September Girls Page 11

  “What, we’re just gonna stand here?” Jeff asked, and he began to race down the empty beach. I followed him, but soon we were both out of breath, the rain didn’t seem to be letting up in the slightest, and anyway we were as wet as we were going to get. I slowed first, but Jeff only had a minute or two on me and pretty soon we were walking along in silence, side by side with our heads down, staring at our feet to keep the water out of our eyes.

  “So,” Jeff said after a while. “Kristle’s little sister, huh? Good going, bro.” He punched me in the shoulder. “Saw that one coming a mile away. Not as hot as Kristle, but close. This place is treating us well.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Her name’s DeeDee. And I don’t think they’re exactly sisters—not technically at least.” I didn’t feel like being congratulated by my brother, whose next remark was sure to be something gross and obliviously degrading.

  “Still, it’s kinda like incest, though, huh? Two brothers fucking two sisters? Look, I like you, bro, but let’s watch our step here.”

  “I’m not fucking anyone,” I said. “And by the way, Kristle’s a total slut, so I hope you haven’t caught anything from her yet.”

  I should have known better. (Although Jeff was not usually the type to take offense at much, so come to think of it why should he care?) Either way, before I knew what was happening, my brother had tackled me into the sand with something between a grunt and a scream. He pinned my shoulders against the soggy ground, his knee against my nuts. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” he said. “You little fucking prick.” I got his spit in my eye and squirmed, tried to wipe it away with my shoulder, but just ended up getting wet sand all over my face.

  “What the fuck?” I yelped. It came out more girlishly than was my intention. I felt like a little kid again.

  “Don’t fucking call her that,” Jeff said. His face was an inch from mine and I could smell Kristle’s cigarettes on his breath. “Who the fuck do you think you are?

  “Okay, she’s not a slut,” I said testily. “Just a skank.” I don’t know why I was being such an asshole, but I couldn’t help myself. All you had to do was look at her to know she couldn’t be trusted. The way her pupils seemed to float a few inches in front of her eye sockets when she talked to you. The way her face rearranged itself the longer you looked at it. And everything else. I couldn’t believe that Jeff was falling for her succubus bullshit.

  “Just to remind you, she’s the one who tried to fuck me,” I said. “Your little brother—like two minutes before she actually did fuck you. From what I understand, at least. Now that’s some fucked up shit. And let’s not even get into what she said to me yesterday.”

  Jeff looked physically pained and outraged at the same time; I only remembered seeing this look on his face once before, years ago, when I had hit him in the head with the remote control in a skirmish over possession.

  He pressed his forearm across my chest and shoved with all his weight. “You fucking shit,” he said. “Say you’re sorry.”

  “Or what?” I wheezed. I could barely see Jeff with the storm coming down. Water was streaming from his hair into my eyes. There was another crash of lightning and this time I could feel the thunder in my rib cage.

  “Or I’ll fucking kill you.”

  I almost laughed but caught myself. Also I didn’t have enough oxygen left for laughter. While I struggled to escape, the sad truth is that I knew it was no use. My older brother is probably close to twice my size. He threw his weight against me with another grunt, and nearly knocked the wind out of me. “Well?”

  “Fuck!” I said. “Okay, I’m fucking sorry! What’s your problem?”

  “Thank you,” Jeff said, and just like that a conciliatory smile crossed his face. He stood up, slicked the hair from his face, and waited for me to collect myself. I took a moment, stood, and tried to dust the wet sand off my ass.

  “You just don’t get it,” Jeff said. “I can see why you’d think so, but she’s not just some slut. Things are complicated for her.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said. “‘Which dick am I gonna put in me today?’ It gets complicated.” I knew I had gone too far—I was disgusting even myself—and half expected a punch in the face. I would have deserved it this time. But Jeff was over fighting. One of the nice things about Jeff is that he has a mind like a goldfish and can’t sustain anger for more than about three seconds.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “She’s had it hard. She’s not from here, you know.”

  “Yeah, so’s DeeDee,” I said. “But you don’t see DeeDee acting like some nympho bitch.”

  “DeeDee’s younger,” he said. “A lot younger.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “It doesn’t fucking matter,” Jeff said. “It’s different for her. Kristle’s fucking tough, okay? You don’t even know what she’s been through.” And then, seeing my dubious look, “I think I’m, like, in love with her.” He looked away almost shyly and scratched his jaw. “I mean, I think.”

  You have to know my brother to know that this kind of admission on his part was just flat-out unheard of. Or maybe you know him well enough already to figure that out. The nicest thing I’d ever known him to say about a girl before was that she had an ass he’d like to smother himself in.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Jeff said. “It’s totally possible I’m going completely insane.”

  “Uh,” I repeated. But before I could formulate an actual thought, he was stretching his arms to the sky, screaming at the top of his lungs as the rain swept through him. He leaped into the air and landed on his knees in the sand with a triumphant fist pump.

  “Uh,” I said again. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m just so fucking in love!” Jeff screamed, his face gargoyled into a googly and shit-eating grin. I felt humiliated on his behalf. Come on.

  “Get ahold of yourself,” I said. But Jeff didn’t seem to hear me. He cocked his head in a look of startled curiosity, putting out an open palm to the sky.

  “Look,” he said, climbing back to his feet. “The rain stopped.”

  He was right. I stretched my hand out and felt nothing but sky. When I looked up, the stars had appeared and were bright and shining and unobscured. I had to admit that it did seem fairly miraculous; like someone was answering him. So maybe Jeff really was in love. Even if he was, I couldn’t approve of a display like that. It was unseemly, not to mention so out of character as to be a little scary.

  We walked home in agreeable silence. I didn’t ask Jeff about Kristle’s hard life or what she’d said about what would happen. Actually I might have forgotten some of that stuff anyway. All I was really thinking about was being with DeeDee in the sand, how it had felt to be with her, how I hadn’t felt nervous or uncertain. I had just been happy and amazed. Like that, the summer had transformed itself. I’d thought I’d known exactly how it would go and now, in just a few minutes, everything had changed.

  I thought of the person I had been yesterday. I thought of who I was now and who I would be tomorrow and the next day and the next, and I realized that even though each of those people were different from the others, they all felt like me. I could draw a straight line from one to the next.

  “Things might get a little weird from here on out, pal,” Jeff said as we were crossing the beach road back into Seashell Shoals. “There’s a lot more to these girls than you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “That much is obvious.”

  “I just mean there’s something about them. They have this thing about them. Right? Am I right? But that probably applies to all girls. All the good ones, at least. And, you know, who cares? I think it might be worth it.”

  I would have pressed him on the matter, but I was distracted by the Volvo sitting in the driveway of the cottage. It had a new bumper sticker on it: MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOM. Jeff and I exchanged a nervous glance as we climbed the stairs to the door.

&nbs
p; UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  MOTHER

  We have been learning about mothers. Since we don’t remember our own mother, we have little to go on, but we try. We do try. Mothers are everywhere: there are books and movies and television shows about them and magazine articles and the woman named Angelina Jolie and something called baby bumps. We soak all of it up, gathering information, making guesses, wondering if any of these mothers could be our own, or at least know her. It seems unlikely. We suspect that our mother has no interest in land mines or Burma/Myanmar or even Meals-on-Wheels. But you never know with her.

  Mothers are everywhere except when they’ve disappeared. The disappearance seems to be a common routine, but where do all these disappeared mothers go? Is there an island somewhere?

  Well, even when they’ve disappeared, these mothers are still around. They never seem entirely gone. They remain as shadows in corners and as untraveled hallways and as ladybugs crawling across mirrors. You never know where you might find someone’s mother. She could be the lucky penny in the street. You never know what somebody’s mother might be up to. She could be the bad penny just as easily.

  Consider the amateur sleuth Nancy Drew. Could her dead mother be the one behind the many mysterious happenings—the missing jewels and kidnapped heiresses, the inexplicable lights flickering on the cliffside? Could Nancy’s mother be the one pulling all those criminal strings, safe in the remove of her own shadowy elsewhere? And could that elsewhere be just around the corner, under a manhole, or behind the Employees Only door in a smoky, disreputable bar in the bad part of town?

  These are the things we consider. We are motherless.

  Or are we? Because the thing we sometimes forget to include is that our mother did not disappear. It was we who disappeared, and that makes her failure almost worse.

  She could not protect us. Or, consider it another way: she would not protect us. Being the Deepness, our mother has many tricks at her disposal. She has more than tricks, really—our mother commands vast and untold power, all of which seemed to do us no good when it mattered. As here we are, in the land of the disappeared.

  Why did she fail us? Well, she must have had her reasons. It’s been suggested by a few of our number that she may secretly have been happy to see us go—but we put that notion to a vote and rejected it soundly. She must have had her reasons—good ones. One of us (Taffany? Chanterelle? We can never be sure) pointed out that it’s all the same in the end anyway. As here we are.

  Here we are. But where is she? Is she still with us, in some small, pointless way? Sometimes we think we see her, when we cover our faces in our hands and spread our fingers and squint out at the ocean’s horizon.

  Sometimes we think we see her in the bathtub drain, or in soapy clouds in buckets of dirty mop water. Once, we thought she might have been a contestant on The Bachelor. (Or is it contestantette?)

  It doesn’t seem so farfetched to suppose that she could be nearby. If so, is she watching over us, or is she setting booby traps? Does she love us? Did she ever love us?

  It doesn’t matter. We don’t actually care. We miss her. We know she’ll have us back, if only we can get to her. Wherever she is, it’s not at the bottom of some bucket.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  TWELVE

  “WELL, DID YOU miss me?” our mother said from the couch when we stepped inside. Dad was standing at the kitchen island, shell-shocked, clutching a glass of wine in midair. Mom was smiling maniacally. She had her shoes off and her feet up on the coffee table and was wiggling her toes.

  “Color me surprised when I got home and you guys had just taken off. It was like Pompeii! You know, you left half the lights on. I guess I’m the only one who cares about conservation.”

  I knew it was my fault that she was here, but even so, I was first surprised and then annoyed to see her. I hadn’t been expecting her to show up at all, I don’t think, but I’d at least figured that if she was going to go to these lengths to return to us, she would also have had the grace to offer up some small impression of penitence. I’d figured that she would do us the favor of trying to be her old self.

  But the opposite was true: she had been a changed person in the days before she’d left and in her absence she had changed even more, to the point that I was only about sixty percent certain that she was my actual mother at all. She had pierced her nipples—the hoops were obvious through her sheer, long-sleeved T-shirt—and her scoop neck revealed an elaborate tattoo, a blue, scaly snake that curled across her collarbone. Her graying tangle of hair was now a bob streaked with fire-engine red.

  “Hellooooo,” she was saying as she hopped up from her perch and scrambled over to me and Jeff to wrap us both in a single hug. “I’ve missed my little guys,” she said. She stank of patchouli and sebum.

  “I thought you weren’t allowed to talk to men anymore,” I said when we had extricated ourselves from her embrace.

  “Oh, that,” Mom said, rolling her eyes. In her excitement to see us she had dribbled red wine down the front of her shirt, and she bunched the fabric to her lips to suck up the spot. When she let it drop, all she had done was leave another stain—the sloppy print of plum-colored lipstick. “Let me tell you, Women’s Land isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. They kicked me out after—what?—a week and a half? I thought the whole point of going there was to stop being bossed around by every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Well, meet Tina, Donna, and Harriet. And you should have seen the bathrooms! Oh, Lord.”

  I felt Jeff press a tense fist into the small of my back. “Jesus fuck,” he mumbled. It was just for me to hear, but I saw Mom shoot him a sharp glance. Dad hadn’t moved since we’d walked in; he was still standing at the counter with his wine at his chest, his face plastered with a frozen grin.

  “I like your tattoo,” I told my mother when no one had said anything else. It was obviously a total lie, just me trying to cover the awkwardness. The old mom had been a kindergarten teacher prone to chunky sweaters with appliquéd ducks all over them.

  Mom beamed at the compliment. The room around us seemed to exhale and then hold its breath again. “My friend Gonzo did it. He’s a genius, G-E-N-I-U-S. A real artist, you know. I’ve been staying with him since my banishment from the land of the ladies. Or, I was. It was much better there—the shower actually drains. Who would have thunk?”

  “Who would have thunk?” Jeff echoed.

  “And look at this one!” she exclaimed, lifting her sleeve and extending her forearm, which was covered in illegible tattooed text. “It’s Sharon Olds. Brilliant.”

  I hadn’t gotten a chance to look at Jeff’s face and had no graceful way of turning for his reaction. But I could pretty much picture it. “Fucking unreal,” he said. A moment later, I heard the door slam. He was gone.

  “Well someone’s in a bad mood,” Mom said. “Jeez Louise.”

  Dad shook his head and wandered off and then it was just me and Mom, staring at each other. She sighed and collapsed back onto the couch, splaying out dramatically. I wanted to leave too—just go somewhere—but I felt sort of bad for her. And where was there, really, to go? So I just hovered.

  “Was this a bad idea?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “At least you want me here,” she said. “At least I’ve got my old pal Sam.”

  “Why did you come back?” I asked.

  “You told me to. I could tell you needed me.” She slugged the last of her wine. “‘Winter, spring, summer, or fall . . .’” James fucking Taylor again.

  But it was true. I was the one who had summoned her. Maybe I could have done it all along. Maybe if I had asked her nicely she never would have left in the first place.

  DeeDee had asked me if I missed her and I sai
d I didn’t know, but I had; I had missed my mother. Even this strange person sitting in front of me with her tattoos and her striped hair and whatever else: I didn’t even know her and I had missed her.

  She had tried to do something. She was trying to do something. She was my mother. She had come back for me. At least, that’s what she said.

  I left her sitting there and walked outside. Jeff was crouched in the driveway and I squatted down next to him. We didn’t have anything to say to each other. If he had been DeeDee I could have told him anything. I could have pretended she didn’t speak English and just confessed everything, things I didn’t even know I had to confess. But Jeff was just Jeff ,and I didn’t know where to find DeeDee, so we just sat there in silence.

  “Crazy day, bro,” he finally said, after we had sat there for what must have been an hour.

  “Crazy,” I said.

  We both went back inside and went to sleep.

  Jeff’s voice was the first thing I heard the next morning. “Hey,” he whispered as I groaned in my sleep. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I can’t be in this house with these people.”

  I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes. Somewhere in the distance I could hear strange noises. Well, strange if murder can be considered strange—it sounded like someone was being killed down the hall.

  “Are they having sex?” I asked.

  “Never you mind, little brother,” Jeff said, “Let’s just go.”

  I considered fleeing in my pajamas, but in the end decided to throw my bathing suit on. I met Jeff in the driveway, where he was smoking and fidgeting with his hair.

  “Since when do you smoke?” I asked.

  “Oh,” he said. “I don’t. Come on, let’s walk somewhere.” We went to the beach because that was pretty much the only place to go around here.

  On the shore, I could feel restlessness rising at my ankles. When I tried to picture Sebastian and school and even Sasha Swain and our house in the suburbs in my mind, I came up with hardly anything. Would any of them remember me when I got home? Was our house still ours, and if we ever returned to it, would I be the same person when I got there? If so, who exactly was that person, again?