“Where do you think you’re going?” Rosie appears at the top of the stairs with a spatula in her hand. The smell of slightly over-grilled cheese wafts down to where I’m standing on the small landing at the front door. “You’re grounded.”
“Library. I have a paper due. Bandwidth in this place sucks.” It isn’t exactly a lie. I do have to finish my paper. I even have my backpack with me. And the bandwidth does suck. While the twins are streaming a movie, there’s no chance in hell I’ll get fast Internet.
“You think I don’t know when you’re lying to me?”
“You gonna have me followed again? Because you’ll be disappointed when your Neanderthal ex only follows me to the library.”
“My what? Josh, I have no idea—”
“I’ll be back in plenty of time before you have to work tonight. Library’s only open until four on Sundays.”
“I’m exhausted. I barely slept last night after the shit you pulled.”
“You mean the tantrum you threw? For no good reason? That was two nights ago, Rosie.”
“Mom. You call me Mom. And I’m talking about you leaving in the middle of the night and not coming back until sunrise.”
Oh. So she knew about that. “I just went for a run.” To the boardwalk. To meet Chatham, who sneaked out, too. There’s something about a girl leaning her head on your shoulder as the sun comes up. A girl you’d give anything to kiss standing right there on the sand, but a girl with whom you just can’t risk fucking things up to try kissing this early on.
“I was worried sick,” Rosie says. “Up pacing until I heard you come back. If I’m expected to pull a double tonight—and we need the money, so I have to—I’m going to need a nap, and your sisters . . .”
My sisters . . . what? It’s like she doesn’t even have a valid reason they might need her. When they fall and scrape their knees, when they’re scared in the middle of the night, when they need anything at all, who do you think they look for?
Not Rosie.
Me.
“I’ll be back in an hour or two.”
“I need to sleep. What do you expect me to do with your sisters?”
“Find some duct tape and sheet metal.”
“What? What am I going to do with—”
“Build a time machine, and go back to the night it all happened and decide to say no this time.”
Before she has time to process and react, I leave and slide into my car, and turn the key in the ignition. She pounds on the driver’s window, and her face is all screwed up in this vicious expression.
“I hate you!” she yells. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”
I give her a nod. Mutual.
It doesn’t hit me until I’m halfway to the Churchill: my mother said she hated me.
What kind of a mother hates her own kid?
What kind of kid deserves to be hated?
Maybe I do deserve it. I mean, I love my sisters, and a few minutes ago, I all but said I wished they hadn’t been conceived.
I roll down the windows, let the early autumn breeze, still calm and somewhat warm, wash away all the ugliness I feel around me. It’s practically clinging to my clothes. It’s like the air around my mother is a toxic cloud, and because I breathe it, I’m polluted, too.
Air it out. Can’t have that pollution contaminating the space.
God, I hope Margaret and Caroline didn’t get what I was saying. And I hope my mother has the sense not to explain it to them if they have questions. Can I ever forgive myself for wishing they weren’t here?
Chatham’s waiting on the front steps of the room-and-board when I pull up to the curb. Today she’s wearing cut-off shorts—black ones this time—and a vintage-looking T-shirt—white with a black-rimmed collar—that says Van Halen OU812 on it beneath a gray hoodie she hasn’t zipped, the sleeves of which she cut off at the cuffs. She’s wearing flip-flops and, on her left ankle, a black anklet that looks like it’s made of rubber.
Her hair is curlier than usual, and she might be wearing makeup. Maybe a little gloss on her lips, a little mascara on her lashes.
“Hey.” She’s sitting next to me now, pulling the seat belt across her body. Then a second later: “Is something wrong?”
I shrug a shoulder, and just as I tell myself to let it all go, tell myself to just leave it all behind us when I pull away from the curb, I start blurting it all out. It’s crazy. It’s not like it’s any big crisis. It’s nothing next to Savannah’s running away, or Rachel Bachton’s being missing for over a decade, or anything like that. Still . . .
“My mother told me she hated me. Four times.”
“She doesn’t really hate you.”
“You know, I never used to think so. But lately, I think she might.”
“She doesn’t.” Chatham touches me on the elbow. “Mothers just don’t always make the best decisions. I would know.”
“Yeah?” I glance at her.
The way she’s looking at me—as if the world beneath her feet is about to split and swallow us whole—tells me she really would know. But a beat later, she’s smiling this great smile and turning up the radio. “I love this song!”
It’s some old tune—Clapton, maybe—about things that happen late at night, when you’re ready to have some fun and throw your cares to the wind. I like it, too.
For the rest of the drive out to Northgate, we don’t speak. But we share the space the same as we shared the sunrise this morning. It’s a moment just for us.
And when we approach the lighthouse, there’s a small crowd on the lawn, which is cluttered with long, fold-out tables. It’s a bazaar, or something. A craft fair, with quilts and hand-blown glass and macramé.
“This is amazing.” She’s a few steps ahead of me, eager, like my sisters when we’re going out for ice cream.
I follow her lead. We snake through tables, and she touches the handmade wares. She’s delicate about it, appreciative of artistic processes and materials, and it’s clear she values the time, effort, and years of knowledge and practice that went into each piece.
“This is great, man!” Her backpack lands on the ground at her feet. She slips out of her hoodie and hands it to me, like it’s the most natural thing in the world—me, holding her discarded clothing—and shrugs into a knit cardigan she found on one of the artists’ tables.
It’s a sage-and-beige thing, made with that kind of yarn that’s dyed a different color every few inches, and it’s long and soft. She looks so happy wearing it, her eyes practically sparkle. This isn’t why we came here, but there’s something to be said about serendipity, about the universe laying things out in your path.
She buys it on the spot, with a wad of cash she pulls from the pocket in her shorts. This place is teeming with other people like her, people who find things made with hands more special than the things you consume in mass market.
We meander through the fair, manage to make it to the end without her purchasing anything else, and find ourselves standing at a weathered, but always present, memorial to Rachel Bachton. This is where it happened. Right here, by this lamppost, around which passersby have tied pink ribbons over the course of the twelve years that have passed since it happened. At the base of the post, the empathetic people of this world have placed now-ratty and rain-soaked and sun-dried teddy bears and withered flowers. Pictures of her frozen in time, some in frames on the ground, some bolted to the post, stare me in the face. Pleading for resolution. Praying for answers.
No one will ever throw any of this stuff away, I suspect, until she’s found. And maybe not even then. God, it’s been such a long time!
I don’t want to think about the things that might have happened to her.
We stand there, with the lake stretching out before us.
“Nothing’s familiar,” she says. “If I was ever here, I don’t remember it.”
I feel my eyes prick with tears. I wish I’d known Rachel Bachton. “I wish I’d been here that day,” I say.
“Why?” She tucks a wild curl behind her ear. “What could you have done?”
“Nothing.” I know it’s true. I was only four years old at the time. “But as crazy as it sounds, I wish I knew something. Something that could help save her. If not then, now.”
“Maybe that’s how Savannah feels, too.”
I don’t know if Chatham reaches for my hand, or if I grasp hers, but the moment my fingers close around hers, it doesn’t matter that I wasn’t here that day and couldn’t possibly make a difference, that I’m probably stuck in Sugar Creek until my bones disintegrate, that I’m maybe a guy his own mother hates.
She faces the breeze tumbling in off the lake. Whitecaps today.
“You know,” she says, “I don’t think I’ve ever been here before.”
And even though I’ve been here a million times, I know exactly how she feels.
Because I don’t know if I’ve ever felt the way I feel around her, and it makes this place feel completely new and unfamiliar.