The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (14 page)

Jim Riley has already turned away. The people
who should be most ashamed of themselves generally aren't. Kayleigh Moore
appears at Severin's side to say good-bye, squeezes his hand. "Wasn't it a great
party?" She doesn't speak as much as
exude.
"All the most important
people in the city were here for the Chief."

The arrow on my internal Had Enough scale
suddenly shoots to the outer reaches. Hey, you know, I deal with the most
important people too. I deal with James Bond, and Martha Stewart, and Daniel
Boone. And they happen to be very nice people.

Trevor has retrieved the car--alas, still the
Mustang. He's got a bunch of Polaroids on the front seat--him in his penguin tie
standing next to the Einstein Chief and the Bodybuilding Chief and the God
Chief. I dance a Polaroid around. "Hey look, everyone, I think I'm God," I say
in a Grover voice, only I can't do Grover, and Trevor looks at me like I've
truly lost it this time.

"Did you inhale helium?" he asks.

Kayleigh Moore stands outside the door of the
house with her frat boyfriends. Trevor's got the car running, and I'm not sure
how it's possible, but the sound has gotten worse. Kayleigh claps her hands over
her ears.

"Can we
please
get out of here," I
say.

"Later, Chief," Trevor says. He hits the gas
and the car rolls maybe two feet before there's this horrible clanging metal
crash, and then the catastrophic sound of iron scraping against cement. "Uh-oh,"
Trevor says. He stops the car.

"Shit! What happened?" I say. "Did you run over
someone's wheelchair?"

102

"Oh my God," Severin says. "They're all
watching."

"Please excuse me for a moment," Trevor says.
He opens his car door and steps out.

"What's going on?" I ask.

"Oh my God," Severin says again. "The muffler
fell out. It's lying on the drive. Behind the car."

He's right, I see. There's a huge metal object
sitting behind Bob Weaver. Kayleigh and her friends are laughing, but Trevor
just lifts up that muffler and carries it to the car. He places it in the
backseat. Trevor does this as if mufflers falling from cars are a mere nuisance,
a trifle, something that happens all the time in front of the houses of
gajillionaires, no big deal. He does this with a great deal of dignity. It is
one more reason to love Trevor Williams. And then he starts the car, and we
rumble off, leaving the sound of a thousand fighter jets in our wake.

The night gives me the sense that I want to
shake something off of me, some film of unkindness. I am sure I wear its secret
odor, detectable by people with good hearts, same as the way dogs can smell when
you've been with other, unknown dogs.

The amount of money spent tonight on flowers
alone could have fed a small African village, I'm guessing; it was no doubt more
than what Mom makes in several months. Something about this knowledge makes me
feel slightly sick. This is not about jealousy. This is severe sadness about
things unjust. A queasy shame that the rightful owners of it don't feel. A sense
that something is seriously wrong with us. I wash my hands, strip off those
hideous stockings, and get into my flannel pajamas. Even though the night is
warm, flannel is your most understanding clothing.

103

I sit at the edge of my bed, aware that the
time has come to open the Vespa guy's envelope. I lift my pillow and remove it.
The house is quiet; the night is quiet, except for the faraway sound of some
neighborhood dogs barking. I hold the envelope on my lap and run my fingertip
across the ink. I carefully lift the flap, edge my finger along the opening. It
is a letter, with a few other papers attached.
Dear Indigo Skye,
it
reads.
Consider this thanks for your kindness. I decided to do as you
suggested and make my life my own ...

I stop reading. A paperclip attaches all the
pages, and I slip it off. At that moment, a piece of rectangular paper flutters
to the floor, lands upside down. It is a check, I can see that. I crouch to my
knees, turn the paper over. His name is there, Richard Howards, a signature at
the bottom. I am on my knees, almost in a position of prayer, when I see the
numbers.

Two and a half million dollars,
it
reads.
Two and a half million dollars.

When I see those numbers, they are not real. It
could just as well read
two and a half million antelope,
or
two and a
half million red apples
or
two and a half million sailing ships.
It
is not a number I understand. And for a long time, I cannot even rise from where
I kneel.

104

6

"No one just gives away two and a half million
dollars," Mom says. It's one a.m. but her eyes are bright. I am sitting on her
bed and so are Severin and Bex; everyone awakened when I screamed. Even Trevor
is there, sort of--the phone is lying on the bed too, and the speakerphone is
on.

"You still smell like Axe," I say to
Mom.

"That might be me," Severin says.

"It's definitely not me," Bex says, but she
smells her underarms anyway. "I don't even wear deodorant." She picks at the
fuzz of her moon and stars pajamas.

"You people can't smell me." Trevor states the
obvious, his voice coming from down by the bedspread.

"Maybe it's not real," Mom says. She looks at
the check for the millionth time. The two and a half millionth time.

"It's the biggest tip I've ever heard of,"
Severin says.

"It's a fucking big tip," Trevor says, as if it
was his own idea.

"We should all go back to bed. We'll have to
figure out what to do in the morning," Mom says.

"Figure out what to do? Figure out how we're
going to spend it," Severin says.

"A nice fat donation to tsunami relief, for
starters," Bex suggests. "An Xbox."

"We can get a new muffler," Trevor
says.

"We? Hey, people. This is my check here," I
say.

"Who can sleep anyway," Bex says.

105

"I'm starved," Severin says.

"It's because you drink that protein shake shit
instead of really eating," I say.

"I have the sudden urge to make pancakes," Mom
says. "No, French toast." She leaps up from the bed.

"Man, I can't believe I'm not there," comes the
little voice from the bedspread.

"Powdered sugar on it," Bex says. She bounces
on her knees around the mattress and Freud bolts out the door like there's a
fire.

Mom hunts under the bed for her slippers. She
can find only one, gives up and puts on a pair of socks. I say good night to
Trevor, and in a few moments, there's the smell of melting butter and the ziss
of egg-and-butter-soaked bread in a hot pan.

"It's like some movie," Mom says, waving around
the spatula. "Like one of those movies where a waitress wins the lottery, or
something."

"Holl-ee-wood," Bex says.

Mom just stands there shaking her head and
holding the spatula, and you know that the bread needs turning over. "Mom,"
Severin reminds.

"Mom," Chico says, under the cover of his cage.
He's supposed to be sleeping. "Mom! Mo-om!"

"Oh! Right," she says, and saves the bread just
before it burns. In a short while we're sitting around the table, now flecked
with snowy white that's drifted from our plates.

"I don't know if any of this is really
happening," I say.

Bex pinches me on the arm, then Mom does, then
Severin leans over the table to do it too. "Ouch," I say.

"It's happening," Bex says.

106

***

When I wake up the next morning, reality takes
a slow train back to my brain. In my bed, I've convinced myself it's some weird
dream, brought on by a bizarre night of wealth and emotional poverty. But, no,
there's the envelope on my floor.
Richard Howards.

"I called your father," Mom says. She's
standing outside the bathroom door. She pounds on it with her fist. "Did you
fall asleep in there, Severin? Come on, you'll use all the hot
water."

"You what?" I ask. We all seriously need some
coffee.

"Your father? Well, first I called Bomba, and
after I got tired of hearing her screaming 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,' I
called him."

Mom calling Dad has happened only twice in the
last few years since my father remarried--as far as I know, anyway. The first
time, Mom phoned Dad when Bex was taken to the emergency room with a high fever
and possible meningitis. The second time, Severin was three hours late coming
home because the car battery died, and Mom was sure he'd been kidnapped or
murdered. So this was right up there with illness and death and
homicide.

"What'd he say?"

"Well, he agreed with me. We have to find some
way of giving it back."

I feel nettle prickles of irritation. "Wait a
sec," I say. "I'm eighteen, here. This isn't something everyone else decides." I
might have agreed with them. In fact, I
did
agree with them. It was
annoying, though, when parents got so, well,
parental.
For God's sake,
give me my bottle and a graham cracker, you know?

107

And the money--I was excited about the money,
sure, but not in any real way. It reminded me of when Severin and I were seven
and my parents were still married and my dad told us he was taking us to
Disneyland. Severin and I shrieked and ran around the house and hit each other
and my Mom smiled and told us to calm down and they kissed. Dad even had slick
pamphlets that Severin and I spread out on the kitchen table and read aloud. We
fought over which ride we would go on first. But even then I knew in my deep
inner pieces that we were never going. Dad, my father of restlessness and poetry
and soul-searching, who kept Thoreau and Emerson on his bedside table like
people keep Bibles--he couldn't be on the teacup ride, and I understood that,
even at seven, even as I hit my brother in giddy thrill and snatched the
pamphlets from his hands. He couldn't be on the teacup ride, and I couldn't be
the sudden owner of a shiny new two and a half million dollars.

"For God's sake, Severin." Mom pounds. "Now!
I'm going to be late for work!"

"Jeez, chill, Mom," he says. "Estrogen surge,"
I say.

The doorknob turns and we back away and Severin
escapes with a towel around his waist and his hair wet. A whoosh of steam dashes
from the bathroom, a ghost running out. The mirror is a moist haze that Mom will
have to wipe away with a towel or her robe sleeve.

"Do you smell what I smell?" I say.

"Yeah, Severin. Lay off my Axe," Mom
says.

"You used half a can, apparently," I say to
him, but Severin's in his room already, slams the door on us.

"God, I love that smell," Mom says.

108

***

"No one just gives away two and a half million
dollars," Melanie says. We are in her room. She has a new poster on her wall, in
a frame. The posters in my room--a close-up of hands on guitar strings and the
back of Hunter Eden onstage (yeah, we all know his ass could keep Levi's in
business for all eternity)--those posters were hung up using bits of masking
tape looped into circles of stickiness. But this has glass and a mat, the whole
works. It has six rows of fish, with their scientific names in italics
underneath. I'm surprised it doesn't have one of those little
let's-pretend-we're-in-a-
museum lights over it.

"Nice poster, Mel," I say.

"Shut up," she says. "My father gave it to
me."

"You should ask him for the
bedspread."

She ignores me. "This is mind-blowing. I just
can't believe it." She shakes her head. "Who would do that? No one would do
that. He wants something. Maybe he wants
you."

"No, he doesn't. He's not some Internet perv,
trust me."

"Pervs don't wear T-shirts saying they're
pervs," Melanie says.

"Don't tell anyone about this, okay?" I say. I
don't want this to be some running conversation at school, like when Lauren Liu
got chosen for a Coke commercial or when Zen Markson's mother committed suicide.
I am not other people's entertainment.

"I won't," she says. And then, "Oh my God,"
Melanie shrieks. It's the kind of girly sound that makes me hate her and love
her at the same time. Being friends with Melanie makes me feel like I'm in
junior high and have just been asked to walk to the bathroom with a cheerleader
when I know she's perfectly capable of going on her own. Melanie is fascinating
and baffling, exciting

109

and annoying as hell. "I just realized
something."

I shriek too, just to try it out. I sound a
little like Freud, the time Mom had to give him a bath after he'd knocked over a
bottle of motor oil Trevor was using in our driveway.

"I'm going to Malibu this summer," she
says.

"Malibu, like where Barbie is from?" I
say.