What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay (6 page)

“Want to come with me, to take my little brother and sister?”

“Is this the booby prize? Are you feeling sorry for me?” I asked.

“Nope. I just don’t want to take the little monsters by myself.”

“Are you going to wear a costume?”

“No, but you can.”

I grinned at him. “What kind of get-up would embarrass you the most?”

“Can’t embarrass me.” Jesse looked like he was daring me to try.

“Can Lily come too?” It wasn’t fair to abandon her on Halloween.

“Reindeer? Sure.”

5

I spent some time trying to think up a good costume, and finally settled on La Llorona, who is a famous weeping woman in Mexican folklore. She wears a long black dress and mantilla, and drowned either her children or her husband in the river. Every night she goes back to the river, and either looks for them or drowns them again. There are a lot of variants in folklore.

“ ‘Long Black Veil,’ very cool,” Jesse said when we knocked on his door, adding yet another variant to the possibilities. Lily had on reindeer antlers. “This is Angie and Rudolph, guys,” he said to the two little kids who were waiting with their plastic pumpkins. “Angie and Lily, this is my mom and dad.”

His parents shook hands with us very formally and his mom smiled. “It’s nice of you to help Jesse take the little ones out.” She tugged at Jesse’s pant leg where it was bunched over the artificial leg. “You won’t walk too far?”

“He’ll be fine,” his dad said. “He’s supposed to walk.”

His mom shot him a look. “In your judgment. Which I have learned not to trust as blindly as I used to.”

“Come on, guys.” Jesse shooed the little ones out the door. They had masks on but I assumed Batman was his brother and the princess with the wings was his sister. “I hate it when they do that,” he said.

Lily gave him an appraising look. I’d told her what Mom had said about Jesse’s dad signing him up. “Are you the oldest?”

“Yeah.” He lowered his voice. “They had a kid after me, but he had one of those genetic diseases and he died when he was a baby.”

“Oh man, I’m sorry,” Lily said.

I wondered how much awfulness one family could take. His mom might have had her limit.

Jesse said, “They had a lot of testing before these two. That’s Michael under there, and this is Sarah.”

“I’m Batman,” Michael said.

“And I’m
Princess
Sarah.”

“Good wings,” Lily said. “I’ll trade you for my antlers.”

“Princesses don’t have antlers. Except unicorn princesses.”

A lot of kids were out in the first dark, escorted by parents and older sisters, their flashlights making little circles of gold light. Most of the houses had their porch lights on, so the kids were going to get a good haul.

“Come on, guys. Loot,” Lily said, beckoning Michael and Sarah toward the first house.

“Mom’s had a rough time,” Jesse told me while they went up to the door. “I wish she wouldn’t snipe at Dad, though. The army was my idea.”

“I guess she can’t snipe at you,” I said.

Michael and Sarah came bouncing back down the walk and we went on to the next house. Lily was prancing and making what were supposed to be reindeer noises. Jesse chuckled. “She’s really getting into it.”

I saw that he wasn’t walking as fast as Lily and the kids, so I slowed down to match my pace to his. He noticed, and grimaced. “Mom’s right. The leg hurts me, but I hate it when she fusses.”

I thought it was hard to tell when being nice stopped and fussing started. And how much was it okay to talk about it? “Will it get better?” I asked. “I mean, will you get to where it doesn’t hurt?”

“Supposedly. I’m supposed to get another one that’s even more high tech. I already feel like a robot.”

“High tech?”

Jesse stopped and pulled up his pants leg. I don’t know what I was expecting. One of those pink plastic legs, I guess. This one ended in a real-looking foot—I could see it under the cuff of his sock—but the rest of it was made of metal and looked like it could take off on its own.

“I can get one that’ll let me run marathons. Or play tennis. Or snowboard,” he said. “If I did any of those things.”

“You might.”

“There’s a computer in the knee. You tap your toe three times or whatever, and it changes modes. My counselor at the vet center told me about it. It’s called a C-Leg.” He let his pants leg fall as Lily and the kids came running back.

“Look! We got Snickers!” They took off again.

By the time we’d crisscrossed the neighborhood, their pumpkins were overflowing. Lily insisted we get in her car and go over to the Arbolada, where she said the candy was even better.

“Mom won’t let them eat this much candy as it is,” Jesse said.

“We can take it to the battered women’s shelter tomorrow,” Lily said. “It’s the principle of the thing.”

Batman and the princess were jumping up and down, so he said okay. Lily had extra bags in the car (Lily is always prepared) and we drove across the valley. The Arbolada is an old neighborhood full of big oaks and winding streets with no sidewalks, but no one ever drives very fast, so it’s okay. We could see lots more flashlights and hear shrieks and laughing. Lily parked the Volvo next to the old cemetery. It’s a little scruffy-looking, with wrought iron fences around it and tall marble angels and obelisks. There are even Civil War veterans buried in it. The little kids grabbed Jesse’s hands, one each, and power-walked on past it.

“Good choice,” I said.

“Adds to the ambience,” Lily said. “You want them to have the full experience.”

The white stones looked shiny and ghostly in the moonlight. I wondered if I had any ancestors in that cemetery. Lots of people in the valley are descended from the old Spanish land grant families, like Wuffie, who was a Camarillo. I thought maybe this year I should come out with a vase full of marigolds and some spray cleaner and see if there are any Camarillos there. Wuffie probably wouldn’t approve—she thinks celebrating the Day of the Dead is morbid and/or sort of countrified—but my father might have been from Mexico, or maybe his parents were. I feel entitled to that much of him, at least.

Once we were past the cemetery, Michael and Sarah let go of Jesse and followed Lily, who said she knew where the best houses were. Jesse and I ended up sitting on a rock at the end of someone’s driveway, waiting for them. I could tell the leg was hurting him but he wasn’t going to say anything else about it, so I developed a blister on my foot. I don’t think he believed me, though.

But I could see the tension in his jaw loosen up when we sat down and he stuck his bad leg out in front of him. “You look nice in that veil,” he said. “It suits you.”

“It makes me feel like Zorro’s girlfriend.”

He reached over and tucked it around my chin, arranging the folds. “Nah. Duchess of Alba.”

“Who?”

“By Goya. Famous painting. She reminds me of you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” He smiled at me. “She’s always been my favorite.”

I can absolutely get into the idea of looking like a famous painting.

After a while, Lily and the kids came back with their bags overflowing. Jesse looked sort of horrified—there was enough candy to keep two little kids sick for a month—but Lily, it turns out, had already negotiated the deal with them and they were all pleased with themselves for collecting candy for the shelter. We sat in Lily’s car while they dumped it all out onto the back seat and graded it, putting their favorite stuff back into the pumpkins. They were half asleep and sticky by the time we dropped them off.

“Thanks, you two,” Jesse said as he hauled them out and put the princess over his shoulder. “’Night, Rudolph. ’Night, Duchess.”

Lily raised an eyebrow, and I said, “Famous painting.” A little smugly, I expect.

“Goya,” Jesse said. “You should look her up.”

So I did, the next day after school. She actually does look kind of like me, and she definitely has my hair. I also looked up the C-Leg online. The manufacturer’s website has a picture of the leg, which looks like something you’d see on the cover of a science fiction paperback. It said the C-Leg is “ideal for people who currently are or have the potential to be unlimited community ambulators.” Only a company that made something like computerized legs would think up a phrase like “community ambulator” to describe someone who wants to get up and walk around.

Our whole house is wireless—Ben’s a computer nerd—so I took my laptop into his study to show him. His scripts have people getting blown up all the time, and I thought he might know about things like the C-Leg. He was clicking away at his keyboard, but he turned around and smiled when I came in. He’s been acting strange ever since he and Mom had the fight about picking me up, and I wonder if maybe he isn’t as unconcerned about it all as he’s been acting.

“So why do you want to know about this?” he asked, when I showed him the screen.

“Jesse says he might get one. I was just trying to picture what it would be like to have to walk around on something like that.”

“Oh.” Ben gave me a funny look. “How old is Jesse?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s nineteen maybe. Too young to have to wear something like that.” I jabbed a finger at the screen. I hadn’t thought much about the war really until lately, but now the whole idea of it was making me furious.

“Are you upset about war or about Jesse?”

I wasn’t really sure. About people getting blown up, I suppose. That’s real, and pieces of them really come off, not like in Ben’s movies where it’s rubber and fake blood. And there are little kids, like Michael and Sarah, getting blown up too. “It’s just not right,” I said. “Why do we have to do that to each other?”

Ben nodded. “Oh, Angelfish. It’s pretty painful when you get a social conscience, isn’t it?”

He couldn’t tell me much about the C-Leg though. “Pretty much everything in movies is made up,” he said. “If the technology we need doesn’t actually exist, we just lie.”

After dinner, Mom called me up. “Angie, honey …” I could tell she was using her working-up-to-something-in-a-casual-fashion voice. “Did you have fun last night? Trick-or-treating?”

“Yeah. And I’m not eating a bunch of candy.”

“Darling, I was not calling you to quiz you on your candy consumption.”

“Jesse’s little brother and sister got all the candy. Well, maybe I stole a Heath bar, but that’s all.”

“Jesse. Mmmm. How old is Jesse Francis?”

“Mom, Ben asked me that. And you already know, anyway.”

“Well, I … do you think maybe he’s a little old?”

“For what?”

“Well, don’t you think maybe he ought to be dating—girls his age?”

“There aren’t any still in school. Mom, he needs a friend.”

“Honey, you want to come have a coffee with me? Maybe we could talk.”

I hate having “discussions” over the telephone, so I said okay and met her at the coffee bar downtown. We got cappuccinos and sat down at a corner table. Mom poked the froth in hers around with her spoon.

“Four years is a big age gap when you’re fifteen,” she said. “Later, it won’t make much difference, but right now the difference is huge.”

“Boys my age are idiots,” I muttered.

“Granted. But still.” Mom sighed. “I never thought I’d see the day when I’d encourage you to go out with Noah Michalski, but at least he’s your age.”

“Mom! He tried to stick his hand up my blouse and then he told everyone I let him do it!”

“I know. His mother says he’s sorry.”

“You’ve been talking to his
mother
about me?”

“Just in passing!” Mom looked guilty. And obviously she was scraping the bottom of the barrel if she was trying to fix me up with Noah.

“This is ridiculous. You never worried about my friends before.”

“Jesse may be a more complicated friend than you think,” Mom said.

I thought about the mazes he draws around the pictures in his books and on the backs of his binders. But am I supposed to just abandon him because he’s four years older and he makes my mom nervous?

“An experience like war affects people,” Mom continued. “There are things you just don’t see, but they’re there. It affects things like perception … judgment. I don’t know how stable Jesse is.”

“He’s perfectly stable!” I said.

“I’m just not comfortable having you go out with him,” Mom said.

“I’m not ‘going out’ with him.”

“How do you know how he feels about you?”

“He thinks I don’t treat him like a freak, and he knows I don’t gossip about him.”

“He’s too old for you.”

“I’m not dating him.”

We sat there and stared at each other. “Ben called you, didn’t he?” I asked her.

“He thought I might be concerned.”

And she paid attention to Ben this time instead of automatically taking the other side. That might be a good sign. But I didn’t say that. “I tell you what,” I offered. “I won’t stop being friends with Jesse, but I promise that if anything at all gets weird, I’ll tell you. Okay?” I left the definition of “weird” open.