The Moment Before

by Suzy Vitello

  I’m still lost in the imaginary conversation with Connor’s mother when he rips the door open wide. In one second I can tell, he’s completely baked.

  “You sure you should be here?” he says, the smell of weed wafting out his lips.

  All that comes out of my mouth are swear words. “Shit, Connor, what the fuck?” Though I’m here to explain why I can’t see him for a while, I’m derailed by the fact that he’s high. I feel, somehow, invested in his poor choices. Dr. Stern would call that the slippery slope of co-dependence.

  Before I can even utter a word, he cuts in with, “Sounds like your mom put a bug in Lilith Cupworth’s ear. Guess she must have shaken the old lady up because she started talking about restraining orders and whatnot.”

  An elevator feeling slips into my body. Guilt. Fear. A mixture of emotions. Mom. Jesus. “Connor, that really sucks. I’ll set her straight about you. But, you’re going to get kicked out of your house if you’re not careful. Is that what you want? For your mom to send you off to live with your dad in some trailer park?”

  Connor shrugs. “My life is shit here. People think what they think, and that’s not going to change. It was super lame of me to get close to you, anyway. Given what we were up against. It’ll be better, me living a mountain range away from all this crap.”

  When he says “all this crap,” I feel like he just slapped me in the face, giving me a shiner worse than Dad’s. Only this bruise won’t disappear in a few days. I want to blink back time. Go back to the day before Dad’s accident. Or, as long as we’re in a time machine, go back to the day before Sabine’s accident. Everything is unraveling, and this boy who is the center of it all, he’s just one big, snagged thread. “Connor, believe me, I wish there was another way. I wish we could just figure this out, but right now, I need to help put my family back together.”

  “Yeah,” he says, his eyes red and itchy looking, “well, like your sister always said, ‘People love winners. As for losers, they might as well burn in hell.’”

  I notice that there’s no earring dangling from his lobe as he shuts the door, giving me one last look at a long slice of him—a boy who once held my sister’s future in his hand.

  twenty-six

  I walk through the next few weeks like a painting of myself. Something formed by someone else. I’m viewing this painting as an outsider, too. Watching myself going through the motions. Brushing, flossing, taking out the trash. In trig, I get my first A. My paper on Flannery O’Connor is a solid B, but Mrs. McConnell tells me I can do better. Where’s the passion? she writes on my paper all red inked and loopy.

  Passion? I’m done with that. I’ve joined the rosary prayer people. The pill-poppers. Like a Nike ad, I’m “just do it-ing” my way through life. Every time I think about Connor, how much I miss him, I flip a switch in my heart. Better to just move forward. Don’t feel. Don’t feel. Don’t feel.

  Dad is released. He’s on a strict no cholesterol, low salt, 1500-calorie diet. He has to go to meetings and talk about one day at a time. Mom has turned into his personal cheerleader. She follows his diet to the letter. She buys a kitchen scale and, no kidding, she’s weighing lettuce leaves. She dumps all the whiskey down the drain. She’s counting out raisins for his oatmeal. Dad can’t return to work for another month, so afternoons, it’s me and Dad on the couch, watching Wheel of Fortune and World Series of Poker. The occasional Mariner’s game.

  He’s always asking me if I’m happy. “You seem down, Little Bird,” he’ll say.

  “I’m not,” I argue. “I’m fine.”

  “I am really ashamed, Brady. So ashamed.” I know he’s thinking about when he slapped me, but when he tells he wants to make amends for everything, who I think about is Connor. The person who should be forgiven more than anyone. I want to tell Dad everything I know. About Connor, about Sabine. About Nick. But Dad’s so broken. So fragile.

  I pat his hand. On TV, a Versace-wearing poker player who reminds me of Nick slowly chews gum. I hope he loses all his money.

  Dad says, “Are you sure? Are you sure you’re fine?”

  I nod. Fine. Stupid word. A word that’s empty of feeling. The perfect word for now.

  Don’t feel, Brady. Just don’t.

  And in the real world. The world that continues on, the ballot measure passes. Arts and electives are safe for another year. Bowerman and McConnell get to teach their classes again. Pink slips are tucked back into the district file cabinet. Everybody cheer.

  A couple times a week, I head up to Mrs. Cupworth’s and work on some sketches, and even a few paintings. At first, after she fired Connor, I wanted to boycott the whole artist-in-residence thing. Let her know she’d drawn a line in the sand. Mom and I had it out about that.

  “I’m sorry but I had to tell her,” Mom said. “I let her come to her own decision, but I had to give her the facts.”

  “What facts, Mom? You don’t know the facts.”

  In my new life as a robot, I decided to go back to Mrs. Cupworth’s studio. Pretend to still be an artist. Fake it ‘til I make it. I set up a still life with a St. Agatha statue and a bowl of plastic apples that I got from Michael’s. I printed out a version of da Vinci’s The Last Supper from Wikipedia, and blew it up at a copy store. It’s scary pixelated, and I set it behind the bowl of apples and the St. Agatha, so it really just looks like colorful embroidery. At least that’s what shows up on my canvas when I dab my brush into color after color. Art, reduced to upholstery. That’s sort of how I feel.

  The sketch I did of Connor, the day Dad had his heart attack, I can’t bring myself to throw it out, or refine it. I simply tuck it into the sketchpad where I imagine it’ll smear itself unrecognizable. I think about him every day. And then I make myself unthink about him. But I can’t help it. Every tree on this property, the shrubs, the roses—which are now being tended by Mrs. Cupworth’s entourage of gardeners—remind me of Connor. His lips and the dimple at the side of his mouth. Is there no end to grieving? Every time you love someone, it seems, you’re setting yourself up for a fall. Sabine isn’t the only one who took a chance and lost.

  “Don’t feel. Don’t feel.” I yell at myself out loud one day, just as Lilith Cupworth sashays through the door.

  “Don’t feel what?” she says, eagerly peering over the canvas.

  “Stop messing up the painting, I guess,” I tell her.

  “Doesn’t look very messy to me,” she says, appraising it with a bit of a sigh in her voice.

  I step back a bit, squinch my eyes the way I’d seen Connor do a million times. “Do you like it?”

  She sighs again. “I do. I like it.” And then she stares square into my face. “It’s perfectly fine. But, to be honest, it doesn’t quite have your energy behind it. It lacks a certain … oh, I don’t know. Authority?”

  “Passion, you mean?” I fill in the party line.

  “Right.”

  I bite my lip.

  “Brady, Dear. I know you miss that boy. I know a broken heart when I see one.”

  I want to tell her she’s wrong. She can’t see the shards of my broken heart. I’ve swept them up. And, I want to spill all the other things she can’t possibly see, about Mom and Sabine and Dad and the web of lies, but, truly, I don’t see the point.

  “The two of you were quite adorable together, no denying that. But. I’ve seen what drugs can do. Seen it in my own children. Cocaine. Marijuana. You can’t trust a drug addict, you know.”

  Cocaine? Where did that idea come from?

  “Mrs. Cupworth, it wasn’t about drugs. That’s not why my mother intervened.”

  “No? Well, she was clearly very worried for your safety. She told me that the young man was high when he caused the accident that killed your dear sister.”

  I take in a deep breath, and hear a ringing sound in my ears. It’s like the way Nona always described the trumpets of Heaven, only, for me the ringing is more like a Greek chorus chanting He was high when h
e killed her! over and over and over. Duplicity, I think. Double standard. And then, I just say it. Plain and simple. “Connor Christopher was not high when Sabine plunged to her death. That’s what nobody will believe. My sister performed a move that was well outside of her abilities. She wanted to win, and she pushed the envelope into crazy. She was the one who made the mistake, not Connor. She had secrets. She was—”

  I can’t finish my sentence. Mrs. Cupworth is clutching the strand of pearls that hangs just below her throat. “What, child, she was what?”

  “She was a liar,” I shout. “She was the one who shouldn’t have been trusted. She and her so-called boyfriend were playing an ugly, dark game with each other. Connor just got caught in the middle.”

  I go on to explain The Eraser Game that Sabine used to play. “It was like that, only instead of scarring up a forearm, it was other people’s lives.”

  Mrs. Cupworth shakes her head. “These are certainly odd times, Brady.”

  “Well,” I tell her, “I guess you should know what you’re in for if you want to open your house up to teenagers from Greenmeadow.”

  All the way back down the hill to my house, I think about what I said. Regret and shame and anger all mixed up together like Nona’s sauce. I’m wondering if that’s why Catholics trot off to confession every Saturday afternoon like clockwork. It would be so nice to walk into Holy Redeemer’s darkened space, wait in the line of sinners, and pop into the booth to spill my troubles. My guilt over betraying Sabine. Like Beaverton Grief & Family but instead of a middle aged shrink with dandruff and yapping mutts next door, you get some Angel of God who stays on his side of the panel, and gives you a little homework assignment that you can punch out in a few minutes.

  For no apparent reason, Natalie jumps into my thoughts. There was that day, late in the summer of Johnsaffair, Sabine painted rubber cement all over Natalie’s golf club handles. Dad was furious. His Scottish temper making his face redder than a sinking sun, he demanded that we apologize to Natalie, and pay for cleaning and re-gripping the clubs. I didn’t even know what had happened, but I silently took the blame and punishment right alongside my sister.

  Afterwards, depleted of a year’s worth of babysitting money, Sabine was jubilant. She knew this stunt was the last straw. And sure enough, by the next weekend, Johnsaffair was history.

  Her apology was not sincere—it was just for show. She’d do it again in a minute, she told me, as Natalie’s Pathfinder barreled down Pelican Lane for the last time.

  A few late lilacs still offer some pleasant scent as I cut through the dog park near home. It’s warm and drizzly out. Typical Rose Festival weather. Summer’s coming on fast, which always makes me sad for some reason. Maybe it’s the way a mother feels when her baby learns to walk, or gets a tooth. That sense of fleeting time. Life moving ahead on its own terms. The brand new bright green leaves have matured, and they’re getting rubbery. Apple blossoms are gone, and hard, golf ball-sized fruit dots the trees. Dreams turning into wakeful realities. A next thing and a next and a next. But never a straight line. Never life just getting better and easier. Everything has a cost. I suppose I’m done protecting my sister. I suppose I’m ready to face the consequences of that.

  Why now? says Sabine.

  I’m still a few blocks from home when Martha calls, all breathless and in a tizzy. Tomorrow is coronation day, where she and the other princesses will gather in the Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum and, in front of an enthusiastic $30-a-ticket crowd, a Rose Festival Queen will be announced. The lucky Princess who becomes Queen has her lowly court tiara replaced with a queen tiara by one of the ancient Rosarians while the other princesses pretend to be happy for her. Poise under pressure, Martha tells me, is one of the things they’ve been drilling into them. Martha is pretty sure she’s neck-and-neck with Cleveland High School’s Princess. A girl who recently donated some of her bone marrow stem cells to a leukemia patient. “But her GPA is only 2.9,” Martha says, hopefully, over the phone.

  “Maybe you should offer someone a kidney or something,” I tell her. “It’s not too late, is it?”

  “Will you come?” she wants to know. “I’ll pay for your ticket. It would be so great to see you in the audience.”

  I think about it for a minute. Sitting there in the cold venue, where people go to see monster trucks and hockey games. It’s the closest thing Portland has to a beauty contest, this Rose Festival Court gala. “Will Nick be there?” I ask.

  “Oh Brady, don’t be like that. I want you both there. Can’t you just get over your issues with one another?”

  I don’t want to give her an ultimatum—one of those him or me deals—but it seems that Martha needs all the facts about this boyfriend of hers. She needs to know what he’s capable of. “Can you come over? There’s something you should hear.”

  Martha shows up bearing a platter of low-fat, tofu spring rolls. And a six-pack of Evian. “They say spring water is good for the heart,” she tells us.

  Dad is happy to see her, and Mom asks her to sit down and catch up. Martha is so good at doing the bread-and-butter thing. She launches into her free-range chicken speech, and my parents smile and nod, attentively. They wish her luck and thank her for all she’s done, and then, finally, I have an opportunity to nab her and pull her into Sabine’s room.

  “Wow,” she says, stroking Nona’s rose and pink quilt. “I still can’t really believe it, you know?”

  I’m shaking. This is going to be harder than I thought. I grab the little cheerleader doll and start pulling at the cellophane pom-pom strips. She loves me, she loves me not.

  “So, what is it? What do you have for me?”

  I gesture toward the top of Sabine’s tidy dresser next to the photo of Sabine and Martha French-braiding my hair, and point to my sister’s phone. I tell Martha the code, and ask her to listen to the voicemail sequence under LoverBoy.

  She takes the little techno-brick in her hand, turns it over a couple of times and says, “Isn’t this a breach of privacy?” She says privacy the way Brits do, with the short-voweled i.

  “There’s a lot of breach, Martha. One could say these last few months have been nothing but breach. Seriously, it’s up to you, but if it were me? I’d want to know.”

  Martha sighs, reaches into her pocket for a pill, and swallows it with a big gulp of Evian, then drags her index finger along the bar. She puts the phone to her ear.

  I yank at the little green pom-pom strips.

  Martha’s face goes through a spectrum of movement. First, it’s all poise under pressure, but as she engages the history of Nick’s messages, drilling down the conversation, poise abandons Martha. And in the end, once the cheerleader doll is holding a bald pom-pom, I’m cradling Martha in my arms. Stroking her glossy princess hair while she sops the front of my tee-shirt with her tears. This same Martha who was once a little girl who got teased for wearing Finding Nemo underpants. My dear friend, who frustrates, annoys and fascinates me. The girl who seems like she has all the answers, but really, is just as mixed up as the rest of us. The candidate for Queen of Rosaria whimpers into my chest, “I had no idea.” She blubbers. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  twenty-seven

  Mom, Dad and I sit in our pricey Rose Festival Queen Coronation seats, and in front of us, in a semi-circle up on the stage, is a wave of pink. The princesses are ethnically diverse, but they are all sisters today in matching gowns, each of them delicately arranged on a chair, sparkly silver tiaras nestled upon their royal coifs.

  Nick is nowhere to be seen. This morning I helped Martha apply gobs of concealer, rubbing out the black circles under her eyes. Years of charcoal shading has given me a terrific skillset. If I don’t make it as an artist, there’s always a career in makeup.

  “He didn’t take it very well,” she told me.

  “But, you told him what you heard, right?”

  Martha assured me. It’s over. Nick is history.

  Now, ga
zing upon her calm face, her perfect smile, you’d never know she just broke up with her boyfriend. Of course, the pill she popped probably helped.

  I tell myself to calm down. Enjoy the outing with my parents. Aside from his mandatory Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, it’s Dad’s first public event since his heart attack, and, twenty pounds slimmer, sober and well-rested, he looks like the handsome old dad of years ago. Mom and he are holding hands like a new couple. For the moment, I’m thinking, everything is perfect.

  A Rosarian, dressed in a dashing red tuxedo, takes the podium and talks about how each of these girls is an example to young people everywhere. They are the future of our city. Even though there’s only one girl who will be crowned Queen, they are all winners.

  Bullshit, says Sabine. Sabine, who earlier told me to pocket the key to her car. Now, my fingers reach down into the pocket of my raincoat and dig the metal notches into my skin.

  A few more speeches, a list of donors and sponsors, a plug for Pacific Power.

  Then, the moment we’ve all been waiting for.

  “All princesses please stand.”

  The pink wave rises. I grab Dad’s hand.

  A disembodied announcer’s voice booms out the echoey loudspeaker.

  “It is my pleasure. To introduce. This year’s Rose Festival Queen…”

  The princesses are rapt. Trying to look poised, because the close-up cameras are zeroing in. God forbid you scowl when your name isn’t the one bouncing off the coliseum walls.

  “…Martha Hornbuckle.”

  Dad pumps his fist in the air. Mom stands and claps so loud you’d think Martha was her own daughter. And me? I’m happy in a quieter way. A fairy-tale ending way. Martha is Cinderella up there, without Prince Charming, but with all the riches and treasures.