Girl Unmoored

  “Blind?” I asked. “Blind blind, like you can’t see blind?”

  “Yes,” Mike said, dinging open the cash register and pulling out some money. “It’s what happens in the final stages.”

  I stared at Mike. Then handed him the eighteen dollars the old man had just given me. “Thanks,” Mike said.

  “How long?” I asked quietly.

  “A few weeks,” Mike said, looking down, counting out money.

  “A few weeks? He’s only got a few weeks?”

  “Oh,” Mike said looking up at me. “To see. I thought you meant how long does he have left to see.”

  I kept staring at Mike, trying not to say it.

  “To live?” he asked, reading my mind. “Nobody knows. Sometimes people can live like this for months.”

  “Months?”

  “Not years,” he said, taking my hand and folding some money into it.

  I kept my hand out, exactly where he had left it. “But what are you supposed to do now? I mean, how are you supposed to act normal?”

  Mike looked at me, his blueberry eyes searching. “I don’t know, Apron,” he said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  And then, just like that, I understood what my real job was this summer, and it had nothing to do with flowers.

  42

  Conlige suspectos semper habitos.

  Round up the usual suspects.

  Walking down our dirt road, the evening fog had already rolled in and the only thing making any noise was Mr. Orso’s lawn mower and a few of his barks when the mower turned off. I waved to him, and he waved back. I tried not to think about how Chad couldn’t see me doing that now. Helen Keller said that when you lose one sense, another one grows stronger. But by the time Chad learned how to hear me waving, it would be too late.

  Mrs. Weller’s orange love bug wasn’t in the driveway and her rose bushes were starting to look scraggly: there were missing petals everywhere. Cold fog blew on me when I turned into our driveway and saw my dad’s car in the garage. It felt good to be cold. So I stood at the bottom of the porch stairs and took in a long deep breath, then held it in there like oven cleaner.

  In the sky, seagulls were coming out of nowhere, doing a fly-by and then disappearing again. It didn’t smell like low tide yet, which meant I would have to go down to get more sea glass later, after I had done all the chores for M.

  I made sure the screen door didn’t slam when I walked into the house. The last thing I wanted was for people to start ordering me around before I could get some food. The Portland Bagel Mike gave me had worn out hours ago.

  When I walked into the kitchen, there was fog in it. I looked to the back door, but it was shut.

  And then I saw the window next to it was shattered.

  My heart started beating backward. The window had jagged pieces sticking up like shark’s teeth and behind it on the back staircase you could see the top of a kitchen chair. I heard footsteps outside. Blood drained into my feet and I couldn’t move. Those footsteps kept getting closer, two more steps and I would be kidnapped, or worse.

  “Apron,” my dad said sticking his head in between the shark’s teeth. “Be careful.”

  “Dad, what happened?”

  He pulled his head out and opened the door.

  “Well, it’s okay now,” he said, dragging in a big garbage can from outside.

  “Did we get robbed?”

  “No,” he said, too calmly. “Just a little argument, it’s over now.”

  “With who?” I said. “Did they try to steal your book?”

  “With whom. And no, Apron,” my dad said, turning to the broken window and carefully pulling the glass teeth out one by one, then dropping them into the garbage can. “No one tried to steal anything. Margie and I, we just had a little …”

  M, I thought grinding my teeth. “Did you kill her?”

  “What?” my dad said turning back to me. “No, Apron. Just a chair, went through the window. Margie’s upstairs.”

  “You threw a chair?” The blood started leaving me again. My dad never used to punch people or throw chairs. I stepped back a little.

  “Well, one of us did. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  My dad went back to pulling teeth. But I stood there, grinding mine. “Dad,” I said. “Did she hurt the baby?”

  He cocked his head sideways, staring at me, not answering.

  Finally he said, “No. Why would she do that?”

  I shook my head and stepped forward to help him. There was a lot of cleaning up to do around here, and my dad wasn’t going to be able to do it alone.

  43

  Diis aliter visum.

  The gods decided otherwise.

  This was what happened now: I woke up and had breakfast with my dad and his newspaper head, then walked up our dirt road and took the bus to Scent Appeal.

  Sometimes I got my normal seat, and sometimes I had to peek over other people’s heads to see my graffiti. The lady bus driver was usually there, except on Tuesdays, and maybe Mondays, but I wouldn’t know because on Mondays, Scent Appeal was closed. On those days, I helped Mrs. Weller with her rose bushes.

  It wasn’t as hard as it looked, cutting those old buds. Some of the petals floated away before I even clipped them. Mrs. Weller still bled here and there, sometimes she might scrape her ankle against a leaf and have to go lie down, and one time she got another nosebleed. But other than that, she was very happy that I was helping her and kept trying to give me fifty cents. But I told her no, flowers were my profession now and I needed all the practice I could get. She bought me my own rose bush as a thank you, which we planted in my mom’s old garden. “I see you’ve got your mother’s green thumb,” my dad said one day, puffing on his cigar and squatting down to pull out some weeds.

  My dad tried to tell M she couldn’t go out with her friends at night anymore. She was still in her wooden shoe, but she could waddle around as fast as she wanted to now. When he told her this, M threw a fork at him. “They’re all wild, Margie,” he argued. “Too wild for a pregnant woman.” But she just stormed off, clunking her way down the porch stairs and meeting up with her friends anyway.

  One night, I made them tofu pasta. M said it was the most disgusting thing she had ever seen, but my dad said, “Hey, not bad.”

  “Try some, Margie,” my dad said. But we both knew she wouldn’t. She had stopped eating. Her doctor said as long as she kept drinking water, she didn’t need as much food as you might think. But M looked like a scarecrow that ate a mixing bowl now.

  “Where do you think you’re going tonight with those girls?” my dad asked, putting down his fork and crossing his arms.

  “Just to go and to see the movie,” M said, looking pale. “I am still allowed to do that, Dennis,” she said flatly, but with a pinch of a question in it.

  “Eat something then,” my dad said picking up his fork and taking another bite.

  “I cannot eat that, Dennis,” M said, pushing her plate away.

  My dad looked at me. And I stopped chewing. Then they both watched me slide that plate off the tap-dancing lobster.

  “Apron, can you make some without the tofu then?” my dad asked.

  I nodded. A good chef is prepared to be creative should a particular ingredient become unavailable. That was what it said in Quick Cooks:150 Easy Recipes for Busy People.

  And I was busy now. Usually I got home from Scent Appeal just in time to head down to the beach before the mosquitoes started showing up in truckloads. Mosquitoes don’t like to buzz down past the high-tide mark so the lower the tide, the more blood you could keep. I had started putting periwinkles at the bottom of my vases, too. Stargazers and lily of the valley looked great with them down there, but a few flowers, like tuberoses, didn’t.

  “Thanks, Apron,” my dad said after I brought some regular pasta back to the table. M didn’t thank anything.

  “Eat it,” my dad told her, crossing his arms again and staring at her plate.

  Lately my
dad had been talking to M like that. I would have gulped that pasta down in one bite if he talked to me that way. But M wasn’t even scared. She just blew air through her lips and said, “Horrivel.”

  “Fine, Margie,” my dad said, giving up. “When Holly was pregnant she ate everything but the kitchen table.”

  “She did?” I asked proudly.

  My dad lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “She never felt better,” he said, twirling his pasta and taking another bite, not seeing M roll her eyes.

  A little later, when I was cleaning up, dirt crunched on our driveway. I listened to M’s wooden shoe clobber down the stairs and my dad’s voice meet her at the bottom.

  “Who’s picking you up?” he asked.

  “Suzanna,” M said like she had told him that a thousand times already. It turned out that Suzanna was the other nurse at the church the day I knocked the shake out of Grandma Bramhall. She was going back to Brazil at the end of the summer. There was no Mr. American Right for her, I guess.

  “Damn it, Margie,” I heard my dad say. “You’re pregnant. You can’t be parading around with those girls all night.”

  “I tell you we are just going to the movies, Dennis,” M said, but she wasn’t sounding mean enough to be telling the truth, and my dad and I knew it.

  I kicked at the bottom of the broom to knock the dirt off and emptied the dustpan into the trash. My dad said something I couldn’t hear and M said something back, fast and hot.

  “Twenty weeks, Margie, you waited twenty God damn weeks to tell me. You had plenty of time to change your mind, so don’t give me any more of that bullshit.”

  M yelled something then clobbered off down the porch stairs. My dad went back into his office and slammed the door. I stood there listening to Suzanna’s car back out and take M up to Route 88, and on to who knows where.

  Almost six hours after M had left for the movies, lights moved across my window shade and tires crackled down the dirt road and stopped in front of Mrs. Weller’s house. A door shut quietly and then the car started backing up, never even pulling into our driveway. Way up the road, I heard the door shut again, hard this time. My punched-in stomach said it was the middle of the night before my clock did. A few minutes later, you could hear slow careful clobbers coming up the stairs and turning down the hall into my dad’s room. He wasn’t there, though. I had heard him earlier go into the little whatever’s room and lie down on the bed in there.

  44

  Spectemur agendo.

  Let us be judged by our acts.

  I was reading the Fancy Facts on the back of my new cereal box when the phone rang.

  “Hi, dearie,” Grandma Bramhall said.

  “Hi,” I said relieved. Every time the phone rang, I worried it was Mike calling with bad news. Chad had been pretty much the same since he started going blind: some days he came down to the shop and wanted me to tell him a few jokes, and one day he came down so quietly I hadn’t even heard him. I found him squinting over me while I read The Little Town on the Prairie behind the counter. The Long Winter was finally over and Laura was practically all grown up, whether she liked it or not. It was my least favorite book in the series. I waited for Chad to laugh at me and ask why I was reading a baby book. But instead he asked me to come sit on the couch and read it to him. They were his favorite books, too.

  “I had to read them with a flashlight under my covers so my parents wouldn’t see,” he said smiling down around my belly button, the two of us sitting so close I could see my legs were thicker than his now.

  So the next day I brought in my old, soft Book One and that was what we did, Chad and me. There were nine books in the Laura Ingalls Wilder series and I wanted to get through all of them before the end of summer. Which was why I worried every time the phone rang.

  “How’s the boy?” Grandma Bramhall asked. My dad had told her last week that I was working at Scent Appeal for Mrs. Weller’s nephew and his sick friend, Chad.

  Grandma Bramhall waved her hand down and said, “I know all about it, Dennis. Millie never knows when to shut that trap of hers.”

  She also knew about the Latin tags because it turns out the lady with the cat on the leash was hosting their bridge group one night. And when Grandma Bramhall read the tags, she asked what color hair the girl who sold them to her had and knew it was me.

  “Chad was okay yesterday,” I told her.

  “Good,” she said. “Listen, dearie, do you think that father of yours would like to come to a pre–Fourth of July party tonight, before Mr. John and I set sail tomorrow? It’s a last-minute thing, but you never know what might happen to us out there.”

  Grandma Bramhall had started talking like this, like they were heading out to sail through the Bermuda Triangle instead of staying on a cruise ship that was bigger than my school. It was starting to drive my dad crazy too. “Look, Mom,” he said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s a cruise ship and the only sail you’ll be setting is when you’re three sheets to the wind.”

  “Don’t be sassy,” Grandma Bramhall said. My dad smiled though, for the first time since M had clobbered back up the stairs that morning saying, “No way, will I to sit at dinner with that mother of yours and listen to her tell me how to serve you all the day, Dennis.”

  “A pre–Fourth of July pool party?” I asked hopefully. Already, it was hot and humid and Grandma Bramhall’s pool was the perfect solution.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “All right, and oh, do you think she’s going to feel up to coming?”

  I said I didn’t know. My dad had told Grandma Bramhall that M was having a hard pregnancy and that her broken toe wasn’t helping matters. He didn’t tell her about the smashed window or the fork throwing, though.

  “No matter,” Grandma Bramhall sighed. “Six sharp.”

  After I hung up, I swung my backpack on, heavy with six bags of bleached rocks that I was going to try in the vases this morning and some more food for The Boss. No one had adopted him yet. But Chad and I had started playing with him upstairs in their apartment. We made a collar for him out of my Swatch watch and tried to walk him on a piece of string. It took a few nudges for The Boss to get moving, but then he got good enough to take out onto the sidewalk. When Mike caught us he got really mad, though, and told us we were scaring customers away. We kept doing it anyway, whenever Mike was gone.

  Usually it was fun when people stopped to watch us, until Johnny Berman and two of his skateboard friends zoomed by. Johnny did a double take when he saw me and flipped up his board.

  “Hey, Apron,” he said. “What are you doing?” He was even cuter with blonder hair and a tan.

  “Nothing,” I told him. I glanced over at Chad to see how sick he was looking just then. He had his sunglasses on at least.

  Chad tugged on The Boss’s leash. “We’re training him for the David Letterman Show.”

  As soon as Johnny got a good look at Chad, his face pulled up and he stepped back. The truth was: Chad looked like a skeleton. He had on his same jeans, but his belt was cinched so tight it almost went around him twice. And the black splotches on his neck were impossible to hide. Another one had come out on his forehead.

  Johnny looked at me and then back at Chad, before throwing down his skateboard and jumping on again. “Cool. See ya.”

  After he zoomed away, Chad stopped and tipped his head at me.

  “Sorry.”

  “For what?” I leaned over to fix The Boss’s Swatch watch collar.

  “For being seen with me. I’m guessing my good looks have started to fade a little,” he smiled his gray, cracked lips. “Not exactly good for the popularity meter.”

  He was right. But I stood and looked him square in the sunglasses. “He’s just a stupid boy from my class. He’s in Special Ed, I think. And besides, you don’t have to do anything for some people to hate you.”

  Chad held out The Boss’s leash for me, and when I took it, he took my hand too. I squeeze
d it tight, black splotches and all, as we walked back into Scent Appeal.

  Now, I left a note for my dad on his lobster. Grandma Bramhall tonight 6 pm party, and walked outside.

  The heat hit me like a ton of bricks. My hair was still looking fancy and layered, though. When my dad first noticed it, he nodded and said, “You’re growing up, all right.”

  When I got to Scent Appeal, the door was open but the lights were off. Usually this meant Mike had gone out to get more flowers or something for Chad. Mike said today would be a busy one. We’d probably have to stay open late because people would be running in at the last minute to buy flowers for their Fourth of July parties, and if that happened, don’t worry, he’d drive me home. Mike had even bought a bag of tiny American flags, which I stuck into all the vases yesterday even though Chad said he’d rather have his fingernails peeled off than celebrate Reagan’s crusty right-winged America. The real Boss was mad at President Reagan, too, for singing “Born in the USA” without permission. The story was on the cover of my dad’s newspaper. Even when Bruce Springsteen looks mad, he’s still a fox.

  I got busy with the flowers in tubs that Mike left for me every morning. Then I found the largest vase with the biggest opening, and dropped a bleached rock into it. A long crack spread across the bottom. I didn’t know how much a vase cost, but it had to be worth at least a couple of Chad’s pills. Every day, Mike made him take about ten. I felt guilty, but there was nothing I could do to save it. So I put it in the trash and sprinkled the rest of the bleached rocks around the tables and lobster traps instead.

  Twenty minutes before we opened, an orange danger cone dropped into my stomach. Mike still wasn’t back yet and I hadn’t heard anything upstairs at all. I went up quietly to check on Chad. But when I opened the door, he wasn’t on the couch. Or in the bedroom. Or anywhere else in the apartment.