The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (16 page)

"You heard right." I grab a towel, start wiping
the counter. I wipe the same spot over and again. I make circles. I make circles
because circles are starts and middles and ends and starts again.

"My, my, my," Joe says. He whistles long and
low. It's a ten-syllable whistle. "Now you've got yourself some
trouble."

"What are you talking about?" Leroy says. "Joe,
you don't know jack." Jack raises his head from where he lies on the
floor.

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Joe hears the friendly punch, boxes the air in
Leroy's direction. "This is an
opportunity.
An opportunity? No, wait.
This is a new universe. He handed you a universe."

"Who would do that? No one does that," Jane
says. "Unless he wants something."

"Some psycho," the bookstore guy
says.

"No," I say. "He doesn't want
anything."

"My God," Trina says. Her hand is to her
heart.

"And I thought I was having a good day," Funny
says.

"I'm giving it back," I say. They stare at me.
And I have a weird sense of me here and them over there. Like there is the
breeze of sudden space between us. I have my first two-and-a-half-million-dollar
realization: Having money requires the ability to ignore the selfishness of
having money.

"Are you okay?" Jane asks. She's at my elbow.
Takes the towel from me. "You look really pale. Sit down, Indigo."

"I'm a little ... in shock." I know it sounds
crazy. I know it does. But I feel like I might cry. I suddenly see where I'm
standing, and that's at the edge of change--really, really big change. Not the
small, daily movements of regular change. Not the regular breaths of
life-movements. It's tectonic-plate change. A shift so monumental that the
landscape will be forever altered, and my toes are at the edge of it, and it's
jolting, and then all at once the ground really does seem to move. The actual
ground is really slipping under my feet, and ...

"Someone get a cold washrag," Jane says. She's
peering down at me, and I don't know what's going on, because I have a sudden,
strange view of the ceiling. What I realize is there's some crap up there,
stuck, above Rosso Verona, probably flung there by that Hitler toddler.
Someone's going to have to get a chair and get it off.

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"There's pancake on the ceiling," I
say.

"Indigo, are you all right? You fainted," Jane
says. "Give her some space, everyone."

Leroy's looking down at me, and so is Nick, and
the bookstore guy, who is being elbowed out of the way. Even Jack is looking
down--I see the underside of his furry chin. Funny appears with some hard brown
paper towels from the bathroom, soaked in water. Nick's holding napkins that he
dunked in his ice-water glass. Joe's got the towel I used, but there's crap on
that, too. Restaurant work is messy.

I sit up on my elbows. "Whoa, I've never
fainted before," I say. "That was weird. Like human consciousness melting. Kind
of cool."

"Yeah, it's cool how you scared the shit out of
us," Leroy says. "That was cool." He acts pissed at me.

Joe leans over, pulls down the skin under my
eyes, stares inside. His brown eyes are staring right into mine. His eyes look
huge. "Hey, quit that," I say. "You're creeping me out."

"She's fine," he says.

"Should we call 911?" Jane asks.

"She's ready for another round," Joe
says.

"I bet you didn't eat a good breakfast," Funny
says. "In all your excitement." I sit up.

"You're right." She is right, I realize. I
didn't eat anything since French toast at two a.m. I had completely forgotten
about food in all the talk about money. I look around at my new world. I realize
the tiny man and the big woman are gone.

"Dine and dash," I say, and point.

"They left bills on the table," Nick
says.

"Fifty dollars." Jane counts. "For two
breakfasts."

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"They left rather in a hurry," Nick says. "When
you hit the ground." Now that I'm standing again, he wipes his own face with the
napkins.

"Sit down, for God's sake," Trina says to
me.

"Hey, fifty bucks. Another big tip," I
say.

Jane hands me a piece of Harold's pie on a
plate. "Ha, not on your life," she says. "Eat. Indigo, my God. I don't know how
to process this."

"Me either," I say.

"Finish all of that," Trina says. "If you faint
again, I'm going to faint. I can't handle anything medical."

"Those emergency room shows ... ," Nick says.
"The worst," Trina says.

"She's fine," Joe says. He seems pleased at
being the expert. He even hitches his belt up. He crosses his arms and gives a
small nod.

"Two and a half million dollars? It's a dream
come true," Trina says. "God, I wish I'd waited on him."

For the rest of my shift, Jane insists I either
go home or take it easy. Everyone is treating me as if I'm fragile and new. Nick
asks when I'll be quitting Carrera's. Trina asks if my family will be moving.
Funny says I won't have to work for the rest of my life. Leroy tells them to
back off, for God's sake.

I know I'm not saying good-bye when I leave
that day. But it feels like a kind of good-bye. I feel that empty place of
something left behind.

Leroy calls my name as I head toward Trevor's
Mustang. "Indigo!" he shouts. "Leroy!" I shout back.

"This is a good thing," he says. "Got it? A
universe."

120

7

It takes me a minute to realize what's
different. It's Sunday afternoon, and I'm sitting on the seat with pony interior
and Trevor has kissed me and he gently pushes the lever into drive and we're
passing Chuck's BBQ and the bookstore and the Front Street Market and I watch
some man crossing the street carrying his dog, and I'm wondering about that when
it hits me.

"The car's quiet," I say. "No, it's
purring."

Trevor cracks up, slaps the steering wheel with
his palm. "Finally. I was wondering when you were going to say
something."

"When did you fix it? I thought you worked
today."

"Baby, did you see that guy carrying his dog?
What's up with a guy carrying his dog on a walk?"

But I don't care about that anymore. "Focus," I
say. "The car?"

"I had it fixed. Doesn't Bob sound happy? I
never heard Bob sound so happy." Trevor peers at me from under his shaggy
bangs.

"What do you mean you had it fixed?" Trevor
always fixes Bob himself.

We stop at the red light by the library. I see
Erik Dobbs from my school coming out of the 76 station, holding a bottle of Coke
and, what is that? A yellow bag of Funyuns? Who eats Funyuns, for God's sake?
But Trevor's right. The Mustang is purring, and when the light turns green, it
pulls out with a confidence Bob's never shown before. I'm not sure I like Bob
like this.

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"Trevor!" I say.

He's apparently engrossed in the sound too,
because he tosses his head as if shaking himself into reality. "He just sounds
sooo good." He grins. "I'm loving this! I bring it to the Mustang place, right?
Downtown Seattle. Let them replace the muffler, a few other things
..."

"Trevor, God, how much did that cost?" I feel a
little panic-flutter. Butterfly wings of anxiety. I have a feeling I know where
this is going.

"I took it out of my savings. Baby, you should
see your face," Trevor says, and chuckles. "Relax. Have you forgotten that we're
rich?"

He stops at the next light just turning yellow,
by the True Value where Nick works. There's a stuffed collie outside. He used to
belong to the owner, Terry, and I guess, technically, he still does. The dog
wears a True Value baseball cap, and he gets dragged out every morning and
dragged back in at night. The light turns red, and Trevor grabs my shoulders,
kisses me long and hard. He's forgotten I'm not into public displays of
affection; still, his tongue lulls and makes a right turn, then left, and it's
the kind of kiss that would make me usually forget what century I lived in or
what planet I was on. The light must have turned green, because the car behind
us honks and Trevor separates from me, my lips cool with the sudden
air.

"We're rich!" he says again.

Usually that kiss would have acted like some
tingling, hypnotic spell, but this time, I feel something else. A small,
internal stepping back. A slight shove to his chest with my palm that I see only
in my mind. Just, this little echo of
away.

122

***

Mom sits at the desk that's against one wall in
the living room, tapping on our computer. It's heavy and prehistoric, bulky and
as large as old televisions, and it is the yellow-tan color of a corn tortilla.
Occasionally you'll hear it groan and creak and grind when it's just sitting
there, like it's trying to remember something painful from the past. You kind of
feel bad for it, like it should be on an IV and allowed to just rest. It's a
terminal terminal, ha-ha.

Mom's got a pencil behind one ear. She's
looking all over for something, lifting papers and scanning the floor, and my
bet is, it's that pencil she's missing. Trevor's out front showing Severin under
the hood of the car, and I hear Bex in the kitchen. By the warm, thick smell in
our house, I'm guessing she's making brownies.

I snitch the pencil from Mom's ear. "Looking
for this?" I ask. "Aah. I knew it was here somewhere."

"What are you doing?" I ask. Actually, I snoop
at the computer screen, which usually pisses her off. This time, though, she
leans to one side to show me. It's an Alaska Airlines website, a grid of travel
dates and times and prices.

"Well, you said you thought he went to Maui,
right? That was your guess?"

"Yeah," I say.

"Well, Dad did some asking around. Okay,
really? He did more than ask around. He says he called everyone he knew and they
called everyone
they
knew and it was practically an all-out man
hunt."

"Oh my God, you're kidding," I say. I can't
believe this. I picture poor Richard Howards, gone to Maui to escape his life,
to get

123

a little rest and relaxation, descended on by
helicopter tour guys and parasailers and surfers. I feel horrible.

"No, no," Mom says. "It's okay. It's good. No
one talked to him. But they did find him, Indigo. You were right. He went to
Maui."

"That was easy," I say. I feel a swoop of
disappointment. "I think we should be grateful he apparently lacks imagination.
Or just wanted to get the hell out, fast."

"He's been there five days. The first few
nights he stayed at the Four Seasons, but then he rented a house."

"What, does Dad have a spy ring?"

"You know your dad. People love him. He
probably knows everyone on the island."

I sigh. I'm getting a headache. Mom's eyes have
those coffee-ring moons underneath, and her hair is in the same ponytail from
this morning.

"So, you're going to fly out there?" I
ask.

"No, I thought you'd fly out there." She taps
the screen with her pencil. "Next week? Thursday? Stay the weekend with your
dad?"

"And what do I do when I get there? 'Hey, hi,
remember me? Am I blocking your sun? I'm the waitress you gave two and a half
million dollars to. Where'd you get that piña colada, it looks
delicious'?"

"I don't know," Mom says. "Your dad will help
you."

My mother is under the permanent delusion that
my dad can fix things she can't. Anytime something breaks, she sighs and makes
some comment along the lines of
If your father hadn't run off to
Hawaii...
She'll stand and look at the dripping sink or the broken shower
head or the leaking dishwasher and imagine my

124

father as this home repair hero, when the truth
is, he sucked at home repair. He would stand there scratching his head and
knocking on pipes with his knuckles like they might knock back an answer in
secret code. I watched him hang a picture once, and it took him five tries and
he hammered the nail in with the bottom of a nearby vase. You could see the
Holes of Failure surrounding the upper edge of the picture frame. He's really
not great at any other crisis either. He supposedly got lost on the way to the
emergency room when Mom was having Bex, and they kept turning around in the
parking lot of a 7-Eleven until the cashier stood at the door with folded arms,
probably thinking they were casing the joint for a robbery. I could just picture
Mom giving birth right there in a parking space littered with a Slurpee lid and
cigarette butts and one of those white, ruffly paper trays they put hot dogs in.
You could be having a heart attack and Dad would be looking for his car keys
under the couch cushions. Yet somehow in Mom's mind, if Dad were still with us,
we'd never have car problems or a brown lawn or printer jams. To her, he had
some ability to make things right and keep things running in a way she'd never
be able to.