The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

by Deb Caletti

  “Missus!” Trevor says. He looks over his shoulder at Mom. “Check it out!”

  “Mom, your favorite!” Bex says.

  “Axe!” Severin says.

  “Whoo-hoo,” I laugh. “Look, Ma, giant Axe ad.”

  Mom sighs. “I give up,” she says.

  “I don’t get how people think God and science don’t go together,” I say as I look up at the starry night. My head is in Trevor’s lap, and we are on the dock at Pine Lake Park, our park, our place. We arrived at twilight; Trevor pushed me on the playground swings and we watched the trees turn yellow as I flew toward the sky. Then it got dark and the light lost its magic, and the trees became secretive. “Just look at those stars and tell me, how can you not believe in God? Yet, all these wacky people think if you talk science you’re some kind of atheist.”

  “We could buy a house here, you know, In,” Trevor says. He is wrapping my hair around one finger.

  “And why can’t evolution and God go together, anyway? Sure, that’s not what the book says, but what are they gonna do, try to explain the whole process to people who still thought the world was flat? I mean, come on. God created, presto chango, that everyone could understand. But why can’t God have created evolution? I don’t get it.”

  “We could probably even buy our house. You think? We could knock on their door and offer them some fucking-tastic amount they couldn’t say no to.”

  “You’re not even listening.” I sit up. I circle my knees with my arms.

  “We’ve got some decisions to make here, In. I mean, I think it’s time we talk seriously about Nunderwear.”

  An ugly wave rises up inside of me. “And I think it’s time we talk seriously about you talking about my money every fucking second.”

  The swell of anger—it’s not the worst thing. What’s worst is that Trevor looks at me then, gauging whether I’m kidding or not. He thinks I am. It is not the kind of mistake Trevor-Indigo of the past could have made. We always saw each other. But he doesn’t see me. He doesn’t see me. He actually laughs. Like I’m just a great big kidder.

  “Anyway, I think if we get it started? It’s a way, you know, to have money make more money. It’s a great idea, In. People are going to love Nunderwear. People will love the Jesus lip balm. ‘Lookin’ smooth for the Lord.’ You gotta love it.”

  “I can’t believe it,” I say. But it’s the I can’t believe it that means you can believe it. Maybe that you even expected it. The water is black and twinkly. A mosquito annoys my bare legs and I swat him away. “Take me home.” I stand up.

  “What’s the matter? In? What’s going on?” He stands up too. He holds my arms. I look at his blue eyes, under his shaggy bangs. He is someone I know and don’t know. Or maybe that’s actually me.

  “If you keep talking about we and us and my money, I’ll start thinking we’re a threesome,” I say. I twist my head to the side so I don’t have to look at him.

  He ducks and dodges so that he can meet my eyes. “It’s always been we and us,” he says. “Is it wrong to want to make some plans?”

  I feel the pressure of his fingertips against my skin. “You’re holding me too hard,” I say, even if this isn’t exactly true.

  He lets go. “I don’t get you, In. I don’t get what’s going on here.”

  “I told you, I want to go home,” I say.

  We walk to the parking lot. My arms are folded. It was foolish to think nothing would change. I get in Bob Weaver and slam the door.

  “Easy, In. Jesus,” Trevor says.

  For some reason, this pisses me off more. That there’s this object he cares about more than my feelings at the moment. When we get home, my house is dark, except for the porch light glowing. A few mosquitoes buzz there, too, like the last holdovers at a party. Trevor kisses me good night and I kiss back, but it’s a weird, absent kiss, performed by my body double. And when he says he loves me and I tell him I love him in return, that, too, is faraway, distant and echoey, like words spoken in a too-large and empty room.

  12

  Over the next three weeks Severin went to the prom, and we both finished classes and had our graduation ceremony. Trevor and Bex and Mom held up cards when Severin and I paraded in. Bex held WE, and Mom held LOVE, and Trevor held YOU. They screamed their heads off when they saw us, and Mom tried to take pictures with our new digital camera, but most of them were a sea of purple gowns or the curly brown head of the woman seated in front of her. She’s not so good on the technical end. There were a lot of prom pictures, though; Severin bought the super-deluxe pack, and he had wallets of him and Kayleigh and refrigerator magnets and this huge eight-by-ten that sat in a frame on the desk in his room. Kayleigh, in white satin and carrying a dozen roses with roses at her wrist, looked like a prom queen who’d been hit by a floral delivery truck, and Severin was tall and handsome beside her, his arm around her waist.

  Dad’s graduation present to me was a book of Emerson’s essays. The note inside said The source of my fatherly wisdom. Remember who you are. Love, Dad. I cracked it open, but was assaulted with what seemed like a million tiny words; a Hark! leapt from the page, and I shut the book again. Dad had planned on coming to graduation, but Jennifer had slipped in a splotch of water sloshed from Keiko’s bowl and had broken her ankle and Dad needed to be there to take care of her. He sounded sad and disappointed and he sent flowers and cards and called us twice that day, once beforehand to wish us luck and once after to see how it went. He pressed me on my future plans, urged college now that money wasn’t an issue. I had missed all application deadlines so I had time to think, I told him.

  Mom bugged me daily until I finally visited Dad’s financial adviser, who discussed investments with me and who gave me a spending budget and set me up with a debit card. I hadn’t made any Big Decisions about the money yet. I bought a car—a VW Rabbit. I tried again to talk Mom into getting one for herself, tried to talk her into moving, but she just got that hard-as-marble face. Save it for your future, she said. I gave her rent money one month, but found it later propped up on my pillow with a note: We’re fine, In. But thank you. XXXOOO Mom. So, here I was with people asking me for money I wasn’t sure I wanted to give and people not taking money I was sure I wanted to give. Melanie gave up on me coming with her to Malibu. She was leaving the next day for the summer, moving on to UC Santa Barbara. Just like she said, her parents “worked something out.”

  “I cannot believe you are giving up this chance,” she says when she calls me that morning from the gym. Melanie’s one of those baffling people who get up at insane hours to work out when all other sensible people are repeatedly hitting their snooze button. Right then, I’m driving Severin over to Kayleigh Moore’s before heading to work, and I’m balancing my phone between ear and shoulder as I drive. “With all the people my Dad knows? You could bring your guitar. You could play for some big-name producer, who knows?”

  “Who Knows is a big-name record producer? Never heard of him,” I say. Besides, my guitar and I are taking a break from our relationship.

  “Left up here,” Severin says. He’s all hyped up because it’s the first time he’s seen Kayleigh Moore since prom, and the first time he’s been invited to her house since we worked there the night of Chief’s birthday. They’re having some kind of swimming party, and Severin is wearing his swimming suit. He has a rolled-up towel beside him, and he smells like coconutty sun lotion. It seems a little early for a swimming party, but hey, maybe seven a.m. swimming is some new fad among the superwealthy.

  “Don’t you care about doing something other than staying here with your family and working and being with Trevor? Don’t you find all this a little small? Someone has opened the door to your cage, and you’re just sitting there. How many places have you even been? And you think Trevor’s going to widen your world?” I hear someone shouting on her end, “Hey, Wiley, stellar abs, man!” and then laughter.

  The question scritches at my nerves. I think of Funny, How many places have you laid yo
ur head? It occurs to me that there are two and a half million ways not to measure up. “Isn’t your Amazing Abs class about to start?” I say.

  “Aerobics and then weight training,” she says. “I’ll be ready when I go to put on a bikini.”

  “Pump it, work it,” I say. “With buns of steel, you can sit anywhere. You are my exercise role model. Ha, now that I have a role model, can I skip doing it myself?”

  “Left! Back there!” Severin says.

  I glare at him. “Mel? I gotta go. I can’t do this driving-and-talking thing.”

  “I’m sorry you won’t be coming, Indigo. I’d love to have you. And I think you’re missing out.”

  “Send me a postcard,” I say.

  I have to make a U-turn into a neighborhood with a SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY sign. This would be the time for Severin to make our same lame joke about fast children, and the fact that they must be playing somewhere else. But he misses the sign entirely. One hand is clinging to the door handle, and the other is clenching a clump of fabric from his swim shorts.

  “Would you relax?” I say.

  “God, In, the way you drive makes that slightly impossible,” he says. “You almost took out that lady with the stroller, and then you slid through that stop sign and now we’re having the grand tour of this neighborhood, with that cocker spaniel practically riding on our front fender.”

  “No children or animals were hurt in the making of this film,” I say. “Backseat drivers must get out at the next stop.”

  “That poor dog. I saw the terror in his eyes,” he says. Maybe I have made Severin a little nervous with my defensive driving. I’ve got the air conditioner on, but he’s got a mustache of perspiration.

  “You want your own car? Work on Mom for me. Until then, it better be ‘Thank you, Indigo, my beautiful, wonderful sister, for going out of your way for me this morning so that I can visit my spoiled girlfriend, Buffy.’”

  “Now take a right. Right, here! Shit, man. Okay, that next left, by that willow tree.” He points, but thanks, I can see it two feet in front of me. “God, I’d love a car. Why’s Mom freaking out like this? She doesn’t want it to change us in some drastic way, but she’s the one going to extremes, if you ask me.”

  “Hormones!” I sing.

  We reach Kayleigh Moore’s house, if you can call that place a house. I had wondered if it would look different to me now. I couldn’t buy it, or anything close to it, even if I spent everything I had. But I have seventeen-dollar lipstick on now, from my binge at the makeup counter. I view the house with new, expensive lips and realize it looks the same to me as before. It feels cold and unreal, like a movie set. It is not a place where your Mom would go into the kitchen in her robe in the morning and make hot chocolate. It is not a place where you could find the bag of marshmallows for that hot chocolate, fastened closed with a rubber band.

  I leave Meer Island and hit the gas so I won’t be late to work. I breathe better once I am out of that place. There’s something about it that makes me feel like I’ve got a plastic bag tied around my head. At the next stop light, I drag race a King County Library bookmobile and a minivan with the bumper sticker PROUD PARENT OF AN HONOR ROLL STUDENT. I beat them both soundly, then take the on-ramp to the freeway. I get off at the Nine Mile Falls exit, curve around the Texaco station and Old Country Buffet, one of those all-you-can-eat places that no one who lives here actually goes to, one of those places with gravy that makes you have second thoughts. My eye is caught by something at the roadside.

  It’s a man, and he’s wearing some huge, spongy yellow upright rectangle costume, with some orange glob coming from the top. He is dancing around and holding a sign that says, SPEND THE MORNING AT OLD COUNTRY BUFFET. Usually, I wouldn’t pay much attention, but my eyes travel from the mysterious costume down, and I see the legs that stick from under it. Tattooed legs. Legs with zodiac signs—rams and bulls and water bearers and intertwined fish—that edge down into the top of his sneakers.

  Maybe I forget my turn signal, because someone honks, and maybe I swerve just a little, because the spongy yellow upright rectangle hightails it into the restaurant bushes. I yank the parking brake, get out. The yellow rectangle has had the orange goop scared out of him, and he’s taken a tumble—he’s horizontal in the junipers and it appears that he’s unable to right himself again.

  “Leroy?” I call.

  “Who is it?” His arms and legs are flailing like a tortoise stuck on his back.

  “Me. Indigo.”

  “Oh, thank God! Did you see that car try to run me over?”

  “Leroy, jeez, I’m sorry. That was me! I was just pulling over. I saw this yellow rectangle with your legs…”

  “I’m a breakfast burrito. Help me up.”

  I pick my way across the junipers, hold out my hand and foist him upright. “You have shit all on the back of you,” I say. I swat off the back of him, freeing bits of prickly green and dirt and leaves.

  “That was you? What were you doing? I thought you were going to kill me.”

  “I was pulling over!” I say. “That’s all! That guy didn’t need to honk and shake his fist! I couldn’t believe this was you! What are you doing?”

  “It’s a job, Indigo.” A car with a bunch of teenagers passes by and they beep their horn and wave. “I needed a job, you know, after I got canned from the old lady.”

  “But, Leroy…,” I say. “This?” It’s a humiliating job. It makes me sad to see him here, those Leroy eyes under that orange…“What’s that orange stuff on your head?”

  “Cheese. Melted cheese,” he says.

  Under that melted cheese. Leroy’s eyes. This makes him smaller than he deserves to be. Face it—adults plus costumes equals humiliation. No adult should ever have to wear one for money. Wearing a Dopey-the-dwarf costume or a mattress sale sandwich board and dancing around so some big shot can make a profit, well, it’s almost unconstitutional. Cruel and inhuman.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers, okay? Not too many people want to hire me with my tattoos. These people don’t care. I’m all covered up.”

  “Except for your legs.” I point.

  “I was supposed to have yellow socks, but I forgot them,” he says.

  “God, Leroy. A breakfast burrito.”

  “At night I get to be a kidney bean. It’s their house soup special.”

  A large old-people car pulls up and a lady with blue-white hair rolls down her window. “Can you tell us how to get back on the freeway?”

  “Back straight that way.” Leroy points with a yellow arm. I missed a clunk of juniper that dangles from his elbow. “Stay to your right.” The car drives on. “What do they think I am, the visitor’s bureau? I’ve given directions to triple X drive-in, Lake Sammamish, and the post office, and I’ve only been here an hour.”

  “Why do you need to do this at all, Leroy? You have a job at Darigold.”

  “It’s complicated, okay? Indigo, I don’t mean to be unfriendly here, but I’ve got some arm waving and jumping around to do.”

  I leave Leroy, and make my way over to Carrera’s. I’m a little late, I admit.

  “You’re late,” Jane says.

  “Jane cut me a chintzy piece of pie,” Trina says. “You better be on time tomorrow.” I hurry to the back room, drop my bag, wave a hello to Luigi, and put on my apron.

  “Leroy won’t be coming in,” I announce to the Irregulars. “He’s dressed as a breakfast burrito outside of Old Country Buffet.”

  “And I thought I was the crazy one,” Funny says. Her head is bent over her notebook.

  “Anyone says one word against Leroy, I’m gonna, pow, pop him in the kisser,” Joe says. Since my encounter with Nick’s coworkers, everyone’s been a little…aggressive.

  “We all do what we’ve got to do,” Trina says. “Since Roger left, I’m answering the psychic hotline.” She licks the back of her fork.

  “What!” I scream.

  “God, Indigo. Not so loud,” Jane says. “You scared Jack.
” Which is true. Jack has leapt to his feet.

  “I’m sorry, but…Trina, come on. What, you tell people that tomorrow will bring a new day?” I bring Nick his oatmeal. He rips open two packages of sugar and pours them on top.

  “‘A day without sunshine is like night,’” Nick says.

  “Yesterday, she told some woman that she was going to meet a man named Roger who would run off to Rio,” Funny says.

  “So?” Trina says. “The way Roger gets around, it’s probably true.”

  “Wait, guys,” Nick says. He suddenly scoots himself out from the table, knocking his spoon from balance on the side of his bowl. “Is that—Look. Look! Outside!”

  I almost expect to see the Vespa. The Vespa, with the Vespa guy back on it. Richard Howards, looking for me, asking for his money back. I picture it all disappearing—me returning the TV, the digital cameras, the raft, the soap dispenser, damaged from when Mom threw it against the bathtub tiles. The cell phones. God, no, we love those.

  But it isn’t the Vespa. I see a flash of red and white. It’s Trina’s Thunderbird. Parked down the block in front of True Value hardware.

  “It’s my cousin, that idiot,” Trina says. “Do you know he hasn’t washed that car since he got it? There’s an empty McDonald’s cup in the backseat. One of those insulting ‘Sorry you’re not a winner’ scratch tickets. There’s a catalogue thrown on the floor too. The kind that sells sausages and cheese logs?” She puts a knee on the seat, cranes her neck to get a better look. She looks like a mother who’s given up her child, now sure she’s caught a glimpse of him.

  “It’s the Thunderbird, all right,” Nick says. I stand beside him at the window. Jane is there too, and Joe, who has risen from his stool to join us. Funny leans across Trina’s booth to get a look.

  “She’s still a beauty,” Joe says. “Mmm, mmm, mmm.”

  We watch the cousin, a tall man in tight jeans and a black T-shirt. His head cocks at an angle that says These sunglasses make me look hot. He tucks the keys into the back pocket of his jeans, slams the car door so hard we can hear it.