Wildfire

by Carrie Mac

  “Preet,” I whisper while Pete bounds out of the room. I tuck my hair behind my ears and wipe the corners of my mouth with one of the flimsy paper take-out napkins and sit a little taller, all in the seconds I have before she’ll step into the room, leaving a wake of Good Person floating behind her, unpretentious and shimmering and dappled with tiny pink cherry blossoms—like the ones decorating her phone cover, her backpack, her clothes, and pretty much everything else she owns, including her climbing helmet, which I bought when I saw it at REI and then gave to Pete to give to her for Christmas.

  I hear them talking quietly in the hall, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. I feel like an invalid, like my caregivers are conferring with each other while I wait in the sickroom with the ruffled periwinkle curtains and the stained and flattened powder-blue shag carpet—the same color as Gigi’s eye shadow, which was entirely on purpose—a line of her medicine bottles at attention on the shelf beside the bed. I still haven’t thrown them out, which somehow seems connected to not cutting off my cast.

  Gigi’s clothes—still smelling of Chantilly—hang in the closet exactly how she had them, arranged by color and, within that, by length, tops at one end, dresses at the other. Dad came in with boxes the other day, but then he turned around without saying a word when he saw my face.

  Preet comes into the room first, the scent of her just behind her. Sweet, lemony, and a bit of almond, maybe. I can’t remember what her perfume is, but it’s expensive. The two scents do not mix well. Pete wanted to buy her some perfume for her birthday, so we drove over an hour to the big mall in Bellingham. He had fifty dollars in his wallet, and it was nearly double that. I loaned him the rest, but I never got it back. That’s okay, though, that’s how we roll. It always works out in the end. But I do kind of want to tell her that half of that perfume she’s wearing is from me. Dollars made from walking dogs after school. Which is not perfumy at all. Or not in a nice way, anyway.

  “Hi, Annie.” Preet kicks off her sandals and sits cross-legged on the floor, which looks exceptionally dirty around her. Pete stands there for a moment, and I know what he’s thinking. Come sit on the bed with me? Or sit on the floor with Preet? He stands by the door, in between us.

  Preet picks up a piece of pakora with her slender brown fingers, her nails short and fingertips stubbed from rock climbing, which she never did before a few months ago, since Pete gave her the cherry blossom helmet. Pete’s nails are the same, and mine usually are too. Not lately, though. Now they’re just bitten raw, like when Pete and I were little.

  “Did you get any chutney, Peter?” Her British accent makes everything sound covered in cherry blossoms, even his full name, which no one else calls him, not even his dad. It’s a storybook accent, from a book in which all the lovely ladies and tidy children have a tea party laid out on a blanket in the meadow just below the castle. Parasols. There would be parasols. And a perambulator made out of white rattan. Because “perambulator” sounds so much more posh than “stroller.” But there would be a Slip ’N Slide on a grassy knoll, and an archery target range, because even as fancy as she sounds, she is equal parts not. And the cherry blossoms. Must not forget those, falling like sweet pink snow all around.

  “I totally forgot,” Pete says.

  I glance up at him. Forgot about the perambulator?

  “You probably have three kinds of chutney,” he replies to my blank look. “All homemade by your dad.”

  “Two. Fridge. Bottom shelf.” My words come out thick and soft in the middle. Half-baked.

  “I’ll go see, shall I?” Preet collects a stack of dirty dishes and takes them with her.

  “You, me, your stanky old cast.” Pete sits beside me on the bed and tosses his trucker hat toward the door, where it catches on the knob. He’s gotten very good at hooking it in one try ever since Gigi stopped eating in front of the TV in the living room and moved in here permanently for the last month of her life and we started eating in here with her, and then kept eating in here even when she stopped eating. VSED. Voluntary Stopping of Eating and Drinking. Which is how she chose to hasten her death.

  He knocks on my cast. “Earth to Annie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Repeat. I’m taking you to get it off. Right after lunch.”

  Preet comes back with a jar of mango chutney.

  “Perfect,” she says. At first I think she’s talking about the chutney, but then she says, “You can’t very well go to Fire Camp with that cast still on, can you? There will be a lot of water, I imagine. And a lot of dirt.”

  * * *

  —

  I have an image of Fire Camp that keeps coming to me every time I think of me and Pete actually getting there, and it makes no sense. It was a dream at first, of walking up a long dirt road with the bunkhouses off in the distance, fire burning on both sides of us. Trees ablaze and crackling and scorched limbs falling. A searing, shapeless heat suffocating us. I know that I’m just conflating the two words, but I wish it were a campfire, which would also make sense if a brain is going to play tricks on you.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and picture that campfire instead. Between the bunkhouses, just above the little mountain lake the camp edges up to. When I open my eyes, Pete and Preet are standing in the doorway.

  “I have to go, Annie.” She’s stuffing a pakora into the pita bread with the falafel in it. “I’ve got to write a lot more thank-you notes before my flight leaves, or my grannie will meet me at the airport in India and slap my wrist before she even kisses my cheeks.”

  “For the scholarship?”

  “For the money we raised for the school.”

  I smile and nod. Smile and nod. Even though I helped with the book sale and the car wash and the charity auction and the Bollywood danceathon, I cannot talk about the girls’ school Preet’s family supports in Chennai, where most of her family still lives. If I talk about it out loud, I might veer way off into snark. That would be okay if it were in reaction to her being holier-than-thou, I-am-so-nice fake. But she’s actually nice in a nice way, in a way that would make me look doubly shallow and desperate if I brought out even an ounce of snark.

  I love Pete, and he says that he loves her, so I do my best—my very, very, very best—to let Preet in.

  But providing an education for underprivileged girls that includes feminist theory, self-defense training, and basic home repair is simply too much. It is a cartoon, just about. It’s not, only because if you met her doctor parents, you’d understand that they’re the type of people who want every girl, not just theirs, to have real opportunity.

  And so I don’t say anything.

  I just look at the two of them and marvel yet again at how they are so painfully beautiful, both individually (though I wish I could take away points from Preet for being overly perfect) and especially when they are in close proximity. Then they are a supernova.

  Right now they look like storybook parents. Standing in the doorway together, pleased with themselves for the talk about Something Hard they just had with their difficult kid, who they love unconditionally and will not give up on, no matter what. This is how it goes with the three of us. I’m the one screwing up. I’m the one that doesn’t quite fit the dynamic, and I want to know how the hell this happened, when it had just been Annie and Pete since we were seven years old, and we never even had to worry about an outsider until Preet came along, because no one wanted to be our third. We were losers—the lanky, weird, unicorn-obsessed Pete, who could survive by himself in the forest if he had a fishing hook and some line, and me, who came to school with only cod liver oil capsules and dried kelp in my lunch, wearing clothes that my mom had dyed purple in the washing machine on purpose (she said it was the strongest color in my aura), or who didn’t come at all because my mom could not get out of bed and my dad was still living in Bellingham and Gigi was still renting movies to college kids in Corvallis in her
shop that boasted no fewer than a dozen chandeliers of all sorts and sizes. Movies Make It Better, Baby had walls lined with actual movies that they could pick up, bring to her at the front, pay money for, and bring back in a few days. She said it wasn’t my fault, that she had to sell the shop anyway because of the internet, but the truth was that the college kids loved her and her chaise lounge at the back, where she draped herself and watched The Maltese Falcon and the original Hairspray with equal enthusiasm between customers.

  She and my dad were in talks, though, about when they’d have to do something about Movies Make It Better, Baby. She saw it coming first. She had that place closed up within half an hour of getting the call from me telling her that I hadn’t seen my mom in three days but that was okay, I’d used my Christmas money at the grocery store and was using only the toaster oven for my Pop-Tarts and not the real oven.

  I’m sure it took her the usual five hours to drive to me, but it seemed like she suddenly showed up at the front door, like a fairy-tale nanny, shoulders pulled back, a carpetbag over her arm, and a stern look on her face. That stern look was only for my mother’s disappearance, and the instant she laid eyes on me, she smiled and reached out and folded me into her layers of silk and lace and so much drapey polyester that I had to pull away to get a good breath.

  “Let’s get on with things, shall we?” Fancy words with a dumpy rural accent. Music to my ears. “I’ve been in touch with your father, and he says, and I quote, ‘I love you, Banana. I will phone you later. In the meantime, be a dear and help your Gigi find all the gold there is in the house and dump it discreetly into her hideous carpetbag.’ ”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “This carpetbag, I should tell you, was a prop for the Mary Poppins production at the Majestic that I wrote and starred in.”

  “Wrote and starred in,” I chimed in.

  “It was a very important moment in my career,” Gigi said. She peeled off her gloves and swung off her cape and settled into the living room in front of the TV. “Now, what’s on?”

  * * *

  —

  She moved in permanently after that, because my dad couldn’t leave his job in Bellingham and no one wanted to take me away from Pete or our school. Gigi didn’t want to live in Bellingham either, even though my dad told her that she could probably open up a Movies Make It Better, Baby and make a killing.

  “I’ve lost interest,” Gigi said. “We shall stay in Sedro, because where else would your mother go when she decides to come home?”

  “When will that be, Gigi?”

  “You cannot guess,” Gigi said. “You simply have to pray that she is safe, and make space for her here so when she does come home, it’s not like she’s trying to pull up a chair that doesn’t exist to a supper table that doesn’t exist.”

  “We eat in front of the TV.”

  “Room on the couch, then.”

  “I can sit on the floor.”

  “Darling, we always leave a space. For her. Not to be used by anyone else in the meantime. Not one that relegates anyone else to the floor. Your mommy is what you call eccentric, and accommodations must be made.” She spun to look at my father, stuck a pointer finger in his direction. “Don’t say a word.”

  “Will I get eccentric?”

  “No!” Dad bellowed the word. “You won’t. You’ve got half of me, thank Christ.”

  “See, it doesn’t sound like you’re actually thanking Christ,” Gigi said. She kissed the top of my head. “You come by it naturally, darling. Differently, but it’s there.” A pat on my head as she drifted by in her silk kimono and with her cigarette sticking out of the long black holder. “Try not to let it get the best of you as you get older. An odd child is one thing, but an odd adult, well. That’s altogether different. When your mother was a little girl, she was as strange as the day is long. Piano, piano, piano for days and days and weeks and weeks, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then nothing but tears and doomsday and holy ghosts for a month after that.”

  * * *

  —

  Pete knows what to look for, in my brain. The times I’m not myself, or I’m too much myself. Without him, I would worry that I was falling off of normal into something unrecognizable. He and I are two equal parts. It takes only two halves to make a whole. Not two halves and another bit. Preet has altered the original equation. Adapted the creatures we were into creatures that we are now, even if I want things to go back to how it was before. Before Preet. Before Gigi died. Before the crash.

  Maybe even all the way back to our moms, because if I’m going to rewrite history, I might as well change the hardest parts first. Because, believe it or not, losing Gigi wasn’t even the hardest part.

  The nurse asks me privately if it’s okay with me if my boyfriend comes in, or if I’d rather he wait outside. Pete’s standing behind me, my bag over his shoulder, grinning. It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t come in, but now that it’s an option, it appeals for some strange reason.

  “She says just me,” I say to him with a shrug.

  The nurse shrugs too as she leads me into the room. She doesn’t want to wreck Gigi’s garden either, so she and I find a route through the flowers that is not the straight line like on the casts before me, quick and dusty and chucked in the garbage after. She knows a piece of art when she sees it.

  “You did all this yourself?”

  “My grandma.”

  “She’s quite the artist,” she says. “I’d like a purse in this design.”

  “Right? I want sheets, shoes, a bathing suit.”

  “A journal.” She starts the saw. “Underwear.” She begins to slice. “You tell her our ideas. I expect a cut.” She winks, her smile so genuine and easy that I am not going to wreck it.

  “I will,” I say. “She’s waiting in the car.”

  “What kind of car does she drive?”

  “A 1972 Aston Martin.”

  “Of course she does.”

  It is done in less than a minute. She gently slides the cast over my hand now that it has the extra give.

  “Go glue that up,” she says. “And say hi to your grannie for me.”

  “I call her Gigi.”

  “Which is perfect.” She smiles. “Take care, both of you.”

  * * *

  —

  The cast smells like sweat and dead skin, but I don’t care. I put it on the sill in my room. Before he goes to meet Preet at her house, Pete gives me a squishy ball and a set of those hand clamp exercisers.

  “To get you back up to strength,” he says. He kisses me on the forehead and then wrinkles his nose. “Either you or the cast reeks.”

  “Either you or your asshole is an asshole.” I throw the ball at him as he retreats.

  * * *

  —

  For the last two nights, I’ve slept in my room, which is the first time since we brought Gigi home from the “Your Life, Your Death, Your Choice” doctor visit. The sheets are crisp and clean, but a bit musty too. Gigi would want me in here now. Now when the denouement comes, Annie. Never ignore the denouement.

  I’m not certain, but I think this is it. The strands of the story are brought together. Everything is resolved.

  When I say “the last two nights,” I actually mean “for most of the last two nights,” which is still an accomplishment. On the first night back in my room, I made it to midnight and then spent the rest of the night curled up in Gigi’s bed watching a Hitchcock marathon. The second night, I made it to just before dawn, and then I watched Animal House three times back to back.

  But I’m trying.

  Pete calls when the Animal House marathon rolls into a Patrick Swayze one, starting with The Outsiders, which might be in my top ten Brat Pack movies.

  “Can’t talk,” I say. “Ponyboy just opened the composition book.”

 
“Listen, what’s something of mine that you really want to take to Fire Camp?”

  Ten days to Fire Camp and I haven’t told Pete that I’m not going.

  “I love your unicorn flip-flops so much,” I say. “Look, he’s getting chased by the jerks in the car. I should go. He might need my help.”

  “Tell me you want my unicorn flip-flops so bad.”

  “I want them so bad,” I say. “So, so bad.”

  “I knew it! You like them because they’re translucent and sparkly.”

  “You’re on the porch, right?”

  “You want them,” Pete says. He lowers his voice and makes it way too seductive, all things considered. “Say it again. Say you want them nice and deep in your backpack.”

  * * *

  —

  Not even a minute later, he’s at my bedroom door in overalls rolled up a few times, a sleeveless shirt, and bare feet, his disgusting flip-flops in hand. He holds them out, like an offering.

  How is it that he could be wearing a McDonald’s uniform and he would still be the hottest person for five blocks in any direction? He’s asking me something.

  “What?”

  “Are you high?” he says again.

  “Actually, no.”

  “Good. We need to focus.”

  “Can I have a side of fries?”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, inside joke.”

  “Annie, Annie, Annie.” He puts his hands on my shoulders. I love it when he does this, because it’s usually when I feel like I’m about to float off into la-la land or rage land or hysterical land, and his hands are like reassuringly heavy sandbags, which might not seem like a romantic thing, but actually is. “Inside jokes for one don’t really make any sense. Because then they’re not really inside anything, right?”

  I reach up to put my hands on his shoulders, and lean forward until our foreheads are touching. There is that lovely, low pulse I feel when we do this. “News flash,” I say. “Joke’s inside of me. Party of one. Boom!” I jump back, arms spread. “Right? That’s right.”