The Anomaly(47)

She smiled. “And that’s what therapy boils down to in the end, right? Plus…there’s a little more. A few days later it was all but forgotten. Mom and I agreed next morning the rest of the family didn’t need to hear about what happened, because my brothers would make fun of me for getting upset and thinking I’d been abandoned. They could be assholes about that kind of stuff, call me a baby, you know. And they were home now, my dad was back, and the universe had been restored to its proper functioning, so whatever.

“And so I’m out playing in the yard on this particular evening, and I hear Mom and Dad chatting in the kitchen while they’re fixing dinner, those sounds that make you feel comfortable and at home and as if everything is good and simple and always will be. And Dad is telling her how he met Uncle Pete’s new boyfriend in the city and they all had a few after-dinner drinks together, and he seems really nice, and Mom said that’s great, Pete deserves to be with a kind person for once, and eventually the conversation moved on to other things. And I stopped playing, and sat there. And thought for a while. And then I started playing again, and life rolled on.”

She turned her head and looked at me, eyebrow raised.

“I don’t get it.”

She waited.

“The fact he was gay?”

“God, no. That was a known thing. Uncle Pete was stridently homosexual, always had been. Nobody ever tried to hide it or acted like it was a big deal.”

“Okay, so?”

“My folks live in San Diego now. But I grew up in Santa Cruz.”

“I know it well. I’m from Berkeley.”

“Right. And so you’ll also know that if you live in the Bay Area there is one place—and one place only—that you’ll hear referred to as ‘the city.’”

It didn’t take long for me to get it. “Your dad was talking about his recent business trip to San Francisco.”

“Only time he went to the city overnight that year.”

“And if your uncle was up there with his new guy, it seemed unlikely to you that your mother could simultaneously be letting him into his own house, alone, sixty miles away.”

“Yes.”

“Huh. So?”

“I don’t know. I never found out. I didn’t ask, obviously. But I thought back and I realized it had been her idea not to mention her being out to the rest of the family. She’d been subtle, and loving—she knew how my brothers made fun of me for every little thing—but still, it was her idea and she was unusually firm about it. I don’t know where she was that night. But she went out, and I don’t think it was just for a moonlit drive, because she could have said so. She went to see someone.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have a theory?”

“A few months later I started to overhear arguments between my parents, late and loud and long, and they were snippy with each other for a year or two, and my dad seemed very distant sometimes, unhappy, distracted. But eventually that passed. They’re still together now and they’re super happy with each other and so whatever happened during that period, they held their course and navigated those rough seas and came out the other side stronger. Which is awesome. But from then on…”

She shrugged.

“You knew something your dad didn’t,” I said. “Or your brothers. And you also knew your uncle had been used as a fake alibi, but couldn’t tell him even though you loved him. Plus your mom’s suddenly a lot more complex than you realized, and you’re the only other woman in the household, so you wonder if you are, too. Goodbye, simple world—hello, secrets and lies.”

“You’re not bad at this,” Molly said. “Right. Precisely that. All of which has been discussed with strangers who charge a hundred and fifty bucks an hour, and with all of which I have made my peace. And, come on, Christ, all that oversharing boils down to: Girl gets left alone in a dark house, is subsequently wary of dark places? That’s embarrassingly direct.”

“As my grandmother used to say, human beings are very basic cakes. We just have a lot of fancy icing on top.”

“She really said that?”

“No. She was a nice woman but she couldn’t bake for shit. I just made it up.”

“Ha. But the truth is that the event itself was really not that big a deal.”

“And so what is?”

“The other things. That other information. Learning that there’s always something going on that you don’t know about. And that people will lie to you, even if they love you. And that nobody can be trusted, no matter how much you love them. And also that sometimes you’ll know in your heart that something’s wrong about the world, like I did when I first woke up that night. And you know what? You’ll be right.”

She looked me full in the eyes. “I’m right now, too, Nolan. About this place. There’s something very not-okay about it. Something bad. I wish I’d never spotted the way up into that shaft. I wish we’d never found this.”

I held her gaze and I tried to come up with the words to tell her no, it was okay, it’d all be fine.

But I couldn’t.



We made our way back across the pool. As I stood on the other side waiting while Molly dressed in her nice dry clothes—wishing I’d had the sense to do the same—I noticed again that the water in the pool wasn’t as clear as I’d thought. And then that, around the edges, there were tiny little aggregations of what looked like algae.