by Maggie Bloom
I baby step to the scalloped, mother-of-pearl sink. “The one and only,” I say with an encore of the cheerleader grin.
“He feels bad about it, you know,” she tells me, a mystic, far-off tone to her otherwise scratchy voice.
I locate a plastic cup that’s as close to clean as we’re going to get, rinse it under the tap and fill it with cool water. “Where did he go?” I ask, trying to take an interest in Mr. Madden’s Houdini act.
“The astral plane.”
“Huh?” I hold the cup out, but she stares right through it.
“Limbo,” she says. “The space between.”
Why am I here again? Oh, yeah. “Okay . . . uh, do you have a phone number? Maybe I can call him and . . . ?”
She takes the cup and sets it back on the sink among the spent toilet paper rolls, crumpled tissues, and tipped-over bottles of makeup. Below a whisper, she intones, “Guilt is toxic.”
I finger the bourbon bottle in my pocket, work out how I’m going to get the holy water into that cup—and then into her. “I’m sure he’ll forgive you.”
She jerks out a wild cackle. “Forgive me?”
“I just mean that . . . well, everyone makes mistakes. You shouldn’t feel bad. It’ll probably blow over by tomorrow.” I sneak the nip bottle into my palm and carefully uncap it. When she’s not looking: drip, drip, drip—right into the cup.
A dizzy, fuzzy look comes over her. “There’s no such thing as time in the astral plane.”
I give the cup another try. “Aren’t you thirsty?”
She accepts the water, takes a long, slow gulp. “Suppose I was.”
I have no proof of this, but holy water seems to mellow people out—or at least that’s what it did for my dad. “Drink it all,” I prod. “In case you’re dehydrated.”
“He loves you,” she tells me, the cup swinging back toward her garishly outlined lips.
“Mr. Madden?”
“Of course not.” She shakes her head, her gaze floating toward the ceiling. “It’s the boy,” she mumbles. “George.”
* * *
“You’re gonna have to drive,” I tell Haley as we hustle to the Prius after an unsettling tea party with Opal and her mother. I toss the keys in my sister’s direction, but she lets them drop into the street, where they clatter across a manhole cover and skid under the car.
She looks at me like I’ve suggested sacrificing a goat. “Are you crazy?”
I hold my arms out, zombie-style. “You trust me?” I ask, watching my chipped blue fingernails tremble.
She crouches for the keys, fishes them out and gives them a doubtful stare down. “Why don’t we just call Dad?”
It’s not a bad idea, since our father is the understanding type. But if Mom finds out we’ve kidnapped her baby (sometimes I swear she loves this eco-friendly cruiser more than she does us), we’ll be headed for the guillotine. I check my cell phone for the time. “I doubt they’re back,” I say, referencing our parents’ biweekly jaunt to Boston for restaurant supplies.
“Well, I’m not getting behind the wheel,” declares Haley, “and you can’t make me.”
Did she really just say that, or was it an echo from 2002? I wrench the keys from her hand. “Fine. If you’re going to be so . . . immature.”
Neither of us bothers speaking until the Prius hums into the garage at home, the ride an empty blur (which proves I had no business warming the driver’s seat in the first place). “Does this look right?” I ask once we’ve exited the car, a wave of panic washing over me.
Haley studies the way I’ve parked, checks the ground for the chalk marks we’ve left behind as a guide. “You’re off by six inches,” she tells me flatly.
“Should I fix it?” I spin back toward the car. “I should fix it.”
“Lighten up,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “You’ll never get it perfect.” She snatches a whisk broom from the utility bench. “There,” she says, brushing away the first mark. “Good as new.” She taps me on the shoulder with the broom.
“She knew about George,” I mutter, whisking the next chalk line out of existence. “Weird things. Personal things. Things she had no way of . . .”
“Is that why you’re acting so freakish?”
I guess she’d assumed I was rattled from the intervention, which went off swimmingly, all things considered. “Why won’t he talk to me?” I ask, not expecting an answer. “I was . . .” I finish the cover-up and return the broom to its slot. “We were . . .”
“You should have told him.”
A dagger to my heart. “Now you’re a relationship guru? How many boyfriends have you had?”
She grins. “Maybe I don’t like boys. Maybe I have a different preference.”
“Touché.” I give her a snappy nod. “Do you? Like boys, I mean?”
“They’re all right. Some of ‘em, anyway.”
“There’s none like George,” I say. “Not that I’ve seen.”
Haley shakes her head, a look of pity coloring her face. “Don’t you think it’s time,” she says gently, “to let it go?”
I’m so sick of this conversation. For two years, I’ve heard nothing but: It’s not your fault, Cassie. George wouldn’t blame you. Remember the good times. Celebrate his life by living yours.
Ad nauseam.
It’s not like I don’t want to move on; I do. But I can’t. Not without George. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I say. “Message received. Again.” I duck into the Prius for my English books (we’re simultaneously reading 1984 and Brave New World—sort of a compare and contrast assignment), which have been absorbing space in the backseat all weekend. I wiggle the Orwell text from the seat crevice, a startling sight catching my eye. “Haley, come here!” I shout, my voice shrill with alarm. She’s not moving fast enough. “Haley! Help!”
I sense her behind me. “What?”
All I can do is point.
“Oh . . . my . . . God,” she drawls, three measly syllables stretching the length of the alphabet song. She pushes in front of me and stares at the seat, where, tied in a compact little knot, lies an empty Funyuns bag. “Omigod, omigod, omigod!” she squeaks, shifting to staccato rhythm.
I poke absently at her spine. “When did Mom get this car?”
She shrugs.
“Think!” I demand. She goes for the chip bag, which to any normal person would look like trash. But we know better. “Don’t,” I warn. “Don’t touch it.” Disturbing this relic would be akin to defacing George’s grave.
Haley shimmies back out of the car, her face ashen. “It can’t be . . .” she says warily. “Can it?”
“When did Mom get this car?” I repeat, doing some mental math, although it’s all but impossible that the Funyuns bag has been kicking around the Prius since before George died.
Haley nibbles her lip. “July, I think. Or maybe August.” She stares me dead in the eyes. “But it was definitely after seventh grade. I remember, because Mom and Dad had the station wagon when they took us to Six Flags.”
My sister is right, leaving only one explanation: the hungry ghost of George Alfred Brooks has been noshing on delicious onion-flavored snacks, twisting the empty wrappers into his trademark bowtie knots (when he was alive, he claimed the packaging took up less space in landfills this way) and planting the evidence for me to find.
I want to say something, but my jaw just drops and hangs there, slack and dopey looking.
“What’re you gonna do?” asks Haley.
There’s no protocol for how to act when the dead best friend you secretly loved suddenly resurfaces—or at least his garbage does. “I have no idea.”
chapter 5
I came close to kissing George once. It was a sky-blue summer day, the same day his beat-up old skateboard let go of its rickety back wheel and the day after I let go of the sixth grade.
“C’mon, slowpoke!” he called over his shoulder, the board wobbling back and forth as it—and he—careened down the hilly sidewalk by Lemon Park.
I was in the street, trying but failing to race him, my child-sized scooter no match for his skill or agility. “You win!” I yelled, winded from the competition, though most of it was downhill. I sucked in a breath and blew it out. “I surrender!”
George hit the valley at warp speed, spun around a turn and coasted into the dinky parking lot beside the basketball court—or what passes for a court in Milbridge: a jagged slab of tarmac, roughly rhombus shaped, with two off-center posts, backboards and hoops attached but nets MIA. “You didn’t have a prayer,” he told me, all macho and—dare I say?—a little full of himself.
I rolled over to join him, my ankles on the verge of spraining. “Where did I put that trophy again?” I asked, patting around my shorts.
He flashed a grin that traveled all the way to his oversized eyes. “You never learn, do you?”
Our first meeting, huddled behind the tire of that moving truck, had cemented a rivalry between George and me—a friendly one that, from early on, assumed a flirtatious bent.
I noticed Ian and Robie (last name, not first) tearing up the court with an epic man-on-man battle. “Wanna go two-on-two?” I asked George with a nod at his pals.
He squinted, his eyes shrinking to normal size. “Us versus them?”
We had challenged Ian and Robie (or Ian and some other less-than-athletic partner) to a friendly game of hoops before, so there was no reason for him to act so skeptical. “Sure. Why not?”
He didn’t answer right away, but I could tell from his body language (stiffening spine, nose twitch, darting eyes) that he wasn’t on board. “Eh,” he said, “I don’t know.” I felt an excuse brewing. “Wouldn’t you rather do something else?”
Wow, he was off his game today. I started wandering toward the court. “Like what?”
“I dunno,” he said tentatively, his skateboard clunking along behind him instead of buddying up to my scooter in the grass. “Talk?”
He sure did know how to stun a girl. I mean, it wasn’t like we didn’t talk all the time; we’d just never talked about talking. “Um, all right. If that’s what you want, I guess.”
Ian shot George a quick wave, then made a killer basket from half-court. George tossed the wave back and steered me by the shoulder toward the playground. “So what’s up?” I asked as we plopped down in the sand at the edge of the jungle gym.
He scanned for eavesdroppers, though the park was deserted. “I found out something,” he told me, more serious than I’d heard him before.
I hadn’t a foggy clue what he meant. “About . . . ?”
“My mother.” He stared at the ground, poked an ant hill with his sneaker.
Well, that narrowed it down, but I still couldn’t assume. “Which one?” We’d exchanged a few words about his biological parents, but only when the subject came up on its own and never in much depth. Already this interaction felt different.
“The real one,” he said, the syllables rolling off his tongue.
I got a knot in my stomach. “Is it good or bad?” I asked, trying to brace myself.
He shrugged.
“Am I going to cry?” It was common knowledge that George considered me overly sensitive, the way I got worked up over TV commercials and, God forbid, the news, which was always dismal enough to throw me into a funk. You’d cry over spilt milk, he’d say as a running joke. And it was pretty much true.
He brought his gaze to mine. “I’ve got her name.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Yep,” he said with a twist of his lips. He leaned forward and groped the back of his jeans, withdrawing a tattered, quarter-folded piece of paper. “Look and see.” He slipped the paper to me sideways, as if it were a clandestine love note.
I didn’t want to open it. Someone had broken George’s warm, kind, funny heart, and now I was going to have to admit that such an evildoer existed. “Who gave you this?” I asked, pinching the paper between my thumb and forefinger and holding it up to the sun for a sneak preview.
“I stole it.”
My lungs quivered. “You stole it?”
He displayed his palm, which featured a gash outlined in dried blood. “Tore up my hand busting their safe open.”
“Your parents? You broke into . . . ?”
“Out of character, huh?” He beamed his pearly whites again.
“You could say that.”
“So . . . ?”
“Shouldn’t you give me a drum roll or something? This seems too big to just do it.”
He froze, as if an important thought had occurred to him. “I had a different name, you know. So don’t be surprised.”
I clenched my jaw and pried the edges of the paper apart, revealing a jumble of lines, checkboxes, and unfamiliar text. With a lump in my throat, I scanned the page. “Ruth Elizabeth Dawson?” I read, my gaze drawn to the contents of the box labeled MOTHER’S NAME. Under my breath, I repeated, “Ruth Dawson.”
He gulped. “Keep going. It gets better.”
I glanced at the address listed for his birth mother. “New York? You weren’t born in Vermont?”
“Uh-uh. Unless that thing’s a forgery.”
“Ha-ha,” I said, following up with a genuine chuckle. “I doubt your parents would keep a forgery under lock and key.”
He quipped about his official birth certificate being the fake, but I was too distracted by the unusual spelling of his real name to pay much notice. “Uh-NAT-uh-lee?” I puzzled, my face scrunched in concentration over the letters, which read: A-N-A-T-O-L-Y.
“For someone so smart,” he said, snatching the paper from my hand, “you really are quite . . .” He shimmied closer to me, launched an arm around my shoulder and, with his thumb pinned below the word in question, brandished the sheet before us. “An-uh-TOE-lee,” he sounded out, in a voice that suggested I was hopeless. “See?”
“An-uh-TOE-lee?” I parroted. He gave me an mm-hmm and a squeeze, his face—that perfect, freckled, saucer-eyed face—only inches from mine. Play stupid, I thought. Mispronounce something else. Give him a reason to stay. “I like it,” I said in a come-hither voice.
He licked his lips, the gesture seeming to occur in slow motion. “It’s not weird?”
“Well, uh, it’s kind of . . . exotic,” I offered, his cinnamon-scented breath snaking into my nostrils and making me dizzy.
“You always did have a way with words, Cass.” He jostled the paper. “But what about this?” he asked, his thumb inching toward the box marked FATHER’S NAME.
It was empty.
“Clerical error?”
“Really? That’s the best you’ve got?”
“Alien abduction?”
In a radio-announcer voice, he crowed, “It’s a swing and a miss.” His arm dropped off my shoulder. “Nice try, though.”
“At least you know your mother’s name. That’s something,” I said, hoping to cheer him. “If you can find her, who knows what—”
“I can’t,” he blurted. “She doesn’t exist.”
I furrowed my brow. “Huh?”
“Not a trace. Nothing,” he assured me in a pained tone. “She’s a mystery; a phantom.”
“All right, you’re freaking me out.” I hopped up off the sand. “She has to exist, unless . . . unless she’s . . .”
“Dead?” he said, finishing my thought. “Uh-uh. I checked that out too. There’s no record of her being born or dying.”
“Well, that just doesn’t make sense.”
He folded the birth certificate and pocketed it, then stood to face me. “Tell me about it.”
My fingers drifted toward my mouth. “What did you check? How did you check?”
“Online databases. Vital records sites. Stuff like that,” he said matter-of-factly. “There are thousands—tens of thousands—of Ruth Dawsons, just none that fit my search criteria.”
The way he’d presented the information made it seem like a done deal. “Oh.”
“So that’s that, I guess.”
I studied the gentle s
lope of his nose, the enticing fullness of his lower lip, the hint of dominance in his chin for evidence of an alternate identity. “Anatoly? Did I mention that I like that name?”
“I believe you did.”
* * *
The first day back to school after spring break is always rough, but today was even more of a nightmare than usual, because 1) we had a sub for English who, instead of teaching, spent the whole class period regaling us with tales of his failed publishing history (he’s written fourteen novels and been rejected by every publisher in the known universe) and then proceeded to slice our eardrums to shreds with a clunky, mechanical reading from one of said orphan manuscripts, and 2) I got a nosebleed from, of all things, a runaway (or flyaway, as it were) paper airplane that decided to use my face as a landing strip.
It goes without saying that, once the ketchup faucet in my nasal passages ran dry, I decided to walk the mile and a half home instead of taking my chances on the claptrap of a bus the Milbridge School Department is so gracious as to provide us.
* * *
“Oh, hey Cassie,” our cleaning lady Rosita says when she notices me schlepping along the sidewalk, the hatchback of her car swung wide open. She reaches inside and muscles out a caddy full of spray bottles and microfiber cloths. “How’s it goin’?”
It’s probably misleading to describe Rosita—or Rosie, as my family calls her—as a cleaning lady, since she’s only four years older than I am and is a sophomore at Middlebury College. The cleaning gig is her way of taking some of the tuition heat off her parents who, as new immigrants to the United States, founded Dust Bunnies (hence the giant pink rabbits painted all over Rosie’s car).
“Pretty good,” I say automatically, sparing her the gory details.
“Mind carrying this for me?” she asks, a twinkle in her shiny, dark eyes and a Swiffer in her outstretched hand.
“Sure.” Rosie is a sweetheart, the sort of girl my parents probably want me to become: hardworking, genuine, always ready with a kind word and a welcoming smile. And smart. Ludicrously smart.
“Oh, I forgot,” she tells me once we’ve traipsed into the house and deposited her gear in the mudroom. “I’ve got something for you.” She extends a finger, indicating I should wait. “I’ll be right back.”