Free Split by Lisa Michaels

satisfaction from the smack of my palm on her plastic diaper—satisfaction and a misplaced righteousness, since the baby hadn't done a thing. In an instant, Mare was beside us. She elbowed me aside and took Pippy in her arms.
    "You have to go home now," she said to me, and though there was a squeak in her voice, there was also a surprising firmness. I backed out of the yard and dipped through the fence, past the straggly patch of mint, holding in my mind the expression on Mare's face. It looked like the face of love to me—steadfast and protective and tender.
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    Years later, my mother would say, with a tightness in her voice, that I didn't seem quite happy in those early years at 12000 Spring Street: "I wasn't aware of how precarious our life seemed to you." When she had looked at me, running naked across the lawn at the Manomet commune, she felt fierce about protecting my freedom. "You see, peril to me was the closing down of the world like a coffin. Living according to a script. Still, I always tried to make a cozy place for you to sleep."
    And it's true; my mother did her best to shield me. It may well have been my own temperament that made me alert to danger. At seven or eight, I was convinced that I would die in childhood and seized on any evidence that my body was in decline. Once, in the deep claw-foot tub in Floyd's old house, I peered through the lapping water and saw dark streaks running up my legs—signs, I decided, in a snap diagnosis, of leukemia. I sat in the cooling bath gripped by a mixture of terror and relief—terror at the grueling treatments ahead of me, and relief that the ax had finally fallen and my illness had a name. When my mother came in and found me wide-eyed and shivering, she took a washcloth and some soap and showed the streaks to be engine grease, left over from Jim's shower after work on the mail truck. She called me a nervous goose, and we laughed together as she wrapped me in a towel and tucked me into bed. But once she left, my dread returned. My mother swore that things always turned out for the best, and I wanted to believe her, but my life thus far hadn't borne this out. She couldn't promise me that I wouldn't die; I knew no one could promise me that. And if she didn't believe we were all at risk, then I would have to keep watch on my own.
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    Everything that had blown up in my parents' breakup, in the years on the road, was starting to fall back into place. The property at 12000 Spring Street was turning lush under my mother's hands: she rototilled half of the scruffy lawn and planted rows of corn, mounds of zucchini and melons, tufts of silvery artichokes against the fence. She learned plumbing, how to lay insulation and hammer shingles on the steep roof, her firm mouth bristling with nails. She dug trenches to lay water line, pinned her hair under a cap and reworked the building, bone to eave.
    When I saw the zeal with which she threw herself into these labors, I asked for my own plot. Mother rototilled a square of dirt next to an old shed and helped me turn the earth with a pitchfork. "You want to break down the big clods and toss out the rocks," she said, "so the ground is rich and crumbly." We planted the fastest-growing varieties we could find (she knew that a budding gardener needed quick rewards): radishes, carrots, curly lettuce. When the seeds were in, I fenced off my plot with stakes and string, wary of trespassers. By some feudal instinct, I claimed the shed too, since it abutted my garden, and I think I got more pleasure from that spider trap than from the plants popping up in the blistering sun. The shed had mystery. It was built of rough planks, and chinks of light shone through the cracks, casting a stenciled pattern on the packed-dirt floor. There were a couple of shelves, a stack of buckets, and a few hoes and rakes tipped into one corner. I sat there in the dusty coolness, figuring how I might get my hands on a few furnishings: an old leather