You Have Seven Messages

by Stewart Lewis

Just then, a man with large black sunglasses and a trench coat pushes number twelve, Cole’s apartment. Without saying a word, he gets buzzed in. I realize there’s a security camera, so I grab Oliver and scoot us off to one side. A few minutes later the man comes back out empty-handed. We walk to the deli and get Cokes, then come back and see another person buzz, this time a girl, maybe eighteen, in a tracksuit. There is a man selling hats on the curb, and we pretend we’re customers. Oliver puts a few on my head and smiles his approval. I almost forget that we are on a stakeout.

  We move to the stairs across the street, which are flanked by a magnolia tree and some garbage bins. I decide to ask him about his dad.

  He looks at me like, Are we really getting into this? I nod.

  “He lives in Easthampton,” he says, as if Easthampton is in Russia. His face goes tight and blank. I don’t pry further. A toddler goes by carrying a mask and a snorkel.

  “Oh, I just realized, we should go swimming sometime at Janine’s building, there’s this crazy pool.”

  Oliver’s face goes very still, and he seems to be having a seizure of some kind. I get a little scared and ask him what’s wrong.

  “I don’t swim,” he says. He puts down his Coke carefully on the stoop.

  “Oh.” I’m not sure if I know him well enough to push further, but as if sensing my thoughts, he begins to explain, in a voice that I have to move a little closer to hear.

  “My father … well, he’s sort of like one of those annoying life-coach people. He feels like he has to … exercise control over everyone.”

  I watch his face and see a vulnerability I’ve never seen, like he might just crumble and start to cry like a baby. Instead, he stares at me hard, daring himself not to.

  “I was around five, I think, maybe six. It was a pool party at a country club in Greenwich. I was the one geeky kid not swimming. And my father told me I had to get in the water. He had this look, like Harrison Ford or something. Like there was no way I was going to get out of it. So he ended up basically throwing me into the pool.”

  I laugh a little and then totally regret it. It’s obvious he hasn’t told anyone this before. I touch his shoulder in a gesture of apology.

  “All I remember is, well, fearing for my life.” Now he laughs, but it is one of those laughs that should’ve been a cry, or something else. “I just sunk down, until this lifeguard girl got me up onto the stairs. I thought I was going to die.” He makes the non-laugh sound again. “My dad stormed off and I just sat there, coughing up water while the lifeguard held me in a tight embrace.”

  I can feel my eyes watering and Oliver smiles. A genuine smile, like maybe he’s happy to have spoken about it.

  “The weird thing is, I remember feeling so comforted, so safe in the arms of a complete stranger, this lifeguard. I wanted to go home with her, maybe have a different life.”

  I can’t think of anything to say except “Wow,” which makes me sound like a surfer. I sip the last of my Coke, which is now warm.

  “When I got home after, there was a cello on my bed. My mother had bought it for me without telling my father. She had heard about what happened.”

  The sky is getting darker and it starts to mist a little. I don’t think about getting wet, or my clothes, or my hair frizzing out. I just want to stay right where I am.

  “Ever since then, music was the only thing I could escape into. Sometimes, when I see people out in the world with sad, hard expressions, I just want to reach out and put headphones on them, you know?”

  I have felt the exact same way, and feel the urge to yell, Yes! But instead I simply smile and nod. We sit for a while just watching people walk by. It starts to rain a little more. He looks up at the sky.

  “What’s your Singin’ in the Rain?”

  I give him a puzzled look and he explains that his grandmother on his mother’s side was his favorite person. She was a dancer and had three husbands. When she was dying, Oliver read to her for the last few weeks of her life. He didn’t know what the book meant but tried his best to read it well, like he knew the story and was telling it off the top of his head. It’s wonderful to see his eyes light up talking about her, but I still don’t understand what it has to do with Singin’ in the Rain.

  “It was her favorite movie, and she said everyone had one, the movie that made you look at life differently.”

  Immediately, the answer comes to me. “Witness.”

  He smiles. “Harrison Ford.”

  “Yes. Did you know he got his first movie part at age thirty-one?”

  “That’s a lot of tables to wait on. Why Witness?”

  “It’s definitely dark, but it’s also beautifully shot. And I have this obsession with the Amish. They are from another world. I went on a shoot with my father in Pennsylvania and met a whole family of them. I gave this girl my old iPod and she had to hide it from her parents.”

  “Don’t tell me you milked the cows.”

  “Ew, no!”

  After a few more minutes, Cole comes out, lights a cigarette, and hops down the stairs. My mother hated cigarettes. One time she found some in my jacket and got really mad. They were Janine’s but I didn’t bother telling her that, as it seemed like such an obvious lie. She never would have stood for it with Cole. Maybe he recently took them up. He looks older than he does in the picture, and he seems a little more crouched, less confident.

  Oliver nudges me and we whisper, even though he’s across the street.

  “I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to say to him.”

  “Well,” Oliver says, “if you want to get to the bottom of what happened to your mother, I would advise befriending him first.”

  I start to get up just as Cole goes back inside. I run to the curb but a stretch limo goes by, and by the time it passes Cole has shut the door.

  I return to Oliver and sit down, defeated. He looks at me and says, “You’re cute when you’re mad.”

  The edges of our thighs touch, and I am hyperaware of it, as if there is a field of electric heat between us.

  Nothing happens for a long time, except the two of us being together. So often people talk to fill the space between them, even if it’s about the weather or simply to hear their own voices echo into the world. Oliver and I just sit in silence, observing the city life together, and it feels right.

  “I guess this stakeout came up short,” he says. The wind picks up and for a minute everything looks shadowed. With hardly any warning, thunder rips through the sky, giving way to a strong, diagonal rain. The building has only a tiny canopy so we are forced to stand really close. I have to remind myself that I’m not in one of my father’s movies. We are laughing at the rain, even though it’s not really funny. After our laughter settles, he reaches out and cups my chin again, and I know it’s going to happen. Those lips that were alive only in my thoughts are now very alive in real life, closing in, slowly, until they reach mine and we both close our eyes.

  CHAPTER 19

  ON THE MARKET

  Now that Oliver has kissed me, I am untouchable. At school I look the Rachels right in the eye and don’t flinch. I cannot tell you how good this feels. How silly of me to even care about being friends with them. Janine and I sit down at our table across from the Rachels, who are eating yogurt and those little plastic cups filled with mandarin orange slices. We are having chicken tenders. When my mother died, the only thing that made me feel alive was eating. People assumed I wouldn’t have an appetite, but I actually ate a lot. It was almost like my body became depleted by the loss and I had to eat more than normal to replenish it. So many people use food as a substitute for unfulfilled longing, but for me it was a necessity. Every girl at this table will probably stress about food and weight when we’re older, but why do it now? Our metabolism is crazy high, most of us are like Energizer Bunnies, so what’s the point in getting all weird about food? The Rachels barely even finish their yogurt.

  Since I know Janine has experience with boys, I decide to get some advice
from her after lunch as we wait for assembly.

  “Why do you ask? You still crushing on that neighbor of yours?”

  “Yes. We kissed yesterday! He’s supercute.”

  “Good for you, girl. Just stay away from hot dogs.”

  I smile. That’s one of the cool things about Janine. She’s smart enough to know that she made a mistake and should just move on. Being able to laugh at yourself is half the battle. Surprisingly, she tells me to take it slow with Oliver, make sure it’s “organic.”

  There are girls at my school who wear these silly bracelets and preach about abstinence. There’s something about them that creeps me out. Even our Health Ed teacher tells us that it’s our own choice, that whatever we choose to do sexually, we just have to make sure we’re safe and responsible. Aside from them, most everyone has experimented in my grade. I know I’m not superadvanced when it comes to the subject, but I’m not a total prude or anything. I just got sidetracked and kind of gypped out of last year because of Mom dying.

  The assembly starts. It’s a group of African dancers and percussionists. Their costumes are bright and beautiful, and their movements are raw and uninhibited. This does nothing to distract me from the subject of Oliver. He has such a gentle way about him. He makes all this affair-and-message business somehow worthwhile. I need to find out more about the night Mom died, and Cole is the missing link. I don’t know what I’m going to find, but I’m so glad Oliver will be there with me.

  The dancers join in a circle holding hands, then release them up into the air, creating what looks like a blooming flower. I realize that Mom is someone I would have talked to about Oliver. She wasn’t really a typical mom. She was more like a friend. She never imposed her morals on me; she just encouraged me to create my own ways of thinking and dealing with things. Talking with her always made me feel better, no matter the subject. We would fight, of course, but not that often. Most of the time she was like a sounding board, and though Janine is not a bad substitute, I feel my mother’s absence sharply once again. I sigh discreetly. Will this feeling ever go away?

  On the way home from school I stop by her studio. The cleaning woman is there again; she motions toward her supplies but I say, “No, gracias.”

  When I get inside, I open her laptop and see the picture again. I was wearing a purple sweatshirt that I don’t even remember owning. I think it was borrowed. We rented a house every year in Nantucket, and sometimes the other families would leave stuff behind that would become ours. I wonder where the owner of that sweatshirt is now.

  I close my eyes and tell myself to just do it. I open up the file that says “Luna,” and there’s a date in the corner, about a month before she died. It’s written in diary format. There are only three entries. I start to read the first one:

  When we brought you home from the hospital, your father was terrified something was going to happen to you. For the first three nights, when you weren’t nursing, he sang to you and tried to tell you jokes. He canceled one of his biggest movie deals ever to stay home with you. I had to force him to go out, get some air, making up things I needed so he could leave us alone. He was so caring, so genuine, that I told myself then and there I would never leave him. Now, over a decade later, so much has changed.…

  My mother was pretty open with me, but how much do we really see of the people we love? The fact that she wrote this, to me but in private, is strange—almost like she knew she was going to die.

  I pause and look out at the darkening sky, thinking of my dad, whose nurturing I could have used later in my life, when his attention was always somewhere else. When I turned four my mother threw me a birthday party, and it was mostly adults. She was very pregnant with Tile, and my father couldn’t come for some reason or another. I know I was super young but I remember being sad, because I never related to my “friends” at the time. When you’re four, kids just come to your birthday party for the food, and the parents pick out all the presents anyway. My mother seemed almost happy that my father couldn’t make it. She was in her last trimester and drinking a glass of champagne. I blew out the candles on the cake and felt empty inside.

  … your father is the same man, but I fear I am not the same woman. When we met, as you know, I couldn’t really be bothered. But he did all the right things. He made me feel more special than any photographer or camera or fashion spread ever has. I was finally the center of someone’s universe. But that was quixotic. It was simply something that swept me up …

  I wonder if she’s talking about the same thing I’m experiencing with Oliver. There’s a feeling I get with him that almost hurts, a small ache in the bottom of my stomach, but at the same time I crave it. Maybe that’s what the cutters are about, or Janine’s dad, who she once caught getting whipped by a woman who looked like Halle Berry in Batman. I never understood the appeal of pain, but now I’m starting to.

  … and now it’s spitting me out. Something is changing beyond my control, like gravity. I am falling faster every day. There is someone I have been connected to for a long, long time. He challenges me to think outside the lines I so rigidly drew for myself. He loves me, yes. He wants me, yes. He wants to make me happy. He gets pleasure from it. Your father made me happy for a long time, but I’m not sure that any one person can make another person happy forever. Humans are living things, and the deeper our roots go, the more complex the flower. I am not sure your father even recognizes who I have become.…

  I’m not sure I’m recognizing her, either. My mother was intelligent and sharp-tongued, and there’s something in her writing that seems soft around the edges. I realize that my palms are sweating. I wash my hands in her tiny sink, go to the refrigerator, and pour myself a glass of water. I don’t drink it, I just let it sit there, and continue to read.

  … It’s not his fault, it’s not anyone’s fault. Oh, Luna, I hope I am making sense. You see, he thinks I’m having an affair. I’m not, officially. But I do feel myself slipping. I know you’re probably too young to hear any of this, which is why I am typing it instead of telling you. Most of my friends would think I’m a nut job, and the ones who would like to hear it would probably just spread the word. All the people in my life, except Richard, would either judge me or just gossip about it.…

  I start to cry a little. Where are you now, Mom? Why couldn’t you have come shopping with me for a bra? Why do I have to get advice from Janine? I feel so angry I could throw her laptop through the window. I gulp the Pellegrino and suddenly hear a key turn in the lock. My heart leaps through my chest as I close the laptop and pour the rest of my Pellegrino into one of the dead plants.

  “Oh, well, hello there,” says a woman who’s trying way too hard with her outfit. Behind her is a young couple, dressed in Gap, with soft, eager faces.

  “Oh, hi, I didn’t realize …”

  “You must be Jules’s daughter.”

  “Yes, hi.”

  “Kit Langley, with Citi Habitats. Your father put the property on the market yesterday. Shall we give you a minute?”

  “No, it’s okay. I was just leaving anyway.”

  I realize there are still tears on my face. I grab my bag and walk past them, trying to smile and be normal.

  From the third-floor landing I can hear Kit using her key words. Cozy. Light-drenched. I have to talk to my father about this. Why didn’t he consult me? Was he afraid of the things I’d find if I went back there? It’s too late for that.

  The streets are piled with trash bags stacked in front of the pristine brownstones. Some window cleaners whistle at me, and I realize for the first time that though they definitely aren’t as big as Janine’s, I have noticeable breasts. With my hair down I could probably pass for eighteen. When I get back home I go right into my father’s office.

  “You’re selling Mom’s place?”

  “Moon, it’s empty. I should have sold it months ago. What do you want me to do?”

  “I want to use it after school, to do my homework and stuff.”

  He
looks at me, knowing I have more leverage now. The more information I find out about him, the more transparent he becomes. I am chipping away at his exterior.

  “The maintenance is over a thousand a month, my accountant—”

  “Screw the accountant. I’m not ready for you to just sell Mom’s place like it’s some … investment.”

  I don’t really know what I’m saying, but I’m furious. At my mom for leaving the world, at my dad for lying to me, at the Rachels for thinking they’re so cool, and at myself for not being smart enough to see it all coming.

  His phone rings. It says Birnbaum, Alex—his agent.

  “I have to take this.”

  “Good,” I say, turning to leave, “you’ll be needing more jobs to pay the maintenance.”

  He widens his eyes at me and I smile like I’m kidding, but I’m really not.

  CHAPTER 20

  PARTNERS IN CRIME?

  I find a note taped to my door when I get home:

  fifteen—

  5:30—my roof—6th floor

  be there—

  o

  I look at my watch: 5:28. I drop my bag and turn right around, tucking the note into my back pocket. When I get to the sixth floor and open the exit door, Oliver greets me with a bowl of popcorn and points to the recliner chairs set up in the center of the roof.

  “How’d you get those up here?”

  “I know people.”

  I smile, walk slowly over to them, and sit down. I guess our second try at talking to Cole will have to wait.

  He says, “Stay right here.”

  I hear the hum of a projector and see a large white square of light appear on the side of the next building, and then the first shot: golden fields and blue sky. It’s my favorite movie!

  “Witness,” he says. “Your Singin’ in the Rain.”

  I feel like the luckiest girl on the Upper West Side.

  During the movie, Oliver refills my Sprite and occasionally holds my hand.