Wait, Mr. O’Malley, wait. I am getting help. The promise hung silently in the air, and all of a sudden, I knew—Mr. O’Malley was dying. He was dying and didn’t even know I was there.
“W-wait.” I did not know whether Mr. O’Malley was already dead, but I knew he was dying. “Wait, Mr. O’Malley! I’m getting help!”
The cottage was dark now. It was a good thing Remy was not a believer in locking doors, because I barreled right through hers without checking, although with the energy surging through me, I would have gone through it just the same. An old umbrella stand toppled to the floor, and Remy blasted into the room carrying a baseball bat, her long johns twisted up around her and red curls shooting out in every which way.
“What the . . . Jeeez-usss, Izabella! What in blazes? Are you gonna come storming through my door like this every damnable night just to see if I’ll go completely fucking insane?” Remy hollered.
“M-M-M-Mr. O’Malley,” I gasped. The words labored from my throat all forced and crinkled, but they were as determined as I had been to get to the other side of Remy’s front door and were coming through one way or the other.
Remy froze up solid. To hear my voice garbling out Mr. O’Malley’s name like a lunatic put her right into a state of hysteria.
“What? What about Mr. O’Malley?” I don’t even think she realized that she’d grabbed me by both arms and was shaking me dizzy. “Izabella, what?!”
“He’s in th-th-the yard. He needs h-h-h-help.” My lungs were overblown balloons threatening to pop right there on the living room floor. But they had lasted long enough. Just as she’d done when Riley had disappeared over the rocks, Remy grabbed her two-way handset and bolted outside with Luke yapping, leading the way, and me at her heels.
The radio squelched alive in her hand as she ran.
“Jim! Jim! Son of a bitch! Fuck! Pick up the goddamn radio! Get me a fucking ambulance now!” she screamed, choking down panic.
Erch. The radio burped. “Remy! What the hell is going on?”
“Just get a fucking ambulance. Dad’s,” she howled.
“Oh, shit,” said the voice in the beat-up black handset.
“Now!”
“They’re on the way, baby. Sit tight. It’s going to be okay. We’re coming. It’s okay. I’ll meet you there.”
I closed my eyes and felt my chest tighten, then explode. My mother’s voice spun toward me. I could feel her holding me back, refusing to let go. It’s going to be okay, okay, okay. It’s okay, Iz. He’s just going home. We’ll catch the ferry in the morning and meet him.
But it wasn’t okay. It would never be okay again.
I ran after Remy and caught up as she landed on top of Mr. O’Malley with two hands on his chest. She didn’t even stop to see if he was breathing. I guess you just know, when you love someone that much.
“One, two, three . . . ,” I heard her whisper as she pushed blood through his heart. Every time she hit ten, she lurched forward to puff into his mouth. “Goddamn it, Dad! Don’t you dare! I am not doing this, not again. Don’t you dare leave me!”
Behind us, the faint sound of sirens made their way closer and red lights cut through the night, flickering on and off like fireflies. Shell bits spat into the air as the first police cruiser skidded off the lane, spinning into a half doughnut in the field. Officer Dillon jumped out of the driver’s seat before it had completely stopped moving. Three steps and he was on his knees beside Mr. O’Malley, taking over the pumping while Remy focused on the puffing.
“Come on, Tom.” Pump. “The ambulance is on its way.” Pump. “Don’t you let go. Come on!”
A minute later the sheriff pulled in, leading the way for an ambulance. Three men bounded from it, followed by Riley and his dad galloping toward Remy.
“Dad?” The sheriff knelt beside Mr. O’Malley, feeling for a pulse in his neck. “We’re all right here. It’s going to be okay.”
Remy continued breathing for her father while the medics strapped him onto a gurney and loaded him into the ambulance.
They had just gotten him in when my mother ran panting into the yard. Grandma Jo galloped up behind her, pulling a sweater over her naked breasts and fighting with the knit of the fabric, which had tangled around her. My mother looked at Mr. O’Malley, covering a small whimper with one hand. One medic ran to the ambulance’s driver’s seat while another tried to pull Remy, who was turning blue breathing for two people, off Mr. O’Malley.
“Get your fucking hands off me!” she panted. “He’s my father and I know how he likes to breathe!”
The medic looked thoroughly baffled but decided to take over the chest pumping instead of risking life and limb fighting Remy.
“His finger m-m-moved,” I yelled. The world stopped, only for a second, but it most definitely stopped. Remy stopped puffing, the medic stopped pumping, the driver stopped turning his key, Riley and his dad stopped heading for the patrol car. Everyone stared at Mr. O’Malley’s fingers wiggling, except my mother and Grandma Jo, who were staring straight at me.
They were still staring when the ambulance sped away, leaving us alone in the yard. The night had grown black as Yemaya’s skin, but not so black that I could not see tears streaming down my mother’s face. It took a minute for me to realize they were coming down mine, too—for Mr. O’Malley, for my father, for the voice I barely recognized.
The memories that had begun to wriggle loose in the field before Mr. O’Malley collapsed came back to me then, as complete pictures connecting one to the next with breathtaking speed. To let them in meant inviting the pain to come, too—and it did. But for the first time in eight years, I knew it could not destroy me. It wasn’t in my nature to burst into flames. I cried as they came; I cried aloud until the tears would no longer come.
Grandma Jo slid her arms around me, guiding me to the ground. My mother sat on the other side, running her fingers through my hair like my dad once had. We sat staring into the darkness for forever that night, hip to hip, watching the lighthouse. I had always thought that my mother had my grandmother’s nose. That I had my mother’s hair. In this very moment, though, it was not the stubborn chain of DNA that glued us together, but the frailty of love for the same man—the persistent ache left by his leaving.
After all my mother’s years of digging to free my voice, she now seemed content to sit in silence listening to the waves wash in beneath us. Shhh, they whispered. Yemaya, I thought, and I imagined her sweet voice lifting from the shells, her thin hand reaching from the waves, cupped and waiting. Let go.
Grandma Jo put a hand on my knee, giving it a squeeze.
My mother stared at the waves, biting her top lip. After a minute, she pulled a cigarette from her sweater and lit it. When the match finally took, I could see her lashes were wet and clumped together in the corners. I wondered whether she was crying over the sound of my voice or the lack of my father’s. Maybe it was both.
“I wasn’t fast enough,” I whispered.
“Nobody was fast enough, Izabella. You were only six.” I could not remember my mother ever calling me by my full name.
The tears renewed, and I didn’t know where to start hurting first. There were taillights heading for the cliff. And then they were gone. A crash. The weight of my voice on top of it had kept the memories buried for eight years; now they heaved free, shaking my chest until it ached.
The secret tucked away for so very long burned in my throat. My mother turned to look at me and I could tell she saw him there—the spark in my eyes, the way I wore his freckles across my nose. “I told him to go.”
There was silence. A long silence.
“I told him I hated him.” I felt my throat buckle and forced it open. I could not carry the secret any longer. “It never would have happened if it weren’t for me. He told me. He wanted to fly.”
Grandma Jo sniffled, tightening her grip on me. My mother’s eyes were round, horrified, soft—loving.
“My God, Izabella Rae, you were six, no more than
a baby. He was sick; it wasn’t you. He refused to take the medication the doctors gave him. He knew you loved him. And, my God, he loved you more than air. It was the only thing that grounded him to reality. And all children hate their parents sometimes.”
“Some hate them most of the time.” Grandma Jo chuckled. “Your mother is the only child on earth who loves her parent all of the time.”
My mother rolled her eyes with a grin. “It wasn’t your job to chase after him. It’s a parent’s job to stay, no matter what, whether you want them to or not.” She glanced pointedly at Grandma Jo. “He didn’t leave because of you, baby. He adored you, and he knew you adored him.”
“I should have stopped him. If I’d gone with him, if I hadn’t gotten my stupid bag—”
“You would be dead, too.” My mother’s voice was hollow.
I felt Grandma Jo reach around me, touching my mother’s shoulder.
“You were six,” she repeated. “He was wrestling demons that were deep and determined. You couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t stop him. The best doctors in the world couldn’t stop him.” She studied me very carefully, using the cherry of her cigarette to light another. Then she drew the smoke deep into her lungs and hesitated. “Do you remember anything else?”
I thought carefully, listening to the cliffs and the wind, but they were empty. I shook my head.
My mother sighed. “I don’t know what he was doing, what he thought he was doing. Sometimes he thought he was being chased, other times he thought he was superhuman. It was dusk, and the deer were coming into the field to feed. Your dad was driving very, very fast—erratic. He swerved into the O’Malley’s yard. Mr. O’Malley was away and Mrs. O’Malley was setting out salt licks.” My mother stopped speaking. “I don’t think he saw her; if he did it was already too late.”
I felt the vomit rising in my throat again. That was it—that was why Riley had acted like he hated me. More than one person’s disappeared on this ridge. His words from the first day I’d seen him on the cliffs whirled through me. But I guess you already know that. He’d killed her. Whether he’d meant to, or not, my father had killed her. And that was why Remy was so protective of Mr. O’Malley. He was the last parent she had left. I thought about the empty stool while we were making pies. My mom and I have baked for the festival since I was toe high to a fiddler crab. Never missed a year yet. That was probably why she’d been sticking around so close, too. We were the same—Remy and I. Both of us had lost a parent that day; Mrs. O’Malley and my father left this world in the very same minute—together.
My mother just looked at me, then back at the blinking lighthouse.
My heart felt as though if it suffered any more, it would break into pieces so tiny it could never be glued back together again.
“He was trying to kill himself?”
Neither my mother or Grandma Jo answered, and that was answer enough. “I don’t remember Mr. O’Malley or Remy.”
“They weren’t here when it happened. I think something happened between Remy and her husband, and Mr. O’Malley went to get her on the mainland.”
The statement thrummed in my ear so loudly it knocked the air out of me. I rolled back onto the grass, closing my eyes. In one single sentence I knew what nobody else did about Remy. Mr. O’Malley leaving to get her was her “I hate you.” We were walking through the world with the same guilt and it was too heavy to carry alone. If I hadn’t had a baby tantrum and screamed, “I hate you” on that very night. If she hadn’t asked Mr. O’Malley to come get her that particular weekend. We were both moving through the universe searching for an “I’m sorry” big enough to fix it. But there wasn’t one. She knew it and so did I, but not one other person could understand.
“By the time they got back, Grandma Jo had come to bring you to her house while I worked out the details.”
“Why wasn’t there a funeral?”
“Your dad hadn’t wanted that, Iz. And people were angry. They didn’t know him. They didn’t understand. Anyway, by the time the coast guard could recover the wreck, there wasn’t anything left to bury. We had a small gathering at the beach in Tuckertown to say goodbye. You were just so distraught—you wouldn’t talk, you wouldn’t listen, you refused to cry. You wrote him a letter promising to wait on the step every night for him to come home, and for five months, you did. You refused to believe he was gone. You locked the memory away so deep even you couldn’t get to it. Dissociative amnesia, that’s what Dr. Boni called it, when a person isolates something so traumatic they can’t live with the knowledge and barricades it away where the memory can’t hurt them.”
Grandma Jo was staring into the night with tears silently streaming down her face, the way I had cried for eight years. In a way, it must have been the worst for her, watching all of her children drowning in a sea of hurt with no basket like Yemaya’s to collect the pain in and wash it away.
“Would you like to go to the hospital?”
“We don’t have a car.”
“Well,” my mother sighed, “Remy hijacked my car; I don’t see any good reason I cannot hijack hers. Maybe next time she’ll bring me my own.” She stood up, offering me a hand, and turned to stare at the Great Purple Monster of Millbury. Grandma Jo gave each of us one of her famous hugs. “Know where Remy keeps the keys, or shall I hot-wire the beast?” We all laughed, wiping our eyes. That my mother would be seen driving the Monster was solid proof that things would never be the same again. And that was a good thing.
I started to nod, but stopped and instead said, “Yes.”
The word felt smooth and easy in my mouth.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
This is what the Oxford Dictionary says about recollection. “Recollection: (1) the act or an instance of regaining memory; (2) a rejoining, or coming together of formally adhered units; (3) gathering that which has escaped or eluded us. To collect: (1) to bring together into one body or place.”
This is what I say. Recollecting is picking up your empty basket and reclaiming the pieces that make you whole, and as Grandma Jo would say, “whether you want them or not.” It is picking up your stories one at a time and lining them up until they make sense; letting them take up space in the universe with a strong steady voice of their own; and refusing to let so much of yourself fall away that you are reduced to the weakest form of “to be.”
I spent the week after Mr. O’Malley’s heart attack doing that—recollecting. I was surprised at the stories that cropped up, surprised to find there were not only stories about my father but even more about my mother. Her face, although not always smiling, was there as she drove me to Sunday school, braided my hair, running her fingers through it in a way I thought had belonged to my dad. And sometimes, it was smiling for no good reason at all.
I had come to accept the legend of Yemaya; that mothers are a story all their own. You may choose not to read them some days, but their ink never fades and their words have an eerie persistence to them.
I was coming to understand that my mother did not hate me, only that some days, she hated loving me. That was a thing I understood right down to my toes. She had stopped smoking and started eating, letting the fog lift. We all had. And what we found within was not the monsters we had been terrified of but each other—all scared into our very own silence.
Two days after his heart attack I was bringing Mr. O’Malley a Tab from the soda machine at the hospital when I found Lindsey sitting next to his bed chatting about a passenger who had forced Telly to carry a case of seashells onto the ferry so he could make his own statue of Yemaya back in Millsbury. When I came in, she stood up, straightening her pants.
“Hi.” The word came out of her mouth wrinkled and awkward, and she seemed at a loss as to what to do with her hands.
“Hi,” I said, handing Mr. O’Malley his drink.
“I brought you this.” She leaned over and lifted my sweater from the chair. It had been laundered and folded crisply into a neat square.
“Thanks,” I said, tucking
it under my arm.
“Well, I guess I’d better get going. Feel better, Mr. O’Malley.”
“I’ll be back before you realize I was gone.”
Lindsey turned to leave but paused at the door, then turned back to me.
“Thanks,” she said. “He’s not a bad man, you know. Really, he isn’t.” She seemed desperate for me to believe her. “It’s just, since my mom died . . .”
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“Yeah.” She gazed down at her feet, then back up at me. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”
“If you ever need to talk or anything . . .” The words surprised me as they filled the room, surprised me all the more because I meant them. Riley told me it had only been two years since her mother died; I had miles on her and I knew how long those miles could be when you were walking them alone.
“Thanks.” Lindsey gave me a final nod and made her way down the hall. I didn’t want to think about where she was headed or if there would be anyone waiting for her when she got there.
Remy caved first. I guess she felt indebted after Mr. O’Malley’s attack, or maybe she was just pissed that my mother had stolen the Purple Monster—not once, but twice—over the past couple days. But four days after he was hospitalized and right back to complaining about the no-smoking policy at the hospital, Remy took the afternoon run to the mainland and returned in the BMW spitting shells this way and that, pulling into a tight doughnut outside the Booth House. The gray sparkle of it had dimmed with sea salt to a dull steely color, but my mother was glad to have it since it looked like we would be staying awhile.
Sometimes it is the very place your world ended that you have to return to if you want to start living again. I had spent eight years searching for my father, and he was here. I guess we both decided that made this place home.
What the Waves Know Page 23
