by Deb Caletti
She handed me a cup, which I held but ignored. Mrs. Martinelli sipped. “An inferior product,” she said. Her top lip was spotted with dampened chocolate dust. Ginger still sat at her feet like one waiting slipper. She was apparently still hoping for food, the only thrill of her little day. I always thought it was sort of sad, how thrilled dogs were to have their two meals. Then again, I’d had days where there’d been less excitement.
“Mrs. Martinelli. What you’ve done …” How to get this through to her? “You’ve maybe given away everything. Everything, okay? For nothing. These people have sold their ‘plantation’ countless times, all right? Countless. We’ve got to contact some authorities. You’ve got to get your money back somehow. Get that sign out of the yard… .”
“You don’t understand. Poor Morin Jude. Her father was murdered on that business trip to France. By his own business partners.” She drew her finger against her neck to demonstrate. Poor Morin Jude, all right. Thousands upon thousands of dollars richer.
I sighed. I rubbed my forehead the way Mom always did when there was nothing else to be done. This was a disaster. “You’re going to get hurt here. Please. I care about you; can’t you hear me?”
She put on her glasses, read the ingredients of the box, sighed, then put it back down. “Scarlet, should we stay in this house and just move one day closer and another day closer to being dead?”
I looked into her eyes. I saw that same small, vulnerable person I had seen in Kevin Frink’s. Maybe we all just wanted someone to believe in. That’s all each of us wanted, and it should be so simple, but it never was simple.
“You gave away things to people who don’t have your best interests at heart, Mrs. Martinelli. We can’t give away things to people like that. Your money—you may never see it again.”
“You wouldn’t believe what this has done for our sex life,” she said. She snapped her fingers.
I wanted to clap my hands over my ears. “Oh God.”
“Oh, don’t be a prude, Scarlet. Birds do it, bees do it, even old ladies do it.” She rolled something in her cheek. “They call this a marshmallow?”
“Maybe I should talk to Mr. Martinelli,” I said.
“He’s not here,” she said. “He’s at the consulate picking up our passports. Then he’s dropping off the Buick at Bill Rogers’s house. He paid more than what it was worth. The minute this house sells, we’re outta here.”
I had to get on the phone. There must be something that could be done. It was wrong; that was all. People just couldn’t be taken advantage of like that.
“Swiss Miss,” Mrs. Martinelli scoffed.
“I don’t know what to say,” Mom said. Shoes were strewn all over the rug in my mother’s room, and blouses were tossed onto the bed in small mountains of rejection. I had those moments, too, when nothing, nothing looked right or felt right. “I think you have to let other people have their own disasters.”
“Juliet talked to you,” I said. Her words weren’t just about the Martinellis; that was obvious.
“You can’t fix it all, Scarlet. A person can’t hold that much in their own hands. I wish you could.”
“Why can’t a person? I’m sorry; I don’t get that.”
“Why?” She looked at herself in the long mirror on the back of her door. “It’s just, you’ve got to …” She turned back to me. “I don’t know, the idea that we can control things is wishful thinking. Sometimes, there’s nothing that can be done. You can let go; that’s all. Maybe that’s the most important thing to do.”
“That’s chicken shit,” I said. “When something bad is happening, you don’t just give up and let it happen! We know that. We’re taught that. Can you imagine a movie where there’s this big war between good and evil and the fighters of good just say, ‘Oh well, there’s nothing that can be done.’ Film over.”
She gave her outfit a dissatisfied glance in the mirror, turned, and looked at me dead-on. “A different film would start. Maybe a more real one. Bad guys do win. Things aren’t fair. There isn’t always some great big terrific something that happens to make everything turn out right.”
“I know that,” I said. It came out sounding sarcastic and childish. Maybe I didn’t really know that or, at least, completely believe it.
“Sweetie,” Mom said. She sighed. She sat down on the edge of her bed. I looked at her in her confused clothes. She seemed very tired. She had only one shoe on. “We don’t always get what we want.”
This scared me. The one shoe, the sighing, the discarded clothes—it looked like defeat. But what scared me even more was the change in her message—the message we’d heard from the time we were small. You can have anything you want. If you thought positively and set your mind to it, anything was possible.
“Mom,” I said. “Do you hear yourself? You have to believe in your own power to make things different. You told us that! What about conviction? There’s proof, I’ve read about it—thinking positively, setting goals, believing in yourself—people can cure their own cancers! You’re the one who said we could do anything we set our mind to … we could have what we wanted if we believed and worked hard.”
“Optimism can get you into a lot of trouble. You can put your belief in places it doesn’t belong. You can work hard to fix things that you can’t fix. I’m not sure that kind of optimism is always the best thing. Positive thinking, hope—it needs better guidelines. It needs rules.”
Something had changed in her, and I wasn’t sure what it was or when it had happened. But I didn’t like where this was going, not at all. Hope and belief were the good guys. Weren’t they? If you went to the other side, if you left persistence and optimism in the dust, what could happen? Could Dean Neuhaus happen? What would fate do, what would you do, if you set down those Laws of the Universe, the capital T Truths? Because maybe in the old days you weren’t supposed to say the world was round, but now you didn’t mess with determination and willpower and reaching goals and thinking positively. What she had said—it was a modern sort of burned-at-the-stake heresy. Everyone knew that those things were the right things.
“God, Mom. Cynical.”
“Maybe I’m getting my period,” she said. “Or having an epiphany. Does this look awful?”
“You’re only wearing one shoe.”
“You’re right.”
“What is this? Big date?”
“Dean’s taking me out to dinner. He has something important to ask me.”
My stomach dropped. It was beginning to make sense, the clothes, the strange talk, the resignation. Please, no. It wasn’t possible, was it? Was she giving up hope of something better? She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t marry him, would she? She couldn’t. Maybe I’d been watching the wrong disaster in the making. Maybe it was Mom I should have been saving all along. “What does he want to ask you?”
“I don’t know, Scarlet. It could be anything.” But when she looked at me, I saw the lie on her face. It sat there plainly. It was as obvious as spilled red wine on a white tablecloth.
I didn’t know what to say. Dean Neuhaus would shatter us. When she finally spoke, it was more to herself than to me.
“Oh, the power of imminent loss,” she said.
I went to my room, folded about eight paper cranes, fast. Four for me, four for Clive Weaver. It was sort of like praying, only in origami. The ceiling of my room was getting full, a purple and red and yellow and green sky of swaying paper birds. I stood on my bed, taped these up with the others. Let that keep all of the badness out.
If Dean Neuhaus moved in with us, I would move out. I would find my father, maybe. I imagined this—a phone call, an invitation. Or else, Hayden would appear in my doorway. He’d look straight at me. He’d say something simple, but charged. Let’s get out of here. I’d grab a few things, follow him out to his truck. The fantasy got a little hazy after that, except for a long highway and the feel of his jeans under my hands. It was stupid the way a fantasy could actually make you feel better for a while, even if i
t wasn’t real. You had a few minutes when you could really just feel it, and it was actually terrific.
The paper sky was crowded. Like the rain forest canopy that protected all of the delicate living things underneath. We needed protection. Right then, we had no canopy, no ozone, no anything. There were only the straight, hot, poisonous rays of the sun beaming down.
My phone rang. Nicole.
I stared at her name on the screen until the very last possible moment when I finally answered. A part of me was ready for just one more thing to go wrong. It was that sick piece of me that says, go ahead. Bring it on. You feel disaster building and you push things a little further.
“Do you have a minute?” Nicole said. Her voice was everything cold. Icicles and the arctic and vast, empty polar regions.
“Go ahead. You might as well get mad at me too, since everything else is turning to crap now.”
She ignored this. But of course she ignored this. When did she ever actually listen to me? When did she hear my stories or support my problems or give? We’d been best friends since the fifth grade, when she had had that operation to fix the bones in her knees. Or something like that, the details escaped me—we were eleven. She was in a wheelchair for months, and then on crutches, and it was me who wheeled her around and fetched her lunch tray and carried her books and kept her company at recess when everyone else played. I was the one who for years afterward listened to her problems and helped her out of situations and into other ones—I even wrote that note she gave to Geoff Standish in middle school, declaring her love. Maybe I should have charged an hourly rate. Minimum wage times all of the hours I’d been her friend. People like me were made for people like her. Maybe I was having an epiphany too.
I could hear Nicole breathing. “I just want to say, any person who would do what you did is not what I would consider a friend.”
“And what did I do? What exactly did I do?”
She let out a disgusted sigh, the one that’s somewhere between a cough and a choke, when it sounds like you’ve got a revolting thought caught in your throat. “I think you know full well, Scarlet.”
“I talked to someone who wanted to talk to me. I don’t think you have a relationship with Jesse that requires actual loyalty.”
“I have one with you that requires loyalty.”
I stumbled. For a moment I had no idea if she was right or not. But something was building in me, too, my own momentum. Hayden and Juliet, and Ally Pete-Robbins and Clive Weaver, and the Martinellis’, and now the threat of Dean Neuhaus, of Mom and Dean Neuhaus forever and ever … Anger was there, suddenly, sitting right at the surface. The kind of anger that explodes things. “You have a relationship with him in your mind. That’s all. It’s not even real.”
“It’s real to me. My feelings are real.”
“You think he should like you simply because you want him to. You want him to, big deal. It doesn’t work like that. Other people get a say. You can’t just force your way onto someone else.”
She started to cry. Great. Great! I didn’t have a chance now. So much for anger! So much for speaking your mind! “I can’t believe how mean you’re being.”
My will and my fury were shoved aside by guilt. It was that easy. I could feel the anger there, turned down to a sudden simmer, but the guilt had gotten bigger and louder. “I’m sorry, Nicole.” I wasn’t a mean person. Hurting anyone was the last thing I ever wanted.
I tried again. “It’d be like saying I have to hate who you hate, or …” Wait. I did have to hate whom she hated. We stopped being friends with Ashley Brazlen when Ashley didn’t invite Nicole to her sleepover when we were fourteen.
“I just, I think …” She was crying hard now. I felt like shit. “I’m sorry, okay?”
“I talked it over with my mom, and I think we need to stop doing things together for a while. You can’t just let people think they can stomp all over your feelings.”
“What?”
“I think our friendship is over,” she said.
I was stunned. “Nicole, wait …” I mean, we’d been friends for years, no matter what. It was practically like your sister saying she wouldn’t be your sister anymore, or your mother or your father …
I felt a little panicky. I didn’t want her to just go off and leave. It seemed suddenly very, very important that she not. All of my earlier bravery turned to dust. “Please,” I said.
But I heard only dead air—no breathing, no fuzzy telephone background noise of traffic or televisions. Only the quiet that meant that someone was gone.
That night, I called Jasmine. I wouldn’t ordinarily have called Jasmine, but I did. I was unsure and abandoned and my conscience was bothering me, and if Jasmine was on my side, it might mean that none of those feelings was necessary. Jasmine didn’t answer—I got her chirpy voice mail and I didn’t leave a message. I called Kiley. No answer. And then I did something else. I called Erin Redfly, this girl I used to be friends with in the sixth grade. We had nothing in common anymore—she was a volleyball player and was always traveling to far-off cities for some kind of tournament that would get written about in the Parrish Island Courier. Her picture would be there sometimes, her body extended and her arm raised as she reached to spike the ball. My only experience with volleyball was in ninth grade PE, when I was yelled at en masse by my team whenever the ball would splat right at my feet.
She answered the phone. I told her I’d been thinking about her, which was a lie. I never thought about her. She told me about a tournament they’d just come back from in Bellevue. There was an awkward empty pause that I finally filled by asking how her mother was. Her mother had given me a ride home once when I felt sick during the sixth grade Valentine’s Day party. She said we ought to get together sometime, which made me immediately regret calling.
I stayed in my room most of the night. I usually liked being in my room—I liked the cave comfort of being tucked away, knowing that Mom’s knock or the phone ringing were the only possible intrusions. But that night, my room felt too much like me, and it was me I needed an escape from. I sat in the living room, and then in the backyard in the cool night, and then went back to my room. No matter where I went, there I was. I was lonely but didn’t want company. Everyone was out, anyway. Hayden and Juliet had gone to Long Time No See, a small movie theater downtown with creaky rubbed-bare red velvet seats. They showed only old movies—Kramer vs. Kramer had been showing for almost a month and before that, Zorro.
I wasn’t even in the mood for Zeus’s companionship—he would have been too kind and warm and soft, loving me when I didn’t feel deserving of it. Instead, he slept right up against my door, as close as he could to the only other creature in the house. I could hear his elbows and knees banging against the wood as he shifted around and his sighs through his nose, which sounded world-weary. He couldn’t have the actual me, so he took what he could and tried to be satisfied.
I heard Juliet and Hayden come in. Or rather, I heard Zeus’s toenails scrambling and scurrying like crazy against the wall—sometimes he had trouble getting all of his parts going in the right direction. Finally, he was up and barking even when he wasn’t supposed to and there was the sound of the front door and coats coming off and then silence except for a little stern crooning to Zeus from Hayden. Juliet said something sharp, I can get it! and I knew they were fighting again. The tension came right up the stairs. It was clear to me that when Buddy Wilkes was in her thoughts, they fought, and when he wasn’t, they didn’t. He was a wall between them, and Juliet didn’t always mind walls.
The hollow hum of voices downstairs went on and on and finally stopped. At 12:00 a.m., my mother arrived home, the exact time she always did when she went out with Dean Neuhaus. Maybe she set her own curfew and she’d be in big trouble if she broke it. I heard her car, and then the engine turn off, and the key in the door. I heard her clink down her purse on the counter, her steps sounding tired on the way to her room, the click of her door as it shut.
I had a h
ard time sleeping that night. My feelings seemed hard to grasp and name, except for some sort of guilt and grief, which curled inside like ignited paper. It wasn’t that I actually felt I had done something bad to Nicole. I wasn’t even really sorry for what I did. But her going away had left me with this aloneness, an alarming aloneness, an abrupt, scary empty-something, like the time when I was four and I lost my mother’s hand in the crowd at the Parrish Island Fourth of July parade. I’d been so scared. It was alone-forever-and-ever scared.
This time it was me who got up and put on a sweatshirt over my tank top and pajama shorts. Maybe I was hoping that if I went outside and stood with my confusion out by Hayden’s truck that he would also come, the same as I had when he stood there with his. Kevin Frink’s Volkswagen was parked down the street, sitting cold and dark, and I wondered if he had sneaked into Fiona Saint George’s room. The streetlights made the Martinellis’ FOR SALE sign look as bright and white as the moon. By then I was honestly and completely hoping for Hayden’s appearance, his toe kicking the ground, his eyes looking up to the sky, his cigarette, even. There were no maybes about that hope, except for one: Maybe it would be for the best if he didn’t appear right then. I wasn’t sure I could be trusted.
I was hoping so hard that I was shocked when it was actually Juliet who appeared. She came out through the side fence and started heading down the driveway without seeing me. She wore one of Hayden’s jackets, his denim one, over a tossed-on dress. I hadn’t realized how big she had gotten—they had gotten—her and Jitter. The streetlights and the night shadows showed her solid roundness and curve of her back in some way that the daylight never did. Her hands were shoved into the pockets of Hayden’s jacket. She walked fast; she knew where she was going.
“It’s one a.m.,” I said.
She froze, her hand to her chest. She spun around. “Jesus, you scared me,” she said.
“It’s one a.m.,” I said again.
“What are you doing, spying on me?”
Only a guilty person would have thought so. The psychology books have a word for it. “Projection,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t know what I meant. “Not everything is about you, anyway.”
