Girl Overboard (38 page)

Mom stood so abruptly that the blanket fell from her lap. Instead of picking the mocha-brown cashmere blanket off the damp grass, she sidestepped it and headed for the gate to the beach. Beyond that rusting gate, a misshapen barrier of a log, gnarled and sea-soaked, lay across the slick boat ramp. That didn’t deter Mom. She leaped over it to the rock-laden beach.

“Mom, what’re you doing?” I asked, following her down to the exposed shore. The tide was lower than I had ever seen—so shallow, the receding water nearly beached the moored sailboats.

With unerring precision, Mom plucked a stone from the wet sand: a perfect circle, free of barnacles. When dry, the shocking fern green would dull to a mottled brown. Mom handed that Cinderella stone to me.

“Make a wish,” she said.

“But it’s yours.”

“I found it for you.”

What I wanted to wish for wasn’t reprieve from my family’s move; we were too far gone for that, with the house packed and our belongings journeying to New Jersey. What I wanted, needed, was reassurance that Jackson and I would work out. My heart contracted painfully, already missing him even though I knew he was driving me to the airport for our red-eye tonight. But just this once, I wished Mom would tap into the sixth sense Grandma Stesha insisted we both had and assure me I was doing the right thing with Jackson. Just once, I wanted her to tell me with absolute confidence,
Sweetheart, everything is going to work out fine
.

Who was I kidding? If I dismissed the notion of my having a sixth sense, Mom denied its existence in anyone altogether, most especially the family legend that we were descended from psychics and mystics. She practically derided Grandma Stesha’s tours to sacred sites whenever anyone asked. In their dismissiveness of the unknown, my parents were united.

Ignoring me, crouched low to the sand, Mom sifted through the wet stones, rejecting one after another. Usually she was so mindful of the water, especially since my near drowning. But now, her back to the waves, she used both hands to shove aside a large, bulbous rock.

“Mom, geez, you’re going to cut yourself,” I said, alarmed at her frenetic searching, and held out the stone she had given me. “Here, take this one.”

“No,” she said almost angrily, “that’s yours.”

“Okay…” I said, shoving my wishing stone into the pocket of my denim jacket.

I wanted to leave but couldn’t.
Stay.
Mom shoved aside another enormous rock. Both of us screamed when a sea snake, no longer than a foot, with a dangerous yellow stripe down its back, slithered out. Mom recoiled so abruptly, she lost her balance and fell atop the sharp rocks as a wave swept the snake away.

“Mom, you okay?”

The water crept to the shore, lapping at our feet, mine safe in my sneakers, Mom’s exposed in her flip-flops. As the water drew back, I spotted the perfect wishing rock for her, egg-shaped and striated gray-green. Most importantly, a thin white line ran around the top third. That rare circlet, according to Grandma Stesha, was a good luck sign: a halo. I plunged my hand into the icy water to snag it for my mother.

Suddenly, against the soothing backdrop of the surf, I could hear the sobs again. The sound of inconsolable heartbreak. My heart raced in frantic beats. The premonition that something would go horribly wrong if we left here was almost unbearable. For the first time, I felt compelled to tell Mom about one of my feelings. Confess about the weeping I kept hearing. Ask for her interpretation because surely I was wrong.

Fiercely, Mom shook her head, a sharp, cutting movement, the same as the one at the hospital so many years ago:
Don’t dream.
I could have been seven again, swamped with panic from my vision, needing to confide in someone. Only this time it was Mom who was leaving because of what I had seen, not Dad.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said sharply, turning her back on me, my premonition, and the beach.

“Mom, wait,” I said, holding the wishing rock out to her.

“We’ve got a ton to do,” she said, not seeing the stone offering, “and regardless of what your dad thinks, I can’t do it all on my own.”

I retracted my hand. “He would have stayed if you had just said something!”

Mom’s lips pursed as if she were swallowing a mouthful of sour doubt. She marched to the bench, grabbed the blanket off the lawn, and swept up a clipboard I hadn’t noticed. A paper lined with a long list of things yet to be done fluttered in the breeze, a white flag of defeat. “The movers are coming in fifteen minutes to pack your treehouse and bedroom. You need to make sure everything’s ready for them. Pronto.”

As Mom charged up the path with a last bark—“Come on, Reb! I mean it. You’ve got to pack!”—I drew back my arm and threw the egg stone I had found for her and wished her life would be as upended as mine was now.

With an unsettling feeling, I watched the wishing rock arc in the sky and trace an invisible rainbow. As it landed with an impotent thud back on the beach, guilt and worry engulfed me. Now I wanted to stay down where it was safe at the beach. Now I wanted to retract my wish. Now I wanted to insist that Mom backtrack, too, but she was lunging toward the endless tasks that would usher us to the future. It was too late to do anything but follow.

Hours of sweeping and mopping to prepare our house for rental did nothing to stop me from berating myself for that mean-spirited wish. Distracted, I ran the vacuum cleaner into the wall and smudged the meticulous beige with a dark mark. With an impatient sigh, I switched off the vacuum and was about to inspect the damage when, in the abrupt silence, I heard Jackson outside. When had he arrived?

I rushed to my bedroom window and leaned out, ready to call to him. Instead, transfixed, I watched him play with Reid. At ten, my brother was as burly as a middle schooler—precisely why all the coaches of peewee football were chasing him with the fervor of lovelorn NFL scouts.

“Okay, Reidster,” said Jackson, drawing back his arm, “watch and weep as my fireball incinerates your temple.”

“Not a chance, peon, because my arrow of destruction is going to obliterate your wimpy fireball,” shot back Reid as his hands lifted to catch the football.

Just like that, I remembered my once-in-a-lifetime family biking trip in Italy, where I met and fell for Jackson. After a particularly long ride, Dad hibernated in the air-conditioned hotel room to catch up on work, but he wanted Reid to practice before football season started. That left Mom and me, which was a frightening prospect, since neither of us had ever touched pigskin. After watching our bumbling for a few moments, Jackson banished Mom and me from the hotel’s clipped lawn. Watching him toss the ball with Reid back then, I knew with absolute certainty it would be a hop, skip, and a jump from merely liking to being smitten and falling in love with Jackson.

I flew down the carpeted stairs now, intending to spend as much time as I had left with him. Screw cleaning the cottage; Mom could be her own Cinderella. I burst out the back door and onto the porch, where I stopped short.

The crying that haunted me yesterday restarted, building in pitch and intensity. I lowered myself onto the porch steps, fighting the compulsion to rock myself. At that moment, I would have done anything, said anything, to make that wailing in my head disappear.

“Hey, you,” Jackson said, loping to my side.

I forced a placid smile even as my stomach roiled from my effort to ignore the crying that was growing increasingly sorrowful. Between Mom’s order to stop dreaming, Dad’s scornful denial of anything that hinted of premonitions, and Ginny’s painful three-month silent treatment after I predicted that her father would die, I’d learned to stopper my sixth sense. I ignored the few visions I still had on rare occasions, afraid people would fire me from their lives. How different was that from Dad’s terminating employees who didn’t agree with his business vision?

A trickle of sweat that could have been a trail of tears slid down my cheek. Unlike other guys, Jackson didn’t glance away awkwardly because I was upset. Instead, he stared at me tenderly, as if he couldn’t believe I was real. The crying in my head became heartache, every tear a glass shard that pierced my resolve to break it off with Jackson. I didn’t want to hurt as badly as that weeping, not now. So why not try? I turned from the panoramic view of the Puget Sound to Jackson’s piercing eyes.

“So my dad said he’d fly you out for a visit,” I said softly as a cool breeze brought the salty scent of the seawater to me. “October sound good?”

“What do you think?” he asked, grinning at me.

The weeping stopped. All I heard was our breath as we leaned into each other for a kiss, slow and sweet. Then, as if in benediction of my decision, Jackson’s hand wrapped protectively around my hip, and with his forehead against mine, he drew me even closer.

A
s soon as we cleared security at Newark Airport, Dad waved from the barricade, iPhone to his ear, and finished his conversation: “Okay, Mother, they’re here. I got to go. Well, Adam’s not always right, but if you want to buy that property, it’s up to you. Okay, tomorrow. Yes, I’ll call you tomorrow.” With a long-suffering sigh, Dad hung up and pocketed his phone as though it were a distasteful secret he needed to tuck away. I had a sudden inkling of what my own life in college would be like in a few weeks. Like Dad, I could relocate across the country and still not be able to escape my mother’s control.

Before I could commiserate, Dad hugged us each hard, then grabbed my messenger bag in one hand and slung Reid’s backpack over his shoulder. He charged toward the baggage carousels. My phone chimed with Jackson’s text:
Touched down safe? Hello. Bruised and not just from missing you.
Worried, I stopped abruptly in the middle of the corridor to text him back, asking what had happened. I hadn’t realized Mom was trudging behind us until she stepped on my heels and sighed like I was in her way.

“Come on, Reb,” Mom urged as though I were five and could get lost wandering from our pack. Scooting around me, she hiked her misshapen tote bag higher onto her shoulder; the sack bulged with emergency snacks and supplies, like antiseptic wipes to kill the germs lurking on the plane’s folding trays.

“So, you kids excited to see our new house, or what?” Dad asked.

Baggage coursed down the chute and onto the carousel. As if this largesse of other people’s possessions reminded Mom of what was still trucking across the country to us, she said, “We don’t have furniture. Maybe we should spend a couple of nights in your apartment.”

Dad shrugged. “Doesn’t it make more sense to get the kids settled into the house as soon as possible?”

I rubbed my hands together, dry from the plane ride, uneasy because Mom was changing her well-armored plan and Dad was the one thwarting it. But why would he? He knew I wanted to be in New York. Now I wished I had landed anywhere but here. Wished I could jet forward six weeks, when freshman year would start and I could leave Mom and Dad to their house, furnished or not. Mom must have been watching out of her peripheral vision because she held out a small vial of lotion to me.

“Besides, one of the women at the moving company got air mattresses and sleeping bags for us,” Dad said as he checked a message on his iPhone. “It’s no big deal, Bits. It’ll be just like camping in your treehouse, right, Rebecca?”

No matter how much I rubbed my hands together, I couldn’t work in all the lotion, leaving my skin slippery, like I had dipped them in a vat of grease. Even though I was back to being the cheerleader, I couldn’t muster the energy to agree with Dad that, yeah, sleeping on the ground was no biggie. So I simply nodded.

The tote bag slipped off her shoulder, but Mom didn’t bother adjusting it, too busy scouting for our luggage even as she held out her hand to take the excess lotion from me.

The one sixth sense I might admit to having is my ability to feel space. For as long as I can remember, I could tell within a moment of entering a building—home, library, corporate campus—if the space worked or if it failed. The first time I felt true rightness was on Grandpa George’s houseboat, bought a month before I nearly drowned. Even when I was seven, some internal tuning mechanism had declared this home pitch-perfect. That sense of rightness solidified the moment I spotted Grandpa’s inviting window seat beneath the reclaimed wood stairs.