We shook hands quickly, her grasp warm.
“Quite the grip you’ve got there,” she commented, taking her fair hand back and looking at it.
I blushed. I was always the person assigned to open any tough pickle jars. My small but durable hands were probably freakishly strong now thanks to the boot camp. Push-ups really did work every part of your body.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“She’s my lady friend,” Al boasted, squeezing Marda closer into him and kissing the top of her head. The relationship couldn’t have been more than a month old, so it was extra endearing to see Uncle Al acting like this with someone.
But before I could ask them how they met (after all, I apparently had something to do with it), my father demanded everyone sit down. The birthday boy was starving and thirsty. A deadly combination.
I took my place next to Ada and the twins, with the “adults” on the other side of the table. I gave Ada a quick smile but she was staring dreamily into her glass of water. My sister was still the top of the pops when it came to her fashion blog and an occasion like this was a prime excuse for her to dress like someone who had just fallen ass backwards off the catwalk. My black knee-length dress (the only dress I really had) looked fine on me, I guess, but it wasn’t a backless cashmere dress with embroidered details like Ada was wearing. I was actually surprised she hadn’t asked me to take a picture of her like she did every other day when she was wearing an outfit “for the blog.” But Ada wasn’t herself these days, anyway.
While I pondered that over, the conversation around the table turned to pleasantries and news stories. The twins told me about this ATV they bought and I pretended to listen while I picked at my pseudo-healthy chicken Marsala. I was watching Marda and Al with interest. They were sharing bites of their food between each other, pouring each other wine. A bottle of red. A bottle of white. And I was instantly reminded of Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” The memory poked at my insides a little bit until I winced it away.
There was no denying it though; there was a lot of love at this table tonight. It didn’t take long for my mother to pick up on it and say, “Would you look at this! You won’t find dopier, more love struck people than my two daughters and their uncle.”
“Me?!” Ada and I both protested at the same time, then consequently glared at each other in that, “yeah, you” look that we did so well.
“Caught red-handed,” Al said, squeezing Marda’s hand. “And it’s all thanks to Perry.”
“Yeah, what’s the deal with that?” I asked, happy to have the conversation turn over to him.
“Well Marda here works in property insurance. I had to file a claim after you blew up the lighthouse.”
I loved how, even though I barely had anything to do with the lighthouse blowing up (what, it’s not like I set it on fire or anything), everyone still referred to me as the person responsible for its demise. OK, so it would probably be standing today had I not gone poking my nose into its business but then Al wouldn’t have met Marda.
“See, something good has come out of it,” I pointed out, directing most of that toward my father, who just shook his head to himself and poured himself another large glass of wine from a reedy Chianti bottle.
“Of course,” Uncle Al said. “It’s not just the good fortune of meeting my lovely Marda here either, the boys have been happier too, haven’t you?”
Matt and Tony shrugged but even I could now see they looked a bit…relieved. Maybe it wasn’t that they looked older, it was that the ominous, overseeing lighthouse was no longer on the edge of the property, taunting and teasing them with its evil secrets. They looked, well, happier. Al was right.
“And you wouldn’t have your little ghost show either,” he added. “A lot of good has come out of it.”
“You must tell me about this show, Perry,” Marda piped up in her soft voice, leaning against Al and fixing her attention on me. “I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet. Al says it would keep me up at night.”
Matt looked at me. “We’ve been telling all our friends about it. That shit is f**ked up.”
“Matthew!” Al admonished.
He shrugged unapologetically and looked back at me.
“That last episode was f…sick. What was the deal with the deer? That scared the shit out of us!”
“Matthew!” Al again.
With the attention now turned to me, my cheeks flared a beet red. I still have trouble coming to terms with having myself on the internet and I was suddenly grateful that Brock hadn’t told me about knowing who I was until the very end.
“I honestly don’t know,” I told him, trying not to look at the rest of my family, who I knew were looking at me with their usual disbelieving eyes (except for Ada but I could tell she wasn’t even paying attention to me). “We woke up in the middle of the night and like a whole herd of deer were gathered around our tent. We never even saw them after that.”
“Weird,” Matt said. “You said on the blog that a lot more happened but that footage was all lost at the bottom of the sea.”
“Oh, how convenient,” boomed my dad, sounding more drunk by the moment. My eyes flew to him, enraged. It’s his birthday, let him have this, I thought, trying to bury the urge to yell at him.
“It’s true,” I said through gritted teeth, trying to keep focused on Matt’s curious face.
“Well, what happened?”
Too much for me to tell. After Dex and I returned back home, after I got my wrists patched up because of my altercation with the rose garden, and Dex had his raccoon wound stitched up, we decided to show everything we shot (that still remained with us and not on the Super 8 at the bottom of Haro Straight) and leave the rest up to the viewer’s imagination. Normally, I would have written a lengthy blog entry telling the entire story, elaborating on the stuff that the cameras couldn’t pick up on. But this time…I just couldn’t do it.
I think a part of me was afraid that the more I admitted what happened, the more that this “Anonymous” person would come on the blog and comment on what a liar I was. Yep, I knew the hater I had was still lurking around on the internet somewhere, waiting for me to say the wrong thing. And this time, at least, I knew that others would agree with her (Dex seemed adamant that it was a female).