At least she hadn’t told them how she ended up in rehab. Lise wouldn’t be riding with her if she had.
Only good had come out of it, she thought, no real permanent damage. She had to block the vision of the crash from her mind, snap it off with a shake of her head. Some days she didn’t want to think at all, just exist.
“Red light,” Lise informed her.
“Sorry,” Meg said, stopping well over the white line. “I was thinking.”
Lise didn’t ask what about, instead said something about the light being new, a ready-made excuse. It seemed everyone felt sorry for her except Jeff. She wished they didn’t. Her counselor was right—it was what she had to fight in herself, lying back in that soft bed of self-pity, as if she’d been the victim all along.
The light changed and she led the line behind her across, braked and turned into the busy lot of the Blockbuster, the driveway riding over the sidewalk. Beside her, Lise glanced at a jacked-up four-by-four in one of the handicapped spaces and clucked her tongue. Meg thought it was probably just some kid dropping off. Unlike the sticklers in rehab, she was inclined to let people slide on little things. If she’d learned nothing else, it was that there was no gain in being right.
“You have the card?” Lise asked as they walked across the lot.
“Right here.” It was the cottage’s card, still in her father’s name. In all her years of renting, no one had ever questioned her. That he was dead would mean nothing to them, as long as they got paid.
Like the Book Barn, the place was teeming, except here most of the people seemed to be local, and younger—girls in windbreakers advertising high school softball teams, guys in faded baseball caps with ridiculous sideburns, two heavy women in their twenties with pink denim jackets and fanny packs. They leapfrogged each other down the wall of new releases, some of which were a good three years old. Above them, monitors suspended from the ceiling blasted clips urging them to rent films that had clearly bombed despite their hot stars. With its noise and motion and its thin red carpeting, the place had the same distracting atmosphere as a casino. At home, Justin would have asked to tag along so he could rent a video game, and Sarah would have refused to go, telling her to look for some teen thing the name of which Meg would never remember, but here the mission was simple: two movies both the kids and the grown-ups could enjoy.
By the letter C, they were discouraged. Most of the boxes described violent, titillating films that neither children nor self-respecting adults wanted to watch. Her mother would not put up with Disney, and Lise said they’d just caught Mrs. Doubtfire on TV. There was a solid section, floor to ceiling, of Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Dolittle, but despite the store’s vaunted promise, it was sold out.
“The Nutty Professor?” Lise suggested.
“Seen it.”
“Star Trek Next Generation?”
“At least three times.”
“They never have anything.”
The selection only got worse as they went down the alphabet. One of the actresses on what Meg could only call soft porn looked strikingly like Jeff’s girlfriend Stacey, so much so that she almost picked up the box to make sure it wasn’t her, except Lise would see. It couldn’t be—Stacey was a senior sales analyst—but inside, Meg jumped at the possibility of finding evidence against her, as if by proving she was a fake Jeff would see that he was wrong and come back to her. The idea belonged to a Julia Roberts comedy, sweetness winning in the end, but there it was, indisputable. She’d believed in fairy tales. Regardless of what her counselor warned, she’d gone through rehab thinking everything would be all right once she graduated, and Jeff had let her. When she called, he was bubbly as a cheerleader, telling her they missed her, they loved her, they only wanted her to get better and come home. The call was the highlight of her week, her one link to the outside world, and when it was time to go, she didn’t want to hang up, and stalled.
“I love you,” she’d say.
“I love you too.”
“Give the kids a big kiss and a hug.”
“I will.”
There was a pause, an opportunity to say, Okay, good night, but it hung open between them, unused.
“I miss you,” she’d say, and they would start all over again. Later, she wondered if he’d been seeing Stacey then, and her righteous paranoia said yes, that he’d been lying all along, probably since the day they met. She knew that wasn’t so, but it might as well have been. Their good years together had been stolen from her.
She’d thought seriously of killing Stacey. Though now it seemed absurd, something from a B movie, she had entertained a simple plan—walking up to her in the parking lot at work as if she were visiting Jeff and shooting her before she could get her car door open, standing above her and emptying the gun into her, dropping it onto her body and walking away (not even kicking her face, that would destroy the effect). She didn’t think about jail. The plan didn’t go that far, only to the goal of killing Stacey. But these were just fantasies. In those days she was too busy keeping herself sane to do anything that involved complex thought.
And now here she was, back in the land of the free, sober and responsible, changed, and—she could admit—terrified of her new life as this alien person. Maybe the women in pink had come through worse, abusive parents giving way to brutal husbands. And who knew what the kids around them would run up against as they graduated and got married and had children of their own. They were so young, joking with each other in the rows, a girl chasing a guy around his friend, whacking him with a box, the guy stopping so she folded into him, both of them laughing. Meg wanted to tell them to stay that way, not to ruin themselves with stupidity and lying, to keep some nobility and hope for when they would need it.
“So much for that,” Lise said.
They had reached the skimpy Zs and turned to the store empty-handed, looking over the shelves of older videos broken down by categories, the art on the boxes sun-faded, the colors turning strange shades. She was always surprised by how many she’d seen. Somewhere in here were the classic drunk movies, The Lost Weekend and Leaving Las Vegas, and thousands of Hollywood affairs and divorces and car crashes, all true and untrue, all returning, in the end, to her.
“Let’s try Comedy,” Lise said.
“Good idea,” Meg said. “I’m in the mood for something mindless.”
17
They played double solitaire, facing each other, wrapped in their sleeping bags, settled in for the long afternoon with cans of soda and a bag of potato chips. The upstairs was gray, darkening as if it were winter. Drops dotted the window by the top of the stairs. They lay across their pillows, propped on their elbows, slapping the cards down on the horrible carpet, sometimes hitting each other in a flurry, laughing. And then nothing came. They turned over their threes impatiently, going nowhere. Six of clubs, eight of hearts.
“Jack of diamonds, jack of diamonds,” Ella chanted. “Come on, jack of diamonds.”
One two three, one two three—
“Here you go,” Sarah said, and they flailed away. The end was fast, but Ella put down the last king. They finished and counted up the different backs, not really keeping track. They shuffled and cut again.
“Ready? Go.”
Ella thought the rain had stopped, but then it picked up again, racing wild, drumming the roof like hooves. She was happy to be alone with Sarah, to have something both of them could concentrate on. She was convinced that at any second she would blurt out what she hadn’t even practiced in her mind, cutting it short before it could form. She would say it flat out, “I love you,” or “I’m in love with you,” or “I think I’m in love with you”—totally at random, dumping the news on Sarah like it was her problem.
Because she was. She was mad it had happened (as if she’d been tricked), but it had. She thought about her all the time, she wanted to be with her, she couldn’t sleep and then when she did she dreamed of her. All the symptoms fit, so there was no point pretending it wasn’t love. The question wa
s what to do about it.
The first answer that came to her was to do nothing, just be cousins, spend the week together and say they’d see each other soon, that they’d both write or, better, e-mail, knowing they wouldn’t. She could see herself back home, checking her e-mail every ten minutes. Sarah would be back with her boyfriend Mark, or with a new boyfriend. At least she didn’t say she loved him; maybe she was afraid of what Ella might think. But Sarah wasn’t afraid, Sarah wasn’t like that, and she and Mark weren’t really serious. It was up to Ella to make a move, and she knew that unless something big happened, she wouldn’t. The knowledge shamed her, made her feel weak and digusted with herself, but powerless to change things.
The second answer was to confess how she felt. Sarah might freak on her or they might talk. It was risky, too much thinking involved.
The third was simply to kiss her.
In her highest and lowest moments she preferred the third. It would be fast and honest, final. Her chances were the same anyway.
That was a last resort. Most of the time she navigated the space between the first two, trying to find a casual way of discovering how Sarah felt about being gay without being obvious. “So,” she’d say, “what did you think about Ally kissing Ling?” or “I didn’t think Ally kissing Ling was a big deal; I mean, she’d already kissed Georgia.” Those were the two best lines she had, and she was still looking for an opportunity to use them. Sarah didn’t seem to watch the show.
She wouldn’t do anything. It was too much of a risk, and this was probably just a crush (she wasn’t a lesbian, everyone in her class had been in love with Miss Friedhoffer). If Sarah told her mother, her mother would tell her parents and then it would be this huge thing. It was better if Ella just kept everything inside, private. It wasn’t that hard, she thought. She’d had her whole life to practice. It was only three more days.
They played. Sarah won, then she won. It didn’t matter to either of them, and Ella liked that. She could be happy just being with her. They didn’t have to do anything special. They didn’t even have to kiss. It was enough to be her friend. Things would last longer that way.
“What time is it?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know, three-thirty, four o’clock.”
Sarah pushed herself up and went to the dresser, taking her deck with her. She moved their nail stuff around, looking for something.
“Have you seen my watch anywhere?”
“Nope.”
Sarah leaned across the top of the dresser and looked behind it, then walked around bent over, checking the carpet, holding her hair back from her face with both hands. Ella got up and helped. She thought it might have somehow bounced under the dresser and reached underneath, but all she found was a green plastic letter A with a magnet in it.
“I remember those,” Sarah said. “We used to spell things on the refrigerator with them. I wonder where the rest are.”
It set them off on a search. Behind the striped beanbag chair beside the chimney sat an old box like the one in the attic at home where they kept their Christmas-tree ornaments. The box had been there since they were little, and probably before, because the toys inside were wooden and old-fashioned, trucks and dollhouse furniture made by Grandpa for her father and Aunt Margaret when they were kids. The cardboard had turned dark over the years, but she could still make out the marks of an orange crayon, a wobbly, unsuccessful star drawn by someone before she was born. Sarah hauled out a Tonka tow truck with a hook you could reel in like a fishing line, and handfuls of small colored blocks, and a naked Barbie with ribbons in her hair. There were Tinkertoy sticks and their biscuitlike connectors and green windmill fins, a set of plastic checkers missing most of the reds.
“Do you remember what we used to do with these?” Sarah asked, and pushed one of the checkers into her own cheek so the ridged rim left a circular print on her skin.
“Yes!” Ella said, and gave herself a matching tattoo.
At the bottom were milky marbles from a set of Chinese checkers and stray Legos and a few miniature pool balls from a table she barely recalled. They had used the cue sticks for swords and someone had gotten in trouble. “They must have thrown the table out.”
“I always hated that game,” Sarah said. “It wasn’t any fun.”
“Not like Sorry.”
“I remember Sorry!”
“It’s right downstairs,” Ella said, “right behind the TV.”
They agreed that they would have to play tonight.
“And didn’t we have like a fire engine?” Sarah asked. “A white one, the hook-and-ladder kind?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember.”
“I wish I could find my watch,” Sarah said, and Ella vowed to herself that she’d be the one to come up with it.
There were no more plastic letters. Someone must have thrown them away. They agreed that it was sad, that they should have kept them. Sarah remembered writing her name on the refrigerator with them. There was a red S. Ella wanted to find that for her too, to give it back to her and make her happy. They piled everything into the box and closed the flaps, but now they had something to do. They pounded downstairs and shuffled through the boxes for Sorry and Monopoly and Life and a new Jumanji they’d played maybe twice, even an old Chutes and Ladders that was almost flat.
“Now that is a stupid game,” Sarah said, and though she’d liked it better than Candyland, Ella agreed. Sometimes love was giving in to someone. She admired Sarah as she stretched to put the Splat box back and thought it would be easier if she were pretty herself.
But she wasn’t. She just wasn’t, and there was nothing she could do about it. She could look at herself in the mirror with her glasses off and squint all she wanted, she would never be beautiful like Sarah—the kind of beauty that just a glance could make Ella hold a hand to her heart as if she were dying. It felt like that, a shock and then a withering inside, her strength draining away. Last night Sarah had come to bed from the bathroom in her nightshirt with her hair freshly brushed and drawn to one side, falling along her jawline and down her front, and Ella had clenched her hands and gripped her pillow, crushed by how good she looked, by how faraway in her perfection she seemed—not unapproachable but unreachable, so much better than Ella, as if the two of them were from a different species, like the models on TV. Sometimes she resented Sarah for making her feel this way, but it wasn’t Sarah’s fault, just the way things were, and she felt foolish, and then Sarah said something or laughed or just looked at her, and Ella forgot everything. It was those moments she waited for, those moments she didn’t want to ruin. Like now, the two of them having fun.
In the living room, they poked through the basket of magazines and the drawers of the end tables, finding decks of cards and ugly coasters and old pens, then went over the mantel, the crusted batteries and heavy key rings and dishes of pennies dark as chocolate, the big box of wooden matches.
Sarah slid the box open and held up a match. “Dare me?”
“To do what?” Ella didn’t touch the matches at their house except when her parents had her light the candles for Christmas or Thanksgiving, and even then they supervised her the whole time, made sure she ran water over the dead match and left it in the sink through dinner just to be sure.
Sarah scraped one along the box and it caught fire. Ella shrugged, and Sarah tossed the match into the fireplace, where it flickered, still dangerous. “Now you.”
“What?”
“You light one.”
“Why?”
“Just do it,” Sarah said.
Ella did, acting bored. “So what?”
She blew it out before tossing it on the grate. Sarah’s was out now too. Both stayed on top of the grate, evidence against them.
“You ever smoke?” Sarah asked.
“Why would I want to?”
“Have you ever tried it?”
“No.”
“I have.” Sarah hunched closer as if it was a big secret. This was what Ella liked. “I was b
aby-sitting for these people and they left half a cigarette in the ashtray.”
“Eww.”
“Yeah, it was pretty gross. I don’t know how my mom stands them. Come on, I’ve got to show you something.” She took off up the stairs like it was a game, and Ella raced after her.
Sarah was kneeling by her mother’s bed, unzipping her mother’s backpack. She dug inside the main part, her whole arm lost.
“What are you looking for?”
“Wait,” Sarah said, and then stopped. “Okay, ready? Close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“Just close them.”
“Okay.”
“Now put out your hands.”
Ella did. She swayed like she might tip over.
“Keep them shut.”
Sarah put something light and made of paper in her hands. It barely weighed anything.
“What do you think it is?”
“A cigarette.”
“Nope. Good guess though.”
“Some kind of origami?”
Sarah laughed. “Open your eyes.”
It was a cigarette, but hand-rolled, a joint right out of her health book. It was the first one she’d ever seen in person. She dropped it as if it were lit, and Sarah laughed at her, throwing herself back on the bed.
“It’s not funny,” Ella said. The joint was on the floor, caught in the snarled yarn of the carpet. “Is that your mom’s?”
“Duh. She’s only been stoned every minute since she quit drinking.”
Ella sat down beside her on the bed, then lay back so they were both looking at the slope of the ceiling above them.
“That sucks.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You don’t get high, do you?”
Sarah raised up and looked at her like it was a dumb question, then dropped back down. “She says it’s safer than drinking. There’s a pipe in there too.”
Ella wanted to say she was sorry but didn’t think Sarah wanted to hear it again. She was mad at Aunt Margaret. She was supposed to be trying to get better. If she got arrested, who would take care of Sarah and Justin? In the middle of this, she realized they were lying next to each other, that all she had to do was roll over and hold her. She froze, aware of how close they were, their shoulders almost touching.
Wish You Were Here Page 29
