The Sea of Tranquility (21 page)

I was indoctrinated into all of the pointless condolence rituals at age eight and I came to realize that they never really change. I could always count on an onslaught of food and sympathy that I had no use for.

Sometimes people will try to tell you some funny thing they remember, which usually isn’t funny at all, just sad. Then you stare at each other uncomfortably until they finally get up to leave, and you thank them for coming, even though they just made you feel worse.

Then you get the people who just want an excuse to come by to see how ripped up your face looks from crying, see if you’ve cracked yet so they can talk about it with the neighbors.
Did you see poor Mark Bennett and the boy? What a tragedy. It’s just so sad.
Or something equally lame. But they brought you some food, so they’re entitled.

Ten minutes later the doorbell rings again and we start all over. It goes on like this for days. Too many apologies and a crapload of food. Mostly lasagna.

Maybe some people find comfort in obligatory words and reheatable food; my dad and I just weren’t those people. We thanked everybody anyway. Took their foil pans and condolences. Then we threw it all away and ordered pizza. I wonder if there is a person on Earth who is consoled by a casserole.

Then I think about Leigh, and I know that, sometimes, someone shows up at your door offering something better than words and food. Sometimes, somebody brings you something you really need, and it’s not a fucking coffee cake.

The first time I met Leigh, she was standing on my front porch, holding the tell-tale foil-covered dish. My grandmother had died two days earlier and at that point I had about six of them on my counter and a couple more in the refrigerator. I was fifteen, and I think I visibly exhaled with disgust at the sight of it. But not at the sight of her. She was wearing a really short green sundress and she was seriously hot. Those are the only real details I recall. I recognized her from school, but she was two grades ahead of me and we never spoke. I didn’t even know her name until that day.

I took the dish from her, which was actually from her mom who knew my grandmother. I invited her in because I had learned that that’s what you were supposed to do. My grandfather wasn’t home so I did the grieving host thing. We went through the required conversation, making sure to hit all the main points and platitudes. After a few minutes of standing in the kitchen, vying for the title of most uncomfortable, she asked if anyone was home and if I wanted to go into my bedroom. I think it was her way of saying she was sorry and my way of saying thanks for the casserole.

That was the first time Leigh came over. But it wasn’t the last. We never dated. Never hung out. She’d come over and sneak into my room at night or we’d end up in her car somewhere, but that was the extent of our involvement and it’s been the extent for close to three years now. Even now that she’s at college, we manage to keep up a regular schedule. Sometimes we talk but never about anything real.

Maybe it was wrong. Maybe it is wrong. Wrong or not, I don’t feel bad about it. I was up to four deaths by the time she showed up, with only one more to go. I needed one normal thing and Leigh gave me that and it didn’t cost me any emotions or feelings or commitment. I didn’t have to love her. I like her, though I’m not sure if that would have been a deal-breaker, either. I don’t even think it mattered to her if I cared. We still employ a policy of equal-opportunity using, no questions asked. She’s sweet and laidback and good-looking as hell. But if she walked away tomorrow, I wouldn’t miss her. People disappear all the time. I might not even notice.

***

It’s not a coffee cake Nastya’s carrying when she walks into my garage just after eight o’clock. Though if it was, I’m sure it would have been homemade, covered with cinnamon and unbelievably awesome. She is carrying two plastic grocery bags. She walks past me without a word and reaches up with one hand to awkwardly open the door to the inside of the house without letting go of the bag.

“Sunshine?” She doesn’t respond, so I follow her in and find her opening the freezer and shoving no fewer than four half-gallon containers of ice cream into it. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” she snaps.

“You get knocked up?”

She whirls around on me.
“What?”
Guess not. I hold my hands up, palms out in surrender. She’s obviously not in the mood.

“Sorry, just,” I motion toward the open freezer, her hand still inside on one of the containers, “a lot of ice cream.”

“Right, because I’d have to be pregnant to want ice cream. Next thing you’ll be saying that I must have my period because that’s the only reason girls have for getting pissed, but of course since you’re a guy, you won’t actually say
period,
but something prickish like on the rag.” She slams the freezer door shut. Now might be the moment to swear profusely that I had no intention of bringing up her period in any manner, much less one containing the word
rag
, but I feel safer keeping my mouth shut right about now and letting her play this out.

With any other girl I could probably pull out the classic guy fail-safe of walking over and wrapping my arms around her and letting her put her head on my shoulder. It’s cheap, but it works. Drew swears by it. But I’m afraid that in this particular instance it would result in one of two things: a string of innovative new expletives or her knee in my balls. My money’s on the knee.

“I like ice cream. You never have any. Bad things happen when I go too long without ice cream,” she says, sounding slightly calmer.

“Are you sure you got enough?”

“Fuck off.”

“Maybe you should open one of those now,” I suggest.

So that’s what we do. Except that we don’t open one, we open all four of them and eat straight out of the containers at the crap coffee table in front of my couch. I keep this one in front of the couch because it’s shit and I don’t care what happens to it. I don’t have to worry about coasters or Drew putting his shoes on it. I figure I’ll keep it here until he leaves for college, or some girl finally kills him.

Nastya doesn’t eat from the middle of the container like a normal person. A normal person who doesn’t eat ice cream out of a bowl, that is. She waits until it starts melting and scrapes away the melted part from around the edge of the container. According to her, half-melted ice cream tastes better than fully-frozen ice cream. I can’t tell if she’s right because she makes me eat the more frozen stuff from the center and threatens me if I try to eat from the edges. We put a pretty big dent in every one of those containers and she’s definitely more Sunshine and less Nasty afterward. I make a mental note for the next time she gets pissy that, in lieu of mood stabilizers, ice cream will do the trick.

***

We’re both on a sugar high after all the ice cream and we end up back in the garage because I have a list of projects to finish. I figure she’s going to go running because that’s usually her M.O. when she’s carb-loaded, but she doesn’t leave.

“Give me something to do,” she says, with just the barest hint of wariness.

“What do you want to do?” I ask, assessing her.

“Nothing with power tools or anything like that. Something I can do with my right hand.”

“You want to sand?” I offer. “It sucks, but‌—‌”

“I’ll sand. Just show me what to do.”

I grab a sheet of sandpaper and demonstrate how to attach it to the sanding block.

“We have to sand with the grain on this.” I pick up her hands to show her how much pressure to use and they’re so soft that I hate to put sandpaper anywhere near them.

“How do I know when it’s done,” she asks, starting to work.

“My dad’s rule was always that when you think you’re done, you’re probably halfway there.”

She tilts her head and looks at me like I’m useless. “So, how do I know when it’s done?”

I smile. “Just show it to me when you think it’s ready. You’ll start to know after you’ve done it a few times.”

She keeps her eyes on me for just a second longer than she needs to before turning back to the wood. I know the questions are there. I saw them in her eyes as soon as I mentioned my father. How? When? What happened? But she doesn’t ask. She just keeps sanding and I won’t stop her. I despise sanding.

It’s after midnight by the time we call it quits. I don’t know how her hands even held up this long. She sanded the hell out of everything I gave her. I never did ask her what was wrong earlier.

CHAPTER 24

Nastya

When I get to his house at 7:40, Josh is in his driveway, leaning against the side of his truck. As soon as he sees me, he unlocks the doors and comes around to open mine.

“About time, Sunshine,” he says. “I was about to give up on you.”

“I didn’t know you had a field trip planned,” I reply once I’ve settled into the truck and shut the door.

“I have to get to Home Depot before they close.”

“You didn’t have to wait for me.” He really didn’t. It’s not like I was going to be sad to miss the weekly hardware store stock-up.

“No. But I knew you’d be showing up sooner or later and my garage would be closed and you’d feel abandoned and then I’d feel guilty and I hate feeling guilty. So it was just easier to wait.” One side of his mouth turns up.

“Your life is so hard,” I say dryly.

“You are the only person who would even think to say something like that to me.” He sounds weirdly pleased.

“Force field hasn’t kept me out yet.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I give him a pointed look because I’m sure he can figure it out. He keeps staring at me, so finally I shrug and then throw in a sigh so he knows that I’m exasperated at having to explain this to him.

“At school, no one comes near you. When I first saw you on the bench in the courtyard, I wondered if you were surrounded by some sort of force field. I kind of wanted to get one for myself. You can hide in plain sight. It’s pretty awesome.”

“Force field,” he repeats, somewhat amused. “Might as well be. People used to call it the dead zone,” he adds, but he doesn’t elaborate. “Maybe you have special powers.” I assume he’s commenting on my ability to breach his force field, but I don’t respond.

I don’t have any special powers. I’m certain of that, because I’ve spent a lot of time lamenting my lack of them. I do have an uncanny capacity for bitterness and misdirected rage but I don’t think that counts. I feel a little misled. I spent crapload of time over the past couple years reading books and watching movies, and in all of them, when you die and they bring you back to life, supernatural abilities are just part of the deal.
Sorry you didn’t win the grand prize of eternal peace, but you’re not walking away empty handed!
You may come back broken and wrong, but at least you get some cosmic consolation prize, like the ability to read minds or speak to the dead or smell lies. Something cool like that. I can’t even manipulate the elements.

Of course if I were to take the books at their word, I’d also have to believe that all teenage boys go around calling girls
baby,
because apparently that’s the express train to romance. He was an asshole a minute ago but then he drops the baby on you and it’s all over. Uncontrollable swooning and relinquishment of all self-respect activated.
Ooooh, he called me baby. My panties are wet and I luuuuuuuv him.
Do real boys actually call girls baby? I don’t have enough experience to know. I do know that if a guy ever called me baby, I’d probably laugh in his face. Or choke him.

I follow Josh down another aisle. He’s almost as comfortable here as he is in his garage. It’s like he’s being pulled around by an invisible string that leads him to everything he’s looking for. He’s on autopilot, not even thinking. He must spend half his life in this store.

“I’ll get the wood next time,” he says. “I don’t feel like dealing with it tonight. Plus, I think we’re going to have to hit the lumber yard for what I need anyway.” The
we’re
part of that sentence sticks in my head.

“What are you making?” I ask, glancing down the aisle to make sure it’s empty before speaking.

“I have a job for one of the teachers at school. Then I have two Adirondack chairs to make.”

“You sell everything you build?”

“Some of it I give away. Some of it I sell. It’s how I pay for the wood and the tools.”

“Is that why you haven’t applied to college?”

“Huh?” he says, putting two more cans of finish in the cart.

“I heard Mrs. Leighton talking to you. You haven’t applied yet. You don’t want to go?”

“I never really got into the whole school thing.”

“Did your parents want you to go?”

“I don’t know. We never really got that far.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Probably the same thing I’m doing now. Just more of it.”

I get that. I used to think the exact same way, but he can actually do it.

“You can afford that?” I ask. We’re in front of a display of little drawers full of every size screw you can imagine and he’s pulling them out without even looking.

“I can afford just about anything I’m willing to pay for.” I’m not sure exactly what he means by that, but the way he says it is bitter, and if there’s something that makes him sound that way, I don’t want to get into it.

We get up to the self-checkout and I start taking things out of the cart and handing them to him one at a time as he runs them over the scanner. It strikes me how utterly domestic this all seems. He could have come without me because I really haven’t served any purpose here at all. I could have used the time to run which is probably what I should have been doing. It’s what I would have done if I had shown up at his house and he wasn’t there. I would have run myself into exhaustion. He’s right about one thing and I wonder if he knew just how right he was and if that’s why he waited. If I had gotten to his house and seen that closed garage, I would have felt abandoned and I may never have gone back.

***

When we get back to his house just after nine o’clock, I help him carry the bags into the garage and watch him put everything away. He is all grace and fluid in this place; there isn’t one wasted movement. Everything he does has purpose. I don’t feel uncomfortable about watching. He watches me, too. We have an unspoken agreement. I let him watch me. He lets me watch him. We never call each other on it. It’s a gift we give one another. No strings, no expectations, no reading between the lines. We’re like mysteries to one another. Maybe if I can solve him and he can solve me, we can explain each other. Maybe that’s what I need. Someone to explain me.