Amandine (12 page)

“But if that first baby had been a girl, then what would my name have been?”

“I don’t know. I never had a second-favorite girl name,” my mother answered, adding, “and I never had a second-favorite girl. You are our only one. Now good night, Delia.”

I was glad to hear that, and so I don’t know why exactly my imagination invented a secret brother, but from that night forward, he was always there. A big brother with my mother’s grace and my father’s charm. He became everything I wished I could be.

In real life, the sick twin got well, and Lexi had two loud and healthy little sisters living in her house. She always said I was luckier being an only child than an oldest, but none of her reasons convinced me. I think she was only trying to make me feel better.

Mrs. Gogglio clapped her hands when I agreed. The car almost swerved out of its lane.

“Wonderful!” she said, gripping the steering wheel again. “Now then, will you come in with me on Sunday to meet Melvin? He’s the manager in charge of volunteering.”

“What makes you think I’d make a good volunteer?” I asked. I felt reluctant, even unhappy that she had sprung this on me. What did I have in common with a bunch of old people? What did I know about taking care of them?

“You’re a five-star listener, for one,” she replied.

“But if I’m no good at it, Mrs. Gogglio, then I don’t want to keep going.”

“And I wouldn’t press it on you. All I’m asking for is an honest try. You can give that, can’t you?

I nodded yes.

“If it works out, I’ll readjust my own schedule so I work Sundays and take off Mondays. That means you’ll ride the bus to school on Mondays. Think you can handle the bus, just for a day?”

I nodded again. “Really, though, why do you want me to do this so bad?”

“Because I think you’d have a talent for it,” she. answered firmly.

Spending my Sundays at Sunrise Assisted did not seem too thrilling, but it wasn’t as if I had anything else to do. I think Mrs. Gogglio realized that, as well. The school week had become a stack of days to get through, and the weekend a tense anticipation of the next stack about to be served. At home, the strain and silence were almost unbearable.

By the next Sunday, I found myself being introduced to Melvin and touring the halls and grounds of Sunrise Assisted. In my regular blue jeans paired with an issued white smock and an identification badge—Delilah Blaine—I felt unfamiliar to myself.

“They need you,” said Melvin, when I spoke up a few of my doubts. “It’s a lonely business, getting old. People’ll be glad enough that you showed up.”

My first scheduled working Sunday, I felt like the new girl all over again, only here it didn’t seem that I had much to prove. My duties were light and it was attitude, Mrs. Gogglio said, that was most important. At Sunrise Assisted, I had to be efficient and helpful, to put aside whatever was happening at school and home. As Delilah Blaine, I changed bedding, set up tables for lunches and games, collected stray golf and tennis balls, and held up the listening end on the slow unraveling spools of other people’s lives. In the beginning, I felt as if I was playing a role. In my baggy smock and false identification badge, I eased into my character, “Delilah,” who was cheerful and unfazed. I learned how to deal with Mrs. Halliday, who was cranky in the morning, and Mr. Waters, who liked to sneak up to the roof. I understood how Ms. Gould liked her egg salad with chopped pickles, and that while Mrs. Lee loved outdoor walks, she also tired easily. I picked up some of Mrs. Gogglio’s habits, too, the way she respectfully called her patients ma’am or mister, and some of her briskly friendly expressions. “Well, aren’t you a sport!” Or, “Now who’s giving me uphill on this lovely day?”

Eventually, I knew everyone’s names and most of their histories.

“See? It’s exactly like I said. You’ve got a real talent for people management, for caring and listening,” said Mrs. Gogglio.

“Huh.” I didn’t believe her. I’d never had a talent for anything.

“It’s true,” she insisted. “People trust you with their stories, Delilah, and you’re good at keeping the peace. It’s a real nice part of your character.”

That made me the exact opposite of Amandine, if my “talent,” as Mrs. Gogglio called it, was actually part of my character. Amandine’s talent was so different from her character that it seemed to pull her in an opposite direction. And I wondered if that was why Amandine didn’t quite work as a whole person.

So maybe I was luckier than Amandine. Maybe I got something that she didn’t.

It was a weird thing to think about.

“You hardly talk to me anymore,” I said to my mother, staring across the table at her one night during dinner. It had been nearly three weeks since the meeting with Mr. Serra. When I wasn’t under Mrs. Gogglio’s wing or sleepwalking through school, I was left to my own devices, to try to make peace and sense inside a house that seemed permanently shadowed by Amandine’s lie.

“That’s not true,” she said.

“Or to Dad, either. “You’re so quiet all the time.”

“I have a lot to think about, Delia.” Now my mother clawed in her purse for her cell phone, which was rarely out of her reach. “I just remembered, I have to call work.” She stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll only be a minute.”

She disappeared into the den, and I looked down at my plate. I knew that even if I ate everything on it and went back for seconds, I would not get rid of my hunger. In this house, I would not get rid of the feeling of wanting more, not at dinner nor any other time.

That night, I woke to quiet voices. I slipped out of bed and crept halfway down the stairs. In the living room, I could hear my parents talking. I pulled my nightshirt over my cold knees and sat still, listening. In the past month, I had perfected the art of eavesdropping.

Their conversation was heavy with pauses, as if they had been at it awhile. Dad’s voice was rough, thirsty-sounding. “Because we deserve to be happy, Eva. I can’t drag myself through one more day.”

“You have to stop—”

“Each day, the same. We’ve got to get away from here.”

“There’s nothing—”

“I walk into town and I imagine that a thousand pairs of eyes are staring at me. Accusing me.”

A long pause. “Nobody’s staring,” my mother finally insisted. “A horrible little child, a child left alone with too much imagination. She’s ill, she needs help. People recognize that.”

For a moment, I thought that Mom was talking about me. My hand gripped the banister. The silence dragged.

“Such a strange, strange person for Delia to befriend,” my father remarked at length.

“Oh, but Delia isn’t the kind of girl who …”

But I had already raced on silent feet back up the stairs to my room. I couldn’t bear to listen to the kind of girl I wasn’t.

The power of one lie. It probably took a few seconds to tell, the amount of time it takes an earthquake to destroy a village. Now we were living in rubble.

Alone in my room, and again my anger had nowhere to go. I pushed back the covers and got out of bed, and tied myself firm into my robe. I made my feet heavy on the stairs, so that they knew I was coming.

My parents were tucked into shadows. Their faces reminded me of the pale, scared woodcut animals from Amandine’s father’s picket fence sculpture.

“If you want my opinion, I think we should leave Alford,” I said. “I think we should go somewhere else. There’s nothing for us here. There never was.”

Then I turned around and marched upstairs.
“If
you want my opinion,” I called down to them, “which I think you
should
want, by the way.”

Summer had arrived. Green, soft, smelling of tanning oil and grilled hot dogs. Lunchtime breezes rolled potato chip and straw wrappers like tumbleweeds across the lawn. I hadn’t noticed spring, and that first perfect day took me by surprise. It was as if time had stopped for me somewhere in the middle of March, weeks frozen in chunks of gray ice. Now time had dissolved into a puddle behind me, and I was standing alone in the shadowless June sun.

I hardly saw Amandine. She had begun to hang out with a guy, Wyatt Roberts, a skinny sophomore who I thought I’d heard was in a band or had a brother in a band. Anyway, he was always wearing headphones and T-shirts of music groups, and soon enough Amandine had absorbed something of him into herself, and she began arriving at school wearing her own set of labeled shirts and rebel attitude.

Mary and I were friendly but not friends. Friends were a luxury, I realized, and perhaps meant only for certain times in life. The job at Sunrise Assisted seemed to fit me best for now. In its own way, it gave me companionship, as well as a purpose and an identity. I was popular there, both with the residents and the staff. Popular for the first time in my life. One step at a time, Delilah Blaine was helping me come closer to the Delia Blaine I wanted to be, and I was learning how to be friends with myself.

I had Mrs. Gogglio, too. Not only did she keep driving me to and from school, but our Sundays had evolved into a routine loop of work and lunch and maybe a little bit of shopping, afterward. When Odie MacKnight died, Mrs. Gogglio and I drove to his funeral, then went to a tag sale. I bought a letter opener for a dollar. The letter opener looked like something I might once have taken from someone else. These days, though, I didn’t feel so much need to pull from what other people had. It was hard enough work to concentrate on myself.

Final exams came and went and then ninth grade was over, that journey finished forever. By then, my parents had put the house on the market and had a buyer.

“I hope you’ll pick up the phone every now and again,” said Mrs. Gogglio. We were sitting in patio chairs on her front porch, listening to the chimes clinking in the afternoon breeze. “Remember yourself to an old lady.”

“You know I will. When I get my driver’s license, I’ll even come visit,” I told her. “And I’ll drive you around for a change. Only on account of
coincidence,
though.”

She laughed. “I’ll miss you, Delilah.” “Me too. But besides you, it wasn’t that great here,” I confessed. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t all that happy.”

She flicked her hand through the air. “Ah, nobody learns anything from being happy,” she said.

I waited until the last week of school, when everything was passed in and packed up and over before I spoke again to Amandine. By then, I had assembled the things I most wanted to say.

She was sitting outside on one of the redwood picnic benches that had been dragged out recently in honor of the weather and of the newly lazy senior class. She was wearing thick black sunglasses and a white dress thin as paper. Her body was too visible beneath it; I could even see the flower pattern on her underwear.

“Heard you’re moving,” she said brightly when she saw me approach. “Us, too. I’m so psyched. you know, this place is total backwater.” She had a new voice; sleepy with a Californian slur on her
o
and
u.
She sounded like Wyatt. Of course.

“I wanted to come by to tell you something,” I said.

“Shoot.”

I folded my arms over my chest and took a deep breath. “I wanted to tell you that I feel sorry for you, Amandine.”

She bristled visibly, and made a show of looking me up and down. “That’s a good one. I feel sorry for
you,
more like. You’re, like, one of the total most boring people I ever met, you’re not even smart at any—”

“Because, the thing is, you’ve got so much talent, you’ve got everything. You’re an artist and an actress and a ballet dancer. You really are all those things. Those aren’t lies.” She shifted, listening. “But you never decided to use any of what’s so great about you. And I was wondering why.”

“Use. What do you mean,
use?”
she asked. Genuinely curious. She lifted her sunglasses and perched them on her head. Her eyebrows, usually penciled or feathered in the lines of this or that movie star, were plucked and bare. Her face looked bald, and I felt as if I were catching her backstage, the actress between acts.

“Like, why didn’t you audition for the school play?” I asked. “Or do design for the school yearbook? Lots of times, you didn’t even show up for art class. But you could have had your own exhibit or performed your own dance assembly. You’re not shy. You’d have been amazing doing any of that stuff. “You could have done anything.”

She stared at me. Flat gray eyes that absorbed everything and leaked nothing,

“And what would be the point of that?” she asked.

“Well, so other people could
see.”

“But they do see,” she corrected. “Other people are always watching me, Delia. I’ve always got an audience, no matter what I do.” She had given me an answer, sort of. It was the last thing Amandine ever said to me, and the only thing she ever said to me that might have been true.

In July, we moved to Boston.

We might even have gone back to the City, except that the Elroy-Bells had claimed it, although I heard that Amandine’s parents had parted, officially, and had moved into different apartments in separate directions.

My parents are happy in Boston, and things are easier for all of us here, I think, because cities are good for groups. We are less a family than we are a threesome, venturing out to museums and dinners and plays. The city’s impersonality and distractions create the right atmosphere for us to get along better, though. I think it has the right aesthetic.

I guess that has been some unexpected luck. Or at least, it’s a start.

Amandine’s apology arrived sometime in early September, before the beginning of the new school year. Handwritten for extra sincerity. It was a nice enough letter, but you could feel the other pairs of eyes—Roxanne’s, and probably some concerned psychiatrist’s—staring at the paper as Amandine copied the words neatly from her draft.

She had acted without thinking. She was ashamed. She was regretful. She was very, very sorry.

Well, that was what she wrote.

It did not sound like Amandine, this letter. It sounded like a character that she was playing. Even the handwriting was different, with little garnishes upward so that all her words seemed to be carried over choppy waves. I read it and reread it and discarded it. It made my parents feel better, though.