how to fish. But today the couple swam and cackled at each other, and the child was nowhere to be found.
“Where’s the baby?” I asked, concerned that some irate fisherman had felt threatened by the bird’s ability to find fish in the depths of the lake when he, himself, went home empty-handed. It had happened so many times before that now signs all along the lake warned that the loons were a protected species.
“They’ve probably left him alone. That’s how they teach him independence. He’s probably at the other end of the lake.”
“Alone?” I asked, horrified.
“They’ll go get him in a little bit. He’s okay, Piper. He’s just growing up.” She reached into the bag she’d packed and handed me a cold sandwich, wrapped in wax paper. “It’s meatloaf, with mustard.” She smiled. Only she knew that cold meatloaf sandwiches were my favorite. She had probably even saved the last piece, hiding it in the back of the refrigerator, safe from Daddy and Quinn.
I unwrapped the sandwich carefully, like a gift, and ate it slowly, trying not to think about the baby loon alone on the other side of the lake, protected by the law but not by his own parents.
In the summer, we didn’t worry about what would happen when winter descended. In the summer we didn’t worry about money. About food in the cupboards or that my feet were growing so fast I would need new boots again once snow fell. In the summer, it was just me and my mother, searching for broken treasures in the mud.
The clarity of that summer still surprises me. Sunlight struggling through the green of new leaves. The marbled pink of a sunburn, and tumblers filled with lemonade. I suppose the sunshine might have blinded me a little. With the beads of sunlight in my fingers, even now, I skip over the ones made of milky glass, the gray beads that would not let the light come through.
These were the days when Daddy didn’t go to work. The migraine days. The days when he closed his eyes and saw falling stars. On those days, Mum didn’t seem to know what to do. Normally, we would have walked to the lake or through the woods to the Pond, where some of the best glass lay buried in dank mud. But with Daddy home, lying on the couch with a cool cloth pressed against his temples, she stood in doorways, looking lost. On the migraine days, the TV was always on: game shows, soaps, talk shows. She pretended to be absorbed in programs I knew she had never watched before. She jumped every time the phone rang, because once when someone tried to sell her life insurance, Daddy grabbed the phone out of her hand and demanded, Who is this? When Daddy was home, we didn’t go hunting, because every time she walked near the door, Daddy would reach for her, asking, Where are you off to? And then she wouldn’t go anywhere. Not to the lake for picnics. Not even to the shed to work. But then Daddy’s migraine would disappear, as quickly as it came, and he would go back to work. When he was gone, the light returned, and I had my mother back again. I had the green of grass after rain, the soft orange of peaches in a basket, and the violet of the sky outside my night window. If summer here were made of colored glass, this one would be made of emerald, topaz, amethyst. I suppose the sunlight blinded me a little, to the dark days.
On these days, the gray days, I could see the worry in her face and in her hands. I could hear it just under the surface of her voice. At night I listened to their whispers, pretended that their voices belonged to crickets, to bullfrogs, to loons.
“We’re going to Quimby today,” she said one morning in early August.
“Hmmmm.” I nodded. I was busy pushing scrambled eggs across my plate, thinking about how I might ask her for a new pair of jeans for school. I had grown five inches since last summer; I was almost as tall as Daddy, and my clothes didn’t fit anymore. But today was the first day in two weeks that Daddy had gone to work. We didn’t have any money for new jeans.
“Piper?”
I looked up from my plate.
She was standing in front of the sink in her nightgown, and the sun was shining through the sheer fabric. Inside the giant nightie, I could see how small she was. It embarrassed me. I looked back down at my plate.
“I think I’ll bring some of my pictures to the artists’ gallery,” she said softly, like a question.
I looked up again. She was running her fingers across the counter. Nervous.
“You should!”
“You think?” she asked. “Maybe the summer people might buy them?”
I imagined my mother’s glass pictures hanging in strangers’ homes. Filling windows in high-rises, the way they might change the yellow glow of a street lamp into something cool and green.
That afternoon I helped her gather her stained-glass panes and we took them to the artists’ gallery in Quimby. While she met with the owner in the back office, I wandered through a labyrinth of jewelry and sculptures, quilts and paintings. I was amazed by so much beauty in one place and wondered what it would feel like to be able to buy something. To reach into my pocket and pull out enough money for the velvet crazy quilt. How it might look spread across my old bed.
Mum was smiling when she emerged from the back room. The handsome owner of the shop had his hand on her back. When she saw me, she smiled shyly. She blushed when he wrote her a check for the pieces, and she squeezed my hand tightly as we walked back to the car. At the Miss Quimby Diner, she said, “Order anything you want. Anything!” We got hamburgers and French fries smothered in gravy. I’d never tasted anything more wonderful. On the way home, I could still taste the salt on my lips. We rolled the windows down and sang, together, at the tops of our lungs.
But when she told Daddy that night at dinner, when she handed him the check, he was silent. Quinn stared at his plate and disappeared into his room right after dinner. I didn’t know what to do with myself in all that quiet, and finally, reluctantly, I left them alone. Later, the words that crept under my door (trust and cheat and whore) wound their way into my dreams. He asked her, in whispers like pins, Do I have to watch you twenty-four hours a day? And I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to imagine what would happen to us if he never left the house again. The next day he got a headache that didn’t go away for a week.
A month later, my mother had stopped getting out of bed in the mornings. I knew she was awake, listening to hear Daddy either getting ready to leave or clicking on the TV and settling onto the couch for another headache day. In my own room, I was doing the same. Quinn was the only one of us who seemed real anymore. While the rest of us wandered about the house like ghosts, Quinn went to work every morning, and he came home every night with stolen milk from the Shop-N-Save, eggs, and packages of sliced cheese so that we would have something to eat besides the contents of the dusty cans that had been in our cupboards since last winter.
One morning, after Daddy hadn’t gone to work in three days, I thankfully awoke to the familiar sounds of his work boots shuffling across the linoleum, and the sound of Quinn cracking his back, twisting first left and then right. And finally, the rattle of the truck disappearing down the road with the two of them inside. I waited until I couldn’t hear his tires crushing gravel anymore and then I crawled out of bed.
Summer was almost over, but the air was still hot. Sticky and stifling. I had taken to sleeping in one of my mother’s old slips to stay cool, and in the kitchen, in my mother’s tattered lingerie, I poured the last of the coffee into a mug. I wasn’t supposed to drink coffee, but today I didn’t care. I kicked the screen door open and went outside. Sitting on the rusty porch swing in my mother’s slip, drinking the forbidden coffee, I pretended things weren’t falling apart. That it was just another summer day. But my mother would not get out of bed, and there were clouds caught in the tops of the trees.
Inside, I walked tentatively down the short hallway to the door to Mum’s room and peeked in.
“Morning.” She smiled, rolling over to look at the clock.
I sat down on the bed, and she reached for me with her little hands, motioning for me to lie down next to her. Sometimes lately I’d felt as if she were the child; she was so small. But when I lay down next to her and she put her fingers in my hair, I was the little one