Wild Game My Mother, Her Lover, and Me - Adrienne Brodeur Page 0,9

see us in solemn discussion. He would slow, waiting for an invitation from one of us to join in these conspicuous conversations. It had always been us three, after all. Before Ben’s kiss, Peter’s opinion was as valued as mine. But now our mother would abruptly stop talking and regard her son with impatience and a look that said, Is there something you need? The sting of rejection would cross Peter’s face—easier for me to remember now than to see at the time—and he would move on.

“What’s up with you two?” he asked us on that first day when my mother and I were cloistered in the pantry. He hated being excluded.

“Oh, it’s nothing, really,” I assured him. “Boy problems. Trust me, you’d be bored.” Perhaps Peter would think I was confiding in my mother about Ted.

From here on out, I would be lying to everyone.

* * *

The sun finally pushed through the sky in broad columns of slanted light. The tide was dead low, that still hour that marks the sea’s withdrawal and illuminates the teeming life beneath the surface of our bay: moon snails pushing plow-like across the sandy bottom, horseshoe crabs coupling, schools of minnows moving in perfect synchronicity. As the procession of sunbeams merged into one, the day became long with light, and a space in my mind opened like that between a boat and a dock.

I grabbed a wire bucket that we kept in the outdoor shower, opened one of the sliding glass doors, and stuck my head inside. “Who wants to go clamming?” I asked.

Lily and Charles looked up from their books, smiled lazily, and demurred. But Ben rose quickly, as I knew he would, eager to be active. The man could not sit still for long. My mother regarded me with more gratitude than I’d thought possible but remained in her chair. She would need, I understood, public convincing.

Did it occur to me then that I was betraying Charles, who had always been gentle and kind to Peter and me and whom I loved? If it did, I pushed the thought away. All I knew at that moment was I felt lucky. My mother had chosen me, and, together, we were embarking on a great adventure.

“Come on, Mom,” I pressed. “It’ll be fun.”

And, as in a game of chess, having moved a piece and let it go, I could never undo the move.

* * *

Out in the marshes, across the bay and past rippled deserts of sand flats, noisy black-capped terns squawked disapprovingly at our arrival. Mom, Ben, and I slipped into a pond as warm as a bath and sank into the silt. The water was only waist-deep, but we bent our knees as if sitting on imaginary chairs and submerged to our chins. We clouded the water as we shuffled, trying to coax the blunt instruments of our feet to behave like eyes and hands, feeling for lumps in the dark mud. But even in these still waters, surprises lurked below; eels slithered along thighs, minnows bumped ankles, spiny creatures crawled over bare feet. Before long a crab scuttled up my mother’s leg and she sought protection in Ben’s lap, where I pictured his arms, invisible beneath the black water, wrapped around her midriff.

I left the pond, claiming to know of a better spot—there was always a better pond just beyond the one you were in—and dashed across the prickly marsh grass, forgetting my bucket as I fled. There, in the next hole, I found my rhythm, greeting clam after clam with my feet. I turned up my oversize T-shirt to create a pouch and placed the cherrystones and littlenecks in it until my shirt was blackened with mud and stretched long.

Perhaps an hour went by, maybe not quite. The sun was sinking in the late-afternoon sky and an incoming tide ushered cool water into the marsh. I was cold. I made my way back to the boat, scrubbed my catch in the sand, and piled the clean clams in shallow water, where innumerable trails rippled across the bay’s floor. Snails, their paths lingering ghosts of their journey. As the ocean washed over the clams, I watched their hinged shells part and the pink curve of their flesh emerge for a final sip.

In the distance, my mother had also emerged and was sitting on the bank of the pool, long-necked and confident, her skin gleaming. She was flirting with Ben, who was covered in marsh mud and seemed to be pretending