Water Balloon (16 page)

"Something's wrong with your dog, Marley," Grace says.

My dad leans in and says, "He's been trying to catch a fly for six years now. That's what he looks like when he's chasing a fly."

"Six years?" Faith asks. "How hard could it be?" And then she's off, following the quick yellow lights that pulse in the early night sky.

"I'll help you," Jack says, following her.

My dad sits on a bench and rocks Jenna's carriage back and forth. Lynne sits next to him. Ugh. Why did I look?

"I caught one!" Faith yells.

"I wanna catch one!" Grace says. "What do I do with it once I catch it?"

Just then, in front of all of us, Rig opens his mouth and clear as day in the darkening night, a firefly goes right in. Rig sits, closes his mouth. It twitches, looks like it wants to open, but he's keeping it shut. His tail thump, thump, thumps the ground, as though he's saying,
I did it!

"Marley!" Grace screams. "MAR-LEY! Your dog ate Tinkerbell!"

"Make him stop," Faith says. "Why'd your dog do that, Marley?"

Then Rig lets out this weird yelp, almost like he's been stung, and when he opens his mouth, the bug flies out. It heads toward the monkey bars, and the girls race behind it.

"Come here, Rig." I kneel in front of him and open his mouth. Could firefly light be dangerous for dogs? Rig stands up and shakes.

"We should probably go back and get him some water," I say. "Hey, Grace! Faith! I'll see you Monday, okay?"

"Bye, Marley Bear!" they yell out together.

"Bye, Dad. See you, Lynne."

I reach deep inside my spent energy bank to find the strength to walk very quickly away from all that. Jack lags, waving goodbye to the girls.

"Ugh," I say when he finally catches up to me. "You were right."

"About what?"

"She
is
his girlfriend."

"Well, don't laugh, but now I'm thinking maybe I was wrong. I mean, you don't really know—"

"Huh? Hello? She makes him dinner and he pushes her baby around and ugh, I'm going to be sick. Did you see him pushing that baby? I really think I'm going to throw up."

"Well, yeah—"

"So how come you're on his side?"

"I'm not, Marley. I just think you might be jumping to conclusions."

I stop walking and face him. He looks ridiculously sure of himself. "It's bad enough he's hooked up with some stupid girlfriend, but getting me to watch her kids?"

His hands are in his shorts pockets, and he shrugs as if this is no big deal at all. "I get why this is weirding you out, but they really could just be friends. It
is
possible."

I get an image of a high-flying ball soaring from Dad's glove, up in the air—way over my head—to Jack's glove, and back again, in an endless arc, far out of my reach.

We start walking again, dry pine needles crunching underfoot. In a quiet voice Jack says, "Have you ever thought, maybe your father's just trying to move on?"

"He's still married to my mother, or doesn't that even matter?"

"So is that it? You think they might get back together?"

I don't think hoping for something is the same as thinking it. I also don't think it's any of his business right now.

"I'm just not exactly thrilled that my father left my mom and me, and now I'm babysitting for his stupid girlfriend's kids. Can't you get that?"

"I think your dad's a good guy," he says. "I guess I'm trying to see it from his point of view."

"You know what, Jack? You just go ahead and do that."

"What are you so pissed about?"

"You."

He stops walking again. He looks ready to shut down. Shut me out. Good. Who cares? What else do I have to lose?

"It seems like you want to be mad at him. Or mad at someone."

"Like you know so much about me!"

"Maybe I don't."

"Ya think?" He might be cute, but I think he might also be a total jerk. It's too much. I can't stand it anymore. I feel like I got on the kind of ride I'd never go on, the kind of nightmare I have all the time. It's way too scary and twisty and upside down. All I ever wanted was to stay on the kiddie boats that go in gentle little circles in shallow water. I'm holding on, just trying to believe that I'll be all right, that it will end. That everything will be all right.

"So, good
night,
" I say, disgusted with Jack and all his opinions.

I walk home.

Alone.

I avoid my dad all day Sunday—read, sleep, walk dog, repeat. But there's no more hiding when we're back to Monday, in the truck on the way to Grace and Faith's. I can't quite look at my dad, or even start a normal conversation with him. "I don't want to know one thing about last night, so don't talk to me about Saturday night."

"Right," he says. "Are you okay?"

"Sure."

"Are you ready for a day of twins?"

"I guess." We may as well be fishing.

 

The girls are waiting for me outside. Grace is wearing a sleeveless Tinkerbell shirt with Minnie Mouse shorts and Faith has on an oversize man's shirt with a picture of a can of beer. They're both gripping big bundles of dandelions in their hands. It's a total mix, from bright yellow flowers to giant puffballs.

"For you, Marley."

"I missed you," Grace says as she hands me her bouquet.

"Okay, each of you take one of these." I hand them each a puffball. None of them is a perfect globe anymore, as they've been handled too much by five-year-old hands and some of the seeds have already fallen off. But they're good enough. "This kind of dandelion, this puffball, is a magic ball. When you blow it, its powers are released."

"I blown 'em before. But I didn't know about powers. What powers?" Grace asks.

"Special magic powers."

"Like fairy powers?" Faith wants to know.

"Kind of. Make a wish," I say.

"Like a balloon wish?" Grace asks. "Like when you let go of a balloon?"

"Do I have to tell you my wish?" Faith asks.

"Yes, Grace. No, Faith."

"Can I tell you my wish?" Grace asks.

"I think it's supposed to be secret."

Grace nods slowly, seriously.

"So what you do is close your eyes and make your wish, and then you try to blow all the seeds off the dandelion with one breath."

"I can do that!" Faith starts puffing at the dandelion, and when all the seeds don't fall off at once, she starts shaking as she blows, until the stem is bare. Grace does the same.

"Excellent job," I say.

"Marley?"

"Yes?"

"Are wishes real?" Grace is gazing at my face, just waiting for the answer she wants. I have a feeling her wish was about her father, and it just kills me to think I may have planted a false hope by telling her there was magic. What if she spends the rest of the day, the rest of the summer, looking at the driveway, waiting for her father to pull up with a pile of packed suitcases and a heart full of past regret and better intentions for the future? I know better than to be promising happy endings to these two.

But they're five. Just about the only benefit of being five is still believing your wishes can come true. "I think wishes are real," I say. "I don't know if they always come true—I don't think they do. But the wish is definitely still real."

She looks at me for a while, maybe trying to understand, maybe thinking I'm from Mars. "I think what you should do is put a dandelion in a balloon and float it to the sky. That's like two wishes then. And maybe even pray when you're doing it too, so it's like three."

I have worked very hard to banish all thoughts of balloons since the Fourth, but there's something about that image that really appeals to me. A dandelion somehow suspended inside a balloon, slowly rising away from the earth.

"I'm getting more dandelions! I want more wishes!" Faith takes off toward the back of the yard, near the hill where the bunnies race.

"Wait for me!" Grace screams. "Leave some for me!"

As I watch them, I try to imagine what it would have been like for me if my dad had moved out eight years ago. How do their little five-year-old hearts hold all that sadness? Would I have been nicer to them all summer if I knew that they were dealing with the same hard stuff as me?

As they run back toward me, blowing, eyes closed, I try to figure out what they might need, what might help them. My parents, in their different ways, would try to get them to talk about it. Leah and Jane would have done the opposite—tried to change the subject whenever they talked about it. I don't know what's right, so I just promise myself to try to be nicer to them.

I hear the screen door slap shut. "Open your eyes when you're running!" Lynne screams from the porch. I wince, realizing I should have said that. Then I'm thinking, hmm, she's comfortable leaving me, inexperienced, unlicensed me, alone with her kids for weeks and she saunters outside when it's convenient to judge how I watch them? She turns to me and asks, "They're making dandelion wishes?"

What's this? Some veiled criticism about me letting her kids spread dandelion seeds all over their lawn? It's a mess anyway. Just because she might be my dad's girlfriend doesn't mean I can just entertain her kids all day and keep them from blowing dandelion seeds and making her lawn worse.

Did I really once think she was nice?

She looks like she's waiting for an answer. "Yeah, they're just making wishes," I say. "Dandelions never lasted long enough on my lawn for me to make wishes. My dad's like a lawn nazi." Is she going to tell my father everything I say?

"What'd you say, Marley Bear?" Grace asks, pulling at a belt loop on my shorts.

"I never got to blow dandelions at my house when I was your age."

"How come?" Grace is practically climbing me, trying to wrap herself around my leg.

"My father's sort of a dandelion hater."

"That doesn't surprise me," Lynne says.

Yeah, because you know him so well.

"No bunnies for Marley," Faith says. "No dandelions for Marley."

"Poor Marley!" Grace hugs my leg and pats my lower back. "Is your mother mean too?"

I laugh. "No. She's not mean." She's just away. And not that good at returning phone calls.

"It really wasn't too bad," I tell the girls. "My grandmother always let me blow dandelions all over her yard. I made ton of wishes." I think about those wishes now, and they seem so simple—a red bike, a trip to Disney World. I should have made just one, a big one:
Please, oh please, let things stay exactly as they are now.

"We had a lot of different theories about dandelions when I grew up," Lynne says. Was her voice always this annoying? "My Aunt Bemmy always said that if you rubbed the fluid from inside the stem of a dandelion on a wart, it would make it go away."

"Hmm," I say. The twins set off again, scouring the lawn. Grace runs alongside Faith until Faith trips her and takes the lead.

Grace looks around, as though she's deciding whether or not to cry, then gets up and follows her sister.

"There was another dandelion trick where I grew up," Lynne says. "Take one of the yellow flowers, Marley."

Why is she out here today? Shouldn't she be holed up in her little office? Who's watching Jenna? I put the other flowers down and hold a perfect yellow dandelion.

"Now hold it under your chin," she says.

I do. She starts to look at my neck, from left to right, then back again, concentrating on something, looking at me so closely that I can't look back. I look down, but all I see is the flower.

"They say that you can tell if the person holding the flower is in love from the reflection of yellow on her neck."

I don't know if my neck is yellow, but I do know, without even being able to see it, that my face is bright red. Does she get off on embarrassing people? Stealing fathers away from Perfectly Good Lives and having dinner with them?

And I'm not in love with Jack anyway. Obviously. Stupid know-it-all Jack. I'm disgusted with him.

"We used to eat them too." Will she ever shut up? "We'd make salads, fritters, even ice cream."

"How 'bout that?"

Faith and Grace keep running back to pile more dandelions (and other things that are not dandelions) on top of the bunches they already handed me.

Lynne is still droning on. "And my mother—she grew up in England—she said people there believed that if you smelled a dandelion, you'd wet your pants."

The twins start to scream with laughter. I have never heard children laugh so hard. Grace falls down and Faith falls on top of her.

"I'm going to get back to work now," Lynne says. "You seem to have things under control out here."

That she could look at a pile of laughing, snorting twins and consider that under control worries me. Was she checking on me, making sure I was working? What happens here when I'm not around?

Faith and Grace both try to stand up and then fall right back down, howling with laughter, gasping for breath. Before long, they regain what passes for their composure. Then Faith stands and walks over to the pile of dandelions she picked earlier. "Marley Bear?" she says.

I know what's coming. "Yes, Faith."

"I need you to smell this dandelion."

"I don't think I can help you with that."

Grace stands up and approaches me from the other side.

"You're going to have to, Marley."

"Why's that?"

"'Cause we wanna see if it's true."

"You smell it," I say.

"No! You! YOU!"

"You. Are. Angering. The. Marley. BEAR!"

They scream again and take off in different directions, like fireworks snaking down to the ground. I hear one of them, not sure which, start to taunt "Marley's scared of peeing!" I'm pretty sure it's Faith. It always is.

***

When I'm ready to leave, Lynne steps onto the porch. "Can I speak with you for a minute, Marley?"

Can I say no?

"Are you okay?" she asks.

"Fine."

"Is something wrong?"

Please don't, lady. I might break.
I don't answer, my eyes locked on the gray porch floor.

"Anyway, I just wanted to thank you, Marley. The girls are really enjoying their time with you." I'll bet she's only saying this because she knows kindness makes me cry.