Love and Other Unknown Variables (16 page)

4.6

I
’m woken by a text that night.

Greta:
CHUCK! DID U HIT SEND?

The time stamp on the message says it’s 11:36 p.m. My body floods with a surge of adrenaline, pushing me from my bed.

Holy shit! The MIT early application deadline is twenty-four minutes away. My application is still open on my laptop from last night. Without much fanfare or threat of vomit, I hit send.

And then panic.

Me:
Done. Now what?

Greta:
Congrats. Now relax.

She and James sent off their first choice early applications a week ago. They both are hoping for schools in California. It hits me how far away that is. Ridiculously far. How am I supposed to relax when everything I thought I wanted doesn’t feel right anymore?

Me:
Freaking a little.

Greta:
You were made for MIT.

I smile.

Greta:
Or not, but either way, you’ll live.

Me:
NOT helpful.

Greta:
XOXO (the kisses are from James)

4.7

O
n my way home on Friday, I drive by Mrs. Dunwitty’s house. I want to monitor the garden’s progress. If anyone asks, that’s my excuse. It has nothing to do with the fact that I miss our strange conversations, and the way she never looked at me like I was a piñata about to explode. In fact, she took pleasure in poking at me.

The garden itself is filling in. The rose bushes, while only a quarter of the size of the ones I ran over, are filling out, and since we haven’t had a hard frost yet to stop them from blooming, there are even a few orange flowers left amongst the glossy green leaves. The angel is grinning at me from between the plants, reminding me I still haven’t gotten rid of the broken one in my trunk. I’d forgotten she was in there with everything else going on.

Mrs. Dunwitty’s grass is looking shaggy though. It’s too long and it looks like whoever mowed it last time didn’t go in straight lines, so there are strange tufts sticking up everywhere. It’s very unlike her to let her lawn get so unruly.

I park on the curb and make my way to her flamingo-ass pink door. I’m surprised to approach it without dread. When I knock, she doesn’t answer. I wait a few beats and try the doorbell. Still nothing. I figure I’ll come back tomorrow. She’s probably at a Grouchy Granny Anonymous meeting. Step one is admitting you have a problem.

I’m chuckling to myself as I step off the porch and hear the bolt slide back. Mrs. Dunwitty is leaning heavily on her cane when I turn around to greet her, her arm trembling with the effort to hold herself upright. She’s wearing this pale blue housecoat that looks three sizes too big on her instead of her normal elastic waist pants and polyester shirt.

“Hey,” I say, hoping to cover my flummoxed expression with a cheerful tone. Flummox. That’s a word from one of Ms. Finch’s poems. I shake my head, clearing it, and motion toward the yard. “Who murdered your lawn?”

Her eyes smolder like charred coals. “There’s nothing wrong with my lawn, boy. I’ll have you know that took me the better part of a weekend to do on my own.” She lifts her chin and peers down her hawkish nose at me. “What’re you doing here anyway? Your job is done.” Her voice is scratchy, perhaps from disuse. Without me around to harass lately, I bet she’s bored out of her mind.

“I was just checking on the roses.” I lean on the railing at the bottom of the steps, looking up at her. “I’m going to come back tomorrow and mow.”

“You don’t owe me that.”

“I know.”

We stare at each other for a moment, locked in a stubborn battle. I grin first.

Hers looks strained. “See you tomorrow, Jack.”

---

M
rs. Dunwitty has promised me a glass of tea. She said I could even sit in one of her rocking chairs while I enjoy it. “So long as you don’t get too comfortable,” she’d muttered before toddling back in the house to get a glass for me.

I’ve just cleaned and stowed the lawn mower when a silver car comes tearing around the corner. I cup my hands against the glare of the sun as the car approaches. With a jolt, I realize it’s Charlotte’s Civic. I haven’t seen her all week. Apparently, Ms. Finch has decided to punish Charlotte for whatever part she may or may not have played in the stink bombing by making her hang out at home and enjoy the stench.

I’ve missed her.

Charlotte stops her car behind mine. Both she and Becca spring from the car, leaving the doors wide open, and run toward me. My heart goes into hyper drive worrying that something is wrong, but then I notice they are both smiling. Becca’s even laughing.

They each take one of my arms and haul me toward the open car, shoving and pressing until they’ve got me tucked into the backseat. Becca slides in after me and Charlotte runs around to her seat. She peels away from the curb, barely missing my back bumper, whooping and waving an arm out her open window.

I glance behind me to see Mrs. Dunwitty shaking her head before carrying both our drinks back into her house.

“What the hell?” I finally gasp.

Becca laughs beside me. “We’re kidnapping you.”

“Yeah, Hanson,” Charlotte says, her eyes finding mine in the rearview mirror. “You’ve been working too damn hard all week, stuck in detention hell. It’s supposed to be the weekend.”

“Where are we going?”

Charlotte doesn’t answer. Instead she turns up the music so I can feel it in the marrow of my bones, and then she melts them, each and every one, with her songbird voice.

We’re somewhere near the university when Charlotte pulls into a parking lot. “We’re here.”

Becca shoves me out the back door, dragging her backpack behind her.

“How come Becca gets to do work while we’re here?”

“It’s a picnic,” Becca answers, thumping me in the shoulder.

We walk, Charlotte and Becca flanking me, down a well-groomed path, over a small wooden bridge, and up a low hill. When we breach the top of the hill, the beauty before me is stunning.

It’s a rose garden. One ten times the size of Mrs. Dunwitty’s and the place is alive with color. The air is sweet as we descend the hill, Charlotte leading us to the shade of a small arbor overrun with climbing red roses.

“Why did you bring me here?” I ask Charlotte.

She tilts her head to one side, her lips quirking in the same direction. “I thought you’d like it. I thought you liked roses, you know, because you’re always helping the old woman.”

A sonic boom of a laugh explodes from within me. “You don’t know me very well, do you?”

Charlotte smiles over her discouragement. “I’d like to.”

“For starters, I’m not into gardening, but I
am
happy you brought me here.” My stomach recoils in surprise at my candor. Charlotte wants to get to know me. That feels good, better than the first time I solved a problem using Euler’s number kind of good.

---

W
e spend the rest of the day at the park. Charlotte enjoyed every last bite of the cupcake Becca packed for her. She licked the frosting off the paper liner, mumbling, “Tell Jo about this and die, Hanson.” After lunch, Charlotte went off on her own to sketch the reflection of some roses in the water of a small pond.

Becca and I pack up the empty containers. We can see Charlotte from where we’re sitting. I watch the way the thin sunlight plays in the eddies of her curls as she tilts her head to study the water.

“Hey, Bec, how come you didn’t tell me about Charlotte’s cancer?”

Becca looks up from zipping her backpack and blinks. “It wasn’t my story to tell.”

“That’s it?”

“And Charlotte asked me not to say anything. She wanted you to decide to help her because you liked her, not because you felt crappy about her being sick.”

I can’t imagine weighing all my decisions on something as invasive as cancer. She may have tumors in the lining of her brain, but they metastasize throughout her life. A piece of my happiness fractures away realizing this.

“But how’d you find out?”

“It was the second week of school and Charlotte got called out of class. We were working on that group project thing, and everyone goes ‘Ooooh, what’d you doooo?’ when they called her name. Do they do that at your school?”

“No.”

“Oh, well, they do it at mine and it’s dumb. She looked so small walking out of the classroom.” Becca plays with the zipper on her bag. “I waited for her by the nice picture window outside the offices. I read. When Charlotte came out, I could tell she’d been crying, and for some reason, when she saw me waiting, she burst into more tears. Turns out, Ms. Finch had set up meetings for Charlotte with the school counselor to discuss her cancer and the future, she just neglected to tell Charlotte about them.”

Becca’s fingers are now working through her hair, tangling long locks around a finger and then letting them loose. “Charlotte told me that afternoon. It sucked, but we weren’t as close then, so it didn’t suck as much. I didn’t know then, you know?”

“Know what?”

“What it meant to have a friend—that having a friend would change me, make me a better person—make me more real. How was I to know?” She’s watching Charlotte and her eyes fill with tears.

“I don’t want to lose her,” she whispers. “I think it’d be like losing myself all over again, only I didn’t know I needed to be found before.”

I grab Becca’s hand, unwinding a piece of hair from her finger, and squeeze tightly. “I’ll always look for you, Bec.”

She nods with a sigh. “Good, because we can’t hold on to Charlotte anymore than we can touch that cloud,” she says, tipping her chin upward at a wisp of gray in the blue sky.

---

M
ore clouds begin to crowd the sky, blowing in on the breath of the wind, as the afternoon draws on. We lay on our backs in the cool grass watching them soar.

“Do you think it’s going to rain?” I ask, eyeing a cloud the color of an African elephant.

“It wouldn’t dare,” Charlotte says. She inches her fingers so they lay inside the spaces between mine, not touching, but reaching for mine. Asymptote fingers. “It’d be cruel to ruin a perfect day like this. There’s only so many in a lifetime, you know.”

A gust of wind plucks the petals off the rose bushes surrounding us, and suddenly we’re at the heart of a storm so colorful, so chaotic, it raises goose bumps on my skin. The petals fly over us, inches from our prone faces, racing to some unseen end. They are so beautiful I have to look away.

Becca laughs from Charlotte’s other side and reaches her hand in the air, but she can’t catch a single petal.

Not a single one.

She tries.

And so do I.

But Charlotte only watches them float by.

By now, there’s a herd of elephants in the sky, and when the first raindrop falls, I feel like it was inevitable. Becca shrieks and jogs to the safety of the covered arbor with her backpack. I roll my head in the grass to look at Charlotte. She’s closed her eyes and lying still, except for a small tremor in her hand closest to mine. The rain splashes on her bare arms, the bridge of her nose, her lips. It drips down her face like tears.

I don’t want her perfect day ruined. “Charlotte?”

She turns her face to mine.

“Do you want to dance?” Her eyes go wide as I stand and offer her my hand. “Like in that old movie we watched.”

Charlotte laughs and raises her arm. I pull her to her feet and hope she’ll think my palms are wet because of the rain and not because I’m so nervous. She begins to sing the movie song about dancing and singing in the rain and we move in a clumsy circle, slowly at first, but then faster. She tips her head back and the song spills out.

We make a ring, spinning and singing as the rain and rose petals crash down around us. When we stop, Charlotte’s eyes are brighter than Sirius on a clear night, outshining every star in the Milky Way.

We’re soaked, our hair stringy and pasted onto our foreheads, clothes clinging to our bodies. Logic be damned. I’ve never felt happier.

Charlotte smiles at me, squeezing my hand before letting go. “I guess a little rain never hurt anything.”

No, the rain doesn’t bother me at all.

4.8

W
e arrive back at my car still damp from the rain. Mrs. Dunwitty is watching the storm from her porch as we pull up. I wave at the girls and then trot up to the porch to check on Mrs. Dunwitty.

“Nice weather we’re having,” I say. I point to the vacant chair beside her; she
had
promised me I could sit for a while when I was done mowing. It feels like that was another lifetime ago. “May I?”

Her mouth pulls into a sour grin. “I suppose, but I already drank your tea, so don’t even think about asking for that.”

I chuckle as I plop down next to her. I’ve grown to appreciate Mrs. Dunwitty’s frankness. Thunder rolls in the distance. “Sure has been a stormy fall.”

Mrs. Dunwitty nods in time to her rocking, but doesn’t say anything. I try a new conversation starter. “Have you ever been to the rose gardens over by the university?”

Her brows perk up. “Yes, I believe I have.”

“That’s where Charlotte took us today. I had no idea there were that many kinds of roses.” I prop my feet on the railing and notice the peeling paint there.

“You kissed that girl yet?”

My feet slip off the railing. “I thought we were talking about roses, not girls.”

“Suit yourself,” Mrs. Dunwitty says, a wry smile playing at the corners of her wide mouth.

“I saw your roses there, the Harvest Moon. There’s even a little plaque with your name on it. Pretty cool.”

She waves a shaky hand at me. “Psshhaw. No one cares about that anymore.”

“I do. And Charlotte and Becca thought it was neat. Charlotte even sketched them. You left your mark, you know. You changed the world forever. Or rose gardening, at least.”

Mrs. Dunwitty works her jaw like she’s chewing something for a minute. Electric fingers light up the gray sky, reaching for the tall pines along the horizon. “My son is allergic to bees.”

A frown creases my brow, but I don’t interrupt.

“When he was young, he was jealous of my roses, saying I spent more time with them than him. And he was right. I was a botanist. It was all I’d ever wanted to be. I didn’t strive to be a mother.

“Once, when I was working in the greenhouse, he smashed all the flowers in my front garden. Got stung, too. Nearly asphyxiated before I found him.”

She reaches a frail hand out, placing it on my forearm where it lies on the rocker. “I should have chosen him more often.” Her fingers, with their papery skin like aged newspaper, squeeze my arm. “I should have learned to be a botanist
and
a mother.”

My whole body has stilled, afraid that if I move, it’ll shatter her. She seems so frail. She closes her eyes and continues to rock. I cover her hand with mine and wait for the storm to pass.