The Decoding of Lana Morris (11 page)

Lana makes a weak laugh. “Pinkies are better than yellows,” Lana says, and Tilly nods beamingly.

On his way out, Whit stops at the door and, looking back at Lana, he smiles so small a smile that Lana guesses that she alone in the world would know that it is one. She reaches up to feel for the lost two-dollar bill and then tries to remember how long it’s been since she thought of it or of the man named Dee, who had been her father.

A
lmost a week has passed. Lana had hoped in a half-guilty way that in Veronica’s absence the house would be theirs, hers and Whit’s, but Whit has hardly been home—he’s been at the hospital a lot and out bidding a whole slew of painting jobs (though he hasn’t landed any of them)—and when he has been home, the Snicks have been greedy for his company and have followed him so closely he’s been like a man with four shadows. Five if you counted Lana.

Every now and then, he would catch her eye and hold it in a wistful-seeming way, but then one of the Snicks would say, “Play ball, Whit!” or “ ’Eed ’elp, ’it!” and the moment would be gone. Hardly a full minute passes by without Lana’s mind returning to the sketch paper and the powers it seems to contain. Repeatedly she thinks of getting out the paper and making a drawing of Whit and herself, with absolutely nothing else on the page, nothing and no one else to interfere, but whenever she thinks of it, she wonders if it might mean that they’d somehow be dropped into a blank, bleak landscape without food or shelter or even hope or, just as bad, if she drew only her and Whit, somehow something bad might happen to Tilly
and Garth and Carlito and everybody else she leaves out of the sketch, and the one thing she doesn’t want to do with the paper ever again is accidentally hurt somebody, so, in the end, she has just kept the drawing kit hidden away and not drawn anything at all.

The night before, Lana heard Whit come in late, and when he didn’t come upstairs, she put on a robe and crept down. He was sitting at the kitchen table reading the
World-Herald
sports page, which he tipped to pick up the dim light from the single overhead lamp. He didn’t see her and she just stood silently watching him for maybe a minute, aware and yet not aware of her tongue in the tooth slit, until he rattlingly turned back the paper and started scanning the headlines of the next page.

“Hi,” she said.

His hand jumped. Then, “Hey, you. Did I wake you up? I was trying for quiet.”

“You didn’t wake me. Your diesel did.”

He laughed and laid down his paper.

She slid into the chair opposite him. “Tired?” she said.

“And then some.”

“Were you at the hospital?”

He nodded. “She says she can’t sleep if I’m not there.” He made a rueful smile. “Problem is,
I
can’t sleep when I’m there. A nurse took pity and had a chair brought in that reclines a little bit, but still …” He arched his back to demonstrate the stiffening effect of it. He was quiet then for a second or two, staring at her in the shadowy light, and then he extended his arms onto the table. “Lemme see your hands.”

She slid her hands forward. He took them in his, gently turned them over, and began smoothing his thumbs
over her palms, slowly, in a way that sent sensations through her arms to the most secret parts of her body “It’s clear you’re working way too hard,” he said in a soft voice.

She didn’t reply. She didn’t want to speak. All she wanted was to keep receiving the sensations she was now receiving.

“You doing okay?” he said.

She nodded.

He let his thumb stray from her open palm up to the softness of her inner wrist, and if at that moment he’d asked her to follow him to any room of the house, she would’ve risen and followed, she couldn’t have done anything else, but he didn’t ask that. He let go of her hands and said, “You know what? If I don’t go up to bed now, I’m going to fall asleep on this table and then our Snickledy friends will get up in the morning and eat me for breakfast.”

She laughed, but the truth was, she was annoyed he could touch her skin and swell her with feeling and then, with just a joking word or two, disappear on her. When he pushed back from the table, she felt such a desperate need to keep him there that she heard herself blurt, “What would you do if you had three wishes?”

He chuckled. “Easy. Ask for three more.”

“No, really,” she said, because she knew that would keep him. One of the things she liked about Whit Winters was that he would think about things. If you asked him something and he saw you were serious, he’d give it his best serious thought.

Now he said, “You ever hear the story of the fisherman and his wife?”

Lana had, but she couldn’t remember the specifics,
and besides, she wanted Whit to stay, so she shook her head, no.

“Well, this fisherman and his wife are peasants, poor as can be, living in a dirt-floor hut, eating fish head soup every night for dinner. And then he catches a holy mackerel, or something like that, and the mackerel can talk. It pleads for its life, and the fisherman decides that a talking fish is too mysterious and powerful to kill. He tosses the mackerel back and runs home to tell his wife, which was bad thinking on his part. She says right away the fish owes them big and sends him to ask the mackerel for a cottage. Presto, they’re in one, but after a couple of days she looks around and she’s still not happy. She sends her husband back to the fish, asking for a mansion, then a palace, then to be queen, empress, pope, and finally, ‘like the good Lord.’ ”

Whit grinned. “And the moment she asks for this, all the grandeur disappears and they’re back where they started, in a dirt-floor hut.”

Lana thought it served them right. “I would’ve stopped at the cottage,” she said, thinking about those drives through nice neighborhoods with her mother, playing the House Game.

Whit smiled. “That’s because you’re a better human being than your average citizen.”

Whether this was a compliment or mild sarcasm, Lana wasn’t sure.

Whit rose and stretched. “I think of that story from time to time. Know what I think the moral of it is?”

“That being pope is plenty good enough?” Lana said, hoping Whit would laugh.

He did, politely, and then said, “That nobody ever
knows when to stop.” He yawned and grinned. “So, to answer your question, I suppose if I was a smart guy, I’d just say no to your three wishes. But since I’m not that smart, I’d probably say yes and hope I’d have enough sense to be careful with them.”

He came around the table, leaned forward, and kissed her forehead in the same whispery way he’d kissed her that first time, in her room. He smelled faintly of lime soap, and she wanted to reach out and hold on to him for dear life, but she didn’t. She knew that her three wishes used to be that her father was alive, that he was working in a normal place you could tell people about, and that he was coming home every night to one of those houses with a porch. She assumed that if she made those wishes, everything that was wrong with her mother would no longer be wrong.

But now Lana smelled the sweet scent of Whit’s body and tried very hard not to wish for him, him, him. Then he walked away from her toward the doorway.

“Night,” he said, and that’s what Lana said, too.

G
arth Stoneman is sitting on the front steps, waiting. It’s eight twenty-five, almost halfway through his morning waiting hour, but he seems more anxious than usual today. Lana can see him from her place on the porch swing, where she’s making pot holders with Tilly instead of washing dishes and vacuuming, two chores on the Saturday chart Veronica has drawn up from the hospital and sent home with Whit, who handed it to Lana apologetically. “Do what you can,” he said, “and what you can’t, you can’t.”

Tilly picks out the pot holder loop color, and Lana stretches it over the pegs. Sometimes Tilly can be urged to stretch and connect it herself, which, according to the physical therapist who visits for what seems like about three minutes every other month, is supposedly good for Tilly’s fine-motor skills, though Lana doubts it.

“Pink again?” Lana says.

“You bet!” Tilly says. Her allegiance to pink is unswervable.

“Whatcha gonna do when we run out of pink?”

When Tilly doesn’t reply, Lana looks up to see a panic surfacing on Tilly’s face that seems almost brittle, and
Lana remembers Whit’s line about everybody worrying too much. “Red’s kind of pink when you think about it,” Lana says, and just like that, the panic on Tilly’s face dissolves.

“You bet,” she says. “Red is just a pinker pink!”

Lana has to laugh, because, really, it’s more or less true. “Pink squared,” she says, and Tilly says, “Pink cubed!”

Garth hasn’t moved. He just sits, looking at his Popeye guy, looking down the street one way for maybe five seconds, then looking down the street the other way for another five seconds, then looking again down at Popeye. Garth is skinny in a sickly sort of way. Lana thinks it’s because his loneliness is like a tapeworm. His arms poking out of his Spider-Man shirt have no muscles at all, and even when he’s looking down the street, he bows his head in a way that makes her wonder if the sun is in his eyes. He begins to twist Popeye’s head around and around.

“You okay, Garth-man?” she says.

Garth isn’t a talker, but he looks up enough to show that he’s heard.

“Where’s Popeye?”

Garth lifts him from his lap and rotates the head so that he’s looking more or less at Lana. Popeye’s definitely on the grimy side. “That sailor man needs a bath,” Lana says, which causes Garth to pull Popeye protectively back into his lap. This makes Lana feel a little bit bad, so without thinking she says, “What’re you and Popeye doing?”

“ ’Aiting.”

Of course they’re waiting. Except today Garth’s waiting with particular desperation because it’s Carlito’s day with his father, which comes once a month, when Whit
drives him to the county detention center. Carlito’s father is in jail for hitting Carlito and his sister, among other things, so Lana thinks it’s more than a little freakish that Carlito even wants to see him, but when she told this once to Whit, he just shrugged and said, “Maybe Carl only remembers the good parts.” And then, “Love is a mysterious thing.” In any case, Carlito’s visiting days always make Garth even more convinced his turn is coming.

“Want to make a pot holder?” Lana asks him.

Garth shakes his head, no, and keeps twisting Popeye’s head around and around. When Lana first came here, there was a small round hole in the side of Popeye’s mouth, and one morning Whit sat at the kitchen table with a little dowel and some balsa wood. After a while he yelled, “Garth-man, bring Popeye over here!” and when Garth did, Whit slid a perfect little pipe into the hole at the side of Popeye’s mouth. Garth beamed, and Whit said, “If Popeye gets lung cancer, we’ll sue the dowel maker.” A day or two later, Garth lost the new pipe, and Whit said, no problem, he’d make another, but he hasn’t done it yet.

Tilly looks up from her plastic bowl of cloth loops and says, “Your mama’s not coming, Garthy. You shouldn’t sit there like that. No.”

Lana knows Garth’s waiting like this makes Tilly nervous. Lana knows because the waiting makes her nervous, too. Nervous and sad. How could someone bring her son into somebody else’s house and leave him there and never talk to him or write to him or see him again? Why would you do that?

For the same reasons, Lana supposes, that her own mother swallowed methamphetamines and cheap vodka
straight from a tall bottle. Maybe it was because her husband died and left her with one kid and zero money. Or maybe it was so she could live her own screwed-up life in her own screwed-up style without a nuisance-type kid getting in her screwed-up way. There are people in the world with zipped-tight hearts, and Lana supposes she should feel sorry for them, given the misery it brings them, but right now she doesn’t feel sorry for them. She despises them. Because they’re the ones who put the Tillys and the Garths and the Lanas in places like this.

Lana is staring at Garth staring down the street when Tilly hands her a pink loop, and as Lana stretches it over the frame, she has a thought so sudden and pure, she stills her hand so she can look at it undisturbed.

Of course. Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of it before?

“I have to do something, Tilly,” she says in a distracted voice. “You pick out all the reddish pink loops, okay, and I’ll help you finish it later.”

Tilly starts to get up, too. “I’m coming with you, Lana.”

“No, silly,” Lana says. “I need a little privacy.”

“You’re going to the bathroom?”

Lana nods. She doesn’t really need to go to the bathroom, but now she will. She’s never lied to Tilly before, and she’s not going to start now. Besides, it’s as good a place as any for doing the particular drawing she has in mind.

L
ana slides the black leather box from its place under her bed and carts it down the hallway to the bathroom. She locks the door behind her and after putting the toilet cover down, she sits, opens the flap, slides out the paper, and counts the sheets left.

Eleven.

Plenty
, she thinks, and puts ten back.

She smooths her hand across a blank sheet of the old, pink-flecked paper. She takes up her pencil, closes her eyes, and what flows in an easy line from her mind to hand to pencil to page is an average-seeming woman standing on a broad wooden porch, near a door, with her hand raised to the knocker, while, on the other side of the wall, in the interior of the house, a thin boy holding a pipeless Popeye doll cocks his head, about to hear the knock that he never ceased to believe he would one day hear.

When she finishes the drawing, she feels as she always feels—astonished at how good it is and at how little it seems to be her own creation. But there it is, in front of her, a boy with his ear cocked, a mother with her hand raised, a perfect suggestion of fervent hope finally realized.

There
, Lana thinks, and she feels the kind of inside-out happiness she felt that day the dust devil swept through her.