The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life (6 page)

“Would you eat bugs?” Dez asked.

“Absolutely,” I said, puzzling again over that lady by the lake in the sky on the list.

“
You’d
eat insects,” Winter said skeptically.

“If it was the only way to win, yes.” I was trying to figure out when and how we could manage to catch an ant with our trap and keep it alive until Round 2.

“I don’t believe you.” Winter shook her head. “I’ve seen you jump into a pool fully clothed just to get away from a bee.”

“I was hot!” I protested.

The jar of fireflies would have to be gathered at exactly
the right time of day, which was when, exactly? When
did
fireflies come out? And for how long?

“Yeah, right,” Winter said.

“Would you let Barbone slip you some tongue?” Dez pressed.

“Gross!” I said, thinking more about where to get some 5T clothes for the Yeti; maybe at the sporting goods store? “And anyway that would never be on the list.”

Patrick said, “I totally thought there’d be skinny-dipping.” And then as the conversation went on, he kept saying it.

Again and again.

“I really thought there’d be skinny-skipping.”

“I bet there’s going to be skinny-dipping.”

Finally I said, “What’s with you and skinny-dipping?”

“Patrick just wants to see the two of you naked,” Dez said, and I choked a little in my throat from surprise—Winter, too—though really I shouldn’t have.

Ask a stupid question….

But the truth was, for someone who’d never even had sex, Patrick had a funny kind of weirdly strong sexuality—or was it sensuality?—about him.

What if it
had
meant something?

“Maybe it’s
you
I want to see naked, Dez,” Patrick said jovially. “Did you ever think of that?”

“Patrick, Patrick, Patrick,” Dez said, shaking his head and looking far away out the window. “If you only knew.”

“Focus, people,” Winter said, and so I obeyed and looked at the list. “I’m pretty sure there’s a silver bangle at my great-aunt Eleanor’s house,” I blurted.

“And a flag.”

I turned a page.

“And a snow globe.”

And kept scanning.

“And a bunch of the kitchen utensils.”

And scanned some more.

“And a music box that plays ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.’”

I stopped talking as the point values piled up in my head.

“Guys,” I said, feeling my pulse quicken, “Eleanor’s house is a
gold mine
.” I couldn’t get words out fast enough. “She’s got all sorts of old random weird crap. Probably more stuff I’m not even thinking of. Possibly like, I don’t know, three hundred points worth of crap.”

“We’re going to take stuff from a dead woman?” Winter asked.

“Can we even get in?” Dez asked.

“Yes and yes,” I said. “Keys under Mary on the Half Shell.”

“Wait.” Dez flipped through his list. “There’s a Mary on the Half Shell on here.”

“What? Where?” I flipped, too, and confirmed it—
Shuck a Mary on the half shell
—and my hands started to shake with nerves and excitement. Then Dez said, “What the hell is a Mary on the Half Shell?”

I could count the Marys on the Half Shell I knew of in Oyster Point on one hand and was suddenly sick with fear that another team had gotten to Eleanor’s before us. Her house was on a pretty busy street, but the garden had grown over with weeds, so hopefully anyone who knew it was there in the first place had forgotten about it.

“Patrick, drive,” I said. “Before anyone else gets it.”

He made a U-turn and Winter said, “What about Flying Saucers?”

“What’s a Mary on the Half Shell?” Dez all but screamed.

“It’s a statue of the Virgin Mary,” I explained. “In a grotto that’s sort of shaped like a shell, I guess. So if we have to shuck one, it means we have to take the statue from her shell.”

Dez shook his head and said, “You Catholics are weird.”

“It’s worth a hundred points,” I said again. “That’s an awful lot. And if somebody else takes Eleanor’s statue, my family is never going to get over it.”

We rode on in silence until a text from the Yeti came through that said, HIT US WITH YOUR EARLY POINTS TOTALS SO WE CAN SHARE. WE WON’T NAME NAMES.

So I texted in 285—Home Depot plus Mary—which wasn’t exact
yet
, but we’d be there and beyond soon enough. A few minutes later a text came back that said: LEADING TEAM HAS 285.

“Guys,” I said, “I think we’re in the lead.”

There were high fives and whoops and I could feel my heart swell just the tiniest bit but then shrink back down to an even smaller size on account of Mary on the Half Shell.

Please, God, let her still be there,
I thought, and then Patrick blew through a yellow light and I loved him for it.

I HAD TO DIG THROUGH WEEDS AND BRAMBLE,
swatting away bugs I’d startled—God, I hated bugs—before I could exhale.

Mary was still there.

She was maybe two feet tall, dressed in the Holy Mother’s standard-issue white-and-blue hooded robe—with her hands pressed flat together in prayer. Her lips were tiny and pink and her nostrils mere indents the same color as her peach skin. Her blue eyes appeared to have been crying paint thinner, since a trail of dissolved paint ran down each cheek. Gray bird gunk soiled her gown’s hood and right shoulder and the expression on her face seemed calm, like she’d just been waiting for me.

“I’m going to have to clean her up a bit,” I said as I grabbed her and the house keys.

“You’re
incredibly
lucky no one else got to her,” Patrick said, and I knew he was right.

The way everyone in my family treated that statue—making the sign of the cross whenever they walked past it, even just when driving by the house—had always made me a little bit scared of it, like it held some special power. I’d been
posed in front of it for pictures I was too little to remember taking, like at my baptism and my first communion. And I’d spent hours of my youth tending the weeds around her, or fighting with Grace about which one of us was going to do it. All because Great-Aunt Eleanor had brought the statue home from Italy at the end of World War Two, having purchased it in Sienna on the day victory had been declared in Europe, aka “VE-Day.” We weren’t supposed to worship idols as Catholics, but my family had obviously missed that catechism lesson or thought the VE-Day angle bought them a pass in this one case. Throughout my childhood, I’d occasionally prayed to the statue myself, but I prayed less and less the older I got. Not because I felt my prayers had gone unanswered—though they mostly had—but because my own pleas had become so petty, at least when you put them into words.

Please, God, can you make him like me?

Please, God, just one more cup size?

Please, God, Georgetown!

Please, God, shut me up!

Up the porch steps we went and then I fussed with the door and we all went inside, where it smelled strongly of old lady—like dust and cheap shampoo and old sock–drawer potpourri. Despite my family’s best efforts, we still hadn’t entirely emptied the house. Bags and bags of trash and recycling had already been hauled out, but there was just
so much stuff
.

“Okay,” I said, setting Mary down by the kitchen sink, and pulling out some cleaning products.

“You really don’t feel bad taking stuff from a dead woman?” Winter asked, and I said, “She won’t know the difference.”

“I don’t know, Mare,” Winter said, eyeing Eleanor’s doll collection, an army of small porcelain girls wearing clothing meant to represent their home nations, like some kind of bizarro Miss Universe pageant. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“She
was
sort of scary,” Dez said as he started rummaging through kitchen drawers. I’d given everybody assignments in the car the way Dez had done for the Deep.

“Well, I liked her,” Patrick said, and he took the steps two at a time, heading for the upstairs bedrooms.

That makes one of us,
I thought, but I didn’t say it, I just set about cleaning up Mary. “Ten minutes and we’re out of here,” I said, and shouts came back from different rooms to say, “Okay!”

Great-Aunt Eleanor had died that past fall and I hadn’t been that sad about it initially, a fact that had me sort of worried about my character. I wondered whether it was just because she had been very old and very sick and also just not that nice of a person on account of her sharp tongue and rigid ideas. Patrick agreed that it was probably because she was so old but he put a better spin on it, taking it as a sign of some kind of emotional maturity on my part.

“Well, we’re all going to die,” he’d said. “And when you’re as old as Eleanor, it’s not that tragic so that’s why you’re not upset.”

I think he was giving me more credit than I deserved but I went with it.

For a while, anyway.

But then Eleanor, who’d served in the army as a nurse during World War II, had gone and gotten buried at Arlington
National Cemetery. She’d retired with the impressive rank (especially for a woman) of lieutenant colonel and so had been given star treatment as her bodily remains were ushered to their final resting place. A band. A firing guard. A 21-gun salute. Even horses that pulled the caisson down to the gravesite.

I hadn’t cried at all during the wake and the funeral in Oyster Point, but Arlington was an entirely different story. My mother had designated me as the person to accept the flag during the service. So I had been assigned a certain folding chair to sit on, on a small patch of Astroturf laid on the ground by the hole for the casket, and after six soldiers folded up the coffin flag into a tight triangle, one soldier—barely older than I was—kneeled in front of me and looked right at me with eyes deeper than seemed right and handed me the flag, reciting some speech about “a grateful nation.”

I’d lost it.

Completely.

I didn’t even know why.

Except that the whole thing had made me feel small and selfish and alone.

I’d gone and toured Georgetown’s campus the next day—my parents hadn’t wanted to travel down to D.C. twice, so we’d scrambled to make arrangements for college visits—and I’d fallen in love with D.C. and the Georgetown campus and everything and anything I heard about the bachelor’s of science degree in Foreign Service—an undergrad program that prepared people for lives of diplomacy and humanitarian work across the globe. I hadn’t even known that such a degree existed, but it suddenly seemed possible that I could do something that would change the world, maybe be an ambassador or work for the UN. I wasn’t cut out for war, no.
But maybe I was cut out for diplomacy? I could make my life, my self, bigger—the way Eleanor had. When my parents told me, some months later, that Eleanor had left me enough money to pay for my entire college education that had sealed the deal.

“She lived quite a life, your aunt,” Patrick had said one day that winter, after I’d told him he could have the old cameras of Eleanor’s that he’d found when we’d first started trying to clean out the house. Long after I thought he’d gone home that day, I’d found him out front with an old Polaroid, photographing Mary on the Half Shell in the snow. The photos were instantly old looking and cool—a little bit white-washed and blurry, like the Mary statue wasn’t really a figure carved out of stone but was some sort of unearthly apparition.

“She was ahead of her time,” he said, and his breath was fog. “Getting her own mortgage. Getting her degree through the GI bill. Going for a master’s on top of nursing. Most women back then were barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.”

I laughed and pulled my hood up and said, “You have a funny way of looking at things. And you know
way more
about my great-aunt Eleanor than you are required to know as my friend.”

He shrugged inside his red parka. “I just listened to the eulogy is all.”

“Well, she was certainly driven,” I admitted, blowing on my frigid hands. “And she didn’t really seem to like men much, so barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen wasn’t likely.” Eleanor had never had a kind word for her father—a great-grandfather I’d never met—who apparently drank too much.

“You’re a lot like her, you know.” Patrick was taking another photo.

“I like men!” I protested.

He was amused and shaking his head. “Calm yourself, Mare. I just mean that you’re really driven. And independent. And focused.”

“All right, Harvard,” I had said, because really, who was the driven one?

“I just don’t think there’s anything you can’t do if you put your mind to it,” he said.

And for a while, anyway, at least until I’d been rejected by Georgetown, it had felt true.

“I found a silver bangle,” Winter called out from one bedroom.

“I’ve got a flag,” Dez said.

“Is it folded into a triangle?” I called back. “In a wooden box?”

“No,” Dez said. “It’s on a six-inch plastic pole.”

“Perfect!” I said. Because I would not mess with the Arlington flag, not for a measly 25 points.

“Hey, check these out,” said Dez, coming into the room and holding up two folksy black dolls with
x
’s for eyes. “Creepy shit.”

“They’re handmade in Appalachia,” I said, a little bit defensively. I actually wasn’t sure whether the dolls were somehow racially offensive or not, and I crossed the room to take them from Dez and put them back on the shelf in the living room. Most of the knickknacks remained because there was the lingering question of whether they were worth something and whether anyone would buy them at a garage sale or on eBay. There were bells made in Mexico and shamrocked vases from Ireland, small wooden gondolas from Italy, tiny silk slippers from China.

Seriously. Was there any place the woman hadn’t been?

“The three-hole punch binder is in the closet in the second bedroom down the hall,” I said as a way to try to get us all moving again. “And I’m pretty sure there’s a snow globe in a box in the credenza with some Christmassy stuff.”

“I’ll get the binder,” Winter said, and Dez headed for the credenza after mockingly saying, “I’ll check the
credenza
.”