***
It was a cold, windy Thursday evening at the beginning of one of those school-kids-only long weekends. I had the night off work, and it looked like I was going to have to spend it stuck in Upton. I really needed to figure out how to parallel park properly so I could pass my driver’s license test. That’s what I told Darren when he called to see if I was going to be in the city that night.
“No problem. I’ll come get you and bring you back myself,” he offered.
I scoffed. “You’d come all the way to Upton?”
“Sure. Why not?”
An hour later I was skating down my grandparents’ driveway toward Darren’s car. He had thrown the front door open from the inside and I climbed into the empty seat beside him. “Hi,” I said, before I turned to greet the twins in the backseat. But the car was empty except for Darren and me.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
Darren shrugged behind the wheel. “In the city,” he answered. Before I could question him any more about the twins, he’d backed out into the street and changed the subject. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “there’s a huge flower arrangement sitting in the TacoTown back office for you.”
I frowned. “For me?”
“Well,” he admitted, “the card is addressed to the entire staff but it’s meant mostly for you.”
“Darren, what the heck are you talking about?”
He grinned. “Tom’s mom was pretty grateful for what we did for him the other night. She made him come in and apologize to Sandy this morning. They say his hands were still all bandaged up and everything. Anyway, the doctor told his mom he could have lost a few fingers if we – if you hadn’t known what to do for frostbite.”
“Or if you guys had lost your cool and thrown him out of the restaurant,” I added. “It definitely wasn’t just me who helped him. It took all of us to do it. The poor, stupid guy – I’m glad he’s going to be okay.”
“Where did you learn that first aid, anyway?” Darren asked. “All I know is the stuff about drowning that they taught us in swimming lessons.”
I shrugged. “First aid is something we’re taught at a church activities every once in a while.”
Darren laughed.
“Seriously,” I said.
“What’s first aid got to do with god?” he sneered.
I punched his arm through his coat. “Are you kidding me? Haven’t you ever heard of the Good Samaritan?”
“Yeah. I guess I have.”
“Well, that story’s got loads of first aid in it – and it’s right in the Bible. Think about it. How can Christians expect to be able to help people and take care of each other if they’ve never been taught how to help?”
Darren shook his head. “That’s a weird church you’ve got there. Helpful, but weird.”
“It’s the best,” I testified.
“Whatever you say, Mack,” Darren allowed.
“So where are we all going tonight?” We were at the city limits. It was time for me to ask.
“Are you hungry?” It was sort of like an answer.
I’d eaten a tiny bit of the noodly, soupy casserole Carrie had made for dinner that night – just enough to keep from seeming ungrateful to her. I wasn’t exactly hungry but at sixteen years old, I could still eat whatever and whenever I wanted without much consequence. “I think I could eat a little something,” I answered.
Darren pulled the car into the parking lot of a nice Italian restaurant I’d never been to before – the kind of place meant for fully grown-up customers. I opened the car door to find him skidding on the slippery soles of his shoes, leaning on the hood to keep from sliding underneath the car on the January ice.
I laughed. “Darren, what the heck are you doing now?”
He forced a laugh of his own. “I was trying to get over there to open your door for you. But you’re too impatient – and fast.”
I looked down at the door handle. “Why do you have to do it? Is there a trick to it? Is the door broken?”
Darren found his feet, walked over to me, and pulled the door out of my hands. “No. It works fine. But trying to act like a gentleman isn’t just for Mormon guys, you know,” he said.
I coughed. “Quit goofing around. They’re probably waiting for us,” I said, meaning the twins, naturally. “If you hurry up, you might be able to open the door to the restaurant for me.”
The inside of the restaurant was dim and lit by votive candles burning in cut-glass lanterns set on each table. I squinted through the candlelight, looking for Crystal and Wayne. They still hadn’t arrived.
A man in a clean white shirt led Darren and me to a table. He seemed so confident and authoritative about where we sat that I didn’t question him about the tiny round table he assigned to us. “I don’t know how we’ll all fit once Crystal and Wayne get here,” I remarked to Darren after the host left us alone in a dim corner.
“Don’t worry about it,” Darren began as I opened the menu. “Look, the thing is – Wayne and Crystal aren’t coming. There’s really no place for a brother-sister duo on a date.”
My head jerked up from the menu. “Date?” I repeated. “This is a date?”
Darren shoved his own menu aside and leaned over the table, clearly exasperated. “Of course it’s a date. I drove all the way to Upton in the snow to pick you up – alone. I took you to a restaurant with waiters and cloth napkins and everything. And when we’re done, I’m going to pay for it all myself. That’s a date, right?”
I sat back, my eyes darting around the room. Crystal and Wayne were not coming. Now that I knew it, I felt tricked – tricked into dating someone outside the Church for the very first time. But – what was that other feeling – there was something else I felt. It was – flattered. Someone had a crush on the ugliest girl in my junior high school. It was something like a miracle. And even as I fumbled for an escape, I couldn’t help but feel a little pleased about it.
Whether I was pleased or not, it was time to end it. I tucked one edge of my long, yellow hair behind my ear. “Look, Darren –” I began.
He wasn’t listening. He was reaching across the tiny table to touch my wrist with his fingertip, rolling the gold bracelet he’d given me along my arm. “You had to have known what I had in mind for us,” he said, “when I traded with Wayne to get your name in the Christmas gift exchange and then went out and bought you gold jewellery instead of a ten dollar gag gift like everyone else got each other –”
“But – but you did it because we’re friends and my family’s broke, right?” I stammered.
Darren laughed, even though I knew he couldn’t be finding my shock at his confessions amusing at all. “And then there was that time in my car, in Upton, when you almost let me kiss you.”
“I did not,” I hissed. Was that where his hold on my wrist the night of the Christmas concert had been heading? “We are just friends.”
He shook his head. “Friends?” he said. “No, not really. Be honest with me, Heather.”
“Heather?”
“You’re wearing this bracelet nearly every time I see you. So it must mean something to you. It has to.”
I raised my hands to my forehead, moving my arm away from his fingers. “It just means I’m poor and I don’t have many beautiful things of my own,” I murmured. “Darren, you know what Mormons are like. It’s not that I don’t find you sweet and funny and cute and all that. You’re awesome. I just don’t date people from outside my Church.”
“But you’re not like other Mormons, Mack,” he argued. “That’s what’s so great about you.”
“No, that’s what’s wrong with me,” I countered, starting to get loud under the quiet, shadowy roof of the restaurant.
Darren swore quietly to himself and sat back on his own side of the table. “Okay, Mack, here’s what we’ll do,” he said, recovering the same smooth, low voice he’d been using before. “This doesn’t have to
be a date if you don’t want it to be. We don’t have to call it that if it bothers you. We’re just eating together. We’ve done it a million times before when our dinner breaks overlap at TacoTown. We’ll finish here and go find the twins and hang out like we always do for the rest of the night, if that’ll make you feel better.”
I let out my breath. “Finding the twins would make me feel better,” I said. Then I looked up at his face, a little shyly. “So are you still paying?”
Darren laughed and opened his menu. He sounded like himself again – just a smart, funny guy from my circle of friends; the best friend of my best friend’s twin brother. Maybe everything could go back to the way it was before tonight. Sure.
As promised, Darren drove us to the twins’ house after dinner. I saw the slats of the blinds in their living room widow crack open as we started up the walkway to the door, as if they’d been watching for us. Crystal and Wayne were both behind the door when it opened, their brown eyes bigger than I’d ever seen them. They were surprised to see us here this early – and, I thought, they were a little disappointed.
“Dang it,” I thought as I read their faces, “they knew.”
I jumped at Crystal like she was a life raft and started chattering to her about – anything. But out of the corner of my eye I saw Wayne look up at Darren and raise his eyebrows, asking. Darren held up one hand and rocked it back and forth like a see-saw. It’s a motion I learned as a third grader in French class. We always made it whenever we said, “Comme ci, comme ça.” The English translation would be “so-so.” And when Darren made the motion for Wayne that night he meant to say that even though our date hadn’t made me his girlfriend, he was still hopeful.
When the boys finally started to get caught up in their own talk, I grinned stiffly at Crystal and spoke between my gritted teeth, like a ventriloquist. “How could you let me get set up like that?” I asked.
“You mean, with Darren?” she replied in a whisper.
I nodded, still grinning joylessly. “You should have warned me he was about to make a move like that.”
“I thought it was nice. I thought you’d like it,” she rasped back at me. She flicked the gold chain closed around my wrist with the tip of her finger. “Everyone thinks you like him. Don’t you?”
I closed my lips over my teeth as I shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter. He’s not someone I could go out with the way things are right now. I thought I told you that months ago.”
It had started snowing hard outside the windows of the little downtown house where the twins lived with their mother. As always, the fierceness of the weather didn’t arise from the amount of snow falling but from the wind that blew so fiercely the dark sky outside seemed white wherever light cut through it. Taffy, the twins’ fat yellow cat, was asleep on Crystal’s lap. The house smelled like the popcorn we’d made and the whole scene would have been perfectly mid-wintry cozy if the spectre of a dangerous drive back to Upton wasn’t looming over it.
Darren peered out the window to where his mom’s car sat parked on the curb, somewhere behind the wall of flying snow.
“It’ll clear up soon,” I chirped.
But we were only half finished watching a movie on the VCR when the phone rang. It was Darren’s mom and she wanted him home where he – and her car – would be safe from the blizzard right away.
“Stop being so over-protective,” he whisper-yelled into the kitchen phone loudly enough for all of us to hear him from the living room. “Over-protective” was one of those expressions Baby Boomer parents hated in those days, for some reason. We all knew that to utter it was to make a particularly potent attack on them. But Darren’s mom still wouldn’t budge. He was red-faced and huffy when he came to tell the rest of us he needed to leave and I would be stranded in the city for the night.
I sighed. “I don’t blame your mom one bit,” I said. “If you were my kid, I’d tell you the same thing.”
“And don’t worry about getting Mack back to Upton tonight,” Crystal told him. She tried to keep her voice light but everyone there knew she was desperate to make the evening less of a disaster for Darren. “She can sleep over here. Can’t you?”
“Of course I can,” I hurried. “Just let me call my mom. She’s probably starting to freak out at the idea of me being on the highway tonight anyway. Don’t worry about me.”
Wayne stood by the front door as Darren stomped out of the house.
“Bye,” Crystal and I called after him.
“It’s just as well,” Wayne said as the door slammed shut. “I need to leave and run over to Heather V.’s house to say good-bye, anyway. She’s flying off on that service project to go build an orphanage in Guatemala tomorrow morning.”
“Well, they sure picked a nice time of the year to do some good works down by the Equator,” I observed, a little cynically.
Crystal snorted. Wayne rolled his eyes at us and reached for his heavy coat.
“Hey, won’t your mom be mad about you driving around in the storm too?” I asked.
There were a few seconds of silence while Wayne and Crystal exchanged grim looks before breaking into bitter laughter. “What? It’s not like I’m taking her car out in the snow,” Wayne said, “so what should she care?”
“No, Mum won’t mind at all. That’s one of the reasons why he’s going out,” Crystal explained. She flicked her eyes up the stairs to where we could hear a small television set playing in the master bedroom. “He’s testing her to see if she’ll go all motherly on him in the face of danger and try to keep him safe at home, or whatever.”
“Mom!” Wayne called up the stairs. “I’m going out.”
“Uh-huh,” was his mom’s answer.
He smiled broadly at us – satisfied in some masochistic way – and turned to open the door.
It was too awful. “Wayne, don’t go out in that,” I said.
He rounded on me. “Mack, if you can’t stand to see me leave without you, just say so.”
I raised my hand to my throat to cover the red flush I could feel mounting there. What was wrong with me? And what was I going to say now?
But Crystal was on her feet. “Just go,” she said, advancing on Wayne where he stood in front of the door. “Go if you have to, so you can come back before it gets any worse out there.” She pushed him outside.
“You two, shut the door,” their mom called from up the stairs.
The door slammed and we lost sight of Wayne as he trudged down the drifted snow filling the walkway on his way to his little tin can of a car.
“He’ll be fine,” Crystal assured us both. “He just got new tires and he drives like a careful old granny even in good weather.”
We sat back down to the movie we’d all been watching but neither of us was enjoying it and Crystal was yawning so we went to bed. I slept in Crystal’s clothes, pulling the drawstring of her pyjamas pants as tightly as I could and rolling up the cuffs. Crystal was a gifted sleeper and never seemed to have any trouble drifting off despite having me crammed into her single bed with her. She kept sleeping ever after Taffy came to crowd us.
“Taffy – please, no,” I groaned to the cat in the dark quiet. I pushed his furry back away from my sleeping space but he just lolled right back into place. He turned his head toward me and slowly blinked his luminous eyes but otherwise he totally ignored me. I didn’t really know how to behave when faced with all this cat-titude. Our family had never had a pet – not even a small, unobtrusive pet like fish or a hamster or a…
“Parakeet,” I whispered to myself over the sound of Crystal’s breathing.
All at once, there were goose-bumps rising on my arms. I shook my head and sat up in bed. I was thinking about a different kind of animal than cats – a much more confusing and frustrating kind. I was thinking about boys. Here I was, finally getting chased by a boy – by Darren. But he wasn’t from the right circle of boys. And the right boy – well, s
o far I could only think of one person even close to that description and he seemed to consider me little more than a feathery pet.
I sighed so loudly Taffy turned his head to look at me again. I really didn’t have much of a right to complain to the old cat. He slept with Crystal every night. It was me who had invaded Taffy’s territory, after all.
“Fine.” I relented and turned to the wall.
I lay in the dark wondering if the gap between the wall and the bed was wide enough to put me in danger of falling down it. I was just starting to move toward an uneasy sleepiness when a sharp, spitty sound shook the bed. I sat up.
Chee! Chee!
It was Taffy. He was sneezing down in the hollow between my feet and Crystal’s. It was too much. I shook Crystal by the arm as she slept. Her breathing didn’t even waver from its deep, regular pattern. With a lifetime full of nights of good sleep to her credit, it was no wonder the girl was so strong and healthy. She didn’t stir but Taffy raised his head and looked at me with his keen nocturnal vision. I couldn’t tell if he was smug or just bored with me.
Chee!
It was hopeless. I picked up my pillow, climbed to the end of the bed, and crept out the bedroom door. There was a lamp still lit in the living room at the bottom of a creaky flight of stairs so I descended toward it. Away from Taffy, everything was quiet. I wondered if Wayne had managed to sneak back into the house without us noticing. My wristwatch was upstairs, somewhere in Crystal’s room, and the VCR clock was just flashing midnight on and off so I had no idea how much time had passed since we’d gone to bed. I dropped the pillow on the couch and pulled my coat off the banister to use as a blanket. Underneath my coat, I curled up on the couch in the tiniest, warmest, most unobtrusive ball I could make out of myself.
That was when the door opened. Cold rushed into the room. Feet were stamping on the rug in the hall, and someone swore quietly at the weather raging behind him. It was Wayne. There was a rustle and stomp as he threw off his winter coat and shoes. I lifted my head slightly but he still didn’t see me until he’d let himself fall onto the couch, sitting almost on top of my feet.
“Mack!” Wayne nearly shouted as I pulled my feet away.
“Shh!”
“What the – heck – are you doing down here by yourself, hiding under your coat?” he stammered.
“Trying to get some sleep. Did you know your cat has a cold? He’s up in Crystal’s bed sneezing his catty little face off,” I reported.
Wayne grinned. “Taffy? No, he’s not sick. It’s just his winter allergies.”
“Oh, well, why didn’t anyone say so before? I can sleep through sneezes as long as they’re just allergies – no problem.”
“Nice girls aren’t sarcastic, Mack,” he scolded.
“Oh right. Sorry. I forgot you’re an expert on nice girls.” I thought it was a fitting thing to say to someone who’d just come from a long, private visit with Heather V.
But Wayne’s smile faded to nothing. He sighed into his chest. “Apparently not,” he said.
I cleared my throat. “So how is Heather V.?”
He sighed again and rolled his face up from his chest. “Great – excited, packed for Guatemala, learning Spanish – you know.”
“Well, you stayed over there saying good-bye until it got pretty late. That must have been a special adios.” I was trying to lighten his mood.
“It sure was,” he agreed. “It was a permanent adios.”
“Oh no.”
“Yep. She broke up with me,” he said. “She tried to give me that, ‘we’ve grown apart’ – um – garbage.” It was sweet of Wayne to remember to choke back all the swearing in which his poor, beat-up heart would have liked to indulge. He was censoring himself for me but I knew swearing wouldn’t have made him feel any better in the long-run anyway.
He looked down the length of the couch to where my face peeked over the collar of my winter coat. “I’m glad you’re still awake, Mack. I didn’t really want to be alone right now but those two...” He gestured at the upper floor where Crystal and his mom were sleeping.
“There is no possible way to wake up Crystal,” I finished for him.
He nodded and rubbed his arms briskly with his large, brown hands. “Hey, do you want some hot chocolate? I can’t get warm. On top of everything else, it looks like the heater in my car broke down just now.”
Wayne went to the kitchen while I waited underneath my coat in the living room, a little surprised to be experiencing something like a nurturing side to him. He came back with two warm mugs and settled onto the far end of the couch. I watched as he pulled at a fleck in his sweatshirt until a long, golden Heather V. hair came loose from between the fibres – like a magic trick. He sighed again and dropped the hair onto the carpet.
“Don’t get too sentimental,” I chided him. “It could have just been one of my hairs.”
Wayne smirked and blew into his hot chocolate. “Hey, that reminds me. It was a pretty bad night for Darren too, wasn’t it.”
I groaned. “Don’t blame me for that. I was totally shocked by the whole thing. Darren likes me – likes me. Where the heck did that come from?”
Wayne rolled his eyes. “Girls. They only see what they want to see.”
I made a scoffing sound. “I don’t see how guys are any different when it comes to that. And it’s not that I don’t admire Darren. He’s a great person –”
“Spoken like a true Heather,” Wayne interrupted. “I think I heard this speech once already tonight.”
“I totally mean it,” I protested. “It’s not an excuse – and it’s not personal. It’s the church thing...”
My voice broke a little and Wayne turned to look right at me, all brown-eyed and earnest, for once. “The church thing,” I repeated. “It’s real.”
I saw his throat move as he swallowed. “I believe you,” he said. “But don’t people change religions for their loved ones all the time – if they have to?”
“I guess. But that’s an enormous step,” I answered, sounding grave. “And it certainly doesn’t always work out well – or at all. I mean, if Darren ever became a Mormon it would have to be genuine. I wouldn’t want it to have anything to do with a relationship with me. You’re his best friend; do you honestly think there’s much chance of that happening?”
Wayne turned to look straight ahead of himself, into the dark kitchen beyond us, as if he was trying hard to imagine Darren standing there on the linoleum, as a Mormon. “No,” he replied. “I can’t see it. You guys will always have all those rules. He’s too strong willed for that kind of lifestyle.”
I sat up. “Oh, and I’m not strong willed?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Wayne hurried. “You’re will is awesome, obviously. But I can’t see Darren changing his whole life for a church unless there’s also something cute and blonde in it for him.”
Now I was sighing. “Well, that’s really too bad,” I said. Wait – had Wayne just called me cute?
“But don’t expect him to give up on you yet,” Wayne warned me. “He’s used to getting spoiled by his mom and his grandma and, like we all saw tonight, he’s not very good at taking ‘no’ for an answer.”
I hummed into my mug. “Maybe I’m sick and selfish but I don’t really have a problem with him not giving up. I mean, it’s very pleasant, being treated so well – just as long as he can accept never actually having me as a girlfriend.”
Wayne winced. “Not nice, Mack.”
“I know. But – but just let me admit it for once. It’s just the two of us here so let me be brutally honest,” I said. “I know you appreciate both brutality and honesty.”
“I do.” Wayne grinned. “And you know that about me.”
“Yes.”
“Because we’re friends now, right?” Wayne was looking deeply into his hot chocolate.
I almost laughed. “Well, we don’t hate
each other anymore. So – sure.”
He shook his head. “What I mean is, I’m not just Crystal’s brother to you. I’m your friend too – yours, like, independently of other people.”
I shifted underneath my coat. Something about the atmosphere in Wayne’s living room was making me feel restless. I stopped squirming and forced myself to look at him. His face was turned toward me now. I usually liked looking at him. He was pretty – like nice scenery in human form. But sometimes Wayne’s way of looking at people freaked me out. It was as if he wasn’t afraid of other people enough to know that he shouldn’t look directly at them for too long. He didn’t know – or didn’t care – not to glare or stare. And now he was sitting at the other end of the couch, just looking at me as we sat almost alone in the quiet house.
I couldn’t stand it.
I nodded my head hard enough to drop my hair over the sides of my face. “Of course we’re friends,” I said. “And that’s especially cool because I don’t have a lot of friends anymore. I mean, you don’t know what it’s like. All day, every day I walk around like I’m a total weirdo in Upton. Everybody’s nice to me but nobody – hardly anybody – actually likes me. I don’t know if you guys realize how much it means to me to feel so welcome and accepted and – normal – around you.”
“Stupid Upton,” Wayne said as he shook his head. “Still, Darren might end up wearing your resistance down, in time.”
I shook my head. “No.”
Wayne pivoted toward me on the couch, leaning slightly forward. “So,” he began, “so you’d really never ever date a guy who wasn’t a Mormon – never?”
It was a simple question. I thought I knew the answer. I’d always known the answer, hadn’t I? The answer had to be, “Of course I wouldn’t.” But, for some reason, it was hard to say at that moment. I tossed my head instead.
“Why the heck are we sitting here talking about my life?” I deflected. “Here I was all ready to help you work through what happened with Heather V. tonight and you’ve hardly said a word about it.”
Wayne sat back and drained the last of his mug. “I never wanted to talk about that in particular. It is over. That is all. I just wanted to talk about whatever. If we’d ended up talking about professional hockey stats or something that would have been fine with me too. Really, I just couldn’t stand the idea of going upstairs and lying awake going over it and over it.” He looked at me again. “Thanks.”
I smiled as I turned away. “It’s the least I could do.”
Wayne was reaching for the television remote control. “Wanna watch the news? I’ll go up and take Taffy away when you’re ready to go back to bed.”
I yawned and leaned against my pillow on the arm of the couch. “Sure, I’ll watch with you for a bit,” I agreed. And I listened with my eyes closed until the television voices stopped sounding like words. Instead, they were ebbing and flowing with a rhythm, like tides – like a whole ocean full of uncharted, dangerous water.