Free A Private State: Stories by Charlotte Bacon Page A

after a month, he seemed to finger the space my answer would have filled, trying to test its exact shape. "Chloe?''
My body cast a block over Louis's bony shadow. "Naomi won't be coming home," the Doctor said. "We've got to pack her stuff and send it out." I stood, picked up a wet cloth and threw it so hard against the screen the moth scarf sprang into the night. I felt a wave in my chest that would have been, if I hadn't stopped talking, a yell that said, "She's supposed to come back." All we needed was a rest. My father watched me, and it was hard to believe he'd ever helped anyone win anything his whole life, much less made a broken bone lie straight. I sat back down and passed him a fresh towel. "Thank you, baby,'' he said and mopped his face. The screen quit trembling and the moths were floating back when I snapped off the light.
There was no just packing Naomi up. You could box her knives, blouses, and handbags and still she was there, her habits fluttering through my day. The fog of her chamomile facials. The Billie Holliday she played on Sundays. "Just leave," I shouted at her in my head. I applied another layer of "Everyone Loves Scarlet." I tore up hankies that I knew she'd miss.
It was a Saturday of tall, thick heat. The last packages stood on the porch. The Doctor was the color of ash at the bottom of a barbecue. I had to decide something then. I picked up the marker he'd used to write our return address and jotted, "Want to go to

 

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the beach?" The pen felt strange in my hand, though I liked drawing the question mark. "Sure," he said, "sure, hon" and I could tell it helped him to act like a normal family faced with a sunny weekend.
The sand was jammed, with Québecois and Mainers spread far as the tide allowed. The Doctor had gathered the energy to find trunks and a pair of flipflops I remembered from Pensacola, but once settled on the beach, he didn't shift from the umbrella. He lay there, staring at its plastic ribs. Naomi had bought it from a catalog. At the time, we'd lived nowhere near a coast.
That was enough to send me straight to the ocean where I let the cold smack the breath from me. If my heels and hands didn't dip below the top layer, I could nearly pretend to be warm. Salt spiked my hair into orange tentacles that Naomi would have been ashamed of. But she wasn't here anymore. She wasn't going to see this evolution of my style, which was both satisfying and not OK. Out here, however, I could handle it. It was all this good northern cold and big salt, shifting and rocking all around me, an atmosphere of sudden change. Then I felt the water roll below my body, looked up and saw a steep moving curve of wave. And then I was, abruptly, inside it.
The next thing I knew I was on my back and staring at the high blue curve of the sky. I thought I knew how those crabs thrown past the high-tide line might feel. Shocked and wasted. Every inch of my body pearled with sand. I sat up and seawater streamed from my mouth and nose. A stripe of kelp plastered my arm.
Fathers went on playing with children. A girl toddled past me with a green bucket and shovel in her hands. I was too old to be missed. The Doctor was probably still staring at the expensive umbrella. But I'd nearly drowned, I wanted to shout to someone. My heart beat unevenly. My breathing hadn't righted itself.
A blue flash of shorts danced past and I saw Jake, a box greasy with fries and hot dogs in his hands. He saw me and slowed on the way back to his friends. There were too many fries for one person.

 

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He had come with actual friends. I wanted nothing more than to crawl inside a shell and seal me and my ugly hair in. I could nearly see why Naomi had to go. When you were a wreck, it took courage to stay visible. "You OK?" Jake asked. I nodded. He crouched down. His shoulders were burned. He had beautiful knees. "Your cheek," he said, "is bleeding.''
In the sand, I wrote "I'M OK." He didn't seem to think it strange not to answer