Look Both Ways

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  The makeup nearly did her in. She wouldn’t master eyeliner until she was thirty, if ever. She had to swab off the excess with baby oil four times and start over. This time, at least the mascara stayed put.

  Mally knew the origin of the sweater.

  A few days earlier, Mallory had noticed Eden knitting something in black mohair. It was during the afternoon Eden agreed to join Mallory for a full week’s orgy of General Hospital tapes, which took about an hour and a half to watch back-to-back. When Mally asked about the project, Eden simply said she never really knew what things would be until she got going. And it was true that these days, she was always knitting—even during team meetings. It was like a nervous tic. (“We go through a lot of mittens,” Eden told Mallory. “And I make socks for James. He loves the homemade ones.”) But Mallory could tell Eden was using knitting to calm herself.

  As she set up her old VCR with a tape, Mally explained that she had decided to watch all the General Hospital episodes in order, as far back as she had, which was 1983. “There’ll be gaps, of course, but it’s like reading an epic poem,” she told Eden.

  “Or like an epic bore,” Eden said.

  “Be nice. See how miserable Luke is? He thinks of Laura all the time, but she hides from him. I don’t know why she’s hiding from him. She just does. I don’t even know why she left. He’s running around thinking she’s dead and she’s right in that town they live in. I bought these tapes from our neighbor, and she didn’t have any before 1983.”

  “Maybe she ran away because she was too sad to stay. Maybe she couldn’t have the life she wanted, and that’s why,” Eden said.

  “Edes, that’s a good reason if you’re like . . . thirty-five.”

  “It’s a good reason no matter what age you are,” Eden said. “I’m starting to think it’s a better idea all the time. If bad things happen to you, you belong somewhere else.”

  “Eden, I know what that means.”

  Eden had set her knitting aside, but she picked it up again, to give herself something to fiddle with. Finally she said, “I know you’re not stupid. Just because I haven’t come out and talked about what happened up behind the reservoir and why you came up . . .”

  “I didn’t want to make you talk about it. I didn’t know if it went out of your mind after you . . . were you again.”

  “To answer that, no, but it’s like a dream, like a ghost memory. But you know, I won’t let anyone hurt you. I won’t let anyone hurt me or any of mine. And if I have to be out there, I’m sick of hiding in a hole until midnight when I’m starving.”

  “Would it help if I brought you food?”

  “Like pizza?” Eden collapsed on the couch. “Oh, Mallory. We’re a pair! Only if it has meatballs. I’m not a little house cat! I have to get out of this, Mally. Some way.”

  “Promise me one thing,” Mally said. “Promise you’ll tell me first.”

  Eden was silent for a long time, bent over her needles. “Okay,” she said. “Only you. Not my brother. He’s all paranoid about this.”

  “He has a right to be, Eden!”

  Eden didn’t answer. Finally, she said, “I think Merry’s right. You’re sick. If these shows grow on you, they grow like fungus.”

  “Come to my concert,” Mally said, for the second time that day.

  “I . . . can’t come,” Eden said. “Will Miss Yancy record it?”

  “They’ll make DVDs.”

  “I’ll get one,” Eden told her. She got up and gave Mallory a hug. “I have to run. Tell Luke I’m heartbroken for him.”

  “Why can’t you come?”

  “Mallory. You know. I’m busy for the next few nights. I’ll come to your party, though.”

  It was sweet for a junior to come to a freshman’s party, but Mally knew why Eden, who loved choral music, was missing the concert. She would have to sing her heart out, worrying all the while.

  “Will you be careful? Those kids out there, they saw you clearly. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  Eden sighed. She said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this to anyone but family, but when I’m . . . that way, Mal, I’m me but not me. I only sense danger to one of my own. You don’t know how it is to be trapped!”

  “I do know. I have a destiny of my own. And if it’s your destiny . . .”

  “I’m trying to change that! I have to!”

  “Does James know?”

  “Only that I have to hide the truth about him and me from my family. I’ve told him that we have a legend about a white lion. He thinks it’s charming, like folklore. Not even all my brothers and sisters know. Even my father pretends he doesn’t. He feels guilty, I think. And yet, I still get in trouble with him for missing school if it happens when it’s not on a weekend. There’s not one part of it that’s even a little fair. I don’t even believe that my grandmother saw me the instant I was born and knew I was the successor.”

  “My grandmother knew about us the minute she saw us too.”

  “Your whole problem is different. I can’t prove I’m useful. I really think my parents and brothers and sisters and cousins will be fine. The farm’s doing great. Grandma’s going to be in a story in the New York Times for her beading. I don’t buy it. It’s like being a weird nun without a deity.”

  Mally handed Eden her coat. She said, “But there must be a reason. Or you wouldn’t change at all. I don’t want what I was given, but there must be a reason. It’s part of me. I wouldn’t know about you or how to protect you otherwise. I wouldn’t know that mountain lions ate pizza!” Eden laughed, but Mallory continued, in a serious vein. “You’ve saved lives. Merry owes her life to you.”

  “Tell her I just gave her one of mine. I have nine, you know.” Eden’s eyes brightened with tears. “I didn’t want to hurt that boy, David. But he was the predator, Mal. David was doing more than you know. I never dug . . . I never tried to find what’s really down there. But someone will, someday. I couldn’t let him hurt Merry!”

  “How much is it worth to save a life?”

  “It’s worth a lot,” Eden said. “But is it worth my life? Is it worth me living alone forever, never knowing love, growing old, never having babies? Watching my sisters have families while I knit and make ornamental headdresses and potions? You can be free!”

  “You’re never free if you can see the future, Eden. Yes, I can get married and even move away. But I won’t ever be free.”

  “I want to do right,” Eden said. “But maybe it won’t matter.”

  Her words came back to Mallory as she dressed for her concert, slipping the soft black sweater over her shoulders. It fit as though, well, as though it had been made for her. She sent a silent prayer for Eden’s safety and straightened the sweater and the length of velvet ribbon she’d tied around the neck of her blouse.

  When she came down into the kitchen, her uncle Kevin asked, “My eyes confuse me; this can’t be Mallory?”

  “Oh, yes,” Campbell said. “We’ve got quite the young lady now.”

  They all piled into vans and cars, and though Christmas was still days away, the light snow falling made it feel as though the holiday was this very night.

  Before the concert, Mallory peeked out from the wings and was almost embarrassed. It was like one of Merry’s home meets—all the aunts and uncles and cousins. But tonight, they included Aunt Jenny and her new husband, their baby, due in April . . . just like . . . just like her little brother. It made her proud, looking up there at all their smiling Yankee faces, still ruddy with cold.

  Something turned over in her heart. She realized that time would change this picture.

  One day, Grandpa Walker, who was ninety-two, would no longer be among them. Adam would soon be a teenager. She counted twenty members of her family—all there for her. Campbell was beaming in a long satin tunic that showed her big belly, and there had been much laughter at the house earlier as she and Aunt Jenny compared tummies. “I look so old!” Campbell mourned.

  No matter what, tonight Mallory w
as a lucky girl, almost a woman. She felt the ache and joy of growing older.

  The concert choir sang a series of winter songs and carols, including an electrified version of “Deck the Halls” and “Winter Wonderland.”

  When the time came for her duet, she easily sang the alto part of the German version of “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” with Alice Haslanger singing the soprano melody.

  As the audience applauded, Miss Yancy went wild.

  “Girls,” she told the Cantabiles, “that was the most beautiful version of that I’ve ever heard from my students. Keep this up and I’ll take up my colleagues’ offer to come to Italy and sing one day in Florence!” The girls rustled and giggled with the potential excitement. “At least we’ll win first at state in March!”

  The whole audience, hundreds of people, stayed for cookies and punch afterward. But as Mally thanked people for the comments on her new appearance and her never-before-heard singing voice, she noticed only one figure break away from the crowd. And then he was beside her, his dark hair shining and smelling of the old lavender tonic his grandfather had worn, and which would have smelled silly on anyone but Cooper.

  “Hey,” she said. “Mr. Cardinal.”

  “I knew Brynn meant a dark wing, but I didn’t think it meant a lark,” he said.

  “You’re such a flirt!”

  “I heard rumors from my sister of a New Year’s Eve birthday party to which I’m not invited,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t want to come to a fourteen-year-old’s sleigh ride,” Mallory told him. “Or would you?”

  “There are fourteen-year-olds and there are fourteen-year-olds,” Cooper said. “Some are just too hard to resist.”

  And Mallory wished again that the picture of this night would last forever.

  RECKONING AND RECOGNITION

  Kim cheered for the varsity boys’ basketball game the night before the twins’ party.

  It was a big deal, the holiday tournament, and Merry had to admire Pam Door for giving up her spot and being “in” on Kim’s sudden reelevation to varsity, on a part-time basis.

  It had taken Merry’s best powers to convince Coach why Kim needed to be reinstated, to persuade her that Kim hadn’t spurned the honor of being named to varsity. Coach, although she was strict, had watched Kim wither over the long months since David died, her cheerful enthusiasm turn to purely mechanical skill. Coach had always believed that cheerleading was as much about building spirits as solid pyramids. Meredith suspected that Coach chose Kim in the first place not only because she was good but because Kim needed the emotional boost. As for Merry, she felt as though she’d made varsity all over again. She and Pam would give up a fourth of their games each, so Kim could cheer for the rest of the year on varsity.

  “What’s become of cutthroat competition?” Coach asked. “Well, I guess your values are better than mine!”

  Meredith knew that wasn’t true. Under her bluster, Coach was proud of her girls.

  “I’ll be cheering in college anyhow! I have a scholarship,” Pam told Coach Everson. “What are a few extra games?”

  Only Meredith knew the real reason why Kim had been so desperate.

  And she had promised on her heart not to tell.

  To break the news about her plan, Merry had to go to the Jellicos’ house. Nervous to the point of nausea, she waited until Bonnie opened the door—Bonnie, who’d been like a second mom to her until last year. Bonnie’s blond hair now was the color of burned paper. She didn’t even bother with a little lipgloss. If anything, Bonnie, three years younger than Merry’s mom, looked ten years older. The house was still a shrine, with even more pictures of David than right after he died.

  Like a little ghost, Kim appeared and led Merry up the back stairs to her room.

  A few moments later, without Merry even having to ask, Kim was crying, harder and harder.

  “I never thought it would really hurt Crystal. Never! I thought she’d mess up her footwork just enough so I’d look better. She’s so flexible and she can do anything! I didn’t even really know if it would work. I just read about it on some blog. And even after I did it, after I put the tape on, I wanted to run out there and stop it. But if I got expelled, it would be the real end.”

  “What do you mean, Kim?” Merry asked.

  “It’s all me,” Kim said.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s all me now. I have to be perfect. I have to be everything to them now. I have to make up for . . .”

  “To make up for David.”

  “Yes.”

  “They don’t really feel like that.”

  “But they do, Merry! You don’t know what happened.”

  “Do you want to tell me?”

  “My dad counts on me to keep . . . Mom alive. . . .”

  “What do you mean, Kim?”

  “Two months after David died, Mom took an overdose. She saved up all the sleeping pills the doctors gave her and she took them all. Your mom doesn’t even know. Dad was so ashamed.”

  “Ashamed?”

  “Yes! That’s how he is, Merry. He drove her all the way to the city, even though she was barely conscious.”

  “No way!”

  “He took her to an ER there, so no one here would know. He thought we would be ruined forever. After David dying and then my mom.”

  “He drove her for an hour and a half? She could have died.”

  “So when I told her that I’d made varsity, it was just two months later. And she was happy, Merry. Not happy like before David, but almost excited. About me. It was the first time. Because David was the best. . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was popular and good-looking, and I just wasn’t ever as good as he was,” Kim said. “It was like they were . . . not just completely devastated that David died, but they got the leftover kid.”

  “Stop it, Kim.”

  “I heard Dad say it,” Kim told her. “I heard Dad. Right after David died. He said, all we have left is Kim. He said, ‘Do you know how that feels, Bonnie? I had the most wonderful son on earth. My pride. My name! And now we have our cheerleader!’”

  Merry pulled Kim close, her tiny body suddenly large enough to comfort someone thirty pounds heavier and four inches taller than she.

  Another secret Merry could never speak. Shame on them. Even if out of his mind with grief, how could anyone say such a thing, much less feel it? How could Mr. Jellico, even though he was a professor, feel that Kim wasn’t as good as David? Her parents might be a pain, but they would never, not ever think less of her than of Mallory, or Adam. They were all . . . cherished. That, Merry realized, made the gift bearable.

  Despite her fears, Kim’s need and gratitude were so great that Merry let Kim talk her into staying over. She barely slept, believing that any second she’d wake to David’s eyes in the darkness, blazing in maniac glee, the way they had on the ridge. Where else would he be, except here, where candles burned in his memory, where his senior picture had been transformed into an oil painting four times its size, where pale, haggard Bonnie cleaned his room and laundered his clothes as though David would walk in the door at any moment?

  Where his mother had tried to die to be with him?

  In the morning, Bonnie drove both of them to practice on her way to work. As she left, Bonnie said softly, “Say hi to your mom, Merry. Tell her congrats about the baby. I . . . I wish I had another chance.”

  “I will,” Merry said. She took a deep breath and said, “Bonnie, Mom misses you. She loved working with you. She only took the ER job because she needed the money. For the baby. And she’s going to medical school.”

  Bonnie, a distant look in her eyes, said, “She is? I’m glad. I never returned her calls.”

  Merry longed to say, “You do have another chance, Bonnie! She’s right here.” But she knew what Bonnie meant.

  That night at halftime, Merry rushed out onto the floor to do something she’d only ever tried in practice and only once in competition�
�a lib on top of a pyramid formed by four on the bottom and Kim and Libby Entwhistle supporting her balanced on the legs of the four below. Kim and Merry would first do a tumbling pass to the center of the floor, a walkover to a round-off, into three front handsprings, and then up Merry would go, to pull an outsized red-and-green pom-pom from her sleeve and wave madly while she extended one leg. She waited for the opening words, “Green light! That’s right!” As soon as she saw Kim start toward her, she couldn’t help but grin. With Kim’s face alight, Merry forgot everything. Muscle memory took over as she watched Kim cavort like a kid on a trampoline.

  As Merry stood on the pyramid, she hoped that Danny Blinkhorn, who’d dumped Trevor at Thanksgiving, might be looking her way. He wasn’t, but she saw something else: She saw Bonnie on her feet with tears in her eyes, and David’s father—Kim’s father—clapping his hands.

  As they rushed into their dance, picking up their bells for the routine to “Jingle Bell Rock,” Kim whispered, “My mom’s looking at me! At me! Since David’s been gone, and especially since . . . what I told you, my mom hasn’t even seen me. Not when I stay out all night. Never.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “I’ll never be happy like you, Merry. You can’t be if you lose someone. But I’m as happy as I can be. Because of you.”

  “Well, do I get a present for that?”

  Kim looked puzzled. “You mean a birthday present?” They lined up and waited for the opening notes.

  “Yes, sure. Call it that. I want you to promise me just one thing. That you’ll never go to the ravine again. That you’ll hang with us again. Or at least try to.” Kim looked away. “Kimmie? I hate to guilt trip you, but I gave up one fourth of my season. That’s a lot.”

  “I always wanted to!” Kim burst out. “I didn’t think you wanted me!”

  “Well, now you know. I’ll take that as yes?”

  “Yes! Sure! Anything!” Kim cried, and they rushed out onto the floor.

  ON THE NIGHT THEY WERE BORN

  Mallory snuggled under Cooper’s arm and thought, What a difference from last New Year’s Eve.