Just One Day (21 page)

“No, it can’t,” she snaps.

“Well, it’ll have to be,” I snap back.

“So you dictate the rules now, is that it?”

“There aren’t any rules. I’m not dictating anything. I’m just saying you have to trust
the job you did raising me.”

“
Did
. Past tense. I wish you’d stop talking like you’re laying me off from my job.”

I’m startled by that, not by her thinking of me as a job, so much as by the implication
that I am in a position to do the firing. “I thought you were going to go back to
some kind of PR job.”

“I was, wasn’t I?” She guffaws. “I said I’d do it when you started middle school.
When you started high school. When you got your driver’s license.” She rubs her eyes
with the heels of her hands. “Don’t you think if I’d wanted to go back, I’d have done
it by now?”

“So why haven’t you?”

“It wasn’t what I wanted.”

“What
do
you want?”

“For things to be how they were.”

For some reason, this makes me angry. Because it’s both true—she wants to keep me
fossilized—and such a lie. “Even when things were ‘how they were,’ it was never enough.
I was never enough.”

Mom looks up, her eyes tired and surprised at the same time. “Of course you were,”
she says. “You are.”

“You know what bothers me? How you and Dad always say you quit while you were ahead.
There’s
no such thing
as quitting while you’re ahead. You quit while you were
behind
. That’s
why
you quit!”

Mom frowns, exasperated; it’s her dealing-with-a-crazy-teenager look, one I’ve gotten
to know well this past year, my last year of actually being a teenager. Oddly enough,
it wasn’t something she had to zing me with much before. Which I now realize was maybe
part of the problem.

“You wanted more kids,” I continue. “And you had to settle for just me. And you’ve
spent my whole life trying make me be enough.”

That gets her attention. “What are you talking about? You are enough.”

“No, I’m not. How can I be? I’m the one shot, the heir
and
the spare, so you have to make damn sure your one investment pays off because there’s
no backup.”

“That’s ridiculous. You’re not an investment.”

“You treat me like one. You’ve poured all your expectations into me. It’s like I have
to carry the load of hopes and dreams for all the kids you didn’t get to have.”

She shakes her head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says in a quiet
voice.

“Really? Medical school at thirteen.
Come. On!
What thirteen-year-old wants to go to medical school?”

For a moment, Mom looks likes she’s been punched in the gut. Then she places her hand
on her stomach, as if covering the place of impact. “
This
thirteen-year-old.”

“What?”
I’m totally confused now. But then I remember how in high school, Dad always sent
me to Mom when I needed help with chem or bio, even though he was the doctor. And
I can hear Mom reciting the pre-med requisites by heart when the college catalog came.
And I think about the job she once had, doing public relations, but for a drug company.
Then I remember what Grandma said to her at the disastrous Seder:
That was always your dream
.

“You?” I ask. “
You
wanted to be a doctor.”

She nods. “I was studying for the MCATs when I met your father. He was just in his
first year of medical school and somehow found the time to tutor in his spare time.
I took the tests, applied to ten schools, and didn’t get into one. Your father said
it was because I didn’t have any lab experience. So I went to work at Glaxo, and I
thought I’d apply again, but then your father and I got married, and I wound up moving
over to PR, and then a few years went by, and we decided to start a family, and I
didn’t want your father and me to both be in the midst of school and residencies with
a small baby and then we had all the fertility issues. When we gave up on having another
child, I quit working—because we could afford to live on your father’s income. I thought
about applying again, but then I discovered I liked spending time with you. I didn’t
want to be away from you.”

My head is spinning. “You always said you and Dad were set up.”

“We were. By the campus tutoring center. I never told you everything because I didn’t
want you to feel like I’d given up on account of you.”

“You didn’t want me to know you’d quit when you were behind,” I clarify. Because isn’t
that exactly what she did do?

Mom reaches out to grab my wrists. “No! Allyson, you’re wrong about quitting while
you’re ahead. It means being grateful. Stopping when you realize what you have is
enough.”

I don’t entirely believe her. “If that’s true, maybe you should quit while you’re
ahead now—before things between us get really messed up.”

“Are you asking me to quit being your mother?”

At first I think the question is rhetorical, but then I see her looking at me, her
eyes wide and fearful, and a little bit of my heart breaks to think she’d ever truly
think that.

“No,” I say quietly. There’s a moment of silence as I steel myself to say the next
thing. Mom stiffens, like she’s maybe steeling herself too. “But I am asking you to
be a different kind of mother.”

She slumps back in her chair, I can’t tell if it’s in relief or defeat. “And what
do I get out of this?”

For a brief second, I can picture us one day, having tea, me telling her all about
what happened in Paris last summer, what will happen on this trip I’m about to take.
One day. Just not yet.

“A different kind of daughter,” I say.

Twenty-eight

JULY

Home

I
’ve bought my airplane ticket. I’ve paid for my French class, and even with both of
those expenditures, I still have five hundred dollars saved by the end of a surprisingly
busy and lucrative July Fourth weekend. Café Finlay closes on July 25, but unless
things go disastrously in the next three weeks, I should have enough money saved by
then.

Right after the Fourth of July, Melanie comes home. My parents told me she’d be back
from camp for a week before heading off to a rafting trip in Colorado. By the time
she gets back from that, I’ll be gone. And by the time I come back from Europe, it’ll
be time for school. I wonder if the entire summer is going to pass, as the last six
months have, as if our friendship never existed. When I see Melanie’s car in her driveway,
I don’t say anything. Mom doesn’t either, which is how I know that she and Susan have
discussed our falling-out.

French class comes to an end. During the last week, each of us has to give an oral
presentation about something particularly French. I give mine on macarons, explaining
their origins and how they’re made. I dress up in one of Babs’s chef aprons and wear
a beret, and when I’m done, I hand out macarons that Babs made special for the class,
along with Café Finlay postcards.

I am coming home from class in Mom’s car, which I’ve borrowed to lug all my presentation
stuff, when I see Melanie in her driveway. She sees me too, and we look at each other
for a moment. It’s like we’re asking each other, Are we both going to pretend the
other doesn’t exist? That
we
don’t exist?

But we do exist. At least we used to. And so I wave to her. Then I walk toward the
neutral territory of the sidewalk. Melanie does too. When she gets closer, her eyes
widen. I look at my silly costume.

“French class,” I explain. “Here, do you want a macaron?” I pull out one of the extras
that I was bringing home for Mom and Dad.

“Oh, thanks.” She takes a bite, and her eyes widen. I want to say,
I know
. But with all the months gone by, I don’t. Because maybe I don’t know. Not anymore.

“So French class?” she says. “We both did the summer-school thing this year, huh?”

“Right, you were in Portland. At a music program?”

Her eyes light up. “Yeah. It was intense. Not just playing, but composing and learning
about different facets of the industry. We had these professionals come in to work
with us. I composed an experimental piece that I’m going to produce at school next
year.” Her whole face glows. “I think I’m going to major in music theory. What about
you?”

I shake my head. “I’m not sure. I think I like languages.” In addition to Mandarin,
this fall, I’ll take French, along with another Shakespeare class with Professor Glenny.
Intro to Semiotics. And African Dance.

She looks up, hesitates for a second. “So, no Rehoboth Beach this summer?”

We’ve gone to the same summer house since I was five. But not this year. “Dad was
invited to a conference in Hawaii, and he convinced Mom to go with him. As a personal
favor to me, I think.”

“Because you’re going to Paris.”

“Right. I’m going to Paris.”

There’s a pause. In the background, I can hear the neighbor kids splashing around
in the sprinklers. Just like Melanie and I used to.

“To find him.”

“I have to know. If something happened. I just need to find out.”

I brace myself for Melanie’s derision, for her to scoff or laugh at me. But she just
considers what I’ve said. And when she says the next thing, it’s not snide so much
as matter-of-fact: “Even if you find him. Even if he didn’t leave you on purpose,
he can’t possibly live up to the person you’ve built him into.”

It’s not like the thought hasn’t occurred to me. I get that the chances of finding
him are small, but the chances of finding him as I remember him are even smaller.
But I just keep going back to what my dad always says, about how when you lose something,
you have to visualize the last place you had it. And I found—and then lost—so many
things in Paris.

“I know,” I tell Melanie. And it’s weird because I don’t feel defensive. I feel a
little bit relieved because it almost seems like Melanie is worrying about me again.
And also relieved because I’m
not
worrying about me. Not about this, anyhow. “I don’t know that it matters.”

Her eyes widen at that. Then she narrows them, looks me up and down. “You look different.”

I laugh. “No. I still look like me. It’s just this outfit.”

“It’s not the outfit,” Melanie says, almost harshly. “You just seem different.”

“Oh. Well . . .
thanks
?”

I look at Melanie, and for the first time, I notice how she seems. Which is utterly
familiar. Like Melanie again. Her hair is growing out and is back to its natural color.
She’s wearing cutoff shorts, a cute embroidered tee. No nose rings. No tats. No multicolored
hair. No slutty-chic outfits. Of course, just because she looks the same has no bearing
on whether she actually is the same. It hits me that Melanie’s year was probably was
just as tumultuous as mine in ways that I didn’t understand, either.

Melanie is still staring at me. “I’m sorry,” she says at last.

“For what?” I ask.

“For forcing you to cut your hair in London when you weren’t ready. I felt so bad
when you cried like that.”

“It’s okay. And I’m glad I did it.” And I am. Maybe he never would’ve stopped me had
I not had the Louise Brooks hair. Or maybe he would’ve, and we would’ve exchanged
actual names. I’ll never know. Once accidents happen, there’s no backtracking.

We both just stand there on the sidewalk, hands at our sides, unsure of what to say.
I hear the neighbor kids yelp in the sprinklers. I think of me and Melanie when we
were younger, on the high dive at the pool in Mexico. We would always hold hands as
we jumped, but by the time we swam back up to the surface, we’d have let go. No matter
how we tried, once we started swimming, we always let go. But after we bobbed to the
surface, we’d climb out of the pool, clamber up the high-dive ladder, clasp hands,
and do it again.

We’re swimming separately now. I get that. Maybe it’s just what you have to do to
keep above water. But who knows? Maybe one day, we’ll climb out, grab hands, and jump
again.

Twenty-nine

New York City

M
y parents want to drive me to JFK, but I’ve made plans to spend the day with Dee before
I go, so they drop me off at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I’m going to take
the train—my first train in a year—to Manhattan, and Dee will meet me at Penn Station.
Tomorrow night, I catch my flight to London and then onward to Paris.

When my train is announced, we walk toward the platform. Dad taps his toes impatiently,
visions of Maui golf courses dancing through his head. They leave on Monday. Mom just
paces. Then when my train’s headlights are visible in the distance, she pulls a box
out of her purse.

“I thought we weren’t doing presents this time.” Last year, there’d been the big dinner
out, lots of little last-minute gadgets. Last night was more low-key. Homemade lasagna
in the dining room. Both Mom and I pushed it around our plates.

“It’s less for you than for me.”

I open the box. Inside is a small cell phone with a charger and a plug adapter.

“You got me a new phone?”

“No. I mean yes. I mean, your old phone, we’ll unfreeze the plan when you get back.
But this is a special quad-band phone. It
definitely
works in Europe. You just have to buy a . . . what are they called?” she asks Dad.

“SIM card.”

“Right.” She fumbles to flick open the back. “They’re very inexpensive, apparently.
So you can get a local number anywhere you go and have a phone if you need one, and
you can call us in an emergency or text us—but only if you choose to. It’s more for
you, so you have a way to reach us. If you need to. But you don’t have to—”

“Mom,” I interrupt, “it’s okay. I’ll text you.”

“Really?”

“Well, yeah! And you can text me back from Hawaii. And does this thing have a photo
function?” I peer at the camera. “I’ll send you pictures.”

“You will?”

“Of course I will.”

By the look on her face, you’d think I’d given her the present.

_ _ _

Penn Station is mobbed, but I find Dee right away, under the departure board, wearing
a pair of lemon-lime paneled nylon shorts and a tank top with
UNICORNS ARE REAL
emblazoned on it. He scoops me up in a big hug.

“Where’s your suitcase?” he asks.

I turn around, show off the olive backpack I got from the Army-Navy surplus store
in Philadelphia.

Dee whistles. “How’d you fit your ball gown?”

“It folds down really small.”

“I thought you’d have a bigger bag, and I told Mama we’d come back home before we
went out exploring, so she made lunch.”

“I like lunch.”

Dee throws up his hands. “Actually, Mama planned a surprise party for you. Don’t tell
her I told.”

“A party? She doesn’t even know me.”

“She thinks she does by how much I talk about you, and she’ll use any excuse to cook.
My family’s coming, including my cousin Tanya. I told you about her?”

“The one who does hair?”

Dee nods. “I asked her if she’d do yours. She does white-girl hair too, works in a
fancy salon in Manhattan. I thought maybe you could get a bob again, go all Louise
Brooks. Look just like you did when you met. You gotta do something with that mop.”
He fingers my hair, up, as usual, in a clip.

We take the subway all the way uptown, to the last stop on the train. We get out and
transfer to a bus. I look out the window, expecting the rough-and-tumble streets of
the South Bronx, but the bus passes a bunch of pretty brick buildings all shaded by
mature trees.

“
This
is the South Bronx?” I ask Dee.

“I never said I lived in the South Bronx.”

I look at him. “Are you serious? I’ve heard you say a bunch of times that you’re from
the South Bronx.”

“I only said that I was from the Bronx. This is the Bronx, technically. It’s Riverdale.”

“But you told Kendra you were from the South Bronx. You told her you went to South
Bronx High School. . . .” I pause, remembering that first conversation. “Which does
not even exist.”

“I left the girl to her own jumped conclusions.” He gives me a knowing smirk. He rings
the bell to get off the bus. We exit onto a busy street full of tall apartment buildings.
It’s not fancy, but it’s nice.

“You are a master pretender, D’Angelo Harrison.”

“Takes one to know one. I
am
from the Bronx. And I
am
poor. If people want to translate that as ghetto boy, that’s their choice.” He smiles.
“Especially if they want to throw scholarship money my way.”

We arrive at a pretty brick building with cracked gargoyles hanging over the front
entrance. Dee rings the buzzer—“so they know we’re coming”—and then we take one of
those ancient caged-in elevators to the fifth floor. Outside the front door, he looks
at me and tucks some strands of stray hair behind my ear.

“Act surprised,”
he whispers and opens the door.

We step into a party, about a dozen people crowded into the small living room where
there’s a
BON VOYAGE ALLYSON
sign tacked up over a table laden with food. I look at Dee, eyes wide in shock.

“Surprise!” he says, twinkling jazz hands.

Dee’s mother, Sandra, comes up to me and wraps me in a gardenia-scented bear hug.
“He told you, didn’t he? That was the worst look of surprise I ever saw. My baby couldn’t
keep a secret if was stapled to him. Well, come on, then, meet the folk, have some
food.”

Sandra, introduces me to various aunts and uncles and cousins and gives me a plate
of barbecued chicken and mac and cheese and some greens and sits me down at a table.
“Now you hold court.”

Dee has pretty much told everyone about Willem, so they all have advice on how to
track him down. Then they start peppering me with questions about the trip. How I’m
getting there—a flight from New York to London and then on to Paris—and where I’m
staying—a youth hostel in the Villette area Willem and I hung out in, twenty-five
bucks a night for a dorm—and how I’ll get around—with the help of a guidebook, and
I will brave the Metro. And they ask about Paris, and I tell them about what I saw
last year, and they’re very interested to hear how diverse it was, about the sections
that were full of Africans and then this starts a big debate about which African countries
France colonized until someone goes for a map to figure it out.

While everyone pores over the atlas, Sandra comes up with a plate of peach cobbler.
“I got you a little something,” she says, handing me a thin package.

“Oh, you shouldn’t—”

She waves away my objections like stale air. I open the package. Inside is a laminated
map of Paris. “The man at the store said this would be ‘indispensable.’ It has all
the subway stops and an index of major streets.” She opens the map to show me. “And
D’Angelo and I spent so many hours looking at it, it has our good blessings coursing
through it.”

“Then I’ll never get lost again.”

She folds the map up and puts it in my hands. She has the same eyes as Dee. “I want
to thank you for helping my boy this year.”

“Me helping Dee?” I shake my head. “I think you have it the other way around.”

“I know exactly the way I have it,” she says.

“No, seriously. All Dee has done is help me. It’s almost embarrassing.”

“Stop with such nonsense. D’Angelo is both brilliant and blessed with the road life
has taken him on. But it’s not been easy for him. In his four years of high school
and one year of college, you are the first friend from school he’s ever talked about,
much less brought home.”

“You two are talking about me, aren’t you?” Dee asks. He puts an arm around each of
us. “Extolling my brilliance?”

“Extolling your something,” I say.

“Don’t either of you believe a word!” He turns around to introduce a tall, regal girl
with a head full of intricate twists. “I was telling you about Tanya.”

We exchange hellos, and Sandra goes off to fetch some more cobbler. Tanya reaches
out to free my hair from its clip. She fingers the ends and shakes her head, clucking
her tongue the same disapproving way Dee so often does.

“I know. I know. It’s been a year,” I say. And then I realize it has. A year.

“Was it short or long?” Dee asks. He turns to Tanya. “You have to make her look just
the same. For when she finds him.”

“
If
I find him,” I clarify. “It was to here.” I point to the base of my skull, where
the stylist in London had cut my hair to last year. But then I drop my hand. “You
know, though. I don’t think I want the bob.”

“You don’t want a haircut?” Tanya asks.

“No, I would
love
a haircut,” I tell her. “But not a bob. I want to try something totally new.”