The Shortest Way Home (22 page)

“If you find your mind wandering, be forgiving with yourself,” Rebecca murmured. “Scolding is the opposite of what meditation is about. When you find thoughts drifting in, release them like a feather into the breeze.” The softness of her voice wooed him toward acquiescence. “There is no failure in meditation. It is a practice, not an accomplishment.”

Stop scolding yourself,
he scolded himself. The thought made him smile. And then he let it go like a feather. He did the same for the next thought, and the next . . . And then there came a moment when he felt . . . suspended . . . a soft nothingness . . . peaceful . . . whole . . . graced.

Then his scalp felt itchy and he tried not to scratch, because wouldn’t that break the spell? But of course by the time he was thinking those thoughts, questioning the rectitude of scratching, it was already broken.

He opened his eyes and glanced over at her. She sat cross-legged, back straight, face relaxed. And for a moment he wanted desperately to know what she was seeing behind those olive-skinned eyelids. Was he in the scene? Would that be a good thing or a bad one? Did he even want to be there? Her eyes began to open slowly, and he quickly looked away.

“So?” she said.

He shrugged and gave his scalp a good hard scratch.

* * *

T
hey couldn’t decide where to have dinner. Neither one would commit to a place they actually wanted to go. “Milano?” she said. It was where he’d had lunch with Chrissy.

“Sure, if you want to.” But his tone was unenthusiastic.

“I don’t really care.”

“How about Country Squire?”

“Great,” she said. “If I were elderly and had a yen for creamed corn.”

By process of apathetic elimination they ended up at The Pal, plates loaded with fries and bacon cheeseburgers.

“I’m surprised you’d eat this.” He wiped a drop of grease from his lips. “It’s not exactly healthy.”

“Yeah, I can’t do all-healthy, all-the-time. It makes me cranky.”

He nodded.
Of course,
he thought.
Why can’t everyone be so normal?
But suddenly that weird ticker-tapey thing started again and he found himself saying, “So did I tell you I got together with Chrissy Stillman last week?”

The burger in her hands ceased its ascent toward her mouth. “No,” she said, studying the burger. “I don’t think you mentioned it.”

“She came into the Confectionary a couple of weeks ago, then we went out for lunch. She’s training George.”

Rebecca put the burger down. She reached for the salt shaker and sprinkled some on her fries. “I heard she went to law school.”

“Yeah, she was a lawyer, then she got married and had kids. Guess who she married.”

“I have no idea.” Still salting.

“Ricky Cavicchio.”

She glanced up at him, set the shaker down. “Come on.”

“I am not making this up. She
married
that jerk.”

Rebecca’s face warmed almost imperceptibly with some unspoken appreciation.

“They split up, though.” He took a bite out of his burger.

Her eyes flicked back to him, the warmth gone.

“You never really liked her,” said Sean.

Her gaze tightened like a vise, as if to clamp down on something unpleasant.

“Come on, admit it—you know you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t,” said Rebecca. “She wasn’t very nice.”

“How can you say that? If anything she was Little Suzie Sunshine.”

The look on her usually inscrutable face was unmistakable. She was incredulous. “Seriously,” he said, “what could possibly make you think she wasn’t nice?”

Rebecca didn’t answer for a minute, seeming to weigh her options. Finally she said, “She called me Becky Bubble.”

“Bubble?”

She pointed to the right side of her face, the part that bowed out in that strange way. “Bubble,” she said.

It took a moment for the gravity of this to sink in; when it did, Sean felt mildly ill. He knew Chrissy could be kind of self-involved, but this was heartless. She must not have realized how cruel it was. “God, that’s awful,” he said. “When did she say it?”

“What do you mean when? She said it a lot.”

“More than once?”

“All the time.”

“How old were we? Are we talking elementary school? Because kids that age can be really mean without seeing how much they’re hurting people.”

Rebecca looked at him, and there was a sadness, almost a pity there. She didn’t answer.

“Okay, what—junior high?” he asked.

Still she didn’t say anything. She crossed her arms over her chest.

“When?” he demanded. “When was the last time?”

“Remember that party at Dougie Shaw’s the summer before we left for college?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Remember how I wanted to leave early and you convinced me to stay? Why do you think that was, Sean—because I was having such a good time?”

“
Then?
She called you Becky Bubble in
high school
? Jesus, why didn’t you tell me?”

“What would you have done?”

“I would’ve told her to shut the hell up!”

Rebecca looked away. “I did tell you once. Junior year. She taunted me in the lunchroom, in front of half our class. You weren’t there, but I told you afterward.”

“Are you sure? I don’t remember that.”

“You told me to ignore it.” Rebecca’s voice got tight, as if she could still feel the sting of humiliation. “You said Chrissy was just playing, and I shouldn’t take it so personally.”

And then he remembered.

Becky had come out of the lunch room looking pale and shaken. He had asked her what was wrong, and she’d told him. He remembered feeling slightly annoyed by her thin-skinned-ness, and told her to brush it off . . . as if a public humiliation about your facial birth defect could be taken any way other than
personally
.

“Oh, Beck,” he murmured, shaking his head. “God, what an ass.”

She gave a little shrug. “You didn’t get it. No one ever called you names like that.”

He was still reeling from retroactive guilt. “Lucky, I guess,” he muttered.

“It wasn’t just luck. You had this sort of . . . it was like a protective coating. People knew they couldn’t get to you, so they didn’t bother.”

“I was basically an orphan with a terminal disease, what more could they do to me?”

“Plus you made it clear you had one foot out the door—things didn’t affect you.”

“But they did.”

She chuckled. “I’m not talking about things like Chrissy Stillman.”

She was more relaxed now. His admission of guilt seemed to have irradiated the little ball of cancerous anger she’d obviously been carrying around all these years. “You know, in a way I should thank you—both of you,” she said. “People can be mean, whether you’ve got a funny-looking face or not. Part of growing up is learning how not to internalize it. And your reaction helped me realize that I
did
take things too personally.”

“Who wouldn’t take something like that personally!”

“No, but see, Becky Bubble wasn’t me. That was Chrissy’s creation, not mine. I had to get better at not accepting other people’s definitions.”

“Like your parents’.”

“Like anyone’s.”

He studied her for a moment, the warm brown eyes, the mildly uncontrollable wavy hair . . . the bubble. He had stopped seeing it, he realized, had stopped registering it when he looked at her, and forgot that every time she met someone new they might reject or pity her. And if they were repulsed, she would know it. Her strength wasn’t only in her limbs.

“You hate when I call you Becky, don’t you?” he said.

She smiled. “No, it’s fine. I just decided I like Rebecca better. It’s pretty.”

“I’ll try to call you Rebecca, but I might slip sometimes.”

“It doesn’t matter what you call me, Sean. We’re friends—I’ll love you either way.”

Yes,
he thought.
Me, too. Either
way.

And he wanted to reach over and touch her shoulder or squeeze her hand. But instead he pushed his plate toward her and said, “Here, eat my fries. Yours have enough salt to make you hypertensive.”

CHAPTER 24

O
n Sunday morning, Frank Quentzer called. “What’s your e-mail address?” he asked Sean. “I need to send the forms and packing list for camp.”

“Oh. I don’t actually have one.”

There were about three seconds of silence. “You don’t have e-mail.”

“Yeah, I don’t really need it. I’ll give you my sister’s address and get it from her.”

But when Sean powered up Deirdre’s laptop in the den, he realized he didn’t have her e-mail password and wouldn’t be able to access the documents without it. He went upstairs and knocked on her door. She didn’t answer, so he opened it and whispered, “Dee.”

A muffled grunt came from the darkened recesses of the room.

“Dee, what’s your password?” he whispered.

“What?” she groaned.

“I need your e-mail password so I can get something a guy is sending me.”

“What the hell, Sean.”

“Hey, it’s for Kevin.”

“I don’t care if it’s for Andrew Lloyd Webber. I’m not giving you my password.”

“Well, can you get up and do it for me then?”

There was a lot of muttering about having one day to sleep in and lack of consideration. “Seriously,” she said, yanking on a robe. “What
grown-up
doesn’t have his own e-mail account? Oh, yeah—the same one who doesn’t have a cell phone.”

She followed him downstairs to the den and printed out the forms. Then she headed back to her room. As she crossed through the living room, Sean heard George growl.

“Shut it!” Deirdre barked. Then there was only the sound of her aggravated soles hitting each stair as she ascended.

Kevin wandered into the den and saw Sean filling out the forms. “Wait, don’t!” he said.

Sean looked up. “Why not?”

“I’m not sure about going.”

“What do you mean? I thought you decided.”

Kevin slumped onto the couch. “Yeah, but I remembered something. Ivan said the middle school schedules come out next week. I have to be here.”

“Can’t you just get it when you get back?”

“No, because they come by e-mail, and they sent out this form asking what e-mail to send it to, but I didn’t know what to put, so I just wrote in that I’d go to the school and pick it up.”

“I can do that.”

Kevin considered this for a moment. “Are you allowed to? I mean, you’re not, like, in charge of me or anything.”

And who is?
thought Sean darkly.
Look around, they’re dropping like flies.
But he said, “I think it’d be okay, under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“The circumstances of my going down there and saying, ‘I’m his uncle, give me the paper.’ ”

Kevin liked this. “Yeah, give me that paper, or else!”

“And if they won’t do it . . . I’ll . . . take out a squirt gun and squirt them in the face.”

“Yeah, and they’ll be all like ‘Oh, no! Please stop! We’ll give you the paper!’ ”

Sean laughed. “But I’ll keep squirting them anyway, just for fun.”

“Yeah, then you’ll run out of water, and they’ll tackle you and call Officer Doug to take you to jail.”

“Dougie Shaw? You know him?”

“A little. He came by sometimes.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know . . . to say ‘Hi, how’re you doing?’ And he’d bring me stuff from the police station, like a plastic whistle and stuff.”

“He was the one who told me about Boy Scouts,” said Sean.

“Yeah, he knows all kinds of stuff like that.”

The night Dougie had brought him home came back to Sean—the incongruity of seeing crazy Dougie Shaw in a police uniform . . . and saying what a good father Hugh had been. Sean wanted to know more about that. And yet part of him didn’t. Like Hugh’s pranks and shenanigans, his fatherhood had a sort of a semifictional quality in Sean’s mind—an interesting anecdote, but probably only half true. Something inside him didn’t want it to be fully factual.

The camp packing list had only a few items that Kevin didn’t already have, the most critical of which was a Class A Boy Scout uniform. For this they had to go to the Scout Store in Southborough, about fifteen minutes away. Riding down the Mass Pike in the Caprice, Sean said idly, “So you’re pretty excited about middle school.”

Kevin gave him a look that would melt rocks.

“No?”

“Have you
seen
it?”

“Well, not recently, but I did go there myself when I was your age.”

“It’s huge. Like fifty times the size of Juniper Hill. And it’s made out of cement with really small windows—and they’re
never open
. And you have to use a locker room for gym and change your clothes and everything. It smells so bad in there I thought I was gonna puke!”

“When were you there?”

“They do this stupid tour thing. All the fifth graders go over on a bus and walk around and listen to stupid talks and stuff.” Kevin was getting really agitated. Sean didn’t know whether to let the boy blow off steam or to change the subject.

“So apparently we have to get this sticky stuff to glue on the patches,” said Sean. “I’m pretty good at stitching up cuts, but I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with cloth.”

“Did you ever eat lunch in the cafeteria when you went to middle school?”

“Um, yeah. Pretty much every day.”

“It’s so
loud
in there. Kids are screaming, and there’s like one teacher standing there telling them to settle down. But they don’t!”

“Well . . . maybe there’s a corner where it’s a little quieter.”

“I looked,” said Kevin. “There isn’t.”

Sean took his eyes off the highway to glance over at Kevin. The boy’s head was turned toward the window. But Sean could see his chin quivering.

“It’s normal to be nervous about going to a new place.”

There was a little gasp from Kevin, as if his lungs couldn’t expand to take in the air. “I don’t like bad smells or loud sounds, and I”—another little gasp—“I
don’t
like to be bumped. That’s what Ms. Lindquist says. She says it’s okay not to want to roughhouse.” His narrow shoulders began to quiver. “But that’s what they
do
. They bump into each other all the time in the hallways, and bang each other into lockers, and do high fives—I saw it!”