I lit out just as soon as Rosie returned from work this morning, and I’ve been with Aiden ever since. We’re on the bluffs behind Aiden’s dad’s house, watching the sun creep down the horizon. It’s one of those great nights when a deep violet sky meets a fiery tangerine of sunset.
I’ve been gone from Carpenter Street for over sixteen hours now.
Yeah, ground me. Go ahead, Rosie. You gotta sleep sometime, and once you’re down for the count, I’m out the door.
Not that she likely got much rest, once the twins started making a ruckus around six or seven. But that’s her problem.
I bring the weed to my lips, inhale, and pass it back.
Then I see her—Chatham Claiborne—do a double take, and realize she’s not there. I know my mind is playing tricks on me.
“It’s the weed.” Aiden’s always trying to explain the inexplicable. And what he can’t explain, he makes up for in entertaining bullshit. “Good shit.”
Yeah, but I’ve smoked good weed before, and never has it left me seeing things that aren’t there. I have to wonder if Rachel Bachton’s parents feel the same way . . . if they see their daughter in crowds of people, but only in momentary glimpses . . . if by the time they focus on what they thought they saw, she’s gone.
The thought occurs to me: one of my sisters could be snatched if I’m not careful. My heart quickens with the sheer terror of it.
Could anything be more terrifying than not knowing where your kid is? Not knowing what she’s had to endure at the hands of some psychopathic sicko?
Could anything be worse than knowing your kid is gone because you happened to look away for just a second?
“It’s a little Purple Gorilla and a little Banana Haze,” Aiden’s saying. “That’s why you get the aftertaste.”
Purple Gorilla. Banana Haze. “Who names this shit?”
“I don’t know, but I want that job.” He takes a hit and passes the J to me. “I think I’d go with motor oil hum, or mindjam.”
Good to know he’s thinking about it. Aiden’s father, a botanist, is one of those pro-legalization advocates, and he just took a job as a grower in a lab out in Colorado. This means Aiden very well could land a job naming pot strains if he follows in his father’s footsteps.
It also means Aiden is granted a certain modicum of freedom most of the time because his dad is gone a lot. And his mom . . . well, she lives across town and doesn’t pay too much attention to what he does. It’s a vastly different environment than the one in which I live and breathe.
The fact that I haven’t heard from Rosie since her barrage of texts around noon—which is probably when she finally decided to venture down to the basement to get me moving, but found me gone—isn’t all that unusual.
There are three stages to her wrath:
First, the vilification. She unloads a string of insults at me. I’ll never make anything of myself. I’m just as reliable as my motherfucker of a father, and she should’ve known better than to trust either one of us. We’ll see how cute it is when I’m thirty-five and cleaning toilets for a living . . . because that’s where I’m headed.
Check. Stage one complete. And because I wouldn’t answer the phone when she called, she texted this round of insults, so I have it all in writing to prove it.
Phase two: the cold shoulder. She’s sweet as anything to my sisters, but pretends I’m not there. She walks around me. Ignores anything I say or do. She heats whatever frozen concoction we’re having for dinner, but makes only three portions of it. Whatever. I can live on cereal and milk.
I used to walk on eggshells during this phase, but lately, I’ve taken to whistling in the midst of her freeze-outs. It makes the girls feel better, and she can’t stand it, which is an added bonus.
This phase is what awaits me when I return home. It used to bug me, but I actually prefer it these days. The less we speak, the better. If not for the fact that the tension eventually bothers Margaret and Caroline, I wouldn’t mind hovering in stage two for a year or so.
Then, days or sometimes weeks later, Rosie will crack and fall headfirst into stage three, which I call the self-deprecation phase. Tears are involved—lots of tears—and an underhanded soliloquy (or three or four) about how she’s sorry she’s such a bad mother. Maybe she should’ve given me up. But then I’d be living in some group home with other orphaned kids whose mothers didn’t care enough to try. Maybe then I’d realize she does the best she can, that she’s the only one who loves me. My father didn’t want me, my grandparents begged her to get an abortion. But she had me. So why do I blame her for everything that goes wrong in my life, when she’s only trying to give me the best she has to offer?
It’s worth noting here that I don’t randomly blame her for shit. But everything that seems to go wrong is a direct result of some fucked-up decision she’s made, so whether or not I blame her, it’s still her fault.
The tears used to get to me, but I learned long ago. You don’t apologize at this phase or try to make her feel better about herself because it only serves as justification for her wrath. She then spirals back to stage one, and before you know it, she’s throwing things at you and reminding you you’re the worst son ever, especially because she’s done so much for you—and you’ve unknowingly validated her efforts with your apology, thereby proving her dedication, because you gave in and said sorry for shit you really aren’t sorry for and shouldn’t be held responsible for in the first place.
And overarching all this is that I know there are legitimate reasons she’s like this. She’s been through some shit, and sometimes it’s not a matter of her wanting to act with her best judgment, but not being able to. She freezes up, gets scared, doesn’t seem to know how to help herself. It’s just the way things are.
I don’t blame her for the reasons she does these things. I take issue with the fact that she does them. Period.
“So this girl.” It’s all Aiden says. I’m glad to stop thinking about my mother and focus instead on Chatham Claiborne. This girl.
“Yeah.” I don’t have to say more than that, either.
After a few beats of silence, he pipes in: “If she’d shown last night, you know I would’ve explained shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Listen, I gotta make some deliveries.” Aiden takes the last hit, then crumbles the charred remains of the rolling paper on the rocks on which we’re sitting. “Nothing too far. All in the neighborhood. You’re welcome to hang, or come along . . .”
“Think I’ll take a walk.”
Aiden lets out a laugh. “Okay.”
He probably knows what I’m really going to do: return to Northgate Beach. It’s ridiculous, I know. She isn’t going to be there.
But what else am I going to do?
“Meet you back in an hour or so?”
I nod, and as I climb down the bluffs to the grassy sand at the shore, I feel the tingle of the maryjane in my fingertips.
Definitely some good shit.
I head inland a bit, toward the boardwalk, which, in half a mile or so, after obediently framing the beach, juts out over a stretch of sand, thus morphing into a pier, and extends out over the waves.
The boardwalk is closed, but I maneuver underneath the weathered and splintered planks, where it’s damp and barren, and cop a squat on the cool sand. Here, I’m at a good vantage point to see the shoreline from north to south, stretching wide open as far as it can go, like a satisfying yawn.
I like it here. This is where I used to run to . . . before. Back in the days when Rosie was pregnant with the girls and things got out of hand with Damien, I’d hop the gate and ride out the storm beneath this structure.
Right here, where someone carved Rachel Bachton Was Here into the underside of the planks.
From a certain point of view, it’s true. She was here, once upon a time. Not under the pier, but on the beach.
The gorilla haze tingles in my brain.
And maybe it is the weed, but I see a figure—I swear, I see her—walking down the beach toward me.
I close my eyes in a hard blink, fully expecting the silhouette to have vanished by the time I open them again.
But someone’s there.
I hear the splash of her steps in the water.
I scramble out from under the boardwalk and meander toward the shoreline. Not toward her, so much, but near enough that if it is Chatham Claiborne, I might say hello and snag some of her time.
Before I know it, she’s about ten feet away, and the moonlight is just bright enough for me to determine she is who I think she is.
I keep walking south. She keeps walking north.
Any second now, we will pass each other by.
“Miss Claiborne.” I didn’t know I was going to say it—or anything—but I blurt it out half a second before our tracks are about to intersect. It hangs there in the sky for a second or two, like fireworks the moment before they burst.
She slows, but keeps walking. She’s past me now.
Then she looks over her shoulder, and sort of pauses there on the sand. Finally: “Fourteen?”