Zen and Xander Undone (11 page)

“I don't want to drive with you,” Margot says to her. “You're drunk.”

“I'm not!” Xander says. She doesn't even look at me. She only ignores me like this when she's insane with fury.

Adam comes out, tucking his wallet into his back pocket. “I paid your enormous tab,” he tells Xander angrily. “Get in my car.”

“Go to hell,” Xander says, and takes off toward the hatchback.

Adam marches up to her and grabs her elbow. She jerks away from him. “Who appointed you my daddy?”

He doesn't say anything, just grimly clamps his arms around her and lifts her toward his mom's car. She kicks at his legs, catching his shin. He yells and lets go of her before falling down. She takes off at a run, laughing wildly.

“Oh, man, she's really lost it now,” Margot says.

“You're just catching on to that fact?” I spit at her.

“Hey, don't yell at me! She's not my responsibility!”

“No, just your best friend!”

I turn to see that Adam is holding Xander around the waist. She's bent away from him, laughing her ass off. “Let go of me!” she keeps trying to say, but she can't form the words without laughing right through them.

Adam leans his head on her back and yells, “No!” He's laughing too now. “Come on!” he wheezes. “Get in my car!”

Xander relaxes. “Okay, fine. You're right. I'll get in your car, just let me stand up.”

Adam doesn't want to let her go at first, but slowly he releases his grip on her waist. As soon as his guard lets down, she bursts out of his hold and sprints for her car, yelling, “I won! You're a loser, Adam Little!” She pulls on the handle of the car door, but it doesn't open. She feels around her pockets for the keys, and looks at Adam, sheepish. “Oh shit.”

Just then the door opens and the bartender appears. She gives Xander a mean-eyed look before throwing her denim purse at her. “Don't come back,” she says, and slams the door for emphasis.

Xander looks at Adam, who puts his hands on his hips, tapping his toe.

Head down, she walks over to her purse, picks it up, dusts it off, and gets in the back seat behind me. Before Adam can get in, I feel a sharp pinch on my shoulder.

“Ow!” I squeal. I forget my back and twist around to try to hit her, but the searing pain stops me and I have to sit very still and try to catch my breath.

“Oh, that was an accident, I'm so sorry!” Xander says as she pinches me even harder.

Adam gets in. “Everyone put on their seat belts.”

“Or Adam here won't win Fuddy Duddy of the Year,” Xander clucks.

The drive is quiet for a few blocks. Too quiet.

“Ow!” Margot suddenly yells, and I turn to see her rubbing her shoulder. “What's
that
for?!”

“That's for telling her where we'd be tonight!” Xander yells.

The rest of the way home, Xander pinches us all at random until Adam finally tells her he'll drop her off in the middle of nowhere if she doesn't quit it.

She stops pinching him and Margot.

I am not so lucky.

I
'M LEANED BACK
in the car seat, trying to find a position that won't hurt. Through the window I watch the treetops zoom by. There's only one little white cloud in the whole sky, and I wonder about it. Where did that cloud come from? Why is it all alone?

Xander and I are on our way to see Aunt Doris in Brattleboro, Vermont, which is about three hours away from us. She talked Dad into it, saying the trip could be her graduation present. He let us go, even though we just saw Doris at Xander's immensely long, immensely boring graduation. It was one long line after another. A line waiting to get into the gymnasium. Then a line to get out. A line to pick up Xander's diploma. A line to get our picture taken by the professional photographer. It was like Disneyland without the plushies.

I'm just glad the school year is over with.

The drive is pretty, through long rolling hills and lots of beautiful green pastures with black and white cows in them. Above us I see a formation of geese returning for the summer. They fly right through the little white cloud. They don't even seem to notice it.

We get to the section of the highway that's almost totally covered with leafy trees, and I roll down the window to let the green smell in.

“Close it,” Xander snaps.

“No.”

“It's whipping my hair in my face.”

“So?”

“You still owe me for telling Adam about my bar. So I think you can close the damn window.”

“You're mistaken. I owe you nothing. And it's not your bar.”

“It was. Now I have no ID and no place to go!”

“Poor little hussy.”

“Frigid little virgin.”

“Adam and I were just looking out for you. Someone has to.”

“Adam and you can make out with each other in a minefield for all I care.”

I study her profile. I know she can feel me looking at her, but she's too stubborn to give me even a fleeting glance.

“You know, Adam wouldn't act like your jailor if you didn't act like such a delinquent.”

“I'm not acting.”

I root through the bag of junk food that I bought during our last stop for gas. I unwrap a package of Ding Dongs and hand one to Xander to stuff in her mouth.

“So you should be the one to bring it up with Doris,” Xander says through a mouthful of mushed-up cake as she blithely passes a semi.

“Bring what up?” I say just to irritate her.

“John Phillips!” she yells, spitting chocolate through her gross teeth.

Aunt Doris isn't very vulnerable to Xander's tactics. She responds better to straightforward earnestness, which is my forte. “Leave me alone with her tonight.”

“Gotcha.”

I wish Xander and I had never stolen Mom's file from Mr. Blackstone, and I wish we had never heard of John Phillips. Now that we know about him, I can't sleep, I have no appetite, and I hardly want to talk to Mom in my mind anymore. I need to know, but not for the same reasons as Xander. I want Mom to be exonerated so I can go back to thinking of her as a devoted wife and mother who would never do anything to hurt her family.

Xander takes the exit off the highway to Brattleboro, which is a little mountain town tucked between green mounds of trees. You can't see very far in Brattleboro because there are too many leaves in the way. In the winter, when the trees are bare, Brattleboro transforms into a completely different town, and you can see for miles, all the way to the hills that surround the little valley. But now the valley is so close, it feels like we're in a big green room.

We hang a left onto Stump Road and follow it up between the trees. We pass by the neighbor's place, where we see a new foal with its mother, both of them brown and shining in the sun. Their glossy coats remind me of the yearbook photographer's shiny hair. What was his name? Paul. He was supposed to take my picture this weekend, but he never called.

Aunt Doris is sitting on her porch waiting for us with Blue, her slobbery yellow Lab. She lives in our grandparents' old farmhouse. She moved in with Grandma after Grandpa died in his sleep eight years ago. Doris took care of Grandma until she died of missing him, two years later. Then Aunt Doris just stayed in the house, and I can't imagine her anywhere else.

Xander honks when we pull into the gravel parking lot, and Doris bolts down the stairs and makes a run for our car. Aunt Doris is a little on the chubby side, but she can move like the wind. Blue follows, loping over, barking deep from his chest.

“How're my girls!” She jumps up and down while she waits for Xander and me to get out. I stand up carefully. After three hours in the car, my back is stiff.

Doris seems confused about which of us to hug first, so she holds her arms out to us both and hugs us at the same time. “It's wonderful to see such fresh faces!” she cries.

Even though she is ten years older than my mother was, Aunt Doris looks younger than she is, probably because she grows her own vegetables and she doesn't eat meat or cheese. She was a teenager in the seventies when people were still hippies. She looks like a hippie, with her long gray hair and brown skin, and her turquoise jewelry and flowing skirts and cotton tunics. She has about twenty sterling silver rings that she wears all at once on her fingers and toes, and you can hear her wherever she goes because her dozens of silver bangles rattle as she walks.

I kneel down to pet Blue, who slobbers all over my arms, while Doris interrogates Xander. “So! Is it MIT or Caltech?”

“I don't know,” Xander says. Her eyes dart over Doris nervously. Everyone is asking her this question these days, and she doesn't like it. I don't know why she's taking so long to decide.

“Don't you have to commit to them sometime soon?” Doris tosses a hunk of hair out of her face.

“I have to give them my final decision on Monday,” Xander says. Her thin hand covers her stomach.

Doris wraps an arm around Xander and holds a hand out to me until I take it. “Want to see what I've been working on lately?” She pulls us into her warm living room.

Inside, all the windows are open because Aunt Doris doesn't believe in air conditioning, but it's all right because even though it's a hot day, it somehow feels comfortable. We follow her through the living room of furniture slipcovered in light blue denim. Lining the walls are shelves full of hundreds of books and magazines stacked every which way. Her dining table is littered with scraps of fabric, a beading kit, small piles of the doll clothes she sews, and for reasons I do not want to contemplate, three mousetraps.

We walk through the kitchen to the back sunroom, which is Doris's studio. There are dozens of paintings leaning against the walls and stacked on the floor, and we have to weave through them to get to the canvases Doris wants us to see.

Xander gasps.

Aunt Doris has done a portrait series of Mom, at all ages, all based on family photographs that I recognize. The portrait of Mom as a little girl is based on a picture we have of her holding a sand bucket on the beach in Nantucket, but instead Aunt Doris has placed her on the surface of the moon, waving and laughing as the rising Earth glows blue over her shoulder. In another one she's a teenager suspended on a bed of clouds tinged pink by the dusk. In the third she's a young college student wearing amber beads and sitting on the rings of Saturn. In the fourth, she is a bride gliding over the surface of a comet. In the last one, she is sitting in her favorite wicker chair on the porch of our house, on Earth. In this portrait she already looks a little sick, but still beautiful, and serene.

“I'm calling the series Marie, Forever,” Aunt Doris whispers.

I feel tears hitting my chest before I realize I'm crying. I look at Xander, whose face is motionless, though I can tell there's an ocean of feeling churning inside of her. Doris's eyes are red and moist, and she says, “Maybe I should have warned you. I didn't know how to show you.”

“I love them,” I tell her. “Please don't sell them.”

“Oh, no. I never will,” she says, studying the last one. “These are how I've been grieving.”

Xander looks at her, surprised, as if she never thought there could be a
way
to grieve. I guess we all have our ways, though. Dad has pulled himself out of the world and spends most of his time in the basement in his new bedroom because he can't bear to be in the bedroom that he shared with Mom for so many years. Xander has turned into a wildcat. I sit in Mom's old room, in the chair she sat in to watch the birds outside her window, and drink too much mint tea while talking to her in my head.

Aunt Doris's way seems like the best.

We spend the afternoon walking the property line along the crumbling fence that Grandpa put up when he first bought the place. Blue runs back and forth, stopping only to slobber on our hands before bounding off after a squirrel. I should take life-loving lessons from him.

We stop at the neighbor's fence to beckon the little brown foal, who stands in the middle of her green field, blinking her enormous eyes at us. Her mother saunters over, head down, and takes the carrot offered by Doris. Once the foal sees that, she trots up to us and takes a piece of apple in her big floppy lips. Doris smiles. “Apples are better for the babies. Softer.” She threads her fingers through the foal's mane, seeming to be living inside that silky feeling. I reach my hand out to feel for myself, but the foal backs off and trots away. “She's still shy,” Doris says. “It took two weeks before she'd let me touch her.”

“Poor thing,” Xander says, mournful.

Doris looks at Xander quizzically, which is probably how I'm looking at her too. I don't know why she feels sorry for the little foal, who seems perfectly happy not to be touched.

When evening falls we go back to the house and eat what Aunt Doris calls a ploughman's supper of crusty bread, hummus, bean salad, fresh greens, sliced tomatoes, and honey cakes for dessert. It's delicious. I don't even miss meat when I'm staying with Doris.

Once we're all three of us stuffed and leaning back in our chairs, Xander raises her eyebrows at me and gets up from the table. “I think Venus is rising this time of year. I'm going to go check.” She wanders out the front door and onto the porch, stretching herself toward the night.

Doris levels her steady gaze on me. “How are you, Athena?”

“Not so great, I guess.” I know better than to pretend with Doris.

“What's going on? I know this isn't just a social visit. I can sense it.” She squints through the front windows at Xander, who seems to feel her gaze and slowly walks off the porch and into the dark front yard.

“Are you the one?” I ask her, and wait until her eyes land on me. “Who's sending the letters?”

“What letters?” she leans forward, instantly intrigued. I can tell already, she doesn't even know about them.