“How could he be seventeen if his brother was old?” Missy asked. She rolled her eyes at me, like, dork.
“Their father had two wives, and the second one had the kid when their old man was real old himself,” Noah said. “Don’t interrupt, nonbeliever. So, the younger brother took care of his older brother who’d been wounded in some war and was messed up. He was in a wheelchair.”
I couldn’t help flicking an eye at Jesse to see if that bothered him. He was fixing another marshmallow for one of the little kids and didn’t seem to notice. But he has this little tic beside his eye that he gets when something upsets him.
“Then the fire started. And the dude in the wheelchair got trapped.”
The little kids all gasped. “What happened?” one of them asked.
“He burned to death.” Noah looked at them all solemnly. He’s a pretty good storyteller. “The younger brother tried to get him out, but the flames were too hot. The younger brother ran around and around the house trying to get in, and he could hear the old guy in there screaming the whole time.”
I felt Jesse twitch, like he was flinching, and I remembered Felix’s dream about the boats burning up on the river. Jesse was staring at the fire now.
“Then the roof fell in.” Noah smacked his hands together and blew his breath out fast. “And the fire was coming down the canyon.”
The little kid clapped his hand over his mouth.
“They never found him.”
“Who, the guy in the wheelchair?” someone asked.
“The younger brother. He’d waited too long and he couldn’t get out of the canyon.”
“He died?”
Noah shook his head. “He’s still out there. Lots of people have seen him. His face is half burned away and where one of his eyes ought to be, there’s just this glob of jelly, like a marshmallow.” He held the drippy marshmallow up to his eye and hung his tongue out the side of his mouth. “He couldn’t get his brother out, see, and he went crazy. He stayed down in the chaparral and scrub brush, eating animals that had been burned in the fire. He’s still there.”
“Well, what does he eat now?” Missy asked.
“Whatever he can catch. Raw.”
“Eeeww.”
“He caught this girl who went out hiking alone last summer.”
“He did not,” Missy said. “It would have been in the paper.”
“Her parents hushed it up. What was left of her was so gross, they didn’t want anyone to see it.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“He runs down deer,” Noah said. “I saw a chicken he caught once. There was nothing left but the feet and some feathers. He ate it, guts and all.”
“That was coyotes,” Missy said.
“Naw. It was Char Man. The fire couldn’t kill him, so nothing will. He keeps coming back to where his house used to be.”
I don’t believe in Char Man, but that didn’t stop me from getting the creepy feeling that something was actually out there. I scooted a little closer to Jesse and he laughed as if he knew why, but the laugh sounded forced.
“God. I’d forgotten all about Char Man,” he said. “I was raised on that story. I heard it at Boy Scout camp.”
“It’s so stupid, but it gives me the creeps,” I said.
“Fire does that.” Jesse looked back to where the flames were melting marshmallows into gobs of goo. “It … transforms things.”
I think there was a fire when Jesse got hurt. He didn’t get burned, but I think someone did. I can’t ask him. I just can’t.
Afterward I was on trash detail, and Jesse stayed to help me and drive me home. Mom and Ben assumed I would walk, so they didn’t have a chance to say not to go with Jesse.
It’s amazing how much stuff religious, supposedly civilized people will drop. We cleaned up drink cups from the Frosty and tons of gross cigarette butts and hamburger wrappers. We bagged it up with the straw from the stable floor and lugged it all out to the dumpster in back. There was an actual coyote nosing around the dumpster, with a hamburger wrapper in his mouth. In the middle of town. He took off when he saw us.
“Nervy little shits, aren’t they?” Jesse said. He tossed the garbage bag into the dumpster. “Here, give me yours.”
I handed it to him and he tossed it too. Then he rummaged in his coat pocket. He pulled out something wrapped in tissue paper and handed it to me. “I asked Reindeer. She said you take showers.”
I stood there like an idiot, trying to figure out what he meant.
Jesse tapped a finger on the tissue paper package. “Open it. I didn’t want to give it to you in there in front of all those idiots.”
It was the coconut lime body wash from Body Works. I smiled at him. “Thank you. This is my favorite.”
“I’m glad you like it. You looked great tonight in the parade,” he said.
“I felt like an imposter,” I said. “I’m not holy.”
“You are to me,” Jesse said. Real quietly, so I almost didn’t hear him. “When things get bad, I’ll think about you in that starry cloak. You’ll be my talisman.”
I was thinking about what Felix said about the time he saw the Virgin, and whether anything that awful had happened to Jesse, and also about whether it would be a good idea to be somebody’s talisman, when Jesse put his hands on my shoulders and bent down and kissed me. He was kind of tentative about it, as if he didn’t know what I might do.
I kissed him back. I can’t say I haven’t been wondering what it might be like to kiss Jesse.
He didn’t get handsy like Noah would have, he just held me. And after a minute he stepped back and said, “Okay, I think that’s probably enough. You make me forget how young you are.”
That kind of annoyed me. “I’m almost sixteen.”
He laughed. A nice laugh, but he laughed. “You’re an innocent. I’d better watch out.”
“You’d be surprised,” I said, thinking about the dream about the girl in the bar. But if anything, that dream has made me decide I’m not ready for sex. The details of it have faded a bit, the way dreams do; thank God, because although I’ve read that everyone has weird sexual dreams, that one is not one I want hanging around in my head. And I was absolutely not going to explain it to Jesse. So I said, sort of prissily, “I have read about these things in books,” and he laughed again.
Now I really can’t stand it that I won’t see him at school until January.
12
Wuffie has invited Felix to Christmas dinner. Which we absolutely have to go to Wuffie’s house for, all of us, for the sake of the child—who is me. After what happened on Thanksgiving, I’m not so sure it’s a great plan. Felix will probably save Mom from a charging bull or something.
Mom decided that Ben and Grandma Alice and I ought to spend the night at Wuffie’s on Christmas Eve, so that the child will have both parents together on Christmas morning. I think Felix talked her into it and I don’t know if that’s good or bad—if he’s been interceding, or if Mom is trying to figure out how they will all be civilized for my sake once she and Ben are divorced. I asked Ben whether, if they actually get divorced, he can get any custody of me, and he just shrugged and looked sad.
“Don’t you care?” I asked him.
“About you? Of course I do, Angelfish.”
“About Mom!”
He sighed. “Yes, I care.”
“Then why don’t you take that thing out of your script?” I figured it was worth a shot.
He raised an eyebrow at me. “That thing?”
“Whatever it is she didn’t want you to say. She wouldn’t tell me what it is. Why don’t you just not?”
He made that noise he makes when he’s irritated, a kind of click with his teeth. “Because there is only a certain point to which I’m willing to be bullied.”
“Bullied? But you’re writing about her !”
“Angie, you don’t know everything.”
“Then tell me!”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Yes, it is! You’re getting a divorce! Maybe.”
“That doesn’t make it your business.”
“Who else’s is it?” I demanded.
“Mine and Sylvia’s,” Ben said. “As I would think would be obvious.”
“And I’m just some … some … ping-pong ball to bat back and forth between you?” I said. “Like a—a pawn?”
“Except that no one’s fighting over you,” Ben pointed out. “You are not tragically featured in the tabloids yet.”
“All right,” I admitted. “Hokey dialog.” And mixed metaphor, Mom would have said. “But I really hate this.”
“I know. But if you have any Parent Trap–style shenanigans up your sleeve, ditch them,” he warned me.
“I was planning to get you and Mom snowbound together in an isolated cabin so you could meet cute all over again,” I said (this is the plot of one of Ben’s movies). “But it doesn’t snow here.” I stomped out.
So on Christmas Eve we went to Wuffie’s, and Mom slept in her old room with me, and Grandma Alice slept in the guest room, and Ben slept on the sofa.
I wondered what Mom and Ben were going to do about presents for each other. When I asked, earlier, Ben said, “A tiara,” and Mom said, “An exploding cigar,” so I gave up.
Mom was whistling “Angels We Have Heard on High” while we got undressed and I climbed into one of the twin beds. The other one still has her old stuffed animals on it, and she picked up a rabbit and looked at it.
“I don’t know why Mother doesn’t throw these out,” she said.
“Maybe they remind her of when you were a kid,” I said. “She probably gave you most of them.”
“Actually, my first husband gave me this one,” Mom said, and tossed it back onto the bed. Then she pulled the covers back and flipped the whole batch of them onto the floor. She started whistling again.
“Mom?” I whispered.
She stopped whistling.
“Did you love him?”
“Oh, darling.” A long pause. “I expect I did. He was very sweet, and he really wanted to take care of me. Until it went to hell.” Another pause. “I’m not still grieving over him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Then why are you miserable?”
“I’m not.”
“Are too,” I said, turning over and punching my pillow into shape.
The Todal, who we had brought with us, padded in and flopped down beside my bed with a long sigh. The light went out and I heard Mom get into bed. “Go to sleep and wait for Santa Claus,” she said.
They gave each other chocolate. Honestly, it was like those gift exchanges in grammar school where you draw names to be somebody’s secret Santa. On the other hand, Mom gave me the sweater I’ve been drooling over and Ben gave me a framed lobby poster from Pirates of the Caribbean with Orlando Bloom’s autograph. Ben has connections. Wuffie and Grandpa Joe gave me a ring with a tiny diamond in it that was Wuffie’s mother’s, and a card with a picture of a T-Bird on it and a note inside that said, This card may be exchanged on your 16th birthday for a real car (used, 2 to 5 years old) from a list of safe, dependable models. I’ll be sixteen in April. I hugged them both, jumping up and down like an idiot.
“Wheels! Wheels! Wheels!” I shrieked, nearly falling over the Todal, who was asleep in the sun in a pile of spaniels.
“Angie, stop it, you’ll break something!” Mom was laughing.
I unwrapped my present from Lily, which I’d been saving, and found the little elephant-headed god, Ganesh. “Good work,” I told Ganesh, because he’d already removed one obstacle in my life with Wuffie’s present. If I did have to come live here with Mom, I wouldn’t have to ride my bike to town. And I could see Ben when I felt like it.
And then Noah Michalski came to the door and handed me a box of chocolate. When the doorbell rang, I thought it was going to be Felix and I stood there looking stupid while Noah held out the box, which wasn’t wrapped but had the little gold cord thingy the store puts on them, and a tag.
“Dude, what’s that?” he asked as the Todal came to the door, too.
I said, “That’s my dog,” and shoved the Todal back into the house. There was a car in the driveway. “Did you drive over here by yourself?”
“No, I have an invisible mother in the car. She won’t notice. She’s busy burning the turkey.”
“You want to come in?” And get stared at by my family? I didn’t know what to do with him.
“No, that’s okay,” he said, looking over my shoulder at my assembled relatives, who were all looking at him but pretending not to, like really bad amateur detectives. “I just wanted to bring you this.”
“Well, thank you,” I said.
“Well, like, Merry Christmas,” Noah said, and got in his mom’s Toyota and drove over Wuffie’s geraniums.
When I went back in, they had all decided to be tactful and were making coffee in the kitchen or pretending to check their email. Mom and Ben were standing in the doorway to the hall where the bedrooms are, talking. Ben’s face looked tight, the way it does when he’s mad or sad, and Mom had two tears rolling down her cheeks. They both smiled when they saw me, fake smiles like demented manga characters.
“Was that Noah Michalski?” Mom asked, as if she thought maybe it had been a door-to-door evangelist instead.
“No, it was Noah Michalski with a box of drugstore candy his mother made him buy me, thanks to you discussing me with everyone you meet.”
They both snorted with laughter. I just glared at them to make it clear it wasn’t funny. Thanks. Glad my private life can take your minds off your divorce.
I went into the kitchen, where Wuffie was making tamales. That’s the other food I will kill for. They’re a total pain to make and she only does it at Christmas. She was just putting them on to steam in their little cornhusk jackets and I inhaled blissfully. “Thanks for the car.”
“Grandpa will go with you. And no sports cars. Or driving around with boys by yourself. You’re too young for a boyfriend.”
Okay, first of all, I’m fifteen and a half and I know girls younger than me who are pregnant. Or were. But that’s probably not the thing to say to Wuffie. And anyway, “Noah Michalski is not my boyfriend,” I said. I saw no need to mention any other names.
Besides the tamales, Wuffie made rib roast so there were bones we could actually give to the dogs, and nobody choked and had any emergency. The Christmas tree sparkled, and we played Christmas carols and talked about the war. Not cheerful exactly, but on everyone’s mind, although I kept getting sidetracked thinking about Jesse.
Finally Mom said, “War, war, that’s all you think about, Dick Plantagenet!” which is a quote from our favorite awful old movie, King Richard and the Crusaders, and everyone cracked up.
“I saw that!” Felix said. “On the Late, Late, Terrible Movie Channel.”
Then we all got silly thinking up words for groups of things that don’t have names but ought to, like a cheese of bad movies, or a conviction of judges.
“Department store Santa Clauses,” Ben said. “A beard.”
“Prom dresses,” I said. “A slink.”
Felix said, “A goof of spaniels.” Cupcake was sitting on his feet waiting for him to drop something.
“A yawp of poets.” That was Ben.
Mom said, “A despair of English teachers.”
“Oh, no,” Wuffie said. “Surely not that bad.” She scratched Cupcake’s head and made a face. “Ugh. A suction of ticks.”
“Gross,” I said while I helped Wuffie take Cupcake into the kitchen to deal with that. But it was so great, just like Christmas always has been, with everyone sitting around the table getting silly and being happy. And when we sang carols Mom and Ben harmonized just like they used to, without even thinking about it.
13
The family coziness didn’t last. I should have known it wouldn’t. We’d barely gotten home before Mom and Ben were on the phone, back to arguing about whatever it wa
s they’d been arguing about before dinner. Grandma Alice and I could hear Ben through his office door. You could tell by his voice he was mad, and every so often a few words surfaced: “… a screw loose … No, I am not … didn’t bother you when he … God damn it!” We heard him slam the phone into the cradle and I winced. Grandma Alice looked embarrassed, as if she was still responsible for him.
I was so mad I was almost crying. I had such high hopes when everything was so nice at dinner, but I should have known. They’re both morons. They ruin everything. Am I going to turn out like that, too? Like Mom, somebody who can’t settle on one man and makes all her husbands so crazy that they swear at her? I think it may have been Felix that Ben was mad about. But if it wasn’t Felix, it would be something else. Why can’t she just be happy? Why does she get these fits, like some kind of itch, that she has to go start a totally different life, that the one she’s got isn’t any good anymore? I’m probably just lucky she doesn’t decide she wants a different kid, too. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me—some genetic weirdness from Mom that makes me have other people’s dreams, like I can’t settle down in my own skin.
I haven’t told anybody but Felix about the dreams. And God, of course, but He hasn’t given me any advice. Maybe I’m just as batshit crazy as Felix is. Maybe I ought to tell someone before I start wandering around with a saucepan on my head or something. I could start with Lily, I guess; she could tell me whether she thinks I really need a shrink or am just upset about Mom. And why would being upset about Mom make me dream about being in some foreign country where they’re shooting people? Or worse yet, being a guy having sex with a girl. Oh God, I don’t even want to think about that one. Go away! Get out of my head!
I called Lily the next day to see if we could hang out at her place because I was totally sick of watching Ben walk around the house with his own personal thundercloud following him, and she came and picked me up. Lily’s house has all this wild Nepalese and Tibetan art and embroideries all over. They have a big silver head on the coffee table that Lily says is Mahakala, the Face of Wrathful Compassion. I thought that pretty much summed up what I’m feeling about Ben and Mom right now—wrathful compassion. Emphasis on the wrathful.
What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay Page 10