“About what?”
“This is a lot to take in.”
“There are other ones,” I say.
“Other whats?”
“Other Sarahs,” I say. “Like, tonight I saw twenty-three-year-old Sarah.”
She looks at me very seriously.
“She was the one I saw first. At the bus stop. When I started skipping school.”
“Twenty-three-year-old Sarah?”
“Yes.”
She looks relieved. “I’m so glad to hear this.”
“She’s kinda snobby,” I say. “Thinks she knows everything.”
Mom nods.
“Do you think I should see a therapist or something?”
She says, “Let’s make a snack.”
I follow her into the kitchen and she pulls out bread from the cupboard and cheese from the fridge and I sit at the little round table and watch as she makes a cheese sandwich and then piles it high with potato chips, puts the second piece of bread on top of the potato chips, and then smashes it down.
“Want one?”
“Nah.”
“A slice of cheese?”
“No thanks. I’m not hungry,” I say.
She sits in her usual chair and I move back into the corner chair and she says, between crunchy, cheesy bites, “I think I can get you excused from school. I have a friend. A doctor.”
“You’re going to tell him I’m crazy?”
“I’m going to tell him that we’re having a family crisis and that you’re in need of some time.”
“You’re not going to tell him about ten-year-old Sarah, are you?”
“No.”
“Are we having a family crisis?” I ask.
“I think so,” she says. “I’m pretty sure I am.”
“Okay,” I say. “Where’s Dad?”
“Who knows?”
“Aren’t you worried?”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. That he’s not home?”
“Not really.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Do you really think you’re going crazy?” Mom asks.
“No.”
“Good.”
“Did you know that sixteen is a popular age to have an existential crisis?” I ask.
“No.”
“Well, it is,” I say.
“Good to know.”
Dad comes home about a half hour after I go to bed. I know this because he slams his bedroom door. It’s past midnight. I wonder was he out with the person he was saying sorry to last week—if he has some sort of girlfriend or something. I wonder if he slammed his door to wake us up on purpose.
I’m not paranoid. I’m remembering.
Dad has not been the kindest man on the planet.
I’m going to call Bruce again tomorrow. We’ll talk about it. We’ll talk about everything.
Mexico—Day Five II: Edgy
By the middle of Day Five, things got edgy. Edgier than normal. Very, very edgy. Bruce was edgy because Dad was edgy and Mom was edgy because Dad was edgy and I was edgy because everyone was edgy. I think that’s why I ended up making friends with the fish I couldn’t see and the sea god I’d never named.
I think, really, if Dad was the one making everyone edgy, then we had always been edgy and would always be edgy.
He drank all day under his selfish bastard thatched umbrella. It seemed normal in Mexico to do this, but by Day Five, it also made him act like a complete asshole. Mom said please and thank you to waiters. Dad just barked orders. Mom tried to have fun with us in the water despite the seaweed, which stuck to her exposed bikini belly. Dad just rolled his eyes and said that wasn’t his idea of a good time. Dad was—and I knew it that day for sure—the pervasive seaweed in our family’s ocean. No matter if his surface looked calm from the shore, once you got into the water, the waves of crap just crashed and crashed.
I remember wondering what his idea of a good time was. I remember thinking it while floating faceup on the water. I even asked the sea god. I know it’s hard to understand and it was hard for me to understand it when I was ten, but I think Dad’s idea of a good time is sitting in one place, doing nothing. It reminded me of the commercials on TV for depression pills. I remember asking the sea god if Dad was depressed. The sea god didn’t have an answer. I remember asking the sea god if Dad could be helped. The sea god rose out of the water, forty stories high, and reached onto the beach and plucked Dad out from under his thatched umbrella and held him up by the leg. Dad was screaming. Then the sea god turned him into a chicken and swallowed him whole. I felt bad for that daydream, but who was I to control the sea god?
Anyway, Dad drank all day. He snapped at Mom a few times. When we all ate together he kept telling Bruce to stop eating so fast. He kept telling me I would turn into a tortilla chip. He kept looking at Mom like she’d caused him these problems—a son who ate too fast and a girl who was a tortilla chip.
Those days in the middle of the vacation were too long. Bruce went for long walks down the beach by himself or stayed in the room watching TV. Mom and I went to a movie at the resort. But during the day, we just hung out on the beach and it got boring. I was ten. I didn’t have a problem saying that I was bored.