by Yvonne Prinz
Thirteen
The next morning I took my first pill of the day with a sip of water. It was the first day in a long time that I would take two pills a day instead of three. I wanted it to feel like the start of something new for me. I wanted to feel hopeful. I brushed my teeth and looked at my face in the bathroom mirror from all angles. My expression was pensive. Pensive was my default face unless I consciously arranged my features otherwise and stayed completely focused. I would have to try to remember to smile more. Why was smiling so hard for me? I produced a wide confident smile and started a conversation with the mirror. “Hi! My name’s Georgia,” I said. “Great to meet you. Fine, thanks. How are you?” I tried to look like the carefree, fun-loving girl in the deodorant commercial on TV. I turned around and looked back over my shoulder at the mirror. I swung an imaginary tennis racket and bashed my knuckles on the glass shower door. “Damnit!” I squeezed the pain away with my other hand. I looked in the mirror again. I was back to pensive.
After breakfast I went to my bedroom and sat cross-legged on the rug next to my bed. I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind. I took a deep cleansing breath in through my nose and out through my mouth. I repeated this ten times. I opened one eye. Rocket was panting warm dog-food-scented breath onto my bare leg. He wanted to go for a walk. What he really wanted was Fin, but Fin hadn’t been around for several days and I was a very distant second choice for a beach-walking companion.
I looked at Rocket’s eager face. “Sure. I bet he can throw a stick pretty far but does he know where the dog treats are kept? Does he?”
Damnit. I was thinking about Fin again. That was not supposed to happen today. I abandoned the cleansing breaths and grabbed my laptop off the floor. I checked my e-mail as though I were someone who got e-mails. No new mail. Lucky was really the only person who ever e-mailed me. Rocket stood up and barked once.
“Okay, okay. Let’s go.” Rocket ran for the back door. I clipped his leash on and let him drag me out the door and down the hill toward Sonia’s house. I hadn’t talked to her since our awkward phone call. There was a spiral of woodsmoke curling out of her chimney and her mom’s car was gone. I stopped along the way and picked a bunch of blackberries that had just come ripe, the first of the season. I pulled a plastic bag out of my pocket, meant for Rocket’s poop, and filled it with berries. Rocket watched me with interest. I knocked on Sonia’s back door and when she opened it I held up the bag of berries.
“Look.”
She smiled. Her hair, which was honey blond the last time I saw her and all her life, was now the color of the berries in the bag. I’d never known her to dye her hair before.
“Wow. Your hair.”
She touched her hair. “Yeah, it’s a bit dark but it’ll fade.”
“To what?” I couldn’t imagine.
“I needed a change. I just didn’t feel like being me anymore.”
“Mission accomplished. Come for a walk?”
Sonia held the door open for us, and Rocket tore off down the hallway. He sniffed the place out while I went into the kitchen and got a bowl out of the cupboard and dumped the berries into it. My hands were stained to match Sonia’s hair almost exactly. I rinsed them in the sink and watched the deep purple swirl down the drain. Sonia disappeared into her bedroom and reappeared with her hair piled on top of her head. Besides her face, which was now quite pale in contrast to the hair, something else about her looked very different. Her eyebrows. They’d been tweezed into an alluring arch, like a movie star’s. Plus, she was wearing lipstick. It was a deep-plum color. I studied her a moment as she pulled on her jean jacket and wrapped a bright-green scarf around her neck. She looked a bit tragic, but very pretty, like a French woman, like she should light up a cigarette and exhale in that exquisite way that actresses in French films do. I was certain that Fin had something to do with the new Sonia. Had he actually coaxed her into changing the way she looked?
Sonia knew I was scrutinizing her but she said nothing. “Shall we?” she looked at me.
“Oui!” I called for Rocket and he bounded ahead of us out the door.
Afterward, we walked over to the Heron for a coffee. We left Rocket passed out on the porch. Not once on our walk had either of us mentioned Fin, the elephant in every room. I was dying to ask her about him, but I forced myself to wait for her to bring him up in conversation. The restaurant was empty except for an older, well-dressed couple in the corner, enjoying a late breakfast. The sun beamed in through the tall windows onto the rustic wooden floor.
“So I guess you heard that Fin’s got a full-time gig with The Hot Club.”
I hadn’t heard.
“Wow. That sounds kind of permanent.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Are you happy?” Are you having sex with him? What’s that like? What’s it like to be naked with him? What’s it like to spend the night with him? That’s what I really wanted to know.
She looked away uncomfortably. “I suppose.”
I wondered when I would get up the nerve to ask her what she knew about Fin that she wasn’t telling me. Obviously he wasn’t just a friend of Lucky’s who was holding her hand through this. Now that some time had passed, I realized that it had to have been Fin who had chased her out onto the porch at the party that night. Hadn’t she said You shouldn’t have come? What was that all about? It was true. She’d still be wearing stained sweatpants and sleeping all afternoon if Fin hadn’t arrived with his extraordinary talent and his devilish charm and his extreme sense of goodwill. But there was something more to this. Something had happened in Australia between the three of them.
“Where’s he from, I wonder?” I tried to sound like I was just musing. Sonia waved at someone. I turned around. Karl had emerged from the kitchen, his breakfast shift over. He yanked the beer cooler open and put a Heineken down on the bar. He waved at me and grabbed a handful of spiced cashews from a bowl.
“I don’t know. Oregon, I think.” Sonia sipped her coffee.
“Really?” I think? How could she not know?
“Yeah, why?” she asked.
“No reason, just curious.”
Sonia looked at me like she wanted to say something.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing. It’s just that . . . oh, forget it.”
“No, tell me. Please.”
“It’s just that I don’t want my relationship with Fin to upset you. You seem a little revved up about it. I hope you understand how important you are to me. You’re my family. I love you. I would never let some guy come between us. I’ve told Fin that. He totally understands . . . and I get how you feel. I really do. I mean, he’s not Lucky, but you do know that he’s not trying to be . . . right?”
“Of course,” I said, but with very little conviction. I looked out the window at the restaurant garden. I’m revved up? If Fin were just “some guy” she wouldn’t have purple hair right now. I felt silly though. She thought I was looking out for Lucky, even though he’s dead. And, in a way, I guess I was. But I was also looking out for myself. I wished more than anything that Lucky had told me about Fin and what had happened between them on that road trip to Sydney. And now he couldn’t.
Suddenly Sonia’s eyes lit up and fixed on something over my shoulder. She smiled the smile I’d been trying for in the mirror that morning. And then Fin was standing next to our table.
“Two pretty girls. Lucky me,” he said. He leaned over and kissed Sonia on the lips. Her eyes flickered my way and then back to him. Fin straightened and he rested his hand on my shoulder. “Hi, George.”
“Hi.”
He squeezed my shoulder hard. “What are you girls whispering about?”
I looked away. He dropped his hand.
“Sit,” said Sonia. “Join us.”
“I can’t. I’m driving up to Petaluma with Miles to pick up a smoker he bought. I’d better go find him. I have to be back for my shift at four-thirty.”
“Okay,” she said.
“I’l
l see you later,” he said. “Bye, George.”
I smiled thinly.
Fin nodded hello to Karl, who was wiping down the bar, and then he disappeared through the swinging door into the kitchen.
Fourteen
Lucky stood in the foreground, waving at the camera. His friends looked on from behind him, laughing.
“Hey, everyone! Here I am Down Under. As you can see.” He gestured behind him. “I’ve fallen in with a disreputable bunch of scallywags, clearly not worthy of my company, but I took pity on them, poor disparate souls that they are.” The video was all shaky and the audio was pretty garbled.
Jesse turned the camera around to his own face, which appeared comically huge.
“Cocky, isn’t he? And did he say ‘Down Under’? I reckon we ought to take the bugger down a notch or two.” He turned the camera on a group of guys who piled onto Lucky, knocking him down into the sand.
“That’s it, lads,” yelled Jesse from behind the camera. “Show that Yank some Aussie love!”
My eyes welled up.
Jesse kept yelling and laughing from behind the camera.
The video had arrived by e-mail early this morning with this note:
George,
Came across this terrible video I took of all of us. I know it’s not much, we were just mucking about, but I thought you might like to have it. I recorded it a couple of hours before Lucky died. Apologies for the quality and for all the swearing. Cheers, J.
I paused the video on the pile-up of Lucky’s pals in the sand. I quickly located Fin in that pile. It was so strange to see his familiar face right next to my brother’s. I clicked “play” again.
“Get off me, you drongos,” yelled Lucky.
I got back into bed with my laptop. I pulled the covers up over my head, making a tent, and watched the video over and over. It was only a few minutes long and it ended with all of them grabbing their boards and heading into the water. I couldn’t stop watching that part where Lucky spoke to the camera. Having him here and alive and safe in my bed with me made me hang on every precious word. How many times had I told him to shut up? Now I wished he would just keep talking. Every time I pressed “play” again I hoped he would say a bit more. I wanted just a few more minutes with him. Then the tears finally came, rolling down my cheeks, soaking my pillow. I heard Rocket’s toenails clicking across the wooden floor. I pulled the sheet back and he pushed his face into my tent. He cocked his head to the side when he heard Lucky’s voice. I played the video again and he barked and wagged his tail. He smudged my laptop screen with his wet nose and then he tried to lap up my tears.
“I know, right, boy?” I patted his head.
Since Dr. Saul had reduced my dosage, my headaches were fading. The vice-grip on my skull had been replaced by a pressure against the back of my head, sort of like a hand pressing down, but not so hard that I couldn’t bear it. The world seemed to be coming into a sharper focus. The edges of things had returned. I loved the way I was starting to feel, like I was slowly unthawing after being numb for years. I wanted to feel a lot more like that. Not being drugged was like a drug. I was waking up. It didn’t matter that it hurt sometimes, the way it hurt to watch the video. I embraced it. And I wanted more of it.
Late the night before, while the house was quiet, I had pulled a steak knife from the cutlery drawer in the kitchen and taken it into my room. I closed the door and sat at my desk. I meticulously sawed several of the little white pills in half, being very careful not to crumble them. Dr. Saul told me never to cut the pills. I didn’t care. I put the tiny half-moons back into an empty prescription bottle and hid it inside a pair of socks in my sock drawer. As of this morning, I was down to one and half pills a day. It wasn’t like I was going cold turkey. I would reduce the dosage slowly, gently. My body wanted this. A new me was emerging.
I wondered if I should show Jesse’s video to my mom, but lately she’d been doing so well, I didn’t want to ruin it. Ever since the night Fin dropped by it seemed that everything about her had lightened: her mood, her clothes, she even seemed lighter on her feet. The deep lines of pain on her face had started to soften and she’d found her smile again. She was wearing her colorful scarves and necklaces too. She hummed while she worked and she was eating again. Our family routine, which revolved around my mom’s work, was falling back into place. I couldn’t help but think that Fin had something to do with it. To my mom, Fin was probably a lot better place of refuge than Lucky’s clothes or his bed. After all, Fin was a friend, a “good” friend of Lucky’s, but something about all of it seemed wrong to me.
I decided not to show her the video.
I was late for work. Katy would be calling. The store should have been open ten minutes ago. I finally closed my laptop and got out of bed, but I wanted to watch that video all day.
I got myself to the store and spent the day loathing my job. Fortunately, the store required little of me in the way of interacting with the customers. The candy speaks for itself. It’s over there. Help yourself.
I dialed the new, improved Sonia’s number. I wanted to tell her about the video. I thought she might want to see it. She picked up after several rings. She sounded sleepy.
“Hi George.”
“Did I wake you?”
“Nah, I have to get up. What’s up?”
“You know Jesse, Lucky’s friend in Australia?”
“Sure.”
“He sent me a video.”
She was quiet a few seconds. “Yeah? What kind of video?”
“Of Lucky and some friends, on the beach. Fin’s in it too.”
“Yeah?” she seemed nervous.
“Hang on.”
A customer, a very large flushed woman wearing flowered capri pants and a hoodie from the Monterey Bay Aquarium stood in front of me.
“Can I help you?” I asked, holding my hand over the phone.
“Yes. Do you have the nutritional information for the taffy?”
“Uh, nutritional information?”
“Yes, you should have it available to customers. It’s the law.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t. No one’s ever asked me for it before.”
“It’s the law.”
“Yeah. You said that. I can call my boss if you like.”
She looked annoyed. “It should be posted. Some people have food allergies.”
“Would you like a kite instead?” I offered.
I uncovered the phone. “Hey, I’ve gotta go. I’ll send you the video, okay?”
“Sure. Okay.”
The woman drifted off toward the taffy bins and started filling up a bag.
Fifteen
“Hey, Georgie.” My dad grinned at me from the driver’s side window of his truck. “Hop in.” He was wearing a wool beanie and polarized sunglasses.
I crossed in front of the truck and jumped in next to him. The cab smelled like the ocean when the ocean smells bad. I kissed his stubbly cheek.
“You looked lost in thought,” he said, as he steered the truck up the long hill to our house.
I shrugged “Nah. Just trying to remember if I set the alarm at Katy’s.”
“You want me to swing past?”
“No. I’m pretty sure I did. What’s new at the farm?’
He sighed heavily. “Busy busy. Can’t complain about the business but it’s a lot of work this time of year . . . tourist season. Most restaurants are doubling their orders. I guess I got used to your brother turning up every year around this time to help out. You know, I used to think that he would show up when he ran out of money, but now I realize that he showed up right when I needed him most.” He was quiet for a few seconds, like he was considering that. “Yeah, I’ll probably hire someone. I should have thought of that but I just . . . I don’t know.”
I did that too. I kept expecting Lucky to show up at the breakfast table. My dad expected him to pull up in his beater at the oyster farm.
When we got to the house, Fin’s truck was parked in our dri
veway again. My pulse quickened. My dad was oblivious. Here in False Bay, unexpected visitors are a matter of course.
“Looks like we’ve got company,” he said. He pulled up beside Fin’s truck and I jumped out and peered into the cab.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
There was a tennis ball on the seat, Rocket’s, and a bright green scarf, Sonia’s.
“I think I smell lasagna,” my dad said, pulling open the back door.
We heard my mom’s laughter coming from the kitchen. She was in the middle of telling Fin a story about a trip our family took to Mexico when Lucky was nine and I was five.
“. . . and then we finally locate our nine-year-old kid and he’s pulling himself up the side of this sheer cliff with a bunch of these crazy Mexicans who’ve been drinking tequila on the beach all afternoon. I started shrieking like a madwoman, running down the beach, waving my arms, and the little bugger, he waves at me and he yells something like, Hi, Mom, watch me jump, though I can’t hear him. So off the cliff he goes, arms flapping like a baby bird. I almost had a heart attack. Theo and I trip over ourselves to get to the water, ready to dive in, and his little blond head pops up like a cork and he swims to shore like an Olympian.” She laughed again and then she stopped abruptly and took a sip of her wine. She looked over her shoulder at us. “Hi, guys. Look who stopped by.”
My dad shook hands with Fin. I said hi, though I wanted to say, Why? Why do you keep showing up like this? It was pretty obvious he wasn’t here to see me. He smiled that smile I’d become all too familiar with.
A vase of freshly picked wildflowers sat in the middle of the table with a bottle of red wine next to it. My mom took another sip from her glass. There was another glass of wine in front of Fin, who was sitting in Lucky’s chair at the table. No one had sat in that chair since Lucky died. Fin was wearing a brown sweater. The cuffs were stretched out and it looked soft and worn. It was the kind of sweater that you’re compelled to touch even when a stranger is wearing it, even if it’s someone standing in front of you in line at the grocery store. It was all I could do not to reach out. Fin’s hair was tucked behind his ears, making him look especially earnest. In spite of everything, I wanted him to wrap his arms around me and kiss me right that second.
