The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (29 page)

What happened?
Mom doesn't say, but
mouths instead.

I'm expecting Trevor to ask the same thing.
He's always been a good boyfriend that way, and is alert to comfort and misery
clues. Offering his sweatshirt, remembering that girls actually need to use the
bathroom, stuff like that. But this time, I'm not sure he even hears
me.

"I was just driving home from work, and it hit
me," Trevor says.

"A Hostess truck?" I say. I still hear that
jerk's horn.

"What? No, this idea. I've been thinking about
how to expand my product line, you know. I mean, I've got a good line of
Catholic products, I think. But what about other religions? Am I limiting my
sales base? So, I'm just running through the list in my head, okay? Methodists.
Well, the fact of the matter is, Methodists aren't funny. Protestants,
Methodists, Lutherans-- none of them are funny. They're pot roast, green beans,
potatoes. What's funny there? Then I realize. Mormons. You've got the whole
bigamy thing. Bigamy's hilarious."

"That's kind of going low, Trevor. Kind of
cliché. They don't

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even really practice bigamy." Irritation rushes
in. I know where this is heading. Another way to spend my money. I hate the way
he sees me lately. Like I'm a human ATM machine.

Mom scrunches her eyebrows.
Bigamy?
she
mouths.

"What's the matter with you, In? Jesus, you're
sounding uptight."

"I told you, I had a bad day."

"Well, then I guess you're not going to like my
'I Heart My Wives' T-shirts."

He's still being a Teflon listener. Everything
I'm saying is sliding right off of him.

"Why don't we talk about this another time," I
say. "Right now? I'm tired of the whole topic."

There's silence on the other end, the kind of
silence that's very noisy. Unsaids say so much more than saids. I feel the sharp
corners and dangerous ledges in the quiet.

"I know what you're thinking," he says.
Trevor's voice has a snap. And Trevor's voice never has a snap--Trevor has the
perpetual cheer of a Hawaiian shirt. My throat closes. There are so many words
there that want to come out, that nothing can come out. I watch as Mom eeks
through the neighborhood. We finally make the left turn heading toward town; we
inch in the direction of the small bridge that hooks over Nine Mile Falls Creek,
where the salmon run. "You're thinking I'm after your money. It's what you're
always thinking lately." I look at fir trees, every fir tree, and wish for more
space between Trevor's words and what might come after them.

"I'm not your ticket someplace," I
say.

It comes out before I realize it. Mom shoots an
alarmed look my way. There is silence. I just sit there, holding the phone.
I

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don't even hear him breathe. I've shocked him,
and I've shocked myself. The words are horrible, I realize. I want to snatch
them back, but there's too much truth in them to do that.

"Wow," Trevor says finally. "Wow. I guess after
two--more than two--years of being together, I thought we could handle anything.
Even this, In. But you haven't even given us a chance to handle it. You put
yourself in one place and you put me over here."

"I
am
in a different place," I
say.

"Funny, I thought we were heading somewhere
together. I thought this--the money. I thought it was something that happened to
us.
But apparently I was wrong."

I don't say anything. His words are too close,
and so I shove them far.

"And maybe you ought to know something else,"
he says. "Just now? I didn't call you to talk about your money. Maybe you might
remember that I had this idea long before that. I don't need your
money."

And suddenly I feel something I've never felt
with Trevor before. A corner I could turn, down a street away from him. I can
see that corner so clearly that I feel a choice in front of me. To walk ahead
and make the turn or to run back the way I came. The space ahead seems so large,
so frighteningly unknown; the space behind is known. It's where a sense of home
is, even if home doesn't fit anymore. And so I rush back. I run back to safety
like a little kid who thought for a moment he was lost.

"Trevor, I'm sorry, okay? I'm sitting in the
car with Mom. I love you, all right? Just, let's do this later."

Silence again. "Fine."

We hang up our cell phones I bought us. The
thing about

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running back to safety--its relief abandons you
fast. The things-are-still-okay comfort is fleeting, like touching base in a tag
game before you know you have to run off again. Change is the most relentless
nag. For about thirty seconds, I'm so glad I didn't do something crazy and end
things with Trevor right there. And then, the scritch of annoyance starts. He
thought the money was something that happened to us? Wasn't he making an awful
lot of assumptions here, without checking with me first? And, really? My money
wasn't going to be brought up? When it has come up in practically every
conversation we've had in the last six weeks?

"Are you all right?" Mom sneaks a look at
me.

"Yeah," I sigh, but shake my head. My body
isn't so sure. Along with my resumed annoyance is something else. Supreme inner
disappointment, the big daddy of guilt, aka shame. I said
I love you
and
didn't mean love. I meant
Please don't leave me.
I meant
Please don't
inflict change on me.
I meant
Let's just ignore this. I'm not ready for
this right now.
I'm embarrassed at my own self for using Love and Cling
interchangeably.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Mom asks. She
has finally crept over the other side of the bridge. One of us, anyway, is
capable of forward motion, even at the pace of a marble on a barely tilted
surface.

I shake my head, which is starting to hurt. I
realize this about the inner voice--it whispers, then it shouts, and then it
backhands you one with a headache for not listening. You can fool the mind, but
you can't fool the body. The body is more honest. "Can we just get there?" I
ask.

"I'll take the freeway, instead of going
through town," she says.

I roll down my window, lean one elbow out. I
sniff the green,

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hopeful air of summer. Mom sits at the freeway
entrance, her turn signal making an endless
click, clock, click clock.
Finally, she hits the accelerator and we are off, and then there is a horrible,
screeching cry in the backseat, and a sudden moment of confusion and fur and the
long searing scrape of a claw down my forearm.

"Oh my God, oh my God. Freud!" Mom screams.
"Shit, what's he doing in here?"

Freud is wondering the same thing. The car as a
stationary sleeping palace is one thing, but as a speeding, scenery flying,
wind-sucking metallic force of nature--Freud is having none of it. Freud is in
full get-me-outta-here panic, and Mom is trying to merge and a corvette with its
radio blaring screams past, the driver flipping her off, and her turn signal is
still on, and now she's flicked on her windshield wipers by mistake and sent a
fountain of wiper fluid shooting across the windshield and Freud has leapt to
the backseat and now the front again and is clinging halfway up Mom's shoulder.
I try to pull him off so she can drive and we won't be killed as Mom yells, "Ow!
Ow! Ow!"

"Move him! Ow, damnit! I can't see!"

"Pull over, pull over!" I say, and finally Mom
eases over to the side of the freeway. She turns off the engine. A semi rattles
and whooshes past, and the car shakes with apparent fear. Freud still clings to
her shoulder, his eyes wild.

"How did we not see him?" she says.

"I don't know. I didn't even look. He was
probably on the floor."

"When we started going fast..."

I remove Freud's claws from Mom, and he lunges
to my lap, sinks his little needles into my bare shorts-clad legs. I let out
a

224

scream, clench shut my eyes, and feel his
squirming mass rise from my grasp. Shit, he bounds from me, and all I see when I
open my eyes is his furry narrow ass and his hideous, villainous tail escape
through my open window. "Freud!" Mom yells. "Oh, God!"

I have a vision of a flattened Freud; Freud as
a thin roadkill animal crepe. Trodden by Sears radials, guts insta-compressed
into a new layer of asphalt, his soul hightailing it from the premises (heading
for you know where), leaving glassy eyes behind. I don't want to see that happen
to Freud, even if Mom and I look like we've just made a joint jaunt through a
paper shredder. Freud's one of those relatives that you aren't especially fond
of but who is still part of the family, damn it.

But Freud's plan does not involve a leap into
speeding traffic. He's running as fast as his hairy hide can take him, into the
woods adjoining the freeway. I barely notice the SUV pulling over ahead of us,
its monstrous emergency lights blinking on-off. A woman with short brown hair
pops her head from the driver's side window. Her mouth is a gash of open
anger.

"You sicko!" she screams. "I saw what you
did!"

Nothing is making sense. Mom is flinging open
her door, her eyes glued to Freud's little gray body heading for the evergreens,
but this woman is shouting from her massive, environment-smashing
car.

"You animal killer! I'm going to call the
police! Sicko!" she screams again. And then her huge tires are in motion and the
tanklike back of her SUV rolls back into traffic to suck more life from our
planet.

"She thinks we threw him out the window. She
thinks we brought him here to ditch him," I say.

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But Mom isn't paying attention to any of this.
She's hiking one leg over the highway barrier, her arms flailing around for
something to hold on to. Oh, God, this is Mom putting up Christmas lights and
changing smoke detector batteries all over again.

"Wait for me," I say. I unclasp my seat belt
and go out after her. She's stumbling toward the forest and shouting Freud's
name. His evil little behind disappears into some ferns and then appears again
out the other side. He looks over one shoulder at us.

"It's okay, Freud," Mom croons. "Stay there.
I'll come get you. It's okay." Mom is using her
talk-the-suicide-from-the-
ledge voice, which she perfected at work. Well,
maybe not perfected, because Freud takes off again. We scramble after him,
branches breaking under our feet, and holly and blackberries scraping our legs,
already in shambles. Freud eyes a tree trunk. He isn't quite crouched to leap,
but his shoulders are in that considering-it pose.

"No," Mom pleads. She's gone from rational and
calm to desperate. "Freud, no."

But cats love a yes when you need a no. He
slings his body back then forward, slingshot-style, and up the tree he
goes.

We watch him clutch and climb and settle onto a
branch just out of reach. He makes himself comfy.

"Oh, Freud," Mom says.

"This isn't funny, Freud, goddamnit," I
say.

Mom hides her face in her hands. I look around
for something, anything that might help us. The freeway hums behind us. There's
nothing here but huckleberry bushes and ... I don't know, green bushes, I'm not
some kind of horticulture expert. We're in a forest, that's the
point.

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"This is ridiculous," I say.

"I don't know what to do. I just don't
know."

"We ought to leave you here, Freud. You can be
eaten by coyotes and mountain lions. You could be a tasty little morsel," I
sneer.

Mom clasps her hands and looks skyward. Man, we
are in trouble if Mom's praying. Mom says she doesn't generally like to bother
God unless there's a crisis, same as she does with Dad.

"Mom!" I say. I'm trying to snap her back to
the here and now. At the moment, we need a higher power that will actually
return our phone calls.

Mom looks back at Freud. "Please," she says.
"Come on, Freud. Here, kitty. Come here."

But Freud's twisted little sadistic self is
just beginning to enjoy this. If cats love a yes when you need a no, they love a
no when you need a yes even more.

"Fine. Let's leave him," I say.

"Indigo, no. We can't do that."

"Why not? This is a power trip. Look at
him."

"He looks scared," she says.

"Scared, my ass. He looks smug."

Mom looks at Freud, considers this. "Well,
still. We need something to climb up. Maybe we can call someone. Someone with a
big ladder."

Right as she says that, we hear the
crack-snap
of footsteps in a forest. A big square-shouldered figure
approaches. A big square-shouldered figure in a uniform. My God, a
cop.

"Is everything all right here?" he says. "What
seems to be the trouble?" He must have watched plenty of cop shows, because he
has the lines down.

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