The Key to the Golden Firebird

by Maureen Johnson

  Brooks didn’t reply.

  “Are you okay?” May asked. “What happened?”

  “I called Jamie,” Brooks said, her voice raspy.

  “What did she say?”

  “They’re dating now.”

  “Dave and Jamie?”

  Brooks nodded and pushed the advance button on her CD player a few times.

  “I’m sorry,” May said, running her finger along the edge of the door frame. “What happened?”

  “Jamie says that he and I were never dating,” Brooks said. “Not officially.”

  “Not officially? What does that mean?”

  “We never said it. He never said it.” Brooks smirked. “It wasn’t official. So it was okay for him to sleep with Jamie.”

  “Dave slept with Jamie?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  The logical side of May’s brain was sending her urgent messages, telling her that she didn’t have time to stop and talk to Brooks right now, that it was partially Brooks’s fault that she was so behind. But the sight of her sister slumped up against her headboard, her hair hanging limply over her shoulders, looking as defeated as May had ever seen her—it seemed bad enough to merit taking a few minutes away. May came over and sat at the foot of Brooks’s bed.

  “Do you want anything?” May asked quietly.

  “No.”

  May heard a gentle plunking sound. She glanced over to see water dripping down into a trash can in the corner of the room.

  “Your ceiling’s leaking again,” she said, looking at the yellowing spot that the water was coming from.

  “Why do you think I put that there?”

  She was cranky as ever, but May could see tears welling up in Brooks’s eyes. She got up and moved to where Brooks was sitting. Aside from the funeral and when they were small, May had never seen Brooks cry. It was a little bizarre. May reached out to put a hand on her sister’s shoulder, but Brooks turned to her with a decidedly unfriendly expression.

  “Just go, okay?” she said.

  “I was just—”

  “Go.”

  “Fine,” May said. She felt a little stung. Only Brooks could make her feel bad for something like that.

  Brooks put her headphones back on and May got up and left. Back in her room, the television roared up from below. May rubbed her eyes and kept reading.

  May took a minute to buy herself a soft pretzel and a soda for breakfast from a cart on the corner of Thirty-fourth and Chestnut, right around the corner from school. It was a sharp, crisp morning with a bright blue sky. Because she had only slept for a couple hours the night before, she was overtaken by that strange trembling and hyperawareness that comes from pulling an all-nighter.

  She saw Linda coming down the street from the direction of the subway. She looked just as exhausted as May. She had on her thin, rimless glasses instead of her contacts, and she walked quickly, pulling her sweater tight against her chest.

  “You sleep?” Linda asked as she approached May.

  “An hour and a half.”

  “I think I slept two,” Linda said, accepting a piece of May’s pretzel.

  “Brooks was having a crisis,” May explained as they walked down Walnut through the throngs of Penn students hurrying to their morning classes.

  “About her court thing?”

  “No. About her boyfriend. That guy Dave.”

  “What’s going on with him?”

  “He dumped her,” May said. “And she has to go for counseling, starting tonight.”

  “Not a good time to be Brooks,” Linda said, reaching for May’s soda and taking a long sip. “You’re still coming over to my place afterward, right?”

  “I’m thinking about moving in.”

  “Fine by me,” Linda said. “I could get rid of Frank that way.”

  The biology exam was twenty-two pages long and included five diagrams and three essay questions. May worked until the very last minute, furiously scribbling out her final sentences. It was an extensive, somewhat painful test, but May had known all of the material. The only problem was time. If she’d had four or five hours to finish it, she would have been a lot more content.

  Linda stumbled up to May’s seat.

  “I think I just got my Ph.D.,” she said.

  Dazed, they headed out of the building, toward the subway.

  Linda’s house, one of the only ones on the block built after 1776, was in a small gated area called Independence Mews. Each floor had only one or two rooms. The kitchen and laundry room took up the whole basement level. The living room (with the wood-burning stove that May loved) was on the first floor. The bedrooms were on the next two floors. Everything was cozy and compact.

  Since they were both completely exhausted, they headed right up to the third floor, where Frank and Linda’s rooms were.

  “Is Frank here?” May said quietly as they passed his door. She had never actually seen Frank—he was kind of like the Easter Bunny to her.

  “No,” Linda said, pushing open her door. “He’s doing some kind of big experiment with gasoline today. Maybe he’ll blow himself up.”

  Though it was extremely tiny, Linda’s room always awed May. One of her walls was a bright violet, and the other three were cream. Her slender window was guarded by purple blinds, and a large round paper shade covered the overhead light. The bed was in a metal frame and covered in a thick cream-colored duvet. Aside from her desk chair, the only place to sit was in a pile of multicolored cushions in the corner. Linda set herself down in these.

  “I’m seriously going to die,” Linda said. “You can take the bed. I’ll be fine here. I sleep here all the time.”

  Linda leaned back on the cushions. May kicked off her shoes and climbed up the metal rungs. Linda’s cream-colored duvet was very thick and soft, and May sank into it appreciatively.

  “So,” Linda said, “it’s over.”

  This should have filled May with elation, but for some reason, it didn’t. School gave her life some structure. She didn’t want to think about another long summer stretching out in front of her.

  “Have you seen Pete?” Linda asked.

  “Not since Saturday,” May said, burrowing into the thick folds. “But I’ve heard about him. Ask me how much I’ve heard.”

  “You sound bitter,” Linda said, propping herself up. “You got details, didn’t you?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Bad?”

  “I feel…unclean.”

  “Unclean? Or jealous?”

  “The weirdest part is that I got this feeling like it wasn’t even the first time,” May said. “He’s been dating her for what, not even a month? I mean, what the hell?”

  “He’s sleeping with her? Who told you? Pete or Nell?”

  “Nell.”

  “Are you sure she’s not lying?”

  “I don’t think so,” May said. “She described the inside of his house.”

  “They had sex inside his house?”

  “Maybe we should talk about this later,” May said. Before, when she’d found this out, she’d just thought it was weird. Now that the exam was over, the facts were starting to sink in, and they were immeasurably depressing.

  “May?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re bummed, aren’t you?”

  “Kind of.”

  May rolled to the side of the bunk and looked down at Linda.

  “The other night,” she said, “when Brooks got busted—Pete stayed with me. He sat with me and…”

  “And?”

  “Well, he just held my hand. But it was weird. It felt kind of huge.”

  “Huge?”

  “Yeah,” May said, hanging her head over the edge. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” Linda said. “He likes you. You like him.”

  “If he likes me so much, why is he sleeping with a girl I work with?”

  “It could be that he thinks he has no shot with you.”

  “I guess that’s one way of han
dling rejection….”

  “Think about it,” Linda said. “Before you knew that he dated this other girl and that he was sleeping with Nell, you never seemed to think of him like he was a guy. Now you seem to. So maybe it’s good.”

  “Good how?” May grumbled, rolling onto her back and propping her feet against the ceiling. “Good for making me feel jealous and pathetic?”

  “Talk to him.”

  “And say what?” May asked. “I can’t compete with Nell. I’m not ready for that yet.”

  Linda fell silent. May listened to the traffic passing by out on Locust Street.

  “If it really bothers you, maybe you should stay away from him for a while,” Linda suggested. “I mean, if you’re not going to do anything about it, why torture yourself?”

  “Stay away?” This hadn’t occurred to May before. “I’d have to stop the lessons.”

  “It sounds like you’re almost ready anyway.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” May said, closing her eyes. “Maybe I need to do this one on my own.”

  Palmer was completely alone in the house that night. She didn’t mind. She planned on taking advantage of that fact to conduct her most thorough examination of her mother’s room yet—she was going to do the top shelves of the walk-in closet.

  She started by carefully removing her mother’s shoe boxes and sweaters, arranging them on the floor exactly as they’d been set up on the shelf so she would be able to put everything back as it had been. As she had expected, she hit a gold mine. There were yearbooks, photo albums, a heavy crate of vinyl records. She spread herself out on the bed and took a long look through everything.

  The most interesting items could be found in the photo albums. These were early ones, from when her parents had started dating. She spent a good two hours paging through them. There was her mom in leather pants and ripped shirts and Halloween-like makeup; then there she was in her nursing school uniform, looking demure. There was her dad, with the same goofy face he made in every picture—his huge eyes popping open and the strange grin that obscured his bottom teeth. There he was with his college roommate Richard Camp at a toga party. There he was, eighteen years old, posing in front of the Firebird, which he had just purchased.

  These pictures fascinated Palmer. The idea that her parents had had lives before she and her sisters had come along—totally different lives—was hard for her to believe. The pictures had been taken in front of bars, in dorm rooms, in hallways at parties. Her dad with a beer in one hand, his other arm wrapped all the way around her mom’s tiny waist. She could see the slow change as she flipped through. Her mother cut back on the makeup; her father grew a little larger. There were pictures of them in cutoff jeans and T-shirts (her mother’s pregnant belly proudly popping out) getting Brooks’s room ready. Then there was May, with the head of red hair she’d been born with. And then the picture labeled Me and Peach. That was her father holding her when she’d just been born. She looked incredibly tiny in her father’s arms; he practically had her resting in one of his hands.

  After a couple of hours, Palmer started packing up. As she replaced the items on their shelf, she realized the shoe box she was holding was very heavy. She took off the lid. Inside she found a bronze canister, shaped like a vase. In small block letters along the bottom was an engraving that read Michael Scott Gold.

  For a moment Palmer thought she’d found a strange trophy. Then it hit her. These were the ashes.

  Time stopped moving for Palmer for about ten minutes.

  Palmer took the canister from the box and willed herself to walk over and set it gently against the pillows on her father’s side of the bed. She stared at it. She couldn’t put it back, not up there in a shoe box in the back of the closet. It was impossible.

  No. She had to take care of the canister. It was her job now.

  She hurriedly replaced all of the other items in the closet, including the empty shoe box. When everything was as it had been before, she plucked the canister up and quickly took it to her room.

  10

  Without the burden of having to study, May had no problem sleeping in on the first few days of the summer. She had to be at Presto at three, so she lay in bed until eleven, basking in the cool breeze from her clickity oscillating fan.

  When she came downstairs, she found her mother sitting at the table in a pair of black running pants and a black T-shirt. There was a box of doughnuts on the table. May eyed them. Her mom must have picked them up on the way back from dropping Brooks off at the pool for work. Her mother never bought doughnuts unless she had something unpleasant to tell them.

  “Doughnuts?” she said. “Okay. What’s going on?”

  “Well,” her mother said, casually piling up a stack of laundry detergent coupons, “the Starks offered us something.”

  “One of their boys? Say no. We don’t have any Ritalin to give them.”

  “Their RV. It turns out they rented a spot at a campground in Ocean City, Maryland, for a few days, starting on the first of July, but they can’t use it.”

  RV? May’s mind tried to connect these letters to an object, but the only thing she could come up with was one of those extremely large trailers.

  “A what?”

  “Like a Winnebago. They keep it at Bonnie’s mother’s house.”

  “But that’s so soon,” May said.

  “I know.”

  “I have work,” May said, sitting down with her coffee. “Brooks has work, and she has her alcohol awareness classes. And Palmer has her softball camp. We can’t go then.”

  “You can take off. Brooks can take off, and we can work around her class schedule. Palmer can miss a few practices.”

  “But why?”

  “We need to spend some time together,” her mother said, peering at the coupons. “I think we need to regroup a little.”

  “But we’ve never been camping,” May said slowly, taking a chocolate doughnut from the box. “I mean, we don’t even know how to camp.”

  “I know how to camp. I went camping when I was younger, and your father and I used to go.”

  “You used to camp?”

  “Sure.” Her mom nodded. “Why do you seem so surprised?”

  “How did you keep your hair spiky in the woods? Did you have to use maple sap or something?”

  “It wasn’t that spiky. And I just used to tie it back under a bandanna.”

  “Punk-rock nurse in the wild, using her hair to trap small animals…”

  “New wave, not punk,” her mother corrected. “Anyway, you’ll love it. We’ll camp right on the beach.”

  “We’re going to park a huge RV on the beach?” May asked. “Won’t it…sink?”

  “The park is next to the beach. It’s paved.”

  Palmer passed through the kitchen and grabbed a doughnut from the box. She was about to leave, but her mom caught her by the sleeve of her shirt.

  “What?” Palmer growled.

  “Just explain that it’s a family emergency,” her mom said to May.

  “But it’s not a family emergency.”

  “What’s not a family emergency?” Palmer yawned and took a bite of her doughnut.

  “Going to Maryland in an RV,” May said.

  Even Palmer couldn’t ignore something like that. “Mwhuh?” she replied as she chewed her doughnut.

  “On July first,” May added.

  “Mhwha?”

  “To Maryland! They have crabs there!” their mom suddenly jumped in, as if the presence of crustaceans would transform the prospect of spending days trapped together in a parking lot into a living dream.

  “Mom,” May said, “RVs are enormous. They’re like houses. How are you going to drive something like that to Maryland?”

  “It’ll be fine,” Mom said. “They explained everything to me. And it’s gorgeous. They took me through it. It has a bathroom, and a shower, and a TV, and everything.”

  “That’s when my summer session starts,” Palmer finally said. “I can’t go.�
��

  “I’m not asking you, I am telling you. We need some time together, and we are going. It’s up to each of you to get yourselves ready to go.”

  “I’m supposed to take the driver’s exam…,” May said.

  “You’ll take it when we get back. Or take it before you go. It will be fine.”

  Palmer leaned against the counter, chomping furiously on her doughnut. When she was finished, she left the room without a word.

  Palmer stalked into the backyard. It wasn’t a great idea to go and exercise with a fat doughnut still sitting in her stomach, but she had to do something.

  She bent her knees just slightly and hung herself down over her toes until she could easily straighten out her legs and put her palms on the ground. The grass was already dry and warm, and there was a fat bee buzzing around nearby.

  She knew perfectly well that the girls who got on the professional teams, the Olympic teams, and the good college teams all went to camps and had personal coaches. She was way, way behind. Her dad had known all about this. You needed to be serious about it; otherwise, you were just another girl with a pile of worthless school trophies and a few pictures in the sports pages in the yearbook. Brooks’s entire dresser was filled with trophies—what had they gotten her? Now the only thing Brooks did was lifeguard at the pool. It was pathetic.

  As she hung upside down, she saw her mother coming out the back door with her cup of coffee in her hand. Palmer gracefully moved her right foot back into a lunge and pretended not to notice her.

  “Do you have a second, Palm?”

  “No,” Palmer said, reversing her feet and stepping back with her left.

  “You seem mad.”

  Palmer deepened her lunge and concentrated on stretching out her inner thigh.

  “It’s only a few days. And I thought you liked the beach.”

  “I start summer session then,” Palmer said simply.

  “You’ll only miss three days.”

  “We play our first game for the scouts on the sixth,” Palmer said.

  “We’ll be back by then.”

  “But I won’t have time to get ready!”

  “It’s just a game,” her mom said. “You know how to play. You’ll be fine. Then you can start the session on Monday.”