He ignores me.
I brood for a while, not so much mad at him about the France thing as I am about the whole universe shifting on me again. Am I supposed to solve this problem between Mom and Dad? I’m eighteen, for God’s sake. Aren’t they supposed to be helping me?
It’s getting too hot to sit in the sun anymore; plus, I think maybe a change of scenery will shake something loose in my head. So I decide to go check out the rain forest next door at the Mirage. Next door, ha. It takes practically a half-hour to walk over there. I have to go back through Caesars Palace, out the front doors, and down the long driveway to the street, all the while hearing some faux Julius Caesar’s voice booming over the loudspeaker, trying to lure people into his empire. At the Mirage, I get onto a moving sidewalk that deposits me into a wide corridor with a gift shop on one side and a tigers’ cage on the other. Habitat, I should say—like you’d see in a zoo. There are cement caves and cliffs, palm trees and greenery, a big pool for the two Siberian white tigers to play in. The whole space is jammed with people, twelve deep, all along the plate glass, as if they’re watching a huge television screen.
I edge my way through the crowd, glancing at the caged tigers behind the glass. One sleeps, its huge paw draped over a rock cliff, vulnerable as a child. The other prowls. From one end of the cage to the other he goes, up the cliffs and down again. The pattern of his movement fascinates me, and I stop and watch a while, mainly to see if and how it will change. But it doesn’t change. The tiger takes the same route through his cage again and again, back and forth, up and down, as if to constantly monitor the limitations of his world.
That’s it, I think! That’s what I was trying to say to Dad. He’s spent the last six months prowling the glass cage of the world that a 9–5 job made of his life, coming up against the edges of it—just like the tiger. The difference is, the glass walls in the tiger’s cage are real. Dad’s aren’t. Winning LOTTO CASH took them away. Or, at least made the cage a whole lot larger.
That’s why he should go to France.
By now I’m feeling pretty darn metaphysical and pleased with myself. Dang, I think, Mom would be proud of me for figuring this out. Then I think, oh yeah, Mom. What if she doesn’t want Dad to come to France? What if she’s perfectly happy there all alone?
One thing I know for sure: she doesn’t like surprises. I look at my watch. It’s eight o’clock in the evening in Paris. She might be in. I have the phone number of her hotel folded up in my wallet, and I get it out now and look at it a long time. I know that the emergency she thought we might need it for would be some kind of accident, like the one I imagined on that Sunday when she and Dad came to tell me the news about winning the lottery. I find a phone, punch in my credit card number, then the number Mom gave me.
There’s a lot of clicking, then it rings: shrill, foreign rings.
“Bonjour. Hotel de Notre Dame.”
“Madame Hammond, s’il vous plait.”
Then Mom’s voice, anxious. “Hello?”
“We’re okay,” I say.
“Emma?”
I take a deep breath. “Mom?” I say. “Would it be okay if Dad came to see you?”
“Here?” she asks. ““To France? He wants to do that?”
“Yes,” I lie.
“Emma—”
“What?”
“Is there something wrong?” she asks.
“No,” I lie again. “It’s just—Dad wants to come, but he won’t ask you if it’s okay. He thinks you want to be alone.”
She’s quiet for so long that I’m afraid she’s trying to figure out how to tell me, gently, that he’s right. When, finally, she says, “Tell him, yes, come,” I know it took her so long to speak because she’s crying.
I promise to call back as soon as we make a plan.
This, of course, is a trickier issue than she knows. Dad’s going to be furious if I tell him I called Mom; plus, I know it would be better for him to come to the conclusion that he needs to go to France himself. I want him to see what I see: that not to go would be to keep prowling the perimeter of some cage that’s no longer there.
I find him in our room at Caesars Palace, sitting on the black leather couch and perusing the marked-up road maps he’s got spread out on the smoked glass coffee table.
“I’m thinking I’ll sleep a couple of hours,” he says. “Then we can head out, ride into the evening when it’s cooler. If we hit it, I figure we can get to L.A. by midnight.”
“Dad,” I blurt out. “I really think you ought to go to France.”
“Emma, would you get off that?” he says. “We’re halfway through this trip, and I’m supposed to drop everything and go to France?”
“Why not? Just because you marked the map one way doesn’t mean you can’t decide to go another. Let’s just ride straight home instead. If we leave this afternoon, get on the interstate and go, we can be there in two days. You can get on a plane and be with Mom by Friday.”
“Emma,” he says, his voice warning me.
“What? We have to stay on some stupid riding treadmill? California, Montana, whatever. Eventually we’re going to end up at home anyway—where Mom’s not.”
“I can’t control that,” he says.
“Dad,” I say. “Would you just please listen?”
He gives me a withering glance, but I press on, explaining what I saw watching the tiger at the Mirage. “So,” I say when I’m through. “Maybe the space you think you’re giving Mom is false space, contained inside the walls of what your lives used to be. Maybe you ought to step outside the walls that aren’t there any more. Going to France would be a way of doing that.”
“Read my lips, Emma,” he says when I’m through. “I. Am. Not. Going. To. France.”
He folds the maps, puts them back in their case. Then he gets up, walks over to his bed, and lies down on it without turning down the covers. He assumes a sleep position, crossing his arms over his chest, closing his eyes. But he’s faking it. Tension steams off his body and sizzles the atmosphere, like raindrops hitting asphalt on a hot summer day.
I sit down on the edge of my bed and watch him for what seems like an eternity. He’s stubborn, I’ll give him that. I couldn’t lie there three minutes with someone staring at me like I’m staring at him. Then, astonishingly, his eyelids flutter, his whole body visibly relaxes, and he’s fast asleep.
I’m still sitting on the edge of my bed, watching him, when he stirs an hour later. He’s not really awake, just turning to get more comfortable so he can settle in and sleep for who knows how long.
“Dad,” I whisper.
“Unh … ” he says, vaguely inquisitive.
“I talked to Mom. About France. She wants you to come.”
He opens his eyes. “You what?”
“I talked to Mom,” I repeat. “I called her, after we were down at the pool.”
He sits up. “And she wants me to come?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Jesus, Emma,” he says. “Why didn’t you just tell me that from the start?”
Thirty–four
I give Dad a crash course in French on the way back, more to keep him occupied than anything else. We stop somewhere to eat and I make him repeat the words for whatever we’re eating. He’s a disaster. It’s “oofs” for “oeufs ” and “pan” for “pain.” He won’t even try “bifteck.”
“Steak’s fine,” he says. “They’ll know what I want.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And you might as well give up on merci while you’re at it. For you, ‘mercy’ is appropriate.”
“I’m not going because I want to talk to French people,” he says.
I’m pretty much a wreck by the time I get home a few days later and put him on the plane. But I tell myself that if anyone will know what to do with him,
Mom will. She’ll break him in easy, maybe take him over to see the D-day beaches. And there are all those great battle paintings in the Louvre.
I feel better when I go get Harp. He goes into his zoom-mode the second he sees me, flying around in Margaret’s backyard like a canine jet. He jumps up on me, dances around me a while, then goes zooming again. When he finally calms down, I take him inside where he promptly falls asleep in my lap while I eat a piece of Margaret’s chocolate cake.
We chat a while. I fill her in on Jules and Will, and she’s glad to know Jules is finally thinking about settling down. It’s about time! Mom and Dad being in France, though—it’s a stretch for her to see why anyone would want to go all the way over there when they could stay right here in Indiana. Especially in May, with the peonies about to bloom and everything shooting up in the garden.
“All that money,” she concludes. “I guess you’d feel you ought to do something with it.”
“Yeah,” I say, and leave it at that.
It’s late afternoon when I get home. Harp sniffs his way to Dad’s leather chair, then hops up and noses around, like he thinks if he looks hard enough he’ll find Dad somewhere in it. Pretty soon, he sighs happily and curls in on himself. What do I know? Maybe Dad is there, as far as Harp’s concerned. Maybe all that dogs need to be happy is the scent, the memory of a person they love. Maybe they’re more advanced than we are that way.
I wander around the house, like Mom always does when she comes home from a trip. But the things I’ve lived with all my life look foreign to me. Funny: I’ve always thought Mom did the house thing because it pleased her so much to be home again, among the things she loves. In part, I’m sure that’s true. But now I suspect that some other part of her was marveling at the strangeness of the idea that her life was made of these objects, as much as it was made of all she felt and saw and dreamed and knew inside her.
As for me, wandering around the house I’ve lived in since I was born, I see that only something as familiar as the Snoopy glass I drank Kool-Aid from when I was six, or the way light at a certain time of day shines through a lace curtain and casts its pattern on the blue carpet where I played with my Barbies, can teach me how strange life really is. How you just have to work your way through it, collecting things and places you love to ground you, while at the same time you know that they work just like details in a story: they define, but don’t explain you. Nothing can explain you, really—not even to yourself.
This should depress me, but in fact it cheers me up. It’s weird. Letting go of the idea that I’m supposed to be able to explain every little thing about my life, plus figure out how to be a millionaire before I can go forward, makes me feel suddenly, absolutely, irrevocably myself. Like pieces of a puzzle have fallen into place. Not so that I see the whole picture, just one small part. But I see that one part clearly, and it feels like all I need to know for now.
That evening I walk Harp along the Monon Trail, the long asphalt path that cuts through the city where the train tracks used to be. It’s beautiful out, warm and green, summer just around the corner. There are joggers, walkers, cyclists, rollerbladers. People with dogs and babies. It’s festive, like a parade. For a while, Harp trots along beside me so that it looks like I’m actually in control. Then, just before the bridge over the river, he stops suddenly and lies down in the grass beside the path. I bribe him with a doggy treat I have in my pocket. He eats it, walks about ten feet, then lies down again. He gazes at me balefully, like a kid who’s been dragged to the mall and is sick to death of shopping.
I kneel down beside him. “Harp, come.” I make my voice firm, like Margaret’s.
He rolls over, so I can pet him.
“Goddamn it,” I say.
Someone laughs.
I look up, and there’s Gabe Parker, grinning, leaning on his bicycle. Then Josh skids in right behind him. Harp gives a pathetic little growl and stands up, prepared to protect me. I scramble up myself. All I can think is, why am I wearing these horrible shorts that make my legs look like tree trunks? I hear Jules nagging inside my head, you should always look decent when you go out; you never know who you’re going to see.
“I guess this is Harp,” Gabe says. He leans down to ruffle Harp’s fur. “Great dog.”
“I still can’t believe your mom let you get a dog,” Josh says.
“My mom’s in France.”
“Oh,” Josh looks at me, like, forever?
“You don’t even want to know,” I say.
“Okay.”
We just stand there, the three of us. Harp gazes up at me, an inquiring tilt to his head.
Finally Josh says, “Uh, Emma … ” He clears his throat about ten times, moves his bike slightly further off the trail. “Listen,” he says. “Gabe and I—” He glances at Gabe, who gives him an encouraging nod. “We, uh—”
“We’ve been riding the trail in the evenings, thinking we might see you,” Gabe says.
“Me?”
“On account of Harp,” Gabe says. “Remember? You told me you walked him here.”
“Right,” Josh says. “The thing is, Emma—well, the Heather thing. I feel like such an asshole about that. I was an asshole. Again. I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything, except take the car back to your house. I let myself think maybe it was even the best thing to just leave you alone.”
“Which Amy and I told him was chickenshit,” Gabe says.
“Not to mention Tiffany,” Josh says. “Jesus, has she been on my case.”
I cannot think of a single thing to say to that. Exactly where and when did this little pow-wow occur, I wonder—and all I can think is—holy shit—did it happen the night of the beach party? Were all of them there? Gabe, Tiffany, Matt, and Josh and Amy—all of them trying to figure out what the fuck to do with me while I was passed out in the chaise lounge? Which brings to mind, all too fittingly, the image of the way a slug will shrivel up if you sprinkle beer on it—an apt metaphor for how I feel standing there between them.
Eventually, Josh speaks. “It was chickenshit. I could see that. And, okay, it’s sort of chickenshit to track you down here instead of coming over to your house, but I was afraid to see your parents. I still am, if you want to know the truth. Afraid to see them. Plus, Gabe, well … ”
“Me? I’m just plain chickenshit,” Gabe says cheerfully.
About what, I would like to know.
But Josh rattles on. “What I’m trying to say here is that I’m sorry. Again. Emma, I really am.” Probably to cover up the way his voice cracks a little, he gives a little laugh. “And I’m not just saying this to keep from getting expelled.”
I can’t help smiling at that.
“Friends?” he asks. “This time, really?”
I nod.
His face lights up in the grin I remember. He raises his hand, and I high-five him the way we used to do.
“And you’ll clue your dad in before I come over? So he doesn’t kill me on impulse?”
“Yeah, I’ll let him know.”
“Cool.” He glances at Gabe, straightens his bike, puts his foot on the pedal. “All right, then,” he says. “Later.” And rides away.
Leaving Gabe and me standing on the trail together. The relief I’d felt in the moment I realized that things were finally right between Josh and me forever had sort of made me forget Gabe was there at all. Now my mind goes into high gear, trying to settle on some social etiquette that might work in this situation—whatever the situation actually is.
“I was wondering … ” Gabe nods toward a nearby bench. “Could we, uh, talk?”
I sink onto it. Gabe props his bike against it, scoops up Harp and sits down beside me. We’re quiet for a long time, watching the world go by. It’s dusk. In a nearby tree, a whole flock of birds starts up that wild chirping they do just before sunset. The
river’s turned silver.
Harp’s curled up, fast asleep, between us, and I wish I could just close my eyes and fall asleep, too. Awake, I can’t decide whether I want this moment to end right now or whether I want to go on sitting on the bench with Gabe forever.
Finally, he says, “Emma. I feel really bad about the weekend you came down to Bloomington, you know, for Little Five—”
Instinctively, I raise my hands, palms out. “I know Tiffany cooked up the whole thing,” I say. “Which would have been uncomfortable enough, even if I hadn’t gotten drunk out of my mind and made a fool of myself. Which was totally my fault. God. Don’t think you need to apologize for that.”
“I haven’t been riding with Josh every night so that I could apologize to you,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. Squeak, really.
“The thing is,” he says, “after the party, Josh and I talked about some things and made a deal. We’d ride the trail until we found you. Josh would try to set things straight with you, which he really wanted and needed to do. And I—my part of the deal was—”
He takes a deep breath. “Okay. It was that I’d tell you I really like you. A lot. I did right off, that first time at the Daily Grind. And, I know. I blew it. I should have just shut up about the stupid lottery as soon as I saw you were uncomfortable talking about it. But I didn’t know what else to say. And after I’d grilled you about being rich, how could I ask you out? I mean, I figured you’d think the money was what I cared about—it isn’t,” he concludes. “You just have to believe me about that. Do you?”
I nod. I can’t look at him.
“So,” he says. “What about Josh? I mean, do you still—”
“Friends,” is all I can manage.
He groans. “Jesus,” he says. “Emma. Could you give me a little help here?”
Now I’m the one to take a deep breath—and when I speak, the words tumble out. “Okay. Okay, I liked you that first time, too. Only I thought—well, I acted like such a moron. Then I did it again when Tiffany and my grandfather insisted on driving that stupid Winnebago over to the Phi Delt house. And again the night of the beach party.”
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