Arizona nods.
“You shouldn’t have had a whole thing with Natasha without me,” she says. She holds out her fingers for another cig. We’re in it. We’re going for it. There’s a desperate need for a cracked window, but we haven’t done it yet. Almost as if we like being caught in a cloud of smoke and cancer and after-smell.
“You hated her,” I say.
“Well, exactly.”
“I didn’t,” I say.
“But you did. And if you didn’t, you should have.”
I let a huge sigh escape. “Do you hate them on behalf of Mom?” I say. “Because isn’t she pretty hateable too?” It seems impossible, but this is now the most we’ve ever really talked about Mom. Not our feelings about her, at least. Not acknowledging that we want something from her. We’ve wondered where in the world she is and we’ve left postcards from her out on each other’s dressers so that we can both see them, so that there are no secrets between us.
I’ve been awful, when I really think it through.
“I wish Dad had remembered exactly what Mom said. About being in love,” Arizona says. “We should know things like that, don’t you think?” The words are coming out slowly, and I think she’s spent all summer avoiding this room and these fake stars while I’ve spent it falling in love. Historically speaking, we didn’t used to do things separately. We lived different variations of the same life until right now. “Mom was so sad, before she left. When she started getting surgeries.”
“To the closet!” I say. I’m not sure I’m ready for Arizona’s revelations, and the air in her room is feeling very close and too humid. The girl needs an air conditioner in a desperate way.
“I’ve been sad,” Arizona says. “Or maybe angry. I’ve been really angry. Going away makes everything seem bigger and smaller, both. Clearer. All these strangers ask about your life and your family, and when you tell them . . . you see in their faces how fucked up it all is. I hated that about being in college.” I’d thought she loved everything about being away from me and the people who know her best. “And you’ve changed. And Roxanne has a whole new life. And how am I the oldest but the least together? And why is Dad okay with marrying someone who clearly hates me? And did she really lie about her whole life and family? Shouldn’t we be scared of that and not getting dressed up to celebrate it? And why are you so eager to do the things Dad does?”
“I don’t have any of those answers,” I say.
“Not even about you marrying Bernardo?”
I think I’m not so sure I’m marrying Bernardo.
I think that’s not an answer I have anymore.
I think I have to tell Bernardo that I want a space between being so, so together and being apart. That I want that third thing. The slow love thing. The getting-to-know-someone thing. The loving-someone-no-matter-what thing, built over time.
But he might not want those things. He might get the Casey-look on his face.
“You know what was nice?” I say. Neither of us are addressing the other one’s questions or comments. It’s a funny way to have a conversation.
“Hm?”
“Being at the park. When he and I didn’t speak. And he was the mysterious guy with the weird scarf and thick glasses and I was Montana and everything was undecided.”
We head to the Closet of Forgotten Things, and unload it item by item. We play a sad version of our game, where we’re both pretty depressed about the whole situation. Turning a snow globe of Cleveland upside down, I tear up.
“Beginning of the relationship,” I say. “Cleveland could only be construed as romantic at the very beginning.”
“Seems like something he would have done for Tess,” Arizona says.
“No,” I say, surprised that I remember something that Arizona doesn’t. “It was for Mom. She collected them. Snow globes. You don’t remember? At the end, though, he got her an Eiffel Tower one and an ice-skating one and one with little kids sledding with their mom. In the beginning he must have gotten her snow globes on even the stupidest trips, in the airports. Like, how much do you have to love someone to get them a snow globe of Cleveland?”
“And how much do you have to love someone to keep it?” Arizona says.
“But she didn’t keep it,” I say. “She forgot it.”
I shake up the snow globe again. Mini Cleveland gets stuck in a hurricane of confetti-like snow.
“We should bring it to her,” Arizona says. Fake snow is more mesmerizing than I would have thought, and I don’t think I’ve heard her right.
“Hm?”