Anywhere but Here (23 page)

“Hey,” I manage.

“Want to make a paper snowman?” she asks. “We have glitter.”

I sit down at the table, partly because it's hard to say no to a small child with glitter, but mainly because if I don't sit down, I'm going to keel over. After a minute, once Brittany Anne has equipped me with my own construction paper and a supply of white glue, I look up to see both Dad and Sheri beaming at me.

“What?” I say.

“Brittany Anne is Sheri's daughter,” Dad says.

“I figured that.”

“She's five. She usually lives in the Okanagan.”

“My sister helps me out there,” Sheri explains.

“We think she's going to like it here, though.” Dad has stood up and moves to put an arm around Sheri's waist.

“Cole . . .”

I'm frozen with the green glitter jar in one hand and the glue bottle in the other. If I had been thinking, I should have been sniffing it to handle this conversation.

“You have glitter on your forehead.” Sheri giggles.

“Cole, Sheri's quit her job. She's going to look for something
involving less . . . travel. I've asked Sheri to marry me.”

“That rhymes,” Brittany Anne says.

“And to move in here,” Dad continues.

“Get it? Sheri and marry?” Brittany Anne says.

I am trying to breathe. Really, I'm trying.

This is a complete betrayal of my mother. Dad mourned for slightly over a year before proposing to a pregnant exotic dancer with a preexisting child, and now both stripper and child are going to move into my mother's house.

“You look kinda sick,” Brittany Anne tells me.

At that moment, the phone rings. Sheri grabs it as if she already lives here. “Owens residence,” she coos.

“Oh, my.” Her voice drops. “No, he didn't. Well, he didn't really have the chance. We've been . . .”

“I see.”

There's a rather long pause.

“We'll do that.”

Sheri stares at me, eyes wide. Both Dad and Brittany Anne follow suit.

“Of course. Thank you so much for calling.”

When she hangs up, she puts her hands on her hips, like the big red hen in the second-grade spring play. A red hen wearing vagina flowers.

“A concussion! What were you thinking? That was the
teacher from your ski trip. She says you're to go straight to bed.”

She turns to Dad. “We have to check on him in the middle of the night and make sure he's responsive.”

Please God, do not let Sheri check on me in the middle of the night.

Dad actually looks concerned. “You shoulda said something.”

“You were distracted.”

“You seen a doctor?” he asks.

“They checked me out at the ski hill. Said I might have a headache for a while.”

“Do you want to lie down?”

Well, yes. That was what I was going to do, Dad, before you dumped a kid and a marriage proposal on me. I was going to lie down for a week or so, and now I think I might make it a month. Or longer. I might lie down until next September.

“That would be a good idea.”

•  •  •

A celebration dinner: saffron rice, spiced meatballs, and some sort of unidentifiable greens. I watch Brittany Anne eat. She picks all the raisins from the rice and builds them into a pyramid on the side of her plate. Then she eats the rice. Then she eats the pyramid, brick by brick.

This is what Lauren and I could have. This sort of living, breathing creature in our lives. In some ways, the whole idea
seems fascinating. And in other ways, it seems so scary that I want to push back from the table right now and sprint for the highway.

Sheri reveals plum cake for dessert. It's nowhere near as delicious as Mom's, which makes me happy.

After dinner and after my dad and I have done the dishes—“only fair after the girls have cooked all day,” he says in a cheerful voice I'm no longer used to hearing—Brittany Anne and I play a two-hour game of Monopoly. She cheats, but I let her, because as long as we're playing, I can pretend to be completely absorbed in the game and ignore Sheri and Dad nuzzling each other on the living room couch.

Nausea can be a side effect of a concussion. They warned me about it.

Brittany Anne is surprisingly bright.

“You should change your name to Britt,” I tell her. “It sounds less like a s-soap opera star.” I was going to say “stripper,” but that seemed a bit harsh.

“Do you like Britt better?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” she says. Then she yells into the living room, “My name is Britt now!”

I can't help smiling, and she responds with an ear-to-ear grin that would get her on one of those reality TV beauty pageant shows. Actually, that would be right up Sheri's alley.

“You shouldn't change your name,” Britt says.

“No?”

“I like it.”

I have to admit, the girl is growing on me. She's a little ion-powered whirlwind that's sucked all the stale air out of the house.

This doesn't mean I'm okay with her moving in permanently. Not if she wants to bring her mother with her.

•  •  •

At least with Sheri in the house, I'm more motivated to hang out in my bedroom and finish my film. It definitely turned out dark—and I don't mean the background lighting. If this were to hit theaters, researchers would flock to Webster to investigate the population's hopeless, helpless existence. Even to me, the film seems bleak.

It's done, though. Today, I even packaged it up, ready to drop in the mail with my reference letters and my application forms. Since there's going to be a baby in my life, I'll probably never get to film school. But I've spent too much time on the short not to submit it. This way, I can spend the next few years knowing whether or not the studio would have accepted me.

In a sad way, I'm feeling quite confident about it. The film is stark, sure, but they must be used to that at a film school. The whole thing has a rough, raw edge to it. Somehow I'm sure I'll get in, and then I won't be able to go. . . .

I'm thinking about this crazy situation as I search through the linen closet for a sheet to turn into a toga. Lex came through for me, miraculously. She called to say she's convinced Lauren to come to Dallas's party.

Lauren will be there, and I'll be there, and Lex will help arrange a way for us to talk. My chest feels tight even thinking about it. This is a conversation that's going to shape my entire life, Lauren's life, and the baby's.

We're going to make what will probably be our biggest decision ever. While dressed in togas.

•  •  •

“Cole!” There are a dozen people on Dallas's deck who shout my name as I arrive. The bass is pounding. The crowd is a sea of white, although some of the girls dancing outside are wearing ski jackets over their togas.

Both Sheri and Britt ended up helping with my costume, which means my toga has a belt of grape vines. I also have a laurel crown, which I left in the truck so I don't get beat up for looking a whole other level of ridiculous.

“It's freezing out here,” I yell.

“It's like a sauna inside,” Dallas shouts back. “We go in there to warm up, then out here to cool down. It's like the Swedish-Roman system of good health, bro.”

“How's your arm?” I ask him.

“Healing. How's your head? I heard you cracked it open on the ski trip.”

“No pink elephants, but I'm still having hallucinations,” I say.

“Nice.”

“Instead, there's a small child and a stripper living in my house.”

“That's awesome!”

The older you get, the more surreal everything becomes.
It's possible that this is how life works,
I think as I shoulder my way inside in search of warmth.

Another example: Across the room from me, Hannah is wearing a toga made from a red satin sheet. She's dancing on top of the kitchen table, which would be surreal even if Lauren weren't dancing on a kitchen chair beside her, wearing an ankle-length toga skirt with a ski jacket zipped up over top.
Inside
the sauna house. Lex is on the floor below them, dancing with both arms in the air and her head bobbing at whiplash-inducing speed.

As I watch, Hannah slips off the table and is caught like a rock concert bodysurfer by the guys conveniently admiring her red satin. She pops back up and keeps dancing. She's like the sexy foil to Lauren's blond angel. Except . . . not so angelic.

It's enough to make you wonder if Salvador Dalí ever hit his head while on a ski trip.

There's a whole field of surrealist documentary filmmaking
that blends fiction and fact. It started when Robert Flaherty fiddled with reality in
Nanook of the North
, and it developed into all sorts of craziness. If I wanted to join that particular stream of filmmaking, this party would be the place to start.

Greg comes in. He nods to me as he makes his way through the kitchen to the cooler of beer.

“How's it going?” I shout.

“Okay.” An answer worthy of a sulking woman. I would tell him as much, but he's already squeezed past me again, toward the stereo.

I'm not about to agree with my dead mother's theories of friendship, but parties where no one is speaking to you are less fun than you would think. Lauren's still dancing on the chair, so our Lex-engineered talk is not going to happen anytime soon. Bracing for the cold, I head back to the deck, where Dallas—now wearing a cowboy hat with his toga—appears to be demonstrating a line dance. Only Dallas could get away with that.

I lean on the porch railing, freezing, and wish I had somewhere more comfortable to go. And not just the choice between the heat inside and the cold outside. It's the choice between (a) this party with a bunch of drunk people and (b) the building that used to be my home, a place that suddenly has whole milk instead of skim in the fridge. Sheri says Britt's underweight, and she's supposed to drink the full-fat version.

Whole milk is disgusting.

As Dallas and his followers step-cross-step away from me, I decide another thing's gone wrong with my world. Everything in Webster was supposed to stay the same when I take off for Vancouver. That's how I assumed it would work. People were supposed to wait for me so that when I breezed into town to give my this-is-my-birthplace tour to entertainment news shows, they could be suitably impressed.

But no. They all have their own shit going on. Plans or lack of plans. Babies or stripper families. Brand-new video game systems or roast chicken dinners or lesbian romances.

Most of these people don't even know I'm in a life-altering crisis here. But if they don't understand that, and I don't know what predicaments they might be facing, then something's just not right. And I have a heavy feeling weighing in my gut, telling me it might all be my fault.

When I make it inside again, Hannah and Lauren have disappeared from the kitchen table and there's a commotion just down the hallway at the bathroom door. A bunch of drunken girls are pressing into the room as if they're playing sardines, that hide-and-seek game that Greg and I used to like when we were kids.

“Oh my God,” one of them shrieks.

“We should call someone.” That's Hannah's voice, surprisingly clear.

“She can't stay here.”

If I had to guess, I would say some girl's boyfriend got drunk and kissed another girl, which caused the first girl to slap the
second girl, ruining her eye makeup, and now all the girls are crying.

That's what I would guess if I had to, but I don't bother. I'm not exactly concerned. At a house party, girls crying in the bathroom is common background noise. I decide to crack a beer and plant my ass on the kitchen counter until Lex signals me. Then I'm going to talk—really talk—to Lauren.

That's my plan—until Lex pushes her way into the kitchen. There's a streak of red down the front of her toga that's definitely more horror movie than surrealist doc.

“There's something wrong with Lauren and the baby,” she announces to the room.

“What baby?” someone beside me asks. “Who brought a baby to the party?”

Meanwhile, I've slid from the counter and I'm standing in this weird hyper-alert position, ready to run in whatever direction Lex points. “What do you need?”

It's like she doesn't even see me. Lex spins around with a finger extended and aims it at a random guy.

“You. You gotta call an ambulance,” she says.

“Okay,” he says, amused. With her mascara smeared and her toga about to fall off her shoulder, Lex is a portrait of a drunken lunatic.
This
is the person I trusted to broker my future with Lauren?

Sucking in air through her teeth, she draws herself up to her
full height—somewhere around the guy's belly button—and stabs her finger at him again.

“The ambulance!” she shouts.

“Ambulance. Got it.” He doesn't move.

I'm patting my pockets for my own phone, but it must be in the truck. I can't see a house phone through the crowd. And then all hell breaks loose. More people try to jam themselves into the bathroom. Someone starts screaming for help, and everyone on the deck attempts to press inside.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do. It's as if I'm caught in one of those melodramatic silent films, in which some girl is tied to the railway tracks and everyone is running this way and that. Except in this case, Lauren is stuck in the bathroom and Lex is trying to punch the guy across from me. He's blocking her blows and her mouth is still moving, lips flapping in exaggerated motions, though no sound is reaching my ears except friggin' Charlie Chaplin music until finally—finally—Hannah steps into the center of things.

“Cole!” Her voice snaps like a whip. This is not the dancing-on-a-kitchen-table Hannah. She is undeniably sober. “I can't get them out of the bathroom.”