She was gone, and then going even farther away, and I was bawling. I hurt everywhere. It literally hurt to miss her.
I missed her. I missed home. I missed my bedroom. I missed the garden. I missed picking beans and canning tomatoes. I missed sitting on the steps drinking iced tea with dirt under our fingernails. I missed the little fox with the limp, the one I left food out for sometimes. I missed sitting on the old couch on the covered porch, especially when it rained and the rain filled the gutters and spilled over, and I missed the staccato the rain made on the tin roof. Loud and peaceful at the same time. Sometimes I fell asleep out there, wrapped in my quilt, listening to the rain, and Mom would come home from work, or out from making dinner, and she’d wake me up. She’d shake my shoulder and whisper in my ear, Up, up, little one. Even when I wasn’t little anymore.
Maybe terrible things would happen.
In six months, roughly twenty-eight million people would die in the world.
Cancer, murder, speeding trains. Hurricanes, poison, depression, starvation. War, shark attacks, random acts of chaos.
Cholera. The word was as ugly as it sounded. Some people could have it and never know it, but others could lose a liter of bodily fluids in one hour. I’ll be drinking bottled water at the clinic, Mom assured me. Not even ice cubes from the tap. We have treated water at home. Don’t worry, honey.
Maybe she would die in Haiti.
At her Haitian home.
She wasn’t letting me stay home based on one night. The night after what happened with Ruthie. I hadn’t told Mom, and I didn’t intend to either. It was going to be our “test” night, and it had been planned for weeks. If I could do one night, I could try two, and then a week, and then she’d consider letting me stay home while she was in Haiti. I did okay all afternoon, and even through supper. But when it was time to go to bed, the house seemed darker and it was too quiet and my mind kept replaying what had happened in Ruthie’s basement bedroom the day before. When I told 911 that I couldn’t breathe, they sent two ambulances and a fire truck.
I hated thinking about the day at Ruthie’s.
I hated thinking about the day that I spectacularly failed the test.
And this day too. I hated this day.
I hated Raymond for taking her away.
It was all his fault.
Maybe I wished he would die. Maybe it was that bad. A heart attack.
I wished he’d just keel over and die: a stroke, a clot in his lungs, a heart attack. That would be fitting. Dying of a heart attack just as he was falling in love with someone who was neither available nor suitable. Or even appropriate. Served him right.
Maybe not dead, though, because my mom would be so sad.
Maybe just a little heart attack. Just big enough to knock him over and keep him and my mom from going to Haiti.
Not while he was driving to the airport, though, because he might drive off the road and cause an accident with my mother in the car. But maybe as they were checking in. A sudden tightening in the chest, shortness of breath. The airline agent would notice first. Sir? Is something wrong? You look pale. And then my mom. Oh, Raymond, are you okay? Raymond! Somebody call 911!
A trip to the hospital instead of a trip to Haiti.
I could imagine my mother at his bedside, staring at him as he snored in his sleep, thin and sickly in his blue hospital gown, the fluorescent lights buzzing over his bed. She’d sit there and hold his hand and wonder. What had she been thinking? She did not love this man enough to be his nurse. And then she’d get on a plane, and I’d get on a bus, and we’d meet in Seattle, and Dan would drive us all home. Ta-da! The end.
A heart attack? What a terrible thing to wish on a person.
I took back the heart attack. I hadn’t meant it. Not really. I just wanted Mom to come home. And I wanted her to leave Raymond behind. I didn’t want him—or anyone else—to have a heart attack. I was a bad person, to wish something like that on someone. Even if that someone was Raymond. I was a bad person, to think such bitter, dark thoughts.
Sometimes distraction could take my mind off the worry, but sometimes it made it worse. Especially if it was Claire’s idea. Distraction was Claire’s favorite way of dealing with my varying degrees of weird. You just need to keep moving, Maeve. Move. Move your body and your brain and use up that nervous energy that clatters around in there, messing you up. Try new things! Meet new people! Get out there, honey. You think too much because you have too much time to think. When I was younger, she’d sign me up for things like circus camp, or kayak trips, or marimba lessons. That’s why she tried to teach me how to knit. It’s meditative, she said. You zone out and it’s just the yarn and the needles and you, making something beautiful.
But I did not work that way. I lasted half the week at circus camp. I was so worried about getting hurt that I actually could not move the required muscles it would take to participate. And furthermore, I was sure that one of the other kids was going to fall to their death, so I could only sit on the bench with my hands covering my face, muttering, “I can’t watch. I can’t watch. I can’t watch.” They asked me to leave, and not very nicely, considering I was only eleven. One of the instructors actually said that I was jinxing the whole class. Circus = watching someone fall to their death. Kayaking = drowning. Marimba = failure. Knitting = way too much time to think. Claire didn’t sign me up for that kind of thing anymore, but she was always pushing me: get out, go do something, find a friend.
As if.
Drawing worked, sometimes. Sometimes it could lift me out of myself. Sometimes figuring out the lines and curves and shapes of things around me was enough to stop the noise in my head for a while. But usually when the worrying about something stopped, it was because I’d moved on to worrying about something else.
Claire’s latest idea of distraction was to send the twins and me to our grandmother’s in Gibsons, on the Sunshine Coast, for a few days. We’d be going by ourselves. On a big ferryboat.
What if one of the boys fell overboard?
What if I couldn’t find them when it was time to walk off the ferry?
What if there was an engine fire?
What if the ferry couldn’t stop and it crashed into the wharf?
What if we got on the wrong ferry?
What if Grandma never came to pick us up?
What if the boys went into the men’s bathroom and there was some creep in there?
“Do you let them go into the men’s bathroom by themselves?” I asked Claire as she dropped us off at the terminal.
“Sure.”
“You don’t worry about them in there?”
“She means pedophiles,” Corbin said.
“We know about pedophiles,” Owen said.
“I’m not worried about pedophiles,” Claire stage-whispered with a wink. “The boys know what to do if someone flashes a penis at them in the washroom.”
And then there’d be the trip home. Alone.
So, so many things that could go wrong.