by Sara Zarr
I’m not trying to be a cynic. I seriously wonder about this. Because after my dad died, I thought a lot about what a pathetic job I’d done of loving him, and I couldn’t figure out why I was so bad at it or what made it so hard. Then I thought maybe I didn’t really love him until he was gone. And that has made me wonder whether love is impossible until it’s too late.
Except I know love is possible, because I know my dad loved me and loved my mom. What I don’t understand is how he learned to do that so well and what I’m going to do now that he’s not here to show me. Maybe I can’t do it. Maybe I don’t have whatever it is it takes.
“You okay?” Dylan asks.
“Yeah.”
“What are you thinking about?”
I stay quiet a moment longer. This is my chance to say what I’m feeling and thinking and missing about my dad, a conversation Dylan’s been trying to get me to have for almost a year. Not that we haven’t talked about it some—when we’re talking at all—if you count me saying “yes” and “no” and “I don’t know” and “Can we please talk about something else?” Dylan doesn’t.
“Mandy,” I answer. She’s so easy to fall back on, even though I keep telling myself that I’m going to give her a chance or at least learn to tolerate her for two more months.
“Oh.” He scoots away from me a little. “She seems okay.”
“Aside from the lies and the fact that she ate all my peanut butter. What were you guys talking about? When you were looking at that picture?”
“I was telling her how your parents met.”
I tuck my hands under Dylan’s back to warm them up. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about him like that. I mean with her.”
He sighs, then asks, “What lies?”
“The baby is a girl.”
“Ah.”
“And due in seven weeks, not three.”
“Hmm.”
“Yeah.”
“Goes to show doctors aren’t always right, I guess.” He stretches across me to look at the time on his phone. “We should get dressed.”
I get up and collect my clothes from the floor. There’s no point in going on and on about Mandy and ruining what’s been an otherwise nice afternoon. Being with Dylan like this feels so natural. I never think about the fact that I’m naked—how my flab might look, or about the stray hairs on my thighs that I missed when shaving. It’s like we’re an old married couple.
I catch myself in the mirror on his door and say, “Hey. Where might a girl put a tattoo that she didn’t want her mother to ever, ever, ever see for as long as she lived?”
Zipping his jeans, Dylan comes over to stand behind me. He touches my pelvic bone. “Here?”
“Too sexy. The tattoo… it would be something to remember my dad by. So I don’t want it in a tarty place.”
He traces his fingers on my back. “You’re going to honor your dad with something he hated?”
True, Dad did always warn me against getting a tattoo. He’d gotten one when he was eighteen, right before his trip around the world, as a kind of send-off for himself. He claimed to wish he hadn’t. I thought it was cool, though. And the permanence of it is the point. You can’t un-take a trip around the world. Your father can’t un-die.
“It’s not like he’s ever going to know.”
Dylan looks at me in the mirror. “You don’t think he’s up there watching?”
I used to. But right now, I’ve never felt a sense of gone as absolutely as I feel it for him. I shake my head.
“You could put it where your bra would hide it. On your back. But then you wouldn’t be able to see it, either.”
I like that idea. Unless I wind up in the hospital or something, my mom’s not going to see it. And I don’t want to go around looking at it every second, constantly being reminded. It will be enough to know it’s there, as much a part of me as a mole, or a scar.
“I’m going to do it.”
Dylan doesn’t seem too sure. “Maybe you should think about it for a while. Like a year.”
“You love tattoos on girls.”
“True. Tattoos are rock. But that’s what I’m saying. Indestructible. Be sure.”
“There’s laser removal.” I step away from the mirror and finish dressing.
“I’ve heard that hurts like a mofo. And doesn’t always work, and leaves a mark, too.”
He’s right. That’s why my dad didn’t remove his. Also because he was cheap, and busy, and his tattoo—the planet Earth as seen from space, on his shoulder—was kind of big. I don’t know. Maybe I won’t get a tattoo.
“I don’t think doctors would be that wrong about the due date,” I say.
“What?”
“Mandy. She could be innocently clueless, or she could be trying to take advantage. I don’t trust her is all I’m saying.” I sit on the edge of the bed to lace my boots. “My dad wouldn’t have liked her. And that’s why I don’t want you talking to her about him.”
Dylan watches me for a few seconds, then sits on the bed next to me, quiet.
I finish with my boots. “Pick me up for school tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
I get up. He doesn’t move. “What?” I say.
He gives me the saddest look. It’s almost too much, but I stay strong, holding his eyes with mine. “Say it, Dylan.”
“I know he wasn’t my dad or anything? But I miss him, too.”
Mandy
Normally when Robin gets home after being out, she comes straight to me, wherever I am in the house, and asks me how I’m feeling. She asks how the baby is doing and what I ate and if I got any exercise and whether I read any of the books she got for me about taking care of yourself and the emotional things about giving birth. Sometimes we sit at the big wooden table in the kitchen and have a snack together, like organic muffins that don’t have much flavor or cheese that Robin’s careful to make sure I’m allowed to eat.
I like how she talks to me. We have conversations. My mother never had conversations with me. My mother told me things, and I told her things back. Like she would say, “Mandy, don’t stay in the bath so long. It’s a waste of water. Your grandmother used to say only floozies spend that much time in the bath.” Or I would say, “I need you to sign this paper so I can take driver’s ed.” No, what was the point, and did I think I was going to have my own car while I was in high school? Did I think she was going to let me use hers? Like that. Not really conversations.
Robin talks to me about how she’s going to change her schedule when the baby comes, and asks if I think the baby should go to preschool to get socialized or if it’s better to have a full-time stay-at-home mother? “It depends on the mother” is what I said when she asked. She laughed, and that’s another thing I like about Robin. She thinks I’m funny, but it’s not like she’s laughing at me.
None of the normal things happen today. Today she sets her shoulder bag down in the entryway and barely looks at me on the couch. “Hi, Mandy” is all she says before walking heavily up the stairs.
More than an hour later, she still hasn’t come down. I’m hungry. I could make myself a sandwich, but usually she cooks something. I start upstairs. If I phrase it like, I was thinking I could cook dinner tonight, she’ll probably realize what time it is and say, Oh no, honey. I’m coming down now.
Her door is cracked only a tiny bit, and her room is dark. Through the crack I can see her legs on the bed and hear her crying. Not like the big sobbing you do when something tragic and unexpected happens. It’s the quiet kind of crying that can go for hours, when over and over again you try to stop, try to tell yourself it’s going to be okay, but another part of yourself can’t stop thinking about the thing that’s breaking your heart.
Last time I went into someone’s room while they were crying, I was told to get out. This time I go back downstairs and put a pot of water on to boil for the organic whole-wheat macaroni-and-cheese mix Robin buys. She needs comfort food, I can tell. But she’s still not down when Jill comes home
and finds me in the kitchen, done eating, rinsing my bowl and putting it in the dishwasher.
“Hey,” she says, looking at the pot on the stove. “Where’s my mom?”
Jill never asks how I am. She didn’t even say good-bye when she left earlier with Dylan, who at least said, “It was nice to meet you.”
“Upstairs.”
She picks up some macaroni out of the pot with her fingers and puts it into her mouth. She has no sense of hygiene. I could remind her I’m very susceptible to infection right now, but instead I say, “Maybe you should go up and see her.”
I wonder if either of them knows about the time they spend crying in their separate rooms.
Jill wipes her fingers on her black jeans, leaving a faint orange smear. “Why?” Then she closes her eyes for two or three seconds, and her face goes from her usual annoyed expression to one that is so sad. “Shit.” The first time she says it is tired. The second time, her eyes now open, is mad. “Shit!” She slams the lid onto the pot.
“What’s wrong?”
And the way she stares at me, defiant, it’s like she doesn’t want to say. She folds her arms in front of her, clutching each elbow with the opposite hand. “Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years they would have been married, today. Thirty-three years if you count when they met and the years they lived together. Can you imagine seeing someone basically every day for thirty-three years and then one of those days…” She shakes her head and pinches her mouth together.
There’s so much anger in her eyes. I want to remind her that only a few hours ago Dylan was holding her like she was the most special thing in the world. Maybe that would make her feel better. I step back toward the dishwasher and close the door. The chances of me saying the right thing are not good. Still, I have to try, because I can’t pretend she didn’t just tell me about something important and awful.
“At least they had those thirty-three years.” It’s the wrong thing; Jill’s eyes go hard. “A lot of people never find real love,” I say to explain what I mean. “Or they find it, and it gets away before they experience any happiness.” I only want her to understand how lucky she and Robin are to have ever had Mac. Lucky that she had a father like that as long as she did.
She takes two quick steps toward me. Her face is inches from mine; I can smell the cheese sauce on her breath. “You don’t get to talk about this.”
My mother says that when another girl steps up to you, just smile and let her have the last word. My mother says it’s usually jealousy or her wanting something you have. But I can’t think of one thing I have that Jill, who has everything, could want. And I can’t smile when we’re talking about a tragedy.
“I only meant—”
“What did I just say?”
I put my hands on my belly.
“You,” she continues, “aren’t family.” She lets go of her elbows. Her hands shake. “To me you’re just an incubator for the one thing that might possibly make my mom happy.”
She turns, her boots squeaking on the tile. As she leaves the kitchen, I think about what I could say. Those aren’t last words I want her to have. I’m sorry, I could say. Or, Why are you so mad at me when I didn’t do anything? It doesn’t matter. She’s already up the stairs.
It was July.
The cornfields outside of town had come up green and tall like always, oceans of them. You would drive into the farmlands and think that the whole earth was made of these fields. I rode in the back of Kent’s pickup because my mother liked to be alone with him in the cab. I didn’t mind. The warm, moist air flowed over and around me as I watched the road unfurl behind us.
We’d left the city to go to the Riverbrook County Fair. Kent had an idea to maybe buy a horse. I don’t know why, and I don’t know where in Council Bluffs you’d put a horse, but Kent had a lot of ideas he didn’t think through. My mother said not to contradict your man. “Men are fragile,” she said. “They need a cheerleader, not a negative Nelly.”
When we got to the fair, Kent and my mother looked at the brochure and went off to the livestock show. Kent gave me twenty dollars and said to meet them back at the truck by sundown. They didn’t want me to come with them. I mean, they didn’t say that in so many words, but it was obvious, so I went in the opposite direction.
I saw him on the midway. I was looking for a booth where I could get roasted corn and lemonade, and I saw him.
He walked slow, wearing sandals, his shirt off and tucked into the back of the waistband of his jeans, a string of blue beads around his neck. It was his profile I saw because he was with his friends and had his face turned toward one of them, laughing. A big laugh, the kind that makes everyone look to see what’s so funny, and when I looked to see what was so funny he was tucking his shoulder-length hair behind one ear. I stopped walking right in front of them and stared.
One of his friends saw me staring and asked, “What’s the matter? You never saw Indians before?”
I didn’t answer, because I was still looking at him, waiting to see what he’d do next, waiting for him to look at me. When he did, his smile got bigger at first, then it went down, and his expression grew serious. He felt it, too, the air between us, the invisible lines that something or someone had drawn to connect us. That’s the way I remember it.
He spoke first. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
The friend who’d first caught me staring looked at him and then at me and watched us watching each other and said, “Always it’s the white girls.”
“Shut up, Freddy.”
One of his other friends elbowed Freddy. “Come on.” And to the boy I still stared at said, “See you later, Christopher, yeah? Or maybe never again?”
“You wanna walk around?” Christopher asked me, but we were already moving forward together, leaving his friends behind.
All day we walked and talked. I never talked so much to anyone. I told him about my father and about how it was for me at school but even with that I liked the school year better than summer because I could be out of the apartment. Everything I said to him was real. My real thoughts, my real feelings. He listened. He listened so well that I almost told him about Kent, but I didn’t want to ruin our day.
He bought me a sno-cone. He tried to win me something at the booth where you throw darts at balloons, but couldn’t. When we were walking away, a man in a baseball cap who’d been watching him said, “The balloons are underinflated and the darts are dull. You shoulda just thrown as hard as you could. Accuracy don’t matter.”
If someone had said something like that to Kent, he would have gotten embarrassed, then mad, and told the guy to mind his business and maybe a fight would start. Christopher only laughed and said, “Next time,” then held my hand and we kept walking.
On the Ferris wheel he put his arm around me, and I rested my head there between his shoulder and his chest, the way I’d always imagined I would in a situation like that. We watched people go by beneath us, and every time our car neared the top the world would get quiet, the music and crowds fading. When we got off the Ferris wheel, he said that there should be a Tunnel of Love. “At the state fair they have one,” he said, “but I never had anyone to ride through it with. Now I do and there isn’t one.”
We went through the haunted house instead, and in front of a dangling glow-in-the-dark skeleton he kissed me.
Outside the fair gates we made a path through the cornfield until we found a clearing. He spread his shirt on the ground and lay back, and I lay next to him. It wasn’t like with Kent, just the night before and always, fast and anxious and him reminding me not to make any noise so my mother wouldn’t hear. When Christopher touched me, it was like none of that had ever happened.
He took off my sundress and kissed me up and down and moved on top of me, so careful and slow, and I felt everything my mother says you’re supposed to feel, what I never felt before. After, Christopher took off his necklace and put it on me.
“Where do you live?” he asked, running his hand over
the swell of my hip, smooth brown skin on white skin.
“Omaha.” If you live in Council Bluffs, you should always say “Omaha” when people ask where you live, my mother says.
“That’s a hundred miles. I don’t have a car.”
“Do you have a horse?” I could picture him on a wild pony with no saddle, his hair streaming behind him as he rode into the city and swept me up to sit in front of him and gallop me away.
He laughed his big laugh. “No. I don’t live in a tepee, either.”
“I didn’t think that.”
We were on our backs, watching the tops of the corn shiver in the wind.
“You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. Those eyes.” He rolled over onto his elbow. “Stay here. We can live in the corn.”
I smiled. “Okay.” And he laughed a smaller laugh.
In the time since we first lay down, the sky had gone from blue to pink to purple. “I have to go.” I sat up and pulled my dress over my head.
He kissed my hand. My arm. My shoulder.
“Don’t forget me,” I said.
He told me the name of the town where he lived, the reservation. “Just ask for Christopher B. Everyone knows me.” He walked me almost to the parking lot, and then I told him he should go find his friends. I didn’t want Kent or my mother to see us. “Don’t forget me, either,” he said, and our hands separated, then our fingertips very last.
I went running toward the truck, gravel getting between my feet and my sandals. The necklace bounced against my collarbone. Kent stood outside the truck cab, impatient and getting ready to yell at me. I didn’t care.
I know it all sounds like a fantasy. But that’s how it was, and those are the things we said. It’s true. It’s mostly true.
And Jill should understand that, even if she can’t imagine it, there was at least that one day when I mattered.
Jill
Dylan and I sit in his car in the school parking lot as snow piles up on the windshield, gradually reducing the area of visibility until all we can see are the very tops of the heads of all the people going to class. Trudging to class, I should say, like prisoners of war off to the work camp to haul rocks with their frozen fingers, under the beady yet watchful eyes of corrupt guards.
