The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (17 page)

"Severin can come with me," I say.

"Indigo, no. Sweetie. Even you--this is going
on my credit card. I don't have the money for this ticket. I didn't want to say,
but Mrs. Olson was over a week or so ago ..." She rubs one eye with her
palm.

I know what this means. Mrs. Olson is our
landlady. Mrs. Olson looks sweet as a box of See's candy. She wears thin
sweaters and has brown spots on the back of her hands and a little gold cross
necklace around her woggly chicken neck. If you got to talking to her, though,
she would tell you about her ring, with a stone

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to represent each child, that Mr. Olson gave
her on their thirtieth wedding anniversary, and then she'd tell you how the
liberals are messing up the country, giving money away like it grows on trees,
and how the last great Democrat was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but those days
are long gone, and even he would never allow men to marry other men when that
was just against nature. Just
against
nature, and those people ought to
be hung. She actually said "hung," which made you realize that in another life
she'd be the sort to bring her knitting to the public executions. According to
my mother, Mrs. Olson is one of those people who have a fat checkbook but a thin
heart. After Mrs. Olson would come over to raise our rent, my mother would go
into her room and shut the door for a long time, and the bottle of aspirin would
be on the bathroom counter, the fluff of cotton left out and the lid off. Mrs.
Olson never had any
funds
(as she called them) to fix anything. Instead,
she'd dock a couple of dollars from the rent for a month and then turn around
and raise it permanently, which, according to my mom, was the same thing
insurance companies do whenever you use the insurance you paid for.

"Can't we subtract airline tickets from the
money?" I say. "It seems only fair."

"That'd be nice, but is this someone who's
working with a full deck, here?" She sighs. "If it's not one thing, it's
another. Who would have thought too much money would be a problem. I'm agreeing
to this flight, okay?" She lifts her eyebrows, poises her finger dramatically
over the enter key. I nod. "Done," she says. "Done. I did it. You're going." Mom
scrolls down the screen and back up again, presses a button and then stares at
the printer, which just sits there politely.

"Wait--I'm going to have to be alone with Dad,"
I say. "I've

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hardly ever been alone with Dad for an extended
period of time." I feel a wash of nerves, that edgy discomfort you get when
you're in an elevator with strangers. "What if we don't have anything to talk
about?"

"It's not like you don't ever talk to him," Mom
says. But she's not really listening. She's opening up the lid of the printer
and peering inside, the same way she does when the car starts making weird
noises. She pokes her finger around in there.

"Talking to him for five minutes on the phone
every few weeks is different from finding things to say for a few
days." How
is school?
will take up all of about a minute and a half.
How is your
brother and Bex,
another three minutes. What if we complete our
conversational repertoire before we even get out of the airport parking
lot?

"You used to
live
with him, remember,"
Mom says. Barely remember. It doesn't even seem real anymore, our time as a
family altogether. Dad left when I was eleven, when he decided his life was
becoming a frightening suburban cliché. Mom told us this one night when she'd
had a second beer and let both her tongue and the image of him loosen. I like my
dad, don't get me wrong--the five-minute bits of conversation every now and then
and the few times we've all visited him have been great. He's a likeable guy.
But we haven't really gotten to know each other, him and me. Time and place have
been barriers to that, but so has the intermittent sense that I have something
to forgive him for--the fact that he left people who loved him for something
better than that, I guess--and that delicate sense is the architectural frame
our relationship is built on.

"You'll have Jennifer," Mom says. "Jennifer
never stops talking." Mom slams the printer door shut, same as she would
the

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hood of the car when there's nothing wrong, far
as she can tell. Jennifer is my mom's stepwife, but we don't call her our
stepmother. She's ten years older than I am, so "mother" is just not the word
that comes to mind. Mom's right, though. All I'd have to do is bring a stack of
quarters and keep pumping them in and Jennifer would keep on going. "God," I
say.

"He's your father," Mom says, as if somehow
this is my fault. As if I was the one who chose him, not her. She tries the
printer button again, and the machine cranks to life. "Ha!" she says. When it's
done, she snitches the page from the tray, turns off the computer without
shutting it down properly. It exhales in exhaustion.

We hear Bex making the "ooh eee ooh ahh" noises
of someone taking something hot from the oven. Mom yells at her to use a pot
holder, for God's sake (knowing Bex, she used the hem of her shirt).
"For
God's sake!"
I hear Chico screech. This is just another example of sibling
unfairness. I didn't get to use the oven until I was, maybe, fifteen, and even
then Mom hovered over me like I was holding a torch and a can of gasoline. Under
normal circumstances, I would have complained about this injustice (shouldn't we
all have to suffer equally?), but this involves food, chocolate food. In a few
minutes Bex appears with a plate of brownies.

"This is an obvious display of butt-kissing now
that you're rich," she says. At least she's honest about it. "All I ask in
exchange is that you remember the people without homes in Malaysia."

"She has to give it back, Bex," Mom says. "But
we want brownies anyway," I say.

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"Do we ever," Mom says.

"Fine," Bex says. She holds out the plate and
some napkins. The brownies were cut when they were too warm, so they fall apart
a little when you lift them. Two bites and I'm feeling better already. There's
something about consumption--chocolate-to-
mouth,
receipt-in-bottom-of-shopping-
bag--that fills empty places. We need our
empty places filled, and what are the speedy, available options? Material
things, God, love, nachos with everything. Consuming something, anything,
smoothes out the gnawing of need and stitches the gaping of angst, and if only a
brownie is available, a brownie will do.

There are places where time seems to slow down
in some alien-planet way, where everything is on football-game time, a minute
equaling fifteen minutes. Any math class is one of those places, as is the
Department of Motor Vehicles, and the waiting rooms of doctor's offices. And
airports. Time oozes in airports, some primordial flow from before there were
clocks, when thousands of years was a relatively short period of time measured
against eons. That's airport time. I've been waiting to board for twenty
minutes, which in regular-life time feels like four or five days have passed. My
good-byes to everyone and Trevor's farewell kiss are already hazy and long-ago
soft.

I go to the bathroom just for something to do.
I've already gone to the gift shop full of overpriced candy bars and trashy
novels and Seattle key chains and playing cards and those scenic spoons that you
thought had disappeared long ago. Things almost impossible to imagine that
people desire. I find the bathroom sign with the chick in the triangle skirt,
and the rolling suitcase Mom made me bring follows behind me like Bex used to
when she was younger. I want to

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make it go to its room, but we're stuck as
traveling partners. Ha, it'll probably have a more interesting conversation with
Dad than I will.

I do the nervous push-open-the-door-quick
maneuver you do in bathrooms to be on guard against unpleasant surprises. I've
got a real knack for out-in-public bad luck. If some cash register is going to
run out of tape, that's the line I'll be in; if there's some stalker salesperson
in the store, I'm the one she'll follow. And if there's a stall without toilet
paper, I'm in it.

I've been on an airplane twice in my life, both
times to see Dad. He came to visit us, but it was awkward--he stayed at the
Ramada Inn near the airport and we stayed with him, Bex and me in one bed and he
and Severin in the other, the sound of airplanes taking off and landing and the
tiny bottles of shampoo reminding us all that it was temporary. The only lively
part was Bex jumping around in her bathing suit and asking if it was time to
swim yet, and Severin eating crackers out of the minibar before he realized you
had to pay for them, at five dollars for maybe six Wheat Thins. The last time I
was in the airport was a few years ago, and since then the airport has acquired
these creepy, revolving plastic seats on the toilets. Me and my little following
rolling friend cannot believe our eyes. There's this thin skin of plastic on the
seat that eeks around after you flush. I try it a few times just to watch it
work, and let me tell you, whoever sat in some boardroom with this great idea
was really a sicko, or at the very least, the over-achieving son of the
president of the company. I have the sudden fear that this is actually the same
piece of plastic going around the same circle, and wish I had a Post-it note or
a piece of gum or something to stick on and see if I am right. I get out of
there fast. I stand at the sink and before my suitcase has even rolled up behind
me, the faucet shoots on.

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"Hey, I'm not ready," I say to it, because no
one else is in there. The faucet goes off. I position my hands nicely underneath
and ... nothing. I wave them around. Still, nothing. I turn my back to try
another sink and wham, the old one shoots on. God, I hate presumptuous,
overachieving appliances. Toilets that flush before you're ready; automatic,
attacking seatbelts; refrigerators that beep when the door is open too long.
Melanie has one of those. For God's sake, it makes me feel like my inability to
decide is a criminal act. To all the pushy appliances out there, back
off.

I had previously been trying out wearing the
air of an owner of two and a half million dollars, something casual and leaning
and not nervous and wary, some sort of new cool, but the bathroom experience has
reminded me that I am just one of the masses that must deal with creepy,
revolving plastic on toilets. My inability to control an automatic faucet has
zapped my confidence, and so I sit back down in a hard plastic chair formed to
the supposed contours of my body and look around for possible terrorists
instead. Some kid sits on his dad's lap and pats the man's head, which the dad
puts up with amiably. An old guy in a World War II Veterans cap and a snazzy
pair of red Keds high-tops asks me to take a picture of him and his wife, who's
sporting a crocheted cap and a pair of velvety leopard pants. I try to find the
big button there
she is gesturing toward, as she leans back against the
man and smiles.

"Cool shoes," I say to the man. More than the
shoes themselves, I like the fact that he's wearing them. He has a cane and some
huge elastic band around his waist as if trying to keep his internal organs in.
"You two are stylin'."

The woman beams. "We're from New Jersey," she
says.

I hand back the camera, wait for another eon. I
watch a creature

130

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emerge from the sea, grow legs, begin to walk
upright, and then it's time to board. The flight attendants flash their credit
card smiles and I haul my bag up and take my seat by the window, which is good,
because I can keep an eye on the wing this way and make sure it stays on. I
watch the line of people sludge past, waiting for the human lottery of who will
sit next to me if I happen to die a fiery death today. This turns out to be an
older man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and a laptop, which he stows under
his seat. Then he lays his head back and closes his eyes, and I'm alone again.
The seat between us is empty, lucky me. I read the plastic card and follow along
about the yellow evacuation slide and the seat as a flotation device, which we
all know is a lie, but okay. Apparently the life jacket has a whistle attached,
so that if you crash into the water from thousands upon thousands of feet and
still manage to bob along in the sea, you can tweet for attention. People are
reading magazines and eating snacks and sleeping while the rest of us are
looking around for exit rows and thinking about death.

After we've nosed up and we're not wavering
around and the blond lady starts bending over and fussing with the drink cart, I
figure I can stop listening for noises of disaster and smelling for burning
plane parts. No one would hunt for ginger ale if we were about to plunge. I turn
my inner alert switch to standby, flip through the catalogue of expensive
watches and dog carriers and minibars for the office. I read the in-flight
magazine and look at pictures of Portugal and try to see if we're getting a
movie.

I get a Diet Coke and a package of four peanuts
and decide not to pay five bucks for headphones. I've got a hundred dollars Mom
gave me for the whole trip, and I don't want to waste it. She took it from the
envelope of money she keeps in her underwear

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