Future Perfect (2 page)

I
'm awake at two a.m., waiting for the storm. The air's getting thick with the smell of ozone washing in from over the ocean and swallowing us all whole. Everything is holding its breath, waiting for the sky to crack open. Especially me. I am sixteen years old and thunder still makes me jump. Lightning makes me wince.

Because this is centralish California and it is the law, we got 340 days of sunshine last year. There are days when everything and everyone looks bright and flawless and washed clean by sunshine. The sun makes it easy to forget that it won't always be there. Sitting on the boardwalk, stretching out on the sand, strolling down the whole two blocks of Main Street—everyone talks about the genuinely miraculous healing power of the sun's invisible gamma rays. This is my oddball little town, a place full of people too weird for San Francisco.

On the sunniest days I've found myself leaning against the railing overlooking the beach, where the water always seems like
rolling glass and the sky is an impossible, pure blue. When I tilt my head back and close my eyes against the light and heat, I find myself believing, just a little bit, in the magic of those invisible gamma rays.

It's easy then to forget that rain is eventually going to pour down the roof of my grandmother's ancient house, sweeping away more shingles and splashing through the holes in the gutters and sheeting down the windows and gushing through the cracks and the seams and making puddles all over the house. The attic will flood. My father will sit up on the couch and put his romance novel down and complain about the damp. I'll go get armfuls of towels and put out pots all over to catch the leaks before they warp the floors even more. Every time a board creaks under my feet I cringe. I hear my mother's voice in my head, the voice I've made up, since I don't remember her real one. She's arguing with my father:
Why doesn't your mother fix the damn roof? Does she leave it to spite me?
while my father murmurs something soothing and pointless.

The storm is coming, and the faraway rumbling underscores the drumbeat of two-a.m. thoughts pounding through my head—all the things I have to do, all the things I haven't done.

The house is sighing at me as the wind skims over the surface of the ocean and tumbles onto shore, crashing into us.

The worst of it is my college-application essay. The essay that has to get me into school. Win me a scholarship or I can't go, even
if I get in. Establish world peace and cure cancer.

It sits undone, the impossible thing I don't want to do for no real reason that I can figure out, because my only other choice is to stare at the ceiling and feel the essay deadline ticking like a countdown to failure.

Sotomayor flops over and lets out her long, satisfied, rumbling grunt. I lean down and press my face to the side of her thick neck. She smells like a dog and that is the most comforting smell in the world, ahead of the smell of wood fires and Ivory soap and that fresh-ink, new textbook smell. Toby, our latest foster dog, is lying on his back with all four paws in the air. She's a quarter of Soto's size, a squirrely little dachshund to a big muscular pit bull, but she takes over most of the bed. When Soto snorts and rolls half on top of Toby, I wish I could roll over too and turn off the light and we could all just sleep. Or I could shake them awake and creep down the back stairs and out to the driveway and be gone, Soto hanging out the window with her tongue flapping like a flag and Toby spinning in circles in the backseat and the wind in my hair and everything left behind.

But you've always got to come back. My father could need something in the middle of the night—he sleeps worse than I do. My grandmother could check on me. She never sleeps, period. She doesn't make a disappointed face, she doesn't sigh or scold me, but when I do escape down the coast for brief, glorious moments, no matter what time I get back she is sitting in the drawing room
right off the foyer, in her dressing gown, sipping tea. I know she can hear the creak of the hinges but she doesn't call out. And I can never stop myself from peering around the door to see if maybe this is the time she won't be there waiting for me. She looks up at me and says, “Good night,” and I know I am dismissed back to my room to work or study or write an essay or try to sleep until I can't stand it again and have to just go.

Sometimes the thought of her waiting when I come back means I never leave.

I can't leave now. The important things, they have a gravity that's impossible to escape. This essay is the most important thing.

I've had the actual application finished for ages, except for this part, and the deadline is only weeks away. First the storm and then my birthday and then time running out. So many worrisome things all in a row.

When I was eight, at dinner my father said, “What do you want to be when you grow up, Ashley?” This would be before my mother had left, because he was still talking to us. He had stopped for a while after, as if he knew he'd have to confess that her disappearance was his fault.

My mother said, “A veterinarian, I bet.” But I remember that I stopped sculpting my mashed potatoes into a perfect cube and I said, “Grandmother. I want to be Grandmother,” and my mother pushed back her chair and went into the kitchen. She didn't come back out.

What I meant was that I wanted to be someone who knows everything.

It was an endless frustration to me that not everything made perfect sense. I needed a way to straighten it all out, once and for all. My grandmother always seemed to know
everything
. With extreme certainty.

“Go ask your grandmother,” my father always said, and I asked her all the questions I had.

The idea of Harvard? Maybe I got that from my mother. There's a picture of her on the lawn in front of the law school, hugely pregnant with my brothers, leaning back on her hands with her face turned to the sky. I don't remember ever seeing her that happy in real life.

But she dropped out. She gave up. I'm not the kind of person who does that, and I never will be. My grandmother would rather I go to Stanford. But it has to be Harvard. It must be. Because it's the best school in the country. Because it would give me irrefutable prestige, the kind of credentials no one can ever argue with. Even if . . . well, even if my grandmother were right about other things.

And I'm the kind of person who goes to Harvard. People say, “Harvard? Well of course.” I think that's a compliment, most of the time.

That night long ago, at the dinner table, my mom knocked her chair back and disappeared into the kitchen, but Dad laughed
and my older brothers snorted. My grandmother said, “You mean a doctor, darling? Like me?” and I nodded and she actually smiled. She said, “You will be.”

My grandmother explained how things would work out from then on and I believed her, because my grandmother knows everything. After dinner I locked the door to my bedroom and thought about how
I
would graduate Harvard, and then I would know everything one day. The noise and the confusion of the world would settle into something I could hold in my hand and take apart and put back together and finally,
finally
understand.

From my grandmother: anatomy books and medical dictionaries and histories of science. Models and chemistry sets and microscopes. A gold pendant shaped like a strand of DNA that I won't ever take off. Subscriptions to science magazines, the popular and the professional kind. I put each one in a binder to save.

She said: A broad background that you'll narrow down into your scope and focus.

Scope and focus have always been my gift.

It is a feeling of gratitude sometimes when someone cares that much about you. It is hard not to want to live up to those expectations.

My future was set like an atomic clock that night. My grandmother's expectations are not hopes, they're certainty.

I could write an essay about
that
, I think. Instead I shut the
laptop and put my face in a pillow until Soto finds me and shoves her big snouty face in mine to lick everything she can reach.

I could flee, just for an hour, just down the coast. But everything is always waiting for me. Everything is always about to happen.

I can feel the laptop hot and whirring against my shoulder. You get five hundred words for your personal statement, which is about a page if you double-space and a page and a half if you single-space. I checked. I don't know what to tell Harvard that they can't just figure out from my transcripts, from my application, my writing supplement, my SATs, my school report, my teacher reports, my midyear school report, my final school report, the article clippings from all my volleyball wins, the feature in the
Chronicle
about leading a Habitat for Humanity project.

There I am, on paper. All the important parts. Everything I've done and had to do for them. Do they seriously need me to spend a page explaining it all to them?

None of my personal essay attempts have been anything but approximations of me. They have felt empty and strange. Like lies.

My father said, “Personnel essay? Why do they want you to write an essay about staff members?” and laughed at his own joke, as he does. He is not helpful.

My grandmother bought me a book called
50 Successful Harvard Applications
and left it on my bed.

My boyfriend, Hector, says, “If you can't write it, maybe that is a sign that it wasn't meant to be.” And he doesn't mean to be, I know he doesn't—but Hector is sometimes irritating in his sense that the world is something you just sit back and let happen to you. He noodles on his guitar and never remembers the lyrics he forgets to write down and shrugs when I ask him why he doesn't just carry a pen and notebook already. All of his songs are beautiful, and then they're gone forever and he doesn't seem to care.

I have time before I have to start to worry. I will come up with something soon. I always do. But the wind and the noise of the storm outside are not helping me concentrate.

A thought, vivid and pleasant: Maybe this is the year the house will soak up all the rain and start to collapse like cardboard, in slow motion, and be carried away on the river that Highway 1 becomes, all the way down to San Ysidro.

Then my grandmother will forget that it's my birthday.

She'll be so busy being ruthlessly competent—salvaging the rattling old furniture and the antique rugs and establishing a new residence and replenishing our personal items and calling insurance companies to speak to them in icy tones—that she won't remember it's time to draw me aside and hand me the little envelope and watch me while I debate whether this year I tear it in half or crumple it into a ball or scream or cry or whatever. All while she looks at me as though I have disappointed her. As
though she has done everything in the world for me, and I can't do this one thing for her.

When the knock at the door comes I jump like I've been shot out of a cannon. “What the hell?” I say, probably too loudly. My father squeaks open the door.

“You're still up,” he says. His hair is a rat's nest on top of his head, a halo of frizzy dishwater blond curls. He squints at me in the low light of my bedroom because he can never find his glasses when he gets up at night. He's been restless since my mother left eight years ago. That's a long time to be restless. “Are you supposed to be up this late? What time is it even?”

“You should be asleep,” I say. “You have meetings tomorrow. You need to be awake for them.”

He crunches up his forehead and scratches his neck, and then his face clears. “Oh that's right. The boathouse thing.” He leans against the jamb of my door with his arms crossed. He's wearing my mother's awful, hole-filled “100% Latina
Bonita” T-shirt that I have begged him to burn and plaid pajama pants that have almost faded to just gray.

“The boathouse thing,” I agree. “I put together the sales folders for you. Don't forget them.” Soto chuffs like she's agreeing. Toby never stops snoring.

“You know how these people are, kiddo. If they're going to buy they've already made up their minds.” He sounds less hopeless and more resigned. He is not so much cut out to be a real estate
agent, and he knows it. He is not cut out to do much, which he knows, too. My father's boss, Gloria, is the only person in their three-person office who ever sells anything not just by accident. Her properties are the ones that keep the business afloat. She is one of my grandmother's oldest friends and the person who hired my father in the first place.

“You can still convince them,” I say. “Grandmother says that confidence—”

“I know,” he breaks in. He pushes away from the doorjamb and shuffles over to me. He pats the top of my head.

“I'm just saying—” I can hear my voice getting impatient, but he never seems to mind.

“Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite.” He smiles at me.

I sigh. “If they do, I will bite them back.”

“That's my girl,” he says. He pats my head again and turns to shuffle back out of the room, yawning hugely.

“I have to finish my essay first,” I say, opening my laptop.

He turns back around, and his face is a frown. “You work too hard, honey.”

I shrug. “Not really.”

“Your mother liked to keep busy, too.”

I'm not sure how to answer that.

He shakes his head and waves his hand in the air. “You do what you need to, honey. You always do.” He's halfway out the
door now. Toby's head pops up next to me and his little tail starts thumping against the pillow.

“Don't forget your lunch,” I call. “It's in the cooler in the fridge.”

He gives me a thumbs-up and another yawn, and disappears into the dark hallway. Toby leaps over me and then down to the floor to trot after my dad. The light bulbs in the hall must have burned out again. The fixtures are too old and unreliable to ever stay lit long. The floorboards creak with every thud of my father's heels. You can map the movements of anyone in this house, where they are and what they're doing. He stops before he reaches his room, in front of the stairs up to my grandmother's room. I hear voices and tense up, but he's talking to Toby. The foster dogs all get attached to him, trail him like the tail of a comet, but he never seems to notice where they came from, or when they go.