“Nomi, honey, do you want salmon?”
“Do I ever want salmon? It’s like a hundred years old. And before you say it, no, I don’t want Mexican chicken.”
You laugh—you’re sick of your own chicken too—and sigh. Oh, to be a mother and cook every day for thousands of days and be tired of your own Mexican chicken.
The Meerkat slams another cabinet. “Can we cook out on the grill?”
“Well, I guess so… Are you already hungry?”
The Meerkat shrugs—whatever—and she grabs a bag of Tostitos and stomps off to her room. You go back to Melanda and I feel for Melanda, who’s probably contemplating a singleton cauliflower pizza. “Sorry,” you say. “I’m back.”
You get a text and you read the text and you respond to the text and is it the man who drank that domestic beer on your end table? You’re still counseling Melanda, but what about us? When is it your turn to tell her about the Best Kiss of Your Life? And seriously. Who drank that fucking beer?
The acid is cooling in my thighs but it’s burning in my heart and you shiver and stand. You go into your kitchen and you close the screen door. You close the slider and it squeaks—you need WD-40—and I can’t bear the silence so I put on my headphones. Sam Cooke tries to comfort me but he’s wasting his time. I touch my fingers to my toes and the blood rushes to my head and my headphones cancel the noise of the world, but they can’t silence the alarm in my limbic system, the one that dings now. Goosebumps crop up on my arms and my legs as the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight, so many tiny soldiers. Fight or flight. Slowly, I lift my head and the alarm in my brain was right. Someone is here. Three feet away. Armed with a backpack and a cell phone and the two most dangerous weapons in these woods: eyes, blinking beneath unflattering round glasses.
It’s your daughter. The Meerkat.
7
On Animal Planet, this is how the lion dies. The lion has no natural predators but an intrusive human on a mission to break the rules of nature shoots him for the fuck of it.
“Hey,” she says. “You know that’s my house, right?”
I close my eyes. Please, God. Please don’t kill me now.
The Meerkat remains standing. Emotionless. Still. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I got a cramp.”
She nods. Distracted. Good sign. “One time this old guy died out here. It was summer. He had a heart attack.”
That stings a little but it also snaps me out of my paranoia. “Well, I’m not that old.”
“Sorry,” she says. “I’m just in a mood because my mom’s making me go get charcoal.”
Ah, so you were texting with your Meerkat. “You going to the Town & Country?”
She furrows her brow. “We just call it the T & C. God, you’re such a newbie still.”
That was a little vicious, but it’s the same with kids as it is with adults. It’s never about you. It’s about them. She knows she was rude and she squeezes the straps of her backpack and I smile. Cool Joe. Affable Joe. “I’ll head there too,” I say. “I could use a Vitaminwater.”
Now we’re walking and this is normal. This is what people do when they bump into each other and the Meerkat truly isn’t alarmed to see me and here comes another jogger—Hey, Nomi!—and she knows him too and I flinch at a dog barking in the woods and she laughs. “It’s just a dog! Are you scared of dogs?”
“No,” I say. I’m still rattled but I have to remember. I was caught off guard, yes. But I wasn’t caught. “I’m just out of my comfort zone. You grew up in all this but the woods are creepy to me.”
I remember taking RIP Beck to the woods and I shudder and the Meerkat grunts. “Oh please,” she says. “These aren’t woods. The real woods are up by my old school. See, when I was in middle school, I found this old Buick there.”
I nod. “Cool.”
“Yeah…” She sounded like you just then. “There were all these empty alcohol bottles…” She’s so young for her age. Alcohol. “And the year before that, there was this big abandoned house in the woods too. That place was supercool. It used to be a home for wayward boys.”
I raise my eyebrows like a good listener. “Whoa.”
“Now that was creepy. You go up to the fourth floor and you think the house is gonna fall down and there are old-fashioned wheelchairs and cobwebs. It was so cool. But, whatever. Everything cool here gets destroyed.”
“That’s just called ‘growing up.’ See, down at Isla, I listen to these old guys, actual old guys, and they sound like you.”
“Like me? I don’t think so.”
“Oh sure, Nomi. They talk about how this place used to be too, how nobody locked their doors and they left the keys in the car and didn’t worry about anyone breaking in because there were more crickets and frogs than people.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Well, that’s the point. Every generation thinks their way was the best way.”
“But the home for wayward boys… that was actually cool. It was a place to go. Then they tore it down and now there’s nothing.”
We step aside for a set of cyclists.
“So you’re from New York or something, right?”
That’s a good sign, Mary Kay. A show of actual social skills! “Yep,” I say. “And it was nothing like this. My library is a good example. We had homeless people in there, crackheads… now that was scary.”
“At least it’s real. Everything here is fake, fake, fake.”
She tugs on the straps of her backpack and I’m so relieved that I’m an adult. What a nightmare it is to be a teenager, to think there’s a place where everyone isn’t fake, fake, fake. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m just mad. My mom always goes crazy before Thanksgiving but this year she’s crazy-crazy.”
Crazy in Love. “Oh?”
“We always stay here but now she’s dragging us to Arizona to see my papa.”
I wish I had backpack straps to grab because this is news to me. Be cool, Joe. “Well, maybe Phoenix will be fun.”
She just grunts—yeah right. “So what do you do for stupid Thanksgiving?”
Franzen essays and frozen pizza. “I might hop a ferry and volunteer at a soup kitchen.”
She waves at a woman raking leaves and the woman waves back and we are normal. This is normal. But then Nomi gives me what the kids call “side eye.” “but you said you hated the city. You know there’s no soup kitchen here, right?”
“Hate’s a strong word, Nomi. And I like it here, but on a day like that, it’s nice to get out there and help people in need.”
She just stares ahead. “People never say that love is a strong word.”
Is she high? No. She’s just overdosing on Klebold poems and loneliness. “Huh. Why do you think that is?”
“Whatever. I’m just annoyed cuz my mom told me not to say I hate her but she took my Columbine again and I have all these notes in it and I do hate her for that and dragging us to Phoenix. Anyone would. And don’t tell me she’s just looking out for me. You’re wrong. She’s a hypocrite. She’s mad because it’s Columbine. She wouldn’t be mad if I was into some stupid story about horny babysitters and I’m sorry but Columbine is the best. It is the book.”