How I Came to Sparkle Again (12 page)

“It would be nice to have someone at home,” Ben said.

“You’ll have that,” Mike reassured Ben. “You’re going to see some ugly shit, brother. And just when you think you’ve seen the worst, you’ll see something even uglier. But you’re going to get to save the day sometimes, too, and that feels good. Plus, you know, one day you won’t be the new guy anymore, and you’ll be helping us trick some other poor bastard into buying us all ice cream all the time instead of you.”

Ben smiled. “I got Dreyer’s mint chocolate chip—your favorite. You know this isn’t going to go on forever, though. I’ve already bought ice cream for my first call at the station, for the completion of each weekly probationary training, for my first fire, and now for the first baby delivery in the field. This well is running dry. After this, I only have to buy you guys ice cream when my picture is in the paper, which will be never, because I ride in the backseat.”

“You’re a pretty boy, Beano. Marcia from the newspaper is going to put your photo in there a lot,” Mike teased. The guys started calling Ben Beano after chili night his first week at the station, and it stuck.

“You’re the one driving in all the parades, Magoo,” Ben countered, calling Mike by the nickname he earned on a call once when the icy fog was so thick that he couldn’t see anything and was driving blind through all kinds of danger. As Ben turned to leave, he said, “I like peanut butter cup, just so you know. I mean, the Christmas parade isn’t far away.”

Mike laughed, put the last chain saw back together, and went inside to set the table while Ben finished dinner. He felt a little better. But the holiday season was just beginning. It was an extra tough time to watch people lose a loved one, and on many of their calls, that’s exactly what he saw. And this year, for Mike, it would be even tougher.

In his mind, he tried pulling the door to the ugly room shut. He imagined he was holding on to the doorknob, a foot on the wall on each side of the door, pulling with all his might. He pulled and he pulled, but the door just wouldn’t close.

*   *   *

When Jill arrived at Cassie’s house on their sixth night together, Cassie was looking at a poor progress report and a long list of homework she had failed to do.

Jill sat beside her and looked at the list. “Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

“I’ll never be able to do it all. I can’t concentrate.” Cassie pushed the list away in defeat.

“We’ll get through it together, kid. I’ll help keep you focused,” said Jill.

So, Cassie opened her math book, and Jill walked her through three long division assignments. By the third, Cassie had it down enough that Jill could go make a big salad. “Do you like your salad plain, or do you feel adventurous?” she called out to Cassie.

“Adventurous, always,” Cassie replied.

“Kids aren’t supposed to like adventurous meals,” Jill said, and added Craisins, walnuts, garbanzo beans, and feta cheese to the salad, then brought it in for a working dinner.

“This is good,” Cassie said. “I never would have thought to put Craisins on a salad.”

“I never would have expected a ten-year-old to like Craisins on a salad,” Jill said.

“It’s fun to blend new flavors together.” Cassie turned the page and started on equivalent fractions. “I like fresh things. Mom always made fresh things.”

Jill helped Cassie list factors of different numbers and find least common denominators, until at last she was caught up in math. Next on the list was writing. Her progress report said that she had earned a zero so far, having turned in absolutely nothing.

“She didn’t list any assignments. What were your assignments?” Jill asked.

“Usually we just write in journals every day. Before Thanksgiving, we were supposed to write about what we were thankful for,” Cassie explained.

“Of course,” Jill said. “The obligatory Thanksgiving assignment. Did you do it?”

“No,” Cassie said. “I didn’t feel thankful for anything. What am I supposed to write? I’m thankful that my mom’s dead?”

Jill didn’t react. “Right. I get it,” she said, and thought.

“Everyone says they get it, but no one gets it,” Cassie said.

Jill raised her eyebrows. “You’re not the only one to have a great big loss, kid.”

“Yeah, I know. My dad had one, too,” Cassie said, getting sassy.

“You know what, Cassie? Don’t give me attitude. I’m not your enemy here. Look, here’s what we’re going to do for that assignment, okay? You’re just going to lie and say all the junk you think your teacher wants you to say. It’s okay to fake it sometimes and just jump through the hoops. Sometimes when everything’s going wrong, that’s just what a person has to do. You know? It’s not going to make anything better to have to do fifth grade over.”

“I wasn’t giving you
attitude,
” Cassie said with even more attitude. “I just don’t like it when people tell me they know how I feel. They don’t know how I feel.”

“Yeah? Well, Cassie, I don’t like it when you assume to know how I feel, either. Just so you know, today was my due date. This was the day I was supposed to have a baby. But back in October, my baby died. So, no, I don’t know what it’s like to be a kid and lose my mom and have to face the holidays without her. But I know what it’s like to go into the holidays thinking that everything’s wrong, and feeling such emptiness that you wonder how you’ll ever be okay again.”

Jill got up and went to the bathroom so Cassie wouldn’t see her cry, and wondered if she went too far, wondered if that was an appropriate thing to say to a ten-year-old. She splashed cold water on her face and looked at her reflection in the mirror. “Pull it together, Jill,” she told herself, took a few deep breaths, and walked back out to Cassie and her homework. She didn’t make eye contact. She simply sat back down.

Cassie had written a half page about what she was thankful for—a home, her dad, her cat, enough food, clean water, skiing, and that she got to stay here with her dad instead of moving to Arizona with her grandparents, and for Jill, who helped make that happen by babysitting her when no one else would.

Jill read it over her shoulder. “Don’t forget that I don’t feed you frozen dinners,” she said.

Cassie smiled and wrote, “Plus, unlike my other babysitter, Jill doesn’t feed me crappy frozen dinners. She makes good food. And she doesn’t breathe weird like Nancy, either.”

“You might want to make a different word choice than ‘crappy,’” Jill said, so Cassie erased it and changed it to “disgusting.” “And don’t start your sentence with ‘and.’” Cassie erased that, too, and capitalized “she.” “How long is it supposed to be?” Jill asked.

“A page,” Cassie answered.

“What about friends? Can you write about friends you’re thankful for? That would fill space.”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“How is that possible?” Jill asked.

“I just stopped talking to all of them, and now none of them talk to me either,” Cassie explained.

“Why’d you stop talking to them?”

Cassie shrugged. “What’s there to talk about?”

Jill looked at Cassie a second too long and then decided to just leave it. “Uncle Howard would say nature. Yes, nature. You can fill a lot of space writing about the wonders of nature.”

“
Uncle
Howard?” Cassie asked. “Howard on the mountain with the books?”

“That’s the one,” Jill said. “What has he made you read?”

“A year ago he made me read
Hope for the Flowers
so I wouldn’t feel disillusioned when I won the Olympics one day. He said I should question what real success is.”

Something about hearing a ten-year-old use the word
disillusioned
made Jill smile. She shook her head. “That’s my uncle,” she said, and cleared dinner plates while Cassie filled up the rest of her paper about nature.

“Good job,” Jill said, glancing at it. It was already an hour past Cassie’s regular bedtime. “It’s late. Let’s get this packed up. Hopefully checking all that stuff off your list will help your dad go easy on you.”

“Thanks,” Cassie said as she packed her bag. Then, without looking at her, she said, “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” Jill asked, confused.

“I’m sorry about your baby. And I’m sorry I was a brat.”

Jill nodded. “Thanks,” she said, and left it at that.

*   *   *

Lisa rolled out more cookie dough and stamped it with her gingerbread man cookie cutter. She was hopeful that the ginger would kick Jill’s stomach into gear, just like the gingerbread had seemed to help. Jill needed to eat more, and Lisa considered it her duty to make sure it happened.

Tom knocked and let himself in the back door. “I smelled something good!” He looked at the sheet of cookies cooling on the stovetop and gasped. “Cookies!”

“Yes, cookies,” Lisa said, softened by his boyish excitement.

As he reached for one, he noticed how the heads of one row were wedged in between the legs of the row on top of them. “Dear God, Lisa, what are your gingerbread men doing to each other? It’s like a gingerbread orgy down there! You made porn cookies!”

Lisa whacked him on the butt with a spatula. “Only you, Tom Cat. Only you.”

Tom opened the closet door and moved Lisa’s picture to the first square on his Chutes and Ladders board. “Delicious,” he said. Then he moved her to the second square. “And sexy turns today, Lisa. Nice ass.”

“You like?” Lisa asked playfully. She rubbed her hand on one cheek, flouring the pocket of her jeans.

He gave her his best sexy look.

“Take me off your board, Tom Cat, deluxe mimbo. Getting into your bed would be like getting my driver’s license renewed. First I’d have to take a number. Then I’d have to wait for you to say”—she held an invisible microphone to her mouth—“‘Number eighty-six! Number eighty-six, please step up to the bed and take your clothes off!’” She followed her announcement with a fuzzy microphone noise.

As Lisa razzed him in her usual way, she could have sworn she saw a brief flash of hurt, as if he had never considered that any lover of his wouldn’t feel special, given his legacy—even if, in truth, she was.

But he forced a smile and said, “Oh, a take-a-number machine! That’s brilliant! Finally, some form of crowd control! I’m going to go look for one now!” He took a cookie and started for the door. “All right, I’ve got stuff to do. Thanks for the cookie,” he said, and left.

Lisa watched him trek to the Kennel through her kitchen window and wondered what just happened.

She walked over to the closet door and took down her Candy Land board. She wasn’t that woman anymore. She studied Tom’s Chutes and Ladders board for a moment, and all evidence pointed to this abstinence thing being very temporary, so she left his up.

Then she looked back out the window, saw Tom’s bedroom light come on for a few minutes and then go off, and again, she wondered why he had left so quickly. Had she offended him? Was that really possible? She had always thought there were ways in which Tom had depth, and then there were ways in which he did not.

She thought about the dads who dropped their kids off at ski lessons. They were a completely different breed of man. And although she saw them daily, they were exotic and unfamiliar. They were something she couldn’t even learn about because they were identified and claimed before Lisa even knew they existed. The sorting had already happened, and she’d missed it. Now she was stuck with the Peter Pans. Nope. She wasn’t going to do it. There had to be something better—even for her. If God could part a sea for Moses, certainly He could find her a better man. She made a decision.

She finished her cookies, put on her boots and her sassy date jacket, and walked down to the Catholic church. Like the other two churches in town, it was small—not much bigger than her own house—but it had charm. She walked up the steps, opened the heavy door, and walked up to the first altar. She made the sign of the cross, kissed her fingers, and touched Jesus’s face on the picture before her. It seemed she had the whole church to herself, so she went ahead and walked slowly up the long aisle to the altar in the front of the church, feeling the wood give a little under her feet, hearing a board creak now and then. This was what she came to light a candle for—this aisle; so she really let herself feel it. It was like the way the ski instructors practiced on each other before ever teaching for real, or like doing CPR on Ressessa Annie before ever using it for real. It was her dry run-through.

She couldn’t quite picture it, couldn’t quite picture looking at the church through a veil, couldn’t quite picture flowers and ribbons, even though she had been to enough weddings in this church to be able to picture at least that, and she couldn’t quite picture who might be waiting for her in the front. When she looked up and imagined someone in a tux, he always had Tom’s face. Ug. As if.

When she reached the front, she put three dimes in a collection box and took three little candles. She touched their wicks to the flame of a candle left burning, said a couple of Our Fathers, and then whispered a prayer—a prayer for faith, and for strength, and for an end to this particular kind of bottomless loneliness.

chapter nine

SNOW REPORT FOR DECEMBER 21

Current temperature: 20F, high of 23F at 3
P.M.
, low of 17F at 4
A.M.

Mostly cloudy, winds out of the southwest at 5 mph.

49" mid-mountain, 57" at the summit. 4" new in the last 24 hours. 5" of new in the last 48.

Jill watched a young man squat down next to his wife in the FAR. She had hit a tree with her face, and judging by the damage, at high speeds. Her nose looked broken and her eyes were swelling and turning black. Abrasions covered her right cheek, along with a deep slice that went from the corner of her mouth all the way up to her ear. Her husband had left her in the FAR while he went to get his car and had just returned to pick her up.