“I don’t want you to go back,” said Marilyn as I got up to leave. “Your brother might hurt you again.”
“He won’t.… ”
Rupert and Ruby didn’t like slurping or unpolished shoes, wrinkled jeans, loud radios, ringing telephones, or the way I held my cup; but that was the first time I’d been hit. They went to school for parent conferences. They had money for me to go to college. After all those years, Ruby still tried giving me hugs.
But she never asked what I was thinking. They couldn’t guess how unfinished I felt. They never came to hear me read my poetry.
Seeing Lissa and me together must have been shocking. But they still loved me in their own way. Didn’t they?
“My brother won’t hit me again.”
“Stay here with us,” Icky pleaded.
“No, I should go.”
So Icky walked me home and gave me his cell number. “Call me if you have trouble. I’ll stand outside the house. I won’t leave until you wave.”
Rupert and Ruby were already in bed, or at least they were in their bedroom. I paused at the phone in the hallway and listened to my messages. My heart thumped. There was one from Mr. Evans, who sounded like he was having trouble breathing.
“Hi, Orphea. Ahh … I’ve spoken to your brother, so I know that you’ve gotten the news. I’m wondering, ahh … she was a good little driver … it was the snow, I suppose. I had just checked the car.… We’re still in a state of shock.… We’re having a memorial service at the boathouse next to the lake. Day after tomorrow. Asking that her friends bring something to say about her. No pressure. Ahh …
“But you were her best friend.
“One of us will call with more details tomorrow. Bye.”
I went to the window and waved.
I stayed in my room until the funeral, surviving on a bag of marshmallows and water from the bathroom. Ruby and Rupert let me be. The only way I can describe how I felt is “cotton candy.” Like a big, sticky ball filled with air. My body was a wad of nothing about to vanish. But my brain was going overtime. I wanted to say something at the service. Something significant. I scrawled disjointed ideas in my journal—
Lissa was a kind person … always thinking of others.…
We planned a road trip for after high school.
New York, L.A., Grand Canyon, both oceans …
But the first stop, she said, was for me. Proud Road.
Dinky town not on the map where I always wanted to go.
“If it’s important to you, Orphea, we’ll go.”
That was Lissa.
I didn’t think we could do it. She said we’d save our money. Get a car. Drive off and not look back.
“It’s your movie, Orphea,” she said. “You might as well write the script.”
What she didn’t know was that I didn’t have a movie, not of my own. I was just a part of hers, because she was the dreamer.
Being in Lissa’s movie … the best part of my life so far.
I didn’t get to see Lissa at the service. Her family had her cremated. The boathouse was packed with kids from school, especially from the literary magazine, where Lissa did art and I did poetry. A guy we both knew from grade school named Mike came over and put his arm around me.
“How you doing, sweetheart? Y’all were always so tight.”
“Okay, Mike.”
He gave me a curious look. I was wearing shades, but my face was still puffy.
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
He shook his head. “We’re all going to miss her.”
Lissa’s dad told the story of how when Lissa had been four years old she’d jumped off the dock at the lake without her water wings, even though she didn’t know how to swim. She’d gotten this idea that on the morning of her fourth birthday, she’d be able to swim just like that. And she’d tried it. But Mr. Evans had to fish her out. She had a magic way of thinking sometimes, he said, and she wasn’t afraid to take risks.
Mrs. Evans didn’t say anything. Lissa’s sister, Annie, wasn’t there.
At one point Mr. Evans gave me a nod, but I pretended not to notice. At the last minute, I had decided not to speak after all. My feelings were like a dammed-up waterfall. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I opened my mouth. After the service, when Mrs. Evans gave me a hug, my body was stiff as cardboard, I was trying so hard to hold back. They were her parents. They were being so brave. It wasn’t my place to make a scene.
“You were her best friend,” her dad whispered into my ear.
I loved her! I wanted to shout it to the world. But I kept quiet. Instead, in a sealed envelope next to the urn, I left a poem. God took her for a reason—that’s what the minister said. I didn’t believe that. Death had taken Lissa. And Death is a whole ’nother being.
I was the kite
You were my rescue
I was a whisper
You were my ear
You are the flower on my altar
I have no voice unless you hear
No ear
No voice
No rescue
I stand waiting
For you to appear
CRAZY
So, folks …
I see Marilyn coming around if you need to place an order. I recommend today’s special. Whoops!—Icky just put a spot on her—whoa, that’s bright.… Bring it down some, Icky. Okay? Great, that’s better.… I’ll just take a sip of water myself.…
So, where were we?
Lissa’s death left me in a dark place.
I lasted in school for about three weeks, pretending to be there when I wasn’t. I disappeared, burrowing into her absence. In the hallway, people smiled at me kindly. I responded with a mechanical upward tilt of my mouth. Best friends, they were all thinking; tied at the waist; more than friends, some might have guessed. I spoke only when necessary. The world took on sadness so profound that even taste buds were affected. One afternoon I made a smoothie in the blender, something that Lissa and I used to do; fresh strawberries, bananas, ice, milk, vanilla, and that day an overripe mango—I still have the image of my thumbnail pushing the skin away from fleshy fruit. Then it was all in the blender whirring away. I took a taste and where there should have been sweetness on my tongue, there was just the taste of sad. I went upstairs to the bathroom and shaved my head, which gave Ruby yet another complaint and so made me not only sad but foolish. Since I was a fool, one night I carved that onto my skin, using a safety pin, delicately scratching the letter F and all the other letters onto my forearm. Not that I actually believed that I was a fool. That was just an excuse. Scratching my arm with the pin was an exit, you see, a way to let the pain out. But the exit wasn’t big enough. If I scratched the whole alphabet into my flesh I could never let it all out, the pain I was feeling inside. Ordinarily I would have written in my journal instead of on my arm, but writing was a thing I’d done in my other life, the life I had with Lissa.
Have any of you experienced that kind of loss? There you are living a little peanut-butter-and-jelly-type existence, surviving school, answering e-mail, seeing a flick, counting the days until your escape from the dry prison walls of high school and the ruthless eye of the sadist who calls himself your guardian, and BINGO! Fate trips you up, cracks open your chest, yanks out your heart, cuts it in half with a sharp pair of scissors, and then stuffs it back inside of you. And the world tells you to keep on going. Got to keep reading those books, if you want to get into a decent college. Got to write those papers. When Lissa died, I was in the middle of Moby-Dick. Why would I want to read about a whale at a time like that? Even if I were interested, there was no way I could fit all those words into my mind. My mind was filled with images. Images of her, like photographs stuffed into a drawer so full that it could no longer move. A stuck drawer, stuffed with pictures of our lives completely out of order, chaotic, careening clips of our own private movie. How could I think about precalc when I was feeling like that?
After sad and foolish came crazy. I ransacked Ruby’s
medicine cabinet, took some pills and chased them with vodka, but found myself still standing. So, I took a walk to Icky’s diner and put in an order for my very last supper, BLT on a sesame roll. The soup of the day was split pea. To this day, I’m not sure whether it was the pills and vodka or the smell of the simmering kettle that sent me flying to the bathroom. Marilyn held my head over the toilet.
“What did you take? Tell me what you took!”
“Some kind of pills so Ruby could get pregnant,” I said, gagging.
She slammed me on the back. “They probably won’t kill you.”
But by the time I was done being sick, I felt like a ghost. I curled up on the floor of the diner’s kitchen while Icky lectured me.
“You don’t do that kind of stuff, hear me? You don’t take your own precious life. That’s not your place to do that, Orphea. Your job is to—”
“To live,” said Marilyn.
“You ain’t the only one who’s ever lost somebody they love.” Icky’s voice rained down on me. I closed my eyes. I wanted to follow her.
“You think that Lissa would want this bullshit? You think that she would approve?”
They didn’t understand. They hadn’t been there. Maybe Lissa wanted to die after what had happened. Maybe she couldn’t deal with it.
“Lissa was so bubbly and very wise,” Marilyn said. “She would never, ever do something like try to kill herself. That was not Lissa.”
How did they know? How could anyone know what she felt when Rupert went downstairs to rub her nose in it? He had seen us. She would have felt ashamed. She would have been afraid of him calling her parents. Maybe she wrecked the van on purpose.…
A few days later, I was back at the diner. I’d been avoiding the open-mike nights, but Icky’s coffee had become my regular diet. After closing, he and Marilyn invited me upstairs to their apartment. They had something to tell me. Seemed they were leaving town; they’d been planning it for quite a while but I hadn’t known. The news came as a blow. Now that Lissa was gone, they were the only people in the world who understood what I was going through. Oh, Mrs. Evans had called once or twice since the memorial, but there was a distance between us; I’m sure it was because I couldn’t be honest about all that had happened the morning of the accident. How could I? Lissa might not have wanted them to know. Who was I to spoil the memory of their perfect girl? But Icky and Marilyn knew everything. And now they were leaving.
“Where are you going? Why?”
“We got our own place.” Marilyn sounded so happy.
“She saw it in the tea leaves,” bragged Icky.
“But you have your own place. You work here. You’re the boss.”
“The diner is okay, but we don’t own it.”
“Besides, we don’t want a diner. We want a club. And now we got a club in Queens, New York!”
“Queens, New York? What’s wrong with Pennsylvania?”
“I got a grandma in Queens,” said Marilyn.
“We’ve been living in Pennsylvania for long enough,” said Icky. “We would have left a few years ago, if it wasn’t for my parole.”
“Parole?”
“Been a long road to here from juvie,” he said, sheepishly. “Used to be a young arsonist. Mind you, not something I’m proud of, but I paid my debt. Now we’re going to have our dream, our own little club. Right, Marilyn?”
Marilyn snuggled up. “Yes, Icarus, dear. In the Big Apple. Just like I saw in the tea leaves.”
“Who cares about some old dumb tea leaves? You can have your own club right here!”
“We already got the spot. We put down the deposit,” said Icky. “This is our dream.”
“It’ll be paradise,” said Marilyn. “We’ll serve coffee and have a juice bar. All the poets and artists will come. Icky’s going to have theatrical lights! I’ll play bass!”
My eyes stung with tears.
“Great, guys. Congratulations.”
Marilyn touched my shoulder. “This summer we’re hoping you’ll visit us.”
“You mean it?”
“You can’t get rid of us that easy,” said Icky.
“So will you come?” asked Marilyn.
“Yeah, if Rupert and Ruby let me.”
They exchanged glances. Marilyn went into the bedroom. She brought back an envelope.
“Take this.”
“What’s in it?”
“Two hundred bucks. We thought you might need a loan. Use it if you need to get out in a hurry. Get my drift?”
Icky laid a hand on my head. My hair had barely begun growing out. “We don’t like leaving you with that brother of yours.”
“Thanks. But I can’t take the money.”
“Sure you can.”
“It’s too much. I can’t pay it back.”
Icky smiled. “We don’t want the money. Pay us back in poems.”
“You must be joking. I don’t even write anymore.”
“You will,” said Marilyn.
“But two hundred dollars … I’d have to write four hundred poems to pay you back.”
“How about twenty?” said Icky.
I managed a smile. “Lissa wouldn’t believe this. When we were in junior high I used to sell my poems in the grocery store parking lot, while Lissa played the guitar—”
“I didn’t know she played guitar,” said Marilyn.
“She didn’t. She was horrible. But it got people’s attention, so I’d get to sell a few poems. Then we’d split the proceeds for pizza.”
“How much were you charging then?”
“Fifty cents.”
“See there—your price has gone up! One day you’ll be rich and famous.”
“Does it say so in the tea leaves?” I joked.
“Not yet. But one thing I know for sure is that someday we’ll be together.… ”
A lump rose in my throat. “When are you leaving?”
“A few days from now.”
“You have our cell number,” said Icky, “but we’ll call you before we go.”
Marilyn hugged me. “No more pills, promise?”
“Promise.”
Icky shook my hand. “You owe us poems, kiddo. Don’t stiff us.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d be leaving town before they did.
Everybody has got a story to tell
Everybody has got an eye
The truth is what you want to see
In your body’s mind Your mind
and mine clicked like gold
You whispered that my hand was old
The lifeline long though fractured at the palm
Was it this hurt that you foretold?
You with your soul of an ancient seer
Next to my thumb did you glimpse the slippery road?
Or was it my future you felt when I held your hand in mine
My bitch friend Fate, dying to get on a roll
Still, I am yours, embraced by time
Those moments when we touched enshrined
Forever in my body’s mind
FOOTSTEPS
Any jet-setters in the crowd? Once I went to Kenya.…
But I went before I was born, so you may not think that counts. Nadine and Daddy went on their honeymoon and Nadine was already pregnant. So I was there, on board in her stomach so to speak. Nadine told me about it. She told me that when she was on the hotel balcony, she pulled up her shirt while no one was looking so that her belly was bare. Since I couldn’t see any of Kenya, she wanted me to at least feel the heat of the sun through her skin. I don’t remember that either, of course, but Nadine assured me that I felt it.
The only other trip I took was to the mountains in Virginia, to a town called Handsome Crossing. Nadine had grown up there in a place called Proud Road. Proud Road, named for my family. I was around three when that happened. Nadine had been incredibly attached to her family. So much so that she wanted me to have their last name. She insisted on it with Daddy and got her way. So, my name got to be Proud l
ike Nadine’s. Rupert was Jones like Daddy. Rupert wouldn’t have been a Proud at any rate, since we had different mothers. I never knew a thing about Rupert’s mother except that she moved to Cleveland. She came from Handsome Crossing, too, and she hated Nadine on account of how Nadine had stolen her husband. If you’re wondering how I know that, Nadine told me. Weird, how she confided in a small child. Or maybe not weird. Daddy was a lot older. When I was born, she was just seventeen. Seventeen, same age I am now.
When Nadine died, Rupert wanted my name changed to Jones since he and Ruby would be my guardians. When I found out, I went on a hunger strike. I was already so sad in my gray world. Why eat a gray piece of broccoli? A mysterious hand had snatched my mother away. Nobody was taking my name. I’d starve first. Luckily, Ruby took pity on me.
“Look at her Rupert, she’s so pathetic,” Ruby would say. “You don’t need another girl named Jones, as long as you’ve got me.”
“She’ll be Jones as long as she lives in my house.” His house? My house, you mean! It’s where I’d lived my whole life! That house belongs to us both! But Rupert thinks it belongs to him more, because Nadine made him the executor. Well, he may have been in charge of the house, but he was not in charge of my name!
“You’re Orphea Jones,” he would argue.
“Orphea Proud,” I would say stubbornly.
“Orphea Jones!” he would shout. “Eat those peas!”
“I hate peas, you jackass!”
“Did you hear that, Ruby? Go wash her mouth out with soap.”
I would trot off with Ruby to the bathroom, leaving my peas on the plate.
“Why do you anger him so?” Ruby would sigh.
“He hates me. Anyway, I’m Orphea Proud.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” Ruby would say, washing my face. She never, ever washed out my mouth. “Brothers and sisters always fight. Besides, he’s under pressure. Dental school is harder than he thought.”
I scowled. “Orphea Proud.”
“Okay, Miss Proud,” Ruby would say. “I’ll see what I can do.” Then she’d start to make a little braid in my hair. Ruby’s braids hurt. They were too tight. I liked the way Nadine braided.
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