16
GOOD MORNING
For the first painting class, Jordan started out
early. The studio was located in one of the farther-flung ACC
campuses and she had to catch two buses to get there.
It would have been so much simpler if
she could drive. Well, she could drive—that
is, she knew how—but she didn’t have a license. The thought of
driving made her ill now. Nina had always been wild to get behind
the wheel, which is probably why she’d volunteered to drive their
mom last spring, the day of the accident.
The whole thing had played out in
Jordan’s head so many times. It was like a short film she’d pieced
together from scraps of her own memory, what Lily had told her, and
a police report. Some details she’d filled in herself, from her
imagination, just from knowing her mom and Nina.
On a Friday afternoon in March, while
all the family except their dad were on a spring break vacation in
the country, Jordan had been forced to call home just before
dinner. Their mom had been making a pizza, aided by Lily, who had
answered the phone first.
“What’s going on?” Lily had asked,
sensing something odd in Jordan’s voice.
“Just put Mom on,” Jordan had told her
in a clipped voice.
Lily had done as asked, and then had
come the confession, spoken by Jordan in a wobbly but defensively
pissed-off voice. “Mom, I’m at the police station.”
She’d given a brief, humiliating
explanation right there in the middle of a bunch of cops and other
people standing around, who were all staring at her as the dumb
story came out. Knowing that she had an audience, Jordan had
responded with growing exasperation to her mom’s sputtered
questions.
“Look, I’m sorry, okay? Can you just
come get me? Please?” she’d asked her mom in her most irritable
voice.
The last words she’d ever spoken to her
mother.
After hanging up, her mom had
instructed Lily to carry on with the pizza preparation but to hold
off actually putting it in the oven for another thirty minutes or
so. Lily had probably been delighted to be left in charge. Her mom
had then taken the keys off the hook by the door and was just about
to step out when Nina came racing in, volunteering to drive her mom
wherever she was going. Lily had reported that their mom hadn’t
given anyone any details about Jordan’s call, but after a moment’s
thought she’d looked glad to have Nina along.
After that, Jordan could only imagine.
Nina would have gone around to the driver’s side of the Jeep and
driven very carefully on the rural roads. On the way to town, she
would have asked their mom what was going on, which their mom would
have told her because Nina was mature and responsible—the only one
their parents ever really confided in. Maybe she would have asked
Nina for advice on how to get Jordan under control. And Nina would
have been sympathetic to their mom’s frustration yet taken Jordan’s
side, too, and tried to smooth things over. Nina had always been
the peacemaker.
They would have been deep in
conversation when they rounded the curve and found the truck coming
straight at them. The truck had been passing another vehicle
illegally. DO NOT CROSS DOUBLE YELLOW LINES IN
YOUR LANE TO PASS, the signs read, and the truck was in the
wrong lane. According to the police, both vehicles had been going
approximately sixty miles per hour.
And now came the part Jordan replayed
most often in her mind, over and over, a constant loop of torment:
The instant of surprise and fear in Nina’s eyes as a truck barreled
toward her, then a sickening impact of crushing metal and
shattering glass, then intense pain, then semiconsciousness during
the eternal wait for an ambulance, their mom already dead in the
seat next to her, the paramedics arriving just as Nina’s world
turned to dark.
When Jordan told people she didn’t want
to drive now, most who knew her would nod in sympathy. They
remembered the collision, and probably thought she was afraid to
get behind a wheel. Afraid.
It wasn’t fear that made her not want
to drive. It was shame. Nina should be the
one who was alive—Nina, the best of all the Wests. And their mother
should still be with them, too, taking care of Dominic and Lily and
playing piano and feeding birds and being the only woman their dad
had ever loved.
If she lived to be a hundred, she would
have to endure this pain of having lost everything—her mom, her
sister and best friend, the love of what family she had left.
Everything. And it was all her fault.
She’d left the house way too early. But
that was okay. She’d be able to talk to Jed while he was setting
up. She imagined he’d have the music cranked and he would be
slurping some coffee from a battered mug. Jed was a natural-born
teacher. He might put on a cranky curmudgeon act, but he was always
full of energy in class, as if being around students gave him some
kind of performance buzz.
She was so early that she had time to
swing by a coffee shop and buy a to-go cup and a couple of stale
doughnuts. Jed would like that. He was one of those bearish-looking
guys who didn’t mind that he had a gut.
She walked into the community college
building, loving all the smells of paints and glues and turpentine
that made art seem a little like alchemy. She got to her classroom,
dropped all her stuff at a place close to the door, and was a
little surprised by the quiet. She peered around the forest of
empty easels until she spotted a lone seated figure with blond
cornrowed hair slumped over a table at the front of the class. It
was a woman, and she was zonked.
What should she do? Wake the person up?
Call security and inform them that a strange lady had crashed in
Jed’s classroom?
Where was Jed?
The woman snorted, shaking herself out
of sleep, and then raised her head and examined Jordan through red
puffy eyelids. She wasn’t wearing any make-up, and her blotchy skin
still bore the traces of sheet line. Her pale eyebrows blended in
with her skin, and together with her blue eyes gave her a forlorn
look.
“Is it time for class?” she asked
Jordan.
“It’s . . .” Jordan didn’t know what to
say. “Where’s Jed? He’s teaching the painting class, isn’t
he?”
“What gave you that idea?”
“Because his name was on the schedule?
Levenger?”
The woman sat back in her chair with a
sigh and combed a finger through her cascade of snaky braids.
“I’m Levenger,” she said. “Heather Levenger
. . . much as I wish I weren’t.”
“Oh.” Jordan’s disappointment was so
sharp she couldn’t have hid it if she’d wanted to. She’d been
looking forward to being in Jed’s class. That was the whole
point.
The woman smirked. “Don’t tell me . . .
one of Jed’s groupies?”
Jordan shook her head. “No—I had him in
a class once. I just liked him.”
“Yeah, so did I. Once.” Heather
narrowed her puffy eyes on the cup Jordan held. “Where did you get
that coffee?”
“I bought it down the
street.”
“Oh.” The woman sagged. “I thought
maybe it was free.”
Maybe because she worried that she
would have to spend the next three hours with a near-comatose
instructor if she didn’t, Jordan offered the cup to
Heather.
She raised a barely-visible brow. “Are
you sure?”
“Yeah. I’ve had a cup
already.”
Heather reached out her hands to take
the cup, looking almost moved to tears by the gesture. “Thank you
so much.”
Jordan looked in her bag. “I got a
couple of doughnuts, too. One cakey one with chocolate, and a
cruller.”
A childlike gleam appeared in her
teacher’s eyes. “Oh . . . cakey chocolate?”
Jordan handed it over and Heather took
a bite and washed it down. She started to look less like the
undead. Watching her, Jordan had an odd feeling in her chest—the
same feeling she’d had when she and Nina had dropped off gifts for
a giving tree for the underprivileged at Christmas. That little
glow of maybe having made someone’s day slightly
better.
She offered her the other doughnut,
too, but Heather shook her head. “No—thank you. My ass is already
as big as a barn.”
Jordan doubted this was true. Although
the crinkly skirt she was wearing probably didn’t help
matters.
Heather tilted her head and eased her
hand toward the bag. “I might just take the other one for later.
Would that be all right?”
Jordan didn’t want to say no. She was
still trying to think when she’d ever heard an adult talking about
her ass in front of her, and actually using that word. Maybe
never.
She took it as a sign of respect. At
least Heather didn’t see her as just a high school
dweeb.
“So Jed never mentioned me?” she asked.
“Jordan West?”
Heather sent her a blank stare. “You
were at that camp thing he did?”
“Yeah.”
The woman shrugged. “No, but to tell
you the truth, last summer is when we were hitting rock bottom,
relationship-wise. We separated in September. Almost a year ago,
exactly . . .”
“Oh, well . . . it’s no big deal or
anything. I was just hoping . . .”
“I know—you were hoping for Jed.”
Heather sighed. “Well, you got me. I’m guessing that sucks. Which
reminds me, I’d better get going here. Got a class to teach. Would
you mind sweeping up a little? It looks like they had a shop class
in here or something. All this dust is a disaster with
oils.”
Usually having someone boss her around
like that was a huge turnoff. But something about this
woman—exhausted, abandoned, with crazy hair—made Jordan reach for
the broom. Heather was an artist living a real life. A kindred
spirit.
Heather was all alone too. Maybe the
oddballs of the world, like herself and Heather, just would never
fit in, not even with their own families. Maybe they had to find
families of their own, through friendship.
Jordan started sweeping.