“Race or religion, people are always battling
on one kind of moral ground or another. The question
is whether we should start this story on Thanksgiving Day.”
Cal looks thoughtful.
“So, would Jeremy know it was Thanksgiving?
Who would tell him?
And would we want this to be the day he was freed?”
I can’t help but smile at his energy, his effort.
It makes me want to say I’m sorry
for not wanting to share Aggie with him,
for not caring enough about this fiction we are making.
“You got stuck with a crap history tutor, Cal,” I tell him.
“But a damn fine musician.
Even if you don’t show up for jazz band two days running.”
94
I know that somewhere
in Mom’s laundry list of unread e-mails
is one from the Evergreen High attendance office
(and maybe one from Mr. Orson, too),
noting my two days of unexcused absences
from zero-period jazz band.
I should feel guilty about this,
like I feel guilty about letting poor Irish Cal
do way more than half the work for our A-PUSH project,
about still not having chosen a solo
for the holiday band concert.
I should feel afraid for the possible consequences, but
they shrivel in the wake of Dad’s after-dinner proclamation:
“This weekend, we’re all going to visit Holland House,
a special school—a home—for kids like Steven.”
A hunger for Dave’s careless grin
is the only feeling in my stomach,
as I think I’ll skip jazz band again tomorrow.
95
Friday morning, Mom begins feeding my brother
a steady diet of
“Tomorrow, we are going to take a drive.
Tomorrow, we are going to visit a fun place.
We will visit for a little while,
then come right home and have lunch,”
along with the symmetrical waffles
and tepid mac and cheese.
I almost forget to pick up Justine, whose car is in the shop, on the way to school.
“Thanks for the lift.” She wafts into the passenger seat
on a wave of gardenia.
The first inhale is pleasure, but the second, third,
turn the scent cloying.
Justine grins as she watches my nose crinkle.
“It’s Calvin Klein. Mom brought home a sample from work.
Forgot your thing about smells.”
“No.” I try to unfurrow my brow. “I like it.”
“Ned does.” She giggles.
“He says it makes my neck smell delicious.”
“He says that? Ew!” I squeal. But now I’m smiling,
even though Justine has flooded my car
with an overpowering stink of flowers.
I pull onto Main Street,
finally finding a bit of sorrow in my numb heart
for the way our lives,
which used to revolve so much around each other,
have begun to drift into strange new orbits
polluted with scents and boys
and secrets.
Well, my secrets.
96
The high school parking lot is close to empty
at this early hour. Still, I pull into a spot far from
the building.
“Daisy, do you really need me to walk a mile in these
heels?” She wiggles her stilettoed feet, sighs.
“I do like how Ned is so tall.”
I flash to a memory of Justine,
dressed in high ten-year-old style,
down to her sparkle-toed half-inch heels,
standing between my parents
outside the artists’ exit of a concert hall.
(Shirley was at our house watching Steven,
still a manageably small, silent little boy
who would passively push cars across the floor for hours,
whose ticks and stims had not begun to destroy walls,
draw blood.)
It was my first time playing a solo
with the state orchestra, so, of course,
she’d come to listen.
I’ve never liked remembering that day,
its highlight feature being the mistake I made
just a few notes in.
Aggie had told me a zillion times,
“Don’t worry if you hit a bad note;
just put it behind you and play the next one.
Keep moving forward through the music.”
But the instant I heard that absurdly awful E-flat escape
my instrument, everything I knew about the trumpet
floated with it, out into the cavernous auditorium.
I could almost see notes, technique, counts
as sparkles of dust skittering
along the beams of stage light
away from my grasp.
I dissolved into four beats of silence,
redeemed only by the conductor’s hang-in-there smile,
his “and ah-one, two,” the encouraging lilt of his baton
that brought me back to the music.
After, I bowed at the audience’s polite applause,
did not break again until I was back in the greenroom,
awash in confused humiliation.
How could I, the prodigy,
the sister-of-the-living-mistake
who never made them herself,
fall so far from my pedestal so fast?
Now, the memory shifts,
the sting of the false note fading, replaced by the image
of Justine’s thousand-watt grin shining
from between my parents’ uncertain half-smiles:
“You looked amazing in that blue dress!”
“But I . . . but I . . .”
Even then, words had a habit of failing me.
“What, you missed a note? Nobody noticed.”
“You did.”
“No, I didn’t. You are amazing and I dare anyone
to say different.” Her eyes as defiant
as they were the morning of Cal O’Casey’s homeroom snub,
her preteen back straight,
balancing perfectly on her heels.
“Let’s go get ice cream.”
97
“What’s the matter, Daisy?” Justine asks me now.
“You look so upset.”
“Were you right? Are your parents splitting up?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Then what is it?”
I am hungry to tell her, to ask her what to do,
but I choke on the words, afraid
that Justine might finally fail to make me laugh—
be unable to piece the shattered mess of me
back together.
And then where will I turn?
“It’s . . . hard to talk about.”
“Are you in trouble?”
Justine’s question is so quick,
her implied worry so obvious,
that I wonder if she, too, is keeping secrets,
if what she’s doing with her new boyfriend
is maybe more than I imagined it could be.
“Nothing like that.
It’s just that life has gotten so confusing lately.
I feel like everyone wants me to agree to things
&
nbsp; I don’t even want to think about.”
Justine, puzzled, looks at her watch.
“You’re late for jazz band.”
“It’s okay.”
“You’ve never said that before.”
She squeezes my right shoulder.
“You’re my best friend, Daisy.
When you’re ready to talk, I’ll listen.”
She opens the car door,
plants her stylish shoes on the frost-covered pavement,
and gives me a friendly wave.
Her back is straight, her walk eternally confident.
As if on cue, Ned’s car pulls in. He drives up alongside her.
Justine’s bright laugh echoes across the parking lot
as she gets in and is chauffeured
to the closest row of spots after all.
98
What am I doing, sitting in this parking lot,
listening to raindrops pelt the roof of my car,
not playing my trumpet?
A tap on my window.
I roll it down for Dave.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in jazz band, Daisy-brains?”
“Is that all anyone wants to know?”
“Well, whatcha sitting here for?”
“I have a headache,” my stupid mouth answers.
I sound frighteningly like my mother.
Dave goes round to the passenger side of the car. Gets in.
I turn on the CD player.
Ella Fitzgerald’s unmistakable voice
eases into “Body and Soul,”
holding on to each note like it tastes good in her mouth.
“Thought you said you had a headache.”
Dave gives a lock of my brown hair a little tug.
“Not that kind,” I answer, as if that means something,
blushing at thoughts of the Dave-and-me fantasies
I’ve dreamed to this track.
“What kind, then?”
“The kind that makes me want to have a little ‘relax’
out here in my car.”
“Maybe it’s from all the dark eye makeup,” he says.
“Do you have a problem with my eyes?”
I ball my fist.
“Hey, hey, no. It’s a cool look; it just . . .
doesn’t seem you, y’know?”
“People can change,” I snap.
“I guess we’ve both changed.”
He scrapes his fingers through his hair.
“Change . . .” I let my hands relax.
Feel the fragility of the word as it sighs through my lips,
like sorry, its meaning easily worn away by overuse,
from a start that’s vague already;
as easily for the bad as for the good.
“. . . is scary.”
“It’s the story of life.” Dave puts his hand on top of mine,
rubs away the lingering traces of fist,
sending shivers of want up my spine.
“Then life is kind of a horror film.” I try to smile.
“Wanna go to The Movie House tonight?”
He tilts the seat back so he can look out the car’s skylight.
“We’re going to see the new Bond.”
“I already saw it with my parents.”
The words sound lame the second they leave my lips.
Worse than lame:
I-just-turned-down-a-real-date-with-Dave-Miller stupid.
“Besides, I have to babysit, er, hang out with Steven.”
He shrugs.
“I never let the twinlets interfere with my plans.”
“That’s different.
Your stepmom can just get a regular sitter.
We can’t anymore.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
Unlike super-citizen Ned,
Dave doesn’t pretend he hasn’t heard the gossip,
the story told by the neighbor lady
who was watching Steven the afternoon
of the Great Closet Door Kick-In Incident.
“Still, your parents kind of own your time.”
“I know. I wish I could go to the movies tonight. I just . . .”
His eyes lock on to mine;
fringed by thick black lashes,
those knee-jellifying, brown-flecked-with-yellow irises
meet my basic blues.
“I get it.”
He puts his hand behind my neck
in a way that’s starting to feel familiar.
A morning kiss, firm, tantalizing.
I lean forward, my elbow grazing the horn.
We are pulled apart by the sharp honk.
“Oops.”
“Very romantic,” he teases.
He is smiling, straightening the rumple
he’s made of my hair,
even though he never fixes his own.
“How ’bout I pick you up tomorrow at your house?
Seven-ish?”
“I’ll be ready.” Another lame reply.
He gets out of my car, saunters toward the school,
and I am watching him walk away again,
replaying my stupid words, wishing
that tonight I’d be going to watch James Bond
once again save the world
instead of laying out Blokus pieces,
even though I know it may be one of the last weeks
I’ll be living in a prison of boredom and frustration
and a little bit of fear.
Why can’t I be as casual about Steven
as Dave is about the twinlets?
Or maybe he isn’t.
Maybe he, like me,
is engaged in the kind of unspoken rebellion
you don’t want to perform too brightly,
since you’re never certain
anyone in your family will notice
your darkened eyes, skeleton shoes, tousled hair,
patchy attendance record.
You may be sacrificing body and soul
on a ghostly battlefield, fighting across a divide
seen by no one
but you.
99
“Wanna get Thai after orchestra tomorrow?”
Justine asks me at lunch.
“I can’t go to orchestra. Family plans.”
“You never have family plans.
Now you’ve got to tell me what’s up!”
“It’s a secret. Promise not to tell Ned?” I whisper.
Justine almost puts on her
you-can’t-believe-how-scary-these-freckles-can-be expression, the one she uses
when a freshman hogs the bathroom mirror
or Ashleigh Anderson calls us “you girls.”
“Please, Jussie?”
I haven’t called her that since we were in third grade,
when she decided she wanted to have a nickname
like mine
even though I’d pointed out that
Justine was a cool name and, really,
there was no time for me to write out Margaret-Mary
on every spelling test.
Still, we were Daisy and Jussie for most of the year,
even though she is so a Justine:
clever, sharp-witted,
and compassionate in her oh-so-feisty way.
Her scary-freckle-face subsides.
“Okay, Margaret-Mary.”
“My parents are going to put Steven in an institution.”
And the words are out,
like school cafeteria mashed potatoes
slopped onto a lunch tray,
&nb
sp; congealing under gray-white gravy,
ugly and cold.
“Oh my God.” Her voice is hushed.
And I know she won’t tell Ned,
despite being chronically glued to his side.
Honestly, I am happy for her, even a little jealous,
and so, so lonely.
100
“Hey, babe.”
It’s Ned, of course.
Justine slides over
to make room for him on the bench beside her.
“We were just talking about you,” she says.
“How I love that you’re so tall, so I can wear high heels.”
Her comment is adorable,
her lie seamless.
“They look amazing.”
Ned wraps his thin arm around her shoulders.
“I could never stand in shoes like that,”
I say, finding my tongue.
“Sneakers totally suit you,” Justine says.
I look down at today’s Keds.
Despite my recent attempts at Gothdom, somehow,
today, an old pair sporting kelly-green shamrock stamps
and rainbow laces
has found its way onto my feet.
“Erin go bragh!” Ned laughs.
It’s a Gaelic phrase, meaning “Ireland forever.”
The Sound of Letting Go Page 14