Five Minutes More (4 page)

One of my mother's hands snaps up, and for a second I expect her to get up and slap Claire. Then the hand drops into her lap, the fingers pulled into a fist. I press the heel of my own hand over my mouth.

“You don't have a clue what was going on here. You didn't even know your father.” My mother's voice is tight with anger. “Where the hell were you, Claire? Acting like a spoiled child because Mommy and Daddy got divorced. You wouldn't come to see him or spend any time with us. Do you know how
much you hurt him? And he never stopped trying with you. You weren't much of a daughter, Claire.”

Mom lets out a breath. “My husband's things stay in my husband's home until I know what he wants me to do with them. Good night, Claire.” She puts her head back against the sofa and closes her eyes.

Claire gets up, and in a minute I hear the flap of her slippers going upstairs.

I rub my eyes with the back of my hand and swallow the tears before they can get away. It wouldn't be this way if my dad were here. The last time he came home, it was from Alaska. We had grilled cheese sandwiches in the middle of the night, and my dad told us all about the bears he'd gone to photograph. My mom said, “There's school tomorrow.”

Dad swirled her around the room. “And there's life right now.” He kissed the side of her neck under her ear. “I missed you both so much!”

She had to smile. He made everyone smile. Even Claire. It wouldn't be like this if he were here.

Mom turns off the lamp and sits there in the dark. I know I should go to her, but I don't. I can't. I creep carefully back up the stairs.

Standing in the dark in the upstairs hallway, I hear it. Someone crying.
Claire
crying?

I don't know what to do. I stand there in the dark in the middle of the hallway for what seems like a long time. Then I go back to my own room and close the door.

The morning is cloudy and dull. I drink two glasses of orange juice and manage to get half a blueberry muffin down. I wonder who made the muffins. They're good. Or they would be if I cared how things taste.

I'm just finishing when Mom comes into the kitchen. The dark circles under her eyes look like bruises.

“Morning,” she says. She opens the freezer door and roots around, pulling out a brick of coffee. I watch her start the coffeemaker, but I don't say anything. She sits across from me, puts a muffin on her plate and then ignores it.

“I'm going out to rake leaves,” I tell her. I know I'm a coward, leaving her to deal with Claire alone after last night.

“You don't have to do that, D'Arcy. I thought I'd hire someone.”

“I can do it. I want to. Really.” I'm chicken.

She opens her mouth and then closes it with a sigh. “All right. Whatever you want.”

“Anything you need before I go out?”

She shakes her head.

I get my jacket and look in the closet for a pair of gloves. As I pass the table again, something makes me put my hand on Mom's shoulder for a moment. I hear a catch in her throat as she takes a breath.

“Sure you don't need anything?” I ask as I push by.

Her eyes are shiny. “I'm just fine,” she says. “Go on.”

Two big bags of leaves later, I see Claire coming across the grass toward me, hands jammed into the pockets of her trench coat. This is my sister. This is the only other person who is connected to my dad in the same way that I am. But I don't feel connected to her.

“Hi,” Claire says as she reaches me.

“Hi.” I keep on raking. The teeth of the rake make a metallic swish as they scrape the ground.

“I just came to tell you that I'm ready to leave.”

“Have a good trip.” I'm watching her sideways, studying her face. Are her eyes puffy?

Do it
, the voice in my head insists. The words fall out of my mouth before I have any more time to think about them. “I think it was an accident.”

Claire closes her eyes for a moment. “It wasn't.”

“You don't know that,” I say.

“I know you don't want to believe it, but he killed himself, D'Arcy. He didn't want to be”—her jaw moves like she's testing the feel of some word before she says it—”here anymore.”

“No,” I say, staring down at the ground. I've raked the same piece of grass so much there aren't any leaves left. The rake is flinging up bits of dirt.

“Pretending isn't going to change it.”

I stop, lean on the rake and look at her full on. “I'm not pretending. You don't know that he...” I can't get the words to come out of my mouth. I try again. “You don't know that he didn't have an accident. Nobody knows. The police aren't done. Why don't you just believe in him, Claire?”

She looks out across the yard, at the trees, the rock wall, the empty flowerbeds. Finally she looks back at me. “I'm sorry,” she says, so quietly I'm not quite sure she spoke.

We stand there for two breaths.

“I better get going then.” We both hesitate, eyeing the couple of feet between us as though it were a trench filled with crocodiles. For a moment it feels as though we're moving toward each other too slowly even for it to be seen. Then the moment passes. I wrap both hands around the rake handle.

“Good-bye, Claire,” I say.

“Good-bye.”

She turns and heads back across the lawn. I remember the sound of her crying.
Go after her
, the voice in my head says.
At least give her a hug. She's your sister.
I take one step. And then I remember all the things she said to my mother
last night. If there's any part of my father in her, I can't find it. I can't do it. I can't hug Claire. I don't know which bothers me more, hugging Claire or finding out whether she'd hug me back.

The house is quiet. Now and then I hear a car pass on the street. Not very often though. It's Saturday, almost Sunday.

I'm lying in bed on my stomach, the pillows wedged under my shoulders so I can see my clock. I watch the little red bars change: 55...56...57...58...I'm waiting for the week to be over.

I want my life to be normal again. I want the dead empty place inside me to disappear.

I want my dad.

“You should go back to school,” Mom says. She's wearing the plaid robe and a pair of my dad's wool socks instead of slippers.

“You aren't going back to work,” I counter. We're at the kitchen table, Mom hanging over a cup of coffee, me with a bowl of half-eaten, soggy cereal in front of me. I'm not sure how it suddenly got to be Monday morning, but it is.

“I have some things to take care of.”

“I'll help.”

She shakes her head. “I don't want you to miss any more time. Exams aren't that far away.”

The phone rings. For a second I freeze. It's not even seven o'clock. My heart is pounding in my ears. Then I remember. How bad could it be? The worst has already happened.

I reach for the phone. Am I ever going to stop jumping when it rings this early in the morning? “Hello?.”

“Hey. It's just me.”

Brendan. I breathe again. “Hi.” I mouth his name at Mom.

“I just called to see if you're okay and if you're going to school.”

“I don't know. Maybe. I mean about the school part.”

“I could skip practice and drive you.” Brendan is on the basketball team.

“No. I'm not sure yet. Go.”

“If you need me to—”

“I'm fine. Go.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” I sound mad, I realize. I don't mean to.

“Okay. Am I going to see you tonight?”

I toss a quick glance at my mom. There are some things I need to do. “Maybe. I'll call you.”

“Are you sure you're all right?”

Why is he being like this? “Yes. My cereal's getting soggy though.”

“Sorry. I'll talk to you later.”

I hang up.

Mom looks at me. “D'Arcy. Go to school. There's nothing you can do here.”

Suddenly I want to get out. “All right,” I say.

I get dressed, brush my teeth, throw my books into my backpack. It doesn't take very long.

“I don't know if I'll be here when you get home,” Mom says. “But I shouldn't be too late.”

“Okay.”

“Then I'll see you whenever.”

“Okay.” I feel like I'm six years old and it's the first day of school. My breakfast sloshes around in my stomach. I make myself pull on my jacket and go out the door.

I walk quickly, my breath hanging for a moment in front of my face and then thinning into nothing in the cold morning air. I like walking. It's good for thinking. Or for not thinking.

The morning smells like car exhaust. Dad wanted to move out of the city, where it was cleaner. He always said that breathing this air was going to be the death of us all.

Not now. Not all of us.

I take the bottom part of the hill in long strides and turn down Duke Street toward the school. The sun's high and bright but it has no warmth. The school's just in front of me, past the next corner, when my feet suddenly stop.

I look across at the old stone building with the heavy wooden doors and old drafty windows. It feels like a million years since I was last inside.

I put out my hand and touch the trunk of a tree. They're all along the street. They're older than the school. I rub my hand back and forth on the scratchy bark, scraping my skin.

How can I do it? How can I go in there and see people and talk to them? What if, somehow, people know? They're going to say stupid things, wrong things. I don't know what to say back.

There's a sour lump at the back of my throat that I can't swallow down. Okay, five minutes. I'll try it for five minutes but that's it.

I head down the sidewalk toward the main doors just like everyone else. I just want it to be normal. Can't one part of my life be normal again?

Seth Thomas stops me at the stairs. He's the peer tutor in my advanced math class. Peer tutor is what they do with kids who are smarter than the teachers. He's my age and he's doing college-level calculus.

“D'Arcy, I heard about your dad. I'm sorry,” Seth says. He doesn't wait for me to say anything, doesn't seem to expect me to. He hands me a bunch of papers. “These are all the notes of what you missed, and you don't have to worry about the assignment.”

I nod.

Seth swings his leather pack onto one shoulder and shoves his hair out of his face. “That's my e-mail on the top page. In case...you know, you have any problems.”

“Umm, thanks,” I say.

“No problem,” he says and disappears down the stairs.

I hold the pages tightly. This I can figure out. There's
only one answer to these problems, and the answers always make sense.

Marissa is leaning on my locker in jeans and her suede jacket with the fringe. She has all these great clothes because her mother is a buyer for Willington's department store—not just the store here, but all the stores in this part of the country. And she gets to travel with her mom a lot. She's been to New York twice, and last year she went to Paris for five days.

“Hi,” she says. “I wasn't sure you'd be here today.”

“I didn't think
you
would,” I say as I work the combination of my lock. Marissa has been out of school for almost two weeks with some weird flu.

“I got sick of being home. After
The Young and the Restless
, there's not much to do.” She frowns. I can feel her studying my face while I stow my jacket and search for books. “What about you? You okay?”

Here it comes. “I'm all right.”

“I really wanted to come to the funeral, but I had this freaky cough. I sounded like a seal.”

“It's okay, about the funeral,” I say. “I got your note.”

Marissa stares down at her feet. “I...uh...want you to know that I'm sorry. I really liked your dad. He was fun. Not like my dad.” She looks up at me and makes a face. “Do this. Don't do that. Mostly don't do that. It's all my dad knows how to say.”