JULY 29
Birthday Card from Nick to Dara
Happy birthday, D.
I have a surprise for you.
10 p.m. tonight. Fantasy Land.
What comes down, must go up.
See you at dinner.
Love,
Nick
P.S. It’ll be worth it.
AFTER
JULY 29
Nick
On Dara’s birthday, I wake up even before my alarm. Tonight is the night: when Dara and I go back in time. When we become best friends again. When everything gets fixed.
I haul out of bed, pull on my FanLand T-shirt (clean, thankfully) and a pair of jean shorts, and throw my hair into a ponytail. My whole body is sore. In the short time I’ve been at FanLand, I’ve already grown stronger, thanks to carting trash and scrubbing out the Whirling Dervish and jogging the claustrophobic network of FanLand pathways. My shoulders ache like they do after the first few weeks of field hockey season, and I have both muscles and dark, splotchy bruises I haven’t noticed.
In the hall, I can hear the shower running in Mom’s bathroom. This week she’s been going to bed at 8:00 p.m.—right after the evening news, and the daily reports about the Madeline Snow case: whether Nicholas Sanderson, the police’s only kind-of suspect, is hiding anything; whether it’s a good or a bad thing that the police haven’t turned up her body; whether she might, possibly, still be alive. Anyone would think Madeline was her kid.
I take the stairs to the attic, staying on my tiptoes, as if Dara might startle if she hears me coming. All last night, I thought about what I would to say to her. I even practiced whispering the words to my bedroom mirror.
I’m sorry.
I know you hate me.
Please, let’s start over.
Surprisingly Dara’s bedroom door is open a crack. I ease the door open with a foot.
In the murky half-light, it looks like a weird alien planet, crowded with mossy surfaces and solid, unidentifiable heaps. Dara’s bed is empty. The birthday card I left for her last night is still arranged neatly on her pillow. I can’t tell whether she’s read it or not.
For years, Dara has been falling asleep in the den—we’ll find her the next morning on the couch, enfolded in a blanket, an infomercial spouting off about an all-in-one kitchen knife or a bathroom toilet seat warmer. Once, last year, I came downstairs to the stink of vomit, and found that she’d puked in Mom’s Native American clay pot before falling asleep. I cleaned her up, wiping the corners of her mouth with a damp towel, picked off the fake eyelash clinging, furry and caterpillar-like, to her cheek. At one point she just barely woke up and smiled at me through half-lidded eyes.
“Heya, Seashell,” she said, using the nickname she’d made up for me when she was a kid.
That was me: the family janitor. Always cleaning up Dara’s messes.
Dr. Lichme used to say that maybe I liked it, just a little. He used to say that maybe helping solve other people’s issues kept me from thinking about my own.
That’s the problem with therapists: you have to pay them to say the same dumb shit other people will tell you for free.
I thud down the stairs, not bothering to be quiet this time. My left knee is killing me. I must have banged it on something.
When I come downstairs, Mom is just emerging from the bathroom, towel-drying her hair, wearing nothing but work pants and a bra. She freezes when she sees me.
“Were you in Dara’s room?” she asks, watching me closely, as if she doesn’t trust me not to morph into someone else. She looks awful, pasty-faced, like she hasn’t slept.
“Yeah.” When I go into my room to get my shoes, Mom follows me, hovering in the doorway as if waiting for an invitation.
“What were you doing?” she asks carefully. As out of it as she’s been, there’s no way she hasn’t noticed that Dara and I have perfected the art of circling around each other without touching, vacating rooms just before the other person enters, alternating patterns of wake and sleep.
I shove my feet into my sneakers, which have over the summer become deformed, distended into shapelessness by water and sweat.
“It’s her birthday,” I say, like Mom doesn’t know. “I just wanted to talk to her.”
“Oh, Nick.” Mom hugs herself. “I’ve been so selfish. I never even think about how hard it must be for you to be here. To be home.”
“I’m okay, Mom.” I hate it that my mom gets like this now: one second, fine; the next second, all mess and crumble.
“Good.” She holds the back of her hand against each eye in turn, as if she’s pressing back a headache. “That’s good. I love you, Nick. You know that, right? I love you, and I worry about you.”
“I’m fine.” I shoulder my bag and edge past her. “Everything’s fine. I’ll see you tonight, okay? Seven thirty. Sergei’s.”
Mom nods. “Do you think—do you think it’s a good idea? Tonight, I mean? All of us sitting down together?”
“I think it’ll be great,” I say—which, if you’re counting, is already the third lie I’ve told this morning.
Dara’s not in the den, although the blankets are all balled up on the sofa and there’s an empty can of Diet Coke lying on the ottoman, suggesting that she did spend part of the night downstairs. Dara’s like that, mysterious and undirected, always appearing and disappearing at will and never noticing, or maybe just not caring, that other people worry about her.
Maybe she went out last night for an early birthday celebration and wound up sleeping on some random guy’s couch. Maybe she woke up early in one of her rare bouts of penitence and will come through the front door in twenty minutes, whistling, makeup-free, bearing a big paper bag full of cinnamon doughnuts from Sugar Bear and a trayful of Styrofoam cups of coffee.
Outside, the thermometer is already at ninety-eight degrees. There’s a heat wave due this week, a massive, record-breaking blast of oven-temperature air. Just what we need today. Even before I get to the bus stop, I’ve chugged through my water bottle, and even though the air-conditioning on the bus is on full blast, the sun still seems to beat through the windows and turn the whole interior the murky, musty warm of a dysfunctional refrigerator.
The woman next to me is reading a newspaper, one of those obnoxiously thick ones packed with flyers and coupons and pamphlets advertising sales at a nearby Toyota dealership. The headlines are, no surprise, still given over to the Snow case. On the front page is a grainy picture of Nicholas Sanderson leaving the police station with his wife—both of them walking head down as though against a driving rain.