39

"She's been in there for two days straight," said Mary, sitting at the kitchen table with an unlit cigarette in her hand. She buried her head in her elbows, her tousled gray and white hair flying forward.

"You know," said Edward, "Maybe-" he stopped. "I don't know. I was going to suggest that maybe I should ... go away for while. I don't want to cause a rift between you and your d-"

"No!" said Mary firmly. She got up from the table and kissed Edward insistently, then reeled back smiling.

"Ha ha!" he said. "You convinced me! Okay, well, I'm just a little mixed up on whether, should I try to talk to her more? Should I stay away and let you handle it?"

Mary nodded. "I don't know either. Maybe it would be better if you and she didn't talk for a while. To give her some time to get that fishing trip out of her mind." Mary blinked and remembered the boat.

She considered Edward, the peculiar. The new man in her life, a sailor who claimed to hate the water but had his own boat. She remembered her son, underwater and facing up, his eyes open.

"Charlie" she called out instinctively.

"Yeahhh?" said a sullen voice.

"What's cooking. Are you okay in there?"

"I'm playing Playstation, mom."

Not wanting to intrude, she walked over to his closed door.

"Have you heard from Derf?"

"No," Charlie said. She heard the electronic noises coming from inside the door.

"How long since you saw him?"

"Three weeks." Charlie's clipped answers said he was busy concentrating. Mary wondered if Derf's disappearance was connected with the missing Sams and Grahams they were writing about in the paper.

"Charlie?"

"What!"

"What's Derf's real name? It's Stanley, isn't it?"

"Yeah!"

"Not Sam or Graham?"

There was no answer and Mary went back to the kitchen feeling lucky just to have gotten that much of a conversation out of him.

The incident on the boat had not brought out some demonstrative or sensitive inner Charlie she thought might be sitting inside him, feet dangling over a psychological plateau. She didn't think the notion of seeing a therapist would get a very warm reception.

It was Merry she was most worried about. In a way, Doris was the lucky one for having missed the whole thing. Lucky for having not shown up.

She stood up and knocked on the door of her daughter's room.

"Merry?" she said. "Merry?"

"Who is it," said a sad voice.

"It's me, it's your mom."

There was a pause. "Come in." Mary went inside. The room held the signs of high school and early college, overlaid on top of stuff left over from childhood. From the small shelf on the inside of the closet Mary could see the plastic eye of a stuffed animal looking down. Apparently Merry had put her lion out of sight.

Merry dear, are you hungry?" Merry was in bed, under the covers.

"No," Merry said from under muffling.

"Do you-" she closed the door behind her. "Do you want to talk about it any more?"

Merry sobbed. Over the past few weeks, all Mary had gotten out of her daughter was that she despised Edward.

Mary suspected a case of the, not exactly jealousy, the syndrome of resentment towards your single mother's new boyfriend.

Mary trusted this theory, and yet, something about it worried her as a hypothesis. It wasn't Merry's demeanor. It wasn't her style. She could be a bit haughty sometimes - but she would carry it out as some kind of deviousness - she would pull a practical joke. To stay bedridden a week, to pronounce bile and brimstone and bitter vitriolic fire on a person from under the blankets--- it wasn't beyond belief but it was very different.

"Merry-" Mary said. "She killed you, mom!" Merry's head burst out from under thick orange cloth. "She killed Charlie, she killed you, and she even killed Edward!"

Mary blinked.

"I know it sounds insane. It is insane. Do you think I don't realize that I'm sitting here talking to you? But I know what I saw. With a scabbard!"

"Oh," said Mary.

"BAAAAAAAW!" cried Merry, bursting into deep tears. "Is that impossible? Mom, am I crazy? That's impossible, isn't it?"

Mary hugged her child to her shoulder.

Well, she thought, at least she's opening up.