The Snowball Effect (23 page)

“I know she put you in this awful situation, but you can't change it, and she's not coming back. You need to just hold on to your happy memories, don't think about the bad stuff.”

“It's not that easy.”

“Have you tried?”

Aunt Liz parked and got out of the car. I got out and followed her to Grandma Elaine's grave.

I'd never understood the appeal of visiting cemeteries, but I thought I would feel something, some kind of connection, when I stood there where Grandma Elaine was buried. At one time it had been so important for me to go there and see it for myself, but now I didn't feel much of anything. I didn't feel closer to my grandmother. She was dead, in the ground, and I was probably getting sunburned.

It should have been Riley standing there beside me with his arm around me, instead of Aunt Liz standing behind me with her arms crossed. That had been our plan, after she'd died. We couldn't make it for the funeral, but he'd promised he'd get me there eventually. Except I'd screwed that all up. Riley wouldn't take me anywhere ever again. Now Christine hated me too, and eventually Kara would decide it was easier to stop being friends with me, and then Eric would move to Pennsylvania and I'd
have no one, nothing. Not even a job.

I didn't like being here with Aunt Liz standing behind me. It didn't matter if what she said was true. I didn't want to hear it.

I looked at Grandma Elaine's headstone and realized there was nothing for me in Orlando either. It had been fun to daydream about, but I wouldn't start over in Florida. What would be the point of that? Nothing would be better here than it was at home.

There was nowhere to go but back, whether I liked it or not.

 

When I got back to the motel, Vallery and Collin were already there. Collin lay on one bed with a huge Band-Aid on his chin, watching TV, and Vallery lay on the other bed, reading a Disney brochure.

“Good news and bad news,” Vallery announced.

“What happened to his chin?” I asked. I bent down and looked at Collin's face. He turned his head away from me.

“That's the bad news, but it's not all that bad. He fell and busted his chin open on our way into the Holy Land. No stitches, but it was pretty bloody.”

She'd been alone with him for not even an hour before he hurt himself. Nice.

“Are you okay?” I asked Collin. He nodded and waved me away. I was blocking the television.

“So,” I said to Vallery. “Good news?”

“We're going to Disney tomorrow. If you're feeling better.”

“I am.”

“Good.”

I took
Another Day
off the nightstand and went out to the balcony.

Vallery came out a minute later and sat down in the chair beside me. “Where'd you go today?”

“I rested and then took a walk.”

“Long walk, huh?”

I shrugged.

“We've been back for hours, so I know you've been gone all day. Do you have a guy in Orlando or something?”

I glared at her and then looked back down at my book.

“What? You have two in Baltimore. I thought you might have a few spread out across the country. Or maybe a traveling salesman or something.”

“Shut up, Vallery.”

“Then what were you doing today?”

“It's none of your business.”

“By acting evasive, you're only increasing my interest.”

I sighed. “Fine. I saw my aunt.”

“That's the big secret? That's seriously what you did?”

“Yeah. We went to the cemetery and I saw my grandmother's grave; then we went to the mall and had lunch, and then I hung out at her house for a few hours with her
and my uncle and my cousin.”

“Why couldn't you just tell me that?”

“I just did.”

“But you acted like you didn't want me to know. Like you don't want me to have anything to do with your other family.”

“It's not that I don't want you to have anything to do with them. You can't make a generalization like that based on one incident.”

“You wouldn't let me talk to your dad, either.”

“Whatever, Vallery.”

“Okay, listen. I'm not sure why you're in a pissy mood, but I want you to know that we missed you today. If you'd been there, Collin wouldn't have fallen. I wasn't holding his hand like I should have. You always remember to hold his hand.”

“So you only missed me because you can't keep the kid from falling down?”

Vallery sighed. “You know, it's getting really hard to have a fun family vacation with you around.”

I took my book and went down to the pool. Vallery didn't try to stop me.

 

Vallery and Collin both had big smiles the next morning as we sat in the lobby and ate our complimentary breakfast.

Vallery poked my arm and grinned.

I glared at her. “Why are you so happy?” I asked.

“Because we're in Orlando on our fun family vacation.”

“Okay.”

“Look, you're going to have a good time whether you like it or not. I've decided that you will.”

That seemed to be the new theme for my life: doing things whether I liked them or not.

“I'm doing this for all of us, you know,” Vallery said. “And it's upsetting me that you're trying to ruin it.”

“I'm sorry. I'm not trying to ruin anything.”

“So what's your problem? Do you miss your boyfriends?”

Boyfriends. I probably should have called Eric by now. I didn't even know his number by heart. I had it programmed into my cell phone with the dead battery.

“No.”

“Then what?”

I shrugged and spun my empty juice glass around on the table. Everything sucked. How many reasons did she want?

“Can you try?” she asked.

“Try what?”

“To be happy. At least while we're in Disney World. The happiest place on Earth.”

“How do you try to be happy?”

“Like this,” Vallery said. “Like what I'm doing.”

I looked at her. She smiled.

“Just smile?” I asked. “You want me to fake it?”

“Well, you'll only have to fake it at first. Smiling releases endorphins that make you happy. It's a scientific fact.”

“All right,” I said. I flashed Vallery a fake smile.

“Not bad,” she said. “Keep working on it.”

 

As we entered Disney's Magic Kingdom, Collin stopped walking and stared straight ahead at Cinderella's Castle. Vallery whipped out the disposable camera and took his picture.

“We have to keep walking,” I whispered to Collin as the people behind us glared, then shoved around us. So much for being the happiest place on Earth.

“Let's look at the map,” Vallery said. She pushed through the crowd and led us over to a bench.

I unfolded the park map and spread it across Collin's lap. Vallery pulled a pen out of her purse and handed it to him. “Here. Circle what you want to do.”

I sat beside him and helped him read the descriptions. And then I heard Vallery say, “Smile!”

I looked up and saw her aiming the disposable camera at us. I put my arm around Collin.

“Look happy,” I said to him.

“I am happy,” he said. And we both smiled for Vallery.

 

We stayed until the park closed, but we'd made it through only half the things Collin wanted to do. “We'll come back tomorrow,” Vallery promised. Collin fell asleep in
the car on the way back to the motel. I carried him inside and then sat on the bed beside him and opened
Another Day
.

“I think you had fun today,” Vallery said. She squeezed onto the bed beside me even though there wasn't all that much room for her.

I nodded. “I did.”

“Good. You know, I'd been planning this. I mean, not
this
, not a spur-of-the-moment trip. But ever since Collin's awful birthday party, I've been trying to put away money so we could go on vacation. But then there were just too many bills, and I had to start using my savings to make sure stuff got paid on time. Then last week just
sucked
, and I figured we all needed to get away.”

“How are we paying for this?”

Vallery shrugged. “Credit cards. I'll sort it out when we get back.” She looked down at Collin. “Didn't you desperately want to go to Disney World when you were his age?”

“Sure,” I said. “Every kid does.”

“And you knew Mom was never going to take you,” Vallery said. “Just like I knew my dad was never going to take me. So I thought it would be nice to do this for Collin, and for us.”

“Mom would have taken
him
,” I said. “Eventually.”

“You're probably right. She really changed, didn't she?”

I thought about Mom, how she'd always been there
for Collin, how she'd been around for me sometimes, how she'd hardly been there for Vallery at all. It seemed like she got better with each kid. Until she decided to leave all of us.

“She was always changing,” I said.

“You know, if things hadn't happened like they happened, we wouldn't be here.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“I mean, we never would have known each other. You would have just been the bratty little sister I was jealous of, and I would have been the drunk older sister you only knew for one summer. Neither of us would have spent this much time with Collin. I probably never would have met him at all. I'm not saying it's a
good
thing that she did what she did, I'm just saying…”

“No, I get it. Mom would have said that things always work out for the best in the end.”

“So this is the best?” Vallery asked. “This is the best thing that could have happened?”

I thought about it. The three of us together, in a motel room in Florida, going further into debt to spend a few days faking happy at the happiest place on Earth.

I shrugged. “If it hasn't worked out, then it's not the end.”

 

Back at the motel after our second day at the Magic Kingdom, Vallery explained to Collin that we had to go back to Baltimore soon so he could start first grade.
Really, her credit cards were almost maxed out.

“No!” Collin screamed.

“Yes,” Vallery said patiently. We sat on the balcony and let him cry it out for a while, and then I went back inside the room.

“If you stop crying, we have a special treat for you tomorrow.”

“What?” he asked. He narrowed his eyes at me like he didn't really believe me, and then he wiped some snot off his lip.

We'd anticipated a tantrum, so we had a plan. “There's a store here in Florida that sells nothing but LEGOs,” I said.

“LEGOs?” he asked.

I nodded. “And if you're good, we'll go there tomorrow and let you pick out one thing that you want. All right?”

Collin nodded. “All right.”

 

After Collin fell asleep, we sat on the balcony and read. Vallery had taken an old newspaper from the lobby. I finished
Another Day.
It wasn't my kind of novel, but I could see why Mom had liked it. Michaela Davis was married to a cop but had fallen in love with some kind of mobster. I'd thought maybe the book would help me with the Riley-Eric dilemma, but I couldn't figure out which of them was the cop and which was the mobster. At first I thought Riley would be the cop since he'd been my boyfriend and
Eric had been the other man. But the cop's personality was more like Eric's and the mobster was more like Riley. And then I remembered it didn't matter anyway, because Riley had moved on. And Eric was probably going to be mad at me, too. We didn't have a daily-phone-call kind of relationship, but I hadn't talked to him at all since we'd left for Florida, and I figured that probably wasn't a good thing.

Maybe by the time I got home, they would both hate me, and it'd be too late to date either of them. I knew I wouldn't have an infinite number of chances to change my mind.

 

The next day at the LEGO store, Vallery watched Collin stare at boxes and boxes of LEGO sets while I stood behind her looking at the rack of personalized mugs.

“You know what we all have in common?” I asked.

“What?”

I held up a mug that said “Lisa.” “We can never find anything with our name on it.”

“Huh,” Vallery said. “That's true.”

“Is he getting close to deciding?” I asked.

“Not at all.”

I kneeled down beside Collin. “So what are you thinking?”

He shrugged.

“Trains?” I checked the price tag. “No, not trains. Um. Oh, look, Batman.”

I checked the prices on three of the Batman sets and laid them on the floor in front of Collin. “Okay, here, I narrowed it down. Pick your favorite.”

I stood back up and looked around for Vallery, but she'd disappeared. Collin stared at the LEGOs.

“Are you thinking about it or just staring?” I asked.

“Thinking.”

“Okay.”

Several years passed before Collin decided on the Batmobile. When we turned, I saw Vallery running over to us.

“Look what I got,” she said with a smile. “I had them personalized.” She held up a plastic bag. I took a step closer and looked inside.

Three LEGO blocks, each one engraved with one of our names.

B
efore we left Orlando, we stopped at a drugstore. They had a one-hour photo lab. So while I shopped for snacks and a new cell-phone charger, Vallery handed over our twenty disposable cameras.

We sat in the Mustang and looked at the pictures. Pictures of Collin with Disney characters. Pictures of either me or Vallery on rides with Collin, waving and smiling. Pictures that Collin had taken himself, usually crooked and off-center.

We'd gotten only one picture of all three of us together. After standing in line for an hour to meet Mickey Mouse, Vallery'd gotten impatient and insisted that all three of us get in the same picture. She handed our camera to the people in line behind us. It wasn't such a bad picture. Collin hadn't looked at the camera, but at least we'd all smiled.

“Let's look again,” he said when we'd looked at the last stack of pictures.

“We have to go home.” I passed them back to him. “Here. You can look, but don't let them blow away.” I opened up my new cell-phone charger and plugged it in.

“Want to drive?” Vallery asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Why?”

“You think I have ulterior motives just because I'm letting you drive?”

“Yes.” She got out and walked around to the passenger's side. I climbed over to the driver's seat.

Vallery grinned. “Okay, I wanted to read that book you've been carrying around. I read the back and it sounds pretty good.”

I shrugged. “All right. It's in my bag.”

“I'm a fast reader. We can talk about it when I'm done. Like a book club.”

I'd like to say that we had a quiet drive while Vallery read and Collin looked at the pictures, but that wasn't how it happened.

Vallery turned a page in the book. “Oh my God, I can't believe he just did that.”

Collin flipped through the pictures. “Goofy!” he screamed.

“What chapter?” I asked Vallery.

“Twelve. When they go to the ball.”

“Oh yeah, that sucked.”

“Lainey eats a pretzel!” Collin laughed.

Vallery kept me constantly updated on her progress. Collin looked at pictures and narrated our entire trip. But it was better than being covered in ice cream and arguing. It was better than CUT THE GREASE.

 

Before we even stopped for lunch, Vallery had finished the book.

She set it down on her lap. “This isn't the kind of book I imagined you'd read. I thought you'd read Dickens just to prove how smart you are.”

“It was Mom's. Her favorite book.”

“Well, that makes sense. I thought for sure that Michaela was going to stay with her husband.”

“Me too. But the mobster was actually better for her in the end, wasn't he?”

“It seemed like he was. But she had to give up everything to be with him.”

As we drove on I-95 north toward Baltimore, toward home, we talked about the book. And it was nice. I'd never read a book and talked about it with someone else before, outside of English class, and that really wasn't the same at all. Vallery and I talked about the characters like they were people, not like we were looking for symbolism or a moral or anything. And then it occurred to me that if I'd actually finished the book the first time I'd started it, when Mom had given it to me, I could have had this conversation with her. It could have gone on my short list of happy memories. But I'd screwed that all up, hadn't I?

 

That night, while Vallery and Collin slept, Mom's song came on the radio. It was a cheesy love song that she'd liked for as long as I could remember. It had been her and Carl's song. And her and Daddy Steve's song. Every time she got really serious about a man, it had been their song. I hadn't heard it since Mom died. I didn't usually play the easy-listening stations, but we'd been driving so long, I'd stopped caring what was on the radio, as long as it wasn't static.

As I drove down the highway, I remembered Mom singing in the car as she drove me to school. If her song came on while she made dinner, she'd stop in the kitchen and dance. With Daddy Whoever, or with me, or just by herself. Even in her Dark Days, the song had been enough to cheer her up, at least for a few minutes.

I remembered what Aunt Liz had said about digging deep for those happy memories of Mom. I pictured Mom dancing. I pictured her smiling. I tried to remember.

I'd hated dancing with her. I'd complain and pull away. Sometimes I'd give in and sway with her, but most of the time, especially the older I got, I'd just roll my eyes and walk away.

Would it have really killed me to dance with her and not act like I hated every second of it?

I'd never made much of an effort, now that I thought about it.

I could have tried. I could have gone along with it when she tried to include me in her and Carl and Collin's goofy family activities. I could have taken that step-aerobics class with her. I could have sat in on her groups once in a while. I could have listened to her when she talked. I could have talked to her about Riley. Maybe she could have talked to me about Carl and I could have understood why she loved him. She probably knew things about him that I didn't know, things that might have helped me like him. I could have let her keep treating me like a queen on my birthdays. There had been so many times I'd spent so much energy pushing her away when it would have been easier to have given in and danced.

As Mom's song played, my chest felt tight and for a second I was afraid I might be having a heart attack. Then I started to cry.

I cried for Mom, because she'd never get to sing again. I cried for Collin because he'd never remember her singing at all. And I cried for myself.

Mom hadn't been the only problem lately.
I'd
been the problem, too.

I didn't have an infinite number of chances.

And it was too late now.

 

I drove all night and let Vallery sleep. As we approached the Maryland state line, I finally unplugged my phone charger and turned the phone on. I had seventeen new messages.

Oh God. Dad. I found it so easy to push him out of my mind and forget that he even existed. And there he was, worried about me, sounding like a normal father.
He'd even lied to Kara for me.

I still had five messages.

Riley still loved me?

Well, that didn't mean anything. Kara loved me too, but she didn't pine after me.

As we got closer to Baltimore, I waited for everything to look familiar again. But nothing did. We were ten miles from home, and then five miles, and everything still looked strange. Every highway looked the same.

But then I exited the highway and recognized Corben, the supermarkets and the gas stations and the stores and the trash and graffiti. And then our street, finally.

I shook Vallery. “We're home.”

 

Vallery listened to the messages on our answering machine. They were pretty much the same as the ones on my voice mail, except for one from Deborah, the woman who wanted to buy Mom's notebooks.

“I guess I should call that woman back and tell her I couldn't find anything,” Vallery said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Are you going to work?”

She nodded. “What are you doing? Can you stay with Collin?”

“You're not taking him to camp?”

“It's the last day. Why bother? I'll ask if Mabel wants to watch him.”

After Vallery had changed into her work clothes and taken Collin next door, I thought about what to do next. There were so many people to call back. I started to make a list in my head, in no particular order, of people I really
should make up with before the day ended:

Eric—even though he'd written me off and wasn't even worried that I might be dead. He deserved an explanation.

Riley—even though he was probably completely in love with Stupid Gina by now and only loved me as a friend.

Christine—under the circumstances I could probably just stop talking to her completely. High school was over and I didn't have to see her every day anymore. But she
had
always tried to be a good friend to me. And I kind of wanted to go to the hospital and see the baby and apologize to her for Vallery being a lunatic, so things could be normal again.

Kara—apologize and thank her for dealing with Riley for me.

Deborah—well, not really make up with her, but decide what I was going to do about her.

Dad—apologize for being a jerk. Maybe even explain why. Maybe even thank him for lying to Kara for me.

I hesitated for a second and then I added Mom to my list. I wasn't sure how I was going to make up with her, but I knew I had to. Since it hadn't all been her fault.

I was about to call Kara (to start with an easy one), but then I remembered Rodney's message about his mystery visitor. I decided that would make a good lighthearted warm-up phone call. I could practice my explanation on someone who hadn't been all that
bothered by my absence. Perfect.

“Hello?” Rodney said.

“Hey, it's Lainey. I just got your message. I'm so sorry. There was this guy…from Texas…and then I told Vallery, and she flipped out, and we drove to Orlando, and…then we came home….” Okay, so maybe my explanation needed a lot more practice. “Anyway, who was your mystery visitor?”

Rodney laughed. “Your boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Yeah. Well, I guess you guys broke up or whatever. I forget his name. Soccer boy.”