The Do-Over (34 page)

The song held the same kind of possibilities. Somewhere, beyond doubt, the heart would lead to love. Had her heart led her to Vancouver? Would the break from her life take her to another life altogether? She tried to feel something beyond doubt, but doubts were all she had. She felt honest enough to admit she didn’t have any idea what she was doing, where she was going, what she wanted or didn’t or anything else. Maybe there was a place beyond doubt, and she hoped her heart would lead her there soon.

In the sailor blue bedroom, she got into a single bed, its headboard lined with unusual shells. There was the faint sweet of hairspray as Stella leaned over to tuck her in, pulling the sheets closer under her chin and folding the boat printed sheets down. “There.” Stella stepped back and admired her handiwork.

Mara knew the code blue had accomplished all that it could. She’d stopped crying, cleaned up, danced, sang, ate, drank, and now felt genuinely ready to sleep without dreams. “Thank you, Stella.”

Stella shrugged it off. “Not a person alive doesn’t require a code blue now and again.”

“But it’s a rare person who gets one.”

“It’s a person who gives who receives.”

She might have cried again at that, but Stella stopped her emotions with a pointed finger. “Don’t get started again. Got a new day already goin’. Get some sleep, and we’ll eat too much for breakfast, and get on with the business of livin’.”

“Good night, Stella.”

“Good night, Jane Mara Mulligan.”

Pancakes and eggs and bacon… Canadian bacon, Mara was pleased to see. Who ate like that? Besides her and Stella, who ate like that?

The two of them dug in like long haul truckers at a greasy highway stop. And God it was good. She admired the crispy thin edges of the bacon, perfect pancakes, golden fried eggs and the river of maple syrup, real grade A or AA or however the best Canadian syrup got graded, that tied the entire meal together. And the coffee, fresh out of the tin canister she hadn’t known coffee still came in. Her life may be in shambles, but her ass was going to be enormous, so she had that going for her. 

She got up to refill their coffee cups from the pot. “Hey, Stella, I meant to ask you about those shells in the guest room.”

“The conch shells on the dresser Frank and I brought back from Florida.”

“No, the little ones on top of the headboard.”

Stella tipped her head toward the hallway as if taking an imaginary trip to the room to complete an inventory. “Can’t think of what those would be.”

“I’ll get them.” She put the coffee pot back and made her way to the room. She picked up three of the shells and placed them in her palm. An inch long, they rested like tiny cylinders covered in what looked like rocks just a couple of weeks away from being pounded into sand.

She left the bedroom and went back to the kitchen, laying out a napkin and setting the shells in the center of the table.

“Periwinkles.” Stella shook her head. “Forgot they were in there. It’s been years since I noticed them.”

Mara picked one up and looked through it like a miniature telescope. “What went inside?”

“There’s this kind of spider-like water critter with a long body. It makes a cover for itself with what it finds in the river.”

She admired the tiny river rocks cobbled together to make a mosaic. She noticed on the underside of one, a small brown sliver, a bit of stick. It would be just one more useful thing for building.

“I’ve seen them all different colors, depending on the rocks. Sometimes the periwinkles look like walking wood chips when the stones aren’t just the right size.” Stella shook her head, the joy of remembering on her face. “We used to camp when the kids were little, fished when we could. Nothing like setting up near a river and having it put you to sleep at night. The girls took to the periwinkles. The green and blue ones are so pretty when they’re in the water. My girls wanted to use them like beads, run yarn through them and make necklaces. They found a few, but not enough for jewelry.” Stella laughed. “They talked John, he was about six, into catching some live ones and getting the periwinkles out so they could have the shells. He just adored those girls. They could get him to do anything. Of course, boys just love to catch stuff and poke at things.”

Mara smiled back at her. John, all those years ago, her own Logan just a few years before. Boys never changed.

“He’d cleaned out about a dozen of them, had the shells on the banks, and he noticed a fish moving along in the river. He wandered over to the edge and saw it was gobbling up the periwinkles. They were crawling and trying to hide under things, but without their shells, they couldn’t get away from a hungry fish. It was a blood bath of sorts. I heard him yelling all the way back at the campsite. His sisters couldn’t get him to stop hollering, and when I got down there, he was shovin’ the survivors back into their shells. Better to have been eaten by a fish most likely.”

Stella reached for the pancake plate and plopped two more on her plate, two on Mara’s. “Haven’t thought about that in years.”

Mara felt too full for more pancakes but decided she needed her strength and poured syrup over them anyway. “Bet his sisters didn’t talk him into much after that.”

“By the time John grew up, you couldn’t talk him into anything. Sometimes we get lucky, and what he wants just lines up with what we had in mind.”

“Like Abundance.”

“Like Abundance.”

Mara worked on her pancakes while she admired the handiwork of the periwinkles. They made home with what they found. It may look different from time to time, but it always worked, didn’t it? “Stella?”

“Yep.”

“I thought a big breakfast would give me strength, but I’m gonna need a nap.”

“Me too.” Stella forked a bite of pancake off her plate. “Me too.”

Mara keyed into her apartment, swung open the door, and felt both at home and anxious about the prospect of it really being her home. She’d never intended to stay, never genuinely considered it. But now she had to admit it was one of her options, laid out right in front of her. She tossed her keys on the counter and sat on the stool, swiveling to look around the loft.

New life. New place. Canada or she could live in the states, any of them. Arkansas or Utah. Maine. Montana. Wouldn’t she have a different life based in part on where she chose? Wouldn’t she cobble it together from bits of whatever surrounded her? 

She’d be a Southern Periwinkle, a Northern Periwinkle, or a cowboy one. Logan would… That brought a pain in her gut that had nothing to do with the still partially undigested pancakes. How could it ever be okay for him if she didn’t go back to the exact life she’d left? He’d want his Mom and Dad down the hall, together, second door on the right, just where they’d always been.

Logan would expect the giant catsup jug he knew and loved. He’d want nothing to change. Of course, he changed every day. He was already different from the day he’d left for Grandma’s. On the phone his voice sounded richer and more grown-up when they spoke. For his own life he wanted new things, new experiences. He dreamed in the posters all over his room, basketball stardom, rock fantasies, fast cars, the occasional big-eyed starlet pinned discreetly below a sports schedule by his bed. But he needed her to stay the same, to be Mom, the Mom he knew.

If she didn’t go back home, he’d shuttle between them, wouldn’t he? She and Dan would negotiate Easter weekend or spring break. Every other Christmas without Logan? It seemed unbearable to even imagine, but he’d be leaving home in a couple of years, and that didn’t depend on her. That depended on him. He’d be living his own life.

And what about hers? Did she even have the right to claim a life for herself? If she did, she had to pick one, and there were just too many variables in decision making. She didn’t even feel close to being in the neighborhood of good decision making. She did have more than a week left. Well, one week really. She felt shaky and looked around the loft for guidance.

She gravitated toward the chocolate covered teddy. It had once been covered with chocolate Kisses. She pulled Monday’s off. That left her with Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and the last Kiss. Really quite a lot when she named all the days and didn’t pay attention to the staples plastered all over the satin that represented days spent, days gone, days never to return.

Did she feel twenty-two chocolates worth of rested and ready to go back to her life? No. But maybe she only needed seven more. And maybe Dan would… would even what? She didn’t know, and she needed some wisdom, some guidance out of fear. She remembered once when Logan at two had spiked a high fever in the night. She didn’t know what to do then either. Call the doctor? Wait it out with baby meds and worry? Run to the nearest emergency room?

She’d handed Logan to Dan and run for the baby book, the one with the flow charts for a hundred and one ailments. It had calmed her with its steady branch of questions. Fever?
Yes
goes to the right.
No
takes the arrow to the left. Mucus? Yes. Then colors. Then consistency. Gross, definitely, but also reassuring.

They’d waited it out just as the
yeses
and
nos
told them to, and the fever broke at dawn.

She rooted around in her catalog supplies for a blank sheet of paper and a marker and sat back at the bar to make her own flow chart. Unhappy? Yes. Stay or leave? A
yes
to stay would take her to questions about work visas, Abundance, the loft. She drew six more arrows below that and filled in
Logan
. Logan with her during the school year went to the right, summers to the left. Not having him for the school year was impossible. Not having him with her for the entire summer was impossible. She’d skip that part. She filled in branches for teaching, bubble bath testing, and hesitated but wrote in
John
, even though he wasn’t the kind of man to appear willingly on any woman’s flow chart.

She skittered over to the leaving side, but after she wrote go home no arrows followed. She waited. She could… She could… Nothing. It was what it was. She drew one arrow, a long one to the bottom of the page and wrote
die
.

She felt a tremor run through her that smacked ridiculously of superstition. She’d refused, since she was eighteen, to dwell on her mother’s short life. She added after the word
die, of old age
and jumped down from the bar chair. Flow charts were really only useful in medicine and manufacturing. Her life fell under neither of those categories. There wasn’t anything medically wrong with her, and there was nothing she was trying to manufacture. She glanced around the room as if someone could witness her irrationality, her turning flow into a dam.

She grabbed the failed chart and tossed it into the garbage. She had one week left for clarity, and she wasn’t going to roll up in a ball of anxiety asking herself questions with too many confusing options. She was going to shop.

She loved the jingle of Gretchen’s door. She’d not thought of it before, but every day she heard it ring up the side of the building to her window, and it cheered her like a neighbor’s hello.

She stepped in, saw Celia twirl in a white gown, one shoulder exposed, one covered in a swath of shiny fabric and seed pearls. “Celia, it’s perfect.” 

Celia grinned, breaking the fairy tale moment but creating the real perfection that was Celia’s exuberance.

Mara turned to Gretchen and bowed her head to acknowledge a master’s work. Gretchen laughed and gave the three palm waves of a star tenor. “You, my dear, are next.”

She felt her own answering smile. Was the joy of transformation, and the need to have a second opinion on it, as old as humanity? Had cavewomen held up alternating pelts and asked their sisters,
Wooly mammoth? Sabre-tooth? Wooly mammoth? Sabre-tooth?
She followed Gretchen as she headed for the long rack of gowns and suits. “You’ll want something elegant but different.”

Celia hiked up her skirt and followed. “It’s gonna be a great party. Did John tell you what it’s for?”

“No.” She hoped her
no
was true. She didn’t want to believe that her John doubts about Abundance were accurate. She eyed the rack that swelled with lace and satin, and, at the far end of it, men’s black formal wear anchoring all that feminine with seriousness.

The jingle at the door made all three turn, all three smile when they saw Renny. Gretchen’s smile left first, then she felt hers go when she saw the lines dug in deeper around Renny’s mouth and the strain in her eyes.

Celia twirled. “Hey, Renny. I’ll be singing in this. Gretchen’ll get you a good one too. It’ll be great and…”

“The agent called.” Gretchen said it first, but Mara couldn’t believe anyone had said no to Renny and Celia. They were just too good together.

Gretchen took a quick breath in, audible in the silence. “
You
said no.”

Renny took a step closer, but stopped when Gretchen put her hand up as if to keep Renny from getting any closer ever again. “You couldn’t even commit to that, could you?”

Renny looked like she would say something, and Mara felt her whole body pulled forward, willing Renny to make it right, make it right for everybody. Instead she shrugged and spoke to the room, “I’ll sing at the party. I promised.” She turned and gently closed the door behind her, the bells tapping together.

Gretchen faced Celia and put a steadying hand on her arm, the touch before the news.

Celia held up her dress, Cinderella ready to run at midnight but unsure what time it was. “What’s going on?”

Gretchen met her concern with a mother’s intensity Mara hadn’t seen in her before. “You can’t count on Renny.” She took in a shaky breath, and Mara felt a twist of pain for the two of them in the aftermath of Renny’s running, but she wouldn’t play the judge. She had no right to throw rocks at anybody.

“But what…” Celia stopped, her voice wobbly.

“You’re going to make it no matter what.”

“I am?” Celia sounded more teary than sure.