Free The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners by Luanne Rice

through me were wild and powerful. I sat down at the other end of the settee. Six feet separated us, an unbridgeable gulf. Being in the same house, on the same terrace, was in some ways harder than living a continent and ocean apart.
    “What about you?” she said after a few minutes.
    I looked at her, not getting it.
    “I told you I wanted to be an astronomer when I was young.”
    “And now you garden,” I said.
    “Yes. So will you tell me what you want to do?”
    “When I grow up?” I asked.
    “You seem very grown up now,” she said. “But yes. When you finish high school. Have you decided on a college? Do you know what you want to study?”
    “Berkeley,” I said, deciding in that very moment. “And I want to be a psychologist.”
    “Oh,” she said. Nothing more. Just a long stare out over the water as the color rushed into her face again. Had my career choice scathed her? I obviously had spent plenty of time in therapy; no need to clue her in there. We stared into each other’s blue eyes; it was really strange, because I saw myself in the future, how I’ll appear in twenty-five years. We look so much alike, it felt scary.
    I read a lot of psychology. Winnicott, Schore, Van der Kolk. Mainly because of Lucy. But I also read self-help books. It’s not that cool in high school to read things that appeal mainly to people who’ve been divorced, widowed, brokenhearted, or conned, but I’ve never met a self-help book I didn’t like.
    Grief and bereavement, abandonment issues, birth order, dream analysis, codependency sexuality, parenting, body image, women’s health—I can’t get enough. My self needs help, that’s for sure. But looking at my mother, seeing the brokenness in her eyes, I realized hers did too.
    “What did we pretend we were exploring?” I asked. “When we looked through the telescope back in Michigan.”
    “We had a make-believe country,” she said.
    “Dorset,” I said, remembering that part as if it were yesterday. Our country shared its name with our street; we’d lived at 640 Dorset Road. Suddenly I could see the map we drew when I was six; sitting at the kitchen table, we’d spread out a large sheet of paper.
    With a green crayon, my mother drew a big wobbly circle. I’d colored it green. My mother had helped me add cities and towns, mountain ranges and bodies of water. Rivers, ponds, lakes, and the ocean.
    “But we live in Michigan,” she’d said. “There’s no ocean near here.”
    “Our country has an ocean,” I’d said firmly. I’d been to Newport, to visit her family, and been astonished by the Atlantic. Beach, shells, seaweed, rocks. The mystery of where waves came from and where they went, the endlessness of it all.
    “If you say so,” she’d said.
    “I do,” I’d said. “It’s our country, we can have whatever we want.”
    “And you want the sea.”
    “Yes!”
    Staring at her now, I remembered all that. But I still couldn’t bring back the telescope, and her holding me in her arms while we explored … our yard? Our imaginary country? All I recalled was the map. I’d let Lucy paste tiny foil stars all around the edges, to symbolize the sky. I pictured her now, tiny little girl working so hard to make the sky bright.
    And when our father came home from work that night, he’d studied it, and I’d wondered why he seemed so sad. I thought maybe he felt left out, because my mother and Lucy and I had created a country without him. Families were supposed to be together. That night I felt bad, afraid we’d hurt his feelings. The next day, my mother left.
    “The map,” she said now. “You did such an amazing job.”
    “I loved it,” I said.
    “Do you …,” she began. She trailed off, then went for it. “Do you still have it?”
    I shook my head. “We got rid of everything,” I said. “When we sold the house after Dad died.”
    She nodded, as if I were any old stranger talking about the sale of real estate. She seemed to accept it. Maybe she