Love (And Other Uses for Duct Tape)

  Everything is pretty peaceful, and good for song writing and Gabriel playing except for Muffin, who has noticed something in the grass and pounces on it. Her kitty ears flare back and she looks up at me triumphantly. She’s probably attacked an ant.

  “Murderer,” I tell her and look away. I close my eyes and play for a while.

  My foot pounds out a rhythm against the tree root. I don’t think Clannad minds.

  “Every time you giga-play, you take a pizza pie with you,” my mom’s voice sings from her bedroom. While butchering the elevator ’80s song “Every Time You Go Away” (sung by Paul Young, written by Darryl Hall), she is also packing for her trip and still on her post–Jim Shrembersky date high, which is cute, I guess. Her trip is business-related, but since it’s somewhere warm she keeps calling it a vacation. She’s never had a vacation or a conference trip before.

  I mean, I can’t be angry at her for having a life.

  A squirrel chatters at me from a tree as I scribble down some lyrics, which are kind of pedestrian, but whatever …

  Do you know how much need kills you?

  Do you know the price you’ll all pay?

  And do you regret it, at the eclipse of the day?

  God. Eclipse of the day?

  Muffin checks out the squirrel, but he’s too high. She’s a low-impact hit-cat. She doesn’t kill things bigger than mosquitoes. The boom-boom of some hip-hop music Eddie’s listening to bounces down the street. The squirrel chucks a nut in that direction. It lands near Muffin, who squeals and races away to safety. That big mean squirrel.

  “You tell ’em,” I say to the rodent.

  My mom yanks up the screen on her window and leans out. “Belle?”

  “Yep.” I finish writing a chord progression that I’ll probably change. “What?”

  “You sure you’re okay with me leaving Tuesday?” Her voice is tiny like the backtrack on a song. “You’ll be okay and everything?”

  Her face is twisty-sad and expectant.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say. “I’m a big girl.”

  I toss out a jokey smile to lighten her mood. She nods, just the tiniest inclination of her head, and says, “Okay. Okay.”

  She closes the screen and then yells out, “I love you, you know.”

  “I love you too,” I say and get back to my song, which sucks, so I flip to a new page and start over, thinking about Tom. I’ll write Tom a song. Maybe I’m not good at paying attention at his ball games, but this is something I can give him, something I can do. So, I start writing.

  It’s immediately you.

  When you breathe out my name I know

  I can feel all these poems I remember I once had to know.

  I can feel them touch me from ages ago.

  It’s you. It’s immediately you.

  Gabriel likes those lyrics better. I think the trees approve but I’m not sure, it’s kind of schmarmy. I write down the words before I can forget them. I’m not sure how I feel about the word “immediately,” but the world … everything … seems perfect. Everything seems like a promise. Tuesday my mom is leaving. Tuesday, Tom and I will have a house all to ourselves.

  “Can it get any better than this?” I ask the squirrel.

  He tosses a pine cone at me.

  “Punk,” I laugh.

  He laughs back.

  I am so glad we are now buying condoms.

  Happiness never lasts long. Just like people. It drives off. It gets killed overseas by enemy fire. It turns out to not like girls that way. It fades.

  That’s just what happens. One minute you’re making up bad lyrics and talking to squirrels, thinking about your boyfriend’s abs and then … Poof. A mortar hits you in the gut.

  When Em tells me, she is wearing a Hello Kitty T-shirt and her hair is all scraggled into a ponytail. It’s obvious that she has things on her mind. She sits on her bed with her legs crossed, hugging a stuffed turtle. I probably don’t look much better. I’d raced over there on my bike the moment her text message flashed on my screen:

  U must come over. Now.

  When your best friend in the world texts you, you have to come. So I put Gabriel away, stashed my song lyrics and all the rest, then grabbed my bike and hightailed it the mile to Em’s.

  I did not drive because I do not drive, all part of the occasionally having seizures thing.

  Em knows that, of course. Em knows almost everything about me. She knows that I drink Postum instead of coffee. She knows that I like the way Tom’s thighs have all these creases in them from the muscles. She knows that I want to be a folk singer and not a lawyer, which is what everyone else in the world wants me to be. She knows that I talk when I sleep, but not too much.

  And I know that she likes to take the side of her dog’s lips, pinch them together so that they are sort of a mini-mouth and go, “Oh, jowly jowls. Look at them jowly jowls.” I know that she takes pictures all the time, not because she wants to be a photographer but because she’s afraid of losing people, of losing their faces and expressions, the memories of them, the way she lost her dad.

  And I know she hates text messaging because she thinks that it’s pivotal to the degradation of human communication, an opinion only shared with people over seventy years old. So, for her to text me, that’s big.

  I knock on the door to her house, but nobody answers. I let myself in. A dread quiet fills the house. My stomach attacks itself, knotting itself into a nervous ball. Em’s dog meets me in the hall and licks my knees. We head down the quiet hall together. It’s full of pictures. Em’s mom and dad in wedding outfits, smooshing cake into each other’s face. Em, in seventh grade, dressed up in rags for the school musical Oliver!

  “Em?”

  “In here.”

  I tiptoe into her room and perch on the edge of her bed. She’s clutching her stuffed turtle, which is not a good sign. I glance up at the wall. The sun glints off her poster of Kermit the Frog, the Muppet, and he’s riding a bike under a rainbow. My stomach hits itself again. How does it do that?

  “There’ll always be rainbows,” I say in a too-loud jokey voice, because I can’t think of anything else to say and I thought somehow that it would be a good corny first line. It isn’t. It bombs and falls flat to the floor, flopping there like a fish on a dock waiting to be put out of its misery.

  It does, however, make Em look up.

  Her eyes flash. “Don’t be stupid.”

  I shrug. I take the turtle from her and pantomime like it’s talking instead of me. I give the turtle a tough New York accent. “So, ya gonna tell me what’s troubling ya? Did one of them colleges reject my little princess, ’cause I’ll go over there and jack them admissions people crap heads, I tell ya. I will.”

  The edges of her lips almost creep up.

  “You are such an idiot,” she says. “It’s May. I’m already accepted at St. Joseph’s and Turtle Wurtle is southern, not from Brooklyn.”

  I nod and ease myself further onto her bed so my back rests against the wall. “I should know that.”

  “Yeah, you should.”

  She brings Turtle Wurtle up to her face and then places him against a stuffed alligator named Crocky Wocky. Em is not the most inspired stuffed-animal-namer.

  I grab Crocky Wocky and clutch him to my chest, somehow resisting the urge to make him talk.

  “Your shoes are on my bed,” Em says.

  I uncross my legs and yank my Snoopy sneakers off. “Sorry.”

  “Not a big deal,” she shrugs. I wait. Crocky Wocky’s tag tells me he was made in China. I imagine his journey on a barge in a box full of Crocky Wockies, trying to survive the waves, the wind, the rough seas, the suffocating nature of being a stuffed animal transported in a box on a barge to a foreign land. Poor Crocky Wocky. I hug him.

  “Are yo
u going to ask me what’s wrong?”

  “I was waiting for you to tell me.”

  Em arches an eyebrow. “You were waiting?”

  “I didn’t want to be pushy.”

  She shakes her head. She sighs. “I can’t believe you’re my best friend.”

  “You’re very lucky,” I smile. “I buy you tampons and condoms because you’re too wimpy to buy them yourself.”

  She relaxes a bit, starts trying to fix her crazy ponytail. “I know. You’re the best friend ever.”

  The elastic snaps into place again, and she looks more like Em and says, “I’m sorry I’m being such a witch.”

  “It’s okay,” I say and rest Crocky Wocky in my lap. “What’s wrong?”

  “I missed my thingy.”

  It takes me a second to figure out what she means by thingy and then the breath snaps into me. “Oh.”

  She nods and her lip trembles. “Uh-huh.”

  “It might not mean anything. You’ve missed it before.”

  “It’s really late.”

  “But obviously, you think you’re going to get it. I mean, you just made me buy you tampons yesterday,” I reason out, but I know she and Shawn have done it. I know they’ve done it a lot.

  “Did you use condoms?” I ask her.

  She nods and then whispers, “But what if they didn’t work?”

  “Condoms almost always work unless they slip off or something.” I pat her knee like a Grammy or something. “Did it slip off?”

  “Belle!”

  “Do you really think you are?”

  She shrugs. She shakes her head. She grabs Turtle Wurtle again and smooshes him against her like she’s trying to hide behind him. Her voice comes out little and small. “I don’t know.”

  I grab her hand, yank her up off the bed, then let go so I can slam my shoes back on.

  “Let’s go.”

  She turns crazy eyes at me. “What?”

  “We’re going to Wal-Mart.”

  I toss shoes at her. She catches them, slides her feet into them, dazed.

  She grabs her camera and even though she’s all disheveled and befuddled she takes a picture of me. “Why?”

  “We’re going to buy a pregnancy test and we have to go to Wal-Mart to do that, because even I cannot buy a pregnancy test from Dolly at Rite Aid,” I say. “Do you have money?”

  She starts to protest, but I clamp my hand over her mouth. “I will go in by myself and buy it. Okay? Let’s just go.”

  “I’m probably not,” she says in the car.

  “I know.”

  I open her wallet and pull out a twenty dollar bill.

  “I mean, I’m probably just being hyper about this.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Right?” her voice squeaks.

  “Right,” I say and grab her shoulder. I can feel her bones beneath the thin cotton of her shirt, beneath her skin. She’s so skinny. How could a baby ever grow inside of her? “But either way, you just need to know.”

  We don’t play any music.

  We don’t really talk.

  “Do you think it’s like that BabyBeMine program in health?” Em asks as she parks the car in the Wal-Mart lot. She hides it between two RVs from Alabama. People with RVs drive all the way up here, using all that gas, to come visit Acadia National Park out on Mount Desert Island, but then they’re too cheap to pay for a camping spot so they park at Wal-Mart in Eastbrook. How’s that for communing with nature? Still, Em’s little Mustang is pretty small and hidden between the monster Winnebago things.

  I try to remember the BabyBeMine program where we all had to lug computerized babies around and remember to feed them and not jerk them and stuff.

  “No,” I say.

  She turns off the car, leans back in her seat and slow motion turns her head to look at me. Her eyes are so scared. They are not Em eyes. “Why not?”

  “I think all BabyBeMine babies are is a big pain. You know? You can’t prepare for them. They can’t hug you back or smile at you or anything. They’re all the bad parts of babies, but none of the good stuff, you know?”

  She just keeps looking at me so I add, “Not that there aren’t bad parts of real babies, obviously. They’re a huge responsibility.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” she cuts in, closes her eyes.

  A seagull lands on the hood of her car and stares at us through one eye. He hops around looking for food.

  “What do you want me to say, Em? You don’t even know if you’re pregnant yet. You’re just jumping into this depression, end of the world scenario and you have no clue if you’re even preggers.”

  She chokes out a laugh. “Preggers?”

  “I don’t know? Pregnant sounds too formal. Preggers sounds more like you, like us. It’s a good word.”

  Her eyes shift into something softer. Someone in one of the Alabama RVs turns on a country song about lying men and cheating dogs. The world smells like hot asphalt and dirt. Welcome to Wal-Mart. The seagull takes off. He must have realized there’s no nourishment here.

  I squeak. “Isn’t preggers an okay word to say? What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to say the truth.”

  “The truth?”

  “Yeah.”

  I grab her hand, squeeze her fingers in mine. “The truth is that I’m really scared for you.”

  Her lip trembles. “Me too.”

  I open the door, slide out my legs and stand up. Then I slam it shut. I lean through the open window space and say, “I’ll be right back.”

  She nods.

  She opens her mouth and says, “Okay.”

  Walking through the Wal-Mart lot is not real. It’s like my legs are moving. My heart beats, but my head is somewhere off in this nothing place, up above the clouds, floating and incapable of intelligent thought.

  All my brain can do is repeat one little word over and over. With every footfall it comes out, “Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  Because I already know the truth. It’s been there waiting in the perfect Maine May blue skies, lurking beneath the surface of the Union River. It’s been there hiding behind every dread feeling I’ve had the last two weeks.

  I already know.

  Maybe I’m more mature than I pretend to be, or maybe it’s just that I’m doing this for Emmie, because I need her, but whatever the reason I just storm right through Wal-Mart, as determined and as casual as if I’m going in to buy a package of 97-bright, 24-lb printing paper.

  Maybe I just want to get out of there quickly, I don’t know.

  Inside, a fine layer of Wal-Mart dust covers the linoleum floor, the consumer goods. From ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We are born from dust and to dust we shall return. Blah. Blah and all that funeral stuff, which is sort of funnily appropriate because, well, this is Wal-Mart, and pretty much represents the death of all things spiritual in our consumer-based society. All bow down and hail the yellow smiley face who bringeth us low, low prices and self-checkout lanes so that we can purchase without actually interacting with another human. Who needs humans? We have slashed prices and smileys and dust.

  Sometimes when my mom and I feel goofy, we pretend it’s pixie dust and we can make wishes on it. My mom isn’t here. Goofiness does not race through my veins, but I run my finger along the top of the pregnancy tests, picking up the dust, and make a wish. Then I grab a test, and carry it in my hand, back through the aisles, past Mrs. Darrow who kisses me on both cheeks but never checks to see what I’m carrying.

  “I’m making cookies tomorrow,” she says, eyes twinkling, holding up a bag of Nestlé’s chocolate morsels.

  “Yum,” I say, because to not be excited about my next-door neighbor’s cookies would be to break my next-door neighbor’s heart. My own heart thumps wild in my ches
t. There is a pregnancy test in my hand. There is a neighbor casting me “Oh, aren’t you a good girl?” looks.

  Then Mrs. Darrow pulls me into a hug again and whispers into my hair, “You are so much like your father, Belle.”

  My body goes soft like it’s melting into her T-shirt with the puffy flowers on it. I swallow hard and she says in an even softer whisper, “He would be so proud of you.”

  I nod and wonder about that. I really do.

  The self-serve checkout counter will not let me buy the pregnancy test.

  It bleeps angry at me each time I pass the test over the scanner and announces to the world, “ITEM NOT RECOGNIZED!”

  The first time I am cool with it, but after the third time, people are starting to look over at me. Mr. Dow trots over and says, “Need any help with that, Belle?”

  He has big brown eyes like a puppy’s and he has a garden hose in his arms. I love Mr. Dow but now is not the time I want to see him.

  “No. Nope. I’m okay,” I say, holding my hands over the box and trying to scan it again.

  “ITEM NOT RECOGNIZED!”

  He plops the hose on the counter and reaches out, trying to grab the box from my hand, “Here, let me have a shot. These damn things. I swear they try to—”

  “No, that’s okay!” I don’t let the box go and he jumps back, hands upraised, I guess because he’s not used to the hysterical shriek in my voice.

  The self-serve checkout monitor barges up to us. She pulls on her blue apron and reaches out her hand for me to give her the box. “Here, let me punch it in.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Let me see it.”

  I swallow and hand it to her. Her name tag instructs the world that her name is Darlene. She’s not from around here. Most people who work at Wal-Mart come from Cherryfield, about an hour away. There are no stores up there. No work except for blueberrying in August, crab picking occasionally, and making pine wreaths in December.