Kissing in America (25 page)

I
felt better after our talk, for an hour or so—Lulu and I ordered room service, and I managed to eat a little despite the churning in my stomach—but then the dark feelings returned and I went back under the covers and fell asleep. The next morning, Lulu opened the curtains and said my wallowing period was over.

She took the bedspread off. “I can't stand to see you so paralyzed that you can't get out of bed.”

Stomach bug life.

“Lord knows I wallow too. Usually with Ben and Jerry.” She sat down beside me and smoothed out the blanket. “When I got divorced, I hid under the covers for two weeks. I hid even longer when I lost the baby.” She hesitated, and hugged her elbows.

She was silent for a while. Then she said, “You can use it, you know. The grief. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but your dad's death has given you a different way of seeing things—it's not all stomach bugs.” She rested one hand on her belly, as if steadying a globe. “Sometimes, on good days,
I treasure things. Sitting here now, I know how lucky I am.”

She looked distant and gloomy for a moment. “It's a struggle every day. It's not like I wake up feeling instantly hopeful. It's millions of moments of trying. Looking forward.”

Outside, in the parking lot, a construction crane groaned and trucks wheezed alongside the sounds of the sea. I told her how I always felt like I was two different people—the happy-in-love romantic with my books and movies, and the anxious, stomach bug girl. The girl I was today and would probably be forever, now. How I was afraid the stomach bug girl had taken over and nothing else was left.

“It's okay to have stomach bug days. Or ‘personal health days,' as we call them at my age. Days when you have to wallow, and let yourself feel all those bad feelings. But then you have to get yourself out of it. Whether it's reading romances, or traveling, or writing—”

“I always thought my mom would help me more. She could help me get through it.”

“She's done the best she could. Moms aren't the only ones who mother, you know. Friends mother. Fathers mother. We mother ourselves.”

I thought of my dad's trays of tea and the hot water bottle he used to bring me on cold nights. “My dad was kind of a great mom, actually.”

“He mothered your mom, too. She lost that also, when she lost him. It hit her so hard not to have that comfort from him anymore.”

I'd never really thought about her loss before, that she'd lost so many of the same things I had.

“Your dad was such a joyful person—you know, you can honor him by doing the things you love, the things he showed you how to love—great food. A cup of tea. Poetry. Writing, reading books, cooking, enjoying a beautiful place. A beautiful view.”

Her eyes shifted to the window. “Your dad would understand what you're going through because he loved you. Loves you, from wherever he is.”

I thought of Will's little brother with his telescope, looking down on their family. I thought of my dad, looking at us from the ocean. My body felt heavy, flooded with sadness.

Lulu twisted her silver ring. “Love is never easy or guaranteed. Real love is a leap, you know. As you get older, you learn how hard it is, how hard everything is, how we never know if there's any ground beneath our feet, or if we'll be hurt or heartbroken. But we leap anyway. You have to take that leap.”

I
still wallowed for the rest of the morning. I surfed from channel to channel, from soap operas to old westerns, but they made me feel worse. (All those cowboys just wanted to be web designers, anyway.)

That afternoon, though, I picked up the old, nearly empty diary Janet had given me, the diary my father had given to my grandmother. I glanced at the quick letter I'd written to my dad on the bus. I'd broken the seal of the journal, the blank page. I'd been afraid to write more since then because I hadn't wanted the worst feelings and memories to come out. But they'd come out anyway, flooded into my brain on their own. I felt so low now—how much lower could I go?

I opened the diary to the next page. I wrote two words.
Dear Daddy
again. I wrote a few more lines—another letter to him—well, not exactly a letter. A poem-letter. Then another. And another. I told him about the word
remains
and Wonderboob and grief group, and Rosamunde Saunders's voice in my head, and meeting Will and being dumped by Will, and the wreckage in the news and Bubbe 409's grave and every stop on
our trip—the whole story of it, the outside story and the one inside me.

Once I got going, I couldn't stop. I told him about every fight I'd ever had with my mom. And I wrote down everything Lulu had told me while I hid in the hotel bed. Words that had coasted over my mind now began to sink in
. It's a struggle every day. Your dad wouldn't have wanted to cause you pain. Travel not to see a guy but for yourself. Mother yourself. Learn who you are. Learn how to be alone.
Things I needed to learn and to remember. Writing them down made them soak into my pores, seem possible. Seem real.

I kept writing for hours. As I reached the middle of the journal, something changed on the page. I didn't know where the words were coming from—from this deep buried part of me, or some force outside myself—but suddenly, my dad was writing to me.

             
Dear Eva,

             
It's pretty funny about the hand. And I like the part about the disembodied finger trick,

             
with the ketchup spots. And the forearm. You have to be kind to Mommy,

             
you know—she never found dark stuff so funny. Remember the time when you were only six

             
and I dressed up as Bubbe 409 for Halloween? Scrubbies taped all over my chest.

             
Mommy made me take them off. And you know what's funny, too? That I like it here at the bottom

             
of the ocean. It's a good place to be, in this giant underworld

             
of fallen sailors and mermaids, pirates and explorers. In the morning I have breakfast

             
with Ariel and afternoon tea with the Strauses from the Titanic. Dinner is with

             
Francis Drake and sometimes we have parties with all the lost souls

             
dancing. And do you know how quiet it is here, how the plankton flicker like a thousand tiny stars? Scientists know more about the surface of the moon

             
than the depth of the sea, but that's the way it should be, to leave something a mystery.

Daddy

I looked at what I'd just written, the tiny print on the yellowed page of the notebook.

I closed the leather cover and held it in my palms.

It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like—how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you—how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another—and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that
this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.

I'd thought the blank page was a giant slab of raw pain, but once I was inside it, it was like looking off to the side during a horror movie, realizing that all that fear isn't necessary or real.

That's what writing did, what I'd forgotten: how it unraveled the tangled feelings and wove them into something new.

I
lay in bed for a long time, holding the journal, staring at what I'd written. The stomach bug was mostly gone and there was a sense of quiet. And with it came an idea.

I wrote down notes, and then I called Trent in Texas. We talked about my idea to build a website, to start a campaign to raise donations for Annie's scholarship fund. He said he could design a rough beta version, working from his trailer in Texas. At first I wanted to get something posted online as fast as possible, but he said that the better we made it, the bigger chance it would have of paying off. I wrote a draft of the content, explaining what happened with the show, Annie, and Will (changing his name), and explaining how it had been my fault we lost. I told the whole story of what led to me being shut out of the studio that day. We planned to set up a PayPal account for the donations to the fund, and to create links to all of Annie's academic prizes. I hoped that if we worked hard at this, I could make back some—or even all—of the money I'd lost for her.

“It'll take me a week to get the site live,” Trent said. “I'll
work as fast as I can.”

The thought of posting the whole story online felt a little bit like dancing naked on a stage, humiliating and crazy at the same time—but the idea of splaying your insides out for the entire world to see is easier when you're not actually on a stage, but hiding in a hotel room under a blanket.

I sent Annie a link to the first page Trent designed for the beta site. I didn't hear back. The next morning, while Lulu was out getting breakfast, there was a knock on my door. I opened it.

Annie looked both the same and different—she wore jeans and a black T-shirt she'd worn during our trip—but she stood stiffly, her elbows sticking out at odd angles.

“Janet dropped me off,” she said. “She's on her way to discuss syphilis with members of the LA school board.”

She leaned against the doorframe, her arms folded. Would she forgive me? Or murder me?

I held the door open. “Come in! Do you want coffee? The coffee pods they have here are really cool.” I hated how self-conscious I sounded, like I was either an extremely bad waitress or we were on some weird sort of friend date.

She shook her head.

“How's the condo?” I asked.

“It's nice. Janet's actually been really great.” She shrugged.

Everything seemed strange between us now. The world had turned upside down. She and Janet had probably been
painting each other's toenails while watching Lifetime movies and stabbing a voodoo doll of me.

She sat down on the edge of the bed and twisted her hands in her lap. It felt a little like it had when I'd seen Will. She was going to say it was over with us. Our friendship was done. She'd bolt like he did. Something sharp lodged itself in my throat.

“I don't even know what to say,” she said.

“I'm sorry. I screwed up.” I leaned against the dresser and squeezed it so tightly my knuckles turned white. “I keep thinking how I can make it up to you—”

“Was this whole trip just about a guy for you?”

“No—”

“Were you lying that you cared about the scholarship? Did you just use me because you wanted to take this trip?”

“No.”

“We would've won.”

“I know.” I hated that this had happened. How could I fix it? “I have a check for you. I can pay you back for the trip now. I borrowed the money from Lulu.” I walked over to the desk to get it. I thought it might make things easier if I paid Lulu back instead of Annie.

“You don't need to do that. I know you'll pay me back.” She returned the check to me.

“I'll give you all my checks from the laundromat. Everything I earn from now on. I promise. I got so carried away. I
had to see him. I couldn't not see him. I never thought they wouldn't let me back in. Not in a million years.”

“I know you didn't do it on purpose. I just—” She sighed. “I thought you'd be there for me, you know?”

“I know.” I squeezed the corner of the dresser again, so hard this time that my fingernail broke. “I'm going to do everything I can to get you another scholarship. I'll go on
Promzillas
if I have to.”

“You're not going on
Promzillas
.”

“Then
Girls with Lots of Cats, Who Need Boyfriends
.”

“You don't have cats.”

“I'll get some.”

I shook my head. “I'm so sorry. About everything. Losing the money. That's the worst thing I've ever done in my life.” I couldn't stop thinking about the money. It had been so much that I couldn't even picture it,
two hundred thousand dollars, fifty thousand dollars
, ha ha ha, it had even seemed like a joke sometimes, but now that it was lost, I felt ashamed to have joked about it at all, because it wasn't a funny thing—it was our futures and our freedom.

“Wait till the website's up—it'll get the word out. Maybe there are scholarships out there that we don't even know about,” I said.

“I got a couple emails this morning. One from this woman who works at Girls Strive, one of the organizations that sponsored the show. She wants me to apply for some other
scholarships. And I got a message from some guy who saw the show and found me online. He knows about this internal-nomination-only scholarship. I mean, I Googled him and it says he works for some education foundation, so I think he's for real. Of course, maybe it's fake and he's really some convict writing from prison.”

“Possibly,” I said. “See? So many opportunities. Even prisoners want to help you.”

She smiled for the first time, and then hesitated and lowered her voice. “I'm really sorry about Dickhead. I mean Will.”

I moved to the bed and sat down across from her, on the blanket. “Thanks. He isn't totally a dickhead, though. Maybe just five percent dickhead. Two percent.” The dickhead part of him was because his kisses, whether he'd wanted them to or not, had felt like a promise to me. A broken one, though I saw now that all along he'd never intended to promise anything.

“There should be a government board that labels guys like meats, listing the degree of potential dickheadness. The chance they'll break your heart. Prime Grade A Dickhead. Mild Grade C Dickhead,” she said.

“I don't regret the night with him on the roof, though. The friendship.” Maybe that's what “The Floating Poem” meant. What had happened with him would always exist, apart from time. Not everything has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Will would always be the first boy I loved.
Whatever
happens, this is.
We still were, the way Will's brother was always his brother. My father was always my father.

I thought of how I'd always admired Will's strength, how confident and sure of himself he seemed, how even in the beginning when I hardly knew him, he wasn't afraid to tell the truth about his brother. Maybe the real strength was in facing things, putting your heart out there, leaping, as Lulu said, taking chances, feeling pain, loving again and again. Maybe there were as many different types of strength as there were different types of love.

“I regret seeing him in the parking lot and losing the show—
that
I'd take back in a second,” I said.

I got up and walked over to my bag. “I need to give this back to you.” I took out Quarky and handed him to her. She held him in her arms.

I lay next to her on the bed. We were quiet for a long time as we stared at the ceiling, just as we had all over the country.

There's a thing in poetry called the caesura—a pause between words, a silence. I thought: That's what real friendship is, too. Someone you can be quiet with. Someone who understands your mistakes and forgives you.

She fingered the blanket. “Grace was so embarrassed about her panic attack, she hasn't even talked to me since. She and her dad took a flight after the show—they didn't want to stick around. I think she just cracked under the pressure.” She turned to me. “She didn't mean to have you locked out. She
told me how guilty she felt about Tennessee. How she treated you there.”

I nodded. I didn't think it had been Grace's fault, either.

“I decided for the trip back I'm going to get off in Calypso and spend a week there with Chance. Is that nuts?”

“It's not nuts. I think he'd be labeled only .5 percent dickhead. Or maybe zero.”

She smiled. “Want to stay there with me? And Janet? Janet's going back to Texas too.”

“What?”

“Apparently she's coming around to the idea of love. Herpes aside. She's planning to ‘meet with more clients' there—but I think she's really just planning to see Farley again.”

“Wow. Janet in love. You guys really need to read
Cowboys on Fire
, you know.”

“We can write a new book.
Cowboys on Fire with Gonorrhea
.” She leaned on her elbow. “I did win something from the show after all. They had a consolation prize from one of their sponsors. Guess who the sponsor was? GE. You could pick a plasma TV or anything. I told my mom she could choose what she wanted.”

“What did she get?”

“Three new washers and dryers. She's thrilled. She can't wait to replace some of the old clunkers.”

“Oh god. Life is so mean,” I said.

“Could be worse,” she said with a small smile. She reached
out and picked a piece of lint off my shirt. There was still a gulf between us—but it was closing.

A little while later, Lulu returned. We'd planned to have lunch in the Mirabelle restaurant and then go for a walk. We rode the elevator down together.

“I have a table reserved,” Lulu said. The other hotel guests clopped past us in flip-flops and towels, coming in from the beach.

We entered the restaurant. There was someone at our table already. My mother.