The Do-Over (30 page)

“With a very nice thorax.”

She raised her eyebrow at him, and he shrugged and pointed in the general area of her chest. “Just reading.”

She considered her own insect education. She’d had a sprinkling of biology, and he was gesturing to her thorax, so there wasn’t any reason not to be proud of it. “Thank you.”

He disappeared for a moment, and she nearly followed but wanted to enjoy the feeling of having giant golden wings smudged in charcoal lines and tipped with a dreamy blue. Another cut-out appeared in front of her as John pulled one over and gamely stuck his head in the oval. His caterpillar head appeared giant and out of proportion to his long green body, cheery with blue spots and chubby legs. “You’ll be a beautiful butterfly,” she laughed, “as soon as you eat every leaf in the city.”

He tipped his head down to study the six foot length of caterpillar. “I think I saw this movie when I was a kid. I’ve been exposed to radiation.”

“I hate when that happens.” She tilted back from her oval enough to take a drink of coffee, and heard him begin to narrate like she was part of a wildlife special.

“Native grasses comprise most of the Swallowtail’s diet. In the summer, its food source is supplemented by fudge and coffee.” He stepped out from behind the caterpillar and studied it. “That is very green. Wicked witch green.”

Wicked witch green. It could be the inspiration for her last catalog page. “Hey, that’s what I can do for the bubble bath, The Wizard of Oz.”

“Didn’t the witch melt in water?”

“No. Well, yes. But I mean I want to do Dorothy.”

He stopped with the coffee up to his mouth and shook his head. “I hear that. She was hot.”

Mara rolled her butterfly eyes. “I want to use a photo related to the Wizard of Oz for the last catalog section. Dorothy, Toto, something. It’s the bubble bath, and there’s no place like home.”

He walked closer to her butterfly. “But home was Kansas.”

“What’s wrong with Kansas? Are you one of those rude Canadian caterpillars?”

“I’m sure the real Kansas is a wonderful province.”

“State.”

He smiled, a smart-ass caterpillar. “The Kansas in the movie was all in black and white. Auntie Em and Uncle Whatever ignored our young Dorothy, and that’s why she left in the first place. Plus, as soon as she hits home again after her misguided heel tapping, you know that old woman on the bike is gonna put Toto right back in the picnic basket and cart him off.”

“No! Auntie Em and Uncle Whatever wouldn’t stand for that.”

“Did and would again.” He shrugged, moving closer. “It was Toto’s cinematic destiny.”

She thought about Elmira Gulch or whatever the bat’s name was. It was true that Elmira wasn’t the kind of gal to back down from a fight or probably melt in water. But wasn’t it true that there was no place like home, and that’s where Dorothy would find her happy ending?

She watched John put his hand on the edge of her wing, lean in, and felt the brush of his lips on hers. He stayed close, and she could feel his words. “It’s Oz, Mara, who would leave it?”

She hoped she’d said the right things and ridden in John’s car with her seatbelt on, but she didn’t really remember anything after the kiss and the possibility of Dorothy not going home. Just thinking about it had kept her standing on the sidewalk in front of Gretchen’s while John waved and drove off. She’d wandered down the street until she found a seat in a coffee shop and sat with an untouched drink, as expensive as a meal, in front of her. She stared out the window onto a patio where the nearest table was a foot from hers. To keep her mind off of anything meaningful, she calculated that the dozen people seated outside were sipping the financial equivalent of a flat screen TV.

At the other edge of the patio, across a quiet side street, stood Gastown’s famous steam clock. She’d heard about it, passed it a time or two, but hadn’t really experienced the much-hyped event at the top of an hour. 

A few minutes before five, a small crowd began to gather at its base. She wouldn’t say that excitement was building, but the potential for it circled around some of the more vulnerable tourists. She’d keep her eye on the clock, easy to do through the very clean window, and with prices so high, the coffee shop ought to employ outstanding building maintenance.

One minute before the hour, she considered the moment before OZ became Kansas again. Before Dorothy clicked her heels, did she have any doubts? Of course she didn’t. She wouldn’t have. Everyone knew that there was no place like home. It was so deeply true it had become a freakin’ cliché just like in
It’s a Wonderful Life
, how everyone knew that
a man is rich who has friends.
So what if George Bailey didn’t travel the world or even leave his hometown. He didn’t build sky scrapers, or whatever he longed for outside of the walls of the savings and loan, but he was really glad about that compromise in the last three minutes of the movie. 

The two hour movie had three minutes of him being happy? When she laid out his life like that, why would George Bailey have had a wonderful life at all? If he’d done what he wanted to, maybe he would have had an extra wonderful life, a great life, a kick ass life. But even for George Bailey there was no place like home, and an older, wiser Dorothy agreed.

The Gastown clock began to leak steam and whistle a melody she didn’t know, though it seemed elementary-school familiar. Big bells do chime for thee and thine. She didn’t want to know why she’d stored that in her brain.

The tourists watched the steamy show through the five whistles announcing the hour, but she noted only a few patrons on the patio even glanced up from their lattes. And then it was over with a few more belches of steam and a smattering of applause. Everyone walked away with what she felt was a vague air of disappointment that no one wanted to admit. A few even posed for pictures, one nearly being struck by a cab that tried to use the street for a street.

Maybe the exciting thing, that they had all missed, was the engineering itself, a feat only an engineer, a steam one, could appreciate. She didn’t want to think she couldn’t see the attraction in the attraction. The steam clock, Kansas, Bailey’s Savings and Loan, maybe the world needed to be in agreement about these things, right or wrong, so maps didn’t have to change, so anarchy didn’t reign.

The woman on the other side of the window looked like someone who would understand that, a sensible sort whose opinion a person could trust, a woman who maybe looked like a Janie. Mara leaned over and whispered, “would you stay in Oz?”

The woman looked at her, a degree of alarm in her eyes that made Mara subtly reach out to reassure herself, but she discovered there was no window at all.

Abundance was closed. Five-thirty and everyone was gone for their own Saturday night. She stood for a moment and looked up at the sign, extra blue framed by the darker blue sky, and then she saw him reflected in the window. Dan was driving off. She turned toward the street and waved, but he didn’t, of course, check his rear view mirror.

She had her loft key in her hand, the unused van key sliding along the silver circle next to it. She didn’t even know where he was staying, what he’d been up to when he wasn’t showing up at her loft. Maybe his life in Vancouver wasn’t anything like she’d expect. He had changed out of his khakis and button downs, and his hair shagged over his ears in a rumpled summer way that made him appear a tad carefree even. Maybe he was full of the exact kind of surprises she needed, she wanted, she longed for.

She ran for the van, started it up, and jerked the wheels from the curb to follow him. Luckily, traffic had been held up by a red light in the next block, and she could just make out the back of his car. She switched lanes, jogged a few cars closer and switched back, earning her a honk but a better tailing position.

She’d never tailed anybody before, although true tailing probably required closer contact, a bumper-to-bumper sort of arrangement. She clung to the sight of his car from a block back and prayed that he didn’t do anything tricky. If he cranked the wheel and pulled an illegal U turn, or drove up on the curb and caused fleeing and screaming on the sidewalks, well, she’d just lose him.

Lose him to what? She hoped not a bland chain hotel or a bland all you can eat buffet or a bowling alley. She didn’t know why not a bowling alley, but she hoped for a zestier adventure for him than America’s Favorite Pastime.

What if she lost him on his way to a woman’s? She considered for the first time that he could find a woman in a butterfly cut-out and give her a kiss. She felt a sting of jealousy, energetic and surprisingly good, but the danger was quickly squashed by the knowledge that Dan would never venture that far. Not that she actually wanted him to. She had the sense to at least feel the discomfort of her own hypocrisy in that. She wanted to believe that she didn’t know what he was capable of, that Dan could change, grow, be unpredictably, excitingly human.

He turned down Cambie Street, and as long as he continued to signal the required fifty feet before making a turn, observe traffic signs, and stop on yellow, she’d tail him to Hell and back.

Or the basketball courts. She slowed as he pulled into a parking spot and parked several cars back. She watched him get out, step through an opening in a chain link fence and wave in response to the greetings from half-a-dozen teenage boys. They had a couple of years on Logan, a couple of inches, pounds and maturity, but they were close. Dan grabbed the ball from the shortest one and shot a basket. Then, the game fell into place. Everyone knew where they were going, who would move to the right given the chance, or who needed to be stopped before they could get too far in. She didn’t know much about the game, but she understood familiarity.

She’d come to Canada, well, she wasn’t entirely sure why she’d come to Canada, but for certain she’d wanted change. Dan had followed her and re-created home. He played every day from the looks of it and the state of his newly great rear end. If he couldn’t shoot hoops with Logan, he’d do the next best thing.

She didn’t know what she felt, what swirled around unnamed inside her. It was unfortunate emotions couldn’t be more easily labeled. Sadness would have more clarity. If the mood ring turned blue, you could take a moment to shed a tear. Anger might pop like the red button on a cooked turkey, and everyone would say,
stand back she’s going to blow,
and you could lose it because the little red thingee said you could. Happiness might fill a body like helium and someone would have to quickly tie a ribbon around your foot or off you’d go over the buildings and mountains and end up God knows where, not that you’d care because you’d be so helium happy.

She watched him fake to the left and drive around a skinny kid in a ripped up t-shirt. The nubby orange ball rolled a couple of times around the rim and rustled the net on its way in. How many times had she watched him make that same move with Logan? Fake left, score right. Fake left, score right, and Logan hadn’t ever seen it coming, like it was new and a complete surprise, until he’d turned about thirteen. Maybe at thirteen some of life loses its novelty and patterns emerge finally out of the fog of newness children live with. But it had been a sad day, not blue mood ring sad but an
ahhh
and a head shake sad when Dan’s favorite move failed him, and Logan didn’t fall for the fake but instead blocked, finally, the shot. Dan’s bread and butter score had been gone in a heartbeat.

She felt herself smile a little, a movement so slight it probably couldn’t be seen, but she was glad Dan found someone who hadn’t anticipated his move, hadn’t seen it coming, and been impressed at the swoosh. And that, that little bit of happiness for Dan who could use something tried and true and have it appreciated brought on the blue mood-ring sadness that had been circling around the edge of her life for a long time. There in the car she felt it, not the tsunami wave that panic rode in on but an inside job, a smaller movement large enough to cover her entire insides.

She leaned her head back in the driver’s seat and felt the industrial crinkle of the upholstery. The last time she’d done that she’d been in Celia’s car, when Celia had driven her away from John and the sidewalk neck rub that made her legs shaky. That time resting back in the passenger seat felt like relief and excitement and regret as she left excitement behind. It was nothing like the sensation of light leaving her, an instant hollowness that made her shake this time.

The tears came, hot at the outside corners of her eyes. They ran over the contours of her cheeks and dripped into the opening of her ears. The salt stung along her skin. She thought about reaching for the box of tissue she always kept in the car right beside the tub of antibacterial hand wipes, but she hated warehouse paper products, and she hated hand wipes. Her white rooms back home were empty of facial tissues and probably hand wipes too. They had to be gone. They always ran out the same time the tissue went, just before she headed to the warehouse store, just before she donned her frumpy Mom jeans and got back to the business of the rest of her life.

Dan may have a bread and butter basketball move, but her whole life was a bread and butter move. She faked left and scored right with everything everyone wanted from her. She’d learned the move from her mother. Her mom had just run out of game time quicker.

She sniffed and hoped that would help. She didn’t want to sink so low that she couldn’t blow her own nose, but she couldn’t blow her own nose. Her head wouldn’t lift. Her arms wouldn’t move. She remained paralyzed even as she heard the game break up, the boys shouting some
see you laters
to Dan. Dan’s voice returned the goodbyes, and the basketball’s steady thump, thump, possessed less volume as they moved away.

She might not even have a fake remaining, and she’d had so many for so long. She felt tears, faster and hotter. Her fake was the alarm clock that started her day, the shower, the subtle make-up and gray turtleneck, the smile at a neighbor, a co-worker to assure them that all was well. And she’d even meant it, meant it all those years. Maybe a fake only really worked when the player believed it, when she drove to the basket with real intent and then found herself delivering the goods against her will one day in a hotel when the bubble bath ran out, and she just couldn’t fake it any more.