The Worst Thing I've Done

by Ursula Hegi

  How do I remember, Dad? From stories you told to me? From what I still feel in my body: the flying…the lightness…the certainty that there is a way across. “A way we haven’t thought of before,” you liked to say.

  “Fly…” I lifted Opal above the waves, and she gurgled with pleasure. “Fly…”

  “Fly…” Mason brought his lips against my ear. “You and I…we’d make fantastic babies.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Too soon?”

  “I barely know how to take care of one. While you’re playing house.”

  Aunt Stormy came up next to us.

  Mason tilted his head. “Don’t be pissed at me, Annie. It’s just that—”

  “What are they doing?” I pointed to the woman who had buried the man. She was laying her folded towel next to his and stretching out so that her head was next to his, but her body facing in the opposite direction from him, away from the water. Then she started digging herself in, using the smaller of the two shovels to scoop the sand from around her body and heaping it on top of herself. At first she was sitting up, reaching for the sand with her shovel, but then she had to lie down, let the sand sift across her till it was up to her chest.

  “It’s what they do when they go to the beach,” Aunt Stormy said.

  “But why?” Mason asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s what they always do.”

  The woman closed her eyes. Rested. There was something ancient about those two, the burrowing in, something foreign and intimate.

  “Are they married?” Mason asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “I bet they’re mother and son.” I squatted, balanced Opal on my knee, and drew their outlines into the sand. A man and woman burying each other. Someone else might see it as a burial. I knew it wasn’t. Imagined the delicious weight of cool sand. What they do when they go to the beach…

  “I bet they’re married,” he said.

  “She’s much older than he,” Aunt Stormy said.

  “So?” Mason asked.

  Aunt Stormy laughed. “Good for you, Mason.”

  “I bet you ten dollars they’re mother and son.”

  “Ten that they’re married,” I said.

  “And how will you find out?” Aunt Stormy asked.

  Mason grinned at her. “We’ll send you to ask.”

  “Oh no. You two…you’ll go broke.”

  “Whatever money we lose to each other,” he said, “never costs us anything. And even when I’m winning, I want Annie to win too. Not that moment, but soon.”

  “Fly?” Opal was squirming.

  I stood up, raised her in my arms. “Fly…”

  “Lotte was like you in the water,” Aunt Stormy said, “a fish.”

  As Opal’s chubby feet kneaded the air above the waves, it came to me that she was not only my sister but also my daughter—links far tighter than either one link by itself—and that, through her, my parents were continuing to live in my arms.

  I raised her higher. “Fly…” Daughter. And pressed my lips against her back. No longer her make-believe mother. But her real mother. Now.

  My daughter giggled.

  Aunt Stormy was digging her toes into the sand, dislodging something.

  “What did you find?” Mason asked.

  “A critter bit?” I asked.

  She bent. Picked up a piece of cartilage attached to a bone and a couple of feathers. “An excellent critter bit.”

  As a child, I’d loved searching with her along the beach for wings and bones and skulls and spines.

  “Oh dear,” she would say, “those critters have come apart.”

  We’d collect the critter bits, carry them to her cottage, and assemble them with string and wire and nails, creating an animal unlike any other; and when I’d try to breathe life into the bleached bones, I’d feel all-powerful. It was there that my fascination with collages began, with the boldness and conviction that I could resurrect these animals as I envisioned them, or—perhaps—as they were destined to be.

  Mason

  —but the moon and the rocks were getting hotter, your breaths faster. And though you and Jake were not touching—not yet, Annie—I saw you together.

  “For Christ’s sakes—Just do it.”

  “Will you please quite?” Jake snapped at me. “Please, Mason?”

  That’s when I needed proof. The kind of proof you get by offering people something they claim they don’t want. “If you make love now, I’ll believe it’s not an issue between you, that you’re telling the truth.”

  “That is some fucked logic.” Your voice was so furious, Annie, that I knew I was in for chaos with you, even if I quit now.

  But I couldn’t quit. Because Jake’s wanting of you was so…blatant. It’s not like I invented it, Annie. It was all there, like if often is with him. Like when he throws back his head, or when he positions himself in Aunt Stormy’s hammock just so, as if daring you to touch his jaw to make sure it really is that unbearably smooth.

  “Just do it,” I told him.

  “I’m getting out of here,” he said.

  And I was so relieved…relieved beyond relieved, Annie…and already pictured myself following Jake from this drowsy and blighted heat…the night cold against our skin and yet already turning into glow…bracing us for that leap into our pond that will conceal our movements.

  But Jake did not get out.

  Jake said, “Quit being such a weird fuck, Mason.”

  But I could see the change in you, Annie. How you and Jake suddenly considered each other’s bodies. Speculated. Forbidden. Like Jake and me at summer camp, Annie, and you finding us on the raft. Forbidden. Scared and turned on and sure he’d kill me if he could.

  That same urgency last night in the sauna. That same urgency this morning in your studio. One collage is not enough, Annie. I used to love being in here with you, the two of us organizing your supplies, arranging your rice papers by thickness, and I’d listen to you think aloud about your next project. Like White on White. The pond in winter. You said it had to do with memory and coldness, and I was awed by how you brought those two together in rich, deep whites. But you didn’t like it enough, never exhibited it.

  You don’t honor your art the way I do, Annie, won’t allow me to call it art. Whenever I say your art should be in museums, you tell me it doesn’t work like that.

  White on White. I hold it up to the window. Outside, the air is gray, the way it gets moments before a storm when you think it can’t be evening yet though it’s dark. Drive carefully, Annie.

  In the sauna last night, that peculiar smell of wood—swollen and contracted a thousands times—rose from the slats.

  “Doing it now,” I said, wanting to cancel that urgency, to cancel all of this, “is the only way you can convince me it doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re hassling us, Mason.” You, again, Annie, growling at me.

  More steam, as I added water, and when I lay down again, the hot slats dug into me, measuring me, defining me. “Nothing will change,” I told both of you. “Because of the trust we have among us.”

  “You’e done some miserable things,” you said, “but this is the worst. At least lock the door.”

  I got up. At the door, I suddenly wished I could escape. And I thought: Why not? Tried to figure out what to say to undo al this, maybe pretend it was some joke all along—not this wretched jealousy that stalked me, tackled and leveled me, again and again. You think it’s easy, lugging that with me, Annie?

  “Jake?” You leaned toward him. “Jake?”

  When he—

  Three

  Mason

  { Pond House }

  THE MORNING AFTER all the anniversaries, rain smudged the browser bushes and phragmites outside Aunt Stormy’s windows. Mason felt lazy, content, as he lay on the old velvet couch, his head on Annie’s knees, his feet on the stack of books Aunt Stormy usually kept on the couch.

  “Little turtles are the most intelligent
ones. See?” Aunt Stormy turned a page of National Geographic.

  Opal’s hands padded the magazine as Aunt Stormy made up stories for her.

  “Especially turtles with red on top like you.”

  Mason felt Annie’s fingers in his hair. “Don’t you stop.”

  “What is it worth to you?”

  “My life,” he said without thinking but meaning it, knowing it to be true.

  “Is that so?” Her face above him, open, wide. Her smile mischievous. But her eyes sad. Not matching her smile. Not back—yet?—to the light from before her parents’ death.

  Yesterday, on their anniversary, she’d woken up crying, hard, and last night she’d cried for her parents again in his arms, quietly, because they were in Aunt Stormy’s guest room with Opal sleeping nearby in the crib. He’d held Annie like he had all those other nights she cried; but all at once he’d felt furious at her parents. For dying on his wedding day. For squeezing the light from Annie. For making their anniversary a day of mourning—now and to come.

  It’s my day too. He’d loved her parents, especially her mom, who’d looked at him with such joy from the time he was a kid and knocked at her door. If only they’d died a week later, say, or even a month, he and Annie could have their day of celebration. And later their day of mourning. Instead of having their joy sucked up by grief. Is it selfish, wanting joy and grief separate?

  No. It’s Opal’s day too. Her birthday.

  “YOU’RE VERY strong, Opal,” Aunt Stormy said.

  “What did she do?” Mason asked.

  “She untied my shoelaces by pulling at the ends. And she pulled my foot into the air.”

  “You are strong, Stardust,” he told Opal.

  By the windows, she was nestled against Aunt Stormy atop a mound of rugs and blankets from Your Personal Taste, Aunt Stormy’s second business. It had nothing to do with cooking or eating but was a service for summer people whose tastes were offended by their landlords’ decor. Her ads in Dan’s Papers read:

  Your Personal Taste

  improves any rental house

  Many of her clients came to her summer after summer, reserving certain bedspreads or dishes or slipcovers far ahead of the season. She always had stories about them. Like the heart surgeon from the city who sulked because his decor had already been rented by another client.

  Her inventory was stored in the huge guest room that took up the entire second floor. Mason and Jake had installed more than a dozen wooden rods below the ceiling, where during the off-season, she hung curtains and tablecloths and sheets.

  “Like the first floor of ABC Carpets,” Pete liked to say.

  But she bought most of her inventory—dishes, silverware, and crystal that she stored on high shelves; paintings of the ocean and wetlands that she stacked against the walls according to size—at auctions and yard sales. In summer, she’d rent all of that out, but in winter, the guest room shrank into a cocoon with gossamer dividers.

  Some clients became her friends, like Valerie, a poet who’d inherited a house too expensive for her to maintain but was able to keep it by renting part of it for poetry retreats.

  Aunt Stormy’s least favorite client was a financial analyst she’d named Life-in-the-Colonies when he’d complained that his handyman was in Florida. “I guess they can do things like that nowadays…go on vacations.”

  ON THE VELVET couch, Mason reached up and traced the half-moons below Annie’s eyes.

  “Aunt Stormy was right,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “Calling you sexy trouble way back.”

  “That’s how you see me?”

  “Sometimes…”

  “Not often?”

  “Somewhere between sometimes and often. How about me?”

  “All the time.”

  “Trouble and sexy?” Annie asked.

  “Sexy. No trouble.”

  “Way back, when we were little…?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s your first memory of me?”

  “You.”

  She fingered his hair. “What part of me?”

  Mason smiled at her. That was what he liked between them…the playfulness that could lead them anywhere.

  “What part of me, Mason? I remember your toes…touching your toes.”

  “All right. Your left kneecap.”

  “Asshole. And I mean this in an affectionate way.”

  “With a question like that—”

  “Be serious.”

  “All of you. I remember all of you. Always.”

  “Always?”

  “More than my parents.”

  “More than Jake?”

  “In comparison to you, Jake doesn’t count.” He felt himself blush. It felt like a betrayal. But true. Half true. I could have just said yes.

  “Is that the worst thing you’ve done today?”

  “What?”

  “Saying that about Jake?”

  “So far.”

  “That’s pretty awful.”

  “How about you? What’s the worst thing you’ve done today?” It was always there between them, that question, as they upped each other, competed.

  “I stopped loving you when you said Jake doesn’t count.”

  “Will you love me again, Annie?”

  “But not right now.”

  “Jake counts. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “Yesterday, then,” Mason said. “What’s they worst thing yesterday?”

  Opal was tugging a magazine from Aunt Stormy. With her red hair and freckled skin, she could be Annie’s daughter. But if Jake were here now—would Opal resemble him more than me?

  “How about you yesterday?” Annie nudged him. “What is—”

  “I didn’t let Opal eat bird food.”

  “Despicable.”

  “Does that mean I win?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ultimately beneficial.”

  “Indeed…that too.”

  “She could have caught some weird bird disease. Or choked. Or—”

  “Okay, I have a better one. A better worse one. Day before yesterday—” He pointed to his new leather jacket on the blue glass pegs by the door. Butter-smooth and so light brown it was almost blond.

  “Tell me.” Annie stretched.

  “I changed the price tag.”

  “You what?”

  “I peeled the sticker from a sale jacket.”

  “You told me the jacket was half-price.”

  “I did not.”

  “You told me—”

  “I told you I got it half-price.”

  She slid aside so abruptly that his head bounced on the couch.

  “They would have marked it down eventually.”

  “Your logic…sucks.”

  “So do I win?” he tried, knowing he shouldn’t have told her. Still…hard to know with Annie ahead of time. She’d be clowning around…then slap you down with schoolmarm values.

  “You could send a check to the store. For the price difference.”

  “No way.”

  “Or you could pack it up and send it there with a note…anonymously.”

  “No.”

  “It was stealing, Mason.”

  “Correct. If I had done it.”

  “Stop lying to me.”

  “I made it up. To see if I could win.”

  She stared into his eyes as if believing she could find the truth there.

  So he put it there. Without blinking. Held her gaze. Imagined truth in his eyes and shut out the high he’d felt when he’d switched tags and paid half-price, when he’d told the salesclerk he’d wear it home and walked from the store with the jacket so light that it didn’t drag down his shoulders.

  “Listen, Annie, the worst thing I’ve done today is make up that story.”

  “Swear?”

  “Swear.” He scooted toward her on the couch, resettled his head on her knees. “It doesn’t come close to wh
at you did on the train in Morocco.”

  A corner of her mouth moved upward.

  “Is that still the worst thing you’ve done, Annie?”

  WHEN SHE nodded, he saw her in Tangier, enraged as she bought a huge black scarf. Men had been staring at her wherever she went because she wasn’t veiled. To Mason, it was exciting, but she didn’t get it. Twisted this scarf around her head and shoulders as if she wanted to make herself disappear. Rushed ahead through cramped passages of the Medina, lined with stalls where you could buy orchids, bloody sheeps’ heads, clothing, transistor radios, live roosters, jewelry, spices…

  “Wait for us,” Jake shouted.

  A man with a bicycle shoved past Annie, sheeps’ stomachs slung across the handlebars.

  Their travel book had pictures of the Medina but no descriptions of the smells: blood and dust and sweetness and excrement. Even here, Mason could smell the dye vats they’d seen the day before, where boys with dye-stained legs were stomping in caldrons. Young boys. At the pottery wheels too, wearing face masks because the dust made it hard to breathe.

  They ate a meal of lamb and chickpeas at a restaurant where belly dancers performed on a center stage. Unexpected in this country where women were veiled, where coffee shops were for men only.

  On the street to the hotel, Annie held on to Mason’s arm.

  “I want to get out of here tonight,” she said.

  “Tomorrow,” Jake told her. “We’ve already paid for tonight at the hotel.” He kept track of how much they could spend to have their money last.

  Hustlers pressed against them, tried to sell hashish.

  “You stay away from me!” Annie raised both hands to stop the one closest to her.

  “You are a hard, hard woman,” the man hissed. Hollow cheeks. Eyes burning with hate. “Very sick.”

  At the hotel Annie insisted they leave Tangier that evening. Mason loved the city, wanted to stay. And Jake asked Annie to wait at least till morning because he’d washed out his clothes and they were still drying on the windowsills of the smaller room.