The Sweetness of Salt

by Cecilia Galante

  I squatted down slowly next to the sleeping bag, and felt around until my fingers came into contact with something hard and sharp. Drawing the picture frame out, I stared down at Goober’s face, and then clutched it against my chest.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. “Goober. Where are you, baby?”

  chapter

  47

  “Where’s Goober?” I demanded, looking around at the three men inside Perry’s. It was dusk. Most of the tables inside the little restaurant were filled now. Miriam was racing around the room, serving plates of their famous chicken stew and biscuits. The white-haired woman was still there, reading the newspaper now, in between bites of chicken stew and a small bowl of peas. I leaned on the back of an empty chair next to Jimmy and glared at them one by one.

  “Goober?” Walt said. “Who’s Goober?”

  I pointed at Jimmy shakily. “Sophie…she said you talked to her all the time.” I struggled to keep my voice steady. “That’s what she said. She told me you only talked to people you felt like talking to, and that Goober was one of them.” I was pleading now, begging Jimmy for information.

  He did not look up from his coffee cup.

  “Who is Goober?” Walt said again.

  I collapsed into the empty chair so that I would not fall to the floor. “Sophie’s daughter. She’s four. Her name is Grace, but we’ve all called her Goober since she was born.”

  Lloyd raised an eyebrow. “Oh, Gracie!” he said. “Yeah, yeah, we know Gracie. You call her Goober? I quiz her on the state capitals all the time. She already knows about ten of them.” Lloyd nodded at me. “She probably got your brains. She’s a smart little thing, I’m telling you.”

  Walt was studying me carefully. “Why’re you panicking about Gracie? She’s probably up at her father’s place. In Rutland.”

  I shook my head. “Greg gets her every other weekend. That’s it. Goober’s been gone for almost three whole weeks now. And every time I ask her where she is, Sophie makes up some excuse about them going camping.” I slammed my hand on the table. “Who camps for three whole weeks with a four-year-old?”

  Patrons looked up, alarmed at the sound of my voice, and then kept eating. Miriam glanced over at Lloyd and raised an eyebrow.

  I struggled to lower my voice, turning to Jimmy. “Listen to me. I know something’s wrong. I can feel it. Please, please tell me what’s going on. Please just tell me what you know.”

  Jimmy looked up. He touched the brim of his Red Sox hat lightly and then cleared his throat. “Sophie come back yet?”

  “No.” I planted my hands flat on the table in front of me. “She hasn’t. We were…having a…a discussion…and she got upset and left. She walked right out of the house. I didn’t see where she went and I don’t know when she’ll be back.” I leaned forward. “Where’s Goober, Jimmy? Do you know?”

  Jimmy gazed at me. His eyes, a slate blue color, were grave. “You need to find Sophie first.”

  “Oh my God, are you kidding me? I told you I don’t know where she went!”

  “She’ll be back,” Jimmy said calmly.

  I paused, clenching my fists in frustration. “What are you hiding? What do you know about Goober that you aren’t telling me?”

  Miriam came over then, and set her coffee pot deliberately on the table. “Would someone like to tell me what’s going on here?” Her eyes scanned Walt, Lloyd, and Jimmy, before settling finally on me. “Is there any reason you’re giving my dinner crowd a collective heart attack?”

  I shook my head and buried my face in my hands. I was spent.

  Walt reached out and put a hand on my arm. “Easy there. Just take it easy.”

  “Next outburst, you’re going to have to take a walk.” Miriam picked up her coffee pot. “I’m sorry, but I mean it. I can’t have this kind of drama in here. People are trying to eat their dinner.”

  “Okay.” I nodded behind my hands.

  Next to me, Walt sighed. “Anyone ever tell you that you jump to conclusions before you know all the facts?”

  “You think so well on your feet, Julia, which is exactly the kind of trait you need to become a good lawyer.”

  I sat back slowly. Blinked. How was it that nothing—not one single thing—made sense anymore? When had everything I knew, or everything that I thought I knew, been turned upside down, shaken out, and trampled until it was unrecognizable?

  I looked over helplessly at Jimmy again. His eyes were still fixed on me. “Go find Sophie,” he said.

  “Where?” I struggled to control the impulse to reach over the table and throttle him. “Where would she be? Where should I look?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “Don’t know. Doubt she’s gone too far, though.”

  I stood up, leaning my weight on my fingertips. I wasn’t going to get anywhere with this guy, apparently. He had absolutely no intention of offering assistance. “Thanks for all your help,” I said.

  Jimmy tipped his hat forward. “Anytime,” he said softly. “And Julia?”

  “What?”

  “Let me know when you find her.”

  chapter

  48

  Someone said the night is darkest just before the dawn.

  But they lied.

  Night is dark the whole way through, from the beginning all the way to the impossible, interminable end.

  I went from room to room again inside the house, turning off the lights, searching behind the doors, but it was empty. When I called Sophie’s name, it reverberated against the walls, a sad, frantic echo. At least my car was still in the back, parked next to the garage. Still, when I thought about it, Sophie could have gone anywhere. This was her territory, not mine. Where had she disappeared to? When would she return? And where.… The thought made me shudder, bringing hot tears to my eyes.

  Where was Goober?

  Suddenly, I remembered the phone number on the refrigerator. Racing down to the kitchen, I grabbed it and then dialed the number with trembling fingers. It rang once, twice, three times.

  “Hello?”

  “Greg?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is…” I pressed my hand gently along the hollow of my stomach. “This is Sophie’s sister. Julia.”

  “Oh.” He paused. “Hi, Julia.”

  “Hi.” A nervous laugh escaped my lips. “How are you? I mean, how are things?”

  Another pause. I knew how weird this must be. I’d only met Greg once. The day Goober was born, he had shown up at the hospital just as Mom and Dad and I were leaving, holding a bouquet of sunflowers. Sophie had made the awkward introductions, shifting uncomfortably in her bed as Greg set the flowers down carefully on the windowsill. I remember just watching him, how he moved with unease around Sophie, kissing her stiffly on the cheek, avoiding her eyes. And then, how his whole face changed, flushing pink, as he leaned over the bassinet and stared down at their daughter. “I’m…fine,” Greg said now. “And you?”

  “Oh, I’m good.” I coughed lightly. “I’m actually at Sophie’s place. In Poultney.”

  “How’s that coming along? She get it fixed up yet?”

  My heart skipped a beat. So he knew about Poultney. He knew she was down here. Okay. It was a start.

  “Yeah. She’s working hard on it. I’ve been sort of helping.” My eyes fell on the wall across the kitchen. My mural of Main Street. There was the Laundromat and Perry’s with the wooden tables out front and the pizza place too. They were all there, set back a little against the street itself. A wrought iron lamppost stood in the left corner, and next to it was the chokecherry tree, its leaves small and pointed like elf ears. Just like outside. I had done that.

  “Are you staying for the summer?” Greg asked.

  “Yes. I mean, no.” I turned away from the mural and leaned against the butcher block. I didn’t know anything anymore. “I mean, I’ll be here for a little while.”

  Greg didn’t say anything for a moment. I could tell he was trying to guess the real reason for my call. Suddenly, in the backgroun
d, I heard a little voice.

  “Daddy, come finish your picture.”

  My knees buckled at the sound of Goober’s voice. I pressed my knuckles against my lips as Greg answered her. “Hold on, baby. Daddy’ll be right there.”

  “That…that’s Goober?”

  “Yeah.” Greg answered. “We were just coloring.”

  I began to cry. “Then she’s…okay? Goober, I mean? She’s okay? She’s safe?”

  “Julia.” I could hear the sound of Greg’s footsteps as he moved out of the room, out of Goober’s hearing range. “What’s going on? Why are you calling me?” His voice was considerably softer, but firm.

  I struggled for the words. There was no possible way I could begin to explain things to Greg. “There’s just been some stuff…going on. Sophie’s been making all these excuses about why Goober isn’t down here with her, and I didn’t know where she…really was. And I…”

  “Sophie didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Goober lives with me now,” he said simply. “Sophie and I are in the process of getting the whole custody order changed so I’ll be the primary custodian.”

  “What?” I could feel the breath leave my body. “Why? Why would you do something like that to her?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Greg answered. “Sophie came to me with the idea, not the other way around.”

  “But…that doesn’t make any sense! Goober’s her whole life, Greg! You know that! She loves her more than anything. Why would she do something like that?”

  Greg was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was unsettlingly calm. “You know, Sophie and I have never really been close. I mean, aside from the fact that we had a child together.” There was a pause. “It’s been five years since we met, and I still don’t know a lot about her. She doesn’t share anything with me. Never has and, I realized quite some time ago, never will. So when she came to me a few months ago and told me that she was having nightmares about hurting Goober, I knew better than just to blow it off. It was the first time she’d told me anything real about herself. Anything honest. And when she followed it up with the custody discussion, I kept listening.”

  “Hurting Goober?” My voice was faint.

  “She’s never laid a finger on Goober,” Greg said. There was an edge of defensiveness to his voice. “I’m not accusing her of anything, okay? She just said that she’d been having these nightmares…and that she didn’t think she had it in her to be the kind of mother Goober deserved.” He paused. “She’s not totally out of Goober’s life. She comes up when she can—sometimes for the weekend, sometimes not. And they talk every day on the phone.”

  I sank down along the wall. “How is Goober?”

  “She’s…adjusting,” Greg answered. He cleared his throat. “I’ll be honest. It’s not easy. She asks a lot of questions.”

  “Yeah.” Would I ever get to see my baby niece again?

  “She’ll be okay, though.” Greg’s voice sounded wistful. “Kids are resilient, Julia.”

  “Yeah,” I said again. “I know.”

  chapter

  49

  It was impossible to stay inside, to sit still anywhere, after I hung up with Greg. I walked rapidly along Main Street on legs that somehow managed to keep me upright and moving. The fact that I had no destination did not enter my mind. Just the act of breathing was enough. A swell of black sky, perforated with electric bits of stars, stretched out above me. The street lamps threw yellow halos of light down the sidewalk, but everything else was dark. It was almost midnight. Even the Dunkin’ Donuts at the end of the street was dimmed, the store emptied and shut tight until morning. I pushed on, up the little hill, past the high school, and stared down at the fork in the road. I didn’t want to go look at the yellow house. I didn’t want Aiden. I didn’t want Milo. I didn’t even want Sophie at that moment.

  What did I want? The question reverberated back and forth inside of my head. “What do I want?” Had I ever asked myself that question before? Even once?

  I want the truth.

  I kept going, heading down the road Sophie and I had walked only a few weeks ago when I had first come to town. Had it really only been a few weeks ago? It felt like years now, a lifetime. The smell of rain drifted out from the grassy field we had stood in front of just before she had told me. Or had tried to tell me.

  What had she been planning to say? Was she going to tell me she had drowned Maggie that day? That she had held our little sister underwater to stop her crying, to shut up the incessant, nerve-racking noise? Had that been it? I sank to my knees, staring toward the inky horizon. For a long, long time I looked, peering through the shadows, but there was nothing to see.

  Nothing at all but black.

  After a while I reached into my back pocket and took out my phone. I stared at it for a few minutes before flipping it open, then dialed the number and pressed the phone to my ear.

  “Milo?”

  “Julia! Everything all right?”

  “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  “No, I’m just up reading.” He paused. “So what’s up? What’s been going on? How are things with you and Sophie?”

  “It’s…” I caught the word “fine” on the tip of my tongue and drew it back in. “We’re still going through some things,” I said instead.

  “Good things?”

  I hesitated. “Maybe eventually. Right now it’s pretty hard.”

  “Okay.” I could hear him adjusting his position. “Julia?”

  “Yeah?” My voice cracked.

  “What is it?”

  It was such a simple question, such a short, tiny question. But for some reason, I remembered the old story about a little boy who noticed a leak in the dike that separated his town from the sea. The boy blocked the leak with his finger until help arrived, ultimately saving the town from a flooding disaster. I felt like that little boy right now. Except that I had withdrawn my finger and was standing there, watching the water rush out.

  “Milo,” I whispered. It was right there. Everything, about Sophie. The mental hospital. Maggie. Drowning. My mother’s ear. But what I said was, “That night in the car…when I leaned over and kissed you.” I closed my eyes, safe again, remembering how soft his lips had felt against mine, how his skin smelled up close, like heat and musk, how our noses had bumped at first and then fit against each other, side by side, perfectly. “Why did you pull away from me?”

  I waited, hoping he had heard me. I knew I would not be able to ask again.

  “I’ve played and replayed that moment a million times in my head,” he said finally. “I’d do anything to take it back.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes,” Milo said. “And everything I said after Melissa’s party too. About not wanting to lead you on, and just wanting to be friends. That was all crap. It wasn’t the truth.”

  “What is the truth?”

  “I was trying to tell you the truth, that night of the prom…”

  “What was it?”

  He cleared his throat. “How I really feel. About you.” He took a breath as if the words had been choking him for months. “And how much it scared me, because for the last two years, I’ve been watching my parents turn into these two crazy people. I mean they used to love each other more than anything in the world, but now they can’t even be in the same room together. And I don’t know. Seeing them change so much made me scared when I realized how I felt about you. I guess maybe I thought it was too risky, or…God, I don’t know. I tried to figure it out from all those poems I read, but none of them gave me any answers. But Julia.” He paused. His voice was louder, as if the words, exposed now between us, were not so frightening after all. “I love you.”

  “You do?” I whispered.

  “More than anything.” Milo’s voice was steady. “I’ve loved you ever since the first day of senior year when I read that line of poetry out loud and I turned around and you were looking at me from the backseat
of Zoe’s car.”

  I closed my eyes. I remembered it, Whitman. “I am to wait…and to see to it that I do not lose you.”

  “You had your hair pulled back,” Milo continued. “And you were wearing a blue shirt that made your eyes look like little pools of water. Except that I barely got to see them, because you looked away so quickly.”

  I was speechless. I had been staring at Milo from the safety of the backseat, my eyes roving slowly over his hair, which hung down in little rivulets behind his ear, the blue denim of his shirt, and his baggy khaki pants. And when he had said that line—as he had done countless times before—I whispered it back, to myself, silently.

  “Why didn’t you ever say anything?” I whispered.

  “I tried to, I guess, after I gave you the Christmas card with the e. e. cummings quote. But you didn’t really seem like you were into it.”

  “I have it taped to the top of my desk,” I said. “I read it every single night before I go to bed.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. I do. I love it, Milo.” I pulled on my bottom lip. “How could you not think I was into you after I kissed you on prom night? I mean…I’ve never done anything like that before. With anyone!”

  “It couldn’t have been that terrible,” Milo said. “Especially since you were thinking of someone else.”

  “Oh, Milo. No I wasn’t. I just said that so I wouldn’t look like such an idiot. There wasn’t anyone else.”

  “And I guess I kind of freaked, thinking it was gonna be real.”

  “But…” I pushed. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Yes,” Milo answered. “Definitely. But I guess I was just kind of…Jesus, Julia, I don’t know. I think I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to live up to your expectations after that.”

  “What expectations? I never put any…”