We Are the Goldens (19 page)

I WISH I COULD HAVE
let it go. Believed that you were happy, that it was right, that it would all turn out okay. But I know you better than anybody else. Better even than Mom and Dad. Why couldn’t they see it?

You weren’t you.

I don’t care what Mr. B. wrote in that stupid Rothko book:
To YOU. Love ME
. I know the YOU, because I am the ME. And, Layla, the YOU with him is not the real
you
.

No, you weren’t sobbing in my bed anymore. You were back to
Everything Is Awesome and Life Is Amazing
Layla. But now I understood the delicate barrier that kept the sobbing you at bay.

I thought of that fortune. The one I keep in my wallet:
With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes the silk gown
. You are the silk gown. The fragile silk gown.

It’s always suited Mom and Dad best to think of us as smart and mature young women with good sense who make good choices so that they could wrap themselves up in their own lives and fall asleep a little on the job of being our parents. All these years, Layla, we’ve tried to make things easy on them. We go back and forth, back and forth, smart and mature, building a bridge between two lives and crossing it over and over again. You know I’ve always hated being called a baby, but I started to wish it were true. The baby of whom nothing is asked or expected.

I wanted to go to them, to tell them, to put them in charge, but I didn’t know how. I was afraid to cause that earthquake.

I think we all fall back into our patterns. Play our parts when we don’t know what else to do. So as you went back to Layla, the girl with the world on a string, I went back to playing Nell, adoring sister, keeper of the peace.

The sister who lies for you.

I lied to Mom when you told her you were going to the park after school to kick a soccer ball around with some of the girls from the team. I lied to Dad when you told him you were tagging along with Felix and me to the Animation Festival at the Kabuki Theater.

Felix
. We never made it to the Animation Festival. We don’t go anywhere these days but to his house, where I bring stacks of magazines and provisions from Happy Donuts. And while Angel rests upstairs, we sit down in the basement, where Felix doesn’t try to kiss me and sometimes we don’t say anything and that’s okay.

I’ve tiptoed right up to the edge of confiding in him, but
I always step back at the last second. When I’m with him, I can almost forget about you, because I’m thinking about me and I’m thinking about him, and I know that this must be a good thing.

One day he asked.

“Is something up with Layla?” He was marking the
San Francisco
magazine I’d brought with a list of the top one hundred desserts in the city, mapping out a plan of attack. We had to eat three a week if we wanted to meet our goal of trying them all by the end of the year.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she’s kind of MIA lately. And something seems, I don’t know … different with her, or with you and her, or something.”

Felix isn’t Mom, and he isn’t Dad, and he has his own troubles, but still, he’s the only one who knew the right question to ask.

I started making a list, the top reasons it should be obvious to anyone paying attention that you were in a whole heap of trouble. 1. You skipped our girls’ weekend in Big Sur. 2. You ditched school. 3. You locked yourself in your room and cried for a whole weekend. 4. You don’t hang out with your friends anymore. 5. You can’t shut up about a painter who only uses, like, two colors in big boring squares. 6. A new, unbridgeable gap had opened between us.

You were so careful. I always wanted the best for you, but lately I’d been wishing for you to stumble, to screw up. Hoping someone would catch you. Someone would see you together someplace. Someone, other than me, would know.

How could our parents not see?

I lied to Felix like I lied to them.
She’s a junior. School is stressful. Blah, blah, blah
.

Layla, you know I’d happily lie for you to save your life, or to fix your life, but it’s a different story entirely to lie about something that I believe is ruining your life.

Mr. B.

George.

I probably wouldn’t ever have figured out what brought him back to you if it weren’t for the Creeds. Sometimes they point me in the direction I didn’t realize I needed to go.

It was another sleepless night. Sleeplessness had become my new normal. On this night I relived that morning you left school with him. Your seat in US History: empty. His classroom: dark, locked. Why? Why would he take such a risk?

Why don’t you check her phone?
Parker whispered.

There are things a sister just doesn’t do.

She’s a sound sleeper. Go for it
.

I kicked off my covers. I was hot and cold at the same time. My heart raced. I stood alone in the darkness of my room. I was proud that I’d never violated your trust. I hadn’t even told Felix. But reading your texts? How could I justify that?

I’m telling you about your phone when I don’t even have to. I didn’t find anything because you were smart enough to delete any communication with him. I couldn’t even find him in your contacts. You slept, your face unsuspecting as I stood by your bedside scrolling through your history.

What’s up?

Where u been?

When can we hang?

R U mad at me?

Your messages were mostly from Schuyler and Liv, trying to make sense of your disappearing act.

I put your phone back by your bedside. And then I grabbed your backpack. Heavy. That goddamn Rothko book—you took it everywhere. I lugged your bag into my room, put it in the middle of my floor, and stared at it.

It’s not going to open itself
.

C’mon. Get it over with
.

Books. Papers. Homework. Pencils. Gum. Calculator. Lipstick. I pulled out your wallet. You kept it in the outside zippered pocket. I’d told you more than once that you should keep your wallet inside your bag where someone riding the bus with you wouldn’t be able to take advantage as you texted or read, but you laughed and said, “Geez, Nell. You always imagine the worst in people.”

I pulled out a picture of us, from a photo booth at Pier 39. For a second I felt profoundly happy, and then I was struck by a sickening sadness. You couldn’t carry a photo of the person you loved. You couldn’t keep his number in your contacts. You had to erase all signs of him. If an anthropologist stumbled upon your possessions and tried to form a narrative of your life, he’d never conclude that there was somebody essential to you. Someone you believed you could not live without.

I finally got why you took that Rothko book everywhere.

See, Layla? It’s not that I don’t understand you. I get how
hard it must have been, how sad really, to have something so enormous be your secret. I could feel it as I put my hands on your things, the power of that burden.

In your wallet, a stack of receipts. I flipped through them, not really thinking that something so insubstantial could hold the answer I was after.

The connector.

What made him decide that he couldn’t break things off. What made him leave school with you instead of leaving you alone with a shattered heart.

You weren’t totally lying to Mom that day. I guess that explains why your story unfurled so naturally. You did go to Walgreens. You did buy Advil.

You also bought a First Response Gold Early Digital Pregnancy Test for $15.98.

I LAY AWAKE ALL NIGHT
. The sun lightened the walls and then the ceiling of my room and still, no clarity. I don’t know what today will bring. What I’ll do. I suppose this describes most days. There are always things we can’t predict, the plot twists we don’t see coming.

Layla, you are not pregnant. I believe you are not pregnant. But what really kills me is this: I know you wish you were. That’s why you walked away from school that day, isn’t it? You walked toward Walgreens hoping, praying for something drastic to bring him back. Something bigger than you.

Did the test come out negative? And when it did, did you cry? And then, did you alter it? Draw a little pink line where there wasn’t one? Or maybe you just threw it away and then told him, with that tear-streaked face:
It’s positive
.

You can lie to him, Layla, but you cannot lie to me.

We live together and we share a bathroom and we share so many other things, including our cycle, and to put it crudely, I needed a tampon last week and you’d snagged the last one.

If this is your strategy, Layla, to fool him into staying, then you’ve acted without thinking. Failed to see the future. Forsaken that good head on your shoulders. What will happen when he finds out you’re not telling him the truth?

Or … maybe you were pregnant? Maybe that little pink line showed up all on its own and he took you to have an abortion.

Or … maybe you are pregnant? I could be wrong about whether someone who is pregnant might need a tampon. I don’t know everything, Layla. There are still so many things I don’t understand. So there. I’ve said it: you know more than me.

I’m feeling a little crazed as I spin and respin scenarios, everything distorted by sleeplessness. As the morning light continued its climb across my ceiling, I wished for a real earthquake, not a metaphoric one. I closed my eyes and tried to conjure it, the stillness just before everything changes. The ground trembling and then a roar. Everything turned upside down. Maybe then, in its aftermath, I’d find the courage to do something. I’d know what to do.

Is that prayer? I’m not sure. If it is, it seems to be going unanswered, because the earth is quiet and Mom is outside with the car running, waiting to drive us to school.

You sit up front, backpack on your lap. Why do you always get the front seat? I stare at that backpack. Black with
zebra-striped straps. I returned it to your room last night. You took a quick breath, flipped over to face the wall, and settled down into sleep again.

That bag in your lap with an outside zippered pocket that contains your wallet, inside of which lives a stack of receipts—that bag is the end. The living, breathing end of what I am capable of doing for you. What secrets I can keep. That backpack is the creature on my shoulder—devil or angel, I don’t know—that tells me the time has come.

“Mom,” I croak from my seat in the back. She doesn’t hear me over the sound of the radio. “Mom.”

She reaches out and adjusts the knob. Silence. “Yes, my love?”

You turn around and look at me, searching.

In this moment, Layla, on this morning after a night of no sleep, after praying for a natural disaster, it is you and me and Mom together, safe inside her car, just the three of us, and … I can’t tell her. I don’t know how to tell her. I can’t pry the words out. I can’t bear to see what they will do to your searching face. I can’t even figure which words they’d be—
Layla is pretending she’s pregnant
? Or
Layla was pregnant and had an abortion
? Or
Layla is pregnant and she needs help
?

She needs help
. Those are the words.

“Nothing,” I say. Maybe you’re right. I should stay out of your life. Let you make your own mistakes. Maybe it’s time to start untwining us.

Even if I could tell her, I know you’d deflect, deny, derail. You’d dismiss my list of top reasons why it should be obvious to anyone paying attention and make it all my fault, my
crazy fantasy. Nell, always envious. Now she’s turning what stupid kids at school say into some big drama. Why’d she even have to come to City Day? Why’d she have to follow me here? Why does she follow me everywhere? She’s lying. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She can’t prove anything.

But I
can
prove it.

I have that receipt in my pocket.

As Mom pulls the car into the drop-off lane, I think: maybe I should just go to
him
, tell
him
that he must leave you alone because he is making you do crazy, stupid things, but I know I won’t. He is a teacher and I am a student. There are things I cannot do.

I can’t tell Mom, and I can’t confront Mr. Barr, and Dad is buried in work and we won’t see him until Friday night, and this can’t wait until Friday night, and anyway, any talk with Dad about sex and his daughters is inconceivable.

I go and I stand outside Ms. Bellweather’s office. She’s talking on the phone and drinking coffee. To her it’s probably just another day. With lists of things to do. Schedules to juggle. Students to wrangle.

What if I walked in and reported him?

City Day has rules, standards, and they need to know that their teacher is violating everything sacred. They need to take a closer look at the one whose class the girls fight tooth and nail to get into.
Wink. Wink
.

She’d look up at me and in her slight Southern drawl say, “Can I help you?”

And then … what?

I’m standing in the hallway of this place I’ve come to love, and I am totally lost.