You Have Seven Messages (10 page)

I get off the bed and jump up and down a little. How easy was that? Even though I’m totally impressed, I try to tone it down and act normal. “Good thinking.”

“I watch too many detective shows,” he says.

The address is near the Laugh Lounge, and this time Oliver’s driver takes us there. It’s clear that the two of them have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

“Another secret?” the driver asks.

“You could say that,” Oliver says.

As we race past the fancy doctors’ offices on Park Avenue, I’m suddenly grateful that all this is happening, because it clearly has brought us closer. I try to imagine what it will feel like when he finally kisses me. Or maybe I will kiss him. Either way, I can tell it’s coming, like someone standing behind me whose presence I can sense without looking back. I just have to turn at the right time.

Cole’s apartment building is brand-new, sandwiched between two really old one-story brick buildings. It’s a classic sign of gentrification, the new world overtaking the old. Yuppies replacing immigrants, getting elbow room by pushing out the locals. We stand outside and look up at the towering glass, then at each other.

“What now?” I ask.

Just then, a man with large black sunglasses and a trench coat pushes number twelve, Cole’s apartment. Without saying a word, he gets buzzed in. I realize there’s a security camera, so I grab Oliver and scoot us off to one side. A few minutes later the man comes back out empty-handed. We walk to the deli and get Cokes, then come back and see another person buzz, this time a girl, maybe eighteen, in a tracksuit. There is a man selling hats on the curb, and we pretend we’re customers. Oliver puts a few on my head and smiles his approval. I almost forget that we are on a stakeout.

We move to the stairs across the street, which are flanked by a magnolia tree and some garbage bins. I decide to ask him about his dad.

He looks at me like,
Are we really getting into this?
I nod.

“He lives in Easthampton,” he says, as if Easthampton is in Russia. His face goes tight and blank. I don’t pry further. A toddler goes by carrying a mask and a snorkel.

“Oh, I just realized, we should go swimming sometime at Janine’s building, there’s this crazy pool.”

Oliver’s face goes very still, and he seems to be having a seizure of some kind. I get a little scared and ask him what’s wrong.

“I don’t swim,” he says. He puts down his Coke carefully on the stoop.

“Oh.” I’m not sure if I know him well enough to push further, but as if sensing my thoughts, he begins to explain, in a voice that I have to move a little closer to hear.

“My father … well, he’s sort of like one of those annoying life-coach people. He feels like he has to … exercise control over everyone.”

I watch his face and see a vulnerability I’ve never seen, like he might just crumble and start to cry like a baby. Instead, he stares at me hard, daring himself not to.

“I was around five, I think, maybe six. It was a pool party at a country club in Greenwich. I was the one geeky kid not swimming. And my father told me I had to get in the water. He had this look, like Harrison Ford or something. Like there was no way I was going to get out of it. So he ended up basically throwing me into the pool.”

I laugh a little and then totally regret it. It’s obvious he hasn’t told anyone this before. I touch his shoulder in a gesture of apology.

“All I remember is, well, fearing for my life.” Now he laughs, but it is one of those laughs that should’ve been a cry, or something else. “I just sunk down, until this lifeguard girl got me up onto the stairs. I thought I was going to die.” He makes the non-laugh sound again. “My dad stormed off and I just sat there, coughing up water while the lifeguard held me in a tight embrace.”

I can feel my eyes watering and Oliver smiles. A genuine smile, like maybe he’s happy to have spoken about it.

“The weird thing is, I remember feeling so comforted, so safe in the arms of a complete stranger, this lifeguard. I wanted to go home with her, maybe have a different life.”

I can’t think of anything to say except “Wow,” which makes me sound like a surfer. I sip the last of my Coke, which is now warm.

“When I got home after, there was a cello on my bed. My mother had bought it for me without telling my father. She had heard about what happened.”

The sky is getting darker and it starts to mist a little. I don’t think about getting wet, or my clothes, or my hair frizzing out. I just want to stay right where I am.

“Ever since then, music was the only thing I could escape into. Sometimes, when I see people out in the world with sad, hard expressions, I just want to reach out and put headphones on them, you know?”

I have felt the exact same way, and feel the urge to yell,
Yes!
But instead I simply smile and nod. We sit for a while just watching people walk by. It starts to rain a little more. He looks up at the sky.

“What’s your
Singin’ in the Rain
?”

I give him a puzzled look and he explains that his grandmother on his mother’s side was his favorite person. She was a dancer and had three husbands. When she was dying, Oliver read to her for the last few weeks of her life. He didn’t know what the book meant but tried his best to read it well, like he knew the story and was telling it off the top of his head. It’s wonderful to see his eyes light up talking about her, but I still don’t understand what it has to do with
Singin’ in the Rain
.

“It was her favorite movie, and she said everyone had one, the movie that made you look at life differently.”

Immediately, the answer comes to me. “
Witness
.”

He smiles. “Harrison Ford.”

“Yes. Did you know he got his first movie part at age thirty-one?”

“That’s a lot of tables to wait on. Why
Witness
?”

“It’s definitely dark, but it’s also beautifully shot. And I have this obsession with the Amish. They are from another world. I went on a shoot with my father in Pennsylvania and met a whole family of them. I gave this girl my old iPod and she had to hide it from her parents.”

“Don’t tell me you milked the cows.”

“Ew, no!”

After a few more minutes, Cole comes out, lights a cigarette, and hops down the stairs. My mother hated cigarettes. One time she found some in my jacket and got really mad. They were Janine’s but I didn’t bother telling her that, as it seemed like such an obvious lie. She never would have stood for it with Cole. Maybe he recently took them up. He looks older than he does in the picture, and he seems a little more crouched, less confident.

Oliver nudges me and we whisper, even though he’s across the street.

“I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to say to him.”

“Well,” Oliver says, “if you want to get to the bottom of what happened to your mother, I would advise befriending him first.”

I start to get up just as Cole goes back inside. I run to
the curb but a stretch limo goes by, and by the time it passes Cole has shut the door.

I return to Oliver and sit down, defeated. He looks at me and says, “You’re cute when you’re mad.”

The edges of our thighs touch, and I am hyperaware of it, as if there is a field of electric heat between us.

Nothing happens for a long time, except the two of us being together. So often people talk to fill the space between them, even if it’s about the weather or simply to hear their own voices echo into the world. Oliver and I just sit in silence, observing the city life together, and it feels right.

“I guess this stakeout came up short,” he says. The wind picks up and for a minute everything looks shadowed. With hardly any warning, thunder rips through the sky, giving way to a strong, diagonal rain. The building has only a tiny canopy so we are forced to stand really close. I have to remind myself that I’m not in one of my father’s movies. We are laughing at the rain, even though it’s not really funny. After our laughter settles, he reaches out and cups my chin again, and I know it’s going to happen. Those lips that were alive only in my thoughts are now very alive in real life, closing in, slowly, until they reach mine and we both close our eyes.

Now that Oliver has kissed me, I am untouchable. At school I look the Rachels right in the eye and don’t flinch. I cannot tell you how good this feels. How silly of me to even care about being friends with them. Janine and I sit down at our table across from the Rachels, who are eating yogurt and those little plastic cups filled with mandarin orange slices. We are having chicken tenders. When my mother died, the only thing that made me feel alive was eating. People assumed I wouldn’t have an appetite, but I actually ate a lot. It was almost like my body became depleted by the loss and I had to eat more than normal to replenish it. So many people use food as a substitute for unfulfilled longing, but for me it was a necessity. Every girl at this table will probably stress about food and weight when we’re older, but why do it now?
Our metabolism is crazy high, most of us are like Energizer Bunnies, so what’s the point in getting all weird about food? The Rachels barely even finish their yogurt.

Since I know Janine has experience with boys, I decide to get some advice from her after lunch as we wait for assembly.

“Why do you ask? You still crushing on that neighbor of yours?”

“Yes. We kissed yesterday! He’s supercute.”

“Good for you, girl. Just stay away from hot dogs.”

I smile. That’s one of the cool things about Janine. She’s smart enough to know that she made a mistake and should just move on. Being able to laugh at yourself is half the battle. Surprisingly, she tells me to take it slow with Oliver, make sure it’s “organic.”

There are girls at my school who wear these silly bracelets and preach about abstinence. There’s something about them that creeps me out. Even our Health Ed teacher tells us that it’s our own choice, that whatever we choose to do sexually, we just have to make sure we’re safe and responsible. Aside from them, most everyone has experimented in my grade. I know I’m not superadvanced when it comes to the subject, but I’m not a total prude or anything. I just got sidetracked and kind of gypped out of last year because of Mom dying.

The assembly starts. It’s a group of African dancers and percussionists. Their costumes are bright and beautiful, and their movements are raw and uninhibited. This does
nothing to distract me from the subject of Oliver. He has such a gentle way about him. He makes all this affair-and-message business somehow worthwhile. I need to find out more about the night Mom died, and Cole is the missing link. I don’t know what I’m going to find, but I’m so glad Oliver will be there with me.

The dancers join in a circle holding hands, then release them up into the air, creating what looks like a blooming flower. I realize that Mom is someone I would have talked to about Oliver. She wasn’t really a typical mom. She was more like a friend. She never imposed her morals on me; she just encouraged me to create my own ways of thinking and dealing with things. Talking with her always made me feel better, no matter the subject. We would fight, of course, but not that often. Most of the time she was like a sounding board, and though Janine is not a bad substitute, I feel my mother’s absence sharply once again. I sigh discreetly.
Will this feeling ever go away?

On the way home from school I stop by her studio. The cleaning woman is there again; she motions toward her supplies but I say, “No,
gracias
.”

When I get inside, I open her laptop and see the picture again. I was wearing a purple sweatshirt that I don’t even remember owning. I think it was borrowed. We rented a house every year in Nantucket, and sometimes the other families would leave stuff behind that would become ours. I wonder where the owner of that sweatshirt is now.

I close my eyes and tell myself to just do it. I open up
the file that says “Luna,” and there’s a date in the corner, about a month before she died. It’s written in diary format. There are only three entries. I start to read the first one:

My mother was pretty open with me, but how much do we really see of the people we love? The fact that she wrote this, to me but in private, is strange—almost like she knew she was going to die.

I pause and look out at the darkening sky, thinking of my dad, whose nurturing I could have used later in my life, when his attention was always somewhere else. When I turned four my mother threw me a birthday party, and it was mostly adults. She was very pregnant with Tile, and my father couldn’t come for some reason or another. I know I was super young but I remember being sad, because I never related to my “friends” at the time. When you’re four, kids just come to your birthday party for the
food, and the parents pick out all the presents anyway. My mother seemed almost
happy
that my father couldn’t make it. She was in her last trimester and drinking a glass of champagne. I blew out the candles on the cake and felt empty inside.

I wonder if she’s talking about the same thing I’m experiencing with Oliver. There’s a feeling I get with him that almost hurts, a small ache in the bottom of my stomach, but at the same time I crave it. Maybe that’s what the cutters are about, or Janine’s dad, who she once caught getting whipped by a woman who looked like Halle Berry in
Batman
. I never understood the appeal of pain, but now I’m starting to.