Wake

by Abria Mattina

  “You’re going to be short forever, the way you drink that stuff.”

  “Don’t care. Worth it. Coffee. Now.”

  I go downstairs and retrieve Elise’s mug from the cupboard. It’s the one she uses every morning, with a big looped handle and a pink E on the side. It’s also about the size of a cereal bowl. Elise likes her coffee hot, black, and in quantities large enough to send a horse into cardiac arrest.

  When I enter Elise’s room again she’s reburied herself in her nest of bedding. I pull back two of the blankets and a little hand slips through the folds to smack me away.

  “I brought your coffee.”

  “I changed my mind. Come back in six hours.”

  “Lise.”

  She grunts from somewhere in the mound of blanket.

  “I kissed Willa last night.”

  At first I think she’s gone back to sleep and didn’t hear me, but then her skinny hand pops out again and makes a grabbing motion.

  “Alright, give me that coffee.”

  Elise sits on her bed looking very much like a zombie while I pace back and forth, outlining my questions. The more questions I voice the faster they seem to multiply. It’s like having a freaking hydra in my head. Elise keeps her face in her mug, drinking steadily, and only stops to ask the odd question about what happened last night.

  “Give me your phone,” she says when I pause for breath. I hand it over and she mutters, “What am I going to do with you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You worry like a five-year-old girl but have the common sense of a guy. You’re hopeless.” Elise starts typing on my phone.

  “What are you texting?”

  Elise turns the phone around and holds it up. My place or yours today? We can cook here if you like.

  It’s perfect—exactly what Willa would want to hear, in a way that’s not likely to set her off. Now why the hell couldn’t I have thought of that?

  “Because you have a crush on her, genius,” Elise says. “It’s supposed to make you stupid.”

  “Did you just call me stupid?” I try to swipe her coffee and she hisses at me like a cat.

  My phone buzzes with Willa’s answering text and Elise retreats into her nest of blanket, hogging the phone so she can read the message first.

  “Give me that.”

  “You’re not gonna like it.”

  “Give it.”

  Elise passes my phone out from under her blanket. The text reads: I’m volunteering today.

  I send back: After?

  I need to think.

  I hand the phone back to Elise. “Translate to guy-speak.”

  Elise merely glances at the text before tossing my phone back to me. “She needs to think.”

  “Really? Thank you, I couldn’t have worked that out for myself.”

  Elise sticks her tongue out at me and takes another swig of coffee. “She’s probably panicking a little.”

  “What do—”

  “You do nothing.”

  “But—”

  “She’s a big girl. Let her think it out on her own. If she feels pressured she’ll push you away.”

  “But—”

  “Jem,” Elise rests her fingertip on my nose. “Zen, okay? There’s nothing you can do but wait. Let the mountain come to Mohamed, or whatever that saying is.”

  “The mountain doesn’t come, Miss Brilliant.”

  “Fine then, you can be the mountain.” She hands me her empty coffee cup. “Is that all?”

  “But what if—”

  “Ugh, shut up already,” she whines. “You’ve done what you can. The ball’s still in her court—just wait for her to send it back, okay?”

  Elise burrows back into her tangle of blankets and pillows. I have a feeling I’m not going to get any further help out of her at the moment. Neither of us are morning people, but she’s an extreme case.

  “See you in six hours.”

  Elise’s reply is muffled by her nest, but it doesn’t sound kind. I leave her to rest, but not five minutes later Eric, who is a morning person, starts blasting music in the next room. It’s his workout playlist. She’s never going to be able to sleep through that.

  I go downstairs for breakfast, compulsively checking my phone every five minutes, and come back upstairs to find Elise in my bed. She chose to transplant her nest to a quieter room instead of getting up.

  “How the hell can you sleep with a gallon of coffee in you?”

  “Bugger off,” she slurs.

  “No, it’s my room and I’m bored.” I don’t remember what I did with weekends before Willa. I guess I wasted time with Elise, but that doesn’t seem to be an option at the moment.

  “You’re bored?” she says incredulously. “You have two hands and a penis. This shouldn’t be a difficult equation.”

  I turn around to leave. She can be a really lippy little monster when she’s tired.

  “Don’t drool on my pillow.”

  “Too late.”

  *

  Despite having nothing to do, I end up having a pretty productive day. I actually finish my homework for once, make soup for lunch, and do laundry. I missed the smell of the laundry room most when I was in the hospital. The hum of the machines is calming and the detergent smells nice, and dryer-warmed towels are the next best thing to heaven, I’m sure. After I finish my own washing I throw Mom and Dad’s in, but together it isn’t enough to make a full load.

  I enter Elise’s room without knocking and head for her hamper in the corner. It’s almost two o’clock and she’s still in pajamas.

  “I’m pilfering your darks.”

  Elise grunts to acknowledge that she at least heard me, even if she didn’t listen. I dig a few dark t-shirts out of the hamper, some stray socks, and—

  What. The. Fuck.

  The possibility that the lace thong at the bottom of her hamper belongs to some other girl is so much easier to swallow than the thought of my baby sister buying lingerie. If she’s really a lesbian and that jackass was right, I will happily tolerate her girlfriend’s presence. Anything is better than the idea of her wearing sexy underwear with Kipp Latham in mind.

  “Jem?” Elise looks over at me curiously. I bet the look on my face suggests I’m about to have a stroke.

  “Excuse me, I need to go bleach my eyeballs.” Right after I incinerate that fucking thong.

  I pass Eric in the hallway and he asks if I’m all right.

  “You don’t want to know.” Let him keep an image of sweet, innocent little Elise in his head a while longer. It’s too late for me—some things cannot be un-seen.

  *

  Mom emerges from her office around two-thirty, eager-eyed and buzzing with energy. Work must be going well. She sees me folding clothes out of the dryer and says, “It’s so nice that you’re getting your energy back.” She gives me a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek and says, “I’m spring cleaning my office. Want to help?”

  Spring cleaning Mom’s office is like purging a bleached forest. She gets rid of all her drafts and incomplete drawings, fills two garbage bags with recycling, and finds about a hundred things she thought were lost. These newly found items tend to sidetrack her a lot. Eventually she forgets spring cleaning altogether and hunches over her drafting table, muttering something about girders.

  I make myself at home in the corner with her shredder. It was my favorite non-toy when I was a kid, and still doesn’t fail to amuse. I’m feeding pages through one at a time for the fun of it when Elise walks by the office door carrying a toy baton. She sees me looking and puts a finger to her lips.

  “What?” I mouth. Elise points behind her and continues on to the end of the hall. I lean out the door to see what she was pointing at. Eric is asleep on the couch with the TV on.

  Elise props the side door open with her old baton. She’s got running shoes and a jacket on—Eric is about to get his comeuppance for waking her up this morning.

  I look over my shoulder at Mom. She�
��s still absorbed in her girders. Elise tiptoes down the hall, trying not to let her rubber soles squeak on the floor, and leans over Eric. She gets in real close and blows softly on his face. The breeze is just enough to disturb Eric. He wrinkles his nose in his sleep and swats a hand across his cheek. Elise keeps at it until he opens his eyes, and then she lurches into action.

  “Facepalm!” She brings her palm down on his forehead with a crack and runs like hell. The side door is the closest, so she sprints down the hallway. The door is already open—all she has to do is grab the baton on her way past and run as fast as she can for cover in woods behind our house.

  “Shit.” Eric rolls off the couch with a hand to his head, stumbling a little. He starts after Elise and I switch off the shredder.

  It takes very precise timing, but I manage to throw Mom’s swivel chair out into the hall at the exact moment Eric runs past. The collision in such a narrow hall sends him head over heels in the most impressive acrobatic display I’ve seen in a long time. He and the chair tumble to the floor with a crash and a few loud obscenities. Mom doesn’t even look up.

  “Turn that TV down,” she says.

  I dash out of the office and run in the opposite direction from Elise, toward the front door. Eric can only chase one of us. It seems like a great idea until I catch up to Elise in the driveway. She doubled-back around the house.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I grab her by the back of her jacket and stuff her into the narrow space between the wall of the garage and the garbage cans. I hear the side door slam behind Eric and I take off toward the screen of trees. At least I know he’s out for Elise’s blood first, since he used the side door.

  I’m at a disadvantage in the forest around our home. Eric is an avid hiker who knows the landmarks well, and I haven’t been outdoors much since we moved here. I follow the grade of the land down toward the ravine and sit down in a little niche on the riverbank. The curve of the bank hides me well enough, and I need to rest after that run. Soon enough I’m going to regret not bringing a jacket.

  The forest is peaceful, but I have a hard time appreciating it. The calls of birds make me jump and the way the branches rustle in the breeze makes me think I hear Eric coming to kick my ass. By the time I hear footsteps they’re too close for me to make another run for it. I press my back further into the niche, hoping to hide.

  Elise jumps off the bank and lands in front of me. The suddenness of her appearance startles me and I bump my head on an exposed root.

  “Ow!”

  “Shhh!” Elise puts a hand over my mouth. She’s got a wicked grin on. “Have you heard Eric?”

  “No.”

  Elise reaches into her pocket and pulls out Mom’s car keys and Eric’s wallet. “Want to go for ice cream?”

  *

  Elise gets a triple-scoop cone of chocolate, cotton candy and peanut butter ripple. What the hell, Eric’s paying, right? I get plain vanilla and we take our cones back out to the car.

  “Here’s to a good last meal,” Elise toasts. We ‘clink’ cones. It might very well be our last meal. I don’t know what Eric will do to us for revenge, but I’m sure it will be memorable.

  “Where’d you get the idea to do that, anyway?”

  “Oh, I’ve been scheming over that one for awhile,” she says. “I just needed the perfect opportunity.” She smiles proudly and takes a big bite of ice cream. Elise doesn’t fully grasp the point of ice cream cones. She bites with her lips instead of licking them. I’m glad she’s so inept, because that’s one less way for her to flirt with that jock she’s crushing on.

  It’s not safe to return to the house yet, so we discuss where to go next. Elise votes for the beach.

  “Do you want to drive?” The roads are pretty quiet in Smiths Falls on a Sunday. Elise won’t be eligible to renew her G1 license for another eight months, but I think she can handle a short drive to the beach. It’s partly my fault that she lost her license, anyway.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” I get out of the car and we switch sides. Elise has to adjust the driver’s seat all the way forward to reach the pedals. I quiz her on all the signals before we even shift out of park, and it takes some fiddling with the mirrors before they’re at the right angle for her.

  “Okay, back out—slowly.”

  We make it out of the parking lot without incident. Elise is a little jerky on the brake, but she does okay. I coach her along the quietest route toward the beach road, down suburban streets and well-worn gravel roads. She stays almost fifteen km/h below the speed limit the whole way at my insistence, and I can tell it annoys her.

  “I can drive the actual limit, you know.”

  “Not until you’re legal to drive, you can’t.”

  The parking lot at the beach entrance is empty when we arrive. It’s not exactly a nice day for swimming.

  “I miss driving,” she says as we get out of the car.

  “That’s what worries me.”

  I don’t have a jacket, so I open the trunk and take out the emergency blanket Mom keeps there in case of breakdown during the winter. I fold it in half and wrap it around my shoulders for the walk down the beach.

  Elise runs ahead a little bit, splashing in the shallow puddles that form in the dunes. Whenever she finds a flat rock she runs up to the surf to skip it. Her all-time record is eight skips on a single throw.

  She throws another and we count the skips out loud, cheering it on. Only six this time. Elise starts hunting for another flat rock.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket. Willa’s volunteer shift must be over. I open my inbox to find: Stay out of my thoughts, damn it. Do you have any idea how annoying it is to have you pop up in my head all day?

  Uh, and that’s my fault? My first instinct is to do the polite thing and apologize, even though I have no control over the situation. Elise sees me looking at my phone and comes bounding over for a look.

  “Aw, she’s thinking about you,” she coos. She got that out of Willa’s scathing message?

  Elise takes my phone and types a reply.

  Sorry, but I like it in here. You’ll just have to deal with it ;)

  “Who the hell taught you how to flirt?”

  Elise hands back my phone as she considers my question. “Prime time TV and Emily, I think.”

  Thank God she didn’t say Ava.

  My phone vibrates with Willa’s reply and Elise practically tackles me in her eagerness to read it.

  Don’t answer this call. Let it go to voicemail.

  My phone starts ringing a second later. Both Elise and I stand there and stare at the phone between us, like its ringing is somehow unusual or puzzling. It comes to the end of its ring cycle and a few minutes later I receive a voicemail alert.

  “She left you a long message,” Elise says.

  Despite the blanket, I’m getting cold. I pocket my phone and we head back to the car, back to the house. We’re barely out of the parking lot before Elise asks if she can listen to Willa’s voicemail.

  “No.”

  “You’re going to show it to me anyway so I can make sense of it for you,” she argues. She has a point, but I want to listen to it alone first.

  “Please?”

  “Fine, but if I tell you to shut it off, you shut it off, no questions asked.”

  “Deal.”

  Elise accesses my voicemail inbox while I drive and sets it to speakerphone so we can both hear.

  “You have one unheard voice message…”

  There’s a click, followed by a blip of white noise, and then “One Step Closer” by Linkin Park starts blasting through my cell speaker. Elise looks from the phone to me and back again, questioning.

  “Is this some sort of joke?”

  No, this is Willa. This is Willa freaking out, just like Elise said she would.

  The ball was in her court…

  We listen as the song plays out in all is excruciating misery, waiting to see if Willa left a real message at the end of the track. She
didn’t. She hung up just before the last notes of the song.

  “I don’t think she’s panicking,” Elise says thoughtfully.

  “You don’t?”

  “No. See at first I thought she was taking her time to consider, to mull things over, because of the whole cancer thing. And you’re kind of an asshole, but this…”

  “What?”

  “This is her own personal junk. Hmmm.” Elise taps my phone against her chin, pondering her hypothesis. She doesn’t say anything for a whole minute and it’s driving me insane.

  “You can’t just say shit like that and not follow it up with anything.”

  “Well I don’t know.” Elise shrugs. “I don’t think anyone can be so angry without first being angry at themselves. If she hates you she must hate herself way more.”

  “What are you, Gandhi?”

  Elise sighs and sets my phone down in the cup holder. “Fine,” she agrees with an Indian accent. “Ignore what I said. But if I’m right you owe me.”

  I wait a few hours to let Willa cool off. By eight o’clock I think it’s safe to say she has probably vented into her cutting boards and saucepans and may even be in a talking mood.

  I call her house line and Frank answers. He passes the phone off to his sister with a clipped, “The Harper boy’s calling for you.”

  Willa’s ‘hello’ is terse.

  “Can you talk?” This isn’t the kind of conversation most people want to have with the family lurking over their shoulder. Willa tells me to hang on, and for a few moments all I hear is footsteps and the quiet click of a door closing.

  “Now I can. Did you get my message?”

  “Is this what you normally do after a date goes well?”

  “I’m certifiably nuts, you know.”

  “I believe it.” There’s an awkward pause where she doesn’t respond, and I don’t know what else to say.

  “Did you find something to do with your day?” she says.

  “Yeah. Elise and I did some stuff.”

  “That’s nice.” It’s an uncaring, trite answer. I feel like I’m talking to a distant relative to whom I have little to say.