Girl Out of Water(28)

“Oh, right.” I’ve gotten pretty banged up from a few days of learning to skateboard.

“Just don’t let my kids start thinking injuries are cool, okay?” Aunt Jackie says.

“Promise,” I say. I’ve told the boys if they skate without helmets I’ll personally give them brain injuries, but I should probably also lead by example.

I settle into one of the armchairs. “Huh,” Aunt Jackie says, staring at me in a way that makes me think they didn’t lower her painkiller dosage after all.

“What?”

“Nothing, you just look a lot like your mom when she was your age.”

“Oh.” The mom topic startles me. It’s an unspoken rule in the family only to bring her up if she demands to be brought up—basically whenever she appears in town or leaves again. We discuss the logistics of my mom, not my mom herself.

“I think it’s the sunburn and the scratches,” Aunt Jackie continues. “And the messy hair. You know, the whole bedraggled look.”

“The what look?”

“Bedraggled, disheveled. You know, the ‘I’ve been out all night and don’t have time to shower before class’ look. She was a true wild child. And after our mom passed away, she stopped even pretending to act like a good kid.”

Aunt Jackie shifts under the crisp hospital sheets, tilting toward me. Her eyes are animated but trained past me, like she’s watching a movie projected on the far wall. “She’d leave the house one day looking all put together and return the next at the crack of dawn with bruises from going dumpster diving for found art or racing motorcycles she wasn’t licensed to drive. Oh gosh, and one time—when your grandfather was out of town—she jumped off the roof into the pool. It was filled then, of course, but still, it was about the most reckless thing she could do.”

Aunt Jackie reaches for the water on her nightstand and sips from the plastic straw before glancing back at me with that nostalgic-drugged look again. “She was your age, you know.”

The question pops out of my mouth before I can stop it. “My age when?”

“When she ran off. Two years after your grandmother passed away. Your grandmother was born and raised here, and she always talked about finally seeing the world after we graduated from high school, but then she got cancer, and…

“Your mom was terrified to end up like her, to live and die in the same place without seeing the world. That fear and grief just built up. So she left. I was Emery’s age at the time and devastated. And when she didn’t come back, I got angry. One night, a couple months after she left, while your grandfather was sleeping, I ripped up papers and pictures, threw her books in the pool, destroyed all of her stuff. When she finally came back to visit, two years later with a GED and a boyfriend from Mississippi, there wasn’t even a T-shirt of hers left for her to sleep in.”

“Oh.” I shift uncomfortably in the chair. Dad always tells me it’s not my fault my mom leaves, but he’s never gone into detail about her childhood. I never knew Aunt Jackie’s anger is why there’s no evidence of her at the house. I always assumed that, like in our home, she’s a ghost, leaving nothing behind but an unsettled atmosphere.

I try to imagine what my mom’s room would’ve looked like when she was seventeen, but I draw a blank. I can’t conjure her favorite band, let alone her favorite color. One of the strongest memories I have of her is a faint musky scent because she prefers men’s deodorant.

I don’t know how to respond. Talking about my mom, spending time thinking about her, makes me uncomfortable. Why should I spend time on someone who never spends any time on me?

I scramble for diversion. “Do you want a snack? I can grab us something from the cafeteria.”

Aunt Jackie doesn’t respond, and for a moment I’m scared she won’t leave the topic alone. Then she smiles, one of those smiles that make you feel sad not happy. “That sounds good, Anise. Chocolate pudding if they have it.”

“Will do.”

As I leave for the cafeteria, I can’t help but think of my mom as a teenager, wild hair framing her pale face, visiting the grandmother I never met, perhaps already beginning to plan her escape. I glance back at Aunt Jackie’s room, and my heart squeezes as I realize something: I wasn’t the only twelve-year-old girl abandoned by someone I love.

? ? ?

Aunt Jackie and I spend the rest of the afternoon together. We eat chocolate pudding. She reads me excerpts from her paperback romance that put even the cheesiest bits of my Detective Dana novels to shame. I go back to the cafeteria to get us more chocolate pudding. She tells me all of the hospital staff gossip, both of us breaking into hysterical giggles as the nurse we were just talking about comes in to take her vitals. By the time Dad and the kids arrive, Aunt Jackie is nodding off to sleep, and I’m picking through her romance novel, texting Tess the best excerpts, including my personal favorite, Rafael’s scepter pierced her guarded honeycomb. Messaging back and forth constantly almost makes it feel like I’m back home. But then a blast of recirculated air hits me instead of the ocean breeze.

“Hey,” Dad whispers from the doorway with Emery. Parker and Nash slip into the room. “She sleeping?”

I nod, then turn to Parker and Nash and put a finger to my lips. It looks like the pool really did exhaust them because they collapse quietly into the extra armchairs by the bed. I stand and gesture for Emery to take my chair. She smiles at me and joins her brothers. I walk over to Dad at the doorway. “You guys have fun?” I ask him, keeping my voice soft.