The Secrets of Peaches (17 page)

B
irdie knelt in the confessional at Divine Grace of the Redeemer. She was a firm believer that things happened in threes. The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost. Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry. Honey Babe, Eugenie, and
Z
. If she was being punished, Birdie wondered if she could stop the cycle. And if it was too late, who the
Z
would be.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” She always spoke low at confession, not just because she didn't want anyone else to hear, but because Father Michael was always on the other side of the curtain, and she hoped if she disguised her voice, he wouldn't recognize her.

“How long has it been since your last confession?”

Birdie thought. What day was it today? January thirteenth, fourteenth? “Um, eight months?” It hadn't been since before the summer. She guessed it had slipped her mind.

“Go on.”

“I…” Birdie cleared her throat. “I Googled a couple of answers on my history test.”

“Yes?”

“And…I committed adultery and…” Birdie said it low and fast. “I…”

“Wait.”

Birdie swallowed.

“Birdie, is this like the time you thought you committed adultery because you had mooned someone?”

Birdie's stomach flopped sickly. She tried to swallow again, but her throat had gone dry. “No, Father. I…I had
sex
,” she whispered.

Father Michael was quiet. “I see.”

Birdie had visions of him coming around the side of the confessional and throwing holy water on her like in
The Exorcist
.

“Have you shared this with anyone?”

“No.” Well. Not intentionally.

“Birdie, I strongly urge you to talk to an adult about this. This kind of thing is a responsibility.”

“Okay, Father.”

“I want you to say twenty Our Fathers and meditate really hard about what God wants for you.”

“Okay, Father.”

Should she add that sex had turned her into the angel of death? Should she ask if God would kill a feisty old lady because
she
couldn't control herself?

She wrapped up with a few less-extreme sins instead.

 

In the house, Leeda was hunched over her laptop at the kitchen table. She looked almost as white as a marshmallow—her thin white arms curled around her textbook, her legs like toothpicks under her pink plush track pants.

Birdie slid out of her coat, then rubbed her hands together, then looked at the thermostat. “Lee, it's freezing in here.” It was freezing outside too. The orchard slumped under the hazy sky, like somebody holding their breath.

Leeda shrugged. “There's mail for you.” She gestured to a manila envelope on the counter by the phone.

Birdie picked it up. Enrico's familiar messy handwriting had addressed it, simply, to Birdie. She pulled out its contents: photos of her and Enrico's family. A miniature replica of the sun stone from the Zócalo. A pamphlet on the National Autonomous University of Mexico with a photo of Birdie's favorite building on the front. A letter written on a brown paper bag from a bakery where they'd had guava pastries in Mexico City. Birdie ran her fingers over the words on the paper, feeling so far away from Enrico's hands. She hadn't called him since she'd been back, and that had been a week and a half ago.

“Your dad was looking for you,” Leeda said. Birdie looked at her. Her cheeks were almost as pink as her track pants. Birdie reached out to hold a hand against her skin to see if she was hot, but Leeda ducked her head. She pulled her hand back and folded her fingers together gently.

“You don't look so good, Lee,” Birdie told her.

Leeda half laughed. “Thanks.” When she felt Birdie moon-eyeing her, she looked up at her. “I'm fine. Really.”

Birdie shuffled down the hall to the office. Her dad was behind the desk, his big thin-rimmed glasses on, concentrating on some papers in front of him.

“Birdie,” he said, leaning over his desk. “I want to talk about something serious with you.” Oh God. Birdie was blindsided.
She had thought the threat of this had passed. “Your mom doesn't think you're ready to hear it, but I do.”

Birdie nodded.
Tap tap thump.
Birdie scooped Majestic from where she'd hobbled up beside her. Could Father Michael have called? Wasn't confessional supposed to be
private
? Oh God.

He looked uncomfortable, awkward. “It's about my will.”

His
will
? “Your will?”

“Now that the…now that your mother and I have finalized the divorce, I need to amend my will.”

“Are you sick?” Birdie gushed.

To her surprise, her dad smiled. “Birdie, I'm fine. It's just something I have to do. I just wanted to make sure of something before I do it.”

Birdie waited with bated breath. She couldn't imagine what he was going to say.

“I know it probably goes without saying, but I want to leave the orchard to you. I need to know if that's what you want.”

Birdie's stomach began to ache. It was the last question she'd ever expected to be asked. But hearing it like that made Birdie feel like a weight was wrapped around her ankles. “Yeah, Dad. That's fine.”

“You sure?”

“Of course.” Had there ever been any question? Except maybe a cartoon one? A momentary lapse of sanity.

Walter smiled again—which used to be a rare occurrence but seemed to come to him so easily these days. Birdie knew she had told him what he wanted, and needed, to hear.

“How's Enrico?” he asked generously.

Birdie gazed around the office, thinking how to answer that.
She knew every scuff in the wooden floor. Every crack and slope in every shelf. It was funny how you could go somewhere and your whole life could stretch out. And then you could come home and have it all shrink back again to the way it was before. It was funny that it didn't stay stretched.

“We broke up,” she said, with a feeling of deep relief as the words left her mouth. Enrico didn't know it yet. But there wasn't a question in her mind, and that was what felt really good. It was how things had always been meant to be.

She stared around at the piles of papers, which she would inherit one day and in a way already had. For a second, Birdie almost wished she could be some other kind of teenager. Someone who could put rocks on a bus and hope to follow them.

Behind her, somewhere inside the house, there was a screech of wood sliding and a loud thud. Birdie ran into the kitchen, her dad hurrying behind her. The first thing she saw was one of the kitchen chairs lying on its side. Then Leeda, lying on the linoleum. Thin and perfectly white, she was spread across the floor like a ghost.

M
urphy watched while almost every person in the senior class filtered in and out of the hospital room to see Leeda. But what really struck her was how little Leeda seemed to notice they were there to see
her
. How she managed to stay shrunk, even with all the attention. Lying propped on her white pillows, in red lipstick, she looked like Sleeping Beauty.

The room smelled like a mixture of antiseptic and exotic flowers. Everywhere bright bouquets and balloons stood out against the white walls, white plastic tables, gray plastic chairs. Only Leeda's skin—white as a cloud—seemed to blend.

Murphy and Birdie had taken up spots in the room like a royal court, sitting off to the side for hours while Leeda's fans came and went, letting themselves be hypnotized by the steady beep of the machines in the room. Birdie was knitting Majestic a new sweater, one that did not go with the
Amigo
that was no longer around. It said, simply,
Woof
. Murphy was trying to get through Franz Kafka's
Metamorphosis
, but she kept looking up to watch Leeda greet her visitors and watching the door for who might come through it. Rex would have to come at some point,
and Murphy was torn between her loyalty to Leeda and making sure she wasn't here when he did.

Leeda didn't seem to want them there anyway. Whenever the room emptied out, she just looked out the window or flipped the channels with the remote. Birdie had tried asking her questions, like if having pneumonia hurt or if she wanted Birdie to bring her anything from home, but Leeda had muttered halfhearted replies, as if Birdie were a mosquito buzzing in her ear. Murphy wanted to reach out and shake her. She felt like shouting,
Don't you see us?

The clock read 3:30. Murphy, legs restless, leaned forward, closed her book, and bit her thumbnail. “Lee, you want me to stay?”

Leeda shook her head, her eyes on a
Dawson's Creek
rerun. When Murphy said good-bye on her way out, she didn't even reply. Birdie shrugged and mimed a kiss to Murphy.

It had snowed again the day after Leeda had gone into the hospital. In the parking lot outside, the only snow left was caked around poles and street signs, but it was melting fast.

Murphy shivered under her wool hat and corduroy coat as she made her way across the lot, heavyhearted and mad. She didn't know what she was mad at. She was mad at the idea that had made its way into her head, that maybe they wouldn't have Leeda back ever. She wasn't mad at Leeda exactly, but something around Leeda. Whatever monster was surrounding her. And she was mad at not understanding.

As she walked, she scooped up handfuls of dirty snow from against the curbs, packed them hard, and aimed them at nearby trees, some of which already had the smallest hints of buds at
their tips. Murphy wondered if the buds were optical illusions. In New York, buds would wait till the proper time to come out, she was sure. They'd wait till March, at least. Not the middle of January.

Murphy felt off-kilter and crooked inside. She'd read a poem once by Elizabeth Barrett Browning about how meeting Robert Browning had meant she could never even look at her own hand the same way again. Even though the poem was about this joyous love, it was really about mourning. Maybe she and Birdie and Leeda—what they were to one another—had changed the way Murphy looked at her own hand too. Maybe without them being like they were supposed to be, she'd always feel crooked.

Her attention was diverted by a high-pitched voice off to her left. “You're so sweet!”

Murphy turned around slowly. Dina Marie was standing on a curb, peering in through the window of Rex's idling orange truck. He was holding something out to her through the window from the driver's seat. Murphy squinted, and her blood went cold. It was a peach. Some damn imported out-of-season peach.

She watched as Dina Marie took a big bite out of it, grinning.

Something in Murphy snapped. She walked quickly in the direction of the truck. “Hey, Dina!”

Dina turned, and Murphy whaled her last snowball at her. It hit Dina right on her toothy mouth and bounced off, shattering on the concrete. Murphy put her hand up to her own mouth, shocked. Dina just stood staring at the ground, her fingers to her face, trying to make sense out of what had just hit her. A tiny
trickle of blood appeared on her top lip.

Mortified, Murphy began backing away, then turned without looking at Rex. She made a beeline for the edge of the lot, turned left on the road, and hurried beyond the trees. She realized too late she was walking away from her bike. But there was no way she was doubling back.

Behind her, a few seconds later, she heard the rumble of Rex's truck. He pulled up beside her and rolled down his window. Murphy kept walking.

“I'm sorry,” she said, but she picked up her pace.

“Get in the car.”

Murphy shook her head and kept moving.

“Get in, Murphy.”

She stopped and sighed. She got in. Rex put the truck into second gear and didn't say anything. He steered toward Anthill Acres.

“Where's Dina?” she asked the dashboard.

“She's pissed off.” He tapped the steering wheel with his fingers for emphasis. “She left.”

“I'm so sorry.”

Rex looked at her. “Murphy, being sorry doesn't sit well on you. Tell her you're sorry, not me.”

Murphy looked out the window.

“Dina's a nice girl.”

“Yeah, I
know
. She's
so
nice. Nice, nice, nice.” Murphy stole a glance at him to get his reaction to this. He was stone-faced, angry.

“She says you and I have things we need to work out,” he said flatly. Like it was all her fault that his girlfriend had walked
away from him. Which it was.

But Murphy couldn't find it in her to apologize for
that
. “You seem to be working out fine.” She couldn't stop herself.

Rex slapped his hands against the steering wheel once, sharply, and then stretched his fingers, taking a deep breath. “Murphy, you dumped me, remember?”

Murphy huddled into herself. “It was a preemptive strike,” she croaked, staring back at the dirty snow-covered road. Bridgewater at its best.

Rex sighed, pulled over, and let the truck idle. He put his thumbs up to his forehead. Murphy felt like he was working up to something and she didn't want to know what.

“I'm gonna walk.” She got out of the car and walked through the clumps of icy snow. Rex got out too and came up behind her, then reached out for the back of her corduroy coat and tugged.

“I liked it better when you were sorry. Please stop.”

Murphy ignored him. She felt like if she stopped walking, she wouldn't start again. A car sloshed past them and sent slush flying at her. Rex laughed, but she kept going.

“Murphy, I want to be with you. You know that.”

Murphy didn't know. She felt like wild horses were running up and down her rib cage. She knew it would be more beautiful to keep going and not look back. She was wet and cold. She shivered and Rex caught up with her, put his arm around her.

“Come home with me. Let me keep you warm.”

Murphy spun around in his arms and crossed her arms in front of her body, her elbows jabbing him. “I can keep myself warm.”

“Well, then, come home and keep
me
warm.”

Murphy wanted to. She slumped on her hip, stared around for an out, buying time. She didn't want to keep herself warm. She wanted to give in to the flow of what she felt. But like with everything, there was a catch. She knew that if she let herself, she wouldn't ever stop.