“Press this tight. You hate blood, remember? Those cow hearts in bio?”
“I don’t care,” I said again. “It doesn’t matter.”
“That woman actually talks on the radio for a living?” she whispered. “She’s not exactly a fountain of conversation.”
I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. I loved June Le Forestier again. Loved her with more childlike fervor than I’d ever loved Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.
June came back with an album. The cover was pure sixties, a nude woman with a monarch butterfly painted on her face, a vine climbing her midriff. “Take it. We’ve got it on CD.”
“You’re sure, thanks, this means so—”
June waved her hand and disappeared.
* * *
Casey slept against my shoulder on the bus ride home. I stared out at the sunset, holding the record carefully in my lap.
“Love is Blue.” June had given me the instrumental version but I could look up the lyrics. I could buy the sheet music and play it on the piano. Not just the eighteen-note fragment of melody I’d memorized.
The whole thing.
But only when I was alone, so my dad wouldn’t worry that I was getting obsessed, just like my mother had predicted.
She’d liked the tune. She’d liked it enough to pass it on to me, even when life got the best of her. And I finally knew its name. “Love is Blue.” A sad message from her, maybe. Or maybe the only version of the song she’d heard was the music box’s tinny excerpt. But I knew its name, and for now, that was enough.
Casey stirred and leaned close to study the album. “Groovy cover.”
“Groovy is more seventies, isn’t it? This is... What’d they say in the sixties?”
“Trippy? Where are you going to hide it?”
“Your place.”
“Shocker. How’s the cut?”
“You look.” I unpeeled the paper towel.
“It’s not bad.”
Her Little Mermaid Band-Aid dangled from her palm. The blister was still raw.
“We should’ve stopped for bandages,” I said. “And tetanus shots.”
“We’re a mess.” Casey inspected her blister. She pressed my thumb against her palm, matching up our tiny wounds. “Blood sisters,” she said, laughing.
23
Band-Aids
2016
Friday night
“Damn!” The knife clattered to the floor and the onion Casey’d been dicing rolled off the chopping board. She sucked on her finger.
“Is it bad?”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing. But guess you can tell I’m not exactly a gourmet cook. I was trying to show off.”
“I’ll get something.” I ran to her bathroom and rummaged in the medicine cabinet, returning with a Cars antibiotic Band-Aid and a box of gauze pads.
“Let me do it,” she said.
“I’m not squeamish anymore.” I forced her to uncurl her hand and show the half-inch line of red on the tip of her index finger, under a flap of skin. I would have been fine except for the skin flap. As I was blotting it with gauze I felt the old, infuriating rushing in my ears and had to sit on my bar stool with my head down.
“You okay?” Casey laughed, snatched the Band-Aid from the counter, and wrapped her finger.
I handed over the wet wad of gauze without looking at it. “God, I hate being a 1950s cliché. A woman woozy at the sight of blood.” I smiled. “Guess I was showing off, too. Trying to prove I’d grown out of it.”
Casey returned to chopping the onion. “Now, that—” she paused, pointed the knife at me “—would be utterly disappointing and boring.” She turned to check the pot of pasta water.
Another small step forward.
She slid the pile of glistening, pale yellow onion off the chopping board and into the pan of olive oil. It sizzled and spat, a drop landing on my arm. Casey had the pan on too high. But I wasn’t about to tell her. I was celebrating inside. Sally Field in that old Oscars speech. You like me, you really like me!
“That smells so good,” I said. “Please let me help.” I hopped off my bar stool.
“No, you’re the guest. Sit.”
And just like that, another giant step back. I was still a Guest with a capital G. I climbed back onto my stool and sipped my red wine.
Casey stirred the onions. Their edges were browning too fast. “You can entertain me, though. Read me something.”
Forward progress again. Or was she only humoring me? I couldn’t keep up, her mood changed so often.
I dug through the bag of books she’d given me. This wasn’t an e.e. cummings moment. I needed something campy and juicy, to make her remember how we used to be. Valley of the Dolls seemed to be the ticket. I flipped through for a scene Casey and I had mocked many times: the one where a grown woman reassures her mother that she’s doing her bust exercises.
I worked hard, reading the lines aloud in my most earnest voice, as if the bust exercises were life-and-death. Sally Field had never reached so deep.
I worked too hard, of course. Because though Casey smiled throughout my reading, bustling around the kitchen stirring tomato sauce and draining pasta, she didn’t reward me with the helpless snorts and tears of laughter I was after.
And she wouldn’t let me carry a single dish from the kitchen to the table. “No. Just sit, sit.”
* * *
“This is delicious.”
“Thanks.”
We chewed, sipped, smiled politely at each other.
“More wine?”
“I’d love some.”
Chew, sip, smile. “More bread?”
“No, thank you. It’s good, though. So good.”
“Good.”
Bad. So bad. We were stuck. We’d done better over our junk-food dinner at the roller rink, with something else to look at so we didn’t have to strain for conversation.
We should have put on music. I’d have preferred “Shake Your Booty” to this tense silence.
Finally Jett took pity on us. She set her front paws on Casey’s lap and sniffed at her plate to see if there was anything to her liking.
“Jett, off! She never does that. I’m so sorry.”
“Guess she knows I’m a softy.” Casey rubbed at her head. “Elle wants a dog.”
“Are you getting one?”
“I think so. The three of us keep going to the shelter but we can’t agree on who to pick. They all look so desperate to be adopted, you know? They have that look, like love me, love me, please be my mommy... Shit.”
“It’s fine.”
“Shit, shit, shit. I’m sorry. You’d think I’d have more tact, with Elle and all. But tact was never my thing.”
“It’s okay. I got over it a long time ago.”
She drained her wine, leaned back in her chair, and looked up at the ceiling fan. “It’s a goddamn minefield. A black hole. We try to stick to safe topics but keep getting sucked back in. It’s a disaster.”
“I think it’s kind of funny.”
She faced me again, shook her head.
I smiled, nodded. “Casey. It’s funny. Admit it.”
“No.”
“It’s not as painful as when I compared Elle to Jett. Or when you told my first boyfriend he had bad taste in women right in front of me. I think that was probably the low point.”
“Stop.” But she started laughing. At first just hints of a giggle behind her napkin. But after a minute she was snorting, wiping at her eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s not funny. It’s not funny at all.”
* * *
We sat on the couch together with our shoes off and a box of sea-salt toffee between us.
“Music?” Casey said, chewing and scrolling through her iPhone. “Would you like Elle’s G-Rated Hip-Hop Dance Mix, or the Soothing Sounds of
the Harp album I play at the store when I’m doing the books, or... Oh, brother.”
“What is it?”
“Just a text from my mom.”
“Everything okay?”
“They’re fine, she just never fails to freak me out.” She handed the phone to me and started digging in the bottom of the container for toffee bits that had fallen off. “The woman needs to open a psychic shop in the back room of the bookstore.”
At first I didn’t get it. Alex had sent a picture of Elle biting into a drippy triple-stack ice-cream cone in front of a shop I recognized from its white siding and green shutters—the Cinnamon Bear in South Lake Tahoe. Below the picture she’d texted:
Sweetheart. Hope it’s going well. We’re having a ball. I’m even making her floss, don’t worry! XXOOXX Mom. P.S., there’s cookie dough in the freezer for your dessert, in the back. And I made a new song playlist for you two. All your favorites.
“Wow.”
“Right?” Casey crunched another piece of toffee. “Wish I’d known about the cookie dough before we bought this. This is too salty for me. I’m over the salty everything trend.” She went to the kitchen and dug around in the freezer.
Above the message about the playlist was an older text from Casey to Alex: Call me back!!!! Then an angry-face emoji. Casey and Sam would hit it off.
And one above that, from Alex to Casey. Without thinking, I scrolled up an inch so I could read the whole thing: Give Laura a hug for me. I just know in my bones it’s going well.
The hug, of course, had not been delivered.
I realized with a start that I was snooping and set the phone down on the sofa as Casey walked back with two spoons and a big glass bowl half-covered in tinfoil. “Looks like chocolate chip, peanut butter, and something with M&M’s in it. Hard as a rock, though.” She set the cookie dough on the coffee table.
“Elle’s so cute,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“That is freaky about the music. Think she has nanny cams and hidden microphones?”
“I wouldn’t put it past her.” Casey scrolled and tapped, looking for the playlist. “Here it is. Casey and Laura Mix, June 2016.”
“Let me guess. ‘You’ve Got a Friend.’”
“‘The Way We Were.’”
“‘Memories.’ Mixed with Casey Kasem musical countdowns?”
Casey smiled. “It’s just music from high school. Nineties music. Twenty-four songs, good Lord, when did she do all this?”
She pressed a button and a small wireless speaker on the bookshelf sent a low Bluetooth tone before playing the first song.
Mazzy Star, “Fade Into You.”
“This is so my mom,” Casey said, laughing. “I do love this one, though, don’t you? So pretty.” She started digging at the cookie dough, managing to scoop out a shard.
“Yes.” I closed my eyes and listened, trying to hold on to the light mood we’d had only moments before, laughing at the table.
“You okay?” Casey said.
“Sure.” I opened my eyes, smiled. “Just tired.”
“No. It’s something else.”
I hesitated. “It’s the song. It was playing the first time I was alone with J.B. At that party.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“It just surprised me.”
“Bad DJ’ing, Mom. You screwed that one up.”
“She didn’t know.”
Casey forwarded to the next song. Chumbawamba. “Tubthumping.” A tune that sounded like drunk soccer fans shouting in a bar. No painful memories attached to that one.
“Better?”
“Better. Thanks.”
Typical Alex. Trying to be helpful but getting things a little wrong.
* * *
I tossed and turned, flipped and flailed. Too many memories. One minute they wrapped around me gently, warm and welcome and comforting as a blanket. The next they were acid.
24
Liquid Hiding Place
Saturday morning
Casey slept late so by the time we got started for Jade Cove it was eleven.
She wrapped Jett’s leash around her right wrist, and I slung the camera around my neck, following her along the narrow, sandy trail winding through the trees.
For twenty minutes we walked through a dense cluster of pines without speaking. The only sounds were the rhythm of our footsteps on the trail, Jett’s contented panting and jangling tags, the chirrups and twitters high in the trees. The feeling came before I made the connection. A view of Casey’s back, birds, the clean smell of the lake. So familiar.
It was like when we’d kayaked together. Casey in the front, always. Long stretches of silence.
The path curved close to shore, where the trees thinned out, and the lake was so bright I tripped on a tree root, skidding and clutching a branch to right myself.
“You okay?” Casey called over her shoulder.
“I was admiring the lake instead of looking at my feet.”
She glanced to her left only a second, not slowing her stride. “It’s a dinky old thing, but I guess it’s kind of pretty in the right light.” Her voice had all the grudging fondness of a local.
Was I no longer a local? Because I couldn’t pretend the midday sun hitting the lake was anything less than searingly beautiful.
I’d written a report about the lake in third grade. Everyone else in Miss Burkitt’s class had used plain blue marker for their drawings, but I’d experimented with crayons, layering the wax, rubbing until I achieved the shade I wanted. Iridescent blue-black, like a fly’s wing.
I’d loved the lake, known its sounds and colors, the names of water bugs and trees, the location of every shady swimming hole. It had been my only friend, before Casey.
* * *
A curve in the path, and there it was. The name romanticized it. Jade Cove was only a shady, C-shaped notch of pebbly beach under a clump of trees. The water wasn’t really green as the name implied. It was the same deep, murky blue as the rest of the lake. But we’d liked it because it was cool even on the hottest days.
The downed pine tree we’d used as a diving board was gone, and Casey tied Jett’s leash around a new sign: No Fishing No Swimming.
“When did this happen?” I said.
“The owner of the Jet Ski rental place made a fuss, said it was a public safety issue.”
“So ban the Jet Skis.”
“Exactly. I take Elle fishing here anyway. And there’s a new petition to prohibit motorized stuff on the lake again.”
“I’ll sign. I’m a property owner.”
“Write in a comment quoting my mom, how it’s the gem of the East.”
“Jewel of the East,” I corrected.
“You’re sure?” She drew Alex’s list from her sleeve and read dramatically, “‘One picture lost forever now/Taken in the jewel of the East.’”
“My bad,” she said. She continued in a rapid kindergarten singsong:
“‘Four boys were naughty there
But I was the only beast.
Long before our silly race this was your liquid hiding place.’
“The apology tour continues.” Casey stuffed the clue sheet back in her pocket. “God, I was so pissed that night those boys went skinny-dipping, remember?”
Silly. Naughty. Were those accurate descriptions, Alex?
I smiled, but my smile was too wide or too tight, and didn’t fool her.
“You okay?” Casey said.
“I’m just tired.”
Casey nodded, and let this excuse pass. She shed her clothes, revealing a blue bikini, and ran in. Her shoulder blades seemed more prominent than they used to be, but she’d always been thin. Maybe I was remembering wrong. Or envious. Where the lines of Casey’s body had sharpened with age, mine had blurred.
�
�How cold is it?” I said, kicking off my shorts.
“It’s positively spa-like.”
She submerged again, shot back up, and started swimming, falling effortlessly into her perfect crawl. Then she trod water and turned toward me. “What are you waiting for? Too much of a city girl to jump in?”
“You’re going to laugh at my suit.”
“Does it have a skirt?”
“Almost that bad.” It was a simple black one-piece suit with a magic waist-whittling panel. I draped my pants and blouse over the no-swimming sign, hating myself for being self-conscious, and checked one last time for a pack of tourists buzzing by on Jet Skis. I held the camera above my head as I waded in. “Jesus, it’s ice water. Let’s get this over with.”
Casey floated next to me and I extended my arms awkwardly, guessing at the camera height that would best capture our faces, fumbling for the button with my left index finger. Polaroids were not made for selfies.
“Remember that night she first brought out the cameras?” Casey said, laughing. She was exuberant from the cold water. Always happiest when she was swimming.
The water felt good on my skin, too. Bracing and familiar. But I couldn’t match her mood.
“Remember how shocked we were?” she went on. “She’s actually mellowed out, at least, I thought she had until she pulled this stunt, but—”
I pressed the button before she could finish. She turned to look at me, surprised.
The photo was the worst yet. Casey’s profile was blurry. I was shivering, my smile fake.
* * *
“Halfway done,” Casey said on the walk back.
“Hmm.”
“What’s wrong? Are you sad about how much the cove has changed?” She paused to dip her head forward, squeezing out her dripping hair.
“Yes. And...” How much to tell her? Alex had written part of her apology only for me. Casey didn’t seem to know. “I was thinking about the cameras,” I said. “I guess it hit me. How elaborate it all got.”
“Elaborate. That’s one word for it.”
25
Gamemaster
July 1998
Saturday night
Summer before senior year
“C’mon, Alex. Tell us what’s inside.” Julia Masich reached for the white bag on the kitchen counter.
The Summer List Page 17