The Worst Thing I've Done (35 page)

Annie's hand keeps stroking her. Down her back. Across her shoulders. “A spoiled sleeper, Jake was. Gloomy if his nap was interrupted. That total lack of understanding of why anyone would wake him.”

But Jake says, “I don't believe that.”

“Why not?”

“Because the day-care kids came first for my mom.”

“You can't be serious.”

“I picked up all the toys…the mess you made.”

“Your mom made us whisper when you slept…only gave us soft snacks so the crunching wouldn't wake you up. You were the only kid I knew whose mom let him stay home from school because he was tired.”

Jake looks embarrassed. Foxy.

“That respect for sleep…” Annie smiles. “As if sleep were earned, as if interrupting it would be equal to depriving you of what you deserved. Spoiling you so.”

“How about a story?” Opal asks.

“Good,” Jake says.

“A Melissandra story.”

“That would be…yes.” Annie bends forward, lips apart.

“So…what's your name?” Opal asks her.

“My name?”

“Just say: Annie.”

“Annie.”

“I'm Melissandra,” Opal hisses.

“Is that how you say it?”

Opal nods. “I'm bratty and smart.”

“I know a girl like that,” Annie says.

“And I work nights. In a lollipop factory. I eat all the lopsided lolli-pops.” All at once Opal knows that Mason will make up other stories for her. And that Melissandra will be forever one day behind her. Even when she's grown up and goes on dates.

“Why only lopsided lollipops?” Jake asks.

“How old does a girl have to be when she can go on a date?”

“Oh…about thirty-five,” Annie says.

“Don't listen to her, Opal,” Jake says. “I think it's more like sixteen.”

“Twenty-six,” Annie says.

“Sixteen,” Opal says.

Annie lifts Opal's curls. “What's that glitter you've got hidden in your hair?”

“Mandy's glow-in-the-dark barrette. It'll glow even more when the light is out.”

When they get home, Opal pulls on socks and starts sock-skating in the kitchen. Her red curls fly around her ears, and she's humming to herself.

Annie steps back. Opal would stop if she knew Annie was watching her. When she was little, she used to show off, clown for Annie. Now she hides from her.

“The only one hiding is you,” Mason says.

Annie wonders if she'll miss him when she longs for excitement. But he's gone. And her life will never be quite as tumultuous again.

Opal pirouettes, and Annie steps toward her. Applauds.

“Annie, look look, I'm playing Ice Capades. And I'm dancing. Because remember what happened after I punched you with my tiny fist?”

“Tell me.”

Opal raises her pointy chin. “We danced together, I and my mother and you.”

“On my wedding day. Yes.” Annie takes off her sandals, skates with Opal, but her bare feet get stuck on Aunt Stormy's kitchen floor.

“Not like that, Annie!”

“How then?”

“You need socks.” Opal dashes up the stairs. Returns with balled-up socks.

Annie unrolls them. Puts them on.

“Slide…” Opal shows her how to slide.

Could I possibly love her more if she were my birth child?

Annie slides. Toward the window. The door. And into a wall. She laughs.

“Here you go again,” Opal teases her, “breaking everything.”

The rare laughter between them. But for now—as Annie sock-skates with her daughter in the kitchen—that laughter outweighs the despair of war within her. And she knows she'll hold on to moments like this. She'll have to.

After dinner, when Annie carries the trash outside, the air smells of smoke, blanketing all other smells, all nuances, making everything a flat, uniform gray as if the entire north were burning; and all at once the ground slaps against her shins, and she's heaving, the earth dry against her palms, and all she can breathe is the smell Mason must have breathed when his death was about to happen.
One catastrophe summoning another: death not by fire but by rope.

Hands tugging at her—

Heaving, she is heaving in the haze of smoke, on her hands and shins. The day Mason killed himself, she heard on the radio that several Canadian villages had to be evacuated, and she still remembers thinking how amazing it was that fires five hundred miles away could be so evident where she lived.

Large hands tugging at her.

“Did you fall, Annie?”

Jake on the ground. With her.

Spiky, pale hair as if sketched in.

Night through the ends of his hair.

“Annie? What happened?”

“Maybe I…slipped?”

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“No.”

Next to her the burst trash bag…orange peels and coffee grounds and chicken bones—

His arm now, supporting her as she sits back on her heels.

“Can you smell that smoke, Jake?”

He's sniffing the night. Says, “Yes.”

She wipes her palms against her thighs and tries to stand up.

“It's just Pete's fireplace.” Jake's skin is darker than his eyebrows and hair. Darker than the whites of his eyes and the white of his teeth.
Jake—

As she touches the skin around his mouth, her fingertips tingle…dissolve. He presses his lips into her palm, and she can feel the flat of his teeth…the hint of skeleton…of what abides, and beyond that the momentum of his body—

This has nothing to do with Mason—

“Swim with me, Jake?”

“First, we'll have to get you upright.” He eases himself against her, and she stands up.

When they reach the boardwalk, they're suddenly ambushed by desire, by an urgency that was theirs when they were twelve and had their first kiss, winter and all those layers of clothing, and still they could feel each other as if skin to skin. As now, only now, clothes shed, the wisdom and habit of skin as though the rapture had waited for them, grown to meet up with them here on this boardwalk, the post with the peace nest against Annie's back.

They don't move beyond this portal till Annie whispers, “So much for chaste love.”

Laughing, then—
and Mason far away, far enough
—laughing and running naked into the bay, the light, the vastness, and as they swim out, far beyond the small, choppy waves, risking uncertainty, the sea swells around them, finding and nuzzling them everywhere at once till they become water, membrane, all. And yet, when they surface, the haze of smoke reaches them even here, and it comes to Annie that it isn't amazing at all for fire to span great distances, that sorrow and fire can leap, accost you from hundreds of miles away and target your soul, nest inside your bliss, and that the scent of any fire—even a match struck in a nearby house—can ignite your sorrow.