The Worst Thing I've Done (32 page)

“What does that have to do with the price of wheat in Bulgaria?”

I have to laugh. “Where did you get that?”

“Pete.”

“Very good. Is that the beginning of a smile?”

“No.”

“How about a story about our dad?”

Now she's listening.

“TIHII.”

“What are you, Annie? A horse?”

“That's what he used to say. TIHII. It means: this is how it is.”

“This is how what is?”

“Stuff we can't do anything about. Like you being stuck with me and no longer having Mason.”

Opal tilts her mirror, and Luigi chases the light.

“Our dad told me TIHII made him peaceful inside.”

“Why?”

“Because peace takes up so much space, there isn't room for anger and sadness and—”

“I don't like this story. I want the one of how I began.”

“You began inside our mom…inside the same space where I got started too.” I wait for Opal to tell her part of the story as usual.

But she's lifting the dog into her arms. His legs and belly and red-tipped penis stick up as she rocks him.

“You—” I continue, “—began nineteen years before me.”

“No, I didn't.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn't.”

“Yes, you—”

“You can't even get that right, Annie.”

“Stop sniping at me, will you?”

“I began nineteen years
after
you! Not
before
you!”

“I said
after
!”

“You said
before
!”

Siblings, for sure. We could be sniping at each other all day.

“Must you be so exasperating?”

“Exasp—What?”

“Irritating. Maddening.”

“Yes, I must!” She pushes out her lower lip.

“Anyhow, I was already nineteen—”

“You have to start from the beginning, Annie.”

“You—”
Help me out here, Mason—
“You began nineteen years
after
me. Got that?”

Opal nods. “And now I'm nine. Nine plus nineteen is twenty-eight. That's what you are.”

“You began inside the same space where I got started too. Got that?”

“But not inside you.”

“Not inside me.”

“I never lived inside you. Because I don't belong there.” Separating herself from me. Still seeking our mother.

As I am.
“You lived inside our mother, and she let me touch her belly so that I could feel you move.”

“You forgot the blue light, Annie.”

“Our mom imagined her baby levitating in blue light.”

“You could feel my foot.”

“Like a step—”

“A
quick
step,” Opal corrects me.

I loop one arm around her. “You want every single word in the sequence you remember, right?” My voice has softened.

She nods. “You could feel a quick step from the outside when my mom let you touch her belly.”

“A quick step.” I feel the story swelling between us.

“And I punched you with my tiny fist.”

“You punched me with your tiny fist. And I already loved you.”

“And then I got born and she died. The end.” Opal shrugs off my arm. Leaps up and lets Luigi slide to the ground.

He squeals. Hides behind my legs.

“I'm sorry,” Opal whispers to him. She kneels in the grass, holds out her hands to him. When he finally comes to her, she lifts him into her arms.

“He's all right,” I say. “Would you like a new story about our mother?”

She nods. Kisses the dog's moist nose. “I'm sorry, Luigi-dog.”

“Our mother believed we can know about people by looking at their mouths…know what's been happening inside them to shape lips into joy or discouragement or anger. Her favorite ones were mouths that rested, that didn't need to smile or talk or move or pretend. She said she'd never seen a peaceful mouth and restless eyes in the same face.”

“Sometime you have restless eyes, Annie.”

“We need more dog food,” I tell her. “Want to go to the hardware store with me?”

“I don't care.”

“Well, I do.”

“Okay.”

In the store, she studies the seed packages, keeps her back to me.

“Why don't you help me pick out some seeds? Which ones look good to you? Carrots? How about if we grow sunflowers…or pumpkins or…cucumbers?”
Ridiculous, how I'm trying to bring her to me.
Still, I dangle seed packages in front of her, tempt her with photos. “Zinnias? Corn? Rattlesnakes? Chocolate Santas?”

She's working hard not to smile.

“We have to support our troops.” A woman's voice. By the shelf with insecticides.

The man who is with her says, “Now that it's happened, we need to make the best of it.”

“You make the best of it when you're in the midst of a flood.” Heart pounding, I talk quickly before they can tell me to go to hell. “Or an earthquake. Sticking together. Making the best of what has already happened. But to make the best of a corrupt choice simply because it happened?”

“I did not invite you into our conversation,” the woman says.

“I'm sorry. But too many people still can't believe that their government could be doing anything wrong.”

“I wish you had stopped with
sorry
.” She turns away. Dalmatian pattern boots with loud heels.

“Enough, young lady,” the man tells me and follows her from the store.

“Mason says you can tell the tourists by their shoes,” Opal whispers.

“Good observation.” I pick up a can of wildflower seeds. Jiggle it.
Like rain on a roof.
“You want to plant wildflowers?”

Opal gives me her ancient glance, cronish and wise.

“Don't say it,” I warn her, hoping to provoke her into rebelling.

And she does. Loudly. “If they're real wildflowers, they don't come in cans.”

But any smile from me would turn her quiet again.
I hate playing these games with her. So complicated. Still…
I click my tongue. “Such a little cynic.”

She straightens herself. “Not little.”

“Still—a cynic.”

And she smiles. Finally, finally smiles.

How I knock myself out for that smile.

Annie / Jake / Opal / Stormy

“T
he
police are trying to find out who dug through the sandbank between the pond and ocean,” Annie tells Jake as they lift the kayaks from Aunt Stormy's truck.

“So that's why it's so mucky,” Jake says.

The launching area off Georgica Pond has receded, and the ground is swampy. When they drag the kayaks through the shallow water, dark mud sucks at their ankles, releases them, and closes around them again.

“Disgusting sounds,” Jake says.

“Usually, the town opens that gap every spring so that fish can spawn in the pond,” Annie says. “Then it gets closed and, in the fall, opened once again to let the fish into the ocean. Except this year, the rains flooded lots of basements, and when the town refused to let the residents drain the pond into the ocean, someone did it secretly.”

“Maybe it took just one shovel, middle of the night, to make enough of a break for the force of water to push more sand aside and—Damn. I'm stuck.”

“Try this.” Annie eases herself into her kayak.

“Then we'll never get out.”

“Trust me,” she says in a deep-deep voice.

He laughs. “I trust you all right.” But when he sits in his kayak, he can't move forward or back. “I am so stuck.”

“Time for some butt-surfing.” Annie demonstrates by wiggling her kayak forward, sliding her hips and torso in the direction of the open water.

Jake attempts to bounce forward. “Wait for me.” Mud flies from his paddles.

“Like this.” Annie plants one paddle blade into the muck ahead of her, wiggles and pulls herself forward.

“I hope they catch the ones who did it. It messes up that fragile balance of freshwater and salt water.”

When they come past the first bend of the creek that leads into the belly of the pond, they feel the swell of the ocean.

Just then a swan—wings spread, beak raised—slides toward them as if running on water. They paddle, hard, veer to the right to get off its path.

“It looks pissed,” Annie says.

“I bet it's protecting a nest.”

“They can be aggressive. Break bones. Turn over boats.”

“I wonder if we should go back.”

Far ahead of them is the distant border of sand where the pond merges with the ocean. “As long as we respect the nesting area, we're all right.”

Jake motions to something white in the reeds, more than a hundred feet away. “Must be the female.”

Half-rising from the water, the male charges toward them, puffed up like a carousel swan.

“Get away, you—” Jake raises his paddle like a flyswatter.

But the swan is taller than the kayaks, and he keeps advancing, hissing, neck extended as if to strike.

“Get away, you son of a bitch,” Annie yells, paddle swinging. “I'm sorry—”

Her blade strikes the chest of the swan.

She feels sick. “I'm sorry. Get away—”

The swan swerves to the left, keeps himself between the kayaks and the female in the reeds.

“Let's give him a lot of space,” Jake says.

Gripping their paddles, ready to use them against the swan, they get past him, paddling as fast as they can past the huge houses that are set back from the pond. A deer grazes on a slope of lawn.

“Never just one deer,” Mason says.

And there are three more, feasting on shrubs that border the long veranda. No fear at all. Here, deer are considered a pest, but in New Hampshire, Mason used to feed them, buy salt blocks for them to lick, and watch them with Opal from the window.

“You know how Aunt Stormy tells the difference between a year-round house and a vacation house?” Annie asks Jake.

“Tell me.”

“Year-round people don't need that many rooms.”

He laughs.

“Aunt Stormy says some of these go for over fifty million.”

“Crazy.”

When they reach the sandbank, he strands his kayak. “Remember, we still have to make it back past that swan again.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes.” He pulls her kayak ashore. “You?”

“Me too.” She turns her kayak over, spreads a tablecloth across it. “But I don't want to think about the swan now.”

He opens their picnic basket. Pours red wine into metal camping cups. “What is it like for you, living in North Sea?”

“It's an…easy fit. Familiar. And lovely.”

“Will you stay?”

“My mother once said this place wraps itself around your heart.” She passes the focaccia bread to him.

He slices fresh mozzarella cheese and tomatoes.

Mist swirls from the ocean, sheer spirals of moisture that race across the blue of sky, the green of shoreline.

“Will you stay?” Jake asks again.

“For the time being…”

“How long is for the time being?”

Annie smiles. “That's exactly what Opal asked Aunt Stormy after we moved in last year. And she told Opal, ‘For as long as you want.' ”

“And you?”

“I'm on the list for substitute teaching. I could do that and my own work. Aunt Stormy has fewer clients in the winter.”

A thickening of the mist…darkening.

Houses and trees become shadow cutouts, are blotted up.

The color of air and water and sky all one, cocooning them on this shelf of sand.

Only Jake here, close by.

She aches to touch his lips, his dear, dear face.
No—
What if any passion between them can only move through Mason, a conduit, a current?

“We still have to make it back again,” she reminds herself.

“We could stay here,” he whispers. “Just the two of us.”

“On the way back…if we keep way to the left and together, far away from the female…we'll be safe.”

“Let's wait out the fog.” Jake's face, paler than the mist.

Everything gray on gray…shimmering…and the ocean louder now that she can't see it…that rolling disorientation.

With one thumb, she brushes the corner of his mouth, across his lower lip.

“Annie—?”

“You had some sand there.” She pulls her hand back. “Because anything else would be…awkward,” she says quickly to prove to him that it really was just sand even if it's a lie. “Because it wouldn't work.” She feels relieved. Something has been solved.

He hesitates. When he says, “Yes,” her heart constricts.

“It'll be better for Opal…not to, being together as friends…only.”

Jake looks miserable. “Do people still use that word?”

“What word?”

“Platonic.”

“Ah, that word,” Annie jokes. But it feels fake.

“So…do you think we're handling this well?”

“Sort of. Yes. I think.”

“Because this is what we both want now?”

“Right. To leave…sex out of it.”

“A pact…And then we can have our friendship again?”

“Not if we blame each other.”

“Oh, Annie, I don't blame you.”

“Not if only one of us carries the…guilt. But if we were to carry it between us, as we carry Opal…like that, yes, in a weave of…of kindness, together, then we can't fall through.”

“Just as the pain will be ours too. Within that weave.”

“Yes.”

“We can do that,” he says, but his eyes are sad.

“We're lucky we can,” she says.
But then why does it feel like the end between us?

“There's something I need to tell you,” Jake says.

She nods. “I'm listening.”

“Not now. But when I come back in August for the Hungry Ghost. Pete says I can stay with him.”

She squints at him. “You sound…grim.”

“More scared than grim, Annie.”

“Please, tell Mr. Bush that his acting job aboard the
Abraham Lincoln
was ridiculous,” Stormy tells the operator on the other end of the White House line. “To posture there in a flight suit and declare ‘Mission accomplished' demonstrates to the world how arrogant and ignorant he is.”

Every day, the White House answering machine greets Stormy with the same lie, that her message is very important to the president, and every day she's stunned by the beauty of her surroundings, juxtaposed with the madness of war. Both real.

“Please, tell Mr. Bush that he has pushed this country into an immoral war, and that people can see through his lies and justifications.” As always she gives her name.

In Nazi Germany, I could have been shot for this.

She continues to speak out though she's no longer sure that her voice—or an accumulation of voices like hers—can make a difference. That belief has become disillusion. Disillusion even in the
act
of believing that made her question her parents for not speaking out after she'd lived in America for a year.

One night, when she wakes up, sickened by the violence toward the people of Iraq, Pete is already awake.

“Do you ever feel implicated as an American?” she asks him.

“Of course.” He reaches for her.

“So do I. Just as I've felt implicated all my life as a German.”

“Most Americans won't. They…grew up trusting their government.”

“Europeans are more skeptical.”

Stormy keeps calling the White House even if the only person who'll hear her words is some minimum-wage phone operator.

“I'm calling regarding the staged rescue of Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital. Please, tell Mr. Bush that he's using her for his propaganda. Victim and heroine in one.”

The end of May, when Bush goes to Auschwitz and compares himself with the liberators of the concentration camps, Stormy cries. When she's calm enough to phone the White House, she says, “One of Mr. Bush's greatest transgressions so far, a disrespect for the victims of the Holocaust, using Auschwitz for another one of his photo ops.” She checks the Internet for the press coverage. No shock. No rage.

“Is it too dangerous a subject for the press?” she asks Pete. “Doesn't anyone dare fault Bush for posing at Auschwitz?”

“Or that insipid Laura,” Pete stays, “for standing on…the train track to Auschwitz with a red rose.” He draws her close to him. “It's a terrible time. I find some strange…comfort in little rituals. I put a candle in…my window. I go to a vigil.”

“Is it foolish to expect results from the protests? Is it, Pete?”

“No. Of course not.” He kisses her on the lips, the chin. Over the months, his face has been reemerging, the muscles defined once again. His former self arising as he works around what ailed him. Adapting. And as a result, strengthening himself.

The microwave is humming today's tea…camomile and peppermint. Sweet. Soothing.
What soothes?
Seeing Annie work again. Reading to Opal. Pete's arms at night, and now.

Nudging herself deeper into his embrace, Stormy locks her arms around him. “Some days I feel I'd fly off without you, and what keeps me on the ground is seeing you heal.”

“I like having you on the ground right…here,” he whispers, “with me.”

When Jake returns in August for the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, he brings a dragon kite for Opal. For Annie a CD by Annie Gallup. “Another Annie who tells stories,” he tells her when they cut bamboo canes behind Pete's garage for the ghost's chest and tepee skirt.

Afterward, they drive to the nursery where Jake wants to buy a rosebush for Pete. Between the bedding plants and flowerpots, two little boys are dragging their comfort blankets, swiping off leaves and blossoms, while their father strolls along, talking on his cell phone and pulling a red plant wagon.

“Yuppie parenting,” Annie says.

“And how does one define that?” Jake is sweating.

“Like that.” Annie motions toward the boys. “Too precious to be refused anything.”

What if—once he tells her how he ran and let her find Mason dead—she won't talk to him again? Still, unless he tells her, they can't move forward. He isn't sure what's beyond that forward. Only that not telling Annie is in the way.

What's important is to stay together today, Jake tells himself. To steer every word into discussing the kind of rose he'll buy to thank Pete for the invitation to stay.

Annie picks up a morning glory vine, the blue of faded denim. She hesitates. Then abruptly sets it back down.