by Laura McNeal
“Homework,” I finally said.
“Is that all?”
“Uh-huh.”
I listened to the caterpillars that weren’t ready for their last instar and then for something bigger out in the grove—an owl, say, or some coyotes. Coyotes make the worst demonic chorus you’ve ever heard when they’re closing in on some animal they’ve cornered—a house cat or a baby rabbit or a possum or somebody’s helpless lapdog. Right after we moved into this cottage, I opened the door to go to school and nearly stepped right in the mess of innards that a coyote left on the doormat: the liver, stomach, colon, and—grossest of all—severed head of a rat. Not even Robby would bury it for me. “If we were living in eastern Transylvania,” he said, “this would be an omen.”
I couldn’t hear an owl or any coyotes, though, just the caterpillars unsticking their sticky feet.
“Shouldn’t you go back to bed now?” I asked my mother.
“Pretty soon,” she said. The mug of Postum sat cold on her lap as she stared at the meditating caterpillar.
“Maybe you should get a puppy,” I said, afraid that she was getting too attached to creatures with what seemed to me a fairly high incidence of accidental death.
“Night, Pearl,” she said, and went on with her vigil.
Eleven
My father hadn’t called me for a month. He sent little e-mails about loving me and missing me and hoping we could work through this, but when I didn’t respond, he gave up. It bothered me that he gave up so easily, and then one morning I opened the mail.
“Mom?” I said. “This says our health insurance has been canceled. Can that be right?”
My mother was sitting on our porch with my uncle Hoyt, eating mulberries from a bowl. “Let me see that,” my mother said, and her face tightened so that the two lines between her eyebrows nearly met.
My uncle took the notice from her and found a pair of reading glasses in his pocket. He unfolded them and started to read.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Hoyt asked my mother. “I could have paid it.”
“The bill doesn’t come to me,” my mother said. “It goes to Glen in Phoenix.”
“Why didn’t he pay it?” I asked.
“He didn’t pay it,” my mother said in a trembling angry voice that made her spit out each word like the seed of an especially bitter lemon, “because he’s a selfish, cowardly—” She stopped. I knew the psychiatrist had asked her to refrain from criticizing my father in front of me.
“I think the word you’re looking for, Sharon,” my uncle said, folding the bill decisively and sticking it into his shirt pocket, “is spineless son of a bitch.” No one ate any more mulberries after that. Hoyt stood up and went home.
The weather had turned gloomy, too. The blue skies of April are followed by what locals call Gray May, which to me sounds like this cranky, complaining girl you want to slap because she’s such a whiner. One good thing had happened, though. A few days later, Hoyt told me that Esteban, the grove manager, hadn’t found anything bad to say about Amiel, and Amiel could come every Friday.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Nothing to thank me for,” he said. “I’ll have to let him go if he doesn’t work out. The talking thing might be a problem over time. If they don’t get to trust him.”
“Oh,” I said, worried again.
I decided that if I wrote Amiel a note, maybe I could learn more about him and pass this information on somehow. This assumed Amiel could even read the Spanish I put together like a blind person arranging colors.
Juggle = hacer malabares; engañar; trampar
Engañar = to deceive
Trampar = to trick
I arranged and rearranged the words until finally, on a gray misty Friday morning before school, I stood on the driveway, a folded note in my sweaty hand, and I hoped it said:
What is your favorite food?
Where did you learn to juggle?
Would you please tell me how you lost your voice?
While I was standing there, my cell phone startled me, and I found myself staring at my father’s name on the screen: GLEN DEWITT.
I ran my fingers over the edge of the paper and watched the foggy edges of the grove. I listened for the whir of Amiel’s bicycle, and the phone rang again, then again, until I finally said a grudging hello to my father.
“Pearly girl!” my father said. I could imagine him wearing a perfectly starched pink shirt. Cuff links. Obsession for Men cologne.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“The office,” he said. “You ready for a surprise?”
“I don’t know,” I said. A surprise could be dinner at which he would introduce me to the woman or man who must have been eating with him for all those months at La Vache and the French Laundry while he was so-called missing us.
“This is a pretty damn good surprise,” he said. “It’s a place.”
The purple jacaranda tree was blooming its head off where I stood. Jacarandas can make the whole world look like a Technicolor dreamland, as if Walt Disney had decided everything green should be purple.
“Just think of the place you’ve always wanted to go,” my father said, waving his own Technicolor wand.
I pictured, because I couldn’t help it, the Eiffel Tower. Every August, Agnès, Robby, and Hoyt went to Paris to visit her mother, and although they had twice invited me to go with them, both times my parents had come up with reasons why the timing was bad.
I watched the dirt road where Amiel still wasn’t riding in on his bicycle, and I touched the folded note that I hoped said, Where did you learn to juggle? not, Where did you learn to deceive?
“Well, what are you thinking?” my father asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, because I couldn’t tell him about Amiel and I didn’t know how to ask why he had canceled our health insurance.
“Paris, France,” my father said to me from what felt like a faraway room. “This summer. I know someone who actually has a pied-à-terre in Paris, France, so you just need to tell me when you’re going to be finished with school, and I mean finished with the learning part—no need to stay for those days when everyone’s just signing yearbooks and flirting around.…”
I had an inkling about who owned the pied-à-terre, though I didn’t know if the someone was male or female, and I wondered what my dad thought my mother would do with herself while I was in Paris, France, with him and his mistress/mistredo. Maybe she would try to move into the fifth instar for human beings, which is I don’t know what.
“I have to go, Dad,” I said.
“Well, think about it,” he said.
“Okay.”
I pushed the End button as Amiel’s bicycle came humming through the iron arch. He saw me, lifted his fingers in a small wave, and coasted to a stop.
For a second, I couldn’t move or breathe. What is it about a person that makes him harmless to others and fatal to you, like a bee sting or a trace of peanut butter? I put the phone in my pocket and took out my folded message, but Amiel was already walking away to the grove, swinging the long metal prong he used to turn the sprinklers on.
“Amiel?” I said. I tried to say the name nicely, with Spanish vowels.
Amiel turned, so he wasn’t deaf, just like he said. I held out the piece of paper and he got a worried look. He glanced up at the house, and he turned the sprinkler key slowly in his hand like a baton.
“It’s nothing bad,” I said.
He took the paper and set the key down so he could unfold it. His shirt was a white and brown plaid, I remember, and I saw for the first time a sort of leather-thong necklace he wore around his neck. I’m not a fan of man jewelry, but this was man jewelry on Amiel’s neck, so I studied the disk of black stone lying warm on the soft spot between his collar bones and shivered again. I must have breathed in and out, though I’m not sure how. Amiel read the note or seemed to read it, and he looked up at Hoyt’s house again. He neither n
odded nor shook his head at me while the purple jacaranda leaves remained supernaturally purple and the fog closed everything in. Amiel put the paper in his pocket and made the sign I had seen him make earlier, his hand in the shape of the letter C.
“¿Sí?” I asked, and he nodded. Before I could figure out what it meant to say “yes” in this situation, he had walked away.
Twelve
“What were you and Marcel Marceau le signing about?” Robby asked while we waited in the car for my mother to find her phone in the guesthouse and drive us to school.
“Were you camped out in the xylosma hedge again, Mr. Double-oh-seven?” I asked.
Robby just tapped on his backpack with his wide, flat fingers. I didn’t know why we were so rude to each other now. We’d been really good friends our whole lives, and now that I lived in his guesthouse, we sounded like Greenie Coombs and her brother, who bickered twenty-four hours a day.
“Who’s Marsell Marso, anyhow?” I decided to ask, hoping that would be non-hostile.
“You don’t know who Marcel Marceau is? Marceau was a French actor,” he deigned to tell me. “A hugely famous mime. That’s why I thought you’d know. Being so mime-freaked and all.”
There are times when being good-looking and intelligent make up for sarcasm and bitterness, but this was not one of those times.
“Amiel’s not just a mime,” I said. “He juggles.”
“It’s not his choice of self-expression that I’m worried about,” Robby said. “You probably shouldn’t flirt with him.”
“I wasn’t flirting! I don’t see why I can’t talk to someone who has a job here. Your dad’s friendly.”
“That’s different.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said, though I knew it was.
“Can he mime hanging himself?” Robby asked as my mother hurried toward the car holding her coffee cup.
She opened the car door as I said, “Just stop it.”
“Stop what?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
It didn’t feel like I was headed toward any good discoveries, but I was. I was headed, though I didn’t know it, for the river.
Thirteen
By the start of second period, the foggy haze had started to burn off. I wanted to sit in the sun and read or just look at the newly visible turquoise sky and not think about my father or what my note would do to Amiel, but this was school, so Greenie and I just kept shambling toward the redbrick bunker where we had drama with Ms. Grant.
Greenie Coombs became my best friend the last summer of making things up. We were in fourth grade, way too old for playing with Barbies, which is why we were so close: we had to protect our secret. We wanted to give Barbie and Ken a wedding—not just a wedding, actually, but a rehearsal dinner, ceremony, reception, and honeymoon. It was very involved. We found a birdhouse that looked like a chapel at a garage sale and spent five whole dollars on it. We made breath of heaven flower arrangements for the tiny dinner tables and a purple lantana bridal bouquet and a redwood Lincoln Log reception hall and satin dresses for the whole bridal party. Greenie was good at turning one thing into another—at seeing how an acorn cap could be a goblet—and I was good at sewing and believing. Thinking back, it feels like the last time, before Amiel, that I was happy.
Greenie had a pretty face even then, but she was heavy around the middle and her thighs rubbed together. Her hair was black and straight, like a horse’s. Her skin was olive and her eyes were green, which was why her brother had given her the nickname. She breathed with her mouth open, which even I could see made her look dim-witted, though she wasn’t, not at all. She was good at math, like Robby, so she didn’t mind my being good at book reports and vocabulary tests.
Everything was perfect until eighth grade. Greenie was an early bloomer, and while I stayed the same shape, skinny as a tree that grew straight up, the layer of fat around Greenie’s middle seemed to move up to her breasts. She got her braces off and started keeping her mouth closed. Then her legs stretched and became thin. By the end of the year, the sort of boys who didn’t do their homework began to hover around her locker, never the least interested in me. We stayed friends mostly because Greenie and I had this history together, our secret power to bring inanimate things to life.
I remember that we drifted into second-period drama class that day without interest, though it was our favorite class and Ms. Grant our favorite teacher. The room was always cold because the floor was glossy white concrete and the walls were brick. We were supposed to be brainstorming for a one-act, five-minute play, and as usual Greenie and I were partners. Ms. Grant left the class unsupervised, as she sometimes did, and went into her office while fifteen or twenty of us lay sprawled on the various pieces of furniture that had been donated for stage props. I spent some time at the bookshelves where Ms. Grant ran a lending library of British theater productions and foreign films, looking for something that featured Marcel Marceau. A big droopy guy named Hal told me I should watch Les Enfants du Paradis, which turned out not to feature Marcel Marceau at all, but was directed by Marcel Carné and featured a totally different famous French mime. I signed it out and put it in my backpack, and while I was throwing out lame ideas for the plot of our one-act, five-minute play, Greenie started in a very low breathy voice to tell me about her upcoming date with this boy named Hickey.
“You’re kidding, right?” I said.
“You know that guy who drives a Honda with Texas plates?” she asked, ignoring my attempt to laugh at her boy love’s name.
I didn’t, but right then Ms. Grant came out of her office and shouted, “I hope from the noise level in this room that you’re all going to be ready to write a rough draft of your script in fifteen minutes, including but not limited to Ms. Coombs and Ms. DeWitt?”
So that was all I knew when I was introduced at lunch to a boy I would frankly have called unworthy of breathy-voiced description. His eyes had a sleepy look I associate with low achievement, like most of the boys who were mesmerized by Greenie’s breasts. The cuffs of his jeans had come unraveled from dragging along under the heels of his sneakers. His hair hit his eyes mid-iris. He looked older than us, too, which I realized halfway through the conversation was because he had an actual and pressing need to shave.
We were wandering over to the pizza stand when I opened my wallet and saw nothing in there except an old raffle ticket.
“Wait,” I said. “I forgot to get money. I’ll have to go find my mom.”
“You bring your mom to school?” Hickey said.
“Her mother teaches here,” Greenie told him. “Sometimes. She’s a substitute. Mrs. DeWitt.”
“Oh, her,” Hickey said. I waited for further observations, but he kept them to himself, which made me feel subtly insulted.
“So I guess I’ll see you later,” I said.
“We could do Pedro’s,” Hickey said. “I’ve got, like, this gift certificate.”
Fallbrook High doesn’t have an open campus, so I said, “But we’re not allowed to do that”—the sort of nerdy remark I’d been making since the age of about four.
“Hickey is,” Greenie said. “He’s eighteen, so he’s got a pass.”
“He does, but we don’t.” This, too, is the sort of thing I’ve been pointing out since the age of four. But Greenie just gave me a pained look, so I followed her to Hickey’s car, and nobody saw us.
The taco stand was maybe five minutes away, right on Main Street, an old white cube of a building that my mom says was a darling little hamburger and ice cream stand back when Fallbrook was more like downtown Disney. It was my favorite place to eat, and I always ordered the shrimp burrito and horchata, a yummy milk and cinnamon drink. “I’ll pay you back,” I told Hickey after we shouted our orders in the general direction of the outdoor menu.
“No need,” he said. His arms were freckled, and he jiggled the gearshift slightly as we idled at the drive-up window, watching a Hispanic woman fold a tortilla like you’d wrap a newborn baby.
“There isn’t time,” I said immediately.
“We only have two classes after lunch,” Greenie said back, un-Greenie-like.
There was a truck full of construction workers behind us now, waiting with hostile expressions. “Right or left?” Hickey asked.
Left was back to art class and the return to compliance, provided nobody asked us what we were doing off campus.
Right was the river. Sun glinted on the hood of Hickey’s car.
“Right!” Greenie said gleefully, and without asking for my vote, her Hickeyman turned right, speeding us past the fake Irish pub, the Art and Cultural Center, the Mission Theater, the Mexican market, the stoplight, and the brown stucco apartments with sheets draped over the windows.
“You recall that my mother is a sub, right?” I said. “I’m going to get in gigantic, life-threatening trouble, Greenie. So are you, if you care.”
“We’ll be back before the end of school,” Greenie said. “Relax, you big stress cow. You love the river!”
“But I’ll be marked absent in art. They’ll notice right away what’s happened.”
“I worked as an aide in the attendance office last semester,” Greenie said, poking her straw decisively into her horchata. “They aren’t always totally on the ball, I promise. And you know who happens to be working as an aide this period?” She gave me a look I didn’t find at all comforting. “Paula Menard. Who totally owes me one.”
I adjusted to the situation the way I suppose people adjust to being on a hijacked plane. “So, Hickey,” I said, feeling miserable and a little sick. “What’s up with the name?”
“You’d have to ask my great-great-granddaddy, I guess.” He shifted into gear and went faster than any intelligent person would drive on the tight sunlit curves. Huge oak and sycamore trees grow beside the road to De Luz, and the gullies are full of wild cucumber leaves. It was like traveling, much too quickly, down the green-glass tube of a waterslide.