Burning September (13 page)

“Carpe diem.”  He took a deep slug, motioned for me to follow suit.  “Good rule of thumb, I guess.  Could be reckless if not exercised with caution, though.  Doesn’t the ticking drive you nuts?”

“It’s soothing until you focus on it too much.  Then it’s all you hear.  Makes your skin crawl.”

He leaned both elbows on the butcher block, tracing the grain of the wood with a fingertip.  “You can always turn them off.”

No.  I shook my head.  Then I might forget all of Caroline’s little lessons, and I didn’t think it was something I could afford to do.  “Who’s the woman you thought was the Empress?”

He choked on his drink and spat an ice cube into his palm.  “Your segues give me whiplash.”

I didn’t bother telling him Caroline had recently said the same thing, just handed him a paper towel.  “Well?”

“Someone a coworker introduced me to.  Apparently she’s ‘my type’.”  He sketched quotes in the air with his fingers.  “I don’t know how he figured that, because
I
don’t even know what my type is.  Aside from female.” 

I had a feeling his type was a modern Audrey Hepburn.  Demure, with cardigans and doe eyes.  Someone he could bring home to Mom.  But then I remembered his mother was dead. 

“Well what’s so bad about her?”

He wrinkled his nose.  “Nothing, I guess.  She does yoga.”  But he said
yoga
as if it were a dirty word.  “I don’t understand yoga.  People do it naked, can you imagine?  In full classes at the gym.  A bunch of naked people.  Probably a lot of them are people you’d hate to see naked.  I don’t get it.  And she’s always putting Chapstick on.  Constantly.”

I rolled my eyes.  “Oh, yeah.  Quenching chapped lips.  What a weirdo.”

“There’s not a pair of lips in the world that needs Chapstick applied every fifteen minutes.  It’s just bizarre.  Like she’s got some sort of timer.  She’s one of those people who talk really loud sometimes, as if everyone around her is dying to eavesdrop on every word she says.”

“Is she pretty, at least?”

He shrugged, looking down at the fine mist of blond hair on his forearms.  “Hard face, too much makeup.  I don’t know.  She’s not
un
attractive, I guess, in the grand scheme of things.”

“Why don’t you just cut it off if you’re not that interested?”

“It’s nice to get out of my house sometimes.  Going to bars by myself gets old.  My best friend is married.  He doesn’t get out much these days.”  My skepticism must have shone through my eyes. “What, you’ve never submitted to being around people you’re not too fond of because of restlessness, loneliness?  A million years of evolution makes us want to be around other people.”

The only people I didn’t mind being around were Caroline, him, and Professor Lawlis.  I’d never been the type to have a lot of friends.  Acquaintances came easily in high school, but those I’d collected were now flung across the U.S. at their various colleges.   “There’s only a few people I like being around, and their availability is limited.”

His gaze skated across my sucked in bottom lip, my white-knuckled grip on the mojito, my too nonchalant to be believed expression.  I was lonely and he knew it, my only saving grace would be for him to not actually voice the opinion.  I couldn’t tell if he knew he was one of the few I liked.  I didn’t want to know.  I’d inherited Caroline’s pride, though I hoped that didn’t mean I’d go to the lengths she’d reached to avenge it.

“At least you’ve got a few.  A few good friends are better than a bunch of acquaintances.”

It was always people with loads of friends who said stuff like that, I’d noticed.  But I couldn’t even count any of the three as friends, and the knowledge only served to make me feel more pathetic.

Isolation is the artist’s condition, babe,
Caroline said back when I was young and naïve, asking why it always seemed like every other child in my school got playdates, birthday invites, Six Flag parties. 
They see that I’m your mother, for all intents and purposes, and they make their own assumptions.  You must come from a bad family if it’s your young paint-splattered sister who’s raising you.   They might think I look irresponsible, wouldn’t trust their kids around me.  Maybe it scares them.  I don’t know.  But you don’t need them.  Stuff like this, it’ll suck for now, but the same thing happened to me, and I think it made me a better artist.  I got so used to the sidelines, observing, and it overlapped into other parts of my life. 

And those people didn’t know what they were cultivating, shunting Caroline to the sidelines.  They’d given her all the ammunition she’d needed, handed her the accelerant and book of matches.  She knew them better than they knew themselves.  All that watching and waiting had only honed her skills, made her natural intuition that much better, culminating into her way of making a bold and brutal stir in the world of anyone she came into contact with.

You just wait until you’re about fourteen,
she said. 
Past the awkward stage.  Everyone will part like the Red Sea for you, just wait and see. That’s how it went for me.

“They’re not even acquaintances.  That’s the sad part.”  My sister who was practically obligated to love me, a professor who took pity on me, and a lawyer who didn’t even know he’d made my list.

“It’s probably stress, you know.  You’re isolating yourself because of this mess with your sister.  It’s a coping mechanism, but if you keep it up, you’ll come undone.  Trust that I’ve got it handled.  I’m not getting paid the big bucks for nothing.  “Accept the things you cannot change.”  Some AA jargon for you to consider.  My dad was in the program for fifteen years before he died.”

“My dad was an alcoholic, too.”

He bobbed his head over his drink, fiddling with the lime wedge jammed on the rim.  “Nobody’s immune.  But he got sober two years before I was born, so I don’t know how bad he actually was.”

“I only remember the drunk stories of my dad.  I asked Caroline once what he was like before he started overdoing it, and she said “you’re lucky you don’t remember.  I knew him; I know. Let’s leave it at that.”

“It’s amazing how much a father can screw up a daughter.  So many things can be traced back to a dad’s fuck-ups.  Domestic abuse, drug addiction.  The list goes on.”

I thought about all those catastrophes and open wounds a father could leave festering in their wake.  They could walk away, take an extended vacation, never to be heard from again, and the daughter would turn to an older man, or an abusive man, or cling onto any guy who showed her attention, no matter how badly he might treat her.  Anything to quench the thirst her father had left burning in her throat.  An addicted father could pass on his ways, turn his daughter into a junkie turning tricks to satiate the habit or numb all the bad memories swirling in her veins.  A cold, distant father might have a daughter who looked outwardly normal, no scar tissue or track marks, but he could wreak hell on her eventual relationships, cause communication breakdowns, emotional divides. 

If there was nothing like a father to ruin a daughter, maybe Caroline had been right. All girls marry their fathers, I once heard.  Caroline snorted into her tea after Dr. Phil said so. 
Marriage is an illusion.  A piece of paper people cram into the junk drawer and lose track of.  Vows take an hour to write and a minute to forget, and the woman always draws the short straw.  The second I say I want to get married, you feed me some cyanide.

But I’d seen all those sketches of wedding dresses she’d kept in her art binders. 

His eyes were kind, soft and focused right on mine when I looked up.  I couldn’t fully execute the smile I wanted to give him, but it seemed like he understood the attempt.

“Thanks for staying.  I know you didn’t have to.”

“Who can ignore the call of a mojito?”

Why did men always make light of things that mattered?  

“Ready for another?”

I surrendered my glass. My coping mechanism may have been isolation, but his was definitely masking everything with humor. 

He pinched a mound of mint leaves between his fingers, distributed it between our glasses.  “So, hey, I’ve decided I’m going to talk to Caroline tomorrow.  Any tips?”

I watched him squeeze the lime, fleshy pulp guts oozing between his thick knuckles.  “Bring a fire extinguisher.”

***

Beating Kyle to Breakthrough was order number one the next day, hangover be damned, so I’d set my alarm clock and dragged myself out of bed, a barbed wire headache of Captain Morgan’s circling my skull. 

The rickety bus ride swirled minty-lime bile around in my stomach, and it was with more than a little relief when I finally made it into the facility’s ice-cold lobby. 

An aide in white scrubs led Caroline by her elbow as I signed the visitor’s log.  She shook out of his grip and stared at me, hands turning palms-up, a quirk in her eyebrow.  “Boy, you’re looking bright eyed and bushy tailed.  What’s with the impromptu visit?”

I waited for the aide to leave and returned Caroline’s arched brow.  “There’s a lot of things I need to talk to you about, and they couldn’t wait.”

Her arms fell to her sides.  “What is it?”

“Mr. Brown.”  I rubbed the dark circles beneath my eyes, fighting back a yawn. 

Confusion clouded her face, but it came and went within a second.  “What about him?”

“I found your letters.”

“You went digging through my shit?”  She didn’t look mad, exactly, more surprised than anything as she sank onto the couch. 

“Not for nothing.  Your lawyer isn’t some public defender, which is what I originally thought.  He charges a shitload of money, and I wanted to know who was paying him.  How you got all that money in your bank account to start with.  I don’t think I’m buying the sponsor thing anymore.  What the hell is going on?  I’m going crazy, here.  I’m all alone, I miss you, and I think I have a right to know.”

She fell silent for a long time, expressionless, but when she spoke, her voice was acidic.  “You don’t, actually.”  Her fingertip traced the dizzying floral pattern on the sofa which looked like it belonged in an old folk’s home.  “You have no right.  But since you’ve brought it up, let me tell you something about Graham Brown.”

I ducked my head to meet her gaze.  “I’m all ears.”

She studied me with hard honey eyes, but after a slow blink, the animosity had gone.    “Do you know how much it costs to attend USC? A lot.  You know how I paid for it?  Do you know how hard I had to work to get through four years?  Scholarships only cover so much.  There’s a reason I had so many freelance gigs.  Do you think I
wanted
to read tarot cards at the fucking fair?  Do you think it was easy for me?”

Of course I didn’t.  I remembered those days.  She’d been the Energizer bunny.  Going, going, going.  Drinking black tea by the gallon, blinking tired eyes as she drove me to school, swallowing yawns over her textbooks late into the evening, forgetting to feed herself.  She would pace at night.  I’d hear the floorboards in her room creaking, would squint through the dim pink rays of my nightlight to find the shadows of her feet padding catlike down the hallway. 

“I’m not following your point, Caroline.”

“It always took you a while to connect dots.”

I recoiled, stung, and it seemed like she regretted saying as much.  She covered my hand with hers.  “Graham Brown didn’t have a lot of money when I was enrolled at USC.  Teachers make next to nothing, and his wealthy great aunt hadn’t died yet.  That happened recently.  A few months before you got your acceptance letter.  I’d been corresponding with him for a while when that happened.”  She paused, giving the side-eye to an aide wheeling a patient noisily through the lobby.  “I didn’t want you to have to bust your ass to make it through college the way I did.  So I dropped a few subtle hints about the financial situation in one of my letters.  I’d remembered him telling me when I was sixteen he had some rich old biddy for an aunt, how he was her only living relative.  So when he said she’d died, I knew he was getting all the cash.  He didn’t even remember telling me about her, it was so long ago.  He thought it was his own wonderful idea to help me out with your school.”  She flicked a stray strand of hair off her forehead.  “Call me a horrible wretch.  I don’t regret it.  Your tuition’s paid.  You don’t have to struggle the way I did.  That’s all that matters.”

I didn’t like being her reason, her excuse.  I never asked for any of it.  I could have done the same, read tarot cards, sold art on the boardwalk, and it still would have been infinitely easier, since I wouldn’t have had a little sister to take care of on top of it all.  I’d have done anything to keep from forcing Caroline into the debt of some moron, even if said moron never intended to collect.

I slid my hand out from under hers.  “So you robbed him, practically.”

She snorted.  “Don’t turn over rocks if you don’t want to find worms.  Who told you to play private eye?  And I’ve never robbed anyone.  That money was willingly given.”

Willingly given. 
More like expertly liberated by a siren’s silver tongue.  If I didn’t find him so repellent, I may have felt sorry for Graham Brown.  “Kyle says he isn’t the one footing his bill, though.”

She belted her arms across her rib cage, blindly groping through the ice and fog between us, searching for the crack in my exterior.  “Perhaps I should invoke my client confidentiality in regards to this case. 
Kyle
,” she said, saccharine sarcasm drenching her tone, “has a bad case of loose lips.  I could put the kibosh on this whole unlikely friendship thing you two seemed to have started.”