Dark Water - Laura McNeal [56]
When Greenie and I played the game, we almost never managed to guess each other’s words. Letters, yes, but long words took repetition. Amiel closed his hand over the letter P on my second try and withdrew his arm. Then he turned around and faced the empty walls of the ruined house. He crouched down in front of the dead fire and poked at the crumbs of black wood. He refused to look at me, and he shook his head.
I had nothing else to say or do, so I turned and walked through the doorless door of the roofless house, and when I had picked my way down the root-twisted bank, I couldn’t wait for the open trail so that I could run and run and run.
Thirty-four
A few days later, I resumed my old habits of reading and swimming, but I stayed away from Amiel’s part of the river. The days were pale green and flat, like water that got stuck in the reeds and went nowhere. I could have opened my eyes underwater and seen my life as a sunken object, floating and trapped, green with algae.
I was so used to my stagnation that when I found another note from him that said BLACK OAK, I went as far as the tree, picked up the small dark-blue bottle with a white flower poking out of the top, and then just put it in my backpack. I didn’t go looking for Amiel because whatever we were doing, it wasn’t hide-and-seek. Twice more he left notes and twice more I followed them. I collected the pair of acorns joined like the chambers of a heart. The small papery man made from corn-husks. I set them all with the jar of shells on the windowsill of Robby’s tree house, where, I figured, my mother wouldn’t see them but Amiel, who still worked in my uncle’s grove on Fridays, might walk through the grove and see the silent progress of his gifts.
It was mid-July when my mother’s friend Louise asked my mother, “What’s Pearl doing on Mission Road without a helmet?”
By this point, my mother was so thin she could wear things from the junior department at Macy’s, and she wore brighter lipstick. Between her eyebrows were two wrinkles I’d recently learned (from reading the type of magazine she never used to buy, but now, confusingly, did) were called the “11.” When she was angry with me, the lines deepened. I watched them go dark as she said, “Where in the world have you been going?”
“Just the river,” I said.
“With Greenie?”
“No.”
“I already told you it isn’t safe for you to be there alone, and it isn’t safe to ride your bike on Mission Road.”
“The migrants do it.”
Occasionally, you saw muscled men in helmets, sunglasses, and Spandex using the bike lanes of Fallbrook, but mostly it was dark-skinned men in ball caps.
“They,” my mother said, “have no choice.”
“What else am I going to do all day?”
“If you’re going to ride your bike like a migrant, you can get a job like a migrant.”
“So it’s safe to ride on Mission if I have a job.”
My mother blinked. She twisted an earring. “Not safe. Just defensible. And you have to wear a helmet.”
“Fine,” I said.
So the following morning, while my mother watched, I put on a hideous old helmet that used to be Robby’s. I told her when I would be home and exactly where I was going to fill out applications: Major Market and Subway. But after I left those places, I stopped, on a whim, at the Cup o’ Europe, which was right across the alley from the fake Irish pub and had a WE’RE HIRING sign in the window.
The manager, Chloe, was this big friendly woman with a cold, and she was just being polite, I could tell, in letting me apply for the job at all (PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE PREFERRED, the sign said in smaller letters), but as she was reading the top line of my application, she said, “Are you related to Sharon DeWitt?”
My thigh muscles felt like ironing boards. “Yes,” I said.
“As in?”
“She’s my mother.”
“Well, that would be odd,” she said, letting out an overly big laugh. “Do you two bicker?”
“Not usually,” I said, shrugging.
“You