My mother shook her head. “Poor Mila,” she said, but she was smiling, and soon she was laughing, too.

They laughed so hard, tears streamed down their faces. They laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Alone in my cabin, I covered my ears.

I heard Blake leave later on and I knew my mother would come to me. “We got carried away,” she told me. “We didn’t mean anything by it.”

“He does the same thing to you,” I said.

“No.”

“He does.”

“No.”

“The brains of teen moms don’t fully develop? That isn’t true.”

“Honey, you don’t know how these things work.”

“I looked it up,” I said. “He’s lying to us.”

“Honey,” she said. “Sweetie pie. We got carried away. I thought it was a joke, but it was cruel to keep it going for so long. We—”

“Not we,” I said. “Not we. Him.”

“Blake wants the best for both of us. I thought I was doing a good job raising you. I really did. But he’s helped me understand that all of this stuff—school and medicine and technology—it’s all trying to control us. People aren’t meant to live that way. There is an intuition—”

“Inside us! I know! I know what he says and I’m telling you it isn’t true. He’s controlling us. He’s tricking us. He tricked me and he’s tricking you, too.”

“No.”

“How many earrings have you lost?”

She bit her lip. “Come on, Mila.”

“How many?”

“Nine,” she whispered.

“Right,” I said. “Nine. Like a person can even lose nine earrings.”

I saw something then. A glimmer of openness. Like she wanted to believe me.

“I’ll find them,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I think he has them. And if he has them, I’ll find them. And if I find them, that means you have to believe me.”

Each time Blake left, I sifted through his junk and his treasures, all of them wrapped in fabric and stored in various sizes of plastic bags. The opera glasses. The cologne. Bags full of shells—so many of them—the same kind he scattered through the dirt of his property. The 4-Hour Workweek, Macbeth, The Artist’s Way, Ulysses. A small vase. A pair of girlish teacups. So, so many things.

___

And then—three days later, tucked into a slit in the side of his mattress, wrapped in a yellow scarf—nine single lost earrings.

My mother wept.

___

Later, we perched on the sunny platform, where we would be able to see him coming from a distance. We sat close enough to touch, but we weren’t touching. I wanted to close the space between us, but I didn’t know how. She loved me or she hated me for what I had just shown her. It was difficult to tell.