Sweet Water(10)

“How do you know it’s not something more dire? He may need medical attention.” My voice is pleading.

“Because Mary Alice checked him out.” Alton likes to keep everything high and tight beneath his cap, family dirt included.

Mary Alice returns to her seat and nods at William as if to say proceed, but I’m not ready yet. “And what if his condition worsens?” I ask.

“Cross that bridge then,” Alton says.

This is bullshit. Finn probably needs that new spray everyone’s been stocking up on in schools because of all the overdoses, but when I mention it, Mary Alice rolls her eyes and tells me he’s not that bad.

I’m not at all convinced of her nursing abilities and especially the ones needed to deal with an overdose patient. When I asked her years ago why she’d chosen nursing as a vocation, she simply said that back in her day, you either became a nurse or a teacher, and patients talked back less than children.

“Thank you for getting everyone together so quickly,” Martin says as he sits down in a chair, leaving me hanging behind the family circle. It always irks me how Martin thanks his parents for everything, so formal.

I don’t want to sit in this damn circle of chairs, because if I do, it feels like I’m agreeing to something insidious, like when I covered up for Livvy even though I knew the Ellsworths should’ve settled their case and helped the man with the broken leg.

It made me think of my father and how much it would’ve crushed us if he lost a few months’ pay when I was growing up, but this is nothing like Livvy’s situation. This is about much more than lost wages. This is the loss of a young girl’s life.

“Are you going to join us?” Mary Alice asks in her flat tone. She softened to me in the beginning, when Livvy was really going through it, admitting she’d always wanted a daughter of her own. She made me feel special, the daughter she wished she’d had. I didn’t love how she bad-mouthed Livvy. She was so much younger than William and had made mistakes, but I tolerated it because I’d craved a mother-daughter relationship so badly. I wanted to be the good daughter. But I soon learned our relationship flourished only if I did what she said; Mary Alice made our boundaries clear after the boys arrived, that things be done a certain way where her grandkids were concerned.

I sit down, even though they never wanted me in their circle anyway.

If I am going to remain in their circle, I need to play by their rules.

William gawks at me with his cheeks sucked in like he’s just made nice with an especially tart lemon. It unnerves me how they couldn’t let Finn come down from his high, grieve for his dead girlfriend, before they called this ridiculous impromptu meeting. But I’m more upset that no one has called in a doctor for Finn, placing their needs before his well-being.

William and Mary Alice were good to my boys in the way grandparents are, spoiling them with presents. But what they overcompensated for in material things they shorted in affection. Spencer and Finn often returned bristly after spending the day there.

“Sarah?” Martin beckons. “Are you listening?”

“Yes,” I say, although I’ve missed everything. I know Martin tried to tell the council what occurred tonight, but this cannot be just another roundtable meeting about how to make someone’s mistake go away.

A girl died.

And I died a thousand deaths after bathing my teenage son, as the Ellsworths recommended (ordered), while they were preparing their little meeting.

With rising horror, I see it wasn’t to warm Finn; it was to wash off evidence—for the Ellsworths. Martin manipulated me to get Finn here.

I didn’t fully realize it until I got to that room with the Tiffany lamps and the circle of people, specifically Alton. A member of law enforcement, he’d obviously been called in to help circumvent the fact that we’d left the scene of the crime—and the crime itself, whatever that may be. No one is intent on seeing this boy behind bars, especially me, but if I had my choice, I’d still be at a police station right now.

I hear Martin say rumblings of things like “she was already dead,” “there was nothing more we could do.”

“Drugs.” “They weren’t Finn’s.”

We don’t know that for sure, though, Martin. They could’ve been Finn’s.

I don’t like to assume. But the Ellsworths will make it their truth and then my truth.

I let it become my truth that my children would attend the Barclay Classes at the Edgeworth Club from third grade to eighth grade, where they would learn proper manners, how to shake hands, and of course, ballroom dancing. Little boys in full suits and little girls in cotillion dresses twirled across polished country-club floors in a giggly mess of lace and bow ties. I let Mary Alice dictate my actions not because I was completely subservient but because I never had a proper mother and thought she knew best.

For primary school, the boys attended the Academy, which Martin and Bill had attended and which William and his brother, Edward, had attended before them, and then Livvy. The Ellsworths were legacy, William still served on the board for the school scholarship he funded, and none of these decisions was optional.

I never had a say in many things as my boys grew up, and I clearly didn’t have one now, but my silence in this case shouldn’t be mistaken for tacit agreement. I’m not sure if my son was drugged or if he took them of his own accord, but my primary concern is finding out if he had anything to do with Yazmin’s death, not sitting around talking about it. This isn’t like other decisions made in this family. I need to have a say here—where my son’s welfare is concerned.