Dark Water - Laura McNeal [33]
“She told you that?”
“Well, no. I looked it up after we talked. But she talked intelligently about gametes and zygotes.”
“How romantic.”
“In another situation, maybe.”
“So do you like her or what, Robby?”
“Mais non, ma cousine. I couldn’t like someone who had affairs with married men. The main thing is to get her to like me.”
“No offense, but why would a college girl like a guy in high school?”
“Why would a college girl like my dad?”
“Okay, so if she does like men who are either much too old or much too young, then what?”
“I’ll tell her what I think of her.”
At home, not even the appearance of three more silk eggs improved the mood between my mother and me as we went to the store together, sat in the cottage together, ate our canned soup together, and continued, without interest, our old sorority house ways—beds unmade, dishes unwashed, the fun of it gone because it was not a vacation but our lives.
On Thursday night, I wrote a note to Amiel, wrapped it in a plastic bag, then hid it in the underground box where I knew he would go in the morning to turn on the sprinklers in the grove.
Friday came, and I sat in the Oyster car with the windows open. Dew glazed the Icelandic poppies that held their platter faces to the gloom. Bits of morning fog fell very slowly, like petrified rain.
At the usual time, I heard the whirring of his wheels. Amiel parked his bike in the regular place, and I watched him in the rearview mirror until he retrieved the sprinkler key. Then Robby came out of his house and tossed his backpack into the car. “Are you feeling especially well grounded this morning?” he asked.
“I am,” I said, unable to see Amiel or the sprinkler key or the plastic-wrapped letter. I breathed eucalyptus air and fog.
“Guess what I’m doing tonight?” he asked, exhaling mint and Listerine.
I saw a white-shirted flicker in the darkness of the trees. I didn’t ask Robby what he was doing tonight, but he told me anyway.
“I have a le date,” he said.
Robby was not a person who dated. He was a person who received phone calls from girls and never returned them, not even if they were honor roll, flute-playing girls from Advanced Orchestra class who wanted to practice the “Shepherd’s Lament” for the state competition in Sacramento, and I would have thought he’d like those girls.
“Please tell me it’s not MBF,” I said. I was listening to what I imagined were Amiel’s feet compressing layers of sodden leaves, never turning his face to the car where we sat, his body intent on grove work. I pictured him leaning down to open the water valves, seeing the letter in the plastic bag, picking it up.
Robby said mildly, “Okay. It’s not MBF.”
My mother came rushing out of the cottage with her commuter cup, purse, and keys, and off we went, past the avocado grove, through fog that obliterated people and things. I went to school without knowing whether Amiel had found my letter, but I felt pretty sure it was MBF that Robby was dating and that Robby had moved beyond the comic-book adventures of Tintin and his little dog Snowy into a weird father-son triangle of doom.
Twenty
I won’t tell anyone anything.
I won’t bother you.
The note said these things in Spanish:
No voy a decir nada a nadie.
No voy a molestarle.
I didn’t sign my name but drew a little oyster holding a pearl—a code I’d been using with Greenie since fourth grade.
Midway through first period I became convinced that Esteban would find the letter before Amiel arrived and show it to my uncle. In second period, I imagined my uncle walking through the grove with Amiel to show him some problem or another, and they would get to the water valve and my uncle would see the bag with the note in it and pick it up. It would look much worse than it was: nothing to nobody. As if there was something big to tell.
All the time that I was thinking this and failing to write, correctly, the initials of the noble gases or compare and contrast, coherently, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” with “Because