The Second Mother

by Jenny Milchman

  Julie laughed out loud.

  Peter stared at her through the night, his face unreadable.

  “Dog things, you know?” Julie said. “Sometimes it’s like they’re almost human.”

  “They’re better than humans,” Peter answered, so darkly that she shivered.

  “Is that why you climbed up on the roof? To get away from people?”

  The sharp knobs of Peter’s shoulders settled somewhat, though he didn’t answer.

  “Hey,” Julie remarked. “Depot finished awfully fast tonight. I think he must miss you.”

  The dog kicked up a cyclone of dirt, then bounded in their direction. Julie stepped neatly to one side, causing Depot to swerve and wind up beside Peter.

  Peter set out walking and Depot heeled nicely, as if he’d been walked by the boy for years. The night sky, cliff heads, and sea appeared before them as one seamless sheet, a monochrome gray.

  Suddenly, Peter spoke up. “Whose was that picture you kissed?”

  Kids could cut to the raw, bleeding heart of a matter without giving any warning. Julie stopped walking, and Depot looked back at her. Exposure prickled Julie’s skin; this was worse than if Peter had seen her getting changed. “She’s my little girl.”

  Peter took a look around as if Hedley might be somewhere nearby.

  Julie had to stop herself from looking too. She almost never spoke these words aloud, rarely even thought them. Everything inside her recoiled from saying this next part, revealing it to the boy who had laughed at her so eerily and dismissed his mom with adult derision. But she also didn’t want Peter to ask. “She died,” Julie said at last.

  Peter stopped at the rim between cliff and sea. “Your baby? Is dead?”

  Depot rubbed his big body against Julie’s leg. She reached down and clenched a hank of his fur. She nodded.

  Peter nodded back. “That sucks. Really.”

  Julie’s vision clouded. “Yeah. It really does.”

  Peter’s form wavered into shape through her tears, through the darkness.

  “I have a picture I kiss sometimes too,” he told her.

  Then he executed a perfect pirouette at the edge of the cliff—for a second, Julie pictured gravity taking him over—before running forward so that Depot would follow.

  He had lost his father and his home in the last year. That could explain the boy’s behavior, his attachment to this house, better than anything far-fetched, abuse or worse.

  “Peter!” Julie called.

  He turned.

  “I have to bring you home now. You know that, right?”

  After a moment, he nodded again.

  * * *

  According to what Martha had said, their new house lay through the woods, and Peter wasn’t sure whether he could direct Julie to it. (“I never get to walk by myself.”) So Julie came up with a plan B, recalling Ellie’s statement about where Peter’s grandparents resided. Given Peter’s penchant for escaping his mom, perhaps the grandparents would be a better choice tonight anyway.

  The second-highest point of land on the island. Old Bluff.

  Julie had been left a map of Mercy, along with some brochures and promotional materials, neatly stacked in one of the kitchen drawers. It would be easy enough to walk to Old Bluff, the northernmost point on the island. Julie served Depot the dinner he’d never eaten, then she and Peter left the house together.

  The weather was changing, wind moving through the trees like a live thing, late-summer leaves jangling. Julie glanced down at the map. They had to swerve away from the woods that stood to the west.

  She and Peter’s grandparents were practically neighbors, which made sense when you considered that the two houses were generational dwellings. The elders’ was reached by a lane along the cliff. The grassy path dropped, at first imperceptibly, running in the opposite direction from town, which straddled the southern end of the island.

  Clouds began paving over the sky. The lip of the cliff and the sea lay to the east, and once Julie’s house receded into the distance, the land she and Peter traversed opened up. Julie checked the map, although they could’ve been blindfolded and probably still hit Old Bluff. There was nothing between here and it except dark, empty space.

  It was quiet on an island in a way Julie had never known before. No trees here, and without the dry clatter of leaves or clack of branches, any noise the rising wind made was snuffed out. The sea lay calmly, any sound of surf inaudible. No birds, not even gulls, who probably preferred the dock, and no other animals either. At home, Julie was surrounded by birds and mammals, some of the latter threatening and dangerous, but each delivering a feeling of kin.

  She tasted salt on her tongue. The air had gone opaque, and she lost sight of Peter, who’d been trudging along at her side. Clouds clenched like fists, holding back their load of rain. In the distance, barely visible amongst the emerging tendrils of fog, there appeared a jagged rim of roof. Julie was just able to take in the girth of the house—a mansion really—before fog rolled in, enveloping the whole world in a cocoon.

  “Peter?” Julie called out, her voice a whip’s lash in the night.

  The boy didn’t answer. She couldn’t see him nearby, and she didn’t hear him either. He must’ve run off, gotten there first. There was a blur of light ahead, and Julie began to make her way forward, extending her hands and walking as if blindfolded. She couldn’t discern the tips of her fingers through the wall of mist in front of her.

  Julie tried to re-create a mental snapshot of what she’d seen before the fog closed in. Had there been a path, would her feet detect a change from grassy berm to seashell walk? She shuffled along as if elderly, given to falls.

  Then the fog parted like curtains. As suddenly as the mist had come in, it cleared. The house stood before her, illuminated by lamplight, and Peter waited outside.

  Someone emerged from the house, descending to a walkway made not out of shells, as Julie had imagined, but flat platters of stone that must’ve cost a fortune to haul in. She was a gargantuan column of a woman, like a stalk in a giant’s garden.

  It was the person who’d appeared in the video reel, and whom Julie had seen with Laura Hutchins at the very edge of the woods in front of her house. Julie should’ve recognized the family hair. This woman’s version was pulled back so tightly, it could’ve been bare scalp.

  She summoned Peter forward, and he ran to her.

  “It’s good to see you, child,” the woman said, stroking his head as Peter encircled her waist with his arms. “Even at this hour.”

  Peter screwed his face deeper into his grandmother’s side, hiding himself from view.

  The woman extricated herself, delivering a pat to Peter’s bottom as she sent him inside. “The Captain has hot cocoa on. Just the thing for a foggy night.”

  The door thudded shut behind the boy, and Julie had just started to call out a hello when the woman strode forward. The regality in her bearing was undermined by a certain contortion to the features of her face, and her mottled, blotchy complexion.

  She spoke in a low, discreet tone that somehow managed to carry. “Surely you realize that school hasn’t started and your duties are not yet required.”

  So much for introductions, Julie thought. She offered a nod, shakier than she would’ve liked. “Of course. But Peter showed up at my house…his old house, I mean—”

  The grandmother came to a halt close enough that her skin gave off a whiff of complex, perfumed notes. Redolent of flowers, but with something bodily beneath it, the vigor of emotion. “Please leave. It’s quite late.”

  “I’m sorry,” Julie said. “I didn’t know where Peter’s house was, so I thought this would be the better option.”

  The explanation sounded perfectly reasonable to her ears, but the woman extended one arm, swordlike.

  Julie took a hitching step back.

 
; The grandmother kept coming, driving Julie toward the open lane and sea, while she spoke in a low hiss. “I said to leave my land, Ms. Weathers. We’ll look forward to welcoming you another time to our island.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Julie made her way home, shaken and raw. There was a pervasive drizzle in the air, and her clothes grew damp. She couldn’t imagine a much worse start to her new position. She had antagonized the most powerful woman on Mercy Island, someone tightly wrapped Laura Hutchins adulated and even the far more carefree Ellie had warned Julie about.

  As she made her way over the open plain that lay between the two houses, Julie couldn’t escape the feeling that she wasn’t alone. Yet it was precisely the openness of the land, its location next to a sheer drop to the sea, that proved she was. Nobody could hide out here; they’d be visible from any angle. Nonetheless, Julie kept twisting to look behind her, then cursing herself for her nerves. What was she scared of? An old lady?

  Her body thrummed with a strange, medicinal hunger, as if it were missing an essential ingredient it needed to run, like insulin. It was all well and good to blame David for her nightly nips, or of late, Big Gulps. But Julie had always enjoyed her nights at the bar with cop friends—Tim and Mandy and a few others—and the rough-and-ready cocktails that the bartender at The Hole mixed. The only difference after she met David was that Julie let him do the serving, and there was less mixing in favor of scotch taken neat.

  Julie was shivering by the time she got back to the house. She grabbed a towel from the first-floor bathroom and sponged residual rain from her face as she began to search the rooms, making sure Peter hadn’t managed to slip inside—nor anybody else. Depot was asleep, curled into a huge hump by the wall of windows, and Julie didn’t disturb him, though she would’ve appreciated his warm bulk by her side. She turned her check of the house into a hunt for her favorite elixir. Surely Martha’s late husband would have followed a hard day at sea with a drop of the hard stuff? But the kitchen cabinets were filled only with the supplies a teetotaling new resident might appreciate, and the twin breakfronts in the living and dining rooms were desert-dry as well.

  Julie stomped upstairs, flinging open the bedroom doors. Nothing in her room, and the second one had been cleaned out. She braved the third, which had so unsettled her the night before. In the full light from the overhead fixture, she saw that the crib had been less shifted to present a barrier to exit and more simply stood in her path, given the way Julie had entered through the window. She began to open boxes, pawing through their contents, discarding them in an even less orderly arrangement than Martha had left. It was physical exertion, lifting bins, sliding them over, heaving them up to form stacks.

  In the stuffy, closed-in space, perspiration began to slick Julie’s body, while dust from crevices and corners stuck to her pasty skin. There was no sign of her substance of choice, no luxuriantly untouched case left behind amid the rest of the boxes, nor even so much as a partial empty hastily stowed in a packed carton.

  Julie trudged back to her own room, no longer cold, instead sweating and parched and hurting for her fix. The towel she’d used was a damp, wretched twist in her hand; she dropped it on the floor. Without the muffling cocoon of her nightly ritual, everything was cast into sharp, unflinching relief. No syrupy coating to dull the effects of her failures back home, or how she had brought the same to her first days on this island. Nothing was going to be any different here, and the loss of that hope, her fantasy, however inflated or unrealistic it might’ve been, pressed Julie down to the floor, buried her beneath a deadly weight.

  The sound of a small voice—this one decidedly fantastic; Julie knew no one was here—enabled her to lift her head, then stand up and move toward the bed. She had succeeded at one thing tonight, and it was something that used to infuse her with more strength and sense of purpose than a drink or four ever had.

  The first fragile inklings of a bond with a child had begun to take root, send forth tendrils. When Julie told Peter about Hedley, she’d offered the boy a part of herself that she normally kept cloaked, and he had responded in kind. He must’ve been talking about his father when he mentioned kissing a picture.

  The fog and damp had lowered the temperature to even colder depths than August nights descended to in Wedeskyull. Climbing into bed, pulling the covers up over her, Julie reached to pick up Hedley’s photo from the bedside stand. She studied her little girl’s face in the dark, needing no light to know it. Hedley had been a gorgeous baby, with enormous eyes and petal-blossom skin. Probably every parent thought the same about their child. Still, recalling her baby girl’s beauty, all that lost potential, Julie was suddenly seized by a pair of fierce, strangling hands. Everything Hedley could’ve grown into, who she might’ve been.

  There was something here on Mercy that still could be.

  “You don’t mind, Lilypad, do you?” Julie whispered to the photo. “I think he might need me.”

  Behind the glass, Hedley gazed back at her, forever stilled on the cusp of a smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Julie woke the next morning feeling better than she had in as long as she could remember, with a newfound sense of optimism. It took her a second to figure out why, stretching luxuriously in the clean-smelling sheets.

  She had no alcohol in her system, and the difference was profound. No clawing headache, no thick, soupy limbs, no taste in her mouth like the devil’s own brew.

  This was her payoff for having made it through the night.

  No need to clean up, hide the proof of her indulgence; no reason to apologize, if only to Depot. Over the last year with David, he as guilty of excess as she, their gazes would flicker away from each other’s like insects every morning. Whole days could pass while each avoided the other’s glance.

  Julie licked her lips. Why, she hardly even felt the need to brush her teeth. Did the entire sober world live like this, unburdened by a medicine cabinet’s worth of toiletries to scour away the evidence? She got out of bed, floorboards comfortably cool under her feet, and lifted a curtain at the window. The island looked as sunny as she felt, no hint of last night’s fog. The sea was a sheet of diamonds.

  Julie drew on a pair of shorts and a tank top, feeling around beneath the dresser for her flip-flops before running downstairs.

  “Depot, come on!” she shouted. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  She and the dog capped off their exertions with a meal while Julie mentally mapped out her day. Best chance of a reboot with the grandmother? Be a great teacher for the children of Mercy. Which was going to take a ton of preparation. She would go into town for supplies and wind up at the schoolhouse. Perhaps stop in at Ellie’s house, just quickly, to tell her about Peter’s second surprise visit.

  Depot showed no inclination to move, so Julie left him behind with water and a bowl for lunch. Her feet made short walk of the forest path—its route familiar already—but when she passed the quadrant of cottages, there was no one home at Ellie’s.

  A hum grew the closer Julie got to town. Tourists darted like birds in and out of stores, and at the base of the drop that led to the pier, the noise of beachside explorations could be heard. Julie paused at a café with a window open to the road. She got in place in a city-foodie-destination-length line, versus one that belonged on a small island, for what turned out to be elevated sandwiches: lobster rolls with lime-ginger aioli, po’boys adorned with fish roe.

  Instead of fighting for a spot at one of the brightly painted picnic tables, Julie decided to take her wax-paper parcel and drink to the schoolhouse, eat as she would be doing for the rest of the year.

  She had to twist and shoulder her way through clusters of people who’d come in on the morning ferry. They crowded the sandy street and shelled patches of land to both sides, and Julie experienced a not unwelcome twinge of frustration, a first link of belonging to the island. It was the way she felt when mud season e
nded and Wedeskyull’s nicely trimmed population began to bloat. “Go home,” she wanted to say to the folks surging through town or observing the lobster boats from the dock.

  Great. Now she was a xenophobe herself.

  Julie made up for it by trading smiles with a bedraggled clump of tourists who had waded into the freezing cold sea and were emerging, sandy and shivering.

  “They rent towels at the inn,” she called.

  “Thanks!” one of them called back.

  The bustle finally began to abate at the library, and by the time Julie found herself ensconced within the thick stone walls of the schoolhouse, the silence was total. She stood facing the swollen belly of the stove, and rows of desk and chair units. The blackboard was visible peripherally, as well as the dusky curtain cloaking the stage. Fighting the temptation to look for costumes and props, Julie crossed the schoolroom and went out to the short hallway. Dropping her lunch on the table in the teacher’s room, she decided to go through the folders in the filing cabinets first. She sank onto a spot on the floor, where she was instantly lost to curriculum creation and lesson planning.

  Hunger pangs brought her state of flow to a skidding halt. Julie couldn’t recall the last time she’d needed to stop for a meal; in the wake of Hedley’s death, eating had come to seem like an optional activity. She walked down the brief length of hall to the teacher’s room, where she unwrapped her sandwich.

  Back in the schoolroom, the hobbit door slammed shut with a resounding echo.

  “Hello?” Julie called out.

  She hastily swallowed her bite, crossing the hall.

  Nobody stood amongst the rows of desks. The room appeared to be empty.

  Julie walked past the stage and called out again, but got no reply. Girding herself, she flung back the heavy length of curtain, inhaling a cloud of dust. She began coughing, her eyes watering madly, unable to see. But when her vision cleared, there was nobody on the platform. She coughed out the last of the grit and went to check the barn doors at the front of the little building. Closed, and no way to tell if either of them had been recently opened.