Salix shoved her hands into her pockets. “If I text you, will you text me back this time?”
“Yes. I will. Definitely.”
“Okay, then it’s probably safe to say goodbye. So, bye.”
Corbin grabbed my arm. Owen grabbed the other one. “Let’s go!”
“You should go too.”
“Looks like it.”
“Bye, Maeve.”
“Bye, Salix.”
She strode down the block and turned the corner without looking back.
What I wanted to do was go home and replay every second of the time with Salix. What happened was that when we got home, there was an email from Raymond. Seeing his name pop up set me on edge immediately. The subject line said DON’T WORRY, YOUR MOTHER IS FINE!
Hi, Maeve,
We got into a minor car accident on the way back from the beach today, and your mom is staying overnight in the hospital. No broken bones, but she knocked her head pretty good, so they’re keeping her just to make sure it’s only a concussion. She can’t text or email from the hospital, so she asked me to let you know. Here’s a picture, so that you know she’s okay.
She says not to worry.
We’ll be in touch soon,
Raymond
I scrolled down to the picture. She was sitting up in bed wearing a hospital gown, holding a piece of paper. On it, in her writing: I’m fine! xoxo
I zoomed in and searched every inch of that picture, looking for something that would tell me that he was lying, that she wasn’t okay. But there were no bandages, no scrapes, not even a bruise or a black eye. Or was that a shadow of a black eye? I tried to check if her pupils were equal, but the picture was grainy that close up. I emailed Raymond back, cc’ing Mom.
If you broke her, I’ll kill you. Not kidding.
Tell her to phone me the MINUTE she can.
—M
I looked at the photo again. That was a shadow of a black eye, I was sure of it. What if she looked and acted fine at first, and so nobody figured it out? What if she had a bleed so tiny that no one noticed, and then during the night it bled and bled, and she had a stroke? What if she died? What if it wasn’t an earthquake and it wasn’t cholera? What if it was a minor car crash instead?
Deena Glover died today from the result of a minor car accident, shocking her loved ones and the old man who was with her. She leaves behind a garden in desperate need of attention, and a daughter, also in desperate need of attention. Not that she’d know, considering the daughter has been ignoring her. Or avoiding her. As for the old man, he is entirely at fault for this whole mess.
I calculated the time difference. Almost eleven p.m.
“Maeve?” Claire stood in the doorway. “I just got an email from Raymond. He said he sent you one too. And Billy.”
“I have to talk to her.” I could hardly breathe. “Right now. I have to know that she’s okay.”
Claire sat beside me with her computer and looked up all the possible numbers for hospitals in Port-au-Prince and read them out while I called and asked for my mother in terribly accented French. On the fourth call a woman said something in French, and after a click and a pause I heard my mom’s voice.
“Maeve? Is that you? Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” I started sobbing. “No. No. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, honey. I was going to call you in the morning.”
“In the morning?” I said through the tears. “In the morning?”
Claire patted my knee. “I’ll leave you two alone,” she said as she left the room, shutting the door softly on her way out.
“I really am okay,” Mom said.
“How do you know? Did they do a CT scan?”
“They checked me out. Thoroughly.” The line crackled.
“I miss you so much, Mom.”
“I miss you too, honey. It’s harder than I thought, being so far away from you. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
We talked about Haiti. The charity. Raymond. Home. They’d both had an email from Dan, saying that he found a bear on the porch when he went to check on the house. My mom laughed.
“It was probably napping on the couch.”
The old couch on the porch, where I spent hours and hours sketching blue jays and crows, the chickens in the coop, the cedar trees, the fox, and the garden.
“After it shopped in the garden,” I said.
It was so sad that we weren’t there to pick the greens, the baby carrots, and the peas. It was symbolic, and I wished it weren’t. The garden going on without us. The house all alone in the woods.
And all the while, in between the words, all the things I wasn’t saying. So I said some of them. I told a little bit more, like I was letting out string on a kite, just a bit at a time. I told her about Salix and how I ran away on that first date, and about sitting in the park with her. I told her that I found Mrs. Patel. After I told her that, there was a long silence on her end. So long that I thought the call had been dropped.
“Mom?”
“I’m so sorry that you found her,” she said. “I’m so sorry that I wasn’t there to comfort you.”
And Dad. What could I tell her about Dad?
“He’s doing okay, I guess.”
There was a pause. “Really?”
“No. He’s not okay.”
“Maeve.” Another pause. “You know you can’t make him stop. This is his thing to fix.”
“It might be too broken,” I said with a catch in my throat. “I think he and Claire might break up.”
“Oh, Maeve. I’m so sorry. Are you okay to stay there?” she said. “Should I call Dan?”
This was my chance to go home.
It hadn’t occurred to me, until that moment, that Dad was the reason I was there, and that if he was a mess, he could be the reason Mom would let me go home. I could get the five a.m. bus. I could be home the next afternoon. I could be standing barefoot in the garden with the light cutting through the trees and the dirt underfoot and the smell of all the green all around. But I didn’t want to go. And it wasn’t just because of Salix. It was because of Claire and Owen and Corbin and the baby. And it was because of Dad, too, because even if I couldn’t fix it, it didn’t seem right to walk away.
“No more car accidents,” I said. “No more hospitals. Okay?”
“You didn’t answer me,” Mom said. “Do you want me to call Dan?”
“Not yet.”
“You’ll tell me when?”
“I’ll tell you when.”
After we said goodbye, I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at Dad’s unfinished painting of the pug and the German shepherd, which was supposed to have shipped two weeks before. He’d started another painting on the other easel, but I couldn’t tell what it would be. So far it looked like a mess. A complete and utter mess.
When I woke up the next morning and went upstairs, I could tell right away that Dad hadn’t come home. Claire was silently fuming as she made breakfast, slamming cupboard doors, kicking the fridge shut, wrestling toast out of the toaster and tossing it onto the plates. The boys sat on the couch, not playing, not arguing. Just watching Claire scrape peanut butter across a piece of burned toast.
“Have you heard from him?”
“I have not.” She did not look up.
“Can I help? Have you called him?”