“School doesn’t start too early this year?”
“School will start whenever I show up. It’s convenient that way.”
The day after they’d arrived at the house she had, on a hunch, called the registrar’s office. Danny was not registered for the upcoming semester, nor had he finished the last one. This was the power of dead parents and the knowledge of a social security number. Having asked about matriculation, deferment, payment plans, correspondence courses, leaves of absence, she had solutions. And she had a deadline too.
She worked the ground with the cultivator, loosening all around the runners that snaked under the topsoil of the bed. Weeds, insidious, a disease. She eased the runners up, an explosives expert exposing a trip wire, found their noduled and gnarled core, and pulled it all forth, the circulatory system of death.
Danny took long drinks from the green beer bottle, the color of the sea but so much smoother.
“I think you should stay up here a few extra weeks, maybe Gwen too.”
“What about your crew, aren’t they coming up next week?”
“It’s the first week in August, but—” She paused. She had not fully considered this. Danny and her friends in this place together? She had always been so careful to keep them all apart. The family in July, the friends in August. That was the deal. That was the only way it worked. She had tried to mix them once and had learned what Scarlet was truly capable of. But now, without Scarlet here, things were different. Things didn’t need to be hidden or minimized. Her worlds could merge without repercussions, not including Tom, of course.
Danny was like one of her students. One left late in the afternoon, the early darkness of winter closing in. The blank curb, with no car waiting, the only thing staring back at him. As with any forgotten child, she needed to stay with him, or to keep him with her. This house has the power to cure, she thought, I can’t keep it all to myself. Herself and her eight friends.
Though now it could be seven. Patricia, the eighth, would she come? Did Libby want her to? If Patricia came it would mean only that the decision had been made in Patricia’s favor. It felt out of Libby’s hands. And if she told Patricia to stay home, more accurately to stay out of her home, then her friends, those seven, would ask and discuss and accuse and berate and generally heckle.
Danny would, selfishly, be a shield. Danny would be a sad, dark river separating her from them. A new geological phenomenon that sprang up during the long winter, it would be unexpected and it would change the landscape of their vacation, one that had been the same for the last six summers.
“Maybe school can wait.” She said this casually, tossing the strings of roots and blades of grass to the pile of detritus in front of her.
“I don’t know, Bibs, some of those books, those ideas, might expire. Marx, Freud, Hobbes, they’ve been on the shelf awhile now; pretty soon they won’t be safe to consume.”
Always so cute, always the little smart-ass. If she could get him to stay, then she could get him alone. If she could get him alone in a boat, where they could really talk, she knew she could get it out of him. Where he’d been for the last six weeks, where he wanted to go, if he’d tried anything, started giving his possessions away, written notes? Did he have a plan?
Kelly Fern had an office on the back of the island. A man with the name of a flower, or a stylish purse, or a talk show host, was their father’s age, would’ve been, and he was a psychologist. She could take Danny to him. Maybe Kelly Fern could explain how to mourn, how to keep going. Because what she saw, in the gray skin, in the sharp collarbone, was the deep void left by their mother. Like a door that had been left open, with Danny standing right in that cold draft.
“How’d school end for you, Bibs?” He scratched the back of one leg with the opposite foot.
“Good, it’s always good at the end.”
“When they can finally wipe their own butts, and tie their own shoes?”
“Butts, yes; shoes, no.”
Good, because she loved them. Good, because they learned the schedule, and sat in their spots at circle time, and put away paints before nap, and washed hands after wiping said butts. They learned what she taught, and she loved them for it. But also just for them, for their words and songs and small feet. For five hot dogs wiggling in a frying pan, pantomimed with the wiggling fingers of one hand on the sizzling palm of the other. For the sly tastes of Play-Doh, homemade or not. For slow nudging of a halved grape toward one reluctant and satiated turtle. For questions like, “Why won’t he eat it?” For declarations like, “My chin is an umbrella for my neck” and “I’m going to be a dinosaur catcher.” Or the instruction that preceded bad behavior: “Miss Willoughby, just look over there (away from the activity), I’ll tell you when you can look; just don’t pay attention for a minute, okay?” Even the heart-breaking certainties that “Girls don’t like dark colors” or “Boys don’t have long hair.”
Gwen, Tom, and Melissa were all napping. It was that time of the day. This left the house hushed and made Libby feel as if she and Danny were having a secret meeting.
“When are you and Patricia going to have a little butt wiper of your own?”
He never shied from questions. He got that from Gwen. His beer gone, he rubbed the wet bottle on the back of his neck, then brought the bottle’s lip to his and blew across the top, sending a low moan, his own feeble foghorn, out into the sun of the afternoon.
“We aren’t there yet, not even on that road yet. I don’t even know if we’ll get there.” She had wanted a baby with Riley. She had wanted a lot of things with Riley.
Riley was her third girlfriend, the one just before Patricia. There were women in college who were more passing storms or breezes or great and powerful ideas, hardly what could be called relationships. Tiffany’s upturned-collar-and-pearls name belied her actual tattooed-lesbian reality. Before Tiffany, Libby had just a few frenzied gropings in the common room after three a.m. Tiffany told her that women were meant to be together, goddesses on the mountain. And that men should serve simply as vehicles for fertilization, the sinewed arm that dropped grapes into their mouths. This was college.