Virgin Territory (6 page)

After Marie was settled into her assisted-living situation, Doug said that we couldn’t just abandon her and move back to New York. Not yet. Then Doug started saying things such as, “When we used to live in New York”; that’s when I knew for sure that I was stuck in Jupiter. For a while, I sat around plotting my escape, but every scenario ended with me being dragged back to Florida against my will by a state trooper wearing stretch pants and a loaded gun.

“This is hopeless,” I say, referring to the search for Marie, but also it pretty much covers everything that’s happened in the past five years.

Doug swerves the car off to the side of the road and then grabs hold of his whole head, as if it’s going to fly away from his shoulders if he isn’t careful. I’m like,
What the …?
He starts lecturing me. My problem is that I have too much attitude. I’m not focused enough on my future. I spend too much time online. The Internet has made me into a loner, a freak. And this is not going to help me later in life, not one iota.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this speech. Whenever he gets into a state, he tells me what a mess I’ve made of things, and how he’s done his best, and how every single day he’s tried to do everything in his power to ensure that I grow up to be a normal, loving person capable of contributing to society. And yet, despite his best efforts, things are out of control.

“It’s okay,” I tell him.

This is what I always tell him when he gets like this, but he never buys it.

“No!” he says, opening his eyes very wide without looking directly at me. “No. It is not okay! That’s my point!”

His real beef is that I don’t have a clear picture of how I’m going to spend the rest of my life. Why can’t I just tell him what I want to be when I grow up? Why can’t I just choose one thing and stick to it? An orthopedic surgeon? An investment banker? If I would just say it, he tells me, he’d be more than happy to
help me achieve that dream. Do I want to be an artist? He’ll buy me art supplies, send me to a special school. A musician? He’ll do whatever it takes to get me started in whatever profession I choose. Plumber? No problem. Everybody needs a plumber. But I have to start applying myself, he tells me. I have to at least make an effort.

I tell him that I’m more interested in living in the now: that’s my goal. I read a book at the beginning of the summer that said that the present reality was all that really exists, so we might as well get used to it and try to live more fully in the moment. But Doug is not convinced, not for a minute.

I hear him use words like
college
and
SAT scores and financial-aid package
. I watch his mouth move, but I don’t hear a thing.

“All I know is,” he says, as a way of wrapping up his big speech, “if your mother was alive, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

We rarely talk about Kat anymore, so whenever Doug starts in on what our lives
might
look like if only she were still alive, I’m out of there. Whenever he tells me how much happier we’d be as a family, how we’d still be living in New York, how Kat would’ve published her poems by now, how I would know what I want to do with the rest of my life and how I’d be moving toward it full steam ahead—that’s when I know he’s just talking crap, and I refuse to be a party to it.

“Where’re you going?” he calls after me.

He says this as if I have a plan, but as he knows better than
anyone, I don’t have a plan; I never do. I just need some distance between him and me, so I pretend that I’m the planet Pluto, and I’m drifting away from a solar system that refuses to recognize me for who and what I am. I am entering the Oort Cloud, a place so far away that no one has actually seen it with their own eyes.

“Good-bye!”
I call out to Doug.

“I’m not going to tell you again!”
he yells back.
“Get in the car!”

I’m walking along the sidewalk, wondering if the concrete was poured right here on the spot, or if the slabs were brought into the neighborhood ready-made and then pieced together like a puzzle. Either way, it seems as though someone has gone to a lot of trouble to create a sidewalk in a place where there isn’t that much foot traffic. Occasionally, you can spot a lone jogger or a woman who’s out for a walk with her tiny dog, but mostly the walkways are just for show. If people go out, they go out in their cars.

“Get in!”
he yells. Then, “You just gonna ignore me? That it? Am I going to spend the rest of my life just driving around looking for family members who have gone crazy? Haven’t I gone through enough already today without you giving me crap?”

Why does everything always end up being about him? Never mind. I focus on the plant life. Most of the plants in Florida are pointy and sharp. Even the flowers will poke you in the eye and blind you if you dare to get too close.

“Look,” Doug says. “I really don’t have time for this.”

He’s inching the car alongside the curb and at the same
time leaning over to talk to me through the open passenger-side window. He’s steering with one hand, looking up ahead to make sure he isn’t mowing down anybody’s mailbox. Every once in a while, his tires scrape the curb. I keep moving forward as though I’m having a wonderful life.

“I’ve got an idea,” he offers, trying a new approach. “How about we find Marie, and then we all go and eat somewhere. The Dairy Queen. How about that? Wouldn’t you like to go to the Dairy Queen?”

There. I’ve done it. I’ve gotten him to stop thinking about our nonexistent future. He’s in the moment, making sense, thinking about dinner. I am no longer Pluto.

I pause to look at a perfectly twilit Jupiter. I don’t know much about the future, about what I might do or where I might live when I grow up, but I make a promise to myself:
I will never live anywhere that looks like this
. Why? Because this whole town is a fancy trick to make you think that everything’s fine when we all know that everything’s
not
fine. And even if everything
is
fine, it only seems that way. If you wait a minute, it won’t be. In a flash, everything will change, and you will be so shocked by the suddenness of the change that you will never get over it.

After an hour of riding around and not finding Marie, Doug is speaking to the police on his cell, reporting her missing. This is
what we do. Mostly, it’s him who makes the call, but I’ve done it once or twice. We’ve become regulars, and the cops keep pictures of Marie in their glove compartments. We know a few of them on a first-name basis. Today, Officer Mike tells Doug that there’s nothing else for us to do but wait, so Doug hangs up and we continue eating our dinner at the Dairy Queen, just the two of us. We down our burgers and black-and-white Blizzards, and when the time is right, I ask Doug to drive me to the Spring Hill clubhouse.

“At this hour?” he says, fishing for more information.

“If you must know, I need my caddy clothes,” I reply, making myself sound like a parent. “I’ve got to wash them, or people’ll start complaining that I smell like a dirty gym sock.”

What I don’t tell Doug is that the next time I run into Angela, I don’t want to smell like a dirty gym sock. I want to be—like Walt Whitman grass—a scented gift.

We turn the corner and come smack up against a crowd of about a hundred people standing in the street outside the clubhouse. Doug opens his mouth and lets out an incredulous “Whoa.” How is it possible that Doug hasn’t heard a single story about the Blessed Virgin Mary’s appearance in Jupiter? Everyone in town has been talking about it nonstop, and there have been reports on the TV and pictures in all the local papers. The people are holding candles, singing songs, and swaying back and forth like the swell of the sea against a breakwater. It’s an impressive sight. Doug is at a loss; he can’t figure out what’s going on. As I bring him up to speed, I feel like a tour guide.

“I mean, where’ve you been?” I ask him as I wrap up the tour.

“Well, I dunno. I work all day with my head in the sand, so I miss a lot.”

Then, as though a tiny lightbulb has clicked on above his big fat head, he sits up straight and cries out loud, “Hey, that’s why you wanted to Google the Virgin Mary the other day!”

Ding. He’s figured it out. A prize for the guy behind the wheel.

The just-dusk sky over the clubhouse is losing light fast and giving way to the deep blue-black of night. A star comes out, and as Doug and I are walking through the crowd toward the clubhouse, I look up at the first star I see and think about making a stupid, kid wish that begins with,
Star light, star bright
, and ends with
Angela tonight
. But before I can utter a single word—

“Hey, stud muffin.”

I turned around, and there she is, standing in front of me, out of breath, hair pulled back, looking like the answer to a prayer.

“What’re you doing?”

“Me?” I ask, sounding like a third grader who’s been caught outside his classroom without a pass. “I was just about to make a wish on that star up there.”

“Really?” she asks, gazing up into the night sky. “Y’know, some of those stars don’t exist anymore. Something about the speed of light. We’re just seeing the left-behind light. You could be looking up there and wishing at nothing.”

Then she surprises me by taking a step closer and making a big show of sniffing my shirt.

“You’ve been to Dairy Queen!” she announces.

I grab hold of her arms before she can pull away and take a quick whiff of her. It seems only fair. She smells like a just-baked something, a stack of clean towels, a new day.

“You smell amazing,” I say to her, and I mean it.

“So is it true?” she asks, completely ignoring what I had intended as a compliment. “Have you been to Dairy Queen?”

“My grandmother’s missing,” I tell her, letting go of her arms. “We’ve been looking for her. Sometimes she hangs there. She’s big on their Blizzards.”

“Yeah,” says Angela, adjusting the front of her blouse. “Blizzards are totally cool.”

I’m about to ask her if maybe she’d like to go with me to the Dairy Queen sometime when I notice Doug staring at us. He ahems, but I ignore him and pretend that he’s just a guy who’s hanging too close and creeping me out.

“I oughta go,” I say to Angela, and I begin to slowly inch away from her.

“You always have to go,” she says. “Why is that?”

Before I can think of what to say, Doug jumps in, trying to block my game.

“Well, well,” he says, raising his eyebrows. “You didn’t mention you had a
girlfriend.”
He emphasizes the word
girlfriend
by drawing it out and making it go on for about a week. Even after
he’s finished saying it, the word continues to echo in my ears. I hate him.

“I’m not his girlfriend,” Angela says. “I mean, we just met today. Give it time.”

Doug and Angela are both looking at me, but their expressions couldn’t be more different. His is all wrong. Hers is all right.

“Oh. Wait,” says Angela as she looks past me and into the crowd.
“Hey, guys! Over here!”

The next thing I know, a guy and a girl about my age are standing next to her. I’m sure they aren’t from Jupiter. It’s not just that they each have their own particular style (Goth Boy and Beyoncé-on-a-Budget), it’s more that they appear to be visitors from outer space, each visiting from his or her own personal planet or galaxy. Where I live (planet Earth), never in a million years would these three people be hanging out together. It would invite too many questions—the main one being: “What do these people have in common?”

“So this is us,” Angela says, looking at her misfit duo. “We’re the club. Guys, this is Alex. The one I was telling you about.”

“Alex?” Doug asks. His eyebrows shoot up and stay that way. He stares at me as though maybe I am not his own son. “Well,
Alex
has got to get going.”

“My grandmother,” I say by way of an explanation. But then I yank myself free from Doug’s paws and add, “I don’t suppose any of you’ve seen an old woman with dyed black hair and a flower-print dress?”

“We could help you look,” Angela suggests.

I tell Doug that it wouldn’t hurt to give the place the once-over, and as soon as he agrees I suggest splitting up as a way of covering more ground. Then, in a desperate attempt to get rid of him, I say, “You’ll get around better on your own anyway.”

“Meet me by the car in an hour,” he tells me, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. He holds up his cell phone and says, “Call if you find her.”

When Doug is just a head bobbing above the crowd, he turns and calls to me, but he’s too far away, so I just wave and nod as though we’re cool.

“Okay,” says Angela, taking control of the situation. “I guess I should introduce you to everyone.”

First up is the tall, thin black girl who looks like Beyoncé without the bling, big hair, and the heavy lighting. Her skin is flawless, and her eyes are so big and keen they seem to be taking in the whole world at once and then shooting it back at you twice the size. Whenever she smiles (which is often), she makes it seem as though she really has something to smile about.