Deep Wate - Sarah Epstein Page 0,42
become pregnant with Henry almost as soon as she met Wayne Weaver. Mason was introduced to his soon-to-be stepfather only once before the man moved into their house, and by then Ivy’s belly was the size of a basketball.
Ivy and Wayne got married in a registry office one morning when Mason was at preschool, and while Wayne never formally adopted Mason, they started calling him Mason Weaver straightaway. His surname was still Ivy’s maiden name as stated on his birth certificate, and it was only when he was about to start primary school that his mother filled out the paperwork to make things official. She’d never been married to Mason’s biological father, who had been around on and off for the first couple of years of Mason’s life. For most of that time, Ivy claims, his father was mixed up with drugs and the wrong kind of people.
He wasn’t a good guy. Mason knew that. He was too young to remember most of it, but he’d heard it from plenty of people over the years. His father gave Ivy black eyes and bruised cheekbones, split lips that she tried to hide with red lipstick. Uncle Bernie said Ivy once had a broken wrist and she claimed it happened when she’d slipped in the shower. She never went into details with Mason, and got angry whenever he asked about it. He heard from their old neighbour, Mr Milburn, that his father once pushed Ivy off the verandah while she was cradling Mason in her arms. Most people in town thought that would be the last straw, but it took another two years before he was finally gone for good.
Mason wondered how much of his father’s blood coursed through his veins, whether some sick combination of DNA meant he had a predisposition to cause destruction wherever he went as well.
It felt like it.
It felt like searing hot coals pressed into his chest cavity, piled in and sewn up with no way to escape. Sometimes the heat grew so unbearable Mason wanted to tear at the skin on his chest, rip it open and let everything come tumbling out. It made his head hurt and his heart burn. It felt like he had a secret identity trapped inside that he didn’t want anyone to know about.
He might be a very bad person.
He might be dangerous.
What else would you expect, meshing his father’s genes with Ivy’s?
Henry had only half of that genetic shitstorm to contend with. And it made him soft. Where Mason had to be cynical and vigilant, Henry possessed the sort of naivety that made him needy and vulnerable. He wasn’t equipped for a mother like Ivy. His outer shell was too fragile for her teasing and insults, for her lack of warmth and attention. Mason had adapted over the years, but Henry hadn’t yet figured it out.
She watched them now, dunking a teabag up and down in a chipped ceramic mug. Curls of smoke seeped from her freshly-lit cigarette. The quiet was worse than the yelling because there was no way of knowing which way things would go. There’d always been a miserable predictability to her drunken ramblings, the way she’d feel sorry for herself and shake her fist at the world, drink even more and gamble their money, then throw up and pass out somewhere, wake up hungover and start the process all over again.
When she wasn’t drunk, there was a cruelty to her words and actions. Every look she gave them dripped with resentment. Mason felt himself bowing under the weight of it now. Sit up, he chided himself. Grow a spine. Show her that she hasn’t crushed your spirit.
He pretended to believe that or else he might as well give up. Ivy flicked the teabag into the sink and reached up to open a cupboard. Every door in the house had tiny red slashes near the doorhandles where her nail polish had scraped the wood, like the desperate scratchings of a hostage trying to claw her way out. She found the sugar bowl and took her time spooning three heaped sugars into her tea. The shrill scrape of the teaspoon against the bottom of the cup set Mason’s teeth on edge. A generous dollop of milk, then more stirring, round and round.
Screeech. Screeech. Screeech.
Mason chanced a quick glimpse at Henry’s face. His brother opened his mouth as if to speak, but Mason silenced him with a frown.
They’d never been close the way most siblings are. When they were