Vibes (7 page)

Mallory and Eva walk to a table across the room.

Gusty looks at me and I smile knowingly. I could help him out by telling him that Mallory, as far as I know, is inexplicably interested in me instead of the she-demon, but why should I help? He thinks I'm sick.

"One of these days you and Eva need to put away your weapons and call a truce," Gusty says.

"What for?"

"What's the point of fighting all the time?" he says simply, then turns back to the paper and starts to write again. All I can hear in his thoughts is
The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get out of here.

It really hurts my feelings that he wants so badly to get away from me, but I try not to show it.

When Gusty is done writing, he bites his lip. He looks at me nervously as he drops the paper onto the table to show me what he's written.

1. Smart

2. Creative

3. Stealth practical jokes

4. Funny

5. Independent

6. Amazing dresser

7. Interesting

8. Good at math

9. Defiant

And that's it. There's no number ten.

My first reaction is to feel flattered. He wrote some pretty nice things about me, and maybe some of them are even true, but then I get a flash of myself through his eyes and I look monstrous. My arms are round and fat, my eyes are freakishly huge, and my boobs are enormous and sloshing around like two sacks of water.

He wrote those nice things about me to get this over with so that he can skateboard home and probably play video games. So I just look at him, trying not to cry, and I say, "That looks okay. For number ten put 'Impervious to false flattery.'"

His eyebrows crash together as he studies me. "Well, I had something in mind for number ten, but..."

"That's okay. Just put 'Impervious to false flattery,'" I say, because at all costs I must protect myself from number ten.

"I'm not putting that." He watches me angrily for a second, and I can see the color magenta slowly crawling up his neck to take over his face. I totally have his number and he's embarrassed now. He stabs letters onto the paper, then folds it and gets up from the table to leave.

"What did you write?"

"Why do you want to know, since you're so impervious to flattery?" He crunches the paper in his fist and presses it against his leg, thinking,
Bitch.
That's probably what he wrote. He wrote that I'm a bitch.

"Give me the paper, Gusty!" I yell. From across the room, Eva's mean voice sears my mind:
She's such a drama queen.

Gusty sees Mallory and Eva staring at us, and this makes him even madder. "I didn't write anything!" he says, so I have no choice but to lunge at him and rip the paper out of his hands. I get only half of it, but I get the half with number ten and I unfold it to see that he wrote, "Beautiful."

He wrote
beautiful?

By the time I catch my breath and look up from this mind-blowing, confusing, earthshattering, and beautiful word, he has walked out the Bistro door and there's no way I could ever summon the courage to catch up with him.

Anyway, what would I say?

It's a cruel lie. It must be.

I'm just going to put it out of my mind, that's all. I'm not going to think about Gusty Peterson or his mean flattery or the way he stormed out of the Bistro with no explanation. I will not think about the weird way my heart won't stop pounding, and I especially will not think about the piece of torn paper that I folded up and placed in my porcelain box with the painted violets on it that I got from Aunt Ann. The piece of paper is there; it's safe. That's all I need to know about it. So I'm not going to think about it anymore. Because it's a lie.

It's a cruel lie.

I grab an all-natural root beer from the fridge and open the door to my bedroom to let Minnie out, and then I sit on our stuffy leather couch with my feet on the coffee table and settle in for some crappy TV. Minnie pads down the hallway, silently cuddles into the crook of the couch, and purrs like a lawn mower. It's hard to really relax because I have to cram an entire evening of fun with Minnie into the two hours between school ending and Mom coming home.

Her schedule has become annoyingly reliable. I thought with her new job that she would still work late because she's a career-obsessed workaholic, but no sirree. She comes home at 5:30 on the dot and expects us to eat dinner together, which means we park our wide loads on the sofa and watch TV news programs while we eat takeout. I usually feel her thinking,
Why can't we talk?
And I don't really know why we can't, but we never have been able to. Dad was always the one I talked with, sometimes about stuff I did
not
want to know about. To give you an idea, here's a smattering of Dad's greatest hits:

"The passion leaves a marriage surprisingly quickly, Kristi. It can be hard on a man when his wife is more ambitious in her career than he is. It's very emasculating. And God, don't ever humiliate your spouse. She once told our colleagues how long it took me to insert my first vascular shunt when we were interning together. That is a difficult procedure, Kristi, and it has nothing to do with the size of your hands. She was always saying how much better women are at surgery because their hands are smaller, which is just not true. A lot of women have a tremor in their hands—you watch. See if I'm right."

I watched. I saw that he was right.

The worst stuff was what he didn't tell me, but I could catch only little hints of it because it was before I'd fully developed my talent. But I knew. He felt desperate. He felt trapped. Confined. He needed out. My mother had worn him thin.

And when the last lawsuit happened, that was all it took for him to snap.

I guess I don't blame Morgan Stewart's family. He was a college track star who held the record for the long jump. So when he came into the emergency room with chest pain, Dad thought he'd suffered a collapsed lung.

It was all Dad talked about:

"I mean, sometimes the symptoms don't add up, you know? Even brilliant diagnosticians can be fooled. Maybe I should have called an internist to double-check, but everything, and I mean
everything,
pointed to a simple collapsed lung, which can happen in tall, thin young men. Surgery is rarely indicated. Radiology was busy, and we had that hit and run to worry about, so I had him lie down in an observation room to wait until we could get an x-ray, just for a couple minutes." He always stopped here, the lines in his forehead deepening. It was like he was trying to remember it in just the right order to bring the kid back alive. But the story always ended the same way. He would shake his head in disbelief and say, "A complication from undiagnosed Marfan syndrome. Thoracic aortic dissection. Boom. And he died."

He died.

He told me this story over and over again for weeks. At first it seemed like he was trying to explain it to me so that I would understand and forgive him, but I forgave him so many times that I finally realized he was telling the story so that he could forgive himself. But he never could.

If that had been the first lawsuit, it would have been okay, but it was Dad's third. His malpractice insurance got so high that he couldn't pay it. The hospital couldn't keep him on staff without insurance, so they forced him to resign. Dad just accepted it. He didn't even fight it because he believed he deserved it.

I don't know. Maybe he did.

The doorbell screams at me. I jump, and Minnie digs her claws into my lap. I have to breathe for a second before I am calm enough to turn down the TV and answer the door.

Aunt Ann is standing on the doorstep, her face pinched with anxiety. Her face is so narrow that she almost doesn't look normal, but that's not her only problem. She looks like she's been ravaged by a hurricane. Her curly brown hair forms a tangled crown on her head. Her huge ratty coat hangs on her tiny body, and she holds her beaten satchel against her chest as if it is made of Teflon and she is expecting enemy fire.

Don't worry. She's fine. She always looks like this.

"Is your mom home?" she asks with her wavery voice. She is terrified to death of my mother.

"No."

She heaves a huge sigh of relief and barges into the living room. She drapes herself over the back of the couch and leans her elbow on the armrest. Aunt Ann has never used furniture right. "I'm so tired! Don't ever try yoga."

"Uh, there's really no danger of that."

"How's things?"

"Okay," I say, and then I wince because of course I sound fake.

"What's wrong?" She stands up too fast and gets a head rush but keeps talking. "Are you feeling all right? You don't have another one of those headaches, do you? You should have yourself checked for allergies! I should talk to your mother," she says with trepidation. She hates talking to my mother.

"I'm fine." She squints at me because she can tell I'm lying. "It's no big deal. It's just that I've been partnered for a project at school with Gusty Peterson."

"Why do I know that name?"

"Hildie's brother?"

"Oh, yeah. That one was a little looker."

"Now he's a big looker."

"And this is a problem because..."

"He's a totally egotistical jerk."

"Really?" She narrows her eyes at me. "He always seemed like a pretty nice kid."

"Well, he's not. He's insensitive and overprivileged, and I hate him."

"Methinks thou doth protest too much."

"Shutteth uppeth."

"Okay." I expect her to hang on to this topic like a pit bull on angel dust, but instead she takes a deep breath as if she needs to calm herself down. Ever since she started yoga, she's always doing this fancy breathing. She says she has to feed her mind plenty of oxygen to stave off Alzheimer's. She's not getting Alzheimer's—she just likes thinking about illness. It's like a hobby with her.

"So what's your blood pressure, Aunt Ann?"

"One oh four over eighty," she says with great pride as she finally sits down in a chair like a normal person. "I've been drinking plenty of water," she says, and then takes another deep breath. I'm starting to suspect that this is more than the usual health-obsessed breathing, because she's studying me warily.

"What's up?"

"Oh..." she says nervously. I can tell from her thoughts that whatever she has to say involves my dad and it's big. "Well, honey," she says, "your dad called today. Just now. I just got off the phone with him."

"Uh-huh."

She takes a deep breath and holds it. Her cheeks puff out, giving her narrow face the shape of a butternut squash. "He's coming home for a visit," she finally blurts.

I have stopped breathing. Every muscle in my body is clenched as though I could squeeze myself calm. Except that I am calm, but I don't
think
I'm calm. I feel my mouth open, and I think I should use it to say something, but instead all I can do is look at Minnie Mouse, who has curled into the shape of a cinnamon bun on the bottom shelf of our bookcase. She's watching me with her yellow eyes.

Her eyes suddenly look spooky and alien to me.

Her creepy yellow eyes are freaking me out.

Everything is freaking me out.

"Before you freak, honey"—Aunt Ann takes hold of my fingers and squeezes them with a sweaty hand—"let me tell you that he regrets leaving the way he did more than anything in his life, and he's ashamed of himself, and he feels like he's really let you down. He hasn't had the courage to come home until now, but he really wants to try and reconnect with you because you're so important to him."

"Uh-huh," I say, trying to work out how much of this came from Dad and how much is Aunt Ann's
interpretation
of what came from him. Dad doesn't use words like
ashamed
or
reconnect.

"He's flying back next week. And I need to know—do you want to come to the airport with me?" She grinds her little teeth together and raises her eyebrows.

I'm silent, waiting for someone to speak. But the only person who can answer the question is me, so I say, "Um..."

"I think you should, Kristi, honey." She glances at the door because she hears a car door slam and she's afraid it might be Mom. "I really think you need to show him that you're ready to forgive him."

I do? I am?

"So his flight is next Thursday evening at seven thirty-eight, but let's get there a little early because those parking garages are so big, and then we'll both be at security waiting for him, and we'll be holding hands."

"Uh..." I get a mental flash of us standing near the metal detectors in the airport, and I realize this is Aunt Ann's fantasy of how I will be there to comfort
her
when her baby brother comes back to America after two years of fighting horrific African diseases.

"I hope he's not
carrying
anything," she says as she scoots off the chair and stands up. "I'm sure they get shots, but Jesus, some of the diseases they have there are—" She roots through her purse, looking for her hand sanitizer. "I think I'll look into getting us some shots beforehand. We could just get all those shots you're supposed to get before going to Africa and that way we'll be safe."

"I don't like shots," I say.

"Nonsense, honey. It's a tiny little needle and your skin is so big!"

Suddenly I'm trying to breathe all the air in the room at once. Aunt Ann stops looking for her sanitizer and sits next to me, her hand on my back. She rubs and rubs. She stays until I can breathe normally, but leaves soon after because it's dark outside and she doesn't want to be here when Mom finds out. Dad's coming home.

By the time Mom gets home I am calmly watching news footage of a terrible bus crash. When Minnie hears the garage door she jumps off the couch and pads back to my room. I follow her and lock the padlock. Who says you can't train cats?

I wish I could train her to tell Mom about Dad coming home.

Mom comes in breathless. "Hi, honey!" She smiles at me, something in her expression unfamiliar. She's different. I can't put my finger on it until she stretches her arms over her head, saying, "It's weird sitting down most of the day!"