Dark Water - Laura McNeal [14]
I watched the dirt road where Amiel still wasn’t riding in on his bicycle, and I touched the folded note that I hoped said, Where did you learn to juggle? not, Where did you learn to deceive?
“Well, what are you thinking?” my father asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, because I couldn’t tell him about Amiel and I didn’t know how to ask why he had canceled our health insurance.
“Paris, France,” my father said to me from what felt like a faraway room. “This summer. I know someone who actually has a pied-à-terre in Paris, France, so you just need to tell me when you’re going to be finished with school, and I mean finished with the learning part—no need to stay for those days when everyone’s just signing yearbooks and flirting around.…”
I had an inkling about who owned the pied-à-terre, though I didn’t know if the someone was male or female, and I wondered what my dad thought my mother would do with herself while I was in Paris, France, with him and his mistress/mistredo. Maybe she would try to move into the fifth instar for human beings, which is I don’t know what.
“I have to go, Dad,” I said.
“Well, think about it,” he said.
“Okay.”
I pushed the End button as Amiel’s bicycle came humming through the iron arch. He saw me, lifted his fingers in a small wave, and coasted to a stop.
For a second, I couldn’t move or breathe. What is it about a person that makes him harmless to others and fatal to you, like a bee sting or a trace of peanut butter? I put the phone in my pocket and took out my folded message, but Amiel was already walking away to the grove, swinging the long metal prong he used to turn the sprinklers on.
“Amiel?” I said. I tried to say the name nicely, with Spanish vowels.
Amiel turned, so he wasn’t deaf, just like he said. I held out the piece of paper and he got a worried look. He glanced up at the house, and he turned the sprinkler key slowly in his hand like a baton.
“It’s nothing bad,” I said.
He took the paper and set the key down so he could unfold it. His shirt was a white and brown plaid, I remember, and I saw for the first time a sort of leather-thong necklace he wore around his neck. I’m not a fan of man jewelry, but this was man jewelry on Amiel’s neck, so I studied the disk of black stone lying warm on the soft spot between his collar bones and shivered again. I must have breathed in and out, though I’m not sure how. Amiel read the note or seemed to read it, and he looked up at Hoyt’s house again. He neither nodded nor shook his head at me while the purple jacaranda leaves remained supernaturally purple and the fog closed everything in. Amiel put the paper in his pocket and made the sign I had seen him make earlier, his hand in the shape of the letter C.
“¿Sí?” I asked, and he nodded. Before I could figure out what it meant to say “yes” in this situation, he had walked away.
Twelve
“What were you and Marcel Marceau le signing about?” Robby asked while we waited in the car for my mother to find her phone in the guesthouse and drive us to school.
“Were you camped out in the xylosma hedge again, Mr. Double-oh-seven?” I asked.
Robby just tapped on his backpack with his wide, flat fingers. I didn’t know why we were so rude to each other now. We’d been really good friends our whole lives, and now that I lived in his guesthouse, we sounded like Greenie Coombs and her brother, who bickered twenty-four hours a day.
“Who’s Marsell Marso, anyhow?” I decided to ask, hoping that would be non-hostile.
“You don’t know who Marcel Marceau is? Marceau was a French actor,” he deigned to tell me. “A hugely famous mime. That’s why I thought you’d know. Being so mime-freaked and all.”
There are times when being good-looking and intelligent make up for sarcasm and bitterness, but this was not one of those times.
“Amiel’s not just a mime,” I said. “He juggles.”
“It’s not his choice of self-expression that I’m worried about,” Robby said. “You probably shouldn’t flirt with him.”
“I wasn’t flirting!