I move into the basement apartment, and the first thing I do is take a shower, a real shower with warm water. After a while, I get used to having a place, and I feel all of the knots unwinding inside of me. I did not realize how tense I have been—not just during the six weeks of living in my car, but maybe for my whole life. I sometimes hear the family upstairs, moving around or having low, muffled conversations that don’t quite make it down to me. But entire stretches of time slip by when I forget entirely that I am not the only person alive in the world. I sit outside in the little plastic patio chair, and I read from the books on the shelf in the living room. I read classics, Tale of Two Cities, Madame Bovary, War and Peace, which I thought would never end. I started Lolita, which I finally gave up as a bad bet. The TV in the living room remains a decoration to me; I never once turn it on.
I finally read through all of my mother’s letters, spreading the packets out on the floor and moving from one bundle to the next, looking for clues to my life. The letters are, by and large, a disappointment. There are several pictures that I shuffle together in the envelope with the first letter—the only letter that really said anything of value. The others are mostly drunken rants. I can tell by the cycling of loops of ink and thoughts on the page, and I remember how she used to talk in circles, her diction precise but her thoughts dizzy. I can almost hear her as I read them. I had hoped they would be full of information; I wanted her to give me her story, but she doesn’t. She rants about Mitch and Theresa and tells me I should never trust a man. How many times had she said that to me during our life together? She rants about two different bosses in two different letters, and I wonder if she ever read these again after she wrote them. I wonder if the letter I read first, the one that has been on the top all this time, is the only one she wrote to intentionally give me clues. I imagine her writing that one sometime during those last few weeks when she was trying so hard to stay sober. I thought the letters were going to be a jigsaw puzzle of her life for me to piece together, but they are useless and read more like a teenage girl’s journal than anything else. I am so disappointed in the letters, and feel frustrated and angry that I’ve carried the box around with me like a treasure for all these months.
I look up from the spread of pages and see Ron, Vicki’s husband, coming down from the back deck. I watch him, like a spy, and he opens the shed that sits along the left side of the concrete pad and comes out with a long rod and a bucket. A spy, I watch him as he makes his way across the patio to the pool.
The sun is rebounding off the water, and it reflects patterns on his dark-blue shirt. I sweep all the letters together and shove them into the box, not caring that they are not in their envelopes. Useless. I just want to be away from her, away from the meandering insanity that she was when she drank.
“Can I help?” I ask, coming through the sliding glass door to my basement apartment, startling him. He jerks to his feet and turns to face me. Ron appears older than Vicki, closing in on sixty. His salt-and-pepper hair is more salt than pepper, with a strong cowlick above his left eye. A closely cropped mustache lines his lip, more gray than black, and his blue eyes sparkle between his squint. It isn’t hard to see him as the young man he used to be, or even the child. People don’t really change much, unless they gain weight, it seems to me. I’ve seen the picture of their wedding, and his hair was darker then, but the same cowlick and the same mustache. He is a handsome man.
“Familiar with pool work, are you?” He cocks an eyebrow under his cowlick.
“No. But I’d like to learn.”
I hear the slide of the kitchen door upstairs and the prance of feet coming down the stairs. I turn to see two young girls, probably around seven years old, come down the steps, one on the heels of the other, their voices rising out into the yard. They stop dead in their tracks when the first one sees me, and I wonder if they have some form of hive intelligence, or if I’m just seeing double and there is really only one girl.
“Who are you?” the girl in front demands, popping a wad of gum against her teeth, twisting a finger into a curl that has come free of her ponytail. I am thrown by the assessing look that arches across her brows and have almost a visceral response against her.
“I’m Alison.”
“These are Shirley’s girls,” Ron says. “Simone and Sasha.”
I have heard about Shirley, Ron’s daughter from his first marriage. Simone and Sasha are his granddaughters. “Well, hi. How do you tell each other apart?” I ask, leaning forward to really get a good look at them. I meant it to be funny, because they are clearly identical, but I guess I’m not edgy enough to be funny to these kids, and my attempt falls flat when the first girl rolls her eyes and pops her gum.
“Simone,” Ron says, “is the gum popper.” He lets his words hang and levels me with a weary look.
“Nice to meet you,” I say, putting a hand out to the second girl, who hesitates but finally shakes it. I offer the same hand to Simone, but she just looks at it like it is a dead fish. “Tough crowd,” I say, letting my hand drop and glancing back at Ron.
“Girls, go play,” he says, but they have already bounded off across the yard, their voices echoing against the back fence. “Sorry about that,” Ron says. “We hope it’s just a phase.”
“Nothing to be sorry for. Kids are kids.” I don’t want him to feel judgment from me. They have been nothing but kind to me, and I can’t say I would have behaved any differently from Simone had I been presented with a stranger in my grandparents’ basement.
“We want to swim, we want to swim, we want to swim!” The girls have come back to the pool and are skipping a loop around the edge. I see Ron’s shoulders drop, and I wish I hadn’t come out. There seems to be some power struggle that I don’t know anything about. Had he come down to work on the pool to get away from whatever is happening upstairs?
“Go get your suits,” he says after checking the color of the water in a small tube. The girls erupt and scatter up the steps.
When the door to the kitchen has slid closed again, I look at Ron and laugh. “They have a lot of energy.”
He nods in a slow, thoughtful way.
“I think I’ll head back in.” I hitch my thumb toward the sliding glass door and take a step back, as if I can just remove myself from the moment.
“Join us for dinner? You can meet Shirley.”
“Oh. I’d love that.” I pause my escape, and he starts working around the pool with the net, pulling out leaves and debris. I watch him, thinking about how hard it must be to be grown, to already know how your life is going to turn out. I step back to him. “I’ll do that,” I offer, putting my hand out for the handle of the net.
“You want to?”
“Sure.” I take the handle and knock a load of debris into the grass. “Go visit with your family. I’ll watch the girls. I promise I won’t let them drown.” I smile, moving past him to catch a palm frond floating along the edge. When I glance back, there is an amused expression on his face that I don’t understand, and his eyebrow is halfway into his cowlick. He has very expressive eyebrows.
Two hours later, I am sitting on the edge of the pool, nearly as wet as the girls are, feeling the heat of the sun on my skin and happy for it. The girls have been playing a game about mermaids, and I have been an evil queen. They have taken turns being one human and one mermaid, the human discovering the mermaid. They have told each other their lines as if they are play acting, and I guess they are. I don’t remember doing that when I was young, but maybe I just didn’t have anybody to play with like that.
They have come to the edge, and our rough little start has polished away. Simone tends to talk for both of them, and Sasha seems content to let her. They are hanging on the edge of the pool, their fingers on the concrete, feet pressing against the wall, bodies distorted by the water.
“So why do you live here?” Simone asks, because we’ve already talked about how long I’ve been here. They’ve also asked if the red car out front is mine and if it really works, because “it looks like it’s a hundred years old.”
“I don’t know. It’s just where I need to be right now,” I say, surprised at how much I like them, prickly as they are.
“Don’t you have a family?” Simone asks, and I see Sasha look at her sharply, her eyes closing to slits.
“No, sweetheart. I don’t.”
Sasha nods. “We don’t really either.”
Simone and I let a look pass between us, and then we both turn to Sasha. Her voice is so forlorn that I feel my heart tugging toward her.
“Of course you do,” I say, putting my hands into the water, breaking the surface. “I’m gonna meet your mom tonight.” I keep my voice low, not wanting our words to carry up to the deck where the family is sitting.
“That’s right,” Simone says, shoving her hips back and kicking off the wall, her lithe body arcing out of the water before splashing in again. The sun catches the droplets of water, and I try to memorize the look of it, wondering how I would capture light in water like that on paper.
“She doesn’t want us,” Sasha whispers to me while her sister is underwater.
“That’s very sad.” I’m not really sure what else to say, but the look on her face is genuine.
“I’m getting out,” Simone announces when she erupts from the water, and I see all of her sharp points are back in place.
They towel off and start to go upstairs. I hear an unfamiliar laugh from above and the clink of a bottle on the rim of a glass. My stomach turns over. It is a sound I always associate with my mother, the clink of the bottle, the ting of her rings. Sasha gives me a long look before heading up the steps behind Simone, who doesn’t look back.
“Come up, come up,” Vicki calls out, and at first I think she is talking to the girls, but then she leans over the railing and smiles down at me.
“Okay,” I say, but a breeze passes, and I remember that I am wet. “I’ll go change first.”
My apartment is dark, and my mother’s box is still sitting on the table, disorganized and open. I tuck the flaps in and take it back to my bedroom, putting it in the closet.
I change my clothes and exchange the knot in my hair for a haphazard ponytail. I stand for a long time before stepping back out into the waning afternoon. What had Sasha meant about not really having a family? What had she meant about her mother not wanting them? If my mother had taken me back to my grandparents, she would have left me with them and never come back. The realization is not so much a kick as a nudge, like maybe I’ve known it all along and just didn’t want to see it.