The Summer of No Regrets (13 page)

chapter
twenty-four

Outside the waves tumbled over themselves. Luke gazed into the fire, now the only light in the room. “Remember when I said I was looking for Eden?”

“Yeah.”

“This feels like Eden.”

I looked around. “The Jacuzzi fireplace suite?” He chuckled. “No, not that. I mean here with you.” A wisecrack about forbidden fruit leaped to mind. I squished it. But a wave of joy washed over me.

Luke put his feet up on the leather ottoman. “What’s your Eden, Brigitta?”

For some reason I began teling him about Cherrywood, about Nonni and Opa and the birds and the raspberries and the hot cicada-filed summers. I told him about their “spirit-filed” church services and about Nonni singing me to sleep.

“What happened to them?”

My throat tightened. “Strokes. Both of them. Opa went first.”

“That’s rough,” he said. “My grandmother, too. She had a bunch of strokes before she died. It was hard to see her like bunch of strokes before she died. It was hard to see her like that.”

“Yeah.” I stared at my lap. Aunt Julia had said Nonni wouldn’t recognize me or Dad, that it was sily for us to go see her, that the nursing home was providing everything she needed.

The memory pushed at me. I pushed back.

“Hey,” said Luke. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“No, it’s okay. It’s been over a year.”

I’d never told this story before. It was like a bruise—as long as I didn’t bump it, I was fine.

Luke tipped his head. The firelight made shadows on his face.

“You sure?”

I focused on the armchair upholstery buttons. It would be lame to talk about it—like I was looking for attention. But my mind’s eye could see the lockdown wing at the nursing home, the color-coordinated halways, the doors that clicked shut behind us. And Nonni. A different Nonni. Her eyes were all wrong. One side of her face was frozen. She’d shuffled forward with the nurse holding her arm. “Six-one-six-one-six-one,” she mumbled.

An address? A phone number?

Luke put his feet on the floor and leaned toward me, forearms on his knees. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head. “She was just so lost,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I know.”

Did he? I longed to tell it all the way through: Nonni—who I loved like my own hands—her eyes darting around the room.

Crying out, scared when Dad touched her. He’d left me then.

Gone to see the nurses and left me alone with her.

“The room had this maroon walpaper with flocked roses on it,” I began tentatively. “
I
felt marooned.” Luke nodded.

“But I knew she was in there. I knew Aunt Julia was wrong about Nonni being ‘too far gone to care.’”

Luke moved his chair closer. The memory was too fierce to stop. I told him: how I’d put the sewing scraps in Nonni’s lap, stop. I told him: how I’d put the sewing scraps in Nonni’s lap, how she’d pushed them away, crying “Ba-ba-ba-ba!” How the nurse had come then and tried to take her back to her room.

“No! Don’t take her yet!” I’d said. I hadn’t meant to raise my voice.

Nonni had slouched in her chair. “Six-one-six-one,” she had mumbled.

The nurse had nodded. “Okay. She seems less agitated.” She’d touched my arm. “It’s hard the first time you see them. I know.”

Luke listened. His eyes never left my face. It felt good to let the memory out—like lancing a wound.

“I didn’t reach for Nonni after that. I couldn’t bear to see her scared.”

Luke nodded.

“Instead I…I sang to her. The song she used to sing me.” Nonni had turned her face to me as I sang,
“The Lord is my
Shepherd, I shall not want.”
I’d gone on singing: the green pastures, the still waters. Her eyes glistened. I didn’t want to sing the next part, but she was with me now, drinking it in.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death

I
shall
fear
no
evil…”
I had to stop and take a breath. Luke reached for my hand the way I had reached for Nonni’s. I’d wound her cold fingers through mine, and she hadn’t puled away. Her eyes had carried me to the last line:
“I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.”

“Forever,” mouthed Nonni. And then, clear as a bel, she’d said, “Forever, Brigitta-Lamb. Don’t you forget.”

•••

That was as much of the story as I could tel. I roled the upholstery button back and forth in my fingers. Luke knelt in front of me, his eyes red. He had brought me to the door of the memory and then gone through it with me. How had he done that? Why had I let him?

He brushed away my tears with his thumbs and led me to the balcony. The moon was a bright, fat almond. In the cold air Luke wrapped his arms around me. I leaned back against him, and he put his chin on my shoulder. We looked out at the water. I felt safe with him. We stood without talking for a long time.

When I began to nod, he scooped me up. I rested my head on his shoulder, and he carried me inside and set me on the bed.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “I’m tucking you in.” I was too sleepy to protest. He puled the bedspread back, and I slid between the sheets. He went to the fireplace and turned off the switch. Then he climbed onto the other side of the bed but stayed on top of the bedspread. He reached over and took my hand.

I didn’t think I’d sleep, but I did. And then around one o’clock I woke up thinking of the kittens. I had banished them from my mind most of the day, but now they were back, demanding attention. How could I have left them with Malory?

Would she realy know how to take care of them?

I could feel the warmth of Luke beside me curled deep asleep with his back to me. Was he cold? I slipped out of bed and retrieved a blanket from a drawer. I brushed back his hair, and he didn’t wake up. I memorized him with my eyes: his long, dark lashes, his strong jawline. Behind his ear was a small white scar shaped like a bird’s beak. Asleep, his face looked like a little boy’s.

I thought of his lips on me, his hands under my shirt. My insides felt strange. Malory wouldn’t have thought twice about going further. Had I stopped him because I was too immature?

Mom had always said I should wait until I was eighteen, but I don’t know if she’d have been that shocked—just freaked out don’t know if she’d have been that shocked—just freaked out that I didn’t have condoms like Malory insisted.

I’d have been freaked out, too. Getting pregnant would be a definite glitch in my plans. But it wasn’t just that. In that back of my mind, I could hear Nonni’s voice. “Treasure your virginity, Brigitta. It’s a gift you can only give once.” Natalie would have thought it was corny. I didn’t know anyone but Tarah who thought like Nonni did about sex. But even so, there was a part of me that didn’t want to disappoint her.

•••

I woke to the sound of the room phone and Luke’s voice, thick with sleep. The clock said it was nearly noon. “Hulo?” His voice slumped. “Yeah, it’s me.” I watched him through half-closed eyes. He roled to a sitting position. “Yeah. Yeah. Are you sober?” He traced a bird on the bedspread with his finger. “How did you find me here? Oh. They can do that? Who else knows?

Yeah, wel, I’m sorry. Okay.” He stared at the ceiling. “Okay.

Yes, I’ll come home. Just don’t send anyone. Yes, I’ll turn my cell back on.” He stuck one leg out of bed. “Wel, it hasn’t been easy for me, either. Look, we’ll talk about this later.” He hung up and saw that I was awake. “Debit card,” he said. “I just failed lesson 101 in the Art of Disappearing. Don’t use a debit card.”

“Your mom caled the bank?”

He nodded. “At least she thinks I’m alone,” he said.

chapter
twenty-five

Luke didn’t hold my hand in the car. His face was taut as we puled out of Westport. We stopped for a light in front of a surf shop. Outside was a chainsaw carving of a surfer girl, her wooden hair flying—topless, with huge nipples. Luke hit the highway and I watched the speedometer climb. I punched my redial for the fifth time and heard, “This is Malory Schopenhauer. Your call is extremely important to me….” I shut the phone. Where was she? Would she remember to give the kittens water? What if they were afraid of her? Would they go looking for me? My stomach acid kicked into overdrive. Maybe I had ulcers.

Luke passed a green SUV, an old Dakota pickup, and a Lexus. “Is your mom mad?” I tried.

“No more than usual.” He passed an RV.

“How mad is she usualy?”

He snorted and didn’t answer.

I felt the sudden loss of him. Once more he’d gone somewhere and left me behind. Only this time he was right next to me.

I tried Malory and got the voice mail again. How could I have left the kittens? I’d lost my head. If they died it would be my fault.

Luke swerved to avoid a bale of hay in the road.

“Whoa!” I said. “Watch your speed.”

He glanced at me and slowed down. “God,” he said, “maybe I should start drinking.”

It felt like a slap. I couldn’t think of a snappy comeback.

Nonni used to tell me that a boy “lost respect for a girl if she let him press his advantage.” She meant sex, of course, though she would never use the word
sex
. Did Luke hate me now? Had I just imagined how sweet he’d been last night?

I had never told anyone about my last visit with Nonni. Not Natalie, not Devon, not Malory. Why had I told Luke?

Natalie, not Devon, not Malory. Why had I told Luke?

He scowled at the road, obviously irritated with the other drivers for slowing him down.

“Forever,” Nonni had said. I felt tears threatening. I shut them off before they could start. The word
Kwahnesum
meant forever in Chinook jargon. Dad had told us how Kwahnesum was founded in 1850 by a fur trader caled Joseph LaRonge and his Native wife, Izusa. They wanted Native people and white settlers to live together peacefuly, so they caled the town

“Kwahnesum,” hoping it would last forever. But within five years Governor Isaac Stevens had persuaded the Native tribes in Washington to sign treaties that banished them all to reservations.

Did anything last forever? I wanted to believe there was something outside myself that I could count on—some kind of spirit or higher power. And sometimes I felt something—a connection. I’d felt it during the Shabbat service and when I was bowing to the ferns. I’d felt it when Nonni used to pray with me.

It had always been there at Cherrywood.

But maybe it wasn’t anything at al—just a chemical reaction in my brain. That’s what Malory would say. It’s what Dad had always said before he went off the deep end and began painting himself and communing with animal spirits.

My last summer at Cherrywood I had pestered Nonni about this all the time. “Is there realy such a thing as God?” I’d asked her while we peeled potatoes or hung laundry out on the line or dug in the garden. “Is there realy?”

Nonni had never said yes or no. She’d simply replied, “Is there such a thing as love?”

And now I wasn’t even sure I believed in love. At least not the way Nonni meant. Maybe love is just hormones or endorphins—not some great force all around us. Maybe that’s just nonsense. It’s always seemed to me that love is about being found—the way you might find your missing cat because you knew he had a notch on his left ear and came to the sound of knew he had a notch on his left ear and came to the sound of pebbles rattling in a can. But maybe that isn’t the way things work. Maybe you can only be “found” for a little while. Just like Joseph and Isuza LaRonge discovered, “forever” isn’t realy forever. Everything ends. Everything is lost eventualy.

I stared out at the highway and the fields roling by. We came into a town caled Montesano, and Luke puled the Jeep into a mini-mart. He handed me a ten-dolar Bill. “Can you just get us something to eat in there?”

I took the ten without answering and went into the store. I got strawberry Pop-Tarts, doughnuts, two reasonable-looking bananas out of a basket, and two coffees. Not much of a meal.

But at this point, it wasn’t much of a date. Mom would choke if she saw me eating stuff like that, but oh, wel. I grabbed a bag of Cheetos at the register and added it to the stash.

I tried to give Luke his change, and he waved it off so I stuck it in the well by his gearshift. He puled around to an empty park across the street and opened the doughnuts. He offered me one, but I shook my head. “Not hungry,” I said.

He shrugged and went on eating, getting powdered sugar all over the upholstery of his fancy Jeep. I turned away.

“So,” I said to the passenger window, “did I go to bed with Jekyl and wake up with Hyde?”

I heard him sigh behind me. “Am I being that much of an asshole?”

“Yes,” I said. “You are.”

He was quiet again, and this time it didn’t feel like mad-at-Brigitta quiet. I shifted in my seat and looked at him sideways.

“Do I realy make you want to start drinking?” He gave a short laugh. “Not hardly.” He threw the garbage away and started up the car again. This time he took my hand.

“Thanks for doing this,” he said. “Coming with me, I mean.” I was so relieved I wanted to lift up his hand and kiss it.

Instead I put my other hand on top of it. “Are you going to tell me anything?” I said. “So far you’re one big secret.” me anything?” I said. “So far you’re one big secret.” And then he was back inside himself again. He took his hand away and puled out onto the highway, not talking.

He made a left turn, and his eyes darted over to me and then back to the road. What did I have to do to lure him out and keep him there? Every time I got brave, I said the wrong thing.

But I was a secret, too—I had worked my hiddenness into an art form for almost everybody. The more time that went on, the more secrets I kept.

Luke punched a button on his stereo and searched for a track.

Metalica. “The Unforgiven.” He turned it up loud.

•••

Luke’s mother was standing in the driveway with her arms folded when we puled in. She was barefoot and had on black slacks and a white blouse, untucked. Her arms were thin, and her eyes had deep wels underneath, accentuated by her dark hair.

“Crap,” said Luke. “I should have dropped you off at your place.”

His mother’s eyebrows went up a little when she saw me get out of the car.

“Mum, this is Brigitta. She lives next door.” She shook my hand without a word. He didn’t tell me her name.

My jeans and shirt were still in the back of the Jeep, but Luke didn’t make a move to open it. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, suddenly younger. “I’ll, um, see you around, Brigitta,” he said. He didn’t even look at me.