Chapter Fourteen: Carte Blanche
(Vanessa)
Everything after lunch is a blur. I don’t speak to Ivy or Noah. I know I won’t get the chance to confront Zander until I get home from work tonight, so I force myself to focus on going to the senior center with Ketchup after school. A quick text message to Grandma explaining my plans to “volunteer” are met with happy approval. I, on the other hand, am sick just thinking about it. What if Ketchup is right?
It is with trepidation that I cross the parking lot to Ketchup’s car after school. When I finally make it to him, his subdued demeanor lowers my eyes.
“Ready?” he asks.
I nod and slip into the passenger’s seat. The drive is quiet at first. After about ten minutes, I can’t stand it anymore. “Ketchup, I’m sorry about earlier.”
When he looks over at me, his smile is faint, but genuine. “You don’t have to be sorry about anything. I had no right to act the way I did. Forgive me?”
“I don’t need to. I’m the one…”
“Van,” he interrupts, “I know this situation sucks. I don’t understand it, at all, but I want you to know I’m here for you, no matter what. Nothing else needs to be said right now.”
I have the feeling what he means by that last line is that he doesn’t want to talk about me hanging out with Noah anymore. There are still plenty of things that need to be said—mainly me apologizing for being such a horrible friend to him. But I don’t say anything else. I should make myself pull away from him, quit torturing him. It’s the right thing to do, but I can’t. Deep down, I can’t get rid of the hope that one day things will change and I can live the life I want, with the person I want. Ketchup must feel the same. The sense of relief that settles around me may be false, but I hold it close until we pull up to the senior center.
We walk in together, with Ketchup greeting friends of his late grandfather, and me following along behind, not sure whether or not this is going to work. Ketchup leads me deeper into the center. He pauses at a plain wooden door. Even with it closed, I can the hear voices of several men arguing.
“This is the unofficial ‘Vets Room,’” Ketchup says. “I’ve known these guys a long time. I’ve heard their stories dozens of times. All three of them served in the front lines in Vietnam. They’ve never talked much about the actual fighting they did, but they’ve talked about what it was like over there. If you’re right about what the weird taste means, these guys should cause the same effect.”
“But what if it doesn’t? Even around Zander it doesn’t happen all the time.”
Ketchup puts his arms around my shoulder and reaches for the door knob. “Then we’ll come back again, just to make sure. We’ll come back as many times as it takes, okay?”
“Okay,” I say quietly.
Ketchup opens the door and I brace myself. I even find myself holding my breath until I can’t stand it anymore and breathe. When I do, the air smells faintly of tobacco and arthritis cream, but that’s it. I’m pulled out of my contemplation when I’m poked with a cane. I jump back at the hard nudge and glance over at the source.
“Who’s this pretty little thing?” a wrinkled old man asks.
Ketchup grins at his elderly friend. “This is my friend, Van.”
“Van?” one of the others hollers. “What kind of name is Van?”
“It’s short for Vanessa,” I offer. The old man scowls at me. I try not to laugh.
Not wanting to be the center of attention, I tug Ketchup toward a couch. He follows with a smile, asking the three gentlemen how they’re doing. That inspires a whole round of complaining from each of them. Ketchup takes it all in gracefully. When they’re done complaining about aches and the complicated nature of Medicare, their interest turns back to me.
“Why’d you bring a girl here, anyway?” the guy whose name turns out to be Gus asks. He’s also the one who poked me. “This is a gentlemen’s club.”
The other two mutter similar complaints, but Ketchup fends them off. “Hold on now. I bring someone new you all can tell your stories to, and you’re complaining? Every week you three complain that no one new ever comes to visit you.”
When the three look sufficiently chastised, I ask to hear a story. Apparently, they instantly forget their qualms from a few seconds ago, because suddenly all three are tripping over each other to be the first to tell a story of way back when. Their fighting in the war never comes up, but I actually find myself enjoying their tales. The two hours I had to spare before heading off to work go by much more quickly than I expected. Before I know it, Ketchup and I are saying our goodbyes.
Ketchup is saying goodbye with his hand on the door when it hits me. I can barely even stand when the taste slams into me. My hand clutches at Ketchup’s arm. His eyes snap over to me, and his goodbyes wrap up half a second later. The door is pulled shut as I double over. Before I can collapse, Ketchup has his arms around me.
“Van, are you okay?”
My hand flies up to my nose and mouth in an effort to keep the taste away, but it’s already seeped into me. All I can do is breathe and wait for it to pass. Ketchup holds me until I start breathing normally again. My head falls back against his chest in relief. Alone in the hallway, nobody notices the two of us sitting on the floor. I’m grateful for that. I need a few minutes before I’ll be able to stand up.
“It happened again,” Ketchup says, a statement, not a question. “I was really hoping it wouldn’t.”
So was I.
“It means you were right,” I say quietly. The grief that inspires is a heavy weight to bear.
“Maybe not. It could mean something else.” The hope in his voice is faint, and we both know he is wrong. Ketchup’s head rests against mine as his arms tighten around me. His voice is small when he asks, “Who?”
“Who did Zander kill?” Tears well in my eyes. “I don’t know, but there have been nights lately when he hasn’t come home until really late. I don’t know where he’s going, or what he’s doing, but I found blood on one of his shirts this morning. What if… what if he ends up locked up like Oscar?”
That can’t happen. Not only can I not bear the idea of losing another brother, there are more complicated reasons I can’t have Zander taken away from me.
There was a time when I was little, six or seven, that Mom and Dad sent the boys to summer camp for two weeks. It was the first time they had been away from home for that long and they were so excited to go. I was excited to have Mom and Dad’s attention to myself for two weeks. They were only gone two days when I started to get sick. At first Mom thought I had eaten something bad when my stomach started hurting. Two days later, she thought it must have been a nasty flu. Then the fever started. The doctors prescribed antibiotics, but they didn’t help. My brothers had been gone almost a week when Mom called Grandma in a panic.
The next thing I knew, Zander and Oscar were home and I felt a million times better. Nobody bothered to explain anything to me, but I heard Grandma tell Mom and Dad that they couldn’t separate us for so long. She claimed she didn’t know why we had to stay in contact with each other to keep the sickness away, but she made my parents promise they would never keep us separated like that again.
She said it would get better with age, but the most we could ever go without being near each other was a week before our bodies would start shutting down. The staff at Peak View can’t understand why Oscar always feels so much better physically after we visit him. Once a week is the most often we’re allowed to see him, and as hard as it is to sit in that room with him sometimes, it kills us both to know he spends most of his days sick and begging for contact.
What will happen if Zander is locked up and I can’t get to him often enough? What will happen to me?