Here So Far Away(48)

We had sex, for the first time, in the lighthouse, is what I’m saying. Sweaty, clamoring, splinters from the wooden floors, drinking each other in the moonlight sex. I do apologize to all members of the lighthouse heritage society for what we did on the hardwood and possibly to the hardwood. Afterward, we lay under a rough wool blanket that I remembered was in the closet after the fact, our skin quickly cooling, the grandfather clock ticking down the last few minutes before Francis had to leave. I drew a sentence on his arm—

There is nowhere else I would rather be.

“This might be the happiest I have ever been,” he said. “And I did some serious drugs in Peru.”

“Me too. Happy, and relieved.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I was just scared you’d have more hair than I’m used to.”

He kissed my forehead and mumbled something into my hair. It might have been: “I was scared you’d have less.”





Twenty-Three


I never thought I’d be that girl going down on someone in a car on the edge of an empty parking lot. I certainly never thought that I’d be the one to turn the keys off in the ignition, reach over, and unbuckle that someone’s belt. (And absolutely never when he was in uniform, because that would be gross, except those two times after work when he happened to still be in uniform.) Nat and Lisa always made it sound like this was something you did for a guy because he whinged you into it. But I liked it, and I liked what Francis was doing to me, things high school boys couldn’t learn from watching porn. “I need to spend quality time with my friend,” I’d say. “Feel free to listen to the radio.” If you locked me in a room without food and water for long enough, I might have admitted that I wished there was a girl I could talk to about it.

I started having this irrational fear that people could read my mind and everyone knew what filthy thoughts I was having. What if a cross-section of my brain was exposed at an angle that I couldn’t catch in a mirror, and I was the only one who didn’t know my fantasies were playing like a movie reel for the world to see? One day, some little kid who hadn’t yet finished Concealing Knowledge of the Inner Thoughts of George Warren 101 would blurt out, Mummy, that girl is wondering if she has a weird vagina.

If you want my body and you think I’m sexy

Come on, sugar, let me know

My mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her beloved seed catalog, singing along with Rod Stewart on the radio in her choir voice, which was about as horrifying as you’d expect. “There’s my good girl,” she said when I came in.

I was so unlike the person she thought I was. I could still feel where Francis’s hand had gripped my hair.

Dad was standing at the stove. He had on his prosthetic for a change, but somehow, watching him eat Bird’s custard directly from the pot, I doubted he’d been really going at the rehab. Matty had become obsessed with catching him doing his exercises, and rarely did. I slipped a wooden spoon out of the jar on the counter. “Bit early for planting seeds, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Just daydreaming. When I was a girl, Grandad and I used to read seed catalogs like bedtime stories.”

I coated the spoon with the thick, bright yellow custard. “You’re always saying you want to start the garden over. What would you do instead?”

“Ornamental grass,” she said without hesitating. “Real tall, big beautiful plumes, all sorts.”

“Paying for grass is ridiculous,” Dad said. “If you want tall plants, get that joe-pye weed. My mother always said that nothing fills a plot up like joe-pye weed.”

Mum gave Dad a ferocious glare. He may have taken over the house, but the garden was still hers, and had no place in it for his opinion. “It might be ridiculous, but I have a credit at the nursery to use up,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“Back in the fall I helped a customer and she ended up relandscaping her whole yard. Andrew was so happy, he gave me store credit. Said there’s a job waiting for me if I want one.”

“I hope this Andrew understood when you told him you have your hands full at home.”

“Well, no, I didn’t.”

“Why, because you’ve already made up your mind that I’m not going back to my old position?”

“Haven’t you?”

Dad took the pot from the stove and clanged it into the sink.

I was cowering in the corner, but Mum didn’t flinch. How long had she been working up to telling him about this?

“I have not,” Dad said.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Mum said. “But we have a mortgage to pay. Two kids near ready for university—”

“Why don’t you bring in some sewing?”

“No money in that.”

“So talk to Beryl about selling Tupperware. I don’t see why you have to be running out to the nursery every five minutes when you can have the ladies over here.”

“Well, Paul, because that won’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“Get me out of this house. It isn’t big enough. It just isn’t goddamn big enough!”

My mother had grown up in a cabin with three brothers, her parents, and for a while there, a set of grandparents. Now she lived in house with more bedrooms than people. She didn’t mean she needed more space. She meant our house was too small to be sharing with him.