Dark Water - Laura McNeal [7]
A realtor who used to work with my dad sold the house, which I liked to picture with the pointed part of the roof as a balancing point and the door up high, so that nobody could get in. We didn’t get any money afterward.
Seven
Which is why Robby and I were sitting in Lavar’s decrepit cottage on Amiel’s first day of work. I put some tuna on the counter, opened it, and stared out the window. I carried around for the first time that day the sensation of Amiel being nearby, like he had one of those laser pointers aimed at me and the red dot of light moved wherever I moved. All I could see through the window, though, were avocado trunks and a couple of crows.
“Want some le crackers?” I asked.
Robby was sniffing the tuna like it had gone bad. He doesn’t look like my blood relative at all, which I guess is normal for cousins. He has his mother’s coloring, which is whitish, and black hair and gray eyes. His lips are just ridiculously pretty—kind of salmon and curvy the way a woman’s might be, but he’s got a square jaw, blocky hands, and buff shoulders, so he doesn’t look like a wuss who collects Tintin figures.
“I just made it le yesterday,” I said. It was a thing we started doing back when our mothers got this idea that Robby and I should speak to each other exclusively in French, rendering me totally fluent and chic by, like, second grade and keeping Robby from the dreadful fate of growing up American. Robby was much better at Franglish than I was and could generally do more than “le” the heck out of things, but he wasn’t in the mood.
“What’s that terrible smell?” Robby said. He was looking through his glasses in a moderately disgusted way at my mother’s silkworms. My mom’s best friend, Louise Bart, gave my mom the worms because she noticed, while visiting us in our new old cottage, that my uncle had a pair of mulberry trees. A normal friend might have found this a great opportunity to make mulberry cobbler (which tastes like blackberry cobbler), but this friend, like my mother, is fatally interesting, so she said, “You could raise silkworms here!”
“We could?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because you have a constant source of food for them,” she said. “Full-grown mulberry trees.”
I meant “why would we want to,” but my mother didn’t need to ask. She’d gone with Louise to workshops on raising your own cotton, she’d learned to use a spindle one year, and she saw herself, I think, raising silkworms, processing the silk, and weaving it into priceless cloth that she could sell when the wolf came to the door.
Robby looked dubiously at the smooth white caterpillars crawling on the mattress of mulberry leaves my mother and I fetched for them three times a day. They munched big lacy holes until their pulsing bodies were strewn with green crumbs, then waited to be covered again, like children who have kicked off their blankets.
“Aren’t you worried they’ll crawl into your Caesar salad?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “they’ve been bred not to wander,” which is what my mother told me.
“You’d think they might try that with people,” he said more bitterly than I would have thought normal. He stared at them a little longer. “They smell kind of funky.”
“Don’t we all,” I said. I was pretty sure the house smelled funky all by itself, before we even moved in. “But they’re interesting, don’t you think?” I asked. Now that the caterpillars had molted into newer, larger skins five times, they were as big as my index finger and snowy white. A black line that looked like an artery pulsed just below the skin