Phantom Limbs (4 page)

Meg’s fear of navigating new territory stuck with her. For good reason, too: that girl could leave Chicago heading for Wisconsin and end up in Kentucky. It made me smile. Thank God for GPS. Without it, she’d be a lost cause behind the wheel when she turned sixteen this July.

I also hoped Meg had another kind of GPS. One that would navigate her back to me.

I BARELY LEFT MY VIGIL AT THE COMPUTER except to scarf down dinner — spaghetti with a garlicky tomato sauce, fried eggplant cubes, green olives, and fresh basil. I covered mine with grated Romano cheese and spicy red pepper flakes and thought,
Meg would like this.
She’d been was one of those kids who liked everything — anchovies, blue cheese, sushi, you name it. She single-handedly broadened my palate to span nearly everything — I wanted to like everything she liked. I bit into an olive and recalled our parents’ martini phase — Meg and I liked to nick the gin-soaked olives from their cocktail glasses. Did Meg drink now? Or was she a total square like me?

Over dinner my mom and dad treated the subject of Meg and her dad’s return like a land mine to be tiptoed around. Before everything fell apart, our parents had been almost as close as Meg and I were. In the summers, we all had dinner together more nights than not, and we often planned our weekends together, too. Our parents referred to us as “the kids,” as if we were siblings. But I didn’t really know exactly how much our parents stayed in touch after Mason died and the Brandts moved away. The geographical distance was probably the least of their challenges. And the subject of the Brandts in general was one all three of us tended to shy away from.

“You know,” my mom said, swirling the wine in her glass and glancing up at me, “it’s possible they won’t even stay in Willow Grove. They could stay in the city. Jay might want to be close to work.”

“They’re staying up here,” my dad said quietly. “Could you pass the chili flakes?”

“They are?” My mom’s eyes flicked to him, sharp, accusing. She didn’t hand him the chili flakes, which were right in front of her, so I reached across and slid them toward my dad. “How do you know?” she asked him. “How much are you talking to him?”

“I’m not! He mentioned it in his message, that’s all.” My dad picked up the chili flakes and sprinkled them over his pasta so carefully that I was pretty sure he was more worried about setting my mom off than over-spicing his spaghetti. His defensiveness made me wonder if he missed Jay. He must. But my mom was the primary force in his life and we all knew it. He would probably do anything to keep her happy — even giving up a good friend. That didn’t seem fair to me.

“Well,” my mom said, reaching for the salad bowl, “I don’t see why Meg would want to be up here. She obviously left it all behind when they moved.”

You could cut the subtext with a knife.

Something out the dining-room window caught my eye and I glanced up. The kid next door was running after a soccer ball that had rolled into our yard. He dribbled the ball back toward his yard, but his dad rushed in and tried to steal it. Their legs tangled and the boy tumbled to the ground, flinging his arms out dramatically and playing dead. Laughing, his dad pulled him up.

My dad used to laugh.

I watched him twirling pasta onto his fork. “Dad? How long have Jay and Karen been separated? Do you know?”

He shook his head. My mom watched him for a long moment, then stabbed some salad onto her fork. It was so quiet after that I could hear the chewing.

After practice I had a message from Meg. I read it in the locker room, which did nothing to slow down my post-workout heart rate. Then I endured an interminable six-minute drive home with Dara before I could tear up to my room and open it on my computer:

For a casual message, it pretty much knocked the wind out of me. I was still reeling from the fact that after three years of silence, here she was, talking to me. And she wanted to see me — I reread that last line about the tour until it was seared on my brain, smiley face and all. And she had referenced Mason, sort of: those bike rides were our unauthorized visits to the cemetery.

One month. She’d be back in town in one month. It seemed unreal. I wrote:

I considered deleting that. It seemed stupid. Why would she want to come to my fucking swim meet? But I wanted to make it clear that I wanted to see her, and the joke about the tour seemed too easy for her to dismiss.

I stared at my message, then finally hit Send.

I tried to study for my calc test while I waited for a response. Finally, at eleven, it came:

Just the word “Speedo,” coming from her, sent an electric jolt through me. Did she realize I wasn’t exactly the same skinny little weakling I was when she last saw me? Still, the idea of her thinking about me almost naked gave me palpitations. I
had
to look better naked than Football Guy. A swimmer and a football player? Please. Bring it on.

Oh God — had she seen him naked?

Must. Stop. Thinking.

I couldn’t come up with a single safe thing to say. Ultimately I just wrote:

Saturday morning after practice, I showered and dressed, then waited in the hall for Dara to come out of the locker room. Kiera emerged, combing her wet hair. “Hey, Otis. You know Dara left, right?”

“She did?” I checked my phone for a message. Nothing.

“You need a ride home?” Kiera smiled at me and tipped her head. It reminded me of Meg, who had this way of tilting her head when she asked me a question, or when she listened to me. It made me feel interesting. Important. Loved.

“Earth to Otis?” Kiera widened her already-big brown eyes and jingled her car keys.

“That’d be great. Thanks.”

Kiera’s car was new — a far cry from Dara’s. It had that glorious new-car smell. Dara’s had that chlorine-and-old-french-fries smell.

“So you’re practicing a lot out of season,” I said as Kiera drove to my house. She knew where I lived without asking for directions, which I decided not to overanalyze. “Don’t you usually just do mornings?”

She shrugged, squinting against the late-morning sun. “I don’t mind swimming doubles in club season, if I have time. I don’t know how you keep up with homework, the way you train. And don’t you have, like, a four-point-oh GPA?”

“No,” I said, waving her off — though it actually was pretty close to a 4.0.

We talked about our honors English class. Kiera thought Chapman was kind of a dud, but I didn’t think he was so bad. “Well, sure,
you’d
think that,” she teased. “You’re his favorite, obviously.”

I blushed and, unable to locate actual words, made a few random noises.

When she pulled into my driveway, she turned to me with that provocative smile of hers. “Hey, are you hungry? ’Cause I’m starving.”

Under other circumstances, I might have said yes, but all I wanted to do was sit and watch for a message from Meg. “I’ll probably just raid the fridge for leftovers,” I told Kiera, picking my bag up. “I have a ton of homework.” I rolled my eyes for effect.

She nodded, but I felt her disappointment.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said as I got out of the car. I started up the walkway, habitually averting my eyes from the front bay window. It’s where Mason used to sit, in the window seat, watching for me to get home from school. The perpetual emptiness of that window was a chronic stab of pain. It never got easier.

Kiera beeped as she pulled away, and I turned to wave. As she drove off, my eyes were drawn to the magnolia, now in obscene full bloom. On impulse, I pulled out my phone and took a picture of it.

Upstairs, I posted the photo without comment on Facebook, where I never posted anything, and made it public. If Meg ever stalked me the way I stalked her, she might see it.

I ate lunch, and then worked on my last English homework assignment for the year — a sonnet, courtesy of Chapman and our unit on Shakespeare.

Fucking sonnets. They’re only ever about one thing: love.

I was screwed.

I got up and looked at the window that once was Meg’s. A ten- or eleven-year-old boy lived in that room now, but I could still envision it as it used to be: the violets-and-ivy wallpaper border, the antique quilt that covered her bed, the corner of her room dedicated to her ten thousand stuffed animals, each of whom had a name, a distinct personality, and a complicated backstory that she’d made up — or made me make up. She liked it best when I did it.

I gazed at the magnolia tree, remembering the view of it from Meg’s window — framed by white lace curtains and her collection of snow globes on the sill.

There it was — line one of my sonnet, iambic pentameter and all.

Froofy.
I could hear Dara’s voice in my head. Ignoring it, I stretched my arms, rolled my head around, cracked my knuckles, and continued.

By evening it was finished. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but I thought it wasn’t bad.

Meg was not a terrible muse.

Waiting to see if she’d comment about the magnolia photo was killing me. She was probably out for the evening — it was Saturday night, sacred date night for couples. For losers like me, options were kind of pathetic. The guys were getting together at D’Amico’s house for pizza and a slasher movie. They kept texting, cajoling me into coming over, but I wasn’t in the mood. Dara texted, too, saying,
Wanna go eat?

I was about to decline, but then Meg posted a new picture of herself with Football Guy. Apparently he also plays guitar. Fuck me. They had their mouths open in the same position, so I guessed they were singing together. Suddenly I felt like I could use a change of scenery.

Sure
, I texted Dara.

I waited for her downstairs, watching the NBA playoffs with my dad, while my mom, whose sports interests centered on football, paged through some work papers. My dad and I didn’t know all that much about basketball, but even we knew to root for the Bulls and to hate the Cavaliers. If Meg’s dad had been watching with us, he would’ve yelled for Derrick Rose and complained about bad calls and commented endlessly about pick-and-rolls and triple-doubles and flagrants and other things my dad and I had little comprehension of. I wondered if he was watching the game in California, and if Meg was watching with him. Meg could holler at basketball with the best of them.

My dad and I cheered as we watched, and soon I heard the screech of Dara’s brakes in the driveway.

My mom sighed loudly, then looked at me over her reading glasses. “Can’t you get that girl to stop tearing into the driveway like a maniac? You tell her if she can’t drive safely, she won’t be driving you at all!”