by Karen White
“Hey, Georgia,” Bobby said. “I remember you playing volleyball on St. George when we were in high school, ’member?” We’d have those summer parties at night with a bonfire. ’Member that, boys? ’Cept I don’t think you can play without your top on here or somebody’s gonna get arrested.”
Regardless of the lost years between them, Maisy’s first response was to grasp Georgia’s hand and squeeze. We’re a team. It was almost as if Georgia had spoken those words aloud, reminding them both.
Georgia’s face had turned a bright pink, starting at her ears, and she seemed to be fumbling for words. Before she could get them out, Caroline slipped off her Tory Burch flats and began walking down the gazebo steps. “I’ll play. I’m taller, but not at all athletic, so that should even the playing field.”
Becky smiled appreciatively, then grinned that grin that would probably stop the world in a few years.
“So, Maisy,” James said, turning to her. “You mentioned you knew the reason Bobby’s mother wasn’t speaking with him anymore. I’m dying to know.”
Bobby glared at him. “Look, I don’t mean no harm. Me and my buds are just here to do a little fishin’.” He drained his bottle, then headed toward the pier, his friends following. He turned back to tell Madison not to go where he couldn’t see her, then continued on without another word.
They turned their chairs to watch the volleyball game. James leaned over to Maisy and whispered, “So why doesn’t she speak to him?”
Maisy shrugged. “I have no idea. I just figured it had to be something bad, because he’s always been such a mama’s boy and she won’t have anything to do with him now.”
Georgia laughed, making Maisy grin.
“I could guess, but I won’t. There are some visual images that are best left unseen,” Georgia said. She pointed toward the water. “They’ve done a great job restoring the pier.”
“Yeah,” Maisy said. “I forget that you haven’t been back since then.”
“Since when?” James asked.
“Since the 2005 hurricane season. Dennis in July and Katrina in August. Apalach didn’t get anywhere near the damage of the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, but we took a punch. Pier was completely destroyed—took them three years to rebuild it. Georgia left in the fall after Katrina.”
Maisy’s gaze met Georgia’s, and it was like when they were children sharing a room, each knowing what the other was thinking. And Maisy wondered whether Georgia thought about those ten years as a time of simple absence or of rebuilding, of just growing older or growing wiser. Of considering that acceptance and understanding might be an adequate substitute for forgiveness.
“Ouch!”
They looked over at the volleyball court, where Becky was rubbing her nose, the ball rolling away behind her. “You did that on p-purpose.”
Madison and Emily shared a smirk, but didn’t say anything, most likely on account of Caroline’s presence. Caroline retrieved the ball and prepared to serve it. “New rule,” she announced. “If a person is hit above the neck with the ball, the opposing team loses a point.” Without waiting for comments, she served the ball directly into the net.
James’s phone buzzed and he looked at the screen, frowning. “Excuse me—it’s my sister Lauren,” he explained. “She lives in Westchester near our great-uncle Joe and keeps an eye on him and our great-aunt Joyce. Seems Aunt Joyce has been calling nine-one-one on a nightly basis, asking for the police to arrest the teenagers having a party in the backyard.” He tapped a reply, then returned the phone to his pocket.
“I’d probably call the police, too,” Maisy said.
“Which you once did.” Georgia sent her a sidelong glance.
“Because it was a school night and I had an exam the next day and Grandpa wasn’t there to make the call.” She paused. “Somebody had to play the mother.”
Georgia drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “Somebody did.”
Maisy felt a stab of guilt, remembering the summer nights lit by lightning strikes, shaking with thunder, and Georgia crawling into Maisy’s bed to hold her hand not because she was scared, but because she knew Maisy was. And Maisy was too proud to admit it. She cleared her throat. “I think we took turns.”
Georgia didn’t look at her, but the side of her face creased in a soft smile.
James kept his face neutral, as if determined not to take sides. “Yes, well, in this case there’s no actual party—it’s all a figment of my aunt’s imagination. I think it’s time we look at full-time care for them. They’re in their nineties, and my uncle is getting too frail to take care of Aunt Joyce.”
“They don’t have children nearby who can help?” Maisy asked.
James shook his head. “They never had any.” He thought for a moment. “I mentioned Uncle Joe to you before—we were talking about mumps, and how as kids my sisters and I used to laugh at the photo of him in the hospital with his neck so swollen it was bigger than his head. Yes, I know, that’s rude—but we were kids. Anyway, it was the mumps that made him sterile. They didn’t know it until after they got married and tried unsuccessfully to have kids. Not that either one of them would have ever married anyone else. They were pretty much made for each other.”
There were loud shouts from the volleyball court and Georgia sat up, as if trying to determine whether she might be needed as referee.
But there was something James had said that caught Maisy’s attention. “I’m sorry, did you say it was the mumps that made him sterile?”
“Yes. And most of the male patients affected didn’t know until they tried to have children.”
“Not all of them, though, right?” Georgia asked. The hairs on Maisy’s arms stood at attention.
“I’m trying to remember what my mom told me—something about how it only affects postpubescent boys and young men who develop a secondary infection in their ‘man-parts,’ which is how she referred to testicles.”
“Wasn’t there something about mumps on Grandpa’s World War Two enlistment exam?” Maisy looked at Georgia for corroboration.
But Georgia was already halfway out of her chair by the time Maisy heard Becky shout, “I got it!”
The earth’s rotation seemed to slow, the waves thick as honey, the birds calling without sound. The only thing that moved at normal speed was the bright plastic ball, rolling over the grass toward the street, a blur of orange, yellow, and green, bouncing as it hit a tree root protruding from the ground. And Becky’s small figure racing behind it, oblivious to the ancient Suburban rambling toward them on Avenue B.
Georgia was already running before Maisy was out of her chair, her feet stumbling, moving in a dream-run where each step was anchored to a sticky ground.
“Stop!” Maisy screamed, the voice coming from somewhere deep inside her, from someone else. From the Maisy of more than a decade before, when all her emotions were fueled by anger, a rage with Georgia at its center. And suddenly it was another beautiful summer day, people chatting, children playing. The splash of water, a baby crying, a man laughing, and the inexplicable absence of Lilyanna’s babbling.
“Stop!” she screamed again, running toward Becky and the ball, reaching out to grab the back of Georgia’s shirt, blinded by panic and terror and the memory of a single moment when time had melted and the sun dimmed. Like now.
Maisy stumbled, skidding onto her knees just as Georgia reached the edge of the road at the same time as Becky, hooking her around the waist with her arms, pulling them both down on the grass while the sound of squealing brakes seemed to go on and on and on. The ball bounced twice, coming to a stop in the grass across the street.
Sound came back first. The sound of her heavy breathing, the tires of the truck rolling over crushed gravel, a gull screaming in the sky above them. The anger came next. But then, Maisy realized as she stumbled to a stand and began runni
ng toward Becky and Georgia, it had never really left.
They were standing on the edge of the road hugging and crying, Georgia saying over and over, “It’s all right. It’s all right.” Except it wasn’t. It never could be. “Get away from her,” Maisy screamed, yanking on Georgia’s arm.
“Mama—I’m okay.” It was Becky, stepping away from Maisy.
“I know, I know,” Maisy said, putting her arms around Becky, trying to move her away from Georgia.
“I wasn’t looking,” Becky sobbed. “And Aunt Georgia . . .”
“Sshhhh,” Maisy said, shaking her head so violently the earth began to spin.
Georgia put a hand on her arm. “Maisy, it’s okay. Becky’s okay.”
“No, she’s not,” Maisy shouted, no longer recognizing her voice, or recognizing the gazebo or the people standing around her, seeing instead red, white, and blue balloons and fluttering American flags on sticks in the ground, and a small baby pool, the still figure facedown in the middle of it, the yellow bow at the back of the little bathing suit bobbing up and down.
“You were supposed to be watching her,” Maisy said, her voice hoarse, as if she’d been screaming for days. Maybe she had.
“We were all watching her,” Georgia said softly, as if she’d also been transported back in time to a summer celebration, and it was the Georgia from ten years ago, wearing a tiny pink bikini, her eyes blurry from too many beers and who knew what else, her fuchsia lipstick smeared, a small bruised pucker on her neck.
“You were too busy doing God knows what with Bobby behind the house. You were not watching her,” Maisy hissed.
“Neither were you!” Georgia shot back, regret haunting her eyes before the last word had been uttered.
For a moment Maisy couldn’t breathe. She closed her eyes, seeing Lilyanna at the blue plastic picnic table with three other children, eating a hot dog that Maisy had carefully cut into tiny bites so her daughter couldn’t choke. Lyle was flipping burgers on the grill and Maisy had gone inside to the bathroom. She was gone for less than ten minutes. Ten minutes. She had told Georgia before she’d left. She knew she had, even if she didn’t really remember.
“I’m sorry, Maisy. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
Maisy looked at Georgia, seeing her older sister, the one person she had once loved most in the world, and for a moment her grief was as strong as an actual loss, a permanent absence. Maybe it was the passage of years, or growing older, but for the first time Maisy felt her own guilt, her own complicity in their disintegrated relationship. But that was Georgia’s fault, too. She’d always been the one to accept blame on Maisy’s behalf, to take the punishment, to assign responsibility. It was a pattern as permanent and as reliable as the tides.
Maisy took Becky by the shoulders and led her away from the silent group of people and back toward their house, feeling as if her feet were walking on shifting sand, where nothing was ever going to be the same.
chapter 30
“From the same flower the bee extracts honey and the wasp gall.”
Italian proverb
—NED BLOODWORTH’S BEEKEEPER’S JOURNAL
Georgia
My bare shoulders pressed against the roughened wood boards of the dock as I stared at the dimming sky above Apalachicola Bay. I’d been there since about three o’clock, waiting to talk with Maisy about what had happened that morning. Before that, I’d hung around Aunt Marlene’s house phone waiting for Maisy to call first.
I tried to justify my inability to pick up the phone by telling myself that I had already said I was sorry. To ask for forgiveness even when we feel we haven’t done anything wrong. Caroline had said that to me that morning in the garden, but I thought we’d been talking about James.
Finally Marlene had pushed me out of the house, telling me that if I wasn’t going to call Maisy, then I needed to go see her face-to-face. I’d taken my time walking the short blocks and then had stood on the front porch for longer than I cared to admit before finally heading toward the dock. I hadn’t yet decided whether I was waiting to find the courage to face Maisy, or if I was waiting for her to notice me and come outside.
I heard footsteps behind me, too heavy to be Maisy’s or Becky’s. I knew it was James before he sat down next to me and pulled off his shoes, setting them neatly on the edge. “Hope you don’t mind. Marlene told me I might find you here.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath and smelling the salty scent of the water that always reminded me of home. “It’s my favorite place on earth.” I sat up, bracing myself on my hands, and watched the amber light of sunset skip over the shallow waves for a moment. “When we were small, Maisy and I believed there wasn’t a problem that we couldn’t solve by lying on our backs here on this dock and staring up at the night sky.”
“I can understand that.” He smiled, showing me a hidden dimple. “Has your family always lived by the water?”
“As far back as anybody has ever bothered to look, they’ve lived right here on the bay. I guess it’s in our blood to read the sky for weather and navigation.” Hollowness expanded in my chest, the same feeling I used to get after I’d moved to New Orleans and thought about home. “I just don’t think I’m a good enough translator, because I’ve never been able to figure out which way I should go.”
He followed my gaze, toward the stripes of orange and yellow in the sky that seemed to thin as if inhaled by the universe as we watched them, the wide sky sealing us in under a dome of night. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing toward a white orb glowing close to the moon.
“That’s Venus. It’s the closest planet to Earth.”
He continued to study the sky. “Living in the city doesn’t give a person a lot of opportunities for observing the moon and stars. It’s like a whole new world out there. And all we have to do is tilt our heads back to see it.” We were silent for a moment, listening to the gentle swish of water pushing at the dock. “Why is it so bright? It looks like a giant star.”
“Because its thick clouds reflect most of the sunlight that reaches it. Grandpa used to call the moon and Venus Georgia and Maisy. Because you rarely saw one without the other.”
I waited for him to comment, but he didn’t. I liked that about him, I decided, his innate understanding of when something needed to be said and when it was better not to say anything at all.
He pulled out his phone. “Have you seen Becky’s Instagram photos?”
Maisy had recently given Becky her first cell phone, but so far I’d seen her use it only to take pictures. “What do you think?”
“Oh, right.” He moved closer to me so that his hip brushed mine. “You should take a look.” He held out his phone for me to see. “She took all of these. I think she has a really good eye—especially considering how young she is.”
After he showed me how to flip through the pictures, he placed the phone in my hands. The photos were artfully filtered and cropped and were mostly scenes around Apalach—oyster shells being used as ground cover in street medians, skiffs heading into the bay early in the morning, nesting terns under the bridge. But there were photos of people, too, some of Lyle and her friend, Brittany, but mostly of Maisy and me.
“She’s very observant,” James said softly.
He showed me how to spread my fingers on the screen to make a photo bigger. It was the first in a series of four showing my sister and me at the dining room table, looking at Limoges catalogs. In the first one I was pointing at something on a page and talking. Maisy stood behind me, but instead of following my finger she was looking at me, her expression not one I could easily identify. Something between loss and regret, maybe. Or it could have been resentment that I was there at all, sitting in a dining room she’d called her own for nearly a decade.
The next two showed us both listening to something James was saying, each of us taking turns to steal a look at t
he other instead of at him. It was as illuminating as it was startling, and I wondered if Maisy had seen them.
Finally I paused on the last one, a photo Becky had changed from color to black-and-white. She had used a filter that looked like moon glow, our faces having an almost angelic aura. We were both looking at Becky as she’d snapped the photo, our eyes focused on her. We wore identical smiles—more grimace than smile—and staring at us side by side I could see, for the first time, our similarities: the small, elfin chins, the wide, almond-shaped eyes that almost seemed the same color in black and white. The high cheekbones and delicate shell-shaped ears that looked just like Becky’s. It was how I always pictured Maisy when I’d thought of her during my long absence, her beautiful face that I never thought looked like mine, and those eyes that missed nothing.
“You look like sisters.”
“Yeah. We do.” I flipped through the photos again, examining each more closely. “I’ve been wondering why Maisy thought it was okay to give a cell phone to a nine-year-old,” I said, all the negative emotions inspired by the morning’s events suddenly gone, as if someone had shifted my viewfinder so that everything was now in focus. “But I wouldn’t think of asking Maisy. She’d think I was being critical.”
“I did ask. She said Becky really was the only child in fourth grade without one, and it made her a target. So Maisy got one for her—albeit with restrictions. She felt like a neglectful mother, but she couldn’t stand to have Becky picked on for something Maisy could actually control.”
I watched as the stars seemed to brighten against the darkening sky, anticipating the coming night. “I would have done the same thing,” I said with certainty. I handed the phone back to him and lay back on the dock, not surprised when he followed me, his shoulder touching mine.
“You’d make a good mother.”
I tensed beside him, but he continued as if he hadn’t noticed.
“Probably for the same reason that Maisy is. I’ve found that we either emulate our parents and turn out exactly like them, or we do the exact opposite so that we won’t. Sometimes all we need to do to forgive our parents is to understand their own childhoods.”
