The Beginning of After (23 page)

Chapter Thirty-three

S
now was coming, everyone said. And they were making a gigantic deal out of it too. First snow of the season, a White Christmas, and all that.

“They say eight to ten inches,” announced Nana over the buzz of the TV as I was leaving for school.

“Maybe we’ll get a snow day tomorrow and I won’t have to take Ms. Pryzwara’s physics test,” murmured Meg at her locker. She was just saying it to anyone, although I was the only person there.

snoball fight n d parking lot, pass it on
, read the text from Joe. I answered him back (cool) but didn’t pass it on.

Suzie called me that afternoon to cancel our session that day. “Just to be safe, with the roads,” she said.

We went home and the sky was still that teasing gray color, and everyone was bummed out. Even at night, I kept peering at the streetlamp at the end of our driveway, to see if there were flakes twirling in its little spotlight, but there was nothing but black night air.
Oh well
, I thought as I climbed into bed.
It’ll probably just be a little showering of rain and everyone will shut up about snow for Christmas.

But when I woke up the next morning, I knew instantly that it had happened. It was the quality of sound that gave it away—everything was just
muffled
. Tires passing on the road, birds chirping, and maybe somewhere off in the distance, a snowplow. I bolted up in bed and peeked through the blinds, and there were my woods, my trees and my rocks and my sloping ground, blanketed in bright, glaring white.

I heard Nana turn on the television news downstairs, the sound that Toby and I used to get all excited about on days like this. He’d come in and scramble onto my bed and we’d cross our fingers in as many ways we could think of, and perk up our ears for Mom to shout the official snow day announcement.

The thought of Toby on my bed in his dinosaur pajamas sent me all the way under the covers, where it was dark and sweaty and tears didn’t count, until a minute later when Nana poked her head in to say, “No school today, sweetie. Stay in bed as long as you like.”

But even deep in the bed, the memories came to me, and when Masher barreled past Nana and did a flying leap onto my stomach, I took that as a cue to get the hell out.

In my boots and ski pants and big puffy parka, I left the day’s first set of footprints up the middle of our unplowed street, alongside Masher’s as he bounded from one little snow pile to the other. Suddenly, none of the rules of the world applied. I didn’t have to make way for cars and I didn’t have to go to school, and all the neighbors in these houses with the smoke piping out of the chimneys didn’t have to go to work. And maybe I didn’t have to think about Mom and Dad and Toby, like I could get a snow day for that, too. And for worrying about Meg and Nana and college and what happened in Joe’s truck and of course, David’s emails.

I thought about my canceled Suzie appointment and felt so very grateful that I’d already gotten my snow day for that. I knew she was going on vacation for a couple of weeks, and I wouldn’t see her until after the holidays.

The crystals of the snow glistened in the sunlight. It was light, powdery stuff. Not good for snowballs or sledding, but prettier and sweeter, like sugar. I walked a big loop up and down our street and then past Meg’s house. I wanted desperately to go in. To pull her out of bed and pile into the family room to watch DVDs by their fireplace, drinking hot cocoa. But that was on the other side of a line I felt too wimpy to cross, so I kept walking, hoping Meg had been watching me from her window.

Once back inside, I went into Toby’s room to see what was up with the foster cats.

I crouched down to peer into the big dog crate. Lucky, who’d been curled up with her babies, got up and stretched, then walked out of the carrier without them. They were getting big now and wanted to move, move, move, so they followed their mother out of the carrier and into the room.

One, two, three fluffy bodies, all striped, bounded past me. But there were four kittens in the litter.

I poked my head into the crate. One kitten, the white one, was still lying there, sleeping.

Or maybe not sleeping.

My hand shook as I reached out to pet it, expecting to feel it wake up under the warmth and pressure. But it was cold and stiff.

“Oh my God,” I said aloud.

I looked at Lucky, who was sitting under the desk, licking herself. She glanced back at me, and if a cat could shrug, that’s what she did. She just twisted her head and narrowed her eyes as if to say,
Stuff happens
.

I wasn’t sure what came next. What was I supposed to do? It was a snow day and I was sitting on the floor of my dead brother’s room with four cats that weren’t mine.

Nana was shaking her head, trying not to seem as completely repulsed as she was. “Did it even seem sick to you?” she asked. She was doing a great job of hiding the
I told you so
threaded between her words.

“No. I don’t think so. I mean, there was some diarrhea in the litter box, but I had no idea whose it was. It seemed like she was eating, but maybe it’s hard to tell.” I felt like I saw her playing with the others yesterday. But maybe that was three days ago.

I held the kitten wrapped up like a mummy in a towel, so it looked like I was cradling some old rag. It was easy to pretend there was nothing inside.

“What are you supposed to do with it?” asked Nana.

“Eve said I should just bring it in to Ashland. They have an incinerator for that purpose.” I winced. “But they’re not open yet because of the roads.”

Eve had not been surprised, or accusing. She had just sighed and said, “I hate kitten death.” She reminded me that it happened a lot and sometimes there was nothing you could do about it. But I knew from the heavy, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I should have been paying more attention.

“You took on too much,” said Nana, reading my mind, reaching out to stroke my hair. I just nodded, biting my lip.

At three o’clock, Eve called me from Ashland to say that they were finally open and I could bring the kitten in.

“Laurel, the roads are still bad,” said Nana. “Can’t you put your . . . bundle . . . in the garage and take it in tomorrow?”

“I have to do this now. I owe it to her.” I placed the towel in a big shopping bag and grabbed the car keys.

“Please drive carefully,” she said.

“Nana, just for the record, you can pretty much assume that for the rest of my life. You don’t have to say it.”

I rushed out to the car without saying good-bye. It had gotten cold now that the sun was sinking out of sight, and the snow that had been brilliant white that morning was already looking dingy, the color of old underpants.

I drove about ten miles an hour to Ashland, tapping the brakes when I went downhill like my dad had taught me to do on slippery roads. The car fishtailed once at a traffic light, but I got it straight again the way he showed me, by letting go of the wheel for a second.

When I got there, the parking lot was empty. Inside, Eve smiled sadly at me.

“Nobody here today?” I asked.

“Most people canceled their appointments, but we did have a couple of emergencies. A dog who got hit on Spinner Avenue—he’s in surgery right now.” She zeroed in on my shopping bag. “Is that it?”

“Yes . . .” I was going to tell her what happened; I had a whole story complete with an apology. But she stood up and took the bag from me, then glanced into it.

“Do you want to come with me?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Do you need your towel back?”

I shook my head again. Eve disappeared down the hall, and then reappeared about ten seconds later. “Okay. We’ll take care of it,” she said, sliding back onto her wheeled stool.

“Should I talk to Dr. B? Should we try to figure out why it died?”

“No. It’ll be okay.” Eve stared at me in a sad, kind way that she usually reserved for clients.

I wanted more from her, or from someone, but I wasn’t sure what that was. So I said, “Do you need me to stay and help?”

“I think we’ll be okay,” said Eve. “But we’ll need you tomorrow. It’ll be busy with all the catching up.”

“Okay. I’ll come in after school.”

“Take a candy cane,” said Eve, nudging the jar toward me, and I did.

I got back in the car and started driving home. To get my mind off the kitten, I started to make a mental list of all the things I had to do before school the next day. But the feeling of cold white fur, the image of stick-straight legs that ended in stiff little paws, kept swishing back into my head.

When I felt the tears starting to come, I knew I had to pull over somewhere. Before I even knew what I was doing I was making a right turn into the train station parking lot, which was practically deserted. I stopped the car diagonally across the two best parking spaces—the ones my father had been ecstatic about getting on a few rare occasions—and put my forehead on the steering wheel, and cried.

After a few minutes, the car felt hot and the windows fogged up, so I climbed out to lean on the hood and get some fresh air. It was getting even colder and darker now, harder to see my breath. I peered down onto the train platform, where a handful of people stood waiting for the train into the city. Most of them were huddled in the cold-weather shelter that burned heat lamps, but one girl was waiting by herself with a backpack, near the steps.

Meg.

I opened my mouth to call to her, but stopped myself. Instead I walked over to the steps and walked down them as quietly as I could, hoping she would turn around and see me without me having to say her name. Finally I was about five steps above her and whispered, “Meg?”

She turned to look at me, her eyes red and swollen. “Laurel, oh my God. What happened?”

I was confused for a second and then realized that my eyes, too, were red and swollen. What a pair we made.

“Nothing. Long story. What happened to
you
? What are you doing here?”

Megan looked away, across the train tracks to a billboard for vodka, her chin trembling. “My parents are splitting up.”

“What?”

She nodded her head yes and lowered herself down onto the next-to-last step, which I knew was ice-cold, but I walked down to sit next to her anyway.

“They’ve been fighting all night and sometime this morning, my dad told my mom that he’s leaving.”

“Oh, Meg. For real?”

“Total
sayonara
, au revoir, and all that jazz. Apparently he was going to wait until next fall when I went to college, but he can’t make it that long. Isn’t that charming?
He can’t make it that long
, like it’s a living hell to be in our house.”

I put my arm around Meg, and she leaned her head on my shoulder, sniffling.

“Are you, like, running away?” I asked.

“Just a little. I was going to go stay with my sister. I can’t be near my dad until he packs up and goes to some hotel. I’ll vomit if I see him.”

We were quiet for a few moments. The northbound train pulled into the station and let some passengers off.

“I’m sorry about that day,” I said. It was like pouring water into a curved vase. The empty space between us was there, waiting, the perfect shape and size for those exact words. “I should have been there for you the way you’ve been there for me.”

Meg nodded, her head still on my shoulder. “I was so mad, but then I felt so bad about being mad. Then I felt mad about feeling bad.”

“Isn’t that from a Dr. Seuss book?” I said, and that made Meg giggle. “No. That makes perfect sense to me. I just . . . I was just somewhere else. But now I’m here.”

“I really missed you.”

“Me too.” I paused. “I kissed Joe, like, a lot. And I got into Yale.”

Meg lifted her head and stared me square in the face, straight and serious. “Really?” I wasn’t sure which piece of news was more amazing to her.

I opened my mouth to elaborate, thinking how strange it was that I could tell her about Joe but not David Kaufman. Suddenly we heard the familiar faint rumble that meant the train was rounding the soft bend toward the station. Meg stood up and grabbed her backpack.

“Are you sure you want to go to Mary’s?” I asked. “Because you could come back to my house and stay with me as long as you need to. That way you wouldn’t have to miss school. Or put up with your sister.”

Meg glanced at the train, all noise and slick metal, as it chugged up to the platform. Then she smiled at me and threw her backpack over her shoulder, leading the way back up the stairs to my car.

Chapter Thirty-four

T
wo days later, Meg and I had just gotten home from school when Mr. Mita knocked on our door, holding a four-foot-tall Christmas tree in a pot.

“I remember your mother always got these live ones,” he said, and we all glanced out the window toward the edge of the front lawn, rimmed with Christmas Trees Past in various stages of survival.

Christmas was my mother’s holiday. Although she was half-Jewish, it was what they’d celebrated in her family, and she just loved it. Christmas music, all the TV specials, even eggnog. Toby and I got eight utilitarian gifts for Hanukkah—socks, sweaters, new parkas—and the good stuff on December 25. My dad was okay with that, and if Nana wasn’t, she never let on.

When it came to the tree, Mom couldn’t stand the thought of one being grown just so it could be cut down and die slowly with pretty gifts beneath it, then put out on trash day. We planted our trees on New Year’s Day, and although I always thought it was ridiculous trying to dig a hole in the frozen ground every January 1, now I was so grateful we had.

“That’s very sweet, thank you,” said Nana, but I couldn’t tell if she meant it. Mr. Mita put the tree down in the living room and after he left, with a plate of Nana’s cookies in his hands, Meg and I went into the garage to look for our Christmas decorations.

“Do you have a tree at your house yet?” I asked.

“Mom put up the fake one weeks ago. Which is a good thing, because now nobody even cares.”

“What did she say when she called this morning?”

“The usual. She wants me to come home. She swears my Dad’s leaving tonight, so we’ll see.”

I scanned the shelves of the garage until I saw the two big red plastic bins labeled
XMAS
and pointed. Meg grabbed the stepladder and moved toward them.

“Is she mad at you for not being there for . . . you know . . .
her
?” I asked.

Meg paused, then said simply, “Yes.” In a series of quick motions, she hopped up on the ladder, grabbed each
XMAS
box, and handed them down to me.

Ironically, the first thing we saw when we opened the first bin was our electric menorah. When Toby was little he broke the nice ceramic one my parents had received as a wedding gift, and Mom went out and found the plug-in kind at half price during a post-holiday sale. During Hanukkah she kept it on the kitchen counter between the spice rack and the paper towels, and she and Nana had a fight about it every single year.

I showed the menorah to Nana, who actually smiled a bit when she lifted it up, then placed it on a table by the Christmas tree.

While Nana and Meg unpacked the rest of the bins, I took a break to check my email, which was something I did compulsively a little too often since David and I had started writing again.

My in-box contained one new item: a picture message sent from a cell phone. I knew you weren’t supposed to open stuff like that if you didn’t know the source, but I couldn’t resist.

First, the words
i thought this might remind you of something.

Then, a photo of a van parked alongside a road somewhere. It was an older model, with a small round bubble window near the back, painted with a purple and pink desert scene complete with howling coyote and cactus.

I laughed out loud, and remembered.

One painfully hot summer day years ago, Toby and I were sitting in a small patch of shade in our front yard, trying to come up with something to do. None of the other neighborhood kids were around because of the heat, but we’d spent the morning squabbling in the house and Mom had ordered us outside for a while. We were bored and grumpy and pretty much ready to kill each other when David suddenly appeared in our driveway.

“Oh cool, you’re here,” he’d said. “My uncle is visiting and he’s going to put on a magic show, but I can’t find anyone. You guys wanna come down and watch?”

Minutes later the three of us were sitting on the back steps of the Kaufmans’ house, the concrete blissfully cool against our legs, watching David’s uncle James do card tricks. He was David’s father’s brother, and everyone knew he was kind of a wandering soul. He’d dropped out of a PhD program and was taking magic lessons. But the thing we knew best was that he had this awesome vintage van with a bubble window, a mural of planets and stars airbrushed on the sides, which was then parked in the Kaufmans’ driveway. It served as a perfect backdrop for his act.

Eventually Uncle James went back to school, got married, and moved to Virginia, but I always thought of him with that van and space scene behind him. Maybe David did too.

The memory of Uncle James’s voice cutting through the humidity and the emptiness of our neighborhood that day, of giggling at his jokes and gaping at his “magic,” of the perfectly sweet lemonade Mrs. Kaufman served to us afterward, came back to me so sharply I had to put my hand over my heart.

“What’s that?” Meg asked from the doorway, startling me. She was peering over my shoulder to the photo of the van on the computer screen.

I could have made up a lie right there, and I could have made it sound convincing. Instead, I just opened my mouth and told her, easily, calmly, the truth. About David, about the kiss in the woods, about his emails, about Thanksgiving morning, and now, about the picture of the van.

Meg didn’t get mad that I’d kept these things from her, or even seem confused. She just took it all in, shook her head slowly, and said, “Whoa.”

An hour later, Meg I were stringing lights around the dwarf tree when we got a call from her mom.

“Okay,” said Meg, expressionless, into the phone. “Good.” She hung up and looked at me. “Dad’s at the Holiday Inn, so . . . I guess I should go back. She sounds lonely.”

“I’ll walk you home,” I said.

We were silent as we made our way down the hill in the near dark, Meg with her backpack and me carrying her school bag. It was close enough to Christmas now that everyone on our street had put their decorations up, and the leftover snow sat so delicately, it looked painted onto the doorsteps and windowsills.

We live in a nice place
, I thought as we walked. You’d never know by looking at it that behind any one of these doors there was depression and drinking and parents who don’t love each other anymore. And surely there were other houses that held a roof over death and grief and tragedy. It was just that mine got all the headlines.

When we got within sight of the Dill house, Meg asked, “Do you think we’ll be okay?”

I thought about it, and how David might answer that question, and then said, “We will if we choose to be.”

Mrs. Dill opened the back door for us and wrapped Meg in a big hug. They didn’t move for a full minute.

The next day was the last day of school before Christmas break. For the past week, all anybody had cared about was who had gotten in where on their early college application. Everyone else who applied had received their decisions, so they knew I had to have mine. But I wasn’t talking, and it was hilarious to watch them be too scared to come right out and ask me. In the end, it was Mr. Churchwell who spoiled the fun.

He pulled me aside as I was walking past the main office at the end of lunch period. “Did you hear from Yale yet?” he asked me, trying to sound professional.

I couldn’t bring myself to lie to him. “Yeah. I got in,” I said casually.

“That’s fantastic! I’m so proud of you!”

“I’m still working on my other applications, though.”

“You’ll have lots of options, I’m sure.” And then he patted me on the shoulder, the kind of pat that wanted to be a hug but knew better.

Later, on the way out of seventh period, Joe touched me on the shoulder and I turned around.

“Congrats!” he said. “I heard about Yale!”

News traveled fast.

“Thanks!” I said, trying to match his enthusiasm.

Joe looked at me nervously, then said, “Listen, I’m sure the holidays for you are . . . well, they’re not . . .”

“They’re going to suck.”

“Yes, they’re going to suck,” he said, smiling in relief, and I couldn’t help but smile a little too. “Do you want to get together over break? We could catch a movie. Or go into the city and see some of the decorations.”

I pictured myself standing with Joe underneath the big tree at Rockefeller Center, eating roasted chestnuts from a street vendor, holding hands. Why did that kind of moment have to exist only in movies, or lucky people’s lives? It couldn’t be that hard to get.

“I’d like that,” I said. “Just call me. I’ll be around.”

“Good. So . . .”

“Merry Christmas, Joe.”

“You too.”

Then I watched him walk down the hall in that bouncy way that was both awkward and graceful, thinking about how he was more than just a little bit mine now.

Christmas morning, Nana woke me up early and marched me to the tree so I could open what seemed like five hundred gifts. Clothes, jewelry, gift cards, socks, underwear, skin lotion, magazines. Nana had even gone to Victoria’s Secret and bought me three satiny bras. It was more than I ever would have gotten from my parents, and nicer stuff, too. I could picture Nana at the mall with a list, asking herself over and over again, “What would Deborah do? And how can I do it better?”

Each box I opened made me more anxious for Christmas to be over with. Nana seemed to feel the same way, and it occurred to me that this was possibly the first Christmas she’d ever celebrated.

The only thing I was looking forward to was Nana opening her gift from me. Meg and I had gone to the Bead-iful Boutique, where we could make our own jewelry, and I’d sat for three hours carefully stringing a necklace of pearls and onyx. I tried to fake Nana out by putting it in a big, sweater-sized box. She frowned, puzzled, as she opened it and sifted through the tissue paper. And then she found the little box inside and said, “You sneaky girl!” with a sideways smile.

The necklace made her tear up and she asked me to put it on her, and I had to admit it looked pretty nice. So I did one thing right for my grandmother. A tiny superficial thing, but hopefully it counted.

“What can you give your parents and Toby for Christmas?” Suzie had asked me a few weeks earlier.

“
Give
them?”

“I don’t mean a traditional present. More like, some way to honor them. Or honor the gifts they’ve passed on to you, as a person.”

I’d thought long and hard. It was the toughest shopping list anyone could hand me, but I wanted to do this.

For Toby, I emailed Emily Heinz to tell her I wanted to come back to help her run the Tutoring Club, and asked her to look for a student to match me up with.

For Dad, I bought an intermediate crossword book and started on the first one, with the goal of eventually completing every puzzle without looking at the answers.

For Mom, I began work on my first-ever portrait of someone I didn’t mind mangling in the process: myself. So far it was just a sketch of the shape of my face and my hair, done while leaning over a mirror on my bedroom floor.
Don’t erase too much as you go
, Mom said in my head.
Let your hand channel your impressions of what you see.

Joy to the world, a little.

We had several invitations from neighbors who didn’t want us to be alone on Christmas, and Nana accepted them all. Meg had gone with her mom and sister to her aunt’s in Philadelphia, so I couldn’t even drag her along for backup.

“We need to keep busy today,” Nana said, straightening a stickpin in the shape of a rhinestone star on her red cashmere sweater. She had already been busy. She’d made about four thousand cookies and brownies in the last week, then divided them up onto paper plates covered in red or green plastic wrap and a bow. I helped her load them into a gigantic shopping bag, and we each took a handle as we stepped carefully around patches of ice on the driveway on our way to our first stop, the Mitas’ house.

I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I wasn’t looking forward to anything that day. Sitting on the neighbors’ couches with eggnog and a smile didn’t seem any better or worse than lying in bed at home or getting my eyes poked out with hot needles. I had planned on checking out, on being there but not being there, but as I walked into the Mitas’ living room I found myself making mental notes to share with David.

Later, back at home, I wrote this email to him:

When I woke up the next morning, David had already sent me a reply:

I read the last line over and over again, as it went from sounding pissy and then arrogant to just plain sad. The sad version of it was still glowing on the computer screen when the phone call came from Etta, David’s grandmother.