Gwen felt a wave of nausea. From her brush she swirled a black cloud into the jaundiced rinse water.
“Libby has high hopes for every guy. He was just a good time.” She wished that he had mattered, that he was somehow unique and separate from the array that came before. Maybe if he were a lobsterman. A longshoreman. An explorer. The paddler of an ancient canoe, keeping the tradition alive. Even a gondolier. She wished there was more of the sea in his genes. At least he was a musician. Not that it mattered. In a few weeks the nausea would be eradicated and a new good-time man would be found. Maybe one that could lead somewhere. One who’d want a pink door.
“Do you have regrets? Some long-lost love you stalk online?” asked Gwen.
“Just the one I’m married to.”
“He’s the love or the regret?”
The door opened, and in walked Tom saying, “Dan, get your butt out of bed, Libby is making us dig that trench.” He was waving a pair of work gloves. He stopped.
“Melissa.” He said it sharp and quick, the way one calls a dog away from sniffing at the kitchen counter.
“Look how beautiful she is.” Gwen waved at her painting. “I had to have her.”
“Well, I guess you’ll take your clothes off for anyone,” he said to Melissa. Melissa sat up and stared at Tom but made no move to put on her robe. The two of them just looked at each other. Her skin was iridescent in the sun.
“Seriously, Tom, this is the guy you want to be? Grow up,” said Gwen.
“I am the only grown-up in this house.”
“How’s that working out for you? Just because our lives don’t look as picture perfect as yours doesn’t mean—”
Melissa laughed.
Tom looked at her and shook his head, then turned back to Gwen. “While you’re having fun painting pictures and sleeping late, the rest of us, and by that I mean me, have to get things done. Some of us have to pay the bills.”
“No one asked you to be Atlas. We are perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves,” said Gwen.
“Is that why you borrowed money from me in March? Is that why you had me pull Mom’s plug? Because you’re so capable?”
“You volunteered. Don’t put your weird guilt on me just because you’ve hated her your whole adult life. For no fucking reason. What was the worst thing she did to you? Have another son? Poor baby. You should hear some of the fucked-up shit she put Libby through before you act like your life was so hard.”
“I have to go dig a trench. Have fun masturbating.” He walked out, slamming the door behind him.
“That’s probably the first time you’ve ever said that word,” Gwen shouted after him. She turned to Melissa. “I can’t believe he’s anyone’s father.”
“That’s exactly how Kerry and Buster feel. What did Scarlet do to Libby?”
Gwen got up, opened the door, looked down the hallway, shut the door, and sat back down.
“Libby got the worst of it, but somehow ended up the most sane,” said Gwen.
FIFTEEN
ANOTHER SUMMER
Now the sun down, dinner done, the water dazzles with waves of phosphorescence. The children lie down on the float on their bellies, stretching their arms into the water, waving them back and forth like the long fronds of kelp below them. They skim their arms just under the surface to see the lights slide over their skin, curl in on themselves as they pull in the opposite direction.
“The ocean is alive,” they say. “It glows. So many little bugs, or are they fish?”
“It’s full of stars we can wake up with our fingers.”
“We are reaching into space to distant galaxies.”
“Yes,” their mother whispers from her seat on the end of gangway, its old wood wheels having rolled to the very front of their steel track. The float now just three feet below the pier.
“The sea is holding us up,” Libby says.
“It resists gravity,” says Tom.
“It’s ruled by the moon,” says Gwen.
“I’m an astronaut,” says Libby, reaching her arms out into ocean. Her knees bent, her little feet floating in the air, long toes like her father.
“Yes,” their mother says. Her voice is far away. He has gone for the weekend again. “Sailing to Brimstone,” he said. He will bring them back the smooth black treasures that are the stones of another planet, without a mark and softer than the water that bore them. Smooth and black as space, as the water without the light, as the cove at sunset. He will come back, a pocket of his slicker fat and hanging low with the black stones. They have so many already. The walls, unfinished, showing their studs, are lined with them. Mantels and sills are humped and rowed with them. Tom uses one as a worry stone, rubbing it during exams. Gwen gives hers away to friends at home who believe that it is a piece of the dark side of the moon. Libby keeps hers, catalogs them, has a list, numbered, with a description of the stone, the date it was given to her, and the weather conditions under which it was found.
She has realized, living in this place summer after summer, that weather is important. It is like luck, or praying, but also like a game that one must know how to play, when to hold a card, when to lay it down in books. Help yourself first, is the rule of cards and weather. She knows there is more to it than this, but she is still learning. Boats need so much help, so much minding of the weather with boats. The wind up, her father would usually be down on the dock putting the Whaler on the outhaul, can’t stay tied to the float. In a softer wind it could just be led to the leeward side, like a horse to a new stall.
Their mother is sighing on the edge of the ramp. Libby hears.
“I’m an astronaut,” she says again.
“Yes, I see that,” says their mother.
The older two go up, step past their mother as she leans to one side, not wanting to listen to her sighs anymore, but Libby makes her mother come and take their place.
“Lie down, Mama, on your belly,” she pats the planks beside her. Her mother heaves herself up by pulling on the handrails of the gangway. She squats down beside Libby, first balancing on the tips of her toes, then rolling down to her knees, then walking her hands forward to lower herself down. She can’t seem to do much all at once, Libby thinks. Even this, lying down, is done in stages. Adults, she wonders, so strange. Her mother wags a hand in the water, keeping the other under her chin in a fist.
“I see,” she says.
“No, no, both hands. This water,” Libby explains, “is magic.” Her mother needs to see. With four hands in, they wave in unison, and the lights trail their fingers.
“It’s only like this here,” Libby says. Only here.