Where I Want to Be (8 page)

“I changed after your grandfather died, didn’t I?” Augusta’s voice caught at the end. She cleared her throat. “I didn’t mean for it to happen, Jane. It hurt you. You’d come over Sundays, and I’d see your face pinched up with worries, and I knew you needed me, but I was too deep inside my own hurt. I could hardly put the coffee on, or read the paper.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Jane shrugged, but she felt tight with the pain of remembering.

“It does matter.”

Jane looked up, though she kept stirring to hear the clink-clunk of ice cubes bumping against the sides of the pitcher. Her grandmother was holding herself as still as a flagpole, her hands folded tight across her middle.

“I had a responsibility to help you.” Augusta nodded. “I let you down. I’m sorry for that.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” said Jane. “Everything’s good again.” But she realized that she was stirring so hard that lemonade had dribbled over to puddle on the countertop. “You were all alone. But I didn’t know what all alone felt like until you left me. Now I do. Even with you and Granpa here, I know.”

They stared at each other. Augusta knew better than to hug her. Jane had never understood hugs, all that smothering closeness.

Her grandmother took the dishrag and mopped the spill. “You’re here because you’re holding on,” she said. “You’ve got a grudge against the world, and that’s what keeps you stuck in it. You need to let go, Jane. Your grandfather and I are just a step along the way. Don’t you see that?”

And then Granpa appeared in the doorway, rosy cheeked, changed into a fresh cotton shirt and with his silver hair swept back in a puff. Jane blinked. His face was blurred. He looked like all the different ways she’d ever known him. He sniffed at the air and then, smiling, began to dance, snapping his fingers and catching Augusta by the waist as he twirled her to the tune of one of his nonsense songs. “Roast-a beef and lemon-ade and I’m a lucky man-o. Roast-a beef and lemon-ade and dancing with my girl.”

As Jane watched, she could feel her grandparents lost in each other. It was the one place they created that shut her out. It reminded Jane of Lily and Caleb, and their private life together.

“Time for dinner!” she said, to interrupt them.

Augusta smiled and tweaked Granpa’s nose as the dance ended. They took their places at the table. Jane could smell the tobacco and grass and cotton in her grandfather’s skin, the bitter lemon in her own fingers, and the verbena that she had picked earlier and set in a glass jar, for a centerpiece. All the right smells of summer.

On impulse, she reached out and gripped one of her
grandparent’s hands in each of her own, so that they made a chain around the table, the way they used to say grace.

“You see? I’m not letting go of you,” she told them. “Ever.”

She meant it as a happy thing, but as soon as the words were out, she knew it wasn’t.

I’m doubtful about tonight, but I keep up the whole charade of preparing. So does Caleb. It’s like a game of chicken. By seven-thirty, I’ve shaved the stubble off my legs, washed my hair, and combed it out with a daub of my new, overpriced, undersized tube of hair gloss. In my closet, I pick out my favorite dark denim mini along with an off-the-shoulder white top that I bought on sale at Wilner & Webb. The tag’s still on because there hasn’t been any special occasion to wear it. Till now. Maybe.

The phone rings just as I’ve scooted my desk chair to my closet door mirror for a long-overdue eyebrow tweeze. Behind me, Caleb bends into different angles, checking himself out. The setting sun warms the hollows in Cay’s eyes and cheekbones while brightening the highlights of my hair. We smile at each other’s reflections. I wish I could feel as sparkly on the inside. Just thinking of tonight dries up my mouth in anxiety.

On the second ring, I guess out loud. “La Mom.” I dash for the phone, slide flopping across my bed to grab it off my bedside table. “H’lo?”

“Lily?” Mom’s voice sounds a thousand miles away. “How are you? How is everything? Aunt Gwen and Uncle Dean send their love.”

“Fine, fine. Everything’s cool. Tell Aunt Gwen and Uncle Dean I say hi.”

“And have you eaten dinner?”

“Uh-huh, those spring rolls you bought. Caleb gives them two thumbs up. He’s here. We’re going out a little later.”

“Hi, Mrs. Calvert,” Caleb calls absently.

“That’ll be fun.” Mom continued, “Say hi to Caleb for me.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Honey, your dad and I were thinking.” And now Mom
ahems.
“If you wanted to drive the car up here, both your father and I trust your highway driving enough to make the trip.” There’s a stamped-and-finalized way that she says this. She and Dad must have been wrangling with this topic for hours. “As long as you promise to leave before it gets too late. And not to drive in the left lane with all the crazy speed demons. Oop—hang on. Daddy wants to say something.”

I hear a mumble mumble in the background. Now Dad’s got the phone. “Can’t you make it for the weekend, Lily? Your aunt and uncle sure would like to see you.”

“Dad, I already said…” Then the thought strikes me—like a bolt from the blue, only this bolt is the kind that slides across a door and locks me in. Here it is, the Calvert family’s new reality. This is the way it will be from now on. Now the daughter left over has to be daughter enough for two.

The thing is, I’m not sure if I’m ready to face Maine again. Last August turned out to be our last family trip, when we went up there to spend ten days at Uncle Dean and Aunt Gwen’s. I hadn’t wanted to go, and at first I rebelled in a passive protest, eating up all the minutes of my cell phone plan on rambling calls to Caleb, while Jane played pool and Ping-Pong tournaments with Dad and Uncle Dean, or annoyed Aunt Gwen by taking her little froufrou dog, Sartre, out on long mountain hikes that snarled his perfect doggy coiffure.

But after a couple of days, Jane and I were acting like kids again. Braiding each other’s hair and making flower-chain bracelets and, in the evening, playing penny-bet poker or hearts. Or, when we felt more active, outdoor games of badminton. But those nights could get slow, too, and then I’d get antsy, throwing too much wood on the fire, or grazing for snacks in the kitchen, or reading the sexy scenes of Aunt Gwen’s romance novels. Aunt Gwen said there was an ice-cream parlor in town where kids hung out, but Jane only wanted to go to the movie theater, with family.

“This is fun, isn’t it?” she asked me one evening as we sat in front of the fireplace, laughing at a game.

“Sure.” I’d shrugged. It was okay in a plain-vanilla, family vacation way. The fun part was how normal Jane was acting. She was always better when it was just family, who could read her moods and knew all the things not to do or say. That night, watching Jane as she slept peacefully in the twin bed next to mine, I wondered why she couldn’t behave more like this in real life.

She must have wondered the same about me. Without Caleb, I probably brought back memories of the kid sister Jane had liked best, too.

But that wasn’t real life. I shouldn’t have to feel guilty about it.

Miraculously, a few minutes and almost a dozen good-byes and I-love-yous later, I manage to hang up the phone without having to commit to the trip.

“The parental unit is restless for a child,” I inform Caleb as I roll onto my back on the bed and stretch my arms over my head. It depresses me to imagine Mom and Dad sitting out on the deck and trading upbeat comments about the view when their hearts are sick with missing Jane.

Caleb suddenly jumps over to the bed and in the next second is on top of me. “Watch out, my hair!” I squeak as the flats of his hands land on it anyway. “Ouchouchouch, Cay, get off! You’re worse than a puppy!”

In response, he wriggles himself so that we’re hipbone
to hipbone and toe to toe. Then he snuffles into my ear. “You smell so good, Lily-Lilliputian,” he murmurs. “All cleany, shampooy, shaving creamy girlie.”

“Is that right?” The edge of Caleb’s nose is sharp, and his snuffling makes the hairs lift on my arms.

“Mm-hmm.” Leisurely, he sniffs at my face, the underside of my chin and neck, then slowly back up to my mouth. “But ya know what else?” His voice is husky.

“What?” My giggle escapes.

“You’ll never stop tasting like—sturrr-awberries!” And then he licks me, a big, slurpy, puppy-dog lick, all the way up the side of my face.

“Caleb, ugh!” But he’s got me keyed up and semi-breathless, and I don’t want him off me anymore. When his kisses turn serious, and soon enough they do, each one feels like it’s burning a tiny scorch mark in my skin.

“But it’s almost eight,” I whisper eventually, reluctantly. “Georgia.”

“Georgia,” he whispers back, “is also known as the Peach State. The capital of Georgia is Atlanta.”

“No, no kidding. We’re late and we promised.” I nudge him halfway off as I roll out from under him.

“Right.” Caleb lets me go and sits up slowly. “We wouldn’t want Georgia to miss any of her final five, fabulous party days. Geez, imagine if that was the biggest-deal thing you had to think about.”

He’s as jittery as I am about tonight, I guess, even if it’s
for different reasons. Alex’s house will be packed with at least half of the nearly two hundred kids in North Peace Dale High’s graduating class, all of them exploding with their plans for the future. Whoever isn’t heading off to distant pockets of the country, like Georgia, will be going to either Providence Community College, Providence Tech, or Rhode Island School of Design. A full quarter of the class is enrolled in the University, where Jane had been accepted. Then there’s Tamara Kerry, who is skipping school to apprentice herself to the family restaurant business, and the Giovese twins, who are giving the next three years to the Marines. Phoebe Kim is taking off to spend time with her relatives in Seoul, and Liz Joyce has already moved to New York City with dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian.

Whatever they’re doing, though, everyone has a plan.

Everyone, that is, but Caleb.

But we are going. We smooth ourselves out, slip into shoes, check lights, and lock the front door. Outside, the sun is a bright pink beach ball about to slip out of a paler pink sky.

“I’m glad we’re doing this,” Caleb says, tossing me the keys as we approach the car.

“Why’s that?”

“Been a while since I had the opportunity to watch every guy in your radius scratch their head and wonder what I’ve got that got me you.”

“Right.”

Caleb smiles as he catches me around the waist and twirls me into a clumsy dance. All spinning and no rules, the way my grandfather used to dance with my grandmother. I’d forgotten about that. I wish they’d lived to see me as in love with Caleb as they were with each other.

“Seriously. Hey, I’m not complaining. ‘If Lily Calvert’s dating him, he’s gotta be doing something good.’”

“If you think now’s when I tell you I’m the lucky one,” I answer, “you’re so wrong, mister.”

“Ah, tell me anyway,” he says. “Humor me. Tell me you’re the lucky one.”

I stick out my tongue. It’s an old routine, where Caleb acts insecure about himself and then I’m completely unsympathetic. We haven’t done it in a while, but we reclaim it as easily as a game of catch. Only it makes me wonder how much else about us we’ve left behind this summer.

When I open the car door, the trapped fragrance of verbena is so thick that I’m instantly light-headed. I catch my balance on the door handle. And then Jane flows back to me, repositioning herself just in that moment when she’d been farthest from my thoughts. But now here she is, smack in the center again.

The sun dropped away, her grandparents left her, and the house changed. In the twilight, it looked the way it had when Jane had seen it the last day. Back in ordinary time, with the drapes pulled shut and dust collecting in the corners. It even smelled different, of stale, unused air.

Jane moved through the rooms, frosty with the sun and life gone out of them. Gambler walked with her. His muzzle was white and his collar was frayed. He wanted to leave, too. He was finished with Jane’s perfect day.

“Stay,” she ordered him.

In the living room, she skated her fingers across the dust on Granpa’s rolltop desk. Then she sat in Augusta’s balding velveteen armchair as the twilight crept in. She remembered the last time she had visited Orchard Way. The house had sent her two signs.

On that last day, Jane had come here with her parents to help them sort through Augusta’s bills and papers, and to
clean up before the movers hauled off the furniture to Play It Again, a secondhand shop in New Brunswick. Lily hadn’t been there, of course.

As her father had unlocked the door, a sparrow had flown in from out of nowhere, darting past them to hit a front window with a soft thud.

“Oh!” her mother had gasped. They had all watched as the stunned bird flew off in a lopsided beating of wings.

“It’s gone off to die,” Jane had said. “Its wing is broken.”

“You don’t know that,” her mother had answered. “Maybe it’s gone off to heal.”

But Jane did know.

“Okay, folks,” her father had announced as he pushed open the front door. “This is going to be a long day. We’ll go at our own pace and break for lunch in, say, three hours? I think I’ll start with the mail.”

“Then I’ll start on the kitchen.” Her mother had that firm, real estate agent’s look in her eye. “The fridge is probably a good attack point.”

Jane hadn’t volunteered to start on anything. She’d wandered out to the front hall, where her father was ripping open envelopes and skimming their contents.

“Look at this,” he’d said. “Final notice, final notice, urgent. Last warning. Ma wasn’t in communication with any of these companies anymore. I guess I should have figured. She could hardly concentrate on the hour in front of her after Dad passed. He meant the world to her.”

And I meant the world to them, Jane had thought. But they needed to be together. They didn’t mean to leave me behind.

Her second warning sign had come later, when she’d gone outside to tidy the back porch. She’d picked the crumbling leaves off Augusta’s hanging plants and refilled the hummingbird feeder and then had started sweeping away the dirt. As she’d crouched to shuffle the broom along a corner, a splinter, long as an eyelash and dark as dried blood, lodged deep beneath the arch of her foot. Her scream had sent her mother racing outside.