You first, p.18
You First, page 18
I think: eighty-seven percent success rate. I think: Jay and me, happy in our wildly fulfilling new jobs, clinking mimosas on our Golden Guys lanai as the morning sun glints off our matching Lev-B bands.
“Absolutely,” I say.
“Good, then.” Lynette takes her checkbook from the top drawer of her desk and flips it open.
“What are you doing?”
“Writing you a check to cover the cost.”
“Why?”
“Because I can afford it. And you can’t.” Her hand trembles slightly as she fills it out. “She’s expensive. But worth it, reportedly.”
“I can’t take your money.”
“Of course you can.”
“Shouldn’t it be for your grandchild?”
“I’m not giving you my damned life savings, Levon.” She signs her name with a flourish. “I’ll make more.”
“Yeah, but—I’m not even that good a neighbor.”
She makes a chh sound. “How many times have you gotten the voles out of my garden? Talked the mice from my basement? Helped shoo the roaches from Randi’s apartments?”
“I don’t know. A bunch.”
“And how many dollars have you charged me?”
“Zero, but it was—”
“Consider this a back payment, then. For services rendered.”
“I don’t want to take advantage.”
She presses her lips together, crosses her arms across her chest.
“Are you implying,” she says, “that I don’t know when I’m giving a gift, and when I’m being taken advantage of?”
“No! I only meant I’d feel bad…you know…not because I think you’re…”
She lets me twist, eyebrow up and a tiny grin on her face.
“If it makes you feel better, you can pay it off sometime,” she says. “I’ve got six bookshelves I’ve been meaning to alphabetize.”
I bow my head. “Thank you, Lynette.”
“You’re welcome, friend.”
She takes an envelope from her desk and shimmies a monogrammed notecard out. She slips the check inside the notecard, sticks both of them back in the envelope, and seals the flap with a gold foil seal.
“Give this to Ms. O’Callaghan at the end,” she says. “And Levon?”
“Yes.”
“I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
***
Later, when we’re both in our bathroom and Jay pulls me into a hard desperate kiss that’s supposed to make the past three days vanish, I already know I’m not going to tell him the truth about my trip. I’m going to make up a guilty lie, leave town with a secret for the first time. My last-ditch effort to level up will happen in the shadows, away from the harsh glare of his hope and trepidation. I will evolve. Transform. Under C.C. O’Callaghan’s top-secret tutelage, I will become cool and courageous and capable, and Jay and I will live the rest of our blissful lives in whatever pastel monstrosity he wants, the unease of this year a lost memory.
What’s a little lie now, if it locks in our future?
then
“Do you hate these sheets?” Jay said. “Tell the truth.”
I did. I hated the pineapple sheets the second he’d spotted them at Goodwill. But he was wrapped up in them, and I was wrapped up in him, so I said, “No!” and then dutifully swore on my mother’s eyes when he asked me to. It was our six-month anniversary of moving in together, and we were still new enough to celebrate every landmark with bakery cupcakes and epic sex.
“Let’s never lie to each other,” he said, which is the kind of thing you say when you’re twenty-three and so in love you don’t care that your partner eats jam right out of the jar and has never closed a cereal box in his life.
“Never,” I agreed, but part of me knew I was lying right then.
At twenty-five, he lied about liking climate change documentaries, and watched three of them with me before he burst into tears and asked me how I could stomach such gloom.
At twenty-eight, I lied when he asked me if I thought his high school friend Candace was hot (she was) and if I ever missed being with girls too (I did, sometimes).
At thirty-two, he lied about his super-lessons and what he could do, and I lied to myself and him when I said it didn’t matter.
We told ourselves the lies were always for good, to soothe each other and paper over the cracks in our relationship before they got too big.
I hoped—still hope—we were right.
now
“Have an okay time with your dad,” Jay says from his perch on the kitchen counter. “You sure you don’t want me to come? I can call in sick—”
“No, no.” I hide my guilty face in the fridge as I grab a leftover juice box for the road. “We’ll be fine. She just needs someone to hang out with him. So he takes walks and doesn’t eat Cheerios the whole time.”
“Well, tell your mom to have fun. Ooh, tell her to go to Caffe Vittoria! That place where Jeremiah used to get the cannoli?”
“Yeah, yeah! I’ll let her know.”
Why couldn’t I have come up with a better lie? Ma said she’d go along with it, but she’s never been to Boston, and I know she won’t work on her story. Next time he sees her she’ll tell him something absurd, like how she and Aunt Angela ate baked beans at a Red Sox game.
Speak of the devil and she honks outside.
“Call me.” Jay slides off the counter. “Or, you know, text.” Sheepishly, he fumbles his brand-new phone from his pocket. His mom got it for him when she heard about the interview, and he accepted the gift, though he still hasn’t peeled the plastic protector off the screen.
We hug and kiss goodbye. It’s a bit awkward. We’ve been dealing with everything—our fight, Florida, the future—by not dealing with it, quietly sliding all our chips on the chance that an eleventh-hour miracle will come along and everything will somehow be fine.
After C.C., it will be.
I have to believe.
***
My mother drives me to the train station with a parakeet on her shoulder.
Cheep-cheep-twitter-cheep, says the bird, over Ma’s Linda Ronstadt CD.
“Bella-Boo says she hopes you have a safe trip,” says Ma.
“Thanks,” I say to the bird. “When I come back, who knows? I might be able to understand her.”
My mother nods slowly.
“I mean, it’s possible,” I say.
“It is. Yes.”
“Whatever.” I roll my eyes and stab my straw into my juice box, because I am forever thirteen with her.
“Well, what do you want me to say?”
“I kind of thought you’d be hopeful. Or at least proud.”
“I am, polpetto! Extremely proud. Would I have lent you the train money if I wasn’t? I never thought you’d do something like this.” She side-eyes my Cranapple Cooler. “I just want you to manage your expectations.”
“Did you know the lost sequel to Great Expectations was Managed Expectations?”
“Literary jokes. Just like your father.”
“What does Dad think about this?”
“I didn’t tell him! Are you cuckoo? He’d worry too much over nothing.”
“Yeah. Good call,” I admit.
“Not that there aren’t horror stories. Your Aunt Angela dated a man who had a sister whose son went to one of these secret, off-the-grid super workshops, and he ended up in a bathtub in Queens, minus his superband and his left kidney.”
“Thanks, Ma.”
“What? I’m not telling you that to scare you. It doesn’t hurt to be vigilant, that’s all.”
“Because I’m typically so breezy and unguarded.”
“Oh, I know you’ll be safe. And if Lynette recommended her, I’m sure it’s fine. She seems like a very serious woman.” The parakeet cheeps on her shoulder as Ma pulls into the station. “See, Bella-Boo says lighten up! Don’t worry.”
Too late. I am now picturing C.C. O’Callaghan: a tattooed Amazon with a cattle prod in one hand and a rusty scalpel in the other, ready to reap a nonessential organ from anyone who fails her succession of tests. The train station looms into sight. Other anxieties bubble up. The prospect of a seatmate with tuna breath and a bombardment of hypotheses about fantasy football. That three-year-old news story about the passenger train that jumped the track on an overpass and killed a dozen people. The very idea of the train bathroom.
I can’t do this. There’s no way.
“Second thoughts,” my mother clucks. “What did I tell you, Bella-Boo?”
“Goodbye, Ma,” I say, launching out of the car. Someday, years from now, she may reveal on her deathbed that she pecked at me only to motivate me, and part of me will perversely admire her methods, and when she’s gone I will find a clever but slightly evil pigeon to name Teresa in her honor.
***
“What’s up with you?” says my driver. “You sick or something?”
I am leaning forward in the back of his beat-to-hell Dodge, gripping the seat in front of me like a bug on a windshield wiper. The train ride to the Harlan Bluff vicinity was fine—two-plus hours of rhythmic chugging as I read a new library book. But now we’re doing sixty-two on a mountain road with no guardrails, a passage so winding you can’t tell where you’re going until you’re on top of each turn.
“F-fine,” I manage. “Not used to these roads.”
“Oh, this? Yeah, I call this one the Crazy Mouse. Enjoy the ride!” He chuckles and, appallingly, removes his hand from the steering wheel to point at the valley below us. “My fishing cottage is down by the stream. I call it Dave’s Place, see? Log cabin with the red roof? Oh look, there’s a deer family!”
I do not look at Dave’s Place or the deer. I fix my eyes on the double yellow lines as if my gaze will bind us to the road. My cell service dropped out ten miles ago, and my chest tightens every time I think about it. For the first time in thirteen years, I couldn’t call Jay if I wanted to.
“Ohhhhhh-kay, this is you.” The car swerves to the side of the road and screeches to a stop in a notch of gravel. A rusted white mailbox bears the number 144, the address of WildWords Talk Training. Beyond the mailbox, a rope bridge stretches above a rushing stream, swaying in the wind.
I start sweating like a Kool-Aid glass on the hottest day of summer.
“Could you, ah…hang out for a second? While I make sure this is the place?”
He eyes the rope bridge, calculating how long it’ll take a weirdo like me to creep across it.
“Can’t, buddy. Sorry. I got another pickup.” He points to the mailbox. “It says 144, though. That’s it.”
I pay the man and extract myself from his car with great reluctance. He squeals off in a spray of gravel. I take a breath and listen to the shushhhh of the stream and the twitter of far-off birds. The mountain air smells fresh and clean and also sinister, like a Yankee Candle scent called Ominous Seclusion.
I sling my black travel bag over my shoulder and grip the rope-railings. Maybe it won’t be so bad if I shuffle. If my feet never leave the bridge planks.
I reach out one foot and rest it on the bridge. It holds me. For now.
I put the other foot on. The bridge creaks and sways under my full weight. Oh god.
I swallow hard. Move my feet forward again, counting off my steps. One. Two. The planks hold. Repeat. One, two, one, two, don’t look down, oh god don’t let go of the ropes, that creaking sound is totally fine and no you won’t die in a rope-bridge accident on a remote mountainside because that would be absurd and you’re destined to die in a boring way, in your own bed while reading a presidential biography.
I’m doing this. I’m almost there. In three more baby steps I will officially be at the—
I squint to read the sign on the door.
COTTONTAIL NATURE CENTER.
Fuck.
I knock twice. No one answers.
I press my head against the door in despair. I did everything right and still ended up in the wrong place. Now I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere at a deserted nature center, with no cell service, a nearly-empty water bottle, and survival skills that begin and end with rubbing two sticks together theoretically makes fire. Who knows where the next outpost of civilization is? Night will fall soon and I will be forced to take to the woods, foraging for berries and making a shelter out of my t-shirts like that lady on the shipwreck show. C.C. O’Callaghan, her tattooed fists flexing as she surrenders all hope for my arrival, will whittle an effigy of me and toss it into a fire, muttering ancient curses. I will wake up covered in boils and frogs and, somehow, seagull poo.
I slam my fist against the door. It feels good, so I do it again. And again.
Then it opens.
The door’s sudden absence makes me fall forward and stumble. I grab on to a coat rack as a small chipper voice says:
“Did you knock before? I’m so sorry. I didn’t hear you.”
I right myself and find a tiny aging white lady blinking at up me through pink cat-eye glasses. Her friendly powdered face is framed by a cloud of peach-colored hair frosted with white. She’s wearing a pink button-down shirt, a bright green cardigan, and faded jeans decorated with pawprint appliqués.
“I was looking for WildWords Talk Training?”
“You found it.” Puzzled, she opens the door again and peeks at it. “Oh! I forgot to turn the sign. Sorry, hon.” She turns it, even though I’m already here. “It’s a nature center, except when I book clients. Have to keep busy between trainings, you know.”
“Right.”
“You’re Levon?”
“Yes.” I shake her hand. “You’re…?”
“C.C. O’Callaghan.”
I nod like of course you are, no ageist assumptions here.
“You were expecting someone else,” she says.
“Me? No.”
“It’s okay! My reputation precedes me, but my photos don’t.” She makes a funny face, the kind a kid might make at a monkey in the zoo. “I’m sixty-three, according to my mirror, but my brain is forty-one and my spirit is twenty-four.”
Hoo boy. She’s one of those. I look around the lobby for further evidence of flakiness, but I see no crystals and incense, just a collection of framed forest-animal woodcuts and a candy dish shaped like a flattened frog.
C.C. hangs my bag on a hook. “And you’re from…”
“Downstate. Near Middletown,” I hedge, my dad’s cautiousness taking my reins.
“That’s a hike.”
“It wasn’t so bad.”
“I like that spirit. Follow me, would you, Levon? I was in the middle of a feeding when you knocked.”
I’m not sure about C.C. O’Callaghan yet and I don’t like the sound of a feeding, but I dutifully follow her into the next room. It’s a roomy space that looks like the nature center where I passed out in fifth grade while watching an owl devour a rat. Worn floorboards, displays of snake skins and animal tracks, wood-paneled walls adorned with posters like FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEMS and MILESTONES OF VERTEBRATE DEVELOPMENT. Lining the walls are about a dozen large, well-kept tanks occupied by various animals: hedgehogs, salamanders, a box turtle, a couple toads, and a battered iguana who, if this were an animated film, would be the silent brute with a past who dispenses sudden wisdom at a crucial moment. C.C. flits from tank to tank, feeding the animals and chattering to them. I hover near the toad tank. Am I supposed to join in? What if this is my first test, and I’m already blowing it?
“So, ah…” I watch C.C. distribute mealworms to the salamanders. “Is this the seminar room, or…?”
“Oh, no no! You won’t be spending much time in here.”
“No?”
“These guys are my buddies; I don’t make them work for me. We’ll be in the back room. Isn’t that right, Ted?” she says to the iguana.
I see a stark white door at other end of the room. The door says PRIVATE. I shiver. It’s possible a cattle prod could still be involved.
“Oh, wow. Did you hear that, Levon?” C.C. shakes her head. “I apologize.”
“Hear what?”
“Ted insulted you a little bit. Don’t mind him. I ran out of kale and he’s being a grumpus.”
“It’s okay,” I assure her. “Even if I heard, I wouldn’t have understood.”
C.C. stashes the mealworm container in a mini-fridge and walks over to me. She takes my hands in hers and studies my superband. It feels uncomfortably intimate, like when the barber stoops in front of you and inspects your face to see if he’s snipped your hair evenly.
“You’re a Level-D, then?” she says.
I nod. “Like, mid- to low-level. My hearing’s only good for about fifteen feet max. And I can only talk to a few animals. Mostly pests.”
“No, no. We don’t say pests around here. Every animal has a purpose.”
I sigh internally. I’ll be getting an earful about the quiet dignity of fire ants before the workshop’s done.
“That’s true,” I concede. “So I’m hoping I can level up. There’s an opportunity coming up that I want to take advantage of…well, ‘take advantage’ is a bad way to put it. I mean…what I want is…”
I trail off. She looks at me as if my ears have sprouted daisies.
“Who recommended me to you, if you don’t mind? Just curious.”
“Oh—a woman I know. My, ah, landlady…?” It occurs to me that I have no clue exactly how Lynette stumbled across her. I guess I look uncomfortable because C.C. lifts a hand.
“It’s all right. I’m off the grid, so people find me in all sorts of ways. Not all of them easily discussed. Let’s take a load off, okay?” She steers me toward a small table in the corner with a plate of cookies on it. “I like to have a chat with my clients before our work starts.”
I perch on the edge of a wobbly old chair with a needlepoint seat. C.C. plops down across from me.
“You can sit on the whole chair,” she says. “That’s what it’s there for.”
“Sorry. I’m nervous.”
“Oh, jeez. And I haven’t even brought out the grizzly bear yet.” She laughs at whatever my face just did. “Joking! I’m joking. Pecan sandie?”
