Spiritdell Book 1

by Dalya Moon

  “No,” the girl who is like Austin but not Austin says. “I mean she's checking into the hospital tonight, for surgery tomorrow.”

  Behind me, another customer sighs and shifts back and forth, making as much noise as possible without crossing the threshold for rudeness. I apologize and say I'll just be a few more seconds. “I thought the tumor was inoperable,” I say to the girl.

  We're interrupted by a woman saying, “Do you mind?” She's near the coffee counter, sitting alone at a table for four, with a laptop and dirty dishes spread all around her. “I'm trying to work,” the woman says.

  Austin's cousin nods for me to join her at the other end of the counter, so I do. Another person working behind the counter starts helping the people in line.

  “Thank you!” the woman with the laptop calls over cheerfully. I am not a violent person, but I would love to fold that laptop up like a taco and shove it down her throat.

  In a low voice, I repeat to Austin's cousin, “I thought the tumor was inoperable.”

  “Anything can be removed,” she says. “The problem is there might not be anything left.” Her cheeks are puffy and her eyes are rimmed with pink that isn't makeup.

  “I'm sorry. I didn't know. We only just met. Do you think she'd want to see me?”

  The girl sniffs and holds up her finger to indicate she'll be right back. She disappears behind the big, silver, steam-billowing coffee machine, so I take a good look around the cafe. The counter is bright orange, as I remembered, but the floor is red, a stained concrete. Funny, I always pictured the floor being gray and white tile. I thought I could count on my memory, but apparently it fills in the blanks with imaginary details.

  That nice aroma must be all the coffee, which almost smells like something I'd want to eat. I don't drink coffee, except for some mochas during final exam week at school. School. It feels like somewhere I've never been.

  Austin's cousin returns, handing me a paper cup filled with hot beverage and a generous topping of whipped cream. “I can only talk to customers,” she says, nodding her head in the direction of a woman, who I guess is her boss.

  I reach for my money, but she says the drink's on the house.

  “You know Austin better than me,” I say. “Would she want to see me? Either before or after the surgery?”

  I lift the foamy drink to my lips.

  “Better go before. You never know. She's over at her husband's house. I'll give you the address, hang on.”

  Husband? My mouth is full of burning liquid that hurts all the way down.

  CHAPTER 14

  So I'm holding, in my sweaty hand, the address for Austin's husband's house, which is guess is her house too, unless he's her ex-husband. Gah! I did not have these issues a month ago when I was in grade eleven at Mountain High School. Still, does this new knowledge change how I feel about Austin—that she is or has been married? No. I love her. Thinking those words makes me gooey inside, as though the word love were a magic spell of just one word. Love.

  I thank Austin's cousin for everything.

  On my way out, I notice how lovely the door to The Bean is. The wood must be old, as it's covered in multiple coats of textured paint, the most recent a tropical parrot green. It's the kind of door I would photograph, if I had my camera with me, and didn't have life and death matters on my brain.

  Outside, I blink in the bright sunlight and take another sip of the drink to ground myself in reality. I don't know what this beverage is, and I probably shouldn't drink any old thing someone gives me, but this is good.

  Down the street, I think I see Mr. Bad Suit, but it's a young guy wearing an old-fashioned hat. On second glance, this dude with the thin mustache doesn't look unlike a serial killer who makes wind-catcher mobiles out of teenage boys' bones. Now he's pretending to not watch me while he watches me. Has the whole world turned creepy?

  “Zan!” a female voice calls out. I think of the girls from the lake—Missy and Facepuncher—and how I don't relish seeing them. My head down, I run in the opposite direction, my drink sloshing in its cup.

  A block later, the girl calls my name again, sounding closer. I cast my hot beverage into a garbage bin so I can pick up some speed. On the next block, as I reach the park, I'm tackled from behind. I tumble to the grass, the other person rolling over me. She's laughing.

  “Julie?”

  She punches me on the arm, almost as hard as her brother James would. “You nozzle, why are you running?”

  “You're calling me nozzle now?”

  “Yeah. Wanna wrestle?” She pushes me to the grass.

  I clutch my arms up protectively. “Not right this moment, but ... Julie, you do know you don't have to act exactly like James, right? We're real friends now, like I said. You can still be a girl.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Girls like wrestling and roughhousing too.”

  “I knew that,” I say, unfurling and relaxing back on the cool grass.

  Julie lies down next to me at an angle, so that our shoulders and the tops of our heads are touching.

  After a few moments of observing the bunny-shaped clouds, she says, “I need to know you'll marry me.”

  I sit up, startled. “Are you pregnant?”

  She makes a cute little disgusted expression. On James, it's undignified, but on her, it's cute, like a ladybug on a leaf, or a ladybug anything. Even when pissing on your hand, ladybugs are cute.

  “No, I mean when we're old,” she says. “If we haven't found anyone else by a certain age, you and I should get married. James would be the best man.”

  “Of course he would. Okay, sign me up. I will totally marry you if we get old.”

  “Not if, when,” she says.

  “Yeah, I guess some of us will get old.”

  As I say this, the smile falls off Julie's face, and I know we're both thinking about people who get tumors and die tragically young.

  “Have you seen her yet?” Julie asks.

  “No.”

  “I heard she's going in for surgery. There's a, um, decent chance she'll live. I only talked to her at the party for a few minutes, but she was nice. She's older than us, you know. I'm sure she's done some stuff. You know, with her life.”

  I lean back and return my attention to the clouds, since Julie's pep-talk is not giving me any pep. Above me, a fluffy cloud bunny is being chased in slow motion by a giant cloud monster. The monster slowly opens its big cloudy jaws.

  “Is it awful that I'm excited about our wedding?” Julie asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then that's definitely not what I'm thinking about.”

  * * *

  Julie and I are standing in front of a pizza-by-the-slice place, and I can smell the mozzarella and onions, but the scent isn't making me as hungry as it should. My brain notes that the air smells delicious, but also that my stomach doesn't want any. Julie, talking about marriage, makes me wish I'd kept on running, faster than her.

  After cloud-watching in the park, Julie offered to buy me an early lunch, which led us to the pizza place. We go in and order some slices. I get pepperoni, and Julie gets plain cheese with honey drizzled on top. I choose a table near the window, so I can keep an eye out for Mr. Bad Suit.

  “I'm thinking thirty-five,” Julie says, still on the topic of our hypothetical arranged marriage. “Because of, you know, fertility issues. The eggs.”

  I imagine the eggs the way James described, as miniature chicken eggs. With their tiny little shells, they move along fallopian tubes, inside Julie. The imaginary eggs are still fragile, and every time I reject Julie, a bunch of them burst with heartbreak. I feel a twinge of guilt.

  “Thirty-five's okay,” I say. “Why not make it twenty-eight. Twenty-seven if we never discuss the matter again until we're at least twenty-six.”

  “Twenty-eight, and we go to Paris for the honeymoon.”

  “Where else?” I say, holding up my palms.

  “What's that?” She points to the address, still in my hand. I hold it up,
wordlessly, for her to read.

  “No kidding,” she says. “I have the Jeep, I'll drive you there now.”

  * * *

  My hands are conspicuously empty. As I knock on the door, I find myself wishing I'd brought flowers. Or chocolates. Or both. What do you say when the door opens? What do you say when it's a man, about thirty, and he's wrinkling his brow as if to say, Hey, kid, we didn't order any pizza.

  You say, “I'm sorry to bother you, but is Austin home?”

  “Tina?”

  “Yeah. Austina. Is that how you pronounce it? I guess I don't really know her.” I shuffle my feet, the saddest dweeb in the universe.

  “Is that your Caddy?” the man asks.

  I turn and watch as a car with tinted windows drives along the street, real slow. Julie and the Jeep are long gone. She said she'd come in with me, but I insisted she go about her regular Julie business.

  “I don't know who that could be.”

  “Well, come in,” the man says. “We have a rule, and that's no crying. If you have to cry, do so in the bathroom or on your own time.”

  I step over the threshold and kick off my shoes, even though the man is wearing his. Mine aren't as nice as his, which have tassels.

  “Friend from the coffee shop?” he asks.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  He's not wearing a wedding ring, so I'm not sure if this is the husband, but he could seriously kick my ass either way. His sleeves are rolled up and he's got big, meaty forearms, like Popeye, but the sophisticated, urbane version.

  I follow him down a hall, where he knocks on a door softly before pushing it open. Inside, Austin is sitting on the floor, surrounded by magazines, scissors, and cut-outs. She's exactly as I remember her, or possibly even prettier.

  “What, are you scrap-booking?” I say, trying to sound, to anyone else standing in the doorway—like, say, a big man with muscled forearms—like someone who's not slept with Austin, or even had impure thoughts about her.

  “Zan,” she says, beaming. “Wow. Come, sit, you can help me glue.” She clears a spot on the tasteful, cream-colored carpet next to her. “Thank you David,” she says, as though dismissing a butler, and he disappears, off to pump weights or lift cars.

  Austin looks like she does in my photos and memories of her, but smaller. She has dark crescents under her eyes. I sit down next to her and wrestle my inflexible legs into a cross-legged position. Now what?

  She throws her arms around me and kisses me, closed-mouth, but so hard I think my lips might crack. I don't mind the forcefulness, though I note with fear that the door to the room is open.

  She pulls back, and I say, “I should have called you. I should have called the very next day, but I went to the lake, and, then ...”

  “My cousin Claire called to warn me you were on your way,” she says. “So, what scared you more? That I'm married or that I'm dying?”

  “You're not dying, you're having surgery. You are having surgery, right?”

  “Dying is easy, living is hard,” she says, leafing through an open magazine on the floor. “But I decided to stop thinking about time in a linear sense. Just because a song has stopped playing doesn't take away from the song or its beauty ... or how it made a difference to someone.”

  I swallow hard. “I guess.”

  “We don't mourn for the years that existed before we were born,” she says. “And it was more than years. It was forever. Time is so long that it can't help but meet up with itself, and all our songs will play again.”

  At a loss for words, I examine the scissors and glue sticks spread out on the floor before us.

  “By the way, the marriage isn't real,” Austin says. “David's a family friend.”

  I whisper, “You're not really married?”

  “You know how things are, with experimental surgeries and unconventional medical treatments. You're a smart guy. I'm sure you figured out straight away our marriage might be an insurance thing.”

  “You mean Mr. Arms isn't going to squeeze my throat until my head pops off?”

  “Not unless I ask him to,” she says. She picks up a magazine and points to a page. “What do you think of this dress?”

  It's a wedding dress, which looks like all the other wedding dresses: white, fluffy. “Nice.”

  “They'll shave my head for the surgery,” she says. “It will take three years to grow back to full length. Only then can I even start to think about getting married. I have to have my hair just right, you know.”

  I tsk-tsk as lightheartedly as I can. “You girls and your wedding plans.”

  The room darkens as a cloud passes in front of the sun, and the day jumps forward to late afternoon. Time is slipping away from us, and the tighter I try to hold on, the more I miss.

  “Thanks for coming, it's been nice to see you,” Austin says.

  It's been nice. She wants me to leave, but I can't bring myself to go.

  “When are you out of surgery?” I ask. “Can I bring you ice cream?”

  “I'm not having my tonsils out. It's a brain tumor. If I survive, I probably won't even know what ice cream is. I won't even be human.”

  “Don't say that.” My jaw hurts and my eyes are threatening to break the rule about no crying in the house. “I'll bring you flowers for after. What's your favorite flower?”

  “Send lilies, for my memorial,” she says. “This page.” She points to the scrapbook in front of her, at a page filled with cutouts of white lilies. “I always liked how they smell like hot dogs. It makes the whole thing more festive. I wish I were Irish. Some of my ancestors were, but not enough to count.”

  I stare up at the ceiling and choke down my feelings. If Austin is a song, it's not fair her song's about to finish. It isn't right, so it can't be true.

  She continues leafing through the magazines, as calm as Sunday afternoon.

  “Did you have chemotherapy? You still have your hair,” I say.

  “I've had chemo, but everyone's different. Not everybody loses their hair,” she says.

  “Your hair's so pretty.”

  She smiles and twirls a section of pale hair with one hand. It's the most bewitching thing I've ever seen a girl do.

  “I love you,” I say.

  She frowns, wrinkling a little vertical spot between her thin eyebrows. This is the first time I've seen her frown, and it crushes me.

  “People keep saying that to me,” she says. “And since the diagnosis, they also keep telling me to think positive and be positive, but as this dumb ol' tumor grew and grew and no doctors were willing to operate, I started to feel like it was my fault for not thinking positively enough.”

  “You don't have to be positive, I guess. You could get angry. I think I'd be angry, and depressed. I feel that way now, and I don't even have a ... um.”

  “Exactly,” she says. “My parents think going in for a radical surgery with a low survival rate is my own method of doctor-assisted suicide, just to get it over with already.” She tears a page from a magazine. “That's why me and my parents aren't exactly talking right now.”

  I rub my sweaty palms on my jeans. “You can always talk to me. You can talk to me about anything, and I won't lecture you about staying positive. I promise. I'm not really that positive myself. My friends describe me as angsty. I may have a reputation for overreacting. Just a bit.”

  Softly, she says, “I haven't braided my hair since that night.”

  Sensing an invitation, I lean in to kiss her, but she turns her head, and I get nothing but long hair on my lips.

  “You're a sweet kid, Zan, and we had our fun,” she says. “Get lost and forget all about me, okay? Like you already tried to do, but more successfully this time.”

  “But I didn't. I couldn't.”

  “David!” she yells. To me, she says, “David will show you out.”

  “But what about the future?”

  She sighs and rubs at the crease in her forehead, still not looking at me. “If I'm alive, in this future you talk about,
I'll probably date someone my own age. Stay in school, okay? You're a great guy. Some woman's going to be lucky to have you.”

  I want to kiss her again, smell her skin, but now David's at the door. I want to bury my face in her silvery hair and wrap my arms around her, forever.

  When I stand up, an invisible part of me tears out of my body and dies on the floor. On the way out of the house, David's talking about recovery rates and radiation, but I can't hear him from where I am, deep under the water.

  The last time. I just saw her for the second time, and the last time.

  I don't think I even said goodbye.

  Somehow, I get my shoes on. David pats me on the shoulder, gives me a gruff little hug, then I'm on the step, and the door is shut behind me. I have nowhere to go. I need to find a body of water to sink into.

  * * *

  I am definitely not imagining the black Cadillac that's following me down the street. The weather has changed from sunshine to rain, and I cross my arms against the chill, wishing I'd worn more than a shirt, but of course, when I left the house this morning, everything was different.

  I turn right at the corner, then as soon as the car follows, I turn back and cross the street instead. A few minutes later, the car is back behind me. There's no way they can expect to go unnoticed, so I finally give in and trot up to the side of the car, where I knock on the window.

  The driver doesn't roll down the dark, tinted window, despite my banging on the glass. The car stops and the back door pops open.

  What do I have to lose? I'm weightless and foggy as I slide into the back of the car.

  I can't say I'm surprised to see Mr. Bad Suit at the wheel and the scary old woman from the gas station cottage, Heidi, in the back seat next to me. The pupils of her eyes are as dark as graveyard dirt, and her skin, which was wrinkled before, is now gray and stony.

  While I'm not surprised, I'm still horrified. The inside of the car smells like new leather, but also decay. I nearly jump back out the door, but I remember I have nowhere to go, so I stay.