Our Song (2 page)

“I’ve got your bag,” my dad said, popping the trunk open.

Just then, Noah, my eight-year-old brother, came barreling through the door, practically knocking over my mother. “Ollie’s back!”

“The grass, Noah! It’s just been fertilized,” my mother cried out, but it was too late. Noah was already clomping across,
leaving small footprints on the new earth, before taking a running jump into my arms. The weight and force of his body made me stumble back against the car. But it felt good to be hugged, to be his big sister again. I’d been so focused on everything else, I didn’t realize how much I had missed him. My mother never brought him to the hospital, saying something about how the restricted visiting hours for children conflicted with his school schedule. But I knew it was really because she didn’t want him to know the truth.

“Careful with your sister,” my mother warned. “Remember? She’s not feeling well. We discussed this.”

“I’m fine, Mom,” I insisted as he slid off me.

She quickly glanced back at the neighbors, all paused in their activities to stare at us. “Let’s get you inside.” She took my bag from my father. “There are so many germs in the hospital. Why don’t you go take a hot shower while I get this load of laundry started.”

That’s when it hit me: I was the germ, the blight on her otherwise perfect home.

I followed her inside.

“DON’T YOU LOOK
refreshed!” my mother announced as she barged into my room.

“Mom, I’m not dressed!” I said, quickly slipping a shirt over my head. Since the accident, she’d been running on overdrive, checking on me every five minutes. I was hoping it would be different now that I was out of the hospital, that she’d go back to worrying about the trivial domestic things she normally obsessed over, like her orchids. “Can you please knock?”

“Doesn’t a nice shower make you feel so much better?” she said, ignoring me. Maybe a shower was all it took for her, but everything was different now. She went over to the bed and held up a pair of pink pajamas. “Didn’t you see these adorable new pajamas I got you?”

They were exactly the kind I usually loved, down to the floral embroidery around the collar and cuffs. But I couldn’t imagine wearing something so…cheerful. Not yet anyway.

“I didn’t notice,” I said breezily, tightening the drawstring on the torn black sweats I’d opted for instead. “Where’s my computer?” I
eyed the empty spot where it used to sit on my desk.

“We thought it would be too much stimulation to have it here in your room,” she explained, removing a phantom hair from her face. That was my mother’s classic tell. The signal that she was uncomfortable, or covering up the truth.

“Then where is it?” Without Internet access in the hospital, it had been a full two weeks since I’d been online. I was desperate to log on to Facebook, to study Derek’s page, even though I knew it probably hadn’t changed much since the last time I saw it. Like a true politician-in-training, he never posted anything personal.

“Your computer is in the sunroom.”

The sunroom wasn’t technically a room but a small nook off the kitchen that overlooked the greenhouse. Given that my mother basically lived in exactly one of those two places, it meant that I would have zero privacy. “How am I supposed to get my homework done there?”

“Don’t worry about that now. What’s important is that you rest.”

I gripped my head as a sudden explosion of sound erupted in my brain, like the volume had been cranked up. But I wasn’t just hearing my mother’s voice. A cacophony of discordant noises ran through my head. Flapping, clapping, crunching: an avalanche of overlapping, jarring sounds, with the almost imperceptible hint of a melody beneath it all, like a ghost. The music was so faint I couldn’t even be sure what it was or if it was really there, as if a radio had been possessed, urgently flipping
between stations, each one more chaotic than the last, searching, searching, for calm.

“Are you in pain?” my mother asked, rushing toward me.

“I’m fine,” I said, reaching for the armchair to steady myself. With the noises ricocheting in my head, I felt off-kilter, like I’d just stepped off a speeding merry-go-round, like I might faint. But no matter how much it was freaking me out, there was no way I could let on what was happening.

A buzzer went off in the kitchen.

“That’s the oven,” she said, glancing toward the door. “Maybe a good, home-cooked meal will help.”

I pushed the noises back until they reduced to a ringing in my ears and followed her downstairs and into the kitchen. A fresh round of nausea washed over me as my mother removed a steaming dish from the oven. I’d barely been able to eat for the last two weeks. The smell and sight of food—even my mother’s cooking, which I used to love—turned my stomach.

“Ah, perfect!” she said, testing her recipe. Everything needed to be perfect in my mother’s world. Her cooking, her orchids, her house, her family. And now here I was, throwing it all out of balance.

“We’re eating in the dining room tonight,” she said as I slumped into my usual spot at the kitchen table.

“Why?” The dining room was usually off-limits, reserved for special occasions or when my mother hosted her fellow committee members for luncheons. Or when my father needed to impress some clients.

“Because you’re home.” I couldn’t remember the last time
we’d eaten in there together as a family. She reached for a crystal bowl from the shelf where she kept all her fancy dinnerware. “I thought it would be nice to celebrate the occasion.”

“There’s nothing to celebrate.” I pulled my hair out from under my shirt and fanned it over my shoulders. It helped to relieve the pressure from my long, wet strands tugging down on the scar at the base of my skull. Another unpleasant reminder.

“Well of course there is.” She whipped around, clutching the bowl in her hands. “It’s a miracle you’re…back.”

I bristled at that word.
For you maybe
, I wanted to say. Because as much as I wanted to feel grateful, I wasn’t really back. Not in the way I wanted to be.

I went over to the fridge, where my school calendar was tacked to the door next to Noah’s. It listed all the things that happened in the past two weeks, the things that went on without me. The senior talent show, Derek’s debate against Paso Verdes High. Our second anniversary…

I ran through the events in my head, imagining I had been there, that nothing had changed, that I had spent the last two weeks by Derek’s side, the same as the last two years. Love like ours couldn’t just vanish into thin air, no matter what happened. And when he saw me at school again tomorrow, I knew that he would realize it, too.

My mother came up behind me and adjusted my hair so that it fell straight down my back. “It’ll grow back soon.” I nodded silently. She was referring to the square bald patch they had shaved to make room for the stitches. She followed my gaze to the fridge. “I
know this breakup has been especially hard on you, but—”

“We didn’t break up,” I snapped, pulling away. Those words were never uttered. There was still a chance that things could go back to the way they were before the accident. All my hopes were pinned on that chance.

It was true that I still hadn’t heard from him since that night. But Derek wasn’t the best with the phone. And I knew how focused he got in the middle of debate season. He always told me not to take it personally. But each day without him felt like an eternity, and it had already been fourteen. Fourteen days that had been more painful than the bruises across my body and the stitched gash on my head.

“Maybe it would be better if you stayed home for a few more days, to readjust before going back to school.” She scrutinized my face as if she could read my mind before reaching for the phone. “I’m calling Principal Kingston.”

“No,” I said firmly, putting my hand out to stop her. The thought of waiting any longer to see Derek sent a sharp spasm through my heart. “I’m fine. I want to go back.”

She let out a sigh and put the phone down. “We can take it one day at a time.”

When I glanced up, I noticed that the rack above the sink that usually displayed her extensive knife collection was now completely empty. That’s when I realized that she didn’t trust me. She had already come to her own conclusions about what happened that night, no matter how many times we’d gone over it.

• • •

The dining room not only felt too big for the four of us, with the long, rectangular table that could seat twelve, it also felt foreign, like we were guests in someone else’s house. Or maybe it was just that I was the one who felt like a guest.

I didn’t say much through dinner. Neither did my dad, who checked his BlackBerry every five minutes, while my mother filled the silence by jabbering on about her orchid club and a brand new varietal she couldn’t wait to show “the girls.” For the past five years, a dozen neighborhood ladies with nothing better to do met each week to trade tips on orchid care. It always seemed like they were secretly competing, as if the color and size of their flowers represented who they were as people. My mom considered herself the Grand Dame of the group. Not just because she was its founder, but because she was the only one with a bona fide greenhouse. She had it built when Noah started school, and it had quickly become her third child.

“Olive, is there something wrong with your meal?” she asked, doling out seconds for Noah. He seemed so much bigger than he did two weeks ago, as if life was bursting out of him.

I moved my food around the plate to make it seem like I was eating. I’d been trying to avoid this very question. My queasiness had only gotten worse as the odor of garlic filled the room. I could still taste the meat on the roof of my mouth, like it had gotten stuck there and would never go away, no matter how much water I drank to try to wash it down. “No, it’s just that I ate something before coming home,” I lied.

“That’s too bad. I wish I had known. I made this especially for you since it’s your favorite.”

“It is,” I agreed. Or it was. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to enjoy meatloaf again. I knew there was no way my mother would understand, not without reinforcing all the conclusions she’d already come to. Plus, it was clear I’d already offended her. She considered it a personal affront if you didn’t have seconds, much less finish your first plate (even though she herself was exempt from this expectation). It’s one of the reasons she loved it whenever Derek stayed for dinner. His hearty, insatiable appetite was like one giant ego boost. Sometimes I wondered if that was the real reason she liked him: because of the way he made
her
feel. But I couldn’t blame her. That was just Derek. When he decided to shine his light on you, there was no resisting its glow. It wrapped itself around you like a second skin, making you forget everything and everyone else.

I reached my hand back through my hair and felt around for the wound. Most of the stitches had already disintegrated, just like Dr. Farmand told me they would. The area where he’d sewed me up was still devoid of nerve endings. He explained that it could stay that way indefinitely.

Tracing my fingertips across the bumpy ridge, I felt like I was touching someone else’s skin. Short bits of hair were slowly starting to poke through. They reminded me of the soft stubble that appeared across Derek’s face when he tried to grow a beard last year. He was doing it to try to look older so he could buy beer at the gas station by the freeway on-ramp (which was notorious for not carding). Only with his smooth, pink skin and
fair, blond hair, the “beard” had the opposite effect. The thin, uneven patches actually made him look younger, like a boy pretending to be a man. Maybe that was why I liked it so much. It somehow made him seem less intimidating, more on my level. Caressing the new patch of peach fuzz on my head, I closed my eyes and imagined it was Derek’s cheek.

“Stop fussing with that, Olive,” my mother warned, swiping my hand away as she got up to clear the table. “Noah, why don’t you go on up and get ready for bed.”

I was about to get up too when my mother put her hand on my shoulder. “Your father and I would like to talk to you.”

“Okay,” I said, twisting my napkin into knots.

She sat back down, throwing my father a pointed glance. “We’re concerned about you,” she started in before he could offer anything. Not that he would have, anyway.

“I told you I’m fine.” I felt like I should plaster it on my forehead.

“And I thank God for that every day. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What
we’re
talking about,” she added, throwing my father another exasperated look.

I still hadn’t thought about God, much less thanked him. Besides, if there really were a God with a capital G, how could any of this have happened in the first place? “There
isn’t
anything else to talk about.”

“We’d just like to go over what happened that night.”

“Again?” My body tensed up as the screeching noises in my head rushed back in, like a living, breathing organism had taken my brain hostage.

“Based on the impact, the police report says you had to be speeding—”

“It wasn’t my fault,” I protested, cutting her off. Snippets of music, pieces of a song, kept pushing through. Was it the song playing on the radio when the car crashed? With the invasive sounds closing in, it was too difficult to hold on to the melody long enough to identify what it was. I only knew that it weighed me down with a haunting sadness.

“Honey…” She looked at my father, her eyes pleading for him to back her.

“Your mother isn’t saying it’s your fault,” he finally said, clearing his throat. His voice was flat and distant, like he wanted to be sitting there about as much as I did.

“But it’s what you believe,” I said, thinking about the now-empty knife rack.

“It’s just…help us understand,” she said, pulling her chair in closer. “It’s so unlike you to drive like that. Hyacinth Circle is tricky enough as it is with all those sharp turns. You know that. But at night, in the rain…what were you doing, Olive?”

I’d never been in trouble before. Never broken curfew or failed a test or played hooky from school. I
was
the perfect daughter. Why couldn’t she just let this one thing go?