Time Flies: A Novel

by Claire Cook

  B.J. closed her eyes. “I think this might be my fault. I said some stupid things in front of Fawn. I’m really sorry.”

  Veronica crossed her arms over her chest. “Like what?”

  “Ugh,” B.J. said. “I think I said something about how my caretaking days are over and I couldn’t have handled five more minutes here. Damn my stupid smart-ass mouth—I didn’t even really mean it. And Mel and I had no idea she was hiding under my car.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture us standing out in the driveway. “And then I said something about how they say it’s different when it’s your own grandchild.”

  “And then I said something about hoping you could find a way to ditch the kid and meet us at the reunion.” B.J. hit her forehead with the heel of her hand. “I’m an idiot.”

  Veronica turned and walked away from us.

  B.J. and I looked at each other. Then we followed Veronica across the kitchen and into the family room. We climbed the narrow wooden staircase behind her up to the second floor.

  She pushed open the door to a small bathroom. We all walked in and stood elbow-to-elbow. A Hello Kitty shower curtain had been pulled all the way over to one side. A message was scrawled across the bottom of the white porcelain tub in a child’s handwriting.

  “Is it backward?” B.J. said.

  “It’s mirror writing,” I said. “If you hold the words up to a mirror you can read them, so I guess that makes it reversed but not really backward. I used to spend hours and hours practicing mirror writing when I was a kid.”

  “Go play with your friends,” B.J. read.

  Veronica shook her head. “I’ve called the family of every single child she’s ever played with around here, not that there have been many of them. Plus her swimming instructor, the bookstore where we go for story hour, her favorite ice cream place. I don’t know what else to do but keep looking.”

  I shook my head. “What if she was telling you she was leaving so you could go play with your friends?”

  B.J. and I were crisscrossing the yard with the rays of our flashlights.

  “Ally ally in free,” I yelled.

  “Yrros os m’i,” B.J. yelled. “Please come here so I can apologize to you, Fawn. And after that I’m going to buy you your weight in ice cream.”

  We walked to the end of the driveway and yelled Fawn’s name.

  “Fawn,” Veronica yelled from the other side of the house.

  “Listen,” I whispered to B.J. “I think we have to convince Veronica to call the police. We can tell them how responsible she is. I mean, it’s not like she’s a drug dealer. She’s a teacher.”

  “You heard what she told us,” B.J. whispered. “The last time the police came here, it was to arrest Fawn’s mom. What if Fawn’s out there and she sees them drive up and thinks they’re coming for her?”

  I sighed. “But we’re going to miss the whole reunion. Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I—”

  “Mel, it’s a freakin’ reunion.”

  “I know, I know, but I really . . .”

  Even in the dark I couldn’t miss the look B.J. gave me before she walked away.

  I stood at the edge of Veronica’s driveway by myself for the longest time. Like B.J. had never been selfish before. Like it hadn’t been a zillion years since I’d had any fun. Like Finn Miller might not be the last guy who ever waited for me to walk into a room.

  “Have you ever taken her to see Minot’s Light?” B.J. was saying when I found them on the front steps. “You know, the one that flashes one–four–three for ‘I love you’?”

  Under the soft glow of the front light Veronica nodded. “It’s one of her favorite places to visit when we go up to Marshbury. She and her pop even have this little ritual when he puts her to bed. Mark flashes one–four–three with her bedroom light on the way out the door.”

  Veronica let out a little sob, then coughed to cover it up.

  “I can’t shake the feeling she’s right around here,” B.J. whispered. “Maybe she’s watching our every move and just needs to be sure you really want her back.”

  Veronica nodded. “Maybe I just want it to be true, but that sounds like her.”

  “So,” B.J. whispered, “let’s go put on the biggest lovefest anybody has seen since Woodstock. Not that we’re old enough to remember Woodstock.”

  Veronica and B.J. went into the house to get all the candles they could find. I felt left out, excluded in that awful junior high way when two friends align and leave you out in the cold. I wondered if that was how we’d made Fawn feel.

  I followed the beam of my flashlight out to the backyard. The drone of the cicadas was loud and eerie. A mosquito bit the side of my neck, and I swatted it hard. I knew Veronica and B.J. were a quick scream away, but I was still afraid—afraid of the dark, afraid of what I might find just around the corner. I could only imagine how alone and afraid Fawn must feel right now.

  I found the Slip’n Slide. I unscrewed the hose from the back of the house, juggling the flashlight from one hand to the other and finally tucking it under my arm. I dragged the whole thing around to the front yard, stretched out the Slip’n Slide under the lights in front of Veronica’s house, and attached the hose to another water spigot. I turned it on so that the water trickled across the slippery blue plastic like an invitation.

  I looked up at the pitch-black sky and wished on the first star I saw that Fawn was out there in the dark somewhere watching my every move. Veronica came out carrying a big tray of candles, mostly plain white votives and big fat hurricane candles. B.J. followed her with a black wrought-iron candelabra filled with long tapered candles. Crystals dangled from it like a throwback to romantic dinners of long ago.

  I took the candelabra from B.J. and set it up on the highest step. Then Veronica and I arranged the rest of the candles on the steps. When we finished, it looked so much like a shrine that it was creepy. A shiver ran across my back.

  “This is just her kind of thing,” Veronica whispered. “Oh, please, let her be out there.”

  Veronica and I started lighting the candles with long fireplace matches. B.J. came out carrying her iPod. She held up a hot pink iPod dock. “I found this in Fawn’s room. Okay if I use it?”

  Veronica looked up from lighting the last candle and nodded.

  B.J. started scrolling through songs. “Ooh, ooh here it is. I knew I had it on here.”

  B.J. turned up the volume full blast, and the night filled with the sound of seagulls. A wooden flute chimed in, followed by a rich, acoustic guitar and a soothing voice singing about sand dunes and sea grass and foghorns in the distance. And a guardian angel giving a blind ship back its sight with a lighthouse that flashes 1–4–3.

  We did our best to flash the numbers with our flashlights to the gentle beat of the song, over and over again. By the time David Ogden had finished singing his “1–4–3 (Lighthouse Song)” all the way through, Fawn had walked up to the edge of the yard and stood there hugging her mother’s laptop to her like a blanket.

  CHAPTER 31

  “Faster,” I screamed.

  B.J. leaned forward over the steering wheel. Mustang Sally roared.

  “Stop!” I yelled.

  We slowed down.

  “Don’t listen to me,” I shrieked.

  We sped up again. My heart started to beat right out of my chest. The skin on my arms prickled and my hands started to swell. The baby elephant sat down and tried to squeeze the life out of me.

  “I don’t want to die,” I whispered. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth on every syllable. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”

  “Knock it off with the death talk,” B.J. said. “You’re killing me. I’ve never even had an accident that was my fault.”

  “I don’t want to miss the reunion, I don’t want to miss the reunion, I don’t want to miss the reunion,” I whispered.

  “That’s the spirit.”

  I started tapping alternating feet as if the galloping
sound might help get us there sooner. The rhythm was almost soothing.

  “Hurry!” I yelled.

  “If I go any faster, we’re going to get stopped for speeding and then we really will miss the reunion.”

  I’d done my best to pretend I wasn’t watching the clock in Veronica’s kitchen while we waited around to make sure Fawn was okay. She was curled up on Veronica’s lap sucking on a Popsicle while Veronica dabbed the mosquito bites on her back with ointment. They were angry and swollen, but they appeared to be her only physical damage.

  Finally Veronica set us free. “Go,” she’d said. “You still have time to make it.”

  “Are you sure?” B.J. and I both said at once. Neither of us took the time to say jinx.

  Veronica blew us a kiss. “Love you both. Now get the hell out of here.”

  B.J. passed a sports car cruising up the highway in front of us. “Do you believe Fawn had that laptop with her the whole time? Veronica probably could have just emailed her. It’s a whole new world, Louise.”

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I said. “We are soooo going to miss the reunion.”

  B.J. took a long swig of her Tab. “We’re not going to miss it. We’re going to get there just in time to make an entrance. We’ll be the hit of the party, Romy.”

  We passed an SUV and I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look. Then I opened them again so I wouldn’t have to die without any warning. My stomach growled, long and loud. I was gripping the sides of my seat as hard as I could, but I risked letting go long enough to take a quick sip of my Tab. “The food will be all gone, too. I knew we should have gotten two orders of french fries earlier.”

  “Think how flat our stomachs are going to be when we get there. It’ll be like we went on the high school reunion diet after all. Just remember not to touch the Goldfish until we make sure they’ve finished all the dorky reunion games.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just went back to tapping my feet. Maybe I could tap a hole right through the floor of the Mustang and jog us along a little faster, like the Flintstones used to do.

  Flintstones made me remember B.J.’s and my fantasy about Finn Miller creating a daily vitamin that reverses gray hair. Which made me remember the sculpture I’d imagined he was going to commission me to make for his Maui estate. Did they have estates in Maui, or just big beach houses? I could always scale the size of the sculpture up or down accordingly.

  “You know,” B.J. said, interrupting my pipeless pipe dream, “even if we miss it, Fawn’s okay and we were there for Veronica when she needed us. That’s all that really matters.”

  “Yeah, right.” I mean, easy for B.J. to be so generous. Her husband hadn’t just pulled her life out from under her. I leaned over to turn up the music.

  B.J. reached over and turned it down again. “You know, the whole time we were growing up, all I ever heard was how nice that Melanie was. Even my own mother would say, ‘Why can’t you be a good girl like Melanie?’ I might not always show it, but at least I’m there when you need me.”

  It was a direct hit. B.J. didn’t get mad often, but she had a knack for it when she did. I searched for a get-out-of-jail-free card.

  “So, guess what? Finn Miller emailed me. And I emailed back. And well, we’ve emailed a few times.”

  “What? And you didn’t tell me?” B.J. forgot all about the guilt trip she was laying on me and pressed down on the accelerator.

  “Don’t!” I yelled.

  She slowed down.

  “Don’t!” I yelled again.

  She sped up. “How could you not tell me that?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want to jinx it.”

  We pulled around another car and I tried not to scream. We stayed in the passing lane.

  B.J. glanced over at me. “I guess I can understand that. Okay, so fill me in. You’ve Googled him and checked out his Facebook profile, right?”

  “No.”

  “Are you kidding me? What kind of a crush is that?”

  “Sorry. I’m a couple of decades out of practice.”

  “It’ll come back. It’s like being Nancy Drew, only without all the legwork. And with a red Mustang instead of a blue roadster. Come on, Facebook. Now.”

  I gripped my seat with one hand while I opened the Facebook app Troy had installed on my cell phone and tracked down Finn Miller.

  “What’s it say under relationship?” B.J. asked.

  “Divorced.”

  “Good sign. See, you’re compatible already. What does he look like?”

  I squinted at my phone. “Little. And square.”

  B.J. shook her head. “Somebody needs to make bigger cell phone screens. You know, like those big phones with numbers that look like alphabet blocks.”

  I rummaged around unsuccessfully in the depths of my shoulder bag for my reading glasses.

  B.J. shook her head. “Somebody also needs to make reading glasses that come when you call them. I think I left mine back at the hotel. Oh, well, we’ll find out soon enough. Wow, Finn Miller—I’m trying to picture him from high school . . . Ooh, I know.”

  She leaned over and reached under my seat. The car swerved.

  I screamed. “B.J., knock it off.” My heart skipped a beat. I waited to see if I’d go into full-blown panic mode.

  “Sorry. Listen, reach under your seat and see if you can find my yearbook.”

  “You brought your yearbook?” I fumbled under my seat carefully with one hand. And to think I’d been too embarrassed to pack mine. Maybe I should have brought my Spin-the-Bottle bottle for backup, too.

  “Of course I brought my yearbook. I figured we could look at it right before we went in, so we’d have a better chance of recognizing people. Do you know that you can download age progression software now? I thought about uploading my senior picture to see if I turned out even better than I was supposed to.”

  After I finally managed to find the glasses and open the yearbook, I realized it was too dark in the car to see a thing. Life was just too damn complicated. “Hey, you don’t happen to have a flashlight, do you?”

  B.J. reached for the glove compartment. Mustang Sally swerved over the line and the SUV beside us leaned on the horn. B.J. gave it the finger.

  “Please, B.J.,” I whispered. I closed my eyes and tried to make my just-returned dry mouth go away.

  B.J. handed me the flashlight. “Come on, start with Derrick Donohue.”

  “Derrick Donohue?”

  “Remember? He’s the one who’s going to take one look at me and eat his heart out that he never gave me the time of day in high school when he still had a chance.”

  “Right. Okay, here he is. What do you want to know? And don’t you dare take your eyes off the road.”

  “Do you think he was as cute as I think he was?”

  “I guess he was pretty cute. In a bad-haircut kind of way. He looks a little bit out of it in this picture, though. And his yearbook quote is Don’t drink the bong water.”

  “Hey, give him a break. It was a different time back then. Okay, find me.”

  I flipped through until I found B.J.’s picture. “You were gorgeous, Barb. That orange mock turtleneck was so becoming on you.”

  “I know, I know. And how about my quote: Her eyelashes would sweep the cobwebs from any man’s heart.”

  “No wonder you got most conceited.”

  “Hey, I resemble that remark. What was your quote again?”

  “I’m afraid to look.”

  “Do it.”

  I took a deep breath and finally faced my own picture. As soon as I saw it—frizzy hair, bad eyebrows, tentative smile—all the insecurity of the time came back as if it were yesterday. Or even today.

  B.J. turned her head.

  “Keep your eyes on the road!”

  “Relax. Come on, what does it say?”

  “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough. Mae West. Ugh. So much for yearbook quotes as prophecy.”

  “Hey, Thelma, chi
ll, you’ve got plenty of time to get it right. Okay, Finn Miller.” B.J. put on her blinker, and I could actually see the off-ramp up ahead. I hoped it wasn’t a mirage.

  I opened to Finn’s page on the first try. Apparently practice really did make perfect. “School’s out,” I read, as if I hadn’t already memorized it. “Memories past. Don’t ever doubt. The fun will last.”

  “Not bad.”

  “Where did you say he lives now?”

  B.J. reached for her Tab. “As I remember, he divides his time between the Hamptons and the south of France.”

  “No, I think he’d need a ski house. And maybe an urban loft, too.”

  B.J. sighed. “What if this was the movie of our lives and we were just getting to the good part?”

  “What would we call it?”

  “Hmm, excellent question, Louise.” B.J. pulled off the highway and took a right.

  My breathing slowed down and the elephant climbed off my chest. I twisted to the left to take the pressure off my real tattoo.

  B.J. hit the steering wheel with the palm of one hand. “Oh, oh, I know. What about B.J. and Melanie’s Midlife Adventure?”

  “See, you always do that. Why can’t it be Melanie and B.J.’s Midlife Adventure?”

  “It’s not about top billing, Mel. It just has a better ring to it that way, that’s all.”

  I drained the rest of my Tab. I crunched the can with the heels of both hands and threw it over my shoulder. It made a pleasing metallic sound when it hit the others in the backseat.

  We wove our way through the back roads to Marshbury, an occasional glimpse of the stars breaking through the tall trees. I tried to imagine this movie of my life having a happy ending.

  I reached over and turned the music on again and hit SHUFFLE. The first orchestral strains of “Nights in White Satin” filled the car. Maybe it was a good omen. Maybe it was just the luck of the shuffle. My heart filled with yearning anyway.

  We circled the harbor and found the road that led to the reunion.

  “Hey,” B.J. said. “Remember how they always made one chaperone at each dance the designated tapper? Whoever it was had to walk around during the slow dances and tap you on the shoulder if any hands started to roam, or if you were getting ‘too cozy,’ and you’d have to separate.”