Zen and Xander Undone (12 page)

“Mom is having someone send Xander and me letters for certain occasions. We've each gotten them, one right after she died, a video at Christmas, and a second letter on Mother's Day.”

“That sounds like my Marie.” There's such longing in her voice, I have to look away. We're both quiet, in our own thoughts, but then I hear her sniff. “No, hon, I'm sorry it isn't me. I expect she thought I'd be too disorganized to do it properly.”

I look around the jumbled room, which I've always loved because it feels so homey, and I realize that Doris is probably the last person Mom would put in charge of her letters. She would probably lose them in one of her many piles.

Doris cocks her head. “Why would you want to find this person anyway? Why not just let the letters come?”

“Xander's the one who wants to know.” I stop. I feel like I'd be betraying my mother by asking what we really came for. But I need to find out the truth about John Phillips. If I don't, I'll feel like I never really knew Mom, and that is too painful to live with. “We found out some stuff, and we're—confused.”

Doris's bangles rattle as she crosses her arms. “What stuff?”

“Mom seemed to have some kind of friendship with a man named John Phillips.”

She shakes her head. “No, I don't think so, honey. I've never heard that name. And your mother always told me everything.”

I study her face. There isn't anything about her round eyes or her full cheeks that suggests she might be lying. She doesn't even seem concerned.

“She left him one of her bird statues. The lovebirds.”

Doris's eyes freeze on me. “Now, that's odd. I thought she wanted you girls to have all of them.”

It's on the tip of my tongue to tell her the final details, that the statue was worth six thousand dollars, and that he couldn't have given it to her until well after Xander and I were born, but I stop myself. Why should Aunt Doris feel as troubled as I've been feeling?

I can see, though, that she's already troubled.

“That's
very
odd,” Doris says again. “I can't imagine why she'd give it away. She loved that statue.”

We're both silent, mirroring each other's worried faces.

“Your mother always told me everything,” Doris says again, leaning back, thinking. “But there was one period in her life when she seemed to pull away from me, when she was in graduate school with your father. I wouldn't hear from her for weeks, and when I'd ask her how she was, she'd say she was fine in a very distant way, and she'd only talk about her classes.” Doris's face darkens, and she says, her voice throaty, “If she was hiding a man from me, that would have been when she did it.”

“Why would she hide a man?” I ask, because I desperately want Doris to come up with an explanation other than the one I'm imagining. That not only was Mom cheating on Dad, but it started way back in graduate school. Mom might have cheated on us for years and years. I try to dismiss the thought, but I can't. Everything we find out just makes it worse and worse.

Doris shakes her head. “The only reason she ever hid anything from me was because she was ashamed.”

X
ANDER STILL HASN'T COME BACK,
so Doris and I do the dishes alone, which takes a long time because she doesn't have a dishwasher. I kind of like doing dishes the old-fashioned way because the warm water feels good on my hands.

“Hand me that blue dish.” Doris nods toward the table behind her.

I give her the one with the lilacs painted on the rim.

“No, the other one,” she tells me, and points toward the dish that held the honey cakes. It's painted with blue cornflowers.

Doris likes to wash her dishes in a particular order because she displays them in her china cabinet in a certain way. She is sloppy about everything except her dishes, probably because she's spent such a long time collecting them. They're all different because she buys them one at a time at garage sales. They're each hand-painted with a beautiful pattern, and she chooses them carefully. There's something very comforting about eating on an antique plate. It reminds me of how many people there really are, and how many there have been, and how many of them must have eaten their dinner from this same plate. Each plate is like looking at a different side of forever.

Xander likes Doris's plates as much as I do, but she always eats from the same one. It's a green and white plate, and on it is a painted picture of ducks flying, and a hunter with his dog, watching them. She likes it because the hunter isn't shooting at the ducks. He's letting them fly away, holding his gun down at his side.

“Well, honey,” Doris says, stretching to put away the last plate in her cupboard before closing the door. “Blue is hanging his head, and that always makes me sleepy.” I look over at Blue, who is panting in the corner, his eyelids sagging over eyes that are glued to Aunt Doris. “Stay up as long as you want.”

She brushes her hand over my hair and smiles into my eyes.

Even if I can't ever see Mom again, at least I have Aunt Doris, who loves me almost as much as Mom did.

I don't feel sleepy yet, so I'm looking over Doris's bookshelves for some bedtime reading when I hear the screen door creak open. Xander is standing in the doorway, a devilish smile on her lips. In her hand she's holding a pipe of some kind. “Ever dabbled in wacky tobacky?”

I stare at her, confused. She cocks her head, and I follow her out onto the porch.

“What is that?” I ask her.

“Oh don't tell me you're surprised to know Doris smokes weed! Hell, she probably grows her own!”

I can't help the shock on my face.

“Come on, Zen!” Xander whispers. “The woman wears a
mood ring
for god's sake! Of course she tokes!”

“Where did you find it?”

“Upstairs. She had the pipe in plain view on her dresser!”

“But, you've been outside the whole time!”

“I climbed up the trellis and snuck in through her bedroom window while you were doing the dishes. Blue sucks as a watchdog.”

She walks across the lawn and opens the car door, beckoning me to get in. She pulls a lighter out of her hip pocket and holds it over the pipe. The fuzzy stuff in the center starts to glow red, and Xander inhales deeply. Through a closed throat she says, “Do it like that.”

I look at the pipe a second before taking it from her. It feels warm and heavy in my hand. I pause to wonder whether I really want to do this. “What if I get addicted?”

“It's weed! Not crack,” Xander wheedles. “Beer will mess you up worse.”

I have to admit to a certain curiosity, so I raise the pipe to my lips and draw in deeply.

I feel like I just inhaled burning-hot nerve gas. All the blood rushes to my eyes and I cough and cough until I feel like I'm going to have a stroke. Xander taps my back, saying, “It's harsh the first time, but you get used to it.”

“I'll never get used to that!” I say when I can finally speak.

Xander roots through the grocery bag on the seat between us and pulls out a bottle of water. “Drink.”

The cold is wonderful against my throat, which feels like I swallowed a mouthful of sparks. I drink until my lungs feel almost normal, and then I lean back and close my eyes. “That was awful.”

“Next time it's brownies for you.” Xander smiles and takes another hit. She doesn't even cough, and I wonder how often she does this.

“You know, that's not good for your brain.”

“I have IQ points to spare.” She looks around Doris's yard, still smiling to herself. “You know, I really love this place. Do you think Doris will leave it to us?” She wiggles her eyebrows devilishly.

“Mercenary,” I say. I notice a muffled feeling creep over my brain. I blink my eyes, and it seems like suddenly I can see very clearly, even in the dark. “I don't want Doris to die,” I say from far away, and add for good measure, “I think I'm high.”

“That's no lie,” she says.

I chuckle. “I feel like I could fly.”

“Don't even try.”

“There's a sty in your eye.”

“Your vagina is dry.”

“You think you're so sly . . . but you're not,” I sputter, and burst into hysterical laughter. A tiny part of my brain questions why I think this is so hilarious.

Xander is snorting and holding her stomach. She has the ugliest, most obscene laugh of anyone I know. But I love it.

We sit there giggling until we run out of breath, and we trade swigs of water until it's all gone, then Xander tears into a bag of Doritos. “You know, you're more fun without those numchucks you keep up your ass.”

“It's a throwing star, if you
must
know.”

She spits out corn chips, she laughs so hard.

We finish all the Doritos and the other package of Ding Dongs, then go back into the house and sink into Doris's furniture like a couple of boneless worms.

“That's good weed,” Xander says. “Doris is connected!”

“She's totally going to find out,” I say, and this becomes the most horrible thought I've ever had. “Oh my god, she'll never forgive us! We have to put the pipe back right away!” I look out the window, searching for the police who must be creeping up to the house.

“Calm down, you're paranoid. It'll be fine.” Xander leans back in the big fluffy chair, staring up at the tin ceiling, which is covered with chipped white paint. Her breathing seems to even out, and I think she's falling asleep, but then she murmurs, “I wonder what Adam is doing right now.”

This gets my attention, and suddenly I'm awake, though I hadn't noticed I was falling asleep. “Adam? Why do you bring him up?”

She pinches the bridge of her nose and screws her eyes shut. “I don't know. I'm high.”

I roll my head against the back of my chair and look at her. She seems so small, lying there like that. For once she's not darting around, just out of my reach, challenging me, egging me on. She's still, letting her mind wander where it will. Interesting that it should go to Adam.

“You love him, don't you?” I say. There's a little hint of despair in my voice, but I find now that I've said it out loud, it's not such a painful truth to face up to.

Xander pretends to misunderstand. “Of course. He's our oldest friend.” Her voice is too light, too casual.

“You know what I mean. You do, don't you?”

She sniffs. Her eyes travel over the chipped paint on the ceiling, and then drop to the crack in the plaster wall. “It doesn't matter anyway,” she says.

I've never heard her sound so thick, so weighted down.

“Why doesn't it matter?”

“Because. After this summer, that's it. We're leaving. And it'll never be the same again.” She says this like it's something she accepted a long time ago.

But I hate it. I hate what she's saying.

I watch a moth fluttering in the corner of the room, in the circle of light cast up by the lamp on the side table. What does the moth want, beating against the walls like that? Is it trying to get out?

Or is beating itself the whole point?

“I miss Mom.” The words seem to come out of the air, and I'm not sure who said them, me or Xander.

I look at her. Her eyes are closed, but her face is drawn in grief. Maybe she said it.

“I do too,” I tell her, every strand of my voice aching for Mom. I wish so much there was some bridge I could walk across, like the railroad bridge, and I could get to the other side of wherever she is so that I could see her again.

If I ever had a really bad day, Mom and I would walk downtown and share a hot fudge sundae with nuts and whipped cream, and we'd talk about it. Being in the ice cream parlor, surrounded by the red and white striped wallpaper, and the chrome chairs, listening to the oldies station that they played there, I always cheered up. After she died, I was so sad that I went to get a sundae and I ate it all alone. It made me feel twice as miserable as I did before, and I haven't gone back there since.

Xander jerks awake all of a sudden. “What did Doris say?” Her voice sounds different, like she's back to the old Xander.

It takes me a second to switch gears, but I catch up. “She doesn't know John Phillips, but she thinks if Mom ever dated him it would have been during graduate school.”

“But Mom and Dad always said that's when
they
were dating.” She rubs her thumbs into her eyes and yawns. “I suppose Doris isn't the one sending the letters?”

“Right. How did you know?”

“I figured. When I found the pot I realized Doris would be a terrible person to send them. She's too flaky.”

This makes me worry. “She's not a burnout, is she?”

“God, Zen, she's the most vibrant person we know!”

This is true, but I do wonder if Doris didn't smoke pot, would her paintings be hanging in New York galleries instead of Vermont coffeehouses?

Does that really matter?

I think about this until I fall asleep on the sofa, imagining portraits of my mother covering tall white walls.

“I
'M VERY DISAPPOINTED.
”

“I know. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have smoked the pot.”

“Now you're going to be a stoner burnout with tooth decay and dreadlocks.”

“Would you feel better if I told you I didn't like it that much?”

“You didn't?”

“No. I couldn't concentrate on anything, and I didn't like the way my mind wandered. It made me anxious.”

“Well, that's good. It's not as harmless as the potheads would have you believe. I think it's why Doris never got married. Scared off all the right guys, and she was always so high, she let all the wrong ones stick around too long.”

“She seems to like being single.”