What She Found in the Woods

She nods gravely. ‘You did plenty of wrong things. But did anyone ever take the time to teach you how to do the right thing with your anger?’

I smile ruefully. ‘In my family? We don’t feel ugly emotions like anger. We drink Long Island Iced Tea and pop pills instead.’

Her brow creases in sympathy and she hugs me. She smells like Bo, but in a softer way. I melt into her. I’m not crying. I still can’t feel deeply enough to cry with the piles of Prozac gurgling away in my stomach, but the melting feels good.

We pick and chop vegetables and talk some more about how I’m going to move forward with my life.

‘I’m not going to lie to you,’ she says. ‘If you go off these drugs, it’s going to feel like you got hit by a bus. But it’s your bus, you know?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, nodding. ‘I’ve been waiting to feel something. When I’m not around Bo, that is.’ I laugh at myself. ‘So, to answer your original question – the reason I’m with your son is because he’s the only person who makes me feel. It isn’t always good, especially when I’m waiting for him, and I don’t know if he’s going to show or not. But I feel. He’s managed to switch on a corpse. He’s gotta be magic.’

‘Oh, he is,’ she says softly. Our eyes meet, and I realize we will always be able to agree on one thing: her son.

We’re going to get along really well, I think.

At first I wondered why anyone would have so many kids. Somewhere in the back of my head, I assumed she’d have to be some kind of Earth Mother crazy person, but that’s not it. She just has a lot of love and a lot of patience, and the good sense to give both to as many children as she can. It dawns on me I don’t know her name, so I ask for it.

‘Maeve,’ she replies. ‘Maeve Jacobson.’ She holds out her hand, and I shake it a little self-consciou

sly. In her way, I know she’s telling me that from this point on she’s going to be treating me like an adult. And she doesn’t disappoint. ‘You are beautiful,’ she says regretfully. ‘I hope you’re on birth control.’

I’d be embarrassed, but – you know – clozapine, Ativan and Prozac, just to name a few. Puny emotions like humiliation don’t stand a chance. Instead I give a little rueful smile.

‘My mother’s idea of being maternal was to put me on the pill as soon as I got my first period.’ I try to laugh, but it’s not funny. ‘She didn’t even ask me if I liked boys.’

Maeve is quiet for a while. She frowns at her hands as they pick courgettes. ‘Mothers try to do what wasn’t done for them but should have been. We think we’re correcting some horrible wrong, but sometimes we’re just inflicting a different kind of wound.’ She looks up at me and glances around at the general state of her present life with a fair dose of self-doubt in her eyes. ‘Ask yourself why she did that. And then ask her.’

‘If she ever speaks to me again, I will,’ I promise. And I promise myself to ask Maeve the same question someday. But not yet.

I don’t have to tell Maeve not to tell any of this to Bo. She knows telling him is my responsibility. And now that I’ve told her, the clock is ticking. Maybe that’s another reason I told Maeve. Her knowing will force me to be honest with Bo sooner rather than later.

When we finally come out of the greenhouse, everyone is casually/not so casually hanging around the fire pit. Bo is standing next to a man he resembles so strongly, there’s no need to wonder if it’s his father.

Bo’s father is one of those people whose brain processes so much information so quickly that they blink their eyes really hard and fast when those inner gears start turning. Almost like a twitch. A kid in my elementary school did it, and he got transferred to genius school in the third grade. Even through the genius twitch, I can tell Bo’s father isn’t happy to have me here.

‘Hi,’ I say, forcing a smile. He shuffles his feet and screws his face up at the ground in lieu of a smile, his eyes blinking rapidly.

‘That’s Ray, my husband,’ Maeve tells me. It’s OK, she mouths silently. Like that’s going to make me feel better about the fact that Ray definitely does not want me here.

I move to Bo’s side while everyone else stares. On my way, I have to brush past the eldest girl. She’s fifteen, maybe sixteen.

‘Raven?’ I guess. I smile at her, but she doesn’t smile back or answer me.

She’s dark-haired and dark-eyed and obviously has some opinions about my expensive clothes. They are not charitable opinions, but if memory serves, when you’re fifteen very few thoughts you have are charitable ones. She’s wearing a hand-sewn patch dress made out of what looks to be several different T-shirts. It’s cool, actually, but it’s too soon to compliment her. My hiking sandals have caught her eye, despite the fact she’s decided to loathe me as a decadent capitalist.

Hovering close in her shadow, and obviously taking her cues from Raven, is another, much younger girl. She looks about six or seven, I guess. I smile at her and give a little wave.

‘That’s Sol,’ Bo tells me. Sol’s holding the youngest and hikes her up a little higher and tighter as a way to look over and check with Raven if it’s OK if she smiles back at me. It isn’t, so she doesn’t.

‘And that’s Moth,’ Bo says, his fondness for the youngest apparent in the way his voice softens.

Moth smiles at me from her sister’s hip, with a grubby finger stuck in between her baby teeth. Cutest kid ever. She’s practically edible. Rosy cheeks, big pouty red lips like Bo’s, and the same blonde hair that runs on the father’s side. She’s only wearing cotton shorts and a handmade necklace of shells and twine, like some ocean sprite.

The two boys who were fighting earlier blush and smile, then frown, and generally don’t know how to act in front of me. Both of them are trying really hard not to look at my legs. The bigger one, Karl, has a blue bruise forming under his right eye. I guess Aspen is a leftie like Bo. They’re both dark like their mother, and I don’t know if it’s because my first sighting of them was when they were tangled up together or not, but I’ll probably always confuse the two of them unless I see them standing right next to each other.

Before the silence gets overwhelming, Maeve steps in and gives everyone a task. Bo pulls me aside, his eyes wide and anxious.

‘You OK?’ he asks.