Orphea Proud (6 page)

“I’d better go. Lissa’s family might be calling. The whole thing might be a mistake. There isn’t a body.”

“Whoa—you’re not going yet. Marilyn is going to see to your face. When’s the last time you ate something?” He clenched his fist. “That brother of yours is some coward, beating up on children.”

Marilyn gave me some ice for my lip and cleaned the cut on my eye. I put on a pair of her socks. Icky made me sunny-side up eggs with jelly and toast. I stared at the plate.

“Sunflowers.”

“What is it, hon?” That was Marilyn.

“Sunflowers.” The egg yolks were bright yellow orbs. “If you stare long enough, the eggs turn into sunflowers. Don’t you see them?”

“It’s going to be okay, honey.” Icky was speaking. “Hold on.”

“I don’t know if I can.” My mind was a splitting fissure. I felt like I might fall in.

“Eat your sunflowers, kiddo. Come on.”

I couldn’t.

“I don’t want you to go back,” said Marilyn as I got up to leave. “Your brother might hurt you again.”

“He won’t.… ”

Rupert and Ruby didn’t like slurping or unpolished shoes, wrinkled jeans, loud radios, ringing telephones, or the way I held my cup; but that was the first time I’d been hit. They went to school for parent conferences. They had money for me to go to college. After all those years, Ruby still tried giving me hugs.

But she never asked what I was thinking. They
couldn’t guess how unfinished I felt. They never came to hear me read my poetry.

Seeing Lissa and me together must have been shocking. But they still loved me in their own way. Didn’t they?

“My brother won’t hit me again.”

“Stay here with us,” Icky pleaded.

“No, I should go.”

So Icky walked me home and gave me his cell number. “Call me if you have trouble. I’ll stand outside the house. I won’t leave until you wave.”

Rupert and Ruby were already in bed, or at least they were in their bedroom. I paused at the phone in the hallway and listened to my messages. My heart thumped. There was one from Mr. Evans, who sounded like he was having trouble breathing.

“Hi, Orphea. Ahh … I’ve spoken to your brother, so I know that you’ve gotten the news. I’m wondering, ahh … she was a good little driver … it was the snow, I suppose. I had just checked the car.… We’re still in a state of shock.… We’re having a memorial service at the boathouse next to the lake. Day after tomorrow. Asking that her friends bring something to say about her. No pressure. Ahh …

“But you were her best friend.

“One of us will call with more details tomorrow. Bye.”

I went to the window and waved.

I stayed in my room until the funeral, surviving on a bag of marshmallows and water from the bathroom. Ruby and Rupert let me be. The only way I can describe how I felt is “cotton candy.” Like a big, sticky ball filled with air. My body was a wad of nothing about to vanish. But my brain was going overtime. I wanted to say something at the service. Something significant. I scrawled disjointed ideas in my journal—

Lissa was a kind person … always thinking of others.…

We planned a road trip for after high school.

New York, L.A., Grand Canyon, both oceans …

But the first stop, she said, was for me. Proud Road.

Dinky town not on the map where I always wanted to go.

“If it’s important to you, Orphea, we’ll go.”

That was Lissa.

I didn’t think we could do it. She said we’d save our money. Get a car. Drive off and not look back.

“It’s your movie, Orphea,” she said. “You might as well write the script.”

What she didn’t know was that I didn’t have a movie, not of my own. I was just a part of hers, because she was the dreamer.

Being in Lissa’s movie … the best part of my life so far.

I didn’t get to see Lissa at the service. Her family had her cremated. The boathouse was packed with kids from school, especially from the literary magazine, where Lissa did art and I did poetry. A guy we
both knew from grade school named Mike came over and put his arm around me.

“How you doing, sweetheart? Y’all were always so tight.”

“Okay, Mike.”

He gave me a curious look. I was wearing shades, but my face was still puffy.

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

He shook his head. “We’re all going to miss her.”

Lissa’s dad told the story of how when Lissa had been four years old she’d jumped off the dock at the lake without her water wings, even though she didn’t know how to swim. She’d gotten this idea that on the morning of her fourth birthday, she’d be able to swim just like that. And she’d tried it. But Mr. Evans had to fish her out. She had a magic way of thinking sometimes, he said, and she wasn’t afraid to take risks.

Mrs. Evans didn’t say anything. Lissa’s sister, Annie, wasn’t there.

At one point Mr. Evans gave me a nod, but I pretended not to notice. At the last minute, I had decided not to speak after all. My feelings were like a dammed-up waterfall. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I opened my mouth. After the service, when Mrs. Evans gave me a hug, my body was stiff as cardboard, I was trying so hard to hold back. They were her parents. They were being so brave. It wasn’t my place to make a scene.

“You were her best friend,” her dad whispered into my ear.

I loved her! I wanted to shout it to the world. But I kept quiet. Instead, in a sealed envelope next to the urn, I left a poem. God took her for a reason—that’s what the minister said. I didn’t believe that. Death had taken Lissa. And Death is a whole ’nother being.

So, folks …

I see Marilyn coming around if you need to place an order. I recommend today’s special. Whoops!—Icky just put a spot on her—whoa, that’s bright.… Bring it down some, Icky. Okay? Great, that’s better.… I’ll just take a sip of water myself.…

So, where were we?

Lissa’s death left me in a dark place.

I lasted in school for about three weeks, pretending to be there when I wasn’t. I disappeared, burrowing into her absence. In the hallway, people smiled at me kindly. I responded with a mechanical upward tilt of my mouth. Best friends, they were all thinking; tied at the waist; more than friends, some might have guessed. I spoke only when necessary. The world took on sadness so profound that even taste buds were affected. One afternoon I made a smoothie in the blender, something that Lissa and I used to do; fresh strawberries, bananas, ice, milk, vanilla, and that day an overripe mango—I still have the image of my thumbnail pushing the skin away from fleshy fruit. Then it was all in the blender whirring away. I took a taste and where there should have been sweetness on my tongue, there was just the taste of sad. I went upstairs to the bathroom and shaved my head, which gave Ruby yet another complaint and so made me not only sad but foolish. Since I was a fool, one night I carved that onto my skin, using a safety pin, delicately scratching the letter F and all the other letters onto my forearm. Not that I actually believed that I was a fool. That was just an excuse. Scratching my arm with the pin was an exit, you see, a way to let the pain out. But the exit wasn’t big enough. If I scratched the whole alphabet into my flesh I could never let it all out, the pain I was feeling inside. Ordinarily I would have written in my journal instead of on my arm, but writing was a thing I’d done in my other life, the life I had with Lissa.

Have any of you experienced that kind of loss? There you are living a little peanut-butter-and-jelly-type existence, surviving school, answering e-mail, seeing a flick, counting the days until your escape from the dry prison walls of high school and the ruthless eye of the sadist who calls himself your guardian, and BINGO! Fate trips you up, cracks open your chest, yanks out your heart, cuts it in half with a sharp pair of scissors, and then stuffs it back inside of you. And the world tells you to keep on going. Got to keep reading those books, if you want to get into a decent college. Got to write those papers. When Lissa died, I was in the middle of
Moby-Dick
. Why would I want to read about a whale at a time like that? Even if I were interested, there was no way I could fit all those words into my mind. My mind was filled with images. Images of her, like photographs stuffed into a drawer so full that it could no longer move. A stuck drawer, stuffed with pictures of our lives completely out of order, chaotic, careening clips of our own private movie. How could I think about precalc when I was feeling like that?

After sad and foolish came crazy. I ransacked Ruby’s medicine cabinet, took some pills and chased them with vodka, but found myself still standing. So, I took a walk to Icky’s diner and put in an order for my very last supper, BLT on a sesame roll. The soup of the day was split pea. To this day, I’m not sure whether it was the pills and vodka or the smell of the simmering kettle that sent me flying to the bathroom. Marilyn held my head over the toilet.

“What did you take? Tell me what you took!”

“Some kind of pills so Ruby could get pregnant,” I said, gagging.

She slammed me on the back. “They probably won’t kill you.”

But by the time I was done being sick, I felt like a ghost. I curled up on the floor of the diner’s kitchen while Icky lectured me.

“You don’t do that kind of stuff, hear me? You don’t take your own precious life. That’s not your place to do that, Orphea. Your job is to—”

“To live,” said Marilyn.

“You ain’t the only one who’s ever lost somebody they love.” Icky’s voice rained down on me. I closed my eyes. I wanted to follow her.

“You think that Lissa would want this bullshit? You think that she would approve?”

They didn’t understand. They hadn’t been there. Maybe Lissa wanted to die after what had happened. Maybe she couldn’t deal with it.