What the Waves Know (7 page)

She was joking, I'm pretty sure. However, something in the underbelly of her words was not, and I knew if any sane woman on the planet could be driven to loathe a hunk of salt I was sitting beside her. A mighty puff of sweet smoke billowed into the air from the front, followed by a deep chuckle.

“And behind that house is a corner of the property you'd do very well to steer clear from. There's a hundred-and-twenty-foot drop lined up with the corner of a reef, which has made a widow out of many a sailor's wife. If you walk the basin from below, you'll see the sand is the color of chestnut husks due to the smashed-up hulls of whaling ships. They get caught in the currents and dashed into the rocks.” Her story seemed to be gaining steam, when she caught my eye and suddenly deflated, adding quietly, “There's nothing up top to keep you from the dive. So explore all the other edges of the property you like, but leave that one alone, okay?”

A certain gravity took hold of Remy's words, slowing them to a snail's pace, and I noticed my mother eyeing the ridge with a faraway look in her eyes. The normally faint crow's feet around her lips had pulled into tight creases. Beside her in the front seat, Thomas O'Malley's wavy white head nodded in silent agreement all the way past an overgrown field spattered with fruit trees and a thick hedge of evergreens.

A moment later, the Thunderbird's purple hood pointed in the direction of a huge white house with large black-
shuttered windows and a rickety widow's walk peeping out over the Atlantic. The cottage looked to have been empty since the beginning of time, except I knew that wasn't true. I had been here before. The clapboards, the windows, the stairways, were all stuffed with the secret of what had really happened to my father. My stomach churned violently at the thought of going inside.

Three stories high, a stone chimney climbed out of the cottage at one end. A tall proud turret poked into the sky at the other with leaded windows sparkling on all eight sides. Four gables pointed upward from the straight lines of the second floor like fat arrows pointing to heaven. At the foot of the second story, the roof slanted sharply away from the home like a hoop skirt covering a full-pillared porch wrapping around the entire base of the house.

“Is there anything you'll be needing to settle in tonight?” Mr. O'Malley asked, eyeing my mother gently.

“We'll have to make a run to the market tomorrow, but I think we have everything we need.” She looked at him thoughtfully with a nod before glancing at Remy and adding, “Except a vehicle.”

Remy ignored the comment and studied my face, as if she knew inherently that was not true, as if she understood that the very reason we had come to this place was because we had nothing that we needed to keep us going. What we needed was love baked into our walls and the sound of laughter, and there was not a market in the world that could fix it.

Mr. O'Malley unlatched Luke's crate and scruffed the fur behind his ears. Luke gave a thank-you wag, poking his snout into the air for a sniff.

“Out with ya, then.” Thomas O'Malley's voice was soft and gravelly, an utter contradiction to the enormity of him—like one of those Saturday-morning cartoons where Tweety Bird pipes up from the depths of Sylvester's stomach. I liked the sound of him, and so did Luke, who lapped at his open hand before bounding into the yard, tumbling over his own legs. I clamored out of the backseat while Remy flipped open the trunk, placed the suitcases at my mother's feet, and turned back to the larger steamer trunk. She took hold of the handle with the authority of a woman fully prepared to level a great sequoia armed with nothing more than an emery board.

“This one yours?”

I shook my head.

Remy looked my mother in the eye and plopped the trunk on its side no less than an inch from my mother's toe, thereby clarifying what was to become the terms of their acquaintanceship. Taking up the smaller trunk and my art case, she headed down the walk toward the arched French doors. To picture Remy Mandolin as anybody's servant was a difficult image to conjure, and yet there was something about her determination that whispered she'd been down that road once before—and blown it to smithereens behind her.

My mother planted both hands on the shelves of her
hips, watching Remy stroll to the door with my trunk in hand. There was not one thing bony about Remy. She had a Betty Boop body and walked with the swagger of a woman carrying a basket of fruit atop her head.

Two weeks ago, the black-eyed Susans at home had crumpled up into brown papery sacks, sad as spit wads upon their stalks, but here the lawn beyond the porch was speckled with them. Luke barked and I followed him around the corner of the house, sending him racing in lopsided circles around the yard. Overhead a gull screeched, sailing below the cliff and unexpectedly taking my stomach with it. My legs froze right up solid, refusing to go even one inch closer. The gull soared back into sight, tipped its wings, and dove again. In the distance, the cliff swam in and out of focus and the world tipped dizzily off its axis. It was still daylight, but over the waves the evening star winked above the clouds. It wasn't really a star. I had learned that when my mother forced me to make a model of the universe out of grapes and oranges tacked together with toothpicks. It was the planet Venus, named after the Greek goddess of love. The honest truth is, I didn't remember a lot about it. But I remembered this: it didn't have a moon to dance with or throw the tides off balance—just a field of stars to spin inside.

“Someday I'm going
to catch you a star.” My father and I had been lying in the field behind our house watch
ing the Perseids. Resting my head in the pit of his arm, I blinked sleepily as meteors zipped overhead, pulling trails of white across heaven. The bonfire behind us sizzled at the remnants of a marshmallow, which had wriggled free of my stick and been broiled to a bubbling blob, sending a sugary sweetness into the night air.

I don't recall dozing off, but I awoke to my father dancing and darting through the field in nothing but his tighty-whiteys, chasing lightning bugs.

“Be look, stars.” He laughed wildly. “I got you one. I caught you a falling star.” He shook a mayonnaise jar in the air, setting a tiny green light flickering inside.

The commotion must have woken my mother, too, because she'd come jogging out in her robe and sent me to bed.

The next morning I found him in my bedroom jiggling the jar sadly as the small dead bug slid around the base. “It went out.” I remember his voice as that of a child. “The light went out.”

I was brought
back by the chatter of Mr. O'Malley and Remy around the corner of the house. Occasionally, my mother's voice cut in to ask about the oil tank or firewood or, for the millionth time, when Remy intended to deliver her car. Inching away from the cliffs and toward the clapboards of the house, I put on my best eavesdropping ears.

“So it should be here by Thursday,” my mother stated more than asked.

Remy ignored the question outright. “Does she remember?”

“No.” My mother had lowered her voice.

“Did you ask her?” Remy and my mother were talking like they'd known each other all along now.

“Her doctor thinks she needs to come back to it on her own. So I don't try to talk about it anymore and I don't want anyone else to, either.”

“I do not meddle in other people's business,” I heard Remy say.

Mr. O'Malley let out a chuckle of amusement that said he didn't believe her.

“But if you ask me—”

“I didn't.” My mother cut her off short.

“Right. But if you did, I might say that sometimes a situation calls for a good old-fashioned honest heart-to-heart.”

“She'll come to it on her own.”

“In this lifetime?” Remy lobbed back. “Because forgive me for saying so, but your method seems to really suck. I mean, eight years—you can become a damn doctor in eight years and cure yourself.”

“Let me know when you've done that, and then we'll talk. I'm not sure why the hell you care, anyway. Don't you have someplace you need to go?”

“Not really. And maybe I know something about all this,” Remy's voice challenged.

“You're not her.”

I patted my hand to my knee, calling Luke back, and came around the corner in time to see my mother disappear inside with Remy hot on her heels.

Thomas O'Malley propped his huge frame against the purple Thunderbird, causing the red cursive letters to read T
_ _
I
,
the word's middle lost under the expansive girth of his waist, and shook his head, letting the corners of his mouth tilt up.

“Izabella, come see your room.” Remy was leaning out the front door, craning her neck around a porch pillar, apparently having won yet another round with my mother, who was climbing back down the steps to haul in the last of the luggage.

Luke bounced through the door with me behind him. The living room of the Booth House was scattered with Oriental rugs, big splashes of red and blue against the white room. There were two staircases, one that climbed to the second floor from the living room, and a second, narrow utility staircase from the back of the kitchen. A beach-stone fireplace took up one entire wall. From the corner of my eye, I could see my mother pretending to unload a bag of food as she watched me.

“Upstairs,” Remy hollered from the top floor.

Luke bounded clumsily up one flight of steps, disap
pearing around a corner. Two seconds later, I heard the pitter-patter of puppy paws up another flight. When I caught up with him, he was parked inside the doorway, tail drumming back and forth against the jamb.

“Boy, I haven't been in this room in a long time.” Remy pushed open a window.

The room was tucked right inside of the turret and shaped like a huge stop sign, only instead of arrest-me-red it was Pepto-Bismol pink: pink wallpaper, pink quilt, pink rugs, and heavy white velvet curtains to hold it all in. There was no lightning bolt of memory, just a soft tickling déjà vu, as though the walls were trying to whisper something to me in a voice too low for me to hear. Luke sat upright and cocked an ear politely in her direction. I came up close behind Remy to peek out the three-story-high window, keeping the pillowy crescent of her hips between it and me.

“Look at that. Ocean view on six walls!”

She was right about that. From the middle of the room, every window seemed filled up with water like a huge tank.

When my fifth birthday rolled around, my father's apology about the trip to Potter's Creek had materialized in the way of a tank of fish to call my own. While they were not dancing salmon, it's true, my father had filled the tank with as many fish as it would hold and covered the whole thing with a sheet and bow. The morning of my birthday, I'd run to unwrap it with thoughts of angelfish dancing
in my head. Instead, I was greeted by ten golden bellies bobbing grotesquely across the surface and not one living fish. My father, having failed to take into consideration the radiator behind the tank, had cooked the whole lot of them into the here beyond. With the last flush of the toilet, my father had turned and plodded downstairs.

“Perfect.” My mother had sighed once he'd gone. The letters added up to
p-e-r-f-e-c-t,
but her tone added up to
s-h-i-t-h-e-a-d.

“Izabella?” I turned toward the sound of Remy's voice. “Do you want me to open the rest of the windows?”

I shook my head, sweeping the memory back into the corner of my mind. It was hard to sort out exactly when my parents' marriage started to unknit. When I tried, the memories got all knotted up together: one moment I recalled my parents tangled up on a blanket in the backyard whispering to each other and laughing, and the next they were standing a world apart screaming at each other and crying. Not for the first time, I wondered if my mother missed him, if she ever longed, like me, for him to come home.

As I stepped closer to the window, the sharp crags of Knockberry Ridge pulled into view. The sight of them snagged at my gut and I had the distinct feeling one good yank might just go ahead and unravel the entire fabric of me.

“Hey, come have a look at this.” Remy crossed the room, pointing out the northern window. “You see the really
tall boulder out there? That one, down the path there.” I squinted out the window where a huge rock seemed to pitch over the side of the cliff in the shape of a curled wave. Behind it was a ramshackle shed with a broken weathervane on its roof. “That's Witch's Peak. It's where Yemaya watches for the sailors to come home.”

I nodded, leaning over to scoop Luke up before turning back to study the room where two stained-glass side windows threw braided rainbows wavering along the pink walls in the shape of ships. It reminded me of Jesus flying up to the rafters of the Talabahoo First Congregational Church.

When we returned downstairs, Mr. O'Malley was fighting with a damp match to light a fire in the hearth. Remy went over to help him.

“These matches are no good,” she muttered, tossing the entire book into the fireplace. “They can start their own damn fire.”

“I said I'd have the place ready, and I intend to do so. I'll get mine from the car,” Mr. O'Malley said, stepping for the door, and I recalled what my mother had said on the boat about him looking after the house in our absence.

“No, you will not!” Remy bounced to her feet. “You'll just light that damned pipe of Satan again. I'll get them.” She vanished through the door, trotting back two seconds later wielding a Zippo in her right hand. Bending low, she fiddled with the stack of kindling then touched the lighter
to the paper's edge, tending it as if it could not be trusted to burn on its own.

From the kitchen, the phone rang and my mother knocked something to the floor with a thump trying to answer it. It was not until her voice picked up volume in the way of panic that I could make out what she was saying.