Goodbye, Rebel Blue Hardcover (26 page)

AS I’VE LEARNED FROM BOTH PERCY AND AUNT Evelyn, when life gets messy, you need blue cleaning products. I’m not sure why that makes me laugh, but it does. Swallowing a giggle, I carry Aunt Evelyn’s cleaning basket from the laundry room to my bedroom. Nothing should be very funny right now. I dug into the deepest part of my heart, carved out a chunk, and gave it to Nate. Nate, however, is going to prom with someone else, a girl from his calculus class.

Ouch.

Once in my bedroom, I have no idea where to start. I’ve heard of hoarders, people who acquire things and can’t give them away. Some compulsive hoarders have so much stuff, they live in homes with little pathways winding through piles of clutter. I’m not a hoarder; more of an annoyer. Someone like Macey’s therapist would have a technical name for this condition. For years I amassed stuff on my side of the room because it annoyed Aunt Evelyn and Cousin Pen. The truth is, it also annoys me.

Nate isn’t the only one who’s been lying to himself.

I start with the floor, folding and putting away clean laundry. I gather all my color-coordinated pillows and arrange them, or at least I try to. The jumble of pillows looks like the pillow fairy barfed on my bed.

“What are you doing?” Pen stands in the doorway with a frown.

“Cleaning,” I say.

“Why?”

“My side of the room’s a mess.”

“You just had this epiphany?”

“No. Yes.” Next I start scooping up papers: school reports, homework assignments, old sketches and drawings. “Don’t make this any more complicated than it needs to be.”

“You’re the one who complicates things.”

“I know.” I toss papers into the wastebasket next to my desk until it overflows. “I remember what you said. Your parents never fought before I came to live in the bungalow.”

“And this could be some part of your master plan to pit my dad against my mom.”

I reach for the wastebasket near Penelope’s desk. “Or not.”

Pen snatches it back and places it on her side of the room before stomping out the door.

“Hey! I’m trying to do good!”

With the floor clean, I dust furniture, wall hangings, and the glass jars sitting on the windowsill. I spray blue stuff on the window and mirror and scrub. As the dust and grime wash away, I feel light-headed. I wonder if Aunt Evelyn gets a cleaning high or if it’s the blue products. When everything else is clean, I dig out the stuff under my bed.

It’s funny the things that accumulate under one’s bed over time: dust bunnies, a half stick of deodorant, a single soccer cleat, a person’s past. Aunt Evelyn loves boxes, especially stackable plastic boxes you can tuck under beds. The one storage box under my bed is twenty-four by eighteen inches with a red lid. It doesn’t look like a coffin, but inside rests everything that’s left of my mom.

I hook my fingers around the latches but don’t open. My mom never had much. Travel Light types rarely do. She never owned a house, never rented a storage shed, and most of her stuff burned in the car crash.

Slowly, I slide off the lid. My mom’s past smells like sky and smoke.

Inside there’s a camera and a few lenses, her favorite denim jacket, and a tiny charm bracelet with a single daisy. At the bottom lies a large manila envelope. This doesn’t belong to Mom but to me.

Six years ago, I made the choice to tuck it out of sight.

My fingers settle on the bulge in the center of the envelope. Choices. We all make them. My mom didn’t choose to die, but she did choose to drive on that road, one of the most dangerous in the world, in a rainstorm. She wanted to get post-storm pictures high on the mountain. She wanted to capture light and rainbows and slivers of silver peeking from retreating clouds. She should have waited. If I had been able to talk about my feelings after her death, I would have told Aunt Evelyn I was angry at Mom for leaving me and, underneath that, frightened. I wasn’t ready for her death; I wasn’t ready for the rest of the world.

I tip the envelope, and photos tumble into my lap. Mom was a photographer, and I was her favorite subject. Photos of me smiling, posing at a Mayan pyramid and sitting on the beach in Costa Rica, spill across my clean floor. There are close-ups of my face, artistic shots of me in silhouette, pictures of my dirty toes. I dig through me until I find her. My mom rarely stepped in front of the camera. I snapped this photo a few months before she died. She’s sitting on the side of a mountain road in Argentina fixing a flat tire on the Jeep, sweaty, dirty, and smiling from ear to ear.

“She looks happy.” I look up to see Aunt Evelyn standing in my doorway. Other than perfunctory hellos and
Please pass the salt
, we’ve talked very little this week. “Your mom’s happy place was always outdoors, on the beach, high on a mountain, or in a field of daisies under the open sky.” She points at the photo. “May I?” She takes the photo and tilts her head, the football helmet shifting. “It’s a good one. It would look great in one of your picture frames.”

For six years I kept all reminders of my mother packed away because I didn’t want to be reminded of what I was missing. Family. “I was thinking about using the frame with the daisies or the one with the clouds.”

Aunt Evelyn hands me back the photo. “Either would look lovely. You are a good artist, Rebel. I bet I could sell the frames for twenty or thirty dollars apiece to my clients with beach houses.”

“That would buy some serious turtle adoptions.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” I take comfort in The List, because Macey’s right. I haven’t failed at
everything
. And Nate and Uncle Bob are right. I’ll complete every item because I said I would. There’s no deadline, after all. As long as I keep trying.

Aunt Evelyn sits on the window seat and slides her finger along the lip of a jar of sea glass. “I envy you.” She scoops a handful of glass into her palm and lets the shards fall back into the jar, a shower of sea tears. “When I was in high school, I desperately wanted to be an artist. I worked in watercolors and did some graphite sketches. One of my art teachers said I had an excellent handle on perspective and a good eye for composition. What I didn’t have was passion or faith.”

The last word hangs in the air between us.

“Now your mother, she had faith.”

“My mother didn’t believe in God.”

“No, but she had faith in herself. She barreled through life with passion and purpose, and she was a damned good photographer. Her work told stories; it spoke to people.”

I’ve never heard Aunt Evelyn talk this way about my mom. She was always so critical of Mom and her parenting style, but it’s true. My mom had faith in her photographic talents. She had faith in her abilities to be a single parent. She had faith in me that I could lead my own 275-member marching band.

“You have her spirit, her passion, her unwavering faith.” The final bit of glass slips between my aunt’s fingers. “I don’t have that. I never did. So instead of creating art, I create pretty rooms in pretty houses.” She raises her hands, motioning to the matched twin beds. “But you’ll never find yourself doing anything like this. I envy you, Rebel, because you will never work or live inside a box.”

Breakfast the next morning is a mushroom quiche and grapefruit juice, fresh-squeezed. Aunt Evelyn stands at the counter toasting brioche. She doesn’t mention our little heart-to-heart. I don’t, either. But she looks different, or maybe it’s that I’m seeing her differently. Tiny lines spider out from her mouth. The skin under her eyes swells in puffs of gray. She doesn’t look unhappy, more resigned about her life and the choices she made.

Outside, the recycling truck lumbers and lurches. A steady beep fills the air as the arm lifts our bin and dumps the contents. My life would have been so different if a month ago Uncle Bob had chosen to set out the recycling bin and this truck had whisked away Kennedy’s bucket list. I wouldn’t realize Aunt Evelyn is a frustrated artist and that I’m tired of being a loner.

The list. Such a flimsy piece of paper with so much power to change, and I’m not even done. I’ve completed about half the items, but I still have— I set my juice down so hard, liquid sunshine spills over the rim.

“Is there something wrong with your breakfast?” Aunt Evelyn asks.

I run to my room and shuffle through my nightstand drawer. I check under the bed and rifle through my dresser. I tear open the closet door and toss aside my shoes and Pen’s shoes and little boxes that organize.

“Where is it?” I say. I didn’t see Kennedy’s bucket list during my cleaning tirade yesterday. I press my hands to either side of my head.

I haven’t seen the list in a week, sometime before the day I failed to Just Show Up, the day Gabby burned off half her hair, and the day I threw muddy shoes at endangered sea swallows. I’d last seen the list on my nightstand. I pull the heavy piece of furniture from the wall, and the lamp topples to the hardwood floor with a thud. Behind it I find only a gum wrapper and a few popcorn kernels.

In the attic, I dig through my sketch pads and check behind jars of glass. Downstairs I root under the couch and toss aside throw pillows. I dig through the kitchen garbage and nooks and crannies on the computer desk. When I get to the empty recycling bin, I remember pitching all the papers and junk from my cleaning tirade yesterday.

“No.” My voice is a squeak.

At school I rummage through my locker, pulling out books and half-used sketch pads and a pink detention slip from October.

“What are you doing?” Macey asks.

“I can’t find Kennedy’s bucket list. It’s gone. I checked every room in our house.”

Macey leans against the locker next to mine. “Maybe the fates have intervened again.”

I stick my fingers into my ears. “La-la-la-la. I can’t hear you.”

Macey tugs my fingers from my ears. “I think you need to hear me.”

“I need to get to biology.”

“Stop being a smart-ass.” Macey is so loud, a teacher at the end of the hall makes a
shush
motion with her forefinger against her lips. “Think about it, Rebel. For days you tried to get rid of that list, and you couldn’t. So you decided to complete the tasks. Maybe you’ve completed the task or tasks you needed to complete, so the fates have released you.”

“Stop. No more.”

“Maybe it’s destiny.”

“La-la-la-la-laaaaaa!”

Every morning the sun pours buckets of light onto a three-foot square of earth on the east side of the bungalow. This tiny bit of real estate is nestled between the recycling bin and the large plastic storage cupboard where Aunt Evelyn keeps most of her gardening supplies. Aunt Evelyn never planted anything here, probably because no one sees it.

Which makes it the perfect place for a secret garden.

I checked my locker at school and the art room. I checked Percy’s office. Aunt Evelyn and I turned the house upside down. I can’t find Kennedy’s bucket list, but I do remember she wrote twenty items on the list, and so far I’ve remembered seventeen, including
Host a tea party in a secret garden.

With all my strength, I harpoon the shovel at the earth. The metal clanks and chips off a sliver of hard dirt. Thanks to running, my legs are strong. With my sneakered foot, I stomp on the shovel, and a bigger chunk of baked earth breaks off. I jab the tip on the clod until it forms medium-size clods. I stomp and jab, jab and stomp. Sweat beads on my forehead and drips down my nose.

A wet nose nuzzles my ankle. Tiberius, the rat terrier from next door, stands next to me, wagging his tail. “Sorry, Tib, no sweets for you today.” He cocks his head and thumps his butt onto the ground.

I grab a pronged gardening tool and drop to my hands and knees, clawing at the ground to break the medium-size clods into smaller clods. Tiberius watches, his ratty head tilted as if he is confused.

I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t toss him something to eat or because I’m engaging in hand-to-hand combat with dirt.

Less than halfway through the square, sweat soaks my tank, and silty dust coats my arms and legs. There must be an easier way to battle rock-hard dirt. I sit on the backs of my ankles and wipe sweat from my face. Water. If seawater has the power to smooth jagged glass, surely water can soften a secret garden.

With the hose in hand, I spray the plot of earth, transforming the dirt into chunks of dark chocolate. I shovel, but the mud is heavy and clings to the metal. My arm muscles burn. I could get Macey, but then the secret garden would cease to be a secret. Taking off my shoes, I roll up my pants and jump. Mud squishes between my toes and sucks at my calves. I march and squish.

When at last the entire plot is soaked, I climb out, scraping the mud from my legs. I reach for my box of seeds, but they’re gone. Tiberius sits near my bag, two seed packets, empty but for teeth marks, between his paws.