for one more swim, one more jump, one more thrilling ride down Eastman Hill. Stay out an extra half hour, have ice cream for dinner.
Lily was especially good at embracing Dad’s philosophy. Once Mommy’s girl, she started to avoid her, ignore her or, worse, talk about why Daddy was so much fun in front of her.
My flowers and sea glass didn’t cut it. “Thanks, Nora,” she’d say. But I couldn’t undo the hurt—I wasn’t Lily, after all, the magical, beautiful daughter.
Nothing I did seemed to make much impact on my mother, not the As on my report card, not the Mother’s Day art project—a little pinch pot painted yellow with blue polka dots. (Lily said she forgot hers at school; it never came home.)
I learned to kiss my mother hello when she got home, tell her about my day so I could check the mental box that said Talk to Mom. Every once in a while, Mom would give me a look that said I wasn’t fooling anyone. She wasn’t a little black rain cloud, our mother, but her skies were unrelentingly gray.
But Daddy laughed a ton, and he and Lily and I had so many fun times, so many goofy games and adventurings and imaginative meals, long stories at bedtime or in the car when we’d take a ride to nowhere. Of course, I loved him best.
The guilt hardly ever panged at me. Lily, she was the one who was really mean to Mom. Not me. At least I tried.
One spring day when I was eleven, Lily and I came off the bus to find my mother sitting at the kitchen table, unexpectedly home from work, drinking her coffee. Lily buzzed right past, running up the stairs to throw her backpack on the floor and flop on the bed, as was her custom.
“Hi, Mom!” I said in my fake-cheery voice. “Guess what? Brenda Kowalski threw up during our math test, and it almost got on my desk! She had to go home early.”
“Well, that’s too bad.” She didn’t look up, just sat there, staring ahead, holding her mug. She’d changed from her work uniform of black pants and a white shirt and was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt.
No other words were spoken. Mom just sat there, twisting her wedding ring.
“Where’s Dad?” I blurted, unable to take the silence anymore.
Her eyes flicked to me, then back to the middle distance. “He’s gone,” she said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Off island.”
Without us? That was strange. Usually, he’d wait for us, take us on the ferry to Portland, where there was a bakery filled with the most beautiful pastries, and let us get whatever we wanted.
“When will he be back?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.”
My heart started to whump in my chest. “What do you mean, you’re not sure?”
“I don’t know, Nora. He didn’t see fit to tell me.”
Something was wrong. Something big. In that second, I felt my childhood teeter.
I pounded up the stairs. Our room had a slanted ceiling and was divided exactly in half; mine neat and tidy, as Mom requested, Lily’s a snarled mess. She was lying on her unmade bed with her headphones on, waiting for Mom to leave, for Dad to appear with the afternoon’s entertainment, because there was always something fun. Every single day.
I went into our parents’ room, and my breath started to shake out of me.
The closet was open, the top two drawers of the bureau—his—open, as well.
Open and empty. Our father’s shoes—he had more pairs than Mom—were gone. His socks were gone. Empty hangers hung like bones in the closet.
On top of the bureau, dead center, was his wedding ring.
I ran into the bathroom and threw up, my stomach heaving, my whole body racked with the violent expulsion of my ham-and-tomato sandwich and two oatmeal cookies, bits of apple floating on the surface.
“What’s wrong with you?” Lily asked. At ten, she already had a bit of a sneer.
“Daddy’s gone,” I said, my eyes streaming. I puked again, my sinuses burning with throw-up.
“What do you mean, gone? What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. His clothes are gone. He packed.”
As I sat there, retching into the toilet, my sister ran into our parents’ bedroom, then pounded downstairs. She screamed accusations at our mother, whose flat, implacable voice answered questions. Something ceramic broke—Mom’s cup, I bet, throwing up again at the thought of the smell of coffee.
“I hate you!” Lily screamed. “I hate you!”
Then the door slammed, and it was quiet again.
I waited for my mother to come upstairs and take care of me. She didn’t.
Later that night, Lily told me what happened. Her version of it, anyway. Our mother, who was so boring and hateful and mean, had driven our father away. He’d gotten sick and tired of putting up with her, taken his novel and moved to New York City, where he was born, after all, and he was probably about to become a famous author. He’d call us and tell us to pack our things, that New York was the biggest place of all for adventuring, and we’d move, and Mom could stay here on her stupid Scupper Island.
If that was true...if our dad couldn’t stand our mother anymore, I honestly couldn’t blame him. He was a scarlet tanager, a rare, beautiful bird I’d only seen once in my life, flashing with red, its song happy and bright. She was a mourning dove, gray and dull, endlessly sighing the same notes over and over.
But I didn’t want them to get a divorce.
In my version of what had happened, which I dared not tell Lily, Dad would come home with a bouquet of roses. Mom would be wearing that white dress with the red flowers on it, the only dress she had, and they’d be hugging, and we’d move to New York but come home to Scupper for summers, like the rich people.
Days passed. A week. Lily refused to go to school, and I was put in charge of breakfast while Mom went to work. At night, I listened to the suddenly scary noises of our old house, the muffled sobs from Lily’s side of the room. I tried to climb into her bed to comfort her, but she shoved me away.
I waited for my father to call. He didn’t.
He hadn’t left a phone number, either. He had a brother in Pennsylvania—Jeff, eight years older than my father, a man we’d only met twice before. I called him one afternoon when my mom was at a meeting at school—Lily was acting up. There was a long silence after I asked if he knew where my father might be.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I don’t. But if I hear from him, I’ll let you know.”
I could tell by his voice he didn’t think this would happen.
Another week crept by. Mom came home on Saturday morning and told us she’d switched her hours so she’d be able to be home with us after school.
“No one wants you here,” Lily said, her voice so cold and cruel I flinched.
“No one asked you,” Mom said mildly.
And that was the end of our deep family discussion.
What if Mom had killed Dad? Was that possible? She could lop the head off a sea bass, slide the knife down its belly and gut the thing in seconds... She could use a gun... We lived on an island, so she could dump his body anywhere and let the tides do what they would. I regretted reading the Patricia Cornwell novels I’d been sneaking out of the library, not to mention Stephen King, the patron saint of Maine. Was my father down the well, like Dolores Claiborne’s husband?
We didn’t have a well. Mom didn’t talk to the police.
He had packed. Left his wedding ring. Sure, Mom could’ve faked it, but she didn’t. I knew.