The Decoding of Lana Morris

by Laura McNeal

  Whit grinned. “And the moment she asks for this, all the grandeur disappears and they’re back where they started, in a dirt-floor hut.”

  Lana thought it served them right. “I would’ve stopped at the cottage,” she said, thinking about those drives through nice neighborhoods with her mother, playing the House Game.

  Whit smiled. “That’s because you’re a better human being than your average citizen.”

  Whether this was a compliment or mild sarcasm, Lana wasn’t sure.

  Whit rose and stretched. “I think of that story from time to time. Know what I think the moral of it is?”

  “That being pope is plenty good enough?” Lana said, hoping Whit would laugh.

  He did, politely, and then said, “That nobody ever knows when to stop.” He yawned and grinned. “So, to answer your question, I suppose if I was a smart guy, I’d just say no to your three wishes. But since I’m not that smart, I’d probably say yes and hope I’d have enough sense to be careful with them.”

  He came around the table, leaned forward, and kissed her forehead in the same whispery way he’d kissed her that first time, in her room. He smelled faintly of lime soap, and she wanted to reach out and hold on to him for dear life, but she didn’t. She knew that her three wishes used to be that her father was alive, that he was working in a normal place you could tell people about, and that he was coming home every night to one of those houses with a porch. She assumed that if she made those wishes, everything that was wrong with her mother would no longer be wrong.

  But now Lana smelled the sweet scent of Whit’s body and tried very hard not to wish for him, him, him. Then he walked away from her toward the doorway.

  “Night,” he said, and that’s what Lana said, too.

  23.

  Garth Stoneman is sitting on the front steps, waiting. It’s eight twenty-five, almost halfway through his morning waiting hour, but he seems more anxious than usual today. Lana can see him from her place on the porch swing, where she’s making pot holders with Tilly instead of washing dishes and vacuuming, two chores on the Saturday chart Veronica has drawn up from the hospital and sent home with Whit, who handed it to Lana apologetically. “Do what you can,” he said, “and what you can’t, you can’t.”

  Tilly picks out the pot holder loop color, and Lana stretches it over the pegs. Sometimes Tilly can be urged to stretch and connect it herself, which, according to the physical therapist who visits for what seems like about three minutes every other month, is supposedly good for Tilly’s fine-motor skills, though Lana doubts it.

  “Pink again?” Lana says.

  “You bet!” Tilly says. Her allegiance to pink is unswervable.

  “Whatcha gonna do when we run out of pink?”

  When Tilly doesn’t reply, Lana looks up to see a panic surfacing on Tilly’s face that seems almost brittle, and Lana remembers Whit’s line about everybody worrying too much. “Red’s kind of pink when you think about it,” Lana says, and just like that, the panic on Tilly’s face dissolves.

  “You bet,” she says. “Red is just a pinker pink!”

  Lana has to laugh, because, really, it’s more or less true. “Pink squared,” she says, and Tilly says, “Pink cubed!”

  Garth hasn’t moved. He just sits, looking at his Popeye guy, looking down the street one way for maybe five seconds, then looking down the street the other way for another five seconds, then looking again down at Popeye. Garth is skinny in a sickly sort of way. Lana thinks it’s because his loneliness is like a tapeworm. His arms poking out of his Spider-Man shirt have no muscles at all, and even when he’s looking down the street, he bows his head in a way that makes her wonder if the sun is in his eyes. He begins to twist Popeye’s head around and around.

  “You okay, Garth-man?” she says.

  Garth isn’t a talker, but he looks up enough to show that he’s heard.

  “Where’s Popeye?”

  Garth lifts him from his lap and rotates the head so that he’s looking more or less at Lana. Popeye’s definitely on the grimy side. “That sailor man needs a bath,” Lana says, which causes Garth to pull Popeye protectively back into his lap. This makes Lana feel a little bit bad, so without thinking she says, “What’re you and Popeye doing?”

  “ ’Aiting.”

  Of course they’re waiting. Except today Garth’s waiting with particular desperation because it’s Carlito’s day with his father, which comes once a month, when Whit drives him to the county detention center. Carlito’s father is in jail for hitting Carlito and his sister, among other things, so Lana thinks it’s more than a little freakish that Carlito even wants to see him, but when she told this once to Whit, he just shrugged and said, “Maybe Carl only remembers the good parts.” And then, “Love is a mysterious thing.” In any case, Carlito’s visiting days always make Garth even more convinced his turn is coming.

  “Want to make a pot holder?” Lana asks him.

  Garth shakes his head, no, and keeps twisting Popeye’s head around and around. When Lana first came here, there was a small round hole in the side of Popeye’s mouth, and one morning Whit sat at the kitchen table with a little dowel and some balsa wood. After a while he yelled, “Garth-man, bring Popeye over here!” and when Garth did, Whit slid a perfect little pipe into the hole at the side of Popeye’s mouth. Garth beamed, and Whit said, “If Popeye gets lung cancer, we’ll sue the dowel maker.” A day or two later, Garth lost the new pipe, and Whit said, no problem, he’d make another, but he hasn’t done it yet.

  Tilly looks up from her plastic bowl of cloth loops and says, “Your mama’s not coming, Garthy. You shouldn’t sit there like that. No.”

  Lana knows Garth’s waiting like this makes Tilly nervous. Lana knows because the waiting makes her nervous, too. Nervous and sad. How could someone bring her son into somebody else’s house and leave him there and never talk to him or write to him or see him again? Why would you do that?

  For the same reasons, Lana supposes, that her own mother swallowed methamphetamines and cheap vodka straight from a tall bottle. Maybe it was because her husband died and left her with one kid and zero money. Or maybe it was so she could live her own screwed-up life in her own screwed-up style without a nuisance-type kid getting in her screwed-up way. There are people in the world with zipped-tight hearts, and Lana supposes she should feel sorry for them, given the misery it brings them, but right now she doesn’t feel sorry for them. She despises them. Because they’re the ones who put the Tillys and the Garths and the Lanas in places like this.

  Lana is staring at Garth staring down the street when Tilly hands her a pink loop, and as Lana stretches it over the frame, she has a thought so sudden and pure, she stills her hand so she can look at it undisturbed.

  Of course. Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

  “I have to do something, Tilly,” she says in a distracted voice. “You pick out all the reddish pink loops, okay, and I’ll help you finish it later.”

  Tilly starts to get up, too. “I’m coming with you, Lana.”

  “No, silly,” Lana says. “I need a little privacy.”

  “You’re going to the bathroom?”

  Lana nods. She doesn’t really need to go to the bathroom, but now she will. She’s never lied to Tilly before, and she’s not going to start now. Besides, it’s as good a place as any for doing the particular drawing she has in mind.

  24.

  Lana slides the black leather box from its place under her bed and carts it down the hallway to the bathroom. She locks the door behind her and after putting the toilet cover down, she sits, opens the flap, slides out the paper, and counts the sheets left.

  Eleven.

  Plenty, she thinks, and puts ten back.

  She smooths her hand across a blank sheet of the old, pink-flecked paper. She takes up her pencil, closes her eyes, and what flows in an easy line from her mind to hand to pencil to page is an average-seeming woman standing on a broad wooden porch, near a door, with her hand
raised to the knocker, while, on the other side of the wall, in the interior of the house, a thin boy holding a pipeless Popeye doll cocks his head, about to hear the knock that he never ceased to believe he would one day hear.

  When she finishes the drawing, she feels as she always feels—astonished at how good it is and at how little it seems to be her own creation. But there it is, in front of her, a boy with his ear cocked, a mother with her hand raised, a perfect suggestion of fervent hope finally realized.

  There, Lana thinks, and she feels the kind of inside-out happiness she felt that day the dust devil swept through her.

  A happy ending for Garth.

  Lana folds closed the leather cover of the Ladies Drawing Kit.

  There’s nothing to do now except wait for it to arrive.

  25.

  Lana serves lunch to Garth in his room instead of making him come to the table, adding a sandwich the size of a quarter for Popeye, which Garth doesn’t even notice. She and Tilly eat bologna sandwiches with Alfred and, now that she’s started Garth on the way to a happy ending, she begins to wonder what she might do for Alfred. She knows from Whit that Alfred’s father did a vanishing act and that his mother was ruled incompetent because of suicidal tendencies. “Alfie thinks they’re both dead,” Whit said, “and in a way, he’s right.”

  Now Lana says, “How long have you lived here, Alfred?”

  Alfred chews his sandwich, rocks back and forth a few times. “D-d-don’t know. Long time.”

  “I’ve been here longer,” Tilly says. “I remember when Alfred came. I do.”

  “You h-h-hit me,” Alfred says, and the small turn of his lips looks to Lana like crooked amusement.

  “You steal,” Tilly says. “You stole my Starburst. I remember. You did.”

  Alfred still smiles his small, crooked smile. “Th-th-that’s right. Sorry.”

  “Where would you like to live in all the world, Alfred?” Lana asks.

  Alfred rocks. His sandwich is gone, and there’s a trickle of wet mustard on the pocket of his green golf shirt. Lana knows better than to swipe at it with a napkin. He doesn’t like being tidied up.

  “H-h-here,” he says.

  “We already live here,” Tilly says. “Silly. With Lana and Whit and Garthy and Carlito.”

  “And h-h-her,” Alfred says without any change of expression, and Lana knows that by this he means Veronica.

  A silence follows and a minute or so later, when the doorbell rings, it sends a shock through Lana that’s almost electrical.

  “Get Garth!” she says at once, because she thinks it’s going to be Garth’s mother. “Have him answer the door!” Tilly and Alfred just stare at her. “Garth!” Lana yells. “Answer the door! It might be for you!”

  Garth comes out of the downstairs bathroom buckling his pants and it isn’t lost on Lana that she hasn’t heard the toilet flush. He goes to the door, waits for a second, then swings it open.

  A small, wiry man in a brown UPS uniform stands before him with a package.

  He looks up from his clipboard and says, “Can somebody accept this for Chester … Pigeot, who lives next door?” He pronounces Chester’s last name “pig-out.”

  Garth turns a bewildered look toward Lana, who is herself a little bewildered. She believed so completely that the doorbell meant Garth’s mother had arrived that she can’t quite believe the UPS man is alone. She looks behind him before she signs for Chet’s package, and she looks up and down the street as the UPS man walks back to his truck. Nothing. No one.

  “It’s pronounced ‘Pi-zho,’ ” Lana calls out, but the man is already hopping into the driver’s seat. Lana closes the door and takes the square box inside. It’s from a company in Chicago called Above Average Novelties.

  “Me?” Garth says, looking at the package.

  “No, Garth,” Lana says. “False alarm.”

  “Let’s open it!” Tilly says, and though Lana would love to know what Above Average Novelty Chester Pigeot has plunked down cash for, she knows she can’t, and she sets the package on the counter unopened.

  26.

  A half hour later, outside, in the stale heat, Tilly is scrubbing yellow-brown crud from the Wet-’n’-Woolly plastic wading pool while Lana takes bedsheets off the drying line and wonders about the Ladies Drawing Kit. How it works, she knows, is something that can’t be explained, but still, it seems like there ought to be some basic rules. Sometimes what she draws happens fast and sometimes it takes a little while. And what about Veronica’s missing arm?—was there a subset of basic erasure rules?

  This is a thought that gives Lana another idea, one about the pills Veronica planted in her room.

  Tilly’s lost in her crud removal, so Lana slips away and, once inside the house, hurries to her room and slides a blank sheet of paper from the leather case. She takes up a pencil, lets her eyes close and open in a long slow blink, and begins to draw. A while later—how long a while Lana has no idea; it feels like seconds—she drops the pencil and looks at what she’s drawn: a cutaway of Veronica’s purse that shows not just its shape and style but its contents, and in one corner, wedged between hairbrush and tissues, is the bag of pills.

  Lana looks at the bag with an odd flush of pleasure, a feeling that grows even more pleasurable when she takes up the pencil again and, this time using its eraser, begins to rub the pills out of the plastic bag, and the sketch, and, she believes, her life.

  She feels almost buoyant as she slams out the screen door and into the backyard, where Tilly has strayed from her cleaning project and is sitting in the dirt alongside the garage staring down at something in her hand.

  “Look, Lana,” she says, holding up a hollowed fist. “Jiminy Cricket!”

  “Let him go and it’ll be good luck,” Lana says, an idea that doesn’t seem to appeal to Tilly. She turns her back, so Lana can’t see what she does next.

  “Be nice,” says Lana, and Tilly, with both hands cupped together now, says she’s going to go show Jiminy to Garth. Lana starts to say no, she needs to stay here and finish cleaning the plastic pool, but with the first intake of breath, she realizes she’s going to sound just like Veronica, so she stops.

  “Sure,” she says. Then: “But don’t put Jiminy in one of your pockets and forget about him!” Last week Lana forgot to go through all of Tilly’s pockets and put a lizard through the wash.

  Tilly disappears into the house, and as Lana regards the sheets still on the line that need to come down, and the huge wicker basket of wet wash that still needs to go up, not to mention the piles of dirty clothes that still need to be washed, she thinks, I wish Veronica was back, and is stunned at what she’s just wished.

  Lana knows the basic three-wishes plot hinges on people wasting their wishes, but she has nine pages left, not three, so she’s really more like the fisherman and his wife. She needs to be careful with them is all and not get greedy, and even if she uses a wish for each of the Snicks, there will be plenty left for her. Except really anything she wished for herself would be something for her and Whit.

  Where is he right now? she wonders. What does he do while Carlito visits his father at the detention center? Why doesn’t he come home and then go back for him instead of hanging around a strange town?

  What she really wishes is that Whit was back.

  No, what she really wishes is that Whit was back and he’s brought a housekeeper with him.

  No, what she really wishes is that Whit was back and he’s brought a housekeeper and a cook with him.

  No, what she really wishes is that Whit was back and he’s brought a housekeeper and a cook and the news that Veronica has run off with an ambulance driver.

  Well, well, well, Lana thinks. Getting greedy comes in a lot of different shapes. You don’t have to want to be an empress or the pope or God. Or maybe playing God is exactly what you have to want. Wanting to play God for your own private purposes, whatever they are, might be what getting greedy is. And isn’t bringing Garth’s mother to the door and g
etting rid of those pills my way of playing God?

  Lana snaps the wrinkles from a yellow bedsheet and is folding it in half, then half again, lost in her thoughts, when she becomes aware of a presence.

  Someone behind her, watching.

  Whit, she thinks.

  But when Lana turns, it’s Chet, and there’s a strange stricken stiffness to his face, like he’s been caught at something.

  “What were you looking at?” she says.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I don’t know. When you were taking in the dry sheets, it was like you …” His voice trails off.

  “Like I what?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know. It’s just that … it was nice to watch.”

  Lana is not displeased by this, and although she suspects there’s more to what he was watching—her shorts are short and her T-shirt’s skimpy—she guesses he’s not going to say what it was, even if he could.

  “So what do you want?” she says.

  “Nothing. I was just coming to see if the UPS guy left anything with you for me?”

  Lana tightens her gaze. “How’d you know that?”

  Chet shrugs. “Mrs. Harbaugh across the street left a message.”

  Lana has seen Mrs. Harbaugh, has seen how she looks at her and the Snicks. “So Mrs. Hairball saw UPS go to your door, then ours, and she thought you ought to know about it just in case we tried to keep your package for ourselves?”