Chapter 48 #2
We’re out there a few minutes or maybe a couple of hours, I’m not sure.
It’s funny, it’s not how I thought mushrooms would be.
It’s not like we’re all slack-jawed, staring at things and saying, dude, whoa.
It’s really just made everyone a little quieter, less sharply aware of how we ought to be filling silences.
We’re just existing together, noticing what’s around.
Eventually we go back in, Birdie sopping wet, but no one cares.
It’s never been a house for much worry like that.
I hate going to people’s houses where you feel afraid of splashing a bit of water on the counter or worry about what might happen if, god forbid, you spill your glass of wine.
This is a house that absorbs mistakes and casts no judgment for them, holds no stoicism for its forgiveness.
Sammie gets a stack of beach towels. She ends up with the old The Little Mermaid one, I get a striped one I know was stolen from the Sandcastle Hotel, and the guys get ones that would be indistinct to anyone else, but to me—maybe to us all—they’re deeply familiar.
I spot Migla curled up by the fire on a blanket folded there.
I get the urge then to go outside again. I say, “Actually…,” and then I go out through the sliding door and run out into the rain with complete abandon, tearing my shirt off, then my bra, and then my jean shorts, leaving on only my thong. I think I know they’ll follow.
And they do. Buddy system.
No one tells me not to jump into the water, and I realize then that it’s because I’m usually the one who would say not to.
And instead of seeing this as a bad thing, as pressure, as a demand for me to be the adult in the room, it actually means I have freedom.
If no one else will take on the responsibility, it doesn’t mean I have to. No one has to.
Sammie gets naked and jumps in the water with me. It’s surprisingly calm, despite the storm. The water lists in and out, but doesn’t churn. Plus, I know this water so well. Know how far out it stays shallow and where the jetty is.
The guys strip down too, and come into the water. Matt in his boxers, Austin completely naked.
Matt swims up to me and says, “His dick really is huge,” which makes me laugh so hard my mouth fills with water. No one else asks what we’re laughing at.
“I think it actually makes sense,” I call out, over the loud, loud rain. “Like, of course we’re here.”
There’s a ripple of agreement through everyone.
Sammie floats on her back near me and then she says, “Harrison is really nice, isn’t he?”
I nod, and then when I realize she might not be able to see me, I say, “Yeah, he is.”
When we finally go inside, picking up our respective towels again, I feel more sober and about as relaxed as I can ever remember feeling. The house is cozy and sweet and filled with textures that seem designed to make me happy.
I excuse myself, still nude except for the striped towel, and go upstairs.
I pad quietly down the hall, not wanting to be heard.
Maybe because I want this moment to be just for me, or maybe I’m just trying not to disturb the peace of the house.
Maybe not wanting to be heard by the ghosts.
I stop in front of Babe’s bedroom doors.
I think I’m there a long time before I finally open them.
I step inside and shut the doors behind me, soaking in the rich scent of her perfume that still dances in the air as if it were just sprayed. I flip the switch.
It goes to a brass floor lamp in the corner, against the built-in bookshelf, and behind the velvet chaise longue that has been here since Babe was a child.
Her bed is made, and I wonder if it was made last by her.
It looks like it. She always made it the same way, probably some inherited way of doing it, with the top folded down and the sheets splayed neatly on top—pattern facing the right way up, which is only accomplished by putting it upside down.
At the foot of the bed, an old knitted blanket that I always hated because it was too itchy.
I open the balcony doors and let the wind gust in, and for a second it makes the room feel so alive I feel like I might be sent back in time. And why not? Would it even surprise me?
I open her dresser drawers, and touch her things. Soft satin slips she wore to bed, cotton bras, cushy socks. T-shirts, jeans. In the closet, her flowy dresses and rarely needed coats and jackets.
Her bathroom, still neatly arranged.
It really is like a gallery. One of those displays you can hardly believe. This is the very brush Empress Sisi used on her famous long locks, right here having traveled through time to be borne witness by you.
Her toothbrush. Her shampoo. Her conditioner. It makes me feel dizzy. She had all this time before she chose to go, and she didn’t pack up this house, not even her toothbrush. She must have known we’d prefer it this way. Prefer it to be preserved until we can let it all go on our own time.
A wave of nausea rocks through me at the idea of selling the house.
We can’t. How could we? Sammie is right.
The idea of all this in boxes, stripped down to its bare bones, only to be sold to someone else who might come in and fill this place with seashells and signs from T.J.Maxx that say something stupid like MERMAID PARKING ONLY or BEACH HAIR, DON’T CARE.
They’d probably let the old tomato vines, smuggled from Italy when my grandfather was young and heedless, die.
And what about the birds that sing outside these windows, the generations of them that have stayed around here, only to sing to us, every passing generation of us? Aren’t they ours?
A while later, after the discovery of the writhing pattern on the wallpaper in the living room and the fact that we all agree about the key jingle sound thing that I’d never actually said out loud to anyone else, Sammie calls me into the powder room.
I squeeze in next to her.
“What is it?” I ask.
And then she points at the mirror. I follow to our reflection. At first I don’t know what she’s pointing at, I just see us, but then I understand.
I look into her beautiful face, and then into my own. I feel far away and also harshly present.
I stare at each of us until it hits me, and I gasp.
She nods, like we’re communicating completely through brain waves.
In her face, and in my own, I can see our mother. I have her thin nose. She has her blond hair. I have the full lips and she has the dark lashes.
It has never been clearer to me then, and it feels deeply profound, that we are our mother’s daughters.