Monsoon Season (19 page)

‘Fine.’ Donna sat at the small kitchen table. She crossed her legs and started shaking her foot. ‘I talked to Riley today.’

‘Yeah?’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘How is she?’

‘Okay. But guess who showed up at her house.’

‘No way.’ He turned down the burner, leaned against the counter and folded his arms.

‘Yep. He made a big scene in her front yard and told her dad about the abortion.’

‘What an asshole.’

Donna nodded. ‘Her dad chased him away and she hasn’t seen him again so he must be back in Tucson by now.’

He rubbed his chin. ‘Did you tell her we’re getting hitched?’

‘Mmm. I didn’t really get a chance.’

‘You didn’t?’

‘Well, she was upset. It didn’t feel like the right time.’

He turned away. She could hear him breathing. He shut off the burner. ‘Are you backing out?’

He asked it so quietly and sounded so crushed, as if he was getting ready to let her go, if that was what she wanted. Donna stood up and walked toward him, wrapping her arms around him from behind and pressing her lips to the back of his neck. ‘I’m not backing out,’ she said, and she knew she never would.

He grasped her hands at his chest. ‘I’m going to get you a ring.’

‘I don’t care about that.’

He turned to face her, holding her close. ‘I want you to have a ring when we tell your mom.’

Donna smiled. ‘I’m not a jewellery person, Dave.’ This was true. She’d had her ears pierced when she was ten, but hadn’t worn earrings in so long that the holes had closed up.

‘Just something small.’ He was holding her hands, looking at her fingers as if picturing the perfect thing.

‘Something small,’ Donna whispered, as he brought her fingers to his lips. He held her there and she switched off the oven, but the salmon came out a little dry anyway.

Sometimes Donna had a secret wish to run other people’s lives for them, but she kept the secret pretty well. She thought she got it from her mother, who wasn’t so secretive about it. Also, Donna had learned over the years that sometimes she could be wrong, which was oddly comforting.

She was glad that Riley had gone back to Massachusetts. She missed her every day but it just felt safer. Especially after Ben had shown up there. What he’d done. But if she were in Tucson, it would be worse. At least her parents could protect her. And the distance. If Riley were here, Ben would be camped out at their door just like last time. When Donna thought about the times she had run into him, passed along letters. She’d felt
sorry
for him. If only Riley had told her the truth then, Donna would never have let her go back. None of this would be happening.

She did sort of wish Riley had had the baby, though. Donna got the feeling that her parents were in a position to help. And Riley would have made a great mom. She had a lot more going for her than Donna’s mother had when she’d found herself pregnant and alone, that was for sure.

But that’s not the kind of thing you can say to a person. Friendships don’t withstand that kind of judgement.

The shadow leaned and spread across the lawn as if the house was shifting its weight. Gracie trotted over to me. I scratched her lower back and she stood there, one of her hind paws raised slightly, her snout pointed skyward, eyes partly closed. Every few seconds she’d whip her head around, her body making a U-shape, looking like she might bite my hand because she couldn’t stand it any more. But she’d just nip at the air, then face forward again. Finally, after a few minutes, she walked away, chewed the grass. She chewed it with her big, pointy back teeth, pulled it out of the ground with her tiny front teeth. She weeded out the other weeds.

I spent as much time out there as I could. Mom was beginning to need me less. She said it was good for her to get her own lunch. It was all part of her recovery. She was managing the stairs on her own now, slowly. We made dinner together. I carried the boiling water to the sink; she stirred the sauce. She chopped the vegetables; I brought everything to the dining-room table.

I tried to eat dinner quickly and keep my mouth perpetually full. Dad sat across from me, staring into his plate. Mom chattered enough for both of us, her eyes drifting from her husband to her child.

I couldn’t tell what she knew.

When I was twelve, I got my first period. In the fifth grade, I had been prepared for this. My class was divided by gender: the boys went off with the gym teacher, the girls went with the school nurse. We studied diagrams of the human body. It was called Sex Education, but there wasn’t anything sexual about it. We memorized the names of internal organs. We watched a video that showed microscopic sperm swimming tirelessly, slamming themselves into the female’s egg. Nothing about attraction, longing, pleasure. It was all about what happened
after
sex, behind the scenes.

They finished the week with a gift of sample tampons and pads, and pamphlets about other products that could keep our female bodies clean and unobtrusive.
Don’t worry
, they assured us,
you can go swimming with everyone else during your monthly period. No one ever has to know
.

I was not looking forward to it. I was, however, looking forward to the breasts that were promised; the ones that began as overly sensitive little bumps and grew into plump, perky C-cups, the perfect accessory to any outfit. I never did get those C-cups. I was still keeping a close eye on those bumps when I woke up one morning with blood in my underwear.

My mother kissed my forehead as I cried, embarrassed. She told me I should be happy. It was part of growing up. I was becoming a woman. She told me about a girl she knew whose father had bought her a dozen roses to celebrate her first period.

I was horrified. ‘Don’t tell Dad,’ I pleaded.

‘We’re married and that means I tell him everything.’ There was no compromise about it.

I wondered if it worked both ways.

The water was so high this year that there was no beach. Isabel sat in the shallow water, digging in the wet sand as her bulky diaper got bulkier. Laura rubbed sunscreen on the back of her neck, her shoulders, the tip of her nose. I sat on the dock with my feet in the water, watching them.

‘Your mom looks really good,’ Laura told me.

‘Yeah. She’s getting back to normal. She still gets tired easily, but she’s doing really well.’ I tied my hair back into a ponytail, wrapping the elastic around and around.

Gracie chewed at a lily-pad. I kicked water at her and she stood up on her back legs, the water up to her chest, looking like a bear. She hit it with her front paws, splashing back and biting at the water in the air.

Isabel giggled. ‘Doggie,’ she said.

‘Doggie,’ Laura repeated. ‘Silly doggie.’

Isabel made a mud patty, slapped it onto Laura’s thigh.

‘How are you getting along with your dad?’ Laura asked.

I shrugged. ‘We pretty much avoid each other. We haven’t talked about it again. I mean, what more is there to say?’

‘Maybe you could make him understand.’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think I could have done anything worse in his eyes.’

‘It’s like that with my mom. I think Kyle and I could celebrate our golden anniversary and still be the family scandal.’ She shook her head. ‘My mom thinks we’ll never tell Isabel.’

‘Will you?’

‘Sure. When she’s older. Keeping it a secret just makes it seem worse than it is.’

‘You’re right.’

‘So you don’t think you’ll ever talk to your dad about it?’

‘I know he’ll never bring it up. And I can’t imagine myself doing it.’

‘Yeah. I guess some things just don’t get resolved.’

I nodded.

‘So you haven’t heard from Ben since
the incident
?’

‘Nope.’ I sighed. ‘It still seems so unreal. I never thought he’d come here. Especially after—’ I faltered.

‘After?’

‘After I told him about the abortion. Somehow I thought that would be it for him. I think, in the back of my head, it was some kind of guarantee.’

‘Of?’

‘It was my way of ensuring we couldn’t get back together.

No matter how tempted I might be in some of my weaker moments.’

Laura brushed her hair across her forehead and out of her eyes. ‘Can I trust that you’ve finished this chapter of your life?’

‘Yes, yes. No more drama here, thankyouverymuch. My life is just going to be simple and boring from now on.’

‘Simple and boring are highly underrated.’

‘Hear, hear!’ I held out an imaginary champagne glass and Laura held out hers for an imaginary clink.

Gracie walked over to Isabel and licked her face. Isabel turned to Laura, looking crumpled and worried, her eyes filling with tears.

Laura smiled. ‘The doggie likes you,’ she said. ‘She gave you kisses.’

That seemed to satisfy her. She blinked away the tears, giggled and patted Gracie on the head.

The summers of my childhood are filled with the smell of lake water, the feeling of pine needles caught between bare toes walking on the lumpy, hot pavement that ran between my grandfather’s camp and the general store on the corner. It was a lake in New Hampshire that I knew simply as ‘Grampy’s lake’, and when I was really small, I assumed my grandfather allowed the other campers to use the lake out of an extreme case of generosity.

At the general store, they sold Sugar Daddys for fifty cents. The hard caramel rectangle came on a stick wrapped in yellow paper and I liked the way it moulded to the roof of my mouth. After a few minutes of sucking, it resembled the plastic part of an adolescent’s tooth retainer I thought they were cool. There was a boulder in the woods the size of a small house. I knew just where to set my feet to get the right traction to climb it. The top of it was covered with moss; all but one corner was in shade and so cool it felt damp. Lying up there, with my face in the small square of sunlight, I could hide out and pretend to be beyond the reach of my mother’s voice when she called me.

Grampy liked to set off fishing early, but that never happened. Alex was always slow in the morning and my father hadn’t grown up camping and didn’t know the schedule. Grampy would sigh as he watched Alex’s slow spooning of his cereal. My mother would shrug and smile.

The boys went out in the boat after breakfast. Grampy cranked the motor and steered them away as my mother and I watched from the dock until the boat got small. Then she would lay a towel across the boards while I played in the water. She’d lie on her stomach in a flower-printed one-piece swimsuit, wriggling her arms out of the straps to prevent tan lines. She kept her face pointed in my direction and cracked an eye open from time to time as we talked and I tiptoed along the rocky bottom of the lake, worried to step on a freshwater clam and slice open my foot. My mother had warned me this could happen, had happened to her once, and that was the word she used:
sliced
. I tiptoed from one rock to another, like a ballerina, sweeping the surface lightly before trusting it with my weight.

‘That’s far enough,’ she’d say, when the water reached to my armpits.

One day I waited until she’d closed her eyes again and tiptoed a few steps past what was allowed. I lay in the water face down, letting my body go limp. Alex called it the dead man’s float.

I heard her shout my name and the splash she made when she jumped into the water. I was already laughing when she reached me, flipped my body over. Her eyes were wide with panic, then narrowed at my laughing face. I tried to stand on my own, but she was still holding me and my feet couldn’t reach the bottom.

Her scream had carried across the lake and I could hear the motor as the boat drew closer. My mother trudged to the dock slowly, still holding me under the armpits. She sat me on the end of the dock and crouched in the water, holding her stomach as if I had punched her.

‘What happened?’ my father yelled, as the boat came near.

My mother looked up, dazed. She pulled herself from the water, reached for her towel and wrapped it around her shoulders. At camp, all the towels were from the sixties, worn so thin that they were no good at absorbing water and were really only capable of shielding flesh from direct contact with the air.

My grandfather turned off the boat’s motor as he pulled in alongside the dock.

‘It was a joke,’ my mother said, through chattering teeth.

My father stepped from the boat and reached for her. ‘What was?’

She shook her head and pulled away. She climbed up the stairs to the road above. They were so steep she kept a hand on the wooden boards ahead of her, climbing it like a ladder.

My father looked to me for an explanation.

‘I was just kidding around,’ I said, starting with my defence. I wished someone would hand me a towel. They were all at the bottom of the stairs.

‘What did you do?’ My father waved his arms to show his patience was running out.

‘Dead man’s float.’

‘Nice going,’ Alex said, hopping off the boat.

‘Jesus, Riley. What were you thinking?’

I shrugged.

‘You stay out of that water.’ My father pointed a finger at me, in case there was any doubt who he meant. ‘And no more swimming for the rest of the week, young lady.’ He disappeared up the steps with Alex behind him.

My grandfather tied the boat to the dock and stepped off. He walked to the bottom of the stairs, picked up a towel and wrapped it around me.

He stood behind me, breathing slow and loud. ‘Death is a whole lot funnier when you still haven’t seen it up close yet.’

I hugged my knees against my chest and wondered what he meant.

Alex and Emily flew in for the weekend. They rented a car, got a room at the Sheraton across town. They didn’t want to be a bother. I wished I could borrow their room for an hour, hang the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, bolt the door, lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling.

Emily was blonde. They were always blonde. The last one had been younger than me. She’d worn a skirt that ended high on her thigh and seemed to regret her choice as soon as she’d been introduced to my parents. When she sat down, she tugged at it, trying in vain to cover her bare flesh. We had gone out to dinner and she was the only one of us not old enough to order a beer. I had ordered a Coke as well. I felt protective of her.