by Deb Caletti
That afternoon Chip Jr. came back from his best friend Oscar’s house. He went there most summer days when Mom was at work since Oscar’s mom was at home. If I used the word baby-sat he’d kill me. Chip Jr. met up with me in the kitchen. I was peeling an orange into the sink, staring out the window. I guess I was thinking with both guilt and pleasure about that too-pretty face of Travis’s, his fine, silky blond hair. I was thinking about this dark pact we had seemed to make, this ugly and thrilling partnership of going too far. Lately I could think of nothing else. The hidden life I’d been leading took up a place in me, and I wondered what I had done before it was there, what I had thought about, how I filled that time. That no one knew about all of this gave me a delicious feeling of my own separateness. Like a CIA agent, I was creeping around doing huge things and no one even noticed. I wished I’d gone to see him.
“What are you looking at?” Chip Jr. asked.
“All of the holes Poe’s dug in the backyard. It looks like the surface of the moon.”
“We should stick a flag out there,” he said.
I ate my orange. My fingers were covered with those mysterious white scales you get in the process, and I wiggled them at him.
“Mummy fingers,” I said.
“I like apples better. No squirting.” Talking about apples apparently inspired him to have one. He opened the refrigerator, tumbled the apples around in the bin until he found the one he wanted. He took a loud, crunching bite.
“You’re supposed to wash it.”
“I love pesticides. Yum, yum,” he said.
He chomped on his apple, appeared to think awhile. We sat in silence, eating, until he finally spoke again. “What’s the heaviest thing in the world?” Chip Jr. asked me, his cheeks puffed with apple.
“A blue whale.” I slid in a slice of orange. I thought it was a science question.
“Nope. The heaviest thing.”
“A skyscraper.”
“Nope.”
“A mountain.”
“Uh uh.”
“A mountain range.”
“Nope.”
I was getting tired of this game. “I give up.”
He looked at me a real long time. He saw me, that I could tell. He saw me, and he wanted me to see me too. “A secret,” he said. “A secret is the heaviest thing in the world.”
That Chip Jr. was too smart for his own good.
“I like you with your hair wet. It looks brave,” Travis Becker said.
“Brave?” We’d just gone for a swim in Marcy Lake. It had been my idea. We were sitting on the dock, at the same place we’d come when my father had been in town, that one right day.
“Sleek.” He pulled my neck toward him and kissed me. “Mmm, baby,” he said. I had my hand around his shoulder. It was wet and cool, though the sun was quickly trying to change that. His mouth was cold from the lake.
He moved his fingers over, tried to feel around my bikini top. I grabbed his hand and yanked it away. Then I put my shoulder into him and gave a shove, sending him crashing off the dock and into the water. He created quite a splash; a couple of boys about Chip Jr.’s age on the other end of the dock started to laugh. A minute later Travis’s head bobbed up.
“Ha,” I said to him. “That’s what you get.”
“You bad little girl,” he shouted. He swam to the dock’s edge and pulled himself up. Water dripped off him; his swimsuit, fifties surfer shorts with pineapples and palm trees, clung to him as if they’d had a sudden fright and were too scared to let go.
“Served you right,” I said.
He grabbed me in revenge and I shrieked and then went flying. I held my nose just in time so I didn’t get water in it, and a moment later saw an infusion of bubbles underwater next to me where Travis had jumped back in. I was trying to rise, swimming broad strokes upward, and I could see Travis swimming toward me, a flash of pineapple brightness in the murky water, his hair floating out all seaweed-like.
He took hold of my arm, held me down. His face was whitish underwater, bloated with air, and his hair was still doing a witch-doctor dance. I struggled to be free. I never liked those kinds of water games.
There was a tangle of limbs as I thrashed against him. This wasn’t fun anymore. I wanted him to let go. I fought for the surface. I whacked his arm, hard, but he held fast.
He smiled at me, a crooked smile, and I kicked at him so he could know that I wasn’t playing anymore. I needed air. I began to panic. I grabbed his fingers and tried to peel them off me, but he just swam there very calmly and waited. Three seconds, five, ten, as I flung and fought, and then he finally released his hand and I shot to the surface, gasping.
“Travis!” I was ready to . . . I don’t know what. Scream, leave him, never see him again. God damn it, he scared me. He really scared me, holding me down against my will.
“You didn’t know I was on swim team,” he said cheerfully.
“Don’t you ever . . .” I breathed.
“Don’t you ever what?” He treaded water, smiling. “You’re beautiful when you’re mad, did you know that?”
I swam to the edge of the dock. As my fingers grasped the edge, I decided to forgive him. It wasn’t just the compliment, though it’s true that compliments can give something far and beyond what the giver intended. They can have the strength of a medieval tonic, a transforming magic that can take on a life of its own. All you need is the right combination of ingredients—need, uncertainty, a hole to fill and a believable wizard to hand over the bubbling liquid. But it wasn’t just the compliment. If I let the feelings I had under the water rise to the surface and stay there, if I had listened, I’d be making a choice about what was going to happen next. I decided that Travis Becker had just been playing. He hadn’t realized what he was doing when he held my head under that long. I made a little edit of him, turning him to fiction. It was easier than you’d think.
After we dried off, we left the dock and sat for a while on the grass in the shade of the trees—firs, evergreens, one stray maple with leaves big as the hand of a giant. My fear was retreating, though a piece of it sat in my stomach, like the rude party guest who stays long after everyone else has gone home. The lake spread before us, twinkly in the late afternoon sun. A cluster of gnats gathered in one spot for a gnat conference, and several ducks snoozed on the shore, their bills tucked snug into their sides. We kissed for a while. Maybe it was the setting, that water with its darts of bright light, looking so hopeful and expectant that made me want to give Travis Becker another chance to be what I hoped he could be. I stopped kissing him, told him about my family, my father, the way I felt watching the paragliders soar around Moon Point. I wanted him to know me, to see my thoughts. He listened with patience or interest, I wasn’t quite sure. He leaned back on his elbows and ran his fingers across the lawn.
I plucked a dandelion from the grass, blew the puff of white seeds in the air. I watched them drift, slow and beautiful in their randomness. Several arced and swirled and were drawn to Travis Becker, landing gently in his hair, which was made even more light and golden by the sun and water. He had a radiance that even nature noticed and wanted to be close to.
Travis put his hand to his head. “I got that shit all in my hair,” he said.
“My God,” my mother said. “What next?” I had expected her to scream and swear, but all she did was stare at the hole with something like amazement. And it really was amazing that a dog that small could cause so much damage.
“It was my fault, too,” she said, in the way that good people do. In her distracted state, my mother had forgotten to let Poe out of the kitchen, where he slept at night, to the backyard, where he spent the day. I realized something was wrong right when I got home that afternoon. I heard Poe scratching at the sliding door of the kitchen and the jingling of his tags, and then, of course, there was the smell, too huge and overwhelming not to be disastrous.
I flung open the door, already knowing to expect the worst. Maybe my imagination is not very
good, because even though I thought I was expecting the worst, the truth shocked me. There was a long hole in the wall, a gash so deep it had exposed pipe. Scratch marks on the wallpaper indicated that Poe had dug at the wall with his nails until a hole began. After that, it had probably been easy to chew and scrape the blocks of drywall away. The floor was littered with plaster chunks and dust, shreds and bits of wallpaper. He had apparently had some fun with a pair of Chip Jr.’s socks that had been left in the kitchen as well; I could see part of an athletic stripe under the refrigerator; another bit of sock toe had dropped in his water bowl and was floating like a wonton in soup.
Plaster dust was everywhere; small guilty dog prints were set around in it. Poe himself bounded on my legs with the sheer joy of a released prison inmate. From the look of it, he had already tried to dig himself out of his cell with his spoon. Maybe he had been like a claustrophobic in a stuck elevator, panicked for space and air and freedom. Then again, maybe he had just had the best day in his destructive little life.
Poe stopped jumping at my legs. He walked around the rubble and sniffed at things as if the whole thing was a surprise to him too.
“Man, are you in trouble,” I said to him.
Chip Jr. and I decided it would be best to call Mom ahead of time to warn her. We cleaned up. Let me tell you, that plaster dust gets everywhere. There was even some in the coffeepot on the counter. By the time Mom came home, we had fixed everything except that gash, of course. The hole traveled halfway down the kitchen wall, ankle level.
I held Poe in my arms as my mother surveyed the damage. I thought for sure his physical safety would be in danger. I put my nose into his fur. He smelled of his own dog smell; a mixture of hay and wet carpet. “I’m just . . . I’m not thinking lately,” Mom said. She rubbed her forehead with one hand. Wisps of her hair were held back in a barrette, which looked inappropriately cheerful as she bent her head down.
I wanted her to yell. I wanted her face to turn red with fury. I wanted to hear her shriek Youdumbassdog!, her eyes flashing and her voice rising to embarrassing volumes. But instead she did the worst thing. She started to cry. She sat down at the kitchen table, put her head down on one arm and sobbed. Her shoulders rocked up and down. Chip Jr. had left the Lucky Charms out from breakfast; they sat in the middle of the table, bright and unscathed from Poe’s rampage. Chip Jr., at a loss at what to do, put them back in the cupboard. I set Poe down, held my arm around my mother’s shoulders, which heaved under my hand.
Poe trotted over to the hole, stuck his head in. From behind, in spite of everything, he managed to look both proud and curious.
I told my mother I was going out that night to a late movie with Sydney. It was a stupid, reckless lie. Sydney might appear at any time, dropping by to see me, or driving up alone to her own house. Sometimes lies, especially the bad ones, are like flares thrown out onto the street; meant as a warning of the accident that is up ahead.
We had never gone out in the evening before, Travis and I. He offered to come pick me up but I said no. We met at the Yellow Submarine and shared a sandwich. “So when are you going to tell me what we’re doing tonight?” I asked. He had told me that he had a surprise for me. In fact, he’d been wearing a smug, pleased expression since we arrived; he wore it right that moment as he licked the bit of mustard from the corner of his mouth. That night, his clothes were very fifties tennis club. He wore madras shorts and had his hair combed to one side.
“Okay. A clue. Let’s just say we’re going to the house of some old friends of mine.”
“So, what, are they having a party?”
“No. Let’s just say it will be a surprise for them. Trust me.”
I didn’t like the sound of this or the way Travis said it. Satisfaction with an edge. He had taken too many napkins from the dispenser, and when we left they sat there in a big, guilty clump on the table.
We rode into Seattle, across the Lake Washington Floating Bridge, on Travis’s motorcycle. The floating bridge separates Seattle and its patchwork quilt of suburbs, Nine Mile Falls being one of them. The bridge is flat, like a single long air mattress lying somehow still on choppy water. There was a sudden coldness as we crossed over; I could feel it through my clothes, and the lamppost light made the lake look black and stern. I tucked my hands into the pockets of Travis’s jacket and was glad for my own coat. By the time we got there to meet Travis’s friends, my hair was going to look like a chick’s just out of the egg.
Travis exited, and I was grateful for the warmth that the slowed speed brought. A few turns landed us in an obviously expensive area of the city, with a view of the lake and the glittering lights of the east side, where we’d just come from. The houses were large and the kind of old that meant money; columned and eaved, with windows of antique etched glass, entryways guarded by pairs of stone lions, gardens that would make Libby drool, tucked behind hedges trimmed sharply as an old man’s crew cut. You wanted to run your hand along them.
As we passed a three-story white Georgian-style house on a wide corner, Travis slowed, stopped, and cut the engine. He lifted the faceplate of his helmet. “That’s where we’re going,” he said. I unstrapped my helmet. Steps led to a porch with two huge columns and enormous flowerpots of cone-shaped juniper topiary on either side of the door. The porch light was on, but the house looked dark. You could hear the breep-breep of crickets in the night.
“It doesn’t look like anyone is home,” I said. Which was a relief, to tell you the truth. I was wearing jeans, a tank top, and my denim jacket, and it suddenly seemed hugely lacking. People had worn ball gowns in that house, I was sure. The only one who ever wore a ball gown in our house was this doll my grandmother McQueen had given me when I was three. I named the doll Lieutenant, because I heard the word somewhere and thought it was beautiful. Lieutenant was in the back of the closet somewhere, still overdressed but now shoeless and wild-haired, as if the party had been a rough one.
Travis didn’t answer. “I used to live on this street,” he said. “The brick one.”
“Over there?” Jeez, it was huge and serious as a school for wayward boys. Ivy crept up the walls. “So what’s it have, a hundred rooms?”
“Well, the first story is mostly all living room.”
“Oh,” I said. “Wow.” That house had turned me into the monosyllabled Seth.
“My room was up top. Second and third windows. They thought I wouldn’t sneak out that way.”
“Why did you move?”
“Dangerous neighborhood.” Travis grinned. “People were always getting robbed.”
“Oh, it looks real dangerous,” I said. The only sound beside the crickets was the buzz of the streetlights, and the only one who looked capable of harm was this orange cat across the street, his shoulders hunched up in tough-guy fashion, walking the loose, leisured walk of one looking for trouble.
“And my mother wanted a pool. You know, seeing that it rains here ten months of the year.”
Travis balanced the bike, held one hand out to me to help me off. He rolled the bike up onto its stand. I looked again at the dark house. It was late and there didn’t seem to be any movement inside.
“Travis, I really don’t think anyone is home.”
“Shhh, will you? You’ll ruin the surprise.” Travis strapped our helmets to the bike. I had no desire to wake these people by ringing the doorbell, let alone force a visit on them at this hour. They would have to run around looking for their smoking jackets and feathered slippers, unlike Mom, who once answered the door for the FedEx guy in her flannel pajama pants and her I ESCAPED ALCATRAZ T-shirt that Fowler brought back from his trip to San Francisco.
“Where are you going?”
“Just follow me. And, Jesus, keep it down.”
“Why don’t you just go to the door?”
“Come on.”
Instead of going up the steps to the house, Travis was headed around the corner of the street. He reached his hand up to the top of the fence at the property’s ed
ge, felt around with his fingers, and then shoved a gate open with one shoulder.
“Travis.” That seed of nerves, that ugly dread, was knocking around my insides again.
“I said it’s okay. Now would you hurry up? Shit. They’re expecting us.” I followed him inside the gate, and he shut it behind us. My toe caught on a stepping-stone; we were standing on a garden walkway. It was hard to see in the darkness; the streetlight was blocked by a huge lilac tree, making it glow with a giant halo. I could see the outlines of its drooping blooms, and then as my eyes adjusted I also saw wide stone steps surrounded by a layered garden. I could see the spindly outlines of roses, and I could smell lavender bushes and the heavy grandma-perfume sweetness of hyacinth.
We stepped around a white iron table and chairs, round-backed with intricate cut designs that looked as if actually sitting on them for any length of time would be a third world torture. Travis approached a set of French doors, put his hand around the knob.
“What are you doing? Travis!”
“Ruby! I know these people. You’d think I was breaking in.” He stuck his hand in one pocket, pulled out a key ring. “Would I have a key to the place if I didn’t know them real well? Is it breaking in if you have a key?”
Travis held up the key ring to the small amount of available light from the street and looked through the keys. There were a lot of them, labeled with tiny squares of masking tape. I looked down; a pair of women’s tennis shoes sat outside the door. I was beginning to be scared out there in the dark, in this strange place that belonged to the woman with the tennis shoes and not me. “How many people give you their keys?” I asked.