Chapter Four
Four
Past summers when the kids visited, I’d wake before them and sit out on the patio drinking my coffee until Samson, always the first one awake, tumbled outside and begged for me to take him swimming.
Afterward we’d go to the beach, and he and I would sit side by side in the sand, talking about baseball and poisonous plants as the world grew brighter around us.
Mia and Kitty were usually still asleep when we’d return, their pillows dotted with drool.
But as I peeked into the living room now, I was surprised to find Kitty and Mia wide awake.
Mia sat cross-legged on the sofa bed, spooning cereal into her mouth as she stared at her phone with her headphones in her ears.
Kitty’s arm was draped over the back of the couch, and she appeared lost in thought as she prodded the succulents lined up on the windowsill.
I stepped into the kitchen before the girls could see me and scooped grounds into the coffee maker. When I turned around, I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight of Kitty behind me, her long, tangled hair reminding me of an apparition from a horror film.
“Shit!” I held my hand over my racing heart. “Crap, I mean.”
Kitty rolled her eyes. “Even Jonathan Swift used the word ‘shit,’ you know.”
“He’s the guy who wrote about eating babies, right?”
“Yup.”
“Kitty, you’re . . . thirteen. How have you read that?”
“Oh, I haven’t,” she said. “But I’ve read about it. Mia had to read it last year, and she told me about the baby eating, so I looked him up.”
“Well, if ‘shit’ is all right with J. Swift, then it’s all right with me.” I took the milk from the fridge and set it on the counter. “Grab me a mug?”
A cabinet door creaked open, and then Kitty went quiet. Wondering what the holdup was, I turned to find her holding a souvenir mug with a map of the Bahamas I’d bought my first charter season. She stared down at it, running a finger along its side, where the handle used to be.
“Kitty?”
She passed the mug to me, her chin quivering. “Is that the one Sam broke?”
I looked down at the mug in my hands. Last summer, Kitty and Samson had trapped a caterpillar inside of it.
Kitty had coaxed the caterpillar onto her finger, then jerked it into Samson’s face with a laugh, and he’d dropped the mug, the handle cracking clear off.
Embarrassed, Samson had refused to talk to Kitty for hours.
That night, after emptying a glass jar and duct-taping mesh from an old pool skimmer around the top, Kitty and Mia sat watching the caterpillar, wondering what type of butterfly it would be.
That’s a tent caterpillar, Samson had said, breaking his silence.
Kitty and Mia gave him blank stares. It’s a moth, he explained.
You’ve caught a stupid ugly moth. He then turned to me with a mischievous grin.
We should name him Peter, he’d said, making me laugh.
The three of them had spent their entire trip that summer trying to cheer me up post-breakup.
I looked at Kitty. “Yeah, I think it is.”
She nodded, her eyelashes fluttering as tears raced down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said, pressing a hand over her mouth.
The broken mug in my hands anchored me in place. All I could hear was Samson’s voice saying stupid ugly moth, and the memory of that fuzzy black caterpillar made it hard for me to see Kitty standing right in front of me.
Before I could find something to say, Kitty fled, and I heard the bathroom door slam shut.
Mia slid into the kitchen seconds later. “What happened?”
I held up the mug, hoping she’d understand.
She nodded, then darted to the bathroom. I set the mug on top of the fridge, where it would hopefully be forgotten, and followed her down the hall. Mia had her ear pressed to the bathroom door, her brows knit in concentration.
“Should I talk to her?” My hands were slick with sweat. What would I even say?
Mia ignored me. She knocked two, then three times on the door.
“What are you—”
Three sharp knocks sounded from the other side, and Mia sank to the floor, crossing her legs beneath her. “Three knocks means she needs to be alone,” Mia explained. “Two means she wants to talk.”
“Oh.” I glanced at the door. How often did this happen for them to have a system in place?
“Grief support group thing,” Mia said. “She’ll be okay. She just needs a few minutes.”
Grief support group? Beth hadn’t told me about this. Was I supposed to be taking them to one down here? Was I supposed to know these “things” they taught at grief support groups? Our mother didn’t believe in therapy, so when Dad died, we were left to deal with things on our own.
“You don’t have to stand there, you know.”
I took in Mia’s oversized tie-dyed hoodie, the droopy topknot of her hair, her serious eyes. How had she grown up so fast? How could this be the same person I’d once potty trained by bribing her with Skittles?
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” I returned to the kitchen, my hands shaking as I poured coffee into a different mug—one that was part of a set, whole and unbroken, indistinguishable from the rest.
When Kitty emerged from the bathroom twenty minutes later, I tried to act normal.
“The surf report looks good,” I said. “How do you feel about a little beach time?”
Kitty’s eyes brightened at the suggestion. “I’ll get my bathing suit.”
I turned to Mia, who sat on the unmade sofa bed, frowning at her phone.
“What about you, Mia?”
She yanked out a headphone. “Huh?”
“Beach day. Twenty minutes.”
Mia gave me a thumbs-up and rolled off the bed to dig through her suitcase.
The emotional turmoil of Kitty’s meltdown had me feeling unsure I could distract the girls on my own, so I texted the most distracting person I knew.
Beach day?
A message from Nina appeared seconds later. Just say you need help babysitting. Followed by See you in thirty.
—
Kitty, Mia, and I dragged lounge chairs behind us, trudging down the condo’s private beach to the waterline.
The sand warmed the soles of my feet, and the sight of the ocean loosened the tightness in my chest, allowing me to breathe deeply for the first time all morning.
After setting up our chairs and putting on sunscreen, Mia spread out a towel and closed her eyes, while Kitty rushed into the waves with a boogie board under one arm.
I sank into my chair and wiggled my toes in the sand.
Closing my eyes, I tilted my face to the sun.
This beach was where I felt most at home.
Many of my best memories had taken place here.
I remembered leaning against my mother beneath the shade of the umbrella after a morning in the sun.
I remembered my father adjusting my mask for the thousandth time, tugging on the strap and screwing up his face in the effort of it, but no matter what he did, water leaked in whenever I went snorkeling.
I remembered Beth crouched beside me, examining a sand flea as it buried itself.
My phone vibrated. A text from Beth.
Everything okay?
I picked up my phone and took two pictures, one of Kitty out in the water, and one of Mia lying on the chair beside me, then sent them to my sister.
I’m glad they’re having fun, Beth replied.
The text worried me. I wished she were here.
But I also wanted her to work things out with Mark.
Though I knew the statistics on divorce after the death of a child, I also knew the statistics on teenage parents staying together, and Beth and Mark had defied those odds.
Why couldn’t they overcome this? But I didn’t know how to ask how they were doing, mostly because I feared the answer.
I responded with a heart emoji and put my phone away.
“Jo!” I turned and spotted Nina dragging a beach chair behind her. Her bathing suit, like all her nonwork attire, was creative: a one-piece featuring a cat eating a slice of pizza.
“That bathing suit is hideous,” I said when she stopped beside me.
Nina squinted in the sunlight, looking from Mia, next to me, to Kitty, who floated on her back in the water. “You call this a beach party?”
“I never said it was a beach party.” But I could see what she meant. If my goal was to distract the girls, I wasn’t doing a great job.
“Nina!” Kitty called. She paddled in, wrapping Nina in a wet hug when she reached us.
Kitty gasped. “I love your bathing suit. Mia, did you see?”
Mia cracked open an eyelid. “Hey, Nina. Cool bathing suit.”
“See, Josephine?” Nina dropped into her chair. “I’m hip with Gen Z. Don’t think I didn’t hear you.”
Kitty sat down on a towel in front of Nina. “Are you and Ollie together yet? Mia owes me fifty bucks if you two get married.”
Nina turned to me and wrinkled her nose. “This is unbelievable. Stop infecting your nieces with propaganda. Ollie is nobody to me.”
Mia raised her eyebrows. “He sure doesn’t sound like nobody.”
“He is very much somebody,” I said, ducking to avoid the towel Nina threw at me.
“You’re driving now, right?” Nina said to Mia. “You’ll have to take my convertible for a spin. Top down, wind in your hair, there’s nothing better.”
“Oh,” Mia said. “I don’t really . . . driving isn’t really my thing.” She turned to Kitty. “Come play shuffleboard with me.”
“Okay, yeah,” Kitty said, leaping to her feet and following her sister up the beach.
“That was weird,” Nina said once the girls were out of earshot.
“Yeah, it was.” I kept my gaze on the girls until they disappeared through the gate. Last summer, when Mia had her permit, she’d practically been my chauffeur.
Nina sighed into her chair. “How’d the first night go?”
I told her about everything that had happened since the girls arrived, including my call with Beth, Mia and Kitty’s insistence they help with the list after discovering my blog, and Kitty’s meltdown.
“Well that’s not emotionally complicated at all. You’ll have to think outside the box to finish the list, huh?”