The Worst Thing I've Done (3 page)

“The police said I shouldn't have touched anything,” Annie says.

“I was looking forward to…the cruise.” Mel is sobbing. “We both were.”

“Mel, listen to me—” Dr. Francine starts.

But Mel is sobbing.

On Annie's right, the Southampton campus. And now one lane only. A liquor store. Two marinas. Sunoco.

“When I found Mason,” Annie tells Mel and Dr. Francine, “all my collages were pulled out…propped against the walls…against the legs of my worktable. And all I could think was that the air smelled of smoke. The smoke had nothing to do with Mason's death but with fires in Canada.”

They'd been burning ever since lightning struck the parched ground two weeks earlier. And the smoke kept drifting south—more than five hundred miles south—crossing the border, spreading through New England.

Mel. Still sobbing.

Annie pulls into the 7-Eleven, where a wild-haired man is limping across the parking lot in some bizarre pattern of three hops to the side, three forward. When he bumps into Annie's car, he stares at her through the passenger window, the kind of stare small children will give you before they've learned it's not polite.

She waves him away.
Tells Dr. Francine and Mel how, the day after Mason's death, Opal wanted to take the garden hoses to go north and fight the fires in Canada. “As if fighting the fire could still save Mason's life.”

She turns off the engine. Waits till the man has limped into the 7-Eleven. When she enters, he's trying on sunglasses by the tiny mirror on top of the display case, raising his chin, making badger teeth. Two teenagers are studying the candy rack. By the hot food section, four young Latinos are buying burritos. Good idea. Annie buys a burrito, fries, chocolate milk, two doughnuts.

Driving while eating is better than driving without eating.

And driving while eating
and
listening to talk radio is even better because there's space for little else.

Annie's mother used to sing in the car, Hildegard Knef songs that she'd translate for Annie and Annie's father, smoky-voiced songs about stealing hours of happiness by talking them away, songs about lies we tell ourselves and take for truth. She sang her Knef songs in the car the morning she drove with Annie and Mason to Boston to protest against the Gulf War. Their first protest, and they were fifteen, exhilarated to march with her because she didn't behave like someone's mother—more like a friend with a driver's license, waving her protest sign, red hair flying—and they were awed when she told them she'd been arrested. She and Aunt Stormy had been to so many protests, starting with Vietnam when they'd arrived in America, that they had seven arrests between them.

C
HEWING HER
fries, Annie continues east on 27, waiting for Dr. Francine. But it's the man who sells hair thickener. Then the perky people from foreign language by mail.

Dr. Virginia, then. “If you only think skin, Kevin, you are missing the cause. Don't you see what you are doing to yourself?”

Silence while Kevin deliberates. The moment he says, “No…?” Dr. Virginia is on him.

“Self-esteem. Because you hold yourself in such low esteem—”

“Not really. I have a graduate degree in communications. I work out four days a week. I have my own business, and I recently got married.”

“—and you're so defensive about your low self-esteem”—Dr. Virginia's voice rises—“that it's only natural how ugliness rises to the surface, erupts.”

“That is such crap,” Annie tells her.

“So what am I supposed to do?” Kevin asks.

“I just told you,” Dr. Virginia snaps.

“No, you didn't,” Annie snaps.

“No, you didn't,” Kevin snaps.

“Some people never learn to listen.”

“I thought you could tell me what to put on the pimples so that—”

“It has nothing to do with what kind of ointment you put on your face—”

“Wait—” Annie cuts in. “What about all the ointments and stuff you peddle during your commercials? Don't you want Kevin to buy them?”

“—although there are a few exceptional products I endorse on my show—”

“You bet, Chickie—”

“—but what you need to do, Kevin, in addition to applying those products according to directions, is think of the self-esteem as a layer beneath your skin, a layer you have control over—Hello? I'm talking with Brittany from Newark.”

“Thank you so much, Dr. Virginia, for taking my call.”

“T
HAT'S WHAT
she gets paid for,” Annie tells Brittany. “That's how she hawks her pimple cream.”

The moment Brittany starts talking about her daughter's drug use, Dr. Virginia berates her. “It's because of your selfish parenting.”

Annie tries to get mad at Dr. Virginia, to side with Brittany. But she can't get inside their conversation. Though she punches up the volume, she can't get it loud enough to blot out the rope—Quickly, she substitutes another picture—one she's carried within her since she was thirteen and came upon Mason and Jake on the raft at their summer camp—a picture she can evoke any time, because that afternoon the golden inside her grew warm and heavy toward both of them. Above the glitter of the water, shoving each other off the raft, hooting—laughing?—and climbing on again, their movements one continuous dance…Mason, the spider, the monkey dancer, all limbs and motion…Jake, the centaur, calves thick and feet broad, the rest of him slim, all the stability of his body below his knees.

Raft/1
was inspired by what Annie saw that summer afternoon, the boys merging in the center of the raft, a huddle of arms and legs arching toward the edge with immeasurable grace, a grace that embarrassed them when she showed them the collage.

So far, she has eleven raft collages. Train Series she completed in two years. Pond Series in four. Most of her collages are not part of a series; but the Raft Series has tugged at her for more than half her life now, and each collage has revealed more than she believed she knew. Like how that dance above water defines her connection to Mason and to Jake—
one of us always looking on.
If she already understood the image, she wouldn't need to search for it. It's like that when she works…the unknown sucking her in. She rather lets her materials influence what she'll do, a conversation of sorts: she'll lay out an array of papers the way a painter will lay out her palette; tear and bunch and crinkle them; layer them to change colors and textures and depth; and strive for that flicker of a moment when the real becomes unreal and the unreal real, when—in the instant of shifting and becoming—they're equally real.

“I
BELIEVE
in being open,” Dr. Francine says.

“Right. Opal can discuss anything with me.”

Slurping cool chocolate through her straw, Annie drives past East End Tick Control, Burger King, Fast Lube, Mobil, Gulf. Past the animal hospital and plumbing supplies. Past empty side streets that are jammed during the day.

“Whenever I see parents who have trouble with their children, I figure they have to be tight-assed.” She expects Dr. Francine to tell her
tight-assed
is not acceptable for talk radio.

But the doctor says, “Excessive tact often masks an unwillingness to communicate.”

“If those parents weren't tight-assed,” Annie says, “those kids would talk to them, talk it out. I've answered all of Opal's questions. She has torn photos of Mason from albums, taped them to the refrigerator. It makes me sick, but how can I not let her? She adored Mason…still adores him, though she knows what he did…and how. I keep watching her for signs of…trouble. Encourage her to talk.”

With Mason it used to be talk and talk, wonderful talk, excessive talk, draining talk.
“We had periods of silence, of course. Every marriage has those, right?” Annie asks Dr. Francine.

But even after Mason's jealousy binges that made her feel exhausted and judged, they always talked—except after that night in the sauna when he pushed her and Jake beyond the line that had shifted since they were children, separating himself from them forever.

“He watched us as if counting on us to stop him as we had so many times before…like pulling him away from some cliff.”

Dr. Francine sighs.

Annie stuffs the last three fries into her mouth. Aren't widows supposed to waste away from sorrow? In the movies they do. But not Annie. She's never been the type to waste away, and she's been absorbing weight since the suicide, courtesy of Mason. Fourteen pounds already. Going for twenty-four.

“Thank you for that too, Mason.”
She bears left, past the diner and Pier 1. Signs for the vineyards: Wolffer, Duck Walk. Channing Daughters.

“I bet you eighteen pounds max.”

“You can't bet. You're dead.”

“You're gorgeous whatever weight you are.”

“If you figure fourteen pounds in seventeen days, that comes to over three quarters of a pound a day. Right? In one year, that would add two hundred seventy pounds.”

“Y
OU'RE GORGEOUS
—” Mason pressed himself high inside Annie, so slow and sweet and again.

A thud against glass. Beyond Mason's shoulders, outside the window, a streak of gray, a squirrel, falling as if shot from a tree.

“What is it?” Mason asked. “What—”

Annie touched one finger to his lips.

Scratching. Then the squirrel's head and white belly as it scaled the windowsill and hurled itself against the glass. Another thud. And the squirrel plummeting.

“We have a voyeur,” Mason announced. “Must be the incarnation of some ex-lover of yours.”

“In that case…get ready for at least two dozen squirrels.”

Startled, he laughed.

She was glad she'd stopped him with that. Because if she'd told him what she really felt—
I wish you wouldn't say stuff like that…you know there wasn't anyone else
—he'd be asking his jealous questions. So jealous of any moment she was away from him. Except when it came to Opal. With her he was generous and playful and—

The squirrel was readying itself for another leap that would bounce it off the glass and back on the ground.

“I know what it wants.” Mason. Slow and sweet and again.

She pulled in—her breath…him…and managed to say, “Must be cold out there.”

“Not in here.”

“No compassion for the furry.”

“I bet you it'll jump again.”

“Twice.”

“Three jumps. I bet you three.”

The squirrel repeated its ritual outside the window. Through it all, Opal did not wake up in the next room; and Annie was glad for the peace.