“Cody,” I reminded him, “it goes to their apartment.”
“It’s for deliveries,” he practically shouted. “I hate that sliding grate that you have to close after you already closed the door. Then it goes up so slow, and it makes that noise that sounds like at any minute it will break and everyone in it—you and me and stupid Ava Pomme—will smash to death.”
Twice Cody had hyperventilated in that elevator, forcing Ava Pomme to stick his head in a bag of tomatoes one time and a bag of sourdough bread the other time. When he caught his breath, he threw up: once in the elevator and once on Ava’s black shoes.
“That baby,” Cody said. “Zoe.”
I frowned.
“Kiss your baby sister,” Cody said in his Ava Pomme voice.
Zoe didn’t seem real to me. She didn’t do much of anything except get carried around and look cute. When I was a baby, my father used to carry me on his back in a big forest green backpack. I had pictures of that, with my parents standing together on a beach somewhere and my own baby face grinning out over my father’s shoulder. I loved those pictures. No Cody. No Ava Pomme. No Zoe. Just a family.
The idea that Zoe would one day turn into a person, someone to contend with, made me nervous. I didn’t like to think about it.
I hated divorce. It should be illegal or something. All it did was cause problems for everybody. Sometimes I felt like I was getting pecked apart by crows, pieces of me scattered from here to New York. I wished I was still whole, the way I had been before my mother messed up everything.
One time, right after Baby Zoe was born and I was feeling about as low as I ever had, my mother came in my bedroom and found me crying. When she walked in, I put a pillow over my face so she couldn’t see me all red and blotchy and sad. She sat on the bed, took the pillow away, and put her cool hand on my forehead, the way she used to when I was little and felt sick to my stomach. “I know, I know,” she kept saying, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know that I thought everything was her fault. She didn’t know how it felt to have your father leave and marry some other woman and then have a new baby.
So I told her. I sat up and let the pillow drop to the floor and shook her hand off my forehead and said, “It didn’t have to be like this! Why do you go and mess everything up?” She looked shocked. “How did I mess everything up?” Mom asked me. “By being so ordinary,” I told her. Then she started to cry, too. She said, “Oh, Madeline.” In a movie, we would have cried together, in each other’s arms. But this was real life. Mom got up slowly and shook her head and walked out of the room, and I was left alone to think about everything, which now included not just divorced parents and a stepmother, but also a baby sister.
Here she was now, casting a shadow over me.
“Time to go,” Mom said, still in her bathing suit.
“Fine,” I said. Three hours at this stupid kid party and boring Bianca had hardly said a word. She was traumatized because she was going to sleepover camp next week and she had never been away from her parents. How lame is that? She should try never ever getting to spend real days with her father. She should try having everything good being stuck in a photograph instead of part of her real life.
“Bye, Bianca,” I said.
“Are you going to write me at camp?” she said desperately.
What would I ever write to her? “Gee,” I said.
“Of course she will,” my mother said. “She’ll send you postcards from Italy.”
My mother and I stood for a minute, side by side, watching Cody float.
“I am not going to write her at camp,” I said.
“She’s lonely,” my mother said, her eyes fixed on Cody. “You have no idea what loneliness feels like.”
“Here we go again,” I mumbled.
“Hey, buddy,” my mother called to Cody. “Let’s go.”
Slowly, he floated to the edge of the pool, near the ladder. She held out the big blue-and-red striped towel that had his name printed in the middle in bright yellow letters. She was smiling, her arms outstretched.
Cody ran into the towel, into her arms.
“I can’t wait to go to Italy,” he said.
Our mother looked startled. “Good,” she said. Then she nodded. “Good,” she said again, as if she had just won something.
How could he give in like that? Secretly I had been imagining meeting the Pope, praying to saints, going to all the churches. But I had not let my mother know that, of course.
Cody and I never liked the Friday night dinners our mother made us eat. This Friday was even worse: The Boyfriend was joining us. Cody sat at the kitchen counter, watching her cook, sullen. I sat at the table trying to move a glass of water across it using telepathy. Too much distraction, I thought. Too many bad vibrations.
Our mother said, “Is there anything in the world as lovely as the smell of fresh basil?”