I crossed the Heron bridge and hopped log to log past the sticker bushes, seeing how far I could go without touching sand or water, until I smelled that the blackberries had finally sweetened. After gorging on them, I dropped the hockey glove next to its dried twin in the garage and climbed my stairs to get out of my wet sneakers. I’d almost pulled off the second soggy tube sock before I saw the fancy M on the front of the envelope on my pillow.
The card was a close-up of red sea stars and green anemones. Inside were these words in green ink: “Sorry for being so rude the other day. Sometimes not even you can make me feel better or act right.” Below that was a stylish heart next to the letter
A
.
I studied the handwriting. It was as if she’d invented her own slightly offbeat alphabet for me. Part of it, I knew, was that she was left-handed, but it also just made sense that Angie Stegner’s letters wouldn’t look like everybody else’s. I read and reread those twenty words (not counting the
A
or the heart), searching for meaning or emphasis I’d missed. The heart was code for
love,
right? I mean, she wasn’t encouraging me to eat healthy and it wasn’t Valentine’s Day.
When I skipped inside, my parents were sitting formally across from each other, eating silver salmon covered in that gross gray fat that oozes out of them sometimes. Their wooden postures told me they hadn’t spoken in a while, and my father didn’t even look up to greet me. He was so absorbed in the teamwork between his knife and fork it was like watching someone stitch a wound.
“Grab yourself a plate,” Mom said. “We couldn’t wait any longer.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Lost track of time.”
Nothing else was said while I scraped fat off my fillet and choked down a few bites.
“Miles, we need to discuss something,” Mom said.
Her firm tone and my father’s bloodless expression suddenly made sense. Blister’s parents had already found out about the sex call somehow and had already called to complain!
“Yeah?” I said warily.
“I’m going to stay with your aunt Janet in Seattle.”
“For the night?”
“For a while.”
I felt dizzy and slid my chair back from the table. “Is this a”
“No,” they said simultaneously, cutting me off. Dad piled on a few extra
no, no, nos
and a
not at all.
Then Mom said, “We’re just taking a break, Miles.”
“From what?” I asked.
“Don’t make this difficult,” she scolded. “It’s best for everyone, including you.”
They watched me swallow. “Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
They hesitated. “It’s not about you,” Dad said. “Not at all.”
“But Mom just said . . .“ Then I stopped and stared at a place between them until I could speak without stuttering or yelling. “I ate too many blackberries. I’ll eat something later.”
“Are you excusing yourself, Miles?” Mom asked.
“For God’s sake,” Dad hissed, “let him go.”
They stared at me as if I were staggering too close to a flame, but the truth was I’d already been dealing with what they thought I was facing for the first time. And once I stepped outside, it surprised me how quickly my anger turned to unexpected relieE I wouldn’t have to leave the bay, at least not yet.
Later that night, I heated a can of split-pea-with-ham for Florence and, after watching her spill twice, fed it to her one spoonful at a time without looking away until she sneezed out her dentures.
T
HE STORY THAT
changed everything came out the next Sunday, with the first heart-stopper being the photo of me with a golden halo around my head. Another one showed me sitting in the back of Carolyn’s car, leaving the cult compound, looking thoughtful, the way Kennedy looked in those motorcade photos before someone shot him in the head.
I knew another story was coming because that lanky, always-rushed
Olympian
reporter had come out to chat again. You’d think I would have been suspicious, but I was in love with words that day. I took her out to Chatham on a decent low and explained everything until her notebook was full and she had to go. See, I figured I was a harmless piece of her big story about Mrs. Powers. Of course, that’s not the way it unfolded.
The article included plenty of what I told the cult and listed off my marine “discoveries”—including the invasive crabs and seaweed—which she called the sole reason for an upcoming examination of sea life in South Sound bays. She even recounted the details about me reviving a drowning Lab and saving Phelps with a makeshift snorkel. Then she had some cult member calling me a “chid prophet” and Mrs. Powers herself saying, “God is in him.” (The article didn’t mention that the Eleusinians said that sort of thing all the time, that they believed God is in
everyone
.) Then there was Judge Stegner, of course, calling me the next Cousteau. Even Florence picked up the phone: “Miles has one of the brightest yellow auras I’ve seen,” she’d said, adding that she wouldn’t trust any spiritual leader who lacked a yellow aura.
And I thought “the beach talks to Miles O’Malley” was embarrassing.
Near the end of the article, for no reason at all, she described me strolling “pensively” on the beach, pointing things out and wishing aloud that “everyone” would spend a half hour on the flats at low tide—ten minutes listening, ten minutes looking, ten minutes touching. I said it, sure, but I came off like one of those schmaltzy naturalists I couldn’t read more than three pages of without barfing. Yet sure enough, there I was, insisting that such an exercise should be a “minimum requirement” for anyone living near salt water. Maybe that’s just how ridiculous you sound if you keep talking and someone is taking notes and you want to say something that makes them write faster. She also had me saying this: “If you don’t feel any connection to the ocean, then ask yourselfwhy your tears, blood and saliva contain about the same percentage of salt.” The article ended on the craziest note possible, with one Eleusinian describing me finding that Japanese street sign, and another one swearing that the gout in her left ankle subsided after wading with me.
The calls came so steadily that morning my father finally ordered me to stop answering “the damn thing” because he was having one “helluva” time getting through the story with so many “goddamn” interruptions. His breath smelled like charcoal-lighting fluid, and he kept guzzling pints of water and farting as he read and reread the same paragraphs.
He’d talked to the reporter too, but he also hadn’t sensed where she was headed, even though he apparently told her that ever since I was about seven he’d thought of me as an adult trapped in a child’s body. By the age of ten, he said, my vocabulary surpassed his.
After he finished the article, he swallowed three Motrin before saying anything. When he spoke, it was to gently scold me for visiting the cult without telling him. Then he twitched his head, blew his nose and asked, “Do you feel like maybe something supernatural is going on with you, Miles?”
I gave that some thought. “I feel like I always feel.”
“So then where is all this headed?”
“What?”
“Well, where do you come up with comments like the one about God being in nothing or everything?”
“I was answering a question.”
“Why are you telling a bunch of strangers some crazy prediction about the tide coming up too high in September?”
“It just came out that way.”
“But, I mean, what is your goal? Are you trying to scare people or change people—or
change
society?”
He hadn’t raised his voice, but I was getting yelled at.
“I don’t want to change anything,” I mumbled. “I like things the way they are—the way they were.”
He stopped, pressed a finger against his temple, then said, “Your mother loves you, Miles.”
I looked past him to the sparkling bay. “Can I go outside?”
He held up the newspaper. “I’m uneasy about all this. Okay? And I don’t know if it’s because I don’t like it for you, or if I don’t like it for me, but I don’t like it. I’ve never wanted attention. Okay? The worst part of getting married was having everyone looking at me. And I can’t even eat before staff meetings because I’ve got to pretend I’ve got the answers. Okay? And I’m such a lousy reader I have a hard time reading a goddamn newspaper article. So I guess I’m uncomfortable being the Joe Blow father of some speed-reading genius or chiid prophet or whatever it is people are trying to turn you into.”
It was more than I’d ever heard my father tell me about himself, so it took me a few breaths to respond. “You don’t have to talk to anyone,” I said. “And I don’t want to talk to anyone. And this should blow over pretty quick anyway, right?”
He smiled for the first time that morning, rubbed my head too hard, gave me a clumsy half-hug and returned an urgent message from my mother.
She kept asking if I needed help. Her voice was always louder on the phone, as if she barely trusted the technology. She said while it was flattering that so many people had said such nice and bizarre things about me, it had clearly gotten out of hand.
Then she warned me to stay away from the cult. She tried to pick her words, but I knew her lips were bloodless before she sputtered to a stop, then asked to speak to Dad again.
“Well, we are
separated
,” he whined. “Yes, I know I was quoted in the damn story, but I didn’t
know
.” Then he shouted: “How could I know?” He shoved the phone back at me.
She asked again whether I
needed
her.
The night she left she’d argued with my father for so long in the driveway that I’d had time to look for things she forgot. It wasn’t easy. She’d obviously packed for a long stay. Even her sweaters were gone. When I stepped outside and handed over her favorite pillow, she looked away and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. Then she just pushed meaningless words around until she kissed the top of my head and stranded us in gravel.
I weighed her question. Did I need her? Whatever she wanted to hear I wanted to tell her the opposite. “No,” I said firmly. “I really don’t.”
It sounded like a salmon bone caught in her throat, then she told me to remember to eat, and to tell any reporter who wanted to interview me that they needed to talk to my mother first. She gave me Aunt Janet’s number—even though I’d memorized it years ago—and made me repeat it. She said she’d try to make it down during the next couple days and hung up midway through her good-bye.
Dad studied me. “What’d she want?”
“Nothing.”
Our house felt unbearably hot. He stared at me, waiting. “She wanted to know if I needed help.”
He groaned. “Your mother has fallen out of love with me,
not you.
And I personally think she’s fallen out of love with herself. So telling her you don’t need her doesn’t help anything.”
“I’m going outside.”
Florence and Yvonne treated my breathless question like a punch line.
After she stopped laughing, Florence assured me that auras can’t be photographed and that nobody’s was as prominent as my golden halo in the newspaper. Plus, the color was way off, a bright sunshiny gold, instead of my soft yellow.
Yvonne visited so rarely and usually so late at night that I hadn’t seen her since spring, but a decade might as well have slipped past. She held a cane across her thighs and looked winded just sitting in the rocker.
She asked me if I’d noticed the color of Mrs. Powers’s aura. “I haven’t seen anybody’s yet,” I said, “not even mine. And I don’t know how anyone could tell where that lady’s aura begins and her cotton-candy hair ends.”
Yvonne’s laugh sounded so much like a duck it seemed strange to hear it indoors.
“Attention changes people,” Florence said suddenly, “even strong, humble young people.”
She offered more vague warnings that I ignored while I surveyed the fridge. I was relieved to see milk, bread, eggs, apples, cottage cheese and lots of almonds, but something about Yvonne’s ability to deliver groceries made me feel lazy and useless until I heard Florence telling her how great she’d been feeling, how well she’d been getting around, and how a pleasant state case worker by the name of Julie Winslow was outfitting her with all sorts of helpful items.
Maybe I didn’t show up with magical bags of food, but I was the only person Florence Dalessandro trusted.
Phelps swung by later with Blister, Bugeyes, and the Collins brothers, who were a year apart but still looked like twins or at least splices from the same plant.
Phelps had them all bowing and addressing me as “your lordship.” It was ridiculous. I told them to knock it off, but I didn’t see the downside yet. I didn’t hear the avalanche coming.
By Monday, variations of the same story were reprinted throughout the country, including a brief article on the front of
USA Today
with a headline that just said:
KID MESSIAH
? SO many people called—none of them paid attention to time zones—that my father had our number changed before he’d finished his second cup of coffee.
See, it was late August, and there were no hurricanes or elections or wars or Olympics or little girls caught in wells to report. Amazingly enough, I was the story of the day. And it wasn’t just reporters wanting a slice of me. The Washington Environmental Council, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club all wanted me to praise their causes, which I usually didn’t understand even after they explained them. People for Puget Sound showed up to crown me as the state’s Environmentalist of the Year, which seemed odd seeing how the year still had four months to go. I held up that award and smiled, but didn’t know where to put it afterward and noticed their smirks when I folded it into a square small enough to cram into a pocket.
Strangers clustered around the bridge and the tavern like fish around pilings by late afternoon. Some even ventured down our driveway, then returned to the tavern, the bridge or vacant beach lots when their knocks went unanswered. As the tide fell, people waded out toward where six of us were goofing on the mud bars. Most of them either cut their feet or retreated once the mud softened, but several eventually made it. They weren’t actually interrupting anythlng special, but it felt like an intrusion, and Phelps intercepted them with his fuck-you bangs to inform them I wasn’t doing any more interviews.