Page 25

EIGHTEEN COURT LANE , or Dog Therapy

There was glass everywhere. And pie.

“We’re dead,” said Touchstone. “We’re dead, we’re dead, we’re dead.”

Glass across the porch. Glass inside the house. Glass in Henry’s dead plants I’d only just now realized how much we’d failed to water, and so they had turned brown and shriveled. Glass in the frog blanket; glass still trapped in the window, hanging like stalactites, like jagged teeth, like a booby-trapped tomb. Glass on the couch that we’d moved closer to the window the first morning, where Ros and I had once taken a tandem nap, sacked out like two dogs in a sunbeam, the summer spread lazy and endless before us.

“Shoes,” said Phoebe. “Who’s wearing shoes?”

Audrey was wearing shoes. Phoebe was wearing shoes. They spontaneously dematerialized and rematerialized with their arms full: Ros’s lace-ups, Touchstone’s Birkenstocks, my slip-on boots. My knees were weak. My body was numb. I’d thrown a pie at Ros’s head. I’d destroyed the Lily Pad. I’d destroyed the Lily Pad.

“Celia,” Phoebe said gently. “Put on your shoes.”

“You tried to kill me ,” said Ros.

“I think that’s a little dramatic,” said Phoebe.

“I didn’t—I wasn’t—”

“You could have taken my head off ,” said Ros.

“Really not sure that’s the case,” said Phoebe.

“I found a broom!” said Jess. She sounded very far away, even though she was close by.

“I couldn’t—it wasn’t—”

“I’m gonna be sick,” said Touchstone, and threw up over the porch railing.

“Oh,” said Audrey. “Oh, oh, oh.”

A broom was placed in my hand. I’d tried to kill Ros. I’d tried to kill Ros. No, I hadn’t. I loved Ros. Ros was my best friend.

“Celia,” Phoebe said. “Shoes.”

“I honestly didn’t mean to—I’m so sorry—”

“Get out,” said Touchstone, before he retched again. “Celia. Get out .”

“You mean, like, leave ?” I said.

He threw up again and shot me a thumbs-up.

“Dude, you can’t just kick her out ,” said Ros.

“Andrew, you’re not thinking clearly,” said Audrey.

“It’s my uncle’s house, and she needs to go ,” he said.

“Touch, I can help—”

“Just get out, ” he said. “Leave.”

Phoebe let me stay the night at her house.

“They’re my best friend . What is wrong with me?”

She held me stiffly in her arms. It was the first hug we ever had, and we’d joke about it later, when hugging became second nature to us—how bad we were at it, how weird it was.

“This will all look better in the morning,” Phoebe said.

But I couldn’t wait that long.

I was home by six a.m. I crept in through the back door on tiptoe like a cat burglar in my own home. In the mudroom, I caught a smell—musty, the faintest hint of mothballs, the dry smell of tennis balls in cans, towels we used to dry off the dogs after they went swimming—and it took me a few seconds to realize it was, in fact, the house. How strange: to not even recognize the smell of your own home.

A single light was on in the kitchen, which I knew was my mother, up early, making coffee, the dogs lying at her feet. She’d be wearing the soft clothes that she preferred for writing—an old pink bathrobe over soft pants, and her hair would be piled thick on her head, streaked through with gray. She hadn’t heard me come in, so I watched her for a moment—the steady thin stream of water over the grounds, the slow trickle into the carafe. I knew she loved this ritual—it took forever but it made her feel like an alchemist—but I’d never actually been up early enough to see it.

It looked so nice that for a moment I regretted coming, or at least regretted not sending her a text, warning her that I was on the way. It’d been too late to call, and then too early, and now I couldn’t bear the thought of her solitude being disturbed—and what a way to disturb it, too. HEY, MOM, I THREW A PIE THROUGH A WINDOW AND ALL MY FRIENDS—and also that one guy from Power Jam —HATE ME. I contemplated slipping out the back door, continuing to drive, east maybe, until the car ran out of gas.

But then the dogs saw me, and she saw me, too, and then there was no turning back.

“Surprise,” I said weakly.

“Cece!”

Her arms were around me so quickly I’d wondered why I’d ever left home. Why would you leave a place where an alchemist hugged you good morning, where you could lay your cheek against the shoulder of a soft pink bathrobe the same way you’d done as a baby, where dogs would whine with happiness and lick your knees hello?

“You scared me,” she said. “What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”

She was still hanging on to me. My mother’s specialty—besides convincing people that the transits of particular planets would have an impact on whether they should sign financial contracts on particular days—was long hugs. We’d stand there till noon if I didn’t initiate disentanglement, which I did now.

“Hi,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“But it’s so early ,” she said. “Are you sick ? Do you have a fever?”

She laid a cool hand against my forehead. Buckets set about licking my ankles, which he would do for the next fifteen minutes unless I stopped him. Tabitha, gorgeous girl, clever baby, observed me with her trademark superior air. I wondered if she’d get along with Jacques. Between the two of them, they could probably figure out how to rob a bank.

“I’m fine ,” I said—a grand total of three minutes before I snapped at her, which was probably a new record. “I just thought it’d be fun to come say hi for a little bit.”

I could hear how flimsy that sounded and wished that I had Touchstone’s gift of gab, or Ros’s charisma, or Phoebe’s confidence. But my mom, miraculously, seemed to be willing to accept this, at least temporarily—maybe because it was so early, or maybe because she knew I wasn’t ready to talk.

“Aren’t you glad to see me?” I said.

“I’m totally glad to see you,” my mom replied. She hugged me again—one hug was not enough; there had to be multiple. “I want to hear all about Lovesick. How’s Andrew? How’s Ros? Did you drop them off already?”

“They stayed,” I said into her shoulder, and on the second hug, Tabitha’s knowing face visible just over my mother’s shoulder, I felt it all at once: all the late nights at the theater catching up with me—the quick changes, burning myself with the steamer, the lonely nights at the Lily Pad. The stomachache I’d been battling since I left Lovesick Falls. How the summer had turned out nothing like I’d planned; how, in fact, it seemed to be the exact opposite of what I’d wanted. Instead of bringing everyone closer together, I’d managed to drive everyone away.

“They didn’t—” My voice caught, and then I didn’t know if I was crying or yawning. “They didn’t—they didn’t—they didn’t want to come.”

“Cece? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing—I’m just tired—”

I was fully crying then, like a baby, in utter collapse. It was like my bones had melted. My mom held me. I couldn’t believe what a mess I’d made of things. Sure, we could fix the window and sweep up the glass, and I’d spend the rest of my life paying for it, but the rest of it seemed totally impossible to put back together.

“Buckets is standing on my foot,” I said.

“He wants to help,” my mom said.

“It hurts,” I said.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m so upset.…”

“I think you should go rest,” my mom said.

I listened to her. It turned out sometimes, it was really nice to not be in charge.

I slept for what felt like a hundred years. The afternoon sun was bright and hot, bathing my room in yellow light. I’d tried to make some changes over the years, but my room still looked like a little girl’s—a print of a dancing ballerina mouse, the tea sets I used to collect. I had cleaned my room in a frenzy before leaving—there were still vacuum cleaner marks on the carpet, and the rest of my summer reading was stacked neatly on my desk, strategically left at home so it’d be fresh in my brain for school. I thought I knew exactly what I’d need the next time I’d be home. But none of this helped.

I took another shower, even though I’d taken one at Phoebe’s. I still felt like there was glass dust everywhere, making me twitchy, uncomfortable. The water pressure was so strong it nearly knocked me off my feet. The shower grew steamy, and slowly, everything grew comforting: the fruity smell of my shampoo, the ragged edge of the old monogrammed towel, the huge bucket of lotion I couldn’t justify bringing to Lovesick since it took up so much space. I sifted through the dregs of my closet, hopeful to find something that still fit, something that I didn’t hate too much. Some old running shorts were tighter than I remembered but worked fine, though a serviceable shirt was harder to come by. I’d left behind the ones I didn’t like, and then a handful of them were Ros’s, which meant that they were an immediate no . I finally found one buried way down deep with my pajamas: an old shirt I used to sleep in as a kid, slate gray that was faded from so many washings, printed with a diagram of the solar system. Sleep had turned it soft, almost threadbare in parts, but I was shocked to see that the fit was almost perfect—loose but not too loose, roomy in the shoulders. I remembered it coming down to my knees.

“There she is!” my dad called when I emerged downstairs. “And she smells like a walking fruit salad!”

“What time is it?”

“Almost two. You hungry? You’ll have to try some of this bread I made,” he said. “Then I was thinking if you’d be up for it, it might be nice to hit the court, it’s a beautiful day—”

“Celia’s going to walk the dogs with me,” my mom said. There was a firmness in her voice that made me strangely afraid.

I felt like I had been summoned to the principal’s office—not that I really knew what that felt like, but I imagined it was something like this: a creeping sense of dread, of impending doom. I did not want to have to account for my sudden presence back home, or my tears. I did not want to explain to her all the ways in which I’d done my friends wrong.

“Take it to go,” my dad said, handing me a hunk of warm baguette. “You have to eat.”

Bread in hand, dogs in the lead, my mom and I headed off on the normal route, toward the college campus at the end of the road. Tabitha was the confident leader, with Buckets stopping to sniff every tree, getting himself tangled in the leash no fewer than three times at the end of the block. I took a bite of the baguette and chewed slowly—my dad had added some butter, a generous sprinkle of salt.

“This is really good,” I said, chewing.

“He’s been baking a lot,” she said. She adjusted the leashes and looked at me. “I haven’t seen that shirt in a while.”

“It was deep in the pajama drawer,” I said.

I saw her do the math—that I hadn’t brought anything home with me, which meant I’d left in a rush. There it was: that feeling of dread again. She had an extremely piercing brown-eyed gaze that she used, mercifully, in limited quantities, but sometimes she really let it fly, and in those moments, I was half-convinced that my mother was maybe just a hair magic. Like in spite of the very obvious truth that astrology was made-up, there was still something that she was able to see and interpret the way the rest of us were not. It was a gift, and it was unpleasant to have that gift turned on you.

Just let me finish my bread , I thought.

She seemed, somehow, to hear this.

“Well, it fits you nicely,” she said, and tugged on Buckets’s leash. “Come on, Buckets. We’re not going to smell every flower.”

At the end of our street we crossed over into the campus, where my mom had been walking the dogs for years. The school was small and quiet—it was a Catholic college, and most of the students were commuters—but the campus was open to the public, and it was actually kind of pretty in a storybook way. The buildings were made of stone with red-shingled roofs, there were ponds filled with ducks and swans, and for several years, sapphire-chested peacocks had wandered the campus, haughty denizens of some lesser royal court. (“Sometimes I think Tabitha got her attitude from them,” my mom had said once.) Ros and I used to collect their feathers when they dropped, along with other treasures we’d found—a cracked blue shell of a robin’s egg, a rock shaped like a heart, and once, the parched white shell of a turtle. I’d clung to these objects—they were still on display in my bedroom, balanced along the top of my bookshelf. They were probably covered in dust now.

“Whatever happened to the peacocks?” I said.

“I don’t know,” my mom said. “Flew away, maybe? Or got eaten.”

That seemed right—another beautiful thing gobbled up, a messy crunch of blood and bones and feathers.

We trotted over the wooden bridge, the dogs keeping their noses low, and past the little outbuilding with the waterwheel.

“We’re excited to come see the show soon,” my mom said.

“Oh—yeah,” I said. “I think… I don’t know. I’m not convinced you should come anymore. We still have a lot of work to do on the costumes. And it might not be any good.”

“Nonsense,” my mom said. “Is Mr. Blade still as charming and conscientious as ever?”

“He is,” I said mournfully. I could have used his sunglasses now, though they were somewhere in the Lily Pad. I doubted, based on where we’d left things, that Oliver would ever want to talk to me again.

“And Ros?”

“I actually haven’t seen that much of Ros,” I said.

“Really?” my mom said. “Aren’t you living in the same room?”

“I mean—technically, yes. But they started dating someone up in Lovesick,” I said, proceeding with caution, not wanting to give my mom too much information, lest she subject me to her take on things, which I wasn’t quite ready to hear yet. “Anyway. They just sort of… started spending all their time there. It was just a little bit at first, but then it was a lot.”

“Oh,” my mom said. “You didn’t mention any of that to me when we talked on the phone.”

I shrugged.

“It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time,” I said.

“Well, that’s nice for Ros. Though I don’t think it’s very nice of them to just abandon you like that.”

“ Abandon feels a little strong,” I said. “What are you doing?”

We’d come to the end of the pond, the place where we normally turned right and continued on with our route, across the field, up the stone path by the gazebo. But Tabitha and my mom had turned the other way; Buckets, too, was trying to follow them.

“We’ve started going this way,” she said.

“What? Since when?”

“Mmm,” my mom said, like that was an answer to my question. “There’s a spot down here in the creek where the water gets deep enough to swim. Are you coming?”

It was strange to be walking a different way. It reminded me of what Audrey and Phoebe had been saying about the Lily Pad: how strange it was to discover new pockets of your own hometown. We crossed on the back side of the dorms, passed an old greenhouse that seemed to have been abandoned, joined up with a path that had been worn by other walkers.

We came to a spot with a deep swimming hole and unclipped the dogs. My mom found a stick on the bank, and she tossed it in, and the dogs leaped in after it. They swam in happy circles like fat black seals, both their mouths chomped around one stick.

“I didn’t even know this was here,” I said.

“I know,” my mom said. “Believe me, I was shocked, too. We started going this way because of construction originally, but then it turned out there was this whole part of the campus I hadn’t even seen.”

The dogs swam to the far side of the bank. Tabitha stole the stick from Buckets, who barked at her.

“What a jerk,” I said.

“They have such a funny dynamic,” my mom said. “Sometimes it’s hard to believe they have the same mom.”

“Do you worry they’re going to get stuck over there?” I said.

“Not really. They’re too desperate for biscuits.”

Tabitha left the stick and sniffed around the far edge of the embankment; Buckets, having reclaimed his stick, set about swallowing pieces of it. I wished, not for the first or last time in my life, that I could trade places with the dogs. I would eat a million sticks if it meant I didn’t have to return to Lovesick Falls.

“Mom?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Ros says they’re not coming home.”

She turned to look at me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean they’re not coming home. They met somebody up there, and they want to stay. They’re not coming back,” I said.

“Well, that’s never going to happen,” my mom said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What do you mean, what do I mean? Ros is seventeen years old, Celia. They live here. If you think for one second Fiona Brinkman is going to let her kid skip town, you’ve got another think coming.”

I blinked. Of course my mom was right. Of course Ros couldn’t just leave home . Of course I’d thrown a pie at their head for no reason.

I felt my eyes fill with tears.

“Oh, Celia,” my mom said.

“It’s fine,” I said, though it didn’t feel fine. It felt like nothing would ever be the same ever again. “It’s just—I’ve been having some trouble with Ros—they’re there, but they’re not there—and it’s been really hard to be supportive.…”

“What does Andrew have to say about all of this?”

I snorted. “That I’m obsessed with Ros. That I’m a bootlicker. Oh, and Machiavellian. I can’t forget that.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound very nice.”

“I think I deserved it,” I said. “I’m a really bad friend.”

“ I don’t think that.”

“I threw a pie at Ros’s head.”

“You what ?”

“I—”

The whole story came spilling out of me. I told her about the key lime pie and the Cinderella dress. I meant to stop there, but once I got started, I couldn’t seem to stop. I told her about doing Ros’s physics homework. About how empty the Lily Pad felt at night, about that one night I was alone, about how the bird had flown into the window but how I thought it was something much, much worse, how scared I had been, how the trees looked like something else.

“I would have come,” my mom said.

“You would have hopped in your car at three a.m.?”

“Sure,” my mom said. “I’ve got very stylish pajamas. I’d love the opportunity to show them off to the world.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said.

I let myself feel it: how lucky I was to have a parent who would come help me.

“You should not have been doing Ros’s physics homework,” my mom said.

“Mom. Seriously? I thought we were having a moment.”

“I’m serious, Celia. You were cheating; you know that, right? That’s cheating.”

“ I didn’t benefit,” I said.

“Celia,” my mom said.

“Yeah—yeah. I know.”

“And you know I didn’t raise you to take things that aren’t yours.”

“I know.”

“That’s entitlement, Celia. The world is not yours for the conquering. You are part of this world, and you have to be a good neighbor.”

I was silent. She was right, though I didn’t like hearing it.

“I want to go back to the physics homework.…”

“Oh my God, really ?”

“Can I talk for a second, please? You should not have been doing Ros’s physics homework. But I care less about the rules in this case and more about why you were doing it. Why were you doing it? Did they ask you?”

“I offered,” I said. “They would have failed without me.”

“Failure is a part of life,” my mom said. “And it’s not your job to glue someone back together.”

“Yeah. I know. I just—I thought that if I worked hard enough, did all the right things, then eventually they’d… go back to normal.” I sighed.

“It’s really beautiful how much you love Ros, how much you want to take care of them. I knew you were taking care of them, but I don’t think I realized just how much you were doing for them. How tenuous everything was. I never should have let you go on that trip.”

“I wanted to,” I said.

“I know but—it’s too much for a seventeen-year-old. It’s too much for a lot of adults . And you’re right—you’ll be away at college next year—but—it’s a big responsibility. A big change. You are not responsible for another person’s happiness, no matter how close you are.”

“Well, it’s not like it worked anyway.”

My mom sighed, tossed the stick again for the dogs.

“Celia, you love to fix things. You are one of the most resourceful people I know. I’ve never seen a problem that you can’t solve. And I’m not just talking about grades. But I think… sometimes being a good friend isn’t about trying to solve the problem. Sometimes it’s just about letting the problem be there and paying attention to what your friend is asking for. Not trying to push things on your timeline.”

“So it’s my fault,” I said.

“Throwing the pie is, yes. And you have to take accountability for that. But friendship isn’t tennis, Celia. There might be faults, but there’s no score . At least, there shouldn’t be. Friendships are complicated. When it comes to you and Ros, I clearly have no idea how complicated it is,” my mom said. “When friendships blow up, it’s really easy to get into a story about who did what to whom—they did that wrong, she did that wrong. You start keeping score. But keeping score doesn’t really get you anywhere. It certainly doesn’t move you into the future.”

“I don’t know if we have a future,” I said.

“Of course you do,” my mom said. “You just don’t know what it looks like yet.”

We stayed there until the dogs swam back to shore. They shook water all over us, found a new stick, held it between them, and moved on, tails held high.

That night, I looked over everything on my desk, hoping I’d find some clue that would help me put the pieces back together. I had to go back tomorrow; Phoebe had asked for my help with the yeti costume, and I couldn’t leave her in the lurch. I’d left everything out: my summer reading, a fresh pack of highlighters, the pens I preferred for making notes in the margins. I always took notes. It wasn’t just a matter of wanting to learn; I also wondered if it was a matter of wanting to be like Tabitha—wanting to be superior, the sort of person who was prepared for every eventuality. Not that any of this had helped me. Below my summer reading was the packing list I’d been working on right before leaving— overalls x 3, bandannas x 4, bug spray, beading kits . But even that list belonged to a different Celia, a younger Celia, a Celia who thought everything could be reduced to a task: Write it down, cross it off.

Fix window , I wrote down. Then: Fix Triumvirate .

I looked at it for a while, and then I lay on the ground with the dogs and pet them for a long, long time. They were twelve years old—old for dogs, exhausted from their walk. Buckets had developed a cyst above his eye—an old-man lump, my dad called it, nothing to worry about, according to the vet. Tabitha’s muzzle was gray; at the end of the walk, she’d walked into a bush and emerged totally covered in little spiky burs, which looked sort of pretty actually, like jewelry. Buckets had fallen asleep holding an old stuffed bear of mine in his mouth. They smelled like the creek. They wouldn’t be around forever. They were such good animals, such good friends.