Sweet Water (25 page)

“What’s all this about?” Larry said, looking back and forth between us, his eyes narrowing to flinty chips.

“I didn’t think it was my place to tell you,” I said quietly to Elaine. “It was his. Why he didn’t tell you, I don’t know. But I think it’s got something to do with all of this, everybody keeping secrets from everybody else, afraid of—I don’t know what. And the secrets just get worse the longer they’re kept.”

Elaine was fuming. “You may find this difficult to believe, Cassandra, but things were just fine before you got here.
Just fine.”

“Not for Clyde they weren’t.”

“Don’t you say another word about her! You don’t know anything about what she’s been through!”

“I know that she’s been in a lot of pain for more than twenty years about what happened to my mother—and that you haven’t been much help.”

“Cassandra, I think that’s enough.” Horace cleared his throat and signaled to the white-coated man coming toward us with a clipboard under one arm. “Doctor,” he said, “I’m Horace Clyde. I believe you’ve got my mother in there.”

The doctor transferred his clipboard to the other side and shook Horace’s hand. He nodded at the group. “Mrs. Clyde is doing just fine,” he told Horace with a hearty smile. “You all can come on into her room, if you like. She should be waking up shortly.”

Horace headed down the corridor with the doctor, bombarding him with questions.

“I don’t think this is between you and me, Elaine,” I said as we followed along.

She stared straight ahead.

I watched her profile. “I don’t want to be your enemy.”

She stiffened but kept walking. “You’re just exactly like Ellen,” she said. “You think you have the God-given right to pass judgment
on anything and anybody you choose, no matter who you hurt.”

I felt my face flush. “What did my mother ever do to you?”

“She hurt Clyde. She hurt her a lot.”

“But what did she do to you?”

For a moment she was silent. Then she said, “That’s all in the past.”

“I don’t think it is. I don’t think you can let go of it.”

She stopped abruptly and turned to face me. “Aren’t you a piece of work,” she whispered. “You’re the one living in the past.”

“At least I’m facing it.”

“Maybe it isn’t yours to face.”

I looked at her for a long moment. “You never really liked my mother, did you, Elaine?”

“No,” she said. “No, Cassandra, I never did.”

W
hen I woke up, everybody was standing around my bed. Horace and Kathy were white-faced and solemn. Chester looked half awake, his hair sticking up in clumps where he’d slept on it. Alice was bouncing Eric on her hip. He was wearing pajamas and sucking his thumb.

“All this fussing over me,” I said.

Elaine had a sorrowful expression on her face, like she thought I was already dead.

“Don’t furrow your brow, Elaine. Fastest way to wrinkles.”

“Oh, Mother,” she said, trying to smile. “I’m the one who told
you
that.”

“How are you feeling, dear?” said Chester, coming over and tugging on my hands. “You look as perky as ever.”

“Pshaw,” I said. “Just a wrinkled old woman.”

“You’re a liar, is what you are,” he said, but there was no force in it.

“Don’t cry, Chester,” I said. “I might not believe you.”

He touched me on the shoulder and turned away.

Over to the right I saw Cassandra, leaning against the wall, watching. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she said.

I kept looking at her. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Elaine looking from her to me. “Cassandra,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about what I did.”

She came to the bed. “I know.”

“There’s so much I want to tell you—”

“There’s so much I want to hear.”

“I broke all the pieces, didn’t I?”

“Not all,” she said. “I think there was one you missed completely. And the rest of them were mainly just practice. Now I can start on the real ones. “She smiled, but I could tell she was sick about it.

“That’s right,” said Elaine. “Clay pots can be mended. Who’s the one with the broken hip?”

“Leave her alone, Elaine,” I said. I beckoned Cassie closer and whispered, “Troy’s my favorite too.” I reached for her hand and squeezed it.

“Mother, you rest now,” Elaine said, fussing with my blankets.

“I’m all right, Elaine. You look like you could use some rest yourself.”

“Shush now. Close your eyes and sleep.” I felt her long, moisturized fingers on my face. Her voice was strict. I closed my eyes.

A
t five o’clock in the morning, the trees by the roadside were gray-green, the ones behind them black silhouettes against a grainy sky. The few cars I passed had their lights on. I wondered about them: where they’d come from, whether they had been driving all night. I passed fields of sleeping cattle, the black and white of them distinct in the cool gray air. Small, warm, yellow buds, millworkers’ windows, shone like fireflies down in the valley.

My eyes were tired, so tired that they stung and the sockets felt raw. When I left the hospital Clyde was under sedation, breathing loudly, tubes coming out of her arms. A broken hip, painful but mendable. The doctor looked at his clipboard, read the vital signs to the relatives, and explained about old women and childbirth and calcium deficiency. Hip fractures in women are common, he said, the baby in the womb needing so much calcium to grow that it robs from its cradle to get it. Most women never fully make up the loss. But her break wasn’t bad, as breaks went. She’d be up and about in no time.

I didn’t say it, but it looked to me like Clyde was going to die.

Staring at the road, I thought of her, quiet in the bed, surrounded by family. When I had held her, waiting for the ambulance, she was as soft and solid as a sack of flour in my arms. I was calm as the attendants questioned me, calm as I called Horace, waited at the hospital, dealt with Elaine. But now, by myself, I thought of the cold yellow tint of her skin, her blue lips and red-rimmed eyes, the raised
bones of her chest, visible through the flimsy hospital gown. I thought of her frail hands covered with age spots. I thought of my mother, in her lime-green dress, and I started to weep. My voice rose out of me like an animal sound, and I didn’t even try to contain it.

When I got home I would strip out of my clothes and take a long bath. I would lie back, staring at nothing, considering only the strange paths by the cracks in the wall. And when I was ready I would call Troy and tell him that maybe I’d had all the time I needed to figure things out on my own. There were no more secrets here; the house had given me everything I’d asked of it. In that last long space of lightening darkness I had come to the conclusion that maybe I did know how I felt about him. Maybe I’d known all along.

F
or all those years the thought of that box festered in my mind like an open wound. I was certain that when I found it the wound would heal and I could finally forget. What I couldn’t see is that sometimes the healing is not in the forgetting but in the letting go. Sometimes the answer you need is to a question you don’t know how to ask.

There are so many ways to tell this story.

    
She climbed up that boulder and stood on top with her hands on her hips, staring out across the water.

“Sure is beautiful, Connie,” she said.

“Sure is,” I agreed.

From the flat rock where I was sitting she looked like a beauty contestant in that blue-black swimsuit, her hair as dark and shining as it had been when we first met.

She walked to the edge and leaned over, looking down into the water. “I don’t believe what they say about that whirlpool. It looks perfectly normal to me.” She stood up. “I think it’s a lie to keep us from having fun. Like Amory not letting you drive.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’d think there’d be a reason for them to say it.”

She peered over the edge again and shook her head. “Old wives’ tales. I’ll be damned
if I’m
going to stop doing what I want because of some old wife.” She laughed, and her laugh was deep and scornful. I
felt like she had spit in my face. I turned away from her and started cleaning up the picnic.

“Come here, Connie,” she said suddenly. “Let’s jump off together.”

“No, thank you.”

“Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. Don’t be such a spoilsport,” she teased.

“Bryce, I’m not even wearing a suit.”

“What do you need a suit for? It’s only you and me out here.”

I looked up at her standing there. She was looking down at me. I have never hated anyone more than I hated her right then.

“I’ll watch,” I said.

I saw something flash across her face—doubt, maybe, or fear. Whenever I think of that day I think of how she looked for that one moment: eyes cloudy, shoulders uncertain, slightly quivering lips. It lasted less than a second. Then she seemed to brace herself. She stood very straight and gazed over the water again, then crossed two fingers at me and smiled. I smiled back at her.

“Wish me luck,” she said.

“Good luck,” I said.

I watched her, poised on the rock, her knees bending slightly as she gathered her strength, the tips of her fingers rising, rising, over her head. As she arched her body forward I felt a lift in my own shoulders, something like the pull a bird must feel in its wings just before it takes flight.

Through her bedroom wall Molly can hear her foster parents talking about
her in the living room, just beyond her door. “This is not what we signed up for,” Dina is saying. “If I’d known she had this many problems, I never would’ve agreed to it.”

“I know, I know.” Ralph’s voice is weary. He’s the one, Molly knows, who wanted to be a foster parent. Long ago, in his youth, when he’d been a “troubled teen,” as he told her without elaboration, a social worker at his school had signed him up for the Big Brother program, and he’d always felt that his big brother—his mentor, he calls him—kept him on track. But Dina was suspicious of Molly from the start. It didn’t help that before Molly they’d had a boy who tried to set the elementary school on fire.

“I have enough stress at work,” Dina says, her voice rising. “I don’t need to come home to this shit.”

Dina works as a dispatcher at the Spruce Harbor police station, and as far as Molly can see there isn’t much to stress over—a few drunk drivers, the occasional black eye, petty thefts, accidents. If you’re going to be a dispatcher anywhere in the world, Spruce Harbor is probably the least stressful place imaginable. But Dina is high-strung by nature. The smallest things get to her. It’s as if she assumes everything will go right, and when it doesn’t—which, of course, is pretty often—she is surprised and affronted.

Molly is the opposite. So many things have gone wrong for her in her seventeen years that she’s come to expect it. When something does go right, she hardly knows what to think.

Which was just what had happened with Jack. When Molly transferred to Mount Desert Island High School last year, in tenth grade, most of the kids seemed to go out of their way to avoid her. They had their friends, their cliques, and she didn’t fit into any of them. It was true that she hadn’t made it easy; she knows from experience that tough and weird is preferable to pathetic and vulnerable, and she wears her Goth persona like armor. Jack was the only one who’d tried to break through.

It was mid-October, in social studies class. When it came time to team up for a project, Molly was, as usual, the odd one out. Jack asked her to join him and his partner, Jody, who was clearly less than thrilled. For the entire fifty-minute class, Molly was a cat with its back up. Why was he being so nice? What did he want from her? Was he one of those guys who got a kick out of messing with the weird girl? Whatever his motive, she wasn’t about to give an inch. She stood back with her arms crossed, shoulders hunched, dark stiff hair in her eyes. She shrugged and grunted when Jack asked her questions, though she followed along well enough and did her share of the work. “That girl is freakin’ strange,” Molly heard Jody mutter as they were leaving class after the bell rang. “She creeps me out.” When Molly turned and caught Jack’s eye, he surprised her with a smile. “I think she’s kind of awesome,” he said, holding Molly’s gaze. For the first time since she’d come to this school, she couldn’t help herself; she smiled back.

Over the next few months, Molly got bits and pieces of Jack’s story. His father was a Dominican migrant worker who met his mother picking blueberries in Cherryfield, got her pregnant, moved back to the D.R. to shack up with a local girl, and never looked back. His mother, who never married, works for a rich old lady in a shorefront mansion. By all rights Jack should be on the social fringes too, but he isn’t. He has some major things going for him: flashy moves on the soccer field, a dazzling smile, great big cow eyes, and ridiculous lashes. And even though he refuses to take himself seriously, Molly can tell he’s way smarter than he admits, probably even smarter than he knows.

Molly couldn’t care less about Jack’s prowess on the soccer field, but smart she respects. (The cow eyes are a bonus.) Her own curiosity is the one thing that has kept her from going off the rails. Being Goth wipes away any expectation of conventionality, so Molly finds she’s free to be weird in lots of ways at once. She reads all the time—in the halls, in the cafeteria—mostly novels with angsty protagonists:
The Virgin Suicides, Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar
. She copies vocabulary words down in a notebook because she likes the way they sound:
Harridan. Pusillanimous. Talisman. Dowager. Enervating. Sycophantic
. . .

As a newcomer Molly had liked the distance her persona created, the wariness and mistrust she saw in the eyes of her peers. But though she’s loath to admit it, lately that persona has begun to feel restrictive. It takes ages to get the look right every morning, and rituals once freighted with meaning—dyeing her hair jet-black accented with purple or white streaks, rimming her eyes with kohl, applying foundation several shades lighter than her skin tone, adjusting and fastening various pieces of uncomfortable clothing—now make her impatient. She feels like a circus clown who wakes up one morning and no longer wants to glue on the red rubber nose. Most people don’t have to exert so much effort to stay in character. Why should she? She fantasizes that the next place she goes—because there’s always a next place, another foster home, a new school—she’ll start over with a new, easier-to-maintain look. Grunge? Sex kitten?

The probability that this will be sooner rather than later grows more likely with every passing minute. Dina has wanted to get rid of Molly for a while, and now she’s got a valid excuse. Ralph staked his credibility on Molly’s behavior; he worked hard to persuade Dina that a sweet kid was hiding under that fierce hair and makeup. Well, Ralph’s credibility is out the window now.

Molly gets down on her hands and knees and lifts the eyelet bed skirt. She pulls out two brightly colored duffel bags, the ones Ralph bought for her on clearance at the L.L.Bean outlet in Ellsworth (the red one monogrammed “Braden” and the orange Hawaiian-flowered one “Ashley”—rejected for color, style, or just the dorkiness of those names in white thread, Molly doesn’t know). As she’s opening the top drawer of her dresser, a percussive thumping under her comforter turns into a tinny version of Daddy Yankee’s “Impacto.” “So you’ll know it’s me and answer the damn phone,” Jack said when he bought her the ringtone.

“
Hola, mi amigo,
” she says when she finally finds it.

“Hey, what’s up,
chica
?”

“Oh, you know. Dina’s not so happy right now.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty bad.”

“How bad?”

“Well, I think I’m out of here.” She feels her breath catch in her throat. It surprises her, given how many times she’s been through a version of this.

“Nah,” he says. “I don’t think so.”

“Yeah,” she says, pulling out a wad of socks and underwear and dumping them in the Braden bag. “I can hear them out there talking about it.”

“But you need to do those community service hours.”

“It’s not going to happen.” She picks up her charm necklace, tangled in a heap on the top of the dresser, and rubs the gold chain between her fingers, trying to loosen the knot. “Dina says nobody will take me. I’m untrustworthy.” The tangle loosens under her thumb and she pulls the strands apart. “It’s okay. I hear juvie isn’t so bad. It’s only a few months anyway.”

“But—you didn’t steal that book.”

Cradling the flat phone to her ear, she puts on the necklace, fumbling with the clasp, and looks in the mirror above her dresser. Black makeup is smeared under her eyes like a football player.

“Right, Molly?”

The thing is—she did steal it. Or tried. It’s her favorite novel,
Jane Eyre,
and she wanted to own it, to have it in her possession. Sherman’s Bookstore in Bar Harbor didn’t have it in stock, and she was too shy to ask the clerk to order it. Dina wouldn’t give her a credit card number to buy it online. She had never wanted anything so badly. (Well . . . not for a while.) So there she was, in the library on her knees in the narrow fiction stacks, with three copies of the novel, two paperbacks and one hardcover, on the shelf in front of her. She’d already taken the hardcover out of the library twice, gone up to the front desk and signed it out with her library card. She pulled all three books off the shelf, weighed them in her hand. She put the hardcover back, slid it in beside
The Da Vinci Code
. The newer paperback, too, she returned to the shelf.

The copy she slipped under the waistband of her jeans was old and dog-eared, the pages yellowed, with passages underlined in pencil. The cheap binding, with its dry glue, was beginning to detach from the pages. If they’d put it in the annual library sale, it would have gone for ten cents at most. Nobody, Molly figured, would miss it. Two other, newer copies were available. But the library had recently installed magnetic antitheft strips, and several months earlier four volunteers, ladies of a certain age who devoted themselves passionately to all things Spruce Harbor Library, had spent several weeks installing them on the inside covers of all eleven thousand books. So when Molly left the building that day through what she hadn’t even realized was a theft-detection gate, a loud, insistent beeping brought the head librarian, Susan LeBlanc, swooping over like a homing pigeon.

Molly confessed immediately—or rather tried to say that she’d meant to sign it out. But Susan LeBlanc was having none of it. “For goodness’ sake, don’t insult me with a lie,” she said. “I’ve been watching you. I
thought
you were up to something.” And what a shame that her assumptions had proven correct! She’d have liked to be surprised in a good way, just this once.

“Aw, shit. Really?” Jack sighs.

Looking in the mirror, Molly runs her finger across the charms on the chain around her neck. She doesn’t wear it much anymore, but every time something happens and she knows she’ll be on the move again, she puts it on. She bought the chain at a discount store, Marden’s, in Ellsworth, and strung it with these three charms—a blue-and-green cloisonné fish, a pewter raven, and a tiny brown bear—that her father gave her on her eighth birthday. He was killed in a one-car rollover several weeks later, speeding down I-95 on an icy night, after which her mother, all of twenty-three, started a downward spiral she never recovered from. By Molly’s next birthday she was living with a new family, and her mother was in jail. The charms are all she has left of what used to be her life.

Jack is a nice guy. But she’s been waiting for this. Eventually, like everyone else—social workers, teachers, foster parents—he’ll get fed up, feel betrayed, realize Molly’s more trouble than she’s worth. Much as she wants to care for him, and as good as she is at letting him believe that she does, she has never really let herself. It isn’t that she’s faking it, exactly, but part of her is always holding back. She has learned that she can control her emotions by thinking of her chest cavity as an enormous box with a chain lock. She opens the box and stuffs in any stray unmanageable feelings, any wayward sadness or regret, and clamps it shut.

Ralph, too, has tried to see the goodness in her. He is predisposed to it; he sees it when it isn’t even there. And though part of Molly is grateful for his faith in her, she doesn’t fully trust it. It’s almost better with Dina, who doesn’t try to hide her suspicions. It’s easier to assume that people have it out for you than to be disappointed when they don’t come through.

“
Jane Eyre
?” Jack says.

“What does it matter?”

“I would’ve bought it for you.”

“Yeah, well.” Even after getting into trouble like this and probably getting sent away, she knows she’d never have asked Jack to buy the book. If there is one thing she hates most about being in the foster care system, it’s this dependence on people you barely know, your vulnerability to their whims. She has learned not to expect anything from anybody. Her birthdays are often forgotten; she is an afterthought at holidays. She has to make do with what she gets, and what she gets is rarely what she asked for.

“You’re so fucking stubborn!” Jack says, as if divining her thoughts. “Look at the trouble you get yourself into.”

There’s a hard knock on Molly’s door. She holds the phone to her chest and watches the doorknob turn. That’s another thing—no lock, no privacy.

Dina pokes her head into the room, her pink-lipsticked mouth a thin line. “We need to have a conversation.”

“All right. Let me get off the phone.”

“Who are you talking to?”

Molly hesitates. Does she have to answer? Oh, what the hell. “Jack.”

Dina scowls. “Hurry up. We don’t have all night.”

“I’ll be right there.” Molly waits, staring blankly at Dina until her head disappears around the door frame, and puts the phone back to her ear. “Time for the firing squad.”

“No, no, listen,” Jack says. “I have an idea. It’s a little . . . crazy.”

“What,” she says sullenly. “I have to go.”

“I talked to my mother—”

“Jack, are you serious? You told her? She already hates me.”

“Whoa, hear me out. First of all, she doesn’t hate you. And second, she spoke to the lady she works for, and it looks like maybe you can do your hours there.”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

“But—how?”

“Well, you know my mom is the world’s worst housekeeper.”

Molly loves the way he says this—matter-of-factly, without judgment, as if he were reporting that his mother is left-handed.

“So the lady wants to clean out her attic—old papers and boxes and all this shit, my mom’s worst nightmare. And I came up with the idea to have you do it. I bet you could kill the fifty hours there, easy.”

“Wait a minute—you want me to clean an old lady’s attic?”

“Yeah. Right up your alley, don’t you think? Come on, I know how anal you are. Don’t try to deny it. All your stuff lined up on the shelf. All your papers in files. And aren’t your books alphabetical?”

“You noticed that?”

“I know you better than you think.”

Molly does have to admit, as peculiar as it is, she likes putting things in order. She’s actually kind of a neat freak. Moving around as much as she has, she learned to take care of her few possessions. But she’s not sure about this idea. Stuck alone in a musty attic day after day, going through some lady’s trash?