Wild Game My Mother, Her Lover, and Me - Adrienne Brodeur Page 0,32

his arm.

My mother and I settled on a bench on the porch and picked up as if no time had passed. She caught me up on Peter and Charles and then leaned in. “Now, don’t be mad at me, sweetie,” she said, “but I confided in a few more people while you were gone. I just had to. I was going crazy without you here. I needed someone to talk to.”

My alarm was instantaneous. Malabar had promised she wouldn’t let her secret go beyond me and her best friend, Brenda. We both knew the potential dangers of widening that circle.

I felt a familiar tightness gather in my gut, a stomachache forming. “What? What do you mean? Who else knows?”

My mother started ticking off the names: Deborah, her college roommate; Matt, a former colleague from Time-Life Books; Rachel, a friend in San Francisco; Nancy, a neighbor in Chestnut Hill; Steven, an old boyfriend; Suzanne, her cousin . . .

I put up my hand for her to stop.

My mother’s and Charles’s lives had changed while I was on the road. They had moved out of 100 Essex and into the top two floors of a townhouse on Beacon Hill that, fortunately for Charles, had an elevator. Although Charles was only in his mid-sixties, he seemed at least a decade older, his walk now a permanent shuffle, his brain aneurysm a looming threat, although he still hadn’t been told about it. If left untreated, the aneurysm would eventually rupture, killing him instantly. But his weak heart made surgery extremely dangerous. It was a lose-lose situation.

My mother had hired a caregiver named Hazel to look after Charles in Boston, giving her the autonomy to go to Cape Cod or sneak off to see Ben. Hazel was middle-aged, from Nova Scotia, and, according to my mother, dreary and jowly.

“She’s a simpleton, really, Rennie,” my mother complained. “But there aren’t a lot of people who want part-time work. It’s fine. And Charles doesn’t mind her. We only need her for a couple of hours a day to tidy and cook.”

* * *

My brother eyed me warily at our reunion and I became aware of a new distance between us. Peter had been transformed while I was away. He’d had a final growth spurt that catapulted him above six feet, ensuring that he would forever tower over me. He’d gone from boy to man and had a potent arsenal of new gestures, not to mention considerable charm, which he would very occasionally direct toward me. Like our father, Peter had a way with beautiful women, some of whom were my friends.

My stepfather, Charles, gave me a warm welcome and was sweet as ever, but his handsome face, more deeply lined than I remembered, looked distressed. He seemed to have sunk further into the world of his curiosities and was especially obsessed with the Whydah, that ghost of a shipwreck that had captured his imagination. In 1717, the ship was caught in a treacherous nor’easter off Cape Cod and went down. For years, the three of us—Malabar, Peter, and I—had listened unenthusiastically to our resident armchair treasure hunter as he waxed on about the pirates who’d captured the ship on its maiden voyage and about the spoils aboard that had been lost at sea. He had theories as to where the ship had sunk and how the tides might have moved the loot. He read book after book about it and shared details he thought might ignite some passion in us, but to no avail. We found his obsession charming yet easy to ignore. After all, treasure hunters, salvagers, and “mooncussers”—land-based pirates who plundered ships that ran aground on dangerous coasts at night—had been chasing this dream for more than two hundred and fifty years. Surely if there had been treasure to find, it would have been found already.

Neither Charles nor my mother put forth much effort to make Adam feel at home; it was as if they knew he wouldn’t be around for long and was not worth the investment. But Adam was also standoffish; he wanted no part of the everyday lies and silences that had become second nature to me. Within a few weeks of Adam’s and my arrival, my mother suggested that Adam rent his own place.

“It’s one thing to shack up on the road, Rennie; it’s another thing to do so under my roof,” Malabar said, insisting she worried about what the neighbors might think.

The request to modify our living arrangement came as