Home Again

Brittany stared down at her. “You aren’t chicken, are you, Lina?”

The other kids closed in around them.

Lina bit down on her lower lip to keep it from trembling, but she never looked away from Brittany’s face. “I’m not chicken,” she said. “Besides, short hair is way cooler.” She turned to Jett, giving him her biggest, bravest smile. “Go ahead.”

Jett started snipping. Big clumps of jet-black hair slid down her Levi’s jacket. She flinched at each snip-snip-snip, and felt as if pieces of her were falling away.

Brittany fished a mirror out of her purse and handed it to Lina. There was a victorious gleam in her brown eyes. Slowly Lina picked up the mirror and stared at her own face. For a second she couldn’t breathe, but after a minute, she wasn’t looking at the shaggy, hacked-up haircut. She was staring at her own reflection.

The questions came flooding back, and this time the booze and pot offered no sanctuary at all. Suddenly she was thinking of her father—the mysterious father—who’d marked her face and imprinted her soul. As always, she wondered what he was doing right now. Was he coming home from work? Kissing some other child that he’d fathered along the way, one he’d stayed around to raise?

Everything would be different if I knew you, she thought for the millionth time.

“She looks like Mr. Sears,” Brittany said, laughing shrilly. “Hey, Hillyard, maybe the school janitor is your dad.”

Jett picked up a joint and took a hit. Smoke poured from his mouth as he said, “I don’t know why you don’t just ask your old lady. My mom gave me my dad’s address a few years ago. She told me to go live with him, and good riddance.”

Just ask.

Lina shivered at the thought. Maybe she would this time. Her sixteenth birthday was coming up….

The thought coalesced, took shape in her mind until her whole body was shaking. Anticipation blossomed into a living, breathing presence inside her. She knew suddenly what she wanted for her birthday. “It’s time,” she said to herself, feeling the beginnings of a smile.

“What do you think, Lina?” Brittany’s nasal voice broke into her thoughts.

Lina’s gaze jerked up. For a split second she couldn’t figure out what they were all waiting for; then she remembered. The haircut. She looked first at Jett, then at Brittany—who was so clueless, she thought a frigging haircut mattered. “It’s way cool. Thanks, Jett. Now, hand me the tequila.”

Chapter Three

Madelaine dropped the expensive shopping bags on the creaky old dock and sat down.

Salty air caressed her cheeks, tugged at the short strands that framed her face. The dark green water stared back at her, rolling gently, spanking the barnacle-studded pilings, coughing up foam. The dock groaned beneath her, shifted with each push of the tide, as if it were fighting to hold its place against the monumental force of the sea.

“Hi, Mama,” she said, her voice as soft and low as the wind whispering through the decrepit boards.

The sea gazed back at her, waiting, rolling.

She ached to feel close to her mother here, the only place on earth where such a feeling was even possible, but it was difficult, manufacturing a tie that had been broken so many years before. Yet still she tried; the first Sunday of each month she returned and spoke to the woman who should have shaped her life.

She’d first come here when she was six years old. A reed-thin, plain-faced child dressed like a tiny doll, her black patent Mary Janes pressed together at the ankles, her black satin dress billowing in the wind.

She closed her eyes and let the memories flow, all that she had left. Her father, standing on the edge of this dock beside her, his Burberry coat flapping, his cheeks reddened by the cold. He’d seemed so big then, huge and indestructible, with a voice like a foghorn and eyes that never looked at her.

Her mother’s ashes floating on the surface of the water…

Don’t cry, girl. It won’t bring her back.

Madelaine had done as he asked, as she always did, holding back the tears one breath at a time. The sea had blurred before her eyes, shimmered into a huge, endless swath of blue that once had meant nothing to her, and now held all that remained of her mother.

It had taken her years to come back to this place, and once she did, she couldn’t stay away.

Behind her, the packages rustled again, reminding her of why she was here, of the reassurance she needed from her mother.

“It’s Lina’s birthday tomorrow,” she said quietly.

The words were lost, taken and twisted and swallowed by the breeze. After a grueling workday, she’d gone shopping, agonizing over each purchase, wanting each one to be just right. The bridge that would bring her and Lina back together. A miraculous glue that would bind the fraying seam of their relationship.

She wanted tomorrow’s party to be a new beginning for her and Lina, the mother and daughter who’d slid so far apart. But how?