Nest (16 page)

“Well …,” Mom says. She reaches out and pats my hand. Pat. Pat. Pat.

Rachel gets the pie from the table.

“Look, Mom. We made this for you.” Rachel holds the pie out to her.

“Oh,” Mom says, “thank you very much. That was nice of you.” She takes the pie and plunks it in her lap, like it’s her brown everyday purse. She doesn’t look at it. She doesn’t see the perfect waves. “You made it yourselves?”

“Yes,” we say, and I’m about to tell Mom how I had to stir and stir the lemony stuff to get it thick enough, but Mom’s eyes are filling up with tears and she’s looking at Marcy and tapping her wrist with two fingers where her watch would be if she had it on.

Marcy stands up. “I think Hannah is ready to head back to her room now,” she says, then turns to Mom. “Should I give you a moment to say good-bye to your family in private?”

Mom starts to shake her head, but Marcy is already walking away. She’s waiting for Mom by the door.

“Thanks for coming,” Mom says, like we’re guests at one of the dinner parties she and Dad have a couple of times a year.

“Sweetie?” Dad says. “Is there anything you need? Is there anything we can do for you?”

“I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry,” Mom says, and her voice is tiny and scared and so little-girly that I want to block my ears hard enough to hear ocean. Mom hands Dad the pie and pushes herself out of the chair like she’s an old lady, like it’s the toughest thing she’s ever done. She hugs Rachel. She hugs me. I press my face into her neck. Bleach. I need to smell lemon and lavender. I need to smell Mom.

“Okay, honey,” Mom says, and starts to pull away.

“No,” I whisper, “no, Mom,” and hold on tight and sniff, sniff, sniff. I’m going to sniff her back to life. I’m going to sniff her back into my mother with a dancer bun who walks with long dancer steps and laughs like a northern flicker and knows what I’m thinking.

“Marcy,” I hear Mom say. “Marcy, please …” Her voice is gurgly and wet, like she’s talking underwater.

“You need to let your mother go now,” Marcy says in a principal voice, a crossing-guard voice, a man-working-at-the-bank voice. I feel her cold hands on my shoulders. This lady who I’ve never seen before
puts her hands on my shoulders and tugs me backward, away from Mom. She rescues Mom from me.

“Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks for coming,” Marcy says, really fast, like she doesn’t mean it. She takes Mom’s hand and leads her away. Mom’s crying, wet strangly sobs. She doesn’t turn around and wave to us. She doesn’t curtsy or sashay or twirl. She doesn’t say
See you soon, my sweeties
. She just holds on to Marcy’s hand and tucks her head down low, like she’s afraid something might bean her as she walks with her draggy leg past Mr. Cowboy with his stupid hat and stupid red-checked shirt and disappears down the hall.

We just stand here, watching where she was.
Tick-a-tick-a-tick-a
. It’s my teeth. They’re chattering. They won’t stop. My bones are icicles.

“Get me out of here,” Rachel whispers, and she grabs Dad’s hand. Dad grabs my hand. The three of us just stand still, holding hands, stuck frozen. Then Dad says, “My girls,” and Rachel cries, “Daddy!” He squeezes my hand hard, my hand feels warm, and then he starts walking. He’s walking fast, pulling us along, towing us past all of the nutbars, fast, fast, fast, out of this place, away from here, away from Mom and our lemon meringue pie that’s still sitting on the table.

In the car, none of us says anything. Rachel stares out the window. The quiet hurts my ears, but there are no words in my mouth, no words in my head.

“Okay,” Dad says when we pull up at HoJo’s, but his word flutters and bumps like a sparrow against our front picture window at home. I don’t know what word he should have picked, but
okay
isn’t the right one.

When we get to the room, Rachel lies on her stomach on our bed and pretends to fall asleep. Dad sits in the armchair with his book open, but he isn’t reading. He’s just staring all squinty-eyed at the green curtains, like maybe there’s a secret message written there that will make everything make sense. I go into the bathroom, change into my black one-piece swimsuit, and put my clothes back on.

“I’m going to the pool,” I say.

“Okay,” Dad says, not looking at me.

“The rule is, you’re supposed to be fourteen or else you need to be accompanied by an adult,” I say.

“You’ll be fine,” Dad says. “You’re my Cape Cod girl. You’re my quahog. Just get out if anyone tells you to.” He looks at me, smiles, and then goes back to trying to read the curtains.

In the pool, I puff my belly up and float on my back like a dead fish.

The water’s warm. It fills my ears. My breath goes in and out, in and out. My heart thumps. If I were really dead, I wouldn’t hear my breath. I wouldn’t
hear my heart. I could float right on the surface without having to move my arms around to stay up. Since I wouldn’t be moving my arms around, I wouldn’t make waves that slosh against the side of the pool. I would stay absolutely, positively still. No breath, no thump, no slosh.

When I flip over, the chlorine burns my eyes, but I like the way everything looks fuzzy and green. I like how nothing is clear. I surface-dive down, down, down. With my belly on the bottom of the pool, I’m a beautiful mermaid. I take my hair out of its ponytail and put the elastic on my wrist. I swim around with my long, flowy hair and slithery body. Tiny bubbles float off my skin. The golden hairs on my arms wave around. A mermaid never needs to come up for air. She opens her mouth and tasty minnows drift in. She drinks seawater. She swims for as long as she wants, and no one sees her unless she wants them to. No one sees her and no one talks to her and no one touches her and says stupid things. No one even thinks about her. And she doesn’t think about anyone.

I want to stay down here in the fuzzy green, not thinking about anyone, especially Marcy, with her hands on my shoulders and her ugly voice telling me to leave Mom alone, but my lungs ache and my head hurts and I can’t help pulling myself up through the water and gulping in air.

Getting out of the pool, I’m dizzy. I know about putting my head lower than my heart, so I sit on a
white plastic chair and bend over. When I’m better, I get my pants. I fish the napkin out of the pocket. It’s hard to unroll it, because it’s all stuck together. Even though I bet it’s against the rules, I squat down by the edge of the pool and dunk the clam strips in,
dunk, dunk, dunk
, and sing my song:

Little pieces of napkin stick to the clam strips like wet snowflakes. Tiny bits of gold stuff float off the clam strips and sink.

J
OEY
’
S SITTING ON OUR
front porch reading when we pull up. I can tell he’s at a good part, because he’s hunched over and doesn’t look up until we slam our car doors.

“Hey,” he says, and waves. He’s wearing a red sweatshirt and no hat and no gloves or mittens.

“What’s he doing?” Rachel says.

“He’s reading,” I say.

“Duh,” she says. “Why’s he on our porch?”

I look over at Joey. He’s sitting in a sun patch, and his hair looks white in all the light. I start to head over to him but Dad says, “Hey, my stint as your pack mule’s over. Come get your knapsack,” and by the time I pull it out of the trunk, Joey’s gone.

Inside, our house feels empty, like no one has lived in it for an eternity, which is longer than a lifetime. I go into my room and close my door. Rachel goes
into her room and closes her door. Dad yells up for us to unpack our stuff and put our dirty clothes in the hamper, and Rachel yells down, “You know, you don’t have to nag me about every little thing,” and Dad yells back, “This is NOT the time,” and I hear his study door shut loud, not exactly a slam, since Dad doesn’t believe in slamming, but a good, hard, angry shut.

Once I’ve got my knapsack unpacked, I pack it right back up again with my binocs,
The Secret Garden
, and a wool blanket the color of reindeer moss that I took naps with in kindergarten. In the kitchen, I pack Wheat Thins and five boxes of raisins, since they’re full of nutrition, like iron, potassium, and calcium, in case I run into an emergency and can’t get back home in the foreseeable future.

I knock on Dad’s study door. He says, “Yes?” but not “Come in,” which means I shouldn’t open the door, because he’s thinking hard about something important and probably wearing his black beret that helps him concentrate.

“I’m going out,” I say through the door.

“Okay, honey,” Dad says.

I’m nervous ringing the bell at Joey’s, and not just because of his brothers. There’s a dark feeling that creeps out of his house. No one is answering the door, even though I hear footsteps clomping around inside. I count to three really fast, and then I fly down the stairs and along the front path. I’m almost to the
street when I hear the door open. Part of me wants to pretend that I didn’t hear it and just keep walking, but when nobody calls to me, when there’s only a floating balloon of quiet, I’m too curious not to turn around. Joey is standing at the door. He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at me, nods, and shuts the door.

I run all the way to my tree, so that once I get there, my body’s nice and warm. Most people would say it’s too cold now to hang out in a salt marsh, even with the sun and even with a baby blanket wrapped around me, but I’m not most people; I’m a quahog. The marsh lady might be a quahog, too, which means that I shouldn’t have to tell her that late November is a particularly good time for seeing red-throated loons. I’m not in the mood to talk to her anyway. She needs to make a little effort if she wants to get to know me. Relationships are not something you can just take for granted, Dad says. They require both people to put energy in.

I lean against my tree and watch and watch but don’t see any loons. Maybe when I blink I’m missing them when they pop up to the surface, so I try not blinking. The cold burns my eyeballs. It looks like I’m crying. There’s nothing to cry about. Mom is going to keep resting at McLean’s, and Dad says she’ll probably give electroconvulsive therapy a try, which is a safe and effective treatment for an anxious depression and should make a big difference. She’ll
be home before too long, and everything will settle back to normal.

“Hey.”

I nearly jump out of my skin. It’s Joey. He must have followed me here.

“You scared me!”

“Boo,” he says in a gentle, quiet voice, so I know he didn’t mean to.

I wipe my drippy eyes with the back of my mitten. “I’m not crying,” I say.

“I know,” he says. He has a pink mark on his cheek, like someone slapped him or maybe a fat branch snapped back on him. He still isn’t wearing any hat or gloves or mittens.

“If it wasn’t so cold, I’d climb that tree,” he says, pointing to the beech, the tallest tree around. “I bet I could climb all the way to the top.”

“Maybe,” I say.

“I could,” he says. “I’d climb all the way to the top. I’d be able to see everything from up there.”

“P-town?”

“Yup.”

“Boston?”

“Yup.”

“Italy?”

Joey looks at me. His eyes are squinty and his mouth is a short, straight line. I think he thinks I’m being mean to him.

“I bet Italy is a really cool place,” I say.

Joey still looks suspicious.

“Pizza,” I say. “And lasagna.”

“Spaghetti,” he says.

“Meatball subs,” I say, and Joey smiles.

He walks down to the water and scoops up sand with his hands held together like a bowl. When he tosses the sand in, it makes black dots in the dark water. He’s moving in slow motion—scoop, toss, scoop, toss—and I think maybe he’s never going to stop, but then he does. He comes over to me and he’s shivering and the spot on his cheek looks like it’s glowing. I stay really still and don’t say anything, and Joey sits down right next to me, and I wrap part of my blanket around him and keep my arm there, around his shoulder. His body’s shaking, and it makes my body shake, too.