The Decoding of Lana Morris (12 page)

A happy ending for Garth.

Lana folds closed the leather cover of the Ladies Drawing Kit.

There’s nothing to do now except wait for it to arrive.

L
ana serves lunch to Garth in his room instead of making him come to the table, adding a sandwich the size of a quarter for Popeye, which Garth doesn’t even notice. She and Tilly eat bologna sandwiches with Alfred and, now that she’s started Garth on the way to a happy ending, she begins to wonder what she might do for Alfred. She knows from Whit that Alfred’s father did a vanishing act and that his mother was ruled incompetent because of suicidal tendencies. “Alfie thinks they’re both dead,” Whit said, “and in a way, he’s right.”

Now Lana says, “How long have you lived here, Alfred?”

Alfred chews his sandwich, rocks back and forth a few times. “D-d-don’t know. Long time.”

“I’ve been here longer,” Tilly says. “I remember when Alfred came. I do.”

“You h-h-hit me,” Alfred says, and the small turn of his lips looks to Lana like crooked amusement.

“You steal,” Tilly says. “You stole my Starburst. I remember. You did.”

Alfred still smiles his small, crooked smile. “Th-th-that’s right. Sorry.”

“Where would you like to live in all the world, Alfred?” Lana asks.

Alfred rocks. His sandwich is gone, and there’s a trickle of wet mustard on the pocket of his green golf shirt. Lana knows better than to swipe at it with a napkin. He doesn’t like being tidied up.

“H-h-here,” he says.

“We already live here,” Tilly says. “Silly. With Lana and Whit and Garthy and Carlito.”

“And h-h-her,” Alfred says without any change of expression, and Lana knows that by this he means Veronica.

A silence follows and a minute or so later, when the doorbell rings, it sends a shock through Lana that’s almost electrical.

“Get Garth!” she says at once, because she thinks it’s going to be Garth’s mother. “Have him answer the door!” Tilly and Alfred just stare at her. “Garth!” Lana yells. “Answer the door! It might be for you!”

Garth comes out of the downstairs bathroom buckling his pants and it isn’t lost on Lana that she hasn’t heard the toilet flush. He goes to the door, waits for a second, then swings it open.

A small, wiry man in a brown UPS uniform stands before him with a package.

He looks up from his clipboard and says, “Can somebody accept this for Chester … Pigeot, who lives next door?” He pronounces Chester’s last name “pig-out.”

Garth turns a bewildered look toward Lana, who is herself a little bewildered. She believed so completely that the doorbell meant Garth’s mother had arrived that she can’t quite believe the UPS man is alone. She looks behind him before she signs for Chet’s package, and she
looks up and down the street as the UPS man walks back to his truck. Nothing. No one.

“It’s pronounced ‘Pi
-zho
,’ ” Lana calls out, but the man is already hopping into the driver’s seat. Lana closes the door and takes the square box inside. It’s from a company in Chicago called Above Average Novelties.

“Me?” Garth says, looking at the package.

“No, Garth,” Lana says. “False alarm.”

“Let’s open it!” Tilly says, and though Lana would love to know what Above Average Novelty Chester Pigeot has plunked down cash for, she knows she can’t, and she sets the package on the counter unopened.

A
half hour later, outside, in the stale heat, Tilly is scrubbing yellow-brown crud from the Wet-’n’-Woolly plastic wading pool while Lana takes bedsheets off the drying line and wonders about the Ladies Drawing Kit. How it works, she knows, is something that can’t be explained, but still, it seems like there ought to be some basic rules. Sometimes what she draws happens fast and sometimes it takes a little while. And what about Veronica’s missing arm?—was there a subset of basic erasure rules?

This is a thought that gives Lana another idea, one about the pills Veronica planted in her room.

Tilly’s lost in her crud removal, so Lana slips away and, once inside the house, hurries to her room and slides a blank sheet of paper from the leather case. She takes up a pencil, lets her eyes close and open in a long slow blink, and begins to draw. A while later—how long a while Lana has no idea; it feels like seconds—she drops the pencil and looks at what she’s drawn: a cutaway of Veronica’s purse that shows not just its shape and style but its contents, and in one corner, wedged between hairbrush and tissues, is the bag of pills.

Lana looks at the bag with an odd flush of pleasure, a feeling that grows even more pleasurable when she takes up the pencil again and, this time using its eraser, begins to rub the pills out of the plastic bag, and the sketch, and, she believes, her life.

She feels almost buoyant as she slams out the screen door and into the backyard, where Tilly has strayed from her cleaning project and is sitting in the dirt alongside the garage staring down at something in her hand.

“Look, Lana,” she says, holding up a hollowed fist. “Jiminy Cricket!”

“Let him go and it’ll be good luck,” Lana says, an idea that doesn’t seem to appeal to Tilly. She turns her back, so Lana can’t see what she does next.

“Be nice,” says Lana, and Tilly, with both hands cupped together now, says she’s going to go show Jiminy to Garth. Lana starts to say no, she needs to stay here and finish cleaning the plastic pool, but with the first intake of breath, she realizes she’s going to sound just like Veronica, so she stops.

“Sure,” she says. Then: “But don’t put Jiminy in one of your pockets and forget about him!” Last week Lana forgot to go through all of Tilly’s pockets and put a lizard through the wash.

Tilly disappears into the house, and as Lana regards the sheets still on the line that need to come down, and the huge wicker basket of wet wash that still needs to go up, not to mention the piles of dirty clothes that still need to be washed, she thinks,
I wish Veronica was back
, and is stunned at what she’s just wished.

Lana knows the basic three-wishes plot hinges on people
wasting their wishes, but she has nine pages left, not three, so she’s really more like the fisherman and his wife. She needs to be careful with them is all and not get greedy, and even if she uses a wish for each of the Snicks, there will be plenty left for her. Except really anything she wished for herself would be something for her and Whit.

Where is he right now
? she wonders.
What does he do while Carlito visits his father at the detention center? Why doesn’t he come home and then go back for him instead of hanging around a strange town?

What she really wishes is that Whit was back.

No, what she really wishes is that Whit was back and he’s brought a housekeeper with him.

No, what she really wishes is that Whit was back and he’s brought a housekeeper and a cook with him.

No, what she really wishes is that Whit was back and he’s brought a housekeeper and a cook and the news that Veronica has run off with an ambulance driver.

Well, well, well
, Lana thinks.
Getting greedy comes in a lot of different shapes. You don’t have to want to be an empress or the pope or God. Or maybe playing God is exactly what you have to want. Wanting to play God for your own private purposes, whatever they are, might be what getting greedy is. And isn’t bringing Garth’s mother to the door and getting rid of those pills my way of playing God
?

Lana snaps the wrinkles from a yellow bedsheet and is folding it in half, then half again, lost in her thoughts, when she becomes aware of a presence.

Someone behind her, watching.

Whit
, she thinks.

But when Lana turns, it’s Chet, and there’s a strange
stricken stiffness to his face, like he’s been caught at something.

“What were you looking at?” she says.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I don’t know. When you were taking in the dry sheets, it was like you …” His voice trails off.

“Like I what?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. It’s just that … it was nice to watch.”

Lana is not displeased by this, and although she suspects there’s more to what he was watching—her shorts are short and her T-shirt’s skimpy—she guesses he’s not going to say what it was, even if he could.

“So what do you want?” she says.

“Nothing. I was just coming to see if the UPS guy left anything with you for me?”

Lana tightens her gaze. “How’d you know that?”

Chet shrugs. “Mrs. Harbaugh across the street left a message.”

Lana has seen Mrs. Harbaugh, has seen how she looks at her and the Snicks. “So Mrs. Hairball saw UPS go to your door, then ours, and she thought you ought to know about it just in case we tried to keep your package for ourselves?”

Chet shrugs. “Mrs. Harbaugh’s thoughts are Mrs. Harbaugh’s thoughts. They ain’t mine.” He smiles. “I like the Mrs. Hairball moniker, though. It fits her. She’s the kind of gal a town like this coughs up pretty often.”

Lana says, “It’s yours, free of charge.” She doesn’t like Mrs. Harbaugh, and she’s hoping Chet will use the nickname on one of his podcasts. Which reminds her of something, so as she leads him into the house for his package,
she says, “I heard that Chief Chetteroid guy on K-SOD asking questions just like we were asking the other day.”

“Who?” Chet says, playing dumb, which Lana ignores.

“Stuff like, ‘Which would you rather lose, your right hand or your right eye?’ ”

“Who’s this again?” Chet says blandly.

Lana begins to hand him the package, then, eyeing the address, pulls it back. “Uh-oh. This isn’t addressed to you. It’s addressed to somebody named
Chester
.”

Chet says, “You’re a funny girl, Lana,” but he doesn’t say it with his usual sarcasm. It’s more like he’s trying to pay her a compliment, which is something new for him, and it makes Lana a little nervous. She shoves the package his way and says, “So what Above Average Novelty did Chester send away for?”

Chet seems to want to answer, but finally doesn’t, not really. “I’ll get back to you on that one.” He lets his eyes linger on hers.

“Are you okay, Chet?” She has to admit, without the mole and with his little double life, he’s become more interesting.

“Yeah, pretty much,” he says, and gives it some further thought. “I had Ding Dongs and Dr Pepper for lunch. I don’t think I should’ve done that.”

“How many Ding Dongs?”

“Seven or eight. And two Dr Peppers.”

Lana grins. “That’s some staunch dining, Chester.”

Chet laughs, but it’s as if there’s something going on inside him he doesn’t understand, and it has nothing to do with dietary insult. He sighs and starts to go.

“Hey, Chet. One little thing.”

“What’s that?”

“When Chief Chetteroid was doing his either-ors, he said, ‘Which would you rather lose, your mother or your father?’ and you know what he said?”

When Chet doesn’t answer, Lana says, “He said, ‘Both.’ ”

Chet stares, waiting.

Lana says, “I suppose the chief was going for humor, but if you run into him, you tell him that the guys and gals over at Snick House think it was kind of a low blow.”

Chet lowers his eyes, and when he raises them again, he looks abashed. “Okay,” he says, “if I see him, I’ll tell him.”

T
hat day passes, then another, and Garth’s mother still doesn’t show. Wednesday, Garth doesn’t want to go to the library and clean books because, he tells Mrs. Arnot, “ ’Other is ’oming day.”

“Say again, Honeybear?”

Mrs. Arnot calls everybody Honeybear, except Tilly, who she calls Miz Pinkerdilly or, sometimes, Miz Pinkerdilly Pie.

“Garthy’s waiting for his mother,” Tilly says glumly before slipping into the backseat of Mrs. Arnot’s cranberry Camry. “But her’s not coming. No. Her never comes.”

“She might, though,” Lana puts in quickly, and, strange to say, these are her complete thoughts on the subject. It’s been four days and her certainty in the sketch paper has slipped a little. Now, when she thinks of it, she thinks,
Maybe it works, and maybe it doesn’t
.

Mrs. Arnot opens her car door and says cheerfully to Garth, “You sit in the front today, Honeybear. It’s your turn to ride shotgun. And if somebody comes for you, Lana will call the library. Right, Lana?”

Lana nods. “I’m on it, Garth-man. She comes and I’m here for you.”

But Garth’s mother doesn’t come, not that day and not Thursday, a day when Whit is in Marquette painting a convenience store, or on Friday, when Whit is first at the hospital with Veronica and then back in Marquette, or on Saturday, the day that Veronica is discharged from St. Marie’s.

L
ana is sitting on the floor with Tilly, playing Candy Land, a game easy for Lana to Tilly-rig because Lana controls the cards. She slides cards from the top of the deck (and, when need be, the bottom), and she turns to see if Alfred is still copying headlines from the latest Wal-Mart circular. He is. His handwriting is large and jagged, like graffiti. PRICES LASHED, he writes. It makes Lana want to get him something more profound, like Shakespeare or the Bible, but she knows it’s just making the letters that he likes.

The house of pathetic doodlers
, Lana thinks.

Garth is outside playing with a tennis ball. He throws it to himself, high in the air, and then usually misses it. He’s been eating even less lately, and Lana wonders if somehow, without really saying anything, she got his hopes even higher than before, and nothing happened, so now he has no reason to hope at all. It’s depressing. She thought she could do something really good for somebody who’d had something really bad done to him. So what was that? A serious misreading of the facts? Wishful thinking? Delusions of grandeur?

“Double red,” Lana says to Tilly, and moves herself past Lord Licorice.

Then she hears the familiar chug of Whit’s old diesel, faint, but growing louder, and Lana’s heart seems to beat louder, too. Whit’s coming and he isn’t bringing a cook and a housekeeper. He’s bringing Veronica.