Gem & Dixie

by Sara Zarr

  I locked the door, hung the robe on a hook on the back of it, and stepped into the water. I let the faucet run until my whole body disappeared under the lemon bubbles. When I closed my eyes, I saw Dixie and Dad on the Ferris wheel, the image of them burned onto my retinas as if I’d just seen it in bright sun.

  With everything that had happened, the last week, the last day, our whole lives, I don’t know why that one little thing hurt so much.

  I opened my eyes and let my legs float and my feet pop out of the water. My toenails were ragged and needed to be cut but my legs were still smooth from shaving with the new razor. It wasn’t fair to be mad at Dixie about the fact that Dad had spent more time with her. She was a kid. If I was going to blame anyone for that, it should be him.

  But he hadn’t been around to be mad at. Dixie always was.

  I scooted my hips so that I could submerge my whole head in the water, and I rubbed my scalp with my fingers, then came back up just enough to expose my nose and mouth. My blood pulsed in my ears, the rushing of some faraway tide. I stayed under, listening and trying to think.

  I was mad at myself, too. In the early hours that morning, with Dixie sleeping and me forcing myself to stay awake, I’d worked out an idea that might not have been detailed but was clean. Then I’d thought I would just go to school for the first half of the day, so that Mr. Bergstrom wouldn’t worry that something had happened when I left with Dad. Then I’d wanted to thank Luca. And then I wanted to see her, only see her. To make sure she was all right and hadn’t noticed the money missing and hadn’t talked to anyone about it. I should have known better.

  When my fingertips got wrinkly, I flipped the drain lever on the tub and got out. Bubbles clung to me and quietly hissed when I smothered them with one of the white towels. I wrapped another towel around my hair and then sat on the white bath mat with my back against the door and emptied the contents of the backpack onto the floor. It was all the money and then The Grapes of Wrath and a bunch of packs of Haciendas. I hadn’t bothered bringing any school stuff to school except my reading journal, which I’d turned in because I guess I wanted to leave Mrs. Cantrell with a good impression of me.

  I separated the money by denomination and made stacks on the white shelf under the sink, next to the folded towels. At first it seemed like I kept finding more and more fives. I hadn’t even tried to guess at how much money was in the bag but it had seemed like a lot. Now, I wasn’t too sure. Then I found a bundle of hundreds. Another of fifties. A few bundles of twenties. Then some loose fifties and hundreds.

  None of it looked too new, or fake. Dad must have used money from the bag to buy all our groceries. We’d used it to get into this hotel. No one had looked at it twice; it had to be as real as it felt and looked and smelled.

  Piles of paper, that was it. Piles of paper that were as close as my dad had come to taking care of me for a long time, and he didn’t even know it.

  I counted it three times. I hung up my towel and put my robe back on, combed out my hair with my fingers, put lotion on my legs. The whole time, I kept my eyes on the neat row of bills and tried to comprehend the number I’d come up with: twenty-seven thousand dollars, not counting the ones and fives. How long could a person live on that? At least a year, I thought, maybe closer to two if you were like me and you were really careful.

  Dixie’s knock on the door startled me. “Hurry up, I have to pee.”

  “Just a sec.” I crouched on the floor and started to load the money back into the pack.

  She pounded on the door again.

  I stood up, money still piled on the shelf. It was impossible to hide what I’d been doing, and that would only make her trust me less when what I wanted was for her to trust me more. I let her in.

  “I’m counting it.”

  Her robe was around her shoulders like a cape, her clothes still on; the back of her hair was sticking up from her nap. She stared at me, and at the money I was halfway done putting away.

  “We should at least know how much it is,” I added.

  “What difference does it make? We’re taking it back tomorrow. You promised.”

  I didn’t technically promise. “Aren’t you even curious?”

  After a pause she said, “Yeah. Okay.”

  I stood up, holding two bundles of twenties. I had four thousand dollars right in my hand. “It’s about twenty thousand dollars,” I said. “Not counting the ones and fives.”

  “That’s all?” she asked, disappointed.

  For a second, I didn’t breathe. I hadn’t meant to lie. “What do you mean, ‘that’s all’? That’s a lot. Anyway, there’s like another couple thousand in fives, probably.” I pulled the ends of my damp hair over my shoulder and twisted the ends. “You can recount it if you want,” I said. “You probably should. Maybe I got it wrong.”

  “Let me pee first.”

  “Okay.” I put the twenties back on the towel shelf, got my book and cigarettes, and left the backpack as if I didn’t care. I made myself not look back.

  The TV was still on; I flipped channels and turned the volume up. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I stood outside the bathroom door and asked, “Are you counting it?”

  “Can you not talk to me while I’m going to the bathroom?”

  The minutes dragged on. I started to worry she was taking some of the money herself, hiding it in her clothes or her robe somewhere. When the door swung open, I stepped back and saw that everything looked exactly like I’d left it. “I’m starving,” she said. “Let’s order food.”

  I stared at the money. “We probably shouldn’t leave it out like that. I’ll put the rest back in the bag. Okay?”

  “Go ahead.” She pushed past me, and I loaded the money back in the bag and brought it out into the room. I slipped the bag into the space between my bed and my nightstand. Dixie sat on the edge of her bed flipping through a binder full of room service menus. “What do you want?”

  “What is there?”

  “Everything.” She read aloud: “‘All-American Cheeseburger Served with House-Made Pickled Onions,’ ‘Wood-Fired Pizzas with Seasonal Toppings.’ ‘Bacon-Truffle Macaroni and Local Cheese.’ Everything. Fries, salads, pasta, steak, chicken. I’m getting salmon. And also the mac and cheese. And a hot fudge sundae.” She held out the binder to me. “Don’t take forever to decide.”

  I took it and picked a cheeseburger and fries, and a pizza with potatoes and goat cheese on it because I’d never heard of potatoes on pizza before and never had goat cheese. Also a dessert sampler. Dixie called it in, sounding like she ordered room service every day.

  “I need to get a fake ID like yours,” I said after she’d hung up.

  “It comes in handy.” She flipped the channels. “Let’s watch a movie.”

  I retied my robe—it was almost big enough to wrap around me twice—and laid on my bed, shifting my dozen pillows around until I got comfortable. “When did you ever stay in a hotel before?” I asked.

  She scrolled through the on-screen guide. “It was just one time.”

  “When? With who?”

  She dropped the hand holding the remote to her side. “I hate it when you do that.”

  “What?”

  “Interrogate me.”

  “I’m just asking questions.”

  “Well, you ask them like . . . I don’t know. Like I have to answer to you. I mean, I can have secrets. Everybody does.”

  “Maybe they shouldn’t,” I said. “Look what having secrets does to Mom and Dad.”

  “You have them, too, Gem.” She lifted the remote and scrolled through a few more screens. “Romantic comedy or action?”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “Romantic comedy, I guess.” She ordered a movie off the screen. “What was it like?” I asked. “The Ferris wheel.”

  She sighed. I thought about my own secrets, and how they made me feel protected. Like not telling Mr. Bergstrom every single thing. Like having my cigarettes. And like I knew I would have kept the money secr
et if I’d been alone when I found it. Maybe Dixie’s secrets made her feel protected, too.

  “What was it like?” I asked again. “Were you scared?”

  “I told you. It was nothing. I didn’t like it.”

  I pictured her and Dad, swinging at the top with a view of everything, Dixie cuddled up to him, him telling her not to be afraid.

  “Has either of them texted again or anything?”

  “I don’t know. I turned my phone off because my charger is at home. I want to save the battery.” She paused the movie, then said, “Will you please relax? I can tell you’re all tense over there.” Then, in a nicer tone, she added: “We’re here, we’re going to pig out on really good food, and then tomorrow we have to go back to dealing with all the usual shit. So just enjoy being here.”

  She sounded happy.

  “No one knows where we are, Gem,” she continued. “Doesn’t that feel amazing?”

  I would not be going to back the usual shit, I wanted to tell her. “Yeah,” I said. “It does.”

  When the food came, we forgot about everything else. We’d never had anything like it. Every detail of my burger was perfect, from the way the cheese melted without turning into rubber to the little pieces of toasted onion that were part of the bun. The fries were crisp and salty and came with homemade ketchup.

  “Why would anyone make their own ketchup?” Dixie asked.

  “I don’t know, but it’s good.” I made Dixie try it, and she made me try her mac and cheese. After tasting each other’s food, we decided to move it all onto her bed so we could both eat everything.

  “Mom would be impressed,” Dixie said. “Us sharing.”

  I didn’t want Mom with us in this moment. I said mm-hmm quickly and shifted my attention to the pizza before a clear picture of her could form in my mind. “Look how thin the potatoes are sliced.” I peeled one off the pizza and held it up. We could see the glow of the TV right through it.

  “I might be sick pretty soon.” She’d eaten her hot fudge sundae first so the ice cream wouldn’t melt, and had slowed down halfway through her salmon.

  “Not me.” I could eat and eat; my stomach felt bottomless for this. This wasn’t rock-heavy meat loaf and side dishes from a box like Dad had fixed us. “I want to eat like this every day for the rest of my life,” I said.

  Dixie groaned and put down the forkful of food she’d been about to eat. “Maybe we can both get jobs that make us rich,” she said. “We can fly around the world first class and eat potato pizzas in Italy.”

  She’d never talked about us as a “we” that would exist at some point in the future. I wondered if the thought came to her just because of this moment, or if it was something she thought about other times but didn’t say.

  The money we had wasn’t enough for all that. Anyway, it didn’t really matter to me, world travel and fancy food. All I wanted was to make ends meet without needing anyone else to help me. And I wanted that only because I wanted a home that felt like home should feel. Safe. A place you go where you know there won’t be any bad surprises and you can be even more who you are, not less.

  Dixie and I laughed together at the romantic comedy, the stupidity of it. We made fun of how the couple kissed, and we finally gave up and put the trays of what was left of our food out into the hall for the housekeeping people to pick up, like the lady who’d brought it up said to. The big window was rain streaked by the end of our movie. We watched the city lights glisten.

  Right then, with the dream of fancy traveling together, and us getting along, full of food, and Dixie believing that soon things would go back to the way she was used to them being, we were as happy as we were going to get.

  15.

  WHEN I would think about people who could have helped us, either before things got bad or after they did—people who maybe should have helped us—the first one was Uncle Ivan. I never thought he wouldn’t be in our lives. Not like he was the most reliable person in the world—he’d be around, then he’d disappear, like most adults I knew other than my teachers. But he always came back.

  When we were younger, Mom would tell us stories from when they were kids, getting into trouble their mother never knew about while she was at work, and then later, running around Portland in their teens. She’d get mad at me and Dixie for fighting. “You guys should be each other’s best friends. You’re the only ones who know what it’s like to be in your family. You’ll see when you’re older,” she said. “In the end, you’re all each other has. Like me and Ivan.”

  They talked on the phone all the time. Then not as much. Then, she didn’t have him. He met a woman he loved and moved to Idaho and got married without even inviting us to the wedding. He came that one time to help my mom kick my dad out, and that was the last time we saw him. He has a baby now. My cousin. I don’t know what happened with Uncle Ivan and my mom, but she didn’t seem mad about it. There were a lot of times I thought about trying to find out his number and call him, but whenever I asked my mom if I could, she said, “You leave your uncle Ivan alone. He’s got a good life now.”

  I didn’t know what that meant except that us being in it would turn it from good to bad, and I didn’t want to do that to him.

  Then there was Roxanne, my mother’s ex-best friend. They’d met at one of my mom’s jobs a long time ago, and they talked every day. She’d come over to our apartment and Mom would tell her what was going on with my dad and his using or his girlfriends or his not having a job, and Roxanne would commiserate and they’d get high together. But also she would look at me and Dixie sometimes, and smile and play with us, and then tell my mom maybe there were certain things my mom shouldn’t say with us sitting right there.

  “They can hear you, Adri,” Roxanne would say, nodding her head our way and flipping her black ponytail over her shoulder.

  Every year, on the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, they got together to listen to Nevermind—the Nirvana album that came out when Mom and Roxanne were fifteen—and make drinks and light candles in his memory. Sometimes my dad was there. One time, my dad and Roxanne danced around to “Lithium” while my mom went to the freezer to get more ice. Dixie and I were jumping up and down next to them. Then, real fast, Dad moved his hand down Roxanne’s hip and whispered something in her ear. When Mom emerged with the ice, Roxanne was pushing Dad away and saying, “Don’t pull that shit with me, Russ. Especially in front of the girls. Dumbass.”

  She turned and danced with me, and Dad got his cigarettes and went out for a smoke.

  “Last straw yet, Adri?” Roxanne asked Mom between songs.

  Mom took Roxanne’s hands and swayed with her to “Polly” and said, “Not tonight. Tonight is our night. Yours and mine and Kurt’s.”

  Later, Roxanne and Mom got sober together. They’d go to meetings and call each other when they wanted to drink or to use, and they’d celebrate every new sober month by ordering pizza and watching a favorite movie. Something with Julia Roberts, usually, or one of the Terminator movies. They’d toast with diet soda and eat chocolate until they got sick.

  When I was in fifth grade, I got a cold and then strep throat, and Mom didn’t take me to the doctor soon enough and the strep went into my kidneys. My lower back hurt so bad. I stayed with Roxanne a few days, because it was one of Dad’s gone times and Mom couldn’t get off work to take care of me when I’d normally be at school. Roxanne made me a warm bath every day with bath salts that smelled like eucalyptus and lavender, and I’d sit in it until the water stopped being warm enough, and she’d stay with me in the bathroom, reading a book or a magazine out loud to take my mind off how much my back ached. I remember her reading me a magazine story about how to grow out your bangs.

  I didn’t want to go home that time and felt guilty for wishing I didn’t have to. I never thought there would be a time when Roxanne wasn’t there, same as with Uncle Ivan.

  Around the time Dad left for good, Mom started drinking again. Then doing more. And she wasn’t going to the meeting
s or spending very much time at all with Roxanne. They still talked on the phone a lot, but it was mostly fighting. I’d listen to Mom’s side of the conversation and hear stuff like:

  I don’t need that. I’m fine.

  Only wine and pot! Nothing hard, I swear.

  Don’t judge me, Rox. . . . What do you call it, then?

  I can’t deal with that higher power shit. I never could. You know that.

  Gradually we stopped hearing about her. I don’t think Mom ever got over it. She had other friends afterward but none that she loved like she loved Roxanne. Love like the love she had for us—the biggest and strongest love she could feel, still easily blown over by her selfishness or addiction or whatever it was that kept her from being able to be . . . I don’t know . . . different.

  All her real friends cleaned up and disappeared, and she replaced them with disposable friends who were mostly there to listen to her complain about Dad, other men, or work, or to party with her. I wanted Mom to be like Roxanne. Or Roxanne to be our mom. She was evidence that a person could change. I think she wanted to help, and maybe she tried. But Mom was our link to her and that link got broken, and there was nothing we could do about that.

  Stuff happens to most people. One thing going wrong, I mean. One family member missing a chance to help. One who cuts you off. One person with her own shit to deal with.

  One of those things isn’t enough to send you falling through the cracks.

  But all of them together, they accumulate. An abandoned mother here. A missing uncle there. A disappearing father two generations back. A friendship broken by fear or mistrust or addiction. Genes that make you vulnerable to certain problems. Two children who weren’t loved right meeting up when they’re not really adults yet and having two more children who aren’t loved right.

  It adds up. It all adds up.

  16.

  THE CLOCK on the bedside table said 3:17 when I woke with an ache that proved me wrong in thinking my stomach could handle anything. I got up to use the bathroom; then I couldn’t fall back to sleep. Dixie was curled in a ball facing me.