Page 44 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
I did not want to burden my child with the fear that we’d lose what we didn’t even completely have yet. I needed to get my own head in order before I considered broaching the topic with him. So my answer was true, but not complete. “I don’t know. I’m just ... I think I’m just really stressed, and a bunch of old stuff is stirred up inside me, and it came spewing out.”
Wyatt was quiet for several seconds. He continued to stare, but the fury faded from his brow.
“I thought you liked Roman.”
Over the weekend, while we were in Eureka, Roman had asked Wyatt to use his first name, but it wasn’t until this fraught conversation, hearing Wyatt use it so naturally, that I fully understood what that meant: Roman wasn’t my friend only. Wyatt was building a relationship with him as well.
It scared me, frankly.
And right there was when I understood the real truth about my reaction to finding Roman grilling up dinner when I got home: I was scared.
After all the loss and turmoil of the past year and a half, the Sea-Mist had become a safety-net. The last thing between us and disaster. Now that was slipping out from under me as well.
Wyatt wanted to stay in Bluster. He wanted to keep the Sea-Mist. He’d lost everything, too, and it was even worse for him, dependent on me, blown about on the stormy seas of my choices. I wanted to stay in Bluster and keep the Sea-Mist, too. I had a chance to take the place I’d lived for the first eighteen years of my life and make it finally my home. I wanted a chance to make a good life for my son here, in this beautiful nook of the world, and give us something that was finally real and good and secure. But itwasn’tsecure. I didn’t know how to get out from under this huge debt I hadn’t known about until last week.
No, I wasn’t scared. I was fuckingterrified.
And Roman had gotten tangled in that line. Why?
Because he was a beacon, a bright light in my fog, already taking care, clearly ready to stand tall and strong beside me. It would be so easy to lean on him, to let him take my worries away. Just like Micah had.
That was the real truth, wasn’t it? Micah had been controlling because I’d given him control. He’d kept secrets because I’d been content not to know.
Oh shit. What if he hadn’t been keeping secrets? What if he’d been drowning under all those worries and hadn’t thought he could talk to me? Had he thought I wouldn’t want to know? Had he thought I wouldn’t be a good sounding board, a good partner in times of trouble?
Had he been right?
I looked out toward the forest. In the foreground of that view was the grill, the meat Roman had laid on it slowly turning into charred bricks.
“I’m sorry,” I told my son. “I was way out of line, and I’m really sorry, bud.”
“Yeah, you were,” Wyatt replied, not giving me an inch. “I thought you liked him.”
“I do. A lot. But ...” I sucked up some courage in a breath and told him, “but I’m scared, too, about getting too close to anyone too fast. This past year or so feels like one disaster or tragedy after another. I feel like we’ve been carried away on a wild current, and I’m afraid of grabbing something I think is solid and having it pull free in our hands.”
Wyatt’s look had morphed into something like irony. “That was a very English-major answer, Mom.”
I laughed, and so did he. “Yeah, okay. But do you get my point?”
He nodded. “But I don’t think Roman is going to pull free.”
Fifteen-year-olds feel far more grown-up than they are. They are children, no matter how mature they think they are, no matter how quickly they might feel they’ve had to grow up. I’d thought I was grown when I’d left here at eighteen, but once on my own, I’d quickly discovered the depth of my naiveté.
What Wyatt truly understood about the world could fit in the palm of my hand. I shook my head. “You don’t know that. I don’t, either. And even if he’s rooted in place, how fair is it to ask him to pull us to safety?”
“What if we’re not asking? What if that’s what hewantsto do?”
“I don’t want to be saved, Wyatt. I want to find a way to save us myself.”
Frowning, he sidestepped and took a seat on one of the benches of the picnic table he and Roman had set for dinner. “Remember when I started seventh grade, and I had to take Spanish for the first time?”
I was at a loss to see how that was remotely relevant, but of course I remembered. “Sure I do.”
“Remember how it was so hard for me and I hated it so much, and then Senor Adams started that ‘Fiesta Club’ thing?”
I nodded. The Fiesta Club was an after-school thing the Spanish teacher—‘Senor’ Adams—had created as a fun way to give struggling students extra help. He’d intended it to be a cool thing, but in the ancient ways of middle-schoolers, they’d quickly caught on to the ‘extra help’ focus, and within about two weeks a lot of kids were calling it the ‘Feeb’ Club.
Middle school deserves its own circle of hell. Plenty of middle-schoolers are already demons.
