by Lisa Graff
And just like that, I’m floating again. Soaring, really.
“You mean it?” I ask. The words are delicate, like tissue paper. “You’d really want to live with me?”
Sunshine on the beach, that’s what my mother’s smile is like. “I’d have to be out of my mind not to want that, my darling girl,” she says. And I smile back. “I’ve been working so hard, CJ.” My mom sets down her burger and leans in close to ask me, “Do you like the exhibit?”
Her eyes are eager as she waits for the answer. And when I say I think her mushroom jungle is pretty spectacular, her smile nearly grows bigger than her face.
My mom tells me all about the exhibit—how long it will take to complete, and what materials she’s using, and how when the zoo contacted her she was “smack-me-on-my-butt bowled over!” Her face lights up bright as the sun while she talks about her work, so I keep asking questions, and she keeps talking. Meanwhile, my brain is buzzing, same as my skin. I’m going to live with my mom. No boarding school. No tour bus filled with liars. Just me and my mom. I wonder what her house looks like. Bright and sunshiny like her, I bet. I wonder what we’ll eat for dinner, and what we’ll do on weekends. Play board games, like me and Aunt Nic do sometimes? Probably something even better. Suddenly I picture us traveling. Mini-adventures, just us two. I’ll navigate and she’ll pick all the coolest, artiest spots I’d never think to visit.
“I’ve been working with the mushroom theme since I was a kid,” my mom goes on, still talking about her exhibit. I do my best to tune back in, to focus. “I think I always liked the idea of life growing from decay and darkness. Mushrooms just triumph, you know?”
I love how passionate my mom is, about things I would never think to be passionate about.
I pull the cement mushroom cap out of my pocket to show her. “I found this today,” I tell her. “In the backyard of your old house.” Maybe the mushroom cap isn’t exactly a tether, the way it normally works. But Spirit did use it to pull us together, now didn’t they?
“Oh, wow.” She takes it from me and cradles it in her hands, like it’s a favorite pet she hasn’t seen in ages. “You must’ve thought your mother was some kind of nutcase when you saw that barbecue pit, huh?”
“I thought it was incredible,” I tell her seriously.
“I think you’re incredible,” she replies. And then—well, it will take more than a cement mushroom cap to keep me tethered to Earth after that. “Just you wait, CJ,” she says, pushing her tray toward me so I can eat more of her fries. “A few more years and I’ll have saved up enough so we can finally be together for good, like we always should’ve been.”
And just like that, I’m crashing again. “Years?” I repeat.
I don’t realize I’ve started to cry until my mom grabs my hand again. “Oh, CJ,” she says. “Oh, honey.” Her face is as pained as I feel, and I hate that I’ve made her look like that. “Is she really so terrible, your aunt?”
I want to explain, about Aunt Nic’s hands in my hair, making me care about her, making me think she cared about me. But all that comes out is a squawk.
“I’m so sorry, CJ,” my mom says, and she’s hugging me then, warm as her smile. “I wish I’d had someone else to turn to all those years ago. I really do, for your sake. But my parents were gone, and your father wasn’t exactly in the picture.” When she sees the question starting up inside me, she explains, “I’m afraid that’s my fault, too. It was a short-lived love affair, and by the time I knew about you . . .”
One more tiny check in the “truth” column for Aunt Nic.
“But here you are now,” my mom says. “And you’re perfect.”
That smile. I could get used to that smile.
I’ve honestly forgotten Jax is even sitting at the table with us until his phone rings. “Um,” he says, checking the screen. “It’s your aunt.” He says it like he’s worried I might dump mayonnaise from a tub on him just for telling me. “You want me to answer it, or . . . ?”
“Just hang up,” I snap. I never want to talk to Aunt Nic again.
“I mean,” Jax says slowly. The phone keeps ringing, the same stupid song. “She’s probably, like, worried about you?”
“Good!”
That’s when my mom reaches for the phone. “Let me,” she says. Before I can stop her, she presses the green button on the screen. “Nic!” she says into the phone, bright as sunshine. “Guess who?” There’s a pause, and I don’t know what Aunt Nic is saying, but my mom smiles as she tells her, “Cara found me.” She reaches for my hand across the table, correcting herself. “CJ, sorry.”
My mom squeezes my hand again, and I try to soothe the remaining bubbles inside me. Rage. Shock. Disgust. Jax keeps trying to meet my gaze, but I don’t need to know how sorry he feels for me.
“She figured that one out on her own, Nic,” my mom is saying. “She’s a smart girl. Beautiful, too. Thank goodness she didn’t get Dad’s nose.” Suddenly my mom seems irritated. “Well, I’m not the one who lied to her her whole life.” Whatever Aunt Nic says then, my mom narrows her eyes to slits. “That was uncalled for.”
“CJ,” Jax whispers at me across the table. “CJ.”
I finally look over at him. “Yeah?” I’m trying to listen to my mom’s end of the conversation, but apparently Jax has something super urgent he needs to share.
“Are you okay?” he asks me.
I only squint at him. I have no idea how to answer that question.
By the time I tune back in to the conversation, my mom is pulling the phone from her ear. She stretches it out to me. “Your aunt would like to talk to you,” she says.
“What do you want?” I bark into the phone. My voice is a wolf. A lion. I hope it hurts to hear it.
“CJ,” Aunt Nic says. She sounds sad, sorry even, but I know enough now not to believe anything that comes out of her mouth. “There’s . . . a lot we need to talk about, obviously.”
I do not respond.
“I don’t want to do this over the phone. We’ll talk when you get back here.” Another pause. “This must be very confusing for you, CJ.”
“I’m not confused at all,” I tell her.
“Your mom’s going to meet us after tomorrow’s show in Oceanside. We can all talk. Together. We’ll take as much time as you need, then head out to Phoenix the next morning. Sound good?”
“Not as good as knowing my mom my whole life,” I reply.
Aunt Nic takes a deep breath. “Please tell Jax to drive safely, all right? I’ll see you in a few hours. I love you so much, CJ.”
I hang up the phone.
* * *
• • •
I do not want to leave. I do not. But my mother needs to get back to work, and anyway, she assures me, she’ll see me tomorrow.
“You okay?” Jax asks me again as we climb the on-ramp to the freeway. It’s the first thing that wasn’t about shifting he’s said to me since we got back in the truck.
“Yeah,” I reply. Together we upshift till the truck is humming smooth and we’re well on our way. “Why wouldn’t I be? I met my mom today. And . . .” I stare out the window as the cars zoom by. Did I ever pass by my mom, on a highway like this, and not realize it was her? “I think I finally get it now.”
“Get what?” he asks.
There’s a new sort of bubble that’s rising up in me, lighter and swifter and warmer than all the others. The tiniest bubble of hope.
“I know why Spirit sent me here,” I tell him. “For real this time.”
TWELVE
“ARE YOU SURE about this?” Jax asks me as I bite into my vanilla cupcake with thick chocolate frosting. One thing I can say about Jax—he has a knack for picking good dessert places. This one’s called the Sweetest Thing, right outside of San Clemente, still an hour’s drive from L.A. “You really want to try to live with your mom?”
“It’s what Spirit wants,” I clarify. “And anyway, why wouldn’t I? Most kids live with their moms. And she said she’s been trying to get me back my whole life. You heard that, right?” I never was supposed to go to boarding school. That was just another thing Aunt Nic made up. She kicked my mom out of her life to have me all to herself, and now she’s kicking me out because she doesn’t want to share the spotlight once she’s a reality TV star.
Not that she will be a reality TV star.
Not that I’d want to live with her anymore anyway.
“I heard your mom say she never had the money to come get you,” Jax replies, twisting his cupcake around on its little plate. He made a point of grabbing a knife and fork before we sat down, like he thinks he needs them to eat a cupcake.
“Right? Maybe we can get the zoo to give her a raise. I mean, you saw that exhibit. It’s awesome.”
Jax looks up from his cupcake—salted caramel with mango glaze. I thought it sounded weird when he ordered it, but actually it looks delicious. “But you just met her,” he says.
“I just met you, too,” I argue.
“Right,” Jax says like I’m agreeing with him, which I’m not. “And if I asked you to move in with me, it would be weird.”
“Oh, Jax,” I say in a fake swoony voice. I clasp my hands under my chin like one of those ladies in old-fashioned movies who can’t stop fainting. “I had no idea you had such feelings for me!”
“What I meant was,” Jax says, darting embarrassed eyes at the couple glancing our way, “you hardly know anything about your mom. So how can you know if you want to live with her?”
“She’s my mother,” I tell him. I don’t see why any of this is so hard to understand. “And anyway, if Spirit wants me to live with her, I don’t have a choice, really. It’s what I have to do.”
Jax is frowning. “I think you always have a choice about your own life, CJ,” he says.
I let out a huff. “You’re not being super helpful right now,” I tell him. “Didn’t you say your grandpa wanted you to help me?”
Jax carefully peels down one side of his cupcake wrapper. “If that was Abuelo sending me a message,” he says, “then he was probably telling me to look out for you.” He stops peeling and meets my gaze. “Which is different from helping.”
There is a smidge of chocolate frosting on my thumb. I lick it off.
“I just keep thinking,” Jax says as he starts peeling again, “that you didn’t talk to your mom your whole life because you thought she was dead. But she knew you were alive. So how come she never tried to talk to you?”
I roll my eyes. “She told us that. My aunt took me away from her, and then she lied to me about it.” If it weren’t for Aunt Nic, I’d be an artist’s kid in San Diego right now. I’d wear blue every day, and I’d already know how great french fries were with mayonnaise, and probably a million other things, too.
“Maybe you should talk to your aunt before you get mad about it. Just hear her side of the story.”
“You really think there’s anything Aunt Nic could tell me that would make it okay that she lied like that?”
When he doesn’t answer for a while, I think it might be the end of the conversation—maybe Jax will start discussing the baking soda in the cupcakes, or something equally boring. But he doesn’t. Instead he says, “Abuelo used to always tell me about what it was like when he ran away as a kid, back in Quito. Like how for three days, he lived off of these little oranges, and how after he finished reading the book he’d brought with him he wrote his own stories in the margins so he wouldn’t get bored.”
I take a sip of water from my paper cup. I don’t know why Jax is telling me this, but I can tell it’s important, so I try to listen.
“And all that stuff was true, I think,” Jax goes on, “but Abuelo always made it sound like this fun adventure. But then the night of his funeral, we were all up super late playing Cuarenta—that’s this card game Abuelo loved. I don’t think anyone wanted to stop playing, because once we stopped, the night would be over, you know?”
He pauses, and I nod.
“And after a while, my dad and my aunt started telling all these stories about Abuelo I’d never heard before, that were, like, sort of what Abuelo’d told me, but not totally. They said he hid in his neighbor’s yard for a whole week, using a tarp for a blanket. And he got so sick from eating all those oranges, he never ate any again. Which, once they said that I realized, yeah. I’d never seen him eat one, ever. It was like my whole life, I’d heard one story.” He suddenly tugs my half-eaten cupcake toward him, with the bite marks chiseled into the chocolate frosting. “And it was true, what Abuelo told me, but it was fluffy, you know? Pretty. Like chocolate frosting.”
“Chocolate frosting?” I ask. Mostly I want my cupcake back.
“But the story my dad and my aunt told me”—he picks up his cupcake, with the glaze—“it was messy. Definitely not as sweet. But it also . . . It seeped into all the little cracks I never noticed before.” He turns the cupcake this way and that, and I can see the cake through the white-orange glaze, and the tiny dots of holes in the cake’s surface. “It let me see more of what really happened.”
When I’m sure Jax is finished, I point to the chocolate-frosted cupcake across the table and tell him, “I was still eating that.” I half mean it as a joke, but Jax doesn’t seem to think it’s very funny. He slides the cupcake back my way.
“I just think,” Jax goes on, “what your mom said today, about why she left—it seemed like a chocolate frosting sort of truth. And I think maybe you should wait for the mango-glaze truth before you decide anything for sure.”
Here’s what I think, though.
Jax Delgado may be four years older than me, but that doesn’t mean he knows everything about my life, or my mom.
I reach for my cupcake. Chocolate frosting and all.
“I think this truth tastes just fine,” I tell him. And I cram the whole thing into my mouth.
* * *
• • •
We don’t speak much the whole way back to the theater. The only sounds in the truck are the whirring of the gears and every once in a while a “Ready-and-clutch!” But when we zoom past the theater, with the tour bus parked out front, I have to speak up.
“You missed the turn!” I tell Jax, moving in my seat to watch the theater shrink behind us. “Flip a U at the next light.”
“Your aunt wanted me to drop you off at a diner,” Jax says. “It’s up here. She texted me while we were stopped for gas. She said if I dropped you off, you couldn’t run away, and then you’d have to talk to her.”
I harrumph into my seat. “I wasn’t going to run away like your grandpa and live on oranges,” I grumble. “I’m not doing anything”—I search for the word that Grant used before—“impetuous.” I just need to keep my eyes open for another sign from Spirit. They’ll tell me how to find the money my mom needs to take me in. In the meantime, I do not want to go to a diner with my lying aunt. “Just stay out of it, Jax. You’re not my big brother. Turn around up here.” He zips through the intersection. “Jax!”
“Why can’t you just talk to her?” he asks. “Listen to what she has to say. Then make up your mind.”
“Because she’s a liar,” I reply. I feel hot just thinking about it. Like anger is a feeling you can wear on your skin. “Do you not get that? Everything she’s ever told me, my whole life, is a lie.” I let myself laugh at her stupid jokes, I let her do my stupid hair, I let myself care about what she thought, and the whole time, she was lying. Everything was a lie. “So it doesn’t matter what she has to say now, because it will just be more lies. You were the one who was so sure she was a crook, back at the mansion. And now you’re totally on her side?”
“I just think, even if she’s lying about stuff, maybe she has a good reason. And you’ve known her way longer than you’ve kn
own your mom, so why not listen to her?”
He’s scratching his arm.
“You don’t want to go home,” I say slowly, starting to piece things together. We’re passing hotels, office buildings, a police station. All the while we’re nearing the one person I’d give anything to avoid. “You want to keep working for my aunt so you don’t have to go back to Florida, and if you think she’s some horrible liar, then you’ll feel bad. Right? Is that it?” He doesn’t answer. “I thought your grandpa told you to look out for me.”
“I am looking out for you, CJ.” But he’s still scratching his arm.
“You keep telling me that,” I say as we whiz through another intersection. I see the diner, two lights away. “But you’re the one who needs a twelve-year-old to rescue you.”
Jax doesn’t say anything else until we’re turning into the diner parking lot. “I’m going to park right in front of the door,” he tells me. “Then I’m going to wait until you walk in.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” I grumble. “You can’t even get back to the theater if you leave me here.”
“I’ll call Uncle Oscar to come help me,” he replies calmly. For some reason that calmness makes me even more furious.
“If you don’t pull out of this parking lot right this second,” I tell him, “I’m going to make sure Aunt Nic fires you.”
He finds a spot and shuts off the truck without even making it buck. I can see Aunt Nic at a booth inside. She jumps up and waves as soon as she spots us.
“Thanks for the ride,” I tell Jax, scooping my messenger bag and the orange box off the cab floor.
“CJ!” he calls as I jump out.
But I only slam the truck door. Because there’s nothing left for him to say.
