This Must Be the Place: A Novel (17 page)

But that spring, he was a part of Mona’s life every single day. Having Ben not only drive her to school but eat dinner with her, watch television with her, and hell,
sleep
(in the same house) with her, allowed Mona a degree of popularity unheard of for a seventh-grader—the very lowest on the junior-senior high pole. It surprised her with its tangibility: you could
feel
it. The air was different when people you didn’t know were talking about you moments before you entered a room. Her back would twitch and she’d realize she was being watched, being discussed. As genuine as people’s curiosity seemed to be—
Do you see him in his pajamas? What does he like to eat? What does he watch on TV?
—Mona suspected that none of the Ben fan club thought she deserved her good fortune. Their questions were hungry and slightly vicious; her answers were received with greedy smiles and slitted eyes.
Who was that Mona Jones
, she heard them say in her heart,
to have this beautiful man in her life? She wouldn’t even know what to do with him.

Amy never made her feel stupid about Ben. Amy, as usual, barely gave Mona the impression that she knew Ben existed or that Mona was experiencing her fifteen minutes of fame by association. Amy had never asked if Mona and Ben shared a bathroom (Amy
knew
Mona never shared a bathroom with a tenant; it was one of the Darby-Jones rules). Amy never giggled into her hand about how funny Ben was—
did you hear what he said in rehearsal last night?
—or waxed rapturous about how Ben had placed his hand on her shoulder while blocking a scene. So it shocked Mona completely that Amy’s reaction when Mona said
I’m in love with Ben
—and who wasn’t, just a little?—was to turn white and tell Mona to shut up.

On the television, Godzilla belched a column of fire at Mechagodzilla.

“What?” Mona coughed. “What, Amy?”

“You’re not funny.” Amy examined her nails. “I know you think you are sometimes, but you’re not.”

At thirteen, Mona was in the early throes of realizing she might be, with a little practice, a funny girl—she could make her mother laugh so hard she had to put down the newspaper and wipe her eyes with a
tissue—but she still felt clumsy with her humor, a little kid wielding a great big rubber bat. The feeling she got when she made people laugh intentionally—and laugh genuinely—convinced Mona her natural sense of humor was worth training, honing, and putting to use, but it was still awkward and unpredictable. Who could you practice on, other than your friends? Weren’t they supposed to be your first and most forgiving audiences? It hurt her pride, especially since Mona hadn’t even been trying to be particularly funny. She wished she could remember what had made her think to say she was in love with Ben in the first place. It was an impulse, like everything she said or did; the space between Mona thinking and Mona saying was half of a half of a heartbeat.

“Amy, I’m sorry. What did I—”

Amy sighed and laid her palms flat on her legs. Her nails looked like they were covered in sparkly algae.

“You didn’t
do
anything.” She stared straight ahead at the television. “Don’t worry about it.”

Mona chewed the inside of her cheek. Amy sighed again. She opened her mouth and shut it and Mona realized what was happening.

Amy had a secret. Amy was going to tell her something—
finally!
—something that they alone could share. Something that would prove they were friends.

“Ben Tennant . . . sucks,” Amy said. “And—I can’t tell you any more unless you promise not to tell. Anyone. Ever. Do you promise?”

Amy’s voice was odd, colorless and small, and Mona felt apprehension tickle her belly. Maybe she didn’t want to know Amy’s secrets after all. But no—no, right here: this was what best friends were for.

“I promise,” Mona said, and held out her little finger for Amy Henderson to wrap her own pinkie around, a cold, bony little digit that Mona would always remember for the way it shook: the only part of Amy that wasn’t absolutely sure of itself.

“I
am
in love with him,” Amy muttered. She turned away from the television but didn’t look at Mona, didn’t make eye contact. She talked to the couch cushions. “I—I can’t believe I’m such an idiot. I wrote him a—you know he’s lived in New York and London and California, and he’s done—he’s been in shows and—um, a few weeks ago we were just talking . . . here.” Her eyes flicked around the den. Mona remembered. She’d gone to
the kitchen for snacks and came back and there were Ben and Amy, watching television together. “He wants to make movies, too. To write and direct his own movies. He’s the first person I ever talked to about it that didn’t think I was completely insane, and, you know, I just—it felt so good to meet someone who’s like me. I feel so alone sometimes. You know?”

Mona winced.
I don’t think you’re insane,
she thought, but didn’t say.
I don’t think you’re alone.

“So I wrote this . . . letter. A note, really. On a postcard, I thought he’d think that was funny—it said
Wish you were here
and I changed it to say
we
instead of
you
. I didn’t want anything from him other than—I just wanted him to
know
.” She shrugged. Her pinkie, still wrapped around Mona’s, squeezed harder. “And he stopped me in the hall and said he had a question about some of the sets? For the show? And I’d been helping Chuck Woz with some of the—whatever, you know—anyway. In his office he told me—he just—”

Amy closed her eyes and unhooked her pinkie. She scrunched herself back into the crook of the couch arm and pressed both hands flat against her face.

“He told me I was being
inappropriate
.” Her words were muffled and thick.

She was crying. Amy was crying and Mona was paralyzed. She had never, ever, seen Amy cry before—not when she talked about how her parents died when she was five, the summer before Mona met her. Not when she sprained her ankle in gym so bad she had to use crutches for a week. And certainly not when they watched that video of
Beaches
Mona’s mother rented from the drugstore, which had reduced Mona to a gibbering pile of snot. But now Amy was crying over Ben Tennant, and Mona, who had always thought Amy’s heart was invulnerable (to boys
or
to best friends) felt time stop and reorder itself. She was aware of the musty smell of the couch. Dust motes hanging in the sunny indoor air. Amy’s long-fingered hands covering her face, a halo of messy strands of dirty-blond hair escaping the rubber band that tried to hold them back. Maybe three seconds passed, but it felt like Mona lived a lifetime between realizing that Amy was crying and that she had no idea what to do about it. Should she hug her? Should she re-grab Amy’s pinkie, would that be more reassuring? Why didn’t she know what to do?

Before Mona could act, Amy took her hands from her face and sat back up on the couch, perfectly straight. Her cheeks were deep pink. “Screw ’im,” she said, and snuffled, once. Then she grabbed the remote and turned up the volume. And they sat in silence and watched Godzilla ravage some nameless Japanese province until Mona’s mother, carting a basket of clean laundry, stuck her head in the den and asked them to turn it down.

“I’m sorry,” Mona said, when her mother was gone, and winced again, because it sounded so weak and pathetic and was representative of only the tiniest bit of what she actually was: sorry for Amy, sad for Amy, and sorry and sad for herself for getting precisely what she wanted: a secret to prove how well they knew each other. That they were best friends, relatively speaking.

“Me, too,” said Amy, and then, by way of consolation, “Eric Cole’s a dickhead. You can do better.”

The other secret was joint, tied up with the summer they ran away, when they ditched Ruby Falls and hid out on the Jersey Shore. That was the Amy that lived in her mind now, a tall girl with splotchy sunburns on her shoulders and legs, always moving, whether she was running down the beach or the boardwalk. Mona, stretching her own legs under the bedclothes, wondered what Amy had become. Who Amy was now. Still moving, Mona suspected, still going forward. Still running.

Amy ran all the way to Hollywood after that summer in New Jersey, and Mona didn’t see her again until Oneida was four. Of all things, after years of not speaking, Amy called her on the telephone. Simple as that.

Mona’s mother didn’t recognize Amy’s voice and covered the mouthpiece, grumbling about telemarketers. But Mona’s hand went numb within seconds of taking the phone and she had to lean against the kitchen cupboards to stay upright.

“Hi, Mona,” was all Amy had to say.

Mona tried to say hello, but all that came out was a series of huffing sounds.

“Look, I know you’re probably . . . still . . . pissed.” Amy sounded so much like herself, so much like a direct transmission from the past, that Mona’s eyes pricked with tears. She barely remembered herself at that
age, and here was her best friend, exactly the same, a time traveler. “And I can’t tell you how much—I can’t thank you.”

The line went silent for a second and then Amy choked, whether on a laugh or a sob, Mona never knew.

“So listen,” Amy said, her voice stronger but her words hesitant. “I—did some work on this movie, and there’s going to be a premiere in a few weeks out here, and I—I have tickets—and it’s a real movie, Mona. You might have even heard of it, it’s called
The Big Kahuna
and it’s got freakin’ Keanu Reeves in it, and it’s about surfers terrorized by a creature-from-the-black-lagoon-style monster, and I was chief assistant on the underwater creature animatronics and”—Amy gulped in a breath—“I’d really love it if you were here. I—”

Mona didn’t think there was a medical term for the way her heart was frozen, stuck between beats. She hadn’t said a word yet. It wasn’t until her mother touched her cheek, concerned, that she realized how warm she was, how all the blood in her body was rushing to her head. She was going to explode if she didn’t speak.

“Amy,” she said. Her mother’s eyebrows shot into her hairline. “Amy, I would love to come—I wouldn’t miss it. When?”

“Next month. April tenth—you can come for the weekend, I don’t know what your—you know—schedule—”

“I can make it,” she said, because she could; God knows, she didn’t work anywhere outside of the Darby-Jones. “One thing—um.”

“What?”

“Should I bring Oneida?”

“Oh—who?” Amy asked.

“The baby?” Mona said, and thought,
I will pass out
. I
will
pass out. “I . . . kept her.”

Amy’s silence grew between them, long and loud enough for Mona to wonder if she’d gone deaf in one ear.

“Wh—how did—I didn’t know you—”

“Yeah.”

Amy coughed.

“Well,” she said. “Shit, Mona.”

“No, never mind. It’s OK.” Mona’s conscience flared. This was Amy’s
big dream starting to come true, and whatever choices Mona had made with her life had nothing, really, to do with any of it. “I’m sorry, Amy, I won’t bring her. She’s kind of a pain in the ass, frankly.”

“She would have to be,” Amy said, and then laughed nervously. Mona could hear Amy’s shaky inhalation, three thousand miles and a million years away. “OK,” she said. “I mean, if you don’t want to—it would be fine with me if you wanted to bring . . . her, I’d—”

“I’ll bring pictures,” Mona said.

Which she did. And which Harryhausen, the stupid kitten, vomited on as they lay helpless in her open suitcase on the floor of Amy’s apartment. That was one of the few clear memories Mona had of the last weekend she spent with Amy; that, and sitting in the dark of the Chinese Theater as Amy’s dreams came to life in front of her. Nothing more substantial than light and sound, the Big Kahuna, as Keanu—basically playing Johnny Utah in a monster movie—called it,
was
. It existed as a living, breathing being, a being Amy had helped create out of sheer will with the aid of nuts, bolts, and rubber. Mona thought the Kahuna favored Amy, even: it was long and broad (the easier to slip through narrow crevices to devour its unsuspecting prey), singularly determined, and persistent as hell: it was going to eat Keanu if it was the last thing it ever did. Of course, the Kahuna didn’t succeed; he was obliterated with a small portable nuclear device. As the timer on the bomb ticked down to zero, Amy’s hand shot across the armrest, grabbed Mona’s, and squeezed, and when the beast exploded in a geyser of red pulp, Amy’s eyes shone with tears. That was the third—and last—time Mona saw her cry.

The rest of the weekend was a blur. Mona knew they drove around Mulholland and looked over the city, hunted for vintage vinyl, ate falafel (for Mona, for the first time). They went shopping at the drag stores on Hollywood Boulevard and Amy convinced Mona to buy a ridiculous pair of black stiletto knee-high boots she still hadn’t worn. They never looked at the pictures. Mona, at the time, had been too tentative and too awed by the unfamiliarity of her surroundings (since that summer in New Jersey, she had not been out of Ruby Falls for longer than a day) to bring them up; and neither did Amy, apparently content to show off her new town and her new life rather than revisit the old one. When they parted at the airport, they promised to keep in touch, though Mona
suspected neither of them would or expected the other to. They were living parallel lives and that was fine. That they would always be connected by the past was important, but their futures would be separate. She felt a little sad, even, that Amy had invited her to share this event—that there was no one else, no one new, in her new life to be her premiere plus one. Not that there was anyone new in Mona’s life (other than Oneida). But as she settled into her seat on the plane, Mona was more relieved than sad: Amy’s story had a happy ending, and Mona felt she could finally start working on her own.

But what had she done with the past decade? What story
had
she written for herself? In the dark, in her bed, Mona struggled to connect the threads that swirled around the rope of her life, a rope that might as well have been braided from Oneida’s thick mane of hair. The death of her parents: her mother first, her father fifteen months later, both of heart disease. The men, who, after Oneida, had amounted to a grand total of three, only one of whom she’d been desperate enough to sleep with—and only then until she woke up one morning and realized she was sleeping with Eric Cole, who had been a dickhead in the seventh grade and was an even bigger dickhead now. She had started her own business. That made her very proud and very happy. But nothing brought as much form or joy to her life as her daughter. Her new best friend. And Mona Jones loved her life, when she really thought about it: she loved waking up early every morning to make an enormous pot of coffee (Sherman couldn’t teach kids how to hammer a nail until he’d had at least three cups); sharing companionable cereal-eating silence with Oneida, or, if the silence felt like it wanted to be broken, talking about whatever paperback her daughter brought down to read over the morning meal; seeing Oneida off to school; cracking her knuckles and the spine of her sketchbook and spending the afternoon elbow-deep in confectioner’s sugar and flour, whipping ingredients into someone else’s idea of the perfect cake for a perfect day. And then whipping ingredients into her own idea of a perfect meal at the end of a normal day. Talking with her daughter, tucking her daughter in, and falling asleep with a book of her own, her finger pressed between two pages. It was a good life. It was a comfortable life—beautiful, even. It was
her
life and she lived it in the present tense.