Where I Want to Be (13 page)

Restless, anxious, she tiptoed to the kitchen. There wasn’t much to do, so she distracted herself by alphabetizing the spice rack, and then reading some of her father’s old chemistry books even though they didn’t make much sense. She found a pen and underlined each sentence she didn’t understand, so that she could go back to it later. Then she
stood with her forehead pressed against the living room window and watched, scratchy eyed, as the sun came up.

Back in her room, she fell asleep across her bed. When the alarm woke her, she saw that the ink from the pen had stained like dark blue tears down the front of the dress. She took off the dress and chucked it in the corner.

Later that morning as Jane prepared to drop her pill into the toilet, it stuck to her damp palm. She shook it. It wouldn’t budge. She had to flick it off. When she licked her palm, a trace of taste remained. Bitter. The bitterness stayed in her mouth all day and seemed to taint everything that came out of it.

She started in on Lily right after school, while they were watching tennis on television. “My dress is ugly and you know it,” Jane accused during the commercial. “It doesn’t even have any color.”

“Sure it has a color, Jane. It’s silver,” Lily replied. “I thought you loved it.”

“Trade with me.”

“I’ve already had my alterations. And so have you.”

She’s trying to make you look like a clown,
Ganesha reproved from inside Jane’s book bag.
Your little sister thinks you’re out to steal Caleb. She wants to win everything.

No, no. Not Ganesha. That was her own voice in her mind. A
not-real
voice in her own head, like a radio that wouldn’t turn off. Jane pressed her fingers to her temples to
lower the volume. “When Mom comes home from work,” she said, “I’m going to get her to make you trade.”

Now Lily looked worried. She primmed up her lips and didn’t speak. When the commercial ended, she turned up the volume and stared straight ahead.

Jane jumped up and ran to her room. She snatched her ugly, too-small, no-color dress up from its puddle on the floor, twisting it up in her hands as she marched out to face Lily again.

“What are you doing?” Lily sucked in her breath through her teeth. “Oh my God, you ruined it!”

“You want me to be in this dress on purpose, don’t you?” Jane hissed, shaking it in Lily’s face. Tears stung her eyes. Nausea rolled up in waves from her stomach. “You secretly want to make everything bad for me! You tricked me! Isn’t that right? Isn’t it?”

“Oh, sure, Jane. That’s really my mission in life. To make you unhappy.” Lily had tried to sound nonchalant. But she squeezed herself into a tiny ball on the couch. As if she were the one who needed protection. Jane sat on the opposite end, the dress on her lap, picking the threads out of the hem. Lily shielded her face with one hand and said nothing.

Then Caleb arrived. His two-colored eyes seemed to take in everything all at once. He sat between them on the couch, his arm around Lily’s shoulder on purpose, to spite
Jane. To show her that it was two against one. As usual. Jane picked up the remote control and changed the channel to the Spanish station.

“Is it okay to watch tennis instead, Jane?” Caleb’s voice was fake respectful. Jane was sure she heard the sneering undertones.

“No, Person Who Doesn’t Live Here. It’s not okay.”

“How about we watch your show on the commercials?” Lily suggested.

“No. I’m practicing my Spanish.”

Caleb murmured something.

“What did you say?” Jane asked sharply.

“Nothing.”

“I have ears. I know you said something,” Jane retorted. She turned up the volume. “Now you two can talk your private, top-secret language that I don’t understand, and I can listen to my Spanish that you two don’t understand. Fair’s fair.” She sounded like a baby and she knew it.

Time to leave,
Ganesha whispered from inside Jane’s bag.
Let’s go be alone somewhere. You’re not wanted here. You never were.

Jane stood.

Lily looked up. “Where are you going?”

“Into town, to get a new dress. A good dress. Not this trash.” She glared them both down, scornful, daring them to answer back.

Lily opened her mouth, but Caleb interrupted with a quick lift of his hand.

“Okay. Sounds good,” he said. “See ya later.”

“Later, maybe,” she answered. Her tone had been threatening, but she was uncertain about what she was threatening them with. She was dizzy with anger, but all the words she needed to express herself seemed to be packed off into unreachable parts of her brain.

She slammed out the door.

Alone, in the car, she let the tears spring to her eyes. Lily-and-Caleb. Now they were talking about her. Whisper, whisper. She’d never despised them so much as in that moment.

With her silver dress crunched in a heap beside her, she drove to the Wakefield Mall.
You and I are exactly the same,
the dress told her in a small, slithering voice,
because we are both wrong and ugly.

“Shut up!” Jane yelled. “Shuttup, shuttup!” The dress went silent. At the next traffic light, Jane used it to wipe her sweating hands.

But even as she parked in the Wakefield Mall lot, she could feel the rage washing over her, replaced by a hot, bright dizziness. As if she’d been through an electrical storm that had her thoughts snapping like live wires. Maybe Lily hadn’t been trying to trick her. And of course the dress couldn’t talk! That was ridiculous. Like a story from someone in Group.

She rested her forehead on the steering wheel for a long time. She imagined going back to Orchard Way, her grandparents
welcoming her inside. Augusta would take the stained dress and fold it away from sight. Granpa would tell her a funny story that would unkink the knot between her shoulder blades and make her forget about the dance. And Augusta would have ice cream, and they would all sit together, listening to the crickets.

They hadn’t meant to leave her. They hadn’t wanted to. It was beyond their control.

When Jane finally got out of the car, it was twilight. The smell of spring hung in the air. She slipped Ganesha deep into her bag, but she could hear him anyway. He told her to keep walking. Down Castlemark Street to the corner of Bay.

She didn’t have any particular plan. There was no place that she wanted to go. She felt shapeless and fuzzy. She couldn’t feel herself through her body at all. The traffic light changed from red to green.
Real
to
not real.

She stepped off the curb. She hadn’t seen the car until the last second.

The water in the pool was cold. By the third step, she was in waist deep. She kept her eyes on her sister. She realized now that she had been wrong. All of the best times that she and Lily had shared together, her best memories of Jane-and-Lily, floated back to her. It wasn’t Lily’s fault that she’d always had more. It wasn’t Lily’s fault that she hadn’t been able to come to Jane’s rescue, that she hadn’t heard the
help me
that lived inside her head. They had lost each other equally. They’d had to grow up.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “It never was.”

The voice in her head was the only voice she had left, but she saw Lily’s eyes open, and then she heard her sister say her name. Jane could feel her grip softening, releasing her hold on them both. She was not angry anymore. She was not scared of what came next. She was not unhappy to leave behind the faint and fading dreams of the
for real
s that might have been. She was free, and she was ready.

Gambler watched from the side of the pool. He whined faintly.

Jane closed her eyes and plunged.

Through a doze of dreams, I think I hear panting. Then my face is licked.

“Oh, nasty! Caleb!” I reach out a hand to swat him off. “Gross. I think I preferred it when you had your bad-breath phobia after all.”

But when I open my eyes, I see nothing but grass, electric green in the morning sun. I lift my head. Caleb is on the other side of me. At the sound of my voice, he stirs and rolls over.

“Did you lick my face?” I ask, although now I can see that it would have been an impossible feat. I must have imagined it.

“Mmm. Do you want me to?” He moves closer, flops an arm over my hips, pulling me in.

“No, thanks. I don’t think I need it.” Dew has soaked through my clothes. I am totally waterlogged. How could I have slept an entire night on bare grass, with no pillow?
Not only that, but it was the deepest sleep I’ve had in months.

“Gee, I hope Georgia wasn’t counting on a ride back,” I say, remembering.

There’s a moment of silence as we mull this over, and then we break up laughing.

“There’s something I want you to do,” I say once we’re laughed out. I press myself against Cay’s back. I can smell skin and sweat on his neck and T-shirt.

“What’s that?”

“I want you to take my car,” I say, “and go see the world.”

“It’s official.” Caleb yawns. “You’ve lost your last marble.”

“No, I mean it.” I sit up. “Go. Leave. Hang with your uncle Rory and teach kids how to play guitar. Check out the Grand Canyon or the Great Lakes. Drive up to Canada or down to Mexico. School’s over. You’re free, and you’ve been socking away money, Caleb. I know you.”

“I’m not going to leave you.” He pulls one of my hands to his mouth and lightly bites the ends of my fingers. “Not till you’re better.”

“I don’t want you to leave me,” I say honestly. “You’re the only perfect thing in my life. But I can’t live in a cocoon, pretending that every day will be safe just because you’re in it.”

Caleb shakes his head, frowning. “You haven’t thought this through yet. You gotta have a car for work.”

“I quit my job, remember? Right before I was quote fired unquote.”

The echo of a frown stays on his face, but I’ve caught Caleb’s attention. “If I drove away to see the world, wouldn’t you want to come see it with me?” he asks.

I’m silent. Leave school, get away from home. No more answering to school or parental rules. Best of all, no giving up Caleb. In other words, paradise.

I don’t say a word. Instead, I stand up and toss him the keys.

It’s a quiet drive until we arrive at my house. By then all I want is fifteen minutes of quality time with warm water, soap, and a toothbrush.

“I’ll park your car right here and walk home,” says Caleb. “And I’ll come by tonight after work. Burritos okay? Or something else?”

“Burritos.” He’s letting me off the hook for now. Offering me one more perfect day.

He kisses me and I kiss him back, hard and quick, like a passport stamp on his mouth.

Before I lose my nerve, the first thing I do when I get inside the house is pick up the phone and get train schedules.

And then I call Maine.

“Hello?”

“Aunt Gwen?”

“Oh, Lily!” Her voice is almost exactly like Mom’s. The differences are so subtle, but at the same time so obvious,
that I can always tell one sister from the other. Jane’s and my voices sounded like that. Thinking that, my eyes get unexpectedly hot. I’m just touching the beginning of this, I realize. Life without Jane will be filled with these kinds of painful surprises. Life without Jane will take a lifetime to get used to.

“We’d been hoping to hear from you,” Aunt Gwen is saying. “Your mom will be so thrilled. Let me put her on.”

From the moment I hear my mother’s voice, I know that this was the right call to make. They need me. I love them. It’s that simple.

I spend the rest of the morning getting some stuff together. When I take one last trip into Jane’s room, it’s only to scoop her stack of clothes off the bed and put them in her drawer. Then I shut the door behind me, and I go outside to water Mom’s trees.

That afternoon, I call Caleb at the Pool & Paddle. Kids are splashing in the background. “I’m on the 8:18 train tonight,” I tell him. “Think you can drive me to the station after dinner?”

A pause. “You’re sure you don’t want to drive yourself?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“If your folks decide that they need that car back, you should—” but I can’t make out his voice from the chaos of kids screaming in the background. “Caleb, look! Caleb, watch! See how long I stay under!”

“Talk to you later!” I yell over the noise, and hang up.

When he arrives early that evening, I’m sitting on the front step, pretending to read.

He raises the paper bag. “Still hot.”

But we don’t even get to the burritos. Tonight, food isn’t really the priority. And even though we have the whole house, we lock ourselves in my bedroom. I want Caleb so much. I want to multiply every kiss, every second, into a thousand more. I want to keep my face buried in the warm curve between his jaw and collarbone. And I want, more than anything, to drive across the country and see the world with him.

We indulge in the fantasy, a little. Sleeping under the stars and all that stuff. It’s not that far-fetched. Who’s to say next summer it won’t happen?

“What is it your buddy Thoreau once said, about riding waves?” I ask. “You put it in as your yearbook quote.”

“Live in the present.” Caleb kisses my nose. “Launch yourself on every wave.” He kisses my mouth. “And find your eternity in each moment.”

“Right.” I like that quote. It’s so Caleb. “We kinda did that this summer, don’t you think?”

“I hope.” His voice sounds a little scratchy, but when I look up at him, he turns his face to the wall. Caleb doesn’t like to be openly emotional.

He hasn’t broken off his strand of thought from earlier this afternoon. He starts up as soon as we’ve left the house and I’m turning out of the driveway.

“If your folks decide they need that car back, you should—”

“They’ll understand everything once I explain it.” I wave him off. “They’ll have to understand. That’s a tiny advantage mixed up in all the problems of suddenly being the only child.”

“What about the insurance—?”

“Hey, Caleb,” I answer, “stop worrying about everyone else except for yourself.”

It’s one of those rare moments when Caleb is uncertain of his next move.