Still Life with Tornado(49)

“I don’t know,” I said. I looked back to Mom and Dad and they were just sitting there now, watching us. I didn’t want them to get divorced. They were my parents. I was ten. I didn’t know what life looked like without both of them.

When we got out of the water and walked back to the thatched umbrella, Mom got up and held my towel for me. She wrapped me in it and did that thing where she rubbed her hands over the towel to dry me off and that’s when the pain hit me.

My shoulders and my back were on fire. When I said “Ow!” she stopped rubbing and put her sunglasses on her head and squinted at my skin.

“Oh, shit,” she said.

“Ow,” I said again.

“Honey, we have to get you inside.” She grabbed her beach bag and rifled through it, found the key card, and put her sunglasses back on. Dad lay there with his hands across his belly and didn’t even open his eyes, but I knew he couldn’t be asleep. Mom fast-walked me to the door and for the first time in a week she went to the elevator and didn’t make me walk the three flights of steps to our rooms.

“I have sunburn, don’t I?”

“I don’t think it’s too bad,” she said.

Nurse translation: It’s really, really bad.

We got into the room and she told me to take my bathing suit off. She ran warmish water into the bath and put in all the teabags she could find in our rooms. Six tea bags. She ran the water hot for a while to let the tea steep into the bath.

As I watched the tub fill up I noted how all the teabags kept rushing toward the water and getting sucked into the stream and when one of them broke I said, “Mom! One of the bags broke!” and she said, “It’s probably better that way.”

I didn’t think being covered in tea leaves was better. I had no idea what tea had to do with sunburn.

“Why are you putting tea in the bath anyway?”

“It cures sunburn.”

“Cures it?”

“I can’t believe I forgot to cover you up, Sarah.” She came back into the bathroom with shorts and a T-shirt and put them on the sink counter. She checked the temperature of the bath and when she leaned over, her Mexico tanned belly separated into three sections. I leaned over to see if my belly did the same thing. It kinda did, but it wasn’t the same. She started adding cold water to the bath. “I’m a nurse, for God’s sake.”

“It’s okay. It’s not bad, right?”

She looked at my shoulders and my back and made a wincing sound. “Let’s get you into the bath.”

The bath wasn’t like a cup of tea. It wasn’t brown. It was just tan with the leaves floating in it. It was weird. I got in and sank down and got my shoulders in like Mom told me to.

She sat on the sink counter and called the front desk and ordered aloe vera, more tea bags, and a Mango Tango. She asked them to please hurry up. She said, “I’m going to change here. Close your eyes, okay?” But I didn’t close my eyes, really. I watched Mom take off her bikini and stand there naked for a few seconds, brushing the sand off herself. I hadn’t seen Mom naked before—not like this. It felt weird but okay, too. She was my mom. I wanted to know what I’d look like when I grew up. She didn’t seem to care or notice that I didn’t have my eyes all the way closed. She looked at me and smiled. There was something in that moment—me in the tea bath and her being naked—that made me want to hold on to her forever.

I asked, “Is this the kind of sunburn that causes cancer?”

She slipped on her shirt first and then her underwear and shorts. “No. It’s fine. It’ll hurt for a little while but it’ll go away.”

“We heal fast,” I said. That was Dad’s line. We heal fast in our family. Every scraped knee, every stubbed toe, everything that ever happened to me, that’s what he would say. We heal fast.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“I should have remembered,” I said. “I was just so excited about our last day.”

“I know. And I was—distracted.”

She sat while I soaked and someone knocked at the door and brought her the stuff she ordered from room service. She drank her Mango Tango in about two gulps and sat back on the sink counter in the bathroom.

“Are you guys really going to get a divorce?” I asked.

“What?”

“Bruce told me that you were supposed to tell me that you’re getting a divorce. Is it true?”

“No!”

The tea leaves were making a design on top of the water. I swirled the designs with my fingers and made spirals. “Well, Bruce doesn’t lie,” I said. “He wouldn’t make that up, would he?”

“It’s a long story,” Mom said. “But no. We aren’t getting a divorce. You need two parents. A mom and a dad. I’ll talk to Bruce later. I’m sorry he said that to you.”

“Don’t be mad at him. He thought I already knew.”

“Just don’t say anything to Dad, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Everything is fine. I mean it.” Nurse translation: It could be worse.

“Okay.”

“Nothing bad is going to happen to us. I promise.” Nurse translation: We’ll probably have to amputate that leg.

I kept making designs in the tea leaves. The hotel room door opened and Dad came in and Mom shut both doors to the bathroom and left me in there alone. I heard them talking low to each other. I remember hoping that I didn’t get Bruce in trouble. But I somehow knew I’d gotten Bruce in trouble.