Rules for Life

by Darlene Ryan

  I scrambled over to the phone, grabbed the twenty and bolted for the door. I took the box from the delivery guy and gave him the twenty. “It’s okay. Keep it,” I said.

  “Hey, thanks,” he said. “Have a good night.”

  Yeah, right.

  Dad was on his feet. I kept the pizza box out in front of me. I wanted to keep him out of my space.

  “Isabelle, please just give Anne a chance. She’s a wonderful person and she’s going to be a great mother.”

  There was a loud buzzing sound in my head, as though I’d been surrounded by a swarm of wasps. Everything felt strange all of a sudden. My father had turned into someone I didn’t know, a stranger, a space zombie. I had a flash of flinging the pizza, sending it whipping through the living room like a Frisbee. But I was still me, and I didn’t do things like that.

  “Looks like you’ve got everything you want, ” I said.

  There was something lost and sad in the way he looked at me then. My legs were shaking. I set the pizza box on the chest by the door and went upstairs, gripping the railing as though it was the only solid thing left in my life.

  12

  “Something’s wrong,” Rafe said after I’d been in the car about a minute. I’d called him as soon as I heard Dad head for his workshop, said, “Please come and get me,” and then hung up.

  “Just drive, please,” I said. I slid to the middle of the seat, fastened the lap belt and leaned my head against Rafe’s shoulder.

  “Can we go out to the lake?” I asked.

  “You got your key?”

  I put my right hand in the pocket of my jacket and shook my key ring. Rafe moved the old Crown Victoria into the left-hand lane. After a few more minutes I said, “Anne’s pregnant.”

  Rafe shot me a quick glance. “You’re kidding.”

  “No.” I twisted sideways in my seat belt so I could look at him. I loved looking at him. He had the most gorgeous green eyes I’d ever seen. Not blue green or gray green, true green, the way I imagined the ocean looked as you started going down, down below the surface.

  “So that’s why your dad wants to get married,” Rafe said.

  “He says it isn’t.”

  “You believe him?”

  “I don’t know.” I shifted a little more and pulled one leg underneath me. “It just seems like an awfully big co-incidence.”

  Rafe reached for my hand, raised it to his mouth and kissed the back of it.

  I snaked my arm across his chest and neither of us said anything for a while, which was okay because I never minded being quiet with Rafe. Anyway, I knew he was thinking, sorting out his own feelings and probably already worrying about mine. That’s the thing about Rafe; sometimes he cares too much. It’s like everything he feels is just underneath his skin instead of deep inside somewhere, protected, the way the rest of us keep how we feel.

  We bumped down the lake road. Rafe stopped at the turn and I got out and undid the lock between the two pieces of chain closing off the driveway. The car crept the last few feet through the trees and out into the clearing by the cottage.

  The cottage was my favorite place in the world. It sat into the hill as if the stone foundation had grown out of the ground with the trees all around it. The shingles were the same blue gray as the rock wall where the beach began. It used to belong to my grandparents. Mom’s mom and dad. The cottage is how my mom and dad met.

  One summer Dad helped build the verandah that runs across the front of the house. He was twenty-one. My mom was nineteen. Eight weeks later he and Mom were married, and pretty soon they had Jason. If you do the math you see that Jason was at the wedding, if you know what I mean.

  We walked around the house and climbed halfway down the stairs to the beach. Sitting on the first landing, I leaned into Rafe and he put his arm around me.

  “How do you feel about the baby?” he asked after a moment, as though there hadn’t been a gap in the conversation.

  The baby. My brother or sister. Well, half anyway.

  “I haven’t thought about it that much,” I said. “I’m not good with babies. They’re all wiggly and floppy and there’s always something coming out of some part of them and it always smells.”

  “C’mon, they’re not that bad.”

  I turned my head so I could see his face. “How would you feel if your father told you that you were going to have a baby brother or sister?”

  The laughter burst out of him. “I’d call all the TV stations,” he said. “And I’d call the Pope because it would have to be an immaculate conception. My mother and father aren’t romantic.”

  “That doesn’t mean they aren’t having sex.”

  The whole top half of Rafe’s body was shaking, he was laughing so hard.“Oh, so what are they doing? Communicating in code? No, no, wait.” He waved his hands in the air. “I know, they’re doing sign language with their eyebrows.”

  He pressed his lips together while his eyebrows twitched on his face and his eyes rolled and darted around. Then he slumped back against the step and started laughing again.

  I tried to imagine Rafe’s oh-so-serious, stick-up-his-butt dad wiggling his eyebrows seductively at Rafe’s mother. Okay, so it was funny. I was laughing now too. I waved one hand at him. “You’re right. There’s no way your parents have sex.”

  I leaned back as well, my arms propped on the step, and for a couple of minutes we just sat there like that, watching the stars over the lake. I sighed and leaned closer to Rafe. “That first summer after my mother died we didn’t come out here at all. Then the day of my birthday Dad dragged—really dragged—Jason out of bed and said, ‘We’re going out to the lake.’ It was so weird being here without her. I could feel her everywhere. I could smell her. When it got dark we had a fire down on the sand. Jason had met some girl and he was down the beach a ways playing his guitar for her. Dad and I just somehow started talking—really talking for the first time in my life.”

  My voice started wobbling and I didn’t know how to stop the tears sliding down my face. I couldn’t talk anymore. Rafe held me so tightly it was hard to breathe, but I didn’t care.

  13

  “Isabelle, do you have a minute?” Anne asked, appearing in the living room doorway just as I was about to head upstairs.

  In the two weeks since I’d found out about the baby I’d managed to avoid saying anything more than “hi” and “excuse me” to her, and we hadn’t spent more than a minute in the same room.

  “Uh, yeah, I guess,” I said. She looked pale and queasy. And I told myself I was crazy for thinking I could see a bit of a bulge under her yellow sweater. It was too soon.

  “I wondered if you had thought about a dress … for the wedding,” Anne said.

  I hadn’t. Because I was trying not to think about the wedding. I shrugged. “Not really.”

  “I … ” She hesitated, cleared her throat and started again. “I’m having my dress made, and if that’s something you wanted to do … or I know a couple of places that may have something you’d like as well.”

  Something I’d like. How could she know what I’d like when she didn’t even know me. I wanted to say, You’re my stepmother, not my friend. And she wasn’t even my stepmother yet.

  I bit the end of my tongue until I could find the right words to answer.

  “I’m kind of hard to fit,” I said. “I think I should stick to stores I know.”

  Anne sighed softly. “All right,” she said. Then she turned and went back into the living room.

  My stomach hurt, like I’d swallowed something hard and heavy.

  “Why am I taking history?” Lisa asked as we headed down the main stairs after our last class.

  “Because it’s a required course,” I told her. “Besides, you know what they say: those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them—in summer school!”

  Lisa stuck her tongue out at me. “Very funny.”

  I leaned on the locker next to hers while she worked the combination to her
lock. “Where do you want to go first?” she asked, poking her head inside the locker. It gave her voice a tinny echo. “Goodwill or Sally Ann?”

  “Groovy Street,” I said.

  Lisa’s head popped out like a jack-in-the-box. “What? You’re actually going to spend more than ten dollars on clothes?”

  I closed my eyes. “My dad’s getting married. I need a dress.”

  “Married?” she squealed. “When?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “So, who is she?”

  I opened my eyes again. “Her name’s Anne. She works on the show with Dad. I barely know her.”

  “I barely knew Haviland when my father married her,” Lisa said, jamming books into her backpack. “That’s how I got my leather jacket.”

  I didn’t get what she meant—which happens a lot with Lisa. “Explain please,” I said.

  “Dad had the whole guilt thing going on.” She slammed the locker shut and snapped the lock. “One time he parked in front of this store. I saw the jacket in the window. Next thing I know he’s buying it for me.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t see my father buying me a leather jacket just because he’s getting married.”

  Lisa grinned. “Well, he better be paying for the wedding stuff,” she said, grabbing my arm and pulling me down the hallway to my own locker.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because after we find you a dress we’re going to the mall. If your father’s getting married you need slut shoes!”

  14

  After my mom died, when I went to bed the last thing I’d do was close my eyes tightly and wish for things to be different. Of course they never were, and I knew they wouldn’t be. But every night I made the wish. And for a second, every morning, there was the possibility.

  So on the morning of the wedding I lay in bed with my eyes closed for a long time. When I finally opened them, the sun was beginning to reach into the bedroom. Outside somewhere a pair of mourning doves cooed to one another. And on the back of the closet door, so it wouldn’t wrinkle, was my dress for the wedding.

  I found Jason in the kitchen scrambling eggs with what looked to be most of a jar of salsa. “You want some eggs?” he asked.

  I scrunched my eyes shut and stuck my tongue out as I passed him.

  “If you ate a little protein in the morning it would stabilize your blood sugar and you’d be in a better mood,” he said.

  I snapped him with my index finger right in the middle of his forehead. “Don’t talk to me,” I said.

  “Or maybe you’re just not getting enough sleep,” he said, flipping the glop in the frying pan and then gesturing at me with the turner. “You should try a slice of toast with peanut butter and a big glass of warm milk at night. Lots of tryptophan. It’ll put you right to sleep and maybe you’ll wake up a little cheerier in the morning.” He gave me a big fake toothy smirk.

  “Are you staying here tonight?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m babysitting you while Dad is on his honeymoon. Why?”

  “More like me babysitting you.” I pushed the start button on the microwave. “That’s good. I’m glad you’ll be here. I won’t have to drag all the way across town to kill you in your sleep.”

  “Hey, be nice to your big brother,” Jason said, dumping his eggs onto a plate and taking a seat at the table. That was another one of Mom’s rules. “I know where they keep that picture of you wearing your potty for a hat.”

  “You okay about today?” Jason asked after a few minutes of silence.

  “No,” I said. “But it’s happening anyway.”

  “Yeah, I see talking to Dad worked real well.” Jason’s fork had stopped in mid-air. His mouth was pulled sideways into a sneer.

  I finished chewing, set down my spoon and pictured myself dumping the bowl on Jason’s head and beating the shredded wheat into his hair with the spoon.

  “Gee, maybe I should have gone out to the lake, gotten wrecked, climbed up on the roof and sung ‘Tangled up in Blue’ while playing a toy guitar with only four strings,” I said.

  The sneer slipped off Jason’s face. He looked away for a minute then faced me again. “Okay, I deserved that,” he said.

  I picked up my spoon again. “Nothing’s going to change this.”

  “You can move in with me if you want to.”

  I sucked in a breath and tried to swallow at the same time. Milk and shredded wheat went up my nose. I choked. I coughed threads of cereal across the table, and milk dribbled down my face.

  “Move in with you?” I finally managed to wheeze. “Are you serious?”

  “And straight.” Jason pulled down his lower eyelids with his index fingers. “Don’t let the red eyes fool you. I am not wasted—except for lack of sleep. You want to move in with me, you can.”

  “But wouldn’t that … ” I waved my hands in the air because I couldn’t figure out how to finish the sentence.

  “Make me crazy? Ruin my sex life?” Jason supplied as a grin spread across his face. “Yeah. So … it won’t kill me.”

  I swallowed down the lump in my throat that had nothing to do with cereal. Jason didn’t act like my big brother very often. Well, okay, never. I shook my head. “It wouldn’t kill you, but we might end up killing each other.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, probably.”

  I leaned across the table and kissed the top of his spiky head. “Thanks, Jason,” I said. Then I got up and rinsed my dishes in the sink. I could feel tears almost ready to fall and I didn’t want that to happen.

  15

  Rule #27: Great-looking shoes are worth the pain. They were more than great-looking shoes. They were fabulous. Sparkly lavender high, high heels that laced halfway up my calf. And I didn’t care if my feet hurt. Maybe they would take my mind off everything else that hurt.

  I looked at my dress in the mirror again; pale blue with a round neck, no sleeves, and swirls of lavender and purple everywhere. No lace. No ruffles. No frills. I wondered where the last person to own the dress had worn it.

  Spencer peeked out of the closet, whiskers twitching. He didn’t like all the uproar. For a second I thought about hiding out in there with him. There was a knock at the bedroom door. Spencer retreated again.

  Jason stuck his head in the room. “Ready?” he asked.

  No. I wasn’t ready.

  I thought about holding my breath until my face turned purple and my eyes rolled back in my head, or diving under the bed and lying there for the rest of the day in the cool, dusty darkness.

  Rule #7: Hiding under the bed won’t solve anything. If the dust bunnies don’t get you, the vacuum cleaner will. Mom had told me that one the first day of school in grade six. I’d tried to put red streaks in my hair the night before, hoping it would make me look older. (I was still waiting for my breasts to pop out.) The streaks had turned out purple and I think they glowed in the dark.

  Mom made me French toast and braided purple and silver ribbons into my hair so the purple chunks would look like I’d done them on purpose.

  I looked down at her bracelet on my wrist. “I’m ready,” I said, turning around. Jason held out a hand. I was probably about five the last time we’d held hands. I hesitated for a second, then I laced my fingers through his and we went downstairs together.

  Dad was in the middle of the living room. He looked incredibly handsome, his freshly shaved face and crisp, white shirt bright against his charcoal suit. “Look at the two of you,” he said. “You look great.”

  “You’re looking good too, Dad,” Jason said. I’d never seen the dark suit Jason was wearing. With his deep blue shirt and tie, the effect was sort of mobster chic.

  “I’m … uh … glad you’re both here,” Dad said. He glanced at me. “Thank you.”

  He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. It was as if he’d suddenly discovered he had them. As if he’d looked down and found these “things” at the end of his arms. Now they were everywhere, tapping and snapping, adjusting his jacket, touching his hair.


  “Hey, Dad, why don’t I drive?” Jason said.

  “Yeah, why not,” Dad said, handing over the keys. He looked at me again.

  Don’t look at me, I thought. You’re not leaving me any space to breathe. I’m here in my pretty dress and my sparkly shoes. That’s all you’re going to get. That’s all I have to give.

  Somehow we got out of the house and into the car. I leaned my head against the back seat and closed my eyes.

  Dad and Anne were getting married at a small inn about half an hour out of the city. It was going to be a very small, simple wedding, no fancy ceremony or reception, just all of us and some of Anne’s and Dad’s friends. My grandmother, Dad’s mother, wasn’t coming. She lived in a nursing home in Montreal and she didn’t remember things very well. Anne’s mother and father were dead, and like Dad, she didn’t have any brothers or sisters.

  Jason pulled into the parking lot with a little spray of gravel. Peter Gregory came down the steps of the old house. I hadn’t known he was coming.

  Peter and Dad had been friends since they were in the seventh grade. The last time Peter had been in town was just before Jason went to rehab.

  I got out of the car. Peter grinned and said, “Wow!” I smiled and hugged him. He was pretty “wow” himself in a gray suit and black turtleneck with his salt-and-pepper hair and beard.

  Peter pulled Dad into a bear hug and then shook hands with Jason. Dad’s hands were going again.

  “Well, old man,” Peter said, “this is your last chance to cut and run.”

  “Too late,” Jason said, grinning and swinging the car keys in the air.

  I didn’t know anything about getting married, but it seemed to me that Dad should have looked happier. He should have looked happy period, not like a raccoon squatting on the center line, trying to decide which way to run while the traffic whipped by in both directions.

  Peter reached into his pocket. “I thought you might need this,” he said. He pulled out a brown necktie, shiny, wide and ugly.

  “Oh lord, Peter, that’s not … ” Dad began.