Night was falling. Soon it would be too dark for us to keep cutting and filling the buckets.
Julia wiped her hands on her work apron. “So, now we load up the wheelbarrow and take them to the cooler. They’ll chill overnight and then, first thing in the morning, I’ll arrange the bouquets.”
Together, we carried the buckets of flowers to the worn wheelbarrow, all wood and rusted metal, and fit in as many as we could. I followed her around the tunnel and to the back of the house, until we reached a shed that housed a walk-in refrigerator. After setting the buckets on the shelves, we made another trip with the rest of the flowers, and then we were finished.
We closed up the shed and headed back toward the house. I took everything in as we walked together. The cold, wet air. Two ghost children on the green, pretending to have a picnic. The darkness and sky and the moon above the rocks.
“Coming back in?” Julia asked me at the side door.
I shook my head.
“Good night then, Mila,” she said.
“Good night.”
Summer was fading, the days still warm but the nights colder, and while the sky had been clear only a moment ago, a fog settled as I made my way to the other end of the field. I wished I had thought to take a lantern, but I made it to the barn door and let myself in. I felt across the inside wall for the switch and found it—but stopped before turning it on. What would the others think if they saw the schoolhouse suddenly bright? I wanted to be left alone there, without anyone checking on me. So I waited for my eyes to adjust before making my way to the closet, where beeswax taper candles rested in a basket, their holders in another. By the woodstove was a box of matches. I struck one and lit the candle, set it on the table.
I sat alone in the quiet.
“The common man pays for more than electricity and gas and water,” Blake told us one morning.
The summer was over but they hadn’t sent me back to school. Both of us—my mother and I—had to unlearn what we’d spent our lives learning. Blake would help us. He taught us the new lessons late at night, in the mornings when my mother returned from work with sore feet and tired eyes, around the fire and inside the frame of his skeleton house.
“The common man pays for the internet,” he went on. “He pays for cable, for Christ’s sake! Because he needs more and more and more! Like anyone could watch one hundred channels. What good is a life if you live it like that? Glued to a lightbox showing you pictures. Telling you when to laugh and what to fear. The common man lives this way because he has lost the intuition of our ancestors. All you need in order to live is this.” He took two fingers and pressed them to my mother’s wrist. Waited, waited, and then nodded.
He let go and took my wrist in his rough hand. “Have you ever taken your pulse, Mila?” he asked me. His voice was lower now, as though these words were for me only.
“I can’t remember,” I said.
“I feel it,” he whispered. “Boom. Boom. Boom. Here. You try.”
I pressed my fingers where his had been but I couldn’t feel anything.
“Keep trying,” he told me.
I moved them. I pressed harder. When I looked up, his green eyes were watching me. “It’s all right, sweet girl,” he said in a kind voice. “You’ll find it. I can see it in you—the intuition is not too far buried.”
“What about me?” My mother laughed. “Am I a lost cause?” It sounded like a joke but I knew better.
“Oh, Miriam,” Blake said, and looked away.
“What?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t say it,” he said. “Let’s not worry.”
“You shouldn’t say what?”
“It’s just . . .” He turned his face to the sky. He looked at her and squeezed his eyes shut as though what he was thinking pained him. “You have a deficit,” he finally said. “But let’s just hope for the best.”
“What do you mean, ‘a deficit’?”
“We don’t have to discuss this, love.”
“Blake,” she said. “I want to know.”
“Well, here it is. It is a sad truth, but the science can’t be argued with. Teenagers—not just you, Mila, but all of them—they have trouble regulating their emotional responses. This is about the amygdala, you see, which is part of the brain, and how it interacts with the frontal cortex. It’s about the balance between emotion and judgment. That’s where the intuition lies. You need to find the balance. But when a girl gets pregnant as a teenager, when her amygdala isn’t yet fully formed, the pregnancy hormones take over during the most crucial years, the formative years.”
“Then what?” my mother asked. I could feel her worry, could see it in her face.
“Then you may never develop the intuition you need to exist as an independent person in the world. You’ve never been one, Miriam. It isn’t your fault. It’s the cards you were dealt. When you first told me that you had a daughter, I considered calling it off. I spent many a sleepless night thinking it over. Not because of the responsibility of a stepchild—which is not insignificant—but because of the deficits that teen motherhood causes.”
My mother sat very still, her hands cupped in her lap.
I said, “But don’t they kind of have to grow up faster?”
“Common misconception,” he said. “I mean, sure, some of them drop out of high school and enter the workforce sooner. But is that growing up? Hardly. It’s a chemical problem. The pregnancy hormones and adolescent hormones. They clash. It has all kinds of side effects in the brain. Really, Miriam. Sometimes it may feel like I’m hard on you but it’s a miracle that you’re doing as well as you are.”
My mother seemed hopeful then. He put his arm around her and she turned her face to his chest. I saw her finding comfort in it. I was cold and confused and I wanted to be the one she was breathing in. I wanted her to hold me all night like she had when I was little.
“You two,” Blake said. “You’re lucky to be here with me. I’ll look out for you. And this is a special property. A special place. You know, a long time ago, it was oceanfront property. Hell, with global warming going the way it is, it’s bound to be oceanfront property again one day.”
My mother didn’t say anything. Her head was still nestled in his chest. Oceanfront? I thought. It didn’t seem possible. We were several towns in from the bay, let alone the ocean. I saw him looking at me. I didn’t say anything.
* * *
___
A few days later, I stepped on something sharp. It cut through the thin sole of my shoe, into my foot.