Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [99]
Mark comes over all the time. He hangs out with Thad so I can work out or grocery shop or have some time to work on The History uninterrupted—that is, when he can make it in or I can make it out—because the paparazzi have just about tripled in numbers around the house. Mark and I are tighter now than we’ve ever been. He really goes the limit to make things cool for Thad. And sometimes I think he’s met someone but if he has it will take him a while to get around to telling me.
We’re getting a lot more foreign press now, and thick outcroppings of protestors and supporters, and God-knows-what-all people hanging out in the streets, including all those oracle seekers, so I’ve had to start looking for a place to move to with Thad, and that has me thinking about colleges in different areas. I don’t know. Sometimes I think Europe, the Netherlands. Sometimes I just want to write the History.
Once things settle down, I want to do whatever it takes to give my parents a proper burial, even if that means breaking into Caesar’s headquarters for Tommy and robbing the graveyard where Allison is photographically interred—or inhumaned, as some call it. Both Uber and Mark say they’re up for that, and they’d be happy to recruit some friends to help out.
I’ve had a stream of offers coming my way, so I don’t answer the phone much. Movie deals, clothing line, TV series, a tell-all book, my own column in Glad Rag. I know Thad would like it if I’d accept the gaming offer because they told him they’d put him in the game as the Living Oracle, before I grabbed the phone from his hands.
Thad doesn’t ask for Mom as much now, or maybe I should say not in the same way, as if she’s stepped out to the store and he’s expecting her home any minute. But I’m not sure if he’ll ever understand that they’re firmly anchored in two different worlds now. Sometimes after I’ve washed his quilt we just sit with our backs against the dryer, the fabric going round and round, and I tell him all the stories he wants to hear about Allison and the fathers. I don’t say this to him, of course, but sometimes I think we’ll always be in mourning.
Most of the time the house is drowning in quiet, no matter how I blast my operas, and Allison’s bathroom door remains locked. When Thad goes to bed, I move from one area of the house to another as if one of them might contain a room with sleep, which they rarely do. Even though I dismantled the Living machine, a couple of times I’ve imagined Allison moving from room to room looking for her unfinished letters so she can tear them up and start over. I like to think that if she had stuck around, we would have talked about how stupid and selfish we were, how lost. I think we could have gotten through all of it and laughed at the total inanity. But who knows.
Uber has his own troubles. His mother had to put his father into a managed-care facility shortly after the trauma of charity night. And Uber has also hired attorneys, who sometimes work in conjunction with mine, to see that we don’t end up back in the arena together. His contracts, including the ones for endorsements, are absolutely contradictory and will keep his team busy for some time to come.
When Thad went upstairs to get his beach ball this morning, Uber dropped the lid on the picnic basket and said, —Maybe we should go out to dinner sometime, just the two of us.
I continued to wash the dishes as if I hadn’t heard him over the running water, because I still feel pulled in two by the whole thing. Finally, I dried my hands and then I showed him the stack of college catalogs I’ve been poring over, including the low residency programs and those abroad. He seemed to accept this pretty easily, I mean, all he said was, —Okay, I understand.
I watched him open the basket