Confessions

 

THE BATH DIDN’T make her feel better. Emerging from the water twenty minutes later, Odette still felt anger at her mother for losing the phone, worry over Grandma Sissy’s sickness and the pills in the cabinet, guilt over not being able to answer Harris’s call, and lonely sadness about her fight with Mieko.

She got dressed in her pajamas and then went back out to the room where Rex and her parents were still working on the puzzle. They’d made progress; the edge was completely finished, framing a square of the tabletop, and large sections of the middle had been connected too. Odette could see what looked to be a snowy mountain in the top right corner.

Grandma Sissy was asleep, still in her chair, with Georgie on her lap. One of her hands rested on Georgie’s back. Her fingers were long and thin. The skin on the backs of her hands was a rainbow of bruises and bumps, purple and green and black.

“What’s the matter with her hands?” Odette asked.

“Her skin is just really fragile,” Mom answered. “She bruises easily now.”

Odette wondered if this was because of the cancer or because of all the medicines, but she didn’t want to ask. How could she have gotten this weak so quickly? On her last visit to their house, she’d had tons of energy for walks around the neighborhood and a trip to the beach and a day at Disneyland. Odette had sat on a stool in their kitchen and watched as Grandma Sissy had baked their favorite cookies—snickerdoodles for Rex and double chocolate chip for Odette.

“Do you want to do the puzzle with us?” Dad asked.

Odette said no and lowered herself to the rug in front of the fire, by Grandma Sissy’s chair. She watched the flames eat at the log. She watched it blacken as it threw off heat. Soon the log would be gone, and the warmth of the fire would fade, and only ashes would remain.

She felt a hand on her hair and looked up. Grandma Sissy was awake. “You look just like your mother did at your age,” Grandma Sissy said.

Tears welled up in Odette’s eyes.

“Oh, darling,” Grandma Sissy said. “It’s all right. You don’t need to be so sad.”

And that was even worse—that Grandma Sissy thought Odette was only upset because of the cancer. She couldn’t stand to lie like that, to her grandmother, so Odette admitted, “Right now, Grandma Sissy, I’m crying because Mom lost our cell phone in the ocean.” A wave of shame hit her square in the chest, and her tears turned to sobs. “I’m such a terrible person,” she said. How could she care about such stupid things—a phone and a boy and a fight with her friend—when Grandma Sissy was dying?

And then the words poured out—how she was supposed to see Harris, and probably he’d called, and now he’d think she was avoiding him, and he was leaving in the morning for Fidalgo Island and he’d never know she had wanted to go on another walk, and that maybe even she wanted to kiss him, and that she was a rotten, terrible, selfish person for caring about any of this right now at all when she was also so sad and scared about Grandma Sissy, and she was sorry, she was so, so sorry.

When she looked up at last, all her confessions made, she expected to see a look of disappointment on Grandma Sissy’s face. But her grandmother was smiling.

“My darling,” she said, “it is perfectly all right to be sad and scared about my dying and at the same time to want to kiss that boy. That’s life, you know; the good stuff and the bad stuff all mixed up together.”

“You wanted to kiss that guy?” Rex said. “But you just met him!”

And that made everybody laugh, which was okay with Odette because it didn’t feel like they were laughing at her, and then her parents left the puzzle and came to sit with her in front of the fire. Rex came too, plopping down practically on top of Odette.

“I’m sorry I dropped the phone, Detters,” Mom said.

“It’s okay,” Odette said. “It was just an accident.”

“You know,” said Grandma Sissy, “Orcas Island isn’t very big. There aren’t very many places where Harris could be staying. I know just about everyone on Orcas, including all the people who run the hotels. I’ll bet I could track him down.”

“Or we could put a sign in the bakery window, in case he comes by in the morning,” said Mom. “It could say, ‘Odette to Harris: Phone Lost! Please Come Inside!’”

“We could all go outside and walk around yelling his name,” Rex suggested. “Probably he’d come out eventually.”

Odette laughed. They all sounded like perfectly awful ideas. “He’ll think I’m crazy,” she said. “I’d feel like an idiot.”

Grandma Sissy said, “In my experience, it’s better to feel foolish now than to feel sorry later.”

That was just like Grandma Sissy, to have a little saying that went with the situation. In a flash, Odette knew that she’d always remember the funny little sayings—always, even after Grandma Sissy had died, even when Odette had become a grownup herself. Because those things were going to happen, as Grandma Sissy said, whether Odette wanted them to or not. “I feel better just talking about it,” Odette said. “Thank you, guys.”

Grandma Sissy petted her hair again, and Dad hugged her, and Mom smiled. Rex just shrugged and went back to the puzzle, but that was okay too. And right then, though Odette knew the feeling wouldn’t last, even with the lost phone and Mieko being mad at her and Grandma Sissy’s being sick, even with all of that, everything felt just fine.