Leftovers (4 page)

Bottom line, whether Tanner's involved or not, I have to find a way to get into my father's restaurant before my mother cleans and does inventory. I
must
find the pictures first. And when I find them, I'll burn them. Every last one of them.
And
the Hush Puppies shoe box I know they're stacked in. Dad probably thought he was a real class act, sticking with old-fashioned, expensive Polaroid photography even when digital became the norm, just so that I'd feel “assured” he wasn't sharing his prize pictures on the Internet. He always made sure I saw him put the developed photographs in the shoe box too, no doubt to “assure” me that he wasn't carrying them around in his pockets, where they might be discovered in the laundry by my mother, or pulled out by mistake while he hunted for pocket change to tip the paperboy. Unfortunately, my father's assurances never included letting me know
where
he hid the box between photo sessions. All my father's actions ever
did
assure me of was that going to all this trouble meant he was less likely to ever get caught and sent to jail.

Now I imagine myself spreading the ashes of the photos on my father's grave, taking care not to touch the poison ivy I planted there on Father's Day.

“Look Mom, why don't you wait until the fall?” I plead. “I can clean! I can do inventory!”

She frowns. “I don't think so, Sarah. I was hoping to—”

I lean forward in my chair. “But...you don't know what all the equipment and gadgets are called or what they're for.”

Mom taps her nails on the side of her empty glass. “Well, you're right about that.”

“And it's too big an undertaking for one person, isn't it?”

She sighs. “I'm sure Tanner will help. I just hate to put it off any longer.”

And
I
hate to resort to whining and shameless begging, but what choice do I have?

“Please, Mom. Wait for me to come home before you go to the restaurant!” I grip the armrests of my chair so hard my knuckles crack. “Let me do it! Let me do the cleaning and inventory!” I pause and suck in air, try to work up a sniffle before I nail my point home. “It'll make me feel better about...letting go...”

I can't believe I just lied like that. Lying makes me itch. My arms and legs feel like they're covered in a million bug bites. If I were Pinocchio, my nose would be five feet long.

Mom's face softens like a pat of butter left out in the sun. With a sad smile, she reaches over and pats my hand. “I guess it can wait until September.”

I relax back into the chair.

For about five seconds. Until I think about the first— and last—time I tried to “clean and do inventory” at my father's restaurant.

Yup, Dad's restaurant. Sarah's Place. That's where I “needed to get away” to the night I stole and crashed Tanner's car.

Better luck next time, I hope. Much better luck. Then my mother can sell—or torch—the damn place for all I care.

Every night, after the dogs have been fed, exercised and bedded down in the barn for the night, we “volunteers” are granted another dose of free time until lights-out at eleven.

“Have fun!” Dr. Fred exclaims, herding us into the musty lodge rec room. “Relax!” You'd think he was giving away all-expense-paid Hawaiian vacations.

But no.

“Just keep it legal,” Victoria shouts from the kitchen. She plays bad cop to Dr. Fred's happy-go-lucky good cop; she's a firm subscriber to the don't-mess-with-me-and-everything-will-be-fine school of interpersonal relations. Victoria's quick to take to task anyone who puts one pinkie over her clearly set boundaries about swearing, cleaning up after the dogs (or oneself), surliness, rudeness and slacking off. Dr. Fred may drive the ship around camp, but Victoria keeps it afloat.

“I'm outta here,” Brant exclaims, pumping a fist in the air. “Catch ya later, losers.”

Each evening, Brant takes off in a dented aluminum motorboat for his parents' house over on the mainland. Brant lives so close to Moose Island that as long as he shows up for morning flagpole and stays until the end of evening chores, he can commute to and from home. He roars off in a cloud of gas fumes to play baseball and “cruise for chicks” in town (so he says), or (more likely, I think) play violent video games and research bomb-making techniques on the Internet in his basement bedroom. Nobody is sad to see him go.

Nicholas flips on the donated big-screen
TV
, his stomach rumbling like an approaching thunderstorm. Leaving the set on, he doubles back to the kitchen to beg Victoria for some corn kernels for the hot-air popper. Nicholas has been at Camp Dog Gone Fun for less than three weeks, but he's already lost twenty pounds. “It's pretty hard to gorge on Mars bars and Doritos on an island with no stores to shoplift from,” he admits, his sad face drooping like a bullmastiff's. His grandmother hasn't been back to Moose Island with any super-sized care packages since the incident with Judy and the lawn chair. And unlike the rest of us “volunteers,” who are sixteen or older, Nicky's court order stipulates that the thirteen-year-old can only leave the island on adult-supervised errands or, if necessary, for emergency medical treatment.

Bummer for him, but you can practically hear his heart and joints and intestines cheering.

Johanna leans against the oak-paneled wall as she does every evening, yap-yap-yapping into her cell phone—to her
boyfriend, to her sister, to her friends, to her lawyer. She'll be at it for hours. Johanna gripes constantly, counting off on her long, French-manicured fingernails all the ways she hates island life. She's worked out a scheme to finish her community service hours giving homeless women manicures, but so far, the judge isn't buying. I think Johanna thought coming here would be easy, that she'd spend her days carrying little dogs around like accessories. She's
so
not prepared to deal with the four-legged misfits at Moose Island. Or their shit.

Taylor, as usual, is sprawled on the worn plaid couch, red and black felt pens in hand, gouging poetry into a beat-up spiral notebook. She openly shares her creativity with anyone who wanders by. “Hey, Nicky, come here. Listen to this.” She beckons as Nicholas comes back into the rec room, a punch bowl full of air-popped popcorn and a pineapple juice box propped against his belly. “This one's called ‘Uncle Joe's a Perv'.”

Taylor's poems make my skin crawl. I don't need to hear them to know she and I have shit in common. Maybe it is just the familiar stoop of Taylor's shoulders or the storm clouds in her eyes even on sunny days.

On the one hand, I envy her for being able to express her anger and pain. But on the other, I've always been suspicious of girls like Taylor—every school has a few—who play the victim card with so much enthusiasm. Is “sharing” really part of “healing,” like one of Taylor's poems says, or does she just enjoy the attention and the sympathy and the shocked, uncomfortable looks her “Rhymes of Rebellion” generate around the rec room?

My goal is to destroy the images of my past, not display them. So I keep my distance.

Some nights, Sullivan digs deep into the Camp Dog Gone Fun “recreation cupboard,” a battered metal filing cabinet full of his discarded childhood games and crusty art supplies. He cajoles Taylor, Nicholas and me into playing a game of Monopoly or Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit. Or he sets up a game of table hockey. Or he rolls out paper and starts a group mural, like he's some overzealous recreation therapist or something.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be as welcoming as Sullivan if a boatload of screwed-up kids were ferried into my life every summer, even if they were helping run the family kennel. But Sullivan bounces around the island, working as hard as everyone else and acting as if Camp Dog Gone Fun lives up to its name. He even takes his turn at daily meal prep, and he runs to the flagpole each morning to avoid Poo Patrol.

Tonight Sullivan materializes beside the balding corduroy recliner where I'm working on a crossword I've ripped out of a discarded newspaper.

He nudges me. Grins when I glance up. “Come up to my room for a sec?”

A rerun of
Law and Order
is on
TV
, but nobody's watching. Johanna is on the phone, having a fight with her boyfriend. Taylor is still slumped on the couch, scratch, scratch, scratching in her notebook. Nicholas sits beside her, seemingly unbothered by the elbow she jabs into his side with each exclamation point. He's already inhaled all
the popcorn and juice and is chewing his fingernails like he'd starve without them.

I tuck my pen behind my ear and raise an eyebrow at Sullivan. “Why?”

“I just want to...talk to you about something,” he says.

“Sullivan and Sarah, up in a tree,” Nicholas sings from the couch. “
K-I-S-S-I
...”

“Fuck off, Nicky,” I tell him.

“That's another five bucks for the cuss fund, Sarah!” Victoria yells from the kitchen.

“Put it on my tab,” I mumble as I follow Sullivan up the stairs.

Call me a sucker for punishment.

Sullivan's summer bedroom is above the rec room, up a steep, narrow staircase. The room stinks of guy-sweat and rotten apple cores. There are worn Batman quilts on the bunk beds, a jumble of sports equipment piled up in a corner, books and magazines scattered around on the floor and the furniture, a pair of faded Fruit of the Looms crumpled near the door.

Clearly he hasn't brought me up here to impress me.

Sullivan swipes a stack of graphic novels off a chair and points for me to sit. “Are you any good at puzzles?” he asks, plunking himself down on his bottom bunk.

“What kind of puzzles? You mean crosswords?”

Sullivan rolls onto his stomach and thrusts an arm under the bed. He extracts a giant jigsaw box and holds it out for me to see, shaking it a little so that the two thousand pieces tumble around inside. The image on the box is
a blurry head-and-shoulders photo of a German shepherd.

Frowning, I reach for the box to get a closer look and discover that the big photo of the German shepherd is made up of hundreds of smaller photos of all sorts of dogs. Light areas are created by images of Westies, Samoyeds, bull terriers and Old English sheepdogs. Black Labs, rotties, Dobermans and chows make up the shaded parts. Gold areas are golden retrievers, yellow Labs, shar-peis.

I know my dog breeds. When I was five years old and wanted a dog, I took a thick picturebook about dogs out of the library. I begged for a dog. I told my parents I needed one because I didn't have any brothers or sisters to play with. But really, I'd seen a show on Discovery Kids about police dogs and guard dogs and thought if I had a dog, it might protect me.

My father surprised me one day with a big, friendly chocolate Lab I named Brownie, who played with me but never protected me. I loved Brownie anyway, but never stopped wishing that he'd been some big, badass German shepherd with a taste for amateur photographers.

“So,” Sullivan asks, jarring my attention back to the matter at hand. “Are you any good at this sort of thing?”

I pass the box back to him. “I guess.”

Actually, I haven't done a jigsaw in years. I have fuzzy memories of a Little Mermaid puzzle box under the tree one Christmas when I was about eight or nine. I'd loved the Little Mermaid movies, watched them over and over. I loved all cartoons, because cartoon characters were just drawings. In seventh grade I'd been assigned an essay.
The topic was “What would you be if you could be anything?” I wrote about how I wished I could be a cartoon character so that I could erase myself. Not so that I'd disappear forever. Just so that I'd be invisible for a while. Until I grew up. Until the day I could move away and redraw myself any way I wanted. But even at age twelve, I knew that might be saying too much, that Mrs. Fallon might send me down to the counselor's office. So I ripped up that first essay and wrote some bullshit about wishing I could be an Arctic explorer. I hate the cold but liked the idea of wearing layers and layers of thermal underwear, snow pants and a heavy parka. Not an inch of skin showing.

“Is something wrong?” Sullivan asks, watching me wrap my arms around myself. It's hotter than hell in his room with the late evening sun streaming through the window, but I'm suddenly covered in goose bumps.

“No.” But I can't stop imagining the image that would appear if my father's Polaroid collection was assembled into a big portrait of me. Fighting the useless urge to clench my eyes shut, I steer my head away from Sullivan, my gaze falling on my distorted reflection in the gray screen of the portable
TV
propped on his dresser. I see my straggly hair hanging around my head like a wrinkled brown hospital curtain. My oversized T-shirt. The baggy cargo shorts that swallow my hips. I look down at myself. Only my forearms and calves are tanned; the shorts and T-shirt are my only concession to the summer heat. Sometimes I envy Muslim women whose burkas cover everything but their eyes. Add a pair of mirrored sunglasses and I'd be good to go.

“Where did you get the puzzle?” I ask Sullivan. Not that I care, really. I just want him to shift his curious gaze from me back to the box.

“It's Dr. Fred's,” he says, kicking off his canvas high-tops—bright orange today—and leaning back on the lower bunk, raising his skinny legs so that his feet push on the bottom of the top bed's springs. The enormous stuffed tiger that I know Sullivan won playing darts at Riverwood High School's Fall Fair topples off the upper bunk, landing belly up on the floor at my feet.

He shakes the puzzle box at me again. “Jigsaw Rover here was a gift a few years ago from some client who owns a hobby store. Dr. Fred cured his Dalmatian of an intestinal blockage. I have to put it together this summer. Dr. Fred wants to mount it on the wall of his mainland office.”

“Why doesn't Dr. Fred do it himself?” I ask.