Counting to Perfect

by Suzanne LaFleur

  “He what?”

  I looked up at the rearview mirror from my seat in the back next to Addie. I lifted her bare toes to her mouth so she could suck on them. She loved doing that and I needed her to be busy. Julia caught my eye in the mirror only for a second.

  “You aren’t old enough to get married.”

  Julia laughed. “I am old enough to get married. Remember, I turned eighteen? That was the birthday my own kid spit up on me when it was time to blow out the candles?”

  I smiled. That had been funny, actually. A lot of people had been there, and Julia was dressed all nice, but she had been holding Addie when someone brought the cake out to her. She had looked so beautiful and somehow graceful and loving as she handed Addie off to Mom and went to get changed. She returned in leggings and a sweatshirt and said that’s better and took Addie back, and then Carter lit the candles for her again.

  “Better than seventeen, when you had morning sickness, you remember that one? You were the one puking then.”

  “Yeah, that was confusing. We didn’t know why yet. My friends were probably so grossed out when I ran to the bathroom at the restaurant. And the staff probably thought I’d been drinking before I got there.” She laughed, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. Yet.

  I looked at Addie, who had forgotten her toes and seemed to be getting sleepy again.

  “Anyway, Carter,” I said.

  “Right, Carter. He asked me to marry him.”

  “Yeah. What did you say?”

  “No, of course!”

  “What do you mean, of course?”

  “I don’t want to marry Carter. Maybe I would have, you know, before Addie happened, but since she did happen, now, I don’t know, it seemed like we had to get married, to make something broken fixed.”

  “Is that why things have been funny between you two?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He asked me if you were okay.”

  “Did he really?”

  “Yeah. I think he was worried.”

  “Well, we can’t just break up, either, you know? He’s Addie’s father. He’ll be in the picture forever. Even when I’m with someone else.”

  I unbuckled my seat belt.

  “What are you doing?” Julia asked, her eyes flicking to look at me in the mirror again.

  “Coming to be with you.”

  I wiggled my way into the front passenger seat as Julia said, “Please Lord don’t let me crash this car right now because my parents will kill me Amen.”

  She was taking us up. Up a mountain, just like she had said. Beyond the metal rail, the ground was getting farther and farther away.

  “So how far from home are we now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are we heading toward home, or farther from it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, you must know something.”

  “Do I look like a GPS? Have you seen me using a GPS?”

  “No.”

  “No.” She picked up the brochure and thrust it at me. “I just read the directions from there.”

  “Oh.” There was a little picture map, but it was cartoony and didn’t look like a real place. “So…if we aren’t headed toward home, we won’t make it there tonight, because there aren’t enough hours left in the day.”

  “Hm. That’s probably true,” she said in a sarcastic voice, as if she hadn’t considered it.

  “Should I call Dad, then, and tell him we got delayed? We need another day?”

  “Don’t call Dad.”

  “What about Carter?”

  “Don’t call Carter either.”

  “But doesn’t Carter need to know where Addie is?”

  “No. Addie’s with me.”

  Was she serious?

  I sighed.

  “What part of I’m leaving didn’t you understand? I was leaving. As in not coming back.”

  I shrank down in my seat. Outside the window, the mountains looked taller and taller.

  “I think I understood that part. The part I don’t get is the you come too part.”

  “I’ll admit that’s become confusing for me, too.” Julia sounded super angry.

  “I mean, if you were leaving forever, what was going to happen to me?”

  “I don’t know. I just…I just…” Julia stopped talking.

  “Um…,” I said when she seemed to have settled down. “If you were leaving leaving, and Carter doesn’t know, did you…kidnap Addie?”

  Julia nodded slowly.

  Then she said, “I also kidnapped you.”

  My big sister was a kidnapper.

  She pulled the car over at a “scenic overlook.” That’s what the sign said. We got out.

  There were other cars there. Normal families with married parents and nobody kidnapped.

  Julia watched my eyes taking in these families, counting their members, analyzing them, as she hitched Addie tighter on her hip. “You don’t know anything about them,” she said. “And they don’t know anything about you.”

  “Go see the view.” I took Addie. “I’ll change her.”

  We’d developed a decent system for changing her in the backseat, so I did that pretty quickly, and had her back up against my shoulder in a couple minutes.

  “What a nice big sister you are,” a friendly but obviously evil woman said to me.

  But I wasn’t the big sister. I was the little sister.

  I thought about saying I’m her auntie, you dolt, but what came out instead was “You don’t know anything about me and I don’t know anything about you!”

  She looked startled, like I had punched her, which was so funny I wished Julia had seen it.

  “I suppose that’s true, love,” she said. “I suppose that’s true. Is there anything we should know about each other?”

  “What brings you to this here mountain?” I asked, making fun of her.

  “Anniversary road trip. Our fiftieth!” She beamed.

  “Sweet,” I said.

  “And yourself?”

  “I don’t think we know yet. Enjoy your trip!”

  I hurried away from the woman, as if I had somewhere to go. I looked for Julia along the rock wall that kept people from falling into the view, but when I saw her, I stopped walking.

  Without us, she seemed alone, but not lonely.

  She looked out at other mountains and between them at the fields and cows and roads and lakes and little houses. Like she could see the whole wide world.

  * * *

  —

  I’d had to help get Julia’s room ready. Mostly because she was getting too uncomfortable to move things around like that, and, with Mom and Dad on actual furniture duty, it seemed to be the little sister’s job to sort through piles of old clothes and the remains of a childhood about to be thrown in the garbage.

  Julia acted like this was the best opportunity for fun we’d had in a long time.

  “Maybe you’ll want some of my old clothes,” she said.

  Because we were six years apart, I hadn’t grown up wearing her hand-me-downs like most little sisters. Mom hadn’t saved a lot of Julia’s clothes, except for a few things for sentimental reasons, and then by the time they had me, Julia was old enough to wear her clothes for a long time and then just keep them until they were worn out. Sometimes there was a sweater or something, but not too often.

  The plan for the bedroom was to move out Julia’s desk and put the crib there; they were going to get rid of her old dresser and get a lower one that could also be a changing table. Most of the drawers would be for Julia’s clothes and then one for diapers and clothes for the baby. The baby would, apparently, grow so fast that she didn’t need lots of clothes in any one size and everything she needed for a few weeks at a time could
fit in a drawer.

  So my job was to help Julia cut down on her stuff so she could store it in less space.

  I dumped out all the clothes drawers in the middle of the floor. We were sorting into three piles: Julia, Cassie, charity.

  “How about this? When was the last time you wore this?” I held up a patterned shirt.

  “Um, before I got the beach ball implanted in my stomach.” Julia giggled from the bed.

  “Will you wear it again after you have the beach ball removed?”

  “I have no idea. You pick a pile.”

  “I’m not going to just pick a pile. What’ll happen is, in a year you’ll say I gave away or took all your favorite things….How about this green dress?”

  “Green dress, schmeen dress.”

  “Julia!”

  “Sorry!”

  “How about this: If you’ve worn it junior year or later, say ‘keep,’ okay?”

  “Okay, sure.”

  I held up something.

  She shook her head.

  Something else.

  She shook her head again.

  “Jul-i-a!”

  “I’m sorry.” She wasn’t. She giggled.

  “At this rate, you will have empty drawers, and you will have to come home from the hospital and raise your baby naked.”

  “Oh well. Then I’ll have to buy new clothes. All-new clothes for an all-new life.”

  I paused.

  “Not everything in your life will be new.”

  Julia looked at me. For the first time that hour, she was being serious. “But my life will never be the same again.”

  I wanted to hug her. At least, part of me did. Or maybe ask her to tell me more about it, then tell her everything was going to be okay.

  But I didn’t want to be the one taking care of her. She was bigger than me. She was supposed to take care of me. And there I was, kneeling hip-deep in a pile of clothes, trying to make her tell me if she would ever wear any of it again because Lord knew she had to wear something when she was a mom.

  My sister was going to be a mom.

  She was watching me. I cleared my throat.

  “How about this? How about if I make the three piles, and you can look through, and if you feel one way or the other about something, you can just fix it, okay? Like when we can’t decide if we want pizza or Chinese and then I pick one and you see if you feel sad?”

  “Yeah, okay,” she said.

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah.” She smiled. “I said okay.”

  * * *

  —

  I came up beside Julia and put my free arm around her. She kept looking out.

  I held Addie tight, away from the edge.

  “Hey, Julia?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can today be the new best day you’ve had in a long time?”

  “I would like that. I would like that an awful lot.”

  “Go ahead then. Keep taking us up. I won’t call home on you.”

  The mountain turned out to be so beautiful and also a lot cooler than everywhere else had been lately. I was glad I’d brought a sweatshirt. We pulled over at another rest area to put Addie in pajamas because that was really the only long stuff we had for her. I sat in back with her again after that, clapping her hands together and then letting her stick her fingers in my mouth to check out my teeth.

  “Does she ever bite you when she eats?” I asked Julia.

  “Yeah, sometimes. It hurts!”

  “What do you do about it?”

  “I ping her.”

  “You ping her? Are you allowed to do that?”

  Julia caught my eye in the rearview mirror again.

  Right. Are you allowed to feed her beans? To take her on a vacation so her dad doesn’t know where she is? What was the point of all these questions?

  “Just on her foot. It gets her attention. She has to eat, and she can’t eat if she does that.”

  I nodded.

  There were a lot more travelers heading up the mountain.

  “What if there’s no place to stay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if there’s no place to stay? I mean, no empty rooms?”

  “Who are you, the Virgin Mary?”

  “Yep. We’ll have to swaddle Addie and lay her in a manger.”

  “Away in a manger, no room at the inn,” Julia sang from the front seat. Addie turned to try to figure out where the singing was coming from.

  “She likes when you sing,” I said.

  “I sound terrible when I sing.”

  “You don’t.”

  Julia used to put me to bed, when I was four and she was ten. I asked for her specifically, every night. She’d sing me the ABCs and then “Twinkle, Twinkle,” which were the same tune, so that was perfect. One night she sang me “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and then I sleepily asked, Why are you making me think of spiders at bedtime? and she laughed and I laughed and she said not to worry, it was just a song. And then she would read me a book and I would never hear the end of the book because I would be asleep.

  “I’ve always loved the way you sing.”

  “I know there’s a room, by the way, because I called ahead, when you were trying to clean your teeth this morning. They usually wouldn’t have had one so late, but there was a cancellation. So it’s ours, just for one night.”

  “Amazing….Is it a hundred dollars again?”

  “Don’t you worry about that. You know what, though? It’s a nice-enough place, I bet they’ll give you a free toothbrush at the front desk.”

  * * *

  —

  The car climbed and climbed the mountain and finally we got to the beautiful, fancy log cabin of a hotel at the top.

  “It’s more expensive, isn’t it?”

  “Ask me no questions.”

  Julia’s head was in the clouds as much as this mountain was. But like, literally. I could see them, the little clouds now below the mountain.

  Had she really needed this so bad?

  I supposed it was worth my life savings. If she had been going to become a crazy person had we all stayed home.

  Our room was a little nicer than the one the night before, and high up, with a view of the mountains.

  “We were lucky to get this view!” I said.

  “It’s the top of a mountain,” Julia said. “Every room has a view.”

  I claimed the bed by the glass doors to the porch.

  “Shall we check out today’s pool?” Julia asked in a snooty voice.

  “Certainly, dear sister.”

  We stopped, of course, for Addie to eat a little.

  I regretted forgetting to dry the bikini but wiggled into it anyway. The big T-shirt was a lost cause, so I rummaged around in my duffel bag for a smaller one.

  “Don’t,” Julia said.

  “Huh?” I looked up.

  “Don’t cover it.” Julia had a sort-of-crooked smile.

  I stared at her.

  Then her smile turned real. “Looks good. You look good.”

  “Oh….Thanks.”

  “Don’t forget to sunscreen that white stomach of yours.”

  I looked down. She was totally right; my stomach was super pale from my wearing competitive suits all the time.

  “But not today,” she said. “The pool is inside. We’ll meet you there when we finish.”

  I followed the arrows through the hallways to the pool and got in.

  It felt like being outside because it was all glassed in with huge windows, and from there you could see the mountains, just like Julia had said. Like swimming in the sky.

  Julia showed up with Addie and handed her over with no hesitation—“Dunk her all you like”—and went to sit in the hot tub.
Addie and I had a great time.

  Later, in our room, Julia asked if I’d brought anything fancy to wear.

  “Fancy? Let me explain again that I had no time, and no idea where we were going.”

  “Hm.” Julia bit her lip, thinking.

  She dumped all our clothes out onto the beds. When my phone tumbled out, I grabbed it and turned it on, but there were no bars on it way up here on the mountain, so I shut it back off. She gave me a look, but I shrugged. “I promised. I’m not going to call anyone.”

  Julia dug through our clothes and came up with two black tops she thought were good enough. “Here.” She handed me one of them. “And your long jeans.” Then she decorated us with lip gloss and eye shadow and mascara.

  She paused over Addie, who really only had the jammies.

  “Oh well,” she said. “She’s a baby, and it’s nighttime.”

  And then we went down to the fancy restaurant.

  It was probably the closest thing to a romantic dinner I’d ever had, except it was with my sister and her kid.

  Nobody seemed to mind the baby, or that we were young. Everyone cooed over Addie in her carrier and eventually she dozed off. We ordered entrees and nothing else, but that also seemed to be okay.

  While we were sitting there, the sun set, right outside the windows. Well, maybe not right outside, but it was beautiful.

  Our waitress brought us sparkling water in champagne flutes.

  “Cheers.” Julia held up her glass, and I clinked mine to it.

  After the waitress walked away, I said, “I don’t really like bubbles in my water.”

  “It’s just for fun,” Julia said. “It’s cute.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I set down my glass. “You didn’t really kidnap me, you know. I decided to come.”

  “I know. Trouble is, when you’re twelve, what you want and what you decide doesn’t matter as much as what the grown-ups think.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  Julia laughed. “Of course you have.”

  * * *

  —

  Back in our room, we turned off all the lights and went out on the porch to look at the stars. There were more of them than at home, and they were brighter. Really the best darn display the heavens had ever put on.