The Hard Kind of Promise (12 page)

Robert laughed. "Cool."

"The best part was the mule trip around the rim of the canyon," Sarah said. "My mule's name was Smoky. He had the softest ears."

"I always mix up mules and donkeys," Lizzie said.
She was standing with one hip jutting out and was twirling a strand of her long, curly hair around one finger, something Sarah had never seen her do before.

"Mules are a cross between donkeys and horses," Robert said. "Donkeys are just donkeys." He laughed again. "I always know completely useless information that no one else really cares about."

Lizzie laughed loudly. To Sarah, she sounded a little like a donkey.

"Me, too!" Lizzie said. "Like, I know exactly how high the Empire State Building is. Twelve hundred fifty feet. And also when the bikini was invented. Nineteen forty-six."

Robert, Sarah noticed, kept sneaking glances at her, even as he nodded along with Lizzie and said, "I usually know mostly science stuff." She tried to feel happy that he seemed to want her to join in the conversation, but she didn't, momentarily overcome with a wave of sadness. The truth was that the best part of the Grand Canyon trip hadn't been Smoky's stiff, velvety ears. The best part was that her parents had laughed and told jokes as they sat in the camper's front seats, remembering trips they had taken years before she was born, trying to agree on which state they'd been in when the policeman had pulled them over for speeding, pointing out roadside trees and flowers that struck them as beautiful or strange. Sarah had sat in the camper's broad back seat, lulled by her parents' pleasure, enjoying the unfamiliar sensation of feeling relaxed in their presence.

Even then, in some mysterious way, she had known that it wouldn't last.

It wasn't the fact of her parents' divorce that made her sad now. It was something subtler, harder to pin down. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that she grieved because she didn't want to tell Lizzie or Robert about how it had really been, sitting there in the back seat, listening to her parents' recollections of happy times, catching glimpses of flowers as red as lips, as startling as a phone call from someone you never expected to hear from again.

"On the bus!" Mr. Roche called, stuffing his clipboard under his arm and cupping his hands around his mouth. "Choir kids! Here we go!"

In the ensuing pandemonium Sarah noted that Robert wandered awkwardly toward a group of boys, embarrassed by the possibility of having to sit on the bus with a girl. Lizzie grabbed her arm.

"We have to sit next to each other," she said. "If I get stuck next to Jason Webb, I'll be sick."

Sarah and Lizzie sat next to each other on the plane as well. Sarah grabbed the window seat, promising that
Lizzie could have it on the trip home. Lizzie settled herself in the middle seat and seemed happy enough until a large older lady with a helmet-like bouffant took the aisle seat and positioned her left arm on the armrest. "Heinous," Lizzie whispered, turning her head just slightly in Sarah's direction. She looked at the magazine Sarah had grabbed from the seatback in front of her. "What are you reading?"

"'Emergency Procedures,'" Sarah said. Having never flown before, she wasn't nervous exactly, but the flight attendant's listless pointing toward the doors seemed alarmingly insufficient.

"I never read that stuff," Lizzie said. "Planes never crash."

"I know," Sarah said, thinking but forcing herself not to say, You can't be too careful.

On takeoff, the plane's engines thrummed under her seat, and the plane itself began its roll down the runway, quickly gathering momentum. Just when Sarah thought that her chest would explode from the roar and speed, everything tipped delicately upward. Beneath her, the world she had always known began to look small and different and far away.

"There's the Bay Bridge," Lizzie said, pointing.

Sarah watched as the city's spires, gray and sparkling under a cloudless fall sky, disappeared behind her. Now
they crossed the bay, then the crowded freeway. The cars looked like beads strung tightly on a thin bracelet.

"That's where my cousins live," Lizzie said, pointing to impossibly small houses cluttering a hillside.

Sarah couldn't take her eyes off the ground below, even after Lizzie, a veteran of plane trips to Hawaii, New York, and Miami, had pulled a fashion magazine from her carry-on bag and begun to study pictures of holiday shoes. The world was different from what she had thought: smaller, grayer, more crowded. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it just depended on where you were when you looked at it.

She said so to Lizzie after the flight attendant had set plastic cups of ginger ale on their tray tables. Below, rolling hills, still gold and gray, as yet untouched by green, looked like a row of soft puppies asleep against their mother.

"I guess," Lizzie said.

"But doesn't it make you think?" Sarah asked, unwilling to be disappointed by Lizzie's lack of interest. "From up here, nothing seems important. From down there, everything does."

"Everything's important up here," Lizzie said. "Nothing's different." She craned her neck, searching for the flight attendant, ignoring the old lady who held her book with one outstretched arm, peering through
thick glasses and moving her lips as she read. "Where are the peanuts? Robert said they give you peanuts."

"Something's different," Sarah said. But maybe it wasn't the world. Maybe she herself was different, unrecognizable to herself without her parents or her grandpa to talk to, her town's streets to walk down, her teachers to question, her TV shows to watch. She felt as though the world she had left behind was a person waving a cheerful goodbye and also signaling to her from below, trying to get her to pay attention, trying to tell her something. But she kept that to herself, knowing Lizzie didn't really care, that it would have sounded weird.

The flight attendant brought them peanuts, but before they could finish them, the plane dipped down and the
FASTEN SEAT BELT
sign flashed on. "Not enough time to get bored!" Lizzie said, stuffing her magazine back in her bag. Sarah nodded agreement, even though she hadn't been bored at all. For the first time in a long time, she could hear herself think. Her own voice inside her head had been long unheard, not foreign, exactly, but only distantly remembered.

She was sorry when the wheels touched the earth, once again ordinary, and the plane skidded to a stop.

The Southland Motel was the kind of place Sarah's mom wouldn't have liked, a place where she would have
checked the sheets before she paid, to make sure that they'd been changed. Lizzie and Sarah got a room with twin beds, a wooden table, and a TV screwed into the wall.

"There's no ice machine," Lizzie whined, flopping onto one of the beds. "And the pool is disgusting."

"It's too cold to swim, anyway," Sarah said, sitting gingerly on the other bed. The blue and green spread was thin and discolored.

"Where's everybody else?" Lizzie asked just as they both heard a knock.

Opening the door, Sarah saw Robert Whitchurch, Jason Webb, and Sean Souza standing awkwardly in the outside hall.

"We're next door," Robert said. "We've only got two beds, though. One of us has to sleep on the floor."

"It's not gonna be me!" Jason said. He laughed loudly, as though he'd made a joke.

From her bed, Lizzie eyed him disdainfully.

Sean Souza was wire-thin, with shaggy hair that nearly eclipsed his large, dark-lashed eyes. Lizzie had long been of the opinion that his passionate interest in fencing, which required the wearing of tights, interfered with his cuteness. "We'll take turns," he said. "That's only fair."

"I have scoliosis," Jason said. "My parents will sue the school if I don't get a bed."

"Shut up," Sean said. "There's nothing wrong with you."

"It's
mild
scoliosis!" Jason yelled.

Robert looked apologetically at Sarah. "You're lucky," he said, just to her. "These guys keep fighting."

"Maybe Mr. Roche can get you into a different room," she said.

Robert smiled. "It's okay. I kind of like seeing what it's like to live with other kids." He tipped his head to the side and raised his shoulder, as though he were trying to insert it into his ear. Sarah realized that she had seen him do this before. Maybe, she thought, when he was nervous.

"It's too bad about not having enough beds," she said.

"I brought a sleeping bag, just in case," Robert whispered. "I'm not telling them that, though."

When he smiled, his eyes actually twinkled, like in a Saturday morning cartoon.

"Smart," she said, smiling back, wondering if her eyes twinkled, too, but doubting it.

Lizzie had risen from the bed and now stood behind her, arguing with the boys.

"Oh, come on!" she yelled at Sean. "I've seen pictures!"

"They're not tights!" Sean yelled back. "They're nylon pants!"

"That's just as bad!" Lizzie said.

"Fencers don't wear tights! My father wears tights when he cycles in cold weather, so I know," Sean said.

"Your dad wears tights?" Jason asked, bursting into laughter.

"Nylon pants are exactly the same as tights, in terms of heinousness," Lizzie said. She turned to Jason. "And you should shut up. At least Sean does something cool with swords. You are just disgusting."

"How do you know I don't do something cool?" Jason asked. "Something I don't have to wear tights to do?"

"Well, do you?" Lizzie sounded to Sarah as though she was pretending not to be interested.

"I play poker," Jason said. "I'm the best poker player in my family."

"I'll bet," Lizzie said, but less derisively than Sarah would have expected.

Mr. Roche emerged from a room across the parking lot. He carried his clipboard and a briefcase, which Sarah knew contained his favorite baton and all his scores.

"Keith School Choir! Outside, please!" he called from the middle of the parking lot. "The bus is leaving NOW!"

"How embarrassing," Lizzie whispered.

"Nobody even cares," Jason said. "We're the only people in this dump anyway."

Lizzie gave him a sour look, probably, Sarah surmised, out of habit. But Lizzie didn't argue with him; she just gathered her purse and her music folder from the bed and followed the boys out into the hall, letting Sarah lock the room behind them.

The bus didn't leave for another twenty minutes, during which Mr. Roche lectured from the aisle next to the driver about respecting authority, listening to directions, staying focused, and remembering that they were representatives of their school. As he droned on, Sarah watched the motel maids wheeling their carts full of cleaning supplies from room to room. They parked the cart outside when they entered each room to make the beds and vacuum the carpets. She tried to think of one nice thing about working as a maid and couldn't. Maybe people who worked as maids just liked for everything to be really clean, she thought. Maybe it made them happy to leave a room with sparkling sinks and crisp sheets still warm from the dryer.

Even as she thought it, she knew it probably wasn't true, that the maids hated this job, or were just doing it for the money and didn't think much about it one way or the other. But it made her feel better to imagine a nicer story, one in which the maids woke up excited to
go to work, happy and fulfilled to be scrubbing toothpaste off of mirrors and pulling hair out of shower drains. Maybe, Sarah thought, at home at night, they even told their children stories about the funny things people left behind on nightstands and under the beds.

"Wherever you go, whatever you do," Mr. Roche said, "remember that you are being watched. Be proud, be polite. Be a credit to yourself."

A fairy tale, she knew. But she couldn't help it. The truth—the way things really were—was sometimes almost too much to bear.

THE CALIFORNIA MIDDLE SCHOOL Excellence in Music Competition was being held at a local community college. The bus deposited them in front of a building that housed the music department. Mr. Roche showed them rooms acoustically designed for band and orchestra rehearsals, classrooms where students sat facing blackboards scrawled with musical notation as fragile and ornate and unreadable as ancient hieroglyphics.

"Maybe some of you will major in music someday," he said.

Sarah raised her hand. "Can you major in music if you want to do something else for a living?" she asked.

"Certainly," he said. When he noticed Sarah's expression, he added, "You don't have to decide anything right this minute."

She knew he was joking, but she couldn't help trying to picture how her parents might react if she told them that she was majoring in music and then planning to be a physical therapist anyway. Her mother would still wonder why she wasn't going to be a doctor. Her father would think that she should focus on just one thing. Diane would probably take her aside and whisper something about trying to join a sorority.

She hated admitting that Mr. Roche's not-so-subtle effort to inspire them had worked, but she noticed that when they finally began their practice session in a room reserved specially for them, they sounded better than they had in their own school music room. Her voice sounded clear in her ears, and strong, as though it could stand alone and also, paradoxically, as though it was one small part of a greater, more complicated whole. The music, she realized, needed every voice to be what it was meant to be, to be perfect. It bloomed around them like a gauzy tropical flower, each of their voices a root that nourished it.

"Let's try it again," Mr. Roche said.

For once, it didn't feel like nagging. They sang it again, and it was even better the second time, and better yet the third.

***

They sang for two hours. As the afternoon sun began to cast long shadows on the walls, Mr. Roche ran both hands through his hair. "Enough," he said. "We don't want to overtire ourselves."

"Like this is tiring for
him,
" Lizzie said, stretching her hands over her head.

"I feel as though I've been exercising for two hours," Sarah said. "Like I've been doing nonstop sit-ups."