The Worst Thing I've Done (9 page)

“Y
ES, THAT'S
a picture of a diver,” Aunt Stormy was telling Opal. “He's come to learn all about diving from the turtles.”

She carried Opal to the refrigerator, poured her a cup of apple juice.

“Look at all those photos.” She held Opal close to the photos on her refrigerator door.

“Most are of you,” Mason said. “There you are, see? With Annie. With me. With Aunt Stormy and Pete.”

Opal patted her hands and cooed, her joy so physical that Mason could feel it.

“That's Pete trimming his trumpet vines,” he told her.

But she was reaching for the photo of the pregnant bride.

Below that was a photo of Annie's parents against a sunset. And next to that a flyer announcing a fund-raiser for Amnesty International. Mason and Aunt Stormy often forwarded e-mails to each other, petitions to sign, senators to call. That was where he connected best with her, as he had with Annie's mother, who'd taught him and Annie—when they were in Boston marching against the Gulf War—that they had the responsibility to raise their voices against injustice.

“J
AKE GOT
so upset in Morocco.” Mason seized Annie's hand, raked it through his hair. “He said you almost started World War Three.”

“I would have changed seats. But the train was too crowded.”

“Jake made too much of it,” Mason said, though he too had been frightened when Annie had stared right back at the man—not at his face but at his crotch—kept staring even when the man became infuriated. Then she had motioned to Mason and Jake, held up her thumb and forefinger, about three inches apart, and grinned.

“Jake was sure the man was ready to attack him and me,” Mason said.

“For not controlling your woman.”

“As if we could.”

“Jake has no appetite for getting even.”

Mason pushed her hand away. “Jake is better than anyone at getting even.”

“How can you say that?”

“Jake would kill me—If he could.”

“I hate it when you come up with…suspicions like this.”

“I always get blamed for what he does.”

“Spare me. Please.”

T
HEY KEPT
postponing their drive home to New Hampshire, waiting for the rain to lessen, but when it didn't, Mason strapped Opal into her car seat, and Annie started off driving as they headed for the South Ferry. On Shelter Island, the rain got so dense that she pulled in to the entrance to Mashomack. The car smelled of baby and of teething cookies that Opal liked above any other cookies, sucking on them till they were mush and took on her smell.

Only two other cars were on the North Ferry, and the waters pitched at them. Mason was glad when they reached Greenport. But he wished he were driving because Annie kept slowing down on the road to Orient Point. She used to be such a natural driver, fast with good reflexes, but her parents' accident had made her too cautious.

“Just keep going.”

“Don't push, Mason.”

“I'm exceedingly patient.”

“Hah. Mr. Exceedingly Patient.”

“We'll miss the ferry to New London.”

“So we'll take the next one.” Neck stretched, she inched forward, wind-shield wipers flying, every one of her fingers hooked around the top of the steering wheel. Like a caricature of some old-fart lady out for her Sunday drive.

Mason laughed.

“What now?”

He sighed. “No reason.”

Opal was asleep when he carried her to the passenger deck of the Cross Sound Ferry, kept sleeping through the long passage, when he took her down to the car again, and while he drove north, more aggressive than usual, to offset Annie's slowness. In New Hampshire, quite a few roads were closed due to flooding, and he followed signs for detours. The severe rainfall had saturated the ground.

“Let's turn back,” Annie said when they came to a section of road that lay underwater.

“This car can float.”

Behind him, Opal was stirring.

“Opal believes me. Right, Mophead?” In the rearview mirror, he waved at her.

She flapped her arms, bounced them off the padded bar of her car seat.

“Do you want to see this car float, Mophead?”

“Don't show off,” Annie warned.

He gritted his teeth. Rolled toward the dip of flooded road. His hands were damp, but as he felt Annie's fear next to him, he drew courage from that. Now he had to prove that she did not need to be afraid. All at once he knew she believed him that the car would float…then the excitement because, incredibly, he was driving in water—
wheels like wings like propellers like wings
—churning him forward, forward and across the flood, where, set against a hill, a gray barn and a gray house leaned toward a pond between them.

Empty. They felt empty to him. A few hurricanes away from propping each other up. Suddenly he was certain that he and Annie and Opal would live here, as certain as he'd been last year about the internship he wanted with New Hampshire Peace Initiative, a nonprofit in Concord. That day too he'd been driving. Away from campus. And just as he'd passed a horse trailer, he'd known he'd get the internship. And he did.

W
HEN THE
car emerged from the flood, Mason took a left up the grassy driveway, expecting Annie to ask what he was doing, but she was staring at a scrawny tulip tree, about Opal's height, that grew in the yard. She got out of the car, touched one of the branches without disturbing the blossoms. Then she walked toward the barn. Mason unstrapped Opal, carried her as he followed Annie.

They didn't speak.

In one corner of the barn was a sauna, cold and musty, nine broken slats in the benches. The house unlocked, empty. Windows bare. Floors cracked linoleum. Bookshelves, gray as rain, on the wall around the fireplace. The faucets dry.

But Annie brought in a bucket of rainwater, and as she dissolved the pulp of teething cookies that had molded itself to Opal's hands and face as if part of her, Opal pointed to the kitchen window. It had stopped raining, and in the pond, the reflections of house and barn were reaching for each other.

“I could see this in a collage,” Annie said.

“What if—” Mason curved one arm around her waist. “—you had a place for just your work?”

“My own studio…”

“Your studio. You wouldn't have to let anyone in.”

But she wasn't talking, just looking the way she got when she was already sketching something inside her mind.

“It's only about ten or fifteen miles from campus, Annie.”

“If we live next to a pond, she needs to learn how to swim right away.”

“For sure.”

“I could imagine working here.”

The following morning, they made an offer with money Annie and Opal had inherited from their parents, phoned Jake, and celebrated with dinner at the nasty fortune restaurant.

T
HE DAY
they moved into the pond house, Jake fired up the sauna. In the pond, Annie swam and Mason tugged Opal around by her life vest. It was still hot—with the moon yellow, full—and Opal paddled with her legs and feet like some small animal. So much of her was animal, Mason thought, that greed, that instinctive grasp, her quick rage.
All now.
She had something savage about her.
A baby wolf.
It embarrassed him, thinking this—
if I were her real father, I wouldn't.

Slick with sweat, Jake came running from the sauna and jumped into the pond, shot up next to Mason, yelling, “Cold and clean and alive!”

“Can we have a bit more enthusiasm here?” Mason teased him.

“Even the scum on this pond feels clean.”

“What scum?” Mason swatted at some floating green muck.

They both laughed.

Opal reached for Jake, her other hand holding on to Mason's ear.

“Ouch, you—” Mason loosened her little fist.

Jake lifted her above his head.
“The-four-of-us again”
—

His love for her was so transparent that Mason couldn't bear it.
Never as happy as when he's with us…with my family. Wanting what's mine. It's all here for him already.

J
AKE HELPED
Mason build a studio for Annie in the barn, where the former owners had kept cows and horses, whose smell was packed into the dirt floor, into the walls and rafters. After they raised the floor of her studio with thick boards, they built her worktable from a massive church door that Mason had found for her at Sparky's Salvage.

It was Annie's idea to prop it on a cluster of eight filing cabinets so that she could approach her work from every angle. Mason bid on two flat files when a surveyor's office closed, and he helped Annie store her paper collection in the wide, shallow drawers. Yellow rice paper. Speckled mulberry paper made from the inner bark. Hemp paper, eggshell-white. Bookbinding paper. Marbleized paper. Porous rice paper. Coated paper that wouldn't fade.

He sorted out her critter bits, brushed off the remnants of sand that clung like an extra layer of skin to the shells of mud snails and slipper snails and ribbed mussels; to the claws of spider crabs and fiddler crabs; to the tails of horseshoe crabs. He took bits of a blue claw crab and fit them together like a puzzle.

“Look what I brought today,” he'd announce when he came home with yet another gift for her studio—a jade-colored pottery jar for her brushes.

He surprised her with sheets of rice paper. Some had threads in them. Others looked as though they had actual rice kernels in them. He ordered a set of Chinese brushes for her: silky brushes from sable and fox and goat; hard-hair brushes from leopard and badger. Their tips were stiff with glue, and he soaked them in cold water till it softened and washed out.

For Opal he bought swim toys. He loved teaching her to swim, and she was faster underwater than on land. When he let her loose, she'd instinctively dart beneath the surface toward the edge of the pond, her arms strong as she pulled herself from the water, wiggling, slithering.

O
N ONE
of his trips to the hardware store with Jake, Mason noticed a baby monitor. “That may be good to have for the sauna,” he said. “We'll be able to hear Opal in her room.”

Jake took it off the shelf. “As a housewarming gift.” He turned it. Checked the price. Frowned.

“No,” Mason said. “I'll get it.”

“I've been looking for something to give to you.”

“It's expensive—”

“That's okay.”

“—considering how cheap you are.”

Jake gave him his pale, wounded look.

“It's true. You use tiny little pencil stubs. I swear you must go through your friends' trash to get them.”

“Quit it.”

“I've never seen you with a new pencil.”

On class outings, Mason used to feel sorry for Jake because his father doubled whatever Jake didn't spend from his trip money. It kept Jake from enjoying the trip, reluctant to spend anything.

When Annie unpacked the monitor—two walkie-talkies with antennas—Jake told her, “We can take the receiver into the sauna with us.”

We?
Mason crossed his arms.

Jake unfolded the instructions. “The other one goes next to her crib. It says here you can hear a baby breathe from four hundred feet away.”

“Do you mind testing the receiver, Mason?” Annie asked.

As Mason walked down the slope of the driveway—at least five hundred feet—he could still hear Annie and Jake in Opal's room, going on about how wonderful the baby monitor was. Women were always spoiling Jake, though he had an alarming ability for choosing awful clothes. Sort of dapper. They made him resemble an old fart, and even his features would change with the outfits, go flat like his hair, make him look heavy all over though he wasn't. Only his thighs. Jake's mother used to spoil him, saving treats for him only, hushing the day-care kids when Jake napped.