“Me neither,” Matt said. “LaRee, I was thinking that maybe…”
“I don’t think that would be such a good idea,” she interrupted.
He smiled. “You don’t think what would be a good idea?”
“What you’re suggesting.”
“What did I suggest?”
“You know perfectly well what you were going to suggest.”
“So, you can still pretty much finish my sentences, but you don’t think it would be a good idea to have dinner.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“You’re probably right,” he said, disappointing her. “It just seemed kind of… overly coincidental to bump into you twice in a row this way.”
He was wearing his park ranger’s uniform; the tucked-in shirt showed his paunch and hid his biceps. Thank God he’d left his hat in the truck. But then, she was over her old longings. For all she knew, she wouldn’t recognize an attractive man anymore.
“If it didn’t occur to you to be in touch before…”
“You mean, when Tracey left? I thought of it, but what would I do, call up and say, ‘Okay, she’s gone—let’s pick up where we left off’? I… didn’t know what to do,” he admitted.
She felt all the old nerves and none of the old electricity; it was terrible. “If it was a good idea for us to… have dinner… you would have known what to do,” she said, watching a dragger come around Barrel Point, glad to have something to fix her eyes on. “You’d have wanted to call me, wanted to see me and talk. It wouldn’t have come up because I rammed into you in a random parking lot.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he said, defeated, a little hurt, and maybe relieved.
She was pretty sure she was wrong, now that she’d said it, but she couldn’t argue against herself without letting at least a few minutes lapse. She had closed off the memory of the night she’d spent with Matt, so she could get over it and live along without thinking about what she was missing. Now it felt like she’d sealed that door so tight there was no opening it again. They’d been close to each other, honest with each other. But almost ten years had passed—the things she’d have confided back then didn’t even seem true anymore. Those ideas of a man as a deep, abiding intimate who would somehow protect her and be vulnerable to her at the same time… Well, it made a nice dream, it was something she hoped for Vita. But her own time was past.
“I mean, it was important to me back then, very important…” she said. If he had any idea!
“Me, too!” he said, defensive.
“But not so you’d make some way for us to talk, or be friends, or anything…”
“It would have seemed like I was… betraying her.”
“I understand. That was important. It was probably the right thing to do. But it does mean you weren’t concerned for me… or, if you were, you put me way down the priority list.”
“Because…”
They heard Sal ending his phone call inside. “Because I felt guilty that you were so important to me,” he whispered quickly.
“I can do it,” Sal said, glad to be the bearer of good news. “No problem. Pick a day next week. Oh, LaRee, were you waiting for me?”
“No, just got talking to Matt. I’ll bring the car in Thursday. Nice to see both of you.”
I felt guilty that you were so important to me. It stuck in her mind, of course. Which was why it was better to avoid him. She knew too much now about the machinery of love. He had to have someone who was “too important to him,” because his wife had walked out on him once and was all too likely to do it again. If LaRee kept away from him, he’d find someone new before he even noticed what was happening. There were plenty of women in town who’d be thrilled to have a man with a steady job and an even disposition. He was lucky they weren’t chasing him down the street! One or another would marry him, and they would invent, together, a whole long list of reasons why they had to be each other’s one and only. And he’d keep a little torch burning for her, LaRee—a torch with about the power of a nightlight. Just in case the new one left him, too.
She took the back way home, stopping at the beach parking lot for a minute to look out. The clouds had thinned to a veil, lit a soft pink by the low sun and reflected on the satin surface of the water. From the top of the dune she could see each wave fold gently on the last, and a pale, fragile moon rising. This yearning—what was it for if not love?
14
FAMOUS MURDER ALL OVER AGAIN
Vita bumped her locker shut with her hip; very satisfying, as if she were sealing her troubles up for good. She skirted behind Shyanne, around a little flock of freshmen who were keeping together for protection, and over Brandon’s foot, which had been stuck out in hopes of tripping her or at least catching her attention. Adam was coming in from the courtyard, and he seemed to smile at her, or at least to make a little sign of recognition. But maybe that was meant for Shyanne, or someone else. Vita tried to glance at him in a way that would acknowledge the smile without basing any assumptions on it, but he had disappeared into the stairway by the time she had her face properly arranged. Her cheeks were blazing—she tried to cool them with her fingers. If she could have communicated by blushing instead of speaking, she would have been the most articulate person on earth. As it was… “Behold, the great blunderer,” she said to herself, in Shakespearean. Then she tried Zora Neale Hurston: “And there she walked without seein’ nobody, her eyes turned in on her own.…” Either one worked. Each was immersed in his own language and the music of it was as important as the words. The English test was going to want her to decipher symbols, though, so failure was pretty much assured.
Something bumped up against her, hard. Dorotea Machado’s book bag.
“You never know where you’re going, do you?” Dorotea said, disgusted.
“I’m sorry,” Vita said. “I was just…”
Dorotea dropped her head of gelled curls and pushed past Vita up the stairs. Even Dorotea, who had not a friend on earth, didn’t want to be seen talking to Vita. Brandon Skiles and the tangle of “popular” kids were behind her, butting their heads into each other’s shoulders, laughing like hyenas.
“Move, loser. You’re in my way,” Brandon told Vita.
He probably meant this as an endearment. There was no point in taking offense. Still, when Vita couldn’t choke out a hello, how did he and the others manage to be so commanding? They acted like they owned the place and… they did. Their parents had graduated from Outer Cape High, worked summers at Doubloons, surfing all morning, waiting tables in their cutoffs and halter tops into the night, pairing off into one marriage and then another until their kids might as well all be related. Grown up, they’d pile those kids into the boat every weekend and meet up at Barrel Point, the men with their fishing poles and beer, the women tanning and gabbing, calling out an occasional admonition to the kids. Brandon’s dad owned Oyster Creek Marine; it put him in the center of everything.
Vita started up the stairs, but one after another Brandon’s friends shoved past. They were a group; you didn’t get between them. Brandon greeted each one with a casual insult—“Yo, bitch,” and “Whattup, ma nigga?” Everyone admired him; everyone wanted to be his friend.
Vita swallowed. She was overthinking. She was too sensitive; people always said so. She stood at the sidelines trying to figure it all out while the others went ahead and did what they did. But… she could hear LaRee telling her to “just live,” shaking her head and laughing, that deep seen-it-all-and-thrown-up-my-hands laugh she had, as if she were talking about a story, instead of Vita’s actual flesh-and-blood, actions-and-consequences life. Had it occurred to LaRee that if Sabine had taken a little care with love, she might be alive right now? If they’d been a real family with a mother and a father and a little girl asleep upstairs, if she hadn’t been drinking wine with some man from over the bridge, someone she barely knew… She stood frozen there in the stairway, thinking about what might have been. Life was more than just a big come
dy show rolling along for LaRee’s entertainment.
“Everything happens for a reason,” she could hear LaRee saying. “And that reason is that God has kind of a vicious wit.”
Vita’s heart dropped. She betrayed LaRee with every thought, LaRee who “just lived” to the extent that she had opened the door on that freezing night and taken Vita in without question, letting her own life veer into the unknown. No one else’s heart had that kind of room in it, and no one else would have gone all this way beside her so staunchly, laughing when there was so much cause for tears. The other girls, the ones with real mothers, sulked and raged and couldn’t wait to get away, while Vita would call LaRee at lunch just to hear her voice. It was pathetic, really, another of the qualities that made Vita the biggest loser in Loserville.
Everyone had gone up the stairs past her now; the ones who didn’t like her because she was a loser, the ones who didn’t like her because she was strange, and the ones who didn’t like her because she wasn’t a real townie.
She slipped into a seat in the back corner of geometry class. The teacher was late, and Brandon hitched his chair desk over beside Alyssa and Gina, whose smooth heads were bent together in gossip.
“Girl on girl,” he said. “Can I get in here?”
“Suck my dick, Brandon,” Gina said.
“Very ladylike,” he told her.
“We’ll never be as ladylike as you are,” she said, miming a polite sip of tea with her little finger out. Vita giggled, and the two girls turned back with one movement. Where did Vita Gray get the idea that she was allowed to laugh at their jokes?
She looked away, but he’d caught her acting like his friend.
“Quit eavesdropping,” Brandon said—sneered, really. If you were a friend of his, that meant you counted for something; if not, you weren’t worth bothering with. So when his voice went hateful, the room got quiet. Everyone was afraid to get burned.
“Suck my dick,” Vita managed, half audibly. It had worked for Gina, and she just wasn’t going to let him win.
“Who’d wanna get that close to you?” he said.
Vita gave him the finger.
“Not that one, idiot, the middle one,” Brandon said. She’d fumbled, putting up her fourth finger at first instead of her third. “Jesus, you don’t even know how to flip someone off.”
The whole room laughed, especially Dorotea, who wasn’t used to being one of the ones laughing.
“I’m glad to see you’re all in a good mood,” the teacher said. “That should help you on the quiz. Pass the papers to the left—no calculators.”
Brandon turned around to give Vita one last sneer. She looked him hard in the eye. She wasn’t going to bend to his will. To think his meanness used to hurt her… well, it still did. But she had The Tempest right here under her notebook; that was the important thing. They were deep into rehearsals now—this afternoon they would be blocking her scene, she’d be there with Adam, with Leo and Sam. They’d be synchronizing themselves, trying to step off into the same imaginary world together, listening, reacting to one another. At school it seemed like everyone had snapped their hearts and minds shut against their classmates, the way you’d lock a door against a thief.
The clock ticked; the rest of them were figuring the areas of obtuse triangles. It was too hot in the room. Vita’s head swam. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes. Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas… Ten minutes later, she had written this speech carefully all around the edge of the quiz paper. She was going to fail; she told herself she didn’t care.
At lunch she finished with Iris’s lines and began to add Ceres’ reply: Hail, many-colored messenger…
She was alone at the corner table, watching them all from a distance. It was funny how that worked—the others refused to see her, which gave her license to observe them boldly. Adam came in, hitching up his jeans with his wrists the way he did, looking awkward and self-conscious, scanning the room for a friend and catching her eye. She looked away but not quickly enough. If he hadn’t guessed her feelings before, he would now, and… she was mortified. Shyanne came in, looking stoned and pouty, and said something that made Adam laugh.
Behind her, Mr. Delvecchio, the principal, was standing at the door, scanning the groups table by table. Mr. Delvecchio was a kind, quick-footed man, who could address a fractious student with such clear respect that the bad behavior, whatever it was, would simply evaporate. His eyes lit on Dorotea Machado now, and he gave a quick, reflexive nod and started toward her. He looked so grave and certain that he might as well have been carrying a scythe. When he touched Dorotea’s shoulder, she flinched, then gathered her books and her purse and followed him, head down as always, hair hanging like a heavy curtain over her face.
“Delvecchio stood out on the path with her till someone came to pick her up,” Brandon said, on the bus.
“Did she look sad? Or worried?” Vita asked.
He shrugged. “How would I know?”
“How wouldn’t you know? Are you, like, blind?”
“They looked like a short bald guy standing there with a girl who’s never, ever, going to get any,” he said. “A girl like you.”
Vita put her earphones back in and stared hard out the window. In a few months she’d have her driver’s license and the bus would be just an awful memory.
LaRee was kneeling in the front garden, weeding behind the peonies, whose buds were just beginning to show. Vita came up the driveway past the white tree, singing tunelessly along with Lady Gaga. “Just dance, it’ll be okay… just da-ance.”
She flicked the earphones out of her ears and plopped down on the front step. “Hello.” Two notes, high and then low, as recognizable as a bird’s call. “How are you?”
“I’m very good, thank you, and yourself?”
“I got the highest grade in the class on the Civil War essay—that’s how I am,” Vita said lightly. This was true. The geometry quiz was pushed out of her mind. She’d figure out what to do about it later. “He said, ‘Shows original thinking.’”
“That’s no surprise.”
“What’s for supper?”
“Spaghetti.”
“Ooh!”
There was something bright at the back of the garden—yellow, maybe a plastic toy, or… LaRee reached through the peony stems and pushed some leaves away to get to it. It was a goldfinch, perfect in death, from his curled feet to the bright, wet eye, from which some ants from the peonies were drinking.
“Vita, look.” LaRee picked the bird up and held him out for Vita to see; you could never look that closely at a live creature. “He must have hit the window. I mean, I don’t know why I say ‘he.’ Oh, the color, of course. The females are drab.”
“LaRee, did something happen to Dorotea’s mother?”
“Not that I know of. She was at the clinic with old Mrs. Machado the other day. Why?”
“Mr. Delvecchio came and got Dorotea from the cafeteria.”
“Maybe she got caught skipping school?” LaRee said. When a cloud dimmed the sun for a minute, Vita would always think someone’s mother had died. “Maybe she won an award?” Though Dorotea Machado was not going to win any awards anytime soon. She went along as if she were at the end of a leash, being led like a slow, docile animal into a cramped, dark future.
“No. It was something really bad.” Tears pricked in Vita’s eyes, blurred her vision and closed her throat. “I could tell, LaRee.…” She cupped her hand under LaRee’s to bring the poor bird a little closer. “It’s so pretty,” she said, the corner of her mouth trembling so LaRee bent in to kiss the top of her head.
“Should we make a little grave for him?”
“I’m not five anymore, LaRee! I’m not going to feel better because we make a little grave!” She balled her hands and struck out at the air, hitting LaRee’s hand so the bird sailed into the brambles at the edge of the woods. “Stop treating me like a baby!”
“Ouch, ow!”
She had smacked her head
into LaRee’s mouth. “Ow! Jesus!” LaRee’s lip was bleeding; Vita rubbed her scalp.
LaRee took the fists in her two hands. “I’m sorry. I… only wish you were five, so I could make it better.” She had to keep talking to keep from slipping into tears herself. Keeping Vita steady and safe and always growing, she had steadied herself against life’s discouraging forces. “Shh,” she said, holding her tight, looking over her shoulder to see the white tree standing there, proud and graceful though it had been dead for years. It had been struck by lightning, and the bark had peeled away but it stood there at the edge of the driveway, the forest rising like a wall, fifty feet of sycamore and oak thatched with vines.
What to say? “We’re all lost here, but adults have made a secret pact to pretend they know what they’re doing so every child has to find out for himself.”
The phone was ringing inside, thank God. Vita made a dash for it, but reading the caller ID, she thrust it out toward LaRee. “It’s Franco. I’m not here.”
“Hello,” LaRee sang.
“LaRee, it’s Danielle.” That flat, husky voice, reporting a matter of fact. It was Danielle and that meant trouble.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just heard.”
“Heard what?”
“Vinny’s dead. That’s what people are saying.”
“What? How?”
“Suicide.”
“Why?” Ridiculous to ask; he expected to spend the rest of his life in prison—the real question was why he hadn’t tried before.
“His mom died yesterday. I guess you know.”
“I didn’t.”
She explained how he’d done it. “They’ll blame Franco,” Danielle said with a heavy sigh. “Everyone will. It’s like, somehow, if Franco had kept his pants on, the sun would always be shinin’ and the cod would be leapin’ right up into the boat.” She was keeping her voice low and LaRee pictured her looking out her front window between the curtains, down over Main Street. “Always gotta blame someone.…”
“Some people will blame me,” LaRee said, to cheer her up. “It’s more fun to blame a woman. We take it to heart. Men barely even notice.”
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