You Have Seven Messages (12 page)

I take Oliver to my mother’s studio and he walks around it carefully, as if it’s a crime scene. He sits on the windowsill and says, “Aren’t you going to read more of what she wrote?”

“Yes, but not today. I usually hate this word, especially ’cause my counselor at school uses it so much, but I still have to
process
everything.”

Oliver walks up to me, puts two hands on my shoulders, then pulls me into an embrace. Part of me wants to let go of everything, lose myself in his skin, his silky curls, the pools of his eyes. Instead I just let him hold me.

Suddenly I realize that I’m starving. As if hearing my thoughts, Oliver says, “Well, could you process a pizza?” I smile and nod.

We sit at a table in the front of Ray’s Pizza—the original one, yeah right—and eat steaming slices. There are hundreds of “Ray’s Famous” pizza places and every one claims to be the original. Either way, it’s yummy. I get cheese and Oliver gets pepperoni. At first, we are ravenous, and then we both pause to take a break.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asks.

“What he said about my father being distraught?”

“Yes. I hate to say this, Fifteen, but I feel like there’s still something he’s not telling you.”

“I know.”

We finish our pizza and walk home. On the way he gets another call from his father, and at one point he tells me to hold on and goes into an alley for privacy. I can hear his voice rising and it kind of scares me. The gentle boy has angst. Why is his father so hard on him? He comes back to join me looking really pale, like he just found out someone died.

“Is everything okay?”

“Not really,” he says, “not at all.”

While we walk I try not to press him, just let him have his space. He doesn’t hold my hand and I can feel the absence. All of a sudden I feel terribly alone.

When we get to my stoop, a look comes over his face I have never seen before. The only way I can describe it is cold.

“I have a recital coming up, it’s a preliminary thing for the Paris show. I have to learn a bunch of new pieces.”

I feel like I’m standing on a small rock in the middle of the ocean and he’s getting on a boat, waving goodbye. He looks like a totally different person. The eyes that covered me with warmth have now gone somewhere else, looking through me.

“Cool,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant even though my whole body is practically shaking, its core the epicenter of an impending earthquake. “Thanks for, you know, everything.”

“I may not be that, well, available for a while.”

That’s fine, I’ll just stand here until the water rises and I drown
.

“Okay, I understand.”

And that’s it. He just turns around. No kiss, no touch, no smile. I watch him walk into his house and I stand there for what seems like an hour, until I hear Tile yell down from the window. I look up and see him, waving his hands up in the air, wondering what the heck I’m doing, oblivious to the fact that I may have lost the only boy I’ve ever loved.

For the first time ever, I keep Tile out of my room. All I want to do is crawl under a rock and stay there for a year. I know that Oliver’s dad really stresses him out, but I didn’t think the guy ran his life. I think about calling Janine, but decide against it. I busy myself with mindless math homework until I hear the familiar bling of an IM on my computer.

I blush at the thought of it.

I start to type but I can’t find words. A
show?

I freeze.
Please don’t let this be about him
. So many times in my life—too many to count—people showed interest in me because they wanted to get to him. I decide to be vague.

Even though she makes it sound like I’m a cupcake, I’m very intrigued by the idea. Maybe Ms. Gray was right, this could be my calling.

I blush again, and there’s a knock at my door.

It’s Tile again. This time I let him in. He walks over to my bed, plops himself down, and says, “She’s here again. Mushroom lady.”

“What?”

“I figured it out. She smells like mushrooms.”

“Well, it could be worse.”

“So what did Dad tell you?”

I close my laptop, turn to him, and sigh. He’s not going to let up.

“He just told me she was spending time with someone named Cole.” I walk over and sit down next to him, grab the racquetball he is squeezing out of his hand. “Tile, it doesn’t matter now. Like you said, she’s dead.”

He looks at me hard. “Dead as a doornail,” he says.

I give him back the ball and he starts bouncing it on the floor. I don’t want to tell him I’ve met Cole, that she was seeing him, and that there’s something still missing about the night she died. The articles in Page Six and
US
Weekly
on her “tragic death” simply reported that she had been with “a friend.” I had always assumed it was her yoga teacher, like Dad told me. Now I know it was Cole, and I’m afraid of what I might find out, afraid that the information might somehow scar me more than I already am. But it’s too late. It’s like scratching a scab, and the blood has already started to trickle.

Tile is concentrating on the ball, and looks so innocent, so unscarred. He doesn’t have his mother, but it hasn’t really sunk in for him. He has dealt with it in a very literal and unemotional way. I feel a crushing in my heart knowing that soon enough, he will really feel the weight of what happened and will have to carry it with him like I do, the heaviness of loss.

“You know all those videos you took of Mom when Dad gave you the Flip video camera last year?”

“Yeah, most of them are boring.”

“Well, I tell you what, why don’t you upload them into my computer and I’ll make a little short film, to memorialize her.”

His eyes light up and he stops bouncing the ball. “Can I choose the sound track?”

I smile, thinking that Blink-182 is not exactly what I had in mind.

“Sure.”

He runs out to get his Flip video and returns in seconds. After we upload them, I tell him I need private time. He nods, but then walks up to me, cowering a little.
He looks me in the eye and I turn away. It’s heartbreaking, how much I want to keep him safe from the world, and how hopeless a notion that is.

“You know, maybe sometime you can have Oliver over. We can play Xbox. Even though I can go to level six on Tomb Raider I can let him win.”

I try to will my eyes not to water.

“Okay, Tile, sounds good.”

Before he shuts the door, he turns around and says, “On second thought, you can pick the sound track. But I want my name in the credits.”

Before I hear the next message I decide to just concentrate on taking some decent pictures. The next day I bring my vintage camera to school, and people look at me strangely as I lug it through the hallway. The first thing I do is set it up in the girls’ bathroom. There are two barred windows above the sink where washed-out morning light bleeds in. When the Rachels come in for their pre-homeroom touch-up, even Rachel Two says the words “Hey, you.” I quickly realize that it’s merely because there’s a camera in the room. The first picture I take is the two Rachels from behind, standing underneath the window. Rachel One is admiring herself and Rachel Two is bent over to fix her tights. There are random objects on the sink, and the mirror is partly clouded up. I remember my father telling me that film is all about
reflection. I wonder if this can be true with photography. I shoot.

Rachel One looks at me like she’s hurt.

“You never called me.”

“Sorry,” I say, “I’ve been busy.”

They look at each other and roll their eyes, and my stomach turns. Somehow nothing I say or do will make them grow up, or understand that this is not an episode of
Gossip Girl
or a chapter in
The Clique
.

The second picture I take is at lunch, outside in the quad. Jared, the ninth-grade stoner, has drawn a huge city on the sidewalk in chalk. It is beautifully intricate. I shoot it lengthwise, with his arm in the edge of the frame, about thirty thin black leather bracelets on his wrist, his hand almost completely white from the chalk.

I get to English early to show Ms. Gray the camera, and not surprisingly she bubbles over with excitement. I decide that if I ever take a picture of someone’s face—a portrait—it will be hers. She stands right in front of the lens, and the only way I can describe her is honest. Nothing to hide. She looks like she wants to save the world, then make you dinner. I tell her she’s a natural.

After I show the camera to the class and everyone gets a chance to look through the lens, Ms. Gray asks me if I’d like to take a picture. I say yes, but I have a specific request.

“As long as we keep our clothes on,” she says. A few kids laugh.

“If everyone could put their feet up on the desks, just for a minute.”

Ms. Gray looks apprehensive, but then nods, as if it’s now the class assignment. For a few moments, I feel like my father directing a scene. I have a few kids cross ankles, and arrange some shoes so that they look askew. Then I tell everyone to freeze. I take the shot and it looks cool: the soles of everyone’s shoes resting on top of the desks at all different angles, with a giant map of the world in the background.

I leave the camera in English for the rest of my classes, then retrieve it at the end of the day. As I pack it up, Ms. Gray says, “How is everything at home?”

I sit on the edge of her desk.

“Fine. My dad’s seeing someone.”

“Really?” Ms. Gray tries to play it down but I can tell by her face that her mind’s working fast.

“She’s an English teacher.”

“Can’t say I disapprove. Is it weird for you?”

I finish packing up the camera and don’t answer.

“Dumb question,” she says. “What about Tile?”

“He’s ten, you know? I think it hasn’t really sunk in.”

“Yes, well, when it does, he’ll be glad to have someone like you as a sister.”

I know that Ms. Gray isn’t saying that just to be nice, that she means it. She knows who I am, that deep down I have good intentions. This makes me feel, for a brief moment as I turn to leave, hopeful.

On the way home, however, I begin my descent into reality. Why did Oliver turn so cold yesterday? What did Cole mean about my father being distraught?

I tell my driver to take my camera home and drop me off at the studio. I feel it’s time to continue reading the Luna file.

Inside, something seems different, the furniture moved slightly. I carefully sit down at her laptop and grab the phone. There’s one message left, but I’m afraid of what it might be, that it will be a hang-up or something that isn’t a payoff of some kind. I decide to wait. I double-click the file and continue where I had left off.

I read the words again and think of Oliver.
Love of my life
. How can she write that? I think of Cole in the coffee shop, so different from Dad, so easily readable. Nervous,
exposed … scared, even. I can’t remember my father ever being scared, or at least giving away that he was. Although my instinct is to hate Cole, I don’t. There was something else in his eyes—remorse, compassion.

What? It’s like I’m reading words written by another person entirely. My mother was so self-assured, so together, almost meticulous in her ways. In one of my earliest memories I was collecting shells on the beach in Nantucket, and lining them all up on an old wooden table in the rented house. I always liked to put things in perfect lines. After taking a bath, I came back to the table and one was missing. My mother said it was cracked, so she had thrown it away. Maybe that shell was symbolic, like a mirror held up to a deep part of herself she couldn’t bear to face. She was the cracked shell.