Everybody Sees the Ants (25 page)

“Shit. That’s my mom.”

“She calling you or a dog?”

I look over and see a woman on the porch of the nicest house on the block. She has one hand on her hip, another in her mouth to whistle again if necessary, and she’s looking right at me. Right through me. Then she points to her watch frantically.

Before I can say anything else, Ginny is gone. She stops to say good-bye to her friends, and while she jogs to her house, I watch her transform into a completely different person. Even from behind I can tell that person would never talk to Lucky Linderman, let alone kiss him.

We wait until six thirty for Dave. Jodi tries calling him on his cell phone, but he doesn’t answer. So we leave for their favorite restaurant without him.

He finally calls while we’re eating our bread and says he can’t make it.

“A last-minute meeting,” Jodi says.

Mom looks disappointed. Before Jodi can comment, she says, “I really should have planned this better so we didn’t come when he was so busy at work.”

Jodi and I look at our plates and don’t say anything.

I gorge myself. I even eat dessert—the house cheesecake with strawberries. When I get home, Mom starts doing our laundry, and I go straight to bed because I can’t wait for Friday because Friday is the day we leave. Because Friday is the day I get to see Ginny one last time. I can’t figure out which is better.

I
wake up to Mom stacking her clean clothing on her mattress. She’s stripped the bed and has borrowed Jodi’s laundry basket, which is waiting for my sheets, I presume, before she will take it to the laundry room and wash them for Jodi. She stacks the piles exactly four inches away from each other. Each piece of clothing is folded perfectly, like a department-store table display. I fall back asleep.

The shower goes off, and Mom arrives a few minutes later wrapped in a towel.

“Get up, Luck. I need to strip your bed.”

“Sure.” I say this, but I want to keep sleeping.

“Up,” she says, making the motion with her arms.

So I get up and take a shower, and when I emerge, I see my bed is stripped and my clothes are neatly stacked on my
mattress as if they were for resale at JCPenney. The POW/MIA department of JCPenney, of course, where our heroes are never forgotten.

I comb my hair and check out my scab in the mirror. The edges have shed their ragged dried bits, and Iowa has morphed into Pennsylvania now—a near-perfect rectangle with a jagged eastern edge and a ridge of mountains through the middle. I find this fitting for the day we’re flying home.

While Mom takes her final few laps in Jodi’s pool, I try to find Ginny. I walk by her house twice, once going east and once going west, but it looks as though no one is home, and so I go to the empty playground and sit in the shade for a while thinking that tomorrow I’ll be home again. I nearly feel all the confidence I have here in Arizona collapse just thinking about it. It’s as if location is more important than I ever gave it credit for.

The last place I remember being happy was at Granny Janice’s house before she got sick. Since first grade, school has made me a jittering coward. The pool was fine until Nader started working there two years ago. Now I hate it. And home is a disaster for a variety of reasons.

I picture Dad alone for the last three weeks—raising the flags, driving to work, driving home from work and lowering the flags. Something about this scene makes me want to cry. Everything about it. All these years I’ve been visiting Granddad while he can’t. When he folds that POW/MIA flag every night, that’s his father he’s folding. It’s all he’s got. It’s all he’s ever had.

I’m eating a late lunch at the kitchen table when I hear Uncle Dave park in the driveway. The ants say:
Hey! Look who decided to show up!

Dave walks in and says, “I’m so glad I caught you! I thought you’d have left by now.”

“Our flight isn’t until late. It’s a red-eye.”

“My sister has always been early for everything,” he says. “Plus, I thought you might be out saying good-bye to your mysterious friends.”

“Nah.”

He cocks his head. “Is something wrong?”

“Nope.”

He can feel my disgust for him. I am purposely sending it.

“Sorry I didn’t make it yesterday. It’s been a killer week at the office.”

“Sure it has,” I say.

He shrugs and goes back to the garage door. “Want to lift a little before you go?”

“Nah. Already showered.”

He stands there looking at me, and I look back at him. Eye to eye. He has no idea that I know he’s cheated Aunt Jodi out of a happy life. Part of me wants him to know this. Part of me wants to tell him to shit or get off the pot. The ants want me to drop a twenty-pound weight on his dick.

“Okay, then,” he says. “I’m going out to lift.”

Just as he’s about to open the door, I say, “I know you aren’t always at work when you say you are.”

He stops and turns to face me.

“I
know
,” I say again.

He looks a mix of caught and hurt, and I don’t say anything else, so he opens the door to the garage and closes it behind him.

As I’m rinsing my plate in the sink, Mom and Jodi come in, toweling off and chatting about calories. Apparently, Jodi thought calorie counting was a myth.

“But let me get this straight. If I eat less than fifteen hundred calories and exercise every day, then I’ll lose weight?”

Mom nods. “That’s the idea, yeah.”

“Why didn’t they teach us that in school?” She wraps her beach towel around her lower half and slips on an oversized T-shirt.

“I think they did,” Mom says. “But it was boring then. You probably forgot.”

“Yeah, well, back then I could eat whatever the heck I wanted and never gain a pound.”

“And another—” Mom starts, but then there’s a banging on the front door and someone rings the doorbell, like, four times in a row.

Jodi is startled. We are all startled, because there seems to be screaming or crying or—Ginny. As Aunt Jodi opens the door, Ginny falls into the house, a lump of sobbing, hands over her face—and nearly bald. I do the first thing that comes naturally. I hug her.

We stumble to the nearest love seat, and she continues to sob into my chest.

I make eye contact with Jodi and Mom, and they both
shrug. Eventually Jodi grabs a box of tissues and sits down on the couch on the other side of Ginny. I hand a tissue to Ginny, and she cleans up her face and then looks at me, and I see she has a huge red-purple mark around one eye—a shiner in the making.

“What happened to your hair?” Jodi asks, because she hasn’t seen Ginny’s eye yet, and Ginny puts her head back on my shoulder and cries again.

I’m speechless. Picture this: girl with a white scalp showing through an inch-long white-blond crew cut, with a welt the shape of New Jersey forming around her eye, the red-purple starting in around the edge, her face puffy with grief. The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life. She’s wearing a pair of oversize sweatpants and a T-shirt. She smells like salt.

Ginny continues to cry in my arms, and Aunt Jodi rubs her back in circles. “Virginia? What’s going on?”

And then Ginny looks over and Jodi sees her eye and she’s speechless for a moment.

I manage to ask, “Who did that to you?”

She traces the welt on her face with her index finger.

“Who did this?” Jodi says.

Ginny looks at me and reaches up to my scab and feels it. I can see her searching for an answer, but she bursts into tears again, and Jodi rubs her back and puts on that concerned face. Not like during the interrogation two weeks ago, but like a genuine concerned face. Like she could imagine Ginny being her own daughter or something.

I hear the radio go off in the garage, which means Dave is cooling down. Mom is still standing where she was when the doorbell rang. Ginny is taking deep breaths, trying to get a grip on herself.

“Do you need me to call Karen or Shannon or anyone?” I ask. She takes a tissue and blows her nose a few times and wipes her face.

She nods in response to my question, and Jodi looks at me with raised eyebrows, looking for direction.

“What horrible reason did they have for cutting off your hair?” Jodi asks.

“I did it,” Ginny says.

Jodi interrupts. “But, sweetheart, I—”

“I’m sick of being hair,” she says. “That’s all I ever was! Hair!”

I nod.

“I think it’s really nice,” Ginny says, feeling the crew cut she gave herself.

I feel it, too. I make a face as if to say:
It is quite nice
.

I feel Jodi getting impatient.

“My mom freaked out,” Ginny says. “She said my career is over, my future is over, my life is over. She told me that maybe she and Dad were going to send me to some boarding school or something.”

Jodi looks again at Ginny’s eye. “So—who?”

“She did,” Ginny says. “I didn’t know what to do. She never did that before.”

Jodi nods.

“She kept hitting and hitting,” Ginny says. “Her eyes were closed. She thought she was still aiming for my arm, I think. She was crying, too.” She inspects her arm and it’s also red-purple.

“Over your hair?” Mom says in the most judgmental voice she’s got.

Ginny nods and sobs a little. Her lower lip curls down, and she brings her hands up to cover her face again.

Mom wraps her towel around her midriff and sits down on the love seat across from us. “If you don’t mind my saying so, hitting your kid is against the law. I don’t care how upset she was. What she did is wrong. Completely wrong.”

Ginny cry-nods. She’s in shock. I recognize the symptoms. (I almost see her dancing ants myself.) She can’t even consider fighting something as big as her mother.

That’s when Dave walks in.

The door slams accidentally because of the breeze, and we all stop what we’re doing to look at him.

“What’s going on here?” he asks.

Jodi and Mom stand up and move into place as shields. Dave wants to see who’s on the love seat with me, and Ginny hides her face in my chest, so all that’s showing is her crew cut. I don’t know what Mom and Jodi do to keep him over by the garage door, but whatever it is, it distracts them all for just long enough.

Next thing I know, Ginny is pulling my sleeve and we’re out the door and running full speed through her ninja tunnels, passing all the familiar walls and fences and family dogs,
but in the daylight. And yet we’re invisible. No one yells, “Hey, you pesky kids! Get off my lawn!” No dogs chase us—or even bark. We are flying.

We get to the playground, and Ginny takes me to the maintenance shed, where she reaches into the eaves and produces a pack of cigarettes with a book of matches shoved into the cellophane. She lights one and sits on the corner of the concrete pad of the shed. Her hands are shaking. I sit next to her, silently.

It’s all happened so fast it’s hard to process. I don’t even know what time it is. I just know I feel better off than Ginny. I mean, yeah, her family has a big house and money, and she does all this cool stuff, and her face is plastered on billboards.
Billboards
. But even with her cool friends and her
Vagina Monologues
, she still has to go home to that house at night and be controlled by those people who want her to be something she’s not. Makes having a conveniently absent turtle-father look appealing right about now. Makes me wish she had a squid for a mother, too.