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  “I guess,” she answers.

  Their mother calls them both out; it is time to start dinner. Their little lips are blue. Many calls and much counting later, the three of them come up the steps, and in the sun there, her mother looks carefully at Gwen’s cut, crouches down, puts her hands on either side of her leg, gently pushes at the skin around the cut.

  “This is deeper than I thought,” she says, “Inside.”

  They leave Libby at the tin house once more. She cannot leave the porch alone, and her mother knows that is a rule she, unlike her sister, will not break. Their father has disappeared. Probably on the south porch hiding. Libby will find him; their mother smirks, happy that his peace will be interrupted. She takes her daughter, her misbehaving daughter, into the bathroom and sits her on the closed lid of the toilet. Peroxide fizzes in her cut. She squirms, her eyes water. Then her mother dabs it with a dry washcloth, smooths Bactine over it, and seals it all with a Band-Aid. As she’s smoothing the edges of the bandage, Gwen puts her arms around her mother’s neck and rests a cheek against her forehead.

  “Thank you, Mama,” she says. And her mother thinks, This child is still mine.

  ELEVEN

  GWEN

  July 6

  The setting sun shone over the thoroughfare, lighting the sails of the ships coming home for the night; it streamed in the kitchen window. Though the view was good, Gwen hated to cook dinner, to be sequestered in the kitchen, to miss even one night of leisurely cocktails on the porch. But Libby’s laminated cooking schedule could not be ignored. It was their turn. Gwen wondered how their mother managed cooking every night, every summer of their childhood. The light shone in Gwen’s eyes and made it hard to see things on the west wall of the kitchen, the bucket in the soapstone sink, the flame under the steamer pot she had just set to boil. The sun brought the temperature up in the room, as if they were roasting chicken for dinner, not simply steaming mussels.

  “Just sit there,” said Gwen. “Your job is to keep us company.”

  “I could at least set the table,” said Melissa.

  “It’s not your night,” said Libby. “You should relax. Danny can do it; it’s his job anyway.”

  “He might like an excuse to get away from Tom. When I left them on the porch, they were both staring at a schooner, not talking. Not even making fun of the tourists.”

  “See, you’re much better off here with us,” said Gwen. She was wondering about Danny. He seemed to be skating around the edges of the house. She thought of him forever camped in the rug room on the wicker chaise rotating between books and cards. But this trip she kept seeing him disappear up the road, or into the woods, not all the time but enough. She wondered if he was getting stoned and didn’t want to tempt her in her condition. Or maybe he was doing something worse, though she couldn’t imagine what that might be. If he was shooting up, he’d never leave the house; if he was doing coke, he’d never have left the city in the first place. Maybe there was a girl, someone pulled to the edge of the paved road waiting for him to emerge from their dirt track. Whatever it was, he couldn’t keep a secret from her very long.

  The mussels were in a bucket in the soapstone sink. Gwen put the bucket at the center of the kitchen table, and Libby set two bowls beside it.

  “So what is the order of operations here?” asked Melissa.

  “How have you never done this before?” asked Gwen.

  “I don’t do fish. I’m afraid of poisoning everyone.”

  “I’ve already washed them,” said Libby. “Now we just need to weed out any bad ones and pull the beards.”

  Mussels had been their mother’s specialty, and she had passed it on to them, the girls, teaching them to scrub and pull and tap. Then she would turn them loose to carry a beer to their father, to pass the cheese plate to guests on the porch. She would finish cooking alone in the kitchen, the windows wet with steam.

  “Sounds like we’re testing fake Santas or something,” said Melissa. Gwen had already worked her way through six mussels. She enjoyed mindless tasks like this. She excelled at stuffing envelopes and filing. It was a moving meditation, like grocery shopping or folding laundry. Simple tasks gave her all the satisfaction of doing something with her hands, accomplishing a goal, but with none of the pressure of actually creating something. She found such things to be the perfect break from drawing, deliciously mindless. When things got tight, when she hadn’t been assigned any classes at the adult ed center for the fall semester, hadn’t sold any work last summer, she’d taken a temp job. By the time she couldn’t take another day of fluorescent lights, they’d offered her a full-time position. She had tried not to laugh. Then, on her last day, she filed drawings of naked women standing on desks, scaling filing cabinets, basking in the glow of a flaming photocopier.

  “Like so.” Gwen took a mussel from the bucket, gave it a sharp tap with her finger, like she was playing a particularly sticky piano key, yanked off the stringy bit of fur that hung from the flattened edge of the shell, and then tossed the mussel into one of the bowls.

  “Then what’s this for?” Melissa pointed to the empty bowl.

  “The rejects, the ones that don’t close up tight when you tap them,” said Libby.

  As they tossed the mussels on top of one another, the shellfish ticked together like walnuts. What looked like stone sounded wooden and brittle. She wished she could pause this cooking party and take out her watercolors and paint the bucket and bowls, the menacing blue-black of the mussels, their grained shells pocked with the occasional barnacle.

  “They’re so prehistoric,” said Libby.

  “More mystical, like black magic,” said Gwen. The place where voodoo and Norse myths might collide, the ridged fingernails of a sea witch.

  When the bucket was empty Gwen and Libby stood, each with a bowl in her hands.

  “I’ll get the boys to dump these,” said Libby, heading out the door. Gwen took her bowl to the stove and checked the water.

  “Almost there,” she said. A watched pot. She put her hand to her belly. Then shook her hand like she wanted to wake up her fingers, realizing that they were dreaming. They were betraying her, resting there like that, searching for some seismic sign.

  “Have you talked to the kids?” she asked Melissa. “The house still standing?”

  “They haven’t managed to tie up their grandmother and make a break for the border yet. They’re too lazy to do anything really terrible.”

  “I wish they were here,” said Gwen. “But it must be kinda great to take a break from Mommy duty.”

  “Yeah, but life is so much easier now. It’s when they’re little that you really need the breaks. Now they spend half their time in their rooms with headphones on. I tried to convince them that they could do that here, but they couldn’t bear the idea of spotty cell reception.”

  “I don’t know how you did it, two kids, two years apart. How did you have a life?” said Gwen.

  Libby came back in and followed Gwen to the fridge. Gwen passed butter, lemons, and berries to Libby. Melissa sat at the table, slowly spinning a glass of wine from its base.

  “I didn’t, really. Your old life sort of disappears, and you create a whole new one that has some of the old stuff and a lot of new stuff. It’s very phoenix-from-the-ashes,” said Melissa.

  So it burns, and you are a magical bird singed and caged.

  “You handled it well,” said Gwen, “Trapped in the house all the time. Parenthood seems more like being an ex-con, only you have to nurse your parole officer.” She had dated the dealer who lived across the street from her, and she referred to him as The Felon, though he had never been convicted of anything. Their relationship consisted of smoking spliffs on his front steps and making out. Eventually things regressed into more of a straightforward business arrangement. Spliffs, yes, kisses, no. That was as close to a life of crime as Gwen had ever come.

  “Guess that makes me a corrections officer,” said Libby. “Maybe I should get my kids little striped s
uits for the dress-up box. Men seem to think relationships are so much work, when really it’s the baby that’s the real ball and chain, not the wife.”

  “See, Bibs, a wife wouldn’t be so bad,” said Gwen.

  “We’re talking about babies,” said Libby, “not wives. I’ve got fifteen kids every year. I don’t need a wife too.” Libby distributed each item around the kitchen, the berries to the sink, the lemons on the table, the butter beside the stove.

  “Maybe just a wedding, then, for the presents and the dancing and the champagne,” said Gwen. She stacked sticks of butter into a mini pyramid.

  “I doubt her parents would want to foot the bill for a wedding when I won’t even let her move in.” Libby rinsed the berries in the soapstone sink.

  “Who says she gets to be the bride?” said Gwen.

  “Why won’t you let her move in?” said Melissa, tilting her head a bit to one side.

  “I look crappy in white.”

  “Does Patricia want kids?” said Melissa. Her glass had grown frosted from the chill of the wine.

  “She wants cats.”

  “Well, you definitely can’t let her move in, then,” said Gwen as she went to get the butter dishes from the china closet. “Just make her live in her car, in your driveway, with the cats.”

  “Gwen, are kids on your agenda?” said Melissa. Libby snorted.

  Gwen was happy to be standing in the china closet, to have her back to the door so Melissa couldn’t see her face. She didn’t keep her own secrets because she was a terrible liar. She had embraced that quality by being brutally honest; if the truth is all over your face, why not say it.

  “It’s just not my idea of a good time,” she called over her shoulder, trying to sound distracted and nonchalant. “Maybe all those years of babysitting poisoned me against the idea. It seems like a two-man job.” It’s hard enough when you get paid to do it. What happens when it costs you?

  At seventeen she had spent two weeks in Hawaii with their neighbors, the Sheldons, and their three kids. For weeks leading up to the trip, she’d had stress dreams. A school of sharks would be waiting under the crest of a coming wave as the three Sheldon children frolicked in its shadow. She liked the kids, but with each wipe of a wet cloth digging between tight fingers, with every curled ear she massaged with suntan lotion, she had thought, motherhood is horrible. At night, she would find the waiter who had served her deflowered drinks at dinner. In his room between the ice machine and the transformer she would collapse on his single bed and ask how we had all managed to survive past infancy. He massaged her pruned hands that had held the youngest Sheldon afloat for most of the day.

  “In Hawaii children are raised by the sea,” he had told her. She wondered if that wasn’t true of herself and Tom and Libby. Danny had had parents, had her. Gwen thought of her father holding Danny as they rode the ferry, her mother pointing out porpoises.

  She rummaged through the closet, rattling stacks of plates, even though the butter dishes were right in front of her, hoping the subject would change. Then Gwen went to the stove, unwrapped the frozen sticks of butter, and let them thud into a saucepan, then she slid the cleaned mussels into the steamer pot.

  “The best kids are other people’s kids,” said Libby. “The ones you can just give back at the end of the day.”

  “Is that true of other people’s boyfriends, too?” whispered Gwen with a smirk. She’d almost said “other people’s wives” but stopped herself. She could tease Libby about Tim but never about Riley. Even so, Libby looked shocked.

  “Tim Sherman was real cute,” said Gwen.

  The three of them hung out for a few weeks one summer, going sailing on the Charles, drinking forties on their back porch. After a party one night she had stayed behind to hold the hair of the hostess and asked Tim to drive Libby home. Gwen knew exactly what would happen; she figured she didn’t like Tim enough and maybe Libby did. In fact, Libby had never liked a guy before or since. Tim had broken up with Gwen the next day. Neither of them had said anything, but Gwen knew. He was a good kid, a safe guy for her sister’s first hetero time.

  At this point, Libby, red from the collarbone to the hairline, was intently rinsing berries, again. It had never occurred to Gwen that Libby might have thought she didn’t know. Hadn’t they joked about this before? Libby left the berries dripping in a colander in the dish drainer.

  “And he was the love of my life.” Gwen sighed, fluttering her eyelashes. Libby twisted up a dishtowel and snapped it in Gwen’s direction. Gwen moved next to her for a moment and kicked her foot up and smacked Libby’s butt and then went back to the stove.

  “Anyway, I agree with Libby. Other people’s kids are the best. I’m madly in love with Kerry and Buster,” said Gwen. She filled the butter dishes with hot water from the electric kettle to warm them. No one wanted congealed melted butter.

  “Really? I hate other people’s kids,” said Melissa. “My kids are amazing.”

  “Bibs, I forgot to add—”

  With a wet hand Libby passed Gwen the white wine from the counter, the redness now receding down her neck, just a speckling, like she had hastily applied sunscreen. Gwen splashed wine into the pot, then pointed the neck of the bottle at the lemons scattered by the edge of the sink.

  “Since Tom is anti-lemon, I’m going to leave it out,” said Gwen.

  “We can just give everyone their own wedge. Melissa?” said Libby, pointing to the lemons on the table. Melissa stood up, eager for a job. She went to the counter, stared at the magnetic knife strip for a bit.

  “Check the block to the left,” said Gwen from the stove. Libby pulled a cutting board from the shelf and put it on the table.

  “Just berries for dessert?” said Libby.

  “Naked berries? Please.” Gwen went to the pantry and produced cream from the fridge, a stainless-steel bowl from the freezer.

  “So smart,” said Libby. They had made strawberry shortcake last summer and ended up with soupy butter instead of whipped cream because the heat in the kitchen kept the cream too warm, too watery to whip.

  When she was a kid, Gwen’s parents were the storm. But then with Danny they didn’t lose each other; there were no houses or boats or china whirling perpetually around them. After Danny was born, she remembered them, her parents, curled together in the rug room on the chaise. They had always liked to sleep when it rained. To nap together. Like cats. They became something impossible—parents who couldn’t get enough of each other. Then again, hadn’t it always been that way? Before, they couldn’t get enough of each other’s tears, and then, they couldn’t get enough of each other’s space and time. They hung on each other, like middle school couples on the school bus, with a desperation, as if at any moment someone would tell them they needed to stand three feet apart, tell them to fornicate on their own time, call them into their office to explain how they were making people uncomfortable with their affection. All of which had happened to Gwen during seventh grade.

  “The hardest part of the kid thing,” said Melissa, “is losing the life you had with your partner. You can get back a lot of what you had by yourself. Well, after the first year. The first year is a fucking tornado.”

  “Particularly with Kerry. Jesus, that shit was ridiculous,” said Gwen.

  Melissa had practically lived in the NICU, Kerry asleep on her chest, the size of a twelve-week-old kitten. She and Libby had alternated days taking care of Buster, picking him up at day care. On weekends Gwen went to the hospital and held Kerry, gathered her tiny, splayed legs and arms to her body and cupped her head as she lay in her incubator. Gwen would go home, but she wouldn’t even make it inside. She’d sit on her front stoop with her sagging purse on her knees and smoke cigarettes.

  “But at least I got to recover, got to sleep at night. That was the upside. Skipping the last trimester definitely made recovery easier too. But leaving her there every day, not knowing. That was hell.”

  “I don’t know how you made it through,” said Libb
y.

  “Tom got through it,” said Melissa. “I just followed him. One day I refused to go to the hospital, knowing that every day there was only a fifty-fifty chance she would make it. I felt paralyzed. And Tom put me in the car and drove me to the hospital. At a stoplight he said, ‘If she goes today, at least we got to meet her, to have her for a few weeks. Even one day is worth it.’ He was the strong one.” Melissa arranged the lemon slices on a plate. “Strange to think that was twelve years ago. We talk about it sometimes. He doesn’t even remember that day. He remembers the bills.”

  “I remember holding Kerry when she was just home from the hospital, and you had gone somewhere. I spent the whole time watching her breathe; I was terrified,” said Gwen.

  “She did have a tendency to turn blue. You’d have to give her a little shake.”

  “God, no wonder you guys never had a third,” said Libby. She poured more wine into Melissa’s glass and then her own. Libby held the bottle toward Gwen, but she waved it away.

  “Maybe with dinner,” Gwen said. Libby looked at the wine bottle for a moment and then put it on the table.

  “The more kids, the more you end up losing track of each other. I didn’t want to compound the problem,” said Melissa. Gwen and Libby exchanged a look. Melissa often complained about Tom. He kept his briefcase under their bed. In the middle of the night Melissa would hear the thunk of the latches opening as he searched out his blackberry. He insisted that their children’s friends call him Mr. Willoughby. Usually, though, she told these stories while sitting next to him, rubbing his back. This was new.