Useless Bay(32)

I stop there. There’s too much shame in what happened next. I don’t like revealing it to myself, let alone Pixie.

“So you told your parents, and they canned her ass, right?” Pixie said, examining the worst scar, the one in the valley of flesh between my thumb and forefinger. It’s bleeding now because I’ve been picking at it so much.

“We got a different nanny,” I said.

We were in the sunroom, surrounded by windows. Windows on three sides and on the ceiling. Thin coverage against the wind and rain, which were now so strong they seemed to have a mood. They were pissed at something. Might as well be me. The betrayal all those years ago was mine. The least I deserved was a squall.

Because here was what I didn’t tell Pixie. Here was what I didn’t even like to tell myself:

When my dad discovered the burns and asked me who’d done them, I said, “Mom,” because that was what I’d been trained to say.

We’d practiced it so much, I didn’t even flinch.

The abuse stopped; the nanny got a promotion that took her away from my sister and me; Mom got a divorce and a restraining order.

Sitting in the sunroom, I felt like everything blew through me, but not this knowledge. Nothing could keep it from sitting like a boulder at the bottom of my gut. Even after twelve years, the whole thing sickened me. Why had I sat at the dinner table and sold Mom out?

That had kicked up a storm that made the one raging around us look like a mild summer breeze. I hadn’t realized how bad it would be until a different rainy day, the drizzly kind, when I watched her from the safety of the attic playroom, the new nanny arranging coloring books and juice on short worktables behind us. Below, in the circular drive, while cherubs frolicked in the fountain, my mom packed thin cardboard boxes of clothes in the trunk of her car, and drove off.

I remember how she took one last look up at the attic. I remember her lobbing the words I love you up at us, and I remember feeling as though I’d caught them.

That’s when I understood what I’d done.

That’s when I understood she wasn’t coming back.

Now I felt sick. It was as though all that had been happening in the past couple of days was nothing compared with what I’d been through twelve years ago. I had to get my head on straight; otherwise, I’d be no use to anyone.

I took my hand from Pixie’s. She was a smart girl. She could never know. It’d been a mistake to reveal this much.

“I need to get home,” I said, shaking myself out of her grasp.

“Right,” she said, looking almost hurt, which surprised me, because sometimes I forget girls her size have feelings. Tall girls were almost bestowed honorary dude-hood. “It’s been a long day. We should all get some rest. Maybe tomorrow we’ll remember something about Grant that we’ve forgotten.”

She stood up to her full height, and once again I was glad I hadn’t told her the whole tale. I didn’t need this much girl judging me.

At the front door, I reached up and kissed her on the cheek. What was I thinking? Of course she had feelings. Over and over, she’d gone out on nights like this with nothing but a flashlight and a hound and brought home scared little kids.

And those were the lucky ones.

Maybe thinking of all those families, families like us, who were missing a loved one and never said thank you when they were recovered, made me do something I’d never done before. I ran my hand through her long blond hair. I buried my face in it. It smelled like lavender shampoo and something the shampoo couldn’t cover, like saltwater spray and Scotch broom pollen and sand and things dying and clams spitting and people laughing and drinking things from a cooler.

She smelled like the island.

What would she know of my betrayal?

I told her good night, and as I turned away, the wind practically forced me off my feet. I had to lean forward forty-five degrees on the walk through the lagoon just to get home. If my abs hadn’t been so strong, I don’t think I would’ve made it.

Down on the shore, people were leaving. News crews were packing it in; retirees and people who could afford waterfront property like us had the belongings they needed in the backs of their SUVs and everything in their houses shuttered and bolted and locked against the storm. The water was only an inch deep on the shore drive, but everyone was in a hurry to get past the DANGER – TSUNAMI ZONE sign.

Everyone but two guys with flashlights wading their way through the lagoon.

Grays. Unfolded by the weather, out looking for my brother. There was a tribe on my side, which should have comforted me. But on this night it wasn’t enough. Not after what I’d almost revealed to Pixie.

It took a long time to get home on the dike trail. Each footstep squelching in the mud, each time I raised my ankle, it made a noise like the question: Why?

Why, Mom?

Why did you stay gone?





seventeen


PIXIE


Outside, the wind was howling. Down on the beach, the water was whipping up actual waves. Unusual for our inland waters. I couldn’t help thinking: The Sea is pissed about something.

I couldn’t understand Henry. It seemed like there was so much he’d left unsaid. When I asked if they’d fired the nanny, and he’d said, “We got a different nanny,” it made me wonder, “What happened to the first one?”

He was hiding something from me. Something important. It felt as though I were out on a search for his little brother and there were a giant flag blowing in the breeze.