The Worst Thing I've Done Read Online Free PDF Page B

apartment, a hundred loops or more. Jake helped. Did his loops with her when he visited. We’d rub Opal’s back or tummy, whisper or sing to her, play music for her.
    Aunt Stormy and Pete arrived from North Sea with fish stew and lemon meringue pies. Pete was a dentist who ran marathons, lived in the cottage next to Aunt Stormy’s, and slept in her bed. Theirs was the story of a great love. “Every full moon they celebrate being together,” my mother had told me. “They paddle their kayaks from their inlet into the bay…drink champagne and eat cake while the sun dips down and the moon rises. In winter, they drive out to Montauk and have their champagne and cake on the big rocks below the lighthouse.”
    Aunt Stormy and Pete walked their loops with Opal and helped us the way they must have helped my parents when I was born. When they sent Mason and me to a restaurant for dinner—our first time away from Opal—I kept thinking I’d forgotten something. Felt too light without her weight fastened somewhere to my body.
    Though I got better at easing Opal into sleep, I didn’t know what to do for her when she awoke because she’d be unconsolable for the first ten minutes. Joy, then—the only moment of joy since my parents’ death—happened one dawn when I was able to soothe Opal as she came out of sleep, and her face, wet and sticky, lolled against my shoulder. A moment of joy that pierced my rage and confusion.

    J AKE’S DORM was a few minutes from our apartment, and he’d bring us groceries, go to the library for Mason and me. Our living room table was buried: half of it, as before, under rice paper and fabrics, receipts and ticket stubs, scissors and glue, boxes of nails, and pictures I’d cut from magazines; the other half under boxes of formula and disposable diapers, tiny shirts and pajamas that needed to be folded.
    I withdrew from my art history class. I couldn’t imagine leaving Opal—not even with Mason or Jake, who urged me to complete summer school. Instead I sat with her on the rocking recliner Jake had bought at a farm auction, Opal’s belly on my thighs, her face on my knees—a position Mason had discovered—and I’d jiggle her softly.
    â€œJiggling makes her let go,” he’d told Jake and me. “You’ll feel her get heavy…content.”
    It was a good position…for Opal and for me, because she couldn’t see me cry.
    For Mason, being her parent came naturally, but I was struggling. What if I drop her? Starve her? Lose her somewhere? Nothing in my life had prepared me for suddenly being someone’s mother. Maybe if you were pregnant and carried a child inside you all those months, you were used to it. You wouldn’t just set it down somewhere and forget it.

    W HEN M ASON and Jake registered for their fall classes—Mason in political science, Jake in environmental conservation—I applied for a semester’s leave.
    â€œYou don’t have to do this,” Mason said.
    â€œIf the three of us take shifts with Opal,” Jake said, “we can all finish school.”
    â€œI’ll work on my collages at home.”
    Instead I knitted an afghan in four shades of pink, uneven rectangles that I sewed together…something I could do while Opal was awake.
    â€œI’ll help you organize,” Jake offered, pale hair sticking up in jumbled tufts, one of his earlobes lower than the other.
    â€œI’ll fix up a studio for you,” Mason said.
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œI’ll figure something.” Mason was always more attentive when Jake was around.
    â€œWe don’t have space. And even if we did, I—”
    â€œYour art is important.”
    â€œDon’t call it that.”
    â€œOnce you know where all your supplies are,” Jake said, “you’ll want to do your collages again.” He could go from cool to dorky in no time, and he