by Deb Caletti
“You what?” I say. “Kayleigh Moore–Kayleigh Moore? Or a different Kayleigh Moore?”
“No, that one. What’s the problem, Indigo? Jeez. You’re acting like I asked out the president’s daughter.”
“Well, you did, you idiot. Of your company.”
“That’s not what I meant. And you don’t have to be concerned. She said yes.”
Freud gets up, stretches, steps to the lawn and plops onto the grass. Closer to that evergreen tree. He’s got one eye on that crow the whole time. His tail twitches.
“Oh, man.”
“It’s gonna be fun. It’s gonna be great. Here.” He hands me the water glass, but I put my hands up. Forget it, Bud.
“And she goes to what, Riverside?” The private school for gajillionaire kids. I once heard that they’re required to each have their own laptop, and get lunch catered from local restaurants. “It’s not like you’re going to be able to give her a carnation and drive her in Mom’s car. What do you see in a girl like that?” I saw her once, when I picked up Severin from work. The lasting image was her T-shirt, which read: THIS IS WHAT A PERFECT 10 LOOKS LIKE. That, and her smile. Row of teeth in a perfect line, like the white deck chairs on a cruise ship.
“She’s not ‘a girl like that.’ First off, she’s gorgeous.”
“Not that you’re shallow or anything.” I decide I want that glass after all. I take it from him, have a long swallow of what is left of the water. It is getting hot out here. Maybe from the sudden desert drought of real.
“She’s more down-to-earth than you think.”
I almost choke on the ice cube rolling around in my cheek. A spiky, ugly feeling is starting in my chest. Some kind of green, creeping sense of them-us, of protection. This cold sense of a power game one is sure to lose. Is it jealousy I feel? I’m not sure, but if it is, I’m fucking mad at myself for feeling it for someone I already have little respect for. Here’s what a perfect ten looks like. Maybe I want what she has without wanting to be what she is.
I watch smug Freud and the nervous crow. I hate crows, I detest crows. They are sleek and crafty and mean. They are the sinister type of sixth-grade boy who makes fun of the quiet kid, and who knows what all the dirty words mean. Crows leer. But right now, it is Freud who I want to put in his place.
“Remember when Bex was, like, four, and she cut off Freud’s whiskers?” I say to Severin.
“Oh, man, that was sad,” Severin says, and laughs. “She thought she would make them ‘even.’”
“He kept bumping into walls,” I say.
I can’t explain this. But I am hoping Freud is listening.
Severin starts the lawn mower again, and I go inside to call Jane. She’s not at Carrera’s, so I try her cell phone number. When I reach her, her voice is almost breathless.
“Indigo! You won’t believe what happened after you left!”
“Trina sold her car.”
“No! It has nothing to do with Trina. It has something to do with you…”
“Me?”
“Yeah. You.”
“Uh-oh. The guy from America’s Most Wanted came in. They finally found me. Oh, no, wait. A Hollywood agent saw my yearbook picture. Ha! And I thought it sucked.” I am just cackling away at myself when I finally realize there’s that endless, cave-deep silence that means Jane’s cell phone cut out. It’s always so suddenly lonely when that happens.
I call her back, but her line’s busy, because she’s calling me back, and we do that annoying call me–call you dance that someone should have figured out a social rule for long ago.
“Sorry, I was going through a tunnel,” she says. I can tell she’s in her car. The sound is all whooshing air, some distant between-channel static. I’ve got to strain to hear as her voice jumps through the hoops of satellites and sonar waves and tin cans with string to get to me.
“You missed all my great jokes.”
But she’s too excited to bother with my award-winning humor. “The Vespa guy,” she breathes. “Goddamned asshole!” she growls. For a moment I’m confused—the Vespa guy is pretty nice, actually. Then I realize I’m being treated to something that would have been inconceivable in the pre–cell phone days: the play-by-play You Are There! of someone’s driving experience. This is a different episode from the You Are There! of someone’s grocery store experience, and usually more exciting. (I’m passing the yogurt. Do we need yogurt? What about eggs?) “Jerk just cut me off,” Jane says.
“The Vespa guy,” I remind.
“Yeah, well, he came in. Back in. After he left. After you left. He brought you something, Indigo. An envelope. Was he supposed to bring you something?”
“No.” My heart has stopped—freeze-frame photo snap, held in midair.
“It’s got your name on it. How’d he know your name? I told you never to give out your name.”
“What kind of an envelope?” I ask.
“Yellow. Large. The kind of envelopes that only hold important stuff.”
“You didn’t peek?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Yeah! Wait. I mean, no. No! Absolutely not.”
“It’s sitting right here on the seat beside me. Would you get the lead out? God, this woman’s driving like an old lady.”
“No. Just keep it for me,” I say.
“Oh shit, it really is an old lady. She can barely see out the windshield. Maybe she didn’t hear me honk. I hope she didn’t hear me honk. I’m a horrible person. Do you think I’m a horrible person? I’ll give it to you tomorrow, okay? Hey, by the way, could you work late? Through lunch?”
“Sure.”
“That’s great. Nikki’s got to take her kid to baseball, or something.”
“I wonder what he could have given me.”
“I have no idea. But, Indigo? This is going to be interesting.”
5
The whole damn house reeks of Axe deodorant, that canned male concoction of musk and helmet-bashing testosterone and a few ozone-ravishing chemicals. I cough. We should all be wearing those white face masks Mom bought in bulk after she was briefly convinced terrorists were going to come to Nine Mile Falls for, maybe, a salmon hatchery tour, or to blow up that drive-through coffee stand that’s made out of an old school portable.
“Severin, man, open a window!” I shout.
“It’s not me.” His voice comes from his room.
“It’s Mom,” Bex says. She’s sitting on the living room floor, eating a Fudgsicle and counting her money. She’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt with a skateboarder on it, and he’s flying high in a wild arc.
Mom’s quiet, though. Guilty-quiet. I follow the scent to her room, where her work clothes are tossed onto her bed. She’s just changed into a pair of khaki shorts and a tank top. “I just wanted to freshen up,” she says.
“Mom! You smell like a guy!”
“I like it,” she says. “It smells good.”
“For guys! I’ve told you before! Axe isn’t for women. This is what half of my school stinks like. Your supposed to be smelling like baby powder. Or flowers. Vanilla is the farthest you get to go on the masculine spectrum.”
“I don’t want to smell like a baby.” She’s reaching up to pull her hair back, giving me a galloping, fresh whiff of maleness. “Ah. A ponytail makes you feel so much more like things are in control,” she says.
“Bad day at work?”
“Probably a full moon or something. You’ll never guess what the drug reps brought.” Since she works in a psychiatrist’s office, Mom’s always getting promotional items like notepads and pens and coffee mugs with brands of drugs printed on them. The names of the drugs are either so long you quit reading after the first syllable or two (benzodiazepine, thioridazine), or are soft and airy and nasal-congested (Buspar, Zoloft). I never figured out how having benzodiazepine on your coffee mug would get you to buy more of it, but okay.
Mom’s got one hand in her purse that’s on the bed, and she’s shifting the ingredients around in there
. She gives up the hunt, removes the larger stuff so she can see better. Wallet, Kleenex pack, hairbrush, a pocket calendar thing she’s never used in her life, a container of Liqui-Stitch fabric glue.
“‘Sewing in a Tube’?” I read.
“My hem was coming out,” she says. Then, finally, “Here. Check it out.”
A small plastic rectangle, with a razor blade along the bottom. “A box cutter?”
“A razor blade box cutter. From this company that makes antidepressants.”
“That’s just twisted.”
“Tell me about it.” She tosses all the stuff back into her purse, a great big new jumbly personal object party. “Trevor coming for dinner?”
“Nah. He wants to get some more sanding done on Bob before we get together later.” Bob Weaver was getting a new paint job, and Trevor was doing most of the work to save money. Bob looked like he had a skin disease—splotches of gray primer showing through the old orange-red metallic. Bob was a Mustang leper. “Are you going out?”
Mom sighs. “I just want to wrap in a quilt and watch TV. Zone out.”
“So all the people out there you could be meeting will have to come knock at our front door, huh?”
She gives me a look, takes herself and her jock-smelling armpits to the kitchen. I know that’s where she ends up because I can hear Chico.
“Chico good boy,” he says. In terms of self-esteem, Chico’s got it to spare, which is probably why he can be so obnoxious. I eat linguine with clam sauce with Mom and Bex and Severin, and Bex gives us the statistics of how many were killed in the tsunami, how many homeless, how many children unidentified and separated from families.
She rolls her pasta on her fork. “One hundred sixty-four dollars so far,” she says.
“Honey, I think maybe we should see a counselor,” Mom says.
“Hey, In. Do you want to make some money waitressing at a MuchMoore party tomorrow? They really need people.” Severin says from over by the blender on the counter. For the last few months, Severin has been into protein shakes—these thick, brown slurpy drinks that smell like grass and the medicinal twinge of vitamins.
“Sure,” I say.
“Trevor, too?”
“Trevor with hors d’oeuvres on a tray? That’s hilarious, but if he gets paid, I’m sure he’d say to count him in.”
“I think maybe talking out your feelings with a professional might be helpful,” Mom says. She cuts her pasta, which she never does. A careful, overly thought-out action that reeks of concern bordering on panic.
“I don’t need a counselor,” Bex says. “I just need more hours in the day. I hate wasting time playing dodge ball.”
“Sadistic game,” I agree.
“I’m not sure if my insurance would cover it, but I could check,” Mom says. “This obsession…”
“What about your Barbies, Bex?” Severin plops some ice into the glass canister too, fits on the lid.
“She hasn’t been into Barbies for two years,” Mom says.
“I haven’t been into Barbies for two years,” Bex says. “Do you think I care about Barbies now, anyway? Do you think Barbies matter?”
“Honey,” Mom says. But she doesn’t seem to know where to go from here. The word just hangs, until Severin starts the blender and there’s only the sound of crunching and grinding vitamins, the silvery core of nourishment, containing every essential thing but the nourishment itself.
Trevor’s got his fingers in my hair, and I love when he’s got his fingers in my hair. We’re lying on the grass by Pine Lake, because Pine Lake is our place. It’s not a big lake like Lake Washington or Lake Sammamish, but a summer-camp type lake, with houses tucked around it—now, in the dark, cozy and glowing from the lights inside. We have our house that we like. It’s not the biggest house, but has the lawn that rolls right to the water’s edge. The couple that lives there has a dog, and we see him sometimes paddling in the water or walking on the grass with a tennis ball in his mouth. The house has a dock with two chairs on it, sometimes an inflatable inner tube on a hot day. Someone is watching television upstairs—there’s the shadow-light blink of nervous, dancing images. My head is lying in Trevor’s lap, and he’s combing my hair with his fingers and it’s baby-sleepy-soothing. We’ve been here awhile already; we sat quiet, just watching twilight, taking in that sweet magic that happens when the light turns golden. Why do you feel like your heart could break when the hills turn pink and the trees turn yellow? Trevor asked. Why do you feel every joy and sorrow and goodness and beauty and past and present and every perfect thing? And I kissed him then, just because he was right.
The magic light passed, and dark crept in; heartbreak time changes to the hours when you tell deep and secret things. I tell Trevor about the envelope.
“So, what do you put in an envelope?” he says. Trevor’s chin is tilted up. From where I lie, even in the moonlight, I can see the narrow white place of his neck that isn’t tan like the rest. He’s got a shirt on over his T-shirt because it’s cool at the lake. It’s white cotton with pearly white snaps like cowboys wear. They make me want to pop them open with my thumb and forefinger. He makes me want to pop them open.
“A letter,” I say up into the night. “A thank-you letter.”
“That’s a card. A big envelope says…” He thinks. “Legal.”
“Business merger. I see. Wants me as his partner for my cool head and brilliant mind.”
“Or he’s suing you,” Trevor says.
“For giving him bad advice. Like those people who sue McDonald’s because their hot coffee is hot coffee.”
“Maybe he’s giving you his Vespa.”
“Ha,” I say. “Wouldn’t I love that.”
“You could sell it,” Trevor says. “What, five, six thousand? You’d be rich.”
“We could run away to Mexico and buy some big sombreros and a velvet painting,” I say.
“You’d promise me that you wouldn’t change, even if you had all that money,” he says.
“I’d promise you,” I say, and he leans down and kisses me then and his mouth is cold, but then, it’s not cold for long, and I like the feel of those snaps under my fingers.
The next morning Mom’s in the kitchen in her bathrobe, her old blue terry cloth that looks slouchy and depressed. She doesn’t, though. Maybe she’s already had too much coffee, but she’s rummaging through the junk drawer with the energy and focus of someone in those Army recruitment ads. “You’re up early,” I say.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she says. “Do you have any batteries?”
“On me?” I pat my pockets humorously (I think), but she just scowls. “Nope. None here.”
“Wait,” she says. “Aha.” Victory—she holds up the thin cylinder of a double A. By the time I’ve got the milk carton out of the fridge, she’s pulling a kitchen chair over to the counter and is climbing up. She shoves aside all of Severin’s cans of liquid protein and mystery powders that are lined up there.
“Good God,” I say, and I set down my cereal bowl and move to spot her. This is what you do as a daughter to Naomi Skye—you steady wobbly ladders as she puts up Christmas lights, you grip chairs when she screws in lightbulbs. You stand close to her jean-clad legs, or robe-clad ones, you hold on. It’s not that she’s ever actually had an accident, or fallen or broken anything, ever. Just that Mom seems perpetually at the edge of the precarious-almost. “What are you doing?” I ask.
“I am just so sick of it being ten twenty, I cannot tell you,” she says. She reaches up, plucks the kitchen clock off the wall. She flicks the battery out with her fingernail, puts the new one in, spins the hands, and sets the clock on the nail again. It’s true that it’s been ten twenty for a long time. Weeks, maybe even months. After a while, I guess, you just stop noticing.
The clock is ticking away with a newfound sense of purpose. Mom climbs down from the chair. “When you get that envelope today, just make sure Jane or someone’s there when you open it. You don’t know this guy. Maybe he�
�s some kind of sicko.”
“Sicko,” Chico agrees.
“He’s not a sicko,” I say. I told Mom about the envelope last night at dinner, but I didn’t think she even really heard. She was so wrapped up in Bex’s tsunami obsession that she brushed it off with an Oh really? that was an I didn’t actually hear that in disguise. I look for a clean spoon for my cereal, but no one’s turned on the dishwasher, so there are only those spiky-tipped ones for eating grapefruit and Bex’s short baby spoon with Ariel the mermaid on it. I go for Ariel.
“You don’t know that,” she says. “He might seem normal, but look at Ted Bundy.”
“So, what, there’s going to be a bloody knife in the envelope?”
“Don’t even joke,” she says.
“No, that white powder terrorists use. I’ll give you a call before I go meet him alone in a dark alley,” I say.
“Sicko, sicko,” Chico says.
I decide to walk to work. First of all, Mom’s get-it-done has been ignited—she’s cleaned the junk drawer of old keys and dried-up pens and a manual for a VCR that died a choking death long ago after a video got stuck inside, and she’s moved on to the pantry, stacking up nearly-empty-but-never-thrown-out cracker boxes, stale cereal we all hated, a plastic bear of honey that’s crystallized, and a Fruit Roll-Up that survived World War II.
Asking her to take me now would be like asking a tornado to kindly stop for a sec. I can only hope she’ll run out of energy in the kitchen, because I can see me coming home to a bedroom empty of everything except a stripped mattress.
Anyway, it’s spring delicious out, and I don’t mind walking. We had nearly two weeks of sun so far in May, which in the Seattle area means that any day now, Mother Nature will make you PAY. Better enjoy while you can. The air smells like juniper and roses and warm cement, and Mrs. Denholm next door has her sprinkler on already, one of those old-fashioned sorts that look like a miniature fountain and only cover a three by three area, and Buddy, the Yeslers’ golden retriever, follows me only as far as the mailboxes, like a good child who stays in the yard like he’s told.
