Panting, she reached the dock and held up a hand. I pulled her up quick, but she still scraped the top of her thigh.
“Jesus! Told you I’d get splinters.”
Lights illuminated the water red and blue, smearing together and staining everything purple. A car door slammed, the sound echoing off the lake.
“Hurry up and get your clothes on.” I thrust her yellow T-shirt at her when she was too slow to grab it herself. Her tiny shorts got stuck halfway up her legs as she yanked them over her wet skin.
The police officer walked down the dock and shined a flashlight in our faces. I moved in front of Lolee, who finally managed to pull her shorts over her underwear.
“Park closes at sundown.”
“Just having dinner.” I held up the crumpled paper bag, but the light never left my face.
“You eating in the water?” The flashlight’s beam shifted to Lolee and swam around her wet head, two damp circles delineating where her bra had sopped up the lake.
“We were about to leave.”
“Let’s see some identification.”
The officer was young and I didn’t recognize him. Very blond with a sharp jaw. He smelled musky, like cologne that had been sitting on someone’s shelf for too long. I dug into the back pocket of my jeans and pulled out my wallet. It was Velcro and made an embarrassing noise when it opened.
He took my license and gestured at Lolee. “I’ll need yours.”
“She’s fourteen.” He flashed the light back in my eyes. It burned there, a lit cigarette butt pressed to my brain. I tried to smile. “She’s my niece.”
He still had my license, looking at it hard like it might change if he shook it. “This your idea of babysitting?”
“We’re just having some fun. It’s Friday night.”
The beam flicked off our faces and danced along the waterfront, through the swaths of cattails and reeds. Glowing green-blue pinpricks lit in pairs of two. “It’s gonna be real fun when we have to come down here tomorrow and drag the lake because a gator bit off your arm.”
It had happened before, a couple of summers after high school. We watched it on the news in my parents’ living room, Brynn parked in Milo’s lap and me holding Bastien. I hope you kids would never be so stupid, my father said, shaking his head. Brynn and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh. The three of us swam in the lake most nights in the summer, not usually wearing clothes. Gators are disgusting, Brynn replied, shuddering, and then Milo dug his hands into either side of her waist and yelled gator bait until she screamed and I walked Bastien in the other room so I wouldn’t have to watch.
The officer handed me back my license and escorted us to the parking lot. He continued to lecture me on the dangers of night swimming in Florida lakes while staring at the wet circles over my niece’s breasts. I handed her the hoodie she’d brought and helped her put it on, zipping it up beneath her throat.
“If you do this kind of thing again, I’ll have to take you in.”
I couldn’t think of a bigger waste of tax dollars. “Absolutely.”
The officer got back in his car and drove away. I stood there feeling stupid and aggravated with myself, wondering what Brynn would think of me doing something so pointless and dangerous with her kid. Probably laugh. Probably do the exact same thing herself. I threw our trash in the Dumpster next to the lot, and a horde of black flies flew up and settled back down. Fragments of pinecone bit into the sole of my one bare foot.
Lolee put her hand on my arm. “Where’s the other flip-flop?”
“Floating around with the alligators. I’ll buy you new ones.”
We drove home on the back roads that bordered the lake. I watched for flashing lights in my rearview, but the streets stayed dark.
An espresso maker sat in the back office of the gallery. As soon as I came in, Lucinda would duck behind the slick black-and-white counter and I’d hear the coughing sputter of the machine. The burnt smell covered the awful odor of wet paint that haunted the place. She’d hand me a cup then and stand quietly while I drank it. The ritual of it helped. Most times I walked in a zipping snarl of nerves, too keyed up to think straight. I didn’t like being places where I felt out of my element. I liked stability, the comfort of knowing my surroundings and what to expect.
Lucinda stood there in her beautiful clothes and looked like she already knew I wasn’t worth the time. With Brynn, I’d held a constant pit in my gut. The burning knowledge that I’d never get to keep her. Never really have her the way I wanted. This was a different experience. It felt like Lucinda was waiting for me to make a wrong move.
“Another?” Lucinda asked, pointing toward the back.
I shook my head and barely sipped the one I held.
Up front was better. It was too hard to watch my mother dissect animals that my father and I had spent so long constructing. She unraveled stitches and shredded hide, yanking the seam ripper through fabric and wire. Glued green sequins onto nostrils, dripping strands of spangled snot. Built fluids from latex. Made puddles of gore. Then there was the bondage gear acquired from online stores. They shipped unlabeled boxes to my mother’s house that piled in listing towers outside the front door.
I couldn’t process the way my mother used sex in her art. It was as if my father’s death had set something loose in her, bottled up for the entirety of their marriage. When my brother and I were growing up, my mother had never talked to us about sex. Never mentioned a single thing that would lead me to believe she’d be capable of creating sex-toy art. She’d sometimes joked around with Milo, teasing him about girls, but it was always lighthearted. Never anything graphic or profane. She hadn’t even liked touching most of the taxidermied stuff. Had never once asked my father if she could help out in the store, as far as I knew.
Let me talk to you about it, she had said as she pulled S&M gear from boxes. There’s a lot you should know.
I didn’t want to know any of it. I wished I knew less.
My mother plugged ball gags into mouths broken open with pliers, wrenched out teeth and sliced off papery tongues. She stuck these inside a clear plastic pouch that hung from the back end of a beaver, the anus an open wound surrounded with more sequins, these ones red. There were handcuffs lined with orange-red fox fur. She used a nail gun to adhere nipple clamps to a female elk whose legs she’d sawn off at the knees.
It felt like watching a low-budget slasher film. I wanted to fast-forward to the end, to get to the part where we could pretend none of it had happened. This wouldn’t be one of those things we’d be able to talk about fondly, a funny memory we discussed over coffee. It was going to be something that wrecked us all and made it so we couldn’t ever look at each other again. The previous week, when I refused to go into the back to look at the pieces, my mother brought up my father again.
If you knew how often he had his way, how many times he took from me, you wouldn’t begrudge me this one stupid thing.
Tired of thinking about it, I put my cup on the counter and rubbed my eyes.
“Would you like to sit down?” Lucinda asked. “Come on.”
I hadn’t seen anyone but Lucinda go into the back rooms aside from one other person—a short woman, decidedly more butch, who usually wore work boots and a beat-up denim jacket with a ripped collar and pins for bands I absolutely did not know. We’d nodded at each other on occasion, but she never spoke to anyone, aside from Lucinda. They seemed . . . close.