Here all I could see was green, stretching until it met a cloudless, achingly blue sky.
I hadn’t realized, until then, how much I’d missed it.
The sky, I mean. And all that green.
When we reached the outskirts of our town, an hour later, I saw that other things besides the buds had changed since I’d last been there. The Chocolate Moose was gone, sold out to Dairy Queen. Same building, new sign.
When we stopped at the red light in front of the courthouse, Rob turned his head to ask me, “Where to?”
“My house,” I shouted back, over the thunder of his engine. “I need to drop my stuff off.”
He nodded and roared off in the direction of Lumbley Lane.
And I soon saw that even the house I’d grown up in looked different, though the only thing that had changed was the color of the trim, which my mother had had spruced up to white from its former cream.
But the place seemed…smaller, in a way.
Rob turned into the driveway and cut the engine. I hopped off the back of the bike, then took off the helmet and handed it to him.
“I’ll call you later,” I said to him. “Will you be at home or the garage?”
He’d pulled off his own helmet. Now he looked at me oddly—as if he thought he’d done something wrong, but couldn’t figure out what.
Welcome to my world.
“What about—” he started to ask.
“I said I’ll call you.” I didn’t know how else to make him understand that I needed to be alone for this next part.
He looked a little angry as he jammed his helmet back on.
“Fine,” he said. “Call me at home. That’s where I’ll be. I should check to see—I mean, maybe she came back by now.”
“She didn’t,” I said.
He studied me through the clear plastic screen of his helmet. There was something he wanted to say. That was obvious.
But he seemed to think better of it and settled for saying instead, “Fine. See you later.”
Then he turned around and drove away…
…Just as the screen door on the front porch of my house squeaked open, and my dad came out and went, “Jess? What are YOU doing here?”
I didn’t tell them the truth. My family, I mean. That I was there for Rob,or that I had my power back…for now.
Sure, all they’d have to do was call Mikey. He’d have cracked under the pressure eventually—though I’d left him with firm instructions not to say a word to anyone about Rob’s visit OR my apparently rejuvenated ability to dream.
But I knew it would be a while before Mike succumbed to the peer pressure to tell. Especially if he wanted to stay on Ruth’s good side. Which I suspected he did.
Instead—after giving our German Shepherd, Chigger, the kisses he leaped up on me and demanded in his joy at seeing me home—I just told my mom and dad that I’d missed them, and had decided to drop in for a quick visit, using some of my airline bonus miles. It’s amazing what parents will believe, if they want to believe it enough. Mine would never, I knew, shut up about it if they learned what I’dreally come home for—to find someone. Worse, to find someone related to Rob Wilkins…whom my dad had actually always liked, up until I’d made the mistake of telling him about Miss-Boobs-As-Big-As-My-Head. Even then, he’d just gone, “But, Jess, are you sure about who was doing the kissing? I mean, if Rob says she was the one who started it, and he was just an innocent bystander, it’s not fair of you to blame him for it.”
Dads. Seriously. They should just stick to handing out the allowance.
My mom was delighted to see me, but mad I hadn’t called first.
“I would’ve planned a barbecue,” she said. “A welcome home barbecue, and invited the Abramowitzes and the Thompkinses and the Blumenthals and the—”
“Yeah, that’s okay, Mom,” I said. “I’m here for a couple of days. There’s still time to plan something if you really want to.”
“We could have a brunch,” my mom said all gleefully. “On Saturday. People like brunch. And if they already have plans for the rest of the day, they can still do them, after brunch.”
“Douglas is at work?” I asked, after dumping my stuff off in my room and noticing that they’d converted his room, across the hall, to an office for my dad, who’d formerly done the books from the restaurants at the dining room table.
“Probably,” my mother said, as she fussed around, saying things like my sheets weren’t freshened up, and how I should have called so she could run them through the wash first. “Or one of those city council meetings.”
“What?” I grinned. “Douglas’s interested in politics now?”
My mother rolled her eyes. “Apparently. Well, not politics, exactly. You know they’re shutting down Pine Heights—” Pine Heights was the elementary school all of us had gone to. It was three blocks away—so close, we’d come home for lunch every day—a building constructed during the Depression by WPA workers, ancient enough that it still had two entrances, one for boys and one for girls.
At least according to the scrollwork over the doorways. No one, when I’d attended it, had ever paid any attention to the signs.
“There aren’t enough children in the neighborhood anymore to fill it,” my mother said. “So the school board’s shutting it down. The city wants to convert it to luxury condos. But Douglas and Tasha”—Tasha was Douglas’s girlfriend and the daughter of our neighbors across the street—“have some big idea about—well, he’ll tell you about it when you see him, I’m sure. It’s all he ever talks about anymore.”
“Maybe I’ll stop by the store and see him,” I said. “If you think he’s working now.”
“He probably is,” my mother said, rolling her eyes. “It’s all he ever does. Besides this Pine Heights thing.”
Which was funny, because just a few years ago, none of us would have believed that Douglas would ever do something as normal as hold down a job. It hadn’t been that long ago, really, that we’d all despaired of Douglas ever even leaving his room, much less supporting himself.
“Invite him for dinner,” my mother called as I banged out of the house. “Tasha, too, if she’s around. I’ll make your father grill some steaks.”
“Hey,” my dad yelled from his office-slash-Douglas’s old room. “I heard that.”
I left them squabbling and went down to the garage. Opening the barnlike doors—our house is a converted farmhouse, and almost a century old like most of the houses in our neighborhood—I went in and found what I’d been looking for: the baby-blue 1968 Harley my dad had bought me, as he’d promised he would, for high school graduation.
Not that I’d specified a year or color. Any bike would have suited me fine. The fact that he’d gotten me such a perfectly pimped ride had really been the icing on what was already some pretty delicious cake.
Still, with one thing or another—the war, and then my acceptance to Juilliard—I had only gotten to ride her a couple of times. I hadn’t dared bring her to New York, where she’d have been stolen in—well, a New York minute. She was a real beauty, the color of the sky on an Easter Sunday—not quite turquoise, but not exactly teal, either. I loved her with an affection that probably wasn’t normal. I mean, for an inanimate object.
But she was just so perfect, with her cream-colored leather seat and shiny chrome trim. My dad had gotten me a matching cream-colored helmet, which I put on after dragging her out from behind my mom’s trim paint cans.
A second later, I was gunning the engine. It rumbled like the finely tuned instrument it was. Four months of disuse had done nothing to dull this beauty queen.
And then I was out on the street with her, feeling the tension that had settled in my neck—around about the time I’d opened my apartment door to find Rob there—finally starting to dissipate.
There is nothing like riding a really finely tuned motorcycle to get rid of stress.