The Truth About Forever (18 page)

"Okay, fine," I said. "My best was five minutes, five seconds."

He just looked at me. "Oh," he said finally.

"What? What's yours?"

He coughed, turning his head. "Never mind."

"Oh, see," I said, "that's not fair."

"It's more than five-five," he told me, leaning back on his hands. "Let's leave it at that."

"That was years ago," I said. "Now I probably couldn't even do a half a mile in that time."

"I bet you could." He held the rod up, squinting at it. "I bet," he said, "you'd be faster than you think. Though maybe not fast enough to fly."

I felt myself smile, then bit it back. "You could outrun me easily, I bet."

"Well," he said, "maybe someday, we'll find out."

Oh, my God, I thought, and I knew I should say something, anything. But now Kristy, Bert, and Monica were walking toward us, and I missed my chance.

"Twenty minutes to curfew," Bert announced as he got closer, looking at his watch. "We need to go."

"Oh, my God," Kristy said, "you might actually have to go over twenty-five to get us home in time."

Bert made a face at her, then walked to the driver's side door, opening it. Monica climbed up into the ambulance, plop-ping herself on the couch, and I followed her, with Kristy right behind me.

"What were you two talking about?" she whispered as Wes pulled the doors shut.

"Nothing," I said. "Running."

"You should have seen your face," she said, her breath hot in my ear. "Sa-woooon."

"Okay," Caroline said, pushing a button on the camera and then coming over to sit next to my mother. "Here we go."

It was Saturday morning. My sister had arrived the night before, having spent the day in Colby meeting with the carpenter about the renovations and repairs to the beach house. This was familiar ground to her, as she'd already done her own house, plus the place she and Wally had in the mountains. Decorating, she claimed, was her calling, ever since one of her college art professors told her she had a "good eye," a compliment that she took to mean she was entitled to redo not only her own house but also anyone else's.

So although my mother was just barely on board—which was itself miraculous, in my opinion—Caroline was moving full steam ahead, showing up with not only most of her extensive library on home decorating but also pictures she'd taken with Wally's digital camera, so she could walk us though the suggested changes with visual aides.

"These things are a real lifesaver when you're doing longdistance remodeling," she explained as she hooked the camera up to the TV. "I don't know what we ever did without them."

She pushed a button, and the screen went black. Then, just like that, the beach house appeared. It was the front view, the way it looked if you had your back to the ocean. There was the deck, with its one rickety wooden bench. There were the stairs that led over the dunes. There was the old gas grill, beneath the kitchen window. It had been so long since I'd seen it, but still I felt a lurch in my stomach at how familiar it was. It seemed entirely possible that if you leaned in closer, peering in the back window, you'd see my dad on the couch reading the paper and turning his head to look as you called his name.

My mother was just staring at it, holding her coffee cup with both hands, and I wondered again if she was going to be able to handle this. But then I looked at my sister, and she was watching my mom too. After a second she said, very carefully, "So this is the way it looks now. You can see that the roof is sagging a bit. That's from the last big storm."

My mother nodded. But she didn't say anything.

"It needs to be braced, and we have to replace some shingles as well. The carpenter was saying as long as we're shoring it up we might want to consider adding a skylight, or something… since the living room gets so little light from those front windows. You know how much you always complained about that."

I remembered. My mother was forever turning on lights in the living room, complaining it was like a dungeon. ("All the better for naps!" my father would claim, just before falling asleep on the couch with his mouth open.) She preferred to spend her time in the front bedroom, which had a big window. Plus the moose gave her the creeps. I wondered what she was thinking now. It was hard for her; it was hard for me, too. But I kept remembering everything Kristy had said two nights before, about not being afraid, and how if I'd come home when I got scared, I would have missed everything that had happened.

"But I've never dealt with skylights," Caroline said. "I don't know how much they run, or if they're even worth the trouble."

"It depends on the brand," my mother said, her eyes on the screen. "And the size. It varies."

I had to hand it to my sister. For all her pushing, she knew what she was doing. Take one small step—show the picture, which she knew would be hard for my mother—and pair it with something she'd feel entirely sure about: work.

It went the same way for the next half hour, as Caroline carefully guided us through the beach house, room by room. At first it was all I could do to swallow over the lump in my throat when I saw the view from the deck of the ocean, or the room with the bunk beds where I always slept. Even worse were the pictures of the main bedroom, where a pair of my dad's beat-up running shoes was still parked against the wall by the door.

But slowly, carefully, Caroline kept bringing us back. For every sharp intake of breath, every moment I was sure I couldn't bear it, there was a question, something logical to grab onto. I'm thinking maybe glass blocks in place of that window in the bathroom, she'd say, what do you think? Or, see how the linoleum's coming up in the kitchen? I found some great blue tile I think we could replace it with. Or would tile be too expensive? And each time, my mother would reply, grabbing the answer as if it was a life preserver in a choppy sea. Once she had her breath back, they'd move on.

When the slideshow was over, I left them in the living room discussing skylights and went to pull my laundry out of the dryer so I could iron something for the info desk the next day. I was almost done when my mother appeared in the doorway, leaning against it with her arms crossed over her chest.

"Well," she said, "your sister sure seems to have found herself a project, hasn't she?"

"Where is she?"

"Out in her car. She's got some swatches she wants to show me." She sighed, running her hand over the edge of the door frame. "Apparently, corduroy upholstery is all the rage these days."

I smiled, smoothing a crease out of the pants I was holding. "She is an expert at this," I said. "You know what a great job she did with her place, and the mountain house."

"I know." She was quiet for a second, watching as I folded a shirt and put it in the basket at my feet. "But I can't help but think it's a lot of money and work for such an old house. Your father always said the foundation would probably go in a few years… I just wonder if it's worth it."

I pulled Kristy's jeans out of the dryer and folded them. The black heart on the knee was just as dark as ever. "It might be fun," I said, picking my words carefully. "To have a place to go again."

"I don't know." She pulled a hand through her hair. "I wonder if it would be easier, if the foundation might be flawed, to just take it down. Then we'd have the lot and could start over."

I was bent over, peering into the dryer to pull out the last things in there, and for a second I just froze. Minutes ago, I'd gotten my first look at the beach house in over a year. To think that it, like so much else, might one day just be gone—I couldn't even imagine. "I don't know," I said. "I bet the foundation's not that bad."

"Mom?" Caroline called from the living room. "I've got the swatches… Where are you?"

"Coming," my mother said over her shoulder. "It was just an idea," she added, more quietly, to me. "Just a thought."

It shouldn't have surprised me, really. My mother trafficked in new houses, so of course the idea of everything being perfect and pristine, even better than before, would appeal to her. It was the dream she sold every day. She had to believe in it.

"Is that new?" she asked me suddenly.

"Is what new?"

She nodded at the tank top I'd just finished folding. "I haven't seen it before."

Of course she hadn't: it was Kristy's, and here, in the bright light of the laundry room, I knew it looked even more unlike something I'd wear than it had when I'd first agreed to put it on. You could plainly see the glittery design on the straps, and it was clear it was lower cut than my mother was most likely comfortable with. In Kristy's room, in Kristy's world, it was about as shocking as a plain white T-shirt. But here, it was completely out of place.

"Oh, this isn't mine," I said. "I just, um, borrowed it from a friend."

"Really?" She looked at it again, trying to picture, I was sure, one of my student council friends sporting such a thing. "Who?"

Kristy's face immediately popped into my mind, with her wide smile, the scars, those big blue eyes. If the tank top was enough to cause my mother concern, I could only imagine how Kristy, in one of her full outfits, would go over, not to mention any of my other Wish friends. It seemed simpler, and smarter, to just say, "This girl I work with. I spilled some salad dressing on my shirt last night so she lent me this, to drive home in."

"Oh," she said. It wasn't that she sounded relieved, but clearly, this was an acceptable explanation. "Well. That was nice."

"Yeah," I said, as she left the doorway, heading to the kitchen, where my sister and her swatches were waiting. "It was."

I left them downstairs, my mother listening dubiously as Caroline explained about how corduroy wasn't just for overalls anymore, and went up to my room, putting my laundry basket on the bed. After I'd stacked all my T-shirts, shorts, and jeans in the bureau, and laid out my info desk clothes for the week to be ironed, the only things left were Kristy's jeans and the tank top. I went to put them on my desk, where I'd be sure to see them the next time I was leaving for work and could return them, but then, at the last minute, I stopped myself, running the thin, glittery strap of the tank top between my thumb and forefinger. It was so different from anything of mine, it was no wonder my mother had noticed it instantly. That was why I should have returned it immediately. And that was why, instead, I slipped it into my bottom drawer, out of sight, and kept it.

On Sunday, my sister was cooking dinner, and she needed arugula. I wasn't entirely sure what that was. But I still got recruited to go look for it with her.

We'd just started down the second aisle of the farmer's market, my sister deep into an explanation of the difference between lettuce and arugula, when suddenly, there was Wes. Yikes, I thought, my hand immediately going to my hair, which I hadn't bothered to wash (so unlike me, but Caroline, convinced there was going to be some mass rush on exotic greens, had insisted we leave right after breakfast), then to my clothes—an old Lakeview Mall 5K T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops—which I'd thrown on without considering the fact I might see anyone I knew, much less Wes. It was one thing for him to see me catering, when, even if I was in disarray, at least I wasn't alone. Here, in broad daylight, though, all my old anxieties came rushing back.