What She Left Behind (12 page)

We pass my favorite kind of tree, a weeping willow. I like it because it makes me feel both sad and happy at the same time. At my grandparents’ house, Matt was always climbing their weeping willow. On the days that I believe in heaven I imagine him lying on a branch near the top with one knee bent, arms under his head. I’m always on the ground, looking up, wishing I had the courage to climb. And the courage to stand up to Dad.

“I lied,” Alex says as he looks at the pictures on the wall of our living room.

“What?”

“About the
Smooth Seventies
CD. It’s mine, not my mom’s.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you just say so?”

He shrugs, looking sheepish. “I guess I was trying to impress you.”

“You should have admitted it, then. I learned to play piano with seventies music. It kind of grows on you. Thanks for driving me home. And for the bike ride. It felt good to get away from things.”

“No problem. You sure have a lot of train pictures around this place. Kind of cool.”

“Yeah, well, my dad’s really into trains.”

“Play me something?” he asks, gesturing at our piano.

“Don’t you have football practice?”

“I can be a little late,” he says, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

I play “Wildfire.” When I finish, Alex comes up behind me and rubs my shoulders. He plays with my hair, which is still free from its ponytail. Then he sits down next to me on the piano bench.

“You look really pretty today,” he says. My heart taps happily, like a snare drum.

Alex moves his face closer to mine. His lips brush my lips ever so slightly.
What am I doing?
I’m going to be leaving any day now. I shouldn’t be leading him on, I should be finding my mom. I make up my mind to walk him to the door. Then Alex rubs his face gently against mine. I like the rough feel of his stubble and the musky smell of his aftershave. He kisses me longer and deeper. I want more.

I’m not quite sure how it happens, but we end up facing each other, chest to chest, pressed tightly together, my legs on top of his, kissing intensely, my whole body tingling. The piano bench is uncomfortable but I don’t want to move, because I don’t want this to stop. Not now. Not ever.

The phone rings.
Maybe it’s my mom.
We keep kissing. It rings again.
I have to get it.
I kiss him one more time, then I get up and answer the phone. Alex follows me and winds his arms around my waist.

It’s my dad.
Oh God. He doesn’t know that Alex is here, does he?
I feel ice-cold. I look up at Alex and put my finger to my lips.

“Is your brother home?”

What is the right answer? What if I say yes and then he
wants me to put Matt on the line? What then? Can he hear Alex’s breathing?

“I think he’s outside.”

“Tell him to sweep the garage.”

“Okay, Dad.” I hang up and rest my head on Alex’s shoulder. “I’ve got to sweep the garage. What’s your stance on manual labor?”

“If it involves seeing you sweat, I’m in.”

When we get to the garage Alex says, “You’re kidding, right? The floor in this place is already clean enough to eat off. Why are we sweeping it?”

“Just following orders,” I say. “My dad likes to have the garage swept out every week whether it needs it or not.”

We finish sweeping and go back to the living room, picking up where we left off. I want to take him to my room, but then I would have to explain about the stuffed dog on my bed. Besides, I’m not that kind of girl, even if I want to be right now. After five minutes, or maybe thirty, the bird in our cuckoo clock sings five. Normally I like the bird, although today I’m mad at it for interrupting. Alex pulls away.

“I suppose I should be going,” he says.

“Right.” My lips still tingle. “My dad will be home soon. I take it you missed football practice.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll probably have to do wind sprints for a week. Maybe two. But it was worth it.” He kisses me on the nose.

I walk him to the door but I don’t watch as he drives away. I don’t want to see him go. It would make me feel even more alone.
I sit down on the piano bench, blushing as I think about what we did here. I pick out the notes to “Wildfire,” close my eyes, and try to imagine that Alex is still here with me.

I get a carrot for Chester, wondering how many more times I’ll be able to do this.

“Hey there, little—”

Chester limps toward me from across the field. As he reaches the fence I see that his leg is swollen.

“It’s not getting any better, is it?” I say, rubbing the side of his head. I offer him my carrot. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you get to a vet,” I promise. “Once you get some medicine, I bet you’ll be as good as new.”

Chester nudges my shoulder.

I pull out my cell. Even though I’m sure that Mr. Jenkins is home by now, he doesn’t pick up. I leave a message.

“Hi, Mr. Jenkins? This is Sara, your neighbor. I just wanted to let you know that Chester’s been limping pretty badly. I really think you should—you really need to get a vet out here to take a look at him. And get him some medicine.”

I rub Chester on the nose and feed him another carrot. “Well, I did it. I called.”
I wish I could say I thought it was going to do any good.

Chester crunches the last bit of his carrot and limps away.

I go back inside, my heart heavy.

In the living room, I turn on
The Winds of Change
.

Julia starts to remember her real husband, Robert.
This is it! She’s going to break free from Ramón!
I give a cheer. A quiet one, so as not to disturb my dad. Only instead of escaping, instead of running
far, far away, Julia tells Ramón about the memory. He just laughs and says she’s thinking about an old movie they once saw together. Somehow she believes him and she stays.

I wonder how long it will take for Julia to figure out that she needs to go. To get away from Ramón. I hope it doesn’t take her as long as it took my mom. Because if it does …

It might turn out to be too late.

T
he next morning the birds wake me up before my alarm. I open my closet and look through my clothes until I find the two shirts that still have tags on them. I bought them a few weeks before, at the Brookton Mall. It’s not much of a mall. It’s got a Sears and a Dollar Store and a dozen or so stores in between, including Zone, the only clothing store that carries anything remotely interesting. This is Mom and me at the mall:

Mom: “This would look cute on you.”

Me: “It’s a turtleneck.”

Mom: “It’ll keep you warm.”

Me: “I’ll feel like I’m choking.”
Translation: I’ll never get another date.

Me (again): “Check out this purple one.”

Mom: [Face all scrunched up.]
Translation: It’ll show off too much of your boobs.

Me: [Twirling my ponytail.]
Exactly.
I can wear the turtleneck under it. Kind of a layered look.
Then I can take the turtleneck off in the bathroom when I get to school.

Mom: [Big smile.] “Perfect!”

I have these weird thoughts, like maybe if I wear that turtleneck, my mom will know and she’ll come back to get me.

I have the shirt partway off the hanger, then I stop. I will not succumb to superstition. Mom’s finding us a new place to live. She’ll be back as soon as she can. No gimmick is going to bring her home any faster. Meanwhile, Alex would definitely prefer the purple one. I yank the tags off and pull it over my head.

Down in the kitchen, my dad is eating his cereal and reading a book called
Surviving Alaska
. Dad loves wilderness adventure stories. I pretend to read
The Catcher in the Rye
for English class. I’ve been meaning to read it for a while now. Today I get as far as the dedication page. Then I give up, open to a random page, and daydream.

Okay, I think about Alex. About passing notes, eating ice cream, and kissing in the living room. Mainly about kissing in the living room.

Then my dad’s voice interrupts: “He should have lost that weight. Ten pounds doesn’t seem like much, but pretty soon it can turn into twenty.”

Not again. Dad looks to me to absolve him of what he said to Matt the week before he died.

Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Don’t tell him what he did is okay!
But I’m not strong enough to listen to my inner voice. I blink fast so I won’t
cry. “Right. He should have lost the weight.” I stand up. “I don’t want to miss the bus.” I don’t throw my cereal bowl against the wall, but I want to.

In English we can hear the movie from the class next door through the walls. It’s in Spanish. When I was picking out classes for eighth grade, I asked my dad if I should take Spanish. He said, “Absolutely not.” I guess he was still a little sensitive about the fact that he and his partner might not have gotten shot back in Philly if he had known some Spanish. At the hospital I overheard some other cops saying that one gangbanger had told another in Spanish that the gun was under the mattress. That, and mumblings about an Internal Affairs investigation. Since I’m the one who never likes to cause trouble, I ditched the Spanish idea. Matt had the opposite reaction. He made sure to add Spanish to his schedule for the following year.

“Get started on your free writing, people,” says Mrs. Monroe. I shake my head, returning to the present, and get out my pencil. When I reach into my backpack, I find a Ritz Bits pack smashed underneath my history book. I make a slit in one side without making too much noise. I grab a handful and pop them into my mouth, leaning my pencil against my lips so it looks like I’m chewing on the eraser. I consider getting up to sharpen my pencil, not because it really needs it, but because I don’t want to start writing. I sigh. Mrs. Monroe’s head turns in my direction. I stop chewing and study the board. The topic is “Camping.”

I’m about to raise my hand and ask why we have to write about
camping when we just wrote about vacations, but Rachel beats me to it. Mrs. Monroe just shakes her head and says, “Shh!”

I hate camping. I would rather write about anything else, even spiders. Like how when I was six I once sat outside during dinner because I was afraid to open the front door since there was a spider near the handle and my dad wouldn’t let anyone else open the door for me or flick it away. Or how I used to believe those stories about people who sucked in spiders when they screamed. Well, maybe I can work the spider stuff in anyway. There are plenty of spiders at campgrounds. I start to sigh but stop myself so Mrs. Monroe won’t get mad. Then I force my pencil to the paper. This is what I write:

I hate camping. I mean I really, really hate camping. We all do, except for my dad, who loves it. My mom and I pretend to love it, or at least pretend not to hate it. My dad loves both kinds of camping: in a tent and in a camper. Tent camping is actually very loud, because you’re out in the middle of nowhere so everything you hear outside the tent is very soothing and natural. All the other human noises that you normally wouldn’t notice are amplified. First, there’s the zippers. The zippers on the tent—Zip! Zip! Zip! (Center, side, side.) Then there are
the zippers on the sleeping bags. Zip! (Down.) Zip! (Up.) Times four of us. And there’s the zipper of the sweatshirt you have to wear over your pajamas because Dad thinks it’s fun to camp when it’s cold out. There’s the bang of the plastic cooler that Dad closes after he gets out a Coke, the explosion of the seal when he opens it, and the slurping in the dark, followed by Zip! Zip! Zip! because then he has to go to the bathroom.

Way better than camping is Ramona’s Retreat, the cabin we used to rent for a week every summer. We’ve been going there for as long as I can remember—except for this past summer, on account of Matt. Even when we lived in Philly we would drive out here because Dad liked Michigan a whole lot; he just didn’t want to live in the same state as his dad. Which explains why we moved to Michigan after his parents died.

After free writing, Mrs. Monroe decides we need to get into pairs and peer-edit the paper we have due on Monday. Our class is a junior/senior elective, and Lauren’s older brother Jay is in the class
too. Mrs. Monroe puts the two of us together. You never know quite what she’s thinking, that woman.

“Hey there,” Jay says as he slides his desk over next to mine.

“Hi. You bring anything with you?”

“The paper? Nah, I’ll pound it out Sunday night. How about you?”

“I haven’t started it,” I say. I’m not planning on still being here Monday, after all. “But here. You can mark up my history notes so we look busy.”

“Ah, history. I hear you and Maloy are in the same history class. Word on the street is he’s got the hots for you.”

“Alex?” I try to sound surprised, but I know I’m blushing.