First I write the legal mumbo jumbo, those lines from the movies, after the date and my name, the whole thing in block letters so there can be no mistake. This is my last will and testament. I start with Joe. He’s the easiest. He was away for most of this last part while I was getting sicker. He won’t miss me but so much. I’ll be like a fingerprint on the edge of his glasses. Most of the time he’ll look through the memory of me and only notice me once in a while, in a vague, absentminded kind of way like you do when you clean your lenses. The memory of me won’t interfere with his career or his social life.
I’m not worried about Joe. Later on after he marries and makes a bunch of little Landons, he may tell them stories about his brother Daniel. At bedtime or on long car rides. It isn’t that he doesn’t love me. He just has a lot of other stuff on his mind. Perfectly understandable. I leave him my two-man tent. He can take a girl somewhere remote and memorable.
Nick is harder. The contents of our cabin. My bicycle. My rowboat, I write next to his name. Maybe the list isn’t enough. The law may require some kind of command. Clarity and all. So I insert between the list and his name a balloon and an arrow. Inside the balloon I add, to receive without condition or payment of any kind. For all I know people have to pay fees to the lawyer or the courts to get their share. Although I’ve left it too late to find out, I’m damned sure Henry Walker isn’t going to extract any more money from my family because of me.
I can almost hear Mack laughing, or trying not to so he doesn’t upset my parents, when he hears I left him my tackle box. He’ll get the joke big-time. I free the tackle box from the never-ending pile of Nick’s soccer equipment in the bottom of the closet and put it by the suitcase. Our Friday-night fishing trip with the twins seems so far away. I’ll have to store the box outside the cabin in case they take the will’s language about Nick and the cabin contents literally. Its being in the cabin would create a controversy and they might not let Mack have it. What I want most, more than Mack using my fishing gear so it doesn’t get rusted, is no more controversy.
My parents won’t care about any of my things. Bad enough they’ll have to look at my clothes and pictures and the empty bunk and be reminded. If I’d planned better, Meredith could have driven me to Goodwill and helped me dump most of it. But until this morning I didn’t know I was going to make this trip.
I write a separate note to her and put it in a sealed envelope with her name on it, adding a little smiley face onto a stick body diving off a bridge. Incredibly goofy, but I want her to have something to laugh about too. I won’t tell you what I wrote to her. It’s private. Holden would be proud of me, though. I don’t get mushy, just mention the high points and wish her a happy life. I sign it Love, Daniel. She knows that already, but it matters to me that she’ll hold the note, her fingers where my fingers were. I hope it matters to her.
You can’t write a will and leave out your mother and father. Especially not if you’re dying out of order and they have to bury you, their child. So I write my father’s name. It feels so weird to be writing Stieg Corneill Landon instead of Dad. I give him back the pocketknife he gave me for my twelfth birthday and the book of Robert Frost poems because he was forever reciting them and he’ll get the connection. I stick my report card in the book of poems and put it on my pillow, to be sure my dad can find it. All that arguing for nothing. If I’d only believed the stupid doctors from the beginning, I might not have wasted that time or energy. Still, there are other things I know now about my father I might never have known if we hadn’t had those fights.
So it comes down to Mom. She was there first and she’s the end, too, even though she won’t physically be there. I scan the bookshelves and open the desk drawers as wide as they go, looking for just the right thing. She has to know how important she is to me. From before all this. And because of these months. I need her to forgive me for all the idiotic stuff I did: bad table manners, not winning the third-grade spelling bee after she coached me all weekend, refusing to wear a tie to Grandma’s funeral, for being a jerk about Walker, for making her cry. Mostly I need her to forgive me for not getting better after the Mexico trip.
Remembering like that, I lose it big-time and I have to get up and find some goddamn tissues. You’d think a person’s tear ducts would dry up with so much overuse. God forbid Mack finds out what a wimp I’ve become. Even he may think it’s time to find a new best friend. When I can focus, there’s my mug from the seventh-grade trip to the Virginia Beach aquarium, with a lifetime’s collection of pens. I sort through them, but stop at the one I swiped from the Richmond doctor’s office where they first hinted at chemotherapy. Mom won’t want a pen from her dead son.
My Spanish book could be a memento of Mexico? The used-bookstore copy of The Catcher in the Rye Joe gave me for Christmas? Maybe then she’d understand my not sticking around. After she reads Holden’s take on growing up or not growing up.
In the way back of the bottom drawer, behind the old lab reports, the crushed diorama of dinosaurs, the Gideon’s Bible that Nick stole from some hotel room and wouldn’t own up to, I feel a small lump in crinkly paper. I pull it out. It’s a fortune cookie, no telling from when or where because Mom and Dad gave up monosodium glutamate years ago. For a minute I toss it from hand to hand, debating whether to open it or leave it to her unopened on the chance that it says something inspiring enough to count with her. I’ve had ADVERSITY MAKES YOU STRONGER before and LOVE HEALS ALL WOUNDS and PERSEVERANCE YIELDS RESULTS. None of that will work this time around.
The truth is there’s not a single thing here in my room, in Essex County, in my twenty feet of space, my sixteen and a half years, that means enough. I’ll write her from New York. It ought to be easier to say what I need to say with a little distance. I close the drawers and get ready to sign the bottom of the will with a flourish, to hide how weak and silly I suddenly feel. This is why Holden wants to leave before his parents come home. How do you talk face-to-face with people who love you in spite of your failing them?
The stupid little fortune cookie stares up at me in its pristine packaging. Some machine halfway across the ocean, or maybe in Secaucus, New Jersey, has stamped a single Chinese letter on the clear plastic. Meaningless because I don’t know Chinese, won’t ever know Chinese, and don’t fucking care. I rip off the end of the package with my teeth and smash the cookie on the desk. The little paper twists loose, deformed from its years of captivity.
Pick it up and read it, I tell myself. Read the damn thing and get it over with.
THERE ARE NO GIFTS OF LASTING VALUE EXCEPT LOVE.
I tape the small rectangle of paper with the fortune above my signature in the blank space next to Mom. After I fold the will, I prop it up with the letter to Meredith against the mug of pens. The desk light shivers with the lapping waves. Both bunk beds are neatly made. No sign of the hours of studying, brainstorming with Holden, debating theories on the end of the world with Nick, or that incredible night with Meredith. It’s been a good place to be. A hard place to leave.
Outside the cabin the sky colors purple and brownish pink, bruised already and shrinking as if it doesn’t want to see what this day holds. If I’m really going, I’ve got to leave now. The heat behind my eyes stings. Tomorrow I’ll be somewhere else and I won’t see this sunrise and this horizon with the bridge spanning it, that familiar solid line of gray that’s been the edge of my life for sixteen and a half years. I hope Meredith’s parents let her stay with my family after they get the final news. For a little bit at least. I should write Nick—but in a separate letter from Mom’s—and tell him to give Meredith the cabin to sleep in if she asks. Without asking questions or making a big deal of it. No point in upsetting Mom over things she doesn’t know.
No point, no point. The words echo in my head as I tiptoe over to the dinghy, the rolling suitcase in my arms like a baby. After I lay it on the far front ribs to keep it from getting splashed, I uncleat the lead line and let the little boat float away from the big one. The oa
rs dip into the water. Silver droplets sprinkle the surface, blue for only a moment in the first beginnings of the filtered sunrise. By the time I reach the shore, the water is brown again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mack’s supposed to be waiting at the far end of St. Margaret’s campus in the blue truck with the engine and lights off. We’ve been over and over this part. Like the D-funct marina summers, it feels good to have Mack as my partner in crime again. A secret from my parents. Whispered details and hidden supplies, even if the ending’s not as unpredictable as it used to be in those adventures. Everyone but Mack has turned nursemaid. I’m so tired, so ready for it all to be over, one way or the other.
The hill between the creek and Jeanette Drive sets me back on the timing. The boots were a mistake, lead weights on my toothpick legs. Where, oh where have my swimming muscles gone? I press my fingers into my chest bone, the sternum according to the bio textbook. One of those damn lung spots must have stuck there and started that ache, so deep that even my fingers can’t reach the pain. I’m sucking in air and have to rest before I even get to St. Margaret’s flat-roofed gymnasium, where Meredith told me she had started taking the birth control pills. I think about not ever making love to her again, not touching the shallow place by her hip bone that catches the moonlight through the cabin window, the warm corner of her lips where my tongue tastes leftover ChapStick, the perfect spaces and lines of her fingers when she slips her hand into mine on a walk.
From across the long open lawn by the administration building, through a tangle of overgrown crape myrtle limbs, Mack’s headlights flash once and die. A signal. Time’s up. My first friend, my last friend, reminding me to stick to the plan.
I rise from the curb, wave at the flashbulb residue of his signal. My arm falls, heavy and useless. Rowing Meredith upstream on Hoskins Creek seems like a fairy tale. The small suitcase rolls along the sidewalk in a gravelly anthem that sinks into the night around me. I force myself to walk to the truck without another stop. Mack’s out before I get there, hustling the suitcase away from me, laying it in the back of the little pickup as if it were made of glass. He boosts me by the elbow into the cab, shuts the door like I’m his grandmother, and jogs back to the driver’s side. As he rolls the truck down Water Lane and out onto a deserted Route 360 slowly, carefully, as if he has just learned how to drive, I take one backward glance. The bridge rises smoky and indistinct in the early morning mist. And then at the corner where 360 meets Route 17 the blaring open-all-night lights of the Texaco station blast me back to reality.
“How’d it go with Meredith?” he asks.
“She had homework.”
“You left without saying goodbye?”
“She’d never understand. She’d think it had something to do with her.”
“Fuck, you’re a cold bastard.”
“Yeah, well, dying does that to you.” That shuts him up.
He flips on the radio and keeps his eyes on the road. Past the churches, past the Gold Coast, Woodside Golf Course, Horne’s at Port Royal with its 1950s striped awning, into Spotsylvania County and the single-lane stretch.
“You falling asleep?” I ask him, but the words stick in my mouth and I’m breathing hard to just get them out.
“I’m fine. I just don’t want the cops to stop us. I mean with Holden waiting for you in New York and all.”
I have to look at him twice to be sure he’s teasing. “Uh, Mack, don’t you think if you drive the speed limit like all the other cars the troopers will be less likely to notice us in the first place?”
“Sorry.” He guns it and the little truck shoots forward on the unlit blacktop, sending my hip bones into my intestines.
“Jeez. I didn’t mean to piss you off.”
“No piss intended. No piss taken.”
He slows to the speed limit, flips the radio knob to a rap station, gives me a wide grin, and starts to slap the steering wheel with one hand. “She’s great, don’t you think?”
“Who?”
“The truck. Who else?” His eyes are glittery, his hands jumping off the wheel with the radio bass. It’s making me nervous, despite his insistence during our last phone conversation that he’s not using anymore.
“Juliann maybe? Your girlfriend Juliann, remember her?”
“That’s over. Been over.” But his tone is tight and too high as if he’s just admitted cheating on a test.
“What happened?”
“Not everyone hits it off like you and Meredith. Juliann’s too tall for me anyway.”
“Since when is height a reason to back off from the perfect woman?”
“I wouldn’t say she’s the perfect woman. She’s a little too straitlaced for me.”
I think about that for a while. Here’s Mack, the Mack I know, pretty much an honor roll student, a suck-up to the teachers, still goes to church with his family, and has a regular job to pay for his car insurance. A nice, steady type of guy, and he’s dissing a girl for being too tall? Something’s screwy about that. Plus Meredith hasn’t said a thing to me about Mack dumping Juliann. Why would he think that? Why would he say it?
He’s a good driver, even upset about Juliann, even streaming along the curves and shadows on Route 17 at sixty miles an hour on a starless night. Because 17 is a killer road for curves, I stop talking and let him concentrate. The truck stays inside the lines and there are no sudden swerves or unexpected braking. It reassures me a little. He can’t be high if he’s driving so well. But I’ve said my piece about the drugs and tonight’s not the night to reopen that discussion.
What if Mom wakes up and discovers I’m not in bed? She’ll listen to see if I flush the head. She’ll come and stand outside, knock on the door, maybe twice before she opens it when I don’t answer. Once she sees I’m not there, she’ll rush around the deck and up to the roof. She’ll call my name, whispering at first so as not to wake Nick until she remembers he’s at a friend’s. When she can’t find me, she’ll start to yell. Dad, his breath raspy at being startled from sleep, will pad outside about the time she realizes the dinghy is gone. She’ll be halfway to the dock in the skiff before he interprets what she’s yelling about. He’ll know right away that I’ve left for good, but he’ll let her go and search because it’s the only way she can cope. Action and argument, proof that she’s still trying to save her son from something stronger than she is.
“Thanks for driving,” I say to Mack, careful not to bring up the twins again.
“No problem. I hope the train isn’t late. If your mom calls the police, they might think to check trains.”
“She won’t call the police. They’ve been the bad guys since the trial.”
“Last year did you ever think you’d be headed to New York on your own?”
“Never crossed my mind. You ever think you’d be driving a blue Nissan with your name on the title?”
We’ve played this game for years. Hollywood fantasies on an Essex County budget. It’s always been fun because our imaginations could take us anywhere even when we were stuck in small-town Virginia.
He turns down the radio, seriously into the game now. And I figure it’ll distract him from the end of the trip, the train station, and a goodbye neither of us wants. A goodbye I’m way more ready for than he is.
He says, “How about…ever imagine you would be the first Essex County High student to leap off the Rappahannock River Bridge?”
“Ever think you’d have the highest grade in algebra?”
“Ever dream that a beautiful girl like Meredith would fall for you big-time?”
“I still don’t believe it. But Meredith’s better than a dream. She’s like solid rock.” I lean back against the headrest and think about how she looked in the half-lit cabin, her eyes, her smile. “How come some people are that way and—”
Mack snorts. “And others are all hot air and shadows like Yowell?”
“What’s with you and Yowell?”
“Nothing. You’re the one who thought he was a trai
tor.”
“I’ve forgiven him.”
“Because of the senator?”
“I guess. He did put his reputation on the line to get the law changed. Got my parents off the hook. But slicko Leonard? Mostly because he’s nice to my mom.” Probably the wrong thing to be thinking about at this point.
Mack shoots a quick look at me, then back to the road. Does he think I don’t know he worries about me? No way that you can drive your best friend to the train where he will ride off into the sunset never to be seen again without worrying. Truly impossible if you know he’s probably going to choke to death on his own vomit in a deserted alley.
Somewhere between Port Royal and the Fredericksburg golfing range, we lose the Richmond radio station. I twist the dial, force myself to settle on something loud. If Holden can do this, I can. Anyway, I’m tired of talking. Tired of thinking.
One minute the road is dark and we’re a bullet hurtling through empty space, and the next minute red strobe lights are crashing all around us. Sirens. Cops.
“I wasn’t speeding,” Mack is practically yelling.
“Okay, okay. So pull over. Maybe they just need to get by.”
“Yeah, and there are so many fucking cars coming the other way that they can’t pass?”
“Mack, pull yourself together. Don’t talk, let them do the talking.”
“Easier for you to be calm. You’re not the one whose license is on the line.”
He’s so bent out of shape I’m beginning to think he’s worried about something more than just a traffic charge. In the mirror I can now see that there’s only one police car. State trooper, actually.
“Mack, you don’t have drugs in here, do you?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Mack?”
“Are you crazy?”
“You said you quit, but you’re going ballistic here. I thought—”
“It would be suicide to carry coke in a car. Every idiot knows that. Any routine stop of a teenager and they search.”
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