Teeth(8)

She sits at the table with me and beats eggs while I scratch out quadratics on a sheet of graph paper. She has the baby monitor they use for Dylan pressed against her ear, like she’s trying to use it to make a phone call. Dylan’s down for a nap, so I’m barely a blip on her radar right now.

I tell her, “I saw Fiona at the market today.”

Mom blows her hair off her forehead. “What are you paying attention to her for?”

Fiona tried to tell my mom’s fortune once. She predicted a happy ending, and I think that’s when Mom tuned her out.

“She was telling me about the ghost who haunts this island. Not even just Ms. Delaney. It’s the whole island. Just one ghost, whole island. Whole ocean.”

Mom says, “Really, Rudy,” in this voice like she hasn’t slept for days. Maybe she hasn’t.

All the more reason she needs a good story. “It’s the ghost of this boy they threw into the ocean who drowned. And now he just . . . wanders.”

She looks up. “Why would you say something like that?”

This hits me like a slap in the face, because she’s looking at me all fierce and angry and I wasn’t expecting it.

I guess she doesn’t like to hear about dead kids.

So I say, “It’s not my story. It’s just something she told me. I thought it was interesting. Come on, I’m not saying it’s true.”


She softens. “I’m sorry, Rudy. It’s been a long morning.”

“Yeah.”

I feel like this exchange should help her unscrunch, but it doesn’t. She’s still beating the eggs, even though they’re now all the same color. Her hand moves faster and faster. Her whisk keeps tapping against the bottom of the bowl. I have this thought that she’s going to keep going forever, like a windup toy that never winds down. Like her whole purpose in life all of a sudden is to beat these eggs. She’s done all this shit for me my whole life, and now all I can imagine her doing is beating eggs.

When I was a kid, I always felt like I needed to keep her safe. She was made of marshmallows and candy canes and she knew twenty hundred lullabies. Dad would give me these talks about how we needed to protect her, and I would feel like a knight. And I loved it. I loved every wimpy bone in my mom’s body, because I felt so f*cking strong.

Now she’s made entirely of steel, and Dad’s the one who cries every time any little thing is wrong. And Mom never cries. She hasn’t cried since the first time Dylan was hospitalized. I can’t decide if I’m afraid to see her cry again, because of what it would mean, or if it would be a relief, like coming home. I don’t know.

The house creaks in the wind.

“Your father wants to take you fishing,” Mom says.

I wonder how hard Dad would cry if he dipped his fishing line in the ocean and pulled out a ghost.

Or a boy.

Maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong. Maybe the fishboy is the ghost.

I should have touched him. I missed my chance to find out what he was.

A ghost is as good a guess as any, I suppose.

And now I’m focusing on the fact that my father is trying to schedule time to be with me, acting like Mom is his secretary, and that feels even more unbelievable than a fishboy or a ghost. We used to play Ping-Pong in the backyard. We used to split peanut butter sandwiches.

I say, “Oh. Okay. I guess I’ll talk to him.”

She nods tightly, like she’s afraid if she moves any more, her cheek will slip, for even a second, from its home against the baby monitor.

“How’s Dylan?” I ask.

“Sleeping well.”

“Good.” I wonder where Dad is. He probably went for a run. We used to run together. There’s no reason, not a single good reason, why we don’t anymore. It’s like my barefoot thing; I want it to mean something and it just doesn’t.

The ancient clock on the wall clicks with each second, but the hands are so springy that every click has two tones.

I’ve got this glass of water that just tastes like salty air.

The clock is making me f*cking crazy.

Mom gets up and goes to the stove. I say, “Mermaids can breathe underwater, right?” I don’t know. Because I have to say something. Because I want her to have answers.

“Rudy, do your homework.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Stop procrastinating.”

“Can you look at me for a second?”

She turns around and does, of course, with this soft expression. I guess I’d forgotten that she still looks at me like that. I thought she saved all those looks for Dylan. I didn’t even pay attention. God, I can be a callous * when I want to be. And I want to be all the time, it seems like.

I wish Dylan were up from his nap. Lately he’s been really into playing pirates, and I could go for that right now. Someday maybe Dad and I can build him a real boat, just a tiny thing, and I could take him out on the water, and we could look for—

Oh. The fisherman was touching him. He couldn’t have been a ghost. The fisherman had his hands all over him. The whole thing was . . . God. I don’t want to think about it.

Besides, I don’t even know why someone would think about doing anything with anyone who looks like the fishboy, and it’s not like he could do anything more than kissing, since he’s scales and fins from the waist down.