I remembered that once, I’d come home from school, and Rook was already there. She was in tiny shorts, sprawled out on the couch so that Dad could practically see her labia. Conveniently, she was at my house a lot. When I wasn’t there. Dropping in to see Dad. Sometimes, Dad would put on Dusty Springfield and cook dinner for us. He’d say that we were his favorite girls. I’d hated Rook for the way she pined over him, but told myself her pain was deep, so was mine, and that things could be fine, that she didn’t mean it the way it seemed. I’d hated Dad for this, too, but made myself believe that they both needed this crush. And I was quiet.
Until the holed-sock in her drawer. I told her I hated her, and I threw Rook’s parents’ fancy champagne onto the bathroom floor, and the mirrors reflected an infinite version of all the glass. Threw the borrowed sweatpants at her, grabbed my things, and left.
She chased after me, crying. She yelled that she’d stop if it bothered me. She said that despite everything, she was in love with him, and she didn’t know what to do. Then she sat on the front porch of her lighted mansion and said if I left her, she’d have nothing. That he’d never choose her over me. She said no one would love her like I do.
Even when I hated her, I believed it, too. I couldn’t abandon her, because then I’d be a person who could leave anyone. She said she’d stop. The hail played a song on the roof, and I couldn’t turn back.
I didn’t go home. Everything was a haze. The sky was up and down, and nothing felt real. An island is round. Even if it’s oblong, it’s round, made of one continuous line that never ends. There’s nowhere to go. Except up into the sky, or underwater, but still, it will always feel like you’re spinning. I rode my bike around until very late, until I was very cold and hail-beaten. The uncomfortable parts of my bathing suit were still damp. I slept in the topiary garden at Ferry Lands, and the hail turned into drizzle, and then nothing at all.
In the morning, I awoke to a gardener poking me with the end of a rake. I told him I was just visiting Mary, and that I was on my way out. I picked a few oranges and sat on the beach, sucking the life out of the fruit and trying to remember that thing people always said: Things will get better. Dad always said: It’s just what happens.
I said I was sick and locked myself in my room. Dad left soup at the door. Rook never went to the mainland to see the show and her druggie cousin. Instead, she lingered around my house until I finally came out, and she held me close, and told me she was the sorriest. She blamed her life. Her eyes ballooned, and I guess we were friends again. Because the worst part was that I loved her. She promised that it was only once, and that she’d stop, and that we’d never tell anyone. I didn’t forgive her, but I said that I would try.
At night, alone on the couch, I listened to the hail tap on windowpanes, and I cried. I cried and cried. I pretended to be fine, to Rook, and to my father. No one taught me what to do with my mad.
And I didn’t speak to my father until I finally did.
“Where is my mother?” I asked my father.
He was shaken by my curiosity.
“I haven’t heard,” he said.
He opened a cheap bottle of vodka.
“Can I have some?” I said.
“Fuck, no, you cannot have any vodka,” he said.
I slammed the front door as I walked out and scurried down the stairs. That betrayal hard as a rock.
My father shouted from the window something about how I needed to be home for dinner. He used his discipline voice. I told him to fuck off, in my loudest, most protesty voice, and I guess he thought it was hormones, because when I got back for dinner, he had two bars of chocolate on the coffee table.
I didn’t tell him that I knew, because I didn’t want to be the one to kill him. So we spoke only about the things required, and I let him believe it was because I was a teenager. Like homework, staying out too late, dinner. When he brought up Rook, I played along, like he was just concerned about her reckless life and missing parents.
But he knew I was different, and I wondered if Rook had told him or if she must have really backed off. And the silence was easier than asking for the truth, and there was more booze then, more nights he didn’t come home, more coke binges, and I didn’t care for a while if he was dead.
On nights he escaped, I did, too, and I rode past Rook’s to see if he had gone there. I never caught them, if they were a them. I didn’t want to. I just saw Rook alone in her hot tub, talking to herself, as if she were being interviewed on a talk show. Or Rook drunk in her hot tub with a few girls we swore we hated from school. Or Rook alone in the darkness, alive only by the light of a movie on a screen, and then more nighttime.
There are so many things I never said, because how can you say all the things when no one is ever listening? What I should have said, loudly: I really hate hot tubs. I hate everything about them. That hot water feels like it is penetrating my heart. It makes it skip beats, my skin goes red for hours, I can’t sleep, I feel so hot, and with the hail, it’s worse, and confusing. A tiny pool of murky water is not my idea of a good time. Also, I bet there were traces of cum all over that fucking hot tub. Also: How could you do this to me?
Rook told me about a guy named Sam, who knew that Bunny was dating some rich summer girl. Sam said they were falling in love. Rook said that if I wanted, she could break up Bunny from his girl. She told me that Bunny fucked this girl on the empty lifeguard tower just last week. Rook told me that I should just get over Bunny, and meet someone new, like she’d done.
I didn’t say anything about my father, because the days and weeks that had passed were somehow erased from our lives. Because I was so good at participating in that kind of forgiveness, the kind that meant only to be forgetful.
I told her I was not ready to give up on Bunny, that I thought I loved Bunny, and she told me to shut the fuck up, and to calm the fuck down, and to chill the fuck out.
“Let’s go to the hot tub,” she said. “I’ll tell Sam to bring a hot friend.”
“The hot tub is too hot,” I said.
She laughed, and told me I was the most wicked funny person she knew. I tried not to hate her. I wanted to tell her that I worried about weather, my father’s dental bills, climate change, the sea—oh, everything in it, even the bad, dark stuff—worried that I was a bad kisser, that my breasts were crooked, my nostrils too big, about my mother, smog, and that I never, ever knew where I should be going, even in the light, that I knew she never really meant forever. But mostly, I wanted to tell her that I really hated hot tubs. That drinking vodka in there made it worse.
We slid in, and she turned the lights to flashing purple.
“Do you think it’s bad that we don’t have any other friends?” I asked her.
“We do,” she said.
“Who?”
She named, then, girls (mostly) from school who we shared cigarettes with after class, or who she got hammered with at parties; she even named the school janitor, who if you asked me, she really liked and had probably kissed at least once.
“And your dad. He’s a cool guy, and a good friend.”
I shriveled. We smoked more.
I’d imagined my father passed out on the bathroom floor, where he’d been trying to clean up his own mess.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.
“Never,” I said.
But I had known so many ghosts.
“I can show you one.”
Then more bud, more vodka, and us drying quick in the cold wind and us squeezing our damp bodies into cool clothes. She was so comfortable being topless, with her perfect nipples. She must have known she flaunted them to me, or to the staring-back sea, or to the moon.
We rode our bikes, with all that wet hair, and pedaled and huffed nicotine, and then more hail came. I didn’t ask where we were going, because anywhere was better than going home. Even if it meant going someplace with her.
Down a dark road was a house with a koi pond. Rook leaned her bike against the bamboo fence.
She urged me to be quiet, to leave my bike behind. She pointed to an upstairs dimly lighted room. I told her I didn’t see anything. She told me to wait, and we kept walking. I followed her to the house, through the unlocked gate, into the garden. She promised ghosts.
“All you’re promising is to get me arrested,” I said.
The yard was only a concrete wall from the bay, and there were leftover wakes slapping lightly against it. The grass was cold and wet, and it soaked our shirts when we lay down. She talked softly, and everything was so dark, and she had a granola bar in her pocket. We split it and sipped the plastic bottle of vodka. We were mostly warm, even with the pricks of ice that dented our faces. That yard was magnificent.
“This is where I come for shooting stars,” she said.
“It’s too foggy,” I said.
For a minute, I forgot about the ghost and snuggled next to her.
“Stay awake,” she said. “A dead old lady is going to walk by the window.”
She quietly sang to me, and I felt loved and whole, even with all that betrayal. Then, I couldn’t keep my eyes open for any ghost anymore.
Eventually, I went home to my father. I helped him sober up again. I got him a job on a boat, and he’d be gone for a few months. I told him to come back with money. He told me to tend to our weed. We didn’t talk about our spinning web of tiny betrayals. He’d return, and I expected that I’d tell him that I loved him, and then I would probably eat lobster for dinner for an entire week.
Before he went, he looked up to me and said, from the small, decrepit balcony, “I think the hail has finally stopped.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked.
Wind
The wind swept through Ferry Lands and whipped up the dusty hills and sank dirt into all the cracks. Even Mary complained. Mary was no biological mother, but she had motherly things: string cheese, apples in a large bowl, warm blankets, a patio full of wind chimes. In the crevices of her house were tumbleweeds of dust, and doors ridden with dampness, and the whole thing smelled like an old boat. A favorite smell. Her house creaked in the night, and its aching bones wobbled in the tug of a storm. She kept a fire most nights, and I spotted her sliver of a smoke trail like the North Star.
The girls in high school called her a witch and a dyke. But I believed Dad used to love her wholly, by the condition of her seasoned hands, by the hours she’d logged at sea, by the sight of her holy long hair. I knew that she could fix an open wound with superglue. Once, a girl called her an old lesbian, and it was Rook who punched that girl in the face. No one talks about your Mary, she’d said. And it was true that I wished Mary was my mother, especially when I couldn’t find my own.
Dad joked that we could never go to the mainland, because then we’d have to get on Mary’s ferry. He said she had a temper, and that if she had the chance to, she’d sink that fucking thing and run my father’s face into the muddy bottom of the bay. Her marriage didn’t work out, and the distance between her and my father grew, even after he told her again that he loved her, so I had to keep Mary a secret. I told my father that I wouldn’t take the ferry, because of Mary and a list of other semitearful things, that I’d have to stay on Winter Island forever. But it wasn’t true, and when he was away, I’d ride the ferry at night with Mary and sit in her booth, and sometimes we had covered so much open water that I finally got sea legs. I’d tell her about Dad and all his weed money, about school, about Rook, and she listened to all the things I wanted.
There were cold nights when Dad stayed late in the fields and spent long hours organizing a small army of men who would carry military-sized rifles and protect electric fences that fortified his massive weed grow. My father and I were in the business of surviving betrayal; we were kind, but we spent as many hours apart as possible. Maybe he knew that I knew, but Rook moved on quickly to a guy our age, and my father invested all of his time into growing Wonderland. I spent nights alone, waiting for Rook to sneak boys into my bedroom, reading romance novels, or writing letters to my mother that I tossed out after a few lines of bullshit and begging. In that winter’s one-bedroom apartment, Dad slept on the couch and I got the bedroom, and I might as well have just lived alone. I waited for the sound of the ferry horn coming into the harbor.
I often sneaked onto Ferry Lands the back way so that the automatic lights wouldn’t shine. I’d sit quietly on Mary’s vast lawn and watch the sea turn purple by the light of the moon. Some nights, I crept onto her porch and rocked in her chair and basked in aching. Sometimes, I could feel the warmth seeping from cracks in her house. Other nights, I actually peered into her windows, hoping to be caught, and fed, and loved, and understood. I tried to stay away from her, and that house, to be loyal to Dad, but when the winds blew, her garden snowed with white flecks of jasmine petals.
Then some nights, there were wool blankets left out to dry out in the sun and mistakenly left behind by nightfall. I wrapped myself in their thickness, her scent, and the leftover dog hairs. On the darkest night, there was an eyelash left of moon, no wind, no sound, the lighthouse quiet and dark. She must have heard me roaming through the fields of citrus, cracking dry things under my feet, inching my way along the dusty trails that led to her door. That dark night, Mary sat on the porch and waited with the dull glow of a lantern.
“Power’s gone out on the whole island,” she said.
I paused.
“I’m just glad it’s been you,” she said. “There are coyotes that come for the dogs.”
She said she’d wondered who, over the years, had crawled about looking for shelter on the emptiness of this land, where people came to fuck and kiss and fight. Where the dogs came to die. The others to eat. She said she’d wondered how many had lived in the divots of this land, and how many she’ll just never know existed.
The dogs rallied around my feet and jumped and made high-pitched screeches with their breaths. We sat in two chairs close to the fire, and it took a lot of our stillness to keep the dogs calm. When it was late, after we had said all of the useless things, she wrapped me in a blanket and brought me a cold piece of apple pie on a paper plate.
I finally told her about Rook and my father, and she didn’t say anything, except she stroked my hair, and that was too much. She told me about the mainlanders who wanted to build a bridge. The clocks flashed, and there was a short flicker of electric light. She said the winds were too rough to get back to my father, that I’d have to sleep there and be gone before dawn so my father wouldn’t worry. She opened a chest and pulled out two pillows. As she shook off dust, she said the only guests she gets are raccoons. She pulled out a book, a blanket, and a flashlight, and I climbed onto the couch.
“I’ve got an early morning,” she said.
I fell asleep fast, next to her fire, Mary and the gaggle of dogs asleep in the bedroom.
In the morning, the power was back, and she had made coffee and left The Origins of the Earth and More with a note that said: Return the book if you find what you’re looking for.
Once, I found my mother in the innards of the dusty San Bernardino Mountains. She was a waitress in a seedy mountain bar and grill, which was mostly a bar, and I was finally old enough to drink. It was messily overgrown with bikers, and they served fries with A.1. Steak Sauce. The chef, also the owner and my mother’s boyfriend, made garlic fries on Wednesdays. I took the ferry, a bus, a train, and a taxi, and if I could have, I would have latched on to a flightless bird if it had promised to get me there faster.
My mother was surprised that I found her. She acted happy, like a good mother, but talked so much at first that she wasn’t listening to anything I said. She said she hated Winter Island. She said she always felt trapped. And while she was wiping down tables with a damp rag, she told me she was sorry for leaving. Though it had been years, my mother was just like I remembered her: indifferent and aloof and always looking to the sky.
“Did your father tell you where I was?” she asked.
I said that I found her on
the internet. That her blog, Mountain Mama, came up if you searched her name. I’d seen her daily mundane adventures in gardening and growing her own vegetables. Her photos were crooked with poor resolution, and her blogs were boring and sometimes full of typos. The garden seemed to make her happy, and I wondered if that is the way for women to be happy, with straw hats, cutoff denim shorts, tan stick legs, and lemonade on a porch swing. On the internet, my mother looked like a wonderful mother.
“Is your father sick?” she asked.
“He’s fine,” I said.
I wanted to ask why she left, but she would just say she could never stay. I wanted her to look into my eyes to see if she could hold a gaze for long enough to see that they’ve changed color with all the hurt and exhaustion. I wondered if our eyes were the exact same color. I followed her to each table while she wiped with vigor and stamina, and she asked me to help fill napkin dispensers and grimy glass ketchup bottles.
“Lunch rush gets real busy up here,” she said.
My mother’s arms were mine. Her hair, too. Her skin hung a little farther from the bone. Still, she was fit and covered in a spritz of perfectly appointed freckles, and she was firm around her rib cage, which protects her middle things. Two bikers called to her, and she wedged herself between them at the bar while they talked to her as if she were the most wonderful woman ever.
“You gotta meet my daughter,” she said.
She introduced me like I was no secret. Like she had told people about this daughter. One who has lived and breathed elsewhere. She called me a daddy’s girl. She wouldn’t say if she left me or if I left her, but it didn’t matter, because she told everyone how pretty I was, and how proud she was to be a mother to me. Me.
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