“Okay then.” She claps her hands, her gold watch jangling around her slim wrist. “What if we head out to that beach you both love? Seems like a good place to start. We could go right now, in fact. What do you say?”
The cops already did a sweep of Victory Island this morning; Lindy told me so when I checked in during lunch. But I can use the ride to sniff out scraps of information Lindy may have on Sidonie Scott. Besides, my only argument against it is my natural aversion to alone time with Lindy. And I can’t tell her that. She’s okay, for a stepmother. I don’t know if any thirteen-year-old would be psyched to share their dad and their bathroom with a new woman. But even if Lindy and I never did the whole hair-braiding, chick-flick-watching, homemade-cookies thing, she could’ve been worse. She left her fancy Boston practice and joined a smaller clinic in Framingham just so she could break the rules and be with Dad, so I guess she loves him. And if it was weird to have this therapist we’d been seeing suddenly walking around my house in her silk pajamas, at least she didn’t try to smother me or anything. She said I was a “partner in the family,” and never treated me like a pain, or the price of marrying Dad, or some pathetic little half orphan.
So yeah, it could’ve been worse, for sure.
I don’t know what’s gotten into Lindy, or what her angle is. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe this is just another case of mutualism.
Crawling through rush hour traffic, Lindy and I retrace Wednesday’s route to the island. While bogged down on I-95, she keeps our conversation bland and safe:
“How’s that English paper coming along?”
“It’s okay. I got an extension.”
“Did you score the defense attorney spot in mock trial?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“How many volunteer hours are you up to?”
“Don’t know. Twenty? Twenty-two?”
“That hamper of your whites in the laundry room—are you waiting for a special occasion to wash them?”
“Not particularly.”
I’m pleasantly surprised by her benign questions. What Lindy really likes is some good self-reflection. It’s the therapist in her, which dozes but never truly slumbers. If I leave my late-night cheese and crackers and cold chicken and ice cream dishes in the sink? We have a talk about pride, and whether my lack of pride in my surroundings signals a lack of pride in myself. If I get a B-minus on a calculus test? We have a talk about my potential, and how my intelligence is a responsibility, and requires responsible choices, and what can we do to nurture said responsibility?
I count myself lucky and, in the breaths between answers, formulate my own questions for the drive back.
The beach, when we reach it at last, is even colder today. The wind whips brutally through the dunes, and with every step Lindy’s boot heels sink into the sand like golf tees.
The first time I remember coming here, it was one of the hottest nights in a legendarily hot summer. Dad told me so. A thunderstorm had knocked the power out and killed our air conditioner hours before, turned our house into a miserable, sticky swamp. In the middle of the night, after the storm blew past us, Dad came into my bedroom, where I was sweating through My Little Pony pajamas. He drove us to the coast. I don’t know how he found our particular beach, if he just went eastward until he couldn’t anymore, but I do know it was right around the Fourth of July, because I watched from the highway as amateur fireworks popped off above the cities. We walked barefoot through the still-warm sand. Lightning flashed in the distance over the ocean, and behind us, fireworks bloomed over Newburyport, so the whole sky was lit up in turns. It’s the first time I remember my little child-brain formulating the words I’d repeat to myself, often and forcefully: We are enough.
Silently, Lindy and I trudge a little ways up the beach, chins tucked into our collars. I don’t think either of us expects to find Dad huddled over a driftwood bonfire.
When sunset dusts the sky, we drive in circles through the kite shops and themed motels and clam shacks. We park pointlessly to show Dad’s photo inside a used bookshop he loves, and a gallery of wood carvings where he’s always threatening to buy something. As if Dad only stepped out to pick up a half-price paperback or a leaping salmon totem pole for the scraggly flowerbed in our front yard.
“It was a long shot,” Lindy says, and sighs as we turn and head for home. I agree; this place is ours, mine and Dad’s, so I hardly think the trail to my mother winds through the Victory Island Soap Emporium. Lindy doesn’t seem dejected, though. I think she spent more time side-eyeing me than scanning the streets out her window.
Still, I give it a little time before I break the silence. “So, did Dad ever tell you any stories? From before?”
“Before?” She takes the entrance ramp for the turnpike.
“I don’t know. Before . . . you.”
“You mean, did he tell me about your childhood?”
“Or before that.”
She wipes her wind-snarled hair out of her face. “What specifically are you asking me, Immy?”