The Accident Season (19 page)

I
carry the typewriter all the way home. It’s balanced precariously on the wooden secrets box, and every few meters I stop and hoist it up again in my arms, and my muscles scream thinly. Rain falls on the keys like it’s trying to type out its own secrets. I would read them aloud, but I don’t speak the language of the rain. I’m not even sure I can understand the river anymore. It roars on beside me, but it doesn’t whisper my secrets back at me, and it doesn’t call my name. Maybe it never really did.

Halfway home, I slip on some loose gravel and fall to the ground. The typewriter flies out of my hands and buries itself in the mud in front of me. The wooden box lands on my foot. It is heavy with so many secrets. I can hear my bones crunch. October is over, but the accidents still seem to be happening. Nothing makes sense anymore.

I carry the secrets the rest of the way on a broken foot (perhaps it is not broken, but it feels like it is; it feels strained and pained and fragile, not a little like my heart). When I get home, the lights are on and voices are raised in the kitchen. I come inside like a storm, brittle bones and heavy secrets and all, and I drop the muddy typewriter on the kitchen table, where it clangs dimly long after it has hit the padded wood. Alice and my mother stare at me. Sam is slumped over the table, his head in his arms. If he’s staring at anything, I can’t see it.

“What happened to you?” My mother points at my mud-splattered clothes, the rip in the sleeve of my coat. “What’s this?” She gestures at the typewriter. Her eyes are wide and the circles underneath them are the same color as her hair. I open my mouth to reply, but at that moment Sam makes a low groaning sound and gets up unsteadily from his chair. His skin is gray. At first I think it is still the makeup from his costume, but then he turns around sharply and throws up in the sink. Alice’s throat chokes out a small noise. My mother drops heavily into the chair in front of her. She looks dazed.

“Sorry, sorry,” Sam croaks. His voice sounds like the gravel I tripped up on earlier. He rinses his mouth out with tap water and cleans the sink without once turning to look at us. I am still standing at the table, unsure exactly what to do. My mother puts her head in her hands.

“You don’t come home all night,” she says into her arms. She says it about Sam and Alice, but it’s like she’s saying it to me. “Either of you.” She raises her head. Sam bows his head over the sink. Alice lowers her eyes. I try to back away, but my mother looks up at me and I freeze.

“I get a call from the police at four in the morning about Sam and Alice trespassing on private property.” Alice blushes fiercely, but she doesn’t tell our mother that Bea and I were trespassing too. “Which means that you both lied to me about spending the night at Bea’s house so you could go get plastered at some party.” My mother’s voice catches, but I can’t tell if it’s from anger or fear. It could be both. “And that Sam started a fight with a classmate who had to be taken to the hospital with a broken nose. His parents are thinking of pressing charges.”

I drag a chair across the rug-covered floor and sink down into it. Sam still hasn’t turned around.

“And he wasn’t even going to tell me,” my mother says to Sam’s unmoving back. Her eyes are filled with tears. “
Fighting,
Sam,” she says. “What are you—? What is this?” She looks around at the lot of us. Alice’s face is bruised. She and Sam are still wearing their costumes. My foot is swelling up inside my boot. My clothes are filthy and torn.

My mother looks back at Sam. “What’s going on, Sam?” she says. “Why are you doing this? What is this? This isn’t you.”

Hunched over the sink, Sam’s shoulders start to shake. At first I think he’s crying, but when he turns around, his mouth is set in a smile meaner than the blue streak in his hair. He laughs like there’s a knife twisting in his heart.

“How would you know?” he says. “How would you know what isn’t me? You’re not my mother.”

Alice and I have the same scared expression on our faces (I can tell because she looks exactly the way I feel). I’ve never seen my mother look so lost. “Sam,” she says softly, “you know that . . . your father—”

“Right,” Sam cuts her off. He lets out a cough of that strange forced laughter. “My father. Maybe you should call him, tell him what I’ve done. Right?” He stares at my mother. His hair falls in his eyes. He looks a little wild. I can see how tightly my mother’s teeth are clenched by the tensing of her jaw.

“You want to call my father?” Sam says, louder. “Huh? In Borneo? Right? With his new wife? Right? Isn’t that right?”

The tears don’t spill from my mother’s eyes. Her mouth is set like she’s been expecting this all along.

“Where does he call you from, once a year?” Sam asks. His hands grip the sink like it’s a lifeboat.

“I don’t know,” my mother says. Her voice is strange and far away. Across the kitchen, Alice has stopped breathing. She inches along the wall to the door. I want to go to her, but I can’t move. My cheek stings like it’s been slapped.

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

My mother shakes her head. “I don’t know, Sammy.”

Sam’s face crumples in on itself. “You’re lying. You’ve been lying to me all along.” My face is a statue. I can’t even blink.

“When he—” My mother clears her throat. When she speaks, it’s almost like the words are rehearsed. “Your father didn’t remarry. At least, as far as I know. He didn’t leave me. Us.” She takes a breath. “I sent him away.”

“Why?” says Sam. “Where to?” He spits out the words. “Not to Borneo.”

“Not to Borneo.” My mother turns around in her chair to face him. “Although he could be there, for all I know.” Her hands are clasped so tightly together that her knuckles are white.

“Seth tried to tell me,” she says, and it’s almost as if she’s talking to herself, “but for a long time I wouldn’t listen because I loved him so much. I loved you both so much.” The silence in the room is stifling. I can’t breathe.

Sam’s face is hard. “What do you mean? Tried to tell you what?” My heart is in my knees and sinking lower.

My mother stares straight at Sam, unflinching, like this is something she’s been wanting to say for years. Wanting, and dreading. “Sometimes,” she says, “there were things Christopher would say, or do, that were very worrying, and—”

“What kind of things?” Sam interrupts. Alice takes
tiny steps toward the door. My mother doesn’t notice.

“Bad things.” My mother touches her face as if to check for tears. “Horrible things. He’d say things about . . .” She looks over at Alice. Alice stops her inching away. “Things about you,” my mother says finally. “And the girls. Very, very worrying things. I didn’t make the decision lightly,” she says to Sam. “But I didn’t want him near you three anymore. I didn’t think it was safe.”

“Safe.” Everything about Sam right now is blank. His gray face, his monotone voice, the way he’s standing by the sink like he’s about to jump into it, or disappear. But not like his father disappeared.

“Yes. Yes.” My mother answers Sam’s word like a question; then, when he doesn’t say anything else, she goes on. “And after Seth died, I was sure . . .” But she falters again. “I sent him away. I—I got a restraining order and he never came back. I don’t know where he is. I get a call sometimes, twice a year maybe, from an unknown number, and I think it’s him, but he never speaks.”

My tongue unglues itself from the roof of my mouth. “What . . . ?” I say. I’m not sure what to follow that up with. The word sits in the silence like a needle in a storm. There’s this strange whooshing noise inside my head. I remember a slap across my cheek in a hallway; I remember hands on my shoulders pushing me down, keeping me underwater; I remember being told to forget.

“So it was you. You did it. You sent him away.” Sam’s voice is choked. He might not have spoken for a thousand years. My heart hurts for him. I look across at Alice. My heart hurts for us all.

“I was afraid of him,” my mother says again. Repeating things is supposed to help you remember. “Of the things he said sometimes. I didn’t want them to be true. I didn’t want to be right, but I couldn’t take that chance. I didn’t want anything to happen to any of you.”

There is a crack opening up in the middle of the kitchen table. The typewriter and the secrets box are too heavy for it. They’re pulling the table down. They’re opening up a hole in the floor. The whole room rips apart. There it is, large as life. Our lives are being blown wide open. I open my mouth as wide as the chasm in front of me and I say it: “It was already too late.”

Alice’s eyes are wider than eyes have the right to be. She looks like she’s crumbling apart. Like she’s been felled and you could count the rings of her to know how old her soul is.

“It was too late,” I say again. “It had already happened. I saw him once, in Alice’s bedroom.” Alice shakes her head. My mother looks at Alice as if she’s never seen her before. “He slapped my cheek and told me it was just my imagination. I believed him because—” I stop. “I believed him. I asked him about it a few weeks later and he—”

“Pushed you under the water.” Alice’s voice is a whisper.
Her eyes say she didn’t know that I knew. I want to tell her I hardly knew myself. The sick, guilty feeling rises up in my throat like bile.

“Is this true?” My mother’s face is grayer than Sam’s. Alice looks around at us all, and before we can stop her, she bolts from the room. My mother runs after her. Sam turns to the sink and retches again, but this time it isn’t because of the alcohol still swimming in his system. He slides along the side of the kitchen counter to the floor. I stare after Alice and I hardly dare to blink.

***

He was always really nice, afterward. Sometimes he brought her Pop-Tarts and
Elle
magazine. Sometimes he told Mom to stop badgering her about homework. This morning he went all the way to the
pâtisserie
in the village close to the house they were renting to get her
pain au chocolat
because it was her favorite. He didn’t get Sam or Cara anything.

Alice didn’t know it could be so hot in October. Sam and Seth and Christopher went around topless the whole time; Seth stocky and broad and blond, tanning as well as the locals over his tattoos. Christopher stayed pale no matter how long he stayed in the sun, and his chest hair—black as the hair on his head—stood out against his white, white skin.

Mom and Cara felt the heat too. They hardly ever changed out of their bikinis except to go to dinner in the village, when Mom put on her favorite vintage sundress and swept her hair—
dyed blue to match the water—into an effortless bun. Alice knew that Mom’s hair was dark blond like hers and Seth’s underneath the dye, but in all her thirteen years, she didn’t think she’d ever seen it.

“Alice, come in the water, it’s amazing,” Mom called from a few feet out from the shore. The Mediterranean was smooth as a lake and Mom was like a mermaid floating along the surface. Farther in, Sam and Cara were screeching and splashing. Christopher was putting on suntan lotion at the edge of the water.

“I’m good here.” Alice put on her sunglasses and opened her magazine.

“You’ll roast,” Mom said. “At least put on your swimsuit. Are you drinking enough water?”

Alice didn’t look up from her magazine. “I’m fine, Mom.”

Christopher got into the water, and he and Mom floated and swam and kissed. Alice kept her eyes firmly on her magazine.

Seth dropped down onto a towel beside her. He poked at her knee with his camera. “Comment alley-voo mad-moose-sell Alice?” he asked in atrocious French. “Not in a swimming mood?” he said, slightly more seriously.

Alice shrugged and shook her head. Seth nodded toward Mom swimming happily in the water. “Nice to see her relaxing a bit this time of year,” he said. “Makes things feel almost normal.”

“That’s what Cara keeps saying,” Alice said, putting down her magazine.

It had taken a fair amount of persuading to get Mom to
agree to a seaside vacation during the accident season. Seth had tried to suggest that maybe the accident season wouldn’t follow them this far from home, but his theory was quickly proved wrong. On the first evening the table in the kitchen of the rental house collapsed on Cara’s legs. On the second day Sam stepped on a sea urchin and Mom spent an hour pulling out the tiny spines with a sterilized needle. Yesterday Alice’d been stung three times by a wasp. Still, Mom didn’t seem nearly as bad as usual this year.

Seth was still gazing out at Mom and Christopher.

“D’you like him?” Alice found herself asking. She bit her lip once the words were out. Seth gave her a measured look.

Seth was one of those grown-ups who didn’t talk down to you, and who always took you seriously. He’d never pretend he didn’t know who you were talking about just to make you repeat it.

Sometimes Alice thought about telling Seth. She had the words all rehearsed.
Maybe it’s just my imagination, but . . . I don’t know if I’m going crazy, but . . . I don’t know if I should be saying this, but . . .

Alice scratched at an insect bite on her leg and Seth looked back at the water.

“I like him okay,” he said lightly. “He’s good for your mom.”

Alice didn’t say anything. She knew Seth was right. It was the middle of the accident season and Mom was swimming in the sea—okay, the Mediterranean didn’t have any waves or sharks or anything, but it did have sea urchins, and Mom was afraid of
everything during the accident season usually. But she didn’t even wince when Cara ducked Sam under the water.

Seth chuckled beside her. “And Sam’s a great kid,” he said.

Alice watched Sam and Cara in the water. They were twelve, but they seemed much younger. They were stepsiblings, but they looked like twins. Seth held up his camera and took some pictures. He was right, Alice thought again. She knew in the pictures they’d all look like a family. The mom and the dad, the two sisters and the brother, the favorite uncle. Everything nice and happy and normal.