I DON’T MEAN to make it sound like everything just snapped into place, though, because it didn’t. L.A. never really got all the way back to being her old self again and there were certain things I had to learn, like being more careful than ever about touching her when she wasn’t looking. What I got in return was her remembering not to make any sudden movements at the edge of my vision, which gives you some idea of how we got through those first days.
Meantime, I was gradually coming to terms with the possibility L.A. was permanently done with talking, even taking a certain offbeat pride in my ability to handle the idea. I doubted there were very many guys out there who could even grasp the concept of a speechless girl, much less get comfortable with it.
But then Dee Campion whispered to her.
Dee was a friend of ours, one of those kids who’s always around but doesn’t usually say much and never really seems to be completely in on things. At the time I didn’t understand how much he and I had in common, and for a while I wasn’t sure what to make of him. Gram called him a “gentle boy,” something I never heard her say about anybody else. He was an artist. His specialty was watercolors, things like apples, onions and wineglasses, and he painted them so well that I couldn’t distinguish what he did from straight-up magic. He was thin and blond and seemed to catch more light than other people, which made him look beyond ordinary, maybe a little tragic, like a saint or a doomed poet. There was just something about him, and whatever it was made me feel like a bear at a tea party when I was around him.
Plus we didn’t actually see eye to eye about much of anything, so even watching TV with him could be kind of an obstacle course. He was polite about it but you could tell he had no use for sports, whereas I didn’t care much for stuff about romance, relationships and other female ordeals. If I ever did get him to watch a game with me, he tended to ignore the count and the infield adjustments and veer off into speculation about things like whether the team colors agreed with a particular player’s personality or how the guy’s relationship with his father might have affected his batting average.
But even though Dee wasn’t the kind of kid you’d ever think of offering a smoke to or going out to hit grounders with, there was still something kind of likable about him and I considered him basically okay. In fact, he was one of the favored few allowed in on the secret of Gram’s supernatural once-a-month raisin cookies, and this month when the day rolled around he dropped by.
But this was no ordinary cookie day, because after a little polite munching and idle chitchat with Gram and me, Dee got up and without any fanfare walked over to the green chair where L.A. was sitting in her usual stony silence. No cookies for her. Just that thousand-yard stare in the general direction of the TV, like the rest of the world didn’t exist. Dee leaned down so that his lips were by her ear and whispered something to her that lasted about as long as the Pledge of Allegiance. When he finished, they looked at each other for a couple of beats, then he lightly touched her arm, went back to his place on the couch and reached for another cookie.
As much as I wanted to know what he’d said to her, I knew I never would, recognizing this immediately as one of those little loose ends the universe was always dangling in front of me, especially where L.A. was concerned. I took the only sensible course, telling myself it probably wasn’t that important anyway, and tossed it in the same mental bin where I kept questions like how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
But then the next night when I was studying for my U.S. History test, flipping through the pages without finding what I needed to know, I said more or less to myself, “What the hell’s the Missouri Compromise?”
And without looking up, L.A. said, “Missouri washes, Kansas dries.”
I almost jumped out of my socks. I watched her and waited for a while to see if there was going to be anything else, but she’d said all she was going to for that day. Still, I took it as a breakthrough. And sure enough, the next morning at breakfast she spontaneously asked me to pass the milk, and by the end of the day she was talking again, not exactly a mile a minute, but almost back to what passed for normal with her.
As far back as I could remember, Aunt Rachel had never stayed at home longer than a few hours at a time, meaning she constantly needed a babysitter for L.A. And since Gram never turned her down when it came to taking care of L.A., and did it for free, L.A. was always overnighting either at our house when I was still at home or later here at Gram’s. So even though she and I were technically solo kids, we were used to each other, and now that we had no place left to fall we did what it took to get along, including wrangling out a morning bathroom schedule and getting the chores divided up more or less equally. I wouldn’t call it wall-to-wall harmony, but we did manage to hammer out some kind of mutual deadlock on most points.
Then Gram started getting serious about L.A. going back to school. “We simply have no alternative, dear,” she said in that law-of-nature tone of hers.
But L.A. shook her head and went silent again. It was their first major standoff, and it got me thinking about whether truant officers actually existed in reality or were just another parental figment like the tooth fairy. I’d never personally seen one or heard a reliable eyewitness report and wondered what the uniform would look like and whether they’d carry special undersized handcuffs and nightsticks and arrive in small paddy wagons painted in cheerful colors.
But I wasn’t truly worried, because of my experience with Gram’s rock-solid belief in education and the unbreakable will behind it. There was also the simple reality of L.A. being a girl, with the kind of backhanded, diabolical intelligence that implies, plus her well-established history of dazzling teachers and showing me up in class. In other words, school was her natural turf, and I knew she couldn’t stay away from it forever.
Sure enough, less than a week later she gave in, coming out of her room at seven-thirty that morning dressed and ready as I was about to leave. We hoofed it over to Lipscomb just like nothing abnormal had ever happened, and that was the end of her educational strike. This returned us to a certain level of regularity at Gram’s, and by the time school was finally out for the year L.A. and I were back in the old groove, kicking around town like we always used to, like we owned the streets and summer was just for us.
I guess it’s proof of how unreliable the so-called Sight was that it didn’t tell me what was coming. I’ve wondered a thousand times how things might have turned out if it had only given me a heads-up about what was going to happen, and what I was going to do, before this summer was over.