Knowing his presence would put some unintended pressure on Ann, making her question every decision no matter how simple until she was unable to make any decision at all, Craig went into the bedroom and filled the dresser drawers and closet with the clothes he’d packed the day before.
The sun was low on the horizon by the time they left the house for the beach. Jeremy walked between Craig and Ann, holding their hands, both an emotional conduit and insulator.
“Look at those clouds sitting on the water,” Jeremy said.
“That’s fog,” Craig told him. “It will probably roll in tonight after we go to bed.”
“Cool.” He toed a broken shell without breaking stride. “Will it still be here when we get up?”
“Probably. And if not, there will be plenty of chances to see it the month we’re here.”
Jeremy didn’t say anything for several seconds. “What will we do if it’s foggy on my birthday?”
“I take it you’d prefer sunshine?” Craig wished Ann would say something. She was better at this kind of trapped-in-the-car conversation with Jeremy than he was.
“They might shut down the rides. If it’s bad enough, they might even have to shut down the whole boardwalk. Then what would we do?”
“They won’t.”
“But what if they do?”
“They won’t, Jeremy,” Craig insisted. “These people are used to fog. It’s as much a part of their summer as sunshine every day is part of ours.”
“How do you know that?”
“My grandmother lived here when I was your age, and I used to visit her.”
That seemed to satisfy him. Jeremy looked at Ann. “Where did your grandmother used to live when you were my age?”
She didn’t answer him.
“Ann?” Craig prompted.
She turned to look at him. “What?”
“Jeremy’s talking to you.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. I was thinking about something. What did you say?”
“I was just wondering where your grandmother lived when you were my age.”
“Why would you want to know that?”
Craig looked away. She hadn’t heard a thing they’d been talking about. It wasn’t going to work. He’d been a fool to believe her promise to try harder if he took time off and they went away together. Nothing had changed. Nothing was going to change.
“It’s okay, Mom. You don’t have to tell me. Me and Dad were just talking about stuff.”
“Shouldn’t you be looking for driftwood?” Craig asked Jeremy. They’d stopped for dinner that night at a restaurant selling wind chimes made out of driftwood and seashells. At first Jeremy had asked to buy one to hang outside his bedroom window, and then, unable to decide which one he wanted, announced he would make his own.
Jeremy seemed torn between going and staying.
“Go ahead,” Ann urged. “We’ll be right behind you.”
He let go of their hands and took off to explore the already picked-over treasures left behind by the last high tide. Craig pointed to a bleached log sitting well back from the shoreline. Too large to have been rolled there by kids, the log’s size and location were silent witness to the fierce storms that occasionally hit the area.
“We can see the whole beach from here,” he said.
“And Jeremy can see us,” she added.
Craig sat on one end, giving her room to take the middle where the wood had been worn smooth. Instead she sat at the other end.
“It’s not like Hawaii,” she said after several minutes. “But it’s nice,” she quickly added. “Just like you said it would be.”
“What would you like to do tomorrow?”
She gave him a blank stare. “I don’t know what there is to do.”
“I take it you didn’t read any of the books I brought home?” Hoping to get her involved in planning the trip, he’d picked up several travel books on the Monterey area and asked her to look through them for ideas.
“I meant to …”
“Did you at least bring them?” He worked to keep the frustration out of his voice, but the look she gave him let him know he’d failed.
Ann crossed her arms over her chest and looked down at her feet. “You know, it’s hard for me to remember the last time we talked, and I wasn’t apologizing to you for something. Everything I do, everything I say, is wrong somehow.” She glanced up to him. “Are you as tired of it as I am?”
“What do you want me to do? I’m willing to try anything to have our old life back.”
She lashed out at him. “Our old life is gone, Craig. We can’t go back. Why am I the only one who can see that?”
“Are you saying that we should just give up?” How could he pray that she would say no and hope that she said yes at the same time? “Is that what you want?”
“If I could really have what I want, we wouldn’t be here.” Tears filled her eyes and spilled over to her cheeks. “We’d be home playing with our baby, sending out invitations for her first birthday party, and writing the letters for her time capsule. I’d be decorating the house and …” Her voice caught in a hiccupped sob. “And … and instead I’m here. How could you not know what being away from her on her birthday would do to me?”
“You should have told me you didn’t want to come.”
“I ordered pink roses for her.” She went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “Barbara is going to put them on her grave for me.” Doubling over, she put her hands to her face and sobbed. “I’m her mother, Craig. I should be the one giving them to her.”
Craig knelt in front of her and took her into his arms. “She was my daughter, too, Ann,” he said. “We gave her everything we had to give when she was with us. She’s somewhere that she doesn’t need us now. Jeremy does.”
She held herself rigid, unable to accept the comfort he offered. Even when they were touching, they were apart.
2
ANN WAITED FOR CRAIG’S BREATHING PATtern to change from light to heavy sleep before she slipped out of bed and took her robe off the chair by the dresser. Instead of curling up on the sofa the way she normally did at home, she carefully unlocked the sliding glass door and went out onto the deck.
A full moon rode the crest of the night sky, laying a shimmering path across the water. For a moment she imagined herself on that path and that the path led to Angela. She would go there even if told there might be no way home–no hesitation, no doubts, no looking back. She couldn’t bear the thought that her baby had no one to hold her when she cried or sing to her when she was sleepy or tell her how much she was loved when she awoke in the morning.
Ann’s arms ached to hold her little girl. Her daughter’s feel was imprinted in her memory. She had only to close her eyes and have Angela there again. Only more and more the baby who came to her wasn’t the smiling one with the sparkling happy eyes. She was the fragile, unresponsive little girl the nurses and doctor had told her was beyond their help. They unhooked her from an array of leads and monitors to wrap her in a soft pink blanket and put her in Ann’s arms.
Ann knew without being told that she had only moments left with her daughter. She struggled to find the words to tell her how much she was loved, words with the power to bring solace and comfort in the loneliness of a world without her mother and father and brother.
Then for a brief heart-stopping moment Angela did what no one believed she would ever do again. She opened her eyes and looked directly into Ann’s. It was as if she could feel her mother’s heart breaking and with incredible effort had gathered the delicate threads of strength left in her tiny body to rally and say good-bye.
Ann didn’t need the nurse to tell her when Angela was gone. She’d known the moment the light left her daughter’s eyes. She hadn’t understood until later that a part of her had died, too, the part that found joy in spring mornings and believed each day was a small miracle.
She’d held Angela and rocked her and sung to her until Craig arrived from the airport two hours later.
Angela grew cold inside the pink blanket despite being held in her mother’s arms and Ann still fought releasing her, even to Craig.
Finally, Jeremy convinced her to let go. Craig had called the woman taking care of him and asked her to bring him to the hospital. He came into the room and silently put his arm around his mother. After several seconds he reached down and gently ran his hand over Angela’s downy head, the way he did when he left for school in the morning. Only this time he kissed her, too.
Tears spilling from his eyes, he pressed his cheek to his mother’s and asked to hold his sister one last time. Ann made him sit in a chair, then carefully placed Angela in his arms, reminding him by rote to hold her with both hands and support her head.
Jeremy huddled over his sister, his back curved, his head bent as if it were still possible for him to protect her. His voice barely above a whisper, he recited from memory “The Three Little Kittens,” the poem he’d read to Angela every day for three and a half months. It was from a book his grandmother had read to him as a baby. Finally, he said he would take care of her toys, then he kissed her good-bye. The parting over, he turned to his father. The bond between them was unmistakable.
Craig took Angela and walked to the window that overlooked the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He stood motionless for a long time, his back to Ann and Jeremy, softly talking to his daughter. He told her how the green leaves on the trees outside the window were beginning to change to gold and red and orange and how snow would follow to coat the branches in white and how those bare branches would come alive again in the spring. Unheeded tears spotted the pink blanket as he promised that from then on he would look closer and longer at the world he had come to take for granted because he would be looking for her, too.
Every moment of that day remained in Ann’s memory as if it had been etched in the window to her soul. She’d never prayed as hard or long as she had the three days following Angela’s death–not for her return, but for a way to go with her. Only knowing what her leaving would do to Craig and Jeremy kept her from finding her own way. At the time, the division of her love and loyalty between Angela and Craig and Jeremy had nearly destroyed her. Now, after eight and a half months, she was numb from the battle, unable to give the smallest piece of herself to anyone or anything.
The fog that had lain offshore all day began its journey inland, consuming the moon’s silver path. The damp breeze caught Ann’s cotton robe, rippling the hem around her legs. She brought her chin up and closed her eyes and focused on the sound of the waves.
Tomorrow she would try harder to be the wife
Craig wanted and the mother Jeremy needed. She would dig deeper and find the woman she used to be so they could be a family again.
If only she could remember who that woman was.
THE NEXT MORNING, HIS APPETITE CONSUMED by the escalating argument between his mother and father, Jeremy ignored the orange juice his father put in front of him. In response to the halfhearted order to finish his breakfast, he poked at the scrambled eggs, moving them to the other side of his plate and tucking a forkful under a slice of toast.
“Can I go outside now?” he asked.
Craig looked at his plate and sighed. “Drink your juice.”
Jeremy managed half the glass. “Now?”
“Stick close to the house. I don’t want you going down to the beach without me or your mom.”
Ann put her hand up to stop Jeremy. “Wait a minute.” She took a piece of toast and scooped the scrambled eggs into the middle, then folded it over to make a sandwich. “Take this with you.”
He looked to his father for confirmation.
“Do it,” Craig said. “And I better not find it in the bushes later.”
It was on the tip of Jeremy’s tongue to ask where his dad wanted to find it, but that would only get him sent to his room. Then he really would have to eat the gross-looking thing.
He opened the front door, saw the fog, and went back inside to get his sweatshirt. When he was outside, he stood on the porch for several seconds and looked around, hoping to see some other kids. Even though the fog wasn’t thick or even very cold, there wasn’t anyone outside, not even a grown-up. Thinking they might be on the beach, he went around the house to the old pathway that ran in front of the deck. He followed a brick sidewalk through some flowers and was almost to the back when he heard something in the bushes that scared him so bad he let out a scream–just like a girl.
He waited for it to happen again, his back pressed against the side of the house. The second time it was clear enough for him to make out what it was. An animal was hiding in the flowers. A big animal, judging by its fierce growl. Probably something that lived in the forest they drove through to get to the house. Probably wild.
His dad had told him he should never run from wild animals no matter how scared he was, something that sounded easy enough when they were hiking in the mountains and nothing was around. But it was hard when it actually happened. So hard Jeremy was afraid he might wet his pants if the thing growled again. And then he would just have to let the thing eat him because there was no way he was going to let anyone see him with a big wet spot in the front of his pants.
He should yell for his dad, but it was like his throat had closed and nothing would come out. He could throw something, but all he had was that stupid sandwich.
The flowers moved. He threw the sandwich. It bounced off the yellow rosebush and landed on the bricks not two inches from the toe of his tennis shoe. A high moan squeaked through his closed throat. Seconds later something big and gray and brown and ugly poked its head out. It looked around and cautiously moved toward him.
It was a cat.
All that screaming and squealing for a dumb old cat. He felt so stupid his first thought was to walk by and pretend it wasn’t there. But he liked cats, at least he liked his grandmother’s, and since no one had seen how dumb he’d acted, it was just as easy to drop to his haunches and put out his hand as it was to walk away.
The cat moved away, arched its back, and let out a hiss with all its teeth showing. When it stopped hissing, its eyes started shifting from Jeremy to the sandwich.
“You hungry? Is that what’s wrong with you?” He retrieved a piece of egg that had fallen on the ground and held it out toward the cat.
The cat stood its ground but stopped hissing.
“It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Something in Jeremy’s voice triggered a response. Slowly, hesitantly, the cat came forward. When it was inches away from his outstretched fingers, it lunged, incredibly snatching the egg without biting Jeremy. It backed away and swallowed what it had taken in one big gulp, then looked up to see if there was more.
Jeremy fed the cat another chunk of egg. With each morsel, the cat became more trusting. Soon all that was left was the toast. Jeremy showed the cat his empty hand. “All gone,” he added.
The cat sniffed every finger. Detecting something unseen, it licked his fingertips, tops, bottoms, and sides. Jeremy tore off a corner of toast. The cat took it without hesitation.
Settling into a cross-legged position, Jeremy fed the cat pieces of the toast until it, too, was gone. After licking his fingers a second time, the cat sat on the walkway in front of Jeremy and ritually began cleaning himself.
“Well, would you look at that.”
Startled to discover he was no longer alone, Jeremy glanced up to see an old man watching him, his white hair covered with a baseball cap. He was standing beside the tall wooden gate that had roses growing over the top and had a beach bag in one hand and an umbrella under the arm of the other hand. Obviously the fog didn’t bother him either.
The smile he gave Jeremy crinkled his eyes. “That cat has been wandering around here looking for someone to take care of him for over a month. Not one of us has been able to get near it.”
Jeremy wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. Everyone said so, even his teachers. But the man didn’t look anything like the strangers he’d been wa
rned about. And not only was he all the way on the other side of the garden, there was no way he could catch Jeremy if he decided to run. “He was hungry.”
“For more than food from the looks of it. I think he needs a friend every bit as much as he needed a meal.”
Jeremy stared at the cat. He was right. The cat didn’t seem afraid anymore. “I could be his friend. Just for a while though. Then I have to leave because this isn’t where I live.”
“Sometimes ‘a while’ is enough.”
“Do you have a cat?” He seemed to know a lot about them.
“I used to.”
He looked kind of sad when he said it, so Jeremy didn’t ask what happened. He didn’t think he wanted to know anyway. He didn’t like hearing sad things. “I had a snake once, but it wasn’t really mine. I just got to keep it over the summer because it couldn’t stay at school all that time by itself. Timmy got to take the rat. He really wanted the snake, but his mom wouldn’t let him bring it home.”
“Jeremy–“
“That’s my mom,” he said, unfolding his legs and standing. “I better go see what she wants.”
“It was nice talking to you, Jeremy.”
“Thanks. I liked talking to you, too.”
He smiled. “Take good care of your new friend.”
“I will.”
Ann called again, louder. “Jeremy–“
“Coming,” he called back.
He found her standing on the front step, still in her bathrobe. “Where were you?”
He pointed toward the way he’d come. “Over there.”
She moved out of the doorway to let him pass. She used to make him hug her before she let him in the house. It was a game she liked to play and he kind of liked, too, but he never told her. Now she hardly ever touched him at all. She’d let him hold her hand, but he could tell she didn’t like it because she let go as soon as she could.
“What were you doing over there?” Ann asked.
“Stuff.”
“If I went there and looked, would I find your sandwich hidden someplace?”
Another Summer Page 13
