by Richard Peck
She was reaching down for the little silver bag she’d carried all evening. “We’re all going home tonight, once we’ve rested up. The four of us. You’ll need to be there. Kerry, sometimes I wonder if you know what friendship is. It’s not all taking. There comes a time for giving back.”
You never know who you’ll need, Tanya always said. One of her sayings.
I had to be careful now. But I wasn’t used to looking out for myself. As carefully as I could, I said, “If we’re not getting home till tonight, I should call—”
“Oh, you want your phone?” Her bag was already in her hand. She snapped it open and fished out my phone. I’d wondered if I’d ever see it again, and there it was. It was almost as if I was supposed to ask for it back. It was almost like part of the . . . script.
“Your mother thinks you’re at your dad’s, right?” Tanya said. “And I get the idea they don’t communicate that well with each other. Messy divorce? Your dad thinks you’re with your mother, though frankly I doubt if he gives you that much thought. And so, who are you going to call? What are you going to say?”
I had my phone back—lifeless and useless like anything Tanya didn’t need anymore. Who did I think I was going to call? What would I say? After all, we’d be there tonight. There.
Where?
We’re test-driving these dresses, Tanya had said. They need to say “Queens of the Prom and Then Some.” She’d said that, going into Fabian’s.
Sleep was pulling on me now, like something Tanya wanted.
“We’re not going to the prom tonight?” I said to her. “That’s not what this is all about, is it? The prom? How could we?”
“We couldn’t,” Tanya said patiently. “The prom’s the final senior statement, and you’re a sophomore. Sophomores can’t go. Unless some senior invited you. And no senior did. And even then, a senior with a sophomore isn’t in the best of taste. But we might drop by one of the after-prom parties, where they don’t have rules. Maybe the one at Chase Haverkamp’s place. The party the guys are giving.”
How? How could we do that? But it was too big a question. “And after that?” I said, half dreaming, my brain going back and forth.
“After that,” Tanya was saying, farther off now, “we’ll see where the evening takes us.”
“But how will we even get there?” My absolute last question before the fog came in.
Tanya was fishing in the little silver clutch, poking around and holding up keys. They gleamed in the sun.
“Aunt Lily’s Cadillac,” she said. “I’ll drive.”
CHAPTER NINE
Tanya Time
WE SLEPT THROUGH the day, right where we were, and dreamed. I did. I wondered later if they did, and what they dreamed. The May-time sun climbed the sky. When it was directly overhead, I dreamed of noon standing still, at lunch in the food court, last fall.
The dream was those first days of September when I’d watched them from afar. Tanya’s manicured finger moved down her calendar, point by point. I strained to hear what they were saying. I listened hard for clues, but the three of them were faded and too far off.
Natalie sighed, though whether in my dream or there beside me I didn’t know. But in one afternoon dream when the light reached all the way across the ballroom floor to our jumble of shoes, I heard the ghostly rumble of roller skates. In the dream here came three girls in old-time skates. Three girls clung to each other, wheels and voices squealing around the corners of the ballroom. Three little girls in funny old-fashioned smocks and Dutch bob haircuts with bows. Three little girls yellow-gray like an old snapshot of themselves. And they had to be Lily and Jackie and Lee.
Then that dream folded like a fan into another one, and here came Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie in roller skates and their prom outfits, skating just the way I’d found them, almost falling but never quite. Makenzie tripping over my backpack.
Then as evening drew on, another dream so dark I almost couldn’t see it. A dream of an old lady, bedridden with an oxygen tank in a room without air. And a flame-red wig on her head. Rhonda. And bending over her bed, plumping her pillows, was the maid, in Rhonda’s spare wig and dark glasses. Flossie. And across the bed from her, Aunt Lily in her bathrobe and her tortoiseshell glasses on a chain, there with them, holed up together, hearing the thunder.
And in all these dreams there were three of them. Always three. Never me.
Somebody just touched my knee, and I rose right out of a dream. I was still braced in the doorway, cramped and gripping my knees. I hadn’t moved for hours, and now it was night. Blue velvet night. Tanya hadn’t stopped time from passing. Maybe she couldn’t anymore.
She was climbing to her feet, brushing off her skirts, being brisk. There below us Natalie and Makenzie were stirring, stiff from the hard floor. The only light was faint and twinkling, from the nighttime glitter city, and I couldn’t see Natalie’s hands.
We were in the dark, and everything was dimmer than that last dream. And I wasn’t as awake as I needed to be. Tanya led us down one hall after another. We padded along in our stocking feet until we found a bathroom with one lightbulb over a green marble sink. The faucets were little gold dolphins.
I watched the three of them around the mirror, repairing their faces with all the swag-bag paint, powder, liner, blush. Brushing their hair with the miniature brushes out of the bags from Chanel and Estēe Lauder. Natalie’s hands were a blur as she worked over her bejeweled blue-black hair. Expertly. Makenzie edged into the lower half of the mirror to re-glitter her eyelids. They sprayed Arpège and leaned into it. They sprayed and sprayed.
I needed less repair, though a little lip gloss wouldn’t kill me. We padded back through the maze of the penthouse to the ballroom where our shoes were. We had to get our feet back into these stilt-heel torture shoes. Mine had the ribbon ties that crisscrossed up the leg.
My backpack was right there, and the flip-flops would feel great, like a . . . walk in the park. But they were out of the question. They didn’t say prom night and then some. I thought Tanya would tell me to leave my backpack behind and everything in it.
But when we had our shoes on and our bags on our shoulders, she said, “Don’t forget your backpack,” and so I took it, and followed them out to the elevator. Following them was what I did best. It was my major.
Time lurched, and now we were in a hurry, on a countdown or something. Tanya’s foot tapped as we waited for the elevator. Then we were dropping past thirteen and all the lighted numbers. When had we done this before, in these same clothes? Last night? This year? Sometime. But history wasn’t repeating, quite. We were quieter now. Makenzie yawned. Natalie sighed. She’d found her black satin gloves and was working them over her hands, each finger individually.
Now we were teetering and wobbling across the lobby in a cloud of Arpège. Our pointy, spiky shoes rang on the tiles. Our skirts overlapped. Three or four doormen were out there at the curb, cupping cigarettes in the petal-soft spring night. “Give them something to remember us by,” Tanya said over her shoulder.
She did a little something flirty with her skirts as we turned past them on the sidewalk. Natalie ran a black-gloved hand down the fall of her hair. Makenzie reached down to give a leg warmer a little tug. I don’t know what I did. I tried to keep up.
THE GARAGE WAS on Seventy-third Street, just off Third Avenue. A parking valet was instantly there at the end of the ramp. He was all eyes, looking us over. Taking in Tanya.
She held up the keys out of her purse. “Miss Garland wants her Cadillac, please.”
“Yikes,” the parking guy said. “The boat?”
“Yes,” Tanya said.
“It’ll take extra time to get it down here,” he said. “It corners like a parade float.”
“Do your best,” Tanya said.
It took him forever. If Tanya had worn a watch, she’d be looking at it now. But finally we heard this roar, and down the ramp came lumbering this enormous car. Boat? It was the Titanic. Huge and black wit
h big drooping, staring headlights. I didn’t know how old it was. It had a big toothy front bumper, and fins.
“Full tank?” Tanya said as the valet pushed the gigantic front door open and slid out of the driver’s seat.
“Yes,” he said, “ma’am.”
Tanya handed him two dollar bills. Mine. “I want you up front with me, Kerry,” she said, handing my backpack to Makenzie, who was following Natalie into the backseat. They were miles away back there. It was like a hearse.
As I was sliding into the big wheezing leather seat, I remembered the last time Tanya must have been behind the wheel of a car. It crossed my mind, and I reached for the seat belt while we were still parked on the ramp. Tanya found hers. “You two in the back,” she said into the rearview mirror. “Buckle up. We don’t want to go through all that again.”
Then, finding the gear, pumping the brake, Tanya took aim at the street. The car needed a lot of open space to turn, but the rear bumper scraped concrete, and we swayed around into Seventy-third Street.
Then somehow we were on the Ninety-sixth Street approach to the FDR Drive. Who knew how we got there? Park Avenue, I think. Did she have a license? I wondered. How could she? I didn’t have a license. How could I? I was only—
A horn blasted us as the Cadillac drifted out of our lane into somebody else’s. But Tanya fought the wheel. She wasn’t perfect, and neither was the Cadillac’s steering. But now we were merging with the FDR traffic, then off it and across a river and onto another highway. The traffic was thinning out. Whatever time it was, rush hour was long over. The twinkling high-rises fell back, and the black, leafing-out trees took over.
No sound from the backseat except some light snoring from Makenzie. I tried to look ahead and see myself all the way home, in my room, in bed. But it was too dark out there. I couldn’t see a moment ahead, or an inch past the headlight beams on the highway.
I could only steal a glance at the dark line of Tanya’s profile, like a silhouette out of black paper. She drove with both hands on the wheel, watching the road, just under the limit. Getting pulled over by the cops was the . . . last thing she wanted. What did I want? If the cops had pulled us over, what would I have done? Said? Would I have run for my life? I doubt it. I doubt it.
But a cop wasn’t going to happen because Tanya didn’t want him to. Also, she was being super careful, concentrating on the road too hard for conversation. But after a while, she began to talk, almost to herself, but not really. “I was only a little kid . . . preschool,” she said, “when I found out about . . . me.”
“What?” I said because I was supposed to.
“You know how little kids try to make the world stop till they get what they want. You know how they yell and scream and throw themselves on the floor and hold their breath.”
“I guess,” I said.
“I wanted it more,” Tanya said. “Whatever I wanted, I wanted it more. You wouldn’t believe how long I could hold my breath. I could turn bright blue, and that scared them. My parents. My mother before she went off to Syria and places. My dad, before Joanne. I’d be blue, and they’d think I was dead. Maybe I was.
“And the minute—the instant I saw that fear in their eyes, I owned them. You always find your power in other people’s weakness. I could bring the world to a stop with what I needed.”
“I knew that,” I said, in the dark. “Lunch went on too long.”
“It went on as long as I said it did. I ruled, and what else is there? Pondfield Podunk High School? Please. I could have owned the universe with a talent like that. People would rather be ruled than be alone. You of all people should know that, Kerry. Even you. And people will sell you their souls if you’ll do their thinking for them. Do you want to study for the exam, or do you want somebody to hand you the answers? Think about it. I could have anything in the world I wanted. And anyone.”
She fell quiet, maybe for a mile, thinking about what she might have had. Who.
Spence, I thought. Spence.
“But then one day in a single, measly moment,” she said, “I looked straight ahead, and instead of all the time in the world and all of it mine, what do you suppose I saw?”
I didn’t want to say, but she’d made me see it. “What, Kerry?”
“The apple tree,” I murmured.
“Yes.” An edge came on her voice, a knife edge. “I was on the phone to you, to join us, if you remember.”
“At Nordstrom,” I said.
“Nordstrom, wherever,” she said. “It was all so totally meaningless, and I missed just that moment. That’s the problem with being in charge. The challenge. You can’t blink. Ever. The BMW was in the air. Then the tree. And after that awful sound, the car was wrapped around it. You saw the pictures. They were all over the Net. I watched them over and over on my phone.”
I’d seen the pictures. But I saw everything now because Tanya was telling it. “I had just time to . . . stop time,” she said. “But it was that moment too late. I went over the steering wheel, through the windshield, hit the tree.” Her hand came off the Cadillac’s steering wheel and touched her forehead.
“This is the part you’re not going to understand, Kerry. The part you’re so not ready for, but try to keep up. If I could have stopped time in the second before I hit the tree . . . but it was too late, and I couldn’t. I broke the windshield, and the windshield broke me. Still, I get what I want, and I wasn’t ready to—walk away from my life. I was dead, against the tree in all that bent metal and broken glass and tree bark. I was dead, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Don’t you see that? It wasn’t my decision. So I was standing beside the car too, just a little safe distance away. By that ditch, in the weeds with my phone still in my hand. The me that matters.”
She put her hand out in the dark and touched my bare arm. I flinched, but it was to show me which me she meant. “Not the ghost of me. Me. The me who doesn’t negotiate,” she said. “You don’t get it, do you? You’re not there yet.”
No. But somehow I saw it. She made me see it. The soft, sunny Saturday afternoon out on the Country Club Road and the mangled car totaled around the tree like all the pictures. I saw Tanya sprawled there at the end of what had been the hood. The buckled hood. Her head against the apple tree, her forehead . . . embedded. I saw her arms flung out, woven into the branches, and the apple blossoms still falling in her hair. And some blood. Not a lot.
I saw that like a witness on the scene. Then I looked beside the crumpled car, and there Tanya stood, with that mark on her forehead like a dark star, but perfect otherwise. Always the best-looking girl anywhere and the first one you noticed. She stood there with her phone in her hand, and it rang. It was me, trying to call her back, but she didn’t have time for that, for me.
“I’d snubbed death like you snub a teacher,” she was saying with her eyes on the road. “But this was the first real moment of my life I hadn’t shaped for myself. And I couldn’t afford another one. I could feel the life leaking out of me. I could feel myself being pulled back toward the car, to the tree. Like . . . undertow.”
She needed Natalie and Makenzie, I thought. She had to rule to live.
She heard me knowing that. “I looked all around. Cars were beginning to stop. I found Natalie first, in high grass, farther than I could believe. She’d been in the front seat beside me, where you are now. But then she was way over there in the grass. All arranged, of course, with her purse in her hand. You know Natalie. Not a mark on her. It was like she was just asleep.
“But there was something wrong with the way her head was, like a little crooked on her neck. And I saw she was dead. I came as close to panic as I ever do. ‘Natalie, come back here, right now,’ I said to her. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve never done a thing on your own, ever. You wouldn’t know how. You wouldn’t know the first thing about it. You couldn’t find the food court without following the crowd.’
“And she opened her eyes and was looking right up at me. Those big violet eyes. Her neck hurt. She
put her hand back there. ‘Never mind about that,’ I said to her. ‘We’ve got to find Makenzie.’
“And when she stood up, the Natalie who’d broken her neck when she was thrown all that way—that Natalie was still there in the grass, perfectly arranged. You know Natalie. She could make even breaking her neck look like the Joffrey Ballet. Natalie reached down and took the purse out of her own hand. Then she tucked her hair behind her ears, and we went looking for Makenzie.”
Ahead of the Cadillac, something small with four legs scurried out on the highway. The creature turned its reflector eyes on us, and Tanya tapped the brake. It darted away into darkness.
“We found her right away, facedown in weeds,” Tanya said. “She was just then dying. A shudder was going through her. Like a tremor. ‘No, you don’t, Makenzie,’ I said to her. ‘Don’t even think about it. You’re—what? Sixteen? You’re not going anywhere. You’re so totally not ready.’
“I was down on my knees, turning her over. I didn’t know how she’d look, but she was perfect too. Not even the beginnings of a bruise. Nothing but grass stains. I think it must have been her heart. She’d slipped away, and her eyes were fixed and staring, so I’d just missed her.
“‘No, Makenzie, keep your eyes right here. Right here.’
“‘Where?’ she said from somewhere down deep—somewhere else. Then she blinked away her dead girl’s stare and saw me. She did what I told her to do.
“‘Focus,’ I said, and she did.
“‘Crikey, that was close, wasn’t it?’ she said in that accent of hers. Then she got up from herself.”
We were driving deeper in the dark now. We hadn’t met a car for a long time, and I was looking for the turnoff. It was time for the turnoff.