CHAPTER THREE
When the night rolled around, I still hadn’t had a chance to talk to Ada about my boy woes. The night before, she had come home after I had fallen asleep, something she had been doing more and more often now that she was dating Layton, and was off to class in the morning.
I couldn’t even catch her after school because she went straight to a friend’s house and then jettisoned home before we all went out for our dad’s birthday dinner.
My dad is a fellow Scorpio like myself, bringing up the end of the spectrum, which still leaves him full of scorpion sting but with none of the passion. At least, none of the passion that I understand. I’m pretty sure the only thing my father feels passionate about is convincing his wavering theology students of the “truth.” That and really good Chianti.
Naturally, his birthday dinner was held at a really old, authentic Italian restaurant just outside Portland, a place he and his brother Al had been coming to since they were young boys. It was no Olive Garden, I can tell you that much.
I half-expected that Ada would have brought Layton with her, but I guess when you were in the tenth grade, bringing your boyfriend to your dad’s birthday bash wasn’t something you took lightly.
It was for the best. I know nothing would ruin my dad’s birthday more than having his teenage daughter’s older boyfriend there but from the glances I stole of Ada on the drive over there, I could tell she was a million miles away and already pining for him, her bright blue eyes swimming in the early darkness. I felt pity for her and her young love for exactly three seconds before reality slammed into me and I realized I was no better than she was.
With family being such an important factor to Italians like my father, I knew that my Uncle Al was going to be there, as well as my nephews Matt and Tony. I hadn’t seen those three since the whole lighthouse incident in late summer and I had been itching to see them ever since. It felt like years ago when I had first met Dex in that fateful tower, when my life had twisted around on itself and changed its course.
What I didn’t expect was that Uncle Al had brought a special guest with him to the dinner party.
“Her name is Marda,” my mom told Ada and me as we got out of the car and walked towards the restaurant. Mom looked elegant as always and not the slightest bit cold in her lacey caplet that barely covered her toned arms.
I struggled to keep up in my heels, not used to dressing up for any occasion, plus I was dealing with overused leg muscles.
“Al has a girlfriend!?” I cried out. I was happy for him, of course, Al seemed like such a lonely bachelor since his ex-wife left him, but it was still surprising. He didn’t go out much, except to play the occasional poker game, so I wouldn’t even know where he could meet any women. It’s not like he’d be at the grocery store, pushing his cart around with the bananas facing a certain way (I had read this is what some singles in grocery stores did. A certain type of fruit in one direction meant you were single. I think melons and bananas were probably all you needed).
My mom gave me a funny look, probably because of the very unladylike way I was walking. “Yes, Marda is his new girlfriend. You should ask him how they met; it’s mostly your fault.”
My fault? I hadn’t played matchmaker since my high school days and that was only because I was the fat, helpful girl who had attractive friends, but before I could ponder that any further, we entered the restaurant to cheers and applause from the waiters and kitchen staff (no one does birthdays like an Italian restaurant) and the sight of Al, Matt, Tony, and a petite blonde woman (Marda, I’m guessing) standing around a Chianti-strewn table.
And then my eardrums were blown out. Drunken exaltations (noting at least one bottle of wine was empty), hugs, cries, slaps on the back and loud hellos were exchanged among the Palominos at deafening levels.
I gave Matt and Tony one big hug at once, happier to see them than I originally thought. There was something about those twins, their goofy demeanor with an underlying wholesomeness, that made me miss the person I was when I last saw them. Everything seemed so simple then.
I pulled back and peered at them. They looked different somehow. Cleaned up (I’d say fresh-faced if Matt didn’t appear to be suffering from some bad acne) and maybe the slightest bit older.
“You guys are starting to look like men,” I said, and grabbed both their biceps for show. There still wasn’t much there.
“So are you!” Tony exclaimed with a smile that made him look momentarily younger. He then grabbed my arm, which was now bare after the hostess took our coats away.
I looked down at it and blushed. I know I had lost some weight but it had only been two weeks since I started the sessions, and though my arms were stronger, they certainly didn’t look much different. It would be a long time before I looked like Sheryl Crow.
“Thanks, I think,” I said to them just as Uncle Al came over and picked me up in a bear hug.
“Perry!” Al exclaimed joyously, his voice muffled into my shoulder.
“Hi Uncle Al!”
He put me down and gave me the once over. A wash of concern came across his wrinkled brow.
“You’re looking beautiful, you’re as tiny as ever,” he said, but I didn’t quite believe him.
“But?” I prodded him.
“But nothing.” He smiled and put his arm out for Marda, who came slinking under it with a shy expression.
“Perry, meet Marda,” he said, squeezing Marda’s slight shoulders. She was a very lovely, sweet-looking lady with small, sparkplug eyes and a long porcelain face, roughly my uncle’s age (late forties). A good match for Al, who wasn’t quite as robust and hard-faced as my father.
We shook hands quickly, her grasp warm.
“Quite the grip you’ve got there,” she commented, taking her fair hand back and looking at it.
I blushed. I was always the person assigned to open any tough pickle jars. My small but durable hands were probably freakishly strong now thanks to the boot camp. Push-ups really did work every part of your body.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“She’s my lady friend,” Al boasted, squeezing Marda closer into him and kissing the top of her head. The relationship couldn’t have been more than a month old, so it was extra endearing to see Uncle Al acting like this with someone.
But before I could ask them how they met (after all, I apparently had something to do with it), my father demanded everyone sit down. The birthday boy was starving and thirsty. A deadly combination.
I took my place next to Ada and the twins, with the “adults” on the other side of the table. I gave Ada a quick smile but she was staring dreamily into her glass of water. My sister was still the top of the pops when it came to her fashion blog and an occasion like this was a prime excuse for her to dress like someone who had just fallen ass backwards off the catwalk. My black knee-length dress (the only dress I really had) looked fine on me, I guess, but it wasn’t a backless cashmere dress with embroidered details like Ada was wearing. I was actually surprised she hadn’t asked me to take a picture of her like she did every other day when she was wearing an outfit “for the blog.” But Ada wasn’t herself these days, anyway.
While I pondered that over, the conversation around the table turned to pleasantries and news stories. The twins told me about this ATV they bought and I pretended to listen while I picked at my pseudo-healthy chicken Marsala. I was watching Marda and Al with interest. They were sharing bites of their food between each other, pouring each other wine. A bottle of red. A bottle of white. And I was instantly reminded of Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” The memory poked at my insides a little bit until I winced it away. >
There was no denying it though; there was a lot of love at this table tonight. It didn’t take long for my mother to pick up on it and say, “Would you look at this! You won’t find dopier, more love struck people than my two daughters and their uncle.”
“Me?!” Ada and I both protested at the same time, then consequently glared at each other in that, “yeah, you” look that we did so well.
“Caught red-handed,” Al said, squeezing Marda’s hand. “And it’s all thanks to Perry.”
“Yeah, what’s the deal with that?” I asked, happy to have the conversation turn over to him.
“Well Marda here works in property insurance. I had to file a claim after you blew up the lighthouse.”
I loved how, even though I barely had anything to do with the lighthouse blowing up (what, it’s not like I set it on fire or anything), everyone still referred to me as the person responsible for its demise. OK, so it would probably be standing today had I not gone poking my nose into its business but then Al wouldn’t have met Marda.
“See, something good has come out of it,” I pointed out, directing most of that toward my father, who just shook his head to himself and poured himself another large glass of wine from a reedy Chianti bottle.
“Of course,” Uncle Al said. “It’s not just the good fortune of meeting my lovely Marda here either, the boys have been happier too, haven’t you?”
Matt and Tony shrugged but even I could now see they looked a bit…relieved. Maybe it wasn’t that they looked older, it was that the ominous, overseeing lighthouse was no longer on the edge of the property, taunting and teasing them with its evil secrets. They looked, well, happier. Al was right.
“And you wouldn’t have your little ghost show either,” he added. “A lot of good has come out of it.”
“You must tell me about this show, Perry,” Marda piped up in her soft voice, leaning against Al and fixing her attention on me. “I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet. Al says it would keep me up at night.”
Matt looked at me. “We’ve been telling all our friends about it. That shit is f*cked up.”
“Matthew!” Al admonished.
He shrugged unapologetically and looked back at me.
“That last episode was f…sick. What was the deal with the deer? That scared the shit out of us!”
“Matthew!” Al again.
With the attention now turned to me, my cheeks flared a beet red. I still have trouble coming to terms with having myself on the internet and I was suddenly grateful that Brock hadn’t told me about knowing who I was until the very end.
“I honestly don’t know,” I told him, trying not to look at the rest of my family, who I knew were looking at me with their usual disbelieving eyes (except for Ada but I could tell she wasn’t even paying attention to me). “We woke up in the middle of the night and like a whole herd of deer were gathered around our tent. We never even saw them after that.”
“Weird,” Matt said. “You said on the blog that a lot more happened but that footage was all lost at the bottom of the sea.”
“Oh, how convenient,” boomed my dad, sounding more drunk by the moment. My eyes flew to him, enraged. It’s his birthday, let him have this, I thought, trying to bury the urge to yell at him.
“It’s true,” I said through gritted teeth, trying to keep focused on Matt’s curious face.
“Well, what happened?”
Too much for me to tell. After Dex and I returned back home, after I got my wrists patched up because of my altercation with the rose garden, and Dex had his raccoon wound stitched up, we decided to show everything we shot (that still remained with us and not on the Super 8 at the bottom of Haro Straight) and leave the rest up to the viewer’s imagination. Normally, I would have written a lengthy blog entry telling the entire story, elaborating on the stuff that the cameras couldn’t pick up on. But this time…I just couldn’t do it.
I think a part of me was afraid that the more I admitted what happened, the more that this “Anonymous” person would come on the blog and comment on what a liar I was. Yep, I knew the hater I had was still lurking around on the internet somewhere, waiting for me to say the wrong thing. And this time, at least, I knew that others would agree with her (Dex seemed adamant that it was a female).
What happened to Dex and me on D’Arcy Island seemed like more than a bad dream. If I told anyone what actually happened, how a psychotic, cross-eyed midget from a 1900s mission turned me against Dex, how we were hunted down by zombie-like lepers, and how I nearly drowned saving a child who was already dead…well, it sounds so unbelievable even I think it over in my head. There was a reason why I blocked most of it out. Except for that second night, when we awoke to the wails of an insane ghost and my need for Dex overtook everything else. And when I say need, I mean lust. That was purely my fault.
I gave Matt a small smile, knowing the blush was deepening up to my hairline.
“A lot happened that I can’t even remember. I’ll tell you the rest one day.”
I shot a look at my parents, who were exchanging wry glances with each other. Well, let them think what they want. I was happy to know that at least the twins gave me more than the benefit of the doubt.
“Apparently, Perry thinks she needs to work out now to fight ghosts,” my mom said after she tore her eyes away from my dad’s increasingly red ones.
I bit my lip, not sure how to answer that without sounding like a loon. I knew from my mom’s voice that she was treating the whole thing like it was a joke.
“But if that gets your weight down, I’m all the more for it,” she had to add.
“So,” Al said, shooting my mother a wary look and then smiling at me as if he was apologizing on her behalf. He didn’t need to. I was used to that shit from my mom. It’s probably why my father and Ada didn’t even notice. “If you don’t mind me asking, how do you plan to defend yourself from…uh…ghosts?”
I knew Al didn’t believe in ghosts per se (though he did believe in “Evil”), hence the gentle yet skeptical tone he was using, but he still seemed sincere in his questioning. Marda was watching me expectantly too.
I tried to answer as diplomatically as possible. “I just think it’s good to be prepared. It’s not so much the ghosts as it is the situations we are in.”
“Is that how you got this?” Matt asked, pointing at the scar on my wrist that sat beneath the purple Silly Bandz bracelet.
“That…was a lively rose bush,” I said, knowing how stupid that sounded.
“So you’ve been going to the firing range so you can shoot gardens?” my dad scoffed. He had never been very supportive of the whole gun use thing. Not that I had a gun or ever planned to get one.
I stared him down. “As I said, dad, it’s good to be prepared.”
“How do you kill ghosts anyway? You obviously can’t shoot them,” Marda said, somehow managing not to sound the slightest bit patronizing.
I honestly didn’t know. I had always wondered that myself.
“I’m not really sure. I don’t think you can; I mean they are already dead and everything. I think you can trick them though.”
“How do you mean?” Tony asked, leaning forward past Matt so I could see him.
“Well,” I started and wondered how best to explain without sounding crazy. I decided I already sounded crazy and went on, keeping my eyes on the wax that was dripping off the candles in the center of the table.
“When we were on the island we had to escape this ghost named Mary. She had stolen one of Dex’s knives and was about to sever the rope that connected the sailboat to the shore.”
I looked around me to see how everyone was reacting so far. My dad rolled his eyes and got up, going to the washroom or perhaps outside to get fresh air and wonder where in God’s name his daughter came from. My mom was watching me with worried, fearful eyes. The rest, including Ada now, were glued to my every word.
“I didn’t know what to do,” I continued. “I didn’t even think. I just grabbed the flare gun out of Dex’s backpack and shot it at her.”
The twins hollered simultaneously.
“You’re f*cking joking!” Matt cried out.
Even Al looked too flabbergasted to get mad at his son’s use of language at the dinner table.
“No, I wish I was. I just fired it. She was maybe only ten feet away.”
“And did that…kill her?” Marda asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. She was already dead, so how could it? But what I think it did was trick her. My theory is that most ghosts don’t really accept the fact that they are dead. I think they spend most of their time wandering around in another dimension, living in denial. I don’t know. Anyway, I think all that did was make Mary think I killed her, at least long enough so that we could get away. It at least knocked her ass off the cliff and that’s all we needed.”
“Why the hell didn’t you write about this?” Matt said, shaking his head and reaching for his glass of wine.
I laughed.
“Why? Because...who the hell would believe me? I sound like a lunatic, I know I do.”
“You sound like your grandmother,” my mom said in the coldest tone I’d heard from her lips in a very long time.
Al gave her another look, this one fully loaded. Something was going on but I couldn’t read into it, not across the table in this busy Italian restaurant. My mother rarely spoke about my grandmother. She died when I was very young and I only saw my grandfather when we went on family trips to Sweden.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said to her, trying my hardest to not sound defensive.
My mother looked down at her manicured fingers for a second before taking a tepid sip of water. “Your grandmother lied a lot, that’s all.”
I smiled at her though there was nothing pretty about it.
“I’m not lying.”
She didn’t say anything else but she didn’t need to.
Trying to dissipate the tension, Tony spoke up. “Too bad you don’t have one of those boxes from Ghostbusters. You know, some way to contain them.”
“Yeah,” I agreed absently, still keeping my eyes on Al and my mother. “But we’re still trying to figure this whole thing out. Learning as we go.”
“You and this Dex fellow,” Al said, noticing my gaze, and for once I was glad to talk about Dex.
“Yup. Going up to Seattle on Monday to film the next episode at the Riverside Mental Hospital. Then on Friday there’s a Christmas party for work. ‘Tis the season.”
“And is your work going to be paying for your hotel this whole time or are we going to have to help out?” my dad asked, returning to the table just in time. It’s like he has some radar that alerts him when someone mentions anything money related. Or touches the thermostat.
“No.” I glared at him despite my promise to play nice because it was his birthday. “I’m staying with Dex and his girlfriend.”
It’s like a collective breath was held above the table. Everyone froze. Finally Ada started coughing on her water.
“Are you insane!?” she yelled and grabbed my hand. I pulled back, surprised at her outburst. Aside from when Al and Marda had asked her about Layton, she had been silent the entire dinner.
“Possibly?” I answered.
My mom reached over and tapped Marda on the arm gently. “She’s in love with her Dexter partner.”
Marda nodded knowingly while I exclaimed, “No I’m not!”
I swear everyone at the table rolled their eyes in unison.
“And his name isn’t Dexter!” I sat back further in my chair and crossed my arms. “Whatever, I’ll be fine. I have a date on Sunday night anyway. With another man. Who isn’t Dex.”
Another gasp at the table. This was the longest dinner ever.
“Don’t act so surprised,” I muttered.
“Who with?” Ada asked.
“My bootcamp trainer, Brock,” I said, ready for everyone to laugh the way Dex had. Surprisingly, everyone looked impressed.
Finally my mom said, “Now this guy sounds like a keeper. Imagine how skinny you’d get around him! Maybe then you could do a fitness show instead.”
There was no use in saying anything. I swallowed my indignation with the last few gulps of my wine and soon the conversation flowed to the local college basketball team and other things, leaving me locked in my head with thoughts that went nowhere.