Summer Island

It changed everything.

Didnt it?

That was the sheer hell of it. Ruby couldnt hold the ramifications of the day in her hands and study them.

One thing she knew: her novelization of the past, with Dad cast as hero and her mother as villain, wouldnt work anymore.

The world wasnt as shed thought it was. Perhaps she was late in making that elemental and yet monumental discovery. She felt as if shed been a child all these years, walking through a land that she alone had devised.

And now something was changing inside of her; growing. It was nothing as cliche or readily definable as her heart. Rather; it was the bones themselves; they were shifting, pressing against her sinew and muscles, and deep down inside, there was a new ache. She reached under the seat and pulled out the pen and legal pad shed packed in the morning. After only a moments hesitation, she started to write.

I was sixteen years old when my mother left us. It was an ordinary June day; the sun rode high in a robins-egg-blue sky. Its funny the things you remember. The Sound was as flat and calm as a brand-new cookie sheet, and a gaggle of bahy geese were learning to swim on the McCuffins pond.

We were an average family, just My father, Rand, was an islander through and through, a commercial fisherman who repaired boats in the off season. He went bowling with his friends every Saturday night and helped us girls with our math and science homework. He wore plaid flannel shirts in the winter and Lacoste golf shirts in the summer. It never occurred to any of us, or to me anyway, that he was anything less than the perfect father.

There was no yelling in our family, no raging arguments, no nights where my sister and I lay in our side-by-side twin beds and worried feverishly that our parents would divorce.

After wed all gone our separate ways, I often looked back on those quiet years. I was obsessive in my search for an inciting incident, a moment where I could say, Aha! There it is the beginning of the end.

But I never found one. Until now.

Today, my parents pulled back the curtain, and the Great Oz-my dad-" revealed to be an ordinary man.

I didnt know that then, of course. All I knew was that on a beautiful day, my mother dragged a suitcase into the living room.

Im leaving. Is anyone coming with me?" Thats what she said to my sister and me. I heard my father in the kitchen. He dropped a glass into the sink, and the shatter sounded like bones breaking.

That was the day I learned the concept of before and after. Her leaving sliced through our family with the bloody precision of a surgeons scalpel.

At the time, we assumed it was temporary. A vacation getaway that should have been with “the girls,” only my mother had no girlfriends. Maybe all kids think things like that.

Its hard to say when my feelings about my mother changed from guilt to anger to disgust to hatred, but that was the arc of it.

I saw what her absence did to my father In the span of a few short days, he became hardly recognizable. He drank, he smoked, he spent the day in his pajamas. He ate only when Caroline or I cooked for him. He let the marina business go to hell and by the next spring, he had to sell land to pay the taxes and keep food on the table.

I formed an image of my mother that summer; From the hard stone of everything that happened, I carved the image of a woman and called it mother. For all these years, Ive kept it on my bedside table; it was no less real for being visible only in my own mind. The statue was a collection of hard edges selfishness, lies, and abandonment.

But now I know the truth: My father was unfaithful to my mother.

Unfaithful; A cold, detached word that gives no hint of the heat involved in passion. He wore a wedding ring and fucked women other than the one hed sworn to love, honor, and protect.

That says it better for me. The vulgarity of the sentence matches the obscenity of the act.

I know it changes everything, but I cant seem to follow where it leads. My childhood, I thought naively, was mine alone, those memories painted in vibrant oil strokes on the canvas of my years. Now, it seems that Barbra Streisand was right. Memories are watercolor,; and a heavy rain can wash them away.

My father is not the man I thought he was.

Even as I look down on this sentence I have just written, I see the childishness of it, but I cant think of another way to say it. I dont know how to look at him now, this father who has proven to be a stranger.

My mother didnt leave him-and us-for fame and fortune, but simply because she was human, and the man she loved had broken her heart.

I know how it feels when someone you love stops loving you back. Its a kind of mini-death that breaks something inside of you.

This knowing, this understanding . . . it should make me want to forgive my mother shouldnt it?

I think Im afraid to love her, even the tiniest bit. The hurt she caused me is so deep that my bones have grown around it. I wonder perhaps who I am without it -

B