Chapter Three #2
“Oh, God. Don’t tell me it’s bowling. Or roller-skating.”
“I said would want. You’d hate those things.”
Those tiny moments where someone got you—they just made you want to bawl your eyes out. “Remember when Arthur and his girlfriend took us ice-skating?”
We cracked up.
Arthur and, what was her name? Lia? Ava?
Something with an A. Our oldest brother, Arthur, so handsome, smart, and kind, was always popular with girls, so it was hard to keep track.
Anyway, the two of them wanted to use us to show each other how great they were with younger kids, but it was a disaster.
My ankles kept folding together, and I could only inch my way around the railing, holding on, near tears, and Maurice barfed up the ton of snacks they bought us.
Arthur learned a lesson, apparently, because he and Maeve never let Maya, Max, and Baby Millie eat crap.
All those Ms—I sometimes felt bad for Arthur, but he didn’t seem to mind.
He didn’t mind much of anything—he was even-keeled and capable to the degree I was fumbling and anxious, like we were the two bookends of the Spectrum of Dad Management.
Maurice got on the freeway. Hmm. The mystery deepened. “Where’re we going?”
He ignored me. He was trying to keep the secret, or maybe he was in his own head. He popped in a CD instead, turned it up loud. He liked music from all eras, and it could be hard to tell if a song was current or not. When it was good, it was just good.
We were on I-90, and we crossed the bridge over Lake Washington.
We passed Mercer Island, and then Bellevue.
He took an Issaquah exit. Out that way, things got a little blurry, what was familiar or not.
I grew up in Seattle, and everything on the other side of the lake was a foreign country, and this was far enough out that there were bears and stuff.
I was here for one of Priya’s soccer games before, but that was about it.
“Where the hell are we?” Now we were on some remote country road. Well, it probably wasn’t a remote country road to the people who lived there, but it was to me. “It’s getting dark. Like, way dark.”
“That’s the idea.” The clue made me nervous. I liked surprises until they started being too surprising. He turned off onto a gravel road then. His tires crunched. The nose of his truck slanted upward.
“Is this a mountain?”
“Technically.”
“What does that mean?”
“A small mountain.”
“Are we going hiking? Night hiking?”
He snorted. “Is there such a thing as night hiking? Did you just make that up?”
“Are we going camping?” It was hard to hide the horror in my voice. I couldn’t imagine ever going to sleep with only a sheet of canvas between you and what might eat you.
He laughed. Put his hand to his forehead and rubbed, like I was hard to take.
“Watch the road.”
All I could think was that we were going to die out there and no one would ever find us.
But he pulled into a little circular area, where there were a handful of other cars.
It was unexpected, and I got excited again.
Other people seemed safer than just us alone, so this might turn out okay.
We got out of the truck and followed a little trail, a very, very dark trail, but I could hear voices in the distance.
My mind scrolled through every night-gathering possibility, which took less than a second.
Addison’s mom took her and her sister to this goddess thing once, where they sang songs around a campfire, haha.
But it wasn’t a goddess thing, thank goddess.
It was a bunch of people and their telescopes.
Cool, cool, cool. I loved it. All sizes of telescopes, all different ages of people.
I always wanted to look through a telescope and actually see a planet or something.
Like Saturn’s rings, something unimaginable.
My mother got my dad a telescope for Christmas when we were kids, but you could tell he didn’t really like it.
He loved the set of weights she got him one year, which he and George both used to pump up their stocky selves, but he only set up the telescope once, in the backyard.
Maybe it was too complicated. I thought I saw something, but it was only my own eyeball staring back at me.
A few years later, the telescope sat with a bunch of other stuff we were donating.
Or rather, stood, waiting for the truck to pick it up, like a lonely traveler heading for the next chapter in its life.
“Perspective,” Maurice said, and that was all, because he was deep like that. A quiet, deep, music-loving best guy.
Quickly, I realized it was more than perspective, though. A girl, a young woman, raised her hand across the hill, waving us over. She must have been watching and waiting for us specifically, because it was really dark up there.
“Who’s that?” It sounded accusing.
“My friend Sandrine?”
“What’s wrong with your voice?” I asked. It had gotten high-pitched, like he was about to break out into giggles. His mouth was pinched in the corners, I could see, even in the dark, that kind of look where you just can’t suppress how pleased you are.
Oh my God. Maurice was giddy. Maurice was never giddy. He was the kind of guy who always carried a paperback, whose wilder side only came out when he was playing drums. He was quietly pleased, sure. Giddy—no.
She was coming our way.
“Hey,” Sandrine said. She had a cute nose piercing (oh, God, I could already hear my father’s opinions on that), and torn denim shorts, and hair that looked like she took some scissors to it herself, and the warmest smile you could imagine.
“Hey,” Maurice said. He twined his fingers with hers. “Seeing anything?”
“Everything.”
Oh my God again. She said it while looking in his eyes.
There were introductions. Turns out, Sandrine had a band, Solar Flare. She sang and played guitar. Wrote their songs, too.
“My cousin’s got his scope trained on some black patch in the sky, so forget him,” Sandrine said. “But this dude over here”—she motioned to an older guy with a woolly gray beard and a Harley-Davidson shirt, bent over a large elaborate telescope—“has got Saturn.”
I suddenly didn’t care about Saturn.
I cared about the cousin.
“No fucking way,” you said, after I excused myself from Maurice and Sandrine and tapped you on the shoulder.
I shrugged. I mean, what else was there to do? Something was going on, something like fate. “What are you doing here?” I asked, like this was my place. You were the one with the telescope, after all, not me.
“What are you doing here?”
“My brother brought me.” I gestured.
“Maurice is your brother?”
“You know him?”
“The new drummer.”
“The new drummer?” Oh, shit. Maurice had secrets.
“Wait. No way. Is he the Maurizio? All meat?”
“Bianca. White cream sauce.” It was easy to get them confused.
And so, it turned out that your mom, Janite, and Sandrine’s mom were sisters.
That you and Janite lived with their family when you moved from California.
Their house was in North Bend, just a few miles from where we stood on Tiger Mountain.
It might seem like another country over here, but this mountain and their house were only a few miles away.
Maybe this wasn’t fate after all. Or else, it was Sandrine and Maurice’s fate.
“This is so weird,” I said.
“I’m here every week, basically?” Now you shrugged.
“But, man, I’m feeling mighty embarrassed at the moment.
” You were the kind of guy to use the word mighty, and you were the kind of guy to plunge forward to address super-awkward things that were about to shock me.
“I mean, I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable with all those pizzas. ”
Huh? “All what pizzas?”
“Wait. You didn’t know?”
“Didn’t know what?”
You let out a noisy exhale. “Oh, God! I feel so much better! I thought I was being such a…” You groaned. “I, uh…After, uh…That day?”
Oh, wow. It was a that day. It was a that day to you, too. “Fall of Roma?”
“Right. You ran off…”
I smack my hand to my eyes to cover them.
“I didn’t get your number. I…uh, called?
Papa Angelo’s? I asked if Margaret usually delivered to Eastlake, the houseboats?
I tried to explain, so they’d know I wasn’t some freaky old dude or something.
The guy on the phone said, Yeah? Depends on the day?
And so I ordered a Margherita. On a Wednesday, the day I saw you.
But nope. You didn’t show. I tried Thursday. Friday. This is humiliating.”
I started to smile. I was trying hard not to burst with joy. I’m sure I had that same face as Maurice.
“It started to seem, uh, like a bad idea. Not, uh, fun, you know, like I imagined? I’ve never done anything like that before. Have you ever noticed that rom-com moves sit right at the edge of stalker-y ones? I was sure you weren’t coming on purpose.”
I thought I’d been rerouted after the car theft, but now I understood.
Dad. This wasn’t a bad omen, exactly, but it sure didn’t mean good things were coming.
My father likely answered the phone the day you called Papa Angelo’s.
He had ideas about me and boys, ones that were different from the ideas he had about my brothers and girls.
Ideas that people, men-people, were supposed to be done with by now, but weren’t done with.
The sad and horrible thing was, it didn’t seem like they ever would be done with those ideas.
How weird, this emphasis on our breasts and lower halves.
Just leave us alone, you know. What are you so afraid of? Our real power is a lot higher up.