catches, but I can’t tell if it’s from anger or fear. It could be both. “And that Sam started a fight with a classmate who had to be taken to the hospital with a broken nose. His parents are thinking of pressing charges.”
I drag a chair across the rug-covered floor and sink down into it. Sam still hasn’t turned around.
“And he wasn’t even going to tell me,” my mother says to Sam’s unmoving back. Her eyes are filled with tears. “Fighting, Sam,” she says. “What are you—? What is this?” She looks around at the lot of us. Alice’s face is bruised. She and Sam are still wearing their costumes. My foot is swelling up inside my boot. My clothes are filthy and torn.
My mother looks back at Sam. “What’s going on, Sam?” she says. “Why are you doing this? What is this? This isn’t you.”
Hunched over the sink, Sam’s shoulders start to shake. At first I think he’s crying, but when he turns around, his mouth is set in a smile meaner than the blue streak in his hair. He laughs like there’s a knife twisting in his heart.
“How would you know?” he says. “How would you know what isn’t me? You’re not my mother.”
Alice and I have the same scared expression on our faces (I can tell because she looks exactly the way I feel). I’ve never seen my mother look so lost. “Sam,” she says softly, “you know that . . . your father—”
“Right,” Sam cuts her off. He lets out a cough of that strange forced laughter. “My father. Maybe you should call him, tell him what I’ve done. Right?” He stares at my mother. His hair falls in his eyes. He looks a little wild. I can see how tightly my mother’s teeth are clenched by the tensing of her jaw.
“You want to call my father?” Sam says, louder. “Huh? In Borneo? Right? With his new wife? Right? Isn’t that right?”
The tears don’t spill from my mother’s eyes. Her mouth is set like she’s been expecting this all along.
“Where does he call you from, once a year?” Sam asks. His hands grip the sink like it’s a lifeboat.
“I don’t know,” my mother says. Her voice is strange and far away. Across the kitchen, Alice has stopped breathing. She inches along the wall to the door. I want to go to her, but I can’t move. My cheek stings like it’s been slapped.
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
My mother shakes her head. “I don’t know, Sammy.”
Sam’s face crumples in on itself. “You’re lying. You’ve been lying to me all along.” My face is a statue. I can’t even blink.
“When he—” My mother clears her throat. When she speaks, it’s almost like the words are rehearsed. “Your father didn’t remarry. At least, as far as I know. He didn’t leave me. Us.” She takes a breath. “I sent him away.”
“Why?” says Sam. “Where to?” He spits out the words. “Not to Borneo.”
“Not to Borneo.” My mother turns around in her chair to face him. “Although he could be there, for all I know.” Her hands are clasped so tightly together that her knuckles are white.
“Seth tried to tell me,” she says, and it’s almost as if she’s talking to herself, “but for a long time I wouldn’t listen because I loved him so much. I loved you both so much.” The silence in the room is stifling. I can’t breathe.
Sam’s face is hard. “What do you mean? Tried to tell you what?” My heart is in my knees and sinking lower.
My mother stares straight at Sam, unflinching, like this is something she’s been wanting to say for years. Wanting, and dreading. “Sometimes,” she says, “there were things Christopher would say, or do, that were very worrying, and—”
“What kind of things?” Sam interrupts. Alice takes tiny steps toward the door. My mother doesn’t notice.
“Bad things.” My mother touches her face as if to check for tears. “Horrible things. He’d say things about . . .” She looks over at Alice. Alice stops her inching away. “Things about you,” my mother says finally. “And the girls. Very, very worrying things. I didn’t make the decision lightly,” she says to Sam. “But I didn’t want him near you three anymore. I didn’t think it was safe.”
“Safe.” Everything about Sam right now is blank. His gray face, his monotone voice, the way he’s standing by the sink like he’s about to jump into it, or disappear. But not like his father disappeared.
“Yes. Yes.” My mother answers Sam’s word like a question; then, when he doesn’t say anything else, she goes on. “And after Seth died, I was sure . . .” But she falters again. “I sent him away. I—I got a restraining order and he never came back. I don’t know where he is. I get a call sometimes, twice a year maybe, from an unknown number, and I think it’s him, but he never speaks.”
My tongue unglues itself from the roof of my mouth. “What . . . ?” I say. I’m not sure what to follow that up with. The word sits in the silence like a needle in a storm. There’s this strange whooshing noise inside my head. I remember a slap across my cheek in a hallway; I remember hands on my shoulders pushing me down, keeping me underwater; I remember being told to forget.
“So it was you. You did it. You sent him away.” Sam’s voice is choked. He might not have spoken for a thousand years. My heart hurts for him. I look across at Alice. My heart hurts for us all.
“I was afraid of him,” my mother says again. Repeating things is supposed to help you remember. “Of the things he said sometimes. I didn’t want them to be true. I didn’t want to be right, but I couldn’t take that chance. I didn’t want anything to happen to any of you.”
There is a crack opening up in the middle of the kitchen table. The typewriter and the secrets box are too heavy for it. They’re pulling the table down. They’re opening up a hole in the floor. The whole room rips apart. There it is, large as life. Our lives are being blown wide open. I open my mouth as wide as the chasm in front of me and I say it: “It was already too late.”
Alice’s eyes are wider than eyes have the right to be. She looks like she’s crumbling apart. Like she’s been felled and you could count the rings of her to know how old her soul is.
“It was too late,” I say again. “It had already happened. I saw him once, in Alice’s bedroom.” Alice shakes her head. My mother looks at Alice as if she’s never seen her before. “He slapped my cheek and told me it was just my imagination. I believed him because—” I stop. “I believed him. I asked him about it a few weeks later and he—”
“Pushed you under the water.” Alice’s voice is a whisper. Her eyes say she didn’t know that I knew. I want to tell her I hardly knew myself. The sick, guilty feeling rises up in my throat like bile.
“Is this true?” My mother’s face is grayer than Sam’s. Alice looks around at us all, and before we can stop her, she bolts from the room. My mother runs after her. Sam turns to the sink and retches again, but this time it isn’t because of the alcohol still swimming in his system. He slides along the side of the kitchen counter to the floor. I stare after Alice and I hardly dare to blink.
***
He was always really nice, afterward
. Sometimes he brought her Pop-Tarts and Elle magazine. Sometimes he told Mom to stop badgering her about homework. This morning he went all the way to the pâtisserie in the village close to the house they were renting to get her pain au chocolat because it was her favorite. He didn’t get Sam or Cara anything.
Alice didn’t know it could be so hot in October. Sam and Seth and Christopher went around topless the whole time; Seth stocky and broad and blond, tanning as well as the locals over his tattoos. Christopher stayed pale no matter how long he stayed in the sun, and his chest hair—black as the hair on his head—stood out against his white, white skin.
Mom and Cara felt the heat too. They hardly ever changed out of their bikinis except to go to dinner in the village, when Mom put on her favorite vintage sundress and swept her hair—dyed blue to match the water—into an effortless bun. Alice knew that Mom’s hair was dark blond like hers and Seth’s underneath the dye, but in all her thirteen years, she didn’t think she’d ever seen it.
“Alice, come in the water, it’s amazing,” Mom called from a few feet out from the shore. The Mediterranean was smooth as a lake and Mom was like a mermaid floating along the surface. Farther in, Sam and Cara were screeching and splashing. Christopher was putting on suntan lotion at the edge of the water.
“I’m good here.” Alice put on her sunglasses and opened her magazine.
“You’ll roast,” Mom said. “At least put on your swimsuit. Are you drinking enough water?”
Alice didn’t look up from her magazine. “I’m fine, Mom.”
Christopher got into the water, and he and Mom floated and swam and kissed. Alice kept her eyes firmly on her magazine.
Seth dropped down onto a towel beside her. He poked at her knee with his camera. “Comment alley-voo mad-moose-sell Alice?” he asked in atrocious French. “Not in a swimming mood?” he said, slightly more seriously.
Alice shrugged and shook her head. Seth nodded toward Mom swimming happily in the water. “Nice to see her relaxing a bit this time of year,” he said. “Makes things feel almost normal.”
“That’s what Cara keeps saying,” Alice said, putting down her magazine.
It had taken a fair amount of persuading to get Mom to agree to a seaside vacation during the accident season. Seth had tried to suggest that maybe the accident season wouldn’t follow them this far from home, but his theory was quickly proved wrong. On the first evening the table in the kitchen of the rental house collapsed on Cara’s legs. On the second day Sam stepped on a sea urchin and Mom spent an hour pulling out the tiny spines with a sterilized needle. Yesterday Alice’d been stung three times by a wasp. Still, Mom didn’t seem nearly as bad as usual this year.
Seth was still gazing out at Mom and Christopher.
“D’you like him?” Alice found herself asking. She bit her lip once the words were out. Seth gave her a measured look.
Seth was one of those grown-ups who didn’t talk down to you, and who always took you seriously. He’d never pretend he didn’t know who you were talking about just to make you repeat it.
Sometimes Alice thought about telling Seth. She had the words all rehearsed. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but . . . I don’t know if I’m going crazy, but . . . I don’t know if I should be saying this, but . . .
Alice scratched at an insect bite on her leg and Seth looked back at the water.
“I like him okay,” he said lightly. “He’s good for your mom.”
Alice didn’t say anything. She knew Seth was right. It was the middle of the accident season and Mom was swimming in the sea—okay, the Mediterranean didn’t have any waves or sharks or anything, but it did have sea urchins, and Mom was afraid of everything during the accident season usually. But she didn’t even wince when Cara ducked Sam under the water.
Seth chuckled beside her. “And Sam’s a great kid,” he said.
Alice watched Sam and Cara in the water. They were twelve, but they seemed much younger. They were stepsiblings, but they looked like twins. Seth held up his camera and took some pictures. He was right, Alice thought again. She knew in the pictures they’d all look like a family. The mom and the dad, the two sisters and the brother, the favorite uncle. Everything nice and happy and normal.
Seth turned suddenly and looked at Alice again. “Why?” he asked, his eyebrows drawing together slightly. “Do you like him?”
Alice’s breath caught in her throat. She told herself Seth was just asking her the same question she’d asked him, but something about the way he was looking at her—kind of concerned but almost not surprised—made her want to tell him even more.
Out in the water, Mom was laughing. Christopher circled Sam and Cara, pretending to be a shark. Alice glanced back at Seth, who seemed to still be waiting for an answer. She shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. Still, Seth looked from her—huddled fully dressed on her towel—back to Christopher in the water, and he was frowning.
“Seth! Seth!” Cara called. “Help! The shark is going to get us!”
Seth waved at Cara and said, “Just a minute, I’ll save you,” but before getting up from the towel, he crouched and looked right into Alice’s eyes.
“You sure you’re okay?” he asked her.
Alice didn’t say anything, but she forced a smile and a nod. Alice didn’t say anything, but she thought she saw a hint of understanding creeping into her uncle’s eyes.
17
When my mother comes back into the kitchen, I ask about Alice, but she shakes her head. “She needs some space,” she says. “Time. Something.” She looks at me, but her eyes are unfocused, so it’s more like she’s looking through me.
“When you nearly drowned that time,” she says, as if from far away, “he said he’d rescued you. He pulled you back to shore.” She can’t seem to make herself say his name. “He pushed you in.” It isn’t a question, so I don’t answer. “He . . .” My mother looks like she is about to pass out.
“Mom, where’s Alice?” I ask her again.
“She’s gone to . . . she needs to . . .” my mother says vaguely, “process . . .” She wanders out into the hall. Her feet tread heavily on the stairs. I make to go and follow her, but Sam speaks up from where he’s sitting crumpled on the floor.
“Don’t leave me alone right now,” he says. His head is in his hands like it’s too heavy for his neck. Like his whole body is too heavy to even sit up straight. “Please don’t leave me alone right now.”
There is too much. There is just too much. Sam looks so lost. There’s a big difference, I imagine, between having a father who walked out on you and having a father who is a monster. But I don’t know what to say to him. I want to ask whose nose he broke, but I’m pretty sure I know the answer. And I have no idea how to feel about it.
I sit back down. I take a breath, then I take out my phone. I try Alice’s number first, but she doesn’t pick up. Then I call Gracie.
She guesses by the sound of my voice that something’s not right. She says, “I’m coming over.” A little voice in my heart tells me I’m glad that my mother has someone like Gracie to rely on. I think about Bea tangled on a mattress with Carl while Alice ran away from the wolf. I wonder who Alice has to rely on. I wonder who I have. I look down at Sam. He is looking up at me. His eyes are muddy puddles. I sit down in front of him and put my hands on his knees.
“Sammy.” I have too much I want to say and too much that I don’t want to say but I feel like I have to. My voice jams in my throat, so I swallow to make it come out. I don’t know what to do. “Maybe we should ask Bea to read the cards for us,” I say.
Sam leans back and gives me that sad, sad smile I know so well now. “Bea doesn’t know everything, Cara.”
“But the cards—”
“Bea doesn’t know everything.” He says it again, with finality. “She’s just another lost kid like us.”
I take my hands off Sam’s kne
es and put them into my pockets. “I know,” I say in a very small voice. “I know.”
By the time Gracie arrives, my mother has joined us in the kitchen again. We drink microwaved coffee and Sam starts to sober up. He and my mother don’t talk about Christopher. It’s like he’s here, sitting at the table between us, like he’s a ghost or the elephant in the room.
I remember Alice, younger, skinnier even than she is now, all bundled up in her accident clothes—hurt, but not by accident. I remember seeing Christopher with her, and it’s like a scene playing over and over in front of my eyes, but not real, and mostly the girl in the scene is a foresty woodsprite and the man is all metal. Metal hands on leafy skin, metal mouth telling lies. Metal teeth, metal heart. Metal breath saying it was all my imagination. Metal arms holding me under the water. I can’t fly away from that kind of thing anymore. I have no wings. I am not the little fairy girl bouncing on her silver Converse.
I knew all along. I type it up on Elsie’s antique typewriter and I think that it is the biggest secret of all. Then I look at Sam, and there is far too much going on in my heart for any of it to come out through the typewriter keys.
I try to call Alice again, but she doesn’t answer. I try Bea’s phone with the same result. I call Kim and Niamh and even Nick—although just hearing his voice makes my skin squirm—but none of them have heard from her. Finally Sam and I decide to go look for her. My mother and Gracie stay in the house and Gracie, echoing my mother’s words from earlier, tells us that Alice will come back when she’s ready, that today was a lot to process. My mother looks slightly reassured, but Sam and I go out anyway. When the front door closes, Sam breathes deep for the first time tonight. The ghost of his father hasn’t followed us out here.
We walk along the river. We are silent, maybe so that the ghosts and memories can’t hear us. Maybe because we don’t know what to say. The rain isn’t heavy enough for us to put up our hoods, but little beads of water mist our hair. Our shoes slide through puddles. My left foot aches every time I put my weight on it, but I concentrate on the swing of my arms and the beat of my breath and the sound of the river, and it soon becomes bearable. The pain in my chest, not so much.
The Accident Season Page 19