Amelia Unabridged

by Ashley Schumacher

  “Photography,” I say.

  Lies, lies, lies.

  “Oh!” She leans forward and grabs my arm excitedly. “Make sure you check out the Missoula Art Museum. You’ll just die.”

  I spend the rest of the day telling myself to be normal, as punishment for my slip. I tell myself it won’t happen again.

  When the press release announcing the extension of N. E. Endsley’s Orman Chronicles breaks the internet, I find out along with everyone else that there will now be five books instead of three. N. E. Endsley does not call me to tell me the third novel will come out next June, and I do not call him.

  I eat dinner at the Williamses’ twice a week. We sign the paperwork for my scholarship, discuss my first semester, and I don’t go to Jenna’s bedroom to say good-bye at the end of each visit, because what’s left to talk about?

  Everything is back to normal.

  Except for photography.

  A few days after the seminar, I squash my brain’s plea of normalcy long enough to walk to Downtown Books and inform them I am going to be their event photographer for what’s left of summer. It has nothing to do with the clever wind—I left that in Lochbrook—but I need a guilty pleasure to get me through the rest of my time here. And maybe it will help release some of this absurd photography energy so I can get on with my life.

  It’s only a month.

  “We can’t pay you,” Becky’s boss—decidedly un-Valerie-like in his sweatpants and book shirt—tells me. “We don’t have the budget.”

  “I’m just in it for the experience,” I say.

  Lies. Lies. Lies.

  It has meant taking more than one picture at a time—another new normal meant to absolve part of my guilt—and with at least two author events a week, the photo library I post to the Downtown Books blog is almost doubling each week.

  “You’re good,” an author I recognize from CCBF says, as she looks over my shoulder after her event. I’ve captured her midlaugh, signing a book for an eager fan. “You should go professional.”

  I tell her thank you and try to ignore the compliment as it plinks down the empty well inside me.

  My walk home tonight feels particularly grueling. I’m exhausted. There were two back-to-back events at the store, my feet are sore, and all day I’ve been stewing over the roommate survey the college sent me.

  It’s supposed to set me up with my ideal match, to give us time to interact and get to know each other before the semester starts. The thought has trailed after me like my own personal rain cloud all day, and since the clever wind didn’t follow me home, I’ve had to tug it behind me lest it rain on innocent patrons.

  When I get home, I drop my camera on my bedspread, too tired to put it away, and allow myself a brief game of pretend. Even though the new normal has meant forgoing all imagination beyond reading, I take the little rain cloud with me when I go shower. I watch as it floats beneath the spigot, growing dark as it fills with water and then drains itself over my head.

  Serves me right.

  The bathroom steam curls behind me as, wrapped in a towel, I return to my bedroom, where I will edit a few photos before I go to sleep.

  I’m thinking I really should fill out that survey, too, when my eyes focus on my mother. She’s sitting on my bed in her new grocery store polo, my camera in her hand.

  “Mom?”

  Her head jerks, blonde hair flying up in surprise as she quickly sets the camera aside.

  “Sorry,” she says guiltily, like she was reading my diary.

  She looks older, her shoulders frail and arms thin. Her nails look brittle and dull.

  Adjusting my towel tighter, I sit next to her on the bed, reaching across her to grab my camera. It’s still on, the thumbnails from tonight’s event in their neat, orderly rows.

  I should be mad at her for snooping, but I’m not.

  She’s looking at me from the side of her eyes and the TV is blaring an electric toothbrush commercial from the living room, but something about sitting next to her—my crustacean mother, who never found another shell to live in after my father left us—makes me pity her.

  It also makes me think of Nolan and flip phones and Orman.

  Nolan.

  A whale peeps out hopefully from the waves, the first I’ve seen since Lochbrook, but I shove it under the water and sail on in my carefully steered, carefully constructed vessel of efficiency and adulthood.

  “I’ve been taking photos at the bookstore,” I tell her. “Author signings and stuff.”

  I tilt the camera’s viewer to her, where a photo of an older white guy with his mouth open, an overly thick book in front of him, awaits. “This is John Rinker. He writes really boring books that everyone loves.”

  I click through a few more thumbnails, pausing on one from an event last week. A woman grins hugely at the camera, holding her middle-grade book above her head like a Super Bowl trophy.

  “This is a new author. She was so excited to have her book published that she didn’t care only six people came to her event. She said you can’t control what happens to your book once it’s published but she loved writing it, and loved that other people—no matter how few—were reading it.”

  My mom doesn’t say anything, but she hasn’t returned to her shows, either.

  I keep scrolling back, trying to find something to interest her, but it’s mostly a lot of people excited about a lot of books—until I stop at the first photo.

  She’s of great interest to me.

  Jenna’s head is bent. She’s looking at the CCBF schedule, her mouth quirked in concentration and mild amusement at my off-camera excitement. Her hair slides around the curve of her cheek, coming to rest in a small tangle of curls under her chin.

  She’s beautiful. It makes my heart stop.

  “Jenna,” I tell my mother thickly. “Before…”

  I stop, not letting the tears tumble out with my words.

  Mom gently takes the camera from my hands. If she was anyone else’s mother, she would hug me, but she only clicks through the photos, hitting the little arrow to leave Jenna behind.

  “I watch a show on channel nine,” she says. “It’s called The Talent Seekers. Have you heard of it? Anyway, they have an episode on photography. I’ve seen it twice.”

  Click. Click.

  “These are good, Ames. Really good.”

  She angles the viewer to show me a photo she’s settled on, lightly tracing a chipped nail along the image of a customer leaning against the wall, her head thrown back in laughter at something an author said.

  I like this photo, too. Her eyes are closed, but painted above her head, on the wall behind her, are the ever-watching eyes of Dr. Eckleburg from The Great Gatsby. If I were to call it anything, it’d be Dreaming with Your Eyes Shut.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I tell Mom. “It’s not something I can turn into a career. I wouldn’t even know how to go about it.”

  Mom clicks through a few more thumbnails and says, “I think you just have to do it, kid. And keep doing it.” She hands the camera back to me. “The bookshop isn’t a bad place to start.”

  This is all very, very abnormal.

  “But I have plans,” I say. “The Williamses … they want me to go to college for something different, something safer.”

  I want her to tell me I’m making the right choice. Or even the wrong choice. But because my mother is my mother and not anyone else, she has reached the end of her bandwidth.

  “Suit yourself,” she says, rising from the bed.

  I click back to the picture of Jenna and stare at it until my hair dries, tracing every pore and detail of her that I can.

  I want to see her. I want to tell her about Orman, about Nolan and Wally and Val’s. I want to make her laugh with stories about Mr. Larson’s coffee and to share her tears over Avery and Emily.

  But Jenna’s not here.

  The wind blows through the crack in my window. It’s not a clever wind, just a Texas breeze. But it makes me think of w
ind chimes and cemeteries, and suddenly I know where I need to go.

  * * *

  A memory: Jenna and me in the back of her parents’ car. Her dad is driving with one hand on the steering wheel, the other interlaced with Mrs. Williams’s on the middle console. Jenna is ignoring them completely, but my eyes keep wandering to the way their hands fit together so neatly.

  “How much longer?” Jenna’s eyes are glued to the internet browser on her phone screen and her thumb is hovering over the Refresh icon.

  I jerk my eyes to my phone, open to the clock app that shows the time down to the second.

  “Two minutes. Will you chill out? It’s not going to sell out that fast.”

  Jenna doesn’t glare at me, but she would if she wasn’t afraid to look away from her phone.

  “I’m not taking chances,” she says.

  “I’m Not Taking Chances: A Memoir by Jenna Williams,” I say in my best droll voice.

  “Amelia, it’s not funny. This is my lucky lipstick we’re talking about.”

  “What is it you’re worried about, Jenna love?” Mrs. Williams asks from the front seat.

  Jenna sighs. “ColorCentral is known for selling out of lipstick. It’s a miracle they’re restocking a color to begin with, and it’s the only berry colored matte I’ve found that doesn’t make me look like I’m wearing clown makeup.”

  “And it’s apparently lucky,” I add. “One minute, Jenna.”

  “What makes it lucky?” her dad asks.

  A pause.

  “I was wearing it when I first properly met Amelia,” Jenna says matter-of-factly. “I saw her in the window because I was looking at my reflection to check my new lipstick.”

  I have never heard this story.

  “Amelia, time.”

  “Jenna?”

  She narrows her eyes but doesn’t look up. “Time, Amelia. I need the time.”

  “Jenna.”

  She looks up. “What?”

  “You’re ridiculous,” I say. And because I suddenly feel the need to tell her, I add, “I love you, but you’re ridiculous.”

  “I’m not ridiculous,” she says, looking back down at her phone. “It was the first time I had worn it and, A, I looked fabulous and, B, it made us friends. So excuse me for trying to do everything in my power to ensure our friendship lasts forever.”

  “Four seconds,” I say.

  She buys ten tubes of the same lipstick. When she announces this triumphantly to the car, her dad says, “You don’t need makeup to look beautiful, sugar, but if it makes you happy, I’m happy.” Her mom calls it a waste of money but is appeased when Jenna offers to give her one of the tubes.

  “Ridiculous,” I repeat, but I smile when I say it, because she thinks meeting me is worth deeming lipstick lucky.

  Her answering smile is dazzling, the gleaming one that makes me believe she really could be a celestial being trapped in human skin.

  “May our friendship last longer than ColorCentral’s restocks,” she says.

  “Duh,” I say.

  * * *

  I haven’t been to her grave since the funeral. When the headstone came in, Mark offered to take me to see it, but I didn’t want to.

  I still don’t want to, not really, but I have nowhere else to go where I can reach her. I know she’s not really there, but it seems like the place to go for the confession I have weighing on my chest.

  It’s too dark to see without my phone’s flashlight, and it takes wandering up and down aisle after aisle of the dead before I find Jenna’s grave.

  There is a bouquet of fake yellow flowers stuffed into the permanent metal vase attached to the stone. They’re garish, even at night, and I absently rearrange them with one hand, the other pointed downward at the stone I don’t want to read.

  Reading it is the final step. It means she’s not coming back, that I’m the one responsible for making decisions and for living with them.

  I turn my phone light off and sit on the thin sidewalk in the dark.

  Cricket and locust songs fill the air around me, an uproar of insect melodies that hides my voice when I say, “Hello, Jenna.”

  There is no answer. No wind. But I have some things to say and somebody—Jenna, this headstone, these bugs—might as well hear them.

  I mean to start with photography, but what comes out is, “I know you sent me a book.” I laugh. “And I went all the way to Lochbrook to see if I could find out more about it … about you. I guess I sort of did.”

  A car engine roars in the distance and I pause to listen until it fades into the night.

  “I talked to Nolan. About you and his sisters and Orman. He told me you saved him at the festival. I’m pretty sure he’s the one who sent the book. Or maybe Val somehow? I don’t know. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.”

  I take a breath. I tell myself everything is normal, that it’s perfectly ordinary for a girl to sit alone, weeping onto the unread headstone of her best friend, in the dark.

  “I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to save you, to pull you from the car, or at least be there when you died. I’m sorry I didn’t hug you as hard as I should have at the airport. I should have crushed you. I should have meant it.

  “I should have known when you died, and I didn’t, and I’m so, so sorry.”

  I’m crying, and I don’t stop when the ground shakes beneath my legs and erupts, ginormous blue whales tearing from the earth, their huge bodies rising around me like fast-growing trees. Dorsal fins and barnacles and rubbery skin covered in tiny hairs brush against me, scraping my elbows and upsweeping my hair as I dissolve into fractured sobs that drown out all the locusts and lake storms in the world.

  I pour out my every regret, my every good and sparkling memory mixed with every bitter memory of her death. I let them seep into the ground as whales twist themselves from the soil and take to the sky, floating on a clever wind that has come howling in from the far reaches of Michigan to greet them.

  “I’m sorry about the photography. I don’t even know why I love it. I just do. It’s part of me and I’ve been carrying it around like this insidious, awful thing, but Jenna, I think it’s the best part of me and … and …

  “I can’t be you,” I say. “I have to choose and I don’t choose your plan and I hope you understand.” I’m crying anew, and my tears taste like the ocean as I am purged by water rather than flame. I force my head to look at her headstone, to trace the lines of her name with my fingertips.

  “How am I going to tell your parents, Jenna? I don’t want to hurt them. What am I going to do? Tell me what I should do.” My voice cracks.

  I’m still drowning on land when a hand rests on the back of my head. I nearly jump out of my skin, my eyes not quite taking in the long, pale legs before me.

  “Mrs. Williams?”

  The noise stops—even the crickets—as Trisha Williams strokes the hair back from my damp face, her perfectly manicured nails combing my scalp.

  “I can go if you want,” she says. “I stop by sometimes after a long workday, but I can always come back tomorrow if you want some time alone.”

  “No.” I wipe my face with my sleeve, hurrying to stand. “No, stay.”

  My ears are ringing in the absence of the whale rumpus and tears. All I can hear is the wind, twisting and winding between us and the grave below.

  Tell her, Amelia. Jenna’s voice is soft, triumphant. Tell her.

  Who am I to argue with the wind? With Jenna?

  I’m purged once more as I tell Trisha Williams about Lochbrook, about Jenna rescuing N. E. Endsley, and about Nolan. I sniffle my way through my discussion with Mark in Nolan’s heart, but I can’t stop giggling when I tell her about the stick figure drawings we drew in the fort and about Wally’s caffeine habit.

  I don’t mention Avery and Emily, or Nolan’s journals.

  Unlike the wind, Trisha nods and murmurs in response to my story, and by the time I’m finished, we are both sitting on th
e ground and she is crying, too. Quiet, steady tears for a quiet, steady woman.

  “I don’t want to go to Montana,” I tell her. “And I don’t know what I want to do yet, but it’s not that. It’s not being a professor.”

  I shudder as the confession I’ve kept buried under stacks of books and blueprints comes ripping out of me. I’m fully expecting Trisha to be like Mark, angry and hurt. Instead, she digs out a pack of tissues from her purse and mops my face like I’m four. Snot smears against my cheek, but the movement is so loving and affectionate that I don’t mind.

  She grabs my chin firmly between her fingers, her nails barely grazing my cheeks, and says, “Amelia Griffin, Jenna doesn’t want you to live her life, she wants you to live yours. I want you to live yours. It’s all you can do, baby. That’s all any of us can do.”

  Together we sit on Trisha’s unfolded blazer, the clever wind caressing us as the insects take up their instinctual hum and the whales move north toward the horizon.

  * * *

  I sleep better than I ever have, after Trisha drops me off at my house.

  “I’ll talk to Mark,” she says in the driveway. She promises me over and over that he’ll come around and won’t be mad.

  “We’ll support you no matter what you do, Amelia. That’s what family is for.” She smiles Jenna’s smile at me in the darkness of her car. “I’m a custody lawyer. I know these things.”

  It’s a bad joke, but I’m so relieved to have finally made the right decision that I crack up anyway.

  chapter nineteen

  The next day’s afternoon event at Downtown Books floats by in a haze. I snooze through two alarms after my graveside confessional with Trisha, managing to wake up only with time enough to make myself look vaguely professional, then I scoot off to the store to photograph a local author tea for two hours.

  Along with my alarm clock, I wake to a text message from Mark, three lines typed late last night after I’d already fallen into a slumber overrun with whales and photographs.