Half In Love With Death (2 page)

As I got up, she grabbed my
Beatles
magazine. “Don't you dare,” I said, expecting her to tear it to pieces, but all she did was study it for a moment and then point to a girl in a photo. “Who's that?”

“That's Jane Asher, Paul's girlfriend.” I loved Paul McCartney, with his angelic mouth and to-die-for eyes.

I waited for her to make some smart remark, but she just smiled. “You know you look a little like her, don't you?”

I gave her a skeptical glance. “Really?”

She turned my face toward her. “Your eyes slant down just like hers, and your smile is like hers, too. You look kind of British. If you curled your hair and cut your bangs, you'd look just like her. I'll help you with that tomorrow.” She paused. “Is there someone special you'd like to impress? I mean other than Paul.” She smirked.

My cheeks grew hot. She leaned forward. “Come on, you can tell me who.”

I glanced away. “Billy O'Neil.”

She laughed. “That freckled-faced jock who lives across the street?” I nodded. “Isn't he with Linda Beckham's little sister, May?”

I frowned. “Yeah.”

“Linda is one super bitch and May is, too, but after I'm done with your hair, maybe you'll have a chance.”

I smiled, wanting this to be true, though doubting it. Billy and I sometimes sat outside and talked about stuff, like whether UFOs were real and the meaning of life. But I couldn't get my hopes up. May was one of the prettiest girls in our freshman class. Her dad, Ron, was my dad's boss, and Mom thought we should be friends, but May barely acknowledged my existence.

Jess went on, “I need you to listen now. This is serious.” For Jess, nothing was ever serious. “You have to promise not to tell Mom and Dad that I'm sneaking out. It's very important.”

Her eyes opened wide, drinking me in. I paused, enjoying the fact that she actually wanted something from me. “Don't worry. I won't tell,” I said.

“Good.” She pointed to her red purse on the floor. “Can you hand me that?”

It weighed a ton. She'd probably stuffed a bottle of Dad's scotch in it.

She took it from me and opened the window, even though we weren't supposed to because the air conditioning was on. As she climbed out, she bumped her head, yelled, “Fuck,” and punched the frame. She sucked on her fist.

I raised my eyebrows. “Hurry up or you'll miss the movie.”

She gave me a blank look as if she didn't know what I was talking about. Beyond her, the night sky was sprinkled with faint, faraway stars. It was easy to grab onto the mesquite tree branch that almost scraped the glass and then drop onto the flat roof over the screened-in porch. From there it was just a short jump to the lawn. Jess had sneaked out this way before, and she never got caught. I figured Tony was waiting down below.

When she was halfway out she paused, sitting on the sill with one leg hanging out and the other in. Her green eyes rested on me for a moment. She started to say, “Would you . . .” but a car honked outside and she stopped mid-sentence.

“What?” I replied.

“Never mind.” She swung her other leg over the sill. “Just remember, tell and I'll kill you,” and then she was gone with a rustling, a thud, and the sound of a car peeling away.

• • •

“Mummy.” A high-pitched voice startled me awake. My first thought was that it was Jess, but it sounded more like a scared little kid. Maybe my five-year-old brother Dicky had cried out in the middle of the night and I'd only dreamed it was my sister. I turned on my light. Her bed was still made up, the way she'd left it.

My heart was pounding so hard I thought it was going to explode as I walked across the carpet and looked out into the hall. I couldn't hear anything from Dicky's room. The bedroom doors were all shut. Everything was the way it was supposed to be.

I glanced at the alarm clock. It was just past midnight. Not that late, as far as Jess was concerned. With each passing second, what I'd heard became less real. It was probably just a nightmare. All I wanted to do was to go back to sleep, but my mouth was too dry. I drank all the water from the glass on my nightstand, but I was still thirsty. I wondered if it was possible to die of thirst in my own bedroom.

I went over to the window that I'd forgotten to shut, leaned my head out, and sucked in the hot air. Somewhere a cat howled, and I breathed a sigh of relief. That's what I'd heard. I glanced down at the street. Everything was the way it was during the day, only darker. Same old cars, same old houses, same old everything. Sometime before dawn, Tony would pull up in his gold car and Jess would step out quietly. She would slip in the back door and creep up the stairs with the stealth of a cat.

A desert breeze lifted the leaves of the mesquite tree. I thought of Jess sitting on the sill, half in our pink room, half out, beyond her the night sky, and beyond that everything else that was outside of our lives, like the world around the edges of the drive-in movie screen. She was out there now, having a good time, knowing things I couldn't possibly know. As I shut the window, I heard her say again, “Would you . . . .”

I wondered what she'd meant to ask me.

Mom scooped some scrambled eggs onto my plate. My fingers trembled as I buttered my toast, careful not to crumble the bread with my knife.

Dad peered at me over his paper. “That lazy sister of yours still asleep?”

I took a long swallow of orange juice.

“Caroline?” He raised his eyes.

My heart was going a mile a minute. Jess hadn't come home last night. I wanted to just get it over with and tell them, but she'd be so mad at me if I didn't keep her secret. “She'll probably sleep until lunch.” I opened up my
Beatles
magazine.

Mom leaned forward. “You know we don't read at the table.”

I glanced up. “Dad is.”

She folded her napkin. “That's different. That's the news.”

Dad eyed me. “Look at this. Your favorite group is in the paper.”

I took it from him and read, “August 15, 1965, will go down in history as the day the Beatles packed Shea Stadium with 55,000 screaming teenage fans.” I frowned. While I was sitting alone in my room, history was being made. If we hadn't moved to Tucson, maybe I could have been there.

Dad shook his head. “Kids today don't want to work, don't want to be part of society. All they want to do is go crazy over the Beatles. Isn't that right, Caroline?” He elbowed me.

“God. Stop it, Dad,” I said.

He sighed. “I wish I didn't have to work at a job I hate, but then we wouldn't have all of this.” I winced as he gestured at the small kitchen.

Mom brushed some crumbs from Dicky's face. “I worry that this country is about to fall apart.”

“You should be worried,” Dad said. “Everyone should be.”

I forced down another bite of eggs, and went back to my room. When I opened the door, I felt a sting of disappointment. I'd hoped that Jess had slipped in unnoticed, but she hadn't. My parents acted like they understood everything that was wrong with the world, but Jess was probably with Tony right now, hung-over, and they didn't have a clue.

I sat down at my desk, piled high with books from the summer reading list for the AP English class I was taking in the fall. Even though I only had to read three from the list, Dad had bought me every single one. Everywhere we went he would introduce me by saying, “This is Caroline, top of her class.” And then he would turn and say, “And this is Jess.”

After she got suspended for drinking in school back east, my parents sent her to a fancy performing arts school in Boston they thought would be perfect for her. It made me ill. I was the one who did well in school, and I had to go to public school. Jess lasted three months before she got kicked out for stealing booze with some boy.

I pulled
The Doors of Perception
from my pile of books. It was really short and about drugs, so I figured why not. My teacher was pretty cool to have put it on the list. If Jess were here right now, she'd probably be saying something like, “Caroline, if you want to learn about drugs you don't read about them. You take them.” I looked around at our pink walls, the pink bedspreads, our pink princess phone. Dust motes danced in the sunlight.

Her clothes were strewn all over the place, black lace bra and jeans on the back of a chair, one of her favorite white shoes on the floor. I loved those shoes. They had a white rose on the toe and a low heel. I slipped it on and limped around looking for the other one, but I couldn't find it. It was probably buried under all her other beautiful shoes in the closet.

As I took it off, I remembered the voice I'd heard in the night. Mummy was what Jess had called Mom when we were little. I'd called Mom that sometimes, too. I bit my nail. Everyone had bad dreams. Jess was going to waltz in whenever she pleased, without having given any of us a second thought. I'd be a fool to let her ruin my day.

I put on my op art bathing suit with the swirling black-and-white polka dots that went perfectly with the daisy necklace I'd made from black-and-white seed beads, grabbed the book and my
Beatles
magazine, and went outside to lie by the pool.

• • •

After rubbing on some suntan oil, I stretched out on a chaise longue. The turquoise water was flat and still. A couple of leaves from the orange tree that grew on the patio rested on the surface, not moving. Before we came here, Mom had raved about the beauty and wonder of that tree, but the oranges turned out to be dry and bitter. I reached down and grabbed one that had fallen next to my chair, flung it into the pool and opened
The Doors of Perception
.

This quote at the beginning knocked me out: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”

I'd always suspected that. When I was younger I used to do magic tricks, but to be honest, I stunk at them and they bored me. Now what interested me was real magic. I was convinced there was a whole other world out there where strange and impossible things could actually happen. It was just a matter of finding it.

Mom walked onto the patio with Dicky. “We're going shopping to buy some fabric, want to come?” she said.

I shook my head. The last thing I wanted to do was to go shopping with her.

She went on, “That's too bad. I'm making new living room curtains, something to brighten things up. What do you think of lemon yellow?”

“Lemon yellow sounds fine.” Her cheerfulness annoyed me. I'd made hardly any friends here, and we were practically living
in
the desert. Did she actually think new curtains would make any difference in our lives?

She took a deep breath. “Jess sure is sleeping a long time. Give her a nudge. It's not good for her to sleep the day away.”

A cold feeling passed through me. It had to be at least noon. Where was she? If she wasn't home by the time Mom got back, I'd have to say something. I heard Mom's station wagon pull out of the driveway. Dad was playing golf, as he did every Saturday. I switched to my
Beatles
magazine and studied Jane Asher's photo, her flowered mini-dress, her long bangs, her soft smile, her downward-slanting eyes that were like mine, her nose that was a little too big. I was thinking maybe I really did look like her, when something rustled on the other side of the fence. My hand tightened on my magazine.

I thought Jess might be sneaking in through our neighbor Debbie Frank's backyard, but when I peered over the fence, Debbie was walking toward me. This was strange. She hung out with Jess and Tony sometimes, but she almost never talked to me.

Her white-lipsticked mouth parted in a grin. “Hi, squirt,” she said. She wore a sleeveless dress with a red patent leather belt. Her dark hair was teased up on top, with a spit curl pressed against one cheek.

Jess called Debbie trashy. Mom did, too, but she was polite at least, while Jess was downright mean to her. Jess said Debbie was as cold as a robot, and dumber than one. Mom said you should never taunt someone for being less than you. You should feel sorry for them, but never let on that you feel sorry. I wasn't sure Debbie needed anyone to feel sorry for her. There were rumors she'd beaten a girl up just for looking at her the wrong way.

“What have you got there?” She eyed my magazine.

I blushed, embarrassed to be holding it. “Something about the Beatles.”

“Let me have a look.” As she glanced through it, cigarette dangling from her mouth, I tried to summon the courage to ask if she'd seen Jess.

Before Jess dated Tony, Debbie had dated him, though Jess said that Tony just used Debbie. When I asked what she meant by that, she laughed and said, “Boys like Tony have needs, and girls like Debbie are easy.” I stared at Debbie now, looking for signs of easiness. Was it her dull eyes with black eyeliner extending like wings from the corners, the way the top few buttons of her dress were undone, the way she didn't bother to push up her bra strap when it slipped below her sleeve?

“Cool.” She handed the magazine back to me. “You got a favorite Beatle?”

“Paul,” I said.

“Yeah, he's the sweet one. I like John. He's got a little meanness in him. I like my guys with a bit of meanness.”

“I wish I could meet Paul.”

“Hold tight to those dreams.” She touched the small red velvet bow in her hair, and glanced back at her yard like she was thinking of leaving.

I struggled to clear my throat. “Have you seen Jess today?”

Her eyes widened. “No.”

“She didn't come home last night,” I said.

She leaned closer and whispered loudly, “That's not surprising, considering she's on her way to California. Your sister sure is something, just taking off last night like that.”

“California?” I felt faint. Through a fog I heard her saying something like, “Didntchuknow?” I backed up, unable to feel my feet.