by S. L. Naeole
“You want to go in for a dip?” I asked, needing to change the subject.
“Sure. Promise you won’t dunk me, though.”
I scooped her up and kissed her forehead. “I promise.”
***
As we drove home, we stopped at Grans’ to pick up some dinner. The inn was having a buffet special which left most of the other places selling food on the main road empty. At least, it should have been. One table inside Grans’ was taken, and when Audrey called out to them, I groaned.
Fallon and her parents were sitting down to a dinner of fish stew. At least, her parents were. She had a salad in front of her, her face wrinkled up as if something bothered her. When she saw Audrey, though, her expression changed almost instantly. Audrey rolled her chair beside Fallon’s, and they began to talk loudly about everything that had happened on the road.
Fallon’s dad nodded at what he heard and then turned to look at me. His eyebrows rose as one side of his mouth lifted in a half-smile. He raised his hand in a silent greeting. He understood; Audrey had mentioned once or twice that his wife was also a mechanic. I raised my hand in acknowledgement before heading to the kitchen where Grans was busy cleaning up.
There was a white, plastic bag on the counter beside a stack of clean, dried dishes. She looked at me and then motioned to the pile of dirty dishes stacked in double rows by the sink beside her. “Get started on those before you go. You sister spent all week helping with the cooking. You can help clean.”
I wanted to tell her that if not for me, she wouldn’t have had the fish to cook, but I bit my tongue and did as she said. There was no fancy dishwasher here. All I had was a brush and a sink full of soapy water. The washing took almost an hour, the dried food sticking to the plates like stink on fish.
“And don’t forget to clean out the sink!” Grans barked as she piled the dishes from the dining room next to me.
“Why don’t you make them wash these?” I grumbled, hating the fact that Fallon was out there, laughing at me while I was in here, cleaning her dishes like some kind of maid.
“Because they actually paid for their food tonight,” Grans growled, her mouth, lined with wrinkles, set into a deep scowl. “You want to be treated like a customer instead of a slave? You start paying for your food, too.”
“Fine,” I said, shoving my wet, pruney hand into my pocket and pulling out a crushed wad of bills. “Here. That’s seven dollars. That’s more than enough for some fried sardines.”
I grabbed the bag and stormed out of the kitchen. Audrey was still talking to Fallon but stopped when she saw me. “Guess I’ve gotta go,” she said with a smile, “but you’re coming tomorrow, right?”
“Right,” Fallon said, turning to look at me, her eyes daring me to tell her no, to tell her that she wasn’t welcome at our house.
Instead, I waited for Audrey and then left. The ride home was quiet. Audrey ate dinner, and I helped her get ready for bed. Her room was downstairs, a converted side parlor with a toilet, shower, and sink situated in a corner to make it easy to care for her but, more importantly, easy for her to care for herself. That didn’t mean she always wanted it, though, and tonight was no different when she asked for my help.
“What do you need me to do?” I asked as I watched her pull out her clothes for bed.
“Could you get the water ready?” she said quietly.
I walked over to the shower and turned the water on. The shower was a simple, crude design: a section of the floor was tiled with a drain to let the water escape. A pipe jutted out of the wall, an adjustable showerhead hanging at waist-height. It was connected to the pipe by a long hose, making it easy for Audrey to use it to wash herself. A plastic chair sat over the drain while a shelf next to it held her shampoo, soap, and washcloth.
“I’m sorry for teasing you about Fallon,” I heard her say behind me.
“Don’t worry about it.” It was my own damn fault. I shouldn’t have let my brain go on vacation the minute she looked at me with something else besides disgust in her eyes.
I stuck my hand in the shower spray and then nodded, knowing that if I didn’t do something else, I’d admit that small truth to her, too. “Okay. Water’s hot.”
This was the routine for us. I’d ask what she needed and she’d tell me to turn the water on. We both knew it was so she could get undressed, and as she wheeled toward me, a large towel wrapped around her, I knew it was time to leave.
“Let me know if you need anything else,” I said before walking away, closing the door behind me.
Dad was home, sitting in his favorite chair, his face covered in a week’s worth of beard.
“How was the hunt?” he asked stiffly.
“Fine.”
“No. How was the hunt?”
My shoulders rose and fell as I sat down on the old couch. I didn’t know what he meant. I’d already answered him once.
“I want to make this clear to you, Liam,” Dad said, taking my shrug as indifference. “You will leave the Timmons’ girl alone. She’s human, but she’s not for you, or for anyone.”
I felt my tongue grow fat in my throat, my eyes feeling huge and buggy as I looked at him, trying to understand how the hell he knew about today. “Look, I can’t help it, okay? She’s a girl, and she…she looked at me like she liked what she saw. And I’m not gonna lie, I liked what I saw, too. Even if she’s a human. But I’m not gonna date her. Yeah, you might like her and think she’s okay and all, but she’s Audrey’s friend, not mine. Most of the time, I can’t stand to look at her. She gets on my damn nerves every time she opens her mouth. Besides, Brenda would eat me whole if I broke up with her to date her dinner.”
The roar that came out of Dad’s mouth shook the house. I could hear the walls shaking at his voice as he came to stand in front of me, his hands turning into claws that dug into my shoulder when he gripped them. “Are you stupid or did you just eat too many stupid people this week? I was talking about killing her. If I’d known that you were actually considering…I was going to tell you that Fallon Timmons is off-limits, that she’s not to be touched by anyone. But I see that there’s more that you need to be told.”
“Look, don’t worry about it, okay?” I started, wincing at the pain in my shoulders, but Dad cut me off.
“No. I’m gonna worry about it. Are you seriously telling me that you’ve got feelings for this girl?”
He squeezed, his claws digging deeper, growing wider and sharper, and I grunted. “Rraaghh, No! The only thing I feel for her right now is hate.” It was as honest an answer as I’d ever given.
“We don’t date humans, Liam. We don’t do it. We don’t mix kinds. You know this. You know why.”
Right there, right then, in his voice was that crack. That crack of pain that I’d only heard when he spoke about it. He let go and returned to his chair, his head hanging as the grief and the disappointment, the hurt and betrayal hit him again like it was brand new.
My shirt was growing sticky and wet with blood, but I sat there and watched as my father turned into a pile of useless bones. I knew what was replaying over and over in his head. The memory of the argument was as fresh in my mind as it was in his. I could still hear my mom’s voice admitting to the secret that she’d been keeping for a year.
“I don’t love you anymore, Joe. I haven’t loved you for years. I hate it here. I hate this house. I’m leaving. I’m leaving and I’m taking the kids.” She had been sad for so many years that the sound of her voice coming out with that much determination was like listening to someone else.
Audrey and I were sitting on the porch, listening quietly. She had been holding my hand just as much as I had been holding hers.
“You’re not taking the kids, Lys. And you’re not leaving. I love you and no matter what you say, I know you love me, too.” Dad’s voice was stern, strong, and more sure than he had a right to sound because immediately after that, Mom said something that changed everything.
“I’m seeing someone else. He’
s human, he knows what I am, and he loves me. He makes me happy, Joe, and I haven’t been happy for a long, long time; you know how unhappy I’ve been here with you. He wants me to marry him. He wants us to be a family, Joe. A real family, just the five of us.”
“Five?”
A long pause filled in the time it took for me to count in my head the number of people involved before my mother answered, her voice shaky. “I’m pregnant.”
It only took a couple of seconds from her announcement to her wail, but in that small amount of time we heard Dad say something to her, something that we’d heard many, many times before. He told her she was bleeding.
We heard her collapse, and then Dad was running out of the house with Mom in his arms. Her legs were covered in blood, her hands holding her stomach as she sobbed and cried out a name that we’d never heard before. When they returned several hours later, we were still on the porch.
Mom walked ahead of Dad, her eyes puffy and red from crying. Dad looked like a corpse, his own eyes sunken in. He told us to get to bed, and we did. Audrey begged me to stay with her, so we slept together in the same bed, waking up the next morning in the car, Mom sitting in the driver’s seat, her forehead pressed against the steering wheel.
Audrey asked where we were going, but all Mom kept mumbling was that she’d lost her only way out. I looked out the window and saw boats. We were on the pier, and the ferry was coming in.
I was about to ask where we were going when I heard the car’s engine rumble to life and then the boats were flying past us. At least, that’s how I always remembered it. Within seconds we were underwater, and before the sun set, Mom was dead and our lives were changed forever.
Mom had never been what some people called normal, but she’d never been so out of it, so sad that she’d hurt us. For the most part, we’d never have noticed her depression if Grans and Dad hadn’t brought it up every now and again.
But that day in the car, we saw that she was someone different. She’d changed from our mom into two different people in less than twenty-four hours, and there was no real acceptable explanation for it except for her relationship with her human lover. We didn’t need to know who he was, or what kind of person he was, to know that if it hadn’t been for him, Mom would’ve never wanted to leave. She would’ve never packed us in the car and driven off a pier after her miscarriage.
Our kind never broke up someone else’s home. Our kind never cheated. Our kind would never leave one of our own alone. Our kind would never leave. The rock is our home, our home is our rock, and on the rock we stay. It was rock’s motto and only humans could make us forget that.
I straightened my shoulders and looked at my father, saying with clear determination, “Don’t worry, Dad. I’m not going to make the same mistake that Mom made. I’m not her.”
“Your mom wasn’t herself either,” Dad said softly.
Of course she wasn’t. With those five words, he made it clear that anyone who fell in love with a human was crazy, and he was right. And, thankfully for all of us, there was no danger of it happening to me, no matter how many shirts were taken off…
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FALLON
My second week on Black Cat Rock went a lot more smoothly than the first. Dad took me to the junkyard that was behind our house and it was like Christmas. There wasn’t a great deal of junkers to look through, but what was there was gold.
The cars that were parked side-by-side weren’t old, like the ones that were on the road here. Instead, they were newer, some looking almost brand new. Dad said that they were cars that had been abandoned on the ferry. There were probably two or three dozen cars that were about ten years younger than our own truck, and I eyed them enviously.
“Don’t even think about it, Fallon,” Dad warned when he saw my expression that first day.
“Oh, come on,” I complained. “Why’d you bring me here if I can’t drool and secretly plot to rebuild one of these for myself?”
“Because we’re here to look for parts for the Triumph.”
Everyone has that one thing they talk about that transports them, makes them look like they’ve gone back in time. Their voice gets all whispery and soft, and their eyes shine and light up like Christmas lights. For Dad, it was the Triumph, a motorcycle that he’d spent the past five years working on. It ran like a dream, but he was never satisfied. It needed more this, more that, and he’d make it happen or else he’d turn in his wrench set. At least, that’s what he kept saying.
The bike had arrived the other day with the rest of our things, which meant Mom was busy trying to fit all of the things in the tiny house and didn’t want any of us inside, which meant I had to keep Dad out of trouble.
That first trip to the junkyard was to find a seat with no damage to its upholstery. Dad’s plan was to rip the seams and then use the material to reupholster the seat to his bike. He found a black leather captain’s seat that he liked, and we spent the rest of the day working. I was supposed to go to Audrey’s house but I lost track of the time and only when Mom came to get us for dinner did I realize how late it was.
After that, I’d only stay with Dad until lunch, after he made it clear that it was too hot to go another round surrounded by the corpses of cars; he’d rather play mortician to a motorcycle.
My afternoons were spent with Audrey at her house, or sometimes I’d meet her at her grandmother’s restaurant. The first couple of days were difficult because I kept worrying that at any moment, she’d start having seizures again.
“I’m sorry if I freaked you out,” she’d said about a dozen times that first day. I probably told her that it wasn’t that big a deal just as many times. But after a while, I did tell her the truth, that I was scared she would die and, mostly, that it had been all my fault.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she insisted. “You didn’t know about my…condition. And besides, I was due for an episode; you just happened to be there when it happened.”
She handed me a sandwich and automatically I sniffed it.
“It’s not fish,” she laughed, pulling apart the slices of bread on her own to prove it to me. “Ham and cheese. See?”
Satisfied, I took a bite. We were outside on the porch, Audrey in her chair, me on the bench. The heat in the house was overwhelming and when she’d suggested we eat our lunch outside, I almost ran.
“So what do you do here all by yourself?” I asked, looking down the empty street. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s around for you to hang with.”
She grabbed a glass of lemonade from the bench and gulped half of it down impressively, her sandwich untouched. “I’m not usually by myself. If Liam’s not here, then I’m either with my grandma, Liam’s best friend Jameson, or Liam’s girlfriend, Brenda. They take turns babysitting me, but they don’t call it babysitting, even if that’s exactly what it is. You’re the only person who doesn’t make me feel like I’m just waiting to be picked up by my Dad.”
“Well, I know what that’s like. No one thinks you can take care of yourself, they always think you need a babysitter or, or a hero or something. I’ve had to prove to people over and over again that I don’t need someone to take care of me, but it’s not like it changes when you move to a new school. And,” I said with a knowing frown, “it doesn’t matter if you have a set of working legs or not.”
“You’ve moved a lot, huh?” Audrey looked at me, her elbow resting on the armrest of her wheelchair, her chin in her hand.
My head bounced several times to emphasize my answer. “Yeah. My parents are really good at what they do. My dad can fix anything with wings and my mom…they used to call her the engine whisperer. Because of that, they went where the need was. They trained mechanics and even engineers, and it took them pretty much everywhere.
“When my parents adopted me, I was only a year old. I don’t know how many times we moved before I could start remembering things, but before we came here we must’ve moved about seven times. We have a house in California – that’s
where we lived before we came here – and I always thought that’s where we’d stay. That’s what my mom and dad kept saying, anyway.”
I could hear the sadness in my voice and so could she. “You miss it, huh? Your house? Did you have a best friend there? A boyfriend?”
I put my cup down and crumpled the napkin that had held my sandwich in my hand. How to talk about California without turning into a complete baby?
“I had a lot of friends in California. I’ve got friends everywhere, really; God, that sounds conceited, doesn’t it?”
“No! No it doesn’t…well, okay. Yeah, it does sound conceited. Especially when the only friends I’ve got live on this rock,” Audrey said with a snort.
“Where are they?” I asked, hoping it didn’t sound like I didn’t believe her.
“Oh, right now they’re all working either with their parents or for them. It’s kind of like what Liam does for our Dad, and what I do for my grandma whenever I get the chance. None of the stores or restaurants or inns here hire out. Everyone that works here lives here. And hey, way to avoid the boyfriend question!” She was laughing, and I laughed with her, although I wasn’t feeling as amused as she was.
“Sorry. My best friend growing up was this boy named Josh, Joshua Pepper. Our parents were stationed on the same bases so many times, it was like we were stalking each other. He’s three years older than me, but he always said he could look past it since I could fix his dad’s lawn mower better than the guy they took it to.
“I was thirteen when he kissed me for the first time. His family was leaving again and mine was staying. I thought…I thought it was the most awesomely gross thing to ever happen to me. I laughed at him and he didn’t call me or text or email me for a year because of that.”
It had hurt, not hearing from Josh for so long. At school, when my friends were starting to hold hands with other boys and kiss them while hiding behind their locker doors and under the stairs, I was picturing Josh kissing someone else. Oh sure, I’d been asked out. Everyone got asked out. Even the ones that others thought never would. But I never said yes to anyone.
