Lock and Key (21 page)

“What?” I said.

“It’ll be fun,” she told me. “And you look good in blue.”

This was little comfort, though, a week later, when I found myself posing by the pond, Roscoe perched in my lap, as Jamie fiddled with his tripod and self-timer. Cora, beside me in her shirt, kept shooting me apologetic looks, which I was studiously ignoring. “You have to understand,” she said under her breath as Roscoe tried to lick my face. “He’s just like this. The house, and the security, this whole life. . . . He’s always wanted to give me what I didn’t have. It’s really sweet, actually.”

“Here we go!” Jamie said, running over to take his place on Cora’s other side. “Get ready. One, two . . .”

At three, the camera clicked, then clicked again. Never in a million years I thought, when I saw the pictures later, stacked up next to their blank envelopes on the island. HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM THE HUNTERS! it said, and looking at the shot, you could almost think I was one of them. Blue shirt and all.

I wasn’t the only one being forced out of my comfort zone. About a week later, I was at my locker before first bell when I felt someone step up beside me. I turned, assuming it was Nate—the only person I ever really talked to at school on a regular basis—but was surprised to see Olivia Davis standing there instead.

“You were right,” she said. No hello or how are you. Then again, she didn’t have her phone to her ear, either, so maybe this was progress.

“About what?”

She bit her lip, looking off to the side for a moment as a couple of soccer players blew past, talking loudly. “Her name is Melissa. The girl my boyfriend was cheating with.”

“Oh,” I said. I shut my locker door slowly. “Right.”

“It’s been going on for weeks, and nobody told me,” she continued, sounding disgusted. “All the friends I have there, and everyone I talk to regularly . . . yet somehow, it just doesn’t come up. I mean, come on.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to this. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “That sucks.”

Olivia shrugged, still looking across the hallway. “It’s fine. Better I know than not, right?”

“Definitely,” I agreed.

“Anyway,” she said, her tone suddenly brisk, all business, “I just wanted to say, you know, thanks. For the tip.”

“No problem.”

Her phone rang, the sound already familiar to me, trilling from her pocket. She pulled it out, glancing at it, but didn’t open it. “I don’t like owing people things,” she told me. “So you just let me know how we get even here, all right? ”

“You don’t owe me anything,” I said as her phone rang again. “I just gave you a name.”

“Still. It counts.” Her phone rang once more, and now she did flip it open, putting it to her ear. “One sec,” she said, then covered the receiver. “Anyway, keep it in mind.”

I nodded, and then she was turning, walking away, already into her next conversation. So Olivia didn’t like owing people. Neither did I. In fact, I didn’t like people period, unless they gave me a reason to think otherwise. Or at least, that was the way I had been, not so long ago. But lately, I was beginning to think it was not just my setting that had changed.

Later that week, Nate and I were getting out of the car before school, Gervais having already taken off at his usual breakneck pace. By this point, we weren’t attracting as much attention—there was another Rachel Webster, I supposed, providing grist for the gossip mill—although we still got a few looks. “So anyway,” he was telling me, “then I said that I thought maybe, just maybe, she could hire me and my dad to get her house in order. I mean, you should see it. There’s stuff piled up all over the place—mail and newspapers and laundry. God.
Piles
of laundry.”

“Harriet?” I said. “Really? She’s so organized at work.”

“That’s work, though,” he replied. “I mean—”

“Nate!”

He stopped walking and turned to look over at a nearby red truck, a guy in a leather jacket and sunglasses standing next to it. “Robbie,” he said. “What’s up?”

“You tell me,” the guy called back. “Coach said you’ve quit the team for good now. And you had that U scholarship in the bag, man. What gives?”

Nate glanced at me, then pulled his bag farther up his shoulder. “I’m just too busy,” he said as the guy came closer. “You know how it is.”

“Yeah, but come on,” the guy replied. “We need you! Where’s your senior loyalty?”

I heard Nate say something but couldn’t make it out as I kept walking. This clearly had nothing to do with me. I was about halfway to the green when I glanced behind me. Already, Nate was backing away from the guy in the leather jacket, their conversation wrapping up.

I only had a short walk left to the green. The same one I would have been taking alone, all this time, if left to my own devices. But as I stepped up onto the curb, I had a flash of Olivia, her reluctant expression as she stood by my locker, wanting to be square, not owing me or anyone anything. It was a weird feeling, knowing you were indebted, if not connected. Even stranger, though, was being aware of this, not liking it, and yet still finding yourself digging in deeper, anyway. Like, for instance, consciously slowing your steps so it still looked accidental for someone to catch up from behind, a little out of breath, and walk with you the rest of the way.

The picture was of a group of people standing on a wide front porch. By their appearance—sideburns and loud prints on the men, printed flowy dresses and long hair on the women—I guessed it was taken sometime in the seven-ties. In the back, people were standing in haphazard rows; in the front, children were plopped down, sitting cross-legged. One boy had his tongue sticking out, while two little girls in front wore flowers in their hair. In the center, there was a girl in a white dress sitting in a chair, two elderly women on each side of her.

There had to be fifty people in all, some resembling each other, others looking like no one else around them. While a few were staring right into the camera with fixed smiles on their faces, others were laughing, looking off to one side or the other or at each other, as if not even aware a picture was being taken. It was easy to imagine the photographer giving up on trying to get the shot and instead just snapping the shutter, hoping for the best.

I’d found the photo on the island when I came downstairs, and I picked it up, carrying it over to the table to look at while I ate my breakfast. By the time Jamie came down twenty minutes later, I should have long moved on to the paper and my horoscope, but I was still studying it.

“Ah,” he said, heading straight to the coffeemaker. “You found the ad. What do you think?”

“This is an ad?” I asked. “For what?”

He walked over to the island. “Actually,” he said, digging around under some papers, “that’s not the ad. This is.”

He slid another piece of paper in front of me. At the top was the picture I’d been looking at, with the words IT’S ABOUT FAMILY in thick typewriter-style block print beneath it. Below that was another picture, taken in the present day, of a bunch of twenty-somethings gathered on what looked like the end zone of a football field. They were in T-shirts and jeans, some with arms around each other, others with hands lifted in the air, clearly celebrating something. IT’S ABOUT FRIENDS, it said underneath. Finally, a third picture, which was of a computer screen, filled with tiny square shots of smiling faces. Looking more closely, I could see they were same ones as in the other pictures, cut out and cropped down, then lined up end to end. Underneath, it said, IT’S ABOUT CONNECTING: UME.COM.

“The idea,” Jamie explained over my shoulder, “is that while life is getting so individualistic—we all have our own phones, our own e-mail accounts, our own everything—we continue to use those things to reach out to each other. Friends, family . . . they’re all part of communities we make and depend on. And UMe helps you do that.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Thousands spent on an advertising agency,” he said, reaching for the cereal box between us, “hours wasted in endless meetings, and a major print run about to drop any minute. And all you can say is ‘wow’?”

“It’s better than ‘it sucks,’” Cora said, entering the kitchen with Roscoe at her heels. “Right?”

“Your sister,” Jamie told me in a low voice, “does not like the campaign.”

“I never said that,” Cora told him, pulling the fridge open and taking out a container of waffles as Roscoe headed my way, sniffing the floor. “I only said that I thought your family might not like being featured, circa nineteen seventy-six, in magazines and bus shelters nationwide.”

I looked back at the top picture, then at Jamie. “This is your family?”

“Yep,” he said.

“And that’s not even all of them,” Cora added, sticking some waffles into the toaster oven. “Can you even believe that? They’re not a family. They’re a tribe.”

“My grandmother was one of six children,” Jamie explained.

“Ah,” I said.

“You should have seen it when we got married,” Cora said. “I felt like I’d crashed my own wedding. I didn’t know
anybody
.”

It took a beat for the awkwardness following this statement to hit, but when it did, we all felt it. Jamie glanced up at me, but I focused on finishing the bite of cereal I’d just taken, chewing carefully as Cora flushed and turned her attention to the toaster oven. Maybe it would have been easier to actually
acknowledge
the weirdness that was our estrangement and the fact that my mom and I hadn’t even known Cora had gotten married, much less been invited to the wedding. But of course, we didn’t. Instead we just sat there, until suddenly the smoke detector went off, breaking the silence.

“Shit,” Jamie said, jumping up as ear-piercing beeping filled the room. Immediately I looked at Roscoe, whose ears had gone flat on his head. “What’s burning?”

“It’s this stupid toaster oven,” Cora said, pulling it open and waving her hand back and forth in front of it. “It always does this. Roscoe, honey, it’s okay—”

But it was too late. The dog was already bolting out of the room, in full flight mode, the way he’d taken to doing the last week or so. For some reason, Roscoe’s appliance anxiety had been increasing, spurred on not only by the oven but anything in the kitchen that beeped or had the potential to do so. The smoke detector, though, remained his biggest fear. Which, I figured, meant that right about now he was probably up in my bathroom closet, his favorite hiding place of late, shaking among my shoes and waiting for the danger to pass.

Jamie grabbed the broom, reaching it up to hit the detector’s reset button, and finally the beeping stopped. As he got down and came back to the table, Cora followed him, sliding into a chair with her waffle, which she then nibbled at halfheartedly.

“It may be time to call a professional,” she said after a moment.

“I’m not putting the dog on antidepressants,” Jamie told her, picking up the paper and scanning the front page. “I don’t care how relaxed Denise’s dachshund is now.”

“Lola is a Maltese,” Cora said, “and it wouldn’t necessarily mean that. Maybe there’s some training we can do, something that will help him.”

“We can’t keep coddling him, though,” Jamie said. “You know what the books say. Every time you pick him up or soothe him when he’s freaking out like that, you’re reinforcing the behavior.”

“So you’d prefer we just stand by and let him be traumatized? ”

“Of course not,” Jamie said.

Cora put down her waffle, wiping her mouth with a napkin. “Then I just think that there’s got to be a way to acknowledge his fear and at the same time—”

“Cora.” Jamie put down the paper. “He’s a dog, not a child. This isn’t a self-esteem issue. It’s Pavlovian. Okay?”

Cora just looked at him for a moment. Then she pushed back her chair, getting to her feet, and walked to the island, dropping her plate into the sink with a loud clank.

As she left the room, Jamie sighed, running a hand over his face as I pulled the family picture back toward me. Again, I found myself studying it: the varied faces, some smiling, some not, the gentle regalness of the elderly women, who were staring right into the camera. Across the table, Jamie was just sitting there, looking out at the pond.

“I do like the ad, you know,” I said to him finally. “It’s cool.”

“Thanks,” he said, distracted.

“Are you in this picture?” I asked him.

He glanced over at it as he pushed his chair out and got to his feet. “Nah. Before my time. I didn’t come along for a few more years. That’s my mom, though, in the white dress. It was her wedding day.”

As he left the room, I looked down at the picture again, and at the girl in the center, noticing how serene and happy she looked surrounded by all those people. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be one of so many, to have not just parents and siblings but cousins and aunts and uncles, an entire tribe to claim as your own. Maybe you would feel lost in the crowd. Or sheltered by it. Whatever the case, one thing was for sure: like it or not, you’d never be alone.

Fifteen minutes later I was standing in the warmth of the foyer, waiting for Nate to pull up at the mailbox, when the phone rang.

“Cora?” the caller said, skipping a hello.

“No,” I said. “This is—”

“Oh, Ruby, hi!” The voice was a woman’s, entirely perky. “It’s Denise, Cora’s old roommate—from the party?”

“Right. Hi,” I said, turning my head as Cora came down the stairs, briefcase in her hand.

“So how’s life?” Denise asked. “School okay? It’s gotta be a big adjustment, starting at a new place. But Cora did say it’s not the first time you’ve switched schools. Personally, I lived in the same place my whole entire life, which is really not much better, actually, because—”

“Here’s Cora,” I said, holding the phone out as she got to the bottom step.

“Hello?” Cora said as she took it from me. “Oh, hey. Yeah. At nine.” She reached up, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. “I will.”