Virgin Territory (22 page)

Turns out, Marie left detailed instructions about the sort of memorial she wanted. “Nothing fancy,” she wrote in a four-page handwritten document that Ora found folded and tucked beneath the mattress of her bed. “Just bury me plain and simple. After that, get everybody together for a dance party. Everybody loves to dance, and there are too few opportunities these days. So go for it.” She also wrote out the names and phone numbers of a few local people who, in her opinion, might enjoy “cutting some rug.” After the burial, which was “plain and simple,” as per her instructions, Doug made arrangements with
the place
to host the dance party. Ora phoned around to invite people. It has a been few years since Marie wrote those instructions, so quite a few of the invitees are already, as Ora described it, “cutting rugs with the angels.” But there are more than enough people to make a good showing on Marie’s behalf. Even the folks who didn’t exactly know Marie are happy to be mixing and mingling on a Friday afternoon.

I’m happy to see that Desirée and Crispy have made the effort. The summer is over and school will be starting in a few days, so their mothers are insisting that it’s time for them to get back to real life. What that will be for each of them is a mystery to me, but I’m hoping that we’ll be able to stay in touch. They are, after all, my first real friends in years, and the fact that they’ve come by to pay their respects to my grandmother on their last day in town is proof of something.

“You didn’t have to,” I tell them as they enter the room.

“Of course we did,” Crispy says without missing a beat.

He’s wearing an oversize T-shirt with the image of a tuxedo jacket, tie, and shirt front printed onto it. This is as close to formal as he is liable to get, and I appreciate the gesture. When I tell him so, he shrugs and says, “Marie was cool. She deserves the best.”

Desirée agrees and then gets a little choked up when she says, “She wanted to marry me. Remember? How cool is that?”

“Cooler than Frank Sinatra,” I remind her.

“Oh,” she says. “And I brought back her dress. It’s in the car.”

Desirée was devastated when she learned that the Miss Jupiter Christian Teen Contest was cancelled due to lack of entries. Everyone agreed that Des had the best chance of winning, and I think she secretly believes that she would’ve walked away with the crown and the scholarship money. But it’s just as well that it turned out as it did, because when Des’s mother found out that her daughter intended to strut her stuff in front of strangers, Christian or otherwise, she yanked the girl out of the running and announced that the party was over. Now they’re heading back to Atlanta, where Des is going to finish school, get a steady job, and sing in the choir on Sundays. In other words, she’s grounded until Christmas.

“You can keep the dress,” I tell her. “Marie would’ve wanted you to have it. In fact, Ora has a couple more packed up for you to take with you. You never know when they’ll come in handy.”

Des kisses me on the cheek and then runs off to find Ora, leaving me alone with Crispy.

He and his mother are leaving in an hour, he tells me. She’s waiting for him out in the car. He can’t stay long.

“We should invite her in,” I say, looking over his shoulder as though I can see clear through walls to the outside.

Crispy steps back and looks at me long and hard. He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out his trusty sunglasses, the ones with the white plastic frames. He hands them to me.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“They’re for you. To remind you that (a) sometimes taking the risk doesn’t always get you what you want, but (b) it always leads to the next thing.”

What he says doesn’t make much sense to me, so he spells it out for me as though I’m an idiot child who’s been left in his care.

“Even after Angela dumped me, I was still hooked. I joined this crazy club because, just like you, I wanted to get in good with her. I took the risk. Funny thing is—I ended up with something better than a girlfriend.”

“Which was what?” I ask.

“Which
is
a friend. Who would’ve thought we’d end up being actual friends, you and me? I wasn’t even accepting applications. Now, let’s see how those glasses look on you.”

I put them on. He shrugs his approval, pulls another pair of identical sunglasses from another pocket, and puts them on. We
stand there, mirror images of each other, each of us reflecting the other in his glasses: friends.

Our good-bye is awkward. We promise to stay in touch and swear to see each other the following summer, even if it means running away from our respective homes. I’m glad to be wearing sunglasses; I would hate for him to see me all teary as we hug it out.

After Crispy and Des are gone, I stand by the snack table and get myself together. The framed portrait of Marie is propped up on the table, and it serves as a reminder of what we’re doing there. It’s one of my favorite pictures of Marie, one that was taken when she was at the height of her beauty and her future was all spread out in front of her and all still a mystery. In the picture, she’s practically daring the camera with a big toothy smile. Her strapless gown serves as a come-on to one and all. She has a hand on one hip, and her opposite shoulder is thrown forward, as if to say,
Get me—aren’t I something?
The picture is proof that her life happened despite the fact that she had a plan. And I take comfort in this, knowing that my life will happen even if I can’t figure it out beforehand. It’s just the way it works; life goes on and arranges itself according to our heart’s desire—like it or not.

“She sure was something else.”

Doug has sidled up alongside me, and he’s staring at the portrait. Even though he’s sad because his mother is dead, I think he’s also secretly relieved. The burden of caring for her
has been weighing heavily on him these last few years, and he’s visibly aged. There’s plenty of gray in his hair now, wrinkles have appeared where his skin used to be smooth, and everything is deepening around his eyes. But still, he looks good for a guy his age, tan and fit.

“So listen,” he says without looking over at me, “I’ve got myself a new job. I start Monday.”

“What about Down to Earth?”

“Finito. From now on I’ll be working for a video-production company over in West Palm Beach. Mostly editing and archiving, but it’s more along the lines of my talents. There’ll be plenty of late nights for me, so you might have to look after yourself a bit more, stay out of trouble.”

“No prob,” I tell him.

I congratulate him and give him a slap on the back. It’s hard not to give some of the credit to the Blessed Virgin Mary. After years and years of working in the dirt, Doug finally found the get-up-and-go to get up and go looking for a job doing the thing he loves most. Maybe this was his miracle. But when I suggest as much to him, he shakes his head and tells me that it was time, that’s all. It was just time.

Ora is DJ-ing, which means that she’s standing over a boom box and flipping through a scraggy pile of old CDs featuring dead crooners backed by big bands and clarinets. As I walk up to her, I notice that Marie’s little gold god is standing at attention right next to the boom box. All the air goes out of me.

“Ora?” I say, which causes her literally to jump in her shoes.

“Oh, child, you scared the livin’ Jesus out of me. What you
doin’
creeping up on people like that? What’s wrong? You gone pale.”

“Where did that come from?”

“That belonged to your grandmother,” she says, taking a step back and giving the thing a proper look. “Frankie Rey gave it to her.”

“Did you ever meet Frankie Rey?”

“Frankie Rey?” she repeats after me.

“Yeah. Was he real? Did you meet him? I have to know. It’s important.”

“Believe me, child,” she begins. “I listened to your grandmother day and night talking about that man: Frankie Rey this and Frankie Rey that. I listened till I felt for sure I knew him well enough. Never in the flesh, okay? Never actually met the man. But I tell you, he’s alive in me just the same.”

I’m back working at the golf course again. Same ol’, same ol’. Of course, the crowds are gone; they disbanded as quickly as they arrived, and except for the trash and trampled grass, they left no trace of ever having been there. There were stories, but no one ever got them right.
(“She appeared in a band of light that swirled over the trees, and I heard someone was totally healed of
MS
.”) I think it’s weird that there were no protests about the downed tree; no one came forward to complain about the fact that a holy site had been desecrated or that anyone’s rights had been denied. I guess without the tree, there wasn’t much to see, so the people quietly went their separate ways, and that was that. The local bishop made a statement declaring that since the apparition had never been officially recognized by the Catholic Church, he didn’t see the need to comment on the matter any further. The Porta-Potties were removed. The hot-dog vendor chose a spot closer to the Roger Dean Stadium, where fast food was the order of the day. Des and her mother went back to Atlanta; Crispy and his mom to Massachusetts; Angela and Mrs. Ramirez, as far as I know, to Miami. Case closed.

Crispy and I continue to text each other, so I’m able to keep him up to date as events unfold. Though I’m stuck in Jupiter and he’s back home in Cambridge, we have plenty to discuss.

“Still no word from her,” is a text I send him at least once a week.

And, of course, by “her” I mean Angela. I leave the occasional message on her cell, but I haven’t heard back. Not yet. By this time, my communication with her is strictly telepathic, which is to say, she is all in my head and, as Ora might say, she’s alive in me just the same.

Still, there’s no denying that Angela changed my life, because once school started I noticed that I was thinking of
myself as a guy who’d had a summer fling. Thanks to Chad, a rumor has been circulating that I ran off with a really hot Latina from Tucson and was then brought back against my will when the police discovered that she’d stolen my grandmother’s stuff. This rumor is much cooler than the one that I’d been living with since my arrival in Jupiter, and I’ve decided to go with it. As a result of my new and upgraded status, the girls in my class are staring at me in the hallways between classes with something more than pity in their eyes. I am somebody. The stories people tell about you are stories they need to tell. It’s not like they get it all wrong; it’s just that they are always less than completely right. Even the Blessed Virgin Mary has to put up with some pretty wild stories; people would rather see her face appear on a tree trunk or in a hubcap or baked into the occasional cinnamon bun than realize that she lives and breathes inside of them.

Poor Prendergast finally suffered his much-anticipated relapse and then went into rehab. About two weeks after his release, I ran into him at the local pharmacy; he was looking as fresh and clean as a laundered shirt. He blinked at me and tried to recall my name, but it was as if everything except the truth had been bleached and pressed out of him. I tried to get him to confirm that he’d seen Frankie Rey that morning in the cafeteria, but he told me that he didn’t remember much from before. Very little. Actually nothing. I didn’t press him any further.

I try not to think about Frankie Rey too often. But like a
lot of people I’m trying not to think about, he refuses to fade from my thoughts. If I could see him with my own eyes just once more, I’d have some proof that he’s for real, but so far he’s a no-show. To be honest, I never stop looking for him. Not entirely. I always half expect him to pop up in a crowd or turn a random corner. The same is true of Kat and Angela and Crispy and Desirée and Marie. It makes no difference to me that some of them are dead or that one of them might not be real; the fact is that each one of them is under my skin, and alive in me just the same.

“Are you named after the poet, Dylan Thomas?” my English teacher, Mrs. Seibert, asks me.

I sit up at my desk and shake off my slouch and fog. I’ve been daydreaming. Again. All my classmates are staring at me. I can feel a thin film of sweat gathering at the back of my neck, threatening to turn into an all-out trickle. I don’t dare move a muscle. I just hold Mrs. Seibert’s gaze, playing chicken with her, as if my life depends on it.