by Shari Arnold
“Where’s dad?” I ask and she points down the hallway. The look on her face tells me I should already know the answer to that question, and then her attention is diverted back to the TV suspended above the kitchen cabinets.
“Mary, have you spoken with Bill yet?” Roger, her campaign manager asks. My mother nods, but she doesn’t turn away from the TV. C-SPAN is the soundtrack to my mother’s life right now with only six weeks until voting day.
Her dark blue eyes, so similar to my sister’s, used to gleam, but now they’re always serious. Serious is her camouflage. “No one wants to see a grown woman cry,” I heard her tell Roger a few weeks after Jenna died. But I’ve noticed there are new lines around her eyes and a crease, dead center on her forehead. It must be her body’s way of mourning my sister, even if she refuses to.
“Turn this up,” she says to the person nearest the remote. I think his name is Tim or Bill. They’re all the same to me with their suits and ties and firm handshakes — they all “yes, ma’am” my mother while barely tolerating me.
I hate these people in her life, how they fill her head with faux confidence and orbit around her like she’s the sun. But if she loses the re-election they’ll drop out of sight, leaving her burnt up and empty.
My father’s office is the second to last room down the hall, and as I approach it I can hear the familiar sounds of Simon & Garfunkel escaping through the walls. Not a good sign. My father is listening to his music in the dark again.
I knock softly and then turn the handle. For a moment I let my eyes adjust to the darkness, even though I know where to find him. He’s stretched out on his back on the brown leather couch he used to tell Jenna and me not to climb on. His rain-soaked boots are hanging over the side, which means he managed to make it outside at some point today. Where he went, I don’t know. I doubt my mother does either.
My father’s hand is draped over his eyes as if the world he lives in isn’t dark enough, but I can tell from his shallow breathing he’s not asleep. He doesn’t sleep anymore, he prowls. Sometimes I wake in the night and listen to his footsteps moving along the hallway as if he’s searching for something. He’ll stop once in front of my door, move on to my sister’s room and then linger for so long I end up falling back to sleep before I can determine his next stop.
“Hi, Daddy,” I say. “I just got home.” But he doesn’t hear me. “Mom made dinner.” Still no response.
I step back out into the hallway and with the close of the door Art Garfunkel’s voice is muffled.
My father used to sing this song to Jenna to get her to fall asleep. Now he just plays it over and over again in the dark. I wonder if his memories are on repeat, just like the song. And I wonder if he’ll ever stop punishing himself for losing a child.
Since Jenna passed away he doesn’t work. He rarely leaves the house and if he eats, he eats alone. Sometimes he’ll show up early in the morning while I’m having breakfast and startle me. Once I dropped an entire carton of eggs on the floor. I stared at him, my hands shaking and my feet dripping with egg yolk. He just moved on down the hall.
My father has become a ghost.
I take my dinner up to the roof. It’s the place I go when I need to get away and be outside without actually being outside. Seattle has a lot of these places. Windowed rooms built into office or apartment buildings where you get the sense that you’re out in open air when you’re actually just enclosed in glass. The real outdoors would be preferred, but I hate always being wet.
I’ve just taken a bite of lasagna when my phone buzzes. It’s a text from my best friend, Sheila. The only friend I’ve retained from my days in public school.
Where you at? she asks.
The roof, I respond.
I’m coming up, she texts back, and I take another bite of my dinner.
Sheila lives on the next block over with her dad and his new wife, while her mother lives in Bellevue with Sheila’s younger brother and their two cats. It’s not that she doesn’t like her mother or brother — or the cats — she just didn’t want to change schools. When she gave me this reason last year I nodded as if I understood, but ever since my sister died I’m not sure I do. Even though my family isn’t what they once were, I need them near me. Every day. I guess when you’ve never lost someone you take it for granted that they’ll always be around.
Sheila and I have very little in common, or so my mom thinks. But when Jenna was diagnosed with leukemia almost two years ago, the rest of my friends got all weird and distant. It was like I’d gone away for the summer and come back a different person, someone they barely recognized. And when my sister died they stopped calling altogether. Maybe they figured I was too busy mourning to need a friend. Or maybe it’s just that death makes everything awkward. It was different with Sheila though. She held my hand at the funeral and it feels like she still hasn’t let go.
The elevator opens and out comes all six feet of Sheila. Her platform boots click clack across the tile in the lobby and then shuffle toward me once she hits the carpet. She doesn’t need her boots to be tall, but nevertheless she is rarely without them. I think she likes towering over people. It used to bother me always looking up. I’ve gotten over it.
“How’s Jilly?” she asks once she’s plopped down on the ground beside me. She’s never met Jilly — she says the day she visits the Children’s Hospital is the day she pops two of her mother’s Prozacs — but she’s one of the few people in my life who doesn’t give me a hard time about always visiting the kids there.
“Not good,” I answer, pushing the rest of my lasagna around my plate.
“Give me that,” she says and takes the plate from me. “Wife-of-the-Moment is still in her cooking phase. Tonight I swear she cooked up our neighbor’s dog. It smelled that gross.” She shovels a large bite of my dinner into her mouth and then closes her eyes with enjoyment. “I love your mother’s lasagna. Seriously. She could box it up and sell it like crack.”
I watch her finish the last two bites and then pass her the rest of my milk. She thanks me and then guzzles it down.
She wipes her milk mustache off with the back of her hand. “ So have you told your parents yet?”
“No.”
“When are you going to?”
“I don’t know. Before Friday?” I offer with a shrug.
“So… tomorrow, then?” Sheila pulls out her cell phone — an iPhone that used to resemble mine before she bedazzled it — and begins texting at rapid speed.
“Maybe,” I say, watching as Sheila manages to carry on multiple conversations at one time.
Her fingers stop and she looks up at me.
“Don’t you think they should know, Livy? I mean, this test is kind of a big deal, right? What happens if you’re a match? What happens if the doctors say you’re in?”
“In?” I pull my knees up and rest my chin on top of my knee.
“Yeah… like, in the donor club? What happens if they say, Olivia Cloud, you’ve just won the opportunity to save a young girl’s life, and all that shit. Is that when you tell them?”
“Maybe.” My eyes are focused on the elevator doors where I can see our reflections in the glass. “Probably,” I whisper. I don’t want to talk about this right now. I’m not ready. I mean I’m ready to give Jilly anything I can to help her make it to another birthday, but I’m not ready to explain it to my parents. It’s my decision. At least it should be. And right now it’s just a blood test. There’s no point in telling my parents, getting them all worked up about the idea, if I’m not even a match, right? If I tell them now and they say no I’ll never know if I could have saved her. And how can I live knowing I could have saved her?
“Huh. Alrighty then,” Sheila says as she types something into her phone. “So we won’t talk about it until we have something to talk about?”
“Let’s do that,” I say, and she smiles at me in the elevator doors.
Outside the windows and to the left the Space Needle is watching us. All my life this
landmark has been my companion. It’s comforting, like a neighbor you know will never up and leave.
“Hey Livy,” Sheila says, grabbing my attention.
“Hey what?” I say back.
She smiles at me, her eyes dancing with laughter. “Do you remember that night we snuck out?”
“Which time?” I say, and thus begins another game of “Do you remember.”
This has always been our way of dragging each other back from those dark moments that seep in periodically — although, it feels like it’s always Sheila initiating the game lately.
“I remember,” she says leaning her head against mine, “when we used to be much more fun.”
“You’re still fun,” I whisper.
“That’s right,” she says, smacking my leg. “I keep forgetting that part.”
And I laugh, which is exactly what she wants me to do.
“You’ll get there, Livy,” she tells me, and then immediately changes the subject to something safer — something lighter — while I’m left wondering if it’s true.
With all the heaviness surrounding me, will I ever be fun again?
CHAPTER THREE
I don’t go to high school like other kids my age. I haven’t since my sister’s health deteriorated last spring. My parents pulled her out of kindergarten and then agreed to pull me out as well. When someone important to you is about to die, normal life no longer applies to you. You aren’t expected to act normal or do normal things. It’s as if you have a pass on life, the my-sister-is-dying-so-I-can-do-what-I-want pass. Sheila said I should take advantage of the situation.
“Get a tattoo or pierce your bellybutton!” she told me.
But I figured I was in enough pain without having to worry about possible infection.
And now, four months after my sister passed away, I still don’t attend public school. I have a tutor who comes to my house three days a week, who sits at my dining room table and teaches me what I should be learning in high school, minus the real-life stuff — I guess I’ve had enough of that lately. Sheila calls him Vladimir after the guy who wrote Lolita, but his real name is Steve. He shows up on time, rarely speaks of things outside of my school subjects and always carries tissues in the front pocket of his tan raincoat. After my sister died he brought me a handful of tiny daisies that I placed in a water glass because they were too small to fit inside one of my mother’s crystal vases. They sat in the center of the dining room table for a week before my mother finally convinced me to throw them out. They were no longer standing up straight and their tiny petals had just begun to speckle the dark wood of the table. But I liked looking at them. They reminded me of my sister. Even though she was small, she had a way of making a room look lived in. She would have liked those daisies.
Today Steve and I are studying calculus, reproductive organs and Spanish. It has been a very long three hours.
“Next week we’re on to the conjugations of to live, to eat and to speak,” he says. “Viva la vida.” He pushes his thin, gold-rimmed glasses back up on his nose and clears his throat. “So practice,” he continues. “Remember to roll your r’s.” And then he demonstrates while I copy him. “I won’t be here but I’ll send a substitute.”
“You’re going to Florida,” I say, because that’s pretty much all I know about it.
“Yes. To visit my mother.” He slips his books back into a shoulder bag that has a large wolf, the University of Washington’s logo, on the front. “She’s having surgery.”
“Right. Well. Um, tell her I wish her luck.” I’ve never met his mother, but it feels like the appropriate thing to say.
“Thank you, Olivia.” He always calls me Olivia, never Livy or Liv. He likes to keep things formal, even though he’s seen me cry, or perhaps because of it. “I’m sure she’ll be fine. It’s nothing major, just minor surgery.”
I walk him to the door, as I always do. “See you when you get back,” I say, and he pulls out his car keys, jingling them in his hand. The elevator ride down to the parking garage is a long one, but I guess he likes to be prepared.
“You’re doing great, Olivia,” he says just before the door closes. “You’re a great student.” He gives me a half-smile, which is pretty much what I always get from him, and what I always give back. I don’t mind it. Half-smiles aren’t as much work.
Sheila has sent me at least a dozen texts since she got out of school fifteen minutes ago. I know not to be alarmed. When Sheila wants to talk and she can’t reach you she takes it as a personal challenge until she tracks you down.
“How’s Vladimir?” she says instead of hello when I return her call. “Did he ask about me? He did, didn’t he? You can tell me.” Sheila has a crush on my tutor, even though he’s more than twice her age. Or rather she has a crush on the idea of him. If she ever sat through one of our lessons (which she begs to do on a regular basis) she’d get over her obsession and realize he’s just a grown man who teaches high school to kids who don’t go to high school. He’s not Jeremy Irons, Cary Elwes or any other male actor who has played a role in a Lolita-esque movie. He’s just Steve the man whose left eye twitches every time he says the words fallopian tubes.
“What’s up?” I say staring at the solar system mobile stapled to my ceiling. Jenna’s room has a matching model. We made them together about five months before she died. I remember she wanted me to help her make a real-life example of outer space using tennis balls and marbles. “Because when you die,” she said, “you float around with the stars. You don’t become worm-food!” Which is what the kids in Cancer Camp, told her. “When I die I’m going to heaven,” she explained. And because neither my parents nor I could describe what heaven was like she decided it looked like outer space, except with pink puffy clouds shaped like marshmallows. And those marshmallows are what I’m staring at when Sheila says, “You’re coming out tonight.”
She hisses at the yipping dog I can hear in the background and yells, “This is my bed. Stay off it.” And then I hear the clipping sound of tiny nails on the hardwood floor just before her bedroom door slams.
Sheila’s more of a cat person.
“I have Spanish homework,” I say and she laughs.
“Well, he’s not Spanish but he does have these incredibly sexy eyes.”
“No,” I say. “I appreciate the invite — ”
“No you don’t,” she interrupts. “But you’re coming out anyway.”
“Sheila—”
“Livy! Listen. You had your blood test today, right? And you could potentially be getting your bones scraped, what, like any day after that… so I think you should come out with Grant and me tonight. He’s bringing a friend, a friend I approved, by the way.” When I stay silent she adds, “You don’t even have to say anything to him. Just sit at the table, eat your bubblegum ice cream and look gorgeous. He’ll love you, I promise.”
Grant is Sheila’s sometimes-boyfriend, which means that sometimes, when she wants a boyfriend, they go out. And when she doesn’t want one, she sees other guys. Somehow she gets guys to agree to this. I think it’s because she’s so pretty and fun, but my mother has her own theory, one she doesn’t share with me. Instead she purses her lips whenever I mention Sheila’s name. She’s a firm believer in: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” What she doesn’t realize is that when her eyes get all tiny and her nostrils flare I know she’s holding back the not nice things. And all those not nice things make it so that we never talk about Sheila.
“Did you hear me, Livy?” Sheila says to me. “I mentioned ice cream.”
“We’re going to Molly’s?” I ask.
“Who loves you?” she answers back. Just before she hangs up she adds, “I’ll pick you up in thirty.”
An hour later I’m sitting in a booth at Molly Moon’s. The ice cream shop is crowded, but it always is. You’d think in a place this cold and wet the locals would stick to the coffee houses. I’ve ordered a large cup, which made Ryan, Grant’s friend from
hockey, raise his eyebrows and smile. But now that it’s sitting in front of me, I don’t want it.
“Hey Livy,” Shannon, the owner of Molly’s, calls out to me in between helping other customers. “How’s Bubblegum Jenna taste today? We added more bubblegum, can you tell?”
“It’s great,” I say and then force another bite down, even though it’s so sweet it makes my stomach churn. I should have ordered chocolate.
Sheila grabs the ice cream cup out of my hand and takes a big bite. “Yours is better,” she says around a mouthful of bubblegum and then she slides her pistachio nut toward me. I give her a grateful smile because Sheila hates bubblegum ice cream.
Molly Moon’s was my sister’s favorite place. They even named a flavor after her, which means in the world of Molly Moon’s, Bubblegum Jenna is now immortal.
I take a bite of pistachio nut and it slides down my throat, cold and tasteless.
“So you must come here a lot,” Ryan says and Sheila bursts out laughing.
“Why don’t you ask her her sign, Ry? Or perhaps, where she’s been all your life?”
“What? I…” Ryan’s face fills with confusion, which only makes Sheila laugh louder.
“I do come here a lot,” I say, turning my back so that I can block out Sheila’s smug expression. “Ice cream is my favorite.” And my best. The words pop into my head but I somehow manage to keep smiling. “What flavor did you get?” I ask, even though I know just by looking into his cup he got banana chunk.
“Do you wanna try a bite?” He holds his spoon out toward me, and then blushes. “I mean, you can use your own spoon if you want.”
“That’s alright,” I say, shying away from his spoon. If I’ve learned anything from the kids at the hospital it’s how to keep my germs to myself. “It’s making me kind of cold, actually. I think I ate too much.” Ryan takes that as a personal invitation to move closer to me and pretty soon his leg is pressed up against mine.
