Chapter 32
Now
Port of call: Wailea, Maui
Itinerary: beach day
Attire: swimsuits
The golden stretch of beach nestled between crashing surf and lush hillside on Maui’s western coast is the perfect place to be buried alive.
“More sand!” the twins yell as they dump another bucket over my splayed-out limbs.
I’ll probably be scraping grains out of my ass for at least three weeks, but it’s worth it for the delighted shrieks of my niece and nephews as they perform my burial.
Liam scoops the pail into a wet stretch of sand and hands it to Riley. “Here, don’t forget to cover her toes,” he suggests.
“Don’t encourage them,” I say through broken laughter. “I’m going to be in the shower until Tuesday scrubbing all this off.”
His eyes flare playfully before he lowers his voice so only I can hear. “Don’t worry,” he whispers. “I’ll join you.”
“You take showers together?” Jackson asks, his little brow scrunched with confusion.
My face burns. So much for trying to be discreet.
But Liam, as usual, doesn’t miss a beat. “Sometimes Auntie Roslyn needs help scrubbing all that sand off,” he says matter-of-factly.
I can see Jackson’s little brain trying to work out the logistics of this before he says, “I don’t need help in the shower. I’m big enough to do it myself,” and goes back to digging in the sand, unperturbed.
Liam’s eyes catch mine, and I do my best to suppress a laugh just as Jonah appears. “Please don’t tell me you’re corrupting my children?” he says.
“You mean you don’t want us telling them about nipple rings and ball gags?” I ask. “You really should have said something sooner, Jonah.”
Jackson’s face scrunches in thought. “What’s a ball gag, Daddy?”
Jonah scowls at us. “Not funny.”
“That’s because you have no sense of humor,” Bella says, appearing by his side in an orange bikini with a water bottle I’m almost certain doesn’t have water in it.
“Trust me,” he says with a heavy sigh. “You have to have a sense of humor when you have three kids under seven.”
“Don’t be such a downer all the time,” Bella says, giving him a jab in the ribs. “You’re gonna scare Roslyn and Liam off. And I, for one, don’t want to be deprived of Liam’s adorable offspring because you’re a grouch.”
“Liam’s offspring?” I ask. “Don’t you mean our offspring?”
“Have you seen Liam?” she jokes. “You better hope they take after him.”
“Bella!” I reprimand her, wishing my arms weren’t buried by my side.
“What?” She shrugs. “We’re all thinking it.”
“No, we aren’t,” Jonah and Ben say in unison.
Liam chuckles, his cheeks red. “Actually, as much as I appreciate your faith in my genes, I’m hoping our kids get Ros’s eyes,” he says, fixing his gaze on mine. “They look just like Maggie’s.”
Heat ripples down the length of my spine, all the way to my sandy toes.
This is all pretend, I remind myself. He’s playing along with the charade. Just like we agreed. But the way he’s looking at me makes me feel like a damned liar.
Bella rolls her eyes. “Just stop it already. What do you two want? A tiara and a sash for being the cutest couple ever? You’re making the rest of us look bad.”
“Excuse me,” Jonah says, wrapping his arm around his husband. “How come Ben and I aren’t in the running?”
“When either of you looks at each other the way Liam looks at Roslyn, then you can be in the running,” Bella says, fixing them both with pointed looks.
Something hot and sticky blossoms in my gut. I look to Liam to see how he’s responding to this, but Jonah kicks up sand in Bella’s direction and she squeals, darting out of the way just as a clump lands right in my face.
“Hey, watch it!” I cry. “That almost went in my eyes!”
She laughs. “That’s just payback for the one time at the park when you told me the sand in the sandbox tasted like Cinnamon Toast Crunch.”
“Well, that’s your fault for believing me,” I say.
“I was five!”
As she pours more sand on top of my stomach and the twins shriek with glee, Jonah stands to the side, a divot forming between his brows.
“The park off Roosevelt?” he asks. “With the tunnel slide?”
Bella’s expression twists with effort, like she’s trying to extract a long-buried memory. “I think so?”
“I drive by there all the time,” Jonah says, the levity now gone from his voice. “It’s next to the kids’ school. But I never let them play there.”
“Why not?” I ask.
A shadow crosses his face. “Bad memories, I guess.”
I frown, trying to figure out what he’s talking about. “What do you mean?”
His brows knit together. “You don’t remember?”
I shake my head, confused.
He digs his foot in the sand, his eyes downcast, before he says, “That’s the park where Mom left us to go meet up with some guy and I thought we were going to have to sleep in the tunnel slide.” He winces like it’s something he’d rather not think about.
A strange new weight presses against my chest that doesn’t have anything to do with the sand. “Mom would never leave us anywhere,” I say.
Jonah gives me a look. “She used to do it all the time. Take us to the park, tell us she had to run an errand, then go meet up with her boyfriend. One time it got so late, I had to ask some lady to borrow her cell phone so I could call Grammy to come pick us up. You don’t remember?” he asks again.
The tightness in my chest expands, turning sharper, more like an ache. Sure, she had lots of boyfriends, but she would never leave us alone for hours at a public park. Right?
“You’re exaggerating,” I say. “I’m sure she was just grocery shopping or something. Right?” I look to Bella, hoping she’ll back me up, but she just shrugs.
“I was too little to remember,” she says. “But it sounds like something Mom would do.”
She and Jonah share knowing looks, and I have the feeling this is something they’ve discussed before.
The usual pangs of feeling left out are there, but this time they’re joined by frustration. How can they talk about her like this?
“Mom wouldn’t do that,” I say again, this time more determined.
Jonah’s gaze sweeps over me before hitting me with a hard look. “She would, but you only remember what you want to remember about Mom.”
Suddenly the sand atop my chest might as well be cinder blocks. I try to sit up, but the sand is too thick, too heavy. Panic presses against my sternum, blocking my airflow, and I struggle to break free, to catch a breath.
Almost instantly, Liam kneels beside me. “You all right?” he asks.
“Just get me out of here,” I gasp.
He shovels the sand off and pulls me to my feet.
His eyes strain with worry, but he doesn’t ask questions, or say anything at all; he just takes my hand and leads me to the shore.
All around us, children play in the sand and teenagers bob in the waves, but I don’t see any of them. All I feel are Liam’s hands on my thighs. The cool water hitting my skin as he washes the sand off me. The unrelenting tightness in my chest.
After a beat, Liam finally asks, “Are you okay?”
I twist my mom’s bracelet around my wrist, reaching for the words to tell him I’m fine, the way I’m used to doing, but they don’t come. Instead, Jonah’s words dance in my mind. You only remember what you want to remember about Mom.
He was wrong. Right? But suddenly, I’m no longer sure.
“Do you think she was a bad mom?” I ask.
Liam swallows. “Maggie was a wonderful person; you know I think that.”
“But was she a bad mom?” I ask again.
His brows draw together, his outstretched hand hovering over my sandy knee. “Do you think she was a bad mum?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I mean, yeah she had a lot of boyfriends, and we moved a lot, but I always felt like she was just doing her best with the shitty hand she was dealt.” I pause, collecting my breath, a breath that now feels heavy in my lungs. “But now I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean?” he asks, using cupped palms to wash away the sand from my back and neck.
I look out at the ocean, hesitating before I say, “I always felt it was her shitty boyfriends’ fault that we didn’t have money or that we had to move or that she was always getting her heart broken. But maybe it wasn’t always them.” My eyes drop to my lap. “Maybe she just made bad choices.”
As soon as I say it, I want to swallow the words back. To shove them deep down inside myself, where no one can hear them, not even me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t talk about her like that.”
Liam pauses, his hands outstretched over the tide rushing across the sand. “Just because she’s gone doesn’t mean your feelings aren’t valid,” he says. “Grief brings up all kinds of memories.”
“I know, I just…” But my voice tapers off, lost to the increasing tightness in my chest, like there’s a crank inside me, winding my feelings tighter and tighter.
As much as I want to defend Mom’s memory, to insist she was the wonderful woman I remember her as, I know Jonah has a point.
That tangled up in good memories of playing dress-up in Mom’s closet and gossiping over iced coffees are memories of moving from apartment to apartment after she lost yet another job or broke up with yet another boyfriend.
Memories of never having any money because she was always writing checks for her boyfriend’s latest start-up or maxing out credit cards she couldn’t repay.
Memories I wish I could silo off in my mind where I don’t have to think about them.
Where I can pretend they don’t exist. Where I’ve been pretending they don’t exist.
“But what if my brother’s right?” I ask, dragging my focus back to Liam. “What if I’ve only been remembering her the way I want to remember her? Because it’s easier?”
Liam looks at me with tender eyes as glassy and transparent as the ocean in front of us.
“Of course it’s easier that way,” he says, looping reassuring fingers through mine.
“Grief is hard, and not all the emotions are easy to digest, so we find ways to make the pain at least a little more tolerable.”
My heart clenches like a fist.