Before My Eyes by Caroline Bock

others—are going down the toilet. Call the EPA.”
    I’m not smart at all, I want to say, only his son. He blocks me from leaving.
    â€œDinner smells good, doesn’t it?” he says. “You’re going to be at the Labor Day event, Max? We need to show a united front as a family.”
    I lock eyes with him.
    He takes that as a yes and says, “Smart boy,” and shifts away as if he hates looking at me. I don’t care what he says. I see it in his eyes that he wishes he had another son, one that wins.
    In a moment, he is in the main bathroom. The toilet flushes, and a shudder runs through the house as the pills are driven into the ecosystem.
    The scent of frying hamburgers wafts down the hall. I used to love my mother’s hamburgers, juicy and slick with onions on the side. Tonight the smell makes me angry. During the last two years, she stopped cooking. She was always taking the train up to Albany to meet my father for some event. I was left with money for takeout. I don’t need to sit down with them for dinner now. I can’t look at them now.
    King rubs against my legs. I clutch at his collar. Even blind, he finds my face and licks it.

Claire
    Friday, 7:00 P.M .
    We stay as long as we can, after most of the families leave, tugging their wagons off the beach, the wagons now piled with wet, sandy towels and half-asleep children seemingly more of the sea than the land. In their wake, upturned plastic sand buckets remain. Fresh-dug holes spill over with seawater. Sea gulls forage the garbage. And the oceanfront reverts into the empty place it should be.
    I hurry a sleepy Izzy toward the minivan. I think that we’ll miss getting home before my father. We’ll end up getting caught in traffic, our hair knotted with sand and seaweed, our skin scaly with too much sun, our mouths singing: we are mermaids.
    Yet in less than a half hour, our minivan slips into the driveway, the lone car. I call my father on his cell phone and leave a message. I thank him for the wonderful day at the movies. I warm up leftover macaroni and cheese, add a few raw carrots to each of our plates. I don’t know how my mother grocery shopped. I can’t seem to figure out how much to buy, or what to buy, or when to buy. Izzy loves bananas. But somehow the ones I purchase turn instantly brown and soft, and then what do you do with them? We have piles of brown bananas and I don’t know what to do with them. We’ve lived on macaroni and cheese for weeks, but I have it all under control. However, tonight neither of us is very hungry. I make sure Izzy has her bath, using the last of our mother’s bubble bath, and change her into one of her princess nightgowns. I don’t remember ever having a princess nightgown. I fluff out her blond hair. Next to me she is fair, adorably freckled. She slips her skinny arms around me and kisses me for the tenth time or more today. She’s easier with her kisses than I ever was.
    Curling up in her bed, she smells like a mix of sea and lavender. All the lights must be on. All the teddy bears must be lined around her. Blond curls and valentine lips, I think again for the tenth or twentieth time, she’s going to be gorgeous. I sigh. “Go to sleep.”
    She pops her head up. “When is Daddy coming home?”
    â€œSoon.”
    â€œCan I stay awake for him?”
    â€œSure,” I say, knowing she’ll be asleep in ten minutes. “Just close your eyes.”
    She lays her head back down with her eyes wide open. “Sometimes I can’t remember her before, can you?”
    â€œIt’s time for sleep now.”
    She studies my face so hard I have to turn away. “I know who she used to look like.”
    I pick up her soggy bathing suit from the floor.
    â€œYou. She looks like you, Claire.”
    â€œNo. She doesn’t look like me.” In her bedroom mirror, a glimpse of my face, burned brown from the sun with its