Six Feet Over It (19 page)

My throat is dry. “Did he
tell
you this?”

“No. But why else would he be spending half his life at the post office?
Love.
Sad for him she’s in Mexico, but oh God, a long-distance affair …”

She slides a sparkly comb into the updo.

My fingers are pink. Wrinkled.

She perches on the edge of the tub. “Calm down, I’m not looking. Don’t you think it’s romantic?”

I shrug.

“How’s school? Still hanging with the cheerleaders?” she asks.

Shrug.

“Leigh,” she says. “You okay?”

“I don’t know.”

I blink. Hard.

“You know what? Let’s go somewhere. You and me.”

I shake my head.

“Anywhere you want. Movie? Make Dad take us to the river? Somewhere out of Sierrawood. Come with me to Rivendell. Please?”

I rest my forehead on my knees. “Can’t.”

“Yes, you can! You’re here too much. I wish … Elanor would be such a good friend.”

“I know,” I say, just before my throat swells predictably closed.

“Leigh,” she whispers, sitting on her knees beside the tub. “You’re too skinny.” She soaks a sea sponge in the soapy water and rubs my aching shoulders. Washes my back. “You need to eat something—
besides
toast. And Yorks.”

It is easy to forget she is my big sister. My
older
sister.

She helps me stand, wraps me in a towel, and pulls the stopper. The tepid sudsy water swirls around my feet and down the drain.

Warm rain overnight and Dario uses every funeral tarp we have to cover his worldly possessions out on his lawn. Our Saturday-morning drive session features me steering the truck, splashing through each muddy puddle, Dario’s braceleted arm hanging out the open window. The clouds thin and reveal a glowing autumn sun. The headstones shine in the wet grass; trees with lingering leaves show off bright patches of red and gold.

“Paint tonight?” he says.

We brush and roller the blue slowly around the windows and door frames, the air not as warm but still moving enough to dry every wall. He is careful not to get paint on the bracelet but will not take it off.

By sundown a second coat is drying on the trailer walls, and we take a tea and chocolate break before starting the final pass.

“It’s a good color, right?” he asks.

“Yes.” I lay my head back to rest on my bent arm. “It’s beautiful.”

“Not too much for such a little space? I don’t want to make it feel smaller.”

He seems genuinely concerned.

“Why?” I murmur, half asleep in the fan-manufactured breeze and paint fumes. “Does it feel smaller to you?”

“Not so far.”

“Well, you’re the one living with it. But it seems good to me.”

“Just nice to have another opinion. A lady’s opinion.”

My closed eyes roll back. “Yeah, I’m quite a
lady.
It feels like the ocean. Like swimming.”

“The
ocean.
That’s high praise.”

“I love it.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I wish my room was this color.”

He stands back from the wall, tips his head. Refills my tea glass.

“When … I had a friend who, when she turned twelve, her mom let us paint her bedroom. Any color she wanted,” I say.

He sets the tea down.

“What did she choose?”

“Oatmeal.”

“Cereal?”

“Like light brown.”

“Okay.”

“Because they were renting their house from this really old lady who sort of fancied herself an ‘artist,’ and the way she expressed this was by painting every interior wall a different primary color.”

“Primary?”

“Red, yellow, blue. But dark, you know really intense. Like a circus.”

“Yeesh.”

“Her room was a super bright yellowish-green. So we walked to the paint store and she got some sample cards. I remember all of them. Off-white. Ecru. Eggshell. Cotton. Cream. Toast. Wheat. But she
loved
Oatmeal.”

“Well, sure.”

“Her mom was all upset; she thought it was crazy that her kid wanted oatmeal-colored walls.”

“Why?”

“Well, I guess because she was twelve. Twelve-year-old girls are maybe supposed to want brightness. Attention, to be noticed. But Emily wasn’t like that. She didn’t need it.”

He nods.

“Her mom kept saying, ‘It’s not the
color,
so much; it’s what it
says
—what it’s
saying.
Seriously,
beige
?’ ”

He nods.

“I think after months of living with the insanity of that green, she just wanted something quiet.”

He nods.

“It was really pretty. Semigloss, smooth like glass. I gave her glow-in-the-dark star stickers and her mom practically cried, she was so happy when we turned the lights off and there they were, all over the ceiling.”

The fans blow, oscillating across the wall, across our faces.

“Okay,” he says. “Last coat tomorrow and I’ll be sleeping under the ocean waves.”

He holds out his hand, helps me to my feet, walks me home.

“See you in the morning!” he whispers.

The rain and cooling weather have dropped so many leaves, even with the pines I can see the Christmas lights clearly from the porch, the entire outline of the trailer. So close.

“Good night,” I whisper back.

I wake in the Sunday predawn dark, ravens going berserk in the pines outside my sheet-covered window. Nearly six anyway.

The truck is not in its spot at the shed.

I tap on the open trailer door and step inside.

The blue is beautiful, ready for its final coat. His makeshift bed of blankets and sleeping bags is on the newspaper-carpeted floor where the kitchen table once was, books and paper and pens near his pillow on a cardboard box labeled with tall Sharpie letters:

Ana.

Knots tighten in my chest.

I step back out the door, down the steps. Hop around in the early-morning cold. Sit on the trailer steps, wait awhile, go to the pile of grave liners. Sit on the edge of a lidded one.

The pines sway. I don’t look up.

I hear the truck through the Manderleys.

“Sorry!” he calls, pulling up beside the shed. “Look what I got!”

In the truck bed, wedged awkwardly beneath sheets and ratchet straps—

“A
mattress.
”

“Practically brand-new, found it in the
PennySaver
—box spring, too!”

He unhooks the straps and pulls the sheets aside.

Ah, the
PennySaver.
You just can’t beat that thing for finding used home furnishings and graveyard jobs.

I don’t mind telling him how sketchy it is to buy a used mattress, which he takes total issue with.

“It’s got plastic around it, barely been used, so why waste all that money for new, and PS I’m already sleeping on a used one.”

Touché.

“Kind of big” is all I have to say about it. His fold-out in the trailer can’t be more than a twin; this one is easily a queen. Where is he going to put it?

“Well, hopefully I’ll have a real bedroom one day and it won’t seem so big.”

“One day when? You just painted!”

His head falls back like a Pez dispenser. “Not
tomorrow
—but I don’t want to spend my entire life living in a trailer.”

My cheeks burn. Of course he doesn’t.

I help him pull the hulking thing from the truck and wrap it in sheets and tarps to rest against the side of the trailer; then he tosses the keys to me.

“Let’s go.”

I drive. Eight weeks till I’ll have my License to Kill. Autumn leaves swirl up, the road and graves covered with them.

“My grandparents had this really tall wrought-iron bed,” he says, “and when they had parties, or like at Christmas, all the cousins got to sleep in it while the adults were up talking and playing music all night.”

Such a Laura Ingalls Wilder memory. I like it when he tells me things about when he was little, which he barely ever does, and only when it is something really good.

He applauds my use of the emergency brake and promises we’ll work on parallel parking; then I am off to read and sell and unwrap Yorks. He hikes over the hills and down into the valley with the leaf blower, clouds of scarlet and saffron and daffodil-yellow, October just days away. This bird’s nest of suspense and intrigue is making me so nervous. Pull one thread and it will all unravel in a giant mess of … messiness. It sweeps circles in my head, my own voice and Dario’s, Kai’s, Elanor’s. Emily’s.

The bracelet. The blue paint. The great big giant bed.

The Ana box.

Something is
up.

All afternoon I watch him clear the graves of color. Visitors come and he silences the leaf blower until they’ve gone. Wade spins headstones. I schedule a Pre-Need service, order a headstone, answer the phone, reorganize files. Read.

The sun is low and red. The leaf blower is silent. I pack up my books, pocket a few Yorks. The truck headlights shine in the windows.

I drive us to the shed, to the Christmas lights. We begin the final coat of blue.

I beg him to change the radio to something less talky and more music-y.

“You don’t know what’s good for you,” he says, but moves the dial anyway from the BBC to a semi-old-people station. Simon without the Garfunkel. A James Taylor ten-in-a-row.

James is “Up on the Roof” and the sun still hovers over the trees, filling the house with the rosy evening glow of
Maybe everything is going to be okay.
I concentrate hard on quieting the nagging voices, let the drowsy painting bliss wash over me, up, down, across, up, down. The beautiful blue is deeper, truer every moment.

We’ve finished the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, and move to the front room.

James gets off the roof and now the radio is full of “You are my only one.”

The
Ana
box is on the floor beside the paint cans. My roller stops midway up the wall, paint dripping across the newspaper-covered floor. I sit down.

It’s what the color says. What it’s saying.

Stupid James Taylor and his hidden clues about other people’s lives.

“You’re leaving.”

He turns over his shoulder to me. “No.”

This color. The great big humongous
queen
bed.

“No?”

“No.”

Wait. “She’s coming here?”

He sets his roller in the tray. James keeps singing.

Now she has a name
and
a bed.

I don’t feel well.

“To
stay
?”

He sits beside me on an empty paint can. His eyes are at once anxious and determined.

“Listen. I am not leaving. I’m not. Okay?”

I nod.

“Please don’t say anything to your dad,” he says. “Is that all right?”

I nod.

“Please. Not yet.”

“Okay.”
What am I not saying?
“Is she your girlfriend?”

“Where’d you get that?”

My heart sprints.

“Kai.” I nod at his wrist. “She said this is a love bracelet.”

“A what?”

“Is it?”

The fans whisper at the damp blue walls.

“I guess so,” he says.

James is still “You are my only one”-ing it and I climb over the newspaper and roller trays to turn him off, and maybe it’s the paint fumes but I am suddenly burning up and sick to my stomach. I do not sit; I stand.

“She’s in Mexico?”

“Yes.”

“When is she coming?”
Please say she’s not; please say it’s just love letters, or better yet just letters.

“Soon,” he says. “I think.”

“You don’t know?”

“Well. It’s—You can’t say anything. Please. Promise me you won’t.”

“Okay.”

“Because I haven’t talked to Wade yet, and I need—”

“Okay.”

Dario knows by now that with Wade, it’s better to just do whatever and apologize later than to ask and give him a chance to say no.

“He won’t care anyway,” I sigh. “He won’t be mad; he’ll love it. Just tell him.”

“Not yet. Promise.”

“Okay.”

“Because I need your help.”

“Okay.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you any of this yet, but now Kai’s got you all worked up. …”