fourteen

BACK IN MY ROOM AT HOME, I opened my notebook. Lula’s backpack sat on my desk; I told Janet I wanted to keep it for a little while, just until Lula came back. I took out Lula’s books, and began copying the underlined sections down in my own handwriting, in between pages of notes on end-arounds and wildcat plays. I never got to ask Christine if she was the one who underlined them, or if Lula did it herself. It didn’t matter. Either way, Lula knew these lines by heart, either way. There’s one section of An Actor Prepares that I kept coming back to. Where the director tells his acting students that they have to light a spark within themselves, that every person who’s really an artist desires to create a more interesting life than the one they have. Maybe that’s all Lula wanted. To create a more interesting life for herself, just like her mom did. Maybe we just weren’t enough to light her spark. I wasn’t, Sam Lidell wasn’t, Janet and Leo weren’t. Maybe Lula was on her way to Santa Fe, to finally meet her mom. Or maybe she was making a whole new exciting life for herself in New York or Seattle, someplace where they didn’t call her Weird Girl in the halls.

The passage I copied down after that is from the Liv Ullmann book. The part where Liv and her daughter go back to the Swedish island where her ex-husband, the movie director Ingmar Bergman, lives in their old house with his new wife. She talks about how nothing in the house has changed, that even the furniture is all in the same place. She says: The circle is closed. Nothing ever comes to an end. Wherever one has sunk roots that emanate from one’s best or truest self, one will always find a home.

It kind of reminded me of me and my mom. But it was also the passage that reminded me most of Lula. It made me hopeful that, someday, she’d find her way back home.

LATELY I’VE BEEN FIGHTING OFF NIGHTMARES in my sleep. In the nightmares, I have to get home, because I know that I have to save someone—sometimes it’s Andy, sometimes it’s my mom. Once it was Janet and Leo. In the nightmare, I’m running through the woods, trying to get to wherever they are. But the woods turn into a football field. Suddenly there are giants everywhere, guys a hundred times bigger than me, impossibly huge, tackling me from all sides, dragging me down into the mud. The more I try to struggle, the harder they are to fight off. Just when I think I’m winning, I realize I’m sinking down into the turf, the mud slurping me under until I can barely breathe. I’ve been waking up drenched in sweat, exhausted, my sheets twisted in damp, sloppy ropes. Once, after one of these nightmares, I even called Andy. He didn’t pick up the phone.

Sometimes I have this other dream, too. It started as a fantasy, something for my mind to idle on during the boring parts of Algebra II. But now I’m actually dreaming it at night. In the dream, I’m sitting in class, and there’s a knock on the door. It’s a man with a badge and a gun on his hip, and he tells me not to be afraid. He’s Agent Mulder, from the FBI, and he’d like to ask me some questions about my friend, Tallulah Monroe. I nod and tell him I have some ideas. We drive out past the community college. Past the cemetery. Past the woods. Out to Janet and Leo’s, where there’s a redheaded agent in Lula’s bedroom, already looking for clues. This is Agent Scully, Agent Mulder introduces. We shake hands. I tell her my friend Lula is a redhead, too. And Agent Scully starts to tear up. She has to look away. Agent Mulder pulls me aside and tells me that this case is personal to Agent Scully. He explains that Agent Scully is Lula’s mom. That she loves Lula and cares about her very much. But that she had to leave her here, with Janet and Leo, to keep her out of harm’s way. Because of the nature of her work. Their work. Agent Mulder puts his hand on my shoulder, and I tell him I understand. I tell him that I’ll do anything I can to help. I tell the agents to come with me, that I know a few places where the police haven’t looked. I take them back to my house. My mother isn’t home. The place is full of furniture, all askew. We make our way up to my room through a narrow path between end tables and easy chairs. And I find Lula there, sleeping in my bed. But, in the dream, the bed is like a lake. A deep pool of water where she sleeps beneath the surface. I lift her out of it, and her body is still. I kiss her, kiss her forehead and her red hair and her mouth until she coughs and spits and breathes again. I hold her close to me and I promise the agents that I’ll take care of her from now on. I tell the agents that their case is closed.