A chill comes over me as I fumble for the car keys. I stop, unable to resist the urge to look up at the apartment building across the road from where I’m parked. Most of the windows have the curtains pulled, except for one. I take out the pair of binoculars I sent for in the mail and hold them to my eyes, fine-tune them until a clear picture comes into focus. The walls inside the apartment are dull beige and there’s a framed picture—a family of five smiling for the camera, wearing their best clothes, the children with wide front teeth. Their smiles look too full, as if forced.
A woman moves toward the window and pulls the curtains shut. Her silhouette remains visible through the sheer material. Someone approaches. They embrace. David—of course it’s David. I watched him walk into the apartment building moments before. Putting the binoculars back in my purse, I feel around for the rock I picked up a few days ago, a chunk of loose asphalt, actually, and hold it in my hand, feel the shape and size. Taking aim, I throw it with all my might, but it hits the side of the building and hurtles back down to earth. It was never going to reach its target anyway. I unlock the car, put the key in the ignition, and drive home.
My apartment feels bare. Snapping the TV on, I curl up on the couch and wait for darkness to descend. When nighttime comes, I curl up into a ball and lie in bed. This is where the pieces from the past come together, all the memories I’ve been fighting so hard to forget. I close my eyes and wait for the thumping, pounding, galloping. It’s inevitable. Hundreds of ponies, they’re coming for me, their beautiful chestnut manes blowing in the wind.
Again, I think of calling Jacob.
“Your mother went crazy,” said Aunt Joan, squeezing her hand in between some rocks. Pulling out a shell, she removed some bits of seaweed from it and held it out for me to take. I reached for it, but the shell struck my fingertips and went flying into the air, hitting the rocks below.
“It’s ruined,” she said, looking down at it. “You’ve ruined it.”
My throat hurt as if someone’s thumb was pressed against my larynx, and I couldn’t speak. I gazed at the broken shell and then at Aunt Joan. Neither one seemed to make any sense. Mumma ran away, took off one day and left Jacob and me all alone. No one knew where she went. In the beginning Daddy told us she’d died, but only because he didn’t want to tell us the truth: she ran off and forgot all about us.
I had no idea why Aunt Joan was bringing Mumma up in the first place when I hadn’t asked about her in weeks, and at a time when we were out searching the shore for shells; not when we were in the kitchen together, her dough pan thumping against the table as she mixed a batch of bread. Her words sounded much different scattered on the ocean mist, the October leaves shimmering in the background, than they would have had they been contained inside her cramped little house filled with the smell of fresh-made bread and lobster.
I reached for the shell, but Aunt Joan told me to leave it be, the words shooting out of her mouth like sparks from a bonfire. I followed behind her, picking my way around the rocks and sand. There were lots of things I could have asked her about, questions that had been plaguing me since the day Mumma left, but I didn’t know where to start. Several times in the past I’d mentioned Mumma, and each time she’d said, “Your mother left for greener pastures.” Now suddenly she’d come up with this new story, but my heart said different. Aunt Joan was mistaken. I was the girl whose mother ran off one day, tired of being a mother and wife. I wasn’t the girl whose mother went crazy. I just wasn’t.
“How many do you need?” she asked, wrapping her fingers around a partly buried shell. She shook it gently and fine grains of sand trickled out the opening.
“Just a few,” I whispered, although I no longer cared about having any.
“Here, hold it to your ear,” she said. Obediently, I held it against the side of my head and waited.
“Can you hear the sea?”
I told her I could, but my hair was in the way and I couldn’t hear a thing. Rubbing a small barnacle off the shell, I placed it in the wicker basket that was looped over my arm. A shell this size would make a good specimen for our school project. Ordinarily, I’d be happy about such a find.
A few more steps and she reached in between the rocks again, bringing out another shell, smaller than the first. Further inspection revealed a small hole on one side. She tossed it away.
“It was awful.” At first, I thought she meant the shell. “Elizabeth frothing at the mouth and crawling in the dirt like an animal. She scratched your father. Dug her fingernails in deep…that was after your grandfather died.”
The pink mark on Daddy’s face had faded a few weeks ago. “A limb jumped up and bit me,” he’d said when I asked what had happened.
Aunt Joan’s face was long and drawn. There was something teetering on her trembling lips, unspoken words she seemed to be wrestling with. I’d spent enough days in her kitchen to know. There was always more she wanted to add.
I thought it must be the cold wind making her tremble, that it had nothing to do with what she was saying about Mumma, because crazy wasn’t a word that would make someone tremble when spoken out loud, but an everyday word like rock or sand or shell. Except for the quivering in her lips, she’d made a quick recovery. Last week she’d spent in her bed with a rail-fence quilt pulled up around her neck, lamenting over Richard’s sudden departure, until late Thursday afternoon when Uncle Dylan finally told her to stop it.
“Get yourself out of bed, Joan. The boy’s not dead. He just wanted something else.”
“That something else you’re talking about,” she croaked from the bedroom, “we could have given him that. If only he would have said something.” She came out of her room then, her blue robe open at the waist, a too-thin cotton nightdress underneath. I could see her breasts beneath the fabric, two drooping shadows lying against her sunken chest. I wanted to laugh seeing her that way and suddenly thought of saying, “A pirate’s delight…a sunken chest”—the same words Jeff Peterson said to Marjorie James one day, a girl in the tenth grade.
“Oh, Jewel, I didn’t know you were here,” she’d said, quickly pulling the robe shut, her eyes suddenly wide open at seeing me standing there. Her face was blotchy, her eyes and nose red and runny. The handkerchief she was clutching was twisted and wrinkled, both ends drooping out of her clenched fist. I looked quickly at the floor.
Her tears were nothing new to me. She was crying the day Mumma ran down to the shoreline after Jacob and me. Later, when I ran back into the house to get the drawing of Dusty, she was standing in the middle of the kitchen. I’d heard her wailing from outside seconds before I tripped the latch. She stopped when she saw me on the other side of the door.
“We’re going home now,” I mumbled, pulling the paper from the table. I could hardly wait to get away. The whole day had been ruined.
“It’s best if you do,” she sniffed. Her wailing picked up again as soon as I closed the door behind me.
The wind made a wild play, whipping up along the shoreline, and we stopped moving for a moment, waiting for it to subside. Branches of yellow leaves swayed playfully. And I wondered for a few moments what it must feel like to be a leaf ripped from a branch, fluttering against the breeze all alone without a thought or care in the world.
A small whirlwind picked up some bits of debris down on the beach, twirled it around, then relaxed. I wasn’t sure if I was the only one who saw it. Normally, I would have said something to Aunt Joan, but not that day. Above us, a miniature gull shrieked out a chorus that dissolved into the clouds and fog. A cormorant stood on some rocks out in the water. Jacob and I would throw stones to make them fly, or else we’d chase them from the water, clapping our hands together and yelling. Aunt Joan would have thrown a fit if she ever saw us.
“Those poor, helpless creatures,” she’d have said. We were always clever enough not to get caught.
A few weeks back, a seal washed ashore on the beach. It was close to death when Jacob and I found it. Jacob wanted to take it home and nurse it back to health. “We can keep it in the shed,” he said.
“It’s too far gone,” I told him. “Besides, it would need water. Salt water. It belongs in the ocean.” It had a glassy stare and a fly was sitting in the corner of one eye. It was barely breathing and was starting to smell. I hurried Jacob away. The next day gulls were swooping and landing on the sand.
“What are they doing?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I told him. We didn’t move closer and he didn’t ask about the seal.
“Your father didn’t want to send her away, but he had no choice in the matter. He couldn’t have handled her, not in the state she was in. She was sick. Sometimes you’ve got to go forward in life without looking back. That’s what your father did. We, Dylan and me, we told him he should.”
“She’ll get better,” I said, patting Aunt Joan’s hand. She shook her head and looked toward the water.
“I’m afraid not. There’s no getting better. Not from that. Not for her. I saw her for myself, at the hospital. Your father and Dylan went too. I wouldn’t have it said we didn’t do all we could for her, because we did. I couldn’t have lived with that on my conscience. Not that.”
We continued to comb the beach, examining each item we found before putting it in the basket—several more shells, a dead starfish, and a sea urchin. Two gulls landed on the beach not far from the water’s edge, warning us not to come closer. I wanted to make my way onto the rocks and let the ocean rise around me, stranding me out in the middle of the water where no one could reach me. Let the water cover my head. Breathe. Once the water covered me, I’d take a deep breath.
Finally, Aunt Joan broke the silence. “Do we have enough? We can keep gathering if you want.” I explained once more that we were only to bring in a few things. I’d been hoping to find something unique to take into school, something no one else would have.
“The sea urchin is different. The urchin will get you an A for sure.” But there was to be no mark. It was for a display Miss Keddy was making called “The Bonnie, Bonnie Sea.” We had driftwood and sand and small round rocks washed smooth by the sea; Miss Keddy said, in the beginning, to bring in only small rocks if we brought any rocks at all. There were three the size and shape of eggs in the display, ones Owen Burns brought in. The rocks seemed like a good thing for Owen to bring, simple and plentiful, requiring little work, and when Miss Keddy passed them around for us to hold I was sure I could feel some heat coming from them.
“See how the water has washed them smooth. Everything is made smooth by the motion of the sea,” she said. It made me wonder if that was why Daddy had moved us down to the shore.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be saying anything, since your mother and I didn’t get along,” said Aunt Joan, but it was too late for her to take back what she’d already said.
The wind pulled bits of her hair out from beneath her bandana and she yanked them from the corner of her mouth before speaking again. “But I want you to know, Jewel, that I tried. I tried as hard as I knew how to be your mother’s friend, to treat her like family. And then the last time she was at the house—well, you remember that day, don’t you?”
Of course I remembered. Mumma never went to their house after that. Whenever we went to visit, she’d stand by the kitchen window and watch us drive away. She’d say, “Have a good time,” but she never came with.
“You’re not supposed to know any of this,” said Aunt Joan, walking up from the beach along the path that led straight to her kitchen door. “I wasn’t to tell you…. And Jacob. Don’t go telling Jacob any of this. He wouldn’t know what it means, anyway. He’s too young. Your father thinks you’re too young, too. But he’s a man. What does he know about girls? That’s only for you and me to say.”
Still nattering, she unlatched the door. “This is the last you’ll hear of it from me,” she said, shaking the sea mist out of her bandana and folding it up to fit in her pocket. I set the basket of shells on the kitchen table while Aunt Joan hung up her coat.
“It started back in April, you know that yourself. That’s where it all started. Everything went downhill from there. But he’s making some headway now, your father is. He seems happy for the first time in a long time. Have you noticed? I suppose she couldn’t help herself,” she added. “Your mother had her problems, that she did.” She removed the shells from the basket, and then suddenly stopped. “Oh, I just wish she could have behaved herself, your mother. There are people who would have given anything to have what she had, anything. But some people are never satisfied. I guess your mother is just one of them.”
“I don’t think she could help it,” I said, fighting the urge to tell her to shut her mouth, that she had no right to be saying things about Mumma.
Taking a large shell from Aunt Joan’s hands, I could see there was more she wanted to add. But she left all that was unsaid dangling like a pendulum back and forth, a slow tick-tock that droned on and on. The basket now empty, she put it back on the shelf in the hall closet and started rearranging the shells.
“We’ll find a box for you to take them to school in. Just leave them here and I’ll have them ready for you on Monday morning.” She stopped me before I went out the door. I swung around. There was a pained look on her face. “Don’t tell your father about any of this. If he asks, I’ll lie. I’ll say I never told you a thing.”