Page 28 of The Treasure House

Flo rolled over. “Apparently oyster spawn—I’ll look that up later, I bet it’s gross—sucker onto culch and live there. And the culch is a bunch of junk that’s settled on the seabed. Like shells and rocks ’n’ stuff. So culch is useful junk. At least to the oyster spawn.”

“I don’t know how much of the culch in our house is useful.” I sighed. “Our culch might just be junk.”

She flopped back onto the bed, happily scrolling spawn pics. “Can I watch Netflix on your phone?”

“Sure.” I felt a wave of relief at the thought of a moment’s peace. I closed my eyes and let the sound of the sea fill me. The summer evening was a song of cicadas and waves and the wind in the leaves.

I heard the tu-dum of Netflix booting up.

“You mind if I wander down to the water?” I asked abruptly. I needed to be alone. It was a keen feeling, sharp as nicking a finger on a kitchen knife. It was hard sharing a room with your kid—you didn’t have space to feel your feelings. At least not openly. “I’ll lock the door behind me,” I said as I covered myself liberally in the cabin’s complimentary bug spray. “And I’ll stay close—you just need to yell if you need me.” I felt guilty leaving her, but I needed a moment alone.

“Where’s your charger?” Flo didn’t care if I was in the cabin or not.

“In my bag.”

Sometimes she seemed on the verge of being a teenager, and I didn’t feel ready. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to parent her. Even now, I felt I was failing her because I needed to be alone. I thought of myself in those cold walk-up apartments, abandoned by Tina…

“If you see anyone, ask them if we can have a campfire,” Flo instructed me cheerfully.

She wasn’t me, I reminded myself. And I wasn’t Tina. We were okay.

“I will. And don’t forget, yell if you need me.”

She didn’t even reply. She just flopped onto the bed, curled over my phone.

I stepped out into the lush blue evening and inhaled shakily. I could feel the tension in my shoulders and neck as I locked the door. I slipped down to the water’s edge, feeling the emotion of the day rise up, now that Flo wasn’t watching me.

Oh God. I’d bought a house full of junk.

I was going to be the owner of that witchy cottage with its broken windows and bramble canes and culch. I had a loan on that junk heap.

I was going to cry, I could feel it coming.

I hid behind a maple and gave in to it.

The dark bay swam before my eyes, and I felt desperately alone as I sank down to the ground, my back against the maple, and pulled my knees up under my chin, hugging myself into a ball. How on earth was I going to do this? I was just one person. That house had accumulated lifetimes of garbage—what could one person do in the face of all that?

And I was one person who had to raise a kid and earn money. How could I possibly take on that house? How could I uproot us from Pittsburgh and the only people who cared if we lived or died? I wished Suni and Wayne were here. I needed someone to tell me I was doing the right thing. But deeper than that, there was a feeling I hadn’t consciously felt for a very long time…

I wanted my mom.

The thought of packing everything up, of hurling us into the unknown, stirred up deep old feelings. Sitting on the edge of the bay in the woods of Oxeye, I felt like I was falling back through time. I was a little kid again; the world was a big scary place, and my mom was nowhere to be found. Mixed in with the wild howling scary feelings was a bright cut of rage.

The first time I was put in foster care it was because Tina had overdosed. I was three. The only memory I have of that time is of a yellow bedroom and a woman who smoked a lot of cigarettes. I can remember looking up through a striated cloud of smoke to her face. Ever since that time, cigarettes have always smelled yellow to me.

The second time I was put in foster care was because Tina was picked up working the streets; she also had a stash on her. I was nine. Just a couple of years younger than Flo. I was at home in our little walk-up when an officer and a case worker came for me. I remember that Friends was on TV; I remember the way the case worker’s eyes swept our poky little room as she gently asked me to pack a bag, to the accompaniment of the laugh track that followed Chandler’s one-liners. I don’t remember the case worker’s name, or what she was wearing, but I remember she had bags under her eyes, and she kept calling me Zo, like my name didn’t have an e on the end. “Zo-e,” I corrected her politely each time, but she kept doing it.

As I sat there in the Oxeye campground, I felt the way I had that night. The cold heaviness in my belly, like I’d swallowed a frozen stone; the tightness in my chest and throat; the hot pull behind my eyes. The feral panic that made me clench my fists until my fingernails cut red, grimacing smiles into the palms of my hands.

And what about Flo? Every ripple I made dictated the course of her life. What if this was the wrong choice for her?

What if the school was terrible? What if she couldn’t make friends? What if she got bullied for being the freak who lived in the hoarder house her mom was incapable of cleaning up?

Jake Abernathy was right. I wasn’t the type. I didn’t know a nail from a screw. I’d never even painted a room before. I didn’t know the first thing about weatherizing a house, or about furnaces and heat pumps; I didn’t know how to keep a garden or clean out gutters or repair stairs or fix plumbing. I was so far out of my depth that the shore wasn’t even in sight.

My throat hurt like I’d swallowed something hard. And in a wordless, hot hungry burst, I wanted my mom so badly. It was a late-night wailing feeling, like the one I used to feel when Tina didn’t come home. When everything seemed to press in on me, when all I wanted was to hear her voice outside the door, to feel her presence. To feel like someone had come to hold me and tell me everything was going to be okay. I buried my face in my bare knees, trying to cry quietly, so Flo wouldn’t hear.

Eventually I shuddered to a wet halt and lifted my face. A pale pink shimmery moon was rising, almost full, swimming in the lavender night above the bay. Its unstable reflection swirled in the rolling waters below. Tina used to tell me the moon followed me. She said no one in the world knew the moon was mine, but it was tethered to me like a helium balloon on an invisible string, turning its face this way and that as it spun on its string. It’s yours, Angel. And no matter what happens, no one can take that moon away from you. You ever have a bad day, you can look up there and see your moon looking back at you, a gift from your mom.