Signs of You (2 page)

That he actually
found
it made Jay's dad sort of famous. But the discovery fueled his drinking. Jay says people think all alcoholics wear dirty raincoats and drink booze out of paper bags under bridges. It's not true. There are all kinds of alcoholics—even super successful smart professors who think if they just drink at home at night after all the kids go to bed they aren't hurting anybody. Late one night when Jay was about ten years old, his dad polished off nearly a whole bottle of scotch—the drink he called “the intellectual's comrade”—and fell down the basement stairs. His head struck the concrete f loor. Jay found his body in the morning in a dried puddle of blood.

I shake off the image of little-boy Jay f inding his dad. It's just so awful. I look back down at the cross in the glass case and read the print etched into the glass.

do not touch.

Yesterday, that's exactly what my best friend, Kate, and I did.

I have three best
friends total—Kate, Jay, and Noah. And we hang out at Jay's all the time, mainly due to his mother's nearly guaranteed absence. I call them “best friends” even though that stupid label doesn't come close to describing what they are to me. There really isn't a word in the English language for it. I met them freshman year in the after-school tutoring/counseling program we were forced into called Back on Track. The four of us were sent there because we all had two things in common: our once-stellar grades were in a death spiral and our attitudes were those of aspiring screw-ups. We were all budding failures at life, but the four of us bonded for an entirely different reason.

Most kids landed in Back on Track due to typical stumbling blocks: too much pot, too much booze, too much pot
and
booze, or too much undiagnosed (enter favorite psychiatric condition here). But not the four of us. No, ours was both weirder and more tragic: all of us had someone close to us die. There was Jay's dad. There was my mom. Then there was Noah's brother, Cam, who hung himself in their basement three years ago. And Kate's aunt—who was like a mother to her—was killed by a violent ex-husband.

And unlike the baseball team, the Woodhull High Back on Track program doesn't have a T-shirt. But if it did, I'm guessing it would feature our school's bee mascot, wings shackled, wearing a dunce cap and sitting next to a honey jar—full of Prozac.

The tutoring and the counseling haven't helped our grades all that much or even our outlooks on life, but I know we've learned something about loss: when you f ind friends who know it, who've been through it, who really, really get the ache that moves in and lives in your bones, it gets a little easier. And the things you share with those friends, the things you know about them and what they know about you, makes the term “best friends” a complete and total joke.

So yesterday, while Noah was at a dentist's appointment, Kate and I went to Jay's without him. When Jay picked up his guitar and was about f ive songs deep into amateur Pink Floyd hour, Kate and I took a break and started roaming the house. That part wasn't unusual. Other than the fact that Noah wasn't with us, we typically have to bail when Jay feels it necessary to play “Wish You Here”
in a loop. What
was
out of the ordinary was what we did. The kitchen offered the usual snacks that ranged from canned beans to moldy pecan sandies, so we made our way to the living room to watch TV. But when there was absolutely nothing on, Kate went over to the glass case with the cross necklace inside.

She later claimed that boredom drove her to pick it up and that her typical clumsiness caused her to drop it on the f loor. The bottom cracked and the locked case broke open.

Without thinking, without even talking about it, we both tried on the cross. She went f irst. I don't know why, really. I guess we were just curious; we wanted to touch something that old. And even though it sounds crazy, I'm thinking that maybe wearing this cross made me see my mom. That maybe it's cursed with some sort of Catholic voodoo or something. Maybe that was why it was so important and valuable to begin with, why Jay's father went to all that trouble to f ind it.

I peer in at the necklace again. I shake my head because my idea is
nuts
. I don't believe in any of that spiritual stuff, anyway. I've never bought what religion is peddling—that there are super special people that the Pope has decided to call “saints” who have direct tickets into heaven, or that there's some Big Dude in the sky who gives a rat's ass about my tiny little life. But if I'm wrong, and He
is
Up There, then He's not exactly someone I'm interested in friending. You know, for that whole letting-my-mom-get-in-a-car-wreck-and-die thing. Somehow, I just don't think we'd really hit it off that well. Too much water under the bridge.

But then I f ind myself talking to the silver cross. Even though I don't
really
believe it's any more special than the BFF necklace I won out of the Big Grab machine at the mall when I was ten. I don't believe it at all.

“If you made me see my mom,” I whisper through the glass case, almost angry, like a hiss, “then make her come back.”

When I get back
to Jay's room, he looks up from texting.

“Everything come out okay?” he asks with a snarky smile.

“Gross,” I say, f lopping onto the bed beside him. I take a deep breath. “So, I have a sort of weird question for you.”

“Okay. Ask it.”

“It's about that necklace. The cross. The one your dad found. Have you ever—”

His phone gongs and, just like before, the room f ills with the sounds of crashing ocean waves.

“Whoa,” he says. He starts texting again, his maple syrup eyes all bright and happy. “Give me a sec. Have to write back.”

I feel like a loser just sitting there, so I take my phone out of my pocket and stare at the textless screen. It doesn't help. So I Google stuff about St. Ignatius and his cross. I get links to information about the order of priests he founded called the Jesuits and all sorts of Jesuit university homepages. And I try to absorb the information, but I can't. Big surprise: I run into that whole focus problem I've had since Mom died. The words just sort of run together.

Jay is still texting away, oblivious.

I Google phrases like “seeing the dead” and “dead people sightings” and “cursed crosses.” The hits are all over the place. Groups pop up: Wiccans, medicine men, fortune-tellers, ghost whisperers. A link to a pop-psychology article about people who claim to have “the gift.” I try to read it, but it's insulting. Anyway, I get the gist. Apparently people who tell their therapists that they've seen or interacted with the dead “can't accept change” and have a “juvenile wish for things to be different or better.”
Wanting your mom not to be dead is juvenile?
Whatever
.
I skim ahead until something grabs my attention: “Many patients report seeing the dead at their gravesites
.
”

The cemetery. Of course.

I give Jay a gentle nudge on the thigh. “I need you to come somewhere with me. And we sort of need to go—like,
now.
”

“
Okaaay
,” he says, still not looking up from his phone. “Do I get to know where?”

“Can I explain on the way?”

“This is highly weird,” he says, still tapping the screen. “But I'm intrigued.”

“So you'll come?”

He f inally quits texting and frowns at me. The frown says it all.

As if you even need to ask.

Chapter 2

Love Sucks.

The cemetery is about f ifteen minutes south. A little shorter if you take the interstate, which I do. I can't stop thinking how crazy this all is, that I'm driving to my mother's grave to actually
look
for her. And Jay's phone is still blowing up with text messages. Every other second the car f ills with gonging and wave crashing. It's driving me nuts.

“Who the hell
is
that?”

“Nobody,” Jay says, still typing. I don't like that answer.
Nobody
means
somebody
that you're not naming for a reason. But whatever, we're at our exit.

I take a left off I-77 and begin the drive toward the cemetery.

“Wait,” Jay says. “Where
are
we?”

“Nowhere,” I answer. (Two can play that game.) I just keep driving. Finally, we reach the entrance and stop, the huge stone sign in my headlights:
richf ield cemetery
.

“Oh, Riley,” Jay says. “I had no idea we were coming here
.
” He puts his cell in his pocket. “I thought you were worried about the history test. But you're . . . missing her?”

“You could say that, yeah,” I say. “We'll have to climb over.” I point at the giant padlock and chain wrapped around the gates.

I pull the car into the grass and park. We get out, and he quickly scrambles up the iron fence. I follow more clumsily and get stuck at the top, the sharp pointy tips gouging my leg through my jeans. Jay grabs me before I fall and helps me down. He gently sets me in the grass, not letting go until he's sure I have my footing. I look in his eyes, then at the bright, pinprick stars all around us, and for a moment the night actually seems sort of beautiful. But then I remember where I am and why we're here. “Beautiful” isn't really the word I'd use to describe this night. Or any part of my life, really.

We walk toward the graves in the darkness, and a breeze passes over my skin like the brush of cool f ingertips. We each grab our iPhones, using the f lashlight apps to illuminate the path in front of us. Jay looks on edge, his eyes a little wide as we slowly drift among the headstones and f lowers people have left, the fake blossoms looking tattered and faded in the cold iPhone light. We make our way around trees—pines, big old oaks, weeping willows like silhouettes of frozen fountains. I hear a rustling and the snap of a twig.

“What was that?” I whisper. In a mad rush, I f ind myself sweeping my phone around looking for my mother's light blue sweater, her f loral print dress, her eyes.

“A squirrel,” Jay says behind me. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

My nerves jangle, but I turn back to the path. “Sorry. Graveyard at night. Dislike.”

When we reach her f lat marble stone, I feel like I always do—like she's been missing and I've just stumbled onto the f irst sign of her, the f irst real trace of her, something tangible that reminds me she was real, that having a mother wasn't just some cruel, distant dream. I fall to my knees and rub my hands over the letters.

 

claire walker strout

1968–2011

Wife, mother, daughter, friend.

Loved and missed, but in our hearts forever.

 

Jay has been with me more than a few times when I've done this. And as always, pain blooms in my chest, strong enough to bring tears, strong enough to
need
tears, but none come. I never cry. Not since we buried her. I just—can't.

Mom, where are you? I saw you. I know it. Please, come back. Just one more time. Let me see you one more time.

And I wait. I wait to hear footsteps in the grass, her laugh high and lilting among the pines, to see the f lutter of her dress behind another headstone. I breathe deep, trying to catch the smell of her lavender perfume. I don't know how long I sit there like that, but it feels like ages. Just waiting, listening, looking. Above all, hoping. But there's nothing. She's not here.

“Talk to me,” Jay says, placing a hand on my shoulder.

“I'm sorry . . . I guess it's nothing,” I say, trying to convince myself. I turn to look up at him. “Nothing but that—I miss her. I really, really miss her.”

He gives me a melancholy smile. “Then why are you apologizing?”

The drive back to
Jay's house is quiet. And awkward, at least for me. I feel so unglued. I can't believe I dragged him to my mother's grave so late at night. Freshman year, I could have explained this away. But now? He must think I'm crazy, forever broken.
Maybe I am
. The silence is interrupted by the gong and crash of the Zen text noise. I think I'm grateful for the distraction. But my eyebrows arch, asking again.

“Okay, okay,” he says. “It's Sarah Larsen.”

Hot Sarah? Popular Sarah? Lost-her-virginity-at-like-thirteen Sarah?
I stare at the road, numb. She's the ringleader of the worst group of girls at our school, the girls who embody everything that's bad about a predominantly white Midwestern suburb like Brecksville. They're Cleveland-is-scary girls; they call Akron “
Crack
ron.” I mean, Akron has admittedly gone downhill since Goodyear shut down their tire plant, but still, you don't have to be an asshole about it. “Tell me you're not going to ask her out. She's obnoxious, vapid, totally conformist. How you can you be into someone like that who—”

“She's actually pretty funny,” Jay interrupts.

At least he's not texting back. I mean, we just visited my
mom's gravesite
—to sit there and text would be a level of jackassery heretofore unknown. He reaches down and silences his phone.

I know I really shouldn't be all that surprised about Sarah. He always
goes for the wrong girls. Like the time he fell for the president of the Honor Society, who didn't even know Pink Floyd was a band. When he played a gloomy song of theirs on guitar for her, she started laughing. Or the time he went for this super-jock girl who was an all-star W.H. Bees volleyball player. She suggested they go on a run for their f irst date. Try as I might, I couldn't get the smile off my face when he told me that he nearly hyperventilated in the f irst quarter mile. Needless to say, neither relationship worked out. It's like Kate always says:
His picker's broke.

“We have a lot in common,” he adds.

Like you both need oxygen to breathe?

“Whoa, what's that face about?” he asks. “Careful, wouldn't want it to get stuck like that.” He says it gingerly, like a question: Is it okay to joke now?

I force an it's-all-good smile as we pull up in front of his house. “Thanks for coming with. I just . . . needed to go.”

He looks at me for a second, sizing me up, trying to tell if it's really okay to let me drive home.

“I'm f ine,” I say. “Just need to go to bed. Get my rest. I have a history test
and
a physics test to fail tomorrow.”

That convinces him, and he opens his car door.

“Night,” he says, his brown eyes catching a sparkle from the streetlight above. He reaches up for the f ist-bump handshake.

“Night,” I say, our hands gently touching.
Ask him. Now.
“Hey, Jay?” I say it before he has a chance to shut the passenger-side door. “Weird question for you.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“You know the cross necklace your dad found?”

He nods.

“Well.” I pause, realizing how deranged I'm about to sound. “You ever, like, wear it?”

“You're right, that's totally weird. You know that my dad always handled it. Threatened to kill us if we even touched it. It's like a million years old. Why?”

“Did
he
ever wear it?”

“I have no idea. I mean, he always kept it locked up. But, seriously, why are you asking?”

Now he's looking at me like I'm a total freak, and I know I need to come up with some sort of reason why I just randomly brought it up.

“I saw one of those antique shows on the History Channel,” I lie, though I'm not sure why. I could've worked the cross into a real explanation somehow. I could've asked if Jay ever missed his dad all of a sudden, at weird times, like I missed my mom tonight. If the feeling was ever so strong that it made him do strange things, like try on that cross. After all, the necklace helped kill his father. Jay has said as much: People became a lot more forgiving of his drinking after the discovery. But Sarah Larsen threw me for a loop. “You know, the ones where people pawn all their parents' heirlooms for cash? Made me think of the necklace, that's all.”

After a moment, he shrugs. “Yeah, well, it would be the douche move of the century to pawn it. I keep telling my mom it should go to a museum.” His face softens, but he still doesn't look convinced that he shouldn't be worried. “You
sure
you're okay?”

I nod, and he looks directly into my eyes, studying me.

“Okay, then,” he says. “Goodnight.”

“Night.”

He takes a few steps toward his house but then stops and slips his cell out of his back pocket.
He's texting Sarah back. He can't even wait until he gets inside?

In my mind, I run through the sad emoji list on my phone. I think of the crying ones and the variety of tear placements on their faces. A sad face with a single tear on the right. Or on the left. Above the eyes or below? A face with a stream of tears on both sides. I move on to the handful with varying degrees of frowns and no tears at all. But even with the vast array of sad choices, none really f it.

I imagine what the I'm-having-hallucinations-about-my-mom emoji would look like. Its face would be confused, a lost look in the eyes. A tiny bottle of meds would be open next to it, a stray pill rolling away. I imagine what the I-am-completely-and-utterly-depressed-because-I'm-into-my-best-friend emoji would look like. It would be unsteady on its feet, on the verge of vomiting, holding a sign that says
love sucks
.

And that's exactly what I text Jay. Maybe because I'm losing it, maybe because I saw my mom, maybe because I feel like the whole world is coming apart, but I text him:

LOVE SUCKS.

One, two, three.
He looks up and turns. He walks back to the car, opens the passenger door.

“What?” he asks. “Love sucks?”

I can feel a hot blush overtaking me, like I'm trying to hide the fact that I was just stung by a hundred bees. He stares at me, waiting for a response. As each second ticks by, I come no closer to inventing some sort of reasonable explanation for why I just texted him
LOVE SUCKS
. I stare at him blankly.

“Riley,” Jay says, his brown eyes shining. “Why'd you text me that?”

And just as I feel like I'm going to break, that I'm going to open my mouth and tell him everything, that I saw Mom, that I'm so into him—it happens. As quick as a breath, I catch a glimpse of something—or someone—right where Jay is standing. I scoot back, press myself against the driver's side door. But it happens again. In and out. Like my eyes are failing me, losing focus; I see f lickers of blond hair and hazel eyes.

“Hang on,” he says. He looks down at his cell and texts away. My lungs lock up, refuse to draw a breath, but I manage to put the car in drive.

“Okay, done,” he says. I don't look at him. I've got my eyes pinned on the little gnats swooping in and out of my headlight beams. I can't look over at Jay; I just can't. “Sorry, I just felt like I
had
to text Sarah back,” he says. “What were we talking about last?”

“I, I—” I stammer.

“Oh, right: love sucks. Why'd you text me that?”

My mind won't work.
Say something.
“Just don't get too wrapped up with the wrong person. I've done it and it sucks, that's all.”

“Who? And when? You've never had a boyfriend—”

“Someone you don't know,” I lie, manufacturing an imaginary person. I manage to look at him; he seems normal now, but totally confused.

I can't stay there one second longer. I put my foot down on the accelerator, the passenger door still hanging open. I leave Jay standing by the curb, in the dark. I don't even look back in my rearview mirror. When I get about ten blocks away from his house, I realize I'm speeding. I nearly run a stop sign and slam on the brakes. The car comes to a screeching halt, halfway in the intersection. I look up at the jumble of stars in the sky, my heart bursting, racing.

What's happening to me?