PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “Maybe you should lie down,” he said, genuine concern softening his voice. I might not have liked Dylan, but it was obvious he loved Lily.

  Lily pulled away from his hold. “I’m okay. But maybe I’ll take a nap.”

  Dylan followed her to her room and a few minutes later left without a word to me or Bianca. Usually, I felt required to see guests out, but not Dylan.

  I settled onto the couch they had vacated and searched for a movie, nixing a few Bianca wanted to see, mainly because they were the artsy ones I had no interest in. We finally compromised on a Ben Stiller flick. Once the opening credits started, I went to check on Lily.

  The knock on her door went unanswered, so I gently opened it and peeked my head in. She was lying on her stomach, her eyes open and gazing at me.

  “You need anything?” I asked, not moving any closer.

  She smiled and rolled onto her back and then propped herself up against the headboard.

  “You can come in, Phoebs.” She laughed at my doubtful expression. “I’m serious. It’s fine.”

  I moved in closer, but took a seat in her computer chair. It seemed safer than her bed.

  “You feel different today,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

  “Different good? Or different bad?” I spun the chair around, loving that I didn’t have to lift my feet over piles of clothing. Maybe there was a benefit to having a tidy room.

  “Different good. Did you talk to Nathan?”

  “Ugh! Why does everything have to be about Nathan?”

  “Maybe because you’ve been obsessing over him.”

  “I haven’t been obsessing, maybe a little fixated but not obsessed.”

  “So you haven’t talked to him, but you’ve made a decision.” Sometimes Lily made me wonder if she had Chloe and Nanna’s gifts for seeing the future and the past.

  “I guess. Yeah, but now I don’t know what to say to him.”

  “Why? Because you may not always be right, but you’re never wrong?”

  “Exactly. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t have blamed him, but still, it makes me uncomfortable to think about how easily he managed to get me to doubt myself.”

  “He didn’t get you to do anything, Phoebe. You did that all on your own.” Her words were so close to what Chloe had said, but it sounded much more reasonable coming from Lily.

  “I know, but it’s easier to be mad at him. I mean it’s not like I can give myself the silent treatment or anything.”

  “True,” she said with a soft laugh that quickly transformed into a massive yawn.

  “I’ll let you get some rest. You sure you’re okay?” I asked as I rose from the chair.

  “I’m sure. Just a little tired.”

  I closed the door behind me and went back to the den. Bianca was on her cell and I collapsed beside her. She said bye to whoever she was talking to and hung up. I waited a moment for her to say who it was, but she shoved a handful of popcorn in her mouth.

  “Who was that?” I finally asked.

  “Tonya.” She popped another handful of popcorn in.

  “And?”

  “She’s busy doing something with her grandma.”

  “She didn’t want to talk to me?”

  “Nope. I guess I’m her new BFF now. Besides it sounded like they were out somewhere.”

  It was a bit of a surprise that not only didn’t she ask to talk to me, but that she’d actually called Bianca instead of me. Then again, it was nice to not be harassed one more time about calling Nathan. I was going to talk to him. I just needed to find a way to do it without having to apologize. Not an easy task considering the things I’d said.

  I tried calling Nathan the next morning, but he didn’t answer and I wasn’t sure what to think about that. He could have been working, or just busy. Or he could have been laughing hysterically with Vivian at his side at the sight of my name finally flashing across the screen of his phone. I ended up leaving a stalker message of heavy breathing while I frantically tried to think of what to say until I hung up, thoroughly mortified at the magnitude of my patheticness.

  Tonya was my next call, but she brushed me off with a lame excuse about being with Gran and hung up before I could tell her what a horrible idea it had been to call Nathan. Between her therapist and Gran, we’d barely had any time to talk outside of school. That she wasn’t able to go to the movies with the rest of us later brought on my pity party full force.

  “Do you know anyone in San Diego?” Chloe asked, coming up behind me as I sat at the kitchen table eating jalapeÑo flavored potato chips for lunch.

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “I just had this really weird vision of you there outside an apartment building.”

  “How do you know it was San Diego?”

  “I got a glimpse of a street sign and it was definitely not Beachgrove.” She sat down across from me and stole one of the chips. “God, these are horrible. You’re not eating just those for lunch are you? You need to seriously start watching what you eat, or you’re going to end up...”

  “Fat?”

  “No.” Good to know.

  “Dead?”

  “No.” Also good to know.

  “So?”

  She rolled her eyes and swiped a second chip. “Just very unhealthy. There’s some left over avocado you can have.”

  “Uh, no thanks.” Just the thought of eating that stuff made me gag. She sat there staring at me. “What do you want?”

  “You should know that Nathan is going to the movies tonight with friends. He’ll want to talk to you.” Despite her complaints, she took another chip. “So, if you’ve realized you were wrong to blame him, have you realized the same about Nanna?”

  My head tilting down, I glared at her from under my brows. “Don’t push it.”

  She held up a hand in resignation. “Fine, I just think-”

  “Shut it, Chloe.”

  “Fine.”

  I grabbed my bowl of chips and went into the living room to finish eating in peace and quiet, but sitting quietly and alone on the sofa didn’t mean I actually felt any peace.

  Nanna was like a hangnail I couldn’t clip. Constantly poking me, rubbing me the wrong way, but if I just ripped her out it would hurt a hell of a lot more. And Nanna was constantly poking my Mom Button. For a while, I’d thought I’d gotten the whole mommy issue out of my system, but after the fight I’d had with Nanna I knew it was still there. And I finally realized why.

  Chloe and Lily had always understood what was happening the day we were born. Chloe had seen it, while Lily had felt our mother’s every emotion. But I had only a sick feeling to remember.

  I surged off the couch, and marched into the kitchen. The bowl of chips flew from my hand into the sink. I stood for a moment, watching it circle the silver space before tipping over and spilling the greasy snack.

  “I’m going for a drive,” I stated, though not to tell Chloe. No, it had been more of a command from my brain to my body, just in case it decided to rebel and go back to the chips.

  Chloe didn’t respond, other than to raise an eyebrow in... something. Probably not curiosity, because she most likely already knew where I was going, even if I wasn’t totally sure of it myself.

  Thirty minutes after walking out the front door, I was standing in front of my mom’s grave. There wasn’t much, just a small headstone with her name followed by the date of her birth and then death. It had been a long time since I’d been there. The trees had grown, and there were more plot markers around. We used to come every month, flowers in hand, each of us waiting for our turn to say something. I never did. When my turn came, I would just stare at her name. Dad assumed I was talking silently. I wasn’t. I had nothing to say to her.

  “You lied to me.” The words burst forth, catching me by surprise. I paused, maybe hoping that the supernatural would allow for a response. But nothing came. Mom wasn’t here. It was just a place for us to hold on to her.

  “How could you have lied to me?” />
  It had taken my gift finally working to really understand why every time I thought of mom I had felt nauseous. My memory of my mother had been of her lying to me.

  “Is that what you think she did?” Nanna stepped up beside me. Her appearance should have startled me, but it didn’t. Somehow, part of me had known she would show up once I finally made it there. Maybe that was the reason I’d avoided coming.

  “It’s what I know,” I answered.

  “Because your gift tells you?”

  My head snapped up, and I stared at her in amazement.

  “Are you really trying to get me to question myself again?”

  She sighed and knelt to brush a bit of dirt from the engraving and pull a few weeds that had dared to creep above Mom. “It was a long time ago, over seventeen years. That’s a long time to hold a feeling.”

  “She lied to me. I know she did.” My voice quivered and I struggled to hold my rage in. How could my mother have made her only words to me a lie?

  “There’s only one way to know for sure.” She reached her hand up, asking for help to rise, seeking a memory I’d been too young to hold clear. I placed my hand in hers, wincing at the tight grip she took.

  She froze midrise, her eyes focused on some point through my chest. Her hand tightened painfully on mine, and I knew this was the first time she had seen her daughter’s last moments.

  “What did she say?” I asked when her eyes fluttered and refocused although they filled with tears. Seeing what had happened could not have been an easy thing, and I was glad I didn’t have to see that part of my past.

  “That she loved you.” Her tears overflowed and wove a crooked path down her deeply wrinkled face. “And that she’d always be with you.”

  Neither of those brought the suffocating pain like I experienced thinking about Mom.

  “Then she spoke to your father and told him everything would be fine.”

  There it was. The lie. Mom knew that nothing would be fine. She died and we weren’t fine. I wasn’t fine. On the surface, it may have looked like we were, but underneath there was the hollow part in all of us that could never be filled. Dad had done his best to be normal, but he had closed himself off so his life consisted of work and us. My sisters had clung to Dad and, even now, they constantly checked up on him. And Mom’s one lie had destroyed my ability to trust not only others but myself as well.

  “She lied. The last words I heard her speak were a lie.” Bitterness tinged my words, giving them a sharp edge that cut through my heart.

  “You see your gift much like Chloe sees hers. Black and white. There’s no space between for what could be or may have been.” She sighed and smoothed her hand over my hair. “People lie for many reasons, Phoebe. Sometimes it is meant to deceive, or trick, or conceal, like how Tonya lied to you. But there are white lies, meant to spare someone’s feelings.”

  “This was not a white lie, Nanna. She was dying, and instead of telling them what would be coming, instead of preparing Dad, she lied.”

  “No, it wasn’t a white lie. But she wanted to protect you and your sisters and Michael. Maybe it wasn’t the right thing, or even the best thing, but I know my daughter, and her every thought and concern would have been for the four of you.”

  “I’ve felt it every time I thought of her. The cramps, the nausea.”

  “She wouldn’t have wanted you to feel that way. Your gift is unique, Phoebe. There’s no way she would have known you would feel that way, or hold on to it for so long.”

  “That’s why I stopped coming here, because being this close to her made it worse.” I dropped to my knees and stared at the puffy white clouds pushing across the sky.

  “And now?”

  It was gone. There was no memory of what it had felt like to hear my mom lie. There was nothing but an aching hole. I didn’t answer Nanna’s question and she eventually smiled and slowly lowered herself to sit beside me.

  “When I questioned you about your gift, I didn’t want you to stop trusting it, I just wanted you to realize that the truth can have many layers, and lies are not always about deception.”

  I tilted my head so it rested on Nanna’s shoulders and, for the first time in years, I cried for my mom.

  Chapter 14

  “You called him, right?” Bianca asked as soon she I found her at the cinema.

  “I did.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He didn’t answer.” I flashed a sly smile as we got into the concession line.

  “But?” She gave me an expectant look.

  “Chloe said he’d be here tonight and that we’d talk.” Chloe’s vision had originally given me a lot of hope, but as I repeated it for Bianca, I started to realize that Chloe hadn’t said anything about it going the way I wanted. And that could be pretty crappy. “I guess we’ll see soon enough.”

  “There’s Owen.” She gestured to the ticket booth where Owen was waiting in line. “I think he walked here just to avoid getting a ride with Karin. He told her he wasn’t sure he was coming, so she ditched us.”

  “Too bad Tonya isn’t here. She’d love a Karin free night out,” I said.

  “You’re lucky she isn’t here. You know she’d be all over you about Nathan.”

  “Well, lucky me that her gran has put her back on lockdown.” When Mrs. Robinson first found out about Trevor, I’d thought that I’d finally have Tonya back full time. No more bailing on us, but it was like nothing had changed. Instead of Trevor taking up her time, it was her gran.

  “At least you’re looking hot tonight.” She fingered the long side braid Nanna had done for me as part of our bonding experience at Mom’s grave, something I just didn’t see happening again anytime.

  “Are you implying that I normally look like crap?”

  “Whatever. You know I would kill to have your hair. If my parents stopped being so fanatical about me having long hair, I might actually grow it out.” She ran her hands through her short spiky hair, which had changed from purple to blue tipped sometime in the past week.

  “You could always let them think you were conforming.”

  She looked at me like I was crazy. “Uh, you have met my parents, right? One small move in their direction and they’ll have my entire life mapped out before I could take a single step back. I’ll be finishing college before you’re out of high school.”

  “Then I guess you’ll simply have to suffer through your jealousy of my superior hair.”

  “Yeah, but your outfit balances it out.”

  “What do you mean?” I glanced down at my black shirt and skinny jeans. I thought I looked good.

  “It’s a bit...Chloe.”

  “Bitch!”

  “Here,” she said, and gripped one of the shoulders of my shirt and yanked it down. Luckily, the stretchy material didn’t rip. It gripped the side of my arm in a now off the shoulder look then she took off her extra-long silver studded necklace and put it over my head. “Chloe so wouldn’t wear this.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Owen!” Bianca called and waved her hand in the air to catch his eye. She spun back around, her eyes huge. “Nathan’s here.”

  “Where?” I glanced in the direction she’d been facing, but I couldn’t see him in the sea of moviegoers.

  “Oh, uh, he was heading through the ticket line.”

  I raised a brow at her suddenly strange tone. “Do you think I should go find him?”

  “No. I mean, didn’t Chloe say he was going to come and talk to you? Besides you don’t really have a great track record when you chase after him.” She paid for her order and I wished I had the spare cash to get something, but a full price movie ticket was the limit to my budget.

  “You’re right. You are,” I said as Owen joined us and we entered the concession line. I glanced around again, hoping to see Nathan. Usually his height made him easily visible, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. “I just don’t want to wait any longer.”

  “Wait for what?” Owen asked.
/>
  “To talk to Nathan,” I said.

  “That might not be the best idea right now,” he answered, shifting from one foot to the other, while managing to avoid looking at me.

  “Why?” I looked from Owen to Bianca, wondering what was going on. Bianca was close lipped, and I knew she wouldn’t spill. So I turned back to Owen, knowing that unlike Bianca, he wouldn’t try to lie. “Why not?”

  He quickly cracked. “Uh, Vivian’s with him.”

  God, couldn’t that bitch just fall down and die or something? Maybe that seemed mean, but it was Vivian, and ever since Nathan and I broke up, she’d been hanging off him like a dog in heat.

  Owen’s comment put a pretty effective end to our conversation, and we made our way through the line. Andy ripped our tickets and pointed to the right. The theater was only half-full, and we got good seats right in the center of a row just up from the middle. I waited a few minutes before looking for Nathan, but it took me less than a minute to scan the place and find him against the back wall. He was standing at the end of the row staring at me. He lifted his hand in a wave. Rather than returning it, I looked down his row and found Vivian talking to one of her little posse.

  I swiveled around, fury building inside of me, pissed at Nathan and Vivian, but mostly at myself. He was with Vivian only because I’d pushed him away. If Tonya were here, she’d be wearing her smug face, and pushing me to take Vivian down. Instead, I was going to wallow in my self-pity.

  “You okay?” Bianca asked as the first previews started.

  I nodded in response and then pulled out my cell phone. I didn’t want to be super annoying and call Tonya, but I did want to tell her what was going on. It took me until the third preview to get a text message typed out, and then I had Owen turn it on to vibrate so I didn’t have to turn it off.

  Focusing on the movie was almost impossible, and I really did try hard. But I could feel Vivian’s spiteful gloating behind me, making me squirm in my seat with frustration. Was she why Nathan hadn’t called me back? Was this his way of telling me that he had chosen her? I twisted around and looked over my shoulder. He was hard to see, but in a few flashes of brighter screen time, I could make him out, and thankfully, Vivian wasn’t beside him. She was a few seats down, two of Nathan’s football friends separated them.