The Worst Thing I've Done (34 page)

“You sound eager to get away.”

“No, no…”

Annie can still see one edge of red, while the other edge has softened beneath the gauzy petals.

This is what Jake sees in her collage: various depths of water. Reflections. Blues in the upper half of the collage. The lower half a strong brown with other colors coming through…orange and amber. A bog, perhaps.

“Is that a bog, Annie?”

“Could be…What matters is what you see in there.”

“And the red girl down there, to the right?”

“That's the one area where it goes flat on me.”

“Could that be you?”

“To me it is.” She picks up scissors, cuts a hand from shiny yellow paper.

Jake peers through the raft where two figures emerge. Two men, spooning. The hand of one man on the hip of the other man—“What is that?”

“From Morocco. The night the tub overflowed.”

Mason's salt-sweaty smell comes at Jake in a rush of longing and disgust. To keep from falling, he stands by the wall. “That's not how we slept.”

“I didn't make it up.”

—Mason's hand on my hip. His face pressed into my neck. Our features blunt. Sleep-flattened. Skin-flattened—
“That photo?” he asks.

“While you were sleeping.”

“But why?”

“I thought it was funny. Then. I was going to tease you but…”

“But you didn't.”

“You woke up, and it was different. I don't know. It wasn't funny anymore.”

“Why now?”

“To see.”

“Is that why you're doing the raft again?”

“You sound like Mason.”

“I'm not—”

“He used to get…squirmy when I did a raft collage. But now you too?”

Mason's face pressed low into that dip between my shoulders. Sleep-flattened—

Annie dabs glue on back of the shiny yellow hand she's cut out. Builds up the hand of the yellow boy who swims with the brown boy next to the raft.

It agitates Jake, the boy's yellow hand. It was yellow before, but not as big and obvious because it was the same rice paper texture as the figure. But now, raised and shiny, it overlaps the forehead of the brown boy.

“I was so…naïve. Was I, Jake?” Annie's breath is high and fast.

“No.” He keeps staring at her collage.

“On the raft too. You and Mason. Not just in bed, there.”

“It wasn't like that.”

She rinses her brushes. “You loved him, right?”

“I loved you both.”

“Really loved
him
.”

“I loved you both. And then only you.”

“You don't have to pretend…about loving me.”

“It's not like that. Because I do love you.”

“But not love me in that way of wanting me.”

“That way too.”

“With both of us?”

“Not with Mason. No.” He shakes his head.

“Then what is this?” She faces the raft. And is stunned. Because she has done it…gone beyond sequence, revealed everything at once: two boys grappling leaping vanishing arising bucking—echoes from layers beneath layers where two men sleep entwined on a bed in Morocco forever and there—the surface smooth again and the boys grappling leaping vanishing arising bucking and the girl getting closer and being inside the image and not just looking on. Echoes. Forever and again all at once.
One of us always watching…

“Annie—”

She laughs. Exhilarated. Terrified.
At last.
“It's possible then.”

Possible?

What's possible then?

Jake wonders if she's thinking of her love for him, the complications of that love.

Her face is flushed.

So much still possible—

Is it even fair to burden her just so that he can quiet his conscience?

What if this—how he saw Mason kill himself—is the one secret he'll need to keep from her?

He can do that.

Carry it alone—no matter how it weighs on him?

Easier than not having Annie and Opal in his life.

Is that cowardly?

Noble?

“I've done it, Jake.” She's still looking at her collage.

“Done what?” He steps next to her, and the image of the boys and the raft shifts itself, supersedes the image of Mason killing himself, cancels it, and becomes a far more significant secret. A secret he can trade for the secret he'll carry alone, a secret he can tell Annie without losing her, making her believe this is what he intended to tell her.

“About what I wanted to tell you…”

“Of course.” She seems startled, brought back from some place he can't go with her.

“That summer at camp when Mason was stealing—”

“You already told me.”

“Not everything.”

“Let's sit by the window so I can watch Opal and Mandy.”

“It's always been there…but far away. And telling you feels…” He shakes his head. “Nasty. When I found Mason hiding in my cabin, he was in my bunk. Crying and saying, ‘I'll do you, Jake.' ”

Annie breathes out carefully.

“I ran. From Mason. From the cabin—”

“From your own wanting?”

“I don't know, Annie. Perhaps from my confusion about wanting? I ran to the lake and jumped in and swam to the raft with him following and stepping behind me on the raft and getting hard. Not just Mason. Me too. Hating myself and hating him for standing with me and feeling him and waiting—” Jake says it all in a rush, and already his shame and horror and grief at seeing Mason die in Annie's studio are fusing with what he felt as a boy when he wanted Mason dead. That same shame and horror and grief. Entwined and true.

“But then I saw you, Annie. On the shore. And I pushed Mason away. Fought to keep him from me till we fell into the lake. But we were still holding on to each other. Still holding. So I pushed him away. Down—”

“You held him down?”

“That's what still bothers me most. That I wanted him dead. And now he is.” Inching closer to the secret he can't tell her. Confessing without losing her.

She gets up. Touches her collage…that shiny hand.

Outside, Luigi is barking at Opal and Mandy, who are scooping cracked corn for the ducks from the metal can and securing the lid with the bungee cord. Luigi follows them, tail wagging.

“Remember us at that age?” Jake asks.

She nods.

“Running around. Playing hide-and-seek.”

“You looked so mad when you swam in from the raft. And you ran off.”

“I felt…nasty.” Jake can't look into her eyes.

“Mason was giddy and so happy I was there. But you—”

“Then I got sick.”

“—ran off.”

“Sick from eating red Jell-O.”

“I thought you were mad at me. And I didn't know why.”

“I wasn't mad at you, Annie.”

But she's leaning toward her collage, toward what she saw that day, the red girl's entire body now inside this dance of fleeting transformations—real to unreal and real again—and she already knows that what she sees will continue to calibrate, and that this too—Jake telling her—is a moment in her life that will shift and align itself.

She feels wise. Generous. Impatient with anything less intense and true. “It started for me that day,” she says. “Falling in love with both of you.”

She recalls the pull toward both of them—

Or was it rather toward what she believed she spied that shimmering day between them?

But what she spies now, that moment, is Jake waiting, and she's no longer watching but immersed as she swims toward the raft where there's only Jake—
Jake only
—reaching into the water for her as she hoists herself onto the warm planks.

Fiddler crabs. Scooting like shadows across the sand. Hundreds of fiddler crabs.

Opal floats. Floats with Jake and Annie and Opal down Alewife Brook. The tide carries them into the harbor. Past the sandbar where a woman and a man wave to them. Square bodies. Square chins. Black hair.

“What are you people on?” The woman laughs.

“Noodles,” Opal yells, letting the ends of her long foam noodle bounce from the water.

“One year our parents drifted with the incoming tide all the way to Alewife Pond,” Annie tells her, “and when the tide didn't turn, they had to walk back.”

“They heard the mussels sing,” Opal says.

“How do you know that?” Jake asks.

“They told Aunt Stormy, and she told me. You want to see the mussels, Jake?”

“Sure.” He pulls on his goggles.

“They live by the underwater wall. Want to see, Jake?”

He follows her underwater.

Feathery plants sway with the current. Touch Opal's neck. And there it is…tiny caves and bridges.

“Magical,” Jake says when they come up for air. He heads toward Annie. “Like a miniature of that ancient wall of caves in Morocco.”

“Don't get out, Jake,” Opal says.

“Just for a while.” He lies down next to Annie. Shuts his eyes.

“Look look at me!” Opal jumps up in the water. “Jake?”

“I can hear you splashing.”

“But you're not looking at me.”

He points to his bald spot. “I'm watching you through my third eye.”

“You're lucky you're so fair,” Annie tells him. “That way it doesn't show so much.”

“Lately, I've been using a little mirror to check the back of my head.”

“Now how many men would admit that?”

“Jake!” Opal yells.

He squints at her. Waves to her. “Remember when you said Opal has two fathers?” he asks Annie.

“Let's do another float with Opal.” Annie runs into the brook. Lifts Opal into her arms and swirls her around.

Jake follows her, and they walk against the outgoing tide, along the shallow edge, where the vivid colors of pebbles dim and revive with the motion of water.

“Look!” Opal has found a feather, still attached to a bit of cartilage.

“A critter bit,” Annie says.

“You can have it.”

“Thank you.” Annie tucks it into the hollow core of her noodle before she gets back into the current.

Where they come around the bend of the sandbar again, the man is burying the woman, and suddenly Annie recognizes them—the people who come to the beach to bury each other. They inspired a collage when Opal was a baby. At first Annie didn't know what it was going to become, didn't know those shapes though she had traced them in the sand; but once she identified them, they reminded her of another collage with overlapping circles.
A Thousand Loops.
Motion disguised as inertia. Encapsulated within those rounded shapes.

When they get back to their towels, Opal and Jake fall asleep, but Annie holds the critter bit in her hands, and already her fascination is drawing other impressions to it…hills of two bodies against the sky…lumis, yes, lumis flickering in the sky…light. And though it will become something different, it will always carry the breath and energy of that first inspiration, though it may no longer be recognizable as that.
It's a way of coming into myself.
Maybe she'll see them again next summer, the man and the woman, mounds of sand defining their large bodies.

Opal tries to curl herself back into sleep. Above her, a flutter sound. She squints. It's the umbrella. Its shade on her face. Her forehead against something soft and warm. Freckles.
A field of freckles.
Annie's arm.

“Jake sleeps like that,” Annie tells her. “Sleep was so important to his mom that she never interrupted it—not even when Mason and I wanted to play with him.”

“I didn't know that.” Jake sits up, yawning

“Because you were asleep,” Opal says. “Duh.”

“Duh yourself.” He wrinkles his nose at her.

Annie strokes Opal's forehead. “All the day-care kids had to walk on their toes when Jake took his naps.”

Opal rubs her eyes. Burrows against Annie.
Freckles and sun.