“It is so majestic-looking. So lifelike.”
“Have you ever seen an eagle up close?”
“No,” he says.
“Then how do you know it’s lifelike?”
“I’ve seen pictures. And Animal Planet,” he says with a hint of wounded pride. “I even know what they sound like.” He starts flapping his arms like he’s flying, and makes some sort of cawing sound.
I snort. “You sound like a crow.”
“I’m a majestic eagle!” he shouts, still flapping his arms and cawing. He looks ridiculous, and I feel a laugh, a real laugh, bubbling up.
He sees me laughing, and it sparks something in him. He starts to leap around even more, cawing and flapping like crazy. And then he loses his balance and he spins toward my mother’s prized Ruth Setmire eagle, and I get up to try to stop him, but I’m too slow, and he smashes into the eagle and it topples, and for an instant it looks like it is going to take off in flight, but then it crashes to the ground and − oh oh oh…
The eagle is broken. Its head has shattered and the wings have cracked.
I think of all the times me and Mika and Koji ran by the eagle. All the times we ducked behind it and around it and were scolded by our parents. How it seemed unbreakable. But apparently, it isn’t.
Seth is standing frozen, like he’s turned into a statue himself, his mouth open, and eyes wide.
Koji comes running in. Of course this would be the thing that would tear him away from his guitar.
“You killed the eagle!” he says, sounding years younger than he is.
“We didn’t kill it,” I say, not meaning to implicate myself by saying we. “It isn’t actually alive. It just broke.” I don’t know how this is better, but I feel like I need to make the distinction clear.
“Mom is going to freak out,” Koji says in a matter-of-fact tone. “That was Grandma Gloria’s eagle.”
“I’m so sorry,” Seth says, running his hand through his hair. “I’m such an idiot.” He doesn’t offer to pay for it. Not that it matters. He couldn’t anyway.
“Koji, help Seth clean it up,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”
I need a moment to myself, a moment to calm down. I go up the stairs and into my room, and collapse on my bed. After a moment, my bedroom door squeaks open and Mika comes and sits on the edge of my bed.
“Did you break Mom’s eagle?” Her eyes are wide. “The one that belonged to Grandma Gloria? What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Mom is going to kill me.”
“Oh, she won’t kill you,” says Mika, “but she’ll be upset.”
That’s worse.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I mutter.
Mika tilts her head to the side. “Aren’t there two?”
“Two what?”
“Two eagles. Isn’t that why this one was so special? Because it was one of a pair?”
I snort. “You think I should get the other one from Ruth Setmire? How? She never leaves her house.”
“But you know where she lives. We visited once, remember?”
We did. It was years ago. That wasn’t the last time I saw Ruth, though. The last time, the last time was… I don’t like to think about it. It was at Mika’s funeral.
“Mom will have Ruth’s address in her book,” Mika says.
I grin at Mika. “You little genius! What would I do without you?”
She grins back. She knows I need her.
I reach out and squeeze her hand, once, twice, and then three times fast. Our handshake.
“Nerd,” says Mika, but she squeezes back.
“Look what I found,” I say, standing at the top of the stairs and holding out Ruth’s address like a trophy. If Seth is surprised that I have the personal address for a famous artist recluse, he doesn’t show it. He is surprised that we are just going to go to her house without calling or anything to see if she’s there.
“Isn’t Ruth pretty old?” he says.
“So what?”
“Well … what if she’s … you know…?”
“What if she’s what?” I retort, even though I know what he is going to say next.
“Dead?”
“Yeah!” says Koji, looking up from his guitar. “What if she’s dead and her body is festering and rotting and you guys are the ones who find it and then, when you go into her house, she turns into a zombie and then she turns you guys into zombies and then…?”
“She’s not going to be a zombie, Koj,” I say, rolling my eyes.
“But what if she … really is dead?” says Seth.
“We won’t have any trouble getting the eagle then, will we?” I say.
Seth’s eyes bulge. “I’m not breaking into a dead woman’s house.”
“One, we’re not breaking in anywhere. And two, what are you so afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid…” Seth says.
“Sounds like you are. Sounds like you are afraid to go on an adventure. Sounds like you are afraid of a little old woman—”
“A little old ZOMBIE woman,” Koji interrupts.
“I don’t know why I’m even trying to argue,” Seth says. “You always win.”
“Of course she does,” Koji says with a snort. “Have you met my sister?”
I tousle his hair. “Says you.”
He swats my hand away. “Oi! You’re messing up my hair.” Koji has recently discovered hair products and is even vainer about his hair than I am about mine.
I look back up at Seth, who is still staring at me. I wonder if he’s even blinked.
“So are you coming or not?” I say, hands on hips.
He smiles, really smiles. “Of course I am.” And something small fizzes between us, like a firefly buzzing from his hands to mine.
My parents won’t be back till late, so my plan is to get to Newberry Springs and be home with the replacement eagle before they even know it was missing.
“Koj, if Mom calls, tell her I’ve gone to Andrea’s,” I say. “We’ll be back in a few hours. There’s some pizza in the fridge from last night, OK? Don’t forget to eat.”
“I won’t,” he says.
“You will. You always forget to eat when you are playing guitar these days. Forget to do anything.” Mika had been the same when she’d practice piano, but I doubt he remembers that.
“I’ll eat, I’ll eat,” Koji says, eyes glued to a YouTube video of someone explaining how to do something that sounds complicated with guitar chords. “Good luck getting the eagle. If anyone can convince a cranky, reclusive artist who has probably turned into a zombie to part with one of her most prized possessions, it’ll be you.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I say.
“That is me being confident! Jeeeeeez,” says Koji. “I’m confident you’ll either come back with the eagle or you won’t come back at all, because, you know, you’ll be zombified.”
“Koji! Don’t be morbid.”
“Worse things than being a zombie.”
“OK, that’s it, I’m going. We’re going,” I say, tugging on Seth’s arm toward the door.
“BYE BYE, ZOMBIE SISTER!” Koji calls out after us.
CHAPTER 15
Seth settles into the front seat as I turn on the ignition of my car. “So your brother is really into zombies, huh?”
I shrug. “Apparently. Last week, it was some other video game thing − assassins, maybe? This week, it’s zombies. And guitars, of course. I don’t know. I can’t keep up.”
“What about ghosts?” he says.
I tense. “What about ghosts?”
“I really like Japanese horror films. You know, like The Ring?”
“My brother isn’t into ghosts. Or into Japanese horror films.” I don’t tell him that we have enough ghosts in our house without inviting fictional ones in. Instead, I toss my phone at him. “Here, I’ve put the address in. You navigate.” Then the only sound is from my tires rumbling on the road and the hum of the car engine.
Neither of us speaks
until we turn onto old Route 66. Then Seth clears his throat. “I’ve always wanted to drive down here,” he says.
“Well, here you go,” I say, turning up the air conditioner. I’m being terse, but I’m still angry with him for breaking the eagle − even though it was an accident.
“I’ve never really been … anywhere.”
I glance at him. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t have a car, and my mom always needs hers to get to the casino for her shifts, and we don’t ever take vacations or anything like that.”
“So you’ve never been…”
“Out of the desert. This desert,” he says, gesturing out of the window at the sand all around us. “I’ve never even been up the tram.” The tram, officially known as the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, takes people up from the desert into the mountains.
“If you wanted me to drive you somewhere, you could have just asked. You didn’t need to break my mom’s priceless eagle that belonged to my dead grandma.”
“I can’t tell if you are kidding or not,” Seth says in a flat voice. “I’m sorry. I said I was sorry.”
“I’m sort of kidding, but I’m not.” I don’t know why I’m being so honest with him. I’m rarely this honest with anyone.
“What if…?” Seth’s voice trails off and out the window, eaten by the desert wind.
“What if what? It drives me nuts when people do that.”
“When they do what?”
“When they start a sentence and don’t finish. What if what?”
“What if … someone else had broken it?”
“What do you mean?”
“One of your other friends. Like Libby Carter or Andrea Torres. Would you be mad at them?”
I would be, but I wouldn’t show it. Not the way that I’m showing it with him.
“That’s different,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because they are my best friends! And you aren’t.” A half-truth. Dre is my best friend. Libby is Libby.
“Shouldn’t it be easier for you to be mad at your best friends than someone you barely know? You know, the way people always say how the people you are closest to see your worst self?”
He’s right. For some reason, I’m more comfortable admitting that I’m mad at Seth. Maybe because we don’t have a history the way I do with my best girlfriends. Maybe it’s because I’ve got nothing to lose.
We’re the only car on the road, so I hit the gas. Might as well try to get to Ruth’s as early as we can. Outside the windows, the desert flies by.
“If this is your way of apologizing,” I say, “you’re doing a pretty crappy job.”
“Of course I’m sorry, I’m mortified. I thought…”
“Will you stop doing that? Finish your sentences.”
“I thought that we were becoming friends,” he mumbles.
“What are we? Ten? Who announces when they become friends?”
“You’re different than I thought you would be,” he says.
“How did you think I would be?”
“Just … different. Not as sharp, but not as sweet either.”
“You sound like you are describing a cocktail, not a person.”
“You didn’t seem like someone I ever thought I’d be friends with.”
I frown. “Well, that’s insulting.”
He laughs, really laughs, and it’s both jarring and joyful. He sounds a little bit like a seagull, and I remember how he laughed the first night we met, with his whole mouth open, like the laugh was forcing his jaws apart to get out.
“What’s so funny?” I ask, even though I’m starting to smile, because his laugh is so ridiculous and so infectious.
“Do I seem like someone you’d be friends with?”
“I never thought about it,” I admit.
“Of course you didn’t! Reiko, the possibility of us being friends was so far removed from your reality you never even thought about it.”
“Well, we’re friends now,” I grumble.
He grins, showing all of his teeth. “I thought only ten-year-olds announced their friendships.”
Now that Seth and I have acknowledged that we’re friends, or something, the tension over him breaking the eagle evaporates. I’m still anxious about it, though, and worried that my mom is going to flip out.
It takes over two hours to drive to Newberry Springs. We go past casinos, a date farm, a buffalo ranch, two ghost towns, and, somewhere near Oro Grande, there is this huge outdoor art exhibition or junkyard, hard to tell which, called Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before: hundreds of metal pipes with bottles of all shapes and colors hanging from them, like a bottle-tree forest. We slow down as we pass, and watch the light dance off the bottles. Interspersed amongst the bottle trees are wind chimes made of animal bones.
“Can you roll down the windows?” Seth is whispering, like we’ve come upon something holy, instead of a yard full of junk. But I do as he asks. The tinkling sound of bottles clanking against one another and the old bones blowing in the wind comes together in an eerie harmony.
I want to get out of the car to take a closer look. It’s like something out of a twisted fairy tale. But I know we have to get to Ruth’s house before it’s too late. “We should come back one day,” I say in a hushed voice, because I don’t want to disturb the magic of whatever it is we’re witnessing.
Seth glances at me. “Yeah,” he says. “We should. So what else do you know about this Ruth Setmire lady?”
“Well, she was apparently best friends with my grandma Gloria,” I say. “They grew up together or something. Ruth first got famous for making giant ceramic flowers the size of chairs. For a while, that was her thing. And then she made two thousand tiny elephants, each one with a different facial expression, and someone bought the whole collection for something ridiculous, like a few million dollars. I don’t know what the hell they did with two thousand tiny elephants.” I laugh a little to myself.
“What?” says Seth.
“I should probably just be glad my mom didn’t buy them. That’s the kind of thing she’d love. Two thousand tiny elephants all over our backyard.”
“Maybe our moms have more in common than we think,” Seth says with a wry grin.
I grin back. “Anyway, soon everyone wanted these tiny elephants. So Ruth became the tiny elephant lady. She stopped making them around ten years ago, stopped making anything, but you can still find her pieces in art galleries and in private collections. We even studied her in Art History this year. Of course, nobody believed me that I have a Ruth Setmire original in our house, because nobody has ever heard of her eagles, because she’d only done the two. That’s why we’ve got to get this eagle. It’s pretty irreplaceable, even without the emotional connection that my mom has to it.”
“Do you have anything like that?” Seth asks.
“Like what?”
“Anything that matters that much to you?”
I think of the scrapbook. But I can’t tell Seth about that.
“Nope,” I say, keeping my voice steady.
“Yeah, me either,” says Seth.
CHAPTER 16
The sun is just setting, turning the sky a dusty pink, when we pull up to the gate of Ruth’s property.
We ring the buzzer. And then again. And again.
Nothing.
“Maybe your brother was right,” says Seth. “Maybe she died in there.”
“We could scale that easily,” I say, eyeing the wall around her property.
“Oh no. Hell no. We are not actually breaking in.”
I’m considering taking a running leap at the wall to see how high I could get when the buzzer crackles to life. A female voice says, “I can see you. And I can see what you are planning. Get out of here before I call the cops.”
I press the intercom on the buzzer as fast as I can. “Ruth Setmire?”
“I didn’t ask you who I was. I know who I am. Not as senile as people seem to think I
am. Now I said go away!”
“I thought you said she knew you,” Seth says low in my ear.
“She knew my grandmother,” I say. And then, louder into the intercom, my words spilling out fast and bright like glitter from a jar, “I’m Reiko Smith-Mori, Suzie Smith’s daughter. Gloria Smith’s granddaughter.”
We wait for a moment. And then the gate swings open.
The house is ranch style, all one story, with a slate-gray roof and pale yellow walls. Seth is standing behind me on the front step, breathing heavily. It’s making me anxious.
“You sound like you are having an asthma attack or something,” I hiss. “Calm down.”
“What do we do now?” he says. “This was a mistake, a big mistake.”
I turn and glare at him. “You breaking the eagle was a mistake. What we’re doing now is fixing that mistake.” I turn back to the front door just in time to see it inching open.
An old woman wearing a cowboy hat is peering out at us. She has long white hair, almost to her waist, and her face is leathery and wrinkled. She’s frowning.
I give her my most charming smile. “Thank you for letting us in.”
She keeps frowning. “I haven’t decided if I’m going to let you in. I wanted to get a look at you.” She stares at me with bright blue eyes. They aren’t that watery blue that some old people have − they are sharp, like pieces of broken blue glass. “You don’t look a thing like Gloria.”
“I look more like my dad’s side of the family,” I say. And then, in case she’s forgotten, I add, “He’s Japanese.”
“Hmmm,” she says, sounding skeptical. “You don’t look Japanese either.”
I get this a lot.
The door has inched open the tiniest bit. “That boy isn’t Gloria’s grandson, is he?”
“No, ma’am. This is … this is my friend.”
“Now, I know who you are, or who you say you are, but I don’t know why you are standing at my front door.”
Only Love Can Break Your Heart Page 6
