by Antony John
“Uh-huh. So what’s this one about?”
“Just stuff.”
She’s giving me a stern look, like she thinks I’m trying to be difficult. Which I’m not.
“Okay, fine,” I say. “It’s called Other Me. We’re supposed to imagine how our life would be if things had turned out differently.”
Momma keeps rocking, but slower. “I imagine there are a lot of things you wish could be different right now.”
Oh no. Momma thinks she is the thing I wish could be different. Sure, I wish she felt well again, but it’s not her fault she’s sick. But now I can’t ask her about the pills she took today, because then she’ll be even more worried. I don’t know what to say, so I run over to give her a hug instead.
“Stop!” she yells.
I freeze.
“You can’t come near me, remember? Not for a week.”
I’m like a statue. Momma is so close, but she’s never felt farther away. And there’s nothing I can do to close the gap.
“Lola,” Ms. Archambault shouts from behind me. “Come have a drink.”
I look over my shoulder. She’s standing on her porch with a glass of something green. I don’t want to drink anything that looks like it came out of a shmorpel, and I don’t want to turn away from Momma. But staying here feels weird too.
“I’m sorry, Lola,” Momma says sadly. “I should’ve gotten checked out sooner.”
“It’s okay, Momma.”
“And I should’ve been honest with you. Except, you’re only ten. You shouldn’t have to . . .” She doesn’t finish the thought, but I think I can fill in the blank: I shouldn’t have to do this alone.
I think she’s right, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Especially not while I’m standing in the middle of the yard. I just need to face it: Momma isn’t my momma this week. She can’t touch me and hold me and comfort me. She can’t snuggle up on the sofa. She can’t even check my homework.
All she can do is count down the days until I return. It’s the same thing I’m doing.
I walk across the yard to Ms. A’s house. She holds the door open and studies me like she’s the judge of a beauty pageant, one eyebrow cocked to show she doesn’t much like what she sees.
“You smell,” she says.
“Huh?”
“You heard me. Reek like a skunk’s behind, you do. Back when I was in television, I had an elephant evacuate right onto my shoes, and it still didn’t smell as bad as you.”
I can’t tell if she’s trying to be funny. Right now, I just want to be alone.
“You need to go shower,” she says. “Wash away all that grit and grime, and whatever else that’s eating at you. You’ll feel better for it. Besides, you can’t go into my kitchen smelling like cow dung.”
She pushes me into the bathroom and points to a neat stack of towels. I lock the door behind her and walk into the shower stall. It’s separate from the bathtub, with pretty glass tiles and a small shelf for shower gel and shampoo and conditioner. As I peel off my tank top and shorts, I get a good whiff of myself. Ms. Archambault wasn’t lying about the stink.
I turn the shower on high and wash my hair and scrub myself clean. When I’m done, the bottom of the shower stall is pretty dirty, but she’s right: I feel a little better.
I dry myself with one of her fluffy towels and tiptoe across the corridor and into the spare bedroom. I get dressed in one of the outfits from the pile on the dresser and check myself out in the mirrored closet that runs the length of one wall. I look like a drowned rat, only clean.
Something catches my eye near the edge of the closet. The door isn’t completely closed, and a piece of clothing sparkles from within the shadows. I slide open the closet door . . . and gasp.
I’ve never seen anything like it. There must be fifty dresses inside, all arranged by color like a rainbow of fabric. They’re long and short, plain and glittering. They’re the kind of dresses that would make anyone feel special.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Ms. Archambault wear one. Sure, she used to be a model, but she put that behind her years ago and she doesn’t like to talk about it now. There’s not a single photograph in the house from her modeling days. So why has she kept the dresses?
Ms. A knocks on the door. “I got you something to drink,” she says.
I open the door. She’s carrying a glass of that green shmorpel juice. “It’s, uh, very green,” I point out.
“It’s good for you.”
“I sure hope so.”
I take a sip. I figure it’ll taste like squished-up spinach, but it’s actually kind of sweet. There’s banana in there. Strawberries too, I think. She’s got a long way to go to replace Nick as champion drink maker, but something this color could’ve been a whole lot worse.
“You found my dresses, huh?” Ms. A nods at the open closet.
Oops. I should’ve closed the door.
She steps toward the closet and runs her fingers across the silky fabric. “Like nothing at all, aren’t they? It’s funny how I can see that now.”
“What do you mean?”
She takes out a dress and holds it up to me. It’s too long, but it’s beautiful.
“I spent so many years trying to be everything everyone wanted me to be,” she explains, her eyes fixed on the dress. “And the longer I stayed in that world, the more I got scared of losing it. Scared that people wouldn’t notice me anymore. That I’d be nothing.” She carefully hangs it back in the closet. “But I was nothing all along. Just a body in a dress.”
“You were famous,” I remind her.
“Sure. Famous for being pretty. For doing exactly as I was told.” She closes the closet door, and the peek at her past is over. “Fifty years, I did commercials, Lola. There was a time I was in so many that if you watched TV for an hour a day, you’d almost surely see me. Now let me ask you something: In all those years, how many words do you think I spoke?”
“Like, in the commercials?”
“Uh-huh. How many?”
I follow her as she leaves the room and walks to the kitchen. She stirs a large pot on her bright white stovetop, which gives me time to think. Momma says Ms. Archambault sometimes filmed a couple commercials a month. That’s twenty-four a year, multiplied by fifty years. Even if she said only a few words, it’s got to be in the thousands.
“Ten thousand words,” I answer.
“Less.”
“Five?”
“Getting closer.”
“Three thousand.”
She sighs. “I said you were getting closer when you answered five, not five thousand.”
She’s turned her back to me, so I can’t tell if she’s joking. And she must be joking, right? How can anyone film hundreds of commercials and say only a few words?
“None,” she says finally. “In fifty years, I never said a single word.”
She stands in front of the stove and ladles stew into two pottery bowls. She places them on the table and points to the chair across from her.
“I don’t get it,” I say.
“I know.” She dips her spoon in the stew and blows on it. Takes a bite and scrunches up her face. “This needs more salt.”
I pass her the saltshaker. She taps it so delicately that I’m sure nothing comes out.
“So,” she says. “Worked it out yet?”
I figure we’re still talking about her speaking in commercials. Kiana showed me a few of them on YouTube. They were really old and weird, but I’m sure Ms. A said something. It’s a riddle. “No,” I admit.
“Hmm.” She tries the stew again. The two or three salt specks must’ve made all the difference because she nods. “They dubbed me.”
“They what?”
“Hired a woman to do voice-over. Every word I said, they’d get her to say it again.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? They said I didn’t have the right voice. They said my drawl was too strong. Whatever it was they wanted, I didn’t have it. So they
took my voice away.”
“Like Ariel in The Little Mermaid.”
“Exactly. And like Ariel, I let them. I figured, what difference does it make who says the lines? I guess deep down I thought the producers were probably right too.” She shakes her head. “It got so when I went to a party, I’d keep quiet. I let people take photos with me, and when they said thank you, I just nodded. I never had an argument, but I got divorced three times.” I must look shocked because she nods. “Ridiculous, huh? See, I’d convinced myself that saying nothing was the best thing I could do. I was just like those dresses in the closet: pretty, but nothing more.”
I haven’t touched my stew. For as long as I’ve known Ms. Archambault, she’s been the strong one. The one whose house is so well organized, it balances out the chaos in ours. She’s the kind of woman Hortense might grow up to be: smart and determined and kind. Someone who knows exactly what to do because she’s always known what to do.
Except . . . that’s not who she used to be after all.
“Did you ever meet her?” I ask. “The woman who said your words.”
She laughs. “They weren’t exactly my words, but no, I never met her. For a time, I felt angry. Like she cheated me out of something. But it was never about her. I let myself get cheated, Lola. I didn’t want to lose what I had, and I became nothing so I could keep it. It took me until I was seventy to realize that you don’t find a voice, like some toy you misplaced. You seek it. Claim it. Own it. And you never apologize for using it.”
Is Ms. Archambault saying it’s good for me to speak up more, to push Momma for answers?
“What changed for you?” I ask, because I prefer talking about her instead of me.
“I saw something,” she says. “And it shook me up. Made me realize I couldn’t stay quiet any longer.” She lays her spoon gently in the bowl. “The next day, I called my agent and said I was done with commercials. Later that year, I spent three months at a yoga retreat so I’d be qualified to teach. By the time I came back, I knew who I was.”
She takes my hand and smiles because it’s a happy ending. I smile right back, but I’m curious what happened. One thing’s for sure: It was after I was born because I remember her going away . . . and wondering if she was ever coming back.
19
Spying is Dangerous
On Wednesday, Nick gives me a slip of paper in class. There’s a name on it: Brett Smallwood.
“Who’s Brett Smallwood?” I ask.
“Bar manager at the Wyndcrest. Been there twenty years.”
Kiana gets excited. “You asked your dad?”
“Nope,” says Nick. “I asked Kat, who asked my dad. She’s braver than me,” he adds, like we might not already know that. “She also found out Brett’s working on Saturday afternoon. So if you want to meet there—”
“Yes!” Kiana and I say together.
“Okay, then. Two o’clock, hotel parking garage,” Nick whispers, like he’s a spy handing over government secrets. “You want to synchronize watches?”
“No,” Kiana and I say together.
“Oh.”
He gets back to his own work. So does Kiana. But my mind is buzzing now. Brett probably knows my parents. He might’ve even been their boss. If anyone can tell me more about my daddy, it’s him.
Ms. Archambault has decided I should shower every day. She has also bought me deodorant that smells of tropical fruit.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “Glad you noticed.”
Maybe this is her way of making sure that I want to move back home in a week.
“And just so you know,” she continues, “I told your momma you need to shower every day. So don’t go thinking it’ll be any different next week either.”
Rats!
I shower and get dressed. Gregoria calls to say she has made dinner for us, including Momma. So I hop onto Ms. A’s golf cart, and we take the back roads to the restaurant.
I go on in while Ms. A waits outside. When he sees me, Frankie holds up one finger and marches off to the kitchen to get our food. There are people waiting for tables, so I try to stay out of the way. That’s when I hear Mallory’s voice coming from a corner booth.
I crouch down and pretend to tie my shoelace so that she and her mom won’t see me. Not that her mom would see me anyway, because her eyes are glued to her cell phone. I can’t see Mallory’s face, but I’m guessing she doesn’t like being ignored.
“We’re doing this project in class,” she tells her mom.
Mrs. Lewis flips through pages on her phone.
“We have to imagine, like, a different life.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” her mom mutters.
After a few seconds of silence, Mallory continues, “Ms. Del Rio gave me another book to read too.”
Now her mom looks up. “We already have plenty of books at home.”
“I’ve read them all. Anyway, this is a good one. I’ve been reading it during recess.”
“Maybe you should try making friends instead.” Mrs. Lewis breathes in and out slowly like she’s doing one of Ms. Archambault’s relaxation exercises. “I swear, Mallory, I work harder at your school than you do. How many field trips have I chaperoned? All for the pleasure of watching you mope your way around some old house or park.”
“So let me stay home.”
“And listen to you moping there instead? I’d rather chaperone. At least then I can talk to the other parents.”
They fall silent again. I can’t see Mallory’s face, and I don’t want to. The whole conversation has left me feeling kind of weird inside. Nothing Mallory’s mom said was completely wrong, but the way she said it . . .
“I really like the new book,” Mallory mumbles.
Mrs. Lewis huffs. It sounds a lot like Ms. Archambault when she sees someone driving badly and her equilibrium gets unbalanced. “What are you talking about?”
“The new book Ms. Del Rio gave me.”
“What . . . new . . . book . . . Mallory?” her mom replies really slowly, like she’s talking to an idiot.
It’s Mallory’s turn to speak. But this time, she says nothing. And I understand why. What’s the use in talking when no one is listening? When no one believes you have anything worthwhile to say?
“Lola!” Frankie calls out. “Food’s ready.”
Uh-oh. I slink over to Frankie hoping that Mallory and her mom didn’t hear my name. He watches me the whole time, looking confused. When I reach him, I stand up straight and take the bag. It’s filled with enough boxed food to feed an army.
“Say hi to your mom for me,” he says.
“Sure. Thanks, Frankie.”
“You’re welcome, kiddo.”
I open the door. Just before I step outside, I glance back at the booth. I shouldn’t do it, but I can’t help myself. And what do I see?
Mallory is staring right at me.
Darn!
Momma’s not outside on the porch when we get home, so Ms. A takes a box of food to her. Meanwhile, I go ahead and set Ms. A’s kitchen table. Her silverware shines.
We don’t say much while we eat because the food is so good. But when I’m finished and the dishes have been washed, Ms. A gives me her laptop so I can talk with Momma. It seems a little odd, seeing as how Momma’s only twenty yards away, but I hate shouting across the yard. Plus, if I can see her up close on the screen, I’ll know she’s really getting better.
Or not. When she answers, Momma’s face is splotchy orange and red. She’s panting.
“Are you okay, Momma?”
She wipes a bead of sweat away with the back of her hand. “Uh-huh.”
“But . . . you look terrible.”
She purses her lips. “Gee, thanks. You know, this is what working out looks like when you’re old and unfit.”
“You’re working out?”
“Okay, maybe not working out. It’s really tiring, even in the easiest gear. But I’m trying. That’s why
you got the bike trainer, right?”
I peel back the kitchen blind. It’s true: Momma’s on the bike, pedaling very slowly. I can even see her staring at her phone.
“Are you feeling better, then?” I ask.
She gives a little shrug. “Maybe a little.”
“So can I come back home soon?”
“Next Monday, hopefully.”
She stops pedaling, but she’s still breathing hard. I think it could be a long time before she’s able to ride the way she used to.
“The doctor says I can start working at the restaurant on Friday,” she says, sounding brighter.
“What about the radiation?”
“I’ll just be washing dishes in the kitchen. Something easy, so I can leave if I don’t feel right.”
“Oh.”
She studies me through the tiny screen. “It’ll only be a few more days now, Lola.”
“I guess,” I say, trying to look brave.
Momma blows me a kiss, and I pretend to catch it. But in the back of my mind, I’m wondering why Frankie and Gregoria get Momma back before I do.
20
My Topsy-Turvy World
I stick to Nick and Kiana like glue the next day. I’m positive Mallory knows I was eavesdropping on her in the restaurant, and I’m even more positive that she didn’t like it. Being close to my friends seems like a smart survival strategy.
Unfortunately, Mallory sits right in front of me in class. Which means I spend the whole morning staring nervously at the back of her head instead of doing my work. By the middle of the afternoon, I almost wish Mallory would blow up at me, so we could get this over with.
Mallory is really good at playing the long game.
For the last part of the school day, Ms. Del Rio makes us give sneak peeks of our projects. She tells us to imagine we’re making a movie trailer and share just enough information to get everyone excited.
Four kids go before me. I don’t actually hear what they say because I’m too busy thinking about what I’m going to say. When it’s my turn to go, Kiana bumps my leg. I think it’s her way of saying good luck. Or maybe it’s a warning to keep things simple.
“So, uh, next week,” I begin, “I’ll be telling you all about Other Me’s long-lost father.”
