by Annabel Lyon
More footsteps on the stairs.
“I’m still tacky,” I say without opening my eyes, fluttering my fingers weakly. “Tell Mom five more minutes.”
“Tell her yourself,” Mom says. I open my eyes. She’s standing in the doorway, hands on her hips, but instead of her raisin face, she’s half smiling. Her eyes are sad. “Oh, Edie.”
I sit up and let her give me a hug. Maybe I hug her back a little.
“It’ll be okay,” she whispers.
“Couldn’t I just stay here? I can take care of myself. I can cook.”
“Absolutely not,” she says.
“I can water all your plants. I can go visit Grandma. I’ll hang out at the library and phone you every day.”
“Uh-uh.”
“I can stay with Merry and Aunt Ellie and Daniel,” I say. He moved in a couple of weeks ago. “I can help keep Merry busy so Aunt Ellie can work. I’ll do housework for her, and I can still water your plants. And visit Grandma.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Mom says. “Five minutes before we’re supposed to go, you think of this? We have a reservation for the ferry, you know. We were supposed to leave ten minutes ago.”
“You could drop me at Aunt Ellie’s on the way.”
Mom shakes her head. Now she is making her raisin face. I guess she’s mad that I don’t want to spend two weeks with her and Dad and Dex, the family I love. She picks up my hand and looks at my nails and her lips go even tighter. “These are dry,” she says.
We go downstairs.
“Go pee,” Mom tells me. “It’s a long drive.”
When I come out of the bathroom, Dad and Dex are in the hall. “Where’s Mom?” Dex says.
I shrug. Then we hear Mom, laughing in the den. She comes out with the phone to her ear. “Five minutes,” she tells whomever she’s talking to, and pokes the button with her finger to hang up. “Come on,” she says to us. “We’re going to miss that ferry.”
The sun is already fierce, the back seat is already baking, my skin is already sticky, and my head already hurts. I look at Dex, all cool in the new summer dress she’s picked out for when Robert first sees her at the other end, already plugged into her iPod, staring out the window as if I don’t exist. I wonder if she’ll let me use her iPod while she’s with Robert. Probably not.
Dad honks the horn the way he always does when we’re pulling out of the driveway for a long trip. “Bye, house!” he calls.
When I was little, I’d call it with him, giggling hysterically. Bye, house! Bye, garden! Bye, street!
“Come on, Edie,” Dad says. “Bye, mailbox!”
“I don’t want to play that game,” I say.
Mom and Dad give each other a significant look.
“I saw that,” I say.
I watch the familiar streets roll by: Cobalt Avenue to Marine Drive to Bluebell Street to Turquoise Avenue to Indigo Court.
“Hey!” I say. “Where are we going?”
“Aunt Ellie’s,” Mom says. “Didn’t we just discuss that?”
Daniel must be at work, but Aunt Ellie and Merry are standing in the doorway, identically dressed in shorts and T-shirts and ponytails and bare feet, holding mugs. They’re beaming. Stunned, I get out of the car. Dad gets out too and pulls my duffle bag from the trunk. Dex gets out, looking confused, and tries to disentangle herself from her earphones. Mom gets out last. She’s crying.
“You take care of her,” she tells Aunt Ellie.
“Just like that?” I say to Dad.
“We phoned Auntie Ellie last week,” he says. “We thought you might prefer this. We wanted you to suggest it, though. I mean, we didn’t want to force it on you.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Mind? We’re thrilled. I mean, we’re going to miss you like—” He stops himself from saying the word, then shrugs and says it anyway. “—like hell. But we’re so glad you and Merry are finally—you know.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know. I’m glad too.”
“What’s going on?” Dex says.
“Edie’s not coming with us. She’s going to stay with Aunt Ellie and Merry.”
I look at Dex. She looks at me. I send her a message with mental telepathy: Please don’t ask why.
“Okay,” Dex says slowly.
Mom hugs me so hard my bones crack. “We’ll phone every day.”
Dad hugs me too. Dex says, “It’s going to be a full moon tonight.”
“Uh, yeah?” I say.
“Look up at it,” she says. “We’ll be looking at it too. It’ll be like we’re together.”
I say, “That’s not even logical.”
She flicks me in the head. Sorry.
I say, “What?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Dex says.
They get in the car and drive away, Mom honking into a tissue. For a second I want to run down the street after them.
“My Edie,” Merry says, taking my hand and leading me inside. “After lunch we get movies from the library.”
“Can you girls manage on the bus?” Aunt Ellie says. “I’ll get some work done while you’re out.”
“I would love to go to the library with you, Merry,” I say. “And maybe some other day we can go to this other library I know. If Aunt Ellie says it’s okay. It has movies too.”
“Lots?” Merry says.
“Millions. It’s at the university.”
“That’ll be fun,” Aunt Ellie says.
“It’s my favourite place in the whole world,” I say to Merry. “You’re going to love it.”
At first it’s hard. I miss Mom and Dad so much sometimes I have to go lock myself in the bathroom until I can hide it. I miss Dex too, but that I can make a joke of. “I miss Dex,” I tell Daniel. “I miss someone to fight with all the time and boss me around and tell me how yucky and annoying I am.”
“We could fight,” Daniel offers. “What do you want to fight about? Hey, I know. I could run into the bathroom in front of you and lock the door and stay in there for an hour talking on the phone when you really, really have to pee.”
“Perfect!” I say.
“No!” Merry says, looking worried, and then we have to explain we’re joking.
Merry likes having me around, but I’m surprised by how much space she gives me, too. Sometimes she really just likes to do her own thing and not be interrupted, even by me. She likes beading; she likes her movies; she likes to swing in the hammock in the backyard and just stare up into the leaves.
“‘Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade,’” I say to Aunt Ellie one scorching afternoon. We’re sitting at the picnic table on the deck while Merry dreams in the hammock. Aunt Ellie is working on her laptop. Daniel is at work. I’m reading The Collected Poems of Andrew Marvell and eating a Snickers bar.
“It’s a hot one, all right,” Auntie Ellie says.
Auntie Ellie has told me she doesn’t really get poetry. I don’t get poetry that’s splattered all over the page—modern poetry, I guess—but I like the old poets from Shakespeare’s time. I’m reading Marvell because I like his name. I’m about to read some more aloud when the phone rings.
“Hold that thought,” Auntie Ellie says. She picks up the little silver wafer of a cellphone on the table beside her computer. “Hello?”
I wander into the kitchen for lemonade. It comes from a poem called “The Garden”:
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Your mind is an ocean full of other worlds? Thoughts are green? The happiest place to be is inside your own head? I don’t really know what it means, actually, but it sounds amazing. It sounds like a witch’s spell almos
t, something strong and mysterious, for chanting. I know spells aren’t real, but that’s as close as I can come to explaining how it makes me feel. I’ve read this one to Auntie Ellie a couple of times already. Her smile freezes a little each time now, but I keep thinking, If I just read it right, she’ll get hooked on it too.
Actually, there’s one more person I miss: Robert. I wouldn’t need to read it to him more than once. Maybe I should send it to him on a postcard.
“Edie, phone!” Auntie Ellie calls.
I jump guiltily. I’m not sending my sister’s boyfriend a postcard. I’ll read it to Merry again instead. She always listens, and claps.
I set the tray of lemonade and three glasses on the table and take the phone. “Hello?”
“Edie?”
“Regan!”
“What?” she says.
“What your own self?” I say. “You phoned me.”
“You just sounded so excited.”
“Listen to this,” I say, and recite the bit I’ve memorized.
“I don’t know what that means,” Regan says when I’m done. “I was wondering if you and Merry want to go for coffee. I’m going to Montreal in a few days and I wanted to say goodbye.”
“Okay,” I say slowly. We haven’t talked since school ended; we’re just not that close. I don’t know why she would want to see me particularly before her vacation. But who understands Regan?
“Bring Sam,” she says. “I like her. She seems to calm you down. How about after supper tonight, when it’s cooler?”
I ask Aunt Ellie and she says she’ll drive us. “Okay,” I say into the phone. “That’d be fun.”
“That thing you just read?” Regan says.
“You want me to read it again?”
“No,” Regan says. “Write it down for me, though.” She hangs up.
We meet at The Shot. Merry and I wear tank tops and shorts. Sam wears a pretty halter-top sundress. Regan, when she barges through the door, is wearing a red and gold sari with her steel-toed boots. She has Christmas tinsel woven into her braids, black eyeshadow, and black lipstick.
“I’m going to Montreal to live with my mom,” she says. “My dad caught me henna-ing my feet and thought I was giving myself a homemade tattoo. He told me he couldn’t handle me anymore. I don’t even know what that means. I get straight As.”
“I’m from Montreal,” Merry says.
“Henna can be beautiful,” Sam says.
“We’ll come visit you,” I say.
Who knows where that came from, but Regan’s face brightens for a moment. “Really?” she says.
“We’ll go to my favourite restaurant,” Merry says. “Indian food.”
“I love Indian food,” Regan says. “Indian everything, really. It’s my new thing.”
I give her the piece of paper with the poem written on it. She unfolds it, looks at it, folds it again, and tucks it in her sari. “Okay,” she says.
We get cold drinks. “There’s this website I love, with clips from Bollywood movies,” I say. “I should send you the link.”
She writes her email address on a napkin and gives it to me. She doesn’t let go for a second, so that we’re both kind of tugging at the napkin. I look up at her face.
“Yeah, cool,” she says.
We make awkward chat for a few more minutes and then Regan says she has to go. She stomps out of the store without looking back, Cordelia in combat boots.
A few days later, the day before my family is due home, Merry and I decide to go to the planetarium by ourselves.
“Easy-peasy,” Merry says when Aunt Ellie asks about the bus.
It’s different going out with Merry than going alone. I feel responsible for her, and am extra careful about crossing the street with her and stuff like that. But people are nicer, too. The bus driver says hello, and people smile at us, and when we buy our tickets, the lady tells us if we need any help just to come ask.
“We don’t need help,” Merry says. I smile at the lady to show she doesn’t mean to be rude.
We go through the exhibits first, the simulator and the games and the displays of the planets and gravity and eclipses and life on other planets. There’s a computer that takes a picture of your face and then changes it so you look like an alien. We spend a long time there, giggling. There’s a diorama about Galileo, and I explain to Merry who he was. There’s a display about how telescopes work that neither of us is very interested in.
“Movie time?” I ask.
“Finally,” Merry says.
We go inside the big domed theatre and sit in seats that tip backward. When the lights go black, I reach over to hold Merry’s hand in case she’s scared. One by one, the silver stars come prickling out all over the inside of the dome.
“Space,” the narrator says, in a voice so deep it sounds as if it comes from the bottom of the sea. Merry sighs with pleasure.
While he talks about the planets and the stars, my mind drifts. I got an email from Regan a couple of days ago. She said her mom’s house in Montreal is really old and she has a fireplace in her bedroom. She said her mom hugs her a lot and sometimes she cries. She said they were going to go to the art gallery and some vintage clothing stores her mom knows about. She said there was a lot of French everywhere, which was confusing. She liked the link to the Bollywood site, and hoped I’d email her again and tell her what I was doing, and send her more poems. “I hope we can stay friends,” was how she finished. “I’m afraid there won’t be any weird people like us at my new school.”
I read that email over and over. I’m weird? And that’s good?
“Behold, the galaxy,” the narrator says. The stars start to thicken and swish in a creamy streak. Everybody gasps. “The Milky Way!”
We watched this same movie the last time we came, with Dex and Robert. At this precise point, Robert leaned over to me and whispered, “It looks like someone sneezed all over the sky.” I laughed until I snorted, and a bunch of people shushed me, and Dex flicked me in the head.
On our way out, we go through the gift store. We buy matching plastic bracelets with glittery moons and stars. I also get a package of freeze-dried ice cream to send to Regan.
At the last minute, I buy a postcard of the Milky Way. I’ll write my poem on the back of it. I think what I’ll do is give it to Dex. She can show it to Robert if she wants, or she can keep it to herself. I’ll try not to mind either way.
On the bus ride home, Merry falls asleep. I pull her head over to rest on my shoulder. Looking out the window, I change my mind one last time. I’ll give the postcard to Merry. She won’t understand what it means either—maybe never—but she loves the sound of it, like I do. And I know, every time she looks at it, it will make her smile.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my agent, Denise Bukowski, and Caitlin Drake and Jennifer Notman at Penguin, for their invaluable guidance. Thanks to my family, always. I gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the B.C. Arts Council.