Water Balloon (19 page)

"It's something I've sort of always shared with my dad. We listen to games together all the time." There's something absurd and defensive in my voice.

"Oh, really," she says, with yet another Leah Stamnick Flirty Hair Flip.

"It's not exactly something you and I would discuss, since you hate baseball," I say. "What are you doing here? And why did you blow me off on Saturday?"

"I was riding by and I saw Jack out here all by himself and thought I'd stop by and say hello." At this moment, I can't really remember anything I ever liked about her. I see all her bad parts squeezing out: flirty here, untrustworthy there, dishonest over there.

"So," she says, her hand reaching out for Jack's arm. "Hello!"

Even from this distance across the yard, I can see that he's smiling.

"Don't you have some scripts you should be reading?" I ask. Leah looks at me for a second, like a bewildered animal, and then my dad's phone starts ringing inside. I want to run back in the house. I also want to make sure Leah doesn't jump on top of Jack. I have that same urge of wanting to put myself between them, or sending Rig to do the job with his psycho-kitty-separation-of-people-standing-too-close-routine. I say, "I have to get the phone," and go back inside.

It's my mom. "Hey, honey, how are you doing?"

"Okay," I say.

"What's wrong?"

"Oh, Leah's just ... I don't know. Anyway, I think I'm coming to see you and Grandma on Sunday, right?"

"That'll be great. I forgot to ask your dad if he would do me a favor."

"What?"

"I didn't realize how long I'd be staying up here, so I didn't pack enough. Do you think you and Dad could go over to the house and bring me some clothes? And I'm going to need my folder of registration forms for work. They're on the left side of my desk, under that big book. Just grab some shirts and pants, maybe a sundress or something?"

"Sure."

"That would be great, save me a trip. Thanks, Marley. Thank your dad for me too. I'll see you on Sunday at the hospital, then."

"Wait! Mom. How is she?"

"She's still weak, but they say that's normal. She smiled when I said you'd be coming to see her."

"Is her hip better? Did the operation fix her hip?"

"It should be..." She stops. "I'm sorry," she says.

Maybe we both just have some constant crying disease. And maybe someday it will go away. I hate this. "Give Grandma a kiss from me, okay?"

"I will. Be good, honey."

Like I'm five. "Okay. I love you."

"You too. Bye."

I go back to the window and stand by it (actually, a little under it), spying on Jack and Leah. I see her throw her head back in that flirty laughing way, at the same time she puts her hand on Jack's arm and moves it down about six inches, like she's feeling his muscle. A whole new move, as yet unpatented and unnamed.

It's better not to watch. I know this, but I continue to look. At some point, though, I just go back into the kitchen and warm up the macaroni and cheese. I bring it into the living room to eat. I click on the remote as the doorbell rings.

"Ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh ruh." I hear Rig, but where is he?

"I'm coming," I say.

Baseball noises from the TV fill the room. Dad was up late last night, watching the game. Did he forget his key? Why is he ringing the bell?

I open the door. It's Jack. And Rig. "Ruh," Rig says.

"Hey," Jack says. "You forgot your dog. I like how he barks from either side of the door when the bell rings."

"Why are you at the front door?"

"I tried willing you to come out the back, but you never did. So can I come in?"

"Of course. I was just eating," I say, leading Jack into the house.

"Oh, I'm sorry—"

"No, it's, like, mac and cheese. No big deal. Want some?"

"Sure, why not?" He sits on the couch. "Cool. What's the score?"

"I just turned it on," I say, going into the kitchen to warm up more food. "What do you want to drink?"

"Do you have any orange juice?"

"Yeah, but my dad keeps buying the kind with pulp."

"I like pulp."

"Are you serious?"

"Totally."

It's so weird, making a guy dinner in my dad's kitchen. I've never done anything like this. It seems a little too good to be really happening. I half expect the doorbell to ring again and for Leah to say she was just passing by and happened to catch a whiff and she's so hungry and would I mind?

But I guess Leah must have left. I want to ask what they talked about. But I decide to try to just be happy that he's here. I'm relieved too, after everything, that he's choosing to spend time with me. I bring out another bowl of macaroni and cheese, a fork, and a glass of pulpy orange juice. We start to eat, watching the game. We talk a little, but our silences are fine too, part of the new dialect we're creating together.

When Dad gets home, he sits in the chair across from the couch. I'm wondering if he'll be cool with me and Jack just being here by ourselves. It's not like we've done anything. But this hasn't exactly come up before, me and a guy hanging out by ourselves in an empty house.

His eyes still on the TV, Dad asks Jack, "Did you know last night's game went to thirteen innings?"

"And hello to you," I say.

Dad smiles at me.

"And then the Yanks gave up that home run in the top of the thirteenth," Jack says.

"We'll get 'em tonight," Dad says. "What's the score?"

"Four-two, us," I say. Us. Like we're all on the same team. "Hey, Dad? Mom wants us to go over to the house and get some clothes to bring to her on Sunday. Do you have time to do that after work tomorrow?"

"Sure." Dad says, folding up some paper. He stands and takes it to the blue recycling container by the back door. "Jack, what do you know about the bulk trash pickup around here?" Dad is looking out the window at his tower of cartons. He looks twitchy, like old Dad is taking over the new him.

"Sorry, I don't know anything. And I've gotta get home," Jack says. "Oh, did you ask about the game?"

"She did," my dad says. "I wasn't clear on the details." And so they talk about times and seat locations and how Dean is going to pick us up. "I can't be sure what time I'll get Marley there," my dad tells Jack. "Why don't you give her the ticket so she can meet you at the seats?"

"Good idea," Jack says.

"How are you getting to the game?" my dad asks. It feels like some kind of old sitcom. Like he's asking about his intentions, only in code or something.

"Train, then subway," he says.

"Nothing like the train," Dad says.

"Nothing like the train," Jack says.

Dad walks into the kitchen. I hear him banging around the pot and colander, which I didn't clean. Or put away.

"Would it be okay if I look at the middle bedroom?" Jack asks. "I want to see what Will's room looks like post-Will."

We walk down the hall to my room. "He had a poster of Babe Ruth on the back of the door, there, and a dartboard with the Red Sox logo right in the middle of theb ull's-eye."

"Cool," I say. My dad hates the Red Sox too. It's what Yankees fans do.

There's something swirly in my stomach, like my body just realized I'm alone in my bedroom with Jack. I'm dizzy. Jack's fingers are grazing the top of my blanket. Whoa. I think I might explode. How do you keep yourself from exploding? I really don't want to explode in front of Jack.

"Hey, Marley?" my dad calls from the kitchen. I don't know if he's sensing something about how long we've been in my room together, like some kind of protective dad radar, but for once his timing doesn't suck.

"I'm gonna go," Jack says.

Explosion averted.

"Wait," he says. "Can I have your cell number?"

"Yeah," I write the number and watch him fold it and stuff it deep into his pocket.

"See ya Sunday," Jack says.

In two more days, Jack will be in his personal nirvana: Yankee Stadium. And I will be in mine: next to Jack.

There's a tower of mail on the floor, piled up from the mailman pushing it through the slot. The house is warm with the heavy air of a place that has been closed up for a while. The smell and the feel and just the sight of everything familiar to me bring on a wave of painful homesickness for all that's lost—my friends, the way I lived comfortably in one home and didn't have to constantly readjust to the other. Even in the midst of this overwhelming longing, though, is the tickle of knowledge that back then, when all that other good stuff was still in place, I didn't know that there was a Jack-with-light-blue-eyes out there. A Jack I look forward to seeing every morning.

I grab piles of mail and stack them semi-neatly on the coffee table. When I look up, my dad's hand is on a picture frame on the bookshelf, and the look in his eyes betrays something close to what I'm feeling (without the Jack part). I step behind him. It's a picture of the three of us—Mom, Dad, and me—on vacation in Bermuda when I was two. I'm sitting, my fat baby legs covered in sand, with Mom and Dad leaning toward each other right behind me, smiling. I don't remember the trip, but that picture has been on that shelf forever. My parents look like younger, happier versions of their present selves.

Dad smiles. "That was a great trip," he says.

We stand there just looking at that picture for a long time, until I say, "I'll go get Mom's stuff."

I go to my room first. Oh, my room. My books! My stuff! On the shelves, framed pictures of—ugh—Leah and Jane and me everywhere. I sit on my bed and feel that no-glasses Jane staring at me. I stay there a few minutes and try not to feel, not to think. It's impossible.

In my mom's room, I'm hit with another ache. I miss my mom!

I've never been away from her for this long before. I open her drawers and just touch her clothes. I try to remember which pants she likes to wear with which shirts, but all her clothes look foreign to me. I take a couple of pairs of capris and some T-shirts, grab some underwear and a couple of nightgowns, and throw it all into her old overnight bag. I look in the bathroom for anything she might want.

"Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"Is there anything you can think of that I should bring besides clothes?"

"There's a jasmine spray that she keeps in her night table drawer. She sprays it on her pillow to help her sleep. If it's in there, maybe you could grab that."

It's exactly where he said it would be. I spray it in the air. Its sweetness is the smell of my mother. I hadn't known that came from a little plastic bottle. I go in her closet and pull out a couple of dresses, then close the bedroom door behind me. In the office, I find the file of new-student registration forms under her big book.

I carry her packed bag into the living room, but I don't want to leave my house yet.

"You okay?" Dad says.

I nod, then shake my head. "It's hard," I say, the familiar burn of tears in my eyes at the kindness in his. "And I'm so sick of crying all the time." It's as though there is some secret cue and I just hit it on the mark, because as I say that, the tears leave the starting position and take off down my face.

"Oh, Marley. I know." Dad reaches out his left arm to me and pulls me against his chest. "It is hard. It's all hard."

I cry for a while. I wish Rig were here. Whenever I cry, he walks over, slowly, and when he can no longer wait, he licks my face. When I was younger, I believed it was out of compassion, but I've learned that he cannot resist the taste of salt.

When I get my breathing back, I ask, "Do you really get that? How hard it all is? Do you have any idea of what's going on? Like how my friends aren't my friends anymore and how I don't want to go back to school because how do you go to school when you have no friends? It's, like, impossible."

"Your mother's been gone. Your grandmother's sick. You're living in two different places. I think I get it."

It feels like that earthquake movie set is splitting inside me, knocking the sadness off-balance and replacing it with this big, red, angry wave of something else. "And do you also get how all this started when you moved out?" My tone is not one either of us is used to.

He's silent. For a long time.

My tears are still coming, but they're furious, not sad.

Dad reaches close, the smell of shaving cream and cut grass, and he tries to put his arms around me. No. I don't want that. I stand up and stalk around the living room.

"Is there one thing that's bothering you the most?" His voice is quiet, controlled.

Most? When everything sucks so completely, do I really need to prioritize all the things that are wrong? I have no friends. I keep slipping back and forth between two homes; and I can't get my footing anywhere.

"It's everything," I say finally. The truth. "It's you, and it's my friends, or my not-friends. My not-friends and my not-family."

"Let's start out easy." His voice is infuriatingly calm. My fists and teeth are clenched, and my head is throbbing. "How can you start to make things better with Leah and Jane?"

"I can't. I don't even trust them. Like, at all. I don't even like them anymore."

"Do you remember what I told you about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig? Did you think at all about that?"

As if everything should have been solved with his wise baseball story. "That was about some little misunderstanding. This is about friends who aren't treating me right. Friends who turned out to not be the best of people."

"You'll meet new people," he says.

"You don't understand: I've been friends with Leah and Jane forever. It's impossible to start over."

"Forever changes," Dad says. "I thought your mom and I would be married forever. It's normal for relationships to change. Sometimes people change, and they grow apart. It's not bad or wrong. It just happens."

"You know what, Dad? I am so sick of that, how it's no one's fault and blah blah blah. Because really? I think it is someone's fault. I think Leah and Jane could have been better friends to me. I think it
is
their fault. And I think you and Mom could have fixed it before it broke. And I don't think it's normal for you to be going out with Lynne already. You don't seem to realize how totally and completely this sucks for me. Except for Grandma, you've said no to, like, everything all summer, and—"