I put the pieces together. Richard was often mad at Mom for not spending time with Danielle. In most houses, it’s the mother accusing the father of that. We were Mirror Image Bizarro World Family.
And now here I was, curling up on the bed with Dani instead of reading about the War of 1812, folding her against my body so maybe she wouldn’t hear my mother’s words as they swirled down the hall.
“I just needed some downtime, Richard,” Mom was saying, her voice high and squeaky. “When do I get a break from taking care of people?”
You chose to be a nurse, I thought. You chose parenthood. How is “taking care of people” a surprise here?
Okay, so I knew it wasn’t that simple. She was tired. She was giving so much, she was losing track of herself. I understood all that; I understood more than I wanted to admit.
“They’ve been fighting a lot lately,” said Danielle. “One of them always goes to the store or takes a walk around the block. Why do they do that?”
“So that person can come back and everything can be okay.” I pressed my cheek into the back of her head. Her hair was so damn silky and she never even shampooed it.
“Was it like that with Mom and your dad?” she asked.
“I don’t really remember. I was only two.” I didn’t want to tell her that I imagined it had been like this. The muffled but angry voices down a hallway, and way too long between good memories. “But it must have been worse,” I said instead, “because eventually, my dad didn’t come back.”
I’d gotten none of the real story. Only gift cards on my birthday and Christmas from an address in Oregon that looked like a small rectangle of a house in online satellite photos. Not that I searched for it (that much).
“Do you think that’ll happen?” asked Dani. “Would Daddy leave and never come back?”
“Absolutely not,” I said, with conviction about the second part of her question. Richard would always come back, to her at least. And if he left, he wouldn’t go far. He wouldn’t go anywhere, except maybe a really sweet condo in one of those new developments with a pool and workout room. Dani would get passed back and forth like a hot potato, and she’d get used to it. Two birthdays, two Christmases. An extra bedroom to fill with new toys. There were worse things.
Like me, and how much I’d miss Richard.
And also my mom being the way she was in the years before she met him.
“It’s just a little fight and it isn’t your fault,” I said to Dani, turning her face so I could look her in the eye and she’d know I was telling the truth. “All parents have them. It’s going to be okay.”
Here’s what I discovered about talking to my sister: sometimes I said things because she needed to hear them, and sometimes I said things because I needed to hear them. It never mattered that I couldn’t tell the difference.
5
Finals were over and school was done, and the days now stretched as tall as they could go.
So here was summer, all official. The white noise of cicadas and crickets, rising and falling against the hum of my bedroom fan. The two big trees outside my window sighing with the breeze. Somewhere on the other side of them was Camden Armstrong.
When I got to Millie’s for the first day of my new schedule—nine o’clock to two o’clock, five days a week—Richard looked up from the greeting card catalog he was flipping through, putting sticky notes on the ones he wanted to carry in the store. “Hey, ducky,” he said. “It won’t suck too bad, will it? Working here? I remember what it felt like at your age, to be forced to do something.”
I adjusted the stool at the register to my height. “You understand why I wanted a different job, right? It had nothing to do with the store.” Say it, Ari. He deserves it. “Or you,” I added.
Richard’s face warmed, even though I hadn’t answered his question about the suckiness. “I do understand,” he said, “and I also understand that your mom’s in a weird place right now. She’s worked so hard to get where she is. I think she’s afraid it’s all going to fall apart any second.”
“We make sure it holds together,” I said.
“Just until the glue dries.”
“I always think of it as Velcro. When things do come undone, we can easily stick them back on.”
“See, Ari. If you didn’t work here, you wouldn’t be allowed to use craft metaphors so freely.” Richard scooped up the catalog along with some others and headed toward the back room. “I have some ordering to do,” he called over his shoulder. “Holler if you need me.”
It was a slow morning. Art students from a summer college program buying jumbo drawing pads. A mother and her son looking for a Batmobile model car kit, their joy at finding the last one as if we’d saved it especially for them. An elderly woman spending over twenty minutes trying to decide between two fancy journals—you know, the kind you can’t actually write in because they’re too beautiful—then eventually putting them both back on the shelf and walking out.
God, it was going to be a long summer. The next time the door chimed, I really had to force myself to look up and do the HiCanIHelpYou smile.
Camden’s friend Max was standing in the vestibule, unstrapping his bicycle helmet.
Something in my throat now. A sandpaper-wrapped grapefruit, perhaps, or aquarium rocks. Whatever it was, I had to swallow it down if I wanted to keep breathing.
This was what always happened the summer before, seeing Max or Eliza. I’d have some kind of physical event, because it meant Camden might be nearby. I grew to know the backs of their heads as well as I knew the back of Camden’s. It’s an unsettling side effect of being infatuated with someone. The infatuation bleeds into everyone surrounding the person, and the sphere of things that make you feel sick with longing grows dangerously wide.
Max saw me at the register and it took him a moment to figure out why I was familiar.
“Oh, hey!” he said. “The lake, right?”
“Yes.” My voice caught.
“Are you . . . Millie?”
“Oh. No. Millie’s dead. My stepdad bought the store from her daughter, so I guess he’s Millie now.” I sounded weird to myself. High-pitched.
“I was kidding.”
“I know,” I lied. “Can I help you find something?” That was better.
“I. Um. Am supposed to find yarn.”
Move, Ari. Act normal. Human, at the very least.
I stepped out from behind the counter and motioned for him to follow me down an aisle.
“We have some, but not very much.” I glanced at Max and he smiled at me, and I realized he was only a guy looking for yarn. And that was odd, yes, but not exactly intimidating. “There was a business feud for a while,” I added. “Between Millie and the lady who owns the knitting store down the street. They worked it out. We honor the treaty.”
Max looked at our selection of yarn, then shook his head. “I need a super-specific color. It needs to match this.” He held out a fabric swatch.
“Agnes at Knit Your Bit. She’s your woman.”
He shook his head again sadly. “I was hoping to avoid that. Let’s just say, Millie wasn’t the only one she had a feud with. We’re sort of banned from shopping there.”
I didn’t know who “we” referred to, but the more appropriate thing for me to ask was: “What do you need it for?”
“My girlfriend, Eliza . . . she’s making me a scarf.”
“In the summer?” Also, Girlfriend + Eliza. Processing that.
Max gave me a look, and although I didn’t know him, I could tell it was supposed to be a meaningful one. He held out the swatch again, so I looked at it again. Really looked at it.
Then I understood. There was a character on Silver Arrow named Bram, a tall alien with silver hair. And he always wore a scarf that was this color.
Eliza was making a Bram Scarf (on the fansite message boards, the real Arrowheads referred to it with one word, a Bramscarf).
Girlfriend + Eliza + Bramscarf. Still more processing needed.
“I can order the yarn for you,” I said. “But don’t tell anyone. You know, because of Agnes.”
“No problem there. Agnes scares the shit out of me,” said Max, who then leaned in closer because apparently this had become some shady deal. “How long would it take to come, if you ordered it?”
“Probably two days.”
Even though I could pick the color out of a lineup from thirty feet away, I snapped a picture of the fabric swatch and took down Max’s phone number.
“I’m really curious about why Agnes banned you from shopping at her store,” I said, feeling more confident now.
“That answer would also involve my girlfriend. She has, you know, artistic vision. It’s pretty strong. She wants what she wants and sometimes she gets a little crazy—I mean, intense about it. That’s why she sent me today. She didn’t want to piss anyone else off.” He looked at me and smiled. His two front teeth were crooked, parted like a tiny curtain. “If she’d known it was you working here, she would have come, I’m sure.”
“I’m here for all your Silver Arrow needs.”
Max laughed hard, as if I’d said more than I’d thought. “Will you be at the lake today?”
Max asking felt like Camden asking. That mammoth lump in my throat again.
“I might.” It came out as a croak. “Will you?”
“Yeah, maybe. See you then. Maybe.”
Then he was gone and the door chimed, and the FIND VERA! poster fluttered in the sudden gust like the wave I should have made but didn’t.
The town day camp was held at the rec center, whose cinder block walls and unfortunate orange-and-green interior design scheme had seen the birth of dozens of pot holders, God’s eyes, and sock monkeys for at least a decade, including several I’d made as a kid myself.
When I walked into the gym, I found Danielle’s group and spotted my sister standing off to the side, her counselor’s hand on her shoulder. Dani was crying. When she saw me, she ran up and wrapped her arms around my waist.
“What happened?” I asked, partly to her and partly to her counselor, a college student with a headband and clipboard.
“She fell.”
“Not by accident!” barked Dani, then shot a dirty look at two girls standing nearby.
“Danielle and those girls were on the playground, and they were involved in some kind of game,” said the counselor, trying hard to sound calm and professional. Not really succeeding. “I guess there was a disagreement and Danielle got angry and ran away from them.”
“To Lava Island,” corrected Danielle.
“To Lava Island,” said the counselor with emphasis, “but she fell. The nurse checked her out. She’s fine. We didn’t feel it necessary to call anyone.”
“But it still hurts!” cried Danielle, the tears coming again. “And if they hadn’t made me run away, I wouldn’t have fallen!”
I took my sister’s hand and started leading her out. “Thanks,” I called back to the counselor. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”
I marched a weeping Danielle through the parking lot, me not saying a word because what was the point in saying any words, and opened the door for her when we got to the car.
“Get in,” I said, rubbing her back. She did.
“We were pretending we all had imaginary ponies and then the other girls changed it to actually being ponies, and that wasn’t how it was supposed to go!”
“I know.” I reached over her to snap her seat belt. When I looked at her face, I saw one stray tear traveling down her left cheek. I pressed my finger to it, then pulled my finger away, and it was like it had never been there.
“I want to go home,” said Dani, her voice shaking.
“We can’t go home. Mom’s sleeping. We’re going to the lake.”
“I don’t want to.” Danielle sniffled.
Yes, we could have gone somewhere else. But I’d told Max I’d be at the lake. Max had probably told Camden I’d be at the lake. I was going to the lake, dammit, melty kid sister or not.
“But I want to teach you how to dive this year, and today’s the day we’ll start.” I pulled that one out of nowhere. I wasn’t afraid to admit I was good.
After a few more sniffles, she said, “Okay.”
By the time we made the left turn at the sign for the lake, she was humming something to herself. I didn’t recognize it, but it was catchy.
First order of business: a couple of warm-up jumps into the water from the side of the dock. Me first, then Danielle. Then together at the same time, both of us holding our noses. Then I showed her how to get down on one knee, point her hands into a jackknife, look at her belly, and trust.
“I’m afraid,” Dani said.
“It’s only water. I promise it’s soft and wet, like always.” I sat down a few feet away from her.
She stayed still for a long time, then finally took a deep breath and leaned all the way forward until her head broke the surface of the lake. Her feet barely cleared the dock as she went in, which made me flinch, but I wouldn’t tell her that.
“Yee-haw!” she yelled when she popped out of the water. She climbed back up the ladder to the dock, and did it again. And again.
“Whenever you’re ready, you can do it from standing,” I finally said.
Danielle looked nervous but intrigued. “Will you show me, Ari?”
I couldn’t remember the last time I dove. I used to do it constantly when I was a kid, from the board at the end of this very dock. But the older I got, the higher the board seemed. The harder the surface of the lake looked. One day, I just didn’t feel like it anymore, the way I didn’t feel like doing a lot of things. Tiny things. Too small to put a name to, especially a giant one like depression.
“Okay,” I said to Dani now. “Watch.”
I stood up. Bent my knees, stretched out my arms. My body remembered.
In that last second before I broke through, the water looked suddenly green instead of brown. The shock of cold, of water in my nose, the dirty-clean and foreign-familiar taste of it. Then, a sensation of being welcomed back to something but only briefly, before the laws of buoyancy lifted me away. My eyes were closed but I could feel the light growing on my face as I floated toward the surface. When I came up, Danielle was cheering.
And Camden Armstrong was standing on the dock.
I blinked away the sting of the water a couple of extra times to make sure.
“Hey,” he said, sitting down so his ankles were in the lake. Then he motioned toward Danielle. “I want to see if she does it.”
“I will,” said Danielle.
“Will you?” asked Camden, narrowing his eyes. I caught a teasing gleam there.
She matched his expression. “Duh. But I have to do five more kneeling first. Okay?”
“Okay. Then, go.”
As Danielle was setting up for her dive, I climbed the ladder quickly but not too quickly, feeling self-conscious about the ten pounds I’d gained as a side effect of my medication. Then I sat down on the edge of the dock a few feet from Camden and crossed my arms so my scars weren’t showing.
“I forgot,” I said as the splash from Dani’s dive sprayed us both. I was determined to talk to him first, and this was the best start I could come up with.
“Forgot what?”
“What it feels like, to dive.”
“Why did you decide to remind yourself just now?”
Because suddenly it felt Possible.
“I wanted to show her,” I said. “I can’t teach her if I can’t do it myself, right?”
Camden looked me in the eye for a gripping second, then glanced away. I was close enough to see his eyelashes for the first time. Thick and long. Almost girlie.
He drew one leg out of the water to scratch his ankle and said, “Forgive me for the cheesy-pick-up-line quality of this question, but do you come here often?” My heart crumpled for a moment, that he didn’t remember me from last year. Then he added, “I mean, I know you’ve come here a lot. In the past.
But this summer. Do you plan to come often this summer?”
Danielle splashed down in another dive, and I took advantage of the sudden distraction to swallow hard, breathe normally. What was he really asking?
“It’s the lake,” I said as calmly as I could. “Everyone comes here often.” I paused. “I thought you were going to ask me something like, ‘What’s your sign?’”
Camden looked straight at me again, almost surprised. Crap. Those eyelashes. “I’m an Aries.”
“Oh.” Oooookay. “I’m a Libra.”
“And an Arrowhead, apparently,” said Camden.
I smiled. “That, too.”
“I don’t generally like labels, but every once in a while, it’s nice when you can say you definitively are something. ‘I am male. I am six feet tall.’”
“‘I am a fan of a campy sci-fi TV show,’” I added.
Camden laughed and I waited for him to ask me more about Silver Arrow. Wanted him to. Badly.
“I go to Dashwood,” he said instead, and the way he said it, it didn’t seem like a change of subject. “Do you know where that is?” He stared out at the water as he spoke, squinting slightly, as if trying to see the words as he formed them.
“Up by the nature preserve, right? I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard of it.”
It was hard to keep a straight face here. Hard to pretend this was all news, the details of his life we had so desperately hunted down a year ago.
I turned to see Danielle, who was climbing onto the dock, shaking water out of her ears.
“That was five, right?” I said, glad for a break from this conversation that was thrilling me and stressing me out at the same time. “I think you’re ready.”
She shook her head. “No, not yet.”
“Danielle . . .”
Camden got up. “Look at it this way. You’re not standing. You’re just . . . not quite kneeling anymore. I’m Camden. Can I show you?”
She nodded.
Then he turned to me. “It’s okay?”
“Yes. Thanks for asking.” That made me crush on you 5 percent harder.
He went over to Danielle and asked her get down on one knee again. Then he gently picked up her bottom leg so her knees were parallel and she was squatting. He held her around the waist.
What Happens Now Page 5