Phantom Limbs (14 page)

I winced and set down the pitcher. “Should you put something on it?”

She pressed her finger into her shoulder and let go. An oval glowed white, then flashed back to red. She frowned. “A cold compress might be good.”

I ran a kitchen towel under cold water and squeezed it out.

“Thanks,” she said, reaching for it. She dabbed it on her shoulders, drawing in air through her teeth.

“Your back is burned, too,” I told her. “Here.” I took the towel and hesitated. Her hair was in the way, but moving it seemed maybe like taking too many liberties. But she did it herself, sweeping it over her left shoulder. I gently laid the towel on her back. “Is that okay?” Touching her, even through a towel, made me a little shaky. The smell of her hair wafted up to me, fruity and flowery.

“I’m such an idiot,” she said, glancing back at me. “How come you didn’t burn?”

“I don’t really burn. I just tan.”

She made a face and mocked the words back at me, making me laugh.

“Hey,” she said, turning back around. “I’m sorry. About earlier. I . . . I didn’t mean to freak out like that.”

“It’s okay.” But I wished she’d explain. Why had that kid’s shrieking bothered her so much? Just when it felt like she was the exact same Meg, something like this came along to remind me that in some ways she was a stranger to me.

I handed her the towel back, and we took our iced tea downstairs to the family room and turned on a station that ran old TV shows. I excused myself to change into shorts and a fresh T-shirt, wishing I could shower but not wanting to leave her alone for that long. Instead I just slathered a thick layer of deodorant on and hoped for the best.

When I rejoined her, her phone rang, a meditative spa-like ring tone. She grabbed it and said apologetically, “I was waiting for this. Sorry. I’ll be right back.” She stood and ran up the stairs, waiting till she got there before she answered. It didn’t take a genius to figure out who it was.

I sat and sulked. After a few minutes, I decided to head up to the kitchen for some more iced tea — and maybe for some masochistic eavesdropping while I was at it.

“I’m at his house now,” she was saying, so quietly I could barely hear her. “I’m gonna talk to him soon. . . . I know, I know.” A deep, shuddering breath. “And he’s being so
nice
about everything.”

She said it like it was weird that I was being nice. Why wouldn’t I be nice? Was I not always nice? And I hated that Football Guy was in on whatever this talk was she wanted to have with me. Was she going to tell me that she’d never really liked me
that way
and that she could only move back if I promised to keep my distance?

Just then the central air clicked on, and I couldn’t hear her over the blowing. I closed the fridge and headed back down the stairs.

She came down a few minutes later and sat next to me, pulling the flower-patterned quilt off the arm of the couch. “I always loved this quilt,” she said, laying it over herself. “The crotch-et quilt.”

I laughed. “Shut up.” In fifth grade, reading aloud in class, I had the misfortune of coming across the word “crocheted” for the first time, which I pronounced
crotch-et-ed.
How was I supposed to know? Meg used to die laughing every time she remembered it.

She leaned back and closed her eyes. “Maybe we should take a nap.”

I blinked in confusion, unsure if she was serious. The words “we” and “nap” in the same sentence led to some hopeful and unlikely interpretations in my head.

She opened her eyes and gave me a tiny smile. “On separate sofas, I mean.” She yawned.

“Obviously,” I said, trying to get my heart rate back under control. “I’m sure Jeff wouldn’t appreciate even an innocent, platonic nap between friends.”

“Ha. Probably not.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Doesn’t he trust you?”

Her eyes flicked briefly to mine. Just when I thought she wasn’t going to respond, she said, “Why is she so stuck on you?”

“Huh?” Man, she could switch gears.

“I mean, don’t take that the wrong way; I totally get how a girl could get stuck on you. But Dara — it’s different. Obviously.”

I was still processing the line she’d tucked in the middle, about how she totally got how a girl could get stuck on me. I would have liked to plumb that compliment deeply.

“The Olympics.” I traced lines down the condensation on my glass of tea. “She’s trying to get me to the Olympics. That’s why she spends all her time training me. It’s her obsession.”

“The Olympics?” Meg said, eyes widening. She shifted to face me, leaning her back against the arm of the sofa. “Are you that good?”

I snorted. “No. But try telling her that.”

“Why does it matter so much to her?” She leaned toward the table to pick up her glass of tea.

So I told Meg the story of Dara.

When I got to the part about the shark attack, a look of recognition crossed her face. “Oh my God . . . I remember seeing stories about her on the Internet. That was when we were, what, like eleven?”

I nodded, setting my glass down on the table.

“She’s not from here, though, is she?” Meg asked.

“No, she lived in New York. She moved here after the accident.”

Meg raised her eyebrows. “Wow. I mean, I feel bad for her. But still . . . the way she treats you . . .”

Dara would find Meg’s disapproval deeply ironic, given her opinion of how Meg had treated me.

I picked up the remote from the sofa next to me and examined it. “Maybe I wouldn’t like the way Jeff treats you, either,” I said, as if it were an apples-to-apples comparison.

“He makes me laugh,” she said quietly. “I need that.”

Great. He was good-looking
and
funny. I hated him.

“Anyway, he’s my boyfriend. Dara’s not your girlfriend. Right? Just your, what, boss?”

I glanced up at the loaded remark. “Friend,” I said carefully, still fingering the remote. “Friend-slash-coach. I don’t know — it’s complicated.”

“So you keep saying.”

I shrugged.

“There must have been someone,” she said, watching me. “If not her.”

“What do you mean?”

She gave me a
come on
look. “You’re sixteen and a half. And look at you!” She looked pointedly at my body. “There must have been someone. All this time?” Her sunburned nose glowed red in the warm light of the lamp on the end table. She tipped her head to the side, waiting.

Was this the talk? Was she about to pull the rug out from under me? “So what if there was? What would it matter?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly, picking fuzz off the quilt. After a moment, she scooted down and laid her head against the arm of the sofa, curling up on her side. Apparently she was actually going to nap?

I slid to the end of the sofa to give her more room, plucking a Hershey’s Kiss from the green glass candy dish my mom liked to keep on the end table — her grandmother’s. “For what it’s worth, no. There hasn’t been anybody.”

She turned her head to look at me. “How can that be?”

“Impossible standards, I guess.” I held the chocolate out to her. She lifted her head to see what it was, then backed away. “No. No, thank you.”

“What?” I unwrapped it and popped it in my mouth. “Since when do you turn down chocolate?”

“I don’t like it anymore.”

I stared at her as if she’d said she no longer breathed air. “Since when?”

She didn’t answer.

“That doesn’t even make sense, Meg,” I said, unwrapping another Kiss. When we were kids, chocolate was one of the four major food groups. “Who
are
you?”

I was sort of joking, but she apparently wasn’t in a humorous mood.

“I think I’m going to sleep now.” She laid her head back down.

“Seriously?”

Crickets.

I sat there for a few minutes, rolling the foil wrapper in my fingers and watching her. She radiated exhaustion. I got up and arranged the quilt over her. At the very least, I could continue to be “nice.”

I went upstairs and rummaged through the linen closet until I found the caddy of stuff we brought on vacations — mini shampoos, sunscreen, that kind of stuff. I found a travel-size bottle of aloe vera.

I went into my room, tidied up a little, and then messed around on the computer. My mom texted me:
What are you two up to?

Transparent enough? I thought about texting back,
We are having sexual intercourse, try back later
, but I knew how well that would go over. I told her the truth: Meg was downstairs resting, and I was on the computer. She said she was on her way to meet my dad at the nursery to buy some flowering plants for the deck, and then they were going to bring home Thai food for dinner in an hour or two.

Dara had sent me three emails with links to pages about improving breaststroke, subject lines:
STUDY THIS!!
She said nothing else, other than
See you tonight. Don’t forget.

I lay down on my bed, wondering about the changes in Meg. Screaming freaked her out. She didn’t like chocolate anymore. Chocolate! I thought about how many jillions of s’mores we had eaten together over the years, all those summer barbecues . . .

I turned to my side and looked at the picture of Mason. My chest ached. That smile of his — it broke me wide open. Sometimes it could still surprise me, the fact of his being gone. I probably was in no position to judge my mom for how stuck in her grief she seemed to be. Maybe hers was just more visible. I generally made a point to show as little as possible. Of everything.

I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up, aware of a presence. I got up and found Meg hovering in the hallway outside Mason’s room.

“Hey,” I said, running my hands through my hair. When I came closer, I saw her eyes were wet. I marveled at how fragile she seemed to be now; when we were kids, she almost never cried. I was the big baby.

She gestured toward the room. “When . . . ?”

“Recently,” I said, stepping past her through the doorway and picking up a geode paperweight from the desk. I ran my finger along its sparkling, jagged interior. “We actually kept it exactly the same until a few weeks ago.”

“Oh my God. Really?”

I glanced up sharply at the alarm in her voice. I shouldn’t have told her that.

She put a hand to her chest. “This whole time?”

I shrugged. What could I say?

From the hallway she pointed to the picture of Mason and me, the one where I was reading him
Goodnight Moon.
She smiled, but her face was filled with pain.

I set the geode down and went over to her. I hesitated for a second, then put my arms around her, reminding myself that we were not strangers, we
knew
each other, dammit. She shook a little, her arms folded against herself, but after a moment she slid her arms around me and rested her head on my chest. Despite the fact that it was kind of an excruciating moment, it felt so good to hold her.

And it gave me an idea. I had no clue how it might work logistically, though, since I didn’t have my fucking license. Maybe Meg would borrow my mom’s bike . . .

“Hey,” I said softly. “Maybe we could go to the cemetery this week.”

She pulled away from me in a single move, shaking her head.

I frowned. “What? Why?”

Bafflingly, her expression became angry. She turned and walked into my room, so I followed her.

“Look,” she said, spinning around to face me. “I loved Mason, you know that. But I don’t know if I can go back there.” She took a couple of tissues out of the box on my desk and wiped her eyes. She examined the tissues, probably checking to see if her makeup was coming off. It was.

“Okay,” I said. But it wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay. The more time I spent with her, the more of a puzzle she became. I wanted to stay away from things that upset her. I wished someone would give me a list of what those things were so I could avoid them. “So,” I said, wanting to change the subject, “did you sleep?” I glanced in the mirror and ran my hands through my hair again, pointlessly. I wished I’d gotten a haircut before she came back.

“Slept and dreamed, too. I am so sleep deprived.”

“What did you dream?” I asked, desperate to feel a connection to her again. I felt totally cut off.

She lifted a shoulder. “Just . . . stressful stuff.” She dropped the tissues into the wastebasket and took another one.

I went to my dresser and picked up a pack of cinnamon gum. I unwrapped two pieces and popped them into my mouth, in case the smell of chocolate on my breath might bother her.

She examined my display of swim medals and trophies.

“You won all these?” she asked. She picked up a trophy and held it sort of tenderly. “Most improved,” she read.

“Freshman year.”

She put it back and fingered some of the medals hanging on ribbons. “Wow. They’re heavy.”

I sat down in my desk chair and swiveled to follow her as she walked over to the bookshelf on the other wall.

“Hey, I remember these.”

My rock collection — much of which had been procured with Meg at Lake Michigan. My mom would pack picnics and take Mason and us to the beach. Sometimes we’d bring Cassie and go to the dog beach. I thought of the time Mason pointed to Cassie’s bum leg with concern, telling us, “Tassie weg hurt.” The memory made my throat ache.

“I gave you this one,” she said, holding up a smooth, dark red rock.

I smiled, knowing exactly what was coming.

“It’s a
heart
,” she said emphatically.

“Still looks like a kidney to me.”

She shook her head, returning my smile for a brief, glorious second. “Haven’t you changed at all?” She set down the rock and picked up another, her expression once again serious. “You seem the same in so many ways.”

Well, that sucked. I had hoped she’d see me as new, exciting, older. Big and strong. Confident, sexy, and mysterious would be a bonus. Instead she saw me as the same?

“Have you changed so much?” I asked.

She looked out the window, eyes fixed on her former bedroom window. “Yeah.” She rubbed at a smudge on the window with the tissue she was holding. Then she turned and put the rock back on the shelf.