EVIE WAS SUPPOSED to be headed to the fifth grade that year, except that back in kindergarten she had missed two crucial months of school and so it had been decided that she would stay back and repeat the kindergarten year.
That decision had been the beginning of the end of a marriage.
Or maybe the ending had always been fixed, just waiting for the present to catch up.
Evie had fallen off the slide. The slide was supposed to be safe. It was planted in a bed of soft mulch in the playground at school, where teachers played the lunch-break roles of referee and arbiter and nurse. The teacher on recess duty hadn’t seen the fall. She had been trying to sneak in a few bites of ham sandwich. Or untangle the tetherball. Or tie a shoelace. The details didn’t matter. What mattered was that the public school lacked funding to hire teacher’s aides to monitor recess and Evie fell off the slide and broke both her legs. Two fractured femurs.
Her parents fought about the physics of this injury. This “accident,” Chuck said, with air quotes. A broken arm would have made sense, or even a tibia, a kneecap. But femurs? The slide had guard rails. A child could not simply “fall off.” A leap, perhaps. Or a push. Evie would not say how it happened. Post-accident, Evie did not seem distraught. She smiled and ate and watched a lot of TV. But she refused to discuss the fall or her broken legs, and whenever a parent raised the subject she closed her eyes, plugged her ears, hid beneath a blanket, or otherwise pretended these parents and their pesky questions didn’t exist.
Her legs recovered completely. But the accident left her with a fear of heights, and it reinforced the cope-by-avoidance trait she had inherited from Mom.
Mom let her phone battery die. Mom had “forgotten” to plug the phone in. She had an unread stream of texts from Chuck. She had not returned her editor’s phone calls. She had more important things to procrastinate. Like the boy. Timmy Caruso. Or whoever he was.
He was still there in the morning, at the kitchen table, pouring chocolate syrup into his breakfast cereal.
“It’s healthy,” he explained. “Because it’s fat-free.” He handed the bottle to Mason. Mason stuck the squirt-top into his mouth.
“What are we doing today?” Evie asked.
“Can we learn how to surf?” Mason asked.
“Yeah!”
“Yeah!”
“I don’t know. I need…We need to figure out what we’re doing,” Jenn said. “With Timmy.”
“I can surf,” Timmy said. “I took lessons.”
“No, that’s not, I mean, we can’t just keep Timmy here.”
“Why not?”
“Yeah. Why not, Mom?”
The three kids stared at her. Disheveled Mom. Hungover Mom. Mom in her ratty bathrobe with a smear of mascara beneath her eye. Mason suckled the chocolate bottle.
The bottle of rosé wine had seemed like a good idea the night before, on the deck, while the kids watched YouTube videos inside and distant lightning snaked across the black sky and her mind tried to wrap around the story this boy had told her. He was Timmy Caruso. But he couldn’t be Timmy Caruso. Timmy Caruso had died. Which made this boy just a boy, and she couldn’t just let some strange child live in her vacation house because he had a “mission” to save the world and a “feeling” that he should stay there to complete it.
The “sea monster” story was exactly the sort of BS story that Timmy Caruso would tell.
As she drank the whole bottle of wine, Jenn scoured the internet for missing children. She called police stations up and down the coast. She skimmed through news articles going back weeks, extending from Pearl Island to the towns and states beyond. Lots of kids had gone missing or been kidnapped, often by a family member—a parent, for instance, who snatched the kids from their proper caretaker and placated them with candy and carnivals until the joyride reached its flashing-lights-and-sirens end, and the cops cuffed felonious Mommy and shoved her into the squad car, heedless of the psychological impact of this specter on the small creatures who had just beat Mommy at mini-golf.
Arguably, she had now kidnapped three children, one of whom did not belong to her. But the wine helped her ignore this predicament as she tried to internet her way out of it.
“Why can’t Timmy stay?” the kids persisted.
“We want him to stay!”
“Yeah,” Timmy agreed. “And I’m fun to have around!”
“No. I mean, you are fun. But no.”
“But why?”
“Because,” she said. The rally cry of every parent everywhere.
“Because why?”
“Yeah, Mom. Why?”
“Because he’s not ours.”
“That’s true,” Timmy said. “I’m my own man.”
“But we want him to stay.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re not his family,” Jenn said.
“We could adopt him.”
“No. He belongs with his family.”
“We belong with Dad,” Evie said. “Since he’s the one who always takes care of us.”
“I’m taking care of you. Your dad is, he’s—”
“Dad would let us go surfing. If he was here.”
“I invited him. But he—”
She had, in several separate drunken texts, asked Chuck to join them at the beach house. She didn’t want him there, of course, and he didn’t want to come, but what mattered in divorce court was the written record of invitation. She had not absconded with his children; she had orchestrated a fun family beach summer and Chuck had “chosen” not to participate.
“Is Dad coming?” Mason asked.
“I texted him and—” Evie started.
Knock, knock, knock.
“Is that him?”
Knock, knock.
“Shhhh!”
“But Mom—”
“Be quiet.”
She listened, for a moment, to the escalating panic of her own pounding heart as her mind hurled assumptions as to who might come knocking. Chuck. His lawyers. The cops. The FBI. Child Protective Services. Her infuriated editor.
Knock, knock, knock.
Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.
“I’ll get it!” Mason said, and before she could stop them, he and Timmy were both racing for the door. They flung it open.
“Uh, hey dudes.” The contractor stood on the porch, looking hot.
“Who are you?” Timmy asked.
“You’re not Dad,” Mason said. “Are you gonna be our new dad?”
“Um…”
“No,” Jenn said. “Your father is obviously irreplaceable.”
The contractor ran his fingers through his hair. “Oh, uh, hey.”
She felt relieved to see him but mortified to be seen in her ragged old robe, with her rat-nest hair and her under-eye bags black with yesterday’s makeup.
“Yes?” she said, and it came out rude.
“You don’t reply to your texts,” he said.
“Yeah. Well. I don’t want to reply to most of the texts I get.”
“I found them a new home.”
“What?”
“The opossums,” he said. “I found them a new place to live. Not under the house. So when we fumigate, or if we have to demolish—”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good. I mean. A new home.”
She thought about the old home, with its moldy walls and leaking roof and all her mother’s clothes still in their drawers and that poster tacked to the wall, the cat, its nails embedded in a tree branch, its legs dangling. Hang in there! Well, it still hung there on the wall of her childhood bedroom, faded, torn at the corner. She didn’t know what to do with that poster. Or the house.
“But nothing will happen until next week. My guys all have projects. So you have a while to decide.”
“Oh. That’s…a week.” No time at all. “But…all the stuff. There’s still a bunch of stuff in there, so—”
“Right. The Editor said to hire movers to box it up. Move it into a storage unit.”
“She really wants me to get back to work.”
“Work is overrated.”
“Did she tell you to keep checking in on me?” Jenn asked.
“She said you were…having some issues.”
“So I’m getting billed for this visit.”
“Oh, no, the contract is a lump sum,” Dax said. “So when you get a chance—”
“I’m supposed to sign.”
“It’s in your email.”
“Which I haven’t checked.”
“The Editor said you were good for it.”
“And you believed her? That’s trusting.”
“She said you write those romance-action novels. The ones they sell at the grocery store. Philipia Bay.”
“The secret is out. Tell me you haven’t read them.”
“I haven’t read them.”
“Good,” she said. “You shouldn’t. They’re all the same. They’re jejune.”
“Sometimes there’s beauty in mundanity,” he said. Her cheeks felt hot. Hot summer wafted through the open door. “Anyway, the moving stuff, I’ve got it taken care of.”
“You do?”
“Unless there’s anything you want to go and grab. Before it gets packed.”
“I…right…I better go. The kids. They want to go surfing.”
“That’s cool. Except, they probably should wait.”
“Wait? Until…what?”
“Until, you know, the water’s safe.”
Safe. She shivered. “It’s not— I mean, why would it not be safe?”