She wipes something from her eye and goes off to assemble more panini.
Ellen and Hannah don’t trust her to make the bread, but she wanted to do something for us kids during our last weekend of summer, so they let her assemble the sandwiches.
I don’t know how my brothers feel about the “adulthood whole” comment, but I want to go easy on Mom for a while. I keep forgetting there are five of us and one of her. Most of the time she acts as though she can take it, but there has to be a price. I know we have a reputation for being tough, but do we have to be so tough? All those visits to the ER, all those resuscitations, broken bones, missing fingers. She’s never asked for help with us. She’s never asked for backup or a day off. She’s a foot shorter than we are but mightier than us all.
At my feet there is an aroo! I’ve stepped on Calamity’s ear again.
I spent most of the media frenzy that followed Joyce’s death and Grant’s homecoming from Hannah’s wai po’s farm by Henry’s side, holding his hand. The media didn’t seem particularly interested in what I had to say. I was just window dressing. The only thing I was asked about was when I was getting another dog to replace the one Joyce slaughtered.
I said not anytime soon, that it had been too hard burying the last one. Then the search-and-rescue people heard my story. The bloodhound people heard my story.
Suddenly everyone knew a guy who had a litter. Everyone wanted to help. They wanted me to have the best bloodhound in the state.
Two weeks ago a crate arrived on our doorstep with a note from agent Armstrong that read: “This dog is a complete calamity. Man up and train her.”
And then Calamity crawled out.
She was smaller than Patience, and thin, too. I could count her ribs under her fur. The first time I unleashed her in the backyard to soak up the wildlife smells, she stayed at my heels. She wouldn’t eat unless I sat on the floor next to her.
After two weeks of training, she follows a scent for five feet, then realizes she’s gotten away from me and comes cowering back. She jumps at the slightest noise. Tall men freak her out. Loud noises freak her out. Even bunny rabbits freak her out.
I mean, how do you train someone to be brave?
Henry still has no idea what really got Joyce that day in the garage. He thinks she drowned in a really big wave so powerful that it split her in two—both halves washing up in different places on the shore. I was there when we discovered her top half. Everyone kept saying what a blessing it was that the crabs hadn’t gotten to her eyes, which were wide open. I didn’t think it was such a blessing. She looked completely terrified. I couldn’t tell from the deluge in the garage that day, but I wonder if, in that last moment, she saw the troll who had her in his grip and recognized him for what he had once been.
The only ones to whom I can tell the tale are Hannah and her wai po. They believe me.
Hannnah’s wai po is a small woman who walks with a cane, nearly bent over double. But I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side. Her eyes, according to Hannah, are “freaky.” To me, there’s nothing freaky about them.
They’re the color of the sea.
“Oh, that one,” she says to me as I strain the seeds from tayberries to make ice cream. “The troll. I’ve been hearing him for years. I knew the sea was unquiet. I’m surprised he allowed his feast to wash up on the shore and didn’t keep it all for himself. But he did his job. He got his vengeance. And then he spat her out here for the family to see what kind of fate had been meted out to her. Now, I call that justice.”
I agreed with the justice part of what Hannah’s wai po was saying, but I thought there was another element she’d missed, which was that everything dead washed up on Useless Bay. I suppose that applied to Joyce, too. It was gross, but part of the wild beauty of the place that I loved so much.
It is the last weekend of summer. We can see weather systems rolling up and down the entire Sound. One moment it’s sunny; then the wind blows a certain way, and it rains.
My brothers and I hoist the coolers with the sandwiches (excuse me, panini) and Gatorade to take down to the Shepherds. Grant runs to meet us halfway. He appears unfazed by his time in hiding with Hannah’s wai po. He helped make loganberry wine. He got served sweet potato waffles with fried chicken for dinner.
But no matter how good Hannah’s wai po was to him, I know he is not unchanged by his experience in the Breakers that day. He saw his own mother strangled. Mr. Shepherd whisked him straight to therapy—none of which seems to help as much as that book of Russian fairy tales, Henry tells me. “He keeps looking at the illustrations. He wants to know if, wherever his mother is, she is dancing. I tell him that, yes, she is dancing the Firebird Suite so well she lights up the morning sky.”