by Deb Caletti
“Wait a minute,” Olivia says. “She’s not losing it.”
“You’re not losing it,” Zach says.
“Go ahead and lose it,” Malcolm says. “We’re prepared.”
“I told you she wouldn’t lose it!” Gina yells offscreen.
Annabelle looks out the window, gazes across the parking lot into the town of Cherry Valley beyond. She thinks about what Dr. Mann said during their last phone session. She doesn’t have to respond to the press of anything or anyone. She can take her time to decide things.
“I’ll think about it,” she says.
• • •
“I thought Mom made you get rid of all your Hawaiian shirts,” Annabelle says to Grandpa Ed as they hunt for a parking space in the lot of Magic Waters water park.
“Your mom doesn’t make me do anything. I told her I did, but I didn’t.”
“Agnelli Curse.”
“Look at this beauty. You think I’d get rid of this beauty? Your grandma got this for me on our honeymoon in Maui.”
“Socks with your bathing suit, though, Grandpa.”
“Do I tell you how to dress? Che palle! Don’t go sounding like your mother.”
“Are you two ever going to just stop whatever is between you and get along?”
“I hope not.”
“You hope not?”
“I worry. If she stops being mad at me, maybe she don’t love me anymore.”
Oh, love, it’s so imperfect, Annabelle sees. She is thinking about her seventh-grade field trip to Wild Waves. She and Kat were fighting at the time. She can’t even remember why. But she ignored Kat on purpose and hung out with Quinn Kapoor. They rode the raft together, and shared their popcorn, and Kat got stuck with Willy Zonka on the bus.
I’m sorry, she thinks.
Hey, Willy Zonka gave me a whole box of Hot Tamales, Kat says. Next time, a trip down his chocolate river.
“Hurry up, would ya?” Grandpa Ed says. “Don’t forget our towels. Don’t forget our bag.”
“I haven’t seen you this excited since the Sons of Italy newsletter said that Festa d’Italia would be happening when we’re in Chicago.”
“Best day of my life, right here.”
“I thought you couldn’t swim.”
“I can swim. Who told you I couldn’t swim?”
“You did, way back when we were by Flathead Lake.”
“I said deep water. I said I don’t like deep water. Look at this beautiful day, huh?”
He’s right. It is beautiful, and Annabelle can maybe even see his point about it being the best day of their lives. She and Grandpa Ed are already bickering like an old married couple, but look. In the distance she can see the orange and blue and green loops and swirls of the rides. The sky is blue, blue, blue, and Grandpa Ed—in his Hawaiian shirt and shorts and socks and sandals—is whistling, and jingling his keys in his pocket. The whistling doesn’t even annoy her.
What is she feeling, besides guilt?
Gratitude.
Gratitude that she’s alive.
• • •
The line is long. School is out, and Magic Waters is a popular place. As she heads to the information center, she sees a huddle of people in red T-shirts. And then she suddenly stops. She grabs Grandpa Ed’s arm.
“How crazy. I could have sworn I just saw Luke.”
Grandpa Ed is still whistling. She socks him. “Did you put your hearing aids in? I said, I swear I saw Luke.”
“I put my hearing aids in.”
“He’s gone now. I just saw—well, I guess other people might have that hair and those clothes. Just, it’s not as usual out here.”
Whistle, whistle, tweet, tweet.
“That must be the manager, Bill McGuire. The one with the clipboard.”
It is. He waves them over. He introduces Annabelle to various visitors in Run for a Cause shirts. There are students, parents, and a few people from community outreach organizations. Annabelle thanks them. She shakes hands. She gets her photo taken. “Hey, wait,” Bill McGuire says. “Lindsey, the swag.” There are Magic Waters beach bags for her and Grandpa, Magic Waters water bottles, and two Magic Waters T-shirts, featuring a photo of the Typhoon Terror and its screaming riders with their arms in the air. Before Annabelle can avert her eyes, Grandpa Ed is unbuttoning his shirt and revealing his white old-guy boobs and slipping the bright yellow T-shirt over his head.
“Your grandma always said yellow was my color. Whatta you think?”
Annabelle thinks he should have gotten an extra-large. He looks like an expectant mother. She hopes his labor doesn’t start on the Typhoon Terror.
“You look awesome.”
“We have some for your friends, too,” Lindsey says.
“Our friends?”
“They were just right he—”
“Hey, Annabelle,” Luke Messenger says.
• • •
Annabelle is in shock. She taps her thumb to her fingers. Here is Luke Messenger in Cherry Valley, Illinois. Her stomach is flopping around weirdly and she hasn’t even been on the Typhoon Terror yet. How does she feel? Glad. Glad to see him.
“I can’t believe you guys are here,” she says.
“When Mim called to tell me your grandpa invited us to come out, I said, ‘I’m in.’ I was already getting stir-crazy at home. Dad gave me a curfew when I got back. I had to get out of there before Mom started holding my hand when I crossed the street.”
“Grandpa didn’t tell me! I’m really glad to see you. I’ve listened to your tape a thousand times. I’ve read Endurance at least ten.”
“Dog steaks . . . Sorry.”
“I love that book.”
“I feel terrible confessing this, but I’ve given up my running,” Luke says.
She laughs.
“We’re here for a week. We’re going to follow you down to Chicago and then stay and play around the city. I’ve never been to Chicago. You?”
“No. Never.” She calculates. Seventy-nine miles. Luke and Dawn Celeste will be with them for five days.
“I hope you don’t mind us crashing your party.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Your grandpa said he asked.”
Agnelli Curse. “I’m sure he wanted to surprise me. It’s a great surprise.”
“Awesome. Come on. Race you to the Screaming Lizard.”
• • •
They ride the Screaming Lizard and the Double Dare Drop and then they hang out at the wave pool. Annabelle’s having so much fun. She’s drenched, and she’s trekking around in her bathing suit like a little kid at the neighborhood pool. It’s so hot that no one has a T-shirt on anymore. She’s just herself, and the Run for a Cause supporters are, too, and all she can see in every direction is a great array of bodies splashing and swimming and sunning and having the best time ever.
“Look,” Luke says. He gestures toward the winding curves of the Splash Magic River, where the riders sit in tubes and float along a moving channel. She spots them—Grandpa Ed in his palm tree trunks and Dawn Celeste in an aqua one-piece, their fingers linked, their tubes bumping as they glide along the water.
“Oh my God,” Annabelle says.
“She’s in love.”
“She is?”
“Isn’t he?”
“Oh, wow. I thought the brooding and the staring and the bursts of energy were from being cooped up with me in the stupid RV.”
“She does that thing you do when you’re in love, where she keeps finding reasons to drop his name into the conversation. You can be talking about going to a burger place and she’ll say, ‘Ed likes burgers.’ ”
“Really?”
“You seem shocked.”
“I guess it’s weird to think of him as the object of someone’s romantic interest.”
“I don’t know. . . .”
“I mean, look.”
Grandpa Ed spots them and waves. The pale flesh under his arm flaps like a flag. “Woo-hoo!” he shouts, like he’s
going down a rapid.
“Okay. I see your point.”
Dawn Celeste waves, too. So does her underarm flab. She blows a kiss. Her bathing suit is a blue and green splash of batik. “They’re happy,” Annabelle says. Happiness seems like a miracle. Happiness seems like something that maybe always should be celebrated.
“I hope they don’t do anything that makes us related,” Luke says.
He gives her a look she can’t decipher. But then he takes her fingers, same as Grandpa Ed and Dawn Celeste. “Typhoon Terror awaits,” he says, and yanks her forward.
• • •
“He’s giving her something.”
“Tell me it’s not a ring box.”
“No. It’s not a box. Something round? I can’t tell.”
“My eyes are bad. I think I need glasses,” Annabelle says.
The four of them have just finished dinner in the hotel restaurant, and now Luke and Annabelle are on the second floor of the Cherry Valley Hotel, spying down at Grandpa Ed and Dawn Celeste in the lobby. They needed a moment. They just wanted to say good night. Luke and Annabelle crouch on the ground. It’s hard to see around that big palm tree.
“It’s, like, a little wood thing.”
“A wood thing? Why would he give her a little wood thing?”
“He’s putting it in her hand.”
“Oh, God, we’re awful.”
“They’re hugging. She’s wiping away tears. Oh, God, don’t look. Old people kissing.”
“I might throw up my guacamole.”
“She’s holding it up to admire it. It’s a wood thing, all right.”
“Wait, wait, wait! Oh jeez! I know what it is! I know! He whittled that! He almost lost his thumb doing it. I thought it looked like a raccoon turd!”
“Raccoon turd of love,” Luke says.
They bust up. They hit each other to be quiet. Annabelle muffles a snort, but this cracks him up, and that cracks her up, and they are both bent over and laughing silently, holding their stomachs.
“Wait—” He gasps. “Wait, wait.” He’s looking at her with big, round eyes of shock. This cracks her up anew.
“What?” she asks.
“You should see yourself.”
“You should see yourself.”
They are round the bend, because they totally crack up again, and it isn’t even funny.
“I know what the raccoon turd is!” he says.
“What?”
“A bird.”
“A bird? What kind of bird?”
“Don’t hate the messenger, here, okay?”
“What kind of bird,” she says sternly.
“Mim has a . . . a bird. A dove. Tattoo. On her, um, lower back.”
“How low?”
“Really low.”
“Oh my God.”
“You see everything when you’re two people in a camper.”
“You’re telling me. But, a dove on her ass that he whittled . . .”
“It has great meaning to her. The dove, not the ass. She, like, saw one when she first fell in love with my grandpa.”
“I get it. I get the tearful meaning of the dove raccoon turd.”
“It’s sweet! Don’t you think it’s sweet? Dove-ass-tattoo-raccoon turd?”
They bust up again. They laugh so hard that no sound comes out.
He is gasping. She is gasping. “Stop, stop, stop,” she says. “I can’t breathe.”
“Good thing she didn’t have, like, a mermaid back there. He would have needed a bigger piece of wood and more skills.”
“We’re awful. We’re so awful,” she says.
“You’re awful. I’m a hundred percent in favor of whittled ass-tattoos of love.”
“I’ve got to go to bed. This day has been . . .”
She feels it. The whoosh of guilt, coming in like water through her broken ship. It wants to wreck her and toss her on the shore. What do you feel besides guilt? Dr. Mann asked.
Happy. She feels really happy. “This day has been . . . awesome. It has been so fun. But I’ve got sixteen miles to run tomorrow.”
“Okay,” he sighs. “Good night, then. Thanks for bringing the magic to Magic Waters.”
27
It is hard to sleep. There’s the air conditioner for starters—first too cold and then not cold enough and then noisy and blasting. There’s the ice machine, clattering outside in the hall. There’s a group of kids still swimming in the pool when it’s supposed to be closed by ten p.m. There is Luke Messenger, taking her fingers at Magic Waters water park.
There is The Taker—
Stop!
Stop it, really. Will he ruin every moment of her life forevermore? Maybe not forevermore, but for a long time to come, yes, he will still be there shoving forward, reminding her not to forget him or anyone else.
Now, The Taker grabs her fingers under the library table after their night at Neumos. She doesn’t exactly mind. She sort of likes the secret of it, the slow quiet of what is hidden. But he doesn’t want slow, and he doesn’t want hidden.
He wants to walk around the halls holding hands. He wants to kiss her in the stairwell. He grabs her hand, he pulls her to him; she pulls away. He presses.
“God. It’s like, you’re the banana and he’s the peel,” Kat says.
He begins to text and call all the time.
“Who’s calling you so late?” Gina says. “I don’t like it.”
Annabelle doesn’t like it, either. It’s too much too fast. She feels forced. He comes by Essential Baking Company when she’s working and orders coffee. It flusters her. Once, afterward, she warmed up a raspberry muffin for two minutes and turned it hard as a baseball. Her boss, Claire, always kind and perceptive, asked if she needed to talk.
And that lie, the one about his friends the night of Neumos, it nags at her.
“What’s Adrian’s band called again?” she asks The Taker one night when he phones.
“Um, Loose Change.”
“Do they play around here? We should go see them.”
“They don’t play much. And Jules is thinking about breaking things off. She says it’s like she and Adrian are married. They never do anything.”
“We could do something with them.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“I can’t believe you lied about them coming to Neumos.”
He laughs. “I have my trickster ways.”
“It’s not funny! I don’t like trickster ways. I like the truth.”
He’s silent.
“What?”
“I should tell you the truth, then.”
“Okay.” She is sitting on the floor in her room, her back against the bed. Her stomach hurts suddenly. She picks at the threads of her carpet. She feels like something bad is coming. Something bad is coming. Something worse than she could ever imagine.
“Remember when I told you that we moved in part because my mom thought I got in with a bad crowd? That this kid I know robbed an old guy?”
Oh God. Oh no. “Yeah.”
“I was the kid.”
She is silent. She doesn’t tap her thumb to her fingers. Instead, with her free hand, she makes a fist and squeezes hard until she can feel her nails jab her skin.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. I mean, I didn’t, like, rob-rob him. Not like, stick-’em-up rob him. My parents had this friend, Jim Hastings? He was a rich guy, lived alone. He used to teach at the university, too, but then his family sold some patent or something, for some kind of waterproof material, and he got rich and quit. He had this house on the water. And he kept inviting me over. Like, for jobs. To clean his pool, and paint his bathroom, and my parents thought it was great, but the dude gave me the willies. Like, he was always trying to be alone with me, and standing too close, and doing weird shit, like keeping me late to show me his rare-coin collection, and . . . ugh.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yeah, so I finally was like, ‘Fuck this. I’m not going over there. I don’t care if he pays m
e thirty bucks an hour.’ On the last day, I was finishing up this job. Spreading this big shitload of bark in his yard, and I put the tools away in the garage, and then I went in to use the bathroom and wash the splinters out of my skin, and after I dried my hands, I don’t know, I just went in his bedroom and opened up his dresser drawer where the coins were, and I took all these plastic bags. They were rare coins and he just had them in Ziplocs, and I shoved a bunch of them in my pockets, and I got out of there and never went back.”
“Oh, wow.” She doesn’t know what to say. “He had to know it was you.”
“Of course he knew it was me, and my parents kept asking me, ‘Why did you do this? Why?’ And I didn’t have an answer. I was just, I don’t know. I felt like the dude violated me, and I wanted to do it back. I was drying my hands on that towel in his bathroom, and it was a white towel, and then it was smeared with dirt, and I thought, ‘Good.’ I was furious all of a sudden. I hated him.”
“I can understand that.” In a way she can.
“Yeah? You don’t want me out of your life? At home, people avoided me after they heard. Not that most of those asshats were my best friends or anything before that, but still. My real friends ditched me. It sucked. Bad. It’s not like I was a felon. No one pressed charges. He got the coins back. The whole thing was dropped. My parents thought it was because I was hanging out with these two guys, Kevin and Raine, and Kevin smoked pot and Raine was always depressed, but it was because I hated that dude Jim Hastings. Hated him and his creepy lips and fat fingers. He deserved it. He deserved worse, if you ask me.”
Annabelle is disturbed. The man, Jim Hastings, and his fancy house, and the jobs, and The Taker and the coins and the hate disturb her. She doesn’t know how to understand this story. In a way, she feels sorry for The Taker. But the story is distressing. And it is far from her own life. There is so much about the story and about The Taker that is just not her and hers. Will cheated on a test in the seventh grade and still felt bad about it. Kat’s older sister, Becka, who didn’t live with them anymore, got pregnant and had an abortion. That Bastard Father Anthony left them and became a priest, and Gina is so worried about stuff going wrong that she drives everyone crazy, but somehow this stuff is all above the surface, not below. She can see it and know what it is. She understands that Gina also has anxiety and that Father Anthony is emotionally removed.