her licorice had only made me more upset when she’d tried to comfort me. When
I ran from her attempts to console me, it was Mr. Blink who had opened the door
for me and ushered me inside, and it was the scent of the pool water that washed
away my terror. “Jeanette says he finds kids who want to be loved, and Mothers
who want to give more love than they’re capable of,” Bobby explains. “Of course,
she can be too poetic sometimes.”
“Jeanette?”
“Sorry,” he says, “I mean ‘Sally’. Why’d you choose the name Beaver?”
“My parents used to call me that.”
“I bet you just wanted your family, huh? Your real one? That’s why you
chose to go by Beaver.”
“I ended up there by mistake. I only went with him because I wanted him
to give a gun to my Mom.”
44
“You wanted your mother to kill herself?” Bobby says. He stops swimming.
“It wasn’t loaded. I just wanted her to…” I bounce with the motion of the
water. “I wanted her to regret trying to kill herself.”
“See? It fits.” Bobby comes up close to me and rests a hand on my
shoulder to keep himself up. “Eventually you become accustomed to it. Take
Jeanette – she was really beginning to see these women as temporary mothers.
Placeholders. But I still think it’s sort of wrong to just accept people’s love and
then listen to them shoot themselves.”
“Why do they have to do it in the kitchen?” I ask. “Why do we have to
listen?”
“He makes us listen. The more we do it, the more conditioned we become
to ignore the gunshot. It gets easier to pretend that each new Mom that steps
into the house has been there the entire time and that they’ll be there forever, just
like we come to imagine we will be.” The sun begins to cast through the treetops
and outlines the edges of his face and the slight gold of his hair.
“I always wanted to be one of the families in those windows,” I say.