Where I Want to Be (2 page)

I walk to the end of the hall and open the door to Jane’s room. As soon as I switch on the light, I see something new. A pile of freshly folded clothes rests on Jane’s bed. As if any minute she’ll come bounding in to put them away. Must have been Mom. Dad shares laundry duty, but only Mom would cling to the hope that Jane might come back.

Most of Jane’s belongings are secondhand. Mom’s old stuffed-animal horses, Rags and Patches, slump side by side on her dusty dresser. Dad’s desktop model of the solar system is also fluffed with dust, and so is the seat on Granpa’s rocking chair that my grandmother gave Jane after he died. Jane liked to surround herself with other people’s things. They comforted her, I guess, when people themselves could not.

I snap off the light and the fuse blows, and I scream softly as my fingers zap. That’s when I feel it again. It grips me, like two hands squeezing me around the waist, cutting off the air from my diaphragm and knocking me from my feet. I sit at the foot of Jane’s bed, my arms cradled at my middle, working to breathe.

“Jane?” I speak her name into the dark. The room holds the word.

All through that morning, throughout the plump-cheeked minister’s sermon about shy, gentle Jane, I’d wanted to laugh. Shy Jane? Gentle Jane?
Selfish, wild, thoughtless, brave—
I’d start with those words, but even they aren’t right.

I worry that I’m already forgetting pieces of her.

“Jane,” I say, louder, “you’d laugh to see your room like this, so clean. I’ll mess it up a little, if you want. Just give me the signal.”

I sound like an idiot. I know I do. But I jump up from her bed and tug the wrinkles from her bedspread. Then I force myself to leave Jane’s room. Careful to shut the door on my way out.

In the kitchen, Jane ate her special foods. Her grandfather shuffled back and forth from the counter to the table. He heaped her plate.

“All your favorites.”

Jane clapped her hands. A banquet. Buttered, warm rolls. Sliced ruby tomatoes. Perfect spheres of vanilla ice cream. Cantaloupe. Pale, cold milk. Pinks and whites and reds, too good to be true, and Jane knew that it wasn’t true. Not exactly. The food was here because she needed it to be here. The rules were different now. Now everything was as real as she made it.

Even her happiness felt too good. Like she’d borrowed it from somebody else.

And she knew that she was too old to eat with her fingers, but Augusta let her. Then she let Jane spoon-scrape melted ice cream from the bottom of her dish.

“I’m going to stay with you forever.” She used to say this a lot when she was younger. “I’ll sleep in Dad’s old room. I’ll watch movies and eat ice cream. I don’t need anything else. I never did.”

Augusta had Choctaw Indian in her blood, which gave her bones their sensible shape. She had looked the same for as long as Jane could remember. Tall and heavyset, a rugged tree of a grandmother who wove her hair into a silver cable down her back and dressed in pastel pants and denim shirts, or vice versa.

“Let’s get you to bed,” she said. “I’ll lend you one of my nightshirts.”

“I’ll wash up here,” said Granpa.

Her father’s room was off the second-floor landing. Part of his childhood was left behind here. A prism decal shimmered in the window, and a paint-chipped bookshelf was filled with weary hardcovers about Galileo and Einstein and Crick. As a boy, her father had loved science, and he still did. He was a chemistry professor at Providence Community College, where students called him Ray instead of Dr. Calvert and dedicated the yearbook to him an average of once every three and a half years.

When she was younger, Jane used to imagine that her father’s room belonged to her instead. “Let’s pretend,” she’d coax Lily. “Pretend I’m Granpa and Augusta’s daughter instead of their granddaughter. Pretend that you’re visiting
me and it’s olden days from when Dad was little. You start. Say, ‘Hi, Aunt Jane!’ Then ask my permission to unpack your suitcase.”

“But you’re not my aunt! We’re
sisters
,” Lily would wail. “One hundred percent
sisters
. I
hate
your stupid pretending away of the truth! And I hate olden days!”

“If you can’t pretend to be in other times and places, you’ll be stuck in the real world forever,” Jane would warn. “And the real world isn’t half as good.”

But Lily seemed to get along just fine in the real world.

Her grandparents were different. They liked olden days. Granpa knew the whole history of Peace Dale. Before he’d retired, he’d worked at the Rhode Island Historical Center. It was Granpa who showed Jane the home of Mary Butterworth, the sneaky counterfeiter who bought a mansion in Providence with money she’d made herself, using a quill pen and copperplates. Granpa who showed Jane the Old Stone Mill that had been built a thousand years ago by Norse Vikings.

Augusta was not much for field trips or stories. But her presence was like a lullaby.

“Don’t go yet,” Jane said now, reaching out her hand.

Augusta did not leave. She stayed at the edge of the bed and skimmed her fingertips up and down the length of Jane’s arm. The sheets were as crisp as a tablecloth against Jane’s skin, and the sink of the mattress molded to the shape of her body. She closed her eyes and pulled the edge
of the linsey-woolsey blanket so that it brushed her chin. A linsey-woolsey blanket was folded at the edge of every bed at Orchard Way. They were famous blankets, knit by Peace Dale’s own textile mills and dyed with walnut shells to mossy greens and browns. During the Civil War, thousands of these blankets had been distributed to Union soldiers.

“Pretend I’m a soldier,” Jane used to suggest to Lily, “and I’m about to die from frostbite on the battlefield, and you’re a poor factory girl named Hepsbeth, and you find me and cover me with a blanket just in time.”

Lily had liked that game better. Lily liked to rescue people.

“How long can I stay?” Jane asked Augusta sleepily.

“Until you want to go.” Her grandmother’s voice sounded far away.

Yes, that was a nice answer. Sleep was falling softly over her. “Orchard Way is my only place,” she mumbled. She burrowed deeper, darker, safer.

Her grandmother didn’t answer, but her fingers continued to trace the length of Jane’s arm. Up and down, up and down. She would not stop until Jane was asleep.

Caleb drops by late. After his own day at the Pool & Paddle Youth Club, he had to work a shift at the Co-op for a friend. But he bangs through the door with his dimpled smile locked in place. His guitar is in one hand, and a bag of something that smells yummy is in the other.

“You could have called,” I say, wrapping my arms around his neck. My lips touch his throat, his chin, and the tip of his nose. “I’da picked you up. I hate thinking of you walking all this way.”

“The fastest journey is achieved on foot,” Caleb answers grandly. Thoreau, most likely. Caleb is something of a Thoreau fiend. He lets me reclaim him a few seconds longer. Then he shakes the bag. “You eaten?”

“No.” The cereal was hours ago. I’m hungry again.

We set up for a nighttime feast at the picnic table out back. I even light the tea candles and get out the coasters, self-consciously adult without Mom and Dad around. We
talk about next month and the start of my senior year at North Peace Dale High. I’ve gotten expert at dodging around the subject of what Caleb is planning to do this fall. My standing policy on that is to wait for him to bring it up.

Instead, I ask him what happened today at the Pool & Paddle, where Caleb teaches swimming. It’s the right job for him, mixing his love of kids with his near-perfect patience.

“Nothing much. Actually, one of my tadpoles drew me a picture.”

“Oh, cute! Do you have it? Let me see!”

Sheepish, Caleb pulls it from his wallet, unfolding it with care, and passes it over. But he knows I’ll like it.

The picture is of two stick figures. Same height, squiggly spider hands joined and wearing shoes that look like flowerpots. Behind them is a blue blob, which I guess is the pool.

For Coach Caleb love Sophie
marches in painstaking print across the bottom.

“Those kids love you. You have such a good heart,” I tell him.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he answers. He’s shy about compliments.

“Seriously.” I tweak the pink tip of his ear.

“Hey, you’re the one who bakes chocolate chip cookies for crazy old ladies.”

“Mrs. Orndorff’s not crazy, she’s a sweetie pie. Especially if you make her cookies.”

“Which reminds me.” Caleb reaches up and swipes a couple of plates off the top shelf just as the toaster oven timer pings. “I’m starved.”

After more than a year of semi-conversion to Caleb’s vegan diet, soy cheese still tastes like soggy paper to me, but it doesn’t stop me from polishing off two veggie burritos. Then I dig out the last lemon Italian ice in the freezer for dessert. We move off the picnic bench to sit on the stoop, sharing a spoon, scraping and passing the carton back and forth as we check out the stars.

“Lesson?” Caleb suggests.

“Okay, but, warning—I don’t think I’ve improved since last time.”

“How about just as an excuse to sit close to you and breathe down your neck?”

“Oh, well, sure. In that case.”

He stuffs stray burrito wrappings and napkins back into the paper sack, and then places the guitar across my lap and swings a leg around so that he’s sitting behind me. I’m not exactly passionate about these guitar lessons. I’ve got hypersensitive, redhead’s skin, and the strings always feel like they’re about to draw blood from my fingertips. But nothing feels sexier than Caleb sitting so close, the insides of his thighs hard against the outsides of my thighs, his fingers pressing over mine, his breath in my ear
as he explains frets and chord progression. Always breath-minty breath, too, because Caleb is totally paranoid about halitosis.

We strum through some chords. Caleb’s talented. He learned guitar from his uncle Rory, a burned-out music genius who lives in Venice Beach. Unfortunately, I’m no Uncle Rory. After I mangle an old Eric Clapton song, the pads of my fingers begin to welt.

“End of lesson,” I tell him.

“A’right, ma’am, then I’ll have to demand some payment.”

The only thing sexier than Caleb sitting behind me is when he leans forward to kiss me. Warm, mint mouth, palms cupping the edge of my face. So slow, as if he is living only inside right now, without a hungry eye on what might come next. For a second, though, I think I sense something different, a funny-shaped moment where Cay seems to almost-but-maybe-not shift away from me.

“Something wrong?”

“Just…these damn mosquitoes,” Caleb says.

“What are you talking about? There’s no mosquitoes. It hasn’t rained for weeks.”

In response, he makes a halfhearted slap at the side of his neck.

I pull away. “Caleb, if you don’t want to fool around, you don’t need to invent some pathetic lie about it.”

“I’m not…” He slaps his forearm, too deep in.

Now I’m annoyed, so I stand up in a huff and head inside.
I scoop up the remote and turn on the television. Caleb, following me, flops onto the couch and yawns.

“Okay. The thing is…Mike Heller’s having a party at his place.” Caleb forces the casual tone in his voice. “Tonight.”

“Eh,” I answer. I press the channel changer.

Caleb clears his throat. “I’ve been thinking. We’ve been us two pretty much every night. I dunno, Lily. It might be good to get out. See kids.”

“We see kids every day at work.”

“You know what I mean, smart-ass. Our-age kids. Even if we don’t want to…”

I turn from the screen. Caleb scratches at the late-night fuzz that shades his jawline. I won’t say what I’m feeling. This summer, I’m too old for fun and parties.

“Next party,” I say. “Next time. Promise. Just, not tonight.”

“Right.” He seems disappointed. I act like I don’t notice.

“Besides, this is fun, isn’t it?” I wish I could sound a little more joyful about it. “Playing house? No ’rents?”

“Mmm.”

The truth is, it’s not that different from when Mom and Dad are home, cloistered in their bedroom to watch their own TV and give us some privacy.

I shinny down on the couch next to him and stretch out on my side. Our bodies curve together. Familiar, but not so relaxed that there isn’t a charge there. Or at least, I feel the charge, even though it’s been one year, nine months, three weeks, and five days since Caleb and I started seeing each
other. It doesn’t seem like real time, though. It feels like one single, perfect day blended with forever. But our two-year anniversary is real enough. October 10.

We doze through a horror movie. My head is propped on a cushion that rests on Caleb’s shoulder. My fingers drag lightly up and down his forearm, the way my grandmother used to do when I was a kid to get me to sleep. Caleb’s arm is as thin as mine, chlorine bleached and nearly hairless.

“Something happened to me today,” he says. “At the pool.”

There’s a quiet flutter in my blood. “What?”

“I wasn’t going to tell you, but…”

“Tell me.”

Now Caleb speaks in a rush, like he’s been holding it in all evening. “It was during kick practice. I had the five through eights. My kids are all lined up with their paddleboards in the shallow end, and I’m standing in front of them, I’m yelling
Kick! Kick!
, the water’s churning, and I’ve got this whole line of noisy little squirts kicking like crazy.” He pauses to smile. He loves his job. “All I was thinking about was making sure nobody kicked too close or hard—no fighting, no biting. And then.”

“And then?”

He clears his throat. “You know that kinda prickly thing that happens on your skin if someone’s staring at you from behind? It was like that. But stronger. Only when I turned to look? Nobody. All day I’m trying to think how to describe
it, but the best I came up with is it felt like a piece of cobweb or something had landed right…here.” He reaches around to the small of his back. “Except as soon as it happened, I thought—no, I
knew
.” Caleb corrects himself.