Wild Game Read online

  Please, I begged Peter with my eyebrows raised. Come on. Just do this.

  Peter rolled his eyes and shrugged halfheartedly but then gave in and went to the door.

  “Can I be excused?” I asked my mother. “I need some fresh air.”

  She nodded, barely registering the request.

  As I stood to clear my plate, I felt tipsy from the wine. I sped upstairs, brushed my teeth and hair, and rushed to the door, slowing down as I neared it to appear composed.

  My brother and our neighbor Ted were standing on the front porch, shooting the breeze. We all knew the drill: Peter said good night and eased back inside, and Ted and I drifted around the house and down the wooden steps to the shore below. We didn’t have much to say to each other, this boy and I, so we didn’t talk. We went to our usual spot, lay down on the coarse sand, and started to make out as we’d been doing every night for almost a week.

  A couple walked past us, hand in hand, unaware of our presence on the sand behind them, and settled in against a rock near the water’s edge to admire the moon’s reflection on the inlet. We usually pulled apart when someone intruded, but this time Ted put a finger to his lips, telling me to stay quiet, and then, with a tug, jerked my tank top up and over my breasts. I lay flat on the sand, stunned by this unexpected maneuver. Ted’s grinning face, illuminated by the bright moonlight, was full of adolescent lust and greed. His eyes feasted on my chest. Dark blond hair peeked out from his armpits, and the muscles in his shoulders twitched. Then he started—first one breast and then the other, squeezing and releasing, causing sparks to flare in my chest and a warmth to gather between my legs.

  By the time I returned home, my mother’s dinner party was winding down. Lily was clearing the dessert plates, and my stepfather looked exhausted. Even Ben and my mother seemed subdued. I slipped past unnoticed and went upstairs.

  I crawled into bed, and my encounter with Ted started looping through my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d done. The rules of teenage sexual engagement were unambiguous—there was no going back. I knew that a new starting line had been drawn and the next time we sneaked off together, my exposed breasts would be understood as a given.

  The curtains in my bedroom were open, the windows cranked as wide as they could possibly go, and even so, it was sweltering. My hair, damp with the humid salt air, stuck to my neck, and the threadbare cotton sheets, gritty with sand, clung to my legs. The moon was the only thing that looked cool, like a cold piece of metal that I wanted to press against my face. Outside, there wasn’t even the slightest breeze to tug the fishing boats against their moorings or disturb my mother’s wind chimes. The house was silent too. My parents and their guests must have finally gone to bed.

  So much had changed in my body over the past year. I used to have to chase boys to get their attention. Now all I had to do around them was hang on to our porch railing and arch away from it, push my toes into the soft sand, or lift my eyes, squinting as if into the sun, and they were rapt. After a long spell of stillness, my body had burst—breasts erupting, hips expanding, skin stretched taut over new horizons of flesh. My insides had gone wild too.

  I cramped and bled each month, but no one had told me about the rest of it: how dank and loamy it was in there, how even when I didn’t have my period, so much was going on, shifting and softening, leaving slippery clues for me to follow. As I floated toward sleep, I dreamily replayed the night’s events again and again—shirt up, hands on breasts—until an utterly new commotion unleashed itself inside me. An unfamiliar wave swelled from a center deep within and ricocheted through me, licking every nerve and cell along the way.

  What just happened?

  I felt fully awake again, trying to figure out the steps I had taken, wanting to memorize the path to this extraordinary place, but it eluded me. I drifted in and out of a fitful sleep.

  * * *

  “Wake up, Rennie.”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and pulled the sheet over my head.

  “Rennie, please.”

  Even before I turned and saw her face, I could hear a peculiar quaver in my mother’s whisper and smell the remnants of the Pinot Noir. Her voice sounded hesitant and desperate. The mattress sank where she lowered herself beside me, and my body stiffened against the depression. I kept my eyes shut and steadied my exhalations.

  “Rennie!” The whisper, more urgent now, still held an unfamiliar tremor. She pulled down the sheet. “Please wake up.”

  Even with her beside me, hovering over me, her breath warm against my ear, I didn’t want to abandon thoughts of Ted. Why was my mother in my room in the middle of the night? For a moment, I panicked: Did she have some sixth sense that I’d just made my first foray into sex? Or had Peter betrayed me and told her that I’d been sneaking off, getting into trouble? I turned away from her, half asleep, in no mood for a lecture. Still floating from the sensation of what had just happened, I didn’t want to lose track of it.

  “Rennie, wake up. Please wake up.”

  Just go away, I thought.

  “Sweetheart. Please. I need you.”

  At this, I opened my eyes. Malabar was in her nightgown, her hair mussed. I sat up.

  “Mom, what’s wrong? Is everything okay?”

  “Ben Souther just kissed me.”

  I took in this information. Tried to make sense of it. Couldn’t. I rubbed my eyes. My mother was still there beside me.

  “Ben kissed me,” my mother repeated.

  A noun, a verb, an object—such a simple sentence, really, and yet I couldn’t comprehend it. Why would Ben Souther kiss my mother? It wasn’t that I was naive; I knew that people kissed people they weren’t supposed to. My parents had not shielded me from stories of both of their transgressions during their marriage, and in this way, I knew more about infidelity than most children. I was four when my parents broke up, six when my father remarried, seven when that new marriage started to fall apart, and eight when my mother was finally able to wed Charles, who’d been separated from but still married to his first wife when they met.

  Ben was married, too, of course, to Lily. The Southers had been married for thirty-five years.

  Mom and Charles. Ben and Lily.

  The four of them had been couple-friends for as long as my mother and stepfather had known each other, about a decade now.

  That’s what really stumped me about the kiss—the friendship between Ben and Charles. The two men adored each other. Their affection went back some fifty years, maybe more, to a time when they were young enough to skip stones across the flat, gray water of Plymouth Bay, where they pretended to be Pilgrims and built forts in the dunes, fending off imaginary enemies with stick muskets. Over the years, they’d hunted and fished together, dated each other’s sisters, been ushers at each other’s weddings, and become godfathers to each other’s sons.

  “What do you mean, Ben kissed you?” Suddenly I was fully awake. I pictured her slapping him in response. That was something my mother might do. “What happened?”

  “We took a walk after dinner, just the two of us, and he pulled me into him, like this.” My mother crossed her arms around herself, simultaneously demonstrating Ben’s caress and embracing its memory. Then she collapsed the rest of the way onto the bed, smiling, and stretched out alongside me.

  Apparently, there had been no slap.

  “I still can’t believe it. Ben Souther kissed me,” she said.

  What was it about her voice tonight?

  “He kissed me, Rennie.”

  There it was again: joy. A tone I hadn’t heard from her since before Charles’s strokes. Joy had fallen from the night sky and landed in my mother’s voice. One kiss—the gleam and shine of it, what it might portend—had changed everything.

  “He wants me to meet him in New York next week. He has a board meeting—some salmon thing—and Lily plans to stay in Plymouth. I don’t know what to do.”

  We were lying on our backs, heat emanating from our bodies. “What do you
think I should do?”

  We both knew this was a rhetorical question. Malabar was a planner. She had already made up her mind.

  “I’m going to need your help, sweetie,” she said. “I need to figure out how to do this. How to make this possible.”

  I lay as still as a corpse, unsure of what to say.

  “Of course, I don’t want to hurt Charles. I’d rather die than cause him more grief. That’s my top priority. Charles must never find out. He would be devastated.” She paused as if to consider Charles one last time and then rolled onto her side to face me. “You have to help me, Rennie.”

  My mother needed me. I knew I was supposed to fill the space in the conversation, but the words weren’t coming. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Aren’t you happy for me, Rennie?” my mother asked, rising onto an elbow.

  I looked at her face and into her eyes, dark and dewy with hope, and all at once, I was happy for her. And for me. Malabar was falling in love and she’d picked me as her confidante, a role I hadn’t realized I’d longed for until that moment. Perhaps this could be a good thing. Maybe someone as vital as Ben could startle my mother out of the malaise she’d been in since Charles’s strokes and that had appeared, at times, in the years before. Perhaps in the fall, when school started, my mother would get dressed for carpool. No more coat over her nightgown or sheet marks on her puffy morning face. Maybe she’d brush her hair, smear some gloss across her lips, and greet the children on our route with a cheery “Hello” like all of the other mothers.

  “Of course I’m happy,” I said. “I’m so happy for you.”

  Her reaction—grateful tears—emboldened me.

  “After all you’ve been through, you deserve this,” I told her.

  “Sweetie, you can’t tell anyone. Not a soul. Not your brother, not your father, not your friends. No one. This is serious. Promise me that, Rennie. You must take this secret to your grave.”

  I promised immediately, thrilled to have landed a starring role in my mother’s drama, oblivious to the fact that I was being outmaneuvered for the second time that night.

  The people who occupied the bedrooms around us—my brother; my stepfather; Ben and his wife, Lily—were all peacefully asleep. They had no idea that the ground beneath them had shifted. My mother had narrowed her vision and chosen happiness, and I had willingly signed on, both of us ignoring the dangers of the new terrain.

  * * *

  When dawn spilled through my open windows and the sun climbed up and over the outer beach, that long spit of sand and dunes that separates our inlet from the Atlantic, the sky turned a brilliant fuchsia streaked with red. I awoke full of hope and no longer thinking about Ted. I already knew that when he showed up on our porch that evening, I would not sneak down to the beach to feel the determined pressure of his pelvis against mine. Instead, I would stay home and bear witness to my mother’s seduction.

  Two

  If we are to believe that a butterfly flapping its wings in South America can stir up a storm in Texas, what might be the unruly consequences of an illicit kiss on a country road? This marked the beginning of the rest of my life. Once I chose to follow my mother, there was no turning back. I became her protector and sentinel, always on the lookout for what might give her away.

  I awoke fizzy with elation, buoyed by the joy in my mother’s voice, still drunk on the intimacy of our exchange. Malabar had chosen me, and my body vibrated with an ineffable sense of opportunity.

  My brother was already in the kitchen, hunched over a bowl of cereal, when I floated downstairs. Along the counter, half-empty glasses held the stale aroma of last night’s wine. Peter had turned sixteen in June, had a separate apartment over the garage (a source of envy), owned his own boat (another), and already had an eye toward the person he planned to become.

  “You know that Ted is a total creep, right, Ren?” Peter said, shoveling in a spoonful of flakes. He backhanded a drop of milk from the corner of his mouth.

  I blushed, flashing to Ted pulling up my top. Yes, I did realize that Ted was a creep. He was the kind of kid who, five years earlier, had spent summer evenings catching frogs, putting firecrackers in their mouths, then laughing wildly when their legs went flying.

  “No, he’s a good guy,” I said to my brother, the words as smooth as marbles. Even though I was no longer interested in Ted, admitting that he was a jerk was not an option. In our family, being right trumped being truthful. There was no room for uncertainty, so you never let down your guard.

  Peter smirked at this unlikelihood and nudged his bowl toward the sink side of the counter.

  Since our parents’ divorce, a decade earlier, it had been the three of us: Mom, Peter, me. My father was on the sidelines, of course, occupying the every-other-weekend-and-alternating-holidays real estate, and my stepfather, Charles, was present, too, with his four grown children from his previous marriage, now my stepsiblings. But our fundamental family unit since the divorce had always been a triangle, that sturdy shape. Except on this morning, our geometry was changing. Before the end of the day, Peter’s side would be cut loose, and once untethered from him, my mother and I would shape-shift into a single straight line, the most direct conduit for her secret.

  * * *

  “Good morning,” Malabar sang out, addressing no one in particular. She breezed into the kitchen wearing a cotton robe loosely belted over a sheer nightgown; her hair was tousled. It was a bit cooler this morning but still humid, and the sky, a swirl of purple-gray, promised the relief of rain. At the window on the far side of the kitchen, my mother caught her reflection and pursed her lips. In the cold light of day, she eyed the age spots scattered on her hands and the slack skin at the base of her neck, a nectarine a few days past perfect.

  Still, she was lovely, slim and strong with shiny auburn hair that framed an alluring face with a dimple high on her left cheek, a mark left by forceps that was a reminder of her tough entry into this world. Although she cultivated an air of elegant aloofness, she was surprisingly game, willing to bait hooks and often the first to dive into rough waves. I know now that she’d lost some essential piece of herself when she gave up her career as a journalist in New York City and opted for a gentler life and financial security by marrying Charles, who had family wealth. According to my father, my grandmother often told Malabar, “You marry one man to have your children and another to take care of you in your old age.” But if that had been my mother’s intention, subconscious or otherwise, in marrying Charles, it was not working out as planned. Charles had made my mother wealthy, but she was doing the lion’s share of caregiving. Malabar would be forty-nine in the fall and no doubt felt despair over the unexpected changes in her life.

  She raised her chin defiantly against her reflection, turned, and fixed on me a look that proved I hadn’t dreamed the previous night’s encounter.

  “Young lady,” she said, arching an eyebrow, “you and I have things to discuss later.”

  Peter shook his head, wondering what I’d done this time. I figured he thought I’d been caught canoodling with Ted, but he mimed a quick toke on a spliff. That it? His eyes twinkled.

  Then my mother made her tea, an elaborate ritual to clear the previous night’s fog—brought on by cocktails, wine, a sleeping pill or two—and usher in the new day. She dumped the kettle, filled it with fresh water, and set it on the stove. As it warmed, she pried off the lid of a tin of Lapsang souchong, and, poof, the room filled with its distinctive smoky aroma. With her thumb and forefinger, she felt for the perfect amount of dried leaves, which, pinch by pinch, she sprinkled into her teapot. When at last the kettle sputtered and whistled, hot water met leaves, and the tea was left to steep under an outlandish rooster-shaped cozy.

  Charles shuffled in next, freshly showered, all aristocratic square jaw, thick horn-rimmed glasses, and slicked-back gray hair. He looked as he had since his strokes six years earlier: resigned to the fact that he was no longer calling the shots. Revered as the visionary behind
Plimoth Plantation,* the living-history museum he’d founded years earlier and to which he remained passionately devoted, Charles was captivated by various archaeological enthusiasms. His latest obsession was finding the wreck of a long-lost pirate ship called the Whydah Gally. What I admired most about Charles was how fundamentally different he was from my parents—he didn’t swear or lose his temper, and he had no problem conceding a point. Well-mannered, quietly formal, and genial, Charles longed for little more than a good book, preferably history, read anywhere but on the beach. He announced this desire by praying to the rain god every summer morning. “Please, dear rain god,” he would intone over breakfast, “do your thing so I won’t have to sit on that hot, sandy beach.” This always made us all laugh.

  “Looks like you’ll have your way today, Charles,” Peter said, and our stepfather smiled, appreciating the ominous sky.

  “We could drive up to Wellfleet and see what Barry Clifford is up to,” Charles suggested to no one in particular. Barry Clifford, known locally as Cape Cod’s Indiana Jones, was on the hunt for sunken treasures and, like Charles, had set his sights on finding the Whydah.

  No one bit.

  Normally, as my mother sipped her tea, she would serve Charles his morning brew: a spoonful of Sanka in a mug, the remains of her boiling water, a single brisk stir. This was his preference, my mother assured us, a habit left over from his bachelor days. But this morning, with Ben and Lily visiting for the weekend, my mother made a pot of coffee with freshly ground beans, and as I watched Charles drink it down with relish, I wondered if he truly did prefer Sanka.

  We sat in our usual places along the counter, Charles, Peter, and me, all of us looking into the kitchen, where my mother, peppy now from her tea, glided from stove to island to sink to refrigerator, readying breakfast. She had decided on homemade corn fritters, and she was bullying fresh egg whites into stiff peaks, shaving corn from ears, grating nutmeg. Butter softened on the counter, and maple syrup warmed over a low heat on the stove.