Dark Water - Laura McNeal [53]
“What are you going to do with her now?” I asked my mother.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I’m thinking.”
When my mother left for work, I went to the river. It didn’t belong to Amiel, I reasoned, and I found certain places on other banks where I felt completely alone. I read books I’d been meaning to read and books I’d read before. I ate peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and Corn Pops, but no more loquats. I took close-up photographs of the water, the bark, dead leaves, a molted lizard, and a dogface butterfly. I drew pictures of insects in a notebook and tried to identify them the way we’d been required to do in eighth grade, when I was forced to push pins through the bodies of beetles my father helped me catch with a Smucker’s jar full of poison. I drew pictures of plants, too, and this is how I learned to tell miner’s lettuce from black sage, virgin’s bower, and snakeweed. For the rest of June, the weather was mostly foggy and white, as still as the dead cocoons. Then July came and the sun burned yellow flowers called butter and eggs into brown straw, the dodder crept like orange Silly String over the poison ivy, and an insect I never saw made a continuous, furious ticking sound.
I don’t know how often Amiel watched me. In the daytime, I assumed he was away at work, but in the evenings or late afternoons, the whole canyon felt like a tunnel waiting for a train. I listened for him with my feet and my spine and my averted head, but to the hikers who cracked by with their sniffing, leaping dogs, it was just me and my Brontë book, me and my Pocket Field Guide, me and my Corn Pops. I was the hobo girl of Agua Prieta.
Greenie didn’t miss me because she and Hickey had entered a cocoon of their own. They were always together, and Hickey plainly didn’t want me there. Robby, too, had his preoccupations: a college prep class in Claremont that met five days a week for the first four weeks of summer, then a music camp slightly less prestigious than the one he’d failed to try out for in April. My father neither called nor wrote to ask if I’d changed my mind about Paris. My whole life reminded me of how it felt to ride, when Greenie and I were little, in the back of Greenie’s mother’s car, an ancient Pacer with a seat that faced backward and left us staring at places we’d already been and drivers who didn’t want to make eye contact. I was facing the wrong direction, but time still went forward, gliding toward destinations I couldn’t see or choose.
One week my mother decided to have it out with the cocoons. She followed directions from a guy who had his own silk business, and the first, most disgusting step was to extract the worms. Out they came, dead and yellow. Then she soaked the cocoons in hot water. She mushed them around, expecting the hard glue to just melt away, but soon she had a bunch of dented egg shapes that reminded me of Ping-Pong balls you’ve run over with a car. Still, she dried them in the sun, and the next day, right after breakfast, she picked at one until she’d teased out a strand of silk. One strand after another came off in her hands like foot-long hanks of spiderweb. I kept expecting her to give up, but she wrapped the webby bits around and around until she had a miniature ball of truly unimpressive silk. One down, eight to go.
“Now what?” I said.
My mother dumped the rest of the mashed, hollow cocoons in the kitchen trash, and the lid came down with a clap. She set the tiny ball of silk in the basket of random objects she kept on her desk. She took the corpse of the lady moth outside and set her on a gardenia bush. Then she came back inside.
“Sometimes,” she said slowly, as if she were still searching for a useful moral, “you’ve got to know when to give up.”
She left for work, and I hiked all the way to a series of boulders the size of cars that caused the river to flow fast and loud around them. You could stretch out your whole body on some of those rocks, but they were also prime real estate for