chapter nine
I run all the way back to the cottage. By the time I burst through the door, I’m a sweaty mess and what feels like an ocean of tears is on the edge of spilling over. Mama and Peach are both on the couch with their laptops on their legs—Mama’s real one and Peach’s little LeapFrog computer that teaches her letter sounds and words. She’s in her bathing suit and there’s a little sand still dusting the bottoms of her feet, but I’m so relieved I didn’t come back to find her in the sea—or worse—I don’t even care about the dirt.
“Hazel,” Mama says, looking up from her screen as I spill into the room. She glances at her phone on the table next to her. “I didn’t expect you back for another hour. Doesn’t the club go until one?”
Mama lifts an eyebrow. “So what happened?”
“Did you get scared in the ocean, Hazey?” Peach asks.
“No. I just—”
“I went in the ocean! All the way up to here!” She pokes her belly button with one finger. My chest goes tight again, thinking of my sister waist-deep in the sea, unknown depths swirling around her. “Then I got too cold and Mama made me get out.”
“Good, Peach,” I say, managing a smile for her.
“So now I’m braver than you!” She doesn’t say it to be mean, but it hurts anyway.
“Peach,” Mama says, closing her laptop. “Go change for me, okay, Fuzzy? And rinse your feet in the bathtub.”
My sister nods and slips off the couch, leaving little sandy footprints on the hardwood floor as she skips toward the bathroom.
Mama taps the spot on the couch next to her. Relief fills me up and I all but run to get near her. I want to lay my head down in her lap, have her smooth my hair, rub my back. As I sink next to her, though, she doesn’t do any of those things. She pats my leg and then places her hands back on her laptop.
“So tell me,” she says. “How was it?”
“It was…” I swallow a few times, trying to remember my plan to be calm, to be fine, but I feel the tears tipping and spilling. Tears very rarely mean you’re fine, and these are hot as they run down my cheeks. I wipe them away just as fast, but Mama sees them.
She sighs and I feel myself lock up, bracing for Calm down, Hazel, for all the wrong that’s inside me to push her farther and farther away.
Or.
Maybe she’ll see now. She’ll see that this place isn’t good for me. For us.
“It was horrible,” I say through tearful gasps, because she already knows it.
“What was horrible about it?” Mama asks. Her voice is soft, gentle, but she still doesn’t touch me, doesn’t even offer to get me a tissue.
“Just… just everything. I don’t fit in with the kids. They stare at me like I’m some exhibit at the zoo.”
Her eyes go to my scars, but she just nods like she wants me to keep talking. Like other kids staring at her daughter’s face-marring scars isn’t enough.
“And then… then we went out to the beach and there…” I don’t want to say it. I can already feel the sweat forming again on the back of my neck, my lungs tightening up, but maybe it’s the only way to get Mama’s attention. “There was a kayak.”
Mama stiffens. “Oh.”
“And I just… I had a panic attack. Like I used to. Except this time, it was right in front of everyone. Lemon helped me, but… it was bad.”
I stop talking, let it all sink in. My tears stop and I get a deep, shuddering breath. I wait for her to pull me into her arms, to tell me she understands. She remembers the panic attacks. After Mum died, Mama barely slept for weeks. She heard me in the mornings, gasping for air, saw my sweat-soaked sheets. She came and picked me up the first day back at school, when I couldn’t even walk into my classroom. I sank to the tile floor right there outside room 208, my heart skittering around inside my body and my lungs full of barbed wire.
Mama places her hand on my back, carefully, like she’s afraid she might scare me. Then she rubs in slow, soothing circles. I close my eyes, let the soft motion soak into my bones. She hasn’t touched me in so long. Decades, it feels like. It worked. It actually worked.
“Sweetheart,” she says.
Then she leans her head against mine.
I grab her other hand, lace our fingers together.
I can’t remember the last time we sat like this. I breathe in and out normally, like a regular kid sitting with her mom.
“Kayaks are everywhere, honey,” she says.
I lift my head from hers. “What?”
“And kids… well, kids can be mean.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say, even though no one at Ocean Club was necessarily mean.
“But you’re strong,” she says. “You can handle this.”
I pull my hand from hers. “Handle… what?”
She gestures toward the window to where the sea stretches out forever and ever. “This. Being here. Going to the Ocean Club.”
“Wait. I don’t—”
“It’ll be better tomorrow.”
“I have to go back?”
She frowns at me. “Hazel, we don’t quit something because it’s a little hard. Life is hard.”
“Yeah, I know all about life being hard, Mama.”
She flinches at my tone, her eyes growing sad.
Say it, I think. Say Mum’s name.
Say why life is so hard.
Say why I have these scars.
Say she’s gone.
Say she even existed.
Say it, say it, say it.
But Mama doesn’t. Just like I knew, deep down inside, that she wouldn’t. But her eyes go shiny, and I think I see her bottom lip tremble. Just a little.
“You’ll try again tomorrow,” she says as she closes her laptop, then stands and walks toward her bedroom, her back to me. “We all will.”