The Water Castle by Blakemore Megan Frazer

Author:Blakemore, Megan Frazer [Blakemore, Megan Frazer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-11-19T07:00:00+00:00

Nineteen

It was, of course, not dignified to hide in the closet, and Mallory was ashamed of herself. But her mother was downstairs, talking to her father, and gathering more of her belongings to take away from their home to whatever place she had rented.

It had been such a good afternoon, in a strange way. She’d found she actually liked spending time with Will and Ephraim, playing that silly game of tag she’d played with her parents. She’d come home smiling and ready to tell her dad that maybe it was going to be okay and he really didn’t need to worry so much about her anymore. Then she saw the Volkswagen Rabbit in the driveway.

She’d snuck in the back door and up the narrow stairs from the kitchen to the second floor. From there she’d gone to the landing of the main stairs, where she could spy on her mother. Everything about her looked the same as it always did. Her hair sprang up around her head in tight little cords, she wore sneakers with her jeans, and around her neck hung the same necklace she’d worn all of Mallory’s life: a little copper key on a silver chain. It was not comforting, though, all this sameness. Instead it seemed to highlight just how wrong things were. Her mother’s departure had upended Mallory’s world, but it hadn’t seemed to have affected her mother at all.

The retrieval of her mother’s belongings from the family house was a slow, twisting process. When she had first left she took her clothes, her toothbrush, and a bag of shoes. She’d come back a week or so after that for a coat, her tennis racket, and the French press coffeemaker. That had been in August, and Mallory had tried to imagine where she was going where she might make coffee and want to play tennis.

Now she was back for big things, it seemed. They were negotiating furniture and the record player downstairs. Photo albums and souvenirs.

They were not negotiating her.

She reached her arm out of the closet and found an old science book in which she’d begun a picture of a leaf, drawing each vein of its skin. The book was over one hundred years old, and perhaps valuable. The vandalism of it made her feel good, though it was just a sour little secret. She kept working at the drawing. She frayed the edges the way leaves did in the fall, and added a small hole poked out by a stick, perhaps, or chewed by some animal.

Below her the voices rose and fell, breaking the silence of her home with her father. She wished they would just draw a line down the center of the house, dividing it in two, his and hers. The problem was, she didn’t know which side she would be on.

Her mother’s voice swept up the stairs, but Mallory couldn’t make out the words.

“I didn’t want to spend eternity with anyone,” was her father’s reply. “This wasn’t my choice.”

“But you did choose.

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