Where I Want to Be

by Adele Griffin

  “That’s enough, Jane,” said Mom. “Frankly, I’m pretty upset. Here you insisted over and over that you and Caleb are good friends. Then you made me drive you all the way out to the hospital. And what do you do? You try to frighten the bejesus out of him! What if you’d been the one in the hospital, Jane, and that boy had come to visit you, and he made you feel strange and scared?”

  “But they say Caleb Price died and came back to life,” Jane said, her voice full of wonder. “Imagine.”

  Imagine. Sometimes when Jane used that word, like she did now, it made me shiver. It was the same kind of shiver as when Jane told me that Major Duncan Hobhouse had lost three fingers and four toes in the Civil War. “Look at those flesh stumps,” she’d whisper. “Imagine.”

  But Caleb was not somebody Jane had made up inside her head. He was for real. It scared me to think of Jane sucking him deep inside her mind and changing him.

  “You don’t know that kid,” I said. “Not for real.”

  “Maybe not. But what I do know,” and here Jane paused and looked at me, her eyes widened, “is that if you’ve been dead and alive, you’re changed forever. Caleb Price is halfway human now. He’s been on both sides.”

  “He is not halfway human!” I screeched. Jane really knew how to push me into a good screech. “I saw him with my own eyes! There’s two sides to be on. The alive side or the dead side. Jane’s wrong, Mom, isn’t she? Isn’t she?”

  “Of course Caleb is one hundred percent alive, sweetie,” Mom assured me. “Jane’s just making up a story.” Then, with a searching look in the rearview mirror, “Why do you have to act so ghoulish, Janey? I know there’s a happier girl underneath those morbid thoughts.”

  I wasn’t as sure about that.

  Caleb swears he can’t remember anything about our visit to St. Christopher’s.

  “Think, think,” I’ll nudge him from time to time. “Two redheaded girls? One of them in a dress and party shoes, asking you too many questions? The other one hiding in the corner, wishing she could disappear into a hole in the floor?”

  “Nope, sorry. Blank,” Caleb promises. “Actually, my whole accident is pretty much wiped from my brain. To tell you the truth, most of the entire year after is a haze. Doctors say it happens with head trauma.”

  But everyone knew that after the pit-bull incident, Caleb changed. And not just because of the constant visual reminder, since the injury to his right eye had caused permanent pigmentation damage that made it a few shades darker than the left. After his bones healed and his wounds scarred over, he slowly became another Caleb. More of a loner type, who could no longer join in for pickup games of tetherball and kickball, but instead went swimming at the Y as part of his physical therapy. The new Caleb waited for the bus with his nose deep in a copy of Thoreau’s Walden. A gift, he told me later, from his uncle Rory. And the new Caleb had a doctor’s excuse to use Peace Dale Middle’s music room every morning for twenty minutes of meditation.

  Sometimes I heard kids tease Caleb about it in the halls. Asking him if he could bend spoons with his eyes or where he had parked his magic carpet. Caleb never seemed bothered by it.

  Indifference is weird. It makes kids think you know something they don’t. When Caleb started getting his name in the newspaper for winning regional swimming events, and when he placed second playing his guitar in the eighth-grade talent show, kids, cool kids like Alex Tuzzolino, began to pay attention. Then, eventually, to reverse judgment. Deciding that maybe the new Caleb Price wasn’t such a freak after all.

  But Caleb still didn’t care what people thought, and that only made him more mysterious. In a good way, though. Not like Jane, whose sulks and weird lies and angry outbursts had, over the years, left her quietly disliked all around.

  I prop up on my elbows, lean over Caleb’s face, and blow lightly. Caleb shifts his arm as his eyes flutter awake.

  “Good morning.” I dip to kiss him on the mouth, but he presses in his lips. “Don’t worry, sir,” I say in a TV detective’s voice. “Your breath is safe with me. Hand it over.”

  But Caleb turns his face so that he’s talking to the back of the couch. “You were crying last night, in your sleep.”

  “I was?”

  “Must have been a bad dream. Don’t you remember?”

  I shake my head. No.

  “And grinding your teeth.” Caleb bares and grinds his own teeth in imitation as he glances at me. Waiting for me to say something. He shifts, picks up and twists a piece of my hair between his fingers. Red thread on a white spool.

  I don’t answer. I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to talk about it.

  Caleb sighs, then swings up and stomps his feet on the floor. Cups a hand around his neck and cracks the bones awake. “I wish I could take better care of you, Lily,” he says. “I wish I could make it right for you.”

  “Then buy me a cup of coffee at the Co-op,” I answer, “because it’s essential that I caffeinate in the next hour.”

  “That, mademoiselle, I can do.”

  Another thing I love about Caleb. He always knows when to back off.

  9 — STUNNING BLOW

  Jane

  Granpa could kill a bee with one finger.

  His pointer finger, to be exact. As soon as the bee had landed on the hard surface of an armrest or windowsill, he’d sneak up behind it. Then, squish as his finger mashed its tail. Easy as pressing up a crumb from a tablecloth.

  “It can’t hurt you. Their stinger’s up front,” he’d explain.

  Still. Jane didn’t like it. One finger, creeping up from behind. Singling you out.

  Granpa didn’t kill bees for fun. He killed them for bait. “Nothing tempts a brook trout like a hooked bee skimming across the surface of the water,” he’d say. “And a real bee works better’n a fake.”

  But wasn’t a dead bee fake? Jane brooded over it. Because it was no longer real.

  Inside Granpa’s tackle box, dead bee husks were mixed with other crayon-bright fishing baits. Flies, these baits were called, though they weren’t just flies, but all sorts of insects. Jane knew some of the names. Jeweled damsels, Cahills, peacocks, midges.

  This morning, Granpa did not want to squish bees.

  “Help me knot this, Janey?” he said. “You’ve got those skinny malinky fingers.” He handed her a bead-head bird fly. It looked like an earring. A tuft of brown feather, a silver drop.

  Her grandfather’s hands often trembled. Jane was used to taking over the more delicate tasks for him. She liked doing it. It made her feel useful. Like clicking his seat belt into place or putting the quarters into the stamp machine at the post office. Or knotting flies.

  “Might be time for us to go up to Lake Pettaquamscutt again,” Granpa said.

  Jane looked up. “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “Sure I’m sure.”

  Jane had always wanted to go back to the lake. But her first trip to Lake Pettaquamscutt had also been her last. She had been twelve. Lily had been invited, too, but she was off on one of her play dates, so she hadn’t come along.

  The trip had started perfectly. No matter how hard she’d tried, Jane could not find the early warning signs. The signs were always there, though. Always.

  She must not have been looking hard enough.

  In the car, they had listened to Alexander of Macedon on tape. Jane had heard the tape so many times, she knew the story of Alexander by heart. The familiar words made the car time go more easily. Her grandparents understood that.

  Lake Pettaquamscutt rolled into view just as Aristotle had arrived at court to be Alexander’s tutor. Two arrivals at the same time. That was a good sign.

  Augusta gave her a pair of sunglasses. The sunglasses were fun. Jane pretended she was a movie star on vacation, being spied on by fans.

  “Very well, then, a few autographs, and then, darlings, you must leave me in peace.”

  Neither of her grandparents paid her any mind when she talked out loud. Augusta sat on a blanket on t
he shore, knitting, while Granpa trudged out deeper into the lake in his hip waders.

  Then Granpa caught a bite.

  “Ho-ho!” he called. His arms jerked as the hooked fish pulled. “Here’s a big boy!”

  As Jane watched on in horror, Granpa came back to shore, took hold of the fish, and pounded its head against a stone. Jane watched as the fish’s body jerked in a horrible death dance.

  It was then that she screamed, “How could you do that, Granpa? How could you?”

  “Janey, it’s the only way. You need to kill it quickly. You don’t want to eat him alive, do you?”

  “You love fish,” Augusta reminded her. “And not just trout. Salmon, tuna—”

  “This is different!” Jane covered her ears and shook her head back and forth. Words felt far away and hard to get to. “It’s different when you knew him, when you knew where he lived and his family—what if he was on his way home to his family!” Waves of sadness were crashing in her ears, over her head. She ripped off the sunglasses and threw them into the lake.

  Augusta stifled a small laugh. “Oh, now, that was just silly.”

  But she also took the fish from Granpa, who then took Jane’s hand. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  On the walk, Granpa explained that a swift, stunning blow was the best kind of death for a fish out of water. “Because you shouldn’t keep it suffering,” Granpa explained. “That would be cruel.”

  Jane tried to be comforted. She collected some pinecones. She let Granpa wipe her tears with his yellow handkerchief.

  When they got back to camp, Augusta had gutted and grilled the trout, serving it up with lemon. “Now, then,” she coaxed. “Try a bite.”

  And Jane tried to forget that the fish in her stomach was the same as the fish in the net.

  Late that night, the bad feelings came back. She imagined the pieces of chewed-up fish in the bottom of her stomach. Unchewing, reattaching, reforming. The fish hiccupped inside her. It wanted to leave to go back to the lake. She had tried to block out the bad thought by imagining that she was lying under a tree at Orchard Way and feeling the sunshine on her skin, the way Dr. Beigeleisen had taught her.

  Jane hunched her shoulders up to her ears. Flattened a hand to her stomach. She listened to her grandparents’ breathing. Augusta on one side and Granpa on the other, and Jane in the middle, protected on both sides from bears. Both of her grandparents were sound asleep.

  But she knew that she had to put the fish in the water. When she couldn’t stand another minute, she crawled from the tent. On her hands and knees, then barefoot in the slimy, wet mud. Moving to the shore as if she were being pulled forward in an undertow.

  When she kneeled down beside the lake, she could feel the fish wriggling in her throat. She leaned forward, gagging. A sour, vomity taste closed up the back of her throat.

  The pain shocked her. Granpa’s large hands gripped too tightly. “Janey! There you are!” His fingers hooked strong underneath Jane’s armpits, ripping her from her trance as he yanked her roughly up. Her feet caught air as Granpa swung her high. He shook her so hard, she felt blood slosh under her skin.

  “What are you doing so close to the water? If you’re feeling sick, you wake us up! You know better than this! Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

  Jane had never heard her grandfather curse. It was like being stuck by pins. She burst into fresh tears. Then Augusta was there, her gray hair spilled loose around her shoulders, like a sweet witch, shushing her. But Augusta’s heart was beating fast when she pulled Jane close, and Jane wrenched herself away.

  They left the lake a little later that night. Jane pitched a fit all the way back. She tried to explain about the fish. How it spoke to her. How she had to put him back in the lake. Up in the front seat came nothing but worried silence. But the echo of Granpa’s words stayed in Jane’s ears. Are you out of your goddamn mind?

  The next week, her parents took her to Dr. Fox, who worked all the way in Providence. Dr. Fox’s office was more solemn than Dr. Beigeleisen’s. Whereas Dr. B’s office was like an art room where Jane drew pictures and solved puzzles, Dr. Fox’s office was like the president’s. The carpet and the drapes were so thick that they closed off sounds.

  Dr. Fox was a good listener. So Jane told her things. About how she might have danced in The Nutcracker. About how the people she watched on television shows sometimes visited her later in her dreams. How some days everything seemed to have a secret voice—dogs and fish and even her mother’s stuffed animals, who told her funny stories about when Mom was a little girl.

  “My sister says I’m a liar,” she admitted.

  “What else does your sister say?” asked Dr. Fox.

  Jane shrugged. But she pressed her knuckles to her cheeks to hide the shame that burned there. It was terrible when Lily lectured her. As if Lily were the big sister and Jane was the baby. “She said to stop lying,” Jane answered in a small voice. “She says people will think I’m strange.”

  “Does your sister think you’re strange?”

  Jane considered it. “If she did, she never used to mind. But maybe it’s different now. We’re older. Kids talk.”

  Dr. Fox wanted to see Jane twice a week. She prescribed pills to help keep the real different from the not real. “I’ll see you twice a week, and the medication should even you out,” Dr. Fox said. “And when you think you’re ready, there’s a weekly group meeting you’re invited to join. To meet people like yourself, who share your challenges.” Challenges. That was Dr. Fox’s favorite word for what Jane had. There were other words. Delusions. Paranoia. Compulsions.

  Her medications were called antipsychotics. Jane didn’t like that word, either, and she picked off the label with her fingernail. But everyone knew what they were. The new bottles took their place next to the multivitamins on the kitchen table. In the mornings when Jane reached for them, Lily pretended not to notice. Lily never used any of the words.

  After Pettaquamscutt, Augusta held Jane’s hand tight at the supermarket. And Granpa stayed on Jane’s side during their museum trips. His eyes were like magnets on Jane when she wandered to the gift shop or the restroom.

  The next year, Granpa got sick, and then there were no more trips at all.

  “We could even go fishing tomorrow if I wanted, right?” Jane asked him now as she nimbly finished knotting the bead-head bird fly.

  Granpa nodded. “Oh, surely, Janey-cake. ’Course we could.”

  Augusta looked up. Her thoughts seemed to shift off her crossword puzzle, but she said nothing. Jane handed back the fly.

  “Good work,” said Granpa, holding it up for inspection. “Whoo-wee, it’s getting hot.” He plucked his yellow handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead. “Take a plunge, why don’t you? Cool off.”

  Jane stared at the pool. Its cold, blue water invited and reminded her. But she wasn’t ready. The old frustration that had been gone since arriving at Orchard Way took hold of her, as surprising and painful as the night Granpa had grabbed her off the shore’s edge. “No,” she said. She shook her head. “Not yet.”

  10 — STRAWBERRY FIELDS

  Lily

  Caleb drops me off at Small Farms. We plan for him to pick me up in the afternoon. I leap after the car, blowing vampy kisses as he drives away. First he’ll hit his house for fresh clothes. Then he’ll head to the Pool & Paddle. Since my job starts earlier and ends later, it makes sense to lend my car to Caleb.

  My car. Jane’s car. She never let anyone borrow it, and here I am, handing over the keys to Caleb. She’d have hated that. Mom and Dad might be kind of cranky about it, too, because of the insurance. But it’s only practical. Caleb’s a safe driver, so their ignorance is everyone’s bliss.

  The chalkboard at the checkout shack reads that I’m on shift today with Georgia Clowse and Danielle Savini. Cool. Georgia just graduated from North Peace Dale High, in Jane’s and Caleb’s class. As with most Peace Dale people, I’ve known the Clowses since I could cut teeth. Litera
lly. Dr. Clowse is my dentist.

  Danielle is from New Canaan. She’s what we Peace Dalers call a summer skimmer. Her job at Small Farms’ strawberry fields is purely theoretical—so that she can “learn the value of a dollar,” according to her megabucks lawyer parents. In the meantime, Danielle’s vacation “cottage” is twice as nice as my full-time house, and she wears a gold bracelet as thick as a bike chain. But Peace Dale kids are used to skimmers. We’ve grown up with their oceanfront beach pads in Narragansett Bay and their shiny convertibles parked outside the nicest shops and restaurants. To be fair, Danielle isn’t totally ruined from money like other skimmers. She’s fun and sweet, which is how she’s blended as smoothly as a milk shake with the local circle.

  Georgia and Danielle show up half an hour later in Danielle’s shiny convertible, in this case a candy-apple red Ford Mustang. They’re both limp with hangovers and trying to revive themselves with vats of iced coffee.

  “Sorry we’re late. Long night. Heller’s house got wrecked,” begins Georgia, yawning. “It was already wall-to-wall, and then a whole mob scene came over after the open-air TelePop concert. You know the one they had out on the bay last night? Oh my God, and these kids were so messed up, breaking their Nite Sticks in half and pouring that neon glow crap all over, like, everything. People had green skin, green hair.” She grimaces. “Some joker even poured green on the Hellers’ cat.”

  Danielle sighs like she wants to laugh but is too tired. “You shoulda been there, Lily. There was more green beer than the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. So insane. Only now I feel like death.” She seems to cringe from the comment as she cuts me a look that lasts only a millisecond. But I pick up on it. Death equals Jane. And it’s pretty likely that Danielle’s got way too much information about my sister. Jane makes good gossip, and Danielle has enough pals here who’d be happy to give the juicy details.

  The thing is, knowing about Jane and knowing Jane are two hugely disconnected things. Every day, I want to explain that to Danielle. Every day, I can’t.