The Bargaining (3 page)

I've heard some kids with divorced parents say they hated it when their parents would hide stuff from them, all that whispering behind closed doors before they finally put an end to it all. But I would have been fine with a little bit of secrecy. I feel like I know more about why my parents got divorced than they do.

“She just needs more time.”

“It's been five months.”

“Which is nothing considering what she's been through.”

“She's getting worse, Dale. She's adrift. Your daughter is completely untethered. I can't be the only one anymore who thinks that matters.”

When I was little, we learned that people from Seattle were called Seattleites, which always sounded like satellites to me. But in the whole time growing up here, Seattle never felt like my city. It didn't actually start feeling like it was until we
moved to Arizona. Now that I'm back in Seattle, it's supposed to feel like I've found my orbit again.

“What do you mean ‘What about school?' I know I've been gone for a few years, but I wasn't aware they'd done away with public school in Seattle.”

“You just expect her to drop into a new school? Jesus, Natalie, you think that's going to make things better?”

“Frankly, I don't know how it could make things worse.”

I abandon my box on the bed that isn't mine. It's the guest bed, the place they've semi-decorated for me now that I'll be here for more than two nights over Thanksgiving or a few days over winter break.

“She barely knows Rob. It's not exactly fair to either of them. And you know how she gets around April.”

“Right. You're right. I completely forgot to consider how this would affect April. Let's all think about the impact this will have on poor April.”

April bought a few black pillows covered in faux fur and a mesh laundry hamper from Target for the room. She's plugged an air freshener that smells like juniper into an outlet I can't find. I'm guessing she thinks this will make up for the fact that Mom is trading me in for an easier life.

My mom, who is following through on her threat, which still manages to stun me even though she has, in every ­living
memory, followed through on every threat she has ever made. This time, she has brought me to live three states to the north in a house I have set foot in a total of five times with a family that is entirely whole without me.

I take my pad and paper, tuck it under my arm, and stop at my dad's and April's bedroom, and with the same hand that reminded me of my sense of touch a week ago, I smack the closed door until it rattles in its flimsy frame.

“You both make excellent points!” I shout. “Congratulations on another stellar debate!”

I slam the front door behind me, wishing I had engraved a congratulatory plaque to chuck at each of their heads.

2

I
'
D FORGOTTEN HOW COLD
S
EATTLE
is in March. Summer won't finally arrive until July. It's already eighty degrees in Phoenix.

My hand and its pen shake under the chill. Or shake under something, anyway.

Dear Rae,

There was this girl who transferred into my fifth grade class named Lenni Hollingsworth. She used to say that she could tell if someone wasn't from New York by the way they'd wait at the edge of the street for the Walk sign to turn. Real New Yorkers, she said, would just walk when the coast was clear.
I found out later that Lenni actually grew up on Staten Island and only went into the city when she needed to buy new shoes.

Here's how you knew I wasn't from Phoenix: I was so fucking lonely that all I wanted was to be alone. When real, achy loneliness kicks in, this is the kind of self-fulfilling destiny that ensues. The kind that makes you want to wrap yourself in a tight ball and imagine the world moving past you, unaware that the curled up thing in the corner is alive and has a name. That same achy loneliness is probably what first made you notice me. People like you have senses specifically tuned to people like me. And they have talents to make people like me decide we don't actually want that balled-up-tight isolation after all.

You saw me get off the bus, hydraulics sighing like their job was really hard. You watched me until I saw you, then you smirked and kept walking. You just wanted to make sure I saw you see me. And you did it again at lunch two days later. I had a mouthful of ham on rye, and you laughed at me. Not exactly in a mean way. More like in that way that says I'm stupid for being self-conscious about everything. I was sure everyone was noticing what you'd just confirmed
in one little laugh. That whatever I was doing was out there for the world to see. You knew that new kids fall into two categories—new and interesting or new and anonymous. I dropped into the anonymous pile. And you reminded me that sometimes the anonymous category gives way to the category of weird new girl from that place where it rains all the time, a world away from the desert.

So when you finally said something to me—in the gym, underneath the basketball hoop where girl after girl attempted half-hearted layups and we dodged errant basketballs—you said, “You're already a freak. So you should decide right now which sort of freak you're going to be. The kind people talk about or the kind people are afraid to talk about.”

It wasn't that you were telling me something new. It's that you were telling me something at all. Someone had said something to me besides, “Can you move your bag?” or “What's your name again?” I wanted, just once, for someone to ask me a follow-up. “Is Penny short for something?” So then I could tell them no, it wasn't, and they could tell me they didn't think so, but it sounded like one of those names that should be short for something.

I didn't care that you sounded like you were full of shit half the time. Because you seemed proud of having me for a friend, and that was enough.

Love,

Penny

“It's strange, isn't it?”

She's maybe a foot from me, sitting with her knees under her chin in the cold sand.

Her head is tilted toward my pad of paper. She's been reading over my shoulder.

“When you're little, you can't see all the walls, you know? You just see acres and acres of space, and it's all yours to run. You can do cartwheels and build forts and bury treasure to find later. But something happens when you get older. You start to see the walls. Maybe it's because you get taller or something. And then you see the cracks, you see how ­unstable it all is. And you try to test the walls' strength, and you pull a little chunk of it out, and pretty soon, all the sides ­tumble down, and then you're buried under all of it.”

I look at Rae now.

“Buried alive,” she says.

As usual, I expect her to look like a monster, like something that crawled out of a sewer or my nightmare. But if this is my nightmare, she looks remarkably the same as she always has. Cherry-red lipstick and purple hair rolled into Vargas Girl curls, diamond labret that I used to think was sort of cool in a modern glamour kind of way. Now I think it looks contrived, like whatever she just said to me. She's the perfect contrast to my undyed hair that's cut in slants to point at my neck, my cheekbones, my forehead, the star tattoo tucked behind my ear, just enough to see one green tip to hint that there's more behind what my hair covers. The ring through my nostril is so thin it takes some people a second to see it, even though it took my mom no time at all. Rae is the vividness that's missing from me.

“Nothing?” she says, a response to my nonresponse. “I just laid the meaning of life at your feet, and I get nothing?”

“You're not here,” I say.

“Believe me, I wish I wasn't. It's freezing as fuck here, and look at us. Both without jackets.” She puts her arm across my shoulder and squeezes. “Just like your mom to send you north without one. Guess she really didn't want to deal anymore, huh?”

In biology, we learned about all the different species of animals and insects that eat their young. There are tons of them.
Way more than I ever would have thought. And when we talked about why, inevitably the conversation turned to evolution. There was just something that seemed to work in the practice. Otherwise, why would it continue to happen? Or maybe that's the reasoning that keeps wolf spiders and finches and voles licking their lips when they cozy up to their trusting offspring.

Rae tightens her grip on my shoulder briefly before releasing it.

“I'm done reading letters,” she says.

“Then don't read them,” I say.

“See, that's the thing, though. I have to. I have to because that's the only reason I'm here. And believe me, I'd rather be anywhere else but close to you.”

I take the beating of her words as best as I can, deflecting what doesn't puncture. And then I look into her eyes. The normally cold stare of her blue irises. I've never been able to get past the color. But now I catch a glimpse of something else, something that sends a fresh wave of guilt over me.

She looks confused. Confused about how I could cut off our friendship like a dead limb. Quick, one snip of the garden shears on a rotted stem.

For a second, it all falls away—Rae's exterior of hair dye and red lips and piercings. I see a girl who thinks she'll be alone without the person she's made her friend.
I see the bruises of companionship deflected one too many times. Then, as quickly as her armor drops, she raises it back up, and her shell is thicker than ever.

“I'm sure I'll be seeing you soon,” she says.

Then she gives me a slow wink and slips away. I only watch her go for a short time, and then the sight of her hurts.

I walk home the long way even though I'm freezing. I keep thinking I should be feeling something more, but maybe the brain stops making the body and the heart feel anything after a certain point. Maybe it has some sort of automatic shut-off after it hits its trauma limit for one day.

I look around at the brightly painted bungalows lining the streets of my dad's neighborhood and pick out pieces of their yards that might represent this sensation. Because I'm done with words for a while, and I think it might be nice to find a picture like I used to do.

I suddenly regret leaving my camera in Arizona.

The first place my gaze lands is on a garden gnome crouching between two dying rose bushes. Passing the bushes, I look back at the gnome and realize he's crouched because he's pulling his pants down, exposing his bare ass to whoever approaches from the other direction.

“Almost perfect,” I say, framing my hands and snapping an imaginary picture.

When I get back to my dad's house, I see that Mom's car is gone.

I didn't want it to be here when I got back. And even still, I can't manage to catch my heart before it drops, a heavy weight suspended above my stomach. Not adrift. It's still secure. The only thing that's still secure, maybe. And the one thing I wish I could detach.

Rob's shifting the soccer ball between his feet on the front lawn.

“Sounds like peace negotiations went great as always,” he says, pausing his dribbling to swipe the curtain of blond hair from his forehead.

He might be able to pull the look off better if his hair was wavy, but it's stick-straight and cut at odd angles, which is why he's constantly moving it out of his eyes.

“Oh yeah, they're on their way to an amicable treaty,” I say.

It's maybe the only thing we share as stepsiblings: the unsuccessful dodge of parental conflict. We both know that even after the gunfire ceases, the tinnitus rattles your brain until you want to stick a screwdriver through your ear. I'm willing to bet Rob talks about his dad as seldom as I talk about mine.

And I wonder for the first time if that's something I'll have to change now that I'm living with the man I don't ever talk about and the stepson he lets call him Dad.

Rob stops kicking the ball but keeps looking down at it. “So this is for real then?” he says.

I nod because I can't make myself say the words. I want to be casual about this, but it's hard to make light of the knowledge that you've been deemed hopeless by one of the only two people who is never supposed to give up on you.

“I'm really sorry,” he says.

It's getting noisier again. The sounds of all those fake apologies, those shoulder squeezes, that static sympathy that isn't meant to actually move anyone toward healing.

A black truck with glittering flames rounds the corner, and I see the wrong person behind the wheel before I have a chance to assess the truck with my usual eye roll. I would think Rob was being ironic with the unmistakably eighties paint job, except that I know when it comes to his truck, Rob is deadly serious. Not even the landscape of a wolf howling at an honest-to-God full moon tinted into the back windshield can make him crack a smile.

“Rob, you were supposed to call me!” April scolds from the open driver's side window. She throws the emergency brake before shifting the handle at the wheel into park, swinging her tiny legs out of the raised cab.

“Mom, Jesus, the transmission!” Rob runs to the truck's side, absently extending a hand to help his mom down while
keeping his full focus on the truck. He's looking for damage, but Rob's one of those rare breeds who possesses a thoughtless chivalry. In the midst of his panic, he wouldn't let a lady jump from the cab all on her own.

“Well I'm sorry, but you know the big signs don't fit in my jeep.” Then she turns to me. “Penny, we are so, so sorry for all you've been through.” She envelops me in a hug I never once indicated was welcome.

Even in heels, she barely matches my height. She's maybe a size two at her most bloated, her shiny blond hair trying to make her look older in a loose bun, but she still looks all of twelve.

“If I'd known you were here already . . .” she shoots Rob a look, but Rob is stroking the top of the steering wheel.