Some of the Parts (2 page)

M
el and I head for Common Grounds and get there just in time for my shift. I try to avoid coming here on my days off—Cranky Andy doesn't like having to treat his employees like customers. It stretches the limits of his already limited social energy. He'd rather be practicing his foam-art technique or making a spreadsheet to chart sales trends in baked goods. So Mel likes to drive me to work because she can get a latte to go. The only other place to get coffee in town is Dunkin' Donuts and Mel says their coffee tastes “like industry,” whatever that means.

Common Grounds used to be a drugstore, and when they converted it into a coffee shop, they decided to keep some of the old features, including the automatic doors. They swoosh open as if by magic. I mean, it's not magic, obviously. It's magnets or electric sensors or something. Anyway, the swoosh was accompanied by a
ding
until Cranky Andy said he couldn't stand it anymore and made them disconnect the dinger. Cranky Andy gets what he wants. No one else in this town can make a decent latte, especially not with decorative designs engraved in the foam.

I had just gotten used to the
ding
when it stopped. I had just stopped being startled by it and now I kind of miss it. But I'll adjust.

I have to, if I want normal again. I started working here two weeks after the accident. School wasn't out yet but it was clear to everyone that I wasn't going back. Nothing really hurt anymore, my cuts were healing into a map of pink scars threading across my hands and forearms, but I was still tired all the time. My teachers agreed (or were convinced) to give me incompletes on my report card and let me make up the final exams over the summer. So I had a jump on the rest of the summer-job scrabblers when I walked into Common Grounds and asked for an application.

Cranky Andy watched me fill it out. “You're that girl,” he said after I handed it back to him. I had used my full name: Taliesin West McGovern. My parents named me after Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture school in the Arizona desert. They visited it on their honeymoon, and my mother even applied to go there but then she got pregnant with my brother.

Of course I knew exactly what he was talking about, but I made him say it anyway. I was still forcing people to acknowledge it. I wasn't letting anyone get away with less. “What girl?”

“The girl who…” He paused, but barely. “That accident on River Road. Your brother died?”

I nodded.

“That sucks,” he said. It was just a fact, the way he said it. There was no disputing it.

“It does.”

He looked down again at my application, like it was a picture of something interesting. Or distasteful. “You're hired.”

“Because you feel sorry for me?” That was still important then. Less so, now.

Cranky Andy raised his eyes, set them on me. “No, because I can't stand chatty and you don't talk much. And because I don't feel like interviewing a hundred high school kids who don't have the attention span to take a coffee order.”

I didn't need a job, really. I was only there because I couldn't stand it at home, where the air had turned to wet cement and all of us were choking on it. The automatic door swooshed and the not-yet-abolished dinger
ding
ed. I jumped.

“You okay?”

“I'm great,” I said. “When do I start?”

“Right now, if you can.”

I looked around. There were, like, three customers in the whole place.

“I don't know how to make anything,” I told him.

“You don't need to. I make the drinks, you handle the register and the bakery stuff. It gets delivered in the morning, ready to go.”

“What if it gets busy? Shouldn't I be able to help with—”

He put a possessive hand on the milk frother. “I work alone,” he said darkly.

So that was my first day at work, standing at the register, knowledgeless, while Cranky Andy slipped into the back room to record a
Minecraft
tutorial on his phone. I realized later that we hadn't discussed how much I'd get paid. But it didn't really matter.

I would have paid
him
for getting me out of the house, for reinstalling me in the outside world. School ended without me. Summer limped toward fall, and I forced it to carry me on its sweaty back. I was too tired to walk. I woke up in the morning and never felt like I had slept. I was mechanical and dazed, but I proceeded. I ate, I showered, I passed my final exams. I worked. I rode in Mel's car and braced myself for the crash that never came.

I kept on being the one who survived.

The job was like medicine: vaguely unpleasant but probably good for me. Dealing with customers during a rush was exhausting—the eye contact, the forced smiles, the small talk—but I liked it when it was quiet. I spent my time alphabetizing bags of coffee and arranging muffins under glass domes as if they were exhibits in a museum. And Cranky Andy turned out to be a pretty decent boss. He is not the owner of Common Grounds—that's some guy who used to live here and now lives elsewhere but couldn't be bothered to sell the place. Early on, I made the mistake of asking Andy if he was going to buy it. He snapped, “It's not for sale!” and then dumped a bag of beans into the huge industrial coffee grinder with a surprising show of upper-body strength.

I kept myself busy with small, simple tasks and tried to ignore how hollow and disjointed I felt. Sometimes watching the people in the coffee shop was like watching a room full of ghosts who didn't realize that they were in another dimension altogether. That nearby there was a tree ringed by flower arrangements, dried and bleached by the sun that relentlessly rises every day.

So I pretended I didn't know this either, tried to appear as if I was just like them, because that was what I wanted. I wanted to be like them again. Oblivious. Content. Caffeinated.

Unharmed.

Mel takes her coffee and oinks to me on her way out the door, her way of telling me that (a) I didn't imagine that truck and (b) life goes on. I oink back, still shaky but determined to hide it. Determined to act normal.

And then Amy comes in.

Amy and Zoey and Fiona.

The trio that used to be a foursome, when I was part of the club. The friends who used to star in the movie of my life. Until the movie jumped genres from comedy to tearjerker.

Of the three of them, Amy's the only one who reacts to the sight of me. Her eyes widen ever so slightly and she pauses a half step but keeps walking. Plants herself in front of me and says, “Large skim latte, please.” And then, “Hi.”

Before I can answer, she starts digging around in her bag, staring into its vast unseeable depths. She never could find anything in there. I'd given her a flashlight for her birthday as a joke. I think about mentioning it.

“Got it,” Amy tells no one in particular. Someone other than me. She extracts a debit card and holds it out, pinched between two fingers, her eyes set on something behind me so she doesn't accidentally make eye contact.

I take the card, careful to keep our hands from touching.

Fiona and Zoey are hovering behind her. “Hurry up,” Zoey whines. “We're already late for our pedis.” School started three weeks ago but it's still warm enough outside, just barely, to wear flip-flops.

This is where Mel would jump in with a sarcastic warning about the dangers of foot infections from unsanitary salon tools. But Mel is not here. Mel is driving around with her latte, scouting the roads for freshly run-over animals.

Amy glares at Zoey and for a second I think she's going to defend me—the slow cashier at the coffee shop—or herself—the one whose bag is too big. But she doesn't say anything, and as I hand her card back, I am weirdly aware of how close our fingertips are. Our fingerprints coexisting on the same plastic surface, our trace bits of DNA overlapping. We used to be this close all the time.

Now I am radioactive.

Maybe we would have reached the end of our road anyway, even without the accident. I read somewhere that you change friends every seven years, and we'd passed that milestone years ago. We were on borrowed time. We spent our seven years on preschool, ballet classes, soccer teams, birthday parties. Our mothers were friends, so we were friends, too. Little kids don't ask whether they have anything in common. That comes later.

And I don't blame Amy, or her vapid sidekicks, or the girls I played soccer with, or any of the others who avoid me now. Because I get it. I've been marked by this tragedy and the sight of me reminds them that life ends. Whether it's a heart attack or old age or an overdose or a car hitting a tree, there's an end in store for each of us.

It freaks them out.

I know, too, that Amy has her own reasons to hate me for what happened.

Hence my mission: to pay my penance, to get back to normal, back to before. So when they see me, it's not death they see, or the shadow of the boy who always used to be next to me. It's proof that life can be reconstructed, that the tree on River Road can be just a tree again, that the sun-bleached flowers can be swept away and forgotten.

I am convincing myself of this as Amy and Zoey and Fiona walk out the swooshing doors. They pause outside, and for a second I think Amy will walk back in and say something to me. Even something angry would be better than the silence we've shared for the last four months. Then I see that they have stopped to check out a boy who is walking toward them from across the street. Amy simply gapes at him, but Zoey and Fiona compose themselves in photo formation, hips turned and chins tucked down, as if he might take a mental picture of them as he passes. But he strides past them without a glance and displaces their footsteps with his own as he enters Common Grounds.

There are a few colleges in towns nearby, and sometimes professors decide they want to live a little farther away from where they work. When I see him for the first time, I think maybe that is his story—the son of a professor, or a university student—because he looks thoughtful and very sure of himself, and because he is carrying a thick book, one arm curled protectively around it. He doesn't balk at the swoosh of the doors (no more
ding
) or hesitate as he walks to the counter. He doesn't squint at the chalkboard menu over my head. He just looks me straight in the eye and orders an iced chai with whole milk, as if everything could be so simple.

His voice is deep and soothing. He sounds as if he will read audiobooks someday. Or meditation podcasts.

I notice his voice, and I notice these things, too: his hair, which is curly and dark and flops into place when he pushes his fingers through it; his fingers, which are long and would have been praised effusively by my piano teacher; his eyes, which are chocolate brown.

In short, everything he has in common with—

Everything that reminds me of—

I almost knock Cranky Andy to the floor as I sprint down the back hall, where I gasp for air and wait for the vise in my chest to release my heart.

So much for normal.

I
hide in the employee bathroom for an unmeasured amount of time. It feels good to be in a small space. I take comfort in the damp concrete walls, the rust on the metal door, the frayed-edge posters that have faded over the years, as if the effort to brighten up the room has exhausted their colors. The last things I need are sunshine and rainbows. I like things worn and weary these days.

Then Cranky Andy bangs on the door. Back to reality.

I occupy myself with filling little boxes with sweetener packets, carefully lining up their corners. Blue, pink, yellow. The colors of baby clothes. Meant to soothe you and make you forget that the packets are full of chemicals.

The boy is still here, sitting in a far corner, one hand curled around his cup. He glances at me for a few seconds and then goes back to reading his book, flipping the pages, a pile of rustling leaves. I load my tray with the sweeteners and deliver a box to each table, and when I am close enough to peek over his shoulder, I see that he is looking at a page of photographs bound into the middle of the book. The captions are too small for me to read without completely invading his personal space, and also I might accidentally find out what he smells like and if it's anything like—

The last box of packets slides off my tray and onto the floor, scattering its contents. I duck down to gather them up again, crush them in my hand, and throw the ruined collection back onto the tray. He turns his head just enough for me to see his profile and then stills like a portrait.

“You okay?” he asks quietly.

“I'm fine,” I tell him. I should leave it at that—I've already displayed enough buffoonery—but curiosity gets the upper hand. And it feels good to test myself, make myself talk to someone who, even up close, resembles my brother. Not well enough to play him in a dramatic reenactment, maybe, but more than the average guy on the street. “What are you reading?”

He turns toward his table and looks down, as if he's forgotten what book he's holding. His hair curls around his ear like leaves on a vine. “A biography.” He puts his finger in between the pages to mark his place, and closes the book so I can see the cover. A man with dark hair and hooded eyes is staring at us, his arms extended to show the handcuffs linking his wrists.
The Secret Life of Houdini.

“The magician?” I ask.

“Among other things.”

The book is rippled, worn at the corners. “How many times have you read it?”

“I don't know,” he says. He looks up at me as he pulls his finger out of the book.

“You'll lose your place,” I tell him.

He shrugs. “I'll find it again.” Then he says, “I lied to you.”

“What?”

“I know exactly how many times I've read it. See?” He flips the front cover open and shows me the marks, four straight vertical lines with a fifth diagonal slash across them. Three sets of them, plus two extra verticals.

“Seventeen?”

“I'm a creature of habit. Why sugarcoat it?” He grins. “It's been a while, though. We just moved here and I found this when I was putting my stuff away.”

Sugarcoat would be a great band name,
I think. I will try and remember to tell Mel this later. Emboldened by this thought, I step closer. “Do you read anything else?”

“Other biographies, mostly. It's interesting to see what a person's life adds up to. Don't you think?”

Remembering is practically all I do these days. It's such a relief that he can't see it written all over me that I almost laugh out loud. “I guess. But does a person have to be dead before you can do the math?”

He smiles, and it looks almost sad. “I like to know how the story ends.”

The door swooshes then and more people walk in, and Cranky Andy bangs two milk steamers together to get my attention.

“Gotta go,” I say lamely.

The boy nods, a single motion. “I'm Chase,” he says.

I roll the name around, fitting it to him like a limb grafted to a tree. I should offer my name in return, but I don't like to say it anymore. The sound of it scrapes at my heart. It reminds me of my brother, the way our names were always spoken together as if they were one long sound.

“You should try one,” Chase says, lifting the book as if he's toasting me with it. “There are some amazing stories out there.”

I nod.
There are stories everywhere,
I think.

When he finally gathers his belongings and exits the automatic doors, he looks back at me—one second, two seconds, he turns away at three—and I envy his ability to look at another person like that, without wondering if he's breaking some unwritten rule. I wonder if I could read the story of someone else's life and forgive their faults so easily.

But I can't devote myself to nostalgia for people I never knew.

I have my own memories to deal with.

I live in limbo, between before and after. Before the accident, and after. And there's a sizable gap in the middle. Try as I might to ignore this, to act like I didn't lose a whole chunk of my personal timeline four months ago, I haven't really climbed out of the chasm yet. I'm still in between. Before is over, and after is going to happen whether I like it or not.

Before the accident, I saw the usual things in the usual way. My eyes communicated with my brain and there was no misunderstanding. Now, after, my heart keeps throwing itself into the conversation. Everything is scratched, tinged with a wash of blackened light. Nothing is clear. It is, I imagine, how a blind person would feel if someone snuck into their apartment and moved everything around. There is a lot of bumping into things. There is a lot of confusion and frustration and temptation to give up and sit down in one place for however much time is left.

The world is misaligned, uneasy in its balance.

But I have gotten very good at pretending otherwise.

At home, for instance, I can walk through the front door like I used to and I can act like the door is just a door, even though it looks (as everything does) a little bit wrong. A little crooked. Too sharp around its edges. I can keep my face perfectly still so that no one knows how much everything reminds me of—

Because I stop myself, you see? I don't let his name in.

I don't let myself remember how he always slammed the door too hard, how my mother called to him sharply and he had her laughing seconds later. How he got away with leaving his football gear and his backpack and everything else in a pile because none of us could stay mad at him.

I don't think of it.

After the accident, everyone was really nice. Too nice. People I barely knew came up to me in the drugstore and hugged me, clutched me too tight and whispered things like “Oh, you poor thing.” Beyond that, they didn't really know what to say, which became apparent when I tried to go back for the last two weeks of school. Every time I walked down a hallway, the herd of bodies parted like the Red Sea around me. Amy avoided me—she'd duck into a bathroom or down a hallway when she saw me coming—and Zoey and Fiona were only too glad to follow her. I tried to make a joke out of it but no one laughed at my jokes anymore. Except in that nervous way that doesn't sound as much like happiness as it sounds like concern that someone in the room is unstable and might suddenly do something really inappropriate. And then, to everyone's relief, Principal Hunter sent me home again and got my teachers to delay my exams. So I could recover. Whatever that meant.

Everyone could see I was different. Of course I was, because what kind of person would I be if my brother died and I stayed exactly the same? But they still don't know what the real change is, that I can't make the words come out right, that I can't feel anything the way I used to. That my heart is twisted, a knot I can't unravel.

I keep hoping the rituals will fix me.

I call them rituals even though they're not religious and they don't involve voodoo dolls or magic spells—I like to think of them as things that are important to do, important in a way that's beyond my just wanting to do them. So, every day, usually after school, I spend five minutes looking at his high school yearbook. Not the pictures. The index. The list of numbers that signify which pages his pictures are on. I have it memorized by now, but I like seeing the digits printed on the page, always the same, preserved. I cover his name with my fingertip and stare at the numbers: 8, 11, 19, 33, 34, 35, 42, 56, 58, and 73. Senior picture, track picture, student government, photography club, newspaper. Candids in the cafeteria, the chem lab, the parking lot, the library. Best eyes. Best smile. Most likely to succeed.

Fat chance of that now.

But that's the kind of thing I'm not supposed to say. The joke that isn't funny.

Mom and Dad don't know about the rituals. They don't know much about what I do these days. I don't think this was ever their intention, this distance. It's more like a habit that formed over the summer. Right after the accident, there was a frenzy of attention and smothering care—my mother took me everywhere she went, either because she was afraid to let me out of her sight or because she was scared to be alone, and she chattered nonstop about meaningless stuff. But after a few weeks, the mania wore off and she settled into a quiet numbness. She withdrew and my dad did, too, and now we orbit each other like planets. Same solar system, different paths. Different rates of motion.

After the yearbook, I lie down on my bed and close my eyes and feel around for a memory, something with lots of details. Pick an image, bring it into focus until I can see it projected on my eyelids like a movie on a screen. I have my favorites. Swimming in the lake at the cabin when I was five. The day the geese chased us after we ran out of bread and he carried me on his back until we were safe. The first time I beat him at
Mario Kart.
The dinner we made for Mom and Dad's anniversary. Me and him in the kitchen, arguing about whether or not the chicken was done.

“Just cut it open,” I told him.

“No way,” he said, and then added, in a terrible French accent, “Eet will
ruin
zee presentation.”

I go over it again and again, the cooking part. Not the dinner itself. I don't need to remember Mom and Dad. They're still here.

Sort of.

The remembering can take a long time or not, depending on how clearly I can get the picture to focus. I stay there until it's very sharp. It takes work, sometimes. Sometimes I can't remember exactly what he said after I said something, or what the tomato sauce smelled like after we put the anchovies in, or how it felt when he swung me up onto his back and hooked his arms around my legs. But I can usually get it. That's the point. To make sure it's still there.

I do this with one good memory, and then I find a bad one, because I know he wasn't perfect and I want to be accurate. A fight we had. A bruise he gave me. The time he ripped my teddy bear's arm off because he was mad at me.

Two weeks before the accident, when I saw him kissing Amy behind the gym.

I try to avoid that one, but sometimes it pops up unannounced, and then I have to let it in. And it carries a potency that few other memories have, because it's one of the only things we argued about that never got to be okay. How he hadn't told me. How I was the last one to know. We ran out of time to make it okay. And Amy clearly doesn't want to discuss it.

After I'm done with the remembering, I go to my closet and take out the green flannel shirt I stole from his room. It still smells like him. But barely. I can't decide if it would be cheating to buy a new can of his deodorant and spray some on the shirt.

That's the problem with the rituals: There's no one else to tell me how to do them, whether I can make new rules or not. No one to tell me whether they're working. Because sometimes I'm really not sure.

It seems like he's fading anyway.