Girl Overboard (41 page)

“Peter Nakamura.”

“Does some nice urban fills.”

Nice.
The same damning word straight out of Mom’s arsenal of PR vocabulary.
Nice
suggested forgettable and mediocre and, above all, derivative.

My voice might have been soft, but even I could hear its defensiveness: “Peter says it’s important to expand your creative palette. So that’s why I’m here.”

“Do you always do what everyone tells you to do?” The slight shake of his head must have been a dismissal, because Sam parked himself behind his desk and punched a number on his phone. His assistant immediately rushed in to lead me to the lobby, far from Sam’s epicenter of condescension.

“Someone will be in touch with you shortly.” Mollie’s look of compassion practically undid me. Before she sent me off to my regrets and second-guessing, she added, “His bark is a lot worse than his bite.”

As I trudged to the bus stop, frustrated, I composed no fewer than five hundred different, scintillating answers to Sam’s questions. Why had I sounded so stupid, so inept?

Later that night, I showered myself of sweat but couldn’t rinse off my shame. I tore every one of the sketches of fairy houses from my journal and shredded them.

Not too surprisingly, the next morning Mollie called to tell me that Stone Architects was “unfortunately unable” to offer me an internship. So humiliated, I basically hung up on her. When I called Jackson right after that disastrous pseudo-conversation, he actually bristled: “As if you really wanted to work there, right?”

“Well, yeah, I sorta did. Sam’s one of the best architects in the world. Plus, for the amount I sweated, I would have been model-thin in a week.”

He didn’t laugh, not even a snort. “Why? The guy sounds like my dad. Besides, you should see your face whenever you talk about treehouses.”

How many times had I overheard this conversation before, except that it featured my grandpa George explaining to Mom why he was quitting yet another pursuit to start a new one—carpentry one year, glassblowing the next? At his every excuse, my mother’s face would tighten with disapproval, while Dad reminded her later in private that they weren’t Grandpa’s retirement safety net.

This time it was me responding to Jackson’s idealism with a pragmatic “Yeah, well, sometimes you have to pay your dues to pay your bills.”

I knew I was parroting Dad and his career philosophy, but when had he ever been wrong? I was the one who failed, unable to reel in an internship that had been all but hand-delivered on a silver platter.

Three nights later, Dad came home from his business trip just in time for Reid’s birthday cake. At the sound of his key in the door, Mom rushed to the kitchen to collect the chocolate cake we’d spent hours baking and frosting. Every last one of her attempts at conversation over dessert, though, sounded like interrogation: “Did you tell the board about your new marketing plan to target game developers?” I couldn’t blame Dad for his flatline responses. After all, he was the sought-after executive; he knew what he was doing. The closest thing to a career Mom had this last decade was managing our lives. So now we sat at the dining room table, silent, as Mom nibbled her scant sliver of cake while the rest of us devoured large slices.

“Hey, little man, open your present,” said Dad, handing Reid his gift, a large box artfully wrapped and tied with an impressive bow. Inside was an autographed football encased in a clear acrylic box. “Brett Favre signed it. See? You can display it on your bookshelf.”

Reid nodded, uttered a perfunctory “cool,” nothing compared with the awed “coooool” after he opened Mom’s gift, a leather journal filled with hand-torn paper.

“To write your own fantasy novel,” Mom explained. Incredibly, even though we hadn’t coordinated, my gift to Reid was an old-fashioned fountain pen that matched the ancient-looking journal perfectly.

Leaving the signed football on the kitchen table, Reid rushed upstairs, cradling his new journal and pen. Hurt, Dad scraped the last cake crumbs from his plate, and I glared at Reid’s receding back, wanting him to collect the football, fuss over the gift. Didn’t he know how to keep the peace? Who cared if he hated the sport? All he had to do was pretend.

“Do you want another piece?” Mom asked Dad.

“Sure,” Dad said as he retreated to the living room to work. After I served him his second helping, I escaped out the front door to text Jackson in the night air:
SOS
. He phoned me right away, as though he reciprocated my yearning.

“I miss you,” I said.

“Me too…” Jackson paused, then asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I sat down on the front step and deliberately lightened my tone. “Tell me about today.”

“So my dad sold the bird-watcher’s sanctuary,” he said.

In one magical morning, that property had become Our Spot, just as Tuscany was Our Beginning. “Ohhh…” I sighed.

“I know. But a really great couple bought it—the guy’s a carpenter, and the woman writes children’s books.”

“That’s perfect,” I said, but what was even more perfect was how Jackson knew the type of people I’d approve to become caretakers of our property.

I clenched the phone in my hand, ached to tell Jackson that ever since our move, I was afraid to sleep, petrified to see what lay behind my eyelids. I toyed with sharing this unshakable sense of uneasiness about how Dad had been incommunicado on his long business trip.

But.

Even as Jackson and I traded stories now, I remembered the way Dad had smirked at Mom the few times she voiced her forebodings. Like the winter night when seventy-mile-an-hour gales shook our ancient cedar trees as if they were maracas, the boughs rattling crazily as they scraped my skylight. The winds shrieked so loudly that Mom ripped the comforters and pillows off our beds and made Reid and me sleep in the living room, even though Dad scoffed that she was making a big deal about nothing. But the next morning on our way to the ferry, we passed our next-door neighbor’s house crushed beneath a thick Douglas fir. Mom didn’t say anything, just stared at that severed tree trunk and the demolished roof before her gaze darted over to Dad. He kept his eyes squarely on the road ahead.

“I’m sorry, Rebel. I got to go,” Jackson said suddenly.

“Oh, okay.” Gone for less than a week and the bonds connecting us were already overstretching. I bit my lip, disappointed. At what point would those bonds break?

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

“You bet,” I said, even as a shiver made the phone tremble at my ear.

I knew that, yes, I would talk to him tomorrow. But no, I wouldn’t reveal everything and risk Jackson thinking I was crazy. I hung up and stared at the dark cell phone screen that timed the minutes we had spent together. Together. So, like Mom, I kept my misgivings to myself. The price of admission was too high.

“Hey, kiddo,” Dad said, peeking into my bedroom, where I lay on my stomach, journaling on the floor. He sounded more energetic and interested than he had during our entire dessert. “How’s the internship going?”

“Oh,” I said and sat up, ashamed. I hadn’t even divulged the disaster that had unfolded in Sam’s office to my mom, too ashamed to admit that I should have listened to her advice and been better prepared. “Sam hated my work. I didn’t get the internship,” I said, holding my sketchbook up as proof. My doodles of cottages and treehouses had given way to sketches of skyscrapers in Dubai. It was about time I embraced modern architecture.

“Well, here’s a trick I’ve used. Just figure out what the hiring manager likes and regurgitate it,” Dad said easily.

How many times had I heard my father declare that whenever he needed to rally his team: It’s not about the gameplay; it’s how we play the audience. I appreciated how Dad didn’t dwell on my failure.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said, sighing. “It was kind of a tough week.”

The air-conditioning droned so loudly, there was no need to muffle his voice. Even so, Dad said in a conspiratorial tone, “As tough as the way Mom said it was?”

Glad Dad was home, glad to leave the uncomfortable memory of Stone Architects behind, I pictured the way Mom continually nagged at my father. Now that he was back, I realized how much I had missed him since his move from Seattle. I ignored the dull drumming of hurt I had felt all week from his neglect. Why hadn’t he called? Or answered ours?

“Nah,” I said, rolling my eyes. “We were fine.”

“Hey, sorry I missed your interview,” Dad said as he removed two hundred dollars from his wallet, handing me the bills. “Why don’t you buy yourself a new outfit?”

“Are you kidding me?” I asked, grinning past the unsettling memory of Mom unable to access any cash while he was traveling. Whatever, he was home now, I thought to myself. Even if clothes were virtually the last thing I’d buy with this boon of cash, I was touched at his thought, and threw my arms around him. “You’re the best!”

Exhausted for no good reason after Dad left my bedroom, I lay atop my sleeping bag. Then, restless, I flipped onto my side to pull a photograph of Jackson and me out of the back pocket of my sketchbook, the one he had taken with his arm outstretched before us. On our first-month anniversary, we had gone mountain biking on his favorite “beginner’s” trail. I crashed, which freaked both of us out until I told him that I wanted to push on. For the picture, I had yanked my T-shirt down my shoulder to display the bruise collecting near my collarbone, an impressed expression on Jackson’s face, a triumphant grin on mine. As much as I loved the quirk of his grin, the shape of his jaw, the picture was a cardboard-cutout substitute for the real guy.

The wind blew the sheep-wool clouds outside my window, the kind I used to dream about resting upon as a little girl. But now the only place where I wanted to rest was on Jackson’s shoulder. I had already spoken with Jackson and hated the pathetic image of myself as the Needy Girlfriend who had to text him every five minutes.

A few hours later, I awoke to my stomach spewing fire and barely made it to the bathroom before I threw up into the toilet. Before I could raise my head to wipe my mouth, Mom was at my side. For once I was glad that her radar for our distress was on permanent high alert. After wiping my face with a cool, damp towel, Mom led me back to my sleeping bag.

The next morning, I was running a fever, and Dad had already run out the door.

N
o fair! Reb is totally faking it so she doesn’t have to help us unpack,” Reid grumbled as he propped the front door open for the movers with his foot while writing in his journal.

My head throbbed from all the commotion—the sound of heavy footsteps clomping on the marble floor and Reid grousing that it was a Sisyphean task to transfer our books from the boxes to the built-in bookshelves in the living room. Like a high-pitched violin above the cacophony, Mom voiced her wonder at the movers’ personal stories along with her orders about where every box should go: “What brought your dad from Samoa, Antonio? Box one-two-one.”

However much I wanted to nap, it was too mortifying to be tucked in my sleeping bag while the movers barged into my bedroom. So I nested in the living room, out of everyone’s way, and shivered despite the comforter Mom had wrapped around my shoulders as if I were a little old lady.

The few times I ever got sick, I was powerless over my candy-colored visions of people I knew, moving in slow motion as they met their future. As soon as I was well, I would convince myself that I had only been dreaming the fever dream of the sick, that my memory of those dreams was faulty even if I worked to circumvent them. Like Shana in my dreams, slapped around by her college boyfriend when she was sixteen. Instead of telling her as much, I had casually suggested that the Bookster Babes do a community service project for abused women. Even though I didn’t know whether the slap ever happened or not—Shana never said—I could console myself that she would be armed and ready if her boyfriend’s hand contacted her cheek.

To take my mind off these uneasy inklings, I remodeled Mom’s garish bathroom in my imagination, first stripping out the ornate brass fixtures and replacing them with a sleek faucet. That done, I installed a crystal chandelier with extravagant loops of glass that would catch the light and twinkle in a thousand rainbows. There had to be a good store for recycled building materials nearby, what with all these old mansions around us….