Stranded (3 page)

“Better,” Nana approved.

It was honestly horrible.

LATER THAT DAY, NATALIE’S AND MY SHARED
bedroom still wasn’t Kelly Louise–spectacular. To add insult to injury, Natalie had removed my poster of dead Heath Ledger from the wall because she didn’t care for his work in
Brokeback Mountain
. I thought his naked scene was second only to
A Knight’s Tale
, where he pranced naked without a tent blocking the frame.

I experienced withdrawal symptoms from the coffee, internet, and cell phone use Nana denied me until I had more of my room in order. The hours between when Mom and I had arrived and when I finally finished figuring out where to stash my rhinestone belts were the slowest of my life.

Toward evening, when I had gotten a little further on the accessories, I rested in the living room and wrote
a letter to Katy. I used one of Natalie’s notebooks. I had no idea where my own school supplies were—probably still in my locker in Des Moines. I hoped I had at least remembered to remove the Tupperware container of spaghetti that I had for lunch on my last day.

The activity of describing the routine at Nana’s was a break from the pressure of living with Natalie. She seemed to want to worry me about everything—perverts at the QuickMart, spilling juice on the counter, leaving the toothpaste cap on the edge of the sink. She hadn’t always been as relentless as a hen. I underlined the words
going insane
three times in my description of her to Katy, something I wouldn’t have been able to do if I was simply texting. The only uncomfortable subject Natalie hadn’t introduced was Baby Grace, but maybe she figured a dead baby in a field sent its own message, or silence on the topic was the best way to worry me.

I missed not being able to use emoticons to express my feelings, and it was hard inventing adjectives. By improving my writing skills, though, I hoped to return to Des Moines to diagram sentences without upsetting my English teacher or needing to text Katy. While I wrote, I lifted the television remote and flipped channels until I settled on an infomercial for vitamins that increased brain function.

Midway through the testimony of a person who had miraculously learned to speak Spanish after only one weekend, Nana entered the room and wagged her head at the way my lazy body was draped over her furniture. She lifted my feet and rotated them until they were side by side on the floor and I was sitting straight. Her palms were warm and wet on my shins, probably from the load of dishes she had rinsed and put away.

Nana didn’t trust the dishwasher to do its job, either.

“Sorry, Nana.” I remained in the position she’d arranged me in.

I also almost asked why someone would buy an overstuffed couch if they didn’t mean people to flop. To me, the mystery was like the sound of one hand clapping, but I knew Nana would mistake my innocent curiosity for sassiness. She had also been huffing at me all day.

“I’m going out,” she notified me. “You girls behave yourselves while your mother and I are away.”

“We will,” I promised.

Nana slipped into her coat, buttoning it from the bottom, her old fingers moving slowly until she reached the last toggle by her throat. She tied a paisley scarf over her hair and fumbled in her purse for her car keys.

“I’m going to play euchre with my card group,” she said. I assumed she had already told Natalie.

Her taking time to keep me informed was sweet. Mom carried a cell phone when she went out. What devilishness, though—Nana and her cards. Euchre wasn’t exactly thousand-dollar-a-game Texas Hold’em, or beer bong bingo but, still, a racy choice of activity for the nether years. I wondered if there were sexy widowers in Nana’s club and if they did shots when someone lost a round. I was glad to see Nana taking the time to enjoy herself. Card games were much less stressful to the heart than supervising room cleaning.

When the door shut and I was sure Nana would not return to be pained at the sight, I put my feet on the couch again. Meanwhile, I scribbled more of my letter to Katy. I felt guilty about wasting paper and killing trees but I was expressing my suffering with the hope that the rainforest was ancient enough to understand.

While I wrote, the doorbell rang not once but twice.

“Could somebody get that?” I yelled, even though I was closest.

Natalie had been in the vicinity earlier, warning me to be careful with the pen near the upholstery.

“Hello?” I shouted again.

When Natalie didn’t appear, I dropped the notebook,
almost expecting Freddy from Elm Street to be on the doorstep. Instead, a man in a V-necked sweater scraped his feet on the mat. He had very white teeth, like a visiting dentist or the father on the box top of a board game.

“Hi there,” I greeted him. I cocked my hip on the jamb.

“Hi, sweetie.” Dr. Dentist glanced over my shoulder. “Could you tell your mom I’m here?”

Someone from Bonny’s Hair Hut, where Mom had rented a chair before our arrival, must have sent Mr. or Dr. Sweetie our way to keep Mom from succumbing to the same urban withdrawal symptoms I had. Either that or Mom knew Dr. Sweetie from high school and he and she were reuniting.

“Could you fetch your mom?” Dr. Sweetie asked again because I was rooted to the spot, giving him a second chance to be more wowed by my presence.

For some reason, maybe because I only had one pair of socks in my bra, he seemed not to see me. Heaven was such a small playing field, he might have been worried he was my father. Incest anxiety could potentially prevent a person from pumping out the usual allowance of endorphins. The thought that I was related to Dr. Sweetie made me uncock my hips. What if I had V-necked sweaters in my genes?

Mom breezed out of the bathroom trailing the smell of jasmine, Katy’s scent exactly.

“Don’t wait up.” Mom jingled her keys as she passed me.

“I won’t,” I lied.

On the nights Mom went on dates, I never slept. When I discussed the havoc my insomnia was wreaking with the skin under my eyelids, Mom suggested that I try cucumber slices.

Having Mom leave spooked me, but Dr. Sweetie shouting “Yahtzee” or “You sank my battleship” as he orgasmed was also seriously stomach turning. Not all of Mom’s boyfriends were as fake friendly as Dr. Sweetie, but each of them seemed to have a defect or a way of treating me that made me feel like I was six. I disliked having to make small talk with them or meet them in the middle of the night on their way to the bathroom.

Dr. Sweetie escorted Mom down the steps, his hand hovering in the air behind her shoulder blades. She looked beautiful in her black skirt and high heels.

“Who was that?” Natalie appeared a few seconds later, over the deafness that had made it impossible for her to answer the doorbell earlier.

“Mom’s date,” I answered.

“Oh.”

Natalie twirled, modeling the nightgown she had tried on earlier in the day. Mom’s compliment was still with her, and Natalie’s fashion show made me think she might have attracted more of Dr. Sweetie’s attention than I did. I heard Dr. Sweetie’s car start in the drive.

“Nice,” I told Natalie, leaving lesbians out of it this time.

I dropped onto the couch, retrieved the notebook, and wrote my thoughts about my Mom’s latest man-visitor to Katy. I listed my concerns about his loafers even though I knew Katy believed that grown women needed to pursue their sex lives with grown men and that I shouldn’t blame Mom for acting on her adult needs with partners who wore bad shoes. I understood Katy’s logic. Maybe because there had been too many emotional ups and downs in Mom’s life, I never minded when her love interests went their own way again. Maybe all of Natalie’s flouncing had turned
me
into a lesbian.

“Stop,” I told her as she danced around the living room.

I wondered what it had been like for Natalie living in Nana’s house, where the male gender only dropped in if they were called to fix plumbing problems.

Quiet, probably.

For me, the quietness of Nana’s was a break from the rigorous schedule of sex, sex, sex in Des Moines.

On weekends Katy and I headed to the Jordan Creek Mall. We followed strange hotties and not-so-hotties from store to store, daring each other to approach and say, “Hi, sailor,” or “Come here often?” Katy once used the line “Excuse me, sir, can you direct me to where I might purchase a thong?” Our favorite place to choose targets was outside Victoria’s Secret.

I contemplated what it would be like to follow a man with Natalie, who was eye-popping in the nightgown. The activity might make her feel less afraid of shoes with heels and loosen her grip on her virginity pledge. Teaching her about my faster-paced world, a place where everything didn’t have ruffles, might cause her to forget whatever had been making her peck at me the last few days. Inspired by the idea of improving her, and seeing the advantages of having a hot cousin, I flipped a page of the notebook and started scripting a fan letter to the vampire in the movie
Twilight
.

“I’m writing to my boyfriend,” I explained.

Natalie glanced at the page. My guess was that she secretly wanted to have her blood sucked dry too.

My handwriting was big and loopy and dopey-looking, large enough for her to read easily over my
shoulder even though she acted like she wasn’t interested in what I was doing. I wrote that I would give Mr. Vampire a blow job if he visited me and that I was an expert at oral sex. I added hearts to the bottoms of my exclamation points. It made a huge difference to the balance of the work to stick a couple of arrows through the hearts, stabbing them in half.

“Are you really going to send that?” she asked, pointing at my masterpiece after I had finished it.

“I might,” I said.

“Not really?”

I signed her name to the bottom.

She noticed the addition and squealed, leaping off the couch, flailing to recover the pen and the letter. We both struggled on the floor as we wrestled for them. If we were in a
Girls Gone Wild
video, we would have kissed or licked each other and torn each other’s clothes off—talk about lesbos—but since we weren’t, Natalie pried the pen and notebook out of my hands and started to rip the page free.

“Think of that poor boy,” I gasped, out of breath.

“What about him?” she asked.

Natalie wasn’t fragile. She had been tense about perverts, but now that Nana was out of the house, she acted like she wanted all the same things I did—wickedness,
adventure, sex, not to be alone, not to be trapped in some distant town away from a place where you could buy coffee.

I described the glow in Mr. Vampire’s eyes, his steamy thoughts intertwined with hers. She started to crumple the page, but perhaps because her true self was bursting to be free, she changed her mind. She climbed off me and added more dirty stuff, some of it smutty and creative for an avowed virgin, definitely not what you’d expect from a girl who brushed her hair a hundred strokes a night. I’d heard the language she used before, but never from her.

When she finished, she signed, “Sherry Wimple.”

“Who is Sherry Wimple?” I asked.

It seemed like we might finally get to the subject of Baby Grace after a full day of not talking about her. I worried that Natalie was keeping Baby Grace in reserve, to use as some nuclear attack now that my guard was down—she had used sneaky tactics to justify taking more shelf space in our room.

“A friend.” Natalie retrieved an envelope and folded her work of art into it.

“What’s she like?” I asked.

“She’s different than you.” Natalie looked at me strangely.

Natalie confused me. She had so many moods.

I rolled from the floor and ran into the kitchen. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for, but in the pantry I found the gin my grandmother kept around for medicinal purposes. I wasn’t considering drinking it—at least, not more than I could handle, not enough to get reeling drunk like Aunt Denise used to on the holidays.

“What are you doing?” Natalie glanced at the bottle when I returned to the living room and placed it on the coffee table.

“I thought we would get to the bottom of this,” I replied.

NATALIE STARED AT THE GIN. I’M SURE A MEMORY
surfaced—our grandfather after he lost his farm, Aunt Denise.

“It’s OK,” she said after a pause similar to the one that had preceded her additions to our letter to the vampire.

“It is?” I asked.

“Nana sometimes lets me,” she explained.

“Really?” I was amazed.

“Yes.”

She revealed that Nana poured herself two fingers before viewing
Dancing with the Stars
and other network favorites, and that Nana included her in the ritual because drinking alone wasn’t healthy. It was quite the revelation. Mom never consumed anything other than a glass of wine when we were together,
though I had done shots with Katy on more than one occasion. Unfortunately, I had also puked. And yet, if I was a once-or-twice derelict, Natalie allegedly had been getting loose with our fifty-two-year-old nana regularly for the last two years.

Loose but not soused; Natalie explained the difference. Some sort of restraint went into it.

Just to be sure Natalie knew the rules of consumption I lived by, I asked, “You won’t tell?”

“I can keep a secret, Kelly Louise,” she insisted.

“You can?” I tried to remember one rule I had broken that she hadn’t told Nana about since we were six. Nothing surfaced, but maybe I needed to try brain enhancement vitamins.

Natalie smiled with her lips closed.

I could have been making a horrible mistake, risking getting caught, and yet an emotional breakthrough with Natalie mattered more than my worries about what Nana would think. Natalie was the closest thing I had to Katy. I needed someone to get into trouble with. I couldn’t be expected to make only responsible decisions for the next four months.

“Let’s do it,” I decided, acting as if we were heading to the QuickMart for Popsicles or trying on more of Mom’s clothes.

We poured splashes of gin into glasses of orange soda,
Natalie filling hers to the halfway point. Instead of hopping right to prank phone calls and rituals of alcoholic sisterhood, though, we fought for the remote until she cheated, won and flipped away from the infomercial on brain enhancement drugs. She stopped at the news program
20/20
, a show I avoided on Mom’s date nights because why invite creepy. The odd-looking host with the mustache was just intoducing “The Case of the Bludgeoned Beauty.”

“Are you sure you want to watch this?” I asked.

“It looks interesting,” Natalie responded.

For the next few minutes, we drank gin while the host listened to a poor bereaved man confess his love for his murdered wife. The man’s eyes dewed as he gave his version of the events leading to the tragedy. I suggested a game of truth-or-dare. I even asked Natalie about Carrie Nation (the high school in Heaven I would be attending for the next few weeks). I questioned her about which of her teachers she thought would look the best in leather pants. She shushed me without answering.

Then the husband’s lip twitched, and I knew he was guilty. Most people have a part of their face or body that gives them away, and one good thing about watching television is, you get plenty of opportunity to see how little tells work. I poured more gin from
the bottle into my glass.

“Kelly Louise, don’t overdo,” Natalie warned me when she looked to see me set the bottle down.

“I’m not,” I insisted, but I was.

I suggested sneaking to Nana’s room to see if Nana had a vibrator hidden in her bedside table. (Eleven years is a long time to go without a husband.) Natalie waved me to the other side of the couch. The scary man explained how a bloody shovel had gotten into his garage.

The
20/20
reporter interviewed several citizens of the shovel man’s town. Each talked about how much they trusted their neighbor before he snapped and started wielding gardening tools. I decided never to live in a small place, since more than half the crimes
20/20
covers occur in places exactly like Heaven or in western Canada. If Natalie’s friend Sherry Wimple, with her love of vampires, had been the one to abandon Baby Grace, it would be Natalie and me who would be on television. “She seemed so innocent,” I would have to say.

“Do you ever think it’s weird, living here?” I asked Natalie.

Natalie shifted onto the floor and told me life was a little slower in Heaven but the people here were good and I didn’t need to lock the door. She said she planned
to come back to visit every summer after she moved to Hollywood to pursue a Christian singing career.

“Can you do that there?” I wondered. Britney Spears started out as a Christian, but Natalie had always been a different kind of nut.

“Of course,” Natalie said.

The last time we had talked about our future plans, Natalie’s hadn’t included leaving Nana to wither away alone in such an eerie place. I wondered if Natalie suspected that Nana had an illness or whether she had been left out of the loop too. My cousin lay on the white carpet, the nightgown bunched under her stomach. Her knees were bent and the bottoms of her feet faced the ceiling. Her straight red-brown hair fell over her back and shoulder and she smiled, though nothing funny had occurred since we had finished our letter to Mr. Vampire. After she took a sip of orange soda and gin, Natalie raised the subject of a party she had attended at a Quonset hut in the cornfields.

The topic was much more interesting than wife-murdering husbands or thinking of my nana without someone around to take care of her.

“Did you get drunk?” I asked.

“It was an amazing evening,” Natalie told me, tilting
her chin. “Thank goodness I had someone looking out for me.”

“Who?” I jolted in my seat on the couch.

“Can’t you guess?”

“A boyfriend? You have a boyfriend?”

Everyone had a boyfriend lately. Katy had three.

“Tell me about him!” I pleaded.

“He’s older,” she admitted. “He has a beard.”

“Hot,” I complimented her.

“He has handsome eyes,” she declared, as if she were staring him in the face that moment.

Her face was lit by the lamp next to her. In my effort to sidle closer so I could learn which base she was on and which she wanted to steal, I knocked the table. My glass toppled and an orange stain spread on the carpet. I watched it fade and absorb into the pile. Mistakes happen—soda spills, bearded boyfriends.

“Oops,” I said.

“Stupid.” Natalie spit, bending her brows together.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she repeated. I heard her on times number one, two, and three.

She ran into the kitchen for paper towels while I used one of my socks to swipe the soda. When Natalie returned, she snatched my sopping sock and unrolled a wad of towels.

“You dab.” She bunched the paper together and poked at the carpet. “Like this.”

“Thank you for the household hint.” I tried to be funny.

She hissed that I was the most immature fifteen-year-old she had ever met, even though I had gone out of my way to watch
20/20
without chewing on my thumb. She balled the saturated mess in her hands and wound more from the depleted roll. The overconsumption felt like a slap. It was just like her to put a stupid white carpet over living, breathing trees. With each rip, God’s green children died needless deaths in some depleted forest, and maybe the harm that she inflicted caused my relocation frustration to escape.

“Miss Mary Mop-It-Up,” I said.

Natalie’s face stiffened.

“What do you mean by that, Kelly Louise?”

“Miss Betty Bitch.”

Natalie dropped her paper towel. Before I had a chance to take back the word
bitch
, she fled to the bathroom and slammed the door. I heard the lock slide shut.

She always overreacted. Being a bitch means you have a strong mind. Katy’s a bitch.

When Natalie didn’t return, though I didn’t want
to apologize or have anything to do with the mess, I scrubbed, blotted, and moved the couch to a new position. I knew Natalie would be better at hiding the mess from Nana than me, but I sensed she wasn’t capable of more dabbing at that exact moment, at least until she understood I hadn’t been insulting her.

It sounded like Natalie was running a bath. I turned off the television and went to lie on my bed. I wanted to hear about the rest of Natalie’s love affair. She had a weird imagination; even when we were nine, she spooked me by making me believe the ghost of a dead girl lived in Nana’s attic. She also talked nonstop one summer about fairies in the backyard. Before I could decide whether to tiptoe down the hall and tell her what I had really meant by lashing out at her, Mom returned—thankfully without Dr. Sweetie.

Mom discovered Natalie in the bathroom, and another minute later she loomed in the bedroom doorway.

Before I could explain, she asked, “Kelly Louise, how could you?”

“What?” I tried to seem less like I had been drinking earlier.

“Wipe the smirk off your face,” she scolded.

“I’m not smirking.”

And yet I was weirdly contorting my mouth. I didn’t mean to make a face, but little smiles sometimes twisted the edges of my thoughts, and things that shouldn’t have been funny became that way when I was about to get into trouble. Mom delivered a speech about the expense of the carpet, how much it was going to cost to clean, and how she planned to deduct the money from the allowance she only sometimes remembered to give me. Her voice and her words, including practicalities like how far we would have to drive to rent a steam cleaner, made me realize she didn’t suspect I’d been drinking gin, but if I lifted one eyebrow, that would be the end of the secret.

In Des Moines, I spilled daily. My hands never gripped; when I held a cup, if something made me laugh, I would shake so hard that milk, soda, or juice would fly. Sometimes, if the joke was good enough, liquid would shoot out my nose. Mom wasn’t much better. By one of the radiators of our old apartment, there was a spot on the floor where she had dropped a bottle of coral-pink nail polish.

I fumbled out of bed and caught my foot in my lacy new bedspread, which matched Natalie’s lacy bedspread in a way that was cute but might give a person a chill if they looked at them together too long. I trailed Mom
down the hall and watched her scrub and blot the rug another half hour while Natalie, pale and tearstained, emerged from the bathroom and gathered the supplies Mom needed—bleach, more paper towels, a scrub brush. They worked until Mom had exhausted herself and the stain was as close to invisible as Mom could make it—which meant no more invisible than we had left it.

“The orange is not coming out,” Mom confessed.

I said nothing, but Mom whispered, “Stop.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Francine.” Natalie wiped a tear from her eye.

“Oh, darling.” Mom noticed Natalie was weeping and scooted on her knees to hold her in her arms.

“I didn’t do anything,” I defended myself. I had dropped my glass but only because Natalie hadn’t told me about her boyfriend.

“Go get more paper towels, baby,” Mom directed me.

I left for the kitchen and returned with another roll. Mom often reminded me how hard Natalie’s life had been, and how lucky I was in comparison, and though she was taking Natalie’s side more than mine in response to the accident, I understood that Natalie deserved
some
sympathy. It must be hard, being afraid
to wear low necklines and not strong-minded enough to be a bitch. Natalie and Mom rocked on the floor of the living room, rubbing the snot from their noses on each other’s shoulders. My mother cooed and patted Natalie’s shoulder while Natalie gasped and wailed. After a few minutes, Mom tucked my cousin’s hair behind her ear and assured her that the rug was going to be all right.

Sorensons are very emotional—possibly the reason we have a history of farm foreclosure and alcoholism.

Finally, Mom sent Natalie off to bed. I had been hoping Mom and I might have a private chat and asked her if it would be OK if I filed my nails in her room. I thought maybe Mom would reveal why she had been so hard on me or tell me about her night with Dr. Sweetie and why she had given him a pass. I expected she might tell me what Nana’s ailment was. Instead, while Natalie curled into her bed on the other side of the wall, Mom finally told me the story of why we had moved to Heaven.