‘Maybe …’ Lucy answers.
‘Why?’ Simone cocks her head.
‘I don’t know. Eighteen is … on the precipice, isn’t it?’
‘Right,’ Simone says, thinking she doesn’t know at all what eighteen is, actually. Eighteen, for her, was survival, but she would never tell Lucy the full extent of that.
‘Do you have complicated feelings about being eighteen?’ Simone probes.
Lucy nods emphatically while swallowing. ‘For sure. How did you get these so salty?’
‘I made salt,’ Simone says. ‘Didn’t you see – the pan? The salt crystals forming?’
‘I wasn’t sure what you were doing,’ Lucy says. A beat. ‘I was thinking about Dad, when I should have been helping.’
‘What’s complicated about being eighteen?’ Simone asks, wanting to return to this, then raises her palms. ‘Open question. Obviously, lots of things.’
It’s beginning to get cold, now, but it’s still the sweet spot between fierce heat and freezing weather. It’s windier tonight, and Lucy puts her hair up after several moments of being irritated with it sticking to her food and face. By them, the stream tinkles and flows.
‘I’m going to need another fork,’ she jokes.
Simone waits.
‘Are you accusing me of having got us into this situation?’ Lucy asks, and it’s such a leap, a fallacy of logic, that Simone automatically thinks,I wasn’t, but I might now.
‘What?’ she says.
‘Because I didn’t.’
‘I didn’t accuse you of anything.’ Simone keeps her voice level, her mind cycling. Why would Lucy jump to that conclusion?
‘We’re in this together, I thought,’ Simone continues. ‘What makes you think I was accusing you?’
‘I didn’t. Sorry. I’m just stressed. This life is not for me!’ she says. ‘Maybe I will just inherit Dishes after all and be a nepo baby.’
‘No chance. You don’t even recognizesalt.’
And that’s the conversation gone, skirted once more. Simone understands it, has spent much of her life hiding her true feelings from everybody except Damien. But this is the distance Simone keeps encountering. Lucy making veiledreferences tosomething. Lucy not telling her why she doesn’t want to move out. Lucy being defensive, thinking Simone was accusing her. Simone shivers with something like nervousness. When you’re running together, you have to trust each other – and does she?
‘It feels like there’s no hope of a way out at all, ever,’ Lucy says.
‘I know.’
Lucy pauses. ‘I’m depressed now.’
‘Me too.’
‘Let’s, I don’t know, rescue it.’
‘Rescue what?’
‘Save the day. The mood. Look,’ she says, holding out a hand to her mother in the gloom. ‘Let’s go in the stream.’ Less a stream, more a river, here on the flat ground. It’s maybe four feet deep and flowing. ‘Save the day. It means, no matter how crappy your day’s been, you do one nice thing at the end of it.’
‘Sure,’ Simone says agreeably; it’s not that cold yet. This is the sort of parent she is, always wanted to be, the kind of person who says yes almost always but means it when she says no. Fun times and boundaries. Simone only ever wanted to be perfect.
Lucy takes her top and shorts off, and Simone joins her. And the water is chilly, and they don’t have any towels, and now maybe they will be too cold overnight, but – oh. It feels delicious. The water is the temperature of a still winter morning, swirling, small variations detectable, almost warm and almost freezing entwining together. The iciest parts touch and soothe Simone’s sunburn. She floats and thinks nothing, for once. Not about missing Damien, or their ancient cat in the bay window, or Dishes.
‘God, this is nice,’ Lucy says, her head tilted back, her face a grey moon in the water. Her limbs swill, the occasionalfoot hitting foot, and Simone thinks of how her daughter once swam inside her, in the amniotic fluid, and her heart seems to turn over in nostalgia and sadness and something else, too.
