* * *
Aug. 12
32 days until LA: Shipwreck as usual. J.B. and I came close. I think if we’d had a condiment with us it might have happened. (Condiment is what C calls them to tease me.) Alex gave me some. She’s taking me to Sacramento next week to get on pill. But need to be on for month to be extra safe, she says, over and over, like I didn’t learn in Health. She asks a lot of questions about me and J.B., making sure I’m okay.
Know it’ll happen soon. In a real bedroom, with real door, when we can spend the whole night together. Not in Reno. Tacky... One of those cozy cabins in Pinecrest? Candles, fireplace, everything perfect.
He said, “I love you but I want you to be sure.”
I said, “I love you. I’m sure.”
I really do. I really am.
* * *
Aug. 15
29 days until LA: C and A and I went shopping in Sacramento for setting-up-house things for apartment.
Had saved $170 in babysitting funds. M & D paying tuition and share of deposit and rent but didn’t want to ask for extra. I was running out & who came and stuffed ten crisp $20 bills in my hand? Mrs. Ingrid Christie. Truce w. my mother?
So surprised almost forgot to thank her. I hadn’t asked her to come shopping with us, felt tiny bit guilty (but only tiny bit).
When I said thanks, she said, “Your father and I discussed it,” awkward patting of arm. Nice of her.
Bought carload of stuff for apartment with C & A. Our own coffee maker, our own purply-blue-gray bath towels (oh-so-sophisticated), our own silver soap dish. Even got fancy soaps like starfish & mermaids & sand dollars, but for show/guests only.
Alex kept squeezing us. Saying she was so proud of her grown-up girls. We had her pick out her own towel and pillow for when she sleeps over. I caught her crying in the comforter section.
I think she’ll be okay once we’re gone and everybody adjusts.
I wrote the twenty-seven-days-until-LA entry in three-inch-high letters: Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.
38
Lost and Found
August 16, 1999
28 days until LA
The rink and bowling alley were closed until one on Mondays, but J.B. was home for a long weekend, earning some extra cash. The owner had promised to give him a hundred dollars if he could fix the marble run by the entrance. It was a metal thing, an intricate series of chutes and windmills and pulleys, that had been broken longer than I could remember.
I watched him through the glass door. He was kneeling, parts and tools spread on a towel. I liked his face, so serious, so intent on his task.
When I finally knocked, he grinned and ran over to let me in. “How long’ve you been spying on me?”
“Not long. Can you take a break?”
“Definitely.” He kissed me, a strangely chaste, hands-free kiss. We usually couldn’t control our hands—they roamed, dug, petted. “I’m greasy.” He held up his smudged palms.
“I don’t mind.” I examined the marble run. “Any luck with that?”
“Getting close.” He sent a heavy silver sphere down a slide at the top and we watched it traverse its little course. It made its way through the contraption, gliding along ramps and into tunnels, merrily swinging on a miniature trapeze, getting scooped up by a long metal stick like a metronome with a cunning basket on top.
“Whee,” I said softly, following its ride in the basket. Then, abruptly, the silver ball stopped, tripped up by a ridge in front of a sloping tunnel. “Aw, poor little guy. How frustrating to make it so close.”
“I’ll get him to the finish. Need to make this ledge lower, here. What’s in the bag?”
“Our lunch. Ham-and-butter sandwiches. And brownies. I thought you’d want a break from nachos and mummified hot dogs.”
“How long can you stay?”
“I have a babysitting job at two. Are we really alone?”
“See any other cars?”
“Nope.”
We walked down the long, carpeted hallway. The two of us had never been alone in the rink before. Even at the end of the nighttime skate sessions there was always someone there besides J.B. People cleaning up in the snack bar, or Andy, the owner, looking stressed through the glass door to his office.
J.B. headed for the snack bar but I tugged him toward the dark rink. “I have a better idea.” I pulled the picnic blanket from my backpack and kicked my Nikes off.
* * *
“What are you in the mood for?” he called from the DJ booth.
“Bach. ‘Goldberg Variations.’ But I doubt the rink has that.” I’d been trying to master part of it on piano for a year but had put in woefully little practice time since J.B. and I got together.
“Sorry, no Bach. But let’s see how close I can get.”
I recognized drowsy steel guitar, the opening chords of “Walkin’ After Midnight.” Patsy Cline. The beginning of a four-song Patsy medley the rink played on ’50s night. The glitter ball began to spin, layering the rink in shifting white lights.
“How’d I do?” He slid over in his socks.
“Perfect. This song always makes me wish I knew how to waltz.”
He pulled me to my feet. “But we can slide.”
So we slid to Patsy. We dragged and pushed each other, did a sock-foot crack-the-whip, competed in a distance contest. We slid until our stomachs were growling.
After we ate we lay on our backs, looking up at the spinning fake stars and listening to “You Belong to Me.” I picked out the notes on the rink with my hand. “Remind me to get this sheet music sometime.”
“Did you reserve that music room at school for next year?”
“Mmm-hmm. Ten hours a week free if you’re a music minor.”
“Good.” He leaned onto his side.
I swept a lock of hair from his eyes.
He kissed my bare shoulder. “Salty.”
“Andy should charge for this.” I closed my eyes. “Rent the place out for...”
“What?” He murmured into the hollow between my shoulder and neck.
I dug my fingers into his hair. “Rent it for...” His mouth slid higher. “For private dates...”
“I’d rather save it for us,” he said, his mouth traveling up my neck, jaw, chin. Taking my lower lip between his. I forgot where we were until we rolled off the blanket and I felt the cold surface of the rink under my back. We rolled back onto the blanket, onto the little island we’d made.
I gripped his hand, he pressed back. And I knew.
It was daytime. We were both sweaty, in grubby work clothes. No candles, no fireplace. I had to leave in an hour for babysitting. “Now,” I said.
“Here, though? Exotic, but maybe not the most comfortable. And if someone comes in early...”
“Andy’s office?” I said.
“It’s locked.”
“I know where.” I pulled him by the wrist across the rink, onto the carpet. To the storage room behind the arcade, the one holding the big box of lost-and-found clothes. Coats and sweaters and scarves left behind, never claimed. “I always wondered what happened with lost-and-found stuff nobody came back for.”
“This might be a first.”
We made ourselves a big, buoyant nest of forgotten clothes, draped the picnic blanket over it. With the door shut, there was only a faint glow on the floor from the rink lights. But we could still hear Patsy’s lonely contralto singing “I Fall to Pieces.”
* * *
I was too on edge to let go completely in our narrow, dark hiding place. He tried to hold off, to help, but though his fingers were well acquainted with what I needed now, it was a lost cause right then. I whispered, “It’s okay,” and he sank into me one last time, spoke into my neck: “Vyou. Itso. Itso.” I love you. It’s so. It’s so. He shuddered and cried out.
&nbs
p; After, I curled up on his chest. Sticky, marveling, proud.
“You didn’t come,” he said. “I wanted you to so bad.”
“I was thinking too much.” I brushed his wet hair off his forehead.
“Did it hurt a lot?”
“A little,” I admitted, my hand drifting down to where it had stung, mostly at the beginning.
“I’ll make it up to you.”
“It wasn’t as bad as they tell you.” I sat up, my hands on his shoulders, my thighs around his abdomen. He circled his hands around my waist and closed his eyes, and we playacted for a second, moving our hips. “I wish I didn’t have to go,” I said.
“You have no idea how much I wish that... God, you’re. It’s.” He leaned up. “Can you get away after babysitting?”
I leaned forward so he could take my nipple in his mouth, pulled back. Leaned forward again. “Maybe my babysitting job will get miraculously—keep doing that—extended.”
“And maybe.” His voice hummed into my breast. “Maybe I’ll—is this nice?—call in sick.”
“Yes. It’s nice. Keep. Don’t.”
His mouth was now fully occupied, and I was intent on my small, rocking movements. Though some separate, vigilant part of me was on alert for sounds outside our lost and found, and wishing we had all afternoon, I was able to stop thinking. Just long enough.
* * *
We checked into a cabin in Pinecrest at four. Hard workers, for seven hours we devoted ourselves to contrasts, comparisons, combinations. We resisted sleep even though we were both exhausted.
When we drove home it was after eleven. It was a chilly, breezy night, but we left the windows down. J.B. and I clasped hands, hanging on even when he shifted gears.
I leaned against the window. Smiling, letting the wind dry my still-sweaty hair.
J.B. parked a block from my house so my parents wouldn’t hear his engine. “I love you,” he said, lacing his fingers with mine through the truck’s window.
“I love you, too.”
39
Again
2016
Sunday, late morning
Casey and I walked slowly from the church back to her house. For five blocks we didn’t say a word.
We let the town fill the silence with its Sunday noises of buzzing lawn mowers, kids shouting, Jet Skis on the lake.
This time, as we passed my old street, Casey didn’t ask if I wanted to take the picture of the bench my dad and J.B. had made me. But she touched my shoulder. The tiniest, swiftest brush of her hand, to say she remembered our happy week working outside, the summer before senior year.
She thought she knew everything I’d lost in this town.
All the reasons I’d run away.
When we reached the park across from her house, Casey stopped, watching a little dark-haired boy and his ponytailed mother, or nanny, pumping their legs in the swings. They swung in opposite time, high-fiving when they passed each other. Each time they clapped hands, the boy shouted, “Again!”
“So that’s why Alex wanted us to get together now,” I said. “Because you’re sick.”
Casey turned to face me. “You’re not supposed to say sick. My counselor says I’m ‘showing early, manageable symptoms.’”
Casey had always been a natural mimic; I could envision the counselor, some prim no-nonsense nurse in a white uniform, an irritatingly all-knowing expression in her eyes, a sheaf of pamphlets in her hand. But I couldn’t laugh at her imitation. Not yet.
Casey’s sick. I screamed it, in my head.
And I almost hadn’t come.
But maybe Alex had known I would, or cast a spell on me from afar to make sure.
A good witch, after all these years.
40
February
Daniel picked them up in his truck at Lands End Beach. Four hours traveling north, curled up against the window in the passenger seat, fighting the urge at every stop to scream that it was a mistake, she wanted to go home.
She leaned against the glass and closed her eyes, seeing things she needed to forget. The orange garibaldi-fish key chain, the rectangle of morning sun on the faded red living room sofa they’d found secondhand. The denim beanbag chair under her bedroom window, her mom’s fringed saddle purse.
The messy blue counter in their small, shared bathroom, its grout stained orangey-pink from loose chunks of Apricot Velvet blusher. They’d shared this blush. Until her mother discarded anything that didn’t conform to the church’s idea of modest womanhood and they had to leave their faces bare.
Her mother’s cheeks were soft, slightly plump. Like her own.
Katherine opened her eyes and rolled the window down, as if the cold ocean air could pull every unwanted picture from her mind. Scatter them on the wind, send them out to sea.
She had no home. The closest thing to home was Alexandra, sitting there between her and Daniel, her unbraided red hair swirling in wild ropes.
When they pulled up to Daniel’s white clapboard house he said, “The place is pretty full right now. Friends I’ve met on gigs, friends from college.”
The word college was reassuring. Katherine counted twelve other houseguests the first day but it was hard to keep track. They crashed on the sofa, the floor, even the kitchen floor. Sometimes they slept in the hammock strung on the wraparound porch.
He gave her and Alexandra the second-best room, upstairs, next to his, with a door that locked, an actual bed. Daniel said they could use the small bathroom that connected their room with his. Nobody else could.
He said they could stay as long as they wanted.
* * *
The first week, the back of her throat was hot and tight, threatening tears at the slightest memory of home. But she didn’t let herself cry in her bed as she had at camp. Instead she bit the inside of her cheek, hard. A pain she could control.
She didn’t want food, even the warm honey-walnut bread Alexandra brought upstairs one morning, wrapped in a paper towel. “It’s good,” she said. “Derek baked it.”
She took a bite so Alexandra would leave her alone.
“Come outside. Trina’s showing me how to make those dangly earrings. She says I can help her sell them at the farmer’s market next weekend.”
Alexandra had thrown herself into the household. She knew all the names already. Derek the Baker. Trina the Jewelry-maker. Like they were living in a nursery rhyme.
“I’ll come down later. I’m tired.”
She woke to the sound of guitar, Daniel’s low voice singing Beatles songs.
“Blackbird.”
“Let it Be.”
“Julia.”
The lyrics, though soft, carried through the closed doors of their shared bathroom.
He played scales, strings of notes from low to high, like a question. Then he strummed “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair.” Low and sweet, swapping in his own words:
“O dear, what can the matter be
O dear, what can the matter be
Katherine’s so long at the door.
I’m worried about her, she seems oh, so lonely...”
She tiptoed to the bathroom, opened the door inch by inch so it wouldn’t squeak. The door on the other side, the one to his room, was ever-so-slightly ajar. She rested one hand on the sink to still herself, held her breath.
“She’s a quiet one, Katherine / Does she feel like talking?”
She opened his door.
He stopped singing and laughed, picking out a meandering string of notes. “You doing all right?”
She nodded. “You’re a good singer.”
He waved this off, setting the guitar on the bed. “I’m a mimic. Wish I was more than that.”
He’d fastened the driftwood crescent to his brass headboard with wire wrapped around the center. At first she
thought the curving driftwood ornament was supposed to look like miniature bull’s horns, like the ones people strapped to the grills of their trucks.
Then she got it. A ninety-degree tilt to the left and the crescent moon became something else entirely.
“Like what I’ve done with your present?” he said.
“Yes. It’s clever.”
“Don’t tell me you guessed why I wired it on that way. With the points up.”
“For good luck,” she said. “You never hang a horseshoe upside down.”
“Exactly.” He nodded in delight, reaching up to make a minute adjustment to the driftwood so it sat level. “You’re the one who’s clever. You found it for me. My good-luck charm.”
Katherine wandered over to the window. Alexandra and some of the others were out back, sitting at the picnic table under the big tree. They were smoking, laughing, making their odds and ends to sell.
“So you’re not into our little jewelry and candle workshop?” he said. “Don’t worry, it’s not a requirement.”
“It’s not that. I like the things they make. I’m just...”
“Homesick,” he said.
“I guess.”
“I have something perfect for that.”
“Chocolate?”
“Nicer than chocolate.” He pulled a piece of foil from his pocket. “But only if you want it. Again, not a requirement.”
41
A Pirate
Late August 1999
Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. I wrote in my diary on August 17, the morning after my first time with J.B.
Maybe this was tempting fate. The number three has a dark power, according to one of Alex’s books. Maybe, if I hadn’t written the word, or had written it only once, that last summer would have simply rolled on, one perfect day after another.
J.B. and I sneaking off together every chance we got, shaky with desire.
Casey and I visiting favorite spots on the lake to wish them goodbye. See you at Thanksgiving, Jade Cove. See you at Thanksgiving, Raptor Rock. We tried to act solemn during these farewells, but usually overdid it and ended up laughing.
LA was so close we could taste it.
The Summer List Page 26