Wish You Were Here (37 page)

The line was short but the owner was slow, writing up each slip by hand, pressing hard on the carbon. He took down the title of every book as if he planned on restocking. With his cardigan and Ben Franklins and his avalanche of a desk, he was supposed to seem homey and warm, Lise thought, but he and his wife had been gouging tourists for years, tweaking the seasonal markup then buying back at half-price, reselling the same tired stock summer after summer at a hundred percent profit. He'd once yelled at Ella for flipping through an art book, afraid she'd ruin his investment.

Lise examined the Oprah book, hoping for imperfections—dogeared pages, sentences underlined, any excuse to ditch it. There was nothing, even the spine was pristine, as if it hadn't been read. She could borrow it from Carmela or find it at the library. She wouldn't get to it here anyway, with Harry.

“He's taking forever,” she said, as if that were a reason, and went to the Fiction section, found the gap she'd created and slid it back where it belonged.

The rain had driven everyone down to Lakewood, to the gritty stretch of strip malls around Wal-Mart, the muffler and brake shops, the Rite Aid and Johnny's Texas Hots. Meg noticed the road into Jamestown had been widened to accommodate the boom; traffic inched between the new lights. The wipers jogged her nerves, and the radio. Patience, patience. One two three four five six seven … She wished she were alone so she could get stoned.

It wasn't that she didn't trust Lise. She just wasn't sure. Lise judged her, she knew, but Lise judged everybody. She was like her mother, partly afraid of Meg. The idea that she was someone dangerous was amusing, and she traded on it whenever she could, but lighting up now, as they cruised between the discount Christmas stores and tile outlets, would be too much.

At least she hadn't told them
how
she ended up in rehab. Lise wouldn't be riding with her if she had.

Only good had come out of it, she thought, no real permanent damage. She had to block the vision of the crash from her mind, snap it off with a shake of her head. Some days she didn't want to think at all, just exist.

“Red light,” Lise informed her.

“Sorry,” Meg said, stopping well over the white line. “I was thinking.”

Lise didn't ask what about, instead said something about the light being new, a ready-made excuse. It seemed everyone felt sorry for her except Jeff. She wished they didn't. Her counselor was right—it was what she had to fight in herself, lying back in that soft bed of self-pity, as if she'd been the victim all along.

The light changed and she led the line behind her across, braked and turned into the busy lot of the Blockbuster, the driveway riding over
the sidewalk. Beside her, Lise glanced at a jacked-up four-by-four in one of the handicapped spaces and clucked her tongue. Meg thought it was probably just some kid dropping off. Unlike the sticklers in rehab, she was inclined to let people slide on little things. If she'd learned nothing else, it was that there was no gain in being right.

“You have the card?” Lise asked as they walked across the lot.

“Right here.” It was the cottage's card, still in her father's name. In all her years of renting, no one had ever questioned her. That he was dead would mean nothing to them, as long as they got paid.

Like the Book Barn, the place was teeming, except here most of the people seemed to be local, and younger—girls in windbreakers advertising high school softball teams, guys in faded baseball caps with ridiculous sideburns, two heavy women in their twenties with pink denim jackets and fanny packs. They leapfrogged each other down the wall of new releases, some of which were a good three years old. Above them, monitors suspended from the ceiling blasted clips urging them to rent films that had clearly bombed despite their hot stars. With its noise and motion and its thin red carpeting, the place had the same distracting atmosphere as a casino. At home, Justin would have asked to tag along so he could rent a video game, and Sarah would have refused to go, telling her to look for some teen thing the name of which Meg would never remember, but here the mission was simple: two movies both the kids and the grown-ups could enjoy.

By the letter C, they were discouraged. Most of the boxes described violent, titillating films that neither children nor self-respecting adults wanted to watch. Her mother would not put up with Disney, and Lise said they'd just caught
Mrs. Doubtfire
on TV. There was a solid section, floor to ceiling, of Eddie Murphy's
Dr. Dolittle,
but despite the store's vaunted promise, it was sold out.

“
The Nutty Professor
?” Lise suggested.

“Seen it.”

“
Star Trek Next Generation
?”

“At least three times.”

“They never have anything.”

The selection only got worse as they went down the alphabet. One of the actresses on what Meg could only call soft porn looked strikingly like Jeff's girlfriend Stacey, so much so that she almost picked up the box
to make sure it wasn't her, except Lise would see. It couldn't be—Stacey was a senior sales analyst—but inside, Meg jumped at the possibility of finding evidence against her, as if by proving she was a fake Jeff would see that he was wrong and come back to her. The idea belonged to a Julia Roberts comedy, sweetness winning in the end, but there it was, indisputable. She'd believed in fairy tales. Regardless of what her counselor warned, she'd gone through rehab thinking everything would be all right once she graduated, and Jeff had let her. When she called, he was bubbly as a cheerleader, telling her they missed her, they loved her, they only wanted her to get better and come home. The call was the highlight of her week, her one link to the outside world, and when it was time to go, she didn't want to hang up, and stalled.

“I love you,” she'd say.

“I love you too.”

“Give the kids a big kiss and a hug.”

“I will.”

There was a pause, an opportunity to say, Okay, good night, but it hung open between them, unused.

“I miss you,” she'd say, and they would start all over again. Later, she wondered if he'd been seeing Stacey then, and her righteous paranoia said yes, that he'd been lying all along, probably since the day they met. She knew that wasn't so, but it might as well have been. Their good years together had been stolen from her.

She'd thought seriously of killing Stacey. Though now it seemed absurd, something from a B movie, she had entertained a simple plan—walking up to her in the parking lot at work as if she were visiting Jeff and shooting her before she could get her car door open, standing above her and emptying the gun into her, dropping it onto her body and walking away (not even kicking her face, that would destroy the effect). She didn't think about jail. The plan didn't go that far, only to the goal of killing Stacey. But these were just fantasies. In those days she was too busy keeping herself sane to do anything that involved complex thought.

And now here she was, back in the land of the free, sober and responsible, changed, and—she could admit—terrified of her new life as this alien person. Maybe the women in pink had come through worse, abusive parents giving way to brutal husbands. And who knew what the kids around them would run up against as they graduated and got married
and had children of their own. They were so young, joking with each other in the rows, a girl chasing a guy around his friend, whacking him with a box, the guy stopping so she folded into him, both of them laughing. Meg wanted to tell them to stay that way, not to ruin themselves with stupidity and lying, to keep some nobility and hope for when they would need it.

“So much for that,” Lise said.

They had reached the skimpy Zs and turned to the store empty-handed, looking over the shelves of older videos broken down by categories, the art on the boxes sun-faded, the colors turning strange shades. She was always surprised by how many she'd seen. Somewhere in here were the classic drunk movies,
The Lost Weekend
and
Leaving Las Vegas,
and thousands of Hollywood affairs and divorces and car crashes, all true and untrue, all returning, in the end, to her.

“Let's try Comedy,” Lise said.

“Good idea,” Meg said. “I'm in the mood for something mindless.”

They played double solitaire, facing each other, wrapped in their sleeping bags, settled in for the long afternoon with cans of soda and a bag of potato chips. The upstairs was gray, darkening as if it were winter. Drops dotted the window by the top of the stairs. They lay across their pillows, propped on their elbows, slapping the cards down on the horrible carpet, sometimes hitting each other in a flurry, laughing. And then nothing came. They turned over their threes impatiently, going nowhere. Six of clubs, eight of hearts.

“Jack of diamonds, jack of diamonds,” Ella chanted. “Come on, jack of diamonds.”

One two three, one two three—

“Here you go,” Sarah said, and they flailed away. The end was fast, but Ella put down the last king. They finished and counted up the different backs, not really keeping track. They shuffled and cut again.

“Ready? Go.”

Ella thought the rain had stopped, but then it picked up again, racing wild, drumming the roof like hooves. She was happy to be alone with Sarah, to have something both of them could concentrate on. She was convinced that at any second she would blurt out what she hadn't even practiced in her mind, cutting it short before it could form. She would say it flat out, “I love you,” or “I'm in love with you,” or “I think I'm in love with you”—totally at random, dumping the news on Sarah like it was her problem.

Because she was. She was mad it had happened (as if she'd been tricked), but it had. She thought about her all the time, she wanted to be with her, she couldn't sleep and then when she did she dreamed of her. All the symptoms fit, so there was no point pretending it wasn't love. The question was what to do about it.

The first answer that came to her was to do nothing, just be cousins, spend the week together and say they'd see each other soon, that they'd both write or, better, e-mail, knowing they wouldn't. She could see herself back home, checking her e-mail every ten minutes. Sarah would be back with her boyfriend Mark, or with a new boyfriend. At least she didn't say she loved him; maybe she was afraid of what Ella might think. But Sarah wasn't afraid, Sarah wasn't like that, and she and Mark weren't really serious. It was up to Ella to make a move, and she knew that unless something big happened, she wouldn't. The knowledge shamed her, made her feel weak and digusted with herself, but powerless to change things.

The second answer was to confess how she felt. Sarah might freak on her or they might talk. It was risky, too much thinking involved.

The third was simply to kiss her.

In her highest and lowest moments she preferred the third. It would be fast and honest, final. Her chances were the same anyway.

That was a last resort. Most of the time she navigated the space between the first two, trying to find a casual way of discovering how Sarah felt about being gay without being obvious. “So,” she'd say, “what did you think about Ally kissing Ling?” or “I didn't think Ally kissing Ling
was a big deal; I mean, she'd already kissed Georgia.” Those were the two best lines she had, and she was still looking for an opportunity to use them. Sarah didn't seem to watch the show.

She wouldn't do anything. It was too much of a risk, and this was probably just a crush (she wasn't a lesbian, everyone in her class had been in love with Miss Friedhoffer). If Sarah told her mother, her mother would tell her parents and then it would be this huge thing. It was better if Ella just kept everything inside, private. It wasn't that hard, she thought. She'd had her whole life to practice. It was only three more days.

They played. Sarah won, then she won. It didn't matter to either of them, and Ella liked that. She could be happy just being with her. They didn't have to do anything special. They didn't even have to kiss. It was enough to be her friend. Things would last longer that way.

“What time is it?” Sarah asked.

“I don't know, three-thirty, four o'clock.”

Sarah pushed herself up and went to the dresser, taking her deck with her. She moved their nail stuff around, looking for something.

“Have you seen my watch anywhere?”

“Nope.”

Sarah leaned across the top of the dresser and looked behind it, then walked around bent over, checking the carpet, holding her hair back from her face with both hands. Ella got up and helped. She thought it might have somehow bounced under the dresser and reached underneath, but all she found was a green plastic letter A with a magnet in it.

“I remember those,” Sarah said. “We used to spell things on the refrigerator with them. I wonder where the rest are.”

It set them off on a search. Behind the striped beanbag chair beside the chimney sat an old box like the one in the attic at home where they kept their Christmas-tree ornaments. The box had been there since they were little, and probably before, because the toys inside were wooden and old-fashioned, trucks and dollhouse furniture made by Grandpa for her father and Aunt Margaret when they were kids. The cardboard had turned dark over the years, but she could still make out the marks of an orange crayon, a wobbly, unsuccessful star drawn by someone before she was born. Sarah hauled out a Tonka tow truck with a hook you could reel in like a fishing line, and handfuls of small colored blocks, and a naked Barbie with ribbons in her hair. There were Tinkertoy sticks and their biscuitlike
connectors and green windmill fins, a set of plastic checkers missing most of the reds.

“Do you remember what we used to do with these?” Sarah asked, and pushed one of the checkers into her own cheek so the ridged rim left a circular print on her skin.