“I started after my date with Ben. It was traumatic. I’ll quit tomorrow.”
“You should quit today,” Maravelle says. “I liked Ben.”
“You barely knew Ben! He was always working or in school. We led separate lives.”
“You made it that way,” Maravelle says. “You never included him.”
“The world is mine to ruin.” Shelby mixes rum into her iced tea and takes a sip. She licks her lips. She gulps more rum and tea. “Surprisingly refreshing.”
“Ben would have done anything for you.”
“I thought that meant he was an idiot.”
“No,” Maravelle says. “It means you’re an idiot.”
They have dinner on the back porch. Maravelle has been distant lately. She dodges conversation, saying only that there’s trouble with the kids.
“Is that creep Marcus back?” Shelby asks.
Maravelle shakes her head. “It’s not that. But I’m always keeping watch over them. I used to feel bad for you that you didn’t have kids, now I think maybe you’re lucky. You don’t have anyone to worry about.”
“I worry,” Shelby says. “I’m a major worrier.”
“Trust me. It would be worse if you had kids. They start off breakable. They fall off things, they get lost, they get fevers. Then they get older and things get worse. Their hearts get broken, they have terrible friends, they start to lie to you.”
It’s Jasmine’s night to cook, and she’s made orange-flavored beef in Shelby’s honor. Jaz’s summer job is working as a hostess in a Chinese restaurant, and she spends all her free time in the kitchen learning as much as she can. Mrs. Diaz comes out with some rice, stopping to greet Shelby. “I heard you went out with your old boyfriend, but he walked out on you,” she says.
“Well, yes.” Shelby gives Maravelle a look. “Was that reported in the New York Post?”
Jasmine laughs as she brings out dishes and silverware. “It was reported in the Valley Stream Echo,” Jasmine says. “Otherwise known as my mother.”
“Well, that ex-boyfriend of yours doesn’t know what he’s missing,” Mrs. Diaz says in support of Shelby, but Shelby is fairly certain Ben knows exactly what he’s missing and that’s why he walked out of their date.
Dorian arrives home from swim practice, smelling of chlorine; he’s so tall and handsome Shelby feels her throat tighten. Do people really grow up this fast? He leans down to hug her.
That’s when Shelby realizes what’s missing. Until recently, the brothers were always together. “Where’s Teddy?” she asks.
Everyone else exchanges a look. This is why Maravelle has been so upset. It’s something to do with Teddy. Dorian fills his plate and starts in on his dinner. Maravelle does the same. No one answers Shelby.
“I haven’t seen him the last three times I’ve been here. Is he in a witness protection plan?”
It’s a joke, but no one laughs. “Look at that Pablo,” Maravelle says in an attempt to hijack the conversation. The big dog is still sprawled out in the tiny wading pool. “He knows how to cool off.”
“Am I not supposed to mention Teddy?” Shelby asks.
“Well, I don’t want to talk about him,” Jasmine says.
Dorian glares at her. “Maybe you should blame yourself for bringing Marcus around.”
“It’s not my fault! I didn’t tell him to take Mami’s money or steal from us.”
“Jasmine,” Maravelle warns.
“Am I supposed to pretend I don’t hear this?” Shelby asks. “What am I? The cleaning lady? Because if I am, I forgot my broom.”
“What’s wrong with you people?” Dorian gets up from the table and heads for the house, most of his food untouched. “You all just turn your back on him and pretend nothing is happening.”
“Are you sure you want to know?” Maravelle asks Shelby.
Shelby nods, so after dinner she and Maravelle take the dogs for a walk. “There’s nothing so terrible you can’t tell me,” Shelby says. “You know that.”
“He’s in with a bad crowd. I didn’t see what was happening for a long time.”
“How bad?”
The neighborhood is quiet. It’s the place Maravelle moved to in order to get her kids away from bad influences. “He’s doing drugs.”
“I did drugs and I turned out fine,” Shelby reminds her friend.
“Compared to what?”
They both laugh, but only a little.
“It’s more than just using,” Maravelle says. “My mom found a shoe box under his bed full of the stuff. He’s been taking money from my purse and stealing from Jasmine’s savings. Most of my jewelry is gone.”
Shelby used to steal from her mother’s purse when she came back from the psych ward. She’d paw through the medicine cabinet for whatever prescription looked like it could put her out of her misery. She was a good girl on the day of the accident, and then she turned bad. But she always loved her mother, even when she stole from her. She loved her like crazy.
Maravelle gives her a ride back to the city, and all the way home Shelby feels the sting of her remorse. She wishes she’d been a better daughter and hadn’t caused her mother so much worry. It’s her biggest regret, but she was so lost she couldn’t think of anyone else back then. Now she’s gotten into the habit of calling her mom on Sunday nights, and even though it’s late she phones.
“Hey, Shelby,” her mom says when she picks up. “You should be here.” Sue sounds a bit drunk. “I’m out in the backyard on the picnic table. There are so many stars. You used to think you could count them all when you were a little girl.”
“Is Dad with you?” Shelby hasn’t talked to him since her mother revealed he hasn’t always been faithful. She’s afraid of what she might say. How can you hurt the one woman in the world who waits up for you at night till you’re safely home? Who puts up with your moods and your disappointments in life? Who remembers you when you were young and handsome and had faith in the world?
“He’s watching television. It’s that show you hate. The singing contest.”
“That piece of crap?” Shelby says dismissively, but she goes to switch on the TV and watches without the sound. She almost never misses it. She thinks of her mother outside alone, staring at the swirling heavens, living with a ghost who doesn’t even come home for dinner anymore. “Is Dad treating you right?”
“Not as good as Ben treated you,” her mom says.
“Suddenly everyone loves Ben Mink.”
“It’s not sudden, honey,” Sue says. “We always liked him.”
Shelby doesn’t answer because the truth is, it was sudden for her.
Sue says she’s growing dahlias. She gave them up because you have to unearth the tubers in the fall and keep them in buckets of dirt to winter over because they can’t take the cold. But now Sue has time for her garden and for those big, beautiful flowers that remind her of Shelby’s face when she was a child. Upturned and glorious. “When you were little you’d help me dig them up,” she reminds Shelby. “You thought the tubers looked like giant worms.”
“Was I ever a little girl?” Shelby says wistfully.
“Oh, yes,” Sue says. “I have the photos to prove it.”
Later in the week Shelby gets an envelope addressed in her mother’s neat librarian’s script. There’s a postcard inside. Her angel hasn’t forgotten her after all.
Believe something.
The illustration is of a tree with a hundred black leaves. The veins of each leaf make up a spidery word: sky, cloud, rose, kiss.
There’s something else inside the envelope, an old photo that Shelby’s mom stuck in, the color faded, the edges upturned. It takes a moment before Shelby realizes she is the little girl in the picture. Her mother’s handwriting is on the back. Shelby at five. She’s wearing a sun hat and there’s a huge smile on her face. She is surro
unded by stalks of dahlias, orange and yellow and pale red, with leaves so big you could write your life story on each one. She looks like a flower in the garden, just like her mother said.
When the phone rings at five a.m., Shelby is dreaming that she’s following Helene through a field. There are white and black butterflies rising from the tall grass. There are flowers the size of pie plates. Shelby is her current age, but Helene hasn’t aged. She’s seventeen and beautiful, and she runs so fast her feet don’t touch the ground. When Shelby pulls herself out of her dream to grasp the phone, Maravelle is on the other end of the line. Teddy’s been arrested. Shelby is awake in an instant, pulling on her clothes before Maravelle is through telling her the story. She still smells the grass in the field. She feels the sunlight on her skin, though it’s a gray, rainy dawn.
“Do you have an attorney?” Shelby asks Maravelle. “And not that old real estate lawyer you dated. Maybe we can get Teddy out tonight. They can’t just lock someone up without probable cause.”
“There’s cause. His whole crew has been arrested for home invasion. It was supposed to be a robbery but the couple was in bed, so they were tied up and terrorized. I think the old man had a stroke. Maybe he’s dead.”
Shelby sits on the edge of the bed, floored by this news. “Jesus, Mimi.”
“That damn Marcus was involved. Teddy swears he was just along for the ride and had nothing to do with the home invasion. He wasn’t identified in the lineup by the victim’s wife. But he was in the car when the police pulled them over.”
“I’m sure he had nothing to do with it,” Shelby is quick to say.
“Don’t defend him! That’s what I’ve been doing and look where it got us! The robbery happened because they’re all on drugs, Teddy included. I don’t want him getting out unless he’s going to rehab. He’d just go back to the same crowd.” Shelby can hear that Maravelle is crying.
“It will get better,” Shelby tells her. “Look at me. I was in a mental hospital drugged out of my mind. I sat in the basement for two years and did absolutely nothing but get high.”
“Tell me he’ll be fine, like you are.”
“He will be.”
That’s what Shelby says, but you can never be too sure. All week she researches possible placements to present to the court. She finds a therapeutic high school near Albany with a great reputation for turning kids around. Teddy’s attorney likes the looks of it, but the assignment has to be approved by the judge at Teddy’s hearing. That means the judge has to see something in Teddy, a soul worth saving; otherwise Teddy will stay in the detention center where he’s currently being held. There’s a three-week wait for a court date due to a jammed docket, so Teddy stays where he is, with every other underage offender in Nassau County. Nothing good can come of this. It’s a step deeper into a criminal life. He tells his mother not to come visit him. He doesn’t want anyone to see him caged up and humiliated.
On the day of the hearing Shelby waits in the hallway of the courthouse in Mineola with Jasmine and Dorian. Teddy’s attorney says it’s best to have only Maravelle and Mrs. Diaz sit in at the hearing. All the same, Shelby and Jasmine and Dorian are dressed for a serious occasion, wearing clothes they wouldn’t be caught dead in anywhere else. Shelby has on a black skirt and a white buttoned-up shirt she found at a thrift store on Twenty-Third Street. Jasmine’s borrowed one of her mom’s sweater sets, a pale, dignified gray, and a pleated navy-blue skirt. With her hair in braids, she looks like the serious schoolgirl she’s become. Dorian, the most somber among them, is wearing a suit and tie. Dorian looks so concerned that every time Shelby glances at him her heart breaks. She’s brought along the brochure for the school Teddy will be attending if the judge okays it so Dorian can see that it looks more like a college than a jail. A plain community college with brick dormitories, nothing fancy, but nothing horrendous. It’s not what anyone would have wished for Teddy, but it’s the road he’s taken, and it’s the road back.
“I was much worse than he is,” Shelby tells Jasmine and herself as they sit on the bench. A woman turns to glare at her. Everything you say in the courthouse echoes, even a whisper. “Well I was!” Shelby says.
“Plus you were bald,” Jasmine says.
They both laugh, but it’s nervous laughter. It could break in a moment. Dorian pays no attention. He stares down the hall, focused on his brother’s fate. Behind the closed doors of the courtroom, Maravelle and Mrs. Diaz sit in the row behind Teddy and his lawyer. They too are wearing black, as though attending a funeral. In a sense they are. Teddy was always the star, the boy who could have done anything, more confident than his twin, a success at everything he tried. It was always going to be Teddy who was going to attend an Ivy League college and win every award. Maybe things came easily for him, but at some point he just quit. Dorian has admitted he’s been doing homework for the both of them for the last couple of months.
But Teddy’s fate is unknown, and no one can foretell the future. Shelby has borrowed another thousand dollars from her mom to help pay for the lawyer, Isaac Worth, who looks a little like Teddy, only grown up and set right. If the attorney manages to cut a deal, Teddy will be taken directly to the school upstate, where he will remain a student until graduation or upon the occasion of his eighteenth birthday, whichever comes first. It’s the best they can hope for—no jail time, no record, and a chance to get him away from the crowd he’s mixed up with. When the judge agrees to the placement, they can hear Mrs. Diaz offering thanks to God all the way down the hall.
The court allows Teddy to say good-bye to his family, but he’s accompanied by a guard and his lawyer is present. The meeting takes place right there in the hallway. No privacy and not much time. Shelby hardly recognizes Teddy as he approaches. A month in detention and he seems like a stranger: his slouched posture, the regulation T-shirt and khakis, and, more disturbing, the fact that his head has been shaved. Shelby can tell Jasmine is equally shocked to see Teddy is nearly bald. It’s a way to make him look like everyone else, to take away his pride. He’s always cared deeply about his appearance, making sure his hair was perfect before he went out. Still, when he raises his eyes and smiles, it’s the same Teddy, the one all the girls fell for because he knew exactly how handsome he was.
“I look like shit,” he says. “Right?”
Dorian goes to his brother and throws his arms around him. Everything seems fine, until Dorian starts to sob. The sound echoes like a shot. People turn to stare. The guard studies the floor.
“Hey,” Teddy says with a nervous laugh, shoving his brother away. “What’s wrong with you? I just look like crap. It’s not the end of the world.”
Dorian backs off, wiping at his eyes. “This is bad,” he says. “This wasn’t supposed to happen to you.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Teddy says. “You can take my place.” He laughs. “No one would ever know.”
Dorian stares at his brother. “Is that what you want me to do?” Would he or wouldn’t he? Shelby thinks he would. He would walk into the line of fire, take his brother’s place, ruin his own future. That is why she loves him, of course. He’s loyal beyond measure.
“Of course not, stupid. I’m playing with you. I got myself into this. And if one of us would make it through this shithole they’re going to send me to, it would be me.”
Isaac Worth is discussing the court’s terms with Maravelle. “After six weeks you can visit. Other family members can go up later if he’s fitting in. It is not a lockdown. It’s a boarding school. It was a military-style school, but now they focus on academics and behavior. I managed to get some scholarship money, and New York State will pay for the rest.”
Shelby sees the way Maravelle is looking at her attorney. She’s shell-shocked, but she clearly trusts this man so he damn well better be worthy, otherwise he’ll have Shelby and Mrs. Diaz to deal with. Shelby goes to give Teddy a quick hug. “You can come back from this,” sh
e tells him. “Look at me. I just about killed someone.”
Teddy shakes his head. “No you didn’t.”
The kids don’t know about Helene. Shelby wanted to tell them, but Maravelle told her it was unnecessary information. “Seriously?” Shelby had said. “It’s what defines me.”
“Only to you,” Maravelle had insisted. “It doesn’t matter to anyone who loves you.”
“Anyway, you’re a thousand times smarter than I was,” Shelby tells Teddy now. “You’ll figure it out. If you don’t think you’re worth something, no one else will either.”
“What are you? A philosopher?” Teddy says.
“Nope. Just a friend, baby. One who’s been where you are now.”
Later they drive back to Valley Stream, minus one. No one says much, not even when Dorian starts to cry again, his large hands covering his face. They just let him cry and Maravelle switches on the radio. People say that twins can feel each other’s emotions. That if you stick one with a pin the other will gasp as if wounded. Maybe the one who feels the stab of pain is the lucky one, since he’s the one who understands human needs and desires.
Shelby begins a letter to Teddy that night. She thinks about the first postcard that came to her in the hospital, how she thought the nurse had made a mistake when she shouted out Shelby’s name at mail call, how it mattered that someone, somewhere, knew how she felt deep inside. She writes to Teddy all through the rest of the week. It’s a much longer letter than she’d ever expected it to be. She writes during dinner, in between bites of reheated chicken and rice with plum sauce. She writes while the singing competition show she hates and always watches is on. The letter turns out to be ten pages long by the time she mails it on Friday. She’s written about things she’s never told anyone, not even Ben Mink, how she hated herself so much she held her hand over the flame on the stove in the hope she’d ignite. How she wished she had died on the road. How, on the night of the accident, she bit and kicked whoever tried to save her. She sends along a photo she took of Teddy and Dorian with Pablo, snapped during the week she took care of them, when she still disliked children. The brothers’ arms are thrown around one another’s shoulders and Pablo is bigger than the both of them put together. Remember who you are, she tells him. She thinks about the photograph her mother sent her, when she was little and her eyes were so bright with faith and love. What’s deep inside never changes.