The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (39 page)

Jane accepted my investment, and my offer of
any advice I'd learn in school to help her run the business better, and Leroy
came out of the greenhouse closet, so to speak, after he, too, accepted my
business proposal. Trina was back in boots again, her car at the curb. Roger had
returned from Rio and tried to get her back. She told him to go fuck himself,
but she was still taking his calls. Joe left for Saint Louis, wearing a suit and
tie on the way to the airport, a hat on his head. Funny came in every day with
her laptop case strung from her shoulder. But not everything went according to
my plan. Nick said he couldn't accept a ticket out of Nine Mile Falls, although
his eyes got watery when I gave him his gift. Sometimes he wanted to leave he
said, but all the things that made him
him
were here. His memories of his
wife were here. And we were here. I understood this.

My guitar playing, too, underwent a change. I
played for a little while when I got back, and then I stopped for good. I
put

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my guitar in my closet. It seemed to belong to
another time of my life. Some things, I understood, were temporary pieces,
passing phases. Other things, the real passions, stayed for good.

When we leave to visit Dad--me, Trevor,
Severin, and Bex--Mom stays behind, in spite of her invitation. Dad hoped she'd
come too, but Mom said she wasn't sure about that. She is having fun with
Officer Brian, even if she isn't the Mariners fan that he is, even if she
doesn't like camping.
There's a lot of water under the bridge,
she says.
But her eyes look sad, I can see that, when we leave her at the
airport.

Dad says he'll ask again, even if it's silly.
As we sit on the beach and try to snap on our flippers, I can almost picture
her, standing there trying to wipe off all the sand that suddenly clings to her
sunscreen. Maybe when her hormones calm down, she'll come for a visit with
us.

"Would you guys hurry up!" Severin says from
the water. "It's amazing down here. Wait till you see these fish!"

Trevor holds out his arms like a monster, his
mask over his eyes, walking stiff-zombie-legged and flipper-footed toward Bex,
who screams. "AAAAH," Trevor-zombie says, and zombie-lurches forward.

Bex splashes out away from him, and a moment
later, you can see her flowered bikini bottom snorkeling along in the sea. Dad
lies on his towel. He leans back on his elbows, smiles. "Are you coming?" I ask.
"Nah, I think I'll just watch awhile."

I pick my way carefully to the water's edge.
Bex pops her head up. "Mother Nature is a genius!" she yells. "The real world,"
I say, and then I dive in.

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Turn the page for a peek at another novel by
Deb Caletti:

The Secret Life of Prince
Charming

300

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When it came to love, my mother's big advice
was that there were WARNING SIGNS. About the "bad" guys, that is. The ones who
would hurt you or take advantage or crumple you up and toss, same as that poem I
would once try to write for Daniel Jarvis. The wrong men--the psychopaths,
cheaters, liars, controllers, stalkers, ones too lazy or incompetent to hold a
job, to hold their temper, to hold you properly, to hold anything but a joint or
a beer bottle--well, there were RED FLAGS, and you had to watch for them. If you
were handling love correctly, it should go the way of those Driver's Ed videos,
where things were jumping out at you right and left and you had to be on
alert--a swerving truck, a child's ball rolling into the street. The important
thing was, love was dangerous. Love was that dark alley you were walking down
where your purse might be snatched.

Love was also an easy word, used carelessly.
Felons and creeps could offer it coated in sugar, and users could dangle it so
enticingly that you wouldn't notice it had things attached--heavy things, things
like pity and need, that were as weighty as anchors and iron beams and just as
impossible to get out from underneath.

"They ought to make people apply for a permit
before they can say they love you," Mom said once. I remember this--she was in
our big kitchen, holding a mug of coffee in both hands, warming her fingers
against an image of Abe Lincoln embossed on ceramic, the oldest mug in the
house, from when my father once went to Springfield, Illinois, home of our
sixteenth president. Mom was talking to me and Gram and Aunt Annie, who both
lived with us, and the sound of cartoons

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was coming from the living room, where my
little sister Sprout was sitting cross-legged on the floor in her
pajamas.

"Yeah. Make a man pay fifty bucks and take one
of those mental tests," Gram said. She was fishing around in the kitchen drawer
as butter melted in a pan for scrambled eggs. "Quinn, help an old lady find the
damn whisk," she said to me.

"Cynics," Aunt Annie said, but she did so with
a sigh. "You're both cynics." She tightened the sash of her robe around her.
She'd just started seeing Quentin Ferrill at the time. We knew him only as the
Double Tall Chai Latte No Foam guy, who gave long looks at Aunt Annie when he
asked how her day was going across the counter at Java Jive, where Aunt Annie
was a barista. Looks that shared secrets, she had told us. "Looks that are
trying to get you into bed, is more like it," Gram had replied.

The favorite lecture of some mothers was Don't
Talk to Strangers or, maybe, Look Both Ways. My mother's favorite was All Men
Are Assholes.

I tended to side with Aunt Annie that they were
cynics. I was only seventeen--I wasn't ready to be jaded yet. I was just at the
start of the relationship road, where lip-gloss-love ends and you're at that Y
where if you go one way, you'll have flat, easy pathways and everlasting
happiness, and if you go the other, the rocky and steep slopes of
heartbreak--only you have no idea which way is which. I liked to think I was
already heading in the right direction, determined to prove my mother wrong by
making Good Choices. I was sort of the queen of good choices, ruled by niceness
and doing the right thing. Good choices meant asking that weird, solitary Patty
Hutchins to your birthday party even when you didn't want to. Good choices meant
getting your homework in on time and being on the volleyball team and sharing a
locker with someone who played the clarinet instead of someone who drank their
parents' Scotch. It meant liking math

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because it makes sense and liking your family
even if they don't make sense and driving carefully and knowing you'd go to
college. It meant taking careful steps and being doomed to be someone no one
really remembered at the high school reunion.

I think "good choices" also meant
other
people's choices
to me, then. I could feel hazy and undefined, even to
myself. Was I going to be amazing, the best, the most incredible--win a Nobel
Prize in mathematics, achieve great heights, as Dad would constantly tell me? Or
was I going to be someone who would only continue to stumble and flounder and
search, which is what I really felt would happen, since Dad's words sounded as
shiny and hollow as Christmas ornaments to me? Maybe I would be simply
ordinary.
What would happen if that were the case? Just ordinary? And how
did you get to a place where you knew where you were headed and what you wanted?
I hate to admit this, I do, but the fact was, if most of my friends wanted
hamburgers, I wanted hamburgers, and if the whole class kept their hands down
during a vote, I would not be the single raised hand. No way. Too risky. When
you went along, you could be sure of a positive outcome. A plus B equals C. When
you didn't go along, you got A plus X equals a whole host of possibilities,
including, maybe, pissing off people and ending up alone. I badly wished I could
know my own truths and speak them, but they seemed out of reach, and it seemed
better to be sure of yourself in secret.

And in love? Good choices so far meant my
boyfriend, Daniel Jarvis, whom I'd been dating for over a year. Dating meaning
he'd come over to my house and we'd watch a video and he'd hold my hand until it
got too sweaty. Teachers loved Daniel, and he ran track and was polite to my
mother and went to church every Sunday morning with his family. Daniel was
nice.
Like me. He made good choices too. He bought that Toyota instead of
the classic little MG Midget

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with the broken convertible top that he'd run
his hands over lovingly. Toyota love was only responsible love--remembering to
put the gas cap on, refilling the wiper fluid. Convertible love was fingertips
drawn slow over the curve of warm metal.

My inner evil twin, the one who would say the
things I didn't want to hear but that were the truth, would also say that
oatmeal
is nice. Second-grade teachers are nice. That Christmas present
from Aunt So and So was nice, the little pearl stud earrings. My inner evil twin
also knows that the kind of nice that appears in the phrase "But he's nice,"
that emphasis, well, it's suspiciously defensive. Sort of like when you buy a
shirt you don't really like because it was half off and then say, "But it was a
good buy." Justification for giving in to things we don't feel one hundred
percent for. Maybe I just wanted to believe in love, even if I didn't all the
way believe in me and Daniel Jarvis. Maybe what Daniel Jarvis and I had was
half-off love.

With Daniel, there weren't any red flags, but
there weren't any blue ones or green ones, either; no beautiful silk flags with
gold threads and patterns so breathtaking they could make you dizzy when they
blew in the wind. It was enough, maybe, not to have bad things, even if you
didn't have great things. For example, my best friend, Liv, went out with this
guy, Travis Becker, whom she was totally in love with until she found out he was
seeing two other girls at the same time and had recently been arrested for
breaking and entering. God. Then again, Liv is beautiful and I am not. Good
choices are a little harder, maybe, when you have lots of options.

As for Mom, I'm guessing she began developing
her favorite lecture somewhere around the time her own father (Gram's wayward
husband, the elusive Rocky Siler) left when she was two, and after her
stepfather (Otto Pearlman, Aunt Annie's dad) did the same thing ten years later.
She added to the running theme when she and my dad

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divorced after his affair with Abigail Renfrew,
and perfected it sometime after her three-year relationship with Dean. Or, as we
call him now, OCD Dean. He and his two horrible children moved in with us for a
while after Dad left, before Gram and Aunt Annie moved in. Let me tell you,
people of different values don't belong under the same roof. We named Dean's
kids Mike and Veruca, after those characters in
Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory,
Mike Teavee and Veruca Salt ("Da-dee! I want an Oompa Loompa
now!"). It got so bad with them there that it felt like some kind of
home-invasion robbery where the robbers decide to live with you afterward. Mom,
Sprout, and me would go somewhere and leave them behind, and when we had to come
back, Mom would sometimes drive right past our house. We
can't go in
there,
she'd say, as if the building itself were dangerous, filled with
toxic fumes, threatened by a collapsing structure. As if the problem was with
the house and not the people in it.

My mother, Mary Louise Hoffman, is a graphic
designer who used to paint and had shown her work at several galleries. She used
to dance, too, which is how she met my father--they actually performed in a show
together. It's hard to imagine her as this painter/dancer wearing swirling
skirts and swoopy earrings; there's a picture of her from the time just before
she met Dad--someone had snapped her in the middle of a cartwheel, only one hand
on a deep green grassy lawn somewhere, her feet in the air. It seems odd; it
seems like a different her, because her feet were so firmly on the ground after
that. She was sort of the super-functioning head woman in our clan. Mom handled
things--she could sign a permission slip at the same time she was steaming
wrinkles from a blouse and cooking Stroganoff. But if you got her started on the
man thing, she'd get a little crazy-extremist, super focused and wild-eyed both,
like those anti- or pro-religious people, only without the religion
part.

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Most particularly, you didn't want to get her
started on my dad. "Men" meant him, especially, multiplied by a gajillion. She
tended to forget that he was my father, that he was her ex, not mine. And that I
wanted to love him, needed for him to love me back because he hadn't been in my
life always. Her constant reminders about why I shouldn't didn't help anything.
Actually, they hurt her cause. Because every time I heard anything about him, or
about "men," I put up a nice new stone in my mental defense wall of him. It's
sort of like how you protect the little kid from the bully. You want to say,
Hey, every time
you do that, I love Dad more,
but you don't say that.
When your parents are divorced, there's a lot you don't say. And another thing
you think but don't dare speak:
When you talk had about each other, you're
wasting your breath. I stopped listening years ago.
You stop listening when
you figure out that the words aren't actually directed at you, anyway. That
you're basically a wire between two telephones.

Anyway. I guess what I mean to say, what I
should say right off, is that I knew good choices did not include stealing
things from my own father's house. I knew that, and I did it anyway. I had to.
Frances Lee, the half sister I never knew but know now, would say this about
what we did: sometimes good choices are really only bad ones, wrapped up in so
much fear you can't even see straight.