“Like what?”
“Nope. That’s not how it works. You figure out the solutions to the problems. Oh, and by the way, one of those problems is telling your father. Let’s see how you surmount that.”
Chloe became deflated. “I thought maybe you could tell him.”
“That’s likely.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Mom.”
“I’m not being sarcastic. I’m being snide. You know I’m actually going to tell him as soon as he walks in the door.”
“Perhaps he’ll be more reasonable than you,” Chloe said. “Maybe Dad remembers what it’s like to be young. Oh, wait, I forgot, you can’t remember, because you were born old. Born knowing you’d have a kid someday whose dreams you’d spend your entire life harpooning.”
“I’m harpooning your dream of going to Barcelona?” said Lang. “The dream I didn’t know you had until five minutes ago?” She raised her hand before Chloe could protest, defend, explain, justify. “Where are you going to sleep, Chloe? Why don’t you first work on giving your father the answer to that pesky question. Because it’ll be the first thing he’ll ask. Then worry about everything else.”
Her parents didn’t yell, they didn’t punish. They were simply hyperaware of every single thing Chloe said and did. She got a new ribbon at the high school book fair? They knew. She once almost failed a biology test? They knew. She wore black eyeliner? Oh, they knew. She and Mason danced too close at one Friday night canteen? How they knew. They had no life except to live vicariously through hers. And the only thing that was expected of her, aside from not flunking out of school, was not to let down half a billion Chinese mothers by going to a Barcelona beach to have unfettered sex with her boyfriend.
“Going to Barcelona is also an education, Mom,” Chloe muttered. She really didn’t want to face her dad’s questions. What was she supposed to say? We’re going to get two rooms, and the girls will stay in one room, and the boys in the other? What kind of naïve fool for a parent would believe that?
“Yes, an education in boys,” said Lang. “What are you going to tell us, that you’ll get two rooms and you and Hannah will stay in one and the boys in the other?”
There you go. Didn’t even have to say a word.
“Your plan,” Lang continued, “is to rove around Europe for a month with your boyfriend on your hard-earned college savings. This is something you’re seriously proposing to your father and me?”
Dad is not here, Chloe wanted to say. She didn’t know of whom she was more afraid. Dad never really liked Mason, that gentle kid. She didn’t know why. Everyone loved him. “We could go to Belgium, too, if you want.”
“Are you weak in the head? Why would I want this?”
“You mentioned Belgium. I could bring you back some chocolates.”
“Your father gets me a Whitman’s Sampler every Valentine’s Day. That’s enough for me.”
“Belgium is safe.”
“Is Mason safe?”
“Hannah will be with me. She’s nearly a year older. She’ll protect me.”
“Chloe,” said her mother, “sometimes you say the funniest things. That girl couldn’t protect a squirrel. She can’t protect herself. I trust Mason more than I trust Hannah.”
“See?”
“More, which is to say nothing. How much is two times zero? Still zero, child.” She raised her hand before Chloe could come back with a wisecrack. “Enough. I have to slap these Linzers together and then get dinner on. Your father will be home soon. Go to the music room and practice.”
“I’m going to be eighteen, Mom,” Chloe repeated lamely.
“Yes, and I’m going to be forty-seven. And your father forty-nine. I’m glad we established how old we are. Now what?”
“I’m old enough to make my own choices,” said Chloe, hoping her mother wouldn’t laugh at her.
To Lang’s credit, she didn’t. “Can you choose right now to go play a musical instrument,” she said. “Piano or violin. Pick one. Practice thirty minutes.”
“Hannah wants to talk to me before dinner.”
“Well, then, you’d better jump to it,” said Lang, her back turned, an icing sugar shaker in her hands. “What Hannah wants, Hannah gets.”
3
The Perils of College Interviews
CHLOE SPRINTED FROM HER HOUSE ACROSS THE FLOWERBEDS and brush to Hannah’s next door.
Since the divorce five years ago, Hannah’s mother had been involved with revolving boyfriends, and consequently their yard never got cleaned up. “Why can’t she do it herself?” Lang would demand. Blake and Mason offered every month to help, but Terri didn’t want to pay them to do it. And she didn’t want them to do it for free because that was asking men for a favor. So she lived surrounded by unkempt backwoods, in wild contrast to Chloe’s parents’ approach to their house and their rural life. Lang allocated part of every day to weeding, mowing, cleaning, planting, raking, leafing, clearing, maintaining. The birches and pines were trimmed as if giraffes had gotten to them, and all the pine cones were swept up and placed in tall ornamental wicker baskets, and even the loose pebbles were picked up and arranged around the flowerbeds and bird houses and vegetable gardens. It was quite telling that Terri and Lang lived next door to each other for almost twenty years and yet didn’t know each other’s birthdays. Lang never said a thing, and kept Jimmy from saying anything, but Chloe could tell by her father’s critical expression when he spoke of “that family” that he looked forward to the day Hannah might become a friend of the past. There are two kinds of people in the world, Jimmy Devine said. Those who try to make everything they come in contact with more beautiful—and then there is Terri Gramm.
Before Chloe knocked, she stopped by the dock and stared out onto the lake, the railroad across it, the bands of violet mackerel sky. She imagined a lover’s kiss in the Mediterranean breeze, the mosaics of streets, parades down the boulevards, music, ancient stones, and evening meals. Beaches, heat, flamenco, bagpipes. Passion, life, noise. Everything that here was not. She imagined herself, fire, flowing dresses, abundant cleavage, no fear. Everything that here she was not. Her heart aching, she knocked on Hannah’s porch door.
Hannah’s mother was on the couch watching Wheel of Fortune.
“Hello, Mrs. Gramm.”
“Hi, honey.” Terri didn’t turn her head to Chloe. “Are you staying for dinner?”
“No, my mom—”
“I’m joking. We got nothing anyway.”
Hannah pulled Chloe into her bedroom and slammed the door.
“Did she say no?”
“Of course she said no.”
“But was it no, we’ll see, or was it no like never?”
“It was no like never.”
“But then she started asking you all kinds of questions?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s yes. They never ask anything unless it’ll be yes eventually. Give her a week to think about it. She has to talk to your dad.”
“You think I’ll have a better chance with him?”
“No. But he might give you money.”
“For Barcelona?”
“We’ll figure it out. We have bigger problems right now.”
“Bigger than my mom saying no?”
“Yes.” Hannah was biting her nails. Perfect Hannah with her perfect teeth was biting to the nubs her ugly nails at the end of her perfect long fingers. “How likely is it, do you think, that Blake and Mason are actually going to go?”
“A hundred percent.” Chloe pulled her friend’s twitchy hand out of her mouth. “Stop doing that. Don’t you know what Blake is like?”
Hannah didn’t reply. She was too busy bloodying the tips of her fingers.
Chloe plopped down on Hannah’s lavender bed. The girl turned up her music which was already plenty loud. She did it so her mother couldn’t hear her, but the result was that Chloe couldn’t hear her either. Hannah had a barely audible soprano, like a low hum, and over the high treble strands of Metalli
ca’s “Nothing Else Matters” she was nearly impossible to make out.
She lay on her bed next to Chloe. “Chloe-bear, I’m in trouble.”
“What?”
“I have to break up with him and I don’t know how to do it.”
“With Blake?” Chloe sat up. She was horrified.
“No, with Martyn.”
“Who?”
“Stop it. Be serious.”
Chloe stopped it. How to tell Hannah that she was serious? Who the heck was Martyn? She hoped her pitiable ignorance didn’t show on her face. She scrunched it up knowingly, trussed her eyebrows, nodded. “Why, um, do you have to break up with him?”
“He was going to give me money to go to Barcelona, because he knows I don’t have enough, but if Blake is going, he won’t give me any money.”
Chloe blindly navigated the maze before her, hands out in front. “So don’t tell him Blake is going.” Who the hell was Martyn?!
“Except … he was going to meet us in Barcelona for a few days.”
Chloe weighed her words. “Martyn was going to meet us in Barcelona for a few days?” As if repetition would make Hannah’s words make sense.
“I didn’t want him to, Chloe, believe me, but I don’t have enough money to go, and I thought, what’s a couple of days, when we’re going to be there two weeks, right?”
“Martyn was going to meet us in Barcelona.”
“Don’t be mad. I was going to tell you he was coming. I was just waiting for the right time. Please don’t be mad.” Hannah briefly leaned her head into Chloe’s head, and then clapped her hands business-like. “No, that’s it. I’m going to end it. It’s for the best,” she said. “He is getting too serious, anyway. We need to break up, not go on vacation.”
“Martyn was going to meet us in Barcelona.” Chloe couldn’t get past this one point.
“He doesn’t want me to go without him. He’s afraid I’m going to meet someone, have a fling. He is intensely jealous.”
“Martyn is jealous.”
“Yes, so jealous.”
“Um, does Martyn know you have a boyfriend? Maybe he can be jealous of him.” Poor Blake.
“He’s not worried about him.”
“Well, you’re not, why should he be? So this Martyn is afraid you’ll have a fling in Europe with someone other than your boyfriend?” Chloe opened her hands. “What kind of girl does he think you are?”
“Can you please, please be serious? I know I need to break up with him. But then where do I get the money to go?” She wrung her hands, twisted her sore and bitten fingers. The usually unruffled Hannah looked ruffled.
Chloe was afraid to ask the follow-up question. There were so many questions, she couldn’t sort out their order of priority. She was thinking of Barcelona. But she was also thinking about Blake. “Hannah, if you have someone else, why do you string Blake along? Why don’t you break it off with him, and do what you want?”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Chloe,” Hannah said. “Did you not hear me just now when I said I was going to end it with Martyn?”
Chloe heard all right. “Do you even still want to go to Barcelona?”
“More than anything.”
“With Blake?”
“I’d prefer to go with just you.” Hannah pulled Chloe in for a hug. “Like we planned. Do you think we can talk Blake out of going?”
Chloe shrugged. “Perhaps you can dissuade him by telling him if he goes, then your secret lover won’t give you any money for Europe.”
In a humph Hannah turned her back to Chloe.
“I thought you had money,” Chloe said quietly. “I thought we were both saving.”
“We were. We are. But Chloe, I’m not you. I can’t walk around in the same extra-large T-shirt. I need spring clothes, I need summer clothes.”
“What do you want, a new skirt or Barcelona?”
“Both.”
“You don’t have money for both. Pick.”
“Both!”
Hannah’s back curved into a ball.
Chloe sighed, kneading her comforting palm between Hannah’s shoulder blades. “Who’s this Martyn anyway?”
“Don’t joke.”
“I mean”—Chloe cleared her throat—“how come he has money to burn?”
“He’s a professor. He’s got plenty of money.”
Martyn, Martyn, Martyn. Chloe tried to remember the first names of their teachers at the Academy. In any case, Hannah said professor, not teacher. Jumping up, Hannah started to pace and talk, began to tell Chloe things she couldn’t hear. It occurred to her that perhaps this was the reason she didn’t know about Martyn. Hannah told her, but Metallica was playing and through the strands of living life their way, Chloe had missed it.
Hannah grabbed Chloe’s hands. “What am I going to do? It’ll crush him.”
“Do you want to break up with him?”
“I have to. He’s become way too emotionally involved with me.”
“What about Blake?”
“Will you forget Blake! I have a real problem and you bringing him up every five seconds is not helping me.”
Chloe tried to regroup, find something else to say that sounded less hectory. “Um, how long has the Martyn thing been going on?”
“October.”
“Last October?”
“Yes, since my college interview. Chloe, why are you being so obtuse? Is this deliberate? Is this your way of judging me? You’re making it hard to talk to you.”
Now Chloe remembered. She had driven Hannah to Bangor for her University of Maine admission interview. Chloe had been accepted without an interview so she waited outside while Hannah went in. Hannah walked out with a man, who shook her hand or, rather, took her hand and held it. Hannah introduced Chloe to a very tall, grandfatherly gentleman, soft spoken and modest in manner. Surely that wasn’t Martyn?
Chloe thought no more about it, except in January when Hannah asked to be driven to Bangor again because the admissions office needed to go over a couple of things.
That couldn’t be the man Hannah needed to break up with. Chloe had it wrong. It couldn’t be him because he was …
“Hannah, I’m sorry, but how old is Martyn?”
Hannah studied the lilac bedspread as if the answer was written on her sheets like a cheat sheet. “Sixty-two,” she said.
Chloe jumped off the bed.
“Sit down. What are you getting all riled up about?”
“Hannah!” Chloe couldn’t sit. She could barely focus on Hannah’s aggrieved face. “Please tell me you’re not involved with a man forty years older than you. Please.” Was Chloe the only one who thought this was gross?
“Okay,” Hannah said. Metallica segued into Nirvana. Come as you are. As a friend. “Forty-four years,” she corrected Chloe.
Come as you are.
Chloe didn’t know why she should feel so affected by this. Hannah on the other hand was flushed, blinking rapidly, breathing through her mouth, as if she was catching the strands of the plot on her tongue and was about to jump on her computer and write a story for the ages. “He’s very much in love with me,” she said musically. “I didn’t realize he would fall so deep. He’s a widower and has been very lonely. At first he told me it was just for company. He knew we couldn’t last. He’s the one who told me it wouldn’t last!”
“But you’ve only seen him the few times I’ve driven you to Bangor,” Chloe said dumbly. “Right? I mean …”
“Don’t be naïve. We’ve been meeting every Tuesday at the Silver Pines Motor Court. And some Saturdays. He finishes teaching early on Tuesdays.”
Chloe’s expression must have been a sight.
“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” Hannah said. “I didn’t want to be judged, and I was afraid you’d spill the beans to Mason, and then Blake would find out.”
Where had Chloe been that she hadn’t noticed Hannah’s twice-weekly disappearance? What did Hannah tell Blake about her regularly scheduled absence from their alread
y convoluted life? How could he not know? Chloe had been busy squirreling away her own secrets from Hannah, and perhaps was grateful for a few days a week when she didn’t have to look away every time Hannah waxed about the University of Maine they would both be attending in the fall. But what was Blake’s excuse?
Tonight Chloe had nothing to say about Hannah’s dilemma. She remained stuck on the geezer’s age. He was thirteen years older than her father! Yet Hannah seemed unconcerned with this most startling detail: that she was sleeping with Cain and Abel’s uncle. Hannah sighed as if in a romance novel. “It’s extremely flattering to be loved like that,” she said. “So intensely. Oh Chloe! Do you know what it’s like to be loved so intensely?”
“Oh, sure.” Chloe stared into her hands as if they loved her intensely. “Quite a situation you’ve gotten yourself into, girlfriend,” she said.
“Don’t you think I know that?” For a moment, Hannah looked ready to cry. Yet Chloe knew that to be false, for Hannah didn’t cry. She only appeared to look to be ready to cry.
“I gotta go,” Chloe said, rising. “Hey, look on the bright side. My parents probably won’t let me go anyway.”
“How is that the bright side?” said Hannah. “We’ve been dreaming of Barcelona since we were eleven.”
4
Paleo Flood at Red River
IT WAS DARK OUTSIDE AND HER FATHER’S BLACK DODGE Durango was parked in the open clearing by the time Chloe left Hannah’s and made her way through the brambles between the two properties.
It was a warm evening. Through the open window she could hear her mother’s soft voice and her father’s booming one. Chloe slowed down. Treading quietly over the pine needles that crunched under her feet, she inched up to the screened-in window in the living room.
“It’s out of the question.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Why would she want to go there?”
“She says because she hasn’t been.”