Words and Their Meanings (2 page)

3

G
ramps doesn't give up as easily as Mom. If I don't go downstairs, he'll be back. So I put one foot in front of the other. Move toward the kitchen, even if the smell of bacon is turning my stomach. Even if the jazz music echoing up from our made-to-look
-old radio stings my eyes. Dad's the early riser in our family.
When he lived here, those jazz CDs went on before coffee each morning. A soundtrack for a different life.

I
n the front hall, the closet is ajar just a crack. My seven-year-old sister's toes are sticking out. Her attempt at a self-given pedicure looks like Smurfs puked on the tips of her feet.

“Shouldn't you be tucked into someplace a little more advanced?” I ask, pushing the doors shut. Her little toes are still visible. “Pretty lame hiding spot, Bea.”

“You'd find me no matter what,” she chimes before bursting out and wrapping herself around my waist.

“
Coffee first, Buzzy,” I groan as I shuffle to the kitchen.

She grabs the bottom of my tank top until I lean over and kiss her freckled cheek.

Bea became our family's version of the Invisible Man a few days before Joe died. Vanishing act numero uno happened when Mom came home to get stuff to take to the hospital. As she walked back out the door, she called to us. I answered. Bea didn't. Mom paused. Tried again. Nothing.

An hour of frantic searching, begging, screaming “BEATRICE” at the tops of our lungs, put Mom into full freak-out mode. We'd checked her room, behind couches, in the playhouse, the backseat of the car, attic, under a pile of cardboard boxes waiting to be recycled. Every empty space caused Mom's breath to grow more jagged, quick.

I don't know what made me think to look in the oven. Maybe I was going from cupboard to cupboard, pantry to drawer, and opened the stainless steel Viking Range by mistake. Because I had to look twice before the sight registered in my brain: my sister, contorted like a pretzel, wiry red curls matted with sweat and eyes closed as if sound asleep.
How she shut the door behind her is still a mystery.

Since then, Bea's been on the perpetual disappearance plan. I can't seem to provide the proper grief role model for her, but I've become a bloodhound of the baby-sister bounty-hunting variety. I make sure she knows I'll always find her. I'll see her, no matter how many times she tries to be erased.

4

T
hree hug
e cranes are lined up in front of my grandfather. Their angles are precise. Each fold is crisp. There are no mistakes. No ghost edges smoothed and realigned. Gramps is hunched over a piece of pale cream paper, writing something in scratchy cursive. He puts a number four in the place I know will be a wing, and covers the page.

“What are you making?” I ask, a little louder than I'd intended.

“Your surprise. Eat while it's hot, girls. Anna, will you make Bea up a plate, please?”

“I have lost all interest in surprises, Gramps. Will you please just tell me what you're making?”

Gramps has perfect hearing, but he shuffles the squares of paper and tucks the extra-large birds into a bag beside him, as if I'd never spoken. “How about I teach you two some new designs when you're done? Maybe a butterfly or a box?”

“Or a rocket ship?” Bea asks, eyes wide.

“Sure. We can do a rocket ship. Maybe even one with a secret room inside the wing.”

I slap a few pieces of bacon and a pancake on Bea's plate. Drown it all with syrup. “Whatever you're doing, if you can't tell me about it…I don't want it, okay?” I feel the familiar thump of blood in my neck.

“Don't sound so angry. I told you, I'm making you something. Explaining it now would be like handing one of my customers a typewriter with only half the keys fixed,” Gramps shrugs.

“Did you used to use typewriters a lot, Gramps?” Bea asks, her mouth full of pancake.

“I used to fix them a lot,” he says.

“And super heavy computers as big as me?”

“Those too.” As my sister stretches herself tall and wide to mimic an old school computer machine, he smiles.

“And you also fixed radios, and clocks, and record turners, and—”

“It's record players, Bea. Duh.”

She winces at my tone. Before Gramps can reprimand me, I head back to my room and gather a stack of papers buried in the bottom of my closet. Some are ripped in the corners. Some pieces still have tape flapping along the edges, sticky enough to catch against a few loose strands of my hair.

“I have a great idea for a project,” I say when I come back down to the kitchen. “How about making little paper trash cans out of these?”

Gramps flips through the mess of writing awards and certificates I shoved in his lap. His frown runs the length of his chin. I answer with a yawn, long and loud, to punctuate my point.

“It's actually called a turntable, not a record player,” is all he says.

The garage door rumbles opens. Bea ducks out of the room.

“Ah lovely,” I say, really looking my grandfather in the eyes for the first time today. “She's already home. And so it begins.”

5

W
hen Sameera, Joe's girlfriend since eighth grade, called last week, I never should've given Mom the message. Maybe then we wouldn't be seeing her today. Maybe then her bright idea about spending the afternoon together, telling stories, looking at pictures, “celebrating” Joe wouldn't have reached my mother's ears, wouldn't have appeared like the missing piece in a puzzle she and the latest shrink have been putting together to create the perfect time-to-move-on moment for me.

But hearing Sameera's voice is like finding a time machine. A way to get back to before. We walk a little lighter after talking to her. I couldn't rob Mom of that.

“Did you get out the family albums? The ones from under the stairs? I left you a note,” my mom says, arms full of groceries, as she kicks the door to the garage shut. Her face is blotchy. She isn't wearing mascara. I cross my arms and stare at the wall.

She bristles past and opens the fridge, rooting around for one of her stupid meal replacement shakes. I hid it behind a carton of expired eggs and half a chocolate cake last night.

“Anna,” she starts, then stops. I watch her pace from fridge to counter, pulling Sameera-approved foods out of the grocery bags, like rice crackers, almonds, hot pink beet hummus, stuff to make kale salad (disgusting).

“Mom,” I mimic.

“Okay, well, fine,” she says, hands landing on her bony hips. “You aren't excited to see Sameera. Even though she took the day off from her biology lab internship and is driving up from Ann Arbor just to see us. I believe it's what he'd want—”

“Don't.”

But she's just revving up now.

“He would want us talking and laughing and being together. He loved Sameera and you
love
Sameera.” I can tell she's impressed with what she thinks emphasizing the present tense can convey. “You can try to fight this, but you will participate. And if you hate me for it, fine. You can do that too.”

I glare. She sighs. Gramps chimes in something about my first night of work, which conveniently coincides with the deadaversary.

“Are you at all excited about this new job?” Mom asks. She tilts her head and nods, as if she can answer yes for me. “It will be fun, getting to work alongside Nat all summer.”

“Oh, yeah. I'm totally pumped,” I say. My sarcasm drips thick as the leftover syrup on Bea's plate. “There's nothing I wanted more for my summer before senior year than to spend my nights kissing people's asses—”

“Watch your mouth, please,” Gramps warns.

“Oh, sorry. I meant to say I'm
psyched
to be a waitress and I'm
grateful
Nat was able to get me a job, and I'm
thrilled
Sameera is coming over this afternoon.”

Mom doesn't seem so impressed when I turn the italics back on her.

She straightens, tucks long blonde hairs behind her ear, and lifts up her chin a little. A triangle of silence bounces between us. Gramps chews a slice of pancake. I stare at my arm, still red from how hard I pressed ink against skin.

“Natalie seems to like the job well enough,” Mom says finally, wiping the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “I think it's great she managed to get you in too. There aren't a lot of places hiring, you know.”

She pauses, blows out a puff of air, and adds, “That being said, there's always Mrs. Risson's offer to participate in the Roethke Residency.”

“No.”

“I'm sure if we called her and explained you feel up to it now—”

“No.”

“I'm only saying if you wanted to try writing again … a job doesn't have to be about the money.”

“Mom.” My voice is strained, the syllable measured. I know we've crossed into dangerous territory.

The Roethke Residency is my favorite English teacher's annual summer poetry study. It doesn't actually involve residing anywhere, but she calls it the Roethke Residency because the group meets at this dead, famous-for-our-town poet's house turned museum. Mrs. Risson invited me to participate last summer, when the plan everyone assumed I'd be following “fell through.” I guess no one wanted to admit my star potential took a beating when I didn't get into the London Young Writers Intensive.

Only a handful of high school writers are even invited to apply to that uber-competitive wordsmith version of the ultimate summer camp. The five who get selected stay in a London loft with a rotating staff of today's best authors for two whole months. Finalists were given a writing prompt to determine the winners, and I thought I had it in the bag. It was a first line from a Shakespeare sonnet.

“Wherefore with infection should he live … ”
I turned the line into the title of a series of abstracts a painter created while dying. He gave them to his daughter as a way to explain the infinite nature of art. Each scene carried the perfect amount of weight. It's probably the best thing I've ever written.

I didn't make the cut.

The selection committee sent me a eight-line rejection. As if they couldn't fathom how I'd made it so far in the first place.

Thank you for submitting your writing sample to the pool of finalists for the London Young Writers Intensive. While your previous samples were astounding, we were disappointed with the caliber of writing and connection in your last piece. Please understand, this program is highly selective, and though your work was not for us, we hope you keep writing.

This should have broken me, but I just felt numb. The only real pain came from knowing I had to face Mom and Dad and Mrs. Risson and everyone else who believed in such big plans for my words.

Standing here in the kitchen with Mom and Gramps, I try not to let the hollow inside bleed into my voice.

“I am not a writer anymore. As of this evening, I will be a waitress. It's fine. I'm fine. Today is day one of me
loving
my life.”

“Damn it, Anna. Enough.”

Gramps is standing beside Mom now, drawn up to his full height and staring down at me with his bushy white brows furrowed.

“I'm merely telling her I am going to hold up my end of the bargain. That I'll pretend to be normal and happy from here on out,” I say, lifting my hands in surrender.

Here's why I need to lock up the snark: fifteen days ago, sitting in my ninth shrink's office, my parents both slipped into the room. Considering their affection for each other is now akin to cancer and chemotherapy—this tag-team drop-in indicated a serious change in psychological tactics.

I tried to avoid watching my parents' awkward attempt to sit separately but together. I still ended up seeing my father pull his yellow-and-white-striped tie as he nerve-cleared his throat. My mother's hand ticked once. I thought she'd have to physically restrain herself from straightening the tie to ma
tch back up with the buttons on his shirt. Instead, she closed her eyes.

On one side of my
psychologist
“healer” Liza's room there's a Technicolor comic-strip mural depicting Dr. Seuss's
Oh, the Places You'll Go!
Which is fitting, considering my folks were about to drop the as-of-next-week-you'll-be-going-to-hell-bomb. That's a literal statement, by the way.

Hell, Michigan (go ahead, look it up—on the map, not in the Bible) has this place called BrightLight, a year-round Christian boarding school for the afflicted, suicidal, and otherwise broken tween and teenage souls. Whatever brainiac founded the joint must be a marketing genius. The brochure reads, “From the depths of Hell comes a beacon of hope, love, and BrightLight.” It's framed by a filmstrip of photos: beautiful boys and girls playing flag football, raising their hands in class, giggling inside what looks like a local shopping center.

Funny, I hadn't thought of offing myself once until that moment.

A blur of swearing (in ways even Dad found vulgar) filled the remainder of our hour, with my psycho-tamer applauding because I was SHOWING AN INTEREST IN MY LIFE. End result? A hold on crazy camp if I agreed to mark the end of my self-inflicted period of mourning on Joe's one-year deadaversary.

Our contractual bargain, drawn up by the three adults in the room, was pretty straightforward. Easy, even. It stated I must get a summer job and try at least once a week to wear something from the boxes in my closet containing the pre-Patti wardrobe. I agreed to all of it.

Liza started shifting in her seat, the universal sign for a shrink session timing out. I stood to go. But then Mom said, “What about her opening up with the … with the Joe stuf
f?
”

“Ah, yes. Your parents are hoping, Anna, you'll consider spending some of our sessions talking directly about why your uncle's untimely death—” She paused here, looking to Mom and Dad for approval. “Why his death is tied to this personality you've adopted, as well as how it plays into your insistence on giving up your writing. I understand you are a very talented girl, and sometimes, locking away our passions only makes way for depression to sink its teeth deep into us. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

The air in the room turned to glue. My lungs heaved a little. Hell started to sound more appealing.

“Anna?” Hippie Dippie asked, pulling her multi-
colored silk scarf over her shoulders. “I need to clarify here. This is the last part of the deal. You need to be willing to start talking about the tough stuff. We'll need to dig deep, set free your pain, be honest with each other.”

Maybe not telling the truth is like trying to carry a boulder three times your size up a steep hill. Eventually, it'll tip backward and steamroll you.

Mom and Dad, they think I'm broken because I miss Joe. And I do miss him, so much. But they don't know the rest, and I'll never tell Liza the whole story. Still, the lie slipped out easy as Patti's poems slipped like songs from typewriter to page. I said I'd start talking. Whether my parents' reaction was disappointment or relief, I can't say.