Libby keeps playing. Maybe she can’t hear them, maybe because it is not about her it doesn’t matter. Gwen wants to play with her, but she is afraid to move. Sitting would make the cushions wet, playing would make her seem unapologetic, though she isn’t sure exactly what she has done wrong. She assumed they already knew. She has been jumping from the ferry tower for two summers now. Some kids jump a beat or two after the ferry leaves the dock, when the water is still roiling, still oily and flat in spots, and frothy and churning in others. It only pushes you under the dock for a second, then sucks you back out again. At first she had done it only when the ferry was gone and the water quiet. But she watched the older boys, locals only, do it as the ferry left. She has been working up to it all summer, and today was her victory.
She climbed the green metal ladder as the automatic grated ramp went up. As the ferrymen slipped wedges under car wheels, she shuffled out onto the catwalk, and as departing families stopped waving good-bye to their friends, their summer island, she jumped. She was stirred in the pot of black soup, she thought, brought up and pushed down, a bobbing carrot nub. She swam against the current as she’d seen those boys do, and then rode it in swirls, a moment under the dock, sharp rock against her thigh, just above her knee. She emerged, climbing up the ladder that curved to an end on the thick wood ties of the dock, those blocks of wood that weep black oil in the heat. She emerged dripping in her bathing suit and shorts. She wore the shorts on purpose, not wanting to look too much like a girl, too slim and frail up on top of the tower, like a diver or a weathervane. She emerged, and they cheered for her, the first summer girl to have done it.
“I can’t follow her, drive five miles an hour behind her bike,” says her mother.
“You can lock up the bike,” says her father, “you can take her with you, you can be sure she’s hanging out with kids who won’t force her to risk her life.”
She doesn’t want to touch it, but the cut wants to be touched, washed, dabbed with alcohol, flooded with peroxide, smeared with Bactine and covered with a Band-Aid, a big one that looks like a small bumper sticker. She’s earned a big one. Her feet are starting to feel sticky, not slick, in her wet shoes. She takes four steps, slowly, backward toward the stairs, and goes to sit on the top step.
“Please stay on the porch,” her father calls through the door. She is bent, about to sit, and his words make her freeze, assess how “on the porch” this second-to-top step is. She sits. Here the sun comes in under the overhang. Here the gray wood is hot, even through her wet shorts; it warms her.
Back and forth they go.
Libby comes over and sits beside her, looks up at her big sister.
“You’re bleeding.” She is the first to notice. “I’ll get you a Band-Aid.” From inside, there is a smash, a shattering. They both move down a step.
“Well, if you weren’t on that damn boat all the time.”
“I need to get away from you, from this.”
The girls move down another step. It is their mother who is breaking things. She goes for their wedding china first. Gwen figured it out earlier this summer, watching her mother furiously hunting through the china closet for the right dish to throw. But even this is better than what comes.
They cry. Her parents, the adults, cry. Together, holding each other. They sit on the floor, on the landing of the main stairs, on the edge of a guest bed, on the rail of a porch, and cry together. “It shouldn’t be this hard,” they say.
And then they drift away, and it is quiet again for months. He drifts to his boat and she, to her books, and they are apart. And the three of them, Tom, Gwen, Libby, leap off ferry towers, and jump from higher and higher ledges at the quarry, and fling themselves from the dock. Trying to fly away, up high enough to become birds, to swim away deep enough to become fish. But Libby, in her life jacket, Libby standing at the top of the swim ladder too afraid to jump, she keeps them there. She is too small to make the change, and they are too big to leave her behind. Tom is off on his bike now, riding over the low hills and through sharp turns. Soon, he will journey on boats, not bikes. Soon, he will have his way out.
The girls move another step down until their feet touch grass and rock. Gwen whispers in Libby’s ear, and on the count of three, they run for it. Down, down the path, down the pier and the ramp, down to their own float. Libby trails her life jacket behind, always waiting for her at the bottom of the steps. She is golden, with a great orange streamer against the green trees. Once on the hot planks, Gwen buckles Libby in, and they jump. I will wash this cut in the sea, give the blood back to the hungry ocean that tried to take it from me. They splash and laugh. They hear the screen door slam. They are in for it now.
Their mother comes and stands at the edge of the pier under the limp flag. She stands with arms crossed and watches them swim, determined not to let them drown, not to let her husband accuse her of being a bad mother. She doesn’t have the energy to haul them out of the sea, to spank them, at least Gwen, as she deserves. She doesn’t want to talk to them, or him, or think about all her failings, as they have been so conveniently listed for her in the last half an hour. She watches her children swim. Though they have paused and hang with little fingertips from the edge of the float, peeking up at her. She gives them a wave, tells Gwen that they will talk about it later, which means not at all. And they both know that. So they splash and squeal and scamper in and out, up the ladder and down again, up and lofted over the edge of the float.
“Mom, watch this, are you watching, Mom? Watch, look, look, look at this, wanna see something? Mom.” Gwen does a cartwheel off the end, while Libby watches, all adoration. Libby then hangs off the ladder, one hand and one foot loose, and then drops herself in. Gwen cheers wildly for her sister. “Again, again,” she says. But before Libby has a chance, Gwen is back up, taking up their mother’s attention, a handstand at the edge and a backspring into the water. Their mother sees a cut on Gwen’s leg she hasn’t noticed before. The next time she surfaces, her mother asks, “Is that a cut on your leg?” Gwen looks at it as if she has never seen it before.
“I guess,” she answers.
Their mother calls them both out; it is time to start dinner. Their little lips are blue. Many calls and much counting later, the three of them come up the steps, and in the sun there, her mother looks carefully at Gwen’s cut, crouches down, puts her hands on either side of her leg, gently pushes at the skin around the cut.
“This is deeper than I thought,” she says, “Inside.”
They leave Libby at the tin house once more. She cannot leave the porch alone, and her mother knows that is a rule she, unlike her sister, will not break. Their father has disappeared. Probably on the south porch hiding. Libby will find him; their mother smirks, happy that his peace will be interrupted. She takes her daughter, her misbehaving daughter, into the bathroom and sits her on the closed lid of the toilet. Peroxide fizzes in her cut. She squirms, her eyes water. Then her mother dabs it with a dry washcloth, smooths Bactine over it, and seals it all with a Band-Aid. As she’s smoothing the edges of the bandage, Gwen puts her arms around her mother’s neck and rests a cheek against her forehead.
“Thank you, Mama,” she says. And her mother thinks, This child is still mine.
ELEVEN
GWEN