by Lou Aronica
At that moment, an idea came to him, as though delivered by some otherworldly FedEx guy.
“Let’s make something,” he said, a little surprised by the sound of his voice after the lengthy silence.
“I don’t think I can really do that right now, Dad,” Becky said wearily.
“I don’t mean make something with our hands. I mean with our minds. Do you want to?”
“Make something with our minds?”
“A story. Not just a story, though. We’ll invent a whole world to put the story in.”
Becky pulled back and looked up at him. They’d made up stories before, often on long car rides, usually based on characters from one of the books they’d been reading at bedtime. What he was suggesting here was something different, though, and he could see from her expression that it intrigued her.
“How do we do that?”
“We just start,” Chris said, sitting up slightly. “Right now. What kind of world is it?”
Becky thought for a moment and then brightened, her eyes looking bluer than they had in months. “Let’s make it a kingdom. Like in that book we read the other day.”
“King or queen?”
“King and queen. Together.” She put a hand to her forehead for a moment. “And they have a teenage daughter who is very smart and who makes them very proud.”
Maybe something like your cousin Kiley who you adore? Chris thought. “Is there magic in this world?”
“Tons,” Becky said broadly. “All over the place.”
“Cows?”
Becky laughed out loud. He hadn’t heard that in a while. “Cows?”
“It’s an important detail. Are there cows and pigs and birds in this world or are there different creatures we never saw before?”
“How about flying pig cows?”
Chris chuckled. “We could do that.”
“And talking fish.”
“How would we hear them underwater?”
“They don’t talk when they’re underwater, Dad,” Becky said as though everyone on the planet knew that already. That she was animated enough to scold him was a huge thrill for Chris.
“Right, of course. So they’re walking and talking fish.”
“They don’t walk. They roll. Well, not roll, really. They just sort of flip around to get where they want to go.”
The conversation continued until Becky, yawning, laid her head on Chris’s chest and fell asleep. The next night at bedtime, they continued inventing pieces of the world, so caught up in this exercise that they didn’t begin to make up a story until the night after that— which was the first night that Becky slept through in more than a week.
They called the kingdom Tamarisk—named after a tree Becky loved from one of the picture books on plant life Chris had bought her—and it evolved in numerous ways over the years. As Becky got older, the fish stopped talking and she replaced flying pig cows with creatures of sheer imagination with names that Becky seemed to take particular pleasure in determining. When she was nine, she decided that there should be an internal logic to the naming process. Chris came home from work one evening and she handed him a list of rules governing all Tamariskian nomenclature. However, some things about it had never changed. The same king and queen still ruled over the land, they still called the nemesis to the south The Thorns even though this didn’t follow the naming rules, and the sophisticated, beautiful, gutsy, and brilliant teenage princess still starred in most of the adventures.
Rather than becoming less important after Becky had gone into remission, the nightly visits to Tamarisk became more of a highlight to the day. If Becky had a sleepover or Chris had a business function, they found some way to hook up over Tamarisk even if only for a few minutes.
Then, with a suddenness that was more shocking than the end of his marriage, it was over. The day he moved out, Becky declared that she would never tell another Tamarisk story. Chris was certain this was part of her reaction to the divorce—he sensed a kind of hostility in her that day that he’d never experienced with her before and couldn’t fully understand—and that in time they would go back. It had never happened, though, and the years of creation between them took on a mythical status, as though it was legend rather than real life.
“It was an amazing thing,” Chris said with the kind of shrug that indicated he was anything but reconciled about this.
“Life is long, sweetie.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means that our relationships go through movements. Like in a symphony. You’re in a fugue period right now with Becky. That doesn’t mean that a month from now, or three months from now, or three years from now you won’t be someplace else with her entirely.”
“What if the fugue is the last movement?”
“It’s not. Even you don’t believe that.”
“Let’s say I don’t want to believe that.”
“If it’s important for you to make that distinction.”
Chris looked at Lisa and chuckled. She glanced down at her watch and said, “I’m sorry, but we’re all out of time for your bitching tonight. The rest of the evening will be dedicated to my issues and you telling me how fabulous I am.”
Chris pantomimed prostrating himself to Lisa. “As you wish, milady.”
4
Cam Parker was truly a gorgeous guy. He was the kind of guy you could look at for a really long time and not find a single thing wrong with him. Yeah, he knew it and, yeah, he definitely posed way too often, but that didn’t take away from the fact that he was beautiful. And he was especially beautiful to Becky when he was talking to her .
“The guitar sound is just so hot. It’s all—” Cam tore into an air guitar lick complete with sound effects, his face contorted like a rock star’s onstage. Yep, he looked pretty great doing that, too.
“The electric stuff is great, but the acoustic stuff is a little derivative, don’t you think?”
“I think it’s brilliant. Who is it derivative of?”
Becky cocked her head. “You don’t hear acoustic Pearl Jam or Guns N’ Roses in their stuff?”
Cam got a dumb-but-cute expression on his face and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Becky’s first thought was that he was blowing her off. Then she realized that he really might not know what she was talking about. She sometimes forgot that few of her friends had had as much of a rock-and-roll education as she’d had.
“Whatever,” she said, not wanting it to seem like she was challenging him. “Are you going to the battle of the bands Friday night?”
“No question about it. Thunderclap is going to kick every other band’s ass.”
Becky thought Thunderclap was pretty lightweight, but she decided not to mention it. “It should be a good show.”
Cam leaned across the cafeteria table. Even as she felt herself blushing, Becky took note that he looked especially good from this distance. “Maybe we can hang out there,” he said confidently.
That worked for Becky. She was about to tell him so when she saw Cam’s expression change and then noticed the drop of blood on the table. Her hand flew up to her face as she realized that the blood was coming from her nose. Grabbing a napkin, she excused herself quickly and ran out of the cafeteria toward the nearest girls’ room. Passing two students she didn’t know, she slipped into an empty stall and latched the door behind her. She replaced the napkin with a wad of toilet paper and leaned her head back as far as it would go.
This couldn’t be happening. It had been possible to explain away the dizzy spells. But if she was getting bloody noses now as well . . . she could barely think about it. She hadn’t had a bloody nose since she was five. Back before the chemotherapy did whatever it was supposed to do and she got better. Yes, she knew that, technically, she was in remission and not cured, but after a while, you could be pretty sure you beat the thing, couldn’t you?
Becky remembered those horrible chemotherapy sessions: how they made her vomit up her
entire insides, how they made her feel like jelly, how she sometimes couldn’t get out of bed the whole day. All of her hair fell out, she had black circles under her eyes, and everyone looked at her like she was the sorriest human being in the universe. Becky didn’t remember all the specifics from that time—it was nine years ago, after all—but she would never forget how she felt. And she would definitely never forget how much she hated how she felt. She didn’t want to have to go through that again. Maybe this really was something else—though it was getting harder and harder to sell herself on that idea.
“Beck? Beck, are you here?”
It was Lonnie. She’d been sitting next to her in the cafeteria, though Lonnie was as preoccupied with Brent as Becky had been with Cam.
“Over here,” Becky said, unlatching the stall door for her and then replacing the toilet paper in her nose with another wad. The bleeding was definitely slowing.
“What’s happening?” Lonnie said when she found her. “You ran out of the cafeteria—Cam said you were bleeding.”
“I’m fine. It’s almost stopped.”
Lonnie latched the door closed and sat on the floor. “Your nose is the thing that’s bleeding?”
“It’s nothing. People get nosebleeds. Was Cam totally grossed out?”
“I don’t care about Cam, Becky. And you shouldn’t be thinking about him right now, either.”
Lonnie knew all about the nosebleeds, along with every other symptom of childhood leukemia. Friends since preschool, Lonnie had often come over to play in Becky’s room when she was sick, and they’d talked about her disease several times over the years.
Becky leaned her head forward and removed the paper. The bleeding was done. She looked at her friend and saw that Lonnie looked very worried. “It’s really just a bloody nose, Lon.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
Lonnie watched her carefully for several seconds, and Becky finally looked away.
“You’re not sure, are you?”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“Are you gonna tell your mother?”
Becky’s eyes snapped back to Lonnie’s. “No. And you’re not going to tell her anything, either. If this kind of thing happens again, I’ll say something. Right now, it’s just this one isolated nosebleed, and I’m not going to get too worked up about it.”
“Beck, you can’t mess around with something like this.”
Becky stood up, threw the bloodied paper in the toilet, and flushed it along with the other piece, hoping Lonnie hadn’t seen how much blood was there. “It’s a bloody nose. Are you telling me you’ve never gotten a bloody nose?”
“You might want to try that line on someone who doesn’t know you the way I do.”
Becky touched Lonnie on the arm and their eyes locked for a second. In that instant, Becky felt like she was about to start crying and really, really didn’t want that to happen. She turned away.
“If you have to know the truth, I picked it before I went to lunch and I guess I just dug a little too deep.”
Lonnie punched her on the shoulder. “Are you trying to make me gag? Do you want me to spew all over you?”
“No spewing today. At least not near me. This is a new shirt.”
Becky opened the stall and the two of them got out. Lonnie wrapped an arm around her.
“You’re officially on twenty-four-hour watch,” Lonnie said.
“I’m okay, Ma, really.”
Lonnie smiled at her as they left the bathroom. Becky knew she hadn’t really soothed her friend’s concerns. Under the circumstances, it was kind of hard to be convincing.
Polly wasn’t exactly a “getting your nails done” kind of woman. Her nails cracked with predictable regularity and she thought there were few things that made a person look less put together than chipped polish. Still, for the past several years she and Becky had gone to a nail salon together one afternoon every month. It had started as an indulgence for a cousin’s wedding, but Becky seemed so tickled by the experience that it had become an ongoing thing. With Becky well into her teens at this point, Polly was glad to maintain as many rituals between them as possible.
As Polly pulled into the school parking lot to get her daughter—the complete experience involved picking Becky up in the car instead of waiting for her to come home on the bus, and stopping at Starbucks for a caramel latte—she saw Becky flirting overtly with a tall boy with scraggly hair. Becky leaned toward the boy as though she was magnetically drawn to him, presumably by the same magnet that kept her lips in a permanent smile while she spoke. When Becky saw the car, she patted the boy on the arm, waved at him, and ran over.
“Hey, Mom,” Becky said brightly as she got in. She threw her backpack onto the rear seat and pecked her on the cheek.
“Hey.” Polly gave a school bus the right of way and then turned out of the parking lot. “Did you have a good day at school?”
“Yeah,” Becky said in a clipped fashion that suggested she wasn’t being entirely truthful.
“Yeah?”
Becky waved a hand. “Yeah, yeah. It was pretty normal.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Becky took a deep breath and her shoulders sagged. “Mr. Zales hassled us for the entire period about the history test we all bombed last week. It was ridiculous. I mean, isn’t it the teacher’s fault if the whole class fails a test?”
Polly’s thoughts brightened as she remembered Becky’s intensely conscientious reaction to getting a fifty-seven on the test. “It’s definitely the teacher’s fault. Though a few extra minutes of studying instead of texting might have helped a little, too.”
Becky’s eyebrows arched and Polly wondered if this was going to be one of those conversations that skidded off in the wrong direction over the slightest thing. Polly hated those.
Fortunately, Becky got past it quickly. “I aced my language arts essay, though.”
“The one about culture clashes?”
“Yep.”
Polly threw a proud smile at her daughter. “Nice job. That was an excellent essay.”
“Ms. Kellerman thought so, too, obviously.”
“Did anything else happen today?”
Becky shook her head animatedly. “Nope, nothing. Really, nothing at all. It was a nice, easy, normal day.”
“So who’s the guy?”
“What guy?”
“The guy you were mooning over when I pulled up.”
Becky cackled. “I wasn’t mooning over anyone. What does that even mean, anyway?”
Polly reached over and patted Becky’s head. “It means making your interest more than casually obvious.”
Becky’s eyes narrowed again. “I didn’t do that.”
Polly grinned. “If that boy doesn’t know that you like him, he belongs in a rock garden rather than a school.”
“Give me a break, Mom. I wasn’t that bad.”
“I didn’t say you were bad. You were definitely mooning, though.”
Becky scoffed and looked in the other direction. Her daughter obviously liked this guy. She’d have accepted the teasing more jovially otherwise.
Polly stopped at a traffic light and let the silence extend between them. When the light turned, she said, “What’s his name?”
“Whose name?”
“The boy you were . . . talking to.”
Becky huffed and said, “Cam.”
“Is he nice?”
“He’s cute.”
“Does that mean the same thing?”
“And he’s nice.”
“Sounds like a heck of a guy.”
Polly pulled into the Starbucks parking lot and the two of them got out of the car. When they entered the café, Becky started swaying to a song that Polly didn’t recognize. Polly loved watching Becky move. A study in grace and awkwardness. It was amazing how quickly the girl alternated between the two these days, but Polly knew that grace would prevail in the near future. Becky would de
finitely be a polished adult.
They ordered their lattes and sat at the one empty table in the shop.
Becky took a sip of her drink, recoiled from the temperature, and pulled the lid off to allow the coffee to cool. “It would be okay if Cam and I went out a little, right? I mean, assuming he asks me.”
“As long as I knew where you were every single second,” Polly said with a wry smile.
“Do you want to attach some kind of tracking device to me?”
“I think we’ll trust your built-in tracking device to do the job.” Polly tested her latte and then sat back. “Look, Beck, when it comes to guys, the best advice I can give you is to always keep your feet on the ground.”
Becky arched one eyebrow. “Is that some clever way of telling me not to have sex?”
Polly chuckled and glanced away. Becky had never come at that topic so bluntly before. “Well, that, too, but that wasn’t what I meant. What I’m trying to say is that it’s important that you be realistic about boys. They can be a lot of fun as long as you always make sure you stay in charge of yourself.”
“Did you always make sure you stayed in charge of yourself with Al?”
“Always. All the time.”
Becky leaned forward. “Really? Even when he was totally cracking you up?”
Polly smiled at the memory of some of those times. “Yes, of course. Al is a very good man and he does seem to have an uncanny ability to make me laugh, but I’ve always kept my wits about me with him. That doesn’t take anything away from our relationship, by the way. In fact, it strengthens our relationship because we know— at least I do—that we haven’t based anything on fleeting emotions.”
Becky tipped her head from one side to the other. “I’ll have to keep that in mind.”
“If you do that, you’ll never need a tracking device—and neither will I.”
Becky took another sip from her coffee, determined it was safe to drink, and took a longer sip. “Did you do that with Dad?”
“Do what with Dad?”
“Keep your feet on the ground.”
Polly took a second to think about her answer. Her thoughts flashed on the time she and Chris had snuck into the arboretum late at night and made love. On top of that, an image popped into her head that she hadn’t remembered in years: Chris pushing her on a playground swing the morning after their third date. She hadn’t been on a swing in years and she felt a bit odd doing it in front of a group of little kids and their mothers, but Chris implored her to kick her legs out to go higher—and against her better judgment, she did and she loved it.
