The Decoding of Lana Morris (7 page)

“A shop.”

“Good,” Tilly says with finality.

It’s warm out, but the setting sun makes everything seem beautiful and benign. The crickets are at it—laying down a dense reassuring track of sibilant sound.

“Did you find anything in the grass?”

“You bet,” Tilly says, and shows Lana a plastic square that Lana guesses used to close up a bag of bread. It’s faded enough to be pink.

“Good color,” Lana says.

Tilly says, “How come ’Ronica wants to get you a new dress?”

Lana turns. “What?”

“She said she’d get you a new dress.”

This makes no sense at all, and then suddenly it does. “No, Tilly, she said she was going to get me a new
address
, not a new dress. She wants to send me somewhere else.”

Tilly looks stricken. “When?”

Lana shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Tilly holds tightly to the bread fastener.

“Don’t worry,” Lana says quickly. “I’m not going anywhere. Veronica’s just trying to scare me.” Then she says what she wants to believe. “Whit won’t let it happen.”

Tilly seems satisfied with this, and then her face hardens. “ ’Ronica’s the devil!” she says, and Lana has to laugh, but the devil doesn’t seem like quite the right type for Veronica.

“More like Ms. Blizzard,” Lana says.

She opens the flat leather box, slides out a piece of paper, and takes a pencil in hand. She gazes off for a moment or two and then, all at once, her hand begins to move across the page as before—easily, fluidly—and in perhaps two minutes the living line has created someone who both is and isn’t Veronica, an icy, epic figure on her own ledge of a sheer frozen cliff, comfortable in the cold, happy with it, in fact, her white body wrapped in blankets of snow parted to show her creamy cleavage, and then the
living line surrounds and shades a quiver of dartlike icicles that she tosses down at ant-sized humans who, in the valley below, run for their lives.…

A sudden, sharp tapping.

Lana blinks. She’s glazed with sweat—it’s as if she’s been suddenly returned from hard labor under a hot sun. She turns. A foot away, on the other side of a window, Veronica stares out at her with eyes that seem about to explode. And then she disappears for a moment before bolting through the screen door and onto the wooden porch.

“How dare you?” she says through clenched teeth.

“How dare me what?” Lana says, and as she looks at Veronica, it registers that she’s changed out of her gardening clothes into heeled sandals with tight black pants and an open shirt over a tight, stretchy top. Definitely not her house clothes.

“How dare you do
that
,” Veronica says, pointing at the drawing. “It’s me. It’s me made ugly.”

“No, it’s not. It’s Ms. Blizzard. The jolly Ice Queen.” She turns to Tilly. “Right?”

Tilly nods. “You bet. ’Ronica the Ice Queen.”

“It’s not Veronica,” Lana says quickly, but when she looks at the drawing, she knows it’s a lost cause. The fierce frozen eyes are Veronica’s eyes and the thin bluish lips are Veronica’s lips.

“Erase it,” Veronica says.

Lana gives an okay-okay shrug and reaches for the eraser. Veronica unzips her little beaded party bag, checks for something inside, rezips it.

It is during the rezipping that Lana thinks something important:
If she’s taking her beaded party bag, she won’t be taking the blue purse. And the pills are in the purse
.

Lana says, “You going somewhere?”

Veronica ignores this. “Every line of it,” she says. “Erase every line of it.”

Lana starts with a hand and is working her way up the Ice Queen’s quiver-holding arm when a car pulls up to the curb. It’s Louise and her church deacon husband. They’re wearing their Snick-tending clothes—white sneakers, creased unfaded jeans, and T-shirts—and they’ve got their little bag of
VeggieTales
videos for doing the Lord’s work on the disabled.

So Veronica’s definitely going out.

“Where’re you going?” Lana says.

Veronica doesn’t answer. She walks out to meet Louise and her husband on the front lawn, where they talk briefly before Veronica departs.

Lana stops erasing. She’s almost to the Ice Queen’s elbow.

“Hi, Leeze,” Tilly says. “Hi, Marvin. Did you bring Bob the Tomato?”

“Yes, Tilly, we did,” Louise says. Bob the Tomato is the funny one in
VeggieTales
, and, Lana has to admit it, Bob can be funny.

“So where’s Veronica going?” Lana says to Louise’s husband, but it’s Louise who answers. “I believe she said she was meeting her husband for dinner.”

“Well, that’s a good one,” Lana says. “Because her husband left two hours ago and wouldn’t say where he was going. I heard Veronica ask him.”

“Oh,” Louise says airily. “He probably called.”

“I suppose you’re right, but then if he called, you might think the phone would’ve rung.”

“I imagine it was prearranged, then,” Louise says. “Some
kind of little secret.” She lets her eyes settle on Lana. “It’s one of those aspects of matrimony you’ll learn someday—the tender little secrets between a wife and her husband.” Louise glances at her husband. “Am I right, Marvin?”

Marvin nods, and Lana wants to say,
You don’t talk much, do you, Marv?
but instead she turns to Louise and says, “You’ve got a point there, Louise, and I don’t mean the one on your noggin,” and lets loose a big laugh to make it seem like just a joke and nothing more, no offense intended, none whatsoever.

They both stare at her, and then Louise manufactures the stiffest smile Lana has ever seen and says, “Jesus’ forgiveness is roomy, Lana, roomy enough even for you.”

Lana despises Louise. From her clean white Nikes right up to her gold cross earrings, she despises Louise, and yet an image flows unbidden from Louise’s words, an image of an enormous gilded ballroom filled with all the people Lana has ever disappointed—her mother, Hallie, a whole assortment of foster parents and foster kids and teachers and coaches and headshrinkers. They are all there in beautiful dresses and suits and ties and in smooth slow motion they are dancing to perfection the dance they are doing, which is the dance of forgiveness.

The screen door slams shut.

Mr. and Mrs. Louise have gone inside, and Tilly has gone in, too. Lana hears her shout to the other Snicks, “Here comes Bob the Tomato! Yes, yes, yes!”

Lana looks down at her sketch. She likes it—it has the same loose, free flow to it that her sketch of Chet had—and even with her lower arm erased and gone, Veronica still looks like an Ice Queen, which, in Lana’s book, is exactly what she is.

She slides the sketch back into the black box and secures the lid. She smoothes her hand over the box’s pebbly leather cover. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine again the Giant Ballroom of Forgiveness, but it won’t come. She wants to see if she can find Veronica among the dancers, but the vision of the ballroom won’t come. It’s like a face you might recognize if you saw it on the street someday but that you can’t otherwise remember, like, for example, all the faces of her mother’s boyfriends.

A
half hour later, up in her room, Lana goes to the closet and sees how easy she’d made it for Veronica: the shelf high overhead but the empty milk crate—a handy step—sitting there below her clothes. Obvious. And stupid. Beyond stupid.
Pilfering isn’t just in Alfred’s makeup
, she thinks.
It’s in Veronica’s, too
.

From downstairs the sounds of cartoon voices carry, then raucous laughter from the Snicks at something or somebody. Bob the Tomato, is Lana’s guess.

She pushes the drawing kit under her bed and slides out one of the three cardboard boxes stored there. Probably Veronica went through all of these, too, and probably she pushed them all back under, wondering what she’d just looked at.

The boxes contain old photograph albums, the smallest of which is an almost empty souvenir book with black pages and a leather cover celebrating the completion of the Hoover Dam. On the first page of this book, Lana keeps a picture of her father at seventeen.
Dee Morris catches dee most!
someone had written across the front, in the sand below the bare feet of her father, who was holding a string
of trout. Dee’s face was lean and sweet-looking, and his grin was so goofy and wide that you’d think he could never die or hurt people. When Lana was in kindergarten, learning her letters in Miss Marsh’s class, her father was in the House of Corrections. Lana wasn’t supposed to tell people, so she didn’t, but then they came to the letter
D
. “
Bad little, sad little
d” was the rhyme for remembering which way the
d
faced—toward the wall, ashamed of something, and Lana heard it as
Bad little, sad little Dee
and thought somehow Miss Marsh knew about her father.

Things changed in her father’s life, but he never got over fishing, and now, staring at the photograph of her father, Lana remembers how one day instead of taking her to school, he drove her off to a deserted lake where they ate egg salad sandwiches and drank cocoa from a thermos and fished and talked and fished until Lana looked up and saw her mother striding their way wearing a look that meant things were going to get bad and get bad quick. Lana gauged her mother’s position against that of her father’s car and realized that if they made a break for it, her mother would never catch them. “Run for it!” Lana yelled, reeling in her line as fast as she could, but her father took hold of her arm and looked into her eyes and said, “We don’t run, Lana. And we don’t hide.” He smiled. “That’s not who the Morrises are.”

Which was very much a big fat laugh. It seemed like all Lana and her mother ever did after her father was gone was run and hide, hide and run. And now her mother had run and hidden who knew where.…

Shame and sadness. This is what Lana almost always
finally feels when she looks at the Hoover Dam souvenir album, shame and sadness, which is probably why she prefers the other albums, the ones full of photos of families Lana doesn’t know. The books are old, with triangular corner pockets for the black-and-white photographs to fit into—Lana has purchased most of these albums at secondhand stores. The pictures Lana likes are the ones of families on their picnics and Christmases and vacations to Yellowstone or Yosemite. Lana only buys an album if the photographed family seems friendly and happy and has some other indefinable quality she likes. She now has seventeen such albums in the boxes under her bed.

One day a few weeks earlier when she was sitting on the edge of her bed paging through one of the albums, she looked up to find Whit standing just beyond the door staring in at her. He took a step forward and said, “Can I come in?”

The rule was foster fathers didn’t come into the room of a girl without someone else there, but Lana didn’t care. She nodded, and in he came.

“So what’re these?” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed a full three feet beyond her. A safe distance, but she could smell the faint lime scent of his shaving cream.

“Old photograph albums,” she said. “I kind of collect them.”

Whit leaned closer to look.

“I call this one the Vee family,” Lana said. “The father’s Victor, the mother’s Virginia, and the two kids are Victoria and Virgil.” The picture in front of them showed the boy and girl muggingly opening their mouths in preparation for first bites of huge hot dogs and was
labeled
Victoria & Virg eating footlongs at the Great Salt Lake
.

“Funny,” Whit said, and Lana nodded. Then he said, “So, they’re your grandparents?”

Lana shook her head no, and paged through the album while he watched. “I mean, I buy them at shops.”

“Oh,” Whit said. A bit later, he said, “Victoria looks a little like you.”

This pleased Lana, but what she said was, “She’s prettier.”

Whit without looking at her said matter-of-factly, “No, she’s not.”

They went through two more albums page by page and then several more albums quickly. As she closed the last one, Whit said, “Well, I think I finally broke the Morris code.”

Lana looked over at him with open curiosity.

“All the families in these albums are happy-seeming. And they all have a girl with hair like yours.”

This surprised Lana. She’d never looked at them this way. But still, even if it was true, what did it tell you? “So?”

Whit was smiling now, an encouraging, generous smile. “I think you just want to belong.” A pause. “Which isn’t so strange. It’s what we all want to do.”

Lana started to put the albums away, and Whit picked up the little Hoover Dam book, which had slipped to the floor. He opened it, and they looked in silence at the photo of her father, which unlike all the rest was in color, faded yellows and browns and greens that looked muddy now.

“ ‘Dee Morris catches dee most!’ ” Whit read. “I guess
this one’s somebody you know.” He glanced toward Lana. “Your dad?”

Lana nodded.

“He died in an accident, right?” Whit asked.

“Sort of. It happened when he was in jail. I was six.”

Whit didn’t say anything, just as most people didn’t. It was like she’d shown them a disfiguring scar.

Then she heard herself say to Whit, “How come you never had kids?” A question she’d thought before but never expected actually to ask.

He looked at her for two or three seconds, then he said, “Veronica can’t is all.”

Whit pushed himself up and started to go but turned back. He let his eyes settle on her eyes, and he touched a finger under her chin, tipping it lightly up, and leaned forward and gently kissed her forehead, so gently that, in speech, it would’ve been a whisper. He left the room then without a word, but she knew he knew it would mean something to her, and it does.

Lana folds closed the photograph album she’s been looking at, tucks it into its box, and slides the box under the bed.
The pills and the purse
, she thinks. She needs to stop thinking about Whit and focus on the pills.

The pills are in Veronica’s blue purse.

Which is in the cupboard over the refrigerator.

Which isn’t quite as secure as Veronica thinks it is.