“Don’t thank me yet. Let’s see how you do first.” He points at her arms. “You’re going to have to keep that covered, okay?”
He means the tattoos. The ivy, the interwoven flowers, covering much of her left arm, from her wrist past her elbow. She got the first one on the one-year anniversary of being sober, and she’s added one every year since. Three years, three sections of vine.
“Of course,” she says. “No problem.”
She stands outside and looks at the water. Far, far in the distance, she can see a breakwater, and at the end of it a lighthouse. Right in front of her is a tiny stretch of beach, but it’s not really a beach—the sand is made up of small pebbles. She pictures the turquoise water off Miami Beach, the sand like spun sugar. It went on forever, that sand. Forever and ever and ever, like the days and nights and days again.
Well, Dorothy,she tells herself.You’re not in Florida anymore.
Her first instinct is to text her mother to tell her she got a job, to tell her Kristie is going to be okay. Her fingers hover over her phone screen. She can’t text her mother. But she wants to tell someone.
What’s the difference between a poorly dressed man on a tricycle and a well-dressed man on a bicycle?
Bicycle Girl Here, she texts.Guess What?
4.
The Children
After the rain stops, the children spend two hours down on the rocks, hardly noticing time passing. They are full of frenzied energy, the inevitable car squabbles forgotten. (Abigail “squishes” Claire into the middle seat, which they need because the third row is folded down to make room for a summer’s worth of gear; the boy odor when Matty takes off his shoes is offensive. And nobody likes anybody else’s music, which they all can hear through the headphones or earbuds each of them employs.)
Now they are talking about all of the things they will do while they are here this summer. Thewholesummer: a blessed eternity. They love everything about the Owls Head house; nobody, even Matty, admits to missing anything about Brooklyn, where summer is stilted and unforgiving and the air in July always feels too heavy.
They lay their wishes out like beads on a string. Claire wants tokayak all the way to Rockland Harbor, which Matty and Abigail both know she’s not capable of, but in the spirit of the first day of vacation they refrain from pointing this out. Matty wants to eat a hot dog at least twice a week from Wasses, and Abigail wants to see the Oreo cows at Aldermere Farm in Rockport. She wants, she discloses, to touch one. Which isn’t allowed.
They haven’t been called yet for dinner by the adults. Nobody has a watch, and their electronic devices are still in their bags from the car. Every so often a snippet of grownup noise travels from the wide back porch down to the rocks—their mother’s laugh, the loud, somewhat forbidding voice of their grandparents’ neighbor, Mr. Miller. Dinner at the Owls Head house is always at six o’clock sharp, and cocktail hour can start as early as four-thirty. It’s the only real time constraint in the welcome unscheduled strings of hours that make up their days in Maine. Thinking about these days—somanydays, this summer, so many more than previous years!—each child is filled with their own particular brand of excitement.
It is Claire who sees it first. She is thinking about the cheese plate that often appears with the cocktails. Claire is wondering whether it’s worth it to clamber up from the rocks to check on the contents. It sort of depends on what crackers might be available. In this house the children aren’t allowed to rummage through the cupboards for snacks, the way they do in Brooklyn, and while this stricture sometimes seems as though it might be an impediment, it usually turns out to be something of a relief. More surprises are in store if you don’t know what’s in the cupboards. Claire is also thinking about the small pickled onions she sometimes purloins from the cocktail tray, and she is prodding at the water with a stick she has found, balancing carefully on the slippery rocks and pretending she is Percy Jackson, controlling the water, when her eye falls on something just out of reach from her stick, floating.
Matty is far down at the other end of the rocks, thinking abouthis grandfather. It has all been explained to them by their mother, in great scientific detail; she even went so far as to go online and show them side-by-side images of a healthy brain and a brain with Alzheimer’s, the second one shrunken and oddly colored, almost tan. He can’t get the image out of his head; it makes him feel sick to his stomach, the thought of the two brains, and what might be happening inside a person’s skull while they go on about their business. At the same time it makes him feel oddly exhilarated, to know the specifics like this.
His mother spared nobody the images, not even Claire—his father said sharply that Claire was too young to look at the pictures of the brains but Claire said, breathlessly, “I want to!”
“They need to understand why he’s different than he used to be,” his mother said. “It’s less scary this way, if you make it about the science.”
“It’s more scary,” his father persisted, scowling. His mother bit her lip and kept looking at the computer screen and his father went off into his small study, the slam of the door like an exclamation point on the evening.
Matty is wondering how memories can live inside the coils and hills and valleys in the healthy brain and, in the unhealthy one, where they go when they depart. His mother told them that their grandfather may one day know them and be able to have a perfectly respectable conversation, and the next day he may not know his own name or that he once presided over some of the most famous court decisions in the state. Good days and bad days, that’s what she told them.
This is what he’s thinking when he hears Claire yelling about something in the water. He feels something in his stomach knot up, tight as a fist. It’s fear, probably, but he doesn’t give it that name.
Abigail has been brave enough to go knee-deep in the water, even though the water is always frigid in June and the small rocks you have to get past to reach the sandy ocean bottom hurt theirwinter-tender feet until they’ve been in Owls Head at least five days.
“You go see, Abigail,” he says bossily, trying for an authority he doesn’t truly feel. “I’m sure it’s nothing. You know how Claire is.”
Abigail obliges (she does know how Claire is) and makes her way toward her sister. She holds her arms out like a tightrope walker. She almost goes down on the seaweed but she catches herself; in Brooklyn she takes gymnastics, and she’s not excellent at it, but she’s good enough to have balance.
“It’s not nothing!” Abigail calls back to him. “It’s not nothing, she’s right, it’s something dead!” He hears the note of triumph in her voice, not so different from what he heard in Claire’s, and he is vexed by a fear that visits him often, that both of his sisters, though younger, are bolder and braver than he is. He feels both a duty and a dread as he follows Abigail’s path over the rocks, much less gracefully than Abigail traversed it.
The thing in the water, maybe ten feet out from the rocks, is tan, or brown, with speckles of black, and rounded where it comes out of the water, like the top part of a homemade loaf of marble bread. “I think it’s a buoy...?” says Matty uncertainly. It could be a buoy, for sure it could. A few lobster boats drop their traps not so far from here. They see them all the time, from the big picture window in the dining room. Sometimes the buoys come loose from their lines, go off floating. They found one two summers ago, red, black, and blue; it had washed up against the rocks.
“It’s a seal,” says Claire.
Matty’s sharp intake of breath comes before he has time to stop it. A dead seal can signify sharks, and although there has never, ever, been a shark in these waters, the very thought makes Matty’s heartbeat pick up, his blood rush too fast through his veins. Matty is scared of sharks. No, that’s an understatement if ever there was one: Matty isterrifiedof sharks.
The rise and fall from the resulting waves brings the thingcloser, turns it somewhat on its side, and now they can see half of a face, an eye, some whiskers, a single flipper.
“It’s a seal.” Matty whispers. “It is.” They all wait, breath bated, to see if by any chance the seal might be merely sleeping.
