The Life of Glass (3 page)

A few days
later, in biology, I caught Ryan stealing glances at Courtney Whitman. She and her lab partner were assigned to the table next to ours, and as luck would have it, her partner was out for the day.

We were all looking pretty stupid in our safety goggles and rubber gloves, picking through this poor dead frog carcass with tweezers. I had yet to identify anything; all the innards looked oddly the same to me, so it was Ryan who was doing most of the work and pointing things out to me. He didn’t mind because I’d promised to help him out with his English papers.

So Ryan was picking through Kermit, cutting for the
heart, our assignment for the day: find the organ, identify it, draw it in our workbook. I watched him look up every so often to gawk at Courtney, and as I was watching him watch her, I got this sick feeling in my stomach. Maybe she felt his eyes on her, or maybe she was just seriously lost without her partner, but she looked up and said, “Can I work with you guys today?”

Ryan looked as if he’d just swallowed his tongue. So I finally said, “Yeah. Sure, whatever.”

Mr. Finkelstein had paired her up with the odd man out, the only one of us not to have a partner, Jeffrey Gibson. Jeffrey was absolutely the nerdiest kid in our grade, if not the whole entire school. He had really thick horn-rimmed glasses and wore his pants up too high, and he played the flute in the marching band, and he was really, really into the whole band thing, so even when you saw him just walking down the hallway he was doing that funny rolling step that the band kids did on the field. But he was also incredibly good at science, and I had no doubt that he was the one doing all the work on the frog.

So Courtney picked up her frog tray and moved it on over to our table. Ryan seemed to be concentrating very hard on Kermit suddenly, and Courtney leaned over his shoulder. “You have such a steady hand,” she practically
cooed into his ear, so I had to roll my eyes. “Wow.” She popped her gum, which we were not supposed to be chewing in the biology lab, and I looked around to see if Mr. Finkelstein had noticed. Nope. He sat behind his desk absorbed in a stack of papers, and I wondered what he was thinking about. Probably not us. “You’re so lucky, Melinda, to have such a cool partner.”

“Melissa,” I corrected her.

“Oh. Melissa. I’m sorry. It sucks being new.” She frowned, and for a moment, I felt bad for her. I remembered what it was like to come back to school after a marking period in Philadelphia and an entire summer, and even though I knew most of the kids, everyone was new and different and everything had changed. But it was hard to really sympathize with someone so beautiful and perfect-looking—and you could still tell, even with the goggles wrapped around her head. Her shiny blond hair hit her shoulders perfectly. Her blue eyeliner and blue eyes only seemed bluer with the goggles. “And you’re Ryan, right?”

He looked up from the frog and pushed the goggles up his nose. “I am.” He smiled at her. They kind of stared at each other for a minute or two and I started to feel really uncomfortable, as if I were interrupting
something, which was crazy because she was at my lab table with my lab partner. “Here,” he said, and reached for her tray. “Let me find it for you.”

“Oh.” She giggled and shot me a smile. “Thank you.”

Ryan cut with perfect precision, as if our frog had only been practice, and with Courtney’s frog he was an expert with the skills of a surgeon. “Here you go,” he said after a few minutes. “Your heart.”

“Thank you, thank you. I never could’ve found it on my own,” she said. He nodded, red spreading across his cheeks from underneath his goggles. “Hey, Meliss, want to trade partners?” She laughed.

I glared at her. “No thanks.”

“Just kidding,” she said. But Ryan was silent, and the notion that he would trade me away made me feel as if I were about to puke.

I was still annoyed with Ryan after school, so I didn’t wait for him to ride home together like I normally did.

“Hey, Mel, wait up.” I heard him call after me, but I didn’t stop pedaling. I pedaled hard and furious, my legs pumping, a hot breeze cutting through my hair.

It took him a few blocks to catch up. I heard his heavy
breathing behind me, and then I slowed down, afraid that he was going to have an asthma attack. “What’s your problem?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I just didn’t feel like waiting. Okay? I have stuff to do.”

“Like what stuff?”

“I don’t know. Stuff, all right? Jeez. We don’t always have to ride together.” I was waiting for him to tell me I was wrong, that we did need to ride together, that I meant something.

But all he said was, “Yeah, all right. I get it.”

We got to my house and we both stopped. He was still breathing hard, the breath catching in his chest in that thick, raspy asthmatic way that was so familiar that I’d become used to it over the past few years. I felt a little bad that I’d made him ride so hard. “You wanna come in?” I asked. “Or ride in the wash?”

“Nah.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t. My dad’s home.”

I watched him turn and ride down the street toward his house before I went inside.

The Saturday morning of my mother’s date, I convinced Ashley to drive me to the nursing home to visit Grandma
Harry. Well, not so much convinced really, but blackmailed by threatening to tell my mother that she’d been driving Mr. September to school. She glared at me, but she grabbed the car keys and started walking toward the garage, so I followed.

Truthfully, I could’ve ridden my bike. It was only three miles to the home, but the day was hot and the late-morning sun was bright and biting, and I didn’t feel like arriving red-faced and sweating to see her.

Ashley didn’t say a word to me the whole ride over there, and when we got there, she didn’t even park. She pulled up, right in front of the Sunset Vistas sign, a name that always struck me as odd because it sounded more like a resort than a hospital for old people. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” she said.

“Don’t you want to come in with me?” I knew she wouldn’t. Ashley hated visiting Grandma Harry since her memory got so bad. She said it was too depressing to watch, so she basically ignored her unless my mother made her go visit on Mother’s Day or Grandma Harry’s birthday.

“Be waiting outside or I’m leaving without you,” she said. I got out of the car and barely slammed the door shut before she sped off.

I didn’t go to visit Grandma Harry much because, in a way, I agreed with Ashley—it was awfully depressing. Talking to her was sort of like talking to yourself, because she could no longer remember from one minute to the next. She might ask me how old I was now or how the weather was five times within a span of five minutes, but she could still remember the past vividly. Sometimes I liked to go talk to her about my father to hear her remember him as a little boy, as a man. There were times when she forgot that he was dead. So it was sort of like stepping into this little fantasy world where everything was still unbroken.

Still I paused at the door to her room for a minute, hesitant to step inside. I stared at the little placard on the door that said
MRS. HARRIET MCALLISTER
, thinking about how it looked awfully bold and official for a woman who was frail and shrunken and had a U-shaped spine.

There was a time, when I was younger and my grandpa Jack was still alive, that they’d had a house in Scottsdale, and my father used to drive us up there on the weekends. I don’t remember much about it, but I remember Grandma Harry in the kitchen, wearing a red apron, putting trays of cookies in the oven. She wasn’t
a great cook, and she usually tried to make her cookies healthy by lacing them with bran and neglecting to tell us, so if you ate too many you’d spend a solid afternoon near the toilet. But for some reason I can remember the sound of her laughter, very clear and mellow and almost soothing, and I can remember that she had this blond hair that she sometimes had in rollers still, if we caught her too early in the morning.

This Grandma Harry, the one sitting up in the nursing-home bed, white hair thin enough to reveal red patches of skull bleeding out from underneath, skin wrinkled and shriveled and eyes slightly glazed, looked nothing like that other one, the one I knew so long ago that it felt like a dream.

“Melissa, honey, is that you?” I didn’t know how long she watched me standing in the doorway before she said it, so I felt a little embarrassed as I stepped in.

“Hi, Grandma.”

She reached her hands up for me, and I leaned over and gave her a kiss. “Oh, honey, I’m so happy to see you.” She smelled like vinegar and pee, and I pulled away as quickly as I could and moved a chair up next to the bed. “Look at you. You’re getting so big. How old are you now?”

“Fourteen.”

“Oh my. Almost all grown up.” She paused. “Where’s your father?”

I stared at her, and for a second it felt like a game. Did she remember that he was dead or didn’t she? Did I lie or tell the truth? “He’s not here,” I said, which was a compromise, not a lie but not really the truth either.

She sighed as if deep down she really knew, maybe in her heart, and I wondered if the heart held memories that the mind couldn’t. “How’s school?”

“It’s good.” I nodded. “I’m at the high school now.”

“Oh good.” She nodded, but I didn’t think it meant anything to her one way or another what school I was at. “How’s your sister?”

I rolled my eyes. “The same.” Then I added. “She has a boyfriend.”

“Oh my.” She paused. “How old are you now, honey pie?”

“Fourteen.”

“Oh my. Almost all grown up.” I smiled, a big fake smile, baring my horse teeth, though I knew she wouldn’t notice. Grandma Harry never cared what you looked like or if you had makeup on or if you’d done your hair
or dressed up nice for her.
I love you for here and here,
she used to say as she put one hand on my head and the other on my heart.

“Did my father ever date anyone before my mother?” It was a question that had been burning up inside me all week, trying to imagine him with someone else, someone other than her, as if this would make her date okay, justifiable in a way.

“Oh, well, let me see.” She closed her eyes. “Now that’s going way back, isn’t it?” She reached out for my hand, squeezed it. “Yes. There was a girl in college. What was her name? Oh, honey, my memory is terrible.” I nodded. But I knew it was normally her short-term memory that was the problem; she couldn’t remember the minute to minute, the day to day, but take her back twenty years, and she could usually tell you the tiny details of a moment. She opened her eyes. “Then, of course, there was Sally Bedford.”

“Sally Bedford.” I repeated it, rolled it around on my tongue a bit as if this would make it real, the idea of my father with someone who wasn’t my mother.

“Where is your father?”

“I’m sorry,” I told her, ducking the question. “I have to go.” I leaned over and kissed her forehead.

“Thanks for coming by, honey pie,” she said. “Come back soon.”

“I will,” I promised. I wondered, as I walked out, how many minutes it would take until she forgot I’d even been there.

After I inherited
my father’s journal, I decided I would keep a little journal of my own, where I would write down stories about people I knew, the way I imagined them to be. But it took me a while to figure out what to write, and the book stayed blank until the night when my mother had her first date. Then I decided I needed to start writing my parents’ story, because I worried, if I didn’t put it down on paper, that maybe no one would remember it, maybe it would disappear into something that had never even existed at all.

Then there is the new story, the one that is not perfect, that is nothing like a fairy tale. As I hung out by the front window waiting for him to arrive, I tried to imagine the way it might have happened. Maybe as my mother razored up his sideburns their eyes caught for a minute—that would be all it would have taken. I tried to picture him ugly and bearded, fat and sarcastic. But I knew none of that would be true. My mother might be too old to be Queen of the Rodeo, but she was still stunning.

I got the phone and called Ryan while I was waiting. “My mother is getting ready for a date,” I said when he picked up.

“Really? With who?”

“I don’t know. Some guy she met at the salon.”

“What’s his name?”

I still had no idea, so I fashioned a nickname on the
spot. “I’m gonna call him the Hair.”

Ryan laughed. “He could be bald.”

“Then why was he at the salon in the first place?”

“Okay. It’s the Hair then.”

“You wanna ride bikes after she goes?”

He paused. “I can’t. My dad’s gonna be home soon, and he wants to go out to dinner.”

“Well, okay then,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.” It was hard to keep the flicker of annoyance out of my voice. I knew it wasn’t his fault that his dad expected him to go out to dinner, but I wished he would’ve invited me to go along or promised to stop over afterward.

Ashley helped my mother pick out her outfit, a tiny little denim skirt that belonged to Ashley and a red shirt that really brought out her ivory skin. She had on strappy red sandals that made her legs look extra long. She did not look like someone’s mother.

She was ready early, and then she paced by the front window as Ashley and I sat on the couch and watched her.

“This is silly, isn’t it, girls? Maybe I should call and cancel.”

“No,” Ashley said. I glared at her, but I kept my
mouth shut because I really hoped my mother was serious and would decide to cancel on her own.

The three of us watched as he pulled into the driveway in a big, blue, shiny pickup truck. My dad had never really been a fan of pickup trucks. He used to say that he couldn’t stand it when guys needed to show off how big and powerful and mighty they were by driving around in their huge vehicles and revving their engines.

When he started to get out, Ashley and my mother dragged me into the kitchen. “Don’t let him see us watching,” my mother whispered, as if he could already hear her.

I got my first glimpse of him when my mother opened the front door, and he stood there on our porch—tall, extraordinarily tan, clean shaven, completely handsome enough to be an underwear model, and, I was guessing, a good ten years younger than my mother. He had nice, thick black hair, and to my surprise, a good, neat-looking haircut. Maybe my mother knew what she was doing now.

He handed my mother a single long-stemmed purple rose. I looked to Ashley to see how she was reacting, and I was surprised to see that she looked a little stunned, as if the fact that he was beautiful changed everything. She
hadn’t expected a real prospect.

My mother took the rose. “Oh, how sweet. You shouldn’t have. I love purple roses.” She turned to look at us. “Girls, this is Kevin Baker.”

I waved, and Ashley smiled at him and said, “Nice to meet you.”

“Well, we won’t be too late,” my mother said.

My mother stepped out and shut the door behind them, and I was thinking about how she was walking into this whole new world, this entirely different life.

“I’m going out,” Ashley said.

“Where?”

“None of your business.” She paused. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not going to last, with Mom, I mean.”

I nodded. “Well, I know that,” I said, as if it were the most obvious conclusion in the world.

Then the house was quiet. Empty and eerily quiet. Not the good kind of quiet that comes after a storm but the bad kind that falls in the middle of loneliness.

I put a jar of Cheez Whiz in the microwave and sat at the kitchen table dipping potato chips into it for dinner. I was lucky that I had good metabolism, that I could eat whatever I wanted and I still stayed skinny, whereas
Ashley said she put on pounds just looking at half of what I ate. My mother always said my metabolism came from Grandma Harry, who used to eat a ton and was still as skinny as a rail. “Good genes, sweetie,” she’d say.

I was obsessing over my mother’s date, where they were, what they were doing, how much she was laughing, how much she was drinking. My mother couldn’t hold her liquor. I’d seen her have a glass or two of wine with my father, and before you knew it she was crazy giddy, laughing and falling all over him. Do not have any wine, I silently willed her.

I was about halfway through the jar of cheese and starting to feel just a little bit sick when the doorbell rang. Ryan must’ve gotten back from dinner with his father and decided he wanted to hang out after all. I checked my hair in the hallway mirror, pulled it out of the hair band, and let it fall in little waves that hit my shoulders. I smiled, then frowned, and then whispered, “This is ridiculous.” And I put my hair back in the ponytail. It would fly in my face if I rode my bike with it down.

The doorbell rang again, and I ran to get it, not even bothering to look through the peephole before I opened it, so I was shocked when it was not Ryan standing there but Courtney Whitman, holding on to a dog leash that
was attached to a miniature Chihuahua. “Hey, Meliss.”

“Hey.” I tried to disguise my surprise.

“I was walking Paco and thought I’d stop by to say hi.” As if on cue, at the sound of his name, Paco jumped up and barked a little.

“Hey there, boy.” I reached down and rubbed his head, and I smiled to myself. Ryan was allergic to dogs.

“How did you know where I lived?” I asked.

“Oh.” She laughed. “My mom’s a realtor, so she knows where everyone lives.” I didn’t really think that was true, but I guessed they must have a way to look it up or something.

I noticed Courtney wasn’t wearing any makeup like she normally did at school, and her hair was pulled back in a messy bun. She was wearing sweats and a tank top, and without all of that other stuff, the hoopla, as Grandma Harry used to call it, she wasn’t even that pretty, just kind of normal-looking. “Well, what’s up?” I asked.

She shrugged. “You wanna walk with me?”

It occurred to me that it was Saturday night, and here she was walking her dog and stopping at my house. Maybe it was harder for her to be new than I’d thought. “I guess so. Hang on. Let me get my key.”

I shut the door, went back in the house, and scribbled
my mom a quick note, even though I was sure I’d be back first. Though she would expect Ashley to be gone, she might freak out if she came home and I wasn’t in one of my usual spots on the couch or in my bed.

“How old’s your dog?” I asked as we walked down the street, past Mrs. Keely’s house, past Mr. and Mrs. Gonzalez, past Ryan’s house.

“He’s a puppy,” she said. “My mom got him for me when we moved. It’s supposed to help with the whole transition.”

“Does it?”

She shrugged. “Sort of. Not really. I don’t know.” She paused. “Thanks for letting me share with you guys in biology the other day.”

I felt a little guilty as I thought about how annoyed I’d been. “No problem,” I said. “Anytime.”

“So you and Ryan, you’re like a couple, then?”

I felt a sinking in my stomach, as if the Cheez Whiz had just turned into this hard and crushing boulder. “No, no. Nothing like that. Just friends.”

“Oh.” She paused. “And you don’t like him or anything?”

“Ryan? What? No way. Oh no. Definitely not.” They were words I felt like choking on, because after I said
them, I knew there was no taking them back. I was giving her permission to like him, to love him even, to claim him and take him for her own.

“I just don’t want you to get mad at me if I go out with him or something. You’re like the only friend I have here.”

So we were friends. One shared dissection where I’d practically glared at her the whole time, and she considered us friends. There was something I loved about the ease of the whole thing, and something that seemed incredibly forced.

“You totally remind me of my best friend, Janie, back in San Diego.” She sighed. “She was all serious and quiet and sweet like you.”

I thought it was a compliment, but I wasn’t sure. “Why did you move?”

She cringed. I could tell, even in the dark; her shoulders shrank. “My parents are getting divorced, and my mom wanted to be closer to my grandparents.”

“That sucks,” I said. I was tempted to tell her that my dad was dead and my mom was on a date, but I kept my mouth shut.

We’d walked a circle, and we ended up back in front of my house. “Hold out your hand,” she said.

I did. She pulled a tiny little tube of lipstick out of her pocket, turned over my hand, and starting writing on the back of my palm. “Here’s my number,” she said. “Call me tomorrow.”

Just before midnight I heard Ashley climbing in through her window, so I went and sat on her bed and waited for her.

The strange thing about Ashley was that even though she pretty much despised me most of the time, for whatever reason, she usually let me come in her room and hang out on her bed. Before she dated Austin and spent every single second with him, sometimes the two of us would lie on her bed and read magazines or do our homework. We hardly ever talked, and if we did, it was usually to insult each other.

She jumped and banged her hip on the dresser when she saw me. “Jesus, Melissa, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”

She smelled like beer and cigarettes, two smells that were barely familiar to me but still distinct enough to detect. “You reek,” I told her.

“Where’s Mom?”

I shrugged.

“Wow.” She sat down on the bed next to me. “She must really like him.” She swallowed hard when she said it, so I could tell that deep down she was just as nervous about the whole thing as I was.

“You were the one that was all like,
I’ll help you pick out your outfit. It’ll be so great
.”

“Shut up.” She swung her pillow at me, I ducked, and she missed me completely. “I was trying to be nice.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

We sat on the bed in silence for a few minutes, and I was about to get up and leave because I thought she’d already gone to sleep, when suddenly she said it, her voice suspended and calm, sounding more like my mother than her normal self. “Do you remember the time Dad took us on the boat?”

I didn’t. Not really. I couldn’t have been more than four or five at the time, and I remember there was lots and lots of blue water, everywhere you looked—the magnificent sparkle of Lake Mead, the opposite of every other desert landscape I’d ever seen. The water was so clear, and seemed to stretch for miles, that I thought the boat would take us to the end of the world.