26
EVEN HEMORRHOIDS HAVE THEIR USES
Jordan sat erect in the passenger seat, hands
flat on the dashboard in front of her as if she could push the car
forward from within. She was practically vibrating in
panic.
“I’m really worried. She’s not even
answering her phone anymore.”
“We’ll get there soon,” Grace told her
in an even voice. “It’s not that far.”
Jordan wished she could have found
anyone else to help her. Grace seemed to be making a big show of
being calm. Or maybe she was calm, which
was even more irritating. “I know what you’re thinking,” Jordan
told her. “You’re thinking that Heather’s just some sort of freak.
Not worth the trouble. Because of that other time.”
“That’s not what I was thinking. I’m
anxious for her. That’s why I’m doing this.”
A stiff moment of silence
followed.
“She’s not tripping, either, if that’s
what you suspect,” Jordan said. “Just because she stole a couple of
egg rolls doesn’t mean she’s a junkie.”
“I never said—”
“She might have something really wrong
with her, like a disease, or food poisoning—people die of that,
right?”
The light turned green and Grace
accelerated again, but not as fast as Jordan would have liked. She
sighed impatiently.
“She’s not going to die,” Grace
said.
Jordan snapped her gaze toward that
composed profile. “How do you know? I was talking to her. She
sounded really bad. It’s not like people
never die!”
“Right, but—”
“People I know
die,” Jordan said. “Maybe you’ve heard—I’m a curse.”
Grace frowned but didn’t say anything
for a second. “I hadn’t heard that, and I wouldn’t have believed it
if I had. It’s nonsense.”
“Oh, sure. When you’re cozying up to
Dominic and Lily and Dad, they never mention me.”
“Of course they mention you, but no
one’s said you were a curse. Not to me.”
“Well, I am, okay?” Jordan swallowed
past a lump of fear in her throat. “I might even be a murderer,
which is what Lily calls me. If it hadn’t been for me, my mom and
Nina would still be alive. You knew that,
didn’t you?”
“I’ve never heard anyone say you were
responsible.”
“You know why Mom and Nina were driving
down that road in the first place? To retrieve me, the family
delinquent. Because I’d been arrested.”
“Why?”
“It was all so stupid! My family was at
this dumb Hill Country lake house my mom had rented for spring
break. It was so boring there. But I’d met a few kids in town, and
we were driving around one afternoon and there was this dairy farm
in the middle of nowhere. On both sides of the gate to this farm
there were these wood cutout cows—cutesy cows, like for an
advertisement. So these guys I was with decided it would be
hilarious if we moved the cows to make it look like they were
humping. Which is what we did—and it wasn’t easy.
“But then, just as we were finishing,
the owner drove up and the guys jumped in their car and just left
me there. And the farmer called the police, who came and picked me
up. They caught the other guys, too, and eventually we all ended up
waiting at the sheriff’s office ten miles away. That’s where I
called Mom from . . .”
She drew in a ragged breath. “And I was
still there later when they came and told me what had happened—that
Mom and Nina had been killed. Just a mile or so away from the
stupid humping cows. That’s what they probably saw before they
died. Maybe that’s even what Nina was thinking about while she bled
to death waiting for the ambulance to show up.”
Grace didn’t say anything.
“They told us she probably died right
before the ambulance arrived.” Jordan’s voice cracked, and she
stopped to swallow. “But it didn’t get there for twenty minutes. She was in that car with our mom for
twenty minutes, and Mom was—”
Grace interrupted. “You didn’t murder
anybody.”
Jordan pushed back against her seat and
squeezed her eyes shut. What was the matter with her? Why was she
spilling her guts to Grace? She hadn’t even told this much to the
therapist.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Grace said.
“You weren’t even there.”
Jordan scowled at her and began
punching numbers on her cell phone again. “You so don’t get
it.”
“It was an accident,” Grace said. “You
weren’t driving the car that hit them.”
“I might as well have
been.”
She angled away from Grace and watched
the city speed by as they drove along I-35’s access road. Heather
still wasn’t answering her phone, and Jordan almost missed the
turnoff coming up.
“Turn here!” she yelled, pointing so
late at the street that Grace almost had to do a U-turn to make it.
“It’s this little apartment complex up on the right.”
As soon as Grace pulled her clunky old
Subaru into the parking lot, Jordan jumped out of the car, ran to
Heather’s door, and knocked sharply. She tried the doorknob, but it
didn’t turn, so she pounded some more on the door itself.
“Heather!”
After a minute of this, the muffled
sounds of someone stirring inside came closer, and Heather finally
unlocked and opened the door. Her skin was a pale green, and
sweaty. It looked like her legs could barely hold her
up.
“Oh, God,” Jordan said, suddenly
frozen. Now that she was here, she didn’t know what to
do.
Grace stepped past her. “Heather, I’m
Grace. We’re going to take you to a doctor.”
“I’ll be fine . . .” Heather coughed
and wobbled and let out a groan of pain.
Grace surged forward and caught her as
she started to fall. “We’ll get you to the ER.”
“I might as well die,” Heather said,
bursting into tears. “I’ll die on my couch, next to Buns. Poor
Buns!”
Grace shot Jordan a questioning glance
over Heather’s drooping head. Rabbit,
Jordan mouthed back.
Heather’s moaning about Buns seemed
especially delirious because for weeks she had been whining about
how she couldn’t afford to take care of the rabbit and needed to
get rid of him.
“You need to get well to take care of
Buns,” Grace said in a kindergarten teacher voice. “We’ll take you
to the emergency room, but first we need to find your
purse.”
Heather lifted a limp arm to a chair
where her huge canvas bag had been thrown, its contents spilling
all over the seat cushion.
Grace scooped it up and directed them
to turn back toward the door.
They reached the hospital faster than
Jordan would have expected, and when they got to the ER with
Heather—who, as if on cue, puked as they stumbled through the
automatic doors—a nurse came to whisk her away. Grace and Jordan
stayed back to try to give Reception all the information they
could. Just as they were finishing up the paperwork, a doctor came
out and addressed Grace. “Mrs. Levenger needs an emergency
appendectomy.”
Jordan and Grace moved to surgery’s
waiting room. Jordan tried to act as calm as Grace looked, but
inside she was a quivering wreck. Heather can’t
die. That would be too awful. Heather was the only friend
she had. She treated her like an adult—she’d even started asking
Jordan to go out to nightclubs sometimes. Just last Saturday Jordan
had snuck out after midnight to go with Heather to see a band.
Heather had a crush on the lead singer of a group called Swingin’
Love Carcass. It hadn’t been much of a band, but it was fun to go
out like a real person. She was seventeen now, after
all.
And Heather was the one who had seen a
notice for a summer art program for high school students, at a
college in San Francisco. Jordan was going to apply, and Heather
had promised to write her a letter of recommendation. Jordan didn’t
want to spend another dreary summer in Texas. This winter had been
dreary enough. Christmas had been a joke. They’d gone out for
Indian food and exchanged perfunctory gifts almost as if they were
embarrassed to be acknowledging the holiday.
About the only thing grimmer than
Christmas had been her birthday, an occasion her dad had been
adamant about marking even though Jordan would have just as soon
skipped it. He’d acted almost manically determined to be nice to
her that day—almost as if someone had instructed him to. He’d even
brought home a cake from a bakery and insisted on singing “Happy
Birthday” to her. Everyone had gone along, a little dazed, but
during the song Lily had burst into tears and ended up running from
the room, and her father had sunk into his chair, looking defeated.
Jordan hadn’t been able to breathe, so she’d had to blow out each
of her seventeen candles individually. The first time she’d ever
blown out birthday candles all alone. Even Dominic, who usually
could inhale several pieces of cake before any presents were
opened, sat hunched over his plate as if the fluffy coconut cake
were made of mud.
Jordan had gone to bed that night
thinking of her mom, who used to make such a fuss over birthdays.
What would she have thought about their sad attempt at a
celebration? And of course, it was impossible to avoid thinking
about Nina, her partner in birthdays for as long as she’d existed.
How was she supposed to spend the rest of her life getting older,
passing milestones, while Nina remained stalled at sixteen forever?
Every birthday of her life would be a reminder of that other life
that had been cut short. All that potential, snuffed
out.
All her fault.
The surgery seemed to be taking
forever. Jordan got sick of brooding, worrying, and pretending to
read People magazine. She’d probably
flicked past the same article on Angelina Jolie fifteen times
already.
“It’s really good that you panicked
like you did,” Grace said, looking over at her. “You were right
to.”
Jordan felt a moment of
satisfaction—finally, she’d done something right!
Then her lips curled down and she
turned to Grace. “She was dying. Any idiot could tell
that.”
Grace leaned back and folded her arms.
“That apartment really smells. Maybe we should clean
it.”
“It’s pointless. I’ve cleaned it before
and within days it just goes back to the way it was. I should
probably take care of Buns, though. Would you mind swinging by . .
. once we figure out how the surgery goes?”
“No, of course not.”
After another hour, the surgeon came
out and told them that Heather’s surgery had gone well, she was in
recovery, and they could visit her that evening.
Back at Heather’s apartment, Grace
picked her way across the floor to the kitchen while Jordan went
back to find Buns. The poor animal was hovering in the corner,
thumping his back foot on the floor of his filthy cage, which was
out of food and almost out of water. She unhooked the plastic water
bottle from the bracket that held it to the cage bars and went to
the kitchen.
“I’m taking the rabbit with me,” Jordan
announced as she leaned around the open cabinet door to reach the
sink.
Grace gave no indication of having
heard her. “Where are the garbage bags?”
“There are none. Heather doesn’t
believe in them.”
She straightened. “How can you not
believe in garbage bags?”
“They’re not eco-friendly, because
they’re made from petroleum or something.”
Grace’s mouth twisted. “Does she have
paper bags?”
“Nobody’s had paper bags since, like,
1940.”
“But—” Grace looked around, seeming
almost more hysterical over the lack of garbage bags than she had
when they’d been driving Heather to the hospital.
“You don’t have to clean,” Jordan told
her again. “She wouldn’t want you to.”
“Everybody feels better in a clean
apartment.”
“Not Heather. If you’ll just help me
load up the rabbit cage, we can blow.”
“Jordan—”
“What?” Jordan
shouted back. “I didn’t ask you here so you could start doing your
Hazel routine. I just came to get the
rabbit. I told you that, remember?”
Grace lifted her arms and then let them
flop back at her sides, a gesture that struck Jordan as being
really irritating.
“What is it with you?” Jordan
asked.
Grace rounded on her in surprise. “With
me?”
“It’s not like I can’t see what’s going
on, you know.”
“Oh—I can’t wait to hear this,” Grace
said. “Tell me. What’s going on?”
“You’re just trying to suck up, which
is probably why you volunteered to help in the first place. Now you
can go back and tell my dad that you really saved the day, and
he’ll be so grateful.”
Grace just stood there with her hands
in fists at her sides, her mouth working open and shut like a
guppy’s at feeding time. “You asked for my
help—for the second time. Against my better judgment, I haven’t
said a word about the Chinese restaurant. I’ve barely spoken to
your dad since your little Thanksgiving tantrum. So if you don’t
trust me now, that’s your
problem.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Jordan said, turning
to go get Buns.
From behind her, Grace called out, “You
do realize that you make it hard for anyone to like you, don’t
you?”
“Thank you, Miss Broken Record of
2011.” Jordan turned. “You do realize I don’t care whether anyone
does or not, don’t you?”
There went the guppy face again. But at
last Grace stopped and shook her head, sighing. Surrendering. “Just
grab the flippin’ rabbit and let’s get out of here.”