Arcadia's Gift (Arcadia Trilogy)

by Jesi Lea Ryan

  “What are you doing?” I asked, leaning against the counter. Aaron’s blond hair was damp from the shower and he was dressed in jeans and a clean t-shirt which read “The ZOMBIE APOCALYPS is coming.” I wasn’t sure if it was advertising a band or making a social statement.

  “What’s it look like?” he grunted. “Going to school.”

  School. The thought of doing something as ordinary as going to school seemed foreign to me.

  “Why?” I wondered.

  Aaron flashed me a look like I was the stupidest girl he’d ever met. “It’s Monday.” He replaced the cap on the milk and slid it back into the refrigerator. His eyes drifted over me standing there barefoot and in pajamas. “You’re not going?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t thought about it.”

  Aaron’s face softened and he nodded. “If you’re not ready, you should stay home. But I…I just can’t take this house anymore.” He snatched up his bag from the table. “See ya.”

  I stood there for several minutes, my mind completely blank. It felt kind of nice standing alone, like being able to breathe fresh air after a long time in a stuffy room. For the first time since leaving the hospital, I got an urge to get out of the house, to go for a jog, to feel the sun on my skin. I wasn’t ready to go back to class yet, but a run around the neighborhood sounded like it might be okay.

  After swapping out my pj’s for sweats, I walked down the hall to my mother’s room to let her know I was going out. I opened her door slowly and peeked in. The shades were drawn tight, blocking out the morning sun. I could just make out a lump curled in a ball in the middle of the king-sized mattress. Aside from the funeral, my mom hadn’t left her bed. The scent of unwashed sheets made my nose twitch.

  Suddenly, my hands began to tremble and my stomach clenched. Intense sorrow hit me, seeming to radiate from the direction of the bed, both emotional and physical at the same time. It sunk into my body through my pores. My breath caught in my throat and something in my heart snapped. The void left from Lony’s absence sucked the gravity right out of the room. I lost my grip on the door and dropped to the carpet. I hadn’t realized I was sobbing until my mother’s arms wrapped around me, rocking me side to side.

  “I know, honey, I know,” she whispered into my hair.

  After school let out for the day, Bronwyn and Shawn stopped by to drop off some textbooks that I’d asked for. They had been at the funeral, but we didn’t have much chance to talk. They both called regularly, but neither seemed to know what to say to me. I guess I understood that.

  We exchanged big hugs as I invited them inside. Identical looks of horror crossed their faces at seeing my normally put-together mom standing barefoot in the kitchen wearing her dirty bathrobe and eating peaches directly out of a can with her fingers. What I saw as progress they probably saw as a scene from Punked. I herded them upstairs.

  I moved a heap of discarded pajamas and t-shirts from my desk chair and dropped them on top of my already-full hamper, where at least half fell off onto the floor. Bronwyn took the chair while Shawn sprawled out in my window seat. He picked up my binoculars and looked through them.

  “Spying on the neighbors?” he asked.

  “Birds,” I replied, then instantly felt stupid. I knew it sounded like a lame way to spend my time. “I’ve been watching the birds in the pines.”

  Bronwyn bit her lip as she tended to do when she was uncomfortable. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen your room like this before,” she commented, her eyes roaming around.

  For the first time since I got home from the hospital, I really focused my attention on my surroundings. The bed was unmade and the sheets were loose and wrinkled from tossing and turning. Several dirty dishes with clumps of caked-on food were stacked on the desk like my own personal Leaning Tower of Pisa. Next to the dishes, the photos from my bulletin board lay in a crumpled heap from where I’d ripped them down in a moment of rage and regret. On the floor in front of the closet was a pile of old school papers that I’d pulled out of my nightstand drawers for some reason late one night, and never bothered putting back.

  “You were always the neat one,” Bronwyn whispered.

  “Well, now I’m the only one,” I snapped. Bronwyn cringed and gnawed at her lip again. My harsh tone shocked me as much as her, and I immediately felt sorry.

  “Cady,” Shawn said, walking over and wrapping his arms around me “She didn’t mean anything bad. Don’t get angry. We’re just worried about you.”

  I allowed myself the luxury of sinking into his skinny, yet strangely comforting, chest. A wave of calm coated me like a blanket. “I’m so sorry,” I sighed.

  Bronwyn slid up behind me and joined our embrace. The calming sensation intensified and the tense muscles in my shoulders relaxed. Sandwiched between my friends was the best I’d felt since before my Dad left.

  “I don’t have to be home for a couple of hours,” Bronwyn said, “Why don’t you let Shawn and I help you clean up?”

  I groaned. I wasn’t in the mood to clean, but I was willing to concede that doing something productive might make me feel better. I nodded.

  Bronwyn gathered all of the dirty clothes and the sheets off of my bed and dragged them off to the laundry room, while Shawn helped me make up the bed with clean linens. When we carried my dirty dishes downstairs, I noticed the heap already sitting in the sink and stacked on the countertops, the remnants of what couldn’t be stuffed into the dish washer. It didn’t look like anyone had run a load since the accident.

  Bronwyn and I tackled the kitchen while Shawn ran the vacuum, first in my bedroom and then through the rest of the house. My mother, holed up in her bedroom, didn’t come out of her room to help.

  By the time Bronwyn had to leave to get ready for her Bible study group, the house was more or less put to order. I hugged both of my friends tightly and watched as they trotted off to Shawn’s Toyota parked across the street. As they drove away, my energy left with them, replaced by dull emptiness.

  Returning to my newly cleaned bedroom, I sank down on the plush cushion of my window seat, feeling a little like a balloon that just had the air let out. My hands automatically picked up my dad’s old pair of binoculars from his time in the Army. The cardinals looked like they were redecorating their nest. I wondered if they applied the same Feng Shui principles my mother did. Wouldn’t want to see their Chi off balance.

  A smudge of color appeared in the background, and I readjusted my focus. It was my neighbor, stooped over in her herb garden clipping leaves and dropping them into a pouch at her waist. I didn’t know her name. We had adjoining backyards, but her house faced the next street over. The woman had moved in a year ago after our old neighbor died. My mother frequently complained about how poorly this one kept her yard. The garden took up almost half of the space, the bushy plants over-grown and planted haphazardly. The back half of the yard, the half which reached all the way up to our chain link fence, was a large patch of grass which had not been mowed once since the woman moved in, like an urban haven for all kinds of woodland creatures.

  I trained the binoculars on her face. The woman rarely came outside, so I was curious to get a look. She was younger than her long baggy dresses led me to believe. Auburn hair cascaded down her back in wavy tangles as if she hadn’t bothered to brush it that morning. She wore no makeup, but was exceptionally pretty with a smooth, creamy complexion. A slight smile rested on her lips as she clipped away like she might have been having a silent conversation with herself.

  Zooming the focus out, I captured her whole body in my view. Her clothes were weird. I’d noticed them before in the glimpses over the past year. She favored long flowing skirts layered over each other in a way that my mother would have called Bohemian. Her top was a simple, long-sleeved t-shirt in bright blue. I was thinking of zooming in on her house when the woman glanced up and looked right at me. Her face broke into a toothy grin and her hand raised in a little wave.

  I shot out of my window,
dropping the binoculars on the carpet, embarrassed to have been caught spying. Oh, well. It was time to do something more productive than stare at birds anyway.

  The text books that Shawn had brought sat in a neat stack on my desk. Just the thought of school overwhelmed me and made my palms sweat. I’d already missed eleven days in a row. Neither of my parents had mentioned anything about me going back. The doctors at the hospital advised them I should take it slow and suggested a therapist who specialized in post traumatic stress disorder. I had an appointment scheduled for Wednesday.

  I carried the school books over to the bed and opened my literature text. A blue envelope baring Ms. Crowell’s loopy handwriting on the front dropped out from beneath the cover. I opened it to find a sympathy card with a little note inside.

  “Words can’t express how deeply sorry I am for your loss. I know school is the last thing on your mind, but you might find it helpful to focus on something else for a while. I marked a few pages in the poetry section that you might find comforting. I’ve also enclosed a list of assignments that you’ve missed. Don’t worry about the due dates, just do the best you can. If you need any help, please feel free to contact me anytime.”

  On the bottom, Ms. Crowell listed both her home and cell phone numbers. I ran my finger over the digits. I had only been in her class for a week before the accident, not nearly long enough to decide whether I liked her as a teacher or not. Somehow, that handwritten note with her phone numbers meant more to me than any of the hundreds of sympathy cards we’d accumulated since the funeral.

  Maybe Ms. Crowell was right. I needed something more than a family of cardinals to distract my mind. Reviewing the assignment list, I noticed the class had already moved on from the Greeks and had skipped ahead to the Elizabethans. I heaved a sigh of relief at seeing we were to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’d watched the movie on television once and liked it well enough. I couldn’t have handled reading one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. I flipped open the thick book and began reading.

  I’d just gotten to the point where Nick Bottom’s head was turned into a donkey when the land-line phone rang. Probably Dad checking in on me again.

  “Hello?” I answered, my eyes still half-reading the page.

  There was a long pause before the caller spoke. “Uh, may I speak to Arcadia please?” His voice was soft and unsure, not familiar to me at all.

  “This is Cady,” I replied.

  “Hi. This is Bryan…Bryan Sullivan…you know, the new kid.”

  It took me a moment to place the name. When I did, my belly did a little flip. “Oh, right, from literature class.”

  I sat up straight on my bed. Boys called the house all the time, but other than Shawn, they had usually wanted to talk to Lony.

  “I hope you don’t mind my calling. Are you busy? Do you feel up to talking?”

  I shoved Ms. Crowell’s card between the pages to keep my place. “No…I mean, yeah…it’s cool. I was just catching up on some homework, but I could use a break. How’d you get my number?”

  “Phone book.” He paused and took an audible breath in and out. “Listen, I’m really sorry about your sister. I actually went to the funeral, but you looked sort of overwhelmed with people, so I didn’t come up and say anything.”

  “Oh…” I don’t know what surprised me more, that I hadn’t noticed him or that he’d been there at all. “Told you I’m not very observant.”

  “Well, you had a good excuse.”

  We both went quiet for an awkward moment. A faint metallic taste touched my tongue. I realized I was gnawing the chapped skin on my lower lip.

  “So, um…how’s school going?” I asked. Lame, I know.

  “It’s good, I guess. I mean, it’s school. If it weren’t at least a little emotionally damaging, they wouldn’t be doing their job, right?”

  “Right.” I squeezed my eyes tightly and willed myself to come up with something to say that wouldn’t make me seem like a complete moron.

  “So, do you know when you’re going to come back yet?”

  “No idea. My brother, Aaron, went back today, but he hasn’t been home yet, so I haven’t asked him how it went.” I picked at the pilled fabric of my bedspread. “I don’t know how to tell if I’m ready to face it again, and my parents have been like zero help.”

  “I understand. Actually, that’s why I’m calling.” Bryan paused as if gathering the courage to say something. “Um…my older brother...Jesse? He passed away last year. Thought you might like to talk to someone who’s been there, you know?”

  “Didn’t you tell me that you’re an only child?”

  “I am…now I am. After Jesse died, my parents thought we should be closer to our extended family in the Midwest. My mother’s side. So when my dad scored a job transfer to Dubuque, they couldn’t pack us off fast enough.”

  “Oh. How...how did Jesse…?” My tongue stumbled over the question.

  “Die? Do you know what hemophilia is?”

  “Some kind of blood disease, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s a genetic disorder where the blood can’t clot very well. A cut or a bruise can be fatal if doctors can’t get the bleeding to stop in time. Anyway, Jesse was snowboarding —something he was absolutely forbidden to do because of his condition. He was always doing stupid things he shouldn’t. The slope wasn’t even all that dangerous; he just banked too hard on a curve and tumbled into a tree. He was able to get up and walk back to the lodge, but by the time he got there, a huge bruise had formed on his side and began spreading across his back.”

  “Oh, no,” I whispered.

  “Yeah. His friends drove him to the nearest hospital, but he’d lost consciousness before they arrived. He died before my parents could get there. I guess he’d torn his liver when he fell.”

  I squeezed my eyes tightly. Even hearing about the death of a boy I didn’t know could bring me to tears. “I’m so sorry, Bryan.”

  He sighed on the other end of the phone as if he were forcing himself to be strong. “It’s okay. I mean, it was hard at first —it’s still hard —but it gets easier. I wanted you to know that. It gets easier.”

  My chest tightened and my skin warmed for what seemed like the first time in days. “Thank you, Bryan. It means so much to me that you called. It’s like no one really understands what it’s like to lose a sibling. My friends have tried to help, but they’ve never experienced anything even close.”

  “Have you been able to talk with your family?”

  “Yeah, right! My mother has banned my father from the house and won’t let me go over to his place. And she’s been in a Valium haze since the funeral. My brother and I are spending all of our time in our bedrooms on opposite ends of the house. It’s like we brought the mortuary home with us.”

  “I saw your brother today, at school. He looked like a guy walking in a dream. I thought maybe you would’ve come back, too.”

  “I don’t think I’m ready yet. It just seems so hard. I can’t stop thinking about her as it is. How will I be able to look at her locker or her table in the lunch room or the cheerleaders walking around in their uniforms without thinking of her?”

  “You can’t. You’re gonna see Lony everywhere for a while. It will totally suck…but that’s okay.”

  “No! It’s not okay!” Tears were spilling down my face in earnest now. “These reminders just make the hole she left in my life bigger. She was my sister…my twin! All of my life we were defined by our relationship to each other. Lony’s the outgoing one, and I’m the introverted one. She’s got the style, and I’ve got the brains. She’s liked by all of the boys, and I’m liked by all the teachers. I don’t even know who I am without her!”

  Bryan stayed silent for a few minutes while I sobbed. When I calmed down, I set the receiver down to wipe my face blow my nose with a wad of tissues.

  I picked the phone back up and cradled it into the crease of my neck. “I’m sorry, Bryan. I didn’t mean to lose it. I’m doing that a lot lately.”r />
  “Cady, don’t apologize,” he said. His voice was as soothing as hot chocolate. “Don’t ever apologize for what you are feeling. I understand.”

  I sniffed again and asked, “So with Jesse…how did you move beyond it? I mean, how did you go on with your life?”

  “Well, it sounds cliché, but I took it one day at a time. I got back into my routine, you know, going to school, doing my homework. I had a few close friends who helped me along. They kept me busy, but didn’t get offended when I didn’t have as good of a time as they did.”

  “What about your family?”

  “My mom also was lost for a while, but she pulled herself out of it after a few weeks. My dad…well, he doesn’t show his emotions much. I never even saw him cry, which seems weird, but if you knew my dad, it’s not a shocker. He went back to work the day after the funeral like nothing even happened. I don’t think my mother has forgiven him for that yet. They’re not talking a whole lot anymore. I suspect this move is a last-ditch effort on keeping their marriage together. It’s weird living in a house where no one speaks to each other. Sometimes I wish they would just separate and get it over with.”

  “I know what you mean there. My dad had actually moved out the day before Lony’s accident.”

  “Whoa! Brutal.”

  I pulled a blanket out of my closet and carried it over to the window seat where I curled up all cozy-like with the phone. Bryan and I talked for over an hour. I told him about my upcoming therapy appointment, and he told me about the psychologist that his mother made him go see after Jesse’s death and what I might expect.

  “So,” he said finally, “I have to go. My father will be home soon and my mother has dinner almost ready. Will I see you in school tomorrow?”

  I could tell by the way he asked it that he thought it was time I get back in the swing of things, but didn’t want to pressure me.

  “I don’t know, Bryan. I don’t know if I can walk in there. Everyone is going to stare at me.” I knew I sounded whiney, but didn’t care.