This Place of Wonder (34)

He looked at me. “I was ashamed. And once the lie started, how could I change it?”

The moon washed over his extraordinary face, the long nose, the full lips, his heavy brows. “Are you really Creole?”

“In part, but I did not know my father, or any of my family. I don’t know.”

“So Maya—”

“Is the granddaughter and the daughter of women who died of alcoholism.”

I closed my eyes, thinking of her passed out on the ground, an axe at her side. I thought of her when we finally rescued her from Shanti, a little girl with tangled hair and a dirty face, so skinny that I could see both bones in her forearms when I bathed her. I bent my face into my hands, sorrow rising again.

When his big hands fell on my upper back, I allowed the contact. I am human. I need to touch others as much as anyone else, and maybe of all the humans in the world, Augustus would know my sorrow over all this. We had failed her so terribly, both of us.

When he rose and came to kneel before me, I allowed myself to fall into his arms, leaning into the curve of his shoulder, where I inhaled the comforting scent of his skin, and we wept together over our broken daughter.

When he lifted my face to kiss me, I met his lips as if they offered a sacrament. The same wildness broke through us, the same tenderness. When he unbuttoned my blouse and freed my breasts, lifting them to his mouth, I allowed it. When he laid me down in the grass, I allowed it, and opened myself to him, to his ministrations. We shared our sorrow, and the simmering longing we shared for the taste of the other. Our tears and our kisses mingled. Our limbs tangled. We clung to each other as if lashed to a mast in a storm, then lay in each other’s arms in the grass, covered only by moonlight, and for the smallest time, there was peace again in the world.

That was how we began again, for the third time.





Chapter Seventeen


Maya


I’m weirdly nauseated when I get home from work. It worries me, how often my stomach is upset lately; I keep fretting that I’ve completely ruined my liver. Gingerly, I rub the spot on my side, but it doesn’t hurt or feel enlarged. There was a woman at rehab who had such an enlarged liver you could see it at a hundred paces.

Meadow hasn’t yet returned, so I head down the stairs to the evening beach. It’s more populated than the morning, but there still are very few people around. The sun hangs like an orange disk above the ocean, casting shimmers of oily red over the sea. On the horizon, an industrial ship moves against the sky, its speed deceptively slow.

It has been a warm day, and the sand is an agreeable mix of hot surface, cool underlayer. I walk toward the edge of the ruffling water. The tide is low. Birds call into the air. Tension spills out of my body, and it occurs to me with a little shock that I have really missed living near the ocean.

The things I didn’t know about myself, or didn’t acknowledge, keep surprising me. That I missed the ocean, that I wasn’t really in love with Josh and hadn’t been for a long time. That I get hungry. That I need sleep. That I’m actually a morning person who wakes up cheerful if I don’t go to bed drunk.

Who knew?

The fresh air is good, but my stomach is still slightly upset, and I keep swallowing, wondering if I should have had a glass of oat milk or something before I came out. Upset stomach or no, I owe my sponsor a call for the day, and this is as good a time as any. She answers on the first ring. “Hello, Maya. How are you?”

“Not bad,” I say honestly. “Walking on the beach, breathing fresh air.” I pause, watch some birds wheeling around. “Looking at birds.”

We chat about this and that. She asks if I’ve been to a meeting and I can reply honestly that I have. I didn’t see the girl Sunny today, but that doesn’t mean anything by itself. Still, I looked for her.

Deborah asks about the job, which I like and feels like the right place to be. I told her about Rory last night, and we talked through the things I could do next time if I was uncomfortable with people drinking around me. Leaving is always an option. Bringing my own drinks. Giving myself more time before I enter those kinds of social situations. “Or,” she said, “what would happen if you just tell the truth about how you feel?”

Which is what she’s going to say to this next thing. “I asked Meadow to go home,” I say.

“Well. That’s a big step. How did it go?”

“Not that great.” A soft wind blows a scent of brine over my face. “She didn’t quite get that I wanted her to move out completely. She thought I just meant for the day.”

“And?”

“I didn’t have the heart to get more pointed. She’s grieving and she’s worried about me and I know she just wants to help.”

“Mmm. How does that feel?”

I pause, feeling it in my chest, tense and hard. “Not good. I really want her to go home. I need some space to figure things out, and as long as she’s around, I’m never testing myself.”

“Is that what you want to do? Test yourself?”

“No.” I pause. “Maybe? Or maybe I just want to be alone. I haven’t been alone for months, really.”

“It is your house.”

“Well, kind of.” Hair tangles around my face, and I pause to pull it out of my mouth. “She lived there a lot longer than I did. I moved out at eighteen. She lived there another nine or ten years.” I think about the way she moved the paintings around, returning them to the way they’d been. “Maybe I should just give it to her. I can’t possibly pay the upkeep on a house that big.”