Nature of Jade (27 page)

And I have abandoned her."

"No, you haven't," I say. "You still love her."

"I am her mahout--she is like my child, Jum. My little one."

"What can you do?"

"From here, nothing." He shakes his head. "Nothing."

Tess can't contain her excitement. "Whoo-ee," she repeats. "Look at that. Look at him. What a specimen. What a beauty." "Ish," Bo says.

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"Indeed, it is!" she says.

"His eyes give me the creeps," I say.

Bo pokes his finger against the slick, cold scales, scrunches up his face.

"Really," I agree. "Blech."

"Copper River salmon!" Tess sings for the zillionth time. Tony, one of the houseboat neighbors, had caught several the day before and given Tess one. She is hopping around as if she had just unscrewed a Coke lid and found out she'd won a million dollars. The fish lies on some spread-out newspapers on the counter. His eyes are teeny glass paperweights, dull and unseeing, his tail thin and floppy, his middle thick.

"I'm becoming a vegetarian," I say.

"Wait until you taste this. You'll think you've died and gone to heaven."

"I'm happier when I don't think of my food as formerly living," I say. "I'm happy to think it all came from Safeway. Food shouldn't look at you."

"Circle of life," Tess says.

"If you sing, I'm leaving," I say.

"Ish, ish, ish," Bo says. Poke, poke, poke.

"Bo," I say.

"The fish doesn't mind," Tess says. She flaps his tail up and down in a fake swim and Bo squeals.

"Well, I hate to say it, but I can't join you. I've got this last big paper for Humanities, and I need my computer."

"Coward," Tess says. "Chicken. Bawk, bawk."

"Awk awk," Bo says. "Ish."

"No, that's not what a fish says," Tess laughs. "A fish says . . . Hmm. Nothing, really."

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"They just make those kissy-lips," I say. "Like this." I demonstrate for Bo. He tries to copy me, and purses his lips with this face so adorable, I could just eat it. I ruffle his hair. "Man, you're cute," I say. "You are so cute, you should be illegal."

"I can't believe you're going to miss this. Copper River salmon!"

"I really shouldn't have even stopped by. I just wanted to say a quick hello."

"I don't know what's keeping Sebastian," she says.

"Just tell him hi for me," I say. "And have fun with your fish."

"You don't know what you're missing," she says.

I walk down the dock and head up the steps to the street. My usual routine is to take the 212 bus that drops me off at home, or to have Sebastian drop me part way. I'm almost at the stop, down the narrow street, when I see Sebastian's car. He waves, pulls over to the side of the road. He rolls down his window.

"Don't tell me you're leaving," he says.

"Humanities paper," I say. I kiss him through the window. A stuffed Armchair Books book bag is on the passenger seat, along with a half-empty water bottle and a partial bag of bar-beque potato chips.

"Damn. Now I'm really pissed I had to stay late."

"We'll have some time this weekend?"

"Yah. But I miss you now," he says.

"You're having Copper River salmon for dinner. He's lying in the kitchen. Fish corpse. Tess is beside herself."

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"Thanks for the warning."

He takes a strand of my hair. He caresses my face with the back of his hand. "I love you," he says. "I love you, too," I say.

For a few weeks, every time I saw Mom's car in the driveway, I got this sickening attack of messy, unsorted emotions. It was like looking at some automotive equivalent of shame. The car had been in the driveway a lot, too, as she wasn't spending so much time at school. She was planning our graduation ceremony, of course, along with the other PTA ladies, like Mrs. Lender holm, with her Porsche and brown hair roots showing through the blond; and Mrs. Thompkins, who, when she left a phone message, treated you like you were five and unable to spell a challenging phrase like "please call." But Mom usually worked from home. Maybe she had been embarrassed into hiding. Maybe she was avoiding Mr. Dutton and the dangers of his passionate temptations--overdue book fines, paper cuts, heartbreak.

Funny thing, on that day, her car just looks like a car. A regular, aging silver Audi, a vehicle that had done great things (like get me my driver's license) and bad things (like break down on the first day of school once), but that mostly was pretty reliable and had nice cup holders, too. I barely even notice it.

Mom's just sitting there when I open the door. Sitting on the stairwell with a white envelope on her knees. Her hair is pulled back into a small ponytail, and she is wearing Mom clothes. Jeans.

A T-shirt with a zippered sweatshirt over top. She'd moved from being a woman-woman back to a mom-woman.

"Well, Jade," she says.

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"Jeez, Mom. You scared me."

"I could say the same thing about you," she says. Her voice is uh-oh icy. Oh-shit icy.

I don't say anything. She just stays there and looks at me. I hold my backpack in one hand. I don't set it down.

"Something came in the mail for you," she says. She hands me the envelope. I drop my backpack finally. I can see that the top edge of the letter had been torn open, the contents read. I almost don't want to take it, but I do. I reach out, turn the envelope over.

University 0/Santa Fe, it says. I slip the paper out and unfold it. We are pleased to inform you . . .

I'd forgotten about it, that was the weird thing. I actually look at the words and have to urge them into meaning. I feel a surge of relief. This is what she's freaking out about? I can handle this.

This was a betrayal that had an explanation, or at least one that I could blame on someone else.

"Oh!" I say.

"I guess there are things you aren't telling me, Jade."

"No." Yes. "I mean, this is just because Abe . . . Part of my homework was to apply to some other places. You know, not near home. I'm not planning on going."

"Jade, there's a lot you're not telling me."

My inner attorney tells me to keep quiet. Not that I can speak, anyway--a bolt of cold fear has shut my mouth. She knows. About Sebastian. My backstage mind realizes this. I want to run. I feel like throwing up. All I had to lose rushes forward, shows itself. My cheek burns where he had just touched me.

"I said I wasn't going. I had no intention of going. That wasn't even the point. I forgot about even sending it. ..."

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Her eyes look hollow. They have brown circles under them that I don't remember seeing there that morning. She still just sits on those steps. "You never told me. I was really hurt by that, Jade.

I went to find you. I wanted to know why you'd kept this from me. I went to the zoo, but they said you'd left already. No one knew where you'd gone. I saw Jake Gillette in the parking lot.

You know Jake?"

"Everyone knows Jake."

"I see him around school. I try to be friendly to him because he seems lonely."

Jake Gillette. This was who ruined my life?

"He was there, with his bike and this little ramp he'd made out of wood," she continues. "I asked him if he saw you this afternoon, or knew where you went. He said he saw you all the time. That maybe you went off with the guy that has the baby, like you usually do. What the hell is going on, Jade?"

My mother isn't the swearing type, same as Dad isn't. Maybe she'll swear at the aforementioned Audi, maybe at Dad under her breath every now and then. But not often.

"What is going on here?"

I don't know how to start. I don't know how to explain it so she'll understand. "I can't talk about this right now," I say. I need time to think.

"Do you think you have a choice? Is that what you honestly think?"

I leave my backpack where it is. I try to edge past her on the stairs. I want my own room. I want to light a candle, look out my window, watch the elephants wander on my computer screen. "Let me by," I say.

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"No," she says.

"Let me by!" I shove past her.

"I want some answers!" She follows me up the stairs. The PTA ladies should see her now.

Stomping up the stairs, shouting. This isn't in the parenting books, now, is it? This isn't part of the four-cassette pack of Parenting with Love and Logic they sold at the PTA meetings. Now, Junior, this behauior makes me sad.

"It's none of your business."

Oliver stands in his doorway, hands over his ears. I make it to my room, slam the door.

"As long as you live in my house, it's my business!"

She flings open my door. My heart is wild. Hers must be too--her chest is moving up and down as if she'd just climbed something steep. We stare at each other. It's amazing how much I hate this person that I love. Twice now, over a few weeks, our relationship had suffered deep gashes, the claws and teeth of a tiger tearing into solid, strong hide. I know her so well, yet she is a stranger standing there. I see things in her face I haven't seen before. More wrinkles around her eyes. A looseness in the skin of her neck. When was the last time I had really looked at her?

Where had this time gone? It was a question I'd heard my mother ask often, a question I felt now, for the first time.

"You're wearing lipstick," she says. Her voice is quiet. "Not gloss. Lipstick."

I nod. I stare at her and she stares back at me.

"It looks really pretty." Her voice is almost a whisper. "Really pretty." Her eyes are filling with tears.

I swallow. I don't know if I can speak. "Thank you," I say, but the words are full of grief now, too. My throat gathers

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tight, tears roll down my nose. She puts her palms over her eyes, lets out a pained sound. "I'm sorry," she cries.

"I'm sorry too." I sob. She comes to me. We put our arms around each other. I can feel her body wracking, and she likely feels mine.

"It's just . . . ," she says into my shoulder, her voice high from escaping a throat closed with grief.

"You're not ... in your little bathing suit in the blow-up pool anymore."

I laugh, through tears.

"You know?" She sniffs.

I nod into her shoulder.

"You're not . . . making me plates of Play-Doh food. Wearing that pink ruffly apron, remember that? You have this life I don't know about. It went so fast, I never quite caught up." She sniffs again. "Jade, I really ..." Her voice wobbles again. She speaks through new tears, a tiny, high voice. "I really . . . I've really loved being your mother."

"You're not going anywhere," I say. I have the high voice too. The back of her shirt is wet from my tears.

"I know," she says. I can hardly hear her, her voice is so small. "But you are."

We just hold each other. I hold her, the young mother who turned on the sprinkler for me to run through, the one who fished for the escaped magnet under the fridge with the broomstick handle so she could hang my crayoned art, who drove with one arm out the window on the way to the orthodontist's appointment, this woman who loved to organize and who liked kitchen stores and who made great lasagna and who was too afraid sometimes and who wished for things I didn't know

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about. And she held me, her baby, her toddler, her young woman who loved animals and deserts and watching the sky and who loved staying organized and who was too afraid sometimes and who wished for things she didn't know about.

"God." She sniffs. "Look at us."

"I know it," I say.

"I need a Kleenex," she says. I deed a Kleedex. "We both do," I say.

She makes us some tea. We sit at the table in the kitchen, and she sips her tea and looks down into her cup, stares at the browned string of the bag, sips her tea some more. Her eyes are still red, her face puffy from emotion. My own tea is nearly untouched, except for the warm mug, which I wrap my hands around for the comfort of its heat.

"He sounds wonderful," she says.

"He is."

"His maturity, it's something you like."

"Yeah. It's so different. The guys at school . . . Well, you know the guys at school."

"Like Alex Orlando." She holds her cup by the handle, swirls the liquid inside, a mini-tornado. 1

m sorry.

"The fact that you've been lying--that's the thing that really made me mad. It hurt. Hurts." "I can understand that."

"It'd be reasonable for your dad and me to freak out. He's got a baby. You know? This is not just you going to the prom. This is jumping into the deep end of adulthood. Sebastian's had . . . He's had deep relationships."

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"Had sex, you mean. And you talk about the prom like it's this great big innocent punch-bowl-and-corsage life moment. We don't even have punch bowls anymore. We've got police. The prom's about sex, for most guys. Definitely for Alex Orlando. You think Alex cares about love and dancing on prom night?"

"I don't just mean sex." She stops swirling her cup. "Not just. Responsibility, too. Of having a child. You're not exactly going to be having a carefree time."

"Can you honestly say that any relationship is carefree?" I ask. I consider what I've just said.

Mom and Dad, Onyx and Delores, Sebastian and Tiffany, Me and Hannah, Jenna and God--Tess and Sebastian, even. No relationship is carefree-- more the tangle that Tess talked about.

Complicated, if beautiful.

"Mostly carefree, okay? Before it needs to be otherwise? And why does Sebastian live with his grandmother? Where's his family? What's with Bo's mother? You never said where she was."

"Dead." The word slips out before I have a chance to think. Quick as instinct. Like a python zipping under sand to hide, or the tail of a gecko instantly dropping off to distract a predator.

Sometimes, they would be quick. Sometimes, not quick enough.

"Dead? She died?"

"Childbirth." Shit.

"Childbirth?" Shit, shit! "I know it happens," Mom says, "but, Jade, that's really rare."

"I know," I say. My backstage mind has completely abandoned me. I could see it off in the distance, waving its nasty little fingers at me, Whoo hoo! Jade.1 Over here'. Childbirth, for God's sake!