The Worst Thing I've Done (31 page)

She heads for the door. “Where is my windbreaker?”

“I…don't know.” I hate lying to her. Still, if you remove one part of a dream, you undo the dream, break its sequence.

“It was hanging from the second peg.”

I feel superstitious. Unreasonable.

“I want my purple windbreaker!”

“Oh…that windbreaker. You've outgrown that.”

“Not so.”

“It looked…funny in back. It puckered. Where you couldn't see it.”

“Liar liar pants on fire…”

“Drop it, Mason.”

“It really didn't look good on you anymore,” I tell Opal. “We'll get you another one, okay?”

“Not okay.”

“You can pick a new color. You must be getting sick of purple.”

“You don't even know that purple is my mother's favorite color. You don't know anything. You stupid—”

Aunt Stormy catches her in a hug. “How about saving this for our Hungry Ghost? Here's a piece of paper. Now you can write it down and save it in the ghost box for a most excellent fire.”

Distracting her…it's what my mother used to do with me when I was little.
Finding our mothers in different ways…

Opal shields her left hand around what she's writing. “And I don't have to tell you or Annie what I write?”

“Oh no.”

“Unless you want to,” I say, wishing I hadn't.

“I don't want to!”

“Stop sniping at me!”

Aunt Stormy gets the ghost box we've decorated with crepe paper and leftover fabrics from her business. Bright colors, red and purple and gold.

Opal makes mean little eyes at me. “Promise you won't read it?”

“I promise.”

“We all promise,” Aunt Stormy says.

“What if it happens then? What if I write down that Annie is stupid and the ghost takes her away?”

“All our Hungry Ghost does is burn away what's in the box. He won't hurt people or take them away.”

Opal folds her paper, slips it into the box. “This is for our Hungry Ghost.”

Mother-by-choice, then?

I kiss Aunt Stormy's face.

“Hey…,” she says, surprised, and kisses me back.

Not just choosing sisters as she and my mother did,
sisters-by-choice
, but also choosing mothers, daughters?

The air around me feels spacious and light and complete, mine to breathe, to keep, and all at once I know I'm ready to work.

I
WAIT
till Opal is asleep before I retrieve her windbreaker from behind the
Eckbank.
Purple and hooded, it's lined with thin white cotton, almost new still. I could return it to my daughter—

But I need it as the background for my collage. I crumple and rip the purple fabric, glue it to a canvas and overlay it with beach glass, drift-wood, a circle of dried catbriers…no longer dodging my panic and sorrow and rage but letting them become the background against which I'm reconstructing our lives the way Pete is reconstructing his body…layers and circles…paint and glass and seedpods that want to spill beyond the canvas…transforming superstition into a loss that did
not
happen: Opal drowning.

Water, then. The raft—

Again? I raise dental X-rays to the lamp. The hint of bones…shadows of flesh…light coming through from above. If only I'd had them for the windows of my Train Series. For the raft then, now. Linked, the X-rays make up planks. Like vertebrae.

What if Opal recognizes the fabric before it has become something else? But then what I begin with always changes—it's part of what pulls me in, that risk of entering without knowing where I'll emerge. Still, I work quickly in case she wakes up, keep a towel nearby to hide the canvas from her.

What'll happen if I become as much part of that image as Jake and Mason? That long-ago fear rises up to meet me again, leads me toward seeing more.

They're underwater too long.

One head rises.

The other is underwater too long. Mason—

But it's true for the collage…the blue hinting at shadows beneath…hinting at bodies…and there's a richness in that. I have to resist forcing them up to the surface, the boys.
It's just a trick of—

No. Not a trick.

I saw this.

This is what I saw.

And I have to let the boys stay where they are. Mason underwater. Have to let it be disturbing—not only to me in the making but to anyone who'll see this.

I'm working. Working.
And now the other head rises…Mason…both visible now…yes, shoulders and arms…Jake and Mason, hooting—laughing? no, not laughing—hoisting themselves onto the raft, torsos glistening, drawing together in the center of the raft, a knot of arms and legs—

Do they imagine me there between them, warm boards against our feet, the heat of our bodies, there?

Or is it only for themselves, the heat of their bodies?

Once I see, it's there, between them. Has been between them since that day on the raft. I wait to feel surprise. Nothing.

Only on the raft?

Only that day?

What about Morocco?

T
HE SUMMER
after the three of us graduated from high school and went to Tangier, we had cropped hair that bleached under the sun while our skin stayed orange-brown from the instant tanning cream Mason had bought. We never got a normal tan—just that orange-brown and white stripes bordering our new haircuts.

Our combined parents had made hotel reservations for us, a room with two beds for Mason and Jake, a single for me, where I kept my clothes, as if that would appease Mason's parents if they were to call and check on us. In reality, Jake stayed in the single, while I slept with Mason. Our first night, we talked till late, made plans where we wanted to go in the morning. Then Jake slipped away to the narrow room with the narrow bed.

But the next day I felt assaulted by men's stares wherever I went—stares and mumbled words close to my face and the smacking of lips—stifling in a way no one could have told me it would be. I'd traveled with my parents, had loved being in Italy and in Mexico—but Morocco confined me, pissed me off.

Jake stayed next to me. “I'm here, Annie.”

But Mason didn't get it when I freaked out.

That afternoon, I urged Mason and Jake to explore the neighborhood without me. “Just go,” I said. “I'll read. I'll take a bath.”

While I waited for the tub to fill, I sat on the bed and looked through our guidebook, read the same passage twice, too upset to take it in. All I wanted was to get out of Tangier. I read a different chapter. Stood up to get my journal from my backpack. Wet, the bottoms of my feet. Wet. Water, rising through the rugs.
Damn. Damn.

I shut off the tub faucet, grabbed our towels to soak up the water, but they got brown from dirt that oozed from the rugs. I smuggled them into the laundry room across the hall, absconded with fresh towels. But after four sets, the rug was still damp, and we had to sleep in the narrow room, where the rugs were dry.

“I'll have to sleep in the middle,” Mason announced.

“Why is that?” Jake asked.

“Because I don't want you to sleep next to my future wife.”

“Your—what?” Jake asked, stunned.

“If she's in the middle, you're next to her,” Mason said, “and if you're in the middle, she's still next to you. You know how I am when I get jealous.”

“When was all that decided?” Jake asked him, but he was staring at me.

“Sometime in first grade,” I said. “I haven't thought about it in a while.”

Spooning. Mason spooning me tight on the narrow bed. His thigh thrown across me. “How about next summer for our wedding?”

“Would you two like some privacy?” Jake's voice, so hurt.

“Let's just sleep,” I said, “all right?”

But when I woke with sun in my eyes, the space between Mason and me was cool. I turned over. Mason's hand lay on Jake's hip—
that's where it must have fallen while they slept, unaware
—and Mason's body was curled around Jake's back. My stomach felt weird. I eased out of bed. Filled a glass with water.
How embarrassed those two will be to see themselves like that.
I laughed. Drank more water. Got my camera. Snapped a photo. Thinking I'd paste it into their next birthday cards and really embarrass them. I was ready to tease them when they woke up. But then I didn't. Maybe because Jake was crabby when he opened his eyes. He'd always been like that when startled from sleep.

I wanted to get away from the two of them.

Away from the disorienting maze of Tangier.

Asilah was different, white and open, high on the cliffs. We walked through the Medina without being hustled, entered the shop of an old black weaver and watched him weave while we tried on the soft jackets he'd made. He had such dignity and kindness, was a Muslim, talked to us about the extreme poverty in his country, about men having to be out there hustling for their families.

His daughter, a young, heavy woman, made tea for us, and I could smell the strong mint as the old man spoke about people learning to live with others and to live with themselves. I bought a jacket, and we drank the mint tea—its taste as pleasing as its smell. The daughter served, was reluctant to sit with us though I asked her to, but when she let herself down next to me, she smiled and touched my wrist.

The old man untied a string of wooden bracelets, inlaid with tiny stones, and asked me to choose one as a gift. Most were too small to fit over my hand. But he selected the one for me that fit. I wore the bracelet when we explored the ramparts high above the sea, and when Mason grabbed me—playful at first but then not—he tried to pull it off my wrist; and I bit him, wrestled him by the sheer drop of the cliffs, and all along Jake screaming for us to stop it. But his eyes were glinting.

And I went to him.

“S
TILL ANGRY
at me?” I sit down on the back steps next to Opal.

She flexes Pete's pocket mirror in one hand while Luigi hunts the reflection of the light. Muscles taut, he waits, then pounces upon the flicker in the grass.

“He's so much healthier,” I tell Opal. “You take good care of him.”

But she doesn't look at me.

“Just the fact that he's getting into mischief,” I say, “is a sign he's getting more confident.”

She flashes her mirror for Luigi.

He's been ransacking the neighborhood, carrying his booty home—a doll once, a feather duster, a tennis ball, a pair of sunglasses, a sweater—and tucking it behind his cedar bed as if burying bones.

“Do you feel like telling me a Melissandra story?”

“Maybe Melissandra offed herself too.”

“I don't think so. I have a feeling she's still around.”

Opal takes off her shoes. Cups her toes with her hands.

“You want me to rub them for you?”

“No.”

“Are they hurting?”

Opal shrugs.

“How about if you and I make up a story about Melissandra?”

“She's not yours!”

“I hate it when you throw me away like this.”

“I'm not throwing anything.”

“I thought it was getting…easier between us. And I hate it that this stuff is happening again.”

“What stuff?”

“You working so hard to throw me away. Will you listen real closely to what I'm going to say?” I wait for her to nod, and when she doesn't, I say very slowly, pausing between each word: “I. Am. Not. Going. To. Leave. You.”