Aftershock Page 26

  So I have to get back to start rehab as a condition of my probation.

  She stuffed her face with cheeseburger.

  David’s split-second laugh died in his throat.

  You’re serious.

  Jules nodded, watching him over chipmunked cheeks. David studied her, then carefully placed his own half-eaten burger back on his plate.

  You know, Jules, I was really angry at you. For a long time.

  You were angry at me? Jules said, pointing at him then at herself, her mouth too full for the words to make sense on their own. David nodded, handed her a napkin and gestured at her right cheek.

  Yeah. Which, I mean— Do you want to hear this? It’s water under the bridge, far as I’m concerned.

  Mm-hmm. It sounded ominous, but at this point, why the fuck not?

  Okay. Well. He took a deep breath. That whole time, after Lizzie . . . maybe even before . . .

  Jules swallowed her food and watched his mouth and strained to listen, holding her breath, trying to hear the words for what they were, she felt like she was falling.

  I know you were struggling, Jules. He took another, bigger breath, then released the words in a steady stream. You were completely self-absorbed, self-indulgent and irresponsible, and we all suffered for it. Chloe especially. He crossed his arms, leaned back and waited. Jules waited too.

  That’s it? she finally asked.

  That’s not enough? You checked out of our marriage but didn’t think to tell me about it for—what?—four years? Six?

  More like ten, she thought, but he wasn’t done.

  You were my best friend, Jules. And then you were just—gone. Drinking alone in your room, for fuck’s sake. Downright hostile—all the time. He looked around at the empty hotel restaurant, shrugged back at her. Good for you, I guess. Rehab. His face was tight behind his glasses and beard. She suddenly felt exhausted.

  I’m trying, David. I know I made some mistakes.

  Some?

  Okay, a lot. I’m still making them, probably. But you know, I was mad at you too.

  Does Chloe know? About— What are you on probation for, anyway?

  Forgery. And no. And I’ll tell her, but—just let me do it, okay?

  David held up his hands, his eyes wide, glad it was none of his business.

  But I was, I was mad at you too.

  Yeah, so you said. He took off his glasses and pressed thumb and forefinger into the inner corners of his eyes. Jules had an unexpected jolt at how much older he looked without the frames to hide his deep-set lines.

  You weren’t there, Dave.

  There.

  When the baby died. It took you over a week to get home.

  Where David had been building momentum, face tightening, voice rising, he now collapsed into the back of his chair, wilted and withered, a burst balloon. He stared at her so openly and for so many moments that she started to fidget with her napkin. She didn’t want to meet his eyes, didn’t want to be the first to look away.

  What, she said.

  You think I don’t know that?

  What do you think you know. Said as a statement, because she already knew: he knew nothing.

  Well, he said slowly. I know that. And I know I’m sorry. I should have been there, and I wasn’t. I know I should have found a way to get home faster, and I couldn’t. I didn’t.

  She had wanted to relocate her self-blame onto someone else, but he was making it impossible.

  But you should know I’ve been living with it ever since.

  She’d been so, so angry, for so, so long. It felt familiar. It felt like habit. Or like home. When all of a sudden she felt it slipping from her grasp, she wasn’t sure she could let go of it, wasn’t sure she wanted to. What would she be without it? But what was she with it? Did it just gouge her out from the inside, leaving her a hollow husk of remorse?

  It’s one of my biggest regrets. David stared at his hands. I would have done anything to fix it, and you might not believe me, but believe me, I tried. At the time, and afterwards. For years afterwards. I honestly don’t know what more I could have done.

  She wanted to say, You could have just loved me, but she knew it was a lie, because he had, and in some way maybe still did, but she’d felt undeserving, so she’d torched it to the ground, and she knew that made everything, all the falling apart, in some way her fault.

  And so, she was miserable. She felt like a monster.

  I guess I’m sorry too, she said, not sure she’d heard her own words correctly. David looked equally surprised.

  You never could have won, Dave. I was angry you weren’t there, I was angry you were there too much, I was angry you loved me, I was angry you didn’t love me enough. I was angry that you still seemed able to function and feel like a normal person, when I couldn’t even get out of bed. So, nothing, is the answer. You could have done nothing. I wanted to love you, so badly, the way I once did. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel anything.

  She took a sip of the wine she’d ordered with lunch, saw David’s eyes flick to the glass and met his gaze, daring him to say something. He didn’t.

  I have to go feed my cat, he said. I’ll see you later.

  And he left her there to finish her lunch alone.

  IN THE ELEVATOR back up to her room, she saw the sign for the floor with the pool, and it got her thinking. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been swimming. Ten years ago? Twenty? She imagined the feel of water on her skin, the sound of her own breathing, her body moving forward under her own power. Later, she thought, she would see if the shop across the street had a plain-enough one-piece. Then she wondered if she could even do it. She knew she was weak, probably weaker than at any other point in her life. But she wanted to try.

  Daughter.

  Chloe materialized out of the mist the next morning, a dark hooded shadow emerging from the dust. It was December 23, and Jules was smoking a pre-breakfast cigarette on her third-floor hotel balcony when she saw her arrive.

  This is the moment, she realized, feeling it happen, feeling a slight tear in the tissue of her heart. This is the moment when everything shifts. The compass needle has swung right around, the opposing twin burdens of needing and being needed reversing positions. Now that she wanted to hold on, she would have to let go.

  She put out her cigarette and went downstairs to give her daughter hell and cash.

  David beat her to the lobby and had Chloe in a bear hug when Jules walked in.

  As soon as she saw her daughter, all the caustic comments that had been bouncing around her brain dissipated completely. She would have said some weird primal need took over if she believed in such things, but of course she didn’t. She grabbed her daughter and hugged her fiercely for as long as she could—which was a few seconds, at which point Chloe pulled away, practically sputtering.

  Oh my god. Melodramatic much?

  Hardly, when you’ve been missing for weeks.

  Oh, please. Her nose wrinkled. You’re smoking now?

  Could be worse, trust me. I thought we agreed you’d carry a phone.

  I lost it.

  Now, kid, that’s not strictly true, said David. Not from what I hear.

  He told you?

  He did.

  Who did? Told him what?

  Oh fine. I didn’t lose it. I threw it.

  From a boat, David added. He seemed oddly proud.

  Chloe shrugged. It sank.

  Jules laughed, deeply, from her belly, and David laughed with her. Chloe looked alarmed, then smirked. I’m getting you a new one tomorrow, Jules said.

  She felt herself dissembling, as she looked at Chloe’s face. Felt the burn of tears as her vision blurred. This is what it is to demythologize yourself in front of your child, she thought. This is the face that used to look at her like she had created the world, that had radiated unquestioning love, and Jules knew she was now less in Chloe’s eyes. She would always be less. But the truth was, she’d been less for years, and maybe that self-awar
eness bore within it the tools for some kind of salvation.

  Jenga.

  Over blueberry pancakes, I told David I thought I’d stick around and help him with the house. Or whatever he needed. I was focused on my food, but the silence lengthened and I looked up at my parental units, sitting across from me in the booth, which was in itself surreal, both of them smiling proudly, which made me incredibly self-conscious.

  I don’t have to. I just thought you could use a hand?

  Well, maybe. But right now I can’t even get in.

  Wow. Bad, eh?

  David nodded.

  Where’s, um . . .

  Amanda took Char to Dunedin, he said. Safer there.

  Lance?

  He shrugged, gestured towards anywhere but here. On his boat, back up north. Helping with more beached whales.

  With a sudden release of pent-up air, Jules asked, Remember Maureen? What did you call her, Chlo? Mo-mo?

  I narrowed my eyes at Jules, wondering where this was going, and if she was about to bring up the very thing that I had resolved to bring up myself.

  Jules looked different, clearer than I’d seen her in a long time. Sharper. When she looked at me, her eyes were more focused, and she moved her head more quickly in response to shifts in conversation.

  Yes. I remember Mo-mo.

  Vaguely, said David.

  Well, you wouldn’t, really, Jules told him. I saw him flinch slightly. It’s weird, she continued. I never saw her. Not even once after . . . after.

  There was a long, squirming beat during which David looked like he might bolt from the table, and I considered following him if he did.

  I hadn’t thought about her in years, Jules was saying. But she was there, for one of the worst things that ever happened to us. To any of us. That we’ve all been carrying around this whole time. Am I wrong?

  She looked back and forth between us. She was not wrong.

  And I got to wondering if she felt culpable somehow, Jules went on. I mean, I would, in her shoes. I do anyway. But we all know it’s just a random act of nature, right? SIDS is a syndrome—as in, they haven’t got a clue. They just stop. The babies. The light goes out. It’s no one’s fault.

  Jules’s voice was steady, her eyes shining at me.

  I looked down at my half-eaten pancakes. Thought about an elephant’s trunk, damp from the baby’s mouth. I listened as Jules went on to explain about the mandatory autopsy, said again that no one could have predicted it or stopped it. But still I held in my mind images I’d only recently spoken of out loud, to Lee, and relentless dreams of a responsibility that both terrified me and felt like my own. I put the words in a queue in my head, stood back and saw them: ridiculous as clowns, a child’s retelling, illogical and imaginative. I meant to keep them to myself, to take them out later, alone, to decipher how I had so long mistaken them for truth, but instead, thinking it was now or never, I took a deep breath and told my parents: I thought it was my fault. When Lizzie died. And abruptly, we all occupied the moment where it couldn’t be unsaid. That’s what Mo-mo told me, I added. That it was all my fault. I guess I believed her.

  I was startled by the display of emotion on Jules’s face, my mother’s pain more visible in that moment than any other before it, making me wonder if her general inability to express it was actually a sign not of its absence but of how deep it ran. Something taut panged through my core, but I kept going.

  I know it wasn’t, I added. Now I know. And I don’t think you were punishing me.

  Punishing you? Chlo— Jules’s voice cracked. She looked away, composed her face, looked back at me. You did nothing to deserve punishment.

  But. Well, when you sent me away. With Grandpa and Nan.

  I was just getting things off my chest. I certainly never expected an apology, from either of them, for anything. But Jules was making serious eyes at me like she was trying to show me her soul, and when she said, I shouldn’t have done that, which was not something I’d ever heard her admit about anything, I knew that, in one way or another, for one thing or another, she was sorry.

  I think I’m going to sell the house, Jules said next, and the centre of everything shifted.

  David was nodding, which made me wonder what they had talked about before I arrived.

  I felt a flash of deep resistance, or maybe resentment. We’d lived there when I was born. Lizzie had lived and died there. Those two things were the barest details, the broadest strokes, of what bound us all together. Just as I was preparing to excavate my memories, the house that contained them all would be gone from our lives.

  But then Jules pointed out the flip side. It’s time to move on, she said. I need to move on. And that house. She shook her head.

  Bad mojo, said David, and Jules said, Something like that.

  I saw her point. We would never be together that way again. This way again. Because what bound us together had also driven us apart. My parents’ marriage was ancient history, and I was an adult.

  Jules reached over and squeezed my hand. I was slightly disconcerted, but didn’t pull away.

  You can still come home, she said. Wherever I live, any time.

  I sometimes think about what happens to the timeline, David said, when one whole future life just drops out of it, and the rest of us are left to fill in the gaps. To move that timeline forward without that one, integral piece that was intertwined around all of us.

  The memory of the shape of a life, I thought. A shadow on my retina I couldn’t quite see.

  Like that game, pick-up sticks, David continued, fiddling with his fork. You had to pull one out and hope the whole pile didn’t cave in. And you never knew if the one you were pulling was just resting on the others or was central to the whole thing. Without it, all the other pieces would just collapse. And scatter.

  I hadn’t meant to say anything, but out it came: Isn’t that what you did, though, Dad? The nickname made him blink. You up and left—and I get why, but you left me and moved to the other side of the world. Don’t you think that left me with a pretty big “gap”?

  David widened his eyes as though wary I might blow. I thought about earthquakes, and how ground you thought was stable could suddenly cleave open, bringing the walls down around you.

  I guess I resented that you could just go start over, I added, and leave me there with this mess. I jerked a thumb towards Jules. No offence.

  None taken. My mother half laughed and wiped her cheeks with a palm.

  I’m sorry, kid, David said, looking smaller and more sunken than ever. Truly. But you have to know—

  I know it was never about me, I finished. Clearly.

  He looked sad then. I guess I missed a lot of things, he said.

  Anyway, we play Jenga now. I’d aired my grievance and now I felt bad and wanted to move on.

  That tower game? David wasn’t impressed. So hierarchical.

  Jules rolled her eyes. Where are you staying, Chloe? Should we get you a room? Where’s your stuff?

  I have a campsite just out of town. We’re— I paused, thinking this was either a great idea or a terrible one. Actually, if you can’t get into your house anyway, why don’t you guys come and see what we’re doing?

  DAVID CALLED A hotline and was told he could visit his house. I said we could all go, but he strongly discouraged it, giving me the distinct impression that my parents had had enough of each other. He squeezed me tight before he left and quietly slipped me some cash. Lance will be proud, he said. He told Jules to stay out of trouble.

  Oh, and I forgot. He still had his wallet out, and he took from it a folded piece of paper. Char wanted you to have this.

  Feeling like I knew what it was, I unfolded it: the spaceship Char had started drawing in her room that day, with two stick figures standing in the middle of it—one small with dark curls and one taller with bright-yellow spikes.

  She says she hopes you can be her big sister again sometime.

  I didn’t know what to say, but I had a deep urge to send
her something back in return. I had Tanga’s matau in my pocket, but the thought of giving her something Jansen had stolen made my lip curl in disgust. I was planning to go to the post office and send it back to Tanga; how many men with that name could live on that one stretch of road where he picked us up?

  Instead, I pulled from my other pocket the deep-blue shell I had found on the beach on the second day of my hike. I was meaning to get a hole drilled in it for a piece of leather around my neck. Or Lee’s neck. But this seemed more important, so I placed it in David’s hand.

  Tell her I’ll see her soon.

  It wasn’t exactly an outpouring of sisterly love, but it was a start.

  THE BEACHES OF Christchurch were closed for swimming, but this one was as busy as any summer day, crawling with volunteers in rubber galoshes and gloves and masks. The latest earthquake had ruptured another pipeline, and raw sewage gushed into the ocean. Figures in haz-mat suits moved floating bulkheads around in an effort to contain at least the solids on the water’s surface, while volunteers trolled the land with spears, rakes and industrial vacuums.

  We’re camping down the road, I told Jules. But we’re volunteering here for as long as they need us.

  Finally, Jules asked, Who’s “we”?

  I grinned, then turned and waved at Lee, who handed off her rake and came striding over in her black galoshes.

  Hey there, she said, and I introduced them. Lee didn’t waste time.

  So, I don’t know if you want to stay around and help at all? She looked back and forth between us. I grinned more.

  Help? Jules asked.

  Lee knew some of the organizers of this surfer-driven relief effort, and bringing Jules here had been her idea. I watched my mother squirm, clearly not liking the idea of getting her hands dirty, but perfectly cornered.

  HALF AN HOUR later, I ambled down the beach beside her, both of us breathing through masks and by unspoken agreement not talking about the smell. Jules worked the vacuum, sucking black sand and muck through a screaming accordion tube with a filter over the end. I carried a bright-yellow plastic bag marked with biohazard symbols, stabbing at solid objects with my spear and dropping them into it.