Weird Girl and What's His Name Read online

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think she knows, either.”

  “But you did sleep together, right? I mean, I know you’d never tell Janet, ’cause she’s a square from Delaware, but come on. The two of you, alone up here. Your hormones are raging. Why not, right?”

  I jammed my hands in my pockets. Shrugged. “I don’t kiss and tell.”

  “Oh, fine. What do I care, anyway?” Chris stood up and stretched. She reached behind Lula’s desk to unplug her BlackBerry charger. “It’s just funny, that’s all. Well, maybe not funny. Lula’s father was gay. She didn’t know that, did she?”

  “No,” I said. “She didn’t know anything about him.” Wow. I wondered for a second if I heard Chris say what I actually thought she said. Did I just project myself weirdly into her speech somehow? I almost wanted to say, No, you misunderstood, Lula’s dad isn’t gay, I am. What did she mean? That Lula’s father was really, actually, gay? Was that why her mom left her? Was that why he left? Would it have changed anything if Lula had known?

  “Of course, her father didn’t figure it out until it was too late.” Christine stuffed the BlackBerry and its charger into her purse, a faraway look on her face. “Too late for him and me, anyway.” She looked up at me. “I guess that’s genetics for you, though. However you look at it. The kid’s either just like me, falling for her gay best friend. Or she’s just like him. Either way . . .” Lula’s mother trailed off. She zipped her purse decisively. I thought about Andy and his girls. Maybe Lula’s dad was like him. A guy from a small town, a conservative family. Maybe it took a little bit longer for him to figure himself out. Maybe he loved Lula, like Andy loved his daughters, but he couldn’t lead a fake life. I felt a weird pang of sympathy for Lula’s absentee dad.

  “Hey, is Janet still making pierogies?” Christine asked, changing the subject.

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s still literally trying to feed an army. You know who that guy downstairs is, right? With Leo?”

  “Um. No.”

  “Leo never told you about his legendary black-ops buddy Harry Kemp? It’d be right up your alley, all this X-Files government conspiracy stuff.” She picked up her duffel bag, stood it on its end, and latched it closed with expert speed. The bag was her only piece of luggage, and it was exactly like the one Lula had. Standard Navy issue. Leo must give them out at Christmas.

  “Anyway, they’ll find her. Harry’s the one who found me, all those years ago. She’ll probably be home before the week’s out. I wouldn’t worry anymore about Lula.”

  “So you’re leaving? Before she gets here?”

  “I have to get back. I’ve got a theater to run. Besides, Leo and I have just about maxed out our temporary peace treaty. I should leave before we end up in an unintentional reenactment of the infamous You’re-Wasting-Your-Life- With-This-Acting-Bullshit Battle of 1985.”

  “But, wait. What about—I mean, where do you even live? What if—” I stood there at Lula’s desk, bare without the computer. I felt my face go hot, angry. I wanted to shake this woman. I wanted her to unlock some mystery, to explain the pieces she’d left behind for Lula and me to decipher. I wanted her to show me how everything was supposed to fit. How could she expect to just show up here and throw out all these pieces, like telling me Lula’s dad was gay, drop these bombs and leave?

  “She’s been looking for you for so long. She . . . she Googles your name.”

  “Which name did she Google?”

  “Christine. Christine Monroe.”

  “Well, there you go. I’m easily found, if that’s what Tallulah wants. I’m in the Santa Fe phone book, just tell her to look under MacKelvey, not Monroe. And before that, I had to use a stage name, because there was already a Christine Monroe in the Screen Actors Guild. Why didn’t Janet and Leo tell her? I haven’t been Christine Monroe since high school.” She shook her head. “Google. Christ.”

  I couldn’t believe she didn’t understand. That Leo didn’t talk about her. Wouldn’t talk about her. That Lula’s room was the only place in this house where she existed anymore. Lula was the only one here who was keeping her alive.

  “What if she’s there right now? Waiting for you?”

  “My husband’s at home. He knows she might show up there. I’m not taking this as lightly as you think I am.”

  “I didn’t . . . I just wanted to know . . . I think Lula would want to know why you left her. She still keeps that bag of yours.” I nodded at the backpack on the shelf. “She’s read your books a hundred times. She practically worships you.”

  “I left her because I realized that I didn’t want to be a mother.” Chris shrugged. “Simple as that. Couldn’t and didn’t want to. Nothing against Lula—I was just too selfish. I knew I couldn’t get where I wanted to be and stand around being a mom, too. And then her father left, so, a single mom, forget it.” Chris leveled her gaze at me. “I think it’s better I gave her to someone who wanted to be there all the time, don’t you? Instead of dragging her around all over creation, like I was dragged all over creation when Leo was in active duty? That’s hard on a kid. I would’ve been too hard on a kid.”

  “You’re still her mother. You could at least call her or send her an email every once in a while.”

  “Rory, forgive my cliché, but when you get older, you’ll understand.” She reached over to Lula’s shelf for the backpack that Janet had put in its usual place. “My God, why did she keep this ratty old thing?”

  “Because it was yours.”

  “Ugh. This is a terrible picture.” Chris went through the bag, tossing everything out on the bed like it was nothing. Like these weren’t serious relics that had been pored over and contemplated and studied.

  “So that’s where my copy of Unseen Hand went. Liv Ullmann—did she actually read this? This is what she’s been worshipping all these years? A cheap Liv Ullmann memoir from the Strand? Good grief.” She laughed. “Be careful what you leave in the back of your closet. You never know when it might end up on a pedestal.”

  “She just wanted to know more about you.”

  “Well, when she comes home, maybe we can talk on the phone. I’m pretty busy, but maybe we could arrange a visit. Sometime next summer, if I’m not working in LA. Maybe the fall.”

  “Maybe you should just—” I wanted to say something sarcastic and awful, to make this woman feel as awful as I felt right now. I wanted to know what Lula would say. But my mind didn’t work that fast. Instead, I was gripped by the thought that I wanted that little knapsack and the books. They weren’t Christine’s anymore. She’d given them up. They were Lula’s, and I had to keep them safe for her until she came back.

  “Anyway, why is this all on me?” Christine went on. “Maybe she went to find her father. He’s over in Nashville—that’s, what, a couple hours’ drive from here? Maybe she Googled him. I told Leo, but he’s obsessed with this idea that she went to New York. Why wouldn’t a girl want to find her father?”

  I didn’t have an answer. If Lula had ever looked for her father, she never told me about it. Maybe she never mentioned it because she knew I didn’t like talking about my own dad leaving.

  “Maybe girls just need their mothers more,” I theorized.

  “She’s got a perfectly good grandmother downstairs,” Christine said, warily. “I mean, does Lula really need me, specifically, to explain the joys of the menstrual cycle?”

  “Then why did you bother coming here at all?” I said finally. “You don’t even care.”

  “I care,” she shrugged again. “I just don’t think it’s the dire situation you all make it out to be. She packed a bag. She’s off having adventures; let her have them. Anyway, Leo thought it would help if I came back.” She shrugged. “But, obviously, he was wrong.”

  “Obviously.”

  fourteen

  BACK IN MY ROOM AT HOME, I opened my notebook. Lula’s backpack sat on my desk; I told Janet I wanted to keep it for a little while, just until Lula came back. I took out Lula�
��s books, and began copying the underlined sections down in my own handwriting, in between pages of notes on end-arounds and wildcat plays. I never got to ask Christine if she was the one who underlined them, or if Lula did it herself. It didn’t matter. Either way, Lula knew these lines by heart, either way. There’s one section of An Actor Prepares that I kept coming back to. Where the director tells his acting students that they have to light a spark within themselves, that every person who’s really an artist desires to create a more interesting life than the one they have. Maybe that’s all Lula wanted. To create a more interesting life for herself, just like her mom did. Maybe we just weren’t enough to light her spark. I wasn’t, Sam Lidell wasn’t, Janet and Leo weren’t. Maybe Lula was on her way to Santa Fe, to finally meet her mom. Or maybe she was making a whole new exciting life for herself in New York or Seattle, someplace where they didn’t call her Weird Girl in the halls.

  The passage I copied down after that is from the Liv Ullmann book. The part where Liv and her daughter go back to the Swedish island where her ex-husband, the movie director Ingmar Bergman, lives in their old house with his new wife. She talks about how nothing in the house has changed, that even the furniture is all in the same place. She says: The circle is closed. Nothing ever comes to an end. Wherever one has sunk roots that emanate from one’s best or truest self, one will always find a home.

  It kind of reminded me of me and my mom. But it was also the passage that reminded me most of Lula. It made me hopeful that, someday, she’d find her way back home.

  LATELY I’VE BEEN FIGHTING OFF NIGHTMARES in my sleep. In the nightmares, I have to get home, because I know that I have to save someone—sometimes it’s Andy, sometimes it’s my mom. Once it was Janet and Leo. In the nightmare, I’m running through the woods, trying to get to wherever they are. But the woods turn into a football field. Suddenly there are giants everywhere, guys a hundred times bigger than me, impossibly huge, tackling me from all sides, dragging me down into the mud. The more I try to struggle, the harder they are to fight off. Just when I think I’m winning, I realize I’m sinking down into the turf, the mud slurping me under until I can barely breathe. I’ve been waking up drenched in sweat, exhausted, my sheets twisted in damp, sloppy ropes. Once, after one of these nightmares, I even called Andy. He didn’t pick up the phone.

  Sometimes I have this other dream, too. It started as a fantasy, something for my mind to idle on during the boring parts of Algebra II. But now I’m actually dreaming it at night. In the dream, I’m sitting in class, and there’s a knock on the door. It’s a man with a badge and a gun on his hip, and he tells me not to be afraid. He’s Agent Mulder, from the FBI, and he’d like to ask me some questions about my friend, Tallulah Monroe. I nod and tell him I have some ideas. We drive out past the community college. Past the cemetery. Past the woods. Out to Janet and Leo’s, where there’s a redheaded agent in Lula’s bedroom, already looking for clues. This is Agent Scully, Agent Mulder introduces. We shake hands. I tell her my friend Lula is a redhead, too. And Agent Scully starts to tear up. She has to look away. Agent Mulder pulls me aside and tells me that this case is personal to Agent Scully. He explains that Agent Scully is Lula’s mom. That she loves Lula and cares about her very much. But that she had to leave her here, with Janet and Leo, to keep her out of harm’s way. Because of the nature of her work. Their work. Agent Mulder puts his hand on my shoulder, and I tell him I understand. I tell him that I’ll do anything I can to help. I tell the agents to come with me, that I know a few places where the police haven’t looked. I take them back to my house. My mother isn’t home. The place is full of furniture, all askew. We make our way up to my room through a narrow path between end tables and easy chairs. And I find Lula there, sleeping in my bed. But, in the dream, the bed is like a lake. A deep pool of water where she sleeps beneath the surface. I lift her out of it, and her body is still. I kiss her, kiss her forehead and her red hair and her mouth until she coughs and spits and breathes again. I hold her close to me and I promise the agents that I’ll take care of her from now on. I tell the agents that their case is closed.

  Summer–Fall 2008

  Bloom Orphan

  one

  HAVE YOU EVER WATCHED SO MUCH TV that you feel like your eyeballs are burned out of their sockets? You’re sick in bed or something, and at first it’s fun, no excuses, no place else to go, you just lie there in your feverish daze watching the pictures swim. Or it’s raining out and you decide to stay in and watch movies all afternoon. But after a few hours, your body gets stiff and you start to lose your perception somehow. Like, the trees outside are a little too distant, and your own limbs don’t seem to move the way you want them to. You’re surprised to find that you’re real, that you’re moving around in some completely different world from the one you were just watching so closely. You’re real and your voice is too loud and your movements are all over the place. You look in the mirror, expecting to see someone else—this character you thought you were—but it’s just boring old you, same as ever.

  That was how I felt after I’d spent almost the entire weekend on an X-Files bender. Just lying in bed, going from one episode to the next, only getting up to pee and eat and change DVDs. When Rory and I used to watch it, we rationed it out. One episode every Friday night, exactly at 9 p.m.—just like when it was first on the air. With other shows we watched, we didn’t care—we’d throw in a Buffy or Star Trek: The Next Generation DVD on a Saturday night or a Sunday afternoon, whenever. But with X-Files, we wanted it to be as real as possible. We wanted to feel what it felt to be older, to have been watching the show when it was originally on. But more importantly, we wanted a sense of ceremony. The X-Files wasn’t just any TV show we were watching. It was our show. It was our escape hatch. It was our secret world. It spoke to our solitude, to that inescapable feeling we had that we were the only two people on this whole miserable planet who understood each other. And, in our minds, we were just as cool as they were—at least, we wanted to be.

  The other FBI agents on the show might have thought Mulder and Scully were losers, banished to their basement office, chasing after UFOs. But we knew better. Mulder and Scully had to deal with a lot of weird-ass situations, and they suffered their share of damages on their quest to find the truth, but they never lost their shit. They were the coolest of the cool. And, more than that, they had each other, even when it seemed like the rest of the world was out to get them. They were connected. It didn’t matter if Mulder and Scully weren’t officially boyfriend and girlfriend. They were beyond those kinds of labels. The connection they had was deeper than kissy-faces or pet names or making out in the back row of the auditorium during Special Assembly. It was the same kind of connection that we had. Rory and I. He was my Mulder and I was his Scully, or at least, I wanted to be. If I couldn’t be his girlfriend, then I wanted to be his soul mate, that one person that he confided in, that he trusted with his deepest, darkest dreams. But Mulder never went and got it on with his gay boss. Not unless you read Internet slashfic, anyway. And would he have told Scully about it if he did?

  But that was the Rory and me of four months ago, back before I left. Now I was back at Janet and Leo’s, and Rory wasn’t speaking to me and there was nothing else to do all weekend long, even if I had been allowed to leave the house. It was the sticky end of a rainy summer, steam coming off the pavement in thick waves, too hot to go outside. I’d read all the books I checked out from the library, and now I needed something to quell the air-conditioned boredom. I figured I’d work on the Guide, with or without Rory. Before I left, we were in the process of creating a comprehensive guide to every X-Files episode that ever aired. Rory was the best at it—the kid literally wrote epic poetry about Agent Scully. But now he was too busy doing the deed with his creepy boss to care about some TV show. Not to mention the whole not-speaking-to-me thing. Fine, then—I was no slouch. Who’s to say I couldn’t finish it by myself? The only problem was, I hadn’t seen an episode of The X-Files in months. I
had to get back in the loop.

  So I picked up where we left off, Rory and I. I watched the entire end of Season Three on Friday night. Spent Saturday watching Season Four and part of Season Five. Sunday was the rest of Season Five, then the first movie, and now it was time for Season Six. At this point, it was dark out again and I was hitting the fast-forward button from time to time, skipping a few episodes here and there. Truthfully, I was so fuzzed out on TV overload, I was starting to feel like I didn’t care if I never saw Mulder and Scully again. Guide or no Guide. But I had to keep going. I’m not sure why, but in the back of my mind, it had something to do with Rory, with proving some kind of point.

  I knelt down to put the Season Five DVDs away and start on Season Six. My ears buzzed in the artificial-feeling silence of my room. I could hear Janet and Leo downstairs. Leo was practicing his short game on his indoor putting green. I heard the tap of his putter against the ball, the faint pok! sound it made when the ball landed in the shallow plastic cup at the end of the narrow green felt.

  “She’s eighteen in a week. You can’t keep her under house arrest,” Janet said. I stayed very still, listening.

  “As long as she lives under this roof, she’ll go where I tell her to go and do what I tell her to do.” Pok! Leo hit another ball.

  “You’re not in the Navy anymore,” Janet said, pausing. I could almost see her, swirling her glass, taking a drink. “And I’ve already lost a daughter. I’m not going to lose my granddaughter, too.”

  “Now you’re being melodramatic.” Pok! “And it’s two different things. Chris abandoned her child. I’m supposed to condone that behavior? That’s not the way we raised her. That’s her own rebellion. I won’t have it.”

  “Yes, Leonard, you’ve made that abundantly clear. And I know you wanted to protect Lula from Christine’s irresponsibility, but you made it impossible for Chris to even try—”