“Definitely cancer,” I say, and then bite my cheek for responding.
It’s not Luca’s light that scares me. It’s what happens when it goes dark. When a person gets used to bright light, the eyes adjust, the skin warms, every color is accentuated. A person sees the world differently. But when it disappears . . .
It’s the fading light I’m afraid of. I can’t handle any more darkness.
“Yeah . . . cancer sucks. You’re right.” He nods. “I guess I’ll stick with the natural deodorant. Thanks for your input. I’m Luca, by the way.”
“I know who you are.”
“You do?” His posture becomes inflated. “What did Leia tell you?”
That he makes working in a sea of shit better. Is Luca the lily pad Lizzie was talking about? But I can’t bring myself to say any of that.
He waits, but I stay quiet, so he says, “Seems unfair that you know me, but I don’t know you.”
“I don’t know you.”
“You just said you did.”
“I said I know who you are. There’s a difference.”
“I’m intrigued,” Luca says. “Explain it to me.”
But I see the trick. He just wants me to talk.
When I don’t expound, he says, “At least tell me your name. If you don’t, I’ll just ask Leia.”
“Wren.”
“As in the bird? Very cool. Do you sing?”
“No.”
That’s kind of a lie. I know one song.
“Thank God. That would be super weird if you were named after a songbird and you could sing.”
Kind of like a boy being named after the Latin word for “light” and having an aura that’s freaking yellow and blinding?
I try to take notes on what Mr. Angry Driver’s Ed Teacher is saying. Luca leans in, startling me, and whispers in my ear. He definitely doesn’t smell bad. His scent is warm and inviting.
“You know you can google all this information.” He taps the notebook.
I don’t look at him when I respond. “I retain it better this way.”
“OK. But don’t get too attached to your mind. Eventually we all lose it.” He settles back in his seat, arm resting behind his head, legs stretched long. “I’m strictly here for the go-carts.”
“Go-carts?” I ask.
“Yeah, we practice driving in go-carts. Didn’t you read the brochure?”
No. Chief signed me up. I just went along with it.
Luca digs into his backpack and reveals a gigantic sandwich.
He unwraps the roast-beef sandwich and offers me half. “You want some?”
“It’s ten in the morning.”
“The perfect time for a snack.”
“That’s a snack?”
“Teenage boys need twenty-five hundred calories a day. I’m just trying to keep up,” he says before taking a large bite. After he swallows, he says, “I pilfer sandwiches from Rosario’s. But technically I don’t consider it stealing . . . more like taste testing. I need to know what I’m selling.”
He takes another large bite. The sandwich is half-gone already.
“I’d steal one for you,” he says in a whispered tone that sends a rush down my spine.
“Why?” The word falls out of my mouth. “You don’t even know me.”
“We’ve established that,” Luca says. “Sometimes you don’t need to know. Sometimes a person can just tell.”
“Tell what?”
“You’re worth it.”
Sweat trickles down my back, cool. My nerves are practically shot.
“Don’t steal for me,” I say, squaring myself to the front of the room. “Leia will kill you if you get fired.”
“OK,” he says nonchalantly, creating space between us again. He puts his head down on the desk, eyes gazing lazily in my direction as another wave of yellow hits me. “I’m entering a food coma, Wren. I’m not going to make it. Fill me in later?”
Luca sleeps through the entire two-hour lesson on Washington State driving laws. I stare out the window, half listening, eyes on the passing cars and the heat that radiates from the asphalt and distorts the air with warmth.
“Even the air knows how to dance, Songbird,” Lizzie said once. “Let it show you how. Follow the breeze.” She was twirling around in our front yard, arms out wide, fingers tangling with nothing, her long hair a sprinkler of brown all around her. “Don’t be afraid to get dizzy. Sometimes it’s better to see life a little blurry. We can easily change the way the world looks if we just start to spin.”
But I worried about the moment she’d fall. The moment her foot caught on a tree root. It felt . . . inevitable. And I wanted to be there to catch her.
Lizzie could blur the world because I was there to catch her.
But me . . . I’d just fall.
I knew I could never be like her, like a leaf caught in the wind with no care as to what direction it danced or where it landed.
A few times Mr. Angry Driver’s Ed Teacher looks directly at Luca’s sleeping frame but doesn’t move to wake him up.
When everyone shuffles to leave for the day, Luca finally stirs. He zips up his backpack, grabs his skateboard, and says, “So let’s just say you weren’t opposed to me stealing for you. What kind of sandwich would you want?”
I don’t know how to answer him. Silence is my only defense. It’s how Chief and I have survived these past weeks. Maybe even the past sixteen years.
I refuse to feel again the same ache that plagued me the morning I woke up and found Lizzie gone.
It’s been over a month, and I’m almost used to living in the ravine Chief and I dug for ourselves. To crawl out now means risking the fall back to reality.
Everyone will eventually leave me.
I saw it on Lizzie’s face when I went inside and left her alone to tangle with the wind in the front yard.
I saw it on Chloe’s face when she started dating Jay.
I even see it in the crinkle around Chief’s eyes, in the way his hands rest on his hips, in the gray-peppered mustache that covers his smile.
Disappointment and regret hold hands as they walk away, and neither looks back.
“A woman who doesn’t give up her secrets easily . . . ,” Luca says. “Just how I like it.”
Through the window, I watch him coast down the street on his skateboard and move through the waves of heat emanating from the pavement, a trail of yellow following him. Luca turns from side to side smoothly, as if one with the wind, as if dancing through the breeze, as if held softly and gently by the atmosphere itself, so that he won’t fall, no matter how dizzy he gets. Just like Lizzie did.
His unabashed freedom only makes me want to hold steady that much stronger.
10
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN TRUDEAU AND ZYWIEC
The fifth floor of the Spokane Public Library is stuffed with secrets. I’ve decided I need to find one. I’m searching frantically row by row, book by book. It may be the only way to stop the crushing feeling in my chest.
“Why do you come up here, Songbird?” Lizzie asked once, her nose crinkled at the musty smell of books.
“I don’t know,” I said, running my hand along their spines. “To remind these books they’re not forgotten, I guess. Everything deserves a little attention.”
I showed Lizzie a paper about whether woodpeckers got headaches.
“Isn’t that interesting?” I said. “Doesn’t it deserve to be noticed by someone?”
But Lizzie wasn’t intrigued by research. To her it wasn’t important if a woodpecker got a headache.
“What if the research found out woodpeckers did get headaches? What would people do then?” Lizzie asked.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s the problem, Songbird. Depending on what you find in your search, you might be in more trouble than you thought. Before you know it, you’re trying to give ibuprofen to all the woodpeckers. Better to just let the woodpecker be . . . a woodpecker. It’s not our job to know what’s going on
in its brain.”
In the strangest way, Lizzie made complete sense.
“I have an idea,” Lizzie said, taking an old dusty book from the shelf. She told me about this guy in Seattle who stands outside a grocery store, handing everyone who walks past a piece of paper and an envelope. He asks them to write down a secret anonymously and send it to him. When people do, he takes the secrets and hangs them up on display outside the grocery store, so anyone who walks past can read them.
“Why would he do that?” I asked her. “That defeats the purpose of keeping a secret.”
“Because he knew secrets weigh you down,” Lizzie said. “He was trying to help free people.”
“But the secrets are anonymous.”
“That’s not the point, Songbird. People don’t share secrets to help others. They share secrets to unburden themselves. He wanted a place people could unpack their secrets and let them go.”
That’s when she said we should write down our secrets and hide them in the books in the stacks.
“Anytime we need to unburden ourselves, we know where to come,” she said. The only time I’d ever see Lizzie touch a book with affection was when it held a piece of her. All Lizzie ever wanted was to be cared for and held.
These books are secret keepers. Somewhere on the fifth floor of the library, tucked in unknown books, are Lizzie’s secrets. And I desperately need to find one.
Maybe then I’ll know why she left.
I keep searching, but so far I haven’t had any luck. The stacks are enormous, and a few years ago the library reorganized each section. Not that Lizzie would have made it easy. She wouldn’t let me see where she hid her secrets, in what book, and I’m sure she wouldn’t have put the book back in the right place anyway.
“Promise you won’t go looking unless it feels absolutely necessary,” she said. “Always remember, Songbird: you might not like what you find.”
Right now that threat feels small compared to my desperate need for proof that she was real. Is real.
But for all my searching today, it seems Lizzie’s secrets might be lost in the stacks indefinitely.
The sun starts to descend in the sky, and every book I open is empty. Lizzie isn’t tucked in their pages. Exhausted, I lean back on the bookshelves and wipe the last tear from my face. My face is swollen. My eyes are red. The tip of my drippy nose aches from wiping it. I won’t let Chief see me cry. It will only make things worse.
Then I pick up a piece of paper and write down a secret. I can’t stop thinking about Luca. Taking an old Encyclopaedia Britannica, volume 12, from the shelf and hiding what I’ve written somewhere between Trudeau and Zywiec, I let my secret go. For now.
After all, Lizzie wasn’t the only one hiding things among the pages.
11
FOR THE LOVE OF CATS
“Baby Girl” McCarty operates the Looff Carousel at Riverfront Park in Spokane. All summer long. She’s had the job since she was fourteen, back when she was a vegan who protested on the weekends outside Macy’s downtown, with a bucket of red paint to splatter on anyone wearing a leather jacket. That phase lasted only until Chief threatened to arrest her should she decide to ruin anyone else’s innocent Saturday.
“We lack tourists to begin with, Katherine,” Chief said. “You’re scaring the precious few who do come to Spokane.”
Aside from her mom, Chief is the only person who’s ever called her Katherine. To everyone else, it’s Baby Girl.
“Please do not stand or leave your chosen location for the duration of your ride. Wait for the carousel to come to a complete stop before exiting.” She speaks into a microphone. “As Rūmī said, ‘What’s wrong with waiting? It’s the only surefire way to avoid pregnancy and chlamydia. Patience is protection.’ Namaste.”
Baby Girl decided to try on Buddhism two months ago, though I’m not sure she’s actually done any research. I’m pretty sure Rūmī was a Sufi mystic.
Before Buddhism, Baby Girl was a pothead. And before that she was a runner. Baby Girl tries on personalities like clothing. So far nothing has fit for long. She sheds each persona like a snake sheds skin, and starts all over again. Ever since she and Lizzie became best friends in junior high, Baby Girl’s aura has never been a consistent color. It’s always a shade of purple, but with every personality shift, the aura morphs, the hue lightening with a little more red or darkening with a swirl of navy. Today she’s haloed in eggplant.
The carousel spins around and around in front of me, a blur of people and fake decorated horses. When Baby Girl sees me, she leaves her post in the announcer’s box. She’s dressed in an old bathrobe. Hair that used to be long, practically down to her butt and knotted into light-brown dreadlocks, is gone now. That suited her only during her weed phase, which lasted the longest of any. I was worried Baby Girl thought she found herself in weed, because sometimes disappearing feels like the only way to be. But she eventually got sick of it. Baby Girl buzzed her hair clean off just a month ago, right after Lizzie left.
“You want a ride, Wren? I’ll let you go for free.”
“No, thanks. I get nauseous.” That’s not why I’m here. Just watching the carousel spin makes me queasy.
“The Buddha once said, ‘The ride is unavoidable. Don’t fight it, and get used to the stomachache.’”
“He really said that?”
“Something like that.”
“How’s the Buddhism going?” I ask.
“Going. Staying. Heaven. Earth. It’s all the same.” Baby Girl wipes her shaved head. “The bathrobe is comfortable.”
“I didn’t know Buddhists wear bathrobes.”
“They wear regular robes. This is the best I’ve got. ‘Sometimes you’ve just got to improvise life.’ Jim Carrey said that.”
Baby Girl has never been the most accurate person. It’s only natural when you don’t know who you want to be. “I’m not very good at improvising,” I say.
“Practice, Wren. ‘Practice makes for more practice, and then you die.’ Patanjali said that.”
“Patanjali doesn’t sound very nice.”
“Wise and nice don’t always go together.”
“I guess that’s true,” I say.
I was jealous when Lizzie and Baby Girl first became friends, though I should have seen it coming. When Lizzie was little, she collected stray cats. It didn’t matter how mangy, ugly, or tattered they were. Whether they were street cats with cuts on their noses or lost house cats with groomed fur, if she found one, she wanted it. Even if it belonged to someone else. Even if it was covered in fleas.
She would hold each cat like a precious soul that needed tending, feed them and give them milk and make cat beds out of blankets and pillows in her room. I’m not sure who followed whom, but Lizzie and each cat were inseparable from the moment she welcomed one home. They were soul mates from the start.
Chief never allowed her to keep them. He’s allergic to cats and also thinks they’re inherently mean.
“I’m just not a cat person,” he said.
“What kind of a person are you?” I asked.
“I’m a person . . . person, I guess. If people took as much care of humans as they take of lost animals, the world would be a better place.” Chief glanced at Lizzie, who was snuggling whatever cat had wandered into our lives at that moment. “It’s easy to take care of something that doesn’t talk back, Wren. Animals are unconditionally loyal. People are selfish. That’s the challenge.”
I got it then, because at that exact moment, I was envious of the cat Lizzie was holding. I didn’t want her to have it either. She held me like that sometimes, and I didn’t want competition.
Lizzie would sob every time she had to let go of a cat. She would beg and plead, but Chief never bent. After the heartbreak of letting so many cats go, Lizzie got smarter about her choices. If Chief was a people person, Lizzie was sure there were a few stray people she could pick up without Chief turning her down.
Baby Girl started coming to our house every day aft
er school in seventh grade. Lizzie would feed her and brush her hair and dress her in different clothes. She even set up a bed for Baby Girl in her bedroom. The forest on Lizzie’s walls was thick with new trees and flowers and butterflies, but she still owned a proper bed. The hammock that now hangs from the ceiling didn’t come until later. Lizzie begged Chief for one for years.
“Beds have edges to fall off of, Songbird, but a hammock never lets you down,” she said.
Baby Girl and Lizzie would lie there and gaze at the forest sprouting on the walls.
For months it seemed like Baby Girl was constantly at our house, taking up space in Lizzie’s universe.
“Why do people call you Baby Girl?” I asked her one time.
“Because that’s my name.”
“I thought your name was Katherine?”
“That’s just what my mom calls me.”
According to Lizzie, Baby Girl’s parents couldn’t agree on a name for her after she was born, and like so many couples do, they called her Baby Girl. The nurse even put it on her birth certificate, expecting that her parents would change the name once they agreed on something.
Apparently Baby Girl’s parents never really got along, and her dad never liked any of the names his wife suggested. He refused to call her anything else. Eventually her mom just started calling her Katherine because she liked the name, but her dad never did.
“Why doesn’t she go by Katherine?” I asked Lizzie once.
“Because the moment we give a name to something, it suddenly carries the burden of meaning, Songbird. Sometimes it’s easier just not to have one.”
When Lizzie used my nickname, I knew what she meant. Everyone expects a wren to fly, but I was born with broken, rusted wings.
“What’s Baby Girl’s burden?” I asked.
Lizzie wouldn’t tell me, but soon I discovered Baby Girl’s secret on my own. Admittedly I was jealous of how much time Lizzie and Baby Girl spent together, but when I told Chief about the bruises I saw on Baby Girl’s body, I swear it was well intended.
I watched from the small crack in the door as Baby Girl changed out of her clothes and into one of Lizzie’s shirts. Baby Girl showed Lizzie this bruise on her back that was so mulberry purple and indigo, it looked fake, and then one on her thigh and another on her arm. Lizzie examined Baby Girl’s body like it was the most interesting painting she’d ever seen. She caressed Baby Girl’s skin as delicately as I’d seen her pet a cat with scratches on its nose. She tended to Baby Girl with love.
Postcards for a Songbird Page 5
