Keep calm and carry on.
That fucking poster. It was calling my name even though I wasn’t looking at it. I scooted to the edge of the bed and stared at Dad’s easel instead. He was painting a pair of dogs: a pug and a German shepherd. They were wearing crowns and had long velvet capes, none of which were in the photo he was working from. I crossed the room for a closer look. The customer’s email was tacked to the wall beside the easel. She wanted Queenie and Prince to be painted in full royal attire. I was surprised that Dad would agree to paint something that looked so ridiculous. But there was the estimate, paper-clipped to the photo he was working from. He was charging double what he normally would. That made me smile. It was a shitty painting, and he knew it.
Shelves of paint pots, jars of paintbrushes and gesso, racks of finished paintings and half-finished paintings. Claire’s workbench with the sewing machine at one end and a row of clear plastic drawers with bits of cloth all sorted by color. Since I’d been here last, Claire had reorganized the drawers to be a rainbow of colors. Gay pride. Sweet of her. She meant well. She always meant well.
—
This would be my home for the next six months.
One hundred and eighty-two sleeps. Four thousand three hundred and sixty-eight hours and some change.
And seventy-five days until the first day of school.
Claire had already registered me at Britannia High, the same school that had sent eleven kids to the hospital the year before, because of a suicide pact they were trying to carry out in the senior girls’ bathroom with bottles of vodka and pills. The same school where Owen had found a dirty needle at the edge of the soccer field where the boys’ junior soccer team practiced. The school in the background of the YouTube video, the one of the kid getting his face kicked in by four other kids, and a whole bunch of kids crowding around, cheering them on.
Don’t think about school.
Mom would be leaving for Haiti in four days.
Ninety-eight hours, to be exact.
I miss you. I can’t do this. It hurts. I want to go home. Please don’t go.
There was no text back. I held my phone in my hands and waited and waited and waited. I wanted to know I could reach her, even when she was so far away. I wanted to know that she was hearing me. But she wasn’t, even though she’d said she would. She was with Raymond, and not thinking about me at all. I was sure.
There would be no keeping calm and carrying on. There would be panic, and reeling backward. Which would be fine if it took me home. All the way home. To my real home in the woods, with the garden all around, and the woodstove. I liked starting the fire on cold mornings. Usually.
He’d come to Port Townsend to visit Dan, his younger brother, as in younger by almost twenty years. All it took was a couple of dinner parties and one bonfire with marshmallows and homemade wine before he invited Mom to join him in Haiti, where his charity had an immunization clinic. The flames reached up hot and orange into the black night, and I laughed. Actually laughed, until I heard my mom tell Raymond that she’d think about it. She poured more wine into his glass and then put her hand on his leg and slid it up just a bit and told him that she’d think about it.
For a moment, in the shadows beside the fire, I thought she was serious. But then Raymond left, and she never mentioned it, because it was a stupid idea. I was in Port Townsend, and so was Mom’s job with the town, and her garden, and her friends, and her car, and her house, and all of her life, all in Port Townsend. Not Haiti.
But then Raymond came back a few weeks later, and Mom went to pick him up at the airport, not Dan. And that was when I started to really worry. They’d been emailing, which I hadn’t known about until I checked the computer while Mom was on her way to get him. It started out all nice-to-meet-you, but by the most recent ones he was calling her sweetheart and she was calling him love, and in the very last email—sent just before Mom got into the car and drove away—she told him that she knew of a little park on the way back. She told him no one ever went there, and that there was a corner of the parking lot that would be perfect for a “proper hello.”
He spent eleven nights out of fourteen at our house, so I doubted that he’d come to see Dan at all, really. They weren’t going to tell me that he was sleeping over, so the first morning was a surprise. I hadn’t slept very well, because I could not get rid of the image of Mom and Raymond going at it in the back of the car, with the seats folded down and that old grimy blanket spread out. So I got up earlier than usual, rather than lie in bed thinking about it. It was cold, so I was kneeling by the woodstove, blowing on the kindling, when I heard a man’s cough and looked up to see Raymond padding into the kitchen, entirely nude.
But he didn’t see me. I tried to close the stove door as quietly as I could, hoping that he’d just get a glass of water or whatever and go back to Mom’s room. But the door creaked, and he heard that and spun around, and I fell back and knocked over the side table by the couch, which sent the ceramic lamp to the floor, where it broke into a million little pieces.
“Maeve!” Raymond grabbed the dish towel and covered himself. He scurried behind the cover of the kitchen island. “I certainly didn’t see you there. Uh, good morning.”
“Morning.” I stood up, very reluctantly, and then bolted down the hall, hoping that we could just pretend that we hadn’t seen each other at all. But then Mom came out of her bedroom, pulling her robe on as she did.
“What’s going on?” She saw me, and she saw Raymond, and at first her face went pale. “Well, shit.”
“I got up to make you coffee,” Raymond said. “I was going to bring it to you before I went back to Dan’s.”
“You’re naked.”
“Sorry.” Raymond shrugged. “Really sorry.”
And then her face turned red and she got mad. “I have a teenage daughter, Raymond!” She steered me back into my room. “This is totally unacceptable, Maeve. I am so sorry. I should’ve told you that he was staying over. It was a bad idea not to, and I apologize. Give us a minute.”
“Gladly.” I shut the door and leaned against it, willing myself not to throw up. I’d seen three penises in my life up to that point: my dad’s and the twins’. Raymond’s made four. I’d been way too close to Raymond’s old-man dick, all shriveled and wobbly and with great big sagging balls. It had practically been in my face. But worse than that—as if old-man penises weren’t bad enough—I was upset about what his penis being there meant in the first place. My mom was going. And she wasn’t just going in order to be helpful. To be charitable. For the greater good. No. She was going. As in, off in the direction of Raymond. Away from me.
—
Sometimes I still thought of the car parked in that empty lot.