Where I Want to Be (4 page)

On the closet door hook, Jane reclaimed her favorite bathing suit. It was a red-checkered one-piece, an old favorite that she thought she’d lost forever but now once again fit perfectly. In the mirror she saw herself. Flat edged and lanky. Like in her ballerina years, before she’d been padded down into a body that she’d never gotten the hang of.

She could not feel any of that chunky softness now.

“I’m the right shape again,” she said to her reflection. “I’m me again.”

She danced down the stairs and through the dining room. She spun in perfect pirouettes. Once her parents had taken her and Lily to Boston to see
The Nutcracker
. Sitting upright and trembling from her seat in the audience, Jane had watched Klara swoop across the stage in her lace nightgown and pink slippers. White-hot footlights were mirrored in her eyes, and her muscles flexed with every leap and turn. Jane could sense it all exactly. It took nothing for her imagination to spin it all into memory.

“Why are you telling kids you were in
The Nutcracker
ballet?” Lily had confronted her a week later.

“Because…” Jane faltered. Hadn’t she been?

“Kids think you’re the biggest liar in the school. They say you lie about tons of things.”

“No, I don’t.”

But Jane saw the suspicion in Lily’s face, and the shame.
It wasn’t true, then? She hadn’t danced in
The Nutcracker
? Not for real? Not just a little bit?

Because the difference was important. For Lily,
for real
was like a green light and
not for real
was a red light. Opposite colors that blinked separately and did not interfere with each other. But somehow, Jane seemed to see only one color. And sometimes that color shone very, very brightly.

Now Jane leaped in her best imitation of Klara. She jolted against the china cupboard, rattling Augusta’s prized collection of handmade Mexican plates.

In a perfect world, nothing fell, and nothing broke.

She danced into the kitchen. It was empty. Her grandparents must be down by the pool. She took a plate from the cupboard. Five round scoops of cantaloupe for the mouth. Two pads of butter for eyes. A toasted roll nose. She smiled back at her smiley-face breakfast, tucked a napkin through the strap of her bathing suit, and trotted outside.

Swallowtail butterflies and yellow jackets swooped and dropped in the air. Augusta’s impatiens was sprayed with purple and white blooms, but the azalea bushes were crumbly brown and the hydrangeas looked parched.

Her grandparents were lounging in lawn chairs. The green-striped table umbrella was cranked up. Augusta was filling in her morning crossword puzzle. Granpa’s tackle box was open in front of him. He was rethreading his baits.

“Good morning,” sang Augusta.

Granpa patted the chair between them. “So we can share you.”

Jane set her plate down next to the tackle box.

“Well, look at that. You made a face.” Augusta nodded approvingly. “That’s as pretty as something in a restaurant. Such a talent with crafts, Jane.”

Jane smiled back. She stretched her legs. Her toes brushed against Gambler, who was collapsed under the table between them. She dropped him a piece of her roll.

“Delicious, thanks,” he panted. Then he rolled on his back for a stomach rub. Obligingly, Jane nudged her toes over his tummy.

With Jane at the table, Augusta didn’t seem much interested in her puzzle anymore.

“Sleep well?”

“I woke up from the thunder.”

Granpa was listening, too. It had never been hard for Jane to hold her grandparents’ interest. Their eyes were shiny on her. Their smiles wanted more.

“And then I dreamed I was a rock climber,” Jane told them now.

“A rock climber? Oh, you do beat all,” drawled Augusta.

“Tell us,” said Granpa.

So Jane told them her dream, taking her time and adding details. Her grandparents were her best dream listeners.

She swallowed her cantaloupe and used her fingers to
spread the butter on her roll. After she finished eating, she lolled back in her chair. Her mouth and hands were hot, buttery, sticky. She could eat melon and buttered rolls every single day and never be tired of them.

And she didn’t need to say this to her grandparents, because they already knew.

“Maybe I’ll water the plants,” she said. “They look thirsty.”

“Why, that’s a good idea,” said Augusta.

“The sprinkling can’s under the porch,” added Granpa.

Yes, she’d water the plants. Maybe weed out the dandelions. And then she’d skim the leaves out of the pool after rescuing any stray daddy longlegs from the surface. Summer had always been Jane’s favorite time at Orchard Way. Lazy days, but with the most odd jobs.

Lily never treasured Sundays like Jane did. By the time she was in sixth grade, Lily was making other weekend plans. Right from her first invitation, Lily had loved in-line skating and sleepovers and roaming in packs of kids at the mall where she could spy on boys and run up mile-high bills on her emergency cell phone.

“Come with me to Orchard Way,” Jane had implored her once.

“No way.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s boring. There are no neighbors,” Lily answered. “There’s nothing to do. Know what I mean?”

No. Jane didn’t know. She didn’t understand why Lily always wanted fun and parties and people. Orchard Way had everything. But Orchard Way wasn’t as fun without Lily. That was the truth. No matter how much Jane hated to admit it. That was the truth.

Morning. I groan. Wriggle my toes and fingers to get the blood flowing again. Careful not to wake Caleb, who sleeps with one arm flipped over his head and the other curled around me. His T-shirt’s crinkled up around his chest. I can see his belly button, a semi-outie. I press my finger against it. Softer than the tip of his nose, but firmer than his earlobe. I can’t keep my hands off Caleb. He jokes that I make him feel like a science experiment.

Sometimes it seems like I’ve waited my whole life to grow up and fall in love. The night of my first date with Caleb was the first time I felt completely, wholly alive. The details are as sharp as an etching in my mind. October 10, fall of my sophomore year, dry with a bite of cooling air. We took a train into downtown Providence and explored, checking out the head shops and tattoo and piercing parlors. At some point we wandered into an all-night grocery store and bought a bunch of green grapes. Each grape
popped so juicy and fruity in my mouth, it was like I’d never tasted grapes before. In no time, I was drunk on them, just as surely as I was intoxicated by the grip of Caleb’s fingers laced through mine when we crossed the street, or the surprising bark of his laugh, or the way the blades of his shoulders stood out like fins through his clothes. I could have told Caleb right then that night that I loved him.

Cay looks different asleep, like a marble sculpture of himself. A blue vein runs up the vertical length of his temple. I can see a scar that runs parallel to his lower lip, and another scar extending from the outer edge of his eye, Egyptian-art style. He has yet another scar in the back of his head, visible through his summer swimmer’s buzz cut. Then it appears, long and pale as a shark’s tooth, white-puckered and nubby to touch.

All three scars are the result of the same accident. Back in sixth grade, Caleb was attacked by a pit bull. His face caught the brunt of the violence. The dog lunged straight for it, tearing the skin from the corner of one eye and ripping the flesh from his chin. But the real damage happened when Caleb fell onto the concrete sidewalk and split open the back of his head. The surgeons had to drain the fluids from his brain to relieve pressure. For seven days, he was in a coma. He lost so much blood that Mr. and Mrs. Price had signed organ donor release forms. A chaplain was called.

I heard these snips of news because Caleb, Jane, and I all went to Peace Dale Middle Magnet School. Back then, I knew Caleb only slightly. He was in Jane’s class. I was one grade lower. All I could have said about him then was that he was a sporty kid with long, gangly legs and a mean-sounding recess yell: “C’mon! I’m open, ya bum!”

When word of the dog attack got out, the whole school thrilled with rumors. From her privileged place in Miss Wrightman’s class, Jane had way better information than I did. Every night at dinner, she’d give us an update.

“Caleb Price is in critical condition.”

“Caleb Price is as good as dead.”

“Caleb Price might pull through, but he’ll be a vegetable forever.”

“Caleb Price might not be a vegetable, but he’ll definitely be a retard.”

Each grade made Caleb a batch of get-well cards, but that wasn’t enough for Jane. The facts of the accident obsessed her. How many pints of blood, how many teeth, how many days of school Caleb had lost. How many stitches had been sewn into his scalp, his lip, his chin, his eye. She began to talk about how much she missed Caleb. Telling stories about what great pals they’d been. How they’d picked each other to be lunchroom cleanup buddies. Slowly, somehow, Caleb turned into one of Jane’s pretends. A character she had created for one of those games that continued to twirl endlessly inside her head.

And then one weekend Jane finagled Mom to take her to the hospital to visit the real Caleb. She got all dressed up in her best party clothes. I dragged along.

In the pediatric ward of St. Christopher’s, I looked at the metal hospital cot and saw a kid whose features were too purple and swollen for me to compare them with the boy in the baggy sweatshirt who was the second-fastest runner in the school. This boy was wearing babyish, dancing bear pajamas. He was hooked up to a jungle gym of plastic cords and tubes and wires, and I could see the bag where his pee went. He was awake, though. When I stared down at him, his fury crackled back at me.

I knew exactly why. What boy would want to be spied on by two girls who’d then go give reports about his pajamas and his pee?

Jane didn’t seem to get this. Or, if she did, she didn’t care.

“We brought cookies,” she announced, dropping the ribbon-tied bakery box on his bedside table. She leaned up on the tips of her squeaky buckle shoes. Her hands gripped the bedrail and her eyes were greedy. I could hear Mom and Mrs. Price chatting in the corner. “…don’t mean to impose, but Jane seemed so troubled,” I heard Mom say, apologetic, because Jane didn’t look as troubled as she did shamelessly curious.

Caleb was glaring at Jane. From deep in his throat, he managed a throttling growl. He sounded a little like a pit
bull himself. My sister was not put off that easily. She reached down and flicked the tips of her fingers across Caleb’s forehead.

“Did you see that dog coming before he almost bit your face off?” she whispered, but not so quietly that the rest of us couldn’t hear. “Were you scared? Did you think you might die? Did you know where you were when you were in that coma? What did you see?”

“Jane!” By now, Mom had snapped to Jane’s side to drag her away. To Mrs. Price she said, “I am just so sorry!” Then back to Jane, with a shake. “I don’t know what gets into you sometimes.”

“Aw, that’s okay.” Mrs. Price looked a lot younger than Mom, and her excited, girlish voice didn’t remind me of regular, Mom-aged moms, either. “Blood and guts is a natural curiosity with kids.”

But Mom’s hand had clamped like a clothespin around Jane’s neck, ready to haul her off.

On the drive back, Jane said that when she’d touched Caleb, he hadn’t felt real.

“Not human real, anyhow. More like a wet snake,” she said. “Like he was breathing through all of his skin, instead of just his mouth.”

“That’s enough, Jane,” said Mom. “Frankly, I’m pretty upset. Here you insisted over and over that you and Caleb are good friends. Then you made me drive you all the way out to the hospital. And what do you do? You try to
frighten the bejesus out of him! What if you’d been the one in the hospital, Jane, and that boy had come to visit you, and he made you feel strange and scared?”

“But they say Caleb Price died and came back to life,” Jane said, her voice full of wonder. “Imagine.”

Imagine.
Sometimes when Jane used that word, like she did now, it made me shiver. It was the same kind of shiver as when Jane told me that Major Duncan Hobhouse had lost three fingers and four toes in the Civil War. “Look at those flesh stumps,” she’d whisper.
“Imagine.”

But Caleb was not somebody Jane had made up inside her head. He was for real. It scared me to think of Jane sucking him deep inside her mind and changing him.

“You don’t know that kid,” I said. “Not for real.”

“Maybe not. But what I
do
know,” and here Jane paused and looked at me, her eyes widened, “is that if you’ve been dead
and
alive, you’re changed forever. Caleb Price is halfway human now. He’s been on both sides.”

“He is not halfway human!” I screeched. Jane really knew how to push me into a good screech. “I saw him with my own eyes! There’s two sides to be on. The alive side or the dead side. Jane’s wrong, Mom, isn’t she? Isn’t she?”

“Of course Caleb is one hundred percent alive, sweetie,” Mom assured me. “Jane’s just making up a story.” Then, with a searching look in the rearview mirror, “Why do you have to act so ghoulish, Janey? I know there’s a happier girl underneath those morbid thoughts.”

I wasn’t as sure about that.

Caleb swears he can’t remember anything about our visit to St. Christopher’s.

“Think, think,” I’ll nudge him from time to time. “Two redheaded girls? One of them in a dress and party shoes, asking you too many questions? The other one hiding in the corner, wishing she could disappear into a hole in the floor?”

“Nope, sorry. Blank,” Caleb promises. “Actually, my whole accident is pretty much wiped from my brain. To tell you the truth, most of the entire year after is a haze. Doctors say it happens with head trauma.”

But everyone knew that after the pit-bull incident, Caleb changed. And not just because of the constant visual reminder, since the injury to his right eye had caused permanent pigmentation damage that made it a few shades darker than the left. After his bones healed and his wounds scarred over, he slowly became another Caleb. More of a loner type, who could no longer join in for pickup games of tetherball and kickball, but instead went swimming at the Y as part of his physical therapy. The new Caleb waited for the bus with his nose deep in a copy of Thoreau’s
Walden
. A gift, he told me later, from his uncle Rory. And the new Caleb had a doctor’s excuse to use Peace Dale Middle’s music room every morning for twenty minutes of meditation.