My parents won’t care about any of my things. Bad enough they’ll have to look at my clothes and pictures and the empty bunk and be reminded. If I’d planned better, Meredith could have driven me to Goodwill and helped me dump most of it. But until this morning I didn’t know I was going to make this trip.
I write a separate note to her and put it in a sealed envelope with her name on it, adding a little smiley face onto a stick body diving off a bridge. Incredibly goofy, but I want her to have something to laugh about too. I won’t tell you what I wrote to her. It’s private. Holden would be proud of me, though. I don’t get mushy, just mention the high points and wish her a happy life. I sign it Love, Daniel. She knows that already, but it matters to me that she’ll hold the note, her fingers where my fingers were. I hope it matters to her.
You can’t write a will and leave out your mother and father. Especially not if you’re dying out of order and they have to bury you, their child. So I write my father’s name. It feels so weird to be writing Stieg Corneill Landon instead of Dad. I give him back the pocketknife he gave me for my twelfth birthday and the book of Robert Frost poems because he was forever reciting them and he’ll get the connection. I stick my report card in the book of poems and put it on my pillow, to be sure my dad can find it. All that arguing for nothing. If I’d only believed the stupid doctors from the beginning, I might not have wasted that time or energy. Still, there are other things I know now about my father I might never have known if we hadn’t had those fights.
So it comes down to Mom. She was there first and she’s the end, too, even though she won’t physically be there. I scan the bookshelves and open the desk drawers as wide as they go, looking for just the right thing. She has to know how important she is to me. From before all this. And because of these months. I need her to forgive me for all the idiotic stuff I did: bad table manners, not winning the third-grade spelling bee after she coached me all weekend, refusing to wear a tie to Grandma’s funeral, for being a jerk about Walker, for making her cry. Mostly I need her to forgive me for not getting better after the Mexico trip.
Remembering like that, I lose it big-time and I have to get up and find some goddamn tissues. You’d think a person’s tear ducts would dry up with so much overuse. God forbid Mack finds out what a wimp I’ve become. Even he may think it’s time to find a new best friend. When I can focus, there’s my mug from the seventh-grade trip to the Virginia Beach aquarium, with a lifetime’s collection of pens. I sort through them, but stop at the one I swiped from the Richmond doctor’s office where they first hinted at chemotherapy. Mom won’t want a pen from her dead son.
My Spanish book could be a memento of Mexico? The used-bookstore copy of The Catcher in the Rye Joe gave me for Christmas? Maybe then she’d understand my not sticking around. After she reads Holden’s take on growing up or not growing up.
In the way back of the bottom drawer, behind the old lab reports, the crushed diorama of dinosaurs, the Gideon’s Bible that Nick stole from some hotel room and wouldn’t own up to, I feel a small lump in crinkly paper. I pull it out. It’s a fortune cookie, no telling from when or where because Mom and Dad gave up monosodium glutamate years ago. For a minute I toss it from hand to hand, debating whether to open it or leave it to her unopened on the chance that it says something inspiring enough to count with her. I’ve had ADVERSITY MAKES YOU STRONGER before and LOVE HEALS ALL WOUNDS and PERSEVERANCE YIELDS RESULTS. None of that will work this time around.
The truth is there’s not a single thing here in my room, in Essex County, in my twenty feet of space, my sixteen and a half years, that means enough. I’ll write her from New York. It ought to be easier to say what I need to say with a little distance. I close the drawers and get ready to sign the bottom of the will with a flourish, to hide how weak and silly I suddenly feel. This is why Holden wants to leave before his parents come home. How do you talk face-to-face with people who love you in spite of your failing them?
The stupid little fortune cookie stares up at me in its pristine packaging. Some machine halfway across the ocean, or maybe in Secaucus, New Jersey, has stamped a single Chinese letter on the clear plastic. Meaningless because I don’t know Chinese, won’t ever know Chinese, and don’t fucking care. I rip off the end of the package with my teeth and smash the cookie on the desk. The little paper twists loose, deformed from its years of captivity.
Pick it up and read it, I tell myself. Read the damn thing and get it over with.
THERE ARE NO GIFTS OF LASTING VALUE EXCEPT LOVE.
I tape the small rectangle of paper with the fortune above my signature in the blank space next to Mom. After I fold the will, I prop it up with the letter to Meredith against the mug of pens. The desk light shivers with the lapping waves. Both bunk beds are neatly made. No sign of the hours of studying, brainstorming with Holden, debating theories on the end of the world with Nick, or that incredible night with Meredith. It’s been a good place to be. A hard place to leave.
Outside the cabin the sky colors purple and brownish pink, bruised already and shrinking as if it doesn’t want to see what this day holds. If I’m really going, I’ve got to leave now. The heat behind my eyes stings. Tomorrow I’ll be somewhere else and I won’t see this sunrise and this horizon with the bridge spanning it, that familiar solid line of gray that’s been the edge of my life for sixteen and a half years. I hope Meredith’s parents let her stay with my family after they get the final news. For a little bit at least. I should write Nick—but in a separate letter from Mom’s—and tell him to give Meredith the cabin to sleep in if she asks. Without asking questions or making a big deal of it. No point in upsetting Mom over things she doesn’t know.
No point, no point. The words echo in my head as I tiptoe over to the dinghy, the rolling suitcase in my arms like a baby. After I lay it on the far front ribs to keep it from getting splashed, I uncleat the lead line and let the little boat float away from the big one. The oars dip into the water. Silver droplets sprinkle the surface, blue for only a moment in the first beginnings of the filtered sunrise. By the time I reach the shore, the water is brown again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mack’s supposed to be waiting at the far end of St. Margaret’s campus in the blue truck with the engine and lights off. We’ve been over and over this part. Like the D-funct marina summers, it feels good to have Mack as my partner in crime again. A secret from my parents. Whispered details and hidden supplies, even if the ending’s not as unpredictable as it used to be in those adventures. Everyone but Mack has turned nursemaid. I’m so tired, so ready for it all to be over, one way or the other.
The hill between the creek and Jeanette Drive sets me back on the timing. The boots were a mistake, lead weights on my toothpick legs. Where, oh where have my swimming muscles gone? I press my fingers into my chest bone, the sternum according to the bio textbook. One of those damn lung spots must have stuck there and started that ache, so deep that even my fingers can’t reach the pain. I’m sucking in air and have to rest before I even get to St. Margaret’s flat-roofed gymnasium, where Meredith told me she had started taking the birth control pills. I think about not ever making love to her again, not touching the shallow place by her hip bone that catches the moonlight through the cabin window, the warm corner of her lips where my tongue tastes leftover ChapStick, the perfect spaces and lines of her fingers when she slips her hand into mine on a walk.