He was drinking, as he almost always was when he wasn’t at work. He’d filled his cup again and again from the jug of “iced tea” in the red-and-white cooler between his feet. The sun made him thirsty, he said. I was ten and had tasted what was in his cup. I didn’t see how it could quench his thirst.
Alex’s shoes squeaked on the tile as he came closer. His hand on my shoulder felt heavier than it should have, an undeserved weight. He meant it to be caring, but his understanding was too intimate to be borne. I didn’t want to be beholden to him for his compassion.
I shook off the memory. “We didn’t drown, obviously.”
“But you were scared. You’re still scared, remembering it.”
“I was ten. I didn’t know any better. My dad wouldn’t have done anything to hurt me.”
Gentle but firm, Alex squeezed the tension in my shoulder. He found the trigger point. My body wanted to melt into that simple touch, to give up the coils of anxiety woven into my muscles. I didn’t move, and we stayed like that, linked by the touch of his fingertips.
The flash of lightning and almost instantaneous crash of thunder made me jump. I slipped a little, but Alex was there with a hand under my elbow and a firm forearm for me to grab. I didn’t fall.
The power went out with a bleat from the microwave and came back on a moment later with a similar, electronic cry. Another rumble followed another flash, and the power stayed out. Night hadn’t fallen but the afternoon had gone dark enough to cast the kitchen into shadow.
Darkness reveals as much as it hides, sometimes. We were touching, hand to shoulder, hand to arm, hand to elbow. We dripped. We breathed. My teeth had stopped chattering, because of the heat.
“He was drunk,” I said.
Alex’s fingers squeezed again. I never said that aloud. We all knew, my sisters and my mother and I, but we never said it aloud. I never even said it to James, the man to whom I’d bound my life.
“He couldn’t get us back in. The water came over the sides and up to my knees, and I thought we were going to die. I was ten,” I said again, like it was important.
Alex said nothing, but we moved closer to each other anyway. The hem of his jeans caressed the skin of my foot revealed by my flip-flop. His shirt dripped onto my bare arm, and the water was cold.
“Families suck,” Alex said.
The power came back on. We moved apart. By the time James came home, I’d made dinner and we ate while they laughed together and I put a smile on and pretended it was real.
My mother was dithering. I didn’t know whether to scream or take pity on her and simply remove the choices that had sent her into such a frenzy. The air in the attic was so hot it was like breathing steam.
“Mom, just pick out a couple and let’s get downstairs. Or better yet, bring the boxes downstairs and we’ll look at them there.”
“Oh, no, no,” my mother said, her hands fluttering like birds over the carefully labeled boxes of photographs. “I’ll just be a minute. There are so many nice ones ….”
I bit my tongue against a sharp retort and craned my neck to see the pictures she’d lifted. There were a lot of nice ones. Nobody could ever say my parents weren’t photogenic, not even in the butt-ugly 1970s prairie-style wedding gown and brown tuxedo with the yellow ruffled shirt.
“How about this one?” She held up a portrait-size photo of the two of them. She had Farrah Fawcett wings in her hair and he had mutton-chop sideburns. They looked happy.
“Perfect.”
“I don’t know.” She dithered some more, going back and forth from one to the next, the only difference between the two was the width of their smiles. “This one is nice, too ….”
The heat sapped my patience; so had the lack of sleep the night before. I’d dreamed again of the weight of stones in my pockets and water closing over my head. “Mom. Just pick one!”
She looked up. “You pick, Anne. You’re so good at that sort of thing.”
I reached for the one closer to me. “This one.” I put it in the pile of others she’d chosen for the collage Patricia wanted to put together.
“Oh, but that one—”
I gathered them up and tucked them into the manila envelope for safekeeping. “I have to get out of here before I pass out. I’ll take these.”
Without waiting for her answer, I ducked through the low-hanging eaves and down the set of pull-down stairs. Compared to the stifling heat of the attic, the second floor felt like the arctic. My vision blurred for a moment and I swallowed hard against a swirl of nausea. I could blame it on the attic, but I almost always felt a twinge of stomach upset whenever I stood in the place I was now.
The stairs from the first floor came out in the middle of the second level. We had no upper hallway, just a square cordoned off by banister railing surrounding the stairs. The three bedrooms and the bathroom all opened off this square. As they’d always been, the doors were cracked open to keep the breeze flowing.
Mary, at home for the summer while she waited to return to law school in Pennsylvania, had taken over the room that had been mine and Patricia’s. Claire had the room she’d shared with Mary all to herself. They still shared the single bathroom, but with only two instead of four, the fighting for the shower probably never reached the epic proportions it had when we all lived at home.
The door to my parents’ bedroom was closed, the only one to ever remain that way. Closed to keep in the cooler air from the shadowed side of the house, and the air from their window air conditioner. Closed to keep us out, as children, when our dad had “a headache” and needed to “rest.” A closed door that shut us out but didn’t keep us from hearing the shouting.
“Anne?” My mother’s flushed face appeared in front of me. She wore her curls shorter than mine, in a cut that emphasized the bright blue of her eyes. She’d stopped coloring her hair and now two side streaks of white painted the dark auburn. I didn’t need a time machine to know what I’d look like as I aged. I only had to look at my mom.
The world swam and I swallowed again. Dizziness swept over me and I gulped in air that no longer felt so cool.
“Sit down.” She might have been held hostage by indecision at having to choose which pictures to use, but my mother didn’t hesitate now. In a house full of pale-skinned redheads, fainting had been a common occurrence. “Put your head between your knees.”
I did as she said, knowing well enough the warning signs of buzzing in my ears and flashing spots in my vision. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth with slow, measured breaths. She brought a cold, damp washcloth and laid it over the back of my neck. It only took a few minutes before the discomfort of the balustrade digging into my back was worse than the dizziness. My mom brought me a plastic cup of ginger ale, cold but without ice, and I sipped it.
“Should I ask if there’s something you want to tell me?” she asked, and when I looked up, her eyes were twinkling.
I shook my head, only slightly, not wanting to send myself back into feeling faint.
