No More Us for You (12 page)

After the funeral, I went home and changed clothes and checked my email. There was one from Mira with the subject heading “Call me after you read this.” I clicked it open and her letter filled the screen, a wall of text from one side of the monitor to the other. I didn't have time to read it, nor did I want to. Hooking up with Mira the previous night had been a mistake, plain and simple, so I deleted her email without reading it. If there was a way I could've blocked out that evening and hit the
BACKSPACE
button, I would've done that too.

At the museum I walked past the east wing and saw that Nadine was suited up and filing her nails, dragging the emery board casually across her fingertips. I held up my hand toward her and she kept on filing as if I didn't exist.

I knocked on Ms. Otto's office door even though it was already open. While she typed furiously at her computer, her printer was spitting out sheets of address labels. Without so much as a glance in my direction, she said, “Just give me two seconds.” She was still wearing the black blouse and pants she wore to the funeral, but her large hat was nowhere to be seen.

“One…
two
,” I said, teasing.

Ms. Otto didn't respond. She just kept typing away, mumbling the words to herself, the keyboard firecracking underneath her hands.

The stack of address labels was getting pretty thick, so I removed them from the output tray. All of a sudden the printer began chewing on a sheet. A wheel inside made a grinding noise and the
ERROR
light started blinking red.

“I didn't touch anything,” I said, trying to look innocent, the warm stack of labels in my hands.

Ms. Otto swiveled away from her computer and rolled toward the printer. “It's been doing that,” she said. “For some reason it doesn't like these address labels.” She pressed a couple buttons and readjusted the blank sheets into the feeder.

“You want me to get started on something?” I asked her.

“Yes, actually.” From underneath a table in the corner of her office she slid out a cardboard box stuffed with sealed envelopes. The museum's logo—the letters
LBCM
floating in a red square—was printed in the corner of each envelope. “You can start by putting labels on these,” she said.

“No problem.”

She wheeled back to her computer using her feet. “Make yourself comfortable.”

I placed the labels on top of the envelopes and moved the box to the glass coffee table. Her couch was sleek in
design and made of leather the color of dark chocolate. I sat down and began to unpeel the address labels, sticking them to the envelopes as straight and dead-center as I could. Five minutes into it, Ms. Otto turned around and said, “How are we doing?”

I was aligning a label just right. “Good.”

“It doesn't have to be perfect, Carlos. It just has to get there, you know?”

“Sorry.”

“That's okay. There's just lots to do,” she said. “When you're done with those, I've got some postcards for next month's exhibit that also need labels.”

Ms. Otto went back to whatever she was working on and I picked up my pace with the labeling until I had a steady rhythm going, the envelopes moving from one hand to the next before I dropped them into the cardboard box. I was like a factory machine.
Peel, stick, drop. Peel, stick, drop.
I was certain there wasn't a faster labeler in all of Long Beach.

My mind wandered and I thought about Mira, the email I deleted.

Peel, stick, drop.

I thought about Snake. The dream. Ms. Wagner kicking his head.

Peel, stick, drop.

Isabel and the way I left her at the cemetery parking lot.

Peel, stick, drop.

How guilty I felt for hooking up with Mira when I had no intention of getting back with her.

Peel, stick, drop.

How afraid I was that Isabel would see the guilt on my face.

For a half hour straight I labeled, barely even reading the names, but there was one I paused on: Richard Spurgeon. His address label stuck to my fingertip like an unpeeled Band-Aid. I decided to say his name out loud to test my theory that he and Ms. Otto had once been together.

“Rich-ard Spur-geon,” I said slowly. “Isn't that the neon artist guy?”

Ms. Otto swiveled around in her chair. “Give me
that.” She stuck her hand out. “He won't be in town for the opening.” She plucked the label from my fingertip and crumpled it in her hand.

“I thought the postcards were for the opening?”

“Yes, well…” She paused and motioned toward the box of envelopes. “Those are letters asking for donations. I generally don't like to ask artists for money.”

“Oh,” I said. “I see.”

The printer began crunching on another sheet. Ms. Otto made a growling noise with her teeth clenched and rolled her chair over and pulled the ruined labels out.

“Are you friends with him?” I asked.

“Acquaintances,” she said, rolling back to her computer.

“He seems like a nice guy. I had to help him move the sign to his car. He acted like—”

“Carlos,” she interrupted. “I need to finish typing this letter.”

“Sorry.”

Peel, stick, drop.

We worked together for a good hour in silence except
for Ms. Otto's occasional mumbling. Once I finished labeling the envelopes, I moved on to the postcards that announced the new exhibit in three weeks. The postcards had a photograph of a red balloon lying on its side in the grass. Because the picture was taken from a low angle, you could see the blurry background in what appeared to be a park, the green splotches of trees under a blue sky, an unfocused man or woman walking down a fuzzy pathway. Tethered with a piece of string to the balloon's navel was a card like the ones coroners slip on a dead person's toe. On the card there were five lines—one for
NAME
, one for
AGE
, three for
WISH
—that someone had already filled out with a blue felt-tip pen, too messy to read.

Ms. Otto kept mumbling to herself while she typed. The printer continued to jam on the address labels until I clasped two fat binder clips on both sides of the feeder, forcing the sheets to go down straight. “How ingenious,” Ms. Otto said.

Again my thoughts wandered to Isabel, to Mira and Snake and then back to Isabel, what she said in the parking lot back at the cemetery.
We were there, the four of
us…. Where do you think they were going?…none of this would've happened if we'd all stuck together.
Although I told her thinking that way was pointless and wouldn't change anything, I had the same thoughts and often had an alternate version of the evening playing in my head. I don't open my mouth and say,
Let's go inside and tear up the dance floor,
I don't open the car door, I don't tell Isabel to come with me. Instead, the four of us sit together in the car, drinking and laughing, until Snake pulls the key out of the ignition and says,
Come on, let's show off our moves,
and we all stumble out into the cool evening and cross the parking lot, take our raffle tickets outside the gymnasium entrance, and step into the blaring music and flashing lights and dance.

Around three o'clock I was all done with the labeling. I stood up from the couch and twisted at the waist, cracking my back. Ms. Otto thanked me for coming in on my day off and said I could go home. “See you tomorrow,” she said.

“Tuesday,”
I corrected her.

“That's right.” She jerked her head like a bug had
flown into her hair. “I can't get my days straight. There's too much going on right now.”

“I know,” I said. “I feel the same way.”

“At least you know what day it is.”

I smiled and walked out of her office. I waved good-bye to Bridget at the front desk, who was laughing on the phone, obviously talking to someone she knew.

Just outside the museum I found Nadine sitting on a concrete bench, smoking. She leaned forward and looked down like someone sitting at the end of a pier, watching the blue water below.

“Bye,” I said weakly.

Nadine wouldn't look at me.

I followed the pathway through the grass, feeling really small, and imagined myself the size of an action figure, scaling up the abstract sculpture in front of the museum like a man climbing a high-rise from the future. Nadine called my name and I turned around and watched her tap out her cigarette on the side of the bench. “Get over here,” she said.

I walked back, my hands in my pockets, head lowered,
so she knew how sorry I felt for kissing her before I apologized again. “I'm really sorry about yesterday,” I told her.

“Forget about it,” she said. “Water under the bridge.”

“I don't know what came over me.”

“Stupidity.” Nadine smirked.

“Okay, I guess I deserved that.” I sat down beside her on the bench, but not too close.

“I didn't call you over to badger you. I wanted to ask a favor.”

“Shoot.”

“Could you cover my shift tomorrow?”

I made a face that said,
Oh no, don't ask me to do that.

“You know…” she began. “What you did yesterday was
really
inappropriate.”

I smiled. “Okay, okay, I get it.”

“So is that a yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Thanks, Carlos. I'll let Ms. Otto know.”

I stood up from the bench. “Okay, now it's
my
turn to ask
you
for a favor.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, yeah? What is it?”

“No more using what I did yesterday to guilt me into covering your shifts.”

Nadine stuck out her hand. “Deal.”

Go back. All I wanted to do was go back and undo everything that had happened over the past year. Just rewind and erase, rewind and erase, until my heart was repaired and I could trust the world again….

 

The mourners walk backward, their legs jerking up the slope of the lawn toward Vanessa's gravesite. At the bottom of the hill, Vanessa's brother raises his foot off the ground and a cigarette leaps up, wedging itself between his fingers. Then he too walks backward up the lawn, his parents trailing behind
him—all three of them pulled closer and closer to where the dirt is flying out of the open grave and into the mourners' hands. “Dust to dust,” the preacher says. “Ashes to ashes, earth to earth.”

 

Heidi takes the flame away from the candle's wick and back onto the tip of a match head. I hold my hand over the glass and the candle slides up to my fingers. Across the street, a black sports car rolls in reverse into a gas station. A plastic bag on the pavement inflates as the tire rolls over it, then the bag spirals away. Wind breathes a flame into a burnt-out match I'm holding in my hand. I look at the ruined wall and Snake's car pulls away from it, the bricks rising back in place.

 

A heart cut from construction paper hops off the gymnasium floor and slips between the double doors just as Carlos closes them. We walk into the crowd, hand in hand. A red balloon floats to his head and swerves quickly into my slap. We dance, then move away from the flailing crowd, the warm air leaving our bodies as we step outside. We return our raffle tickets to Ms. Lauden, Mr. Bissell erases two marks on a sheet with
the tip of a pencil. We zigzag through the parking lot all the way to Snake's car. Carlos sucks air out of his cupped hands and then rubs them together. I climb into the backseat and see Vanessa's blue profile in the console's glow. Her hand is over my hand. My hand is on her shoulder, unsqueezing it gently.

 

Bite by bite I piece the licorice together and hand it to Carlos. He pushes the licorice into its bag, slips it into his jacket pocket, asks me if I want a Red Vine. Around the middle of the room I linger, wishing Carlos would talk to me. Heidi steps away from the pile of green sand and points at the pink neon sign on the wall. I take strands of hair from behind my ear, pull them forward so they rest alongside my cheek. I read the overlapping names on the black painting. When I step away from it, the names sink into the canvas.

 

The tail of a lizard dangles from Roland's raised fist as he tiptoes into the flower beds, turns, and lifts his empty hands from behind the quivering daisies. The smell of burning trees blows away from me as I close the sliding glass door. I sit on the couch where Vanessa and Heidi pull wedges out of their mouths and
fit them into their oranges. I motion toward the tree in our yard. Vanessa mends the peeled skin over her fruit. Above Heidi's hands, a cloud of mist forms like a ghost and disappears into her orange. It's the one-year anniversary of Gabriel's passing.

 

I sob in the shower, the water leaping from my body and shooting into the showerhead. I get dressed and go to my room where the “Risk of Death” chart, crumpled in a ball, springs out of the wastebasket and into my hand. I stretch out my fingers and the clipping flattens out. In the kitchen, my dad walks in from the garage and places a banana in the fruit bowl, twisting it at the stem until it joins the bunch. Mom tells him to take a banana. He says good-bye to us and hurries to the bedroom. I look at the clipping and notice there are many ways to die that aren't included on the chart. The microwave beeps, then glows a dull yellow behind the glass where Roland's frozen pancakes turn counterclockwise, getting colder and colder.

 

The weeks reel back, the months—September, August, July, June. My mind is nowhere and elsewhere at once. The ache
grows inside my chest as May turns to April, March to February. Tears crawl into my eyes more and more—at home, during class, under bedcovers, in the shower. The grief sharpens, then the shock of the phone call: Gabriel is dead. The telephone rings.

 

His car emerges out of the glittering blue canal, water materializing out of the air and into a giant splash folding into itself. The car rolls up the embankment and the chain-link fence rises as he crashes out of it. The car hops down the curb, skids out of a turn, accelerates. Backward he drives toward my house and I watch him coming down my street. I taste the spearmint of his gum, I lean into his lips, he leans into mine, and we unkiss.