Had Cookie ever known their mother’s arms in the way he knew was missing that day? He knew he hadn’t.
By the time he got home the cool wind had calmed, along with his distress.
His mum and Dot were sitting down to supper.
“Danny, finally. We’d about given up on you,” said Dot. “Do you realize it going on seven o’clock?”
“Sorry. I guess I lost track of time.”
It was Sunday, so Dot had cooked a roast with all the trimmings.
After supper he helped with the dishes, and when Dot and his mum were settled in the living room, he hauled the dictionary off its shelf in the dining room and looked up aura. There were three meanings. One of them had to do with headaches and epilepsy, so he discounted that one. The other two were much alike, but one seemed to apply to the very air we breathe, and the other to something more particular. It said: subtly pervasive quality or atmosphere seen as emanating from a person, place, or thing.
Okay, emanating. Emanate: to flow out from a source or origin.
In this case, the aura emanated from Rock Sand, who was the source. Danny wished the dictionary went into more detail. Both words, aura and emanate, were vague. They offered nothing he could sink his teeth into. All he knew for sure was that the emanation from Rock surrounded Janine and pulled her in. Away from him.
He needed an emanation, a first-class one, so that he could gather Janine in to himself. It was hard to think about. He doubted he had it in him to be the source of an aura, not a good one, anyway. If he could muster one up at all, it would probably be prickly like a cactus and stinky like the garbage under the sink when he let it sit too long.
Anyway, he had for sure ruined things with her. There was no fixing what he’d said.
He went into the bathroom and locked the door. He forgot all about Rock Sand for a few minutes and thought about Janine’s heart-shaped face, as it was before he had damaged it with his words, and then he fixed his mind on the smooth golden indentations hinted at above the line of her cutoffs where they hung down low and caught on her hips. If he could lick one of them, slowly, he would give up anything else he had hoped for in his whole life, including his plan for Miss Hartley.
For the rest of the evening he stayed in his bedroom. He wondered about the possibility of having a television installed in his room, so he could watch the shows he used to watch with Cookie before his mum took to the couch. Cannonball was his favourite. He supposed some rich kids had TVs in their rooms. And, according to Janine, he was rich. There was no way he was going to sit in the same room as his mum for even half an hour. Plus, Dot was there and she’d probably talk through the whole thing.
He sat in his chair and thought about having no friends. He was on his own again. But he knew which way was east; that was something, he supposed.
20
When Danny woke up the next morning, he thought for a couple of seconds that he had already done it, and his stomach turned.
He thought back to the time before he had hatched his plan. A lightness suffused him and he arose from his bed. He didn’t have to do it. It surprised him to realize how good that made him feel. Then it worried him.
By the time he got dressed he knew he hadn’t left his plan behind.
His jackknife lay on his desk along with a few stones and a nickel from yesterday. He put them in his pocket and started down the stairs. Then he remembered that Dot wanted to take him home with her, and his steps slowed.
“Morning, Danny.” She looked him over. “There’s a pile of clean clothes in the laundry basket.” She forked sausages onto a plate for him. “I just haven’t folded them yet.”
“Thanks, Auntie Dot.”
His mum looked up for a moment; her eyes were at half-mast.
As his aunt chattered, he thought about Janine. There was no way she could still like him after yesterday. Also, the trust he’d had in her had wavered when he saw the way her eyes went when she talked about Rock Sand. It vanished completely as he watched her transformation in his presence. She was crazy for that guy. She would tell him their secret when he kissed her. Danny knew that from Cookie’s old love comics. That’s what kisses did. They caused people to give up their secrets. And he knew she would let Rock kiss her again. That’s what the look on her face meant, and that’s what she meant when she said the word aura. And it went further than kisses. She wanted to do it with Rock Sand. She probably already had.
Danny groaned, and his aunt and dozy mum both looked at him.
After breakfast, he rummaged around in Cookie’s closet till he found her old copies of Young Love. He spent a good part of the morning poring over them and by the time he was done he knew he couldn’t use Janine as an accomplice, even if she forgave him. The beautiful women in the comic books looked exactly like Janine did when she talked about Rock. They ended up with the men of their dreams, but they got there at the expense of everything else in their lives. They left a trail of crap in their wakes. Danny did not wish to be part of that trail.
None of the dreamboats in Cookie’s comics looked anything like Rock Sand. If there was an opposite of him, these comic book men were it. Some of them even wore ties.
What had Cookie seen in these stories? He had never thought about this sort of thing in terms of his sister. He had just taken her comic books for granted, as she must have done with his Superman and cowboy comics. Had she longed to be like these women with the stars in their eyes, and the tears spilling down their cheeks? He could not fathom it.
He wondered if Cookie would have turned out differently if they’d had a father. For sure she would have in some ways. Maybe the detail in her nearly sixteen years of life would have differed enough from what had been that she’d still be alive. It dizzied Danny to think about it.
There were some Little Lulus and Archies mixed in with the love comics. He had read his share of Archies, but he put some Little Lulus in his room for later so he could find out what the attraction had been for Janine.
When he went back downstairs, his mum was on the couch, and Aunt Dot was in the kitchen making potato salad. He sat at the table and watched. There was no point in avoiding his aunt. She was more likely to think he was getting along okay if he was present and forthcoming.
“I’m very fond of potato salad,” he said.
“This is going to be a good big one, sweetie. It should do us for a few days.”
Us. How long was she staying?
A few years ago on a hot day in summer, Danny had decided there was no good reason he and Cookie shouldn’t have potato salad just because their mum never made it, and he went about giving it a try.
He chose a time when she had gone to lie down. It was something she did a lot, even back then. He went to the cellar and came back with three big potatoes. He was going to cook just two, but Cookie said he better do three because they should share it with their mum.
She scrubbed them clean, while Danny searched for the utensil that his mother used to peel them. It had been invented specifically for that purpose. He peeled carefully, cut each one into four pieces, and plopped them into a saucepan that Cookie had filled with water. Then he placed them on the stove to boil.
Both of them knew that this was the most important part, because it could go terribly wrong since it involved the stove. He put the lid on the pot, and turned on the burner. They both stared at it till Danny remembered that he had heard someone, maybe Aunt Dot, say, a watched pot never boils.
So they got out a deck of cards and began a game of War. Their mother came into the room a little later and took the lid off the pot to see what was inside. When the potatoes began to boil she turned down the heat. When they were done, she drained them.
“I’ll take it from here,” Danny said.
“What?”
“We’re making potato salad.”
“Oh. Okay.” She rinsed them with cold wate
r.
She left the room, and Cookie and Danny smiled at each other.
He got the Miracle Whip out of the fridge and looked in the vegetable crisper where he found celery and radishes. The celery was on the limp side, but he figured the limpness would be disguised inside the salad. He cut the potatoes into smaller chunks, as small as he could manage, put them in a bowl, and added the dressing. Cookie sliced the celery and radishes. They mixed it all together, added salt and pepper, covered it with Saran Wrap, and put it in the fridge. It looked a little soggy — Danny suspected he had added too much Miracle Whip — but not too bad. There were worse things than soggy.
They played a little more War, and then Danny went outside to cool off in the pool. He looked forward to presenting the salad at suppertime to round out whatever his mum was making. She still did most of the cooking back then.
“Danny. Supper,” she called out the kitchen window.
It was five o’clock. They always ate at five, earlier than anyone else Danny knew. It was too early, in his opinion, and he didn’t get why it had to be that way. He had asked his mum once.
“Well, it’s good to get it out of the way, isn’t it?” she’d said.
After supper she would get them to clean up so there wasn’t a trace of anything left in sight. Not a crumb.
Danny and Cookie were often hungry again when it was time for bed. If their mum heard them messing about in the kitchen, she would say, The kitchen is closed. She said it in no uncertain terms.
On the day of the potato salad, when Danny entered the kitchen Cookie was already seated at her place. He saw that there was a hamburger in the centre of each of their plates. Potato salad went with hamburgers. People ate them together when they had barbeques in their yards or went on cookouts to City Park. This was good.
He went to the fridge to get it. He moved things around and around.
“Sit down, Danny,” said his mum.
“But where’s…where’s…?”
“Your sister ate it.”
Danny looked at Cookie, who stared down at the table, turning red to the roots of her hair. She wore it in a ponytail that day.
“But…”
“Sorry, Danny,” she said.
“But…”
“Sit down,” said his mum.
It would do no good to say anything else. He had walked into a silent period. He couldn’t taste his burger, and no matter how many times he chewed each bite, it was never ready to go down.
As soon as supper was over he went outside again. He didn’t see Cookie again that day, but when he went to bed there was a note on his pillow in her left-handed scrawl: sorry danny.
The events of that day, potato salad day, were etched deep in Danny’s brain as the start of it all. There must have been inklings before that, but none that he had taken in.
She had scarfed down the entire potato salad by herself, after they had prepared it together, for the three of them.
The next day he asked her about it. “Why did you do that, Cookie?”
“I don’t know.”
“What were you thinking about when you did it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you forget that it was for all three of us?”
“No.”
“I don’t get it,” Danny said.
“Me either,” said Cookie.
He remembered asking his mother about it.
“Do you think Cookie eating all of the potato salad has to do with the hole in her heart?”
“What do you mean?” said his mum.
“Maybe she’s trying to fill it.”
Danny realized now, as he sat at the kitchen table, that he was alone in the room. He heard murmurs from the living room and slipped out the back door without explaining himself. A risky business with Dot there. That was one good thing about when it was just his mum and him: he never had to explain himself. Dot required explanations.
At the school grounds Danny found a good stick and threw it over and over and over and over again for Russell.
In recent years Cookie had asked him more than once, more than twice: Danny, do you think I’m fat?
No, he always said. But that was all. Maybe he should have said more. Picked some efficient words to say that would have worked to make her feel better.
He blamed their mum, always harping on about Cookie’s shape, her unfortunate shape. He pictured how thin she had looked in her gym clothes last April.
Please come back, Cookie. I’ll do better.
21
Danny didn’t see Janine for the rest of the week. He made a point of staying away, and she made no effort to be in touch. More than anything he wished he could turn back the clock to before he made fun of Rock Sand. He tried to remember what the last straw had been, what had caused her to run. Was it when he called him a pipsqueak? Or maybe it was when he made a joke of his hair. If only he could go back and not make fun of him at all.
He tried to tell himself that she wasn’t as wonderful as he thought. He sure didn’t like the part of her that admired that greaser the way she did. It was distasteful — one of his mum’s words. It was no good to examine it too closely though. He didn’t want to turn it into not liking some part of himself that he hadn’t known about before. That happened sometimes: dislike turned itself around and faced the other way.
Thoughts of Paul crept in from wherever they dwelled, and he pushed them back again. And thoughts of Cookie. She had loved him no matter what. She got mad at him for sure, but love was always there, like the river.
He’d heard of hermits who lived in shacks in the woods. He wondered if they were happy or sad. They couldn’t be happy. But if they were too sad they wouldn’t be able to do all the hard stuff they had to do to stay alive, like chop wood, kill food, and patch holes in their leaky roofs. Sadness took away your strength. He remembered the days of sitting in his chair, before his plan took shape, before Janine. He couldn’t have played with Russell then, let alone patched a roof. Perhaps the hermits were medium: neither happy nor sad.
It seemed a miracle to him that in the days following Cookie’s death he had managed a trip downtown with Paul. He supposed he did that during a sinking-in period, while the enormity of what had happened settled into its place, with him a permanent fixture in the middle of it.
He didn’t know what to think about that wouldn’t make him feel bad, so he took his slingshot to the river and concentrated on smooth round stones and topmost leaves in their shades of green.
Aunt Dot didn’t question why he was around home so much, and he was grateful for that. He guessed she didn’t want to make him feel worse about having no friends by talking about it. She gave him chores to do, and he was even grateful for that. He biked to the store for her, and to the library and the drugstore, and he helped with the dishes and the yard. He even dusted once when she asked him to, though that was a chore he could have done without.
When he woke up on Saturday morning his first thought was of Janine. And then he remembered that he had wrecked their friendship and that even if he hadn’t, he had decided she couldn’t be his accomplice.
He hadn’t seen her for six days. His decision and the wreckage didn’t seem so fixed now. The decision was his alone; he could reverse it or change it in any way he wanted. The wreckage was up to Janine.
After his last bite of toast with apricot jam, Danny headed out. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, and Dot commented on it.
“It’s warm out, Danny. Seventy-five already, if that’s to be believed.” She nodded towards the thermometer attached to the outside of the window frame.
He wondered what she would do if he told her to go to hell.
“Go to hell, Aunt Dot,” he said on his way down the lane. The words didn’t seem so bad if you said them cheerfully. They were just groups of letters. They could fall apart.
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He hoped Janine could forget the horrible things they had said to each other. He would be on his best behaviour and act as though everything was normal, as though he hadn’t behaved like a moron the last time they were together.
Russell trotted along beside him. They approached the backyard from the lane. No one was there. He found her sitting on the front steps with a large cat — white, grey, and orange in colour.
Janine hadn’t seen him yet. Everything in the world depended on how her face looked when she saw him standing there.
“Hi,” he said.
She looked up. A quiet smile materialized on her face.
It was enough. All’s right with the world. It was a line from a song he’d had to sing in stupid music class. But it made sense now.
“Hi,” she said. “Long time no see. Hi, Russell.”
The dog swished her tail from side to side, but kept her distance. Whimpers escaped her throat. Her trepidation due to the cat’s presence clashed with her joy at seeing Janine.
“Hi,” Danny said again. “Is your dad home?” He wished that on the way over he’d thought up a better topic to open with.
“Yeah. He’s sleeping.” She stood up. “Go sit on the stoop. I’ll get us some Kool-Aid.”
When they were settled in the backyard with their sweet cherry drinks, Danny said, “I’m sorry.”
“Never mind.”
“But…”
“I mean it. Never mind.”
“Okay.”
The cat leapt up and insinuated itself between them. Russell sat on the grass a short distance away and shifted from one haunch to the other.
“This is Pearl,” said Janine.
“Hi, Pearl.” Danny held out his hand to her.
She nosed it tentatively and gazed up at him.
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