I know it’s impossible to replace a person with an exact duplicate, so I tell myself not to worry. This can’t be a real thing, especially because I was the only one who saw it. I must have been doing some version of sleepwalking this morning. Some half-awake dream. Maybe it’s a puberty thing. Hormones and stuff messing with my brain.
Still, I’m afraid to go home. As long as I don’t see her again, I can tell myself that the other mother is not real. I can pretend to believe that I was sleepwalking or it was something I ate or maybe I hit my head in the middle of the night. As soon as I see her again, I won’t be able to fool myself anymore. It will be real again.
Auntie Carole is waiting on the dock. She’s tall and thin. Her gray hair is tied up in a bun. She’s wearing a dark blue dress. She always wears a dress. She calls to us as we get close. “Hello, my little ones!”
“Auntie Carole!” Julia shouts. “I caught more fish than Charlie!”
“Good for you,” she shouts back.
“She cheated!” Charlie says.
“Did not!” Julia fires back. She splashes at Charlie with her oar. “Besides, how do you cheat at fishing anyway?” She splashes again, and this time, she hits him with a spray of water.
“All right, knock it off,” Auntie Carole says. “And don’t go tipping over. I see that no one bothered to wear life jackets again.”
“You heard Auntie!” Charlie says, sticking his tongue out in Julia’s direction. “No play horses!”
“What?” Sarah says to me from her boat, mouthing the word. “Play horses?”
“He means no horseplay,” I say. I can’t blame him for that one. Horseplay makes no sense.
As the girls maneuver their canoe, Julia tosses a line to Auntie Carole and climbs out onto the dock. Sarah follows, exiting the canoe like she’s been doing it all her life. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Sarah.”
“Hello, Sarah,” Auntie Carole says. “Did my little ones take you to the island today?”
“They did. It’s beautiful.”
Auntie Carole laughs. “I’ve been to the island, my dear. It’s certainly not beautiful, and even if it was, it’s not mine. No one owns it, really. The town, I guess, since they own the pond, too. My husband loved to tell people that it was his island. That he planned on retiring to it some day, but no one was ever dumb enough to believe him.”
“He died,” Charlie says, climbing out of the boat. “Uncle Norman, I mean.”
“Yes, he did,” Auntie Carole says.
Just like that, her sunniness is gone. It’s nothing specific. I can’t pick out any one thing that has changed about her. It’s a combination of everything. It’s like every tiny bit of her body—every cell—instantly flipped from happy to sad. Except it’s not exactly sad. It’s worse than sad. It’s what Glen sees as crazy, but it’s not crazy. It’s lostness. I know that’s not a word, but I’ll bet that’s exactly how Auntie Carole feels. She’s lost without Uncle Norman. It’s like all the roads and streets and sidewalks have been wiped away, and Auntie Carole is walking through the world without any idea where she should go.
“I’m so sorry,” Sarah says. It’s the second time today that she’s had to say this to someone about Uncle Norman.
“Thank you, dear,” Auntie Carole says, but she’s not really with us anymore. This is what happens. She’s somewhere else now. I can see it in her eyes. She will still chat with us and offer lemonade and help pull the canoes onto the shore, but her mind has gone to another place.
This is what worries Mom. It’s what makes Glen think she’s lost her marbles.
I think she’s just trying to get back to Uncle Norman. In her mind, at least.
As we turn on to our street half an hour later, I see that Mom’s car isn’t in the driveway. She probably went to work already. She gets called in early a lot, and when they call, she always says yes because we need the money. We always need the money.
It gives me hope. I don’t think the other mother could fake being a nurse. Being a nurse is way too complicated. Mom says that nurses need to know more than doctors, because doctors can go back to their offices and look stuff up on the internet. Nurses don’t have offices. They have desks in the middle of hallways where everyone can see them all the time, and they need to be “on” all the time. Mom once told me that she got a wedgie when she was working at one of those hallway desks but couldn’t pick it for like an hour because she never had even a second of privacy. Patients and doctors and other nurses were around her the whole time. I didn’t want to take my meds that day, so she might’ve just made the whole thing up to make me laugh and be more agreeable (which it did), but I don’t think so. It sounded like a Mom thing. And a nurse thing.
Only a real nurse could be a nurse, so the other mother must be Mom.
I pretend to believe this. In a tiny (huge) part of my brain I know it’s not true, but that doesn’t mean I can’t pretend until it’s impossible to pretend again.
We stop at the bottom of the driveway and Sarah hands me the pickle bucket hanging on her handlebars. “I need to get going,” she says. “My cousin’s birthday party is this afternoon.” She’s wearing her T-shirt again. I miss her bathing-suit top, but I feel like I know a secret now. I know what Sarah Flaherty looks like in a bathing suit, which means I practically know what she looks like in a bra. It’s not my biggest secret. Not by a long shot. Still, it’s a pretty good one.
“Thanks for fishing with us,” Julia says. “You’re the first girl who ever went fishing with me.”
“I had fun,” Sarah says.
“Michael had fun, too. I think he liked having a girl with us, too,” Charlie says. He’s grinning. He thinks he’s funny. He’s trying to embarrass me, and it’s working. I feel my cheeks turning red. I want to punch him in the face, except I’ve never punched Charlie and Julia before. I’ve punched plenty of other kids, and I punched an adult once, and I shoved my bus driver’s face, and I’ve wanted to punch Glen a million times, and I even wanted to punch the other mother this morning, but I’ve never hit Charlie or Julia, though they sometimes deserve it more than anyone.
Charlie especially.
Julia shoves Charlie for me. It’s a hard, two-handed shove that almost knocks him off his bike. “Of course Michael liked having Sarah with us,” she says. “Fishing with anyone is better than fishing with you, stupid.”
Julia is in fourth grade. She can’t ride in a canoe alone and is still afraid of the dark and secretly watches little kid shows like The Wonder Pets in her bedroom with the door closed, but sometimes she is more like my older sister. She knows just what to say when I need something said.
“I had fun with you, too, Charlie,” Sarah says. She bends over when she says this, making way too much eye contact with him, the same way some adults do when they talk to little kids. She’s not being sweet, though. She’s treating him like a baby on purpose. She’s patronizing him. Patronizing is pretending to be so nice that it becomes insulting. It’s an amazing trick. Kind of like poisoning someone with chocolate or bacon. Mrs. Newfang said that I can be patronizing when I agree with people like the principal just to make them shut up. Sarah is patronizing Charlie because she didn’t like him trying to embarrass me. She’s trying to let him know it without telling him that he’s a jerk.