What Happened to Lani Garver

by Carol Plum-Ucci

  "Never mind," I muttered, then let loose a sarcastic laugh that almost sounded angry. "I'm just ... losing my grip on reality today."

  I decided not to tell her anything. To tell her that Lani had died might be very misleading. It could end up being very unfair to her. That's what I reasoned on my way down the stairs, looking forward to rolling some of that tea across my stinging throat.

  33

  I stayed in Children's Hospital from late Monday night until Friday, having been diagnosed with pneumonia and acute bronchitis. They did some blood-bolstering thing with IVs, for people in remission who had been through a trauma. Dr. Haverford tried to tell me that sometimes a health trauma can compromise a remission and that I would have to get my blood tested every thirty days for six months. I tried not to hear that. I tried to keep my mind occupied with other things.

  I called DYFS on my mom. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. The lady social worker was really nice when I said Mom wasn't like this before I had gotten sick. I said she had been a good mother, but now she needed some help that was way over my head. The social worker said in cases like this they usually try to talk parents into attending AA, instead of forcing them to relinquish custody of their kids and go to rehab. That was a relief. I didn't want to turn my mom's life on its head, only get her to return to her former self. I also didn't feel like leaving Hackett and staying with my dad—not after Hackett had gotten rid of Lani so easily. It was like a matter of principle for me to stay there, if I could get out from under my fear of Tony and Vince. One step at a time.

  I called Ellen. She came right after school Tuesday and stayed until dinner every night, when my dad and Suhar showed up. The first night, she fired off the ever important question: "Where is Lani?"

  I told her that we'd been thrown in the water and that he'd gotten away somehow, and I hadn't seen him since. I knew I could be telling a serious lie, but she might tell someone if I hinted the worst, and I wasn't ready for any full-blown police thing. Not yet. At first my wheezing and coughing was out of control, so she didn't ask endless questions. But I could sense her heartbreak ... how she watched the door every time footsteps approached, like maybe it was him. It might have driven me nuts, except I figured I could tell her the whole truth when the time was right.

  I asked her to share some acting lessons to pass time. She gave a couple of great performances that taught me stuff and kept my mind focused. Then Wednesday night, after my dad and Suhar went home, I used everything she'd taught me, and I called Scott.

  "I just want to tell you I'm sorry for everything ... It was completely my fault, and I know you could never like me now, but ... I wanted to make sure you were doing all right—" I let go of a huge lungful of white stuff, but he sighed in relief so loudly I could hear it above the earthquake. I guessed it was driving him crazy that I might snake, and this phone call meant to him that I wouldn't.

  He finally went on in a stony voice that said nothing. "Macy said your mom says you're in the hospital."

  "I'll be out in a couple days. Got pneumonia."

  The silence got way long, then some of his steel melted a little. "Claire, I never, ever meant for you to get hurt like this. It just got out of hand. Me and Phil, we're not killers. We tried to save him. You were there. Right?"

  I was going to edge around to my important questions, but Scott didn't need any help.

  "We went back at first light. He never washed up, but guess what did? That white thing ... that contraption he was dressed up in. Big goofball. Goddamn, that was eerie, finding that floating on a wave in a slop of seaweed. The green kind."

  Bingo. I knew a body had not washed up yet. "Yeah, wow, that's awful. What did you do with it?"

  "Phil and Vince and me, we—" He sniffed, not trying to hide his crying jag anymore. "We tied it around a cinder block and heaved it off the stern of the boat."

  "Good thinking." I winced with guilt at my own good acting. "And ... what about Tony? Where did he go after he left us?"

  "To the emergency room at Port Dingo. Told them he got sliced on an outboard motor. Took twenty-some stitches."

  I wanted to know if Tony had sneaked back to the Garvers' and taken Lani's backpacks, to make it look like Lani ran away. "So ... he went ... right home after that?"

  "Uh-uh. He saw Vince's car in front of my house. He came here and crashed out, like, went totally to sleep, though the rest of us were nuts. Hospital gave him some of those painkillers he loves so much. He says it was worth it to be stoned out on Percodan all day long."

  I clamped down on my jaw, fighting my anger with a stray hope that floating angels might be real, and Tony would get what he deserved.

  "Uhm..." I quickly came up with a pretty good lie to use, since he hadn't completely answered my question. "My mom said Mrs. Garver thought somebody broke into the house. She got home from the VFW that night and ... some stuff was missing from their house. Two backpacks full of stuff. Tony didn't steal them when he came out of the house, did he?"

  "No. He was using both hands on that moron." Scott sighed a couple of times, sounding distracted. "Like I give a flying fuck about that pervert lady and her son-slash-daughter. Whoever it was, it wasn't any of us. You can tell her that much. But, Claire, you know ... me and Phil, we could go to jail ... if you sound off. You know? You're still with us, right?"

  They hadn't taken Lani's backpacks. I hung up without saying good-bye.

  My dad somehow talked Erdman into coming around to see me—I think by promising him a banged-up old Les Paul guitar supposedly played once in Philly by Jimmy Page. He did a therapy session with me at the hospital. A session lasts a whole hour. But if Erdman suspected I had witnessed a crime, he never said, and he seemed happy enough to exchange rapid fire with me about my parents and Suhar.

  During one of Suhar's visits, I asked her point-blank, to her face, "Why didn't you like to come to Dad's apartment when I was doing chemo? Were you grossed out by me?"

  She told me she was very afraid of death, though she couldn't figure out why—maybe just because artists are afraid of everything. She said that seeing me back then inspired her to make anonymous donations to the American Cancer Society, though talking to me to my face had been too much on her. We ended up laughing about some of the stuff my dad does, like, Why does he sing in the shower when it sounds so horrible, and how can a guitar player sing like that?

  Four guys from Calcutta came Thursday afternoon—I think Erdman tipped them off that I had been hospitalized. I ended up spewing the whole story of Lani to them—except for the potential angel stuff. I don't know why I spewed, except they seemed so cool—so genuinely concerned about me, but without making a big deal of my IVs, black eye, and general shape. I figured they were the people in the universe least likely to flip out and have a seizure about my holding back from the police.

  To my shock, they were totally stubborn that I should spill my guts to the cops. I had thought, some of them being former drug addicts, that they would have had some kind of hatred for the police. But they seemed more militant than people who had never done anything wrong.

  "Those guys need to pay. They need to pay," Jason French insisted. "You're actually ruining their lives if you don't turn them in."

  So, finally, I talked. First to my dad, who called a lawyer. The lawyer came the next day about three minutes before a cop from Hackett—one whom I hardly knew, thank god. It was easier to look in somebody's face and snake on your friends when you can't tell if that face is liking it or hating it. At the end he asked me only one question.

  "This story is five days old. Why didn't you come to the police right away?"

  I couldn't think of a good answer. Yet when the lawyer cleared his throat, the officer studied my two IVs and said, "Never mind."

  Despite my snaking, the guys' good luck looked to be holding just fine. The police hauled them in to the cop station to see what they had to say about any supposed drowning. They denied everything. The police sent officers to Mr. Dern's
boat just to be sure. If any evidence had remained of a crime, the guys—maybe with the help of Mr. Dern—got rid of it. For whatever reason, maybe "convenient thinking," the cops decided not to call in a homicide squad to check for microscopic evidence, like blood and stuff.

  They did call the coast guard to dredge the harbor for a body, probably to cover their asses. The coast guard dredged the point around Fishermen's Wharf for two days. At the conclusion, they said that either I was crazy or the tides were crazy. They mentioned the tides had been crazy that night, but the local police really didn't want to hear anything that might implicate islanders. They probably pretended they never heard that part. But a body never washed up.

  Mrs. Garver verified my craziness to the police, telling them I had been there on Monday and had never mentioned any drowning thing to her, and besides ... if her son were dead, where were all his belongings? She told them I was a nice girl, but like a lot of Lani's friends, I'd seen a little too much trouble in my life to be considered "stable."

  After being released from the hospital, I spent the weekend at my father's, and he drove me home on Monday. I knew I could get a visit from Vince or Tony Clementi the first time I set foot outside my door. Fortunately, I had a week's worth of recovering to do, at least, and my mother did not leave me, despite her mood swings. She was doing Alcoholics Anonymous online until I got better. A couple of nights, she thanked me as she dialed up. And a couple nights, she looked keyed up and pissed off, like she'd much rather be blitzed on vodka.

  I slept a lot, to avoid thinking that if Tony or Vince didn't destroy my future, cancer might. And I had one dream. It was one of those whacked-out sick dreams, where you're sleeping and waking so frequently, you don't know when you fell asleep. I was in bed and dreamed I rose and went to the window, looking out at the ice storm. A shadow rose on the window ledge, like someone had come up behind me. I wasn't scared, though the shadow was not the shape of my mother. Out came a man's voice and a lady's voice simultaneously, like some sci-fi movie effect. They said in unison, "Indian summers ... one man's curse is another man's cause." Weird. I was afraid to turn and see this creature, feeling sure it would be some girl all full of razor-blade cuts. I finally turned, and nobody was there.

  I knew I had been dreaming only because a second later I was in bed, opening my eyes. I shrugged it off, went to the kitchen for something to eat. If another full day had passed, I probably would have forgotten about the dream entirely. But what happened next, to Vince and Tony, has kept it in my mind and made me think about dreams, and the supernatural, and floating angels.

  If I had been looking for signs of floating-angel revenge on Tony Clementi, I would have expected Tony to be dashed against the rocks of the fishing jetty in a rogue wave or something more Hollywood-ish than what actually happened.

  The third night I was home, the police got a phone call that a truck had skidded off Hackett Boulevard and rammed into the post office. The police might have thought the icy force of nature caused Tony to skid off the street. But Tony told the cops a story that he insisted was true. That story forced them to test him for drunk driving and to search the vehicle. He was .02 over the legal limit, and on the floor of the passenger seat were three Ecstasy pills and an empty prescription bottle of Percodan, meant to last thirty days. It was dated ten days earlier.

  Since Tony had been busted before, the drinking and possession violated his probation. He went to jail and had to serve the time from his first bust—nine months. It would be long enough for me to finish the school year without his terrorizing presence.

  My first day back to school was lonely but uneventful, despite the presence of Vince, Phil, and Scott, on whom I had obviously snaked. But they seemed stirred up by the story Tony had told the cops the night he rammed the post office. The story is definitely weird. Tony said he purposely totaled his truck, and he had good reason. He told the police that he was sick of looking in his rearview mirror all the time and seeing some faggot standing in the middle of his flatbed, staring back at him.

  Tony's "craziness" went into every gossip channel, probably because his mom cried on a few shoulders, and island nature took its course. People were calling me Crazy Claire for making up some wild story about a drowning gay kid who had obviously run away, and they were calling him Tanked-Out Tony. They were saying we should get married. It would have made me a little nuts, except that I had the privilege of seeing what Tony's story was doing to Phil and Scott and Vince. Talk about realities cracking open. I'm not saying they would have believed anything Tony said at this point, but his insistence that he'd been seeing spooks was eerie enough to mess with their heads. They looked like zombies my first day back at school. They had no interest in taunting me at all.

  My second day of school, Vince was not there. Word seeped out that he had been found in his car—dead. His house didn't have a garage, but the one across the street did. He pulled in there after the neighbor went to work. News travels quickly around here. The police showed up around nine-thirty, after another neighbor complained about hearing an engine behind a closed garage door. It was all over school by the end of third period. I was in such a state of shock, I didn't know what to feel, except a hazy relief that he wouldn't be bothering me anymore, either.

  I'm not saying I wanted people to start dying, or even that I had been looking for floating-angel revenge on Vince as well as Tony. Vince's death looked just like a basic suicide—not like he was driven into the garage by some force greater than himself who held him there. In fact, there was a note in his hand, in his handwriting. It said, "I ain't waiting around here to get haunted. I'm going after him."

  Obviously, the note hinted that somebody was dead. You would think a crazy note like that might give my drowning story some credibility with the police. The most the police did was drum on Mr. Dern's head a little—we're going to get a search warrant, so be prepared. And they paid a second visit to Mrs. Garver to see if she had heard from her son yet. She hadn't, but she swore to them over and over that Lani was alive, that he'd done this before, and that she would surely contact them the minute she got her first letter from him. I smelled the stench of serious convenient thinking. Mrs. Garver had to believe her son was alive, or feel guilty that he stayed alive on the streets for two years and yet managed to get killed under her "safe" parental roof.

  People believe what they have to, and considering the lunacy that came out of Tony and Vince, I would say it's not beyond the realm of reason to think that Mrs. Garver unpacked Lani's backpacks or destroyed any evidence of them and went about the business of telling herself they were with him in some major city somewhere. Nothing would have surprised me at that point—which isn't to say I totally believe Mrs. Garver did that. Things continued to happen that kept me asking those questions about what Lani Garver was.

  Phil broke up with Macy about an hour after Vince Clementi's funeral. Geneva Graham hit on Scott at the funeral and managed to go out with him. I wasn't at the funeral. But later I could sit in a bathroom stall at school between my classes, pull my feet up, and hear just about anything I needed. Eli gossiped that Phil had told Macy some shit, some "You're just not right for me." Problem was, nothing was "right" for Phil. He was losing interest in everything. He quit school two weeks before the all-star football game, which he and Scott had been picked for. He kept saying school was a bore. He took a job with the city on a street-cleaning truck.

  Scott quit school the first week in January, giving similar reasons, plus one other: Geneva Graham was pregnant and he needed to get a full-time job. Whatever powers Geneva has over guys still escape my comprehension. But the two of them moved into a two-room studio over someone's garage. I get the feeling Geneva keeps Scott somewhat sane. He took a job with Mr. Matlock, fixing cars. He's lost about forty pounds, looks like a shell of his former self, but he makes it to a job every day.

  As for me, I became the first girl in the history of Hackett Island to quit cheerleading without being injured. Macy Matlock became
the second. The reason I gave Ms. D'Angelo was that my music life was taking off and I couldn't do weekend games. Macy didn't give a reason. She refuses to speak to me, but she never gets mean. She just ignores me, though she's still pretty loud and raucous about other people. She gets that way around me, as if to show me she doesn't care, but the cheerleading thing let me know that she does. She's waiting for me to come up to her. Maybe I will someday, though the idea of having friends on this island still makes me want to puke. Other than that, my digestive track is working well these days. I've even developed a strange liking for hot fudge sundaes.

  I think it's prime that Macy has no best friend right now. And I think it's prime that both Phil and Scott have fisherman parents but neither of them took a job anywhere near the boats, where the pay is a whole lot better. I think everyone who was guilty has paid, and in a somewhat just fashion.

  Which isn't to say I'm going to wave a nine-hundred-dollar book all over Hackett, making wild and socially unacceptable accusations as to what Lani might have been. There's nothing in what happened that looks weirdly supernatural. We've got a suicide, three kids looking forward to living their lives in cheap, tiny apartments, two with a baby coming, and Macy Matlock hanging out by herself. The biggest weirdness has to do with Tony. Word is out that even after he got sober, he stuck to his story about why he crashed up his truck. He still says he kept seeing some gay kid in his rearview mirror. Because of his head injury as a kid, he qualifies for some kind of psychiatric assistance from the state. His mom is having him committed, and he could stay locked up for years.

  Justice came down. Yet there wasn't much flamboyance about it. There wasn't enough to scream floating-angel revenge and have it sound completely credible.

  If I add on what's happened with me—how the Claire Zone of Bad Luck seems temporarily out of service—it might add a little credibility to my story. I recorded four songs with Calcutta for P.A.R.A. (Philadelphia AIDS Relief Album), and the thing all but made us famous downtown. We got invited to play at huge halls in Philadelphia—and some in New York City—that I still can't believe. We've also been asked to do a major metro tour of eleven big cities in America, which we had to decline because people's health is not that stable, though no one has died. I have stayed in remission so far. Dr. Haverford once mentioned his theory that doing what makes you happy sometimes helps you stay healthy. For me, just being in a studio ... spending Saturday nights chilling with real musicians ... that was all I needed to feel on top of the world.