Rosebush (13 page)

Something about the way my eyes lit up told Loretta all she needed to know. She held the phone to my ear. “David!” I said, louder probably than I needed to.

“Hey, babe. How—how are you doing?”

The familiar bass of his voice sent a wave of pure joy through me. And something else unexpected that felt like—relief ? I didn’t know what I had been afraid of, but hearing his voice made it vanish.

“I’m good now. Are you coming to see me?” I didn’t want to seem too desperate, even though now that I had him on the phone, I felt like I needed him. Needed to see him.

It sounded like he exhaled. Like he felt relief too. “I can’t tonight, but I’ll be there first thing in the morning. I just wanted you to know I was thinking about you. And babe?”

“Yes?”

“Better than cupcakes. That’s 139.”

I couldn’t stop smiling, even though it hurt. “No way.”

“Yes way.”

I felt so happy. Normal. This was normal.

In the background I heard voices and I heard a siren. Or maybe it was on my end.

“Where are you? It sounds like you’re in a parking lot.”

“Something like that. Listen, I gotta run, but I’ll see you soon.”

“Promise?”

“Super-promise. Love you, babe. You take care. Stay soft.”

“Love you too.”

I heard him say, “Hey, wait up—” and then the phone clicked off. Who was he meeting? What lucky person got to see him now?

It didn’t matter. I’d see him tomorrow.

He sounds like the perfect boyfriend,
I heard myself say to Nicky.

He was.

I grinned at Loretta.

“My goodness, couple more doses of him and you’ll be doing jumping jacks out of here,” she said. “I guess you hardly like him at all.”

“Hardly.”

“You got off the phone just in time, your mother’s about to be a star.” Loretta turned up the sound as the five-o’clock-news jingle started to play.

My case made the first slot. An ambulance with a siren blaring went by and then the shot moved to my mother. I’d expected a podium—she liked podiums for her candidates—but instead she was standing on the front steps of the hospital with Annie and Joe beside her on her left, like a perfect family. On her right, in the place she always made me stand (“to balance the image”), was little Sloan. But that didn’t bother me. Nothing could bother me.

I thought about Scott’s Still Lifes with Aspirations and how every one has a telltale detail as I watched. I took in Annie’s non-matching socks, the whiteness of my mother’s knuckles, the way Sloan kept looking over her shoulder and—hold up, did she have a hickey? Nice one. That was one of the first habits I’d had to train David out of when we started dating, because you never knew when my mother would need a family photo op. Too bad for you, Sloan, I thought, you can’t quite replace me yet.

After them there was a report about a fireman who rescued a child from a cougar that got loose from someone’s private wild-animal collection, an interview with wild-animal trainers about how you shouldn’t have a private wild-animal collection, and a piece about a convenience store heist where they made off with a case of Butterfingers, $143.72, and several issues of
Playboy
using iPods disguised as tasers.

They teased the Memorial Day weekend hot dog taste-test challenge before cutting to commercials.

Orange juice. Michigan. Two-for-one drinks at Friday’s. In my mind I saw David and me enjoying it all, arm in arm, always with a sunset behind us.

I spent the rest of the night watching television and thinking about all the things David and I would do when I was better.

The last ad I saw before turning off the television was for something called Scar-B-Gone. “Get rid of unsightly scars in just ten days with our miracle cure or your money back,” and my mood skyrocketed. David loved me. My scars could become invisible. Everything would go back to the way it had been.

I had yet to learn that there are scars no miracle cure can heal. Scars buried so deep you can’t see them or reach them or stop them from aching. Scars that can kill you.

Saturday

Chapter 12

“Hey, lover lips.”

My mind cleared. I was staring up at David.

Like always, he was wearing sunglasses, and their lenses were showing me two distorted images of myself. He bent to kiss me on the forehead and I felt the brush of the guitar pick he wore on a chain around his neck against my skin and smelled Prada for men. He only wore that for special occasions.

My heart soared.

He had a T-shirt that said COME BACK TO LEBANON! which was one of his favorites and jeans and a day’s growth of stubble and he looked amazing. I felt suddenly nervous. How did I look? He was so handsome and I was so—

“How’s my brave girl?” he asked, taking my hand. The way he called me brave, the way he smiled at me, made me want to cry. “You look like a princess who’s seen a few things.”

“I feel like one.”

“I’m so proud of you, babe,” he said, and even though I didn’t know why—what had I done?—it made me happy.

“Thank you.”

“I’m working on a song about you,” he told me. “Already have most of the chorus worked out.”

He was writing a song for me. That was—I felt tears pricking in my eyes.

“Aw, don’t cry, babe. You know I love you.”

“I love you too.”

He looked at me over the tops of his glasses and winked. Then he straightened up and pointed a thumb behind him. “Look who else came along to give his most sincere regards.”

I don’t know why, but somehow seeing Ollie there was a shock. The flowers had been odd, but now it was like some part of my mind was tensed. The atmosphere in the room seemed to shift as he stepped closer to the bed.

“Thank you for the flowers,” I said. “They’re beautiful.”

“Oh yeah, sure. Always send flowers to ladies in distress.” His tone was casual, normal, but he rattled his car keys against his right leg nervously. “How are you feeling? I mean, your spirits good?”

It was an odd question, but the answer was easy. “Great now,” I said, smiling at David.

Ollie nodded to himself. “Yeah, you look okay. How’s the head?”

“Still a bit slow. A lot I don’t remember.”

“I expect.” He looked at me for a moment with one of his unnervingly intense gazes and repeated, “I expect. Probably better that way. No reason to ask a lot of pointless questions.” Then turned to David. “I’ll wait for you outside, man. Don’t be too long, it’s ten of eleven now and I want to get to the Apple store before it gets busy.”

“Be out in a few, buddy.”

God, he was so weird. As soon as he left, the strange feeling in the air disappeared.

David sat down on the chair next to my bed. He pushed the hair off my forehead with his left hand. “How come you can even look great when you’re all busted up, lover lips?”

I laughed hard. It hurt my face and a little in my chest, but it was still the most wonderful sensation. I felt like I hadn’t truly laughed in ages. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

He slid his glasses off his nose. I could see his eyes were a little glassy, but he wasn’t too stoned. “Would I lie to you?” He gave me that crooked smile, the one that I had fallen in love with the very first day we hung out, when I didn’t even imagine he could be interested in me.

It had been a Saturday at the beginning of the previous October and Langley, Kate, and I were manning a booth at the Livingston Days Faire, raising money for the no-kill animal shelter in town where Langley volunteered. We were selling cookies, so Langley had decided we should dress as sexy Girl Scouts, and since things had been on the rocks between her and Alex then, Kate and I had acquiesced to make her happy.

We’d only just finished setting up our booth when David and Ollie came by. Kate waved them over and began recruiting them to be our plants at the fair. “All you have to do is go around saying in loud voices how great our cookies are,” she explained. “Then we’ll do the rest.”

Kate and David had been next-door neighbors since they were little, so she knew him pretty well, but I’d never talked to either him or Ollie before. They were super-popular seniors and I’d always been a little intimidated by them, but they stuck around all afternoon, pretending to be our bouncers and funneling people to the booth. “Step right up and get a load of these lip-smacking good morsels,” Ollie would say, and David would put in, “And the cookies are good too!”

They were funny and clever and really easy to hang out with. David spent most of the afternoon talking with Kate and Langley while Ollie talked to me. Even then he had a way of looking at me that made me feel like he was looking through me, but it didn’t quite have the edge of not liking what he was seeing. That came later.

The day of the fair, he was nice and surprised me by knowing a lot about photography and art and galleries in New York. And after we’d sold all our cookies, he invited us back to his place for a barbecue. The idea was thrilling—a barbecue with two popular senior guys—but Saturday was family dinner night at my house and I knew there was no way my mother would let me out of it.

It was mortifying to have to tell Ollie and David that I had to spend Saturday night with my mother, sister, and Joe watching
Muppets Take Manhattan
, but instead of making fun of me, David offered me a ride home. He and I had hardly talked at all during the day, so at first it was a little weird—

Me: This is a nice car.

Him: It’s new.

Me: What kind is it?

Him: Audi.

Me: Did you pick the color green?

Him: Naw, my mom did.

—but then he looked at me out of the corner of his eye and asked if I’d ever been a real Girl Scout.

“I was, back in Illinois before we moved here,” I admitted.

That was the first time I saw the crooked smile. “Thought so. You’ve got this innocent thing about you that’s like sexy and sweet all at once. I couldn’t stop watching you today.”

I stared at him, dumbstruck. He took his hand from the steering wheel and put it on my knee. “Maybe we could go out sometime?”

That’s when I blurted, “But I thought you liked Langley.”

He looked at me quizzically. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you talked to her all day and didn’t even look at me once.”