“So tell me about your mom,” the doctor says, crossing his legs.
Aaron presses his tongue against the top of his mouth like he’s trying to stop brain freeze. He bites his lip.
“She’s a person,” he says.
“Well, that’s encouraging.”
Aaron cracks a mild smile. “It is encouraging.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Not much to tell,” Aaron says, and for some reason he thinks about the beach thing.
He’s eight years old. It’s a bright, sunny summer day and Dad is still working in a bank. It’s just before the split, before his dad’s Big Change, and Mom is home, one of those meandering days in Forest Hills, with Mom at the helm, once in a while going to auditions but mostly just hanging. They’ve settled into a routine. Cocoa Puffs and Pillsbury croissants rising in the oven, watching cartoon DVDs—Ren & Stimpy, his mom’s favorite—on the family room couch. Then it’s across the street to the park, where he joins the other kids running in circles through the sprinkler while his mom sits alone, away from the other moms who congregate by the same row of benches every day. Aaron’s mom is not a plays well with other moms sort of person. Aaron loves these days. The predictability of the endless hours with nothing that they need to do.
But on this day, they don’t have their usual breakfast. Mom wakes him early. Her eyes are puffy and pink.
“C’mon,” she says. “We’re going for a train ride.”
Aaron lights up. He loves his mom, and he adores a good adventure.
The train leaves from Penn Station. His mom says they’re going to Jones Beach. Aaron cheers, wondering: Where’s our stuff? His mom isn’t carrying any bags, and for the beach, you usually want a blanket, bathing suits, towels, maybe a pail and shovel to play with, that gooey sunblock in the orange squeeze bottle.
“Don’t we need things?” he asks.
“It’s an adventure,” she says. “Stop worrying.”
On the train, Mom starts saying things she’s never said before.
She puts her hand on his knee. “I’m so completely bored, Aaron. Do you know what that’s like?”
“No.”
“I hope you never know. It’s torture.”
They take a train and then a jam-packed bus, and once they reach the beach, they walk onto the sand and keep walking, aimlessly. Aaron keeps spotting places that would be good for building a sandcastle but they don’t stop anywhere, and he keeps stealing glances at his mom, who just looks blank—tired, maybe. Finally, without warning, she plops down in the sand like an unstrung marionette. Aaron looks around, wondering if someone will bring them a blanket or towels.
“What should we do? We can go in the water or we can build a sandcastle,” he offers. “We can draw pictures in the sand.”
She nods, doesn’t answer, looking off at the horizon, sitting on her hands on the warm, slightly wet sand. She smokes a cigarette, which he’s never seen her do before. He sits next to her and breathes in the chalky fumes, and he starts to dig a little, and he finds himself getting thirsty and his head is on fire from the sun but it’s fun to just dig, dig, so he does and then he starts to feel the heat in his cheeks and he remembers the time he got a burn when he was five in Cape May, and they had to put lotion on him and his skin peeled for a week.
After about an hour and a half, his mother stands and wipes sand off her knees and hands.
“This is stupid,” she says. “Mom screwed up.”
They walk back toward the bus, away from the water they never got to play in.
“Sometimes you try new things,” she says as they walk. “Occasionally they work.”
Aaron remembers so clearly staring down at the sand as they walked, trying to step entirely in big people’s footsteps. You have to make your own fun was the thought he had. Which turns out to be true, Aaron realizes, and he smiles, and he crosses his arms over his chest.
“What are you thinking about?” the doctor asks.
“Nothing,” he says, remembering that moments ago he was noticing it was hygge in here, and he wants his hygge back. He offers a tight-lipped smile. “A good memory.”
Aaron’s father is seated in the waiting area when Aaron comes out with a prescription and a bunch of business cards, which is weird, like the doctor wants Aaron to hand them out on a street corner or something. He hands them to his dad.
“He wants me here every day this coming week. I told him I didn’t know if I could because—”
“You can,” his father says. “Of course. This is the only thing right now. Nothing else matters but getting you better.”
“Also I guess I’m going to be on medicine because there was this depression-ometer in there and I broke it. We owe him money because he has a ‘you break it, you buy it’ policy.”
His dad hugs him tight and buries his chin into the back of Aaron’s neck. “I am so sorry. I feel like I let you down. How could you go up there—how did I miss this?”
Aaron doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s thinking about Tillie. If his score was eighty-two, what was hers?
Even though the body is barely recognizable, barely what it was, they still need to pick out clothes for the funeral.
Winnie asks Frank to do it. Frank says yes and then he gets a business call, and he has to take it, and he’s so sorry, but would she mind, and Winnie says of course, she’ll do it, of course, and she walks into the room and it steals her breath. She has to steady herself against the doorframe. It’s like she’s walked into an actual physical barrier and it slammed her in the stomach.
How does anyone do this? How can a parent be asked to—
And suddenly Britt is there, standing next to her mom, and it happens with no words. Britt goes in, and maybe she heard them talking about picking out clothes? She goes in and steps into the closet and looks around. Even at this moment when she has never understood Tillie less, she tries to figure out what she would want to be buried in.
Something black, it seems to Britt, makes sense. Tillie liked black. And pink. White is for weddings. But it doesn’t matter what she wears, also, because it’s not really her. She’s in a box but she isn’t. She’ll be wearing clothes but she’s dead.
None of it makes any sense.
The text comes from a number Molly’s never seen before.
The breath gets caught in Molly’s throat, and the weird thing that happens next is that she pictures her old friend from sixth grade, Tillie with pigtails and pink scrunchies, and then she pictures that girl, not the weird one who’d changed so much, jumping off the bridge. And her eyes well up.
She doesn’t answer the text. What is there to say? The texter is right, but that’s not, like, something you agree with on the record. Could she go to jail?
A second text comes in from the same number.
Molly turns off her phone. As if whatever that was—a threat?—will cease to exist if she powers down.
“Are you up for a trip to Sephora?” her mom asks through the door.
Fury catches in her throat. How is it possible that her mother is thinking about makeup right now?