by E. R. Frank
“My Life as a Dog?” I say, looking at one of the DVDs. “What is that? My brother is so weird.”
“Big,’ Seth says, crunching into his Toffee Crisp and reading the title of the other movie. “Which one should we watch first?”
“My Life as a Dog will make you cry,” Ellen’s mother informs us, walking through the family room to get to the stairs.
“Out, Mom,” Ellen tells her, loud, and then she winces. Her ribs and the spot where her bra strap meets the cup must still really hurt. It creeps me out to think a tube poked right into her body there. I’ve seen the aftermath, once, when Ellen changed her shirt in front of me. It’s all this gauze and white tape and a wettish spot in the middle. She has to change it twice a day. Ugh. Poor Ellen. I saw her laugh at something Jason said at school earlier, and then immediately grit her face and almost cry.
“I never weep at movies, Mrs. Gerson,” Seth is saying now.
“Weep?” Lisa goes.
“Am I allowed to respond?” Mrs. Gerson asks Ellen.
Ellen shrugs. “A-parent-ly.”
“That movie will make every single one of you cry,” Mrs. Gerson announces. Then, at Ellen’s look, she speeds up, saying, “Yes. Yes. I’m going.”
So we watch Big. Seth keeps his arm around my shoulders the whole time. Ellen doesn’t even seem to notice. I stick my tongue out at her to make her notice.
“Mature,” she says out loud to me, but not like she cares.
“Shh,” Lisa goes.
Later I can tell that Ellen’s not even paying attention. Once, I see her eyes on the TV screen, but they’re all spaced out, and another time she’s braiding the tassels on the scarf around her neck.
Jason’s not into it either. He wanders around the Gersons’ bookshelves halfway through and pulls out something to read. When the movie’s over and everybody’s getting ready to go, Lisa starts teasing him.
“Since when are you such a bookworm?”
“That movie sucked,” Jason says.
“Are you kidding?” Seth goes. “That movie rocked.”
Jason slides his book back onto the shelf, using his body to hide it so that we can’t tell what it was.
“What were you reading?” Lisa asks.
“You’ll never know,” Jason tells her.
“I can’t believe you actually sat here and read a book while we watched a movie.”
“Anna’s walking me out,” Seth announces. “Don’t follow us. We’re going to be fooling around.”
“If you’re lucky,” I tell him, but I follow him to his car. We get in, and he leans over to kiss me.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Oh.” He sits up straight again. He looks bummed. I’m not really sure why I stopped him. I want him to kiss me, but when I think about him kissing me now, I think about us kissing later, and us being boyfriend and girlfriend, and I get tired. And then I think about Ellen and how tired she is all the time, and how, truthfully, she’s seemed not okay somehow, and I get more tired.
“So why did you come into the car with me?” Seth asks after a while.
“Because I like you,” I tell him.
“Oh.”
“It’s just … there’s a lot going on.” I’m not really sure what I mean.
“Cameron?” It’s the obvious thing.
“I guess,” I say.
“I know.” He looks at me sideways. “Did you see her?” At first I think he means did I see her car swerving. But then I realize he means did I see her dead.
“What kind of question is that?” I ask him.
“I just …,” he starts.
“Does it matter if I saw her?” Does he only like me because Fm some sort of reverse celebrity now? Because I’m some story?
“Anna. Whoa. I didn’t mean to …”
“Does it matter if I saw her!” Does he think he gets status if he can go and tell everybody all the gory details? “Seth!” I’m shouting. Really shouting. “I’m asking. You. A question!”
He looks like I’ve just smacked him. “I was only …”
“Forget it,” I tell him, opening the car door. “Just forget it.”
The others are gone when I get back inside. Ellen and I set up our sleeping arrangements in her temporary downstairs room. Actually, I set things up, while Ellen watches and rubs Whitey across her chin over and over. She gets the bed, obviously. I sleep on the blow-up mattress, inside a sleeping bag.
“I saw which book Jason was reading,” Ellen goes after we’ve turned out the light.
“What was the book?”
“The Bauble.”
“The what?”
“Think about it, Anna.”
“I’m not in the mood to think. Just tell me.”
She sighs. “The Bible.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Is he religious?”
“I have no idea.”
“He’s into philosophy, you know.”
“I know. And stealing.”
“What?”
“He didn’t put it back. The Bible.”
“He didn’t put it back on your shelf?”
“Nope.”
“But we saw him put it back.”
“It’s not there now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
We’re quiet, and I think she’s almost asleep, but she’s not. “Let’s not tell anyone,” she says. “Okay?”
“About Jason?” I go. “Of course not.”
“It’s a weird secret to keep for someone,” Ellen says. “You know?”
“Yeah.”
“That they were reading the Bible.”
“Yeah.”
“That they stole a Bible.”
“Right.”
“But he definitely didn’t want us to know he was interested in it. And he’d never tell something we wouldn’t want him to tell, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“Besides,” Ellen adds. “Nobody in my family’s going to notice a missing Bible anyway.”
We’re quiet again, and this time I’m sure she’s asleep, only Fm wrong.
“Did you and Seth have a fight?” she asks.
“We’re not even really going out to have had a fight.”
She’s too smart to buy that. “What was it about?”
I feel how wide awake I am. “The accident.”
“How could you have a fight about that?” Ellen asks.
“We just did.” Then it doesn’t seem fair not to tell her more. We tell each other everything. “He wanted to know if I saw Cameron dead,” I say.
“Oh,” Ellen says. “Did you?” Coming from her, it doesn’t seem like such a bad question. She was there too. She got hurt too.
“No,” I tell Ellen. And I can hear the screaming, stopped. I shiver and zip the last part of my sleeping bag to get warmer.
“I’m sorry I passed out,” Ellen says.
“What?”
“I’m sorry I passed out.” Her voice is sort of breathless, like she’s been on a StairMaster or something. “I was thinking that I escaped the worst of it by passing out, and you were on your own.”
“No,” I tell Ellen. “No way. I never thought of it like that. No.”
“I’ve been sort of thinking that.”
“You nearly died,” I say, and I concentrate on not starting to cry. “I only got some stupid blood in my eye. Plus, I was driving. I could have done something different.”
“I might not have passed out like that if I hadn’t been so drunk.”
“Even if you hadn’t passed out, there’s nothing you could have done.” I hear her smacking her pillow. She can never get her pillow the way she likes. She’s always smoothing it or plumping it or something.
“Were you terrified?” Ellen asks after she settles things with the pillow.
I think about it. I try to think about it the way she would. The way Jack thinks I should, the way Jason likes for people to do. I really think about it.
“I’m more terrified now,” I say.
I’m on Ocean Road and there’s a glass ponytail slicing into my eye, and there’s the earth dangling above me in the dark sky, and there’s screaming and screaming and screaming, and there’s Jack, giant size, with tree trunk legs planted wide and tree branch hands up and out like a good monster traffic cop’s, and there’s a tidal wave of salt water and blood about to destroy us, and there’s screaming and screaming and screaming, and then the screaming stops.
“Anna, wake up!”
The lights are on. Mrs. Gerson is shaking my shoulders. “Anna!”
“I’m awake,” I say. My heart is going wild.
“You’re soaked,” Mrs. Gerson says. “Soaked.” I don’t know who she’s talking to. I look over at Ellen, half sitting up in bed.
“Are you okay?” she asks me. I touch my face. It’s wet. My heart is like a little animal trapped inside my chest.
“Did I wake you up?” I ask. My body is shaking again. From tip to toe. My whole body.
“You could say that,” Ellen says sarcastically.
“Was I really loud?” I ask them. A tidal wave and my brother and screaming, stopped. I could vomit.
“Freight trainish,” Mrs. Gerson says. “Get up, now. i’m running you a bath.”
“A bath?” My heart starts to slow down.
“Mom, you can’t make her take a bath,” Ellen says. The shaking turns more into a slow shudder.
“For God’s sake, Ellen,” Mrs. Gerson goes.
“It was just a nightmare,” I tell her. “i’m okay. Really. I don’t need a bath.” But actually, a bath sounds sort of good.
“You are not okay,” Mrs. Gerson tells me. She looks at Ellen. “And neither are you.” She leans over and kisses Ellen’s head and then touches her cheek. When Ellen shakes her off after a second, those tears sliding out of the corners of her eyes, her mom sighs at her in this nice way. Then Mrs. Gerson turns to me again, takes my hand, pulls the twisted sleeping bag off my legs, and tugs me to a stand. “Neither of you is okay.”
14
I DON’T KNOW WHaT MRS. GERSON SAID TO MY PARENTS, BUT IT’S a week later, Thanksgiving is in five days, and Jack, Ellen, Mr. and Mrs. Gerson, and I are all on a plane to Florida. We’re going to some resort “to get away and recuperate,” as Mrs. Gerson puts it.
“Isn’t it weird,” Ellen’s saying to Jack, “how Anna and I have been best friends for years, and you and I have barely ever said a word to each other?” Her back is to the window and her leg is stretched out in my lap. That cast is heavy. We got to board first because of it, and we’ll get off last.
“Same with Anna and Rob,” Jack answers. He’s across the aisle from us.
“That’s only because Rob never talks,” I say.
“He talks,” Jack says.
“Barely,” Ellen goes.
“I hate peanuts,” Jack tells us, holding his mini package of them by the edge.
“Since when?” I ask him.
“Since always.”
“I didn’t know that,” I tell him. “I hate peanuts too.”
“So does Mom.”
“Ellen loves them,” I say. “Give her yours.”
Jack gets his own room. Ellen and I share. There’s a pool with purple and red tiles checkered around its sides and a swim-up bar where you can buy drinks and sandwiches and chips. The beach and ocean are through a gate and down a stone path. There’s a huge, round floating trampoline anchored beyond the breakers pretty far out. We never had that when we were little. It looks like fun.
The Gersons keep their distance from us, except at dinnertime, when we all go out to eat. They let us order wine, and I notice Ellen motioning the waiters to fill her glass every time it gets near half empty. Other than dinner, when they pass by us, Mrs. Gerson makes either a shooing motion or else puts up her hands, as if we’re throwing eggs at her.
“Recuperate,” she orders. “Recuperate.”
Mr. Gerson brought a Monopoly game, which I never would have thought of, but we take it from him and set it up by the pool. We arrange things so that Ellen can prop her leg in the shade but sunbathe the rest of her. She still has a jumbo-size square gauze bandage underneath her bikini where the strap meets the cup, but it’s not as bad as it seemed a few weeks ago. It’s smaller and cleaner now. She and I make Jack shuffle over every twenty minutes so we can stay in the sun and maximize our tans. When Jack and I get hot, we jump into the pool and then come back to shake our wet hair onto Ellen. We cover her leg with a cut-out piece of blue tarp to protect the cast. We all bought sunglasses in the airport. The wire-frame-with-colored-glass kind. Ellen bought a shade of light blue. Jack bought orange. I think his are weird, but Ellen says they’re funky and cool. So whatever. I’m working on trying not to worry about things like that. I bought as dark a pair as I could find. My right eye still hurts when the sun hits it. Ellen and Jack and the mirror tell me that the pupil’s dilated, only not to the degree it was before. Also, it’s not round so much as vertically oval. All I know is Dr. Pluto said not to worry, and I’m allowed to swim.
“Seventy-eight entries,” Jack announces right after his turn at Monopoly. He’s been taking his laptop with him everywhere. Since UCLA’s deadline was so early, and since you can use the same essay for different schools, he’s pretty much through with college applications. Deadlines for NYU and Brown aren’t until January anyway. So mostly he’s not working, but checking his Web site and the Cameron link. “Two new ones today.” He means memorial posts for Cameron.
I roll, land, and then go directly to jail.
“I thought that one written by Shelly was really nice,” Ellen tells Jack. I didn’t know she’d gone to the site.
“Did you write one?” I ask her.
“Didn’t you see it?” she asks me back.
“Ellen’s was great,” Jack tells me sort of softly. I try to think of a quick lie, but my brain won’t work fast enough.
“You’ve looked at the site, right?” Ellen asks.
I shake my head. Ellen rolls the dice and gets really busy moving the hat.
“I’m hot again,” I say to Jack. “Want to jump in?”
“It’s just weird,” he tells me. “You haven’t even looked?”
“Hotel,” Ellen tells Jack. Then she winces. “Aaagh.”
Jack and I have gotten used to seeing her pain come suddenly. It’s the chest tube wound, mostly. Her ribs aren’t as bad. We’ve learned to wait it out with her. So now, within a few seconds, she relaxes and hands him some of her colorful cash. He hands her a little red building in return.
“You haven’t even looked at it?” Jack asks again. I stare at the red and purple tiles in the pool and feel small.
“Not yet,” I say.
It’s a wave made up of tree branches, millions and millions of them in all shapes and sizes, and it’s bearing down on me, and somehow it’s clear water, even though it’s tree branches, and I can see my father behind the wave in the distance, and I can tell he’s just hurled the wave at us, and I look around for my mom, but I can’t find her to help, and there’s screaming and screaming and screaming, and the wave is rising and curling, all those tree branches interwoven and meshed together, and the screaming and screaming, and a jagged glass ponytail splashes out of the tree branches and latches on to my eye, and then Jack is next to me, feet planted wide, hands up and out, and I know he’ll be able to save us, and he’s shouting loud, “Stop, stop,” but the wave keeps coming, and it’s the screaming, it’s the screaming and screaming and screaming that stops.
I sit up fast, my heart racing, and my stomach rising into my throat and mouth and then falling again, and I’m breathing really loud, and it’s dark, and then something hits me, and it’s Whitey, the polar bear.
“Ellen?” I say. I fumble for my lamp and turn it on. She’s half sitting up, which is actually sort of how she sleeps these days anyway. She’s got the phone in her hand.
“Don’t call anybody,�
�� I tell her. My entire body is shuddering.
“What’s the nightmare?” she whispers.
“Don’t call your parents.” My heart starts to slow. “Come on. It’s embarrassing.”
“What’s the dream?” she asks, hanging up the phone. I swallow to get the sour taste out of my mouth.
“It’s just a bad dream.” I peel off my nightshirt. An extralarge T that says TALK TO MY AGENT across the front. Ellen got it for me as a gag last Christmas. Now it’s wet with sweat.
“Nice apples,” Ellen tells me. My heart’s regular now, but my curls are matted to my skull.
“Apples?” Underneath the damp sheet I wiggle out of my sweaty underwear. “You are so weird.”
“What’s the dream?” Ellen asks me again.
“What do you think?” I ask her back. She slumps deeper into her covers. “I’m sorry,” I say right away. “I’m sorry.” I toss Whitey back to her, but gently. She rubs him across her chin with one hand and starts plumping her pillow with the other.
“Do you ever dream about it?” I ask. I move to a cooler, drier spot in my bed. It feels better.
“No,” she says, pounding and smacking. I like the sound. “I just dream that I’m a mermaid mummy.”
“A mermaid mummy?”
“Don’t tell anybody.”
“I won’t.”
“In the dreams my torso is all taped up in this tight gauze and my legs are fused together, and Fm on land, and I can’t move.”
Oh.”
She smushes and whacks a few more times.
“Tell me when you’re ready for the light off,” I say.
She tugs and flattens. “Leave it on,” she goes. So I do.
“Your friend Seth called,” my mother says over the cell phone. “He says he’s had trouble reaching you.”
I unfurl a towel with an underwater scene on it. “I’m not picking up when it’s him,” I tell my mother. Ellen shakes her head, and Jack gives me the thumbs-down. We’re in the hotel gift shop. It’s drizzling outside, so no pool or beach this morning.
“What should I tell him if he calls here again?” my mom asks.
“Just don’t pick up when it’s him,” I say, rolling the towel back into a sausage and returning it to the shelf. “Check the caller ID.” Ellen picks out a seashell anklet and gestures for me to put it on her good ankle.
