Shattered Castles 1 : Castles on the Sand (30 page)

“I started packing after your phone call last night, got in the car, drove until somewhere in Nevada that I do
not
remember right now, where I stopped and called around until I found a place to rent, and then I kept on driving. Got here as fast as I could.”

“Thanks. You didn't have to.”

“I love you.”

“Love you too. So you got a place to rent? Where?”

“Two streets over from you. Two bedroom, rent is cheap. My Etsy store alone can cover it. When I called the Foundation that rents out those houses, they said that all I needed was to have a job here or another connection to the town, and guess what? You count. So I'm making you an offer. Want to come live with me? Our parents were real bad at the whole family thing, your best friend who shouldn't even be your friend is in the hospital, maybe foster care. I get here and see you're dating the senior class... um... loner who plays with fire-”

“Psycho,” Alex corrects him.

“-as you wish. Maybe you should try doing the whole live with family who loves you thing, and see if you like it?”

“You're moving here?”

“Only if you want me to, but yes, totally a genuine offer.”

“What about your school?”

“My school can wait. Yours can't. I'm old enough to put some of the rest of my life on hold. You've still got to finish out the basics.”

“Definitely finish high school,” says Alex.

“Madison, I
love
you, and I had a lot of fun my senior year in high school. If there's anything I can do to help step down all the other drama in your life, I will so do it, if you let me try. I may screw some stuff up. I know you're not used to having rules and you and I will have to find a way to meet in the middle there. I will
totally
set a curfew and lover-boy here better respect it. I know the religion thing might get tricky sometimes, but, like I said, genuine offer.”

I don't know what to say.

“Anyway, I'm gonna go crash. The Liangs are putting me up tonight. I'll talk to you tomorrow, when I'm coherent. And you-” he points to Alex “-make sure she gets home safe and that everything's okay.”

Alex nods.

“Night, Madison. Love you.”

I step forward and give him a big, bear hug, which he returns with a happy chuckle. Then, once he’s back in his car and pulling away, even though I know it's petty of me, I turn around and resume kissing Alex, who laughs and doesn't protest.

W
e decide to all descend on Mom en masse, so that she won't zone us out. Lance and Logan are still a little bleary eyed from the drive out from Utah and our family meeting that went late into the night.

“I can't do the dramatic reunion thing,” was what Lance said. “I don't want to get into whether Mom feels like she needs to forgive us or if we need to forgive her. I hate drama.”

“But we need to help her,” was what John said. “She's totally adrift right now, and we
can
help her.”

“I suggest we just show up,” was what I said. “Don't bother with the forgiveness talks. Just walk in like we belong there and that way we let her know that we do. We aren't going to leave her alone. She just has to deal with us.”

“Can we do that?” Logan had asked.

“Don't see why not,” was John's conclusion. “I just sprang Madison on you guys and you seem cool with it.” He hadn’t told them about finding me until this past week.

“We’ll beat him up later,” Lance had promised me with a wink.

And so today, here we are. Mom comes in the back door as all of us siblings file into the kitchen. She stares, blinks, and stares some more.

“Mom,” says John. “It's past time we dealt with this.” He holds up his camera. “I'm going to take pictures of your pottery.”

“Hey, Mom,” says Lance.

“'Sup, Mom,” says Logan. He sets up his laptop on the kitchen table and boots it up.

Mom stares at us as if we're all ghosts. My brothers quickly spread a dropcloth over the kitchen table, rig up some lights, and John heads out to the shed as if he knows where he's going and returns with a pot. “These are amazing,” he says. “This glaze effect? You have to show me how you did it. I'm a sculptor, by the way.”

“Painter,” says Lance, raising one hand.

“Quilter,” says Logan. Then, when we all turn to look at him, he says, “Okay, not really. So fine. I'm the one with no artistic talent. Everyone stare. Yeah, that's right. I'm the freak.”

“I'm not artistic,” I say.

“Yeah, that's right. It's two against two... not counting Mom, not that you don't count, Mom.” He pulls out a notebook and together we start marking up the page with numbers. He showed me how to make a business plan last night after our sibling conference. As we work out prices and costs of materials, I can hear Mrs. Beale screaming, “All real math is story problems!!” in my memory. But I get what she was saying now. Math isn't an arbitrary set of symbols designed to torture students. For Logan, it's a magical system; his equations are like incantations that force the world into a sort of order that allows him to make a company profitable or enable a household to both buy more of what it wants and not go into debt. It's incredible.

Mom's gaze darts from one face to another. When she looks at me, our gazes lock. I take a chance and smile, and after a moment's hesitation, Mom smiles back. It's the first time in a long time.

Alex shows up a couple of hours later, while John is still deep into photographing pottery. Logan and I sit on the floor of the living room, sheets of paper spread out all around us. Alex's hair is short now, but he's not used to it yet. He still jerks his head like he's flipping it out of his eyes. At the sight of me, he grins and kneels down to see what we're doing.

“So you’re the psycho,” says Logan. “You hurt my sister and you are dead. D-E-A-D.”

A kiss on my forehead from Alex communicates that I'm worth the risk. “How's your mom?” I ask.

“Coming home in a week.”

At that I look up, numbers forgotten. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

I throw my arms around him. “That is awesome!”

Mom wanders into the room, looking like a baffled spectator to all the activity. Me hugging Alex gets an extra long look, even though she knows he and I are together. The whole town knows.

“Okay, we taking a lunch break soon?” asks Lance.

“I say, deep fried burritos from The Shack,” says John.

“See, that's not right,” I say. “You aren't supposed to be able to get those until after midnight. Carson totally messed that up.”

“Good thing,” says John, “since you aren't allowed out after midnight.”

I resist the urge to kiss Alex just to annoy my brother. That's not really fair to Alex. “You coming, Mom?”

She blinks. “To lunch?”

“Yeah.”

“Mom, we'll get your Etsy store set up when we get back,” says John. “We all should take a break.”

“Well... okay.” She sounds meek, lost.

John puts his arm around her shoulders and together, we head out.

P
elican Bluffs is a very different place once spring arrives. Wilkstone is swarming with tourists and there's even traffic backed up. People wearing sandals and sun hats stroll around and there's a line of cars waiting to fuel up at Jacksons.

Sea birds scream in the sky, including the pelicans that give the town its name. Some of these you can even see waddling around bluffside. Gray whales are migrating up the coast now, and every now and then some stop to play and the whole town can see them breaching and sending up mist from their blowholes.

The Shack is so crowded that half of us snag a table while the others get the burritos deep fried. They return with a big basket of corn chips, salsa, little tubs of guacamole and sour cream. I do not want to guess how many calories are on this table right now.

I'm just biting into my burrito when Kailie walks past, her steps slowing at the sight of me. “Hey,” I call out. “How are you?” She’s only answered my phone calls with short texts. I get the impression she’s still reeling from the dramatic changes in her life.

She comes over, the scars on her wrists concealed under cuff bracelets.

“Hey, Kailie,” says Alex. “You back home now?”

“Just for a visit today.”

“You want to join us?” I ask.

She looks at me and Alex, and I wonder if she'd get over her crush on him if she knew he’d been baptized. He doesn't seem to care that I'm not part of his religion, but Kailie's not so tolerant.

“I'm gonna eat with my folks,” she says.

“Okay, some other time then,” I reply.

She nods and continues down the street.

Alex and John give me their usual, dubious looks, as if to say, “Why are you friends with her, again? She's not even nice to you.”

But as she crosses Wilkstone and glances back at me, I feel bad for her. She’s clearly so lonely.

It’s hard for me to turn back to the table and not look at anyone else. My gaze meets Mom's, and she smiles. It's a melancholy smile, one that says that she knows what it's like to be alone, feeling as if she hasn't got a friend in the world. Dare I hope that she's telling me she's grateful for what I do? Dare I believe that at this table there's one person who gets me? I smile back and bite deep into the fried tortilla crust.

Like the characters in this book, Jared Lyman and I knew each other since pre-school. His passing, needless to say, was a tragedy, but I'd rather focus on how he lived, not the unfortunate fact that he has since died.

Our first real conversation was when we were in our mid-twenties. I was home for a short spell between law school and starting my first job, and had recently joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Jared had been a lifelong member, and at a church event (I don't even remember specifically what it was), he and I tried to explain to his wife, Emily, that we'd known each other nearly all our lives but had never had a conversation. We plumbed the depths of our memories, trying to recall if we'd ever even exchanged hellos, and came up blank.

Such is the town of White Rock, New Mexico, population 7,000. Jared and I went to the same elementary school, middle school, and high school; he was one grade above me. We had memberships to the same swimming pool (Canyon Vista, from which it is not actually possible to see White Rock Canyon), and spent our summers there. Either of us could recognize the other on sight, and if you'd asked me about him, I'd have been able to tell you that he was a nice guy from a warm and generous family, but no, I couldn't recall ever talking to them or even waving at them in passing. We passed each other all the time. It wasn't noteworthy.

Emily, for her part, didn't laugh at us too hard. Once Jared and I did talk to each other, it became a regular occurrence, and because he'd known me nearly all my life, he wasn't put off by incidents such as the time he walked into a Wendy's and found me and my husband, Trevor, in our Sunday best, trying to saw through the plastic ties on a brand new DeWalt cordless drill with a set of car keys. He came to sit with us, rather than slipping back out and going to the restaurant next door. (The story behind that story is disappointingly dull. We'd just been at a church meeting and I'd bought a drill for Trevor beforehand while running errands. That moment was just one of those moments that makes you stop and think about how you come across.)