Tears stung the back of my eyes. “Don’t,” I whispered. “I can’t cry anymore or my eyes will fall out.”
We sat in the dark in silence, smoking. In the place where the movie of Maya’s crash had been running, a softness filtered in, erasing the edges. “I do blame you,” I said quietly.
“You are not alone,” he said, but stopped short of claiming responsibility. He left her—for me, it’s true—but still.
“My mother was an alcoholic,” he said, out of the blue.
I peered at him. At that moment, I had known him for thirty-three years. We had spent thousands of nights together, had whispered hundreds of secrets to each other in the dark, from pillow to pillow.
He’d never said this aloud even once. “What?”
“She was a sex worker in New Orleans. She drank herself to death, and I became a ward of the state, as they say.”
I was too high to take this in. “I thought she died of cancer. And your aunt in Montreal?”
His mouth turned down as he nodded. His hands were loose between his knees. “That was the story I told.”
“But I always thought you told me the truth.” The anger was boiling again, right below my skin, threatening to burn me, burn him, burn us all up.
He looked at me. “I was ashamed. And once the lie started, how could I change it?”
The moon washed over his extraordinary face, the long nose, the full lips, his heavy brows. “Are you really Creole?”
“In part, but I did not know my father, or any of my family. I don’t know.”
“So Maya—”
“Is the granddaughter and the daughter of women who died of alcoholism.”
I closed my eyes, thinking of her passed out on the ground, an axe at her side. I thought of her when we finally rescued her from Shanti, a little girl with tangled hair and a dirty face, so skinny that I could see both bones in her forearms when I bathed her. I bent my face into my hands, sorrow rising again.
When his big hands fell on my upper back, I allowed the contact. I am human. I need to touch others as much as anyone else, and maybe of all the humans in the world, Augustus would know my sorrow over all this. We had failed her so terribly, both of us.
When he rose and came to kneel before me, I allowed myself to fall into his arms, leaning into the curve of his shoulder, where I inhaled the comforting scent of his skin, and we wept together over our broken daughter.
When he lifted my face to kiss me, I met his lips as if they offered a sacrament. The same wildness broke through us, the same tenderness. When he unbuttoned my blouse and freed my breasts, lifting them to his mouth, I allowed it. When he laid me down in the grass, I allowed it, and opened myself to him, to his ministrations. We shared our sorrow, and the simmering longing we shared for the taste of the other. Our tears and our kisses mingled. Our limbs tangled. We clung to each other as if lashed to a mast in a storm, then lay in each other’s arms in the grass, covered only by moonlight, and for the smallest time, there was peace again in the world.
That was how we began again, for the third time.
Chapter Seventeen
Maya
I’m weirdly nauseated when I get home from work. It worries me, how often my stomach is upset lately; I keep fretting that I’ve completely ruined my liver. Gingerly, I rub the spot on my side, but it doesn’t hurt or feel enlarged. There was a woman at rehab who had such an enlarged liver you could see it at a hundred paces.
Meadow hasn’t yet returned, so I head down the stairs to the evening beach. It’s more populated than the morning, but there still are very few people around. The sun hangs like an orange disk above the ocean, casting shimmers of oily red over the sea. On the horizon, an industrial ship moves against the sky, its speed deceptively slow.
It has been a warm day, and the sand is an agreeable mix of hot surface, cool underlayer. I walk toward the edge of the ruffling water. The tide is low. Birds call into the air. Tension spills out of my body, and it occurs to me with a little shock that I have really missed living near the ocean.
The things I didn’t know about myself, or didn’t acknowledge, keep surprising me. That I missed the ocean, that I wasn’t really in love with Josh and hadn’t been for a long time. That I get hungry. That I need sleep. That I’m actually a morning person who wakes up cheerful if I don’t go to bed drunk.
Who knew?
The fresh air is good, but my stomach is still slightly upset, and I keep swallowing, wondering if I should have had a glass of oat milk or something before I came out. Upset stomach or no, I owe my sponsor a call for the day, and this is as good a time as any. She answers on the first ring. “Hello, Maya. How are you?”