by Lisa Wingate
As Megan climbed into her Lexus and drove away, her Junior League decal glinting in the sun, a lonely, miserable, helpless sensation swelled inside me. I knew better than to stay out there on the sidewalk alone with it. Now was no time for an emotional crash. I still needed to talk with Dustin, find out what really happened, and try to get a handle on what was going through his mind when he decided to leave without permission, in the company of a bunch of kids he’d apparently just met.
But in truth, I didn’t want to be counselor, or Mom, or single parent right now. I felt bone-tired and weary, exhausted in body and spirit. I wanted to turn the problem over to someone else – say, I handled it last time. It’s your turn, the way I could have in the past.
But now there was only half. Half a parental team. Half a family, trying to re-form into a new whole.
In the house, the living room was empty, and I could hear the shower running in the hallway bathroom. I knocked, but Dustin either couldn’t hear or wasn’t answering. The door was locked, of course. Short of breaking it down, I didn’t have much choice but to keep an eye on the hallway and wait. I passed the time by e-mailing the office to let the secretary, Bonnie, know that I’d need to reschedule my missed afternoon appointments. Sending the e-mail off into cyberspace, I dreaded its arrival at the office. I’d look completely incompetent.
My stomach tightened and started churning, and I laid my head back against the chair, watching the birds enjoy bits of bread Mother had scattered on the deck. A misty rain started falling, and the weight of the day overtook me. I let my eyes close.
Just for a minute, I thought. Just for a minute… .
When I awoke, the birds were gone, and the house was dark. In the room with the bunk beds – the room that was still decorated in the soft rose and pale green hues of my childhood – Dustin was curled up, softly snoring with his face mashed sideways against the pillow. One long, sinewy leg hung off the mattress, a foot twitching just slightly, as if he were a napping hound dreaming about chasing squirrels.
He knew I wouldn’t have the heart to wake him from a sound sleep. He knew I’d stand over his bed, think about how peaceful he looked, how young, so much like my baby boy. So smart. So handsome. So perfect. An incredible kid who’d always been honest, and tenderhearted, and smart, and faithful, and bold …
And now … damaged?
Broken? Fearful? Angry? Bitter? Closed off?
Tears welled in my eyes, and before I sensed it coming, a gush of emotion wrenched from my stomach and pressed out a sob. The sound split the silence, causing Dustin to jerk in his sleep, blink and rise in a clumsy push-up.
“Mom?” he whispered, his eyes narrow slits in the stream of light from the hallway.
“Shhh …” The sound shuddered, my lips trembling as it passed. I swallowed hard, trying to force the emotion down my throat, tuck it away where it wouldn’t hurt anyone. “Everything’s all right.” I wished that were true. More than anything else about our old life, I missed the feeling of security, the confidence that everything was fine, that tomorrow would be the same as today. The same routine, the same people. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to worry about.
Dustin collapsed onto the pillow again, exhaling a long sigh. I pulled the sheet over his shoulders, touched his hair, remembered the days when I’d fretted over homework he didn’t do exactly right, or a friend who’d turned against him in school, or soccer games in which he didn’t make the starting lineup. How many times had I knelt by his bed and prayed that the world would be easy on him, that everything would go his way?
How could I not have seen that the biggest danger wasn’t outside our house – it was inside?
I went to bed and lay awake, my mind doing what it usually did – sifting through the past, rehashing history, trying to understand it, until finally I fell asleep. In my dreams I was sailing on the lake, the boat, a catamaran, skimming over the water on a clear day, the sails popping, stretching in a stiff wind. The freedom was golden. Closing my eyes, I let a cool breeze stroke my hair. I felt larger than life. Indestructible. Unbroken.
In the shelter of the Big Boulders, the wind died, and the boat floated along on the current, traveling under Eagle Eye Bridge, into the river channel. I felt no need to adjust the sails. The current knew where it was going. It was taking me someplace I was meant to be.
Overhead on the bridge, a rust-spotted pickup rattled by. In the passenger-side window, a little girl turned my way, her blue eyes curious, her dark hair swirling in the breeze. When the truck stopped, the little girl slipped out the passenger door and skipped across the deck of the bridge. She was too young to be up there alone. It wasn’t safe.
Laughing, she climbed onto the railing, moved along it with her arms outstretched like a tightrope walker’s.
I screamed for her to stop, but she couldn’t hear me. The truck was backing up now, rattling toward her. If it shook the railing, she might fall… .
I adjusted the sails, tried to move the boat underneath her, but the current was pulling me the other way.
The truck rolled closer and closer to the girl, the railing vibrating, humming like a tuning fork.
“Stop!” I screamed. “Be careful!”
I jerked awake, looked around the room, struggled for a minute to sort out dreams and reality, to remember where I was.Thoughts raced through my mind in rapid-fire bits, ricocheting and repeating. Work. Dustin. Divorce. Lake house. Family meeting. Scissortail.
The little girl in the truck.
A glance at the clock whisked the dream into the dustpan of things to be considered later. It was after six thirty. If I didn’t get moving, I’d be late checking in at the office. Dale Tazinski had been, so far, an extremely understanding boss, but one more slipup like yesterday’s, and he’d wonder if his newly hired Licensed Professional Counselor was in need of counseling herself.
Whipping around the room, I grabbed one of the summer dress suits I’d purchased three weeks ago before starting my new job.Then I showered, toweled my hair, and slipped a ponytail holder over my wrist for later. By seven fifteen, I was dressed, had everything in a pile by the door, and was ready to head for the Tazinski and Associates office, forty minutes down the road in Cleburne. I hurried to the kitchen to pop some waffles into the toaster so that Dustin and I could sit down to breakfast together, talk about what had happened yesterday, and discuss the fact that he was grounded as a result. His parameters for today in no way included leaving the property. In fact, I’d be preparing a chore list, which I would text to him when I arrived at work.
Something caught my eye as I crossed the living room – a movement down the hill where the backyard sloped steeply toward the lake. There was a boat by our boathouse. A man was on our dock… .
I moved toward the bay window to get a better look. In the hallway, Dustin’s bedroom door opened.
“Dustin,” I called, a note of disquiet raising prickles on the back of my neck. All the docks in Larkspur Cove were private. No one should have been there. “Dustin … there’s someone down by the boathouse.” Maybe one of Dustin’s newfound friends was paying an early visit.
But the stranger on the dock didn’t look like a teenager. He was tall and broad-shouldered … and coming up the hill.
A wise old owl sat on an oak;
The more he saw, the less he spoke;
The less he spoke, the more he heard.
Why aren’t we like that wise old bird?
– Anonymous
(Left by a mother of six on a family vacation)
Chapter 6
Mart McClendon
The mom came down the hill with the kid rushing behind her, trying to talk his way out of trouble. I didn’t have to hear what they were saying to figure out that Dustin hadn’t bothered to tell his mama that I’d be showing up this morning. You work in this business awhile, you learn to read body language. Dustin was trying to do damage control, and it wasn’t working. Judging from the way his mom was dressed, she’d been headed out
the door to work. Right now she was moving at a pretty good clip, even with her high heels sinking into the sod. Her arms swung at her sides, stiff as baseball bats.
She looked like the type who would be living in a high-dollar waterfront place like this – kind of buttoned-down and uptight, all business. While she was walking down the hill, she pulled her hair up and stuck it in a ponytail, like we were about to have a wrestling match, and she didn’t want the hair getting in the way.
This won’t take long, I thought. She’ll ask where she can pay the citation, make a few excuses for the kid, and we’ll be done. I’d already had a call from the lawyer-dad this morning. He’d talked to some buddies who worked juvenile court cases, and he’d figured out that the kid wouldn’t get any more than a slap on the wrist. He was going to pay Max’s way out, so the kid wouldn’t miss football camp next week. Probably wasn’t the first time Max’s dad had bought Max’s way out of trouble. Probably wouldn’t be the last. You had to wonder sometimes why people who couldn’t be bothered to raise their kids got to keep doing a lousy job of it, when someone like my little brother, Aaron, never had the chance to see his kids grow up, and my little nephew, Mica, never got to grow up at all.
If these parents could’ve stood by those side-by-side graves, they wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get to work.
Dustin and his mom met me halfway across the yard, Dustin babbling that he’d forgotten to tell her I was coming, and someone was asleep, and something about being in the shower. Considering that the kid hadn’t had much to say for himself yesterday, he was spitting out rope like a twine baler today. Pretty soon, his mama was gonna hang him with it. She finally told him to hush up, and he snapped his mouth shut. I couldn’t blame him. If my mama’d given me that look, I would’ve zipped it, too.
“We’ll talk about this later,” she growled, then turned from him to me and introduced herself.
Something strange happened, and her name flew right past my ear without going in. I lost focus for a minute. She had the prettiest eyes – big and brown, kind of nervous, the way a doe looks when she’s deciding whether to bolt for the woods or stand her ground. She reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t place the resemblance. Someone on TV, maybe. She was that kind of pretty, and tall enough to look me in the eye, standing uphill like she was.
“But Maa-om …” Dustin whined, and my mind snapped into forward gear. Somebody needed to tell him to square his shoulders and act like a man.
“Just a minute, Dustin!” She held a hand up, her fingers shaking. Moisture was gathering in her eyes, and all I could think was, Man, I’m not in the mood for a crying jag this morning. There was nothing here that was worth a big emotional display. All I wanted was to take the short road through the usual conversation, get this over with, and go home to bed. It’d been one long night with the contraband alligators.
After explaining yesterday’s details to the other parents, I had the routine down pat. The conversation was already rolling in my head. She’d have the same excuses as the rest of them – the boy hadn’t ever done something like that before, he didn’t mean to do anything wrong. He wouldn’t do something like that on purpose. And there was no way he would be out drinking beer. He was a good kid, after all. A n angel, really. Never been in any trouble. Why was I harassing teenagers on the lake, anyway? Didn’t I have any better ways to spend my time? The county had a drug problem, for heaven’s sake. Law enforcement should be focusing on the real issues, not harassing kids who made one little mistake… .
I pulled off my hat and rubbed my eyes, felt my head start to pound. I was beat and I stunk like swamp water and gator slime. If I was lucky, I wouldn’t end up with amoebic dysentery from going with my partner from the north end of the county, Jake Moskaluk, to haul those gators back to where they belonged. On the way home, we’d stopped at one of Jake’s favorite little Mennonite bakeries, and right now all that food had me ready to lay out under a shade tree somewhere.
I introduced myself, but I did her the favor of not offering a handshake. The lady didn’t look like she wanted one, anyway. She could probably smell the swamp water from over there.“Look, I’ll give you the short version,” I said. “I’m guessing that Dustin, here, didn’t exactly fill you in on how he ended up in trouble yesterday.”
She cut a sideways look at the kid, and he backed away a step, holding up his hands. “Mom, I tried… . I mean, I was going to, but everybody was here and then you were outside with Aunt Megan, and well … then you were asleep and stuff. I was gonna get up and tell you this morning, but my alarm didn’t go off.”
“Tell me what, exactly?” She shot him a glare that could’ve poached an egg.
The kid fidgeted from one foot to the other, hiking his shoulders up close to his ears. “I just forgot, okay? It’s not … like it’s a big deal. I …”
Mom blinked at him, eyes ending up wide open with whites circling the top.
The kid had the good sense to backpedal. “I screwed up, all right?” He put a pretty convincing tremble in the words – a little staccato to let Mom know he was so sorry he was about to cry. If she could’ve seen him in the Waterbird yesterday, she wouldn’t be buying it.
I held off from saying anything, figuring the kid was about to get a shucking. But Mama took one look at him, standing there all round-shouldered and sad, and she melted like butter. She blinked several times and swallowed hard, like she didn’t know what to do next. After a minute, she seemed to remember they weren’t alone. She turned back to me, wrapping her arms around herself and pulling one high heel, then the other out of the dirt. “I’m sorry. We had a very busy evening yesterday. I don’t think Dustin meant to get himself in any further trouble.”
Yeah, he didn’t mean to climb those rocks or tool around the lake in the beer boat, either. “How much did your boy tell you about what happened yesterday?”
She chewed her bottom lip, and for just a second, I was thinking about her lips.
“We didn’t … exactly …” Two pink fingernails pinched the bridge of her nose, her shoulders moving up and down with a breath. “We didn’t have time to talk. It’s really my fault as much as Dustin’s. Yesterday was … chaotic. I should have followed up with him, and I didn’t.”
Followed up? She made it sound like she had to get out the Rolodex and call a business meeting with her kid.
“Ma’am, you need to know what your boy was into yesterday, and he was left with instructions to tell you about that and to let you know I’d come by here in the morning.” She gave the kid another bewildered look, and I went on to explain what had happened on the lake and what Dustin was told while he was sitting in the Waterbird, waiting for her to clear her busy schedule and come after him.
She took a glance at her watch, and that pretty well drilled me.
“Listen, if all this is too much trouble for you, lady, just let me know.” On a normal day, I wouldn’t have popped off like that, but at the moment, I felt rough, dry, and impatient.
She jerked back, her mouth falling open. “I’m late for work,” she said, like that explained everything.
I should’ve just let it go – spelled out Dustin’s options, and left. I didn’t need the hassle, but something about the way the kid was looking off toward the lake just burned me up. I had a feeling he’d be on the Scissortail again, the first chance he got. “Ma’am, are you aware that we’ve had seven drowning deaths on the lake this year alone? Over half of those were teenagers. Most involved alcohol and at least one stupid decision. I don’t think your boy here has a full appreciation of that, but for his own good, you ought to drill it into him. He also needs to understand that underage kids and boats and beer aren’t a good mix … before he ends up in court, or worse.”
She jerked back, wide-eyed again. “Dustin would never …”
“Ma’am, you don’t know how many times I’ve heard that – usually right after I find kids out in the woods partying, or wrapped around a telephone pole in a car, or upside down in a ditch
, or in trouble on the lake.”
She coughed like I’d offended her, and her cheeks went red and hot. Her gaze met mine with a smack, and if she’d seemed lost and confused before, she didn’t look that way now. That was the look of a mama bear coming out to defend her cub. “Now, wait a minute.” Hiking one hand on her hip, she pointed the other at her boy.“Dustin has never, ever been in trouble for anything involving … alcohol. He’s a good kid, and maybe he didn’t think things through well enough yesterday, but I can assure you that you won’t be finding him out in the woods at some sort of … of … underage drinking party. He’s new here, and he doesn’t know those kids. I’m sure he had no idea they were carrying beer.”
The boy stood a little straighter, like he figured his mama believing him would carry some weight with me. He didn’t know how many times I’d picked up kids whose parents didn’t have a clue what they were doing when they left the house.
“Well, I guess he oughta be more careful about who he goes out on a boat with, then, shouldn’t he?” I aimed the question at him, not her, but she was the one who fielded it.
“I’m not saying that he shouldn’t have. What he did was wrong, and he’ll be in trouble for it.” She sounded like she meant that, but Dustin looked like he was already relaxing and figuring he had this little spark of trouble tamped down. A boat passed by on the lake, and he watched it, not having much to worry about, I guessed.
“Is there anything else you need from me?” Mom asked, the words clipped short, letting me know I was sure enough harassing the two of them beyond what was right and proper.
All of a sudden, I was full-on annoyed. Some uppity rich lady trying to pave the easy road for her kid was a bad way to finish a long night. My people skills went out the window, which wasn’t a long toss. Diplomacy, the lack of it, really, was the reason I’d stayed down in the dry country with the roadrunners and the coyotes for so long. “Well, as a matter of fact, there is, ma’am, and Dustin knows what it is. I’ll let him tell you.”
