twenty-one
For the rest of the gray, weary day, I felt lost in Philip. Samantha wrote down his email address and phone number on a piece of her Samantha Denver, Realtor stationery. Philip’s last name was Singh, a detail I’d never known.
It was folded up in my pocket, it was sitting in a crumpled blob on my desk, it was unfolded and stared at. I tried to imagine what Philip was doing. Was it truly possible that he and I had walked down the same city streets, climbed aboard the same subways? It was Friday, so perhaps he was at work, at this mythical architecture company Samantha said he worked at.
Most likely, Philip’s life had evolved, changed, grown. My life in Cobalt, on the other hand, had stagnated—I had designed it that way. Each new day unfolded exactly as the last: I ate white toast with unseeded strawberry jelly. I read the encyclopedias, trying to live as if it were 1965. The Betamax video recorder was an amazing new invention, AIDS was unheard of. Watson and Crick had laid out their “Central Dogma” of DNA, explaining the links between DNA, RNA, and proteins, but there certainly wasn’t any DNA testing, engineering, or even much understanding yet. I tried to avoid any news of current-day New York City, as well as references to it in movies, TV shows, magazines, and books—every time I saw an image of New York, I was reminded of my father.
It hurt that I didn’t just call my father. It hurt that he didn’t call me. Surely he knew I was here—certainly Stella had let him know. Or what about Dr. North, whom I’d called shortly after I’d arrived in Cobalt? Dr. North had assured me that he’d keep tabs on my father—in fact, my father had already called him, saying he was coming back and needed someone to manage and monitor his medications. Surely Dr. North had immediately turned around and told my father that I’d reached him. But maybe my father was so fine with Rosemary and Rosemary alone, he had no need for anyone else.
Certain images of my father and Rosemary together were manageable—them sleeping in the same bed, for example, as long as they didn’t touch. The two of them riding in the car together, as platonic as brother and sister. But did he draw cards for her? Did he lay his head in his lap and make up songs for her? I thought of Rosemary wandering the rooms of our house, running her hands against the top of the credenza, against the refrigerator magnets, along the muzzles of the dogs. My father was probably trying to make his life hers—showing her how to tell Wesley to roll over, demonstrating how to achieve the right blend of hot and cold with the shower taps, walking her through the box of memories.
Philip probably had roommates, a girlfriend. My memories of him hardly amounted to more than a few sharp, painful fragments—the look on his face when I left him, the feel of his lips on mine, the heaviness of the moment when I told him about my father and the snow globe. It was inconceivable that what I’d constructed in my mind about him even remotely resembled the person he was today. And anyway, Philip had more than likely forgotten about me as soon as I left Cobalt; I was just a girl from out of town who needed some sympathy. He asked Samantha about me out of politeness, nothing more.
After we returned from Wal-Mart, Stella made her way into the downstairs den, which was now her bedroom. I sat on the living room couch, leafing through the H encyclopedia’s tracing paper overlays of the human body (first there was the leaf with the skin, then the muscles, then the bones, then nerves, then organs, and then the organs beneath those organs, until you turned the page and it was just text again). It was comforting to know that the people of 1965 saw the human body exactly as we did today.
I flipped to the front of the book, searching. Not long ago, wedged between the pages for the entry on handwriting was a photo of a young girl with freckles and short dark hair. She stared seriously into the camera lens, standing next to a blue pick-up truck. After a moment, I realized I recognized it: I’d seen this same photo when I visited for my grandmother’s funeral. I turned the picture over, but there was no inscription. The next time I opened the H encyclopedia, the photo was gone.
Samantha walked into the room, coming to a stop in the exact center of the round, ropy rug. “I should go.”
I closed the book. “You’re not even staying for dinner?”
She fiddled with a strap on her purse. “I should get on the road.”
I ran my fingers over the encyclopedia’s bumpy cover, trying to remain expressionless. “Thanks for stopping by.”
Samantha looked over at the box of wine glasses, unopened on the dining room table amid unfolded towels, empty pill bottles, a big box of disposable wipes. The box showed one of the glasses full of some thick, blood-colored wine, perhaps cabernet. It was the type that stained your teeth and lips, the kind—Stella would say—that dyed your shit black. We would never use them.
“You should really clean up around here,” Samantha finally said, her eyes still on the dining room table. “All this might not be…good…for her.”
I slammed the encyclopedia on the coffee table, hot with rage. For a moment I was positively tongue-tied. “You know, I hear the highway you’re taking to the conference has lots of accidents on it, too,” I blurted out. “Just like the highway from Northglenn to here.”
She crossed her arms and looked away. “Summer.”
I gestured to her car out in the driveway. “And are you sure SUVs are reliable enough? I had a good friend who was in an accident in one. Rolled right over.”
A vein in Samantha’s neck pulsed. “Really?”
My insides felt blackened and thick. I didn’t even know what I was saying. “No,” I admitted, staring at the floor.
“Do you feel overworked here?” Samantha asked. “I might know someone out here who could do something for you. Cleaning, odd jobs, any of that.”
“We’re fine. We don’t need anything.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
“Look, if you’re going to guilt me into coming with you to this miracle healer and seeing this jackapoo or whatever it is, maybe I can change things around, but it’s really not the best time…I mean, it was tough even taking this day away…”
“I’m not forcing you to do anything.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I know your job is important.”
Samantha opened and closed her mouth, like she was chewing gum. Her cell phone started to ring. Her face blossomed. “I should take this,” she said. She started for the door. “Good luck with your excursion tomorrow. I’m sure it will go well.” And then she unfolded her phone. “Hello?” she chirped into the receiver, her voice like a ballet dancer, straightening up and snapping into position as the music began. “Oh, David! Yes, of course. No, it’s wonderful to hear from you—I thought I would! I saw that look on your face when you saw the house on Currier Court!”
She put her hand on the doorknob, turned it, and crunched through the gravel path to the car. I could hear her high, happy voice the whole way to the road, and I was sure Stella could, too.
twenty-two
Things started badly on our journey to see Cheveyo. Stella kept coming up with excuses not to go. Each was wilder than the next: She wanted to stay home and watch Survivor. She had a horrible feeling aliens were going to abduct most of the East Coast this weekend, spanning as far as Lancaster, where we were going, shutting off roads and prohibiting us from returning to Cobalt.
We had a hard time locking the house’s front door, something we usually never bothered with. The lock kept sticking, and the barrel wobbled. Stella told me just to leave it, and eventually we did. This annoyed her, though, and she fidgeted in her seat as we rumbled up the gravel drive to the main road. It got to the point where if she would have just said, I don’t want to do this. I don’t feel well, I would’ve turned the car around and taken her back. But she had to make it outrageous.
The day steadily declined from there: our cones from the Dairy Queen just outside Cobalt tasted funny, like sawdust. Stella tossed hers out the window after just one lick; it splattered against a car’s windshield behind us. The driver
laid on his horn, then pulled over. “Maybe we should pull over, too.” I glanced at the rearview mirror. The ice cream had dripped down over the other car’s windshield, onto the hood, and into the grille. The driver had definitely gotten our license plate by now.
“Just drive!” Stella screamed, as if we’d just robbed a bank. “Keep driving!”
Late afternoon, we pulled over at a Bob Evans. Our waitress had pink streaks in her hair, a pierced nose, fishnet stockings, and combat boots, well worn even though she’d never see battle. She sat us in a booth.
“So.” Stella removed her silverware from the napkin. “I’m pretty sure the jackalope museum is on this road somewhere. I say tomorrow we head over there first thing.”
“But we’re on a time schedule,” I told her, for about the fiftieth time that hour. “You have Cheveyo at one tomorrow. I don’t want to be late.”
Stella rolled her eyes. “Maybe this should just be a sightseeing trip instead.”
I gave her a pleading look. She gave me a sulking one back. “I’m not sure I want to smoke grass anymore,” she said.
“He’s not going to make you smoke grass. I promise.”
“He lives in a log cabin,” she whispered, leaning forward so I could see the fine, pale hairs that grew above her upper lip. “There probably isn’t any plumbing.”
“I’m sure there’s plumbing.”
“But the jackalope is a feat of nature!” Stella cried, the lines around her mouth pronounced. “You’ll be amazed when you see it. It’s…it’s miraculous, is what it is. And they have a nice display of the various animals that live in this part of Pennsylvania.”
“How about this?” I took a sip of water. “We’ll go after Cheveyo.”
“What kind of name is Cheveyo, anyway?” She narrowed her eyes.
“Native American.”
Stella made a noise through her nose.
I dug my nails into my palms. “He was featured on Oprah a few months ago, don’t you remember? We watched it together. His patients came on the show to show everyone how much better they felt.”
Stella leaned forward. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that Oprah woman is black.”
“What’s bothering you?” I demanded. “Are you upset because of Samantha?” Yesterday, when Stella emerged from the den after her nap and found Samantha gone, there was a very obvious look of disappointment on her face. She wiped it off quickly, saying nothing, asking what I was going to have for dinner. She liked the routine of dinner, even if she didn’t eat. I wanted to scream at her, Get upset! You can, you know! You have the right to be pissed off at Samantha!
Stella shook her head quickly, taking the smallest sip of her water. “No, no. Samantha was lovely. She’s so pretty, isn’t she? So driven.”
I poked my pinkie finger into a small tear in the middle of the vinyl booth. “But don’t you think it was weird that she left while you were sleeping?”
“Well, she’s a busy girl. She’s got a busy life.”
I pictured Samantha at her real estate conference, glancing at her cell phone discreetly while someone gave a presentation. “Remember when we saw that conference at Mr. H’s?” I asked. “I wonder what Samantha would say if you did a somersault at her Realtor thing.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Stella snapped, astonishment in her voice. “That would embarrass her.” She leaned over the table. “And honestly, Summer, you could’ve been a little nicer to her.”
I blinked quickly. “Me? Nicer to her?”
But Stella’s attention had wandered elsewhere. The waitress led a group of young men in military uniforms past us. They had freshly shaved heads and wide, blue, scared eyes. Unlike the waitress’s, their boots were polished to a high shine, one that matched the mischief in Stella’s eyes. Stella scooted forward in her seat.
“Hello, boys!” she cried, waving at them.
The army boys glanced at her and smiled. “Ma’am,” one of them said.
“Keep up the good work,” Stella trilled, as if there were a war on. She gave them a salute. By now everyone was staring at us. The army boys saluted back.
Stella’s satin-gloved fingers wrapped around mine, as though we were on a date. “They’re adorable,” she whispered. “Why don’t you go talk to them?”
“I don’t want to talk to them.”
“You’re not committed, you know. Loosen up. Chill.”
My face flushed. I would kill myself if I ever heard the word chill again. “I’m sorry I’m not as fun as Samantha is, okay?” I shook my head slowly. “And I can’t believe you said I should’ve been nicer to her!”
“Well, you should have. You weren’t friendly at all. You were very…cold.”
I stared out at the red and white Bob Evans sign, too stunned to think. “Samantha doesn’t need me to be nice to her.”
“Of course she does. Everyone needs people to be nice to them. She’s probably more afraid of you than you were of her. And anyway, life’s too short to be nasty.”
I clutched my water glass so hard, I thought it might shatter in my hands. The Muzak groaned on, a dirge. An old woman across the aisle gaped at us, her mouth full of eggs.
The lights in Bob Evans dimmed, then brightened. The Muzak changed to something else equally dour and life-denying. Abruptly, the military boys got up without ordering. They unconsciously formed a line and strolled past us again, their boots squeaking virginally. After watching them pivot past the dessert refrigerator and out the exit, Stella turned to me, peeled one end of the wrapper off her straw, and blew it in my face. It hit my nose.
I sighed and removed one end of the wrapper from a spare straw at the table and blew it back at her. It missed her, and instead careened across the aisle onto the old woman’s plate of eggs. The old woman jumped back, as if a tarantula had climbed onto her plate. Her husband, who was sitting next to her and not across from her, leaned over to inspect the straw. He put on his glasses for a better look.
The waitress with the pink-striped hair stared at us from the register. Stella looked at me and I looked at her and we both burst out laughing.
The key card that opened the door to our squat, stale-smelling motel room had an advertisement for Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkins on the back. Inside the room, heavy green curtains blotted out the light.
I unzipped my bag and pulled out all Stella’s medicine. The day’s doses were doled out in one of those Monday-through-Sunday plastic organizer kits. There was ondansetron and dexmathasone for nausea, various medications for pain including morphine, and vitamins. Stella wordlessly unscrewed the top of her Mountain Dew bottle and swallowed Saturday’s pills one at a time. I sat down on my bed and pulled out the Cheveyo pamphlets. On the cover was Cheveyo himself, and the Verdana-font words The Magic of Healing. As the true healer is God himself, Cheveyo acts only as a mediator. Visa, MasterCard, Discover accepted.
It wasn’t a scam because he accepted credit cards. Because he’d put together glossy pamphlets and a professional-looking website. And anyway, Western medicine had turned out to be a scam itself, doing nothing to halt cancer, which had proceeded stubbornly on. Why not try something else? The only thing we hadn’t been scammed out of was time—when I rescued Stella from the hospital after her fender-bender, her doctor gave her a year to live, and we’d already outlasted that prognosis. A nurse once tried to turn it into something positive as she stuck yet another needle into Stella’s arm: At least you have time to say things you need to say. As the nurse turned away, I saw a flicker of outrage cross Stella’s face.
I helped Stella settle into her bed. The evening stretched before me, blank and dull. Stella shut her eyes, nestled under the covers. “Skip and I visited the jackalope together. We hadn’t meant to. We just stumbled on it.”
Here we go again, I thought.
She took a breath. “It’s beautiful, Summer. I remember going in there with Skip and just thinking, Well now, this is what life’s all about. Beautiful and strange. A huge mess, everything smashed
together. Real and crazy and worth believing in.”
“Mmm.” Stella had done an amazing job keeping the jackalope a secret. Whenever I closed my eyes, I had a different mental picture of what a jackalope was. A jack-o’-lantern skull, maybe, its head pumpkin-shaped and its teeth scraggly. A type of plant that swallowed dogs whole. A rock that had naturally formed in the shape of a deer. Perhaps it was all those things, depending on what we wanted, or depending on the day we visited. Maybe the mutability of the jackalope magically altered everything else around it, too, like an activator ray in a science fiction movie. Cancer would walk into the room as a mass of purple, pulsing, murderous cells but then, after seeing the jackalope, it would morph into a long, intricately woven carpet. Or a truck full of diamonds. A piece of anise-flavored candy, about the size of a Nerd.
I changed the TV channel. On the screen, the two Williams sisters were playing in the U.S. Open final. Midset, the program broke to a commercial for a Lincoln Navigator, a commercial for American Express, a commercial for a Mercedes SUV—Samantha’s car. The car navigating the twisty California roads was even the same battleship gray.
“Has Samantha ever seen a therapist?” I asked.
Stella’s sheets rustled. “A what?”
“You know. A shrink.”
“Why on earth would she do that?”
“For her parents. To deal with it. Or something.”
“Now, do you honestly think that nonsense works?”
We watched the TV in silence. I felt confused. Stella’s question seemed to end in an ellipsis. Was she waiting for me to say something? Comment, perhaps, that therapy had worked for my father?
After a while, Stella curled her legs into her chest. “I think I might take a nap.”