The Second Mother

by Jenny Milchman

  Julie left the partially depleted bottle behind in the kitchen.

  She went upstairs and got into bed. Blacked in a square on the calendar to signal an end—no, an interruption—to her slashes, then picked up Hedley’s photo and placed it beside her pillow, where it embedded a hard, swollen line in her cheek as she slept.

  * * *

  The next morning, Depot waited for Julie by the foot of the stairs, a look of mournful apology in his eyes. Trailing him into the kitchen, Julie saw that he’d sicked up the soup and the meal she’d served him at home, as well as what looked to be a fair amount of salt water.

  “Don’t worry,” Julie told him as she cleaned up the mess. “I’ve been there a few times myself as you know. Always good to get the poison out.”

  She wasn’t hungover this morning, however. Hadn’t wound up drinking enough for that. In fact, she felt more clearheaded than she had in a long time.

  Also filled with faint excitement, of the first-day-of-school variety.

  Julie watched Depot lap up three bowls of fresh water, then made her decision. Her dog would accompany her to school today. She wasn’t leaving him alone again until she could be sure he would stay put—or more accurately, that nobody would interfere with him staying put. The walk to town would suffice for his morning exercise, and Julie wouldn’t have to worry about racing right home after school for his second outing.

  They took the trail through the woods; Julie hadn’t located the other route yet, and she figured they’d both had enough of cliffs for a while. Although when they reached the cove an hour before school was to start, she was surprised to feel the sea beckoning, and to find that Depot didn’t resist. Perhaps they were becoming islanders. Julie walked onto the curved sickle of beach—how calm it was here compared to where they’d entered last night—and Depot lowered himself down beside the rock she sat on. They watched curling edges of lace roll into shore, listened to their quiet sighs.

  Julie stared out at the wavering blob of sun coming up over the sea. Sparkles doubled, trebled before her eyes, and when she looked down, tears plashed onto her lap.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Julie said aloud. “I am so very sorry.”

  For what she had done. For what she hadn’t done. But really it wasn’t either of those things as much anymore. Really it was that Julie was just unimaginably sorry that Hedley wasn’t here with her, living her life, experiencing all there was to come.

  Depot lifted his head toward the rising sun, and whatever part of a less tamed breed he had inside him let out a wild beast howl of sorrow.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  For a brief section of time, the schoolhouse retained its air of pristine hush, a theater just before the curtain rises. Then promptly at 8:00 a.m., Julie threw open the barn doors at the front of the building and the classroom filled with the scramble of bodies, slapping feet, and an air of expectancy so palpable, it had a sound all its own, composed of breaths and fidgets, mumbles and whispers, new beginnings and fresh starts.

  Julie stood in front of the blackboard, surveying the room. She felt like she was home again, in a body and a life of her own. She let the feeling of completeness settle over her, then started to count. Nineteen desks occupied. The children had arrayed themselves largely by age and grade, although one or two looked out of place, a situation that would be Julie’s to rectify. She could just imagine the Laura Ingalls–style prank, So-and-So in sixth grade pretending to be in fourth, and chortling over his easy work.

  Peter sat in the last row, long legs thrust out to either side. He was as tall as the girl sitting beside him, but according to Julie’s roster, she was two grades ahead. As Julie eyed him, Peter’s gaze flicked away.

  Did you bring my dog to the cliff and leave him to drown? Julie thought. Maybe Peter’s motivation had been aboveboard—he was taking Depot on the proposed walk. Or could it have been the Captain in a confused state? A different member of the Hempstead clan?

  Children twitched in their seats, glancing at Julie.

  “Good morning, class,” she said at last, an old-fashioned greeting she never would’ve dared unironically in Wedeskyull—itself far from a bastion of hipster culture—but that felt right here. “I’m Ms. Weathers.”

  Another trio of words that would’ve carried different meaning back home where her uncle had once reigned, then fallen. Her new and tenuous feeling of belonging on Mercy, roots taking hold, made her glad to have the mantle back, even if no one on this speck of land would recognize it.

  “I believe I know your names already,” Julie went on, peeking at her roster. “So rather than do a boring old attendance sheet, I thought we’d try something different.”

  She walked back and forth along the rows of desks, laying slips of paper on each surface, before returning to the area in front of the stage.

  “As I said,” Julie went on, “I think I know each of your names, but that’s not a lot to go on when we’re going to be learning and hanging out together and doing different things for a whole year. I’d like us to get to know each other better than that.”

  Collectively, the students’ attention shifted; it might’ve been her reference to the school year, on this very first day when kids were still shell-shocked to be back in class at all. They stirred in their seats, looking over their shoulders at the open barn doors.

  Julie strode back and swung the doors shut, talking as she did.

  “Plus, I’m new to you too,” she said as she passed, aiming a smile at the youngest cluster of students, who smiled back. “So here’s what we’re going to do.”

  She had their attention again. Some had taken pencils out and were holding them poised over their scraps of paper.

  “Don’t write your names,” Julie said, and all nineteen heads shot up. In school, telling kids not to write their names on a piece of paper was a genuine shocker. “This is a guessing game. I want you to put down something about yourself. It can be anything you want, but it’s in your interest to make it something I can guess because if I’m able to figure out who you are from your hint, then you get to ask me something. I don’t have to answer, so don’t get all crazy—”

  Scattered giggles.

  “—but unless it’s something really, you know”—Julie made woo-woo hands, which earned her more giggles—“then I promise I will. Write the question you want to ask me on the other side of your paper. Everybody understand the rules?”

  From the bent heads and hands in play—some scrawling rapidly, others penning careful, painstaking letters, a few frozen in thought—she concluded that they did.

  Then the barn door began to open again with a series of slow, halting pushes.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Julie went back to lend a hand with the heavy door, peeking outside to get a jump start on whoever might have arrived. With ducked head and shuffling steps, Eddie Cowry edged around her and entered the schoolhouse.

  The other children ignored him. It was as if nothing had changed, nobody new was here, the young boy’s presence so meager as to not even disturb the air currents.

  Julie leaned down with an encouraging smile. “Eddie?”

  He shrank back as if she’d struck him.

  Julie felt something pull in her chest. The child’s skin was so pale, it didn’t seem possible that he lived beside the sea, and his eyelids fluttered when she made eye contact.

  “My name is Ms. Weathers,” Julie said. “I’m your new teacher, and if you’ll take a seat, we’re playing a fun game. At least,” she added, offering another smile, “I hope it will be fun.” She held up an extra scrap of paper. “Can you show me where you sit?”

  Eddie looked around as if the question baffled him.

  “He doesn’t sit anywhere!”

  It was a sixth-grade boy, heavyset, packed into a desk in the row in front of Peter. From the sound of his voice, Julie was pretty sure th
at he had been the author of the meanest taunts on those rocks at the party. And here he was again, twisting to see Peter’s reaction, garnering favor.

  “Yes, he does,” Julie answered firmly. Taking Eddie by the hand, she led him to the empty desk in the sixth grade grouping.

  Peter got to his feet, towering over everyone at their desks. “That’s mine,” he said, as if referring to a sack lunch, or an object in his home, something that he owned.

  Julie faced him blandly. “Well, then you should’ve sat in it,” she said, “instead of pretending to be a member of a grade I know perfectly well only has one student.”

  A few muffled giggles, hands clapped over mouths, guilty looks darted.

  Peter looked around at his fellow classmates, who all went quiet. They snatched up their slips of paper and started scribbling again.

  “Stay where you were,” Julie advised Peter. “You can keep that seat for the rest of the morning, then we’ll play a little musical chairs. You’re in fifth grade, yes, Eddie?”

  The boy lowered his head.

  “Eddie?” Julie asked patiently.

  A third sixth-grade boy said, “Yes, he’s in—”

  “Thank you,” Julie cut in. “But I was talking to Eddie.” She couldn’t push this too far—one sure way to incite bullying was to be a teacher’s pet—but she wanted to get the message across.

  “Yes,” Eddie whispered after a moment.

  “Good.” Julie gave a brisk nod. “In a little while, you’ll move over with the other fifth graders, and Peter can have this desk. But first we have a game to play.”

  * * *

  The children in kindergarten, first, second, and third grades were a study in guilelessness. Julie guessed every single one of their identities, not from what they’d written down, which would’ve been a feat of clairvoyance—my turtle’s name is Alexandra; I play Fortnite; I’m a pescatarian; my Instagram name is jamezz:)—but from each one’s tell when Julie read their hints aloud. Giggles, pokes, covered faces. She answered all their innocent questions about herself—where she came from, her favorite show, whether she voted in the last presidential election—while mentally marveling over how aware these Mercy Island little ones were. They might play in tide pools and sell lemonade, but the internet built bridges miles out to sea.

  Things got progressively harder as the students aged up, but Julie was able to stumble along until she reached the sixth-grade boys. Five of them, not one girl in the grade. Julie figured these boys would be ready to swim to the mainland by high school, in search of a coed experience. It was less that the sixth graders were difficult to figure out, and more that their clues glared with an in-your-face meaninglessness. I live in a house; I’ve been on a boat; I know how to swim; I don’t like this game; I don’t like this game.

  Julie skimmed the pieces of paper without reading any of them out loud, finally arriving at something workable in one of the questions she’d been asked.

  Is it true you have a big fucking dog?

  Skipping the curse, Julie faced the class. “I do have a dog. Want to meet him?”

  The kids began to murmur under their breaths, not just the sixth graders, but all of the students, their voices swelling into a wave of sound.

  “What? When?”

  “You mean now?”

  “Is he here?”

  “Did you bring him?”

  Julie nodded. “Let’s finish up this game, and then you can all see Depot.” She glanced as casually as she could toward Peter.

  The boy’s face had lost whatever emotion it held when protesting the loss of his seat, and his sun-bronzed skin had gone the color of winter wheat. Refusing to look at Julie, he picked up his scrap of paper and crushed it into a ball in his fist.

  Julie read the seventh graders’ slips next. The grade consisted of three girls and a boy, all of whom appeared to be tightly bonded, the boy a ringleader of sorts, urging the girls on with nudges and prods and whispered suggestions. They’d clearly collaborated, and the boy kept jabbing his friends and bouncing up and down in his seat, resulting in bursts of hysterical laughter, hugs, and exclamations of mutual love. Julie tolerated the giddiness, even the boy’s disruptions, before focusing her attention on the sole eighth grader.

  Her slip was blank.

  When Julie looked at the girl, she shrugged. “I’m the only person in my grade, I’m out of here by June, and I just want to chill.”

  I’m sixteen, and I don’t need a governess, Julie heard in her head, and had trouble quelling a smile.

  The girl—Macy was her name—frowned.

  Julie spoke quickly. “I know all of that. But seeing as we have nine months together, maybe we can figure out how to make them at least a little bit fun?”

  Macy gave a single-shouldered shrug.

  “How about you just ask me a question? Go on. Anything,” Julie said.

  “Okay,” Macy said in the tone her shrug had conveyed. “Why’d you want to come live on this small-as-shit island?”

  Macy clearly didn’t expect to get a whole lot out of asking the question, but Julie knew it was in truth a make-or-break moment with the class. If she could offer something real, authentic—without crossing over into too-much-information territory—then the tone would be set for the whole year.

  “Small,” she repeated, lopping off the curse again and hoping it wouldn’t render her permanently uncool to the older kids. “You probably can’t wait to get out of this place, and here I am choosing to move here. Right?”

  Macy gave a reluctant nod. The other students watched her do it, then turned back toward Julie. Even the sixth-grade boys appeared to be waiting.

  “Did you ever feel like you needed to get away from something?” Julie asked. “Maybe you don’t even know why. But where you are—it just isn’t right anymore. You have to find a place that fits you better. Do you know what I mean?”

  All over the schoolroom, heads began to turn, kids looking at one another, gazes meeting before being lowered, two or three shared nods.

  Peter’s transformation was the most acute. His pale face had gone from emotionless to contorted, and he dug two fists brutally into his eyes.

  Sixth-grade boys didn’t cry. Even unofficially royal ones. If Julie didn’t keep the other students from noticing—give Peter time to collect himself—then he would despise her forever for triggering what would be his demise.

  “Guess where my dog is right now?” Julie asked brightly.

  The whole class, minus one weeping eleven-year-old, swiveled to face her.

  * * *

  They ate lunch in the cove instead of at their desks—Julie explaining that she would join them since it was the first day, and hoping she hadn’t just undermined the thirty-five-minute break she intended to take for the rest of the year—so that Depot could accompany everybody outside. He gobbled up two separate servings; no portable bowl could be found that held enough to satisfy Depot’s appetite.

  The children watched him eat, keeping a safe distance while sneaking glances. The younger ones marveled out loud—He’s so big! Look at his tail! Would he bite my finger if it went in that bowl?—while the older ones pretended to be unfazed, attempting pats before snatching their hands away.

  The tide started coming in, and Depot scuttled backward. He found a part of the rocky cove that the waterline hadn’t reached, the kelp dry and brittle, a high-tide mark permanently etched into the stone, and lay down. The children followed, and the dog got obligingly back on his feet, whereby the older students began prompting the younger to touch him, until eventually big were assisting little with rides on Depot’s back.

  Peter sat at a distance, acting as if he’d never seen the dog before in his life.

  The school day was proceeding at a startling clip, and after checking the time, Julie morphed the romp on the rocks into a multigrade science lesson—l
iving studies, earth science, geology—before herding everyone back inside, and telling the kids to take their seats while she led Depot to the teacher’s room for a rest.

  Back in class, Julie made sure that Eddie and Peter were in their proper seats before going over some housekeeping tasks with each grade, handing out lessons to work on, and explaining her homework policies.

  She wrapped up the day with the speech she had planned, directed to all the assembled grades, about the wonders of putting on a play. For a finale, she flung back the newly dust-free curtain to show off the stage and pointed out where the spotlights, due in on the next ferry, were going to go.

  “We can decide on a show to do together,” she concluded. “Make a list of suggestions and take a vote.”

  She was pleased to see most of the students listening avidly, appearing to match her enthusiasm. Julie looked around for Peter to get a sense of his response; she needed him in her corner on this, for the other students would follow his lead.

  But the boy was no longer seated at his desk.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Julie felt a prick of annoyance. She had explained the bathroom protocol not twenty minutes ago, and there was the wooden pass hanging on its hook on the wall, a flagrant indication that she’d been ignored. Peter seemed to behave as if he could go anywhere or do anything he wanted to, even in school, flouting not just his mother’s instructions, but Julie’s as well.

  “Andrew Beverly,” Julie said to one of the sixth grade boys. “Please go find Peter in the boys’ room. And I don’t want to hear a single joke,” she added, seeing the other sixth graders begin to gear up. Bathroom humor was still a favorite at their age.

  “Damn, she’s psychic,” Scott Harness said, getting out of the way so that Andrew could shuffle down the aisle and out into the short hallway.

  “He’s not there,” Andrew said when he returned.

  Julie frowned, silently taking roll call as she looked out over the desks. She felt a blip of panic when it seemed that Eddie might be missing too—his body and Depot’s conflating in her mind, along with an image of Peter’s strong, long-fingered hands pushing both beneath the surface of the sea—before realizing that the boy had merely shrunk low enough in his seat that he couldn’t be seen, as if to take up the least possible real estate.