Plan a, p.31
Plan A, page 31
I head to Jiffy Car Wash. I can see out the windshield, but just barely. The car rides along the tracks, and the water comes down, and then the soap, and the sloppy noodles, and more water, and we’re washed clean. Almost clean. There’s still a reddish residue on the hood, and in the corners of the windshield. There are stains all over my clothes.
“Why is the car red?” Mase says as he gets in. “Oh my God.” He sees me. “Oh my God, oh my God. Are you okay? What happened?”
“They just poured some paint on it,” I say. “It’s fine. I can handle it.”
I expect Mase to sympathize, or maybe even cry, but instead his cheeks blaze, same as mine do when I’m upset or angry. He’s both.
“This is just so fucked up,” he says. Mase never uses that word.
“I know. I know, I’m sorry.”
“You, I mean. This, meaning you.”
“Me?”
“You think you have to be some big, strong—”
“Those are good things, Mase.”
“Yeah, if it’s, like, healthy for you. This isn’t that. It’s like you’re taking some punishment. Like you’re supposed to be punished. You’re taking it. You’re doing something you think other people expect of you. Why do you have to face them, huh? Why do they deserve to be faced? Strength isn’t just being…” He windmills a hand around, searching for how to explain. But I know what he means.
“Fierce.”
“Yeah. Strength isn’t being fierce. I don’t even think strength is always being strong.”
My eyes prick with tears. My throat gets tight with emotion, too, the way it does when someone says something true. Choice is strength. Making your own is.
I pull the little lever that squirts the wiper fluid of our shit car, and then I flip on the wipers. I can see so clearly now that our shit car’s shit windshield has become a metaphor.
“Let’s go,” I say.
I turn the engine on. In the film version the battery might be dead, but it isn’t, and I’m done facing obstacles and facing obstacles because I feel like I deserve obstacles.
“Where?”
I drive toward Main Street, past the fountain. I see Mr. Fartso sitting on a bench there, sipping coffee out of a cardboard cup. Mrs. Peony is making her way down the sidewalk with her little walker with the basket. Oh, it all makes me sad. So sad.
“Did you hear me? Where are we going?” Mase asks again.
I pull up in front of Euwing’s Drugs. There’s a free spot right in front, like it’s meant to be.
“NO. Ivy! I just told you! No! You don’t need to go facing stuff and people like this!”
“Not unless I want to.” And I want to. I want that check, too. I need that check, and I earned it. “Will you wait a sec?”
“Oh my God,” Mase says, and folds his arms, mad. “You require a lot of patience, you know that?”
* * *
I walk past the lovebirds, Buddy and Missy. I forget to hold my nose, and the full force of their rank smell hits. I take it all in. I really look. Inside the cage Missy is losing some feathers. Buddy picks at his skin and preens. I hear his words in my head, too, Mr. Euwing’s: You can change its color. You can stop it from flying, even. Sure you can. When you force them to live inside a wire cage, you can make them do anything.
The fluorescent lights give everything a sickly blue hue. Evan is behind the counter, replacing a roll of receipt tape, but he looks up when I come in and raises his hand in a wave. When I stride down the candy aisle, I see Maureen, moving stuff around in pain relief. She sees me and turns away, but then does a double take. I must be a sight, in those clothes. There’s a sale on shampoo, the kind I like, but everything in here is too expensive. Every single thing. I thought this was my future.
I’m so glad I was wrong.
“Ivy,” Maureen says. She’s coming toward me like a linebacker, but I push past and go right through the pharmacy door, where Mr. Euwing is reaching for a box on a high shelf.
“Bob,” I say.
He turns in my direction, wearing his big customer smile, until he sees it’s me. I watch a film play out on his face—disappointment, disgust, and then, when he sees my clothes, confusion and guardedness.
“I came for my check.”
“You’re not who I thought you were, Ivy.”
“You’re sure right about that.”
“What you’ve done is a sin,” Bob Euwing says, retrieving my check from the drawer under the counter and handing it to me. “I pray that you repent, and—”
“You ought to pray that Drake keeps his pants zipped.”
Bob Euwing’s face goes utterly still. For a moment I see it. I know I do. It’s right there—a clear understanding of exactly what I mean.
“Drake,” I say, just to be sure he does. “I wonder if you would’ve forced him to give birth.”
I turn and leave. Maureen is holding that price-checker wand like a gun. Well, sure. They love their guns here. Bob Euwing takes Drake out to the firing range all the time, and Maureen and her husband are avid hunters.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Buddy and Missy as I leave.
37
Some people will never see you. Some unfinished business will always be unfinished. Especially when it’s been unfinished for centuries.
We put our house up for sale.
Taking help is strength, too, Ives, my mom keeps telling me, and maybe herself, as well. Taking help is an act of self-respect.
We’re lucky, I’m lucky, I think again and again, that we have options like this, help like this, when other people don’t have a house or a Grandma Lottie or the freedom and ability to make this choice, let alone the one I already made at that clinic. How can this thought not loop and loop again through my brain?
As we sift through our bathroom drawers, tossing out nearly empty lotion bottles and dried-up mascaras, as we wrap newspaper around our cups and silverware and pans, and fold our clothes into garbage bags to the thump of Mom’s music, I think about Faith’s sister, Harmony, too. Harmony, living at the Belle Vista apartments, with the sign out front that says Heated Pool, Color TV, A/C. I send a silent hope that she’s okay and happy.
“Hey, look what I found,” Mase says. He holds up the green disappearing coin case from the magic kit that we thought was lost forever.
“Where was it?”
“Just stuck between my mattress and the wall. I swear, I shoved my hand down there a million times when we were looking for it.”
Mase—he’s thrilled to be moving. The Oregon Coast has a food trail that you can follow from farms to cafés, and he’s got his eye on a culinary program at a community college a few hours away from where we’ll be living. He can recite the bios of the instructors like a waiter telling you the specials in detail. I can finish my senior year there for free, too, while getting college credits at the same time. After that, who knows. Maybe I’ll study writing there or somewhere else, I’m not sure. These are all the things we say to Dad when he calls to talk about your upcoming transition. It sounds so formal, but he wants to ask if we’re sure and we’re okay and happy about it. We are sure, and okay, and happy about it.
“Well, it’s not gone after all,” I say. Mase makes the penny disappear, and then flips the case over to make it reappear, then disappear, then reappear, like so many things we think are gone but aren’t.
* * *
It takes a few weeks, but we finally sell the house and get a closing date. The tension in Mom’s face eases, especially after she applies for an assistant manager job at Nat’s House of Crafts in Tillamook, Oregon, and gets it. It turns out that Nat is a big bearded guy who went to high school with Mom and who runs the quilt club in town. Finally, she stops sitting over that calculator, looking worried.
We don’t pack our portable speaker, so that night, our last night in Paris, it sits on a cardboard box, playing music in a nearly vacant kitchen as we eat Subway sandwiches. Mase criticizes the bun quality. Mom and me, we crumple up the wrappers and toss them at him, and Wilson lunges at the paper balls and runs off, hoping we’ll chase him, but we’re too tired. With all our stuff in boxes, the house is so bare that our voices echo. It’s strange to see our walls stripped of photos and posters. Now there are just nail holes and dark squares of unfaded paint, revealed when we took the pictures down, the real color hidden under there all along. What’s weird is how happy we are. The house looks so sad and empty, but the people in it aren’t.
“I can’t wait,” Lorenzo says when I tell him the date we’re leaving. It’s hard to talk to him when he’s at Rockaway Auto. Everything is loud and clanging in the shop. I feel shy with him, too. I haven’t seen him in three and a half weeks.
“Attorney news?” I ask.
“Nothing. The guy who reported me probably collected his ten thousand dollars and went on with his life.”
That night I go up to the roof. And then I laugh so hard. So, so hard that I have to hold my stomach, because two other people got there before me.
“Careful, Ivy, don’t fall,” Mase says.
“Sit, sit.” Mom scooches over and makes room for me.
The three of us look out toward that Eiffel Tower. Mase shakes a box of Raisinets, and a few tumble into his palm.
“Where did you get those?” I ask.
“Parting gift from Lorenzo. I was saving them for a special night.”
“I can’t believe you’re eating those disgusting things,” I say.
“I like to keep an open mind,” Mase says. “Actually, they’re quite tasty.” He tilts his head back, pops a few in.
Mom holds out her palm. “Fill her up,” she says.
“Okay, fine,” I say. I hold out my palm.
The three of us just sit under a brilliant and star-filled sky, gazing out at our past and our future both. Real awe, real wonder. Love.
* * *
We’re leaving in the morning. I keep hoping that maybe Peyton will come by, or even Faith, or both of them together. In the film version this would happen. We would maybe reach some bittersweet understanding. The best would happen. But in the film version of things, the worst happens, too—if someone is on the deck of a ship, they’ll fall in, and if people are driving in a car, it will crash. Life, real life—it usually happens somewhere in the middle and not at either extreme.
The movers are picking up everything in the morning, thanks to Grandma Lottie, plus a coupon code, plus a discount. Mom says she got such a good deal that we can maybe just kiss all our stuff goodbye because we probably won’t see it again.
We’re at the cleaning portion of moving. Mom is scraping gunk out of the fridge, and Mase and I are doing the bathroom. When the doorbell rings, Wilson Phillips barks his head off, and the noise echoes in the empty room.
“Can you get it, Ivy?” Mom shouts. She’s elbow-deep in old salad dressings and expired mustard.
I peek out. I’m still afraid in this place. I haven’t even gone out much, not since that paint. My hopeful heart sinks, because it’s not Peyton or Faith, and it never will be. Instead it’s Olivia Kneeley. Ultraconfident Olivia Kneeley, of the bikini and the popular group, of the shiny hair, of the pregnancy test sliding directly under her chair. Olivia Kneeley, of the bathroom crying incident, the wad of TP, the peppermint Life Savers.
I put my back against the wall like I’m hiding from the FBI. I hope she didn’t see me.
She did.
“Ivy?” she asks. “Can I talk to you?”
There’s something in her voice. It’s not anger or judgment. It’s need.
I open the door.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I just wanted to say I’m so sorry. It was really wrong of me not to stand up for you.” Olivia Kneeley’s eyes fill with tears.
I don’t tell her it’s okay, because it isn’t. I don’t give her something I don’t want to give. Instead I just wait.
“My parents are the only ones who know what I’m about to tell you,” Olivia Kneeley says.
And this time I’m not shocked when someone tells me this story. I’m not surprised that there’s another one. I’m not struck that it keeps on happening, this sharing.
It’s what is and always has been.
* * *
In the movies Diesel would become a different dog, too. We’d see the softer side of him, the reason he was always so cruel. But this doesn’t happen, either. Instead, the next day, when we drive away from our house, the only home Mase and I have ever known, he barks oh so viciously and throws himself against that fence. His fangs are bared, and he looks like he wants to rip out our throats.
But it’s the last time I’ll be scared.
38
We take turns driving, Mom and me, stopping for the night only in Albuquerque and Salt Lake City. We play “Hold On,” but also old songs with a new-life vibe, songs with names like “Pack It Up,” and “Dog Days Are Over,” and “Let It Go,” which Mase complains about because it’s from a Disney movie and he thinks it’s babyish. Which means, of course, that Mom and I have to sing the chorus doubly loud to be annoying. Wilson does great on the ride, except for the time we take two seconds to pee and grab our takeout at the Ride On In Café in Albuquerque and he eats half a box of Cheez-Its that Mase left open in the car. It was practically an invitation. At night I watch Mom’s profile both in darkness and in the lights of car beams speeding past. Light, dark, and I remember everything she’s endured. Yet she’s still here, driving forward.
We stop and go again, stop and go, the places and names an exhausted blur. On our arrival day it’s a relief when we finally see that wide sky that means you’re near the ocean. When I roll down my window, I get a glorious hit of sea air, which smells old and deep, like the darkest green if it had a smell. I see Mom’s hands tighten on the steering wheel, and she gets a little snappish as we make our way through the small port town of Garibaldi. We’re all nervous. We’ve only seen photos of the rental house online. If it’s disappointing, we’ll start life out here sliding downward; that’s the fear.
But it’s sweet, so sweet, the house. My heart just lifts, and my body fills with helium giddiness, because it’s small and shingled, with a red door and a patch of very green grass, and a hedge of hydrangeas. It has two stories. It’s pretty.
Mom pulls the parking brake. She pats the dash of our shit car, Mr. Smiley, who has done a downright admirable job of getting us here. “We made it,” she says.
* * *
Inside, the house looks so different from the one in Paris. It has a little sunporch, and wainscot in the living room, and a small bathroom with a claw-foot tub. “Look,” I say in the kitchen. Not about the cupboards and nooks painted a pale green, and not about the old-fashioned glass drawer pulls, but about the thin wood planks on the ceiling that make it feel like we’re in a ship.
“Shiplap,” Mom says. She smiles.
Mase runs his hands across something we didn’t see in the photos. A center island, with a shiny, smooth top. He actually puts his cheek against it and stretches his arms across, like he’s hugging the globe.
“Oh wow!” I point. A dog door.
We explore. You can see a sliver of ocean if you stand on your toes in Mom’s tiny bedroom, and mine has a view of the apartment complex behind us, and Mase’s is so small, it’ll barely fit his bed inside, but we love every corner of this place—the triangle nook above the stairs, the built-in cupboards with drawers below, painted white. The wood-burning stove. The uglies will have less of a chance here, I can tell. I take some photos to send to Dad.
Mom grips my hands. “Lease to own,” she says, like she can hardly believe it, her eyes glittery. I don’t know exactly what that means, lease to own, only that she sees possibilities where she hadn’t before.
Mase can’t believe something else. “We have two stories,” he says.
And, oh, we do.
* * *
Mom wants to find the market, and Mase is outside, walking on the grass with his shoes off because the grass is so soft here. He finds an old tennis ball on the lawn and throws it for Wilson. I have something else I need to do.
“Mom?” I say, and that’s all I have to say.
“Go,” she says.
* * *
I’ve been there before, but Rockaway Auto Supply and Repair is easy to find even if you haven’t. If you were here last month, you’d have seen tourists taking photos of that iconic storefront covered in hubcaps, and that beautiful old truck parked there. It’s a shit truck—it probably wouldn’t take you to the end of the block—but it’s still somehow beautiful, though, showing off its history.
It’s late afternoon, and there are only three or four cars in the lot, including Lorenzo’s Triumph. My anxiety winds up at the sight of it. I don’t have butterflies. I have some big scary creature stomping around, like the kind we saw in Dinosaur.
As I head to the entrance, I run my fingers along the hubcaps on the wall. The bells on the door chime as I enter. The store has changed, and you don’t see the repair shop right away. I have to wind past old Hank, the gas-station guy, and through a few aisles of auto parts. But when I step through the doorway of the garage, there he is, my Lorenzo. He’s cranking the wrench on the engine of a motorcycle, and he looks up, and our eyes meet. It’s full-on Rockaway Weekend, one hundred percent, oh, my heart. I’m not wearing that dress with the hilarious shoulder pads and crimped eighties hair, and he’s not in a leather jacket. Nope. We had the same idea, and we’re each wearing our Captain Ahoy’s T-shirt, with the happy halibut dancing alongside a mug of beer. I want to crack up, because look at us. I want to cry, because I’ve missed him so bad. But instead our eyes meet, almost like I’m seeing him for the first time. He just stands there with that wrench, and I just stand there staring back, and there’s this deep and magnetic energy between us, magic, and I am certain, so certain, that love is the one most powerful and forever thing.
