How I Came to Sparkle Again (9 page)

Jill’s eyes began to water, but she held the tears back. She shook her head gently. “Thanks.”

“It’s okay to cry in front of me, you know. You’re the only one who thinks you’re supposed to look like you’re fine all the time. But I think it’s normal to have messy, loud, sloppy feelings.”

Jill pursed her lips and nodded.

“Well, I’m here,” she said, and Jill nodded again.

When Lisa got up and went home, Jill stared at herself in the mirror on the ceiling. What she saw was a discarded woman in her mid-thirties on a nasty, stained mattress in a dumpy trailer.

She remembered the day David said he had a surprise for her. He’d blindfolded her, guided her to the car, and helped her get in. He was so excited. It felt to Jill that he made a hundred turns before they arrived. She wasn’t sure if he was doing it on purpose so she couldn’t guess where they were or if reaching their destination was really that involved.

Finally he stopped, came around to her side of the car, opened her door, and took her hand. She felt her feet leave the pavement and sink into lush grass with each of her tentative little steps. Then he asked, “Ready?” and took off the blindfold.

She stood in front of the brick house they had toured the week before. Of all the houses they had seen, it had been Jill’s favorite.

“We got it!” David said. She jumped into his arms and he swung her around.

For years they were happy in that little house. When she thought of that house, she thought of the tiny bathroom and how they were always practically on top of each other when they brushed their teeth. She liked the way the small house necessitated closeness like that. They took their showers together nearly every morning. He always washed her hair for her, which she loved. And afterward, while he shaved, she stood behind him and dried her hair with one hand and let the other rest on his hip or back. She just liked touching him. Jill missed that house from the moment they moved out of it and into their German fairy-tale house. She missed the walls that had kept them close to each other.

Back in the Kennel, Jill looked at herself in the mirror and wondered what David saw or didn’t see all those nights they slept together. She couldn’t imagine going through the rest of her life unloved, but she couldn’t imagine dating and then starting a new relationship from the beginning, either. What was the point? If David discarded her, everyone else would, too. If after all this time he didn’t see her as worth keeping, who else would?

In the middle of the night, she woke from a dream where her baby was lost in the hospital and she searched frantically for him, to no avail. Although she was lucid, panic still coursed through her veins. She got out of bed, thinking a walk would be the only way to calm down and clear herself of its energy.

She wandered toward the center of town. Next to city hall was the fire station where an aid car was backing in. Jill walked across the street and waited for the driver to get out.

“Mike, right?” she said.

“Yeah?” he answered.

“I’m Jill. I was working with Tom on the mountain yesterday when you picked up the heart attack patient.”

“Oh, right. Sorry. I was focused on that.”

Jill realized that meant she was entirely unnoticeable. Men noticed stunningly beautiful women no matter what was going on. He hadn’t noticed her. No wonder David found a new woman. It stung, but she recovered and addressed the task at hand. “I heard you needed a sitter.”

“Very badly,” he said. “Are you new in town? You don’t look familiar to me.”

“I lived here a long time ago with my uncle Howard,” she answered. “You know Howard. He found your daughter.…”

“Howard’s a good man,” Mike said.

“Yeah, he is. Lisa was my best friend. I’ve been staying with her, you know, in the yellow Victorian? She works at the ski school.…”

“Right. I know Lisa.”

“Well, if you need references, you can ask either of them about me. I’ve got to confess, though, that tonight I moved into the Kennel, but please don’t hold that against me. I assure you that I don’t share their lifestyle.”

Mike laughed. “The Kennel? Wow.”

“No, really. I was a nurse back in Austin. I make healthy choices.” She wondered if she was starting to sound desperate. She felt desperate, although it wasn’t really about the job as much as it was about being good enough. She wanted him to see that she was good enough.

Mike laughed a little more. “Oh, no worries. Tom’s a great guy. I don’t really know the others. Well, okay, here’s the deal. I’m on for twenty-four, off for forty-eight, starting at eight
A.M.
There’s a futon in our home office you can sleep on. On weekdays Cassie’s at school until three. She’s ten, so she’d be okay until you could get there. On weekends … well, I could probably just turn her loose on the mountain. She
is
ten. But it would be nice to know she could come to you if she had a problem or something.”

“Sure,” Jill said.

“I paid Nancy fifty bucks a shift. Ten shifts in a month, five hundred bucks a month. I know it’s not a huge sum, but it’s what I can afford.”

“Five hundred bucks would help me a lot.”

“Okay, then, you’re on for Monday. I’m at 210 Aspen Street. It’s a blue-purple Victorian. My daughter picked the color.”

His daughter picked the color. Cute.
She smiled.

“Okay, it’s periwinkle. I live in a periwinkle house. I have trouble saying it because it sounds like a magic word used by fairy godmothers.”

Jill laughed, pretended to use a magic wand, and said, “Periwinkle. Yeah, you’re right. It totally does. All right, well, I’ll be at your periwinkle house on Monday after work. Is there anything else I should know? Allergies? Anything like that?”

“No allergies, but she hates frozen dinners.” He paused to take a breath. It was so hard to say. “I don’t know if Tom told you that she lost her mom last July.…”

“Yeah,” Jill said. “I knew Kate.”

“You knew Kate?”

Jill nodded. “We raced together. I didn’t know her that well.” It was nicer than saying she hadn’t liked her. And it was true. In reality, she hadn’t known Kate that well. “She was much better than me. I think I felt intimidated by that.”

Mike laughed. “For what it’s worth, I never beat her down the mountain either.” He smiled for a moment, remembering how hard he tried. “Well, Cassie has nightmares pretty often. Just—” His voice broke. “Just go hug her … you know, until she falls back to sleep.”

Jill could see tears in his eyes. She nodded sympathetically. “Of course.”

“It’s hard. You know. I wish I could be there all the time,” he said.

“Yeah, that would be hard.”

“Jill? Thanks. I was worried that no one would take the job after hearing how she took off and that I’d have to ship her off to my parents in Arizona.”

“Well, if she takes off, she’ll likely go to the mountain, right? I’ve got connections up there. I think we’ll be okay.”

He smiled. “Okay. Well, thanks.”

They shook hands, and she walked away.

She turned around and caught him looking at her and gave him a little wave.

Back at the Kennel, she tried to sleep but found herself obsessing about David and about forgiveness.
It takes a strong person to forgive,
she thought, and she did not feel strong. She felt shattered.
Could I? Could I?
she asked herself over and over.
Could I ever go back? What if he does it again? How could I ever trust him? How could it ever be okay again?

At four in the morning, she heard the front door open and close as Hans and Eric returned from their shift. She heard one of the guys go into the bathroom, piss loudly, flush, and not wash his hands. Suddenly she imagined the fecal contamination all over the house. She was going to need the big guns, Lysol, to live there. As she struggled to rectify the conflict between which she disliked most—germs or the hospital smell of Lysol—she fell back into a dreamless sleep.

At six-thirty, Tom woke her.

She went into the bathroom that smelled like limes and men but which she now knew was full of germs, shut the door, and sat on the toilet. New droplets covered the sides of the cabinet next to it. She noticed shiny little dots on the floor. The roll of toilet paper had been sprinkled, too. Nasty. She unwound the toilet paper until it looked dry and ripped some to use. Then she rewound the gross toilet paper over the roll since it obviously didn’t bother anyone else and made a mental note to buy her own toilet paper to carry to and from her room. When she was done, she looked for evidence that anyone ever cleaned with a cleanser that contained bleach, found some Ajax under the sink, and felt a little better. She was going to need a lot of it. She skipped the shower, got dressed, and joined Tom in the kitchen.

He silently handed Jill a plate of scrambled eggs.

“Thanks,” she said, surprised.

“No problem,” he answered.

They watched Stout sit on the carpet and walk himself forward with his front paws. “His ass itches,” Tom explained.

“Does he have worms?” Jill asked, imagining not just bacteria but parasite eggs in the carpet.

“Nah, I worm him. Sometimes your ass just itches, you know?”

Jill made another mental note to never touch the floor.

Tom poured coffee into his travel cup and then they put on their boots and walked to the mountain. It all seemed so surreal. Two months ago, she had a normal life, and now she had an unfaithful husband and a rental room in a trailer with men who peed all over everything and dogs that dragged their butts all over everything else, and she had a job working on ski patrol in the ski patrol first-aid room and another job taking care of Kate’s daughter—Kate, whom she’d never really liked that much but couldn’t quite believe was gone. None of it seemed real—none of it.

chapter six

SNOW REPORT FOR NOVEMBER 28

Current temperature: 27F, high of 29F at 2
P.M.
, low of 25F at 2
A.M.

Increasing clouds with occasional snow flurries. Winds out of the south at 20 mph with gusts up to 25 mph.

34" mid-mountain, 42" at the summit. 1" new in the last 24 hours. 1" of new in the last 48.

Just as Mike had warned her, Cassie had a night terror in the early hours of the morning. Jill bolted out of the guest futon in the office and across the hall to her room, sat on the edge of her bed, and rubbed her back. Cassie kept her back turned to Jill as she wept and sputtered. And Jill stayed until Cassie cried herself back to sleep.

The evening had not gone well. Jill had knocked, and Cassie had opened the door. Jill introduced herself and then went to the kitchen, where she surveyed the contents of the refrigerator and cupboards and began to make a stir-fry. “I heard you hate frozen dinners,” Jill said. “Me too.”

“I hate pretty much everything,” Cassie replied.

Jill knew that was intended to sting, and instead of reacting, she simply replied, “Bummer.” She wondered what she had gotten herself into. After a long, awkward pause, she tried again. “How was your day?”

“Look, don’t try to be my mom, okay?” Cassie sneered.

Fortunately, Jill was putting the bag of frozen broccoli spears back into the freezer, so Cassie could not see the expression on her face. She took a breath and tried to choose her words and tone of voice carefully. “Perhaps you can make me a list of the things your mother used to do and then highlight the things on that list that you think are my job description so I can really understand where the line is between being a nice person and trying to be your mom, because I didn’t think I was trying to be your mom. I just thought I was being a nice person.”

With that, Cassie got up and went to her room.

Jill finished dinner, ate a few bites, and then made Cassie a plate. She put the leftovers away, cleaned up, and then got ready for bed. All around the house hung pictures of Kate, Mike, and Cassie. Jill paused for curious glimpses of their past—arms around each other in all kinds of scenic places, big smiles. She didn’t remember Kate smiling that much in high school and wondered who she had grown up to be.

Then she brushed her teeth and crawled into the bricklike futon bed in Mike’s office.

The next morning, Cassie pretended like nothing had happened—not the rudeness and not the nightmare. She said good morning and ate her Cheerios in silence.

Jill noticed that the plate from Cassie’s dinner sat in the sink and was glad she had eaten it at some point in the night. She put it in the dishwasher.

Cassie rinsed her bowl and put it in the dishwasher before Jill shut it. Then she put her school books in her bike messenger bag and headed for the door with a casual, “See you later.” Mike came home just as Cassie was walking out the door, kissed her, and wished her a good day.

“How did it go?” Mike asked Jill.

Jill hesitated, trying to choose her words carefully.

“That good, huh?”

“Nothing big. She was a little hostile last night, but seemed civil enough this morning. She had a nightmare last night, but did go back to sleep.”

Mike rubbed his forehead. “Well, thanks for being patient with her until she comes around.”

Jill shrugged as if to say,
We’re all doing the best we can, aren’t we?
and then said, “I hope you’ll be patient with me, too. I can see she’s going to test my boundaries and she might not like me for a while while she figures it out. We might have some tense moments before we hit our stride. I hope you won’t jump to the conclusion that it’s not working out. Sometimes it just takes some time.”

“Right,” Mike said, nodding skeptically.

Jill picked up her bag and put on her coat.

“See you next time,” Mike said as he walked her to the door and closed it behind her.

*   *   *

Jill walked to the mountain under heavy clouds. An occasional tiny flake kissed her face. She liked her new commute. It was by far better than traffic in Austin.