Tempo Change (12 page)

Then the e-mail. That made things almost unbearable.

My father had written back. It was waiting for me that Christmas night, when I got back from the Angeles Forest.

I had no idea what to do with that information. I couldn’t tell my mother because I didn’t want to remind her that I was still talking to him. I didn’t want her to know that he might come to Coachella because I couldn’t imagine what that would do to her. And I couldn’t even think about the fact that none of this would come to pass, anyway, because Viv might not come back.

On day four a vigil was held for Viv at Laurel Hall. Half of the student body came back from whatever they were doing to attend. Parents came, too. Some locals who had nothing to do with the school came. Religious people and political activists and people who decided that this was all the fault of global warming. Redmond Dwayne and the Clauses came and Mom and Ed the Guitar Guy and Ella and Gigi and their parents and Jeff and the Bos from Peace Pizza. I was glad to see Jeff but I felt guilty about that. Dr. Bonny made a speech and then she turned the service over to a priest and then a rabbi and then a Buddhist monk and finally to a grief counselor. We lit candles and we sang and afterward I didn’t feel like much had been accomplished. Ella and Gigi and I talked about hanging out at somebody’s house afterward but we didn’t have any enthusiasm for it. We had seen each other every day and it wasn’t helping.

Walking to the car with Mom and Ed, I heard someone
calling after me. I turned and watched Jeff catching up to me. His cheeks were red from running.

“Street,” he said. “Do you want to go for coffee or something? And then I’ll take you home.”

“I guess not,” I said.

“Honey, it might help,” Mom said.

“How would it help?”

“Get your mind off of things,” Ed said.

“I don’t want my mind off of things.” I turned to Jeff and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, it just doesn’t seem like the best time.”

He nodded. And yet I couldn’t move. He said something to my mother. The next thing I knew he was leading me by the shoulders and then I was inside his Volkswagen Jetta and before he could start the engine I was crying harder than I could remember crying since maybe the first grade when my dad left. Jeff sat very still and didn’t try to touch me or say anything. My nose was running and I wiped it on my sleeves until Jeff gave me a handkerchief. It had his initials on it.

“I never took you for a guy with initialed handkerchiefs.”

He shrugged. “Walking contradiction.”

“Do you keep them around for when girls cry?”

“My mom gives them to me. She’s old school. I can’t give them back, it would hurt her feelings. So I keep them.”

“You are a conundrum,” I said.

“Yeah. So are you.”

“Yeah?”

“You write those songs and you get up there onstage and you let people see all sides of you. But not you. Not really.”

“I just cried and wiped my nose in front of you.”

“I’m going to savor this moment,” he said.

“Okay, take me for coffee, gearhead, or take me home.”

We went to a place around the corner from the school and across the street from the Guitar Center and the Indonesian shop where we’d made offerings to the prayer box. Every now and then he said something about how sure he was they were going to find her, and if you thought about it, four days wasn’t that long. He knew all kinds of stories about people being found after two or three weeks.

“Viv’s smart, right?” he said.

“Yes and no.”

“Her parents are scientists.”

“She’s a jock. I mean, she’s not stupid, but I don’t know if we can rely on her survival skills. She’s a great singer, that’s what she is. I’d love to have her talent. I mean, not her talent, that’s hers. I’d like to have a voice like hers.”

“But then you wouldn’t have a voice like yours.”

“That’s no loss to the world.”

He turned his head, a kind of puppy head cock.

“Is this an act?” he asked.

“Is what an act?”

“You don’t know how cool you are.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t even know what color my hair is.”

“It’s striped,” he said. “That’s not a plan?”

“Nothing is a plan, Jeff. Everything’s random.”

“If you understood numbers, you wouldn’t say that.”

I put my head in my hands. “Really? Right now?”

He leaned across the table and made me look up.

“I quit smoking,” he said.

“That was a short hobby.”

“It was stupid. It was to make you notice me.”

“How could I not notice you? You work with me.”

He shook his hair out of his face. He must have known I liked that gesture.

He said, “Here’s my dirty secret. I love the whole world of X’s and O’s talking to each other and—”

“Jeff, that’s not a secret.”

“Let me finish. And to me, it’s like art. The way we create these systems striving for perfection, connecting us all. Hardly anyone else sees it as art. Well, at MIT or Caltech, but like you, they see it as geekdom. I didn’t think I could ever get you or anyone to see me as anything but that.”

“So what do you want me to do? Officially declare, ‘You are not a geek’?”

“I just want you to see me.”

“I see you. I don’t know what you mean by that.”

He opened his mouth and closed it again. As if he had run out of words.

My phone rang. I glanced down at the number. It was my mother’s.

“Hold that thought,” I said.

I knew what it was before I answered it.

“They found her,” I said.

“Yes. She’s going to be okay.”

And for the second time I started blubbering right in front of Jeff.

“W
HEN PEOPLE DIE OR NEARLY DIE, THEY GET INSTANTLY POPULAR
. It’s the glamour, the thing that sets you apart and makes people want to form a connection.”

This was something my father said on the occasion of the death of some rock legend that he happened to know. He explained to me in an e-mail that the guy was marginally talented and never very likable but now he was going to “get perfect.” He said, “Make sure you don’t count on death as your backup plan.”

I didn’t think that made my dad as weird as it might have sounded. He was a poet; he saw things that way and he couldn’t help sharing them. And I liked that he never filtered his ideas for me. He talked to me as if I’d always been capable of hearing things like that. And in a way, as if I was more capable than my mother.

But the point is, he was so often right.

We went to the hospital and it was nearly impossible to find a place to sit in the waiting room. Now Viv was a rock star.

Gigi and Ella and I hugged each other and talked very quickly and it took a while to get annoyed about not getting to see her. We waited patiently along with so many of the people who’d been at the vigil, including Redmond Dwayne, and all the parents, and Jeff, who had driven me directly there. He leaned against the wall, smiling at me from across the room. He was giving me space. He’d probably read about doing that.

It was close to nine when my mother came in and said, “Visiting hours are almost over. We should probably go home.”

“What? Not see Viv?”

She said, “Her parents are with her. She has a lot of visitors, even the press. We can come back tomorrow.”

“It’s not fair,” I said. “We’re her band.”

She put a hand on my shoulder and said, “She’s going to be around for a while. We can come back.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. I had momentarily forgotten my gratitude.

I was saying goodbye to Gigi and Ella when a nurse entered the waiting room and said, “Is there a Blanche out here? A Blanche Kelly?”

I turned and raised my hand as if I were in school. The nurse pointed a clipboard at me.

“You’re Blanche?”

“Yes.”

“She wants to see you. Visiting hours are really over, so everybody else go home.”

Mom and Ed had to stay behind and I followed the nurse down a corridor, into an elevator and down another corridor. It was late and people were leaving, in various states of emotion.

Finally we arrived at Viv’s room. Her parents and sisters were standing outside. They were talking and smiling. When they saw me, her parents hugged me and her mother said, “She is very insistent upon talking to you, Blanche.”

“I’m happy she’s okay,” I said.

“Yes, we’re all relieved,” her mother said. She gestured toward the door and I went in alone.

Viv was lying in the hospital bed, propped up on some pillows, staring at the blank TV screen as if she were waiting for something to appear on it. She sat straight up when I came in and a smile took over her face. She patted the bed next to her and I sat down. I hugged her. She felt very skinny.

She said, “Have you been here long?”

“Awhile. A lot of people were in the waiting room.”

“The doctors gave me all these tests. Then I had to talk to the reporters. You’d think I’d invented something.”

“Are you okay?”

“I am now. I was hungry but they let me eat some stuff. Not too much. They say you can’t eat a lot at once after you nearly starve.”

“You nearly starved?”

“Well, they say so. I wasn’t hungry much after the first day. I was just cold.”

“Do you have frostbite or anything?”

She shook her head. “I found this place under a rock and I made a bed with some leaves and limbs and stuff. I was near a stream so I drank water. I saw something on the Discovery Channel that said you’re not supposed to move far from where you get lost. So I just stayed in the same place for a while.”

“What did you do?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.” She smiled.

“Go ahead.”

“The first two days were really bad. I was afraid and I worried and I was hungry and cold and stuff. But eventually I got tired and I slept a lot. Then around day three, something happened. I want to tell you.”

“Tell me,” I said.

She was holding my hand now, gripping it pretty tight.

She said, “I thought I was probably going to die. And a lot of stuff went through my head. Believe it or not, I was sorry that we wouldn’t make Coachella, that was the first thing. The second thing, stupid as it sounds, was that crazy guy Redmond Dwayne.”

“He was here,” I said. “He was at the vigil and again in the waiting room.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “He doesn’t matter. I was just missing all the things I thought I’d have. But I got to this weird place where I was ready to die. I don’t mean ready. I mean I figured it was going to happen so it was kind of like when you take an exam. You’re sitting at your desk and the teacher is passing it out and you know you’ve wasted some time but you’ve also studied a little and you’re just
hoping you’ve done more of one than the other. When you think you’re going to die, this weird thing kicks in where you start focusing on the part where you studied. That is, the good stuff you did. And I was thinking about the talent show and how awesome that was and how happy I was that I had it to think about when I was about to die. I was thinking how kind of sad my life might have been without it. At least I did that. That was what I was thinking and I was grateful that you made me do it.”

“I don’t think I made you do it.”

“Just listen.”

“Okay.”

“So on what I guess was the third day when I was getting kind of delirious and sleepy, I kept drifting off, thinking about the band and missing out on Coachella. I didn’t think about soccer at all. I mean, sometimes I had these crazy dreams about missing goals and stuff. But those were mostly nightmares. The nice dreams were about the band. I got to this place … and it’s hard to explain … but I got to this place where all I could think about was the band and every time I thought about it, I felt happy enough to die. And it was while I was feeling like that, I started to pray.”

“Pray,” I said.

“Yeah. You know, my parents are scientists and we don’t believe in that stuff. But I thought, why not try it out. So I prayed. I didn’t pray for anything specific. I just got very quiet and thought about help.”

“Okay.”

“Nothing happened at first. Then I fell asleep and when I woke up, I was looking at this … I don’t know, Blanche …
this thing. It looked like a person but it was more shiny. It was like a white shiny shape. I couldn’t make out any features because it was just so bright. It was like looking at a sunrise. You want to stare but you can’t. I had this overwhelming feeling that whatever it was, it was good news. Not like death. It was some other kind of news. And it kind of spoke to me.”

“It spoke. The white shiny thing.”

“Yeah. Not with words but with thoughts. My thoughts could hear its thoughts or something.”

“Okay.”

“Do you know what it said to me?”

“No,” I said.

“It said, ‘Don’t be afraid.’”

“Oh. Like in the Bible?”

“I don’t know. I don’t read the Bible.”

“In the Bible, angels are always saying don’t be afraid.”

“Well, I’m not saying it was an angel. Necessarily.”

“Okay, go on.”

“It said, ‘Remember what you prayed for the first time.’”

“You prayed for something?” I asked. “When? You said you didn’t pray before.”

She leaned forward and squeezed my hand harder.

She said, “The prayer box.”

“The prayer box.”

“When we went to that weird shop that day, next to Guitar Center.”

“Oh, the prayer box.”

“Yes,” Viv said. “The thing, whatever it was, said, ‘Remember what you prayed for.’”

“Oh,” I said.

“And at first I couldn’t remember what I prayed for. When we did the prayer box thing, I thought it was all kinda stupid. Remember, we wrote down our prayers but I was just goofing around. I didn’t know what to put.”

“Right,” I said.