by Carrie Mac
“I wish I could stay,” she said when I finished. “But I have a student.”
I collected the boys and we walked with her as far as the store. She came in and held the basket for me while the boys ran up and down the aisles. I took a loaf of bread off the shelf, and a carton of milk, and when we were outside again, we stood in the middle of the sidewalk, the boys running circles around us.
Salix shoved her hands into her pockets. “If I text you, will you text me back this time?”
“Yes. I will. Definitely.”
“Okay, then it’s probably safe to say goodbye. So, bye.”
Corbin grabbed my arm. Owen grabbed the other one. “Let’s go!”
“You should go too.”
“Looks like it.”
“Bye, Maeve.”
“Bye, Salix.”
She strode down the block and turned the corner without looking back.
What I wanted to do was go home and replay every second of the time with Salix. What happened was that when we got home, there was an email from Raymond. Seeing his name pop up set me on edge immediately. The subject line said DON’T WORRY, YOUR MOTHER IS FINE!
Hi, Maeve,
We got into a minor car accident on the way back from the beach today, and your mom is staying overnight in the hospital. No broken bones, but she knocked her head pretty good, so they’re keeping her just to make sure it’s only a concussion. She can’t text or email from the hospital, so she asked me to let you know. Here’s a picture, so that you know she’s okay.
She says not to worry.
We’ll be in touch soon,
Raymond
I scrolled down to the picture. She was sitting up in bed wearing a hospital gown, holding a piece of paper. On it, in her writing: I’m fine! xoxo
I zoomed in and searched every inch of that picture, looking for something that would tell me that he was lying, that she wasn’t okay. But there were no bandages, no scrapes, not even a bruise or a black eye. Or was that a shadow of a black eye? I tried to check if her pupils were equal, but the picture was grainy that close up. I emailed Raymond back, cc’ing Mom.
If you broke her, I’ll kill you. Not kidding.
Tell her to phone me the MINUTE she can.
—M
I looked at the photo again. That was a shadow of a black eye, I was sure of it. What if she looked and acted fine at first, and so nobody figured it out? What if she had a bleed so tiny that no one noticed, and then during the night it bled and bled, and she had a stroke? What if she died? What if it wasn’t an earthquake and it wasn’t cholera? What if it was a minor car crash instead?
Deena Glover died today from the result of a minor car accident, shocking her loved ones and the old man who was with her. She leaves behind a garden in desperate need of attention, and a daughter, also in desperate need of attention. Not that she’d know, considering the daughter has been ignoring her. Or avoiding her. As for the old man, he is entirely at fault for this whole mess.
I calculated the time difference. Almost eleven p.m.
“Maeve?” Claire stood in the doorway. “I just got an email from Raymond. He said he sent you one too. And Billy.”
“I have to talk to her.” I could hardly breathe. “Right now. I have to know that she’s okay.”
Claire sat beside me with her computer and looked up all the possible numbers for hospitals in Port-au-Prince and read them out while I called and asked for my mother in terribly accented French. On the fourth call a woman said something in French, and after a click and a pause I heard my mom’s voice.
“Maeve? Is that you? Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” I started sobbing. “No. No. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, honey. I was going to call you in the morning.”
“In the morning?” I said through the tears. “In the morning?”
Claire patted my knee. “I’ll leave you two alone,” she said as she left the room, shutting the door softly on her way out.
“I really am okay,” Mom said.
“How do you know? Did they do a CT scan?”
“They checked me out. Thoroughly.” The line crackled.
“I miss you so much, Mom.”
“I miss you too, honey. It’s harder than I thought, being so far away from you. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
We talked about Haiti. The charity. Raymond. Home. They’d both had an email from Dan, saying that he found a bear on the porch when he went to check on the house. My mom laughed.
“It was probably napping on the couch.”
The old couch on the porch, where I spent hours and hours sketching blue jays and crows, the chickens in the coop, the cedar trees, the fox, and the garden.
“After it shopped in the garden,” I said.
It was so sad that we weren’t there to pick the greens, the baby carrots, and the peas. It was symbolic, and I wished it weren’t. The garden going on without us. The house all alone in the woods.
And all the while, in between the words, all the things I wasn’t saying. So I said some of them. I told a little bit more, like I was letting out string on a kite, just a bit at a time. I told her about Salix and how I ran away on that first date, and about sitting in the park with her. I told her that I found Mrs. Patel. After I told her that, there was a long silence on her end. So long that I thought the call had been dropped.
“Mom?”
“I’m so sorry that you found her,” she said. “I’m so sorry that I wasn’t there to comfort you.”
And Dad. What could I tell her about Dad?
“He’s doing okay, I guess.”
There was a pause. “Really?”
“No. He’s not okay.”
“Maeve.” Another pause. “You know you can’t make him stop. This is his thing to fix.”
“It might be too broken,” I said with a catch in my throat. “I think he and Claire might break up.”
“Oh, Maeve. I’m so sorry. Are you okay to stay there?” she said. “Should I call Dan?”
This was my chance to go home.
It hadn’t occurred to me, until that moment, that Dad was the reason I was there, and that if he was a mess, he could be the reason Mom would let me go home. I could get the five a.m. bus. I could be home the next afternoon. I could be standing barefoot in the garden with the light cutting through the trees and the dirt underfoot and the smell of all the green all around. But I didn’t want to go. And it wasn’t just because of Salix. It was because of Claire and Owen and Corbin and the baby. And it was because of Dad, too, because even if I couldn’t fix it, it didn’t seem right to walk away.
“No more car accidents,” I said. “No more hospitals. Okay?”
“You didn’t answer me,” Mom said. “Do you want me to call Dan?”
“Not yet.”
“You’ll tell me when?”
“I’ll tell you when.”
After we said goodbye, I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at Dad’s unfinished painting of the pug and the German shepherd, which was supposed to have shipped two weeks before. He’d started another painting on the other easel, but I couldn’t tell what it would be. So far it looked like a mess. A complete and utter mess.
When I woke up the next morning and went upstairs, I could tell right away that Dad hadn’t come home. Claire was silently fuming as she made breakfast, slamming cupboard doors, kicking the fridge shut, wrestling toast out of the toaster and tossing it onto the plates. The boys sat on the couch, not playing, not arguing. Just watching Claire scrape peanut butter across a piece of burned toast.
“Have you heard from him?”
“I have not.” She did not look up.
“Can I help? Have you called him?”
She dropped the knife into the sink with a clatter. She put both hands on the counter and sighed.
“Let’s get out of the city,” she said. “Let’s go to the lake.”
—
We got ready in record time, ev
en the boys. Either we all really wanted to go swimming, or we all really wanted to be away from home for the day. When we were down in the garage with the van packed, Claire offered me the keys.
“You drive.”
“I don’t want to.”
“What’s the point in having your learner’s permit if you never use it?”
“I might use it,” I said. “But not here. Did you know that three thousand two hundred eighty-seven people die in car crashes every single day on this planet?”
“No one in this van is going to die.”
“You’re the one who told me that highway is called Sea to Die.”
“It’s a joke,” Claire said. “It’s Sea to Sky, Maeve. You’re not supposed to take it seriously.”
“We should all take it seriously,” I said.
“Oh, Maeve.” She dangled the keys. “Take a chance. Come on.”
“ ‘Oh, Maeve’ will not be driving today.”
“Fine. Make the enormous and very sweaty pregnant woman drive.”
“Claire, I…” I should drive. I knew that. But the disconnect between the idea and the action was too vast. “I want to…”
“No, you don’t. Not really.” There was an edge in her voice, but then it vanished. “It’s no big deal. Let’s go swimming.”
—
About an hour later we turned off the highway and onto the road that led to Alice Lake. My phone buzzed in my pocket.
What are you doing today? Let’s get iced mochas and go to the park to listen to the dying goose. He’s improving. Meet me at the park in half an hour?
We’re just about at Alice Lake, I texted. But I’d love to. Later? I’ll text you when we leave.
But it didn’t send. I tried again as we turned into the parking lot. No service. No service. No service. I rolled down the window and stuck the phone out, but still no service.
“No service at the lake,” Claire said.
“Apparently.” I reached the phone out as far as I could, this time in another direction. “Can we just turn around for a second?”
“There’s no reliable service until Squamish.”
“But I got a text from her when we turned off the highway.”
“Then that was a fluke. I’m not driving all the way back to Squamish.” Claire parked the van. “It can wait.”
Before she could even take the keys out of the ignition, the boys grabbed their backpacks, tumbled out the side door, and raced for the beach.
“There’s no way I can herd those boys back into the van to drive you back to the highway, Maeve.” Claire suddenly brightened. “But you could!”
“No way.”
“You can do it. I know you can. You drive in Port Townsend. And this isn’t the city. It’s a quiet road in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t even have painted lines. Your mom said you need to keep practicing. It’s less than five minutes to the highway.”
“I can’t drive unless there’s a licensed adult with me.”
“Less than five minutes.” Claire pulled the cooler out of the back. “Help me with the wagon.”
I lifted down the wagon and loaded it with all the beach things.
“What if I went and got the boys and brought them back and we just drove down super quick?”
“They’re probably already in the lake.” Claire offered the keys. “You’ll be fine. Go for it. Break the rules. Do something that makes you uncomfortable. Be a rebel.”
And if I hit someone? Or someone hit me? Or I drove into a ditch? Or the brakes failed? Or the engine died? Or the police pulled me over because they could see the guilt blazing through the window like a spotlight?
“It’s illegal.”
“When I was sixteen, you had your learner’s for thirty days and then you took your driving test. Boom, thirty days later, full-fledged driver. So they’ve changed the rules. So what? You’ll be fine. Go ahead. You have my blessing.” She held up a finger to stop my next protest. “We’re not going to force the boys back into the van so you can send a text to your girlfriend. It’s not going to happen.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.” At least I didn’t think so.
But I did need to text her. I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else. I’d be looking at the mountains and drinking lemonade and swimming in that beautiful water and getting a tan and building sand castles, and all of it would be flattened because I’d be thinking of Salix waiting for my reply. I’d already brushed her off that way. I did not want to keep her waiting again.
How long would it take to walk back to the highway? Half an hour? But then what if Claire was right and there was no signal? Then it would just be stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. And I’d miss out on the lake.
“Look, Maeve. Help me haul this to the beach, and we’ll get settled, and then you can go for a swim to clear your head.” She hitched a beach bag onto her shoulder. “I can’t leave the boys alone for this long. People are going to think they’re here by themselves, and the lifeguard already gave me a warning the last time we were here because they were out too far. I had to tell him that they were eight, just so he’d leave us alone, but I know he’s got a hate-on for me, so let’s just go already. Okay?”
Mostly defeated, I picked up the handle of the wagon and started for the trail ahead of Claire.
“Come on, Maeve,” Claire called from not far behind me. “It’s just a text.”
“Okay.”
“She’ll understand.”
“Sure.”
“You could always go by yourself.” That little edge was back.
The wagon bumped and crunched on the gravel.
“Wait up, Maeve.” Claire caught up and put a hand on my arm. “Give a pregnant woman a chance, would you?”
Salix would understand. She wasn’t like me. She didn’t leap from assumption to assumption, adding everything up wrong. She’d go to Thailand on her own. She’d move to New York. She’d wear a rainbow patch for everyone to see.
“Whoo,” Claire puffed. “Whoo, whoo. Okay.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” She winced. “Braxton Hicks. That’s all.”
I dropped the wagon handle and took her arms. “Are you sure?”
I’d been reading. Collecting evidence for my argument against home birth. I’d read a lot. Spiritual Midwifery. The Essential Homebirth Guide. Birth Your Way.
“Positive.”
“If you have more than four in an hour, we should call the midwife.” I found a bottle of water in the cooler and gave it to Claire. “Dehydration can bring them on. It’s been so hot. Have you been drinking enough water?”
“I’m fine, Maeve. Let’s go make sure that the lifeguard hasn’t seen the boys yet.” Claire started down the path ahead of me. She got a few steps and then stopped and turned around. “How do you know so much about Braxton Hicks?”
It was the same lifeguard, but this time he was busy chatting up a flock of bikinied teenage girls, lined up on beach towels, slick with tanning oil. I doubted he’d even noticed that Corbin and Owen were out on the dock by themselves. By all the gesturing and flailing I could tell that Corbin was impressing the other kids with his waterproof cast. Owen stood beside him, shivering, his nose looking beaky even from that distance, his nose plugs squishing it shut.
I set up Claire’s folding chair and a shade umbrella. She sat, digging her swollen feet into the cool sand, and guzzled the bottle of water. She let out an enormous belch after.
“God, the gas.” She winced again, hands on her belly.
“Still having them?” I offered her another bottle of water.
“No thanks.”
“We should go home.”
And if we did, I could be texting Salix in about half an hour. But it wasn’t about the text anymore. Not at all, really. It was about watching Claire wince and cringe and hold her belly.
“I’m fine,” Claire said. “I’m fine, Maeve. The baby is fine. I’m not going into labor today. Or tomorrow. Or even this week, or t
he next, or the next after that. And Salix will wait. I promise. You want to be with someone who won’t get upset if you take your time getting back to her. She’s that person, right?”
I nodded. Be with someone. Girlfriend. Claire was a lot more optimistic than I was. And way ahead of things too.
“There’s no need to worry. Now go swimming.”
“You’re sure?”
“Can you even imagine if I went into labor here? That lifeguard would be horrified.”
“So would those girls.”
“He’d come running over with his big red first-aid box and open it only to find there was nothing in there to help. But at least he has one,” Claire said. “The boys took the one from the van to Gnomenville. King Percival fell from a tower. It was quite gruesome, apparently. We have one under the sink in the bathroom, but I think most of its contents were used in the last big battle between the Wrens and the Percivals.”
“Then the first thing that I’m going to do when we get home is restock it.” I stripped down to my swimsuit.
“That’s Billy’s job.” Claire sighed. “He has a list of things to do before the baby comes. Updating the first-aid kits is on it.”
“What else? Maybe I can help.”
“But I don’t want you to. I want him to do it.”
“Maeve!” Corbin hollered from the dock. “Come out here!”
I glanced at Claire.
“I’m fine. Go ahead.”
The water was cold at first, but it felt good. It washed the dusty drive off, and it washed everything else off too. I dove down into the deep, where the water was colder. It was black and silent and cold, and I felt blissfully alone for the first time since stepping off the bus. I swam deeper still, and then my chest tightened and I ran out of breath. Four minutes for the brain to die without oxygen, yet this was where I wanted to be. I headed back up with my eyes open, watching Corbin and Owen from below, their skinny pale legs churning awkwardly, their small hands bright against the watery dark.
