“Oh—wait.” Nick’s mom looked from Nick to me then back to Nick again. “Miranda? This isn’t Miranda?”
Nick shot me the briefest of desperate looks before his eyes fell to his half-eaten tamale. “Oh yeah. This is Miranda.”
Nick’s mom looked at me, and a big sympathetic smile bloomed on her face. She put down her napkin and rose from the table, walked around Nick, and edged Syd out of the way. Then she opened her arms. Not having a clue what else I should do, I opened my own.
All of a sudden, we were hugging. It was totally insane.
“Oh, Miranda, it’s so nice to finally meet you. We were so sorry to hear about your ordeal on prom night.” I looked to Nick in disbelief—he’d told his parents about standing me up on prom night? My ordeal? He refused to return my gaze. I was speechless. When I disengaged from the hug and stood back, I turned to Syd, actually hoping she might do something crazy just to distract everyone, to make this horrible moment pass more quickly. But Syd wasn’t there. I turned to see the back of her perfectly smooth hair as she slunk down the hall of piñatas and out of sight.
She’d left me there all alone with Nick Allison and his weird mismatched parents, who seemed strangely fine with their son having put me through a prom night ordeal.
“Thanks,” I said to his mom. I looked at the back of Nick’s head. “It was terrible.” Nick offered me his eyes and I tried to shoot daggers out of mine. “It was the worst.”
“Yes,” she said, taking a step back. She was suddenly self-conscious. “So sorry—to accost you. Look at me.” She turned to Nick, then back to me. “Nick’s said such nice things about you. We were so sad—about everything. Anyway.” She clasped her hands in front of herself nervously. It was a familiar gesture, something Nick would do. One of the millions of things I loved about Nick was that he very rarely seemed to know what to do with his hands. He was always shoving them in his pockets or putting them behind his back.
“It was nice to meet you,” I said. I gave a nod to Nick’s father, who still looked stunned and confused, a flank of hair hanging out of place on his forehead. I avoided looking at Nick.
I turned and walked away from the table.
I was so furious, I thought I might burst out into newborn-baby-style tears as I stormed down the hall of piñatas, past the pirate-y hostess, through the crowd of waiting patrons, and out the door, into the stark, frigid night and across the street to the lot where I’d parked my car.
Syd was leaning against the passenger-side door, her back to me. I got in the driver’s seat and put on my seat belt and turned on the engine. My hands were shaking.
I threw the car in reverse. A moment later Syd slunk in.
We sat there, breathing cold air.
“Sorry,” she said meekly.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Syd?” I’d hardly let her get through her apology. I’d never yelled at Syd before—I’d endured a lot of ridiculous stuff, and I’d mediated a lot of situations like the one with the waiter, but she’d never done something like this to me. I’d never felt this much anger toward her. Never.
“Jeez.” She blinked a few big blinks. “Chill. It was just a joke.”
“No, it wasn’t. That was mean.” She tried to insert a response, a denial, but I ran right over it. “And no, I don’t mean to Nick—I don’t care about Nick. It was mean to do that to me. What were you even thinking?”
“I just wanted to screw with him.”
“Of course! Exactly! Because it’s always what you want to do!” I threw my car back into park and gripped the steering wheel. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t even see straight. So I just sat there, staring forward. I tried for my slowest, calmest voice. “As unbelievable as it may be to you, Syd, not every single fucking thing in this world is about you.”
“Damn,” she said. I’d gone straight for her weakness and I’d slashed. I’d wounded her. And I wasn’t sorry.
“Yeah, damn! Dude! That sucked. You suck for doing that.”
“Okay. I get it!” she shouted back. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you though?” I turned to her. She was looking out her window into the parking lot. When she finally turned to face me, she was holding back tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “That was stupid. And it was mean. To you.” She took a big, ragged breath. “And—I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
I loosened my grip on the steering wheel a little. “Just leave Nick alone,” I said. “Leave him alone. He’s my enemy. Okay? At least let me have my own enemies.”
“Okay,” she said. She looked exhausted. The eyeliner she’d applied so meticulously to her bottom lids had begun to run. Her hair was limp. The two of us sat there silently for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
“Okay.” I shook my head. I tried to will myself to cool down, to allow her apology into my overheated brain, but I was struggling. “All right.” I carefully backed out of the space, still shaking.
We didn’t speak the whole way to her house. I glanced over at her a couple of times. She was lost in thought, a million miles away. She was probably thinking about Stanford again. She’d gone back to fretting. Or she was thinking about Medium Hottie. Whatever.
“Just check your phone.” I finally broke the silence.
“I don’t need to check my phone,” she said flatly. “I know everything I need to know.” She stared out the window and into the darkness. I had no idea what she meant by that, and I was too mad and too exhausted to care, so I didn’t say anything.
When we got to her house, she got out of the car and turned and looked in at me. I could hardly return her gaze.
“Bye,” she said.
“See you tomorrow.” I only gave her half my voice.
She closed the door and walked halfway to the trailer. Then, just as I was about to pull forward and turn around, she stopped and walked back to the car. She came around to my side and I rolled down the window.
“I’m really sorry,” she said again.
“Okay,” I said. I just wanted her to walk away. I was done with her and her thousand sorrys. Somehow they didn’t quite add up to one genuine one.
But then she just stood there. “You’re a really good friend, Miranda. The best. Really. And I don’t deserve you.” Her face hung above me, obscured by shadow. I was disoriented by her earnestness but also pretty annoyed by it. “I love you,” she said. And then very quickly—so quickly I wasn’t even sure it happened—she leaned her head into the car and kissed me on the forehead.
I was still sitting there, stunned, with the window down, when she walked away, up the steps, and into the trailer.
Her show of affection dulled but did not extinguish my anger.
I pulled forward and turned around and drove away the second she opened the door, before she’d even stepped inside.
3
I was still wound up when I got home. I kept replaying the scene in the restaurant. Nick’s mom hugging me. His dad looking confused. Syd and her unhinged performance, so caught up in her one-woman show that she hadn’t even bothered to notice she was using me as her prop.
I got into bed and closed my eyes and tried to pray.
I tried to pray like I always did, the way my mother had taught me.
My strongest memories of my mother were of watching her in church. She’d kneel and plant her elbows on the pew in front of her and lean into it, letting her long black hair fall forward, holding her hands up to her temples and planting her palms there, as if thinking hard or peering into a dark window. Her hands made a shield. She blocked out the world. My mother was a self-conscious person. She didn’t like to be looked at or complimented. When she prayed, though, she did it with her whole body, her whole self. She disappeared into it. And when she did, I could look at her. I could observe her freely.
I didn’t really like church, and was never confirmed Catholic, but I’d go to mass sometimes simply to watch my mother pray. Looking back, I guess it should’ve been a sign of
warning, the way she could vanish so easily, before my very eyes.
I asked her how to do it once. I told her I wanted to try. I remember being nervous asking. I guess I thought it was something very private, or very difficult. She answered with strange authority: “Close your eyes and listen. When God says, ‘Go,’ start.” That was it. That was the extent of her spiritual guidance.
Prayer was a phone call. Dial and wait. When God picks up, start talking.
I took her brief instructions and tried. Lo and behold, it worked. Only I didn’t really know what God was supposed to look like, so I didn’t know what to imagine when God picked up the phone.
When I closed my eyes and listened, what came to me was the Milky Way. I don’t know why. I’d only seen the Milky Way once, when my father had driven us out to the dark desert behind my uncle Benny’s house in Española. It was definitely the biggest, most Godlike thing I’d ever seen. And it looked so close and so inviting, as if I could reach up from the hood of my dad’s car and run my hand through those billions of planets like sand. I asked my dad how far away it was. “That’s the crazy thing. We’re looking at it from the inside. The Milky Way is right here.” He’d smacked the hood of his car for emphasis.
It was kind of perfect, the way my mother’s religiosity and my father’s science-minded rationalism canceled each other out inside me. She showed me how to pray. He directed the call to the Milky Way.
Inside me, God was a math problem that always came up zero.
And though my methods were untraditional, I knew God wouldn’t mind being the Milky Way, because God was the Milky Way, just exactly as much as God was everything else and just exactly as much as God was nothing at all. Zero. Right?
For as long as it lasted, my belief in God balanced on that Right?
But when my mother left, everything fell apart. I’d close my eyes and dial, but no one picked up. Not God, not the Milky Way. Nothing. And there was a big difference between zero and nothing.
Then, one day, seemingly out of nowhere, I started reciting the Gettysburg Address instead of praying. I happened to be memorizing it for a presentation at school. It’d lodged in my brain. After that, whenever I closed my eyes and dialed, I got Abraham Lincoln, standing on the battlefield, pulling from his coat pocket a piece of paper with those 272 words written on it.
It wasn’t the same. I guessed it would never be the same. But it worked in a pinch. It worked better than all the breathing exercises I’d learned from all the therapists my father had sent me to in the year after my mom left, all those dumb visualizations and affirmations and behavior modifications. It felt like praying, even if it wasn’t praying. I’d take what I could get. I told no one about this, of course, not even Syd. It was mortifying. I avoided Googling it. I was sure I’d find I was suffering from some obscure form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Lincolnism.
Eventually, as my father had gotten rid of all my mother’s stuff, the Gettysburg Address was all I had left. Of her. Of God. But then, when I was thirteen, I found a copy of Lives of the Saints that had fallen behind a stack of books on a shelf in the guest room—it’d been there for years, I guessed—and I opened it to find my mother’s handwriting on nearly every page. I was thrilled and dumbfounded. This oversight of my father’s was close to a miracle.
I snuck the book into my room and set about reading everything, every passage she’d underlined, every note she’d dashed off in the margins. She liked the gruesome stories most: saints who’d endured nauseating wounds that bled for years on end, or who’d been martyred by beheading. She liked penitents who starved themselves and wore hair shirts and went off to the desert to pray themselves to death in a cave. She had a soft spot for stigmatists, especially those who were the only ones who could see their own wounds (can you imagine? Absolute torture), and for those who heard voices (how do you know the difference between hearing God and LOSING YOUR MIND???). Saint Jude’s was the page on which the spine of the book had broken. In the illustration, Jude’s face was pure serenity. He looked almost exactly like Ryan Gosling. Saint Jude was the patron saint of lost causes, disasters, and hopeless situations. Patron saint of the IMPOSSIBLE! She’d drawn little stars around this, and motion lines, so it looked like it was a comet flying through space. I didn’t know for sure, but by investigating the changes in handwriting, I figured she’d begun her annotations as a kid and had been making them right up until she left, or at least until after I was born. I knew this because on the page of Saint Bridget, she’d circled the feast day, July 23, and had written at the bottom of the page in small, stiff writing: Our Miranda born this day. It’s been one week. Peter already better at this than I am. Looking to God for guidance.
My mother was twenty years old when she’d written that.
I started reading because I found my mother’s notes interesting. She was a mystery. I was going to solve her. But then, after a while, I read it just because. Because it was one of the only things left in our house that had belonged to her. Because it helped me sleep at night. Because now it was mine.
I calmed down after a few Gettysburg Addresses and considered texting Syd to say I was sorry. But why was I sorry? For being a human being with feelings? I decided I’d wait until morning. We could talk it out on the way to school.
I slipped the tattered book out from where I kept it in my bedside table and flipped through to Saint Francis, one of my personal favorites, the son of a rich silk merchant whose father disowned him when he joined the church. I intended to read the entire entry and all my mother’s notes (often pictured w STIGMATA; patron of ecologists), but I must’ve fallen asleep before I’d even made it through his freewheeling youth, the time before he went pious, when he was just some rich dude’s son, living large in Assisi, not knowing what unexpected turn his life was about to take.
4
I heard church bells in my dream. I opened my eyes to see Lives of the Saints open beside me on the bed. I’d dreamed about my mother, as I often did when I read from the book, but the dream was too distant to recall. But the bells—the bells wouldn’t stop. I sat up and realized it was my phone, up on its perch in my windowsill. Someone was calling.
Someone was calling? I scrambled out of bed and grabbed the phone, but before I could answer the call, I heard pounding on the front door. I stumbled out into the hall, disoriented, and my father swept past me to the front door, looking bewildered, pulling on a T-shirt, his eyes slits. He gave me a look that said, Stand back. I registered that the T-shirt he’d put on was his Feminism Club T-shirt from yesterday. I stood back.
Because I’d only ever heard knocking like that in crime shows, I assumed we’d find two police officers standing there, flashing us their badges, informing us of a murderer on the loose. But when my dad opened the door, it was Ray standing there under his giant cowboy hat and Tonya skulking behind him. Ray had his phone to his face. When he saw me standing behind my father, he ended the call and my own phone went silent in my hand.
“Where’s Syd?” He looked past my father to where I stood in the hall.
“What’s going on?” My voice sounded strange, like it belonged to someone else. I took a step forward, and my dad turned and put his hand to my shoulder to stop me.
“What’s going on?” my dad repeated. He sounded groggy but forceful.
“What’s going on is that Syd’s gone.”
“She took her car,” Tonya added. “God knows what else.”
“What?” My brain wasn’t working. It must not have been, since what they were saying was ludicrous. I’d seen Syd last night. I’d dropped her off and she’d kissed my forehead after our epic fight.
“Syd ran away. She’s gone,” Tonya said.
“She probably just went to school early,” I said. I looked at my phone. It was 5:57 A.M. It was totally unrealistic that Syd had gone to school this early. In reality she’d probably just snuck out. Maybe she’d finally gotten ahold of Isaac. Or she sometimes snuck out just to go for drives. She said driving clea
red her head. It was a weird time to be out, but Syd had done weirder things. Last night was a good example.
“No. You don’t understand. She’s gone,” Ray said. He was such a dumbass. He looked like a cartoon character in his cowboy hat. Syd said he wore it because his hair was thinning. I’d never seen him without it on.
“What do you mean?” I was fully awake and getting angry with the two of them. They’d showed up on our doorstep like a couple of bullies.
“What part of she’s gone don’t you understand?” Tonya snapped. Her highlighted hair blazed in the porch light. Her eyes darted to my father.
“Let’s calm down, Tonya.” My father stepped forward and stood in the doorway. He was standing so close to Tonya that she took a step back. “Let’s speak to each other with a little respect. My daughter’s done nothing wrong. It’s six o’clock in the morning for Christ’s sake.” The lump in my throat grew. Tonya looked offended and confused and she glanced at Ray for backup. When Ray did nothing, she shrunk back.
“She left a note,” Ray said.
My brain finally caught up. A note? I turned to my dad. “Oh my god.”
He nodded to me. His face said everything was going to be fine. I didn’t believe his face.
“What did the note say?” My dad put his hands on his hips. He was trying to look imposing in his basketball shorts and yellow Feminism Club T-shirt.
“It said—What did it say, Ton?”
“I’m gone. I’m not missing. That’s all it said.”
“We called the police,” Ray said.
“They can’t do crap,” Tonya barked. Ray shot her a look and she rolled her eyes and threw up her hands.
“They can only do a runaway report. ’Cause she left a note. If she was just missing, we could file a missing persons report and they’d have to help us.”
“She obviously looked it all up on the internet.” Tonya said the word internet as if it were a curse word. I noted she’d done her hair this morning. Definitely. When had she done that? While Ray was talking to the police? “She’s a selfish, stuck-up brat.” Tonya couldn’t help herself. Her hatred of Syd went so deep. But hearing her say those things about Syd didn’t even make me angry at her. They made me angry at Ray. Who would let someone say those things about his own daughter? What kind of a father would allow that? I was unable to speak. I was just standing there in my pajamas, staring at them as if they were a movie. When would it end? And how?
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