Then I looked out at the shining water. She wasn’t at full speed, but even her laziest backstroke was a beautiful thing to watch, liquid and controlled. I wanted to run into the water and scoop her out like those parents in Jaws. She didn’t know what was going on under the surface of our placid little town.
“What’ll you tell your mom about...” J.B. pointed at my bag.
“That I’m eighteen and I’m done pretending.”
* * *
My mother stood in the entry, inhaling and exhaling in a deep, showy way. See what you do to my respiration, wicked child? “You’ve been out with that boy all day?”
That boy. She said it like she said those Collier boys or that mother, meaning Alex. No adjective necessary.
“You know his name.”
My dad crept in as she took another “Lord help me” breath.
“The state you left the bake sale table in. Marjorie Pettit said—”
“Did she tell you about her little cause?” I took the pamphlet from my bag and held it out to her, then at the last second offered it to my dad instead.
He read it and sighed. Handed it to my mother.
She barely glanced at it before handing it back to him. “Marjorie Pettit’s a fool. Always has been.”
“That’s it?” I said. “She’s a fool? She probably knows about Casey. And I know you know, too, the way those old bitches gossip.”
“Laura.” My father’s voice was sharp, but he didn’t look up from the pamphlet. I hadn’t told him about Casey, but I wondered if he’d guessed.
“Witches, then,” I said, softening my language for my father’s sake. Not for her.
“It’s that Shepherd woman,” my mother said. “That house. That’s why she’s acting like this.”
“Alex has never done anything to you. And The Shipwreck is just four walls and a roof. Just because you were too uptight to play with the kids who used to live there—”
“Laura!” my father said.
I took my own deep, showy breath, and when I finally said the words, I sounded like an actor enjoying her monologue too much. An ugly part of me was glad about Marjorie Pettit’s pamphlet. Because now I could say it at last:
“I’m never going back to that church.”
First week of July
The week after I finally told my mother I wasn’t going to church anymore, I waited for my punishment. None came. I was even allowed to take the bus to Tahoe with Casey for fireworks.
I guessed that my father had intervened, told my mother I was almost a grown-up. It’s what he’d said to me twice since my birthday, bashfully: “Eighteen. Hard to believe.”
J.B. came home almost every weekend now, and on Saturday night I went over to Casey’s as usual, and as usual J.B. and I spent most of our time on her bed half-clothed, stopping just short of sex.
I said, “I’m sure. I’m eighteen.”
“Soon,” he said.
While he was down the hall splashing water on his face, I drew the shade up halfway and spied on the remnants of the party from Casey’s window. There were still kids in the lamp-lit garden drinking beer. Alex sat on the bench, a small bowl in her lap. It was the one she’d bought during the high point of her witchy gardening phase, stone with a matching pestle. On a towel next to her were small objects I couldn’t make out.
Ginny Ambrose and Dina Pettit sat at Alex’s feet, laughing and dabbing their arms with paper towels. At first I thought perhaps they’d simply spilled beer, but I realized, from the way Casey stood slightly apart from the others, unsmiling, that this wasn’t the case.
“What’s going on out there?” J.B. settled behind me on the bed.
“I’m pretty sure it’s Alex’s version of a Wiccan blood ritual,” I said. “Seems to be a crowd-pleaser.”
“You’re kidding.” He stared over my shoulder at the scene.
“Casey’s annoyed. I should go help.”
“You’re not her mother, Laur.”
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass. “You mean Casey’s or Alex’s?”
“I meant Alex.”
A boy picked up the mortar and pestle and began drumming. Click-thrum. Click-thrum. The set cost fifty dollars from the Moonshadow occult shop in Sacramento; I’d seen the price sticker the afternoon Alex bought it.
“Want to hear something embarrassing?” I said. “Promise not to tell.”
“Promise.”
I made my confession to the window. “I used to imagine Alex was my mother.”
I waited for him to answer, or laugh, but he didn’t.
I turned to face him. I couldn’t read his expression. It was kind, inviting me to continue my explanation, but was there pity mixed in?
“Alex was so interested in me and...I had it all worked out. We don’t look anything alike, but our feet are almost identical. Narrow, and we both have super-small pinky toenails, did you ever notice? Freakishly small, like basically dots?”
I extended a leg, settling my foot in his lap so we could study my toes.
He tapped my pinky toenail. “I’ve never noticed Alex’s toes. But I like yours.”
“You know they’re weird.” My pinky toenails really were odd. They were like flattened seed pearls inserted into my flesh. The one time I had a professional pedicure, before homecoming sophomore year, the lady at the salon had bluntly asked if I wanted to “overdraw” them. She’d painted varnish straight onto my skin, a trompe l’oeil effect that made it look like I had a respectable-sized nail. I’d told Alex about this salon visit and she’d whipped off her socks to show me how her toenails were almost as tiny.
That means we both have Greek ancestry, she’d said. She’d read a book on this. Casey had held her foot up and it was nothing like ours; her toenails were standard discs and her toes swerved into each other like puzzle pieces.
I withdrew my leg, settling cross-legged on the sagging mattress.
“So, the feet thing,” I said, staring out the window again. “I thought maybe my parents hadn’t told me my real birthday. Because otherwise it wouldn’t be possible. Casey’s is more than two months later. Dumb, huh? Like that kids’ book with the bird. Are You My Mother?”
“It’s not dumb. I’m sure every adopted kid does that.”
We watched Alex quietly through the window, leaning close to catch puffs of breeze from off the lake, welcome after our sweaty tangling on the bed.
“You wouldn’t still want it to be true, would you?” he said, scratching the window screen to indicate the scene outside. “About Alex?”
I looked down at her, holding court with teenagers, oblivious to Casey’s fury. Or, worse, not so oblivious, but unable to resist the attention. She was selfish, foolish, infuriating. But brimming with life.
I shook my head no. But I knew the answer was yes.
* * *
J.B. left at midnight and I curled up in Casey’s bed to wait for her.
When she collapsed next to me, she sighed.
“That bad?” I said.
“If you’d been down there she would’ve poked a needle in you, too. Your church people are going to burn her at the stake.”
“Tell.”
“Love spells for some lifeguards Ginny and Dina worship. The crowd ate it up.”
“No. God, Alex.” I laughed, but stopped abruptly when I saw Casey’s expression. She was right, of course. Certain parents would go ballistic if they found out Alex had tapped their daughters’ tender arms like sugar maples.
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. What would your congregation think?” Her voice was bitter.
“Stop with the church stuff,” I said to Casey. “I’m not going back.”
“You’re pretty girl-who-cried-wolf on the subject.”
“I know, but I mean it this time. And I know I said I’d keep an ey
e on Alex and I haven’t done that, either. But I’ll help you with her next weekend.”
“You don’t have to babysit her on your Saturdays with J.B.”
“He won’t have sex with me anyway. It’s totally frustrating.”
“Poor Laura.” She smiled.
I was so relieved to see her smile. “Help me. Should I take him to a hotel?”
“With a heart-shaped bed.”
“They have those in Reno,” I said.
“You could ask my mom to do one of her spells.”
“How would we get his blood?”
“You could bite his tongue while you’re kissing and secretly save the blood and spit it into the magic stone bowl.”
“He might notice.”
“It’s not a perfect plan.”
For the first time in the hundreds of Saturdays I’d slept over, Casey didn’t set her alarm.
“You’re sure?” she said, her hand hovering over her plastic Eiffel Tower clock.
I said the same thing I’d told J.B. “I’m sure. I’m eighteen.”
* * *
When I came home the next morning I expected to find the house empty.
But my dad was out back, sanding the teak side tables from the den. They nested together in a way that had fascinated me when I was little. My mother said they were a royal pain because they showed every drop of water.
“You’re here,” I said.
“That I am.” He didn’t look up, maintaining a steady scritch-scratch with his sandpaper. Finally, he blew at the fine powder and said, “I always thought Minister Talbert was a decent character. Bit of a windbag, but not one to allow an ugly business like that under his roof. Can’t abide it.”
“Thanks, Daddy. Was she really mad?”
“It’ll blow over.” He nodded across the water at The Shipwreck. “Casey’s a good kid. Nobody’s business, the other stuff. Anyone giving her a hard time?”
“Nothing too bad.”
He smoothed a small section of wood, blew again, and inspected it. “Give your old man a hand. See if you can find the teak oil. Blue can, top shelf.”
I watched him from inside the shed as he bent over the lowest table in the set, his jeans loose on his skinny form, his stooped posture making him look frail. He had such a quick mind that I forgot sometimes, he was nearly sixty-seven.
* * *
My father never went back to church after that. I don’t know what my mother told people. I imagine it hurt her deeply, him siding with me that last summer. We never discussed it again, and although I listened at the heat vent for weeks, I never heard my parents fight about it.
Quiet as it was, the schism in our little family, it turned out, was deep and irreparable.
37
Counting Down
July 1999
Casey was worried about Alex. She’d started dating this guy Casey didn’t like. Older. Gary something. We even got to meet him and he was dull. (Dull. Dull, dull, I wrote in my diary). He lived all the way down in Palo Alto and drove up to Coeur-de-Lune every chance he got.
“It’s because you’re leaving,” I said to Casey about the Gary guy. I didn’t mention that Alex was drinking while we were out on the scavenger hunts. I’d seen her slide a wine bottle behind the knife block one Saturday night when our team returned. “She wants someone to hold on to.”
“You mean it’s because we’re leaving,” Casey said. “You, me. Her excuse to have a fan club at CDL High. That’s what Saturdays have become. Alex Shepherd fan club meetings.”
* * *
By midsummer Alex had become distant and distracted, unpredictable even for her, her graveyard of abandoned projects more sprawling than ever. Her scavenger hunt lists were all over the place—either repetitive, dashed off the night of the game, or written in overly obscure rhymes.
She started smothering Casey, kissing her, squeezing her. But she continued the parties Casey hated, and continued to date the dull, humorless man from Palo Alto. And she kept drinking. I could tell by her pink cheeks, the wildness of her laughter in the garden after the scavenger hunts.
Alex was shattered about us leaving, no matter how much she tried to deny it. She kept talking up the amazing things that awaited us—a big city, the college classes she always wished she’d taken.
I’m so excited for you girls, she’d say, often. Too often.
Casey and I sat near Alex on Saturday nights, limiting her drinks. When J.B. came, he helped.
But at eleven Casey would urge J.B. and me to go inside. We’d hold hands as we left, pretending to be casual so nobody would tease us. We’d walk upstairs slowly, examining the photo wall.
At the top there was a picture of Alex as a toddler on the beach in San Francisco. There weren’t many pictures from when Alex was little, because she didn’t talk to her family anymore. But I liked this one of her in a skirted swimsuit, her bobbed red hair shining in the sun. She was tiny, standing in the sand against a low rock wall.
I’d noticed J.B. studying it more than once.
“Alex looks cute in that one, doesn’t she?” I said one night, when he was lingering by the pictures even longer than usual.
“Yeah, but that’s not why I like it. See the wall of this building behind her? Or what used to be a building—it burned down a long time ago. I went there for a project when I was an undergrad. It’s the Sutro Baths, out by the Cliff House. They used one hundred thousand panes of glass.” He drew in the foggy sky with his finger, showing me where the roof had once been. “At high tide, the salt water would flow right in from the ocean. Pretty innovative for the time. Shame it burned down.”
He started to follow me upstairs, then looked back at the picture. “How old do you think she is here?”
“I think she said one or two. She couldn’t be much older. Look at those chubby cheeks.”
“Yeah. Cute.” He stared at the picture until I reached down for his hand, tugging him up the last few steps.
* * *
I could have helped Casey stop the Saturday nights at The Shipwreck. But they were everything to me. They were my excuse to see J.B.
Behind Casey’s gold candy-wrapper door, J.B. and I spent a hundred hours kissing, exploring, peeling off more and more clothing but keeping it close by, listening for footsteps.
One night he pulled my drenched underwear to the side and ran his tongue up and down my very center, until I cried out and dug my hands in his hair.
The next week I took him in my hand, my mouth. Soon. We both said it now. We knew the rest would happen soon.
In late July, we sat on Casey’s bed, the light from the garden lamp below bathing us in gold, and I finally showed him my music box. He hadn’t seen it since years before, at the rink, and that time he’d thought it was a stone because he hadn’t removed it from the bag.
I opened the lid and played the song, and he didn’t say a word until it was done.
J.B. ran his index finger over the swirling grain of the driftwood case for a long time. “Handmade,” he observed. “Ever see another like it?”
“Never.” I told him how Casey had helped me find out the song title. Softly, I sang the sappy lyrics I’d memorized. I’d never done this before, not even with Alex or Casey. The song was wistful, listing the colors of loss, doubt, regret. Someone’s heart had turned green, or jealous. And that made life gray.
“Sad,” he said.
“I thought there could be a message in there for me. Maybe she was even a painter. You know, the colors?”
“Maybe.”
“I play it on the piano when I have the house to myself.”
He brushed his lips on my temple. “Play it for me sometime.”
August
“Soon we can spend the whole night together,” I said. We lay on Casey’s bed on our backs, feet up on the wall, fing
ers entwined.
“Soon,” he said. “Thirty-seven days.”
We would all be in LA by September 13.
“I love that you’re counting. I thought I was the only one. I’ve been counting down in my diary.”
“I didn’t know you kept a diary.”
“I’m pretty hot and cold with it. Now I usually start off the entries by apologizing for not writing.”
“What do you say about me?”
“That’s private. But you come out okay.”
* * *
Entries in A Girl’s First Diary
Aug. 8
36 days until LA: Casey and I found an apartment 17 miles from CalArts and 18 from UCLA. (Oh, yeah, and drumroll, only 21 from J.B.’s new rental, ahem-ahem.)
Carpet unfortunately rust-colored and shaggy but everything else v. nice. We can buy two single beds and couch from people living there now (also students) for $250 and probably will. Complex is The Pacific Breeze but we are nowhere near ocean of course. We have eensy-weensy balcony over pkng. lot.
Put down $750 deposit. C & I both screamed in car on drive home, so excited. C asked if I wanted J.B. to live with us (very shy, for her) and I said of course not. Not ready for that.
C & I hope she’ll meet fabulous g.f. in LA. I asked C to describe her ideal, perfect g.f. She says I’m too hung up on perfect. Maybe. But if J.B. not perfect, haven’t seen evidence yet.
Major plans to check out her “scene” there & I’ll come along for moral support. Clubs, coffee shops, etc.
(C still doesn’t know about Mrs. P’s stupid red leaflets. She started stuffing them in mailboxes. Last Sat. we got one and I ran over to The Shipwreck to hide theirs before C saw. Told Alex. We agreed not to tell C.)
CDL looked so tiny when we came back from LA. We felt sorry for it.
* * *
Aug. 10
34 days until LA: Daddy ordered pirate’s flag from a catalog for Alex. Exactly like the one in the picture. Another of his perfect gifts.
Will miss him so much. He’s promised to check in on Alex next year.
The Summer List Page 25