Chapter 11

WHAT do you say to that? I sat there in bed still wrapped around my pillow, almost wishing I hadn’t asked. But I marveled at the selfish, tunnel-visioned person I had clearly been to have never asked before.

I couldn’t comprehend losing a child like that. Especially fighting so hard for it and then losing. I also couldn’t stand to see Alex like that. A broken man. He was always the pillar of strength, with the killer smile and kick-ass attitude. This was the Alex he hid from me. The one with the cross to bear.

Oh, man, it ripped my heart out. I got up, wishing Riley was home so I could hug her. I felt like I needed to do something productive to offset feeling like a complete ass, so I decided to go downstairs and clean something. The living room, I noticed, was pretty good. Bathroom was good—much cleaner than mine. The kitchen still had food crumbs and dirty dishes left from earlier, so that was the winner.

Some people find it therapeutic to hand wash dishes. The warm soapy water and the transition from dirty to clean—all that. I’m not one of those people. I feel strongly that dishwashers should experience that magic and provide us with the mystery.

When we first landed back at Dad’s, I was happy to dive into that sink out of sheer gratitude. Over the weeks since, I found reality and reintroduced his dishwasher to the world. I was loading up this marvel of technology when he walked in with Bo, who made a beeline for my crotch before I diverted him with a spatula.

“What’s up?” Dad asked, pulling out a chair with a scrape.

“Nothing. Just antsy today, I guess.”

“What for?” He laid out his newspaper across the table like he’d done my whole life.

“I don’t know,” I said, cramming a meatloaf pan between two plates. “Thinking of things I know I should do, versus—running off to Disney World.”

He chuckled. “You used to want to adopt Pluto. Said he got a raw deal since Goofy could talk.”

That made me grin. “Yeah, I guess even the happiest place on earth has its issues.”

“Guess so.”

“Oh hey, Riley had an album the other day that I’ve never seen before. An old yellow one with black and whites of you and Mom.”

Dad peered down his glasses at the paper. “Yeah.”

“Have you seen it lately? I wanted to look at it.”

“Hmm. No, don’t think so.”

I went back to loading. “Riley said she put it in my room, but it wasn’t there. Oh, and neither is my picture of me and Mom.”

He frowned and looked at me over the top of his glasses. “What?”

“The picture of Mom holding me—it wasn’t in my box.”

“Oh,” he said quickly. “I took that a while back to have copies made.” He winked and went back to his paper. “Kinda wanted one myself.”

“So, where’s mine?”

“I guess I forgot to put it back. Maybe I stuck it in that other album instead.”

I laughed and put a hand on my hip. “Which would be where?”

He looked up again like one waiting for the inquisition to be over. “I don’t know, sweetheart. But I’ll look around, okay?”

“Okay.”

I went back to the dishwasher, thinking that was an odd conversation. Odd enough, that after he left for a drive into Restin, I went on a mission. I looked through every cabinet and shelf in the living room. I went to his room but just stood in the middle and scanned, unable to bring myself to invade his privacy. The picture of my mom and me was in a frame on a bookshelf, and it pulled me closer.

I felt the familiar pang of loss and distance mixed together that I always felt. As if I were looking at someone else’s photos. And it struck me for the first time how much she looked like Riley. Same mischievous smile.

There was only one other place to look, and that was the attic, which seemed a highly extreme thing to do for a photo album. Still, something was driving me to find it. I pulled down the hide-away stairs and peered up into the darkness, sure that I was crazy.

I looked down at Bo next to me, who gazed from me to the stairway and swung his tail like a baseball bat.

“You gonna come with me?”

His eyebrows did a little Groucho Marx thing, and his tail got a little less enthusiastic as the oppressive attic heat poured down.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

I trudged up the stairs as they creaked and wiggled under my weight and grabbed the flashlight my dad kept on a hook at the top. Just in case. Daylight poured in from a dusty window, but it didn’t make it to the corners.

“Whew, it’s hot up here, Bo,” I called down.

But it wasn’t just hot. It was crackly. Like if I rubbed my hands together, I’d ignite a spark. It made my skin itch. And it was an odd sensation in contrast with the mugginess everywhere else.

I scanned the room, turning in a circle with my beam as it landed on boxes and plastic tubs and black plastic garbage bags labeled in tape and Magic Marker. My Big Wheel was there, as well as a pogo stick and a crib that had slept my dad, me, and Riley. Lead paint and all. There was a big box of wooden crafts that I’d started and never finished. My old rock collection, including the polisher that was all the rage when it came out but in reality only held up through one batch. My grandfather’s old wooden rocking chair with two different-sized rockers that always listed to one side.

And a big treasure chest. I laughed when I saw it because for one it looked like something you would find in an attic in the movies. And second, my dad and I made it together for a school project about pirates. Except him being him, it wasn’t made out of cardboard and glue. We made an actual treasure chest of treated wood and heavy-duty hardware that he had to put on rollers so I could bring it into the building, and it will probably outlive Riley’s great-great-grandchildren.

Inside, I knew there was old “stuff,” so I headed that way and pulled up a stool that I had painted eyes all over when I was six. I unlocked the fake padlocks and lifted. Right on top. There it sat. I stared at it for a minute, at first startled, then confused, then annoyed. I picked it up and turned the first couple of pages as a wave of dizziness hit me. I closed my eyes and shook my head, thinking that was happening way too often. I blinked and focused.

“You have no idea where it is, huh?” I said out loud. “Can’t imagine how it got locked up here.”

There were some pictures I’d seen before, which now I knew had just been pulled from their little corner-piece holders, because they were all in their places. Others were new to me.

Snapshots of my mom, young, maybe even Riley’s age, acting goofy and looking full of life. At the beach in pedal pushers and an oversized button-down shirt, throwing sand at whoever took the picture. She and my dad, smooching upside down from tire swings over by the old dock. I recognized the cove. Even Jiminy, young and unwrinkled, holding a bottle of Falstaff up for the camera as he and my dad perched on an old car and grinned the carefree expression of kids with no worries. My dad, whom I’d never known to be skinny and beardless, looked to be about eighteen.

The heat settled on me, making my clothes and hair wilt and stick, but I hardly noticed it. Everything was captioned, and my hands shook as I read the handwriting. All the times I wanted something new of her. And here it was. Funny little quirky comments that were so her style.

Then interspersed with other pictures of them in action were some odd ones of seemingly nothing. A tree. My favorite old dock in its better days. A porch. An old car. But it wasn’t the pictures that made my skin crawl. It was the captions. I read them again and again.

Every nerve ending in my body stood up on full salute, as the ringing in my ears rocketed to a deafening pitch and the words swam in front of me. I felt hotter than before, and I pulled at the neck of my T-shirt like it was cutting off my air.

“Are you kidding me?” I choked out as I touched the faded black print.

She was like me. My mom was like me.

And Dad knew.

“Oh my God.”

I flipped page after page, only half seeing the images, looking for the ones that had no images. There were only a handful of them, but it was enough. As I turned the last page, there was my picture, tucked loose into the back cover. Me and my mother.

“My moth—” I sobbed on the word and touched her face. “You knew this world. You knew how hard—why—why didn’t you come help me?”

I tossed the book aside and buried my face in my hands. All those years of feeling cut off from her. Of needing a mother. Of feeling like an outcast. Treated like a freak.

She was a freak, too.

But—I raised my head—she didn’t come across that way. She tried to take pictures of them, for one thing, and then put them very publicly in a book just because she knew they were there. She didn’t have to do that. She could have hid them or thrown them away. She chose to write about them, and—

“Oh my God.”

Riley looked at that book. But said nothing. Did she not understand? Maybe she didn’t read the captions? Or just thought old people were odd and blew it off. I swiped at my eyes and sweaty face, and then saw something else. Clipped together in a box next to some old framed school photos were a group of folded papers. I pulled them out and unclipped them, the old faded paper retaining the indention. I opened one, and my breath caught as I saw my mother’s handwriting.

I ran my hand over the faded ink, trying to feel her. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it took forty years to find it out. I folded it back carefully and opened two more, which only talked about school and graduation and not having to work at the drive-in for a week because she had a sprained wrist. And little hints about their sex life, which was more information than I needed, but even that I soaked up because it made her more real to me. She was human in those letters. Not just captions under pictures.

There were many generic ones that I scanned, and then the last letter I opened slowly, not wanting it to be over where I’d be searching for more again.

I felt light-headed. I carefully folded each letter back up and replaced the clip, just as I heard the footsteps on the wooden attic stairs.

“Hello? Dani, you up there?”

“Yeah,” I called, but my voice sounded odd and weirdly pitched.

Dad’s heavy footsteps made the trek up and stopped at the top.

“Whatcha doing, sweetheart?”

I couldn’t turn around. Everything inside me threatened to ooze out my pores and scream. He walked up next to where I sat, and I heard him let out a defeated sigh. I could imagine him scratch his beard as he took in the album and the group of papers I still held in my left hand. I suddenly felt oddly guilty for having read his letters, but not enough to stem the flow of anger that poured from my eyes.

Without a word, he walked to the dirty window and stood staring out of it, hands shoved into the pockets of his blue jumpsuit.

“You need to tell Riley,” he said without turning around. “Don’t make the same mistake I did.”

Then he walked back to the stairs and went down and outside. I heard the screen door close behind him. I sat there, unable to move, wondering if there was more to be found. I rooted around halfheartedly but saw nothing else. So I grabbed the album and picked up the letters, then stopped and put them back in their place. The album was fair game, but the letters didn’t belong to me. And they were forever burned into my brain anyway.

I spent the next hour in my room, studying that album like the little kid I used to be, trying to grasp some little new piece of my mother. But I had gold now. Getting to read actual thought processes in her letters was just short of a video for me. Which really would have been awesome, but that wasn’t happening in the sixties.

I was so glad that Riley wasn’t home. My brain was too swirly with secrets to be able to piece any kind of logic together.

But I did need to go face one person.

I wandered out onto the porch with two orange sodas in my hand. Dad was in the porch swing, staring off at nothing.

I took one of the big chairs and pulled my feet up with me, as we popped the tabs on our sodas and I marveled at how big a sound that makes when you’re dancing around silence.

“When I first met your mother,” he began, “I knew something was different, but I didn’t know what. I just knew I was completely in awe.”

“She was beautiful.”

“She was more than beautiful. She had a presence. An infectious laugh. And nothing bothered that girl; she embraced everything as a gift.”

There was a moment of silence, and I didn’t know if I was supposed to fill it, but I couldn’t.

“The first time I found out about it was by pure accident. Walked up on her talking to someone.” He stopped and took a long swig of his soda. “I thought she was joking, but she spilled it all. I wasn’t sure I believed it. I mean, to the outside eye, it just looks like you’re talking to yourself.”

“Guess so.”

“But Jiminy—he thought it was cool, or he just thought she was cool, or probably a little of both. I couldn’t blame him. You couldn’t help but love Nadine.”

“He’s never said anything like that.”

“And he won’t. But he was a better friend to her on that subject. He listened to her. To be honest, it creeped me out a little bit, watching her talk to nothing, whereas Jiminy was all into it.”

Well, at least he was honest. Now.

“And when people looked at her funny, she didn’t care. She laughed it off and people loved her regardless. She just had that way.”

“Unlike me.”

My dad looked at me straight on, and I winced a little at his pained expression.

“Exactly. Honey, when your mother died, I was a wreck. But I went on the best I could because I had someone counting on me. I had this precious little girl that grew to be quiet and thoughtful and watchful and more like me than her outgoing mom.”

I nodded.

“When you started showing signs of—seeing people—” He shook his head and faced forward. “I thought, oh, hell no. Not this girl, please. I was so afraid for you. You didn’t have the thick skin that she did.”

“Like Riley.”

“God, I’m telling you, Riley is so much like her, it’s eerie sometimes. Such a free spirit and doesn’t care.”

“And I’m scared for her. I mean, she’s strong, but she’s also new here. Her roots aren’t deep enough.”

“You’re gonna have to trust that she can handle it, Dani. I screwed up, pretending I didn’t see it half the time, thinking it would go away if we didn’t acknowledge it.” He blew out a breath. “I was wrong.”

My eyes burned with the unspoken subject. “Okay. I can understand that part. But—” I stopped and tried to get it together so it wouldn’t sound angry. He beat me to it.

“Why didn’t I tell you about your mother?” He closed his eyes and scratched at his beard. “I don’t know. I guess because you and I never talked about it, and after a while, too much time had gone by.”

“But—” The hot tears spilled over. “Do you know how alone I felt? I was a freak, Dad. A complete outcast. I still am. Do you realize people threw food on me last night?”

He flinched. “What?”

“Yeah, it hasn’t changed.” I rubbed at my face. “Do you know how much easier life would’ve been just to know I wasn’t the only one? That I had something in common with her?”

His eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry, baby.”

“Why did you keep that from me?” I cried.

He shook his head. “I was wrong.”

We sat in silence for a while, till I got myself under control. I thought of what he’d said about Jiminy, and his relationship with her.

“So—” I began, then having to clear the crying from my throat. “Is that why you and Jiminy grew apart? Because of him and my mother?”

“Not really,” he answered, his voice quiet as he sat back and rocked the swing gently. “I was okay with that. It was more after she died that we didn’t see eye to eye.”

“What do you mean?”

He breathed in slowly and released it even slower. “He took it pretty hard. I don’t think he was ever quite the same without Nadine to light things up.” A silent chuckle came with a small smile. “And she did. She made everything—glow.”

“So being around you, I guess that made it harder?”

“I guess.” He took a long swig of his soda and wiped the orange out of his white whiskers. “Things got more normal later on, we started hanging out a little again. But when you started seeing ghosts, too—and I asked him to keep a lid on it—it all kind of went south.”

I traced the wet on my can, watching the drops creep down in scraggly lines. “He thought what—people should know?”

“He thought you should know. He said Nadine would want it that way, and that it wasn’t something to be ashamed of.” He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “Of course he was right, but I was a pigheaded fool running on little sleep and even less money. I met myself coming and going half the time; I thought all that was foolishness.”

The things you don’t know about your parents. Like that they’re real people with crap on their plate just like you. My dad had quite the double helping.

“He stopped coming around after a while, and that just became the new normal.”

“That’s sad.” I thought of Alex. “Friendship is important.”

“Yeah,” he said, barely putting sound to the word.

I looked at him, taking in the weariness on his face. It wasn’t fair to beat him up for this. He’d done everything alone. I, for one, knew all about that.

I took a deep breath and blew it out, finishing off my soda. Time to change the direction. “So, how do you bring this up to a teenager without them thinking you’re certifiable?”

“Do they have reflections?”

I looked at him, unsure. “Do—what—have reflections?”

“The—people. The spirits.”

“No.”

“Then have your friend stand in front of a mirror.”

THAT was a great idea. I hoped. In all honesty, I could see it going either way, and that had me up all night. I didn’t grab the opportunity when she got home, because she was in a great mood and I hoped it wasn’t “first sex” kind of great mood. Regardless of that, I had trouble getting my mind around the new idea that evidently the women in my family have a secret club. Besides, Alex wasn’t around.

And then there was that. Alex had spilled it all to me and then left distraught, which had me concerned for him. And Jason would be there tomorrow and would it be different? Had he talked to his son? Did he think about me? Yeah, I was pathetic enough to latch onto that last question, too.

Miss Olivia was at the shop bright and early Monday morning, actually before I was.

“Hey, Dani girl,” she called out as she climbed out of her blue Cadillac.

“What on earth are you doing up this early?” I asked as I climbed out of my creaking tub that ten minutes earlier had lost electric window capability. How I wished for that old-fashioned crank.

“Dropping off some soap before I head out for a couple of days.”

I caught up with her in all her green-and-yellow glory. Green top with yellow pants and, of course, the straw hat.

“At six in the morning?”

“Afraid so. Going to see one of my brothers for a week or so, leaving Grady here—so heads up on that, by the way,” she added with a wink.

“Good to know.”

“I’m glad they’re bonding,” she said. “He may be going to school out here this year.”

“Really?”

“His mother’s a wuss.”

I laughed. “Well, bonding is fine. As long as mating is out.”

“I hear that. I love you but I don’t need to be related.”

She linked her arm with mine to go in, and I had to admit that it did take the edge off seeing Jason after the hot dream from hell. There’s a reason girls travel in packs.

“Hey, I heard that you and this one hit the nightlife the other night.”

I heard the inner groan in my head. “No.”

“No?”

“I was there. He was there. We ended up at the same table and we ended up dancing.”

“Ah, so yes.”

“Well, Blaine Wilson threw shrimp on me, so by that definition he bought me dinner?”

She held on to her hat as she got tickled. “Touché, my girl.”

The bell jingled overhead and we walked in to the familiar sight of Jason behind the counter. He did a double take when he saw Miss Olivia and put on a charming smile.

She chuckled and hauled her bag on top of the counter. “Marg wanted some more in the inventory.”

“And good morning,” Jason said, still smiling.

She swatted at him. “Oh, quit flirting with an old woman, Jason.”

“I know where they go,” I said, digging in the bag.

“Okay.”

The two of them struck up a conversation and I couldn’t help feeling a little anticlimactic. He could have at least said hello.

“Well, I’ll be back in time for the party next weekend,” she said, poking me.

I looked at the two of them. “There’s a party next weekend?”

Miss Olivia shook her head like I was so wearing. “The July Fourth party on the square, girly girl. Actually they still call it ‘party on the square’ but it moved to the river a couple of years ago. Over by where Ella’s is now.”

I checked Jason’s expression for any kind of reaction to the mention of Ella’s, but he didn’t bite.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you there. Be careful driving.”

And she was gone. And Jason was left with me.

“So, if you can get those put away, and the tide info ready,” he said. “I’m going to go finish cleaning up the back.”

Well, of course. Aye-aye. “Oh, how did the bait room make out?”

“Fine. I came in yesterday and swept the last of the funk out. Good call on leaving the fan. That helped.”

I nodded. “Okay.” Yay for me.

He went in the back. I continued to nod like a bobblehead doll. This is what I worried about all night (partially) and put on makeup for at the crack of dawn?

“Damn, I could have slept another thirty minutes.”

I did as I was told. I arranged the soaps, I pulled the tide reports, I called Jiminy and Hank and gave them their tour schedules for the week. I called the feed suppliers, I stocked the new Chinese yellow-bellied wigglers we got in that were supposed to make the fish offer themselves with a smile.

Jason walked from the front to the back three more times while I did all that, and I watched him. So methodical. Like a robot. Like he’d been at first, before he learned to relax.

“You okay?” I asked him on a fourth trip up front.

“I’m fine,” he said offhandedly.

“What are you doing?”

“My job.”

Oh honey. Hot dream or not. Hot moment or two on a dance floor or not—that was nasty and arrogant and—ugh! Men are freakin’ pigs.

I plucked his half-eaten blueberry muffin off the counter, and dropped it into the garbage can.

“Oops.”

I snatched a rag left over from Saturday’s cleaning and blindly wiped down the counter till you could probably eat off of it. Too bad he didn’t have anything left to try that out with.

And I didn’t have time to get any angrier because the bell jingled and in walked Riley and Grady. I looked at my watch, then back at her.

“Something blow up?”

“Ha-ha,” she said, making a face.

“What on earth are you doing here?”

“I have to ask Mr. Miller something,” Grady said, stepping up with a grin. A sweet, cute, melt-your-pants-off grin that made me want to tell Riley to run. Fast.

Instead, I just eyeballed him a second or two, hoping it intimidated him. Probably not. Crap.

“Hang on.”

I turned to go get Jason, and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right there. Again.

“God!” he yelled as I landed on his foot. “What is with you and running into me?”

“I’m sorry!” I said, backing up, but the laugh came up anyway. A giggle I couldn’t contain.

He looked at me like I’d lost my mind as I stood there and laughed like a fool, and then Riley got in on it.

“Sorry—” I tried to think of something horrible to make it quit. Cleared my throat. “Sorry. Grady needed to—talk to you.”

“Come back here,” he said to Grady. “It’s saner.”

Riley raised an eyebrow when they had made it to the back. “What’s with Mr. Roboto?”

“I told you he wasn’t all that.”

“He seemed cool the other night.”

Yeah, he did. Night after that, too. “The other night was different—but he’s evidently over it.”

“So, did y’all step it up?”

I frowned. “Did we what?”

“Did y’all do anything to make it awkward now?”

“No! And so not your business. And no.”

She snickered. “You said that.”

“Okay.”

“No kiss good night or anything? I mean, I did leave y’all alone—”

“Oh my God, we are not having this conversation. But let’s talk about you being up at seven thirty in the morning.”

“So?”

I raised an eyebrow. “So, are you attached to his hip now?”

“Please.”

“I’m serious. Are you ‘stepping it up’?”

She rubbed her eyes. “You did not just say that. I’m so never saying that again.”

“Riley.”

“Mom.”

Oh, standoffs were cooler when she was six. Sixteen gave me a headache.

“Miss Olivia is out of town. Where are you two hanging out?”

“I was gonna help him over at Mr. Personality’s boat till I have to go to work.”

“Oh no.”

“What? Why?”

“Because no one is there, either.”

There came the look and the disgust. “We don’t need a babysitter, Mom.”

“You don’t need to be alone where there are bedrooms, either.”

“Oh my God. You are such a spaz.”

I shrugged and held my hands up. “Call me whatever you want, you aren’t doing it.”

“You know, there’s a big flat rock down the street that would work just as well. You gonna go dig that up or just forbid us to sit on it?”

Everything in me went still, and she knew it. It wasn’t our first rodeo.

I took a deep breath and lowered my voice. “Go park yourself on that bench outside until it’s time for you to go to work.”

“Mom!”

“Now.”

She narrowed her eyes and jutted out that famous hip. “You can’t put me in time-out like I’m a child.”

“You get up from that bench, you’d better be bleeding from the eyes, otherwise you’ll be grounded to the house for a week.”

“What’s going on?” Grady asked as they emerged from the back.

“I’m grounded to a bench all day so that we don’t accidentally trip and fall into a bed and have sex,” she spat, glaring at me.

It was Jason’s turn to snicker, and he turned around.

“What? I’m—never mind.” Grady cut himself off when he saw my expression. A smart choice that Riley had yet to learn.

“God, I knew better than to show up here and try to hang out with you,” she said, fighting tears I knew she hated.

“Save the drama. Go.”

She wheeled around and knocked over a map stand on her way out. Probably on purpose. It didn’t really matter. I turned to the two men who stood bewildered behind me.

“Sorry you had to witness her sweeter side like that.”

“Ma’am, we weren’t gonna do anything—” Grady began, but I held up a hand.

“It wasn’t about that, Grady. She got in trouble for her mouth, that’s all. It overrides her brain sometimes.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The kid had manners, that’s for sure. He left, after a few words with Riley outside, not lingering long. He probably didn’t want her bad luck to rub off. Jason stood next to me, as we watched Grady walk down the street and Riley sulk.

“He wanted to borrow my keys so he could fix them something to eat.”

I must have sported a crazed expression because he added, “I told him no, too.”

“Lord.”

“Of course, I didn’t banish him to a bench for it.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. “She got ‘banished’ for—”

“Her mouth, I know.” He nudged me with an elbow. “I was joking.”

Now he was joking? Who the hell could tell?