All That's True (3 page)

My Nana Louise says there is something good in everything. Well, before she lost her memory, that is. But if she could find it, I’m sure she’d insist it’s still true. I wonder how that relates to Alex and come up with a brilliant thought: no one will ever throw up on him again.

Now I’m wondering what good will come from Bridget’s news, which is totally the last straw. She’s going to boarding school and her father says it’s not negotiable. Donna needs more time to herself. She’s having a hard time adjusting to being a stepparent or something equally full of garbage.

“What are you going to do?” I ask her.

We are sitting on my bedroom floor with our legs crossed trying to do yoga. We haven’t been at it long enough to stretch out our limbs and we are all knees jutting into the air like jetties.

She doesn’t answer. She rests her arms on her knees and buries her head.

“Maybe I can go, too,” I add, knowing it’s out of the question. My mother thinks boarding schools make juvenile delinquents out of those that attend them. I’m not sure where she got that idea. Probably from Hollywood; some of those kids are really mixed up and many of them are in boarding schools.

“It has horses,” Bridget offers reaching into her backpack.

She hands me a colorful brochure. It’s on glossy paper and folds out into four sections.

“Cool.”

Westwood Academy is spelled out in large letters. The brochure is impressive. The dorm rooms look like something out of
Southern Living
magazine and the stables show horses with riders in jodhpurs and black velvet hats with chinstraps included.

“But you’re scared of horses,” I point out.

“Yeah,” Bridget says quietly. “My father says that’s the idea; to conquer my fears.”

“So, you want to go?”

Bridget shakes her head vehemently.

“Well, then don’t.”

Bridget looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. Actually, I think I have, or at least what’s left of it is growing very twisted.

“It’s not that easy,” she says.

“Sure it is,” I assure her. “Just tell him the real reason Donna wants you out of the way.”

Bridget stares at me, her blue eyes big as mixing bowls.

My sister and my mother are discussing details concerning Beth’s wedding. Arguing is more like it, but my mother prefers to use the word discuss.

“It’s more civilized,” she insists.

Beth is using her outside voice and is about as civil as a war. She is absolutely convinced that ten bridesmaids are not too many. I’m about to leave, it’s all so boring. Then I pick up her comment that there will really be only nine bridesmaids; I’m to be a junior bridesmaid. If there is anything worse than being in a wedding you have no desire to be in, it’s being dressed up in a kid’s version of the real thing and listed in the program as a junior something-or-other. I have a meltdown.

“Oh, look! Your dress is gorgeous,” my mother croons and holds out a sketch of a pink chiffon concoction with more layers than the wedding cake. It looks like a ballet tutu; not the cake, the dress; well, okay—to be honest—the cake too. The dress will make me look like an overweight baby elephant—it would make an anorexic look like one—it has about three hundred yards of fabric too much.

“I’m not wearing that,” I say. “I’d rather be eaten by pigmies.”

“Listen, you little brat—” Beth starts in.

“I’ll speak with her,” my mother assures her, waving one hand and taking a long sip of wine with the other.

Beth glares at me and leaves the room.

“Now, Andréa, darling,” my mother addresses me with her
aren't we being a bit unreasonable?
tone.

She’s going to guilt-trip me into cooperating and I’ll end up letting her. There’s no way out of this. Beth is marrying Parker Barrett—who I admit is a pretty neat guy, as older guys go—and is determined to make it the fanciest, most talked-about wedding of the season. Don’t ask me why she is marrying him or even getting married at all. She is never happy to see him. All she does is criticize him no matter what he does.

For the moment, my not wanting to wear the dress she has picked out for me is not going to work. None of my objections are going to hold up. If I don’t fold now, my father will eventually be called in. He will make me see things in a new light, which is that I’ll have no allowance until I graduate from college and the keys to my car, which I will never get, will vanish as well.

Why bother to fight it? Sometimes it’s just better to cooperate and be done with it, and pretend everything is just fine, when really your world as you see it is ending. Life has never been fair around here, but then it’s that way for a lot of people. I read in the paper that a woman’s health insurance lapsed when her payment was lost in the mail and she moved and never got the notices that it had lapsed and then her little boy got sick with leukemia and now the insurance won’t pay, so that’s really unfair. It puts wearing a pink elephant tutu in total perspective. It’s rather small in comparison. I tell myself I will think of that at the wedding—the entire day—that poor little boy with the leukemia and no insurance, and I’ll feel better.

My life is falling apart. Ever since I agreed to cooperate for the wedding you would think some things would go right for me—but oh, no—Fate just steps in and says,
Think you are going to be rewarded for being a good daughter and a good sister? Well, think again, you moron, because I am going to totally mess up your life
—and she does.

First off, Bridget called and she is definitely going to boarding school without so much as one simple “I am not!” Her father is going to be working in England on some European investments for his company and he has decided that, for at least one semester, Bridget is to try Westwood Academy and then they’ll talk.

“It’s reasonable,” she says, sounding like my mother. What happened to her being a kid, and unreasonable like the rest of us?

Secondly, Amy is coming over and Jeffrey, Alex’s best friend when he was alive to have a best friend, is coming with her. Amy is about my most favorite person in the world, after Bridget, who used to be after Alex.

Alex met Amy when he first started college and was planning on pinning her as soon as he qualified to have a pin to pin her with, and then he was going to be engaged to her, and then get married, which would make her my sister-in-law, and someday they would make me an aunt. Alex didn’t say all that; he only said the part about pinning—I thought up all the rest on my own, but they are reasonable assumptions.

Amy calls right after dinner and speaks with my father.

“Amy’s coming over with Jeffrey,” he explains to my mother. “Something about they need to speak with us—”

“Is it about Alex’s trial?” I jump in.

“I guess we’ll find out,” my father says and picks up the newspaper. “They’ll be here within the hour.”

I don’t know why the hair on my neck stands up, but if it were
The Twilight Zone
, that weird music would be playing.

Then, I remember something that happened after the funeral and it all starts coming together. Rosa fixed this enormous buffet and all the neighbors sent over dishes so—picture this—the entire dining room table is loaded with the most delicious food you can imagine and people start lining up in droves to make their selections. Others are mingling and whispering how sad it is about Alex, and a few are sharing happy memories of being with him. My parents are in the front hall greeting the new arrivals. I’m sitting in a chair nearest the dining room, next to one of the large columns that divides the sitting room from the dining room, but I have a good view of the food. I’m thinking about fixing myself a plate—there is a large platter of macaroni and cheese that looks particularly appetizing. That’s when I see something out of the corner of my eye that catches me off guard: Amy is standing in line next to Jeffrey—who is not only Alex’s best friend, but has been since forever—and of course goes to Vanderbilt, as does Amy, who followed Alex there.

Amy has on black pumps and a short black dress with three-quarter sleeves and a Peter Pan collar, demure and appropriate. I mean she’s sort of like Alex’s widow and I’m admiring how beautiful she is, which she is—she looks like Jennifer Aniston—and the next thing I know, she is slipping her left hand quietly into Jeffrey’s right hand and then just keeps it there.

Doesn’t that grab you as being very strange? That’s my reaction, but then I tell myself they are probably hanging on to each other to grieve, and let it go.

And now they want to meet with my parents. They have something to discuss. It’s probably about the grieving process, or maybe Alex’s trial.

Sure—and the Pope is really a Methodist.

I’m upstairs on my bed, face down, waiting for Jeffrey and Amy to get here. I’m thinking about when I was five. The unthinkable happened. My mother lost me. She’d taken me to Lenox Mall and while she was preoccupied with a fitting, I wandered off. The story is she went completely hysterical when she realized the dress she’d chosen for an important fundraiser was divine, but in the interim, her daughter had vanished. They had the entire store personnel scouring the mall. Of course, I’d been taught never to talk to strangers, so instead of picking out someone—like a lady with small children or an elderly man with a seeing-eye dog—and asking for help, I went into the first bathroom I could find that had the lady figure on it and hid in the very last stall. I’m not sure how long I was there. I remember chanting the alphabet song sixteen million times. The reason I chose the last stall in the bathroom was simple. Whenever we were shopping, eventually my mother would say we needed to find a restroom and do so quickly. Something about her kidneys not being what they used to be; they were about to explode, which made me wonder what they used to be like and would they please not explode, at least not while I was there to see it.

Mother always used the last stall.

“Less people use this one, Andréa. Always use the last stall.”

I went there knowing eventually she and her kidneys would find me.

Not so. It was a policeman who did. I was curled up in the corner beneath the toilet and this head popped under the stall.

“There you are,” he said, a wide grin on his face. He had large even teeth and generous cheeks with a dimple parked in each one.

“We’ve been looking all over for you,” he exclaimed.

“Where’s my mother?” I whimpered.

“Well, she’s—she’s—” He opened the stall door and reached in to get me.

“I need to wait here for her,” I insisted, and burrowed deeper into the corner. “Her kidneys will be exploding any minute now.”

The officer let out a howl, then reached in and gently pulled me towards him. Once I was free from the stall, he lifted me into his arms.

“Come on, little lady,” he said. “Let’s go find your mama.”

It turned out I was missing all of three hours, which to me was at least three days. The worst part was at the very end, before the nice officer found me. I had this strange agitation going through my heart, like it was going to beat itself out of my chest, but mostly I had this newfound awareness, that life was no longer the safe haven it had been just hours before. Bad things could happen. I realize now I was experiencing a serious case of anxiety. All these years later, it feels just as deadly.

I’m watching the clock, waiting for Amy and Jeffrey to show up at our door. Whatever it is they have to say, I’m pretty sure I won’t want to hear it. My stomach thinks it’s a washing machine. It’s spinning and twisting what’s left of my dinner—meatloaf, mashed potatoes, fried okra and cornbread—into one big soggy heap. Then anxiety walks in and takes over like it owns the place. My heart is beating too fast. I can feel it pulsing even in my ears. I go downstairs and curl up on the sofa in my usual spot, hugging my favorite throw pillow, the burgundy velvet tapestry. I close my eyes. It feels like I’m huddled in that bathroom stall, waiting for my mother to appear and make everything right again. Only this time, she won’t be able to. No one will.

I’m right.
Always trust your instincts,
Ann Landers says. And she’s right, too. Amy and Jeff are a couple. It all happened rather quickly they say. They want us to be the first to know. She’s having a baby. They want to do the right thing—the old-fashioned way—a modest ceremony, no fanfare, only their parents there and perhaps a few friends. Would we like to come? “You see…” she continues, but my ears have lost their ability to hear.

I jump up from the sofa and toss the pillow onto the carpet as hard as I can. I want it to hit the floor like a brick and smash into thousands of pieces, but it’s a pillow, so it just drops where I toss it and plays dead. I run up the front staircase. It twists and turns in spirals and is longer than I ever remember it being. Finally I reach my room. I slam the door and fall onto my bed, face first.

“Oh, Alex,” I’m sobbing. “She’s a little slut—a slut—a slut! Didn’t you know?”

There’s a tap on my door. I answer with dead silence. The door opens. It’s Amy.

“Can I come in?” she whispers.

I sit up and stare at her. She’s gained a bit of weight, not enough that I would have suspected she’d gotten herself knocked up, just enough to take away some of the sharp angles of her face. And her cheeks have a tad more color in them. She has always been beautiful. Now I see what the magazines have been saying all along is true. Pregnant women glow. At least Amy does. That’s it. That’s the last straw. Alex is dead, Alex has been betrayed, my life sucks—and she’s glowing. Life isn’t just unfair. It’s full of crap, too.

Amy walks over to the bed. She sits on the edge and takes my hand.

“Andi—”

She says my name like my father says Beth’s—like it’s a treasure that’s just been discovered. My heart leaps! Why? Why? Why?—I’ve loved you just like a sister, it wants to say. Instead, it breaks in two.

“You cheated on Alex. You said the baby’s due in May, which means you were cheating on Alex in September, it means that while he was alive and loving you—” I’m counting on my fingers one more time to make sure. Yup!

Amy wraps one arm around my shoulder and pulls me close to her.

“Andi, Andi,” she croons like I’m a baby. “You’re wrong, sweet girl. You don’t understand.” She brushes at a loose strand of my hair, soggy with my tears, and tucks it behind one ear. She’s still the same attentive Amy. She smells the same, too—Estée Lauder’s Beautiful. It was Alex’s favorite. Everything about her was Alex’s favorite. How can I hate her? She’s as special as ever, so there’s no way around it. I have to find a way to forgive her. I have to. No matter what she’s done, she’s still part of Alex. It’s so confusing—

“So wrong, sweet girl,” Amy repeats. She takes hold of my shoulders and leans back and stares at me straight on. “Don’t you know what this means?” she asks.

I nod my head that I certainly do!

“It means—the baby is Alex’s, you silly goose. That’s what we came to tell you,” she says, and beams like she’s part of the sun.

“And Jeff is going to stand by me. And we’re always going to have a part of Alex with us.”

If my face were in a cartoon, my eyes would be triple their normal size.
Jeff is going to stand by me
. Sort of like what brothers were told to do in the Bible. I’ve died. I’ve died and gone to heaven. I sit on my bed like I’ve been hit with a stun gun. I can hardly believe it. Just when I think I have everything figured out, and when I’ve had about all that I can take, life pulls a fast one on me. Just up and throws me another curve. Stands right up in my face and says,
So, Andi, how about this?
And I brace myself for another bad hit—and what do you know?—it hands me a rainbow.