TONIGHT
I’m strolling down the ice cream aisle with Colin as he studies the pint-sized cartons.
“What are you having?” Colin asks. “No, wait. Let me guess. I’ll pick a flavor for you and you pick one for me,” he says and smiles.
Despite myself, I smile, too.
“Okay,” I say, staring at the freezer. My eyes scan the rows and fall on the vanilla fudge swirl. I can’t help but think of Andy.
Next to that is Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. I figure I can’t go wrong with that because it has a little of everything, so I open the freezer and grab it. Colin does the same on the other side of me.
“Okay, you first,” he says, holding the ice cream behind his back.
“No, come on, it was your brilliant idea. You first.”
“Fine,” he reveals his choice dramatically. It’s Cherries Jubilee.
“I’ve never had Cherries Jubilee. It looks so . . . pink,” I say.
“Don’t knock it. It’s really good. Anyway, I figured you’d probably get something like coffee, but you should try this.” I make a face, really wishing he’d chosen coffee instead. “All right, your turn,” he says.
I reveal my choice and a look I can’t quite read flashes across his face.
“Relax, it was just a guess. You can get something else,” I say.
He smiles. “No, it’s just . . . my dad had a thing for the Grateful Dead. He always got Cherry Garcia, even though I know he didn’t really like it all that much. He liked chocolate, but always got this for some reason. He . . . uh . . .” Colin looks at me and shrugs his shoulders awkwardly. “He died when I was a kid.”
“Oh,” I say. I wonder why Colin didn’t tell me this at the beach, but then, it’s pretty personal and I get why he wouldn’t. “Grateful Dead was a kickass band,” I say. It might be one of the worst responses ever to news of someone’s death, but it’s all I can come up with. “I’m sorry,” I say quickly. I’m seriously a mental case.
He shrugs off my stupid response before putting the Cherries Jubilee back on the freezer shelf.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Getting you coffee.”
“No, keep that one,” I say gesturing to the carton he’s just put back.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I want to try it. It looks . . . fun.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I shrug. “Just, come on,” I say.
“Say please.”
I roll my eyes. “No, just get it.”
“Say pretty please.”
“No, just get the damn Cherries Jubilee!”
“Say pretty please. With a cherry on top.” He laughs. “Say it or I’m going to start singing.”
“No, that’s stupid.” I wait. “Come on!”
“Say it!” he yells. I don’t say it. “Fine, you asked for it.” He takes a deep breath and starts singing.
“Stop! Come on, shut up!” I tell him, completely embarrassed. A stock boy looks around from the end of the aisle, stares at us, but then decides we’re not worth his time.
His eyes are closed, but he’s way into his performance and looks ridiculous. “Seriously, stop!” I urge, but he keeps going, getting louder. So I ditch him and walk to the next aisle. I can still hear him two aisles over and I don’t know what to think of the fact that he actually seems to know all the words to this song. I can’t help but laugh because he sounds pretty terrible. And I can’t believe there’s not a manager around to stop him. He comes to the end of the song and I decide it’s safe to head back. But as soon as he spots me, he starts over again.
“Please!” I yell.
He sings louder.
“Pretty please!”
He grins for a second, but goes for the high note anyway.
“With a cherry on top!” I yell.
He stops singing. “Good enough,” he says. “Let’s go,” and walks to the registers.
We get in the checkout line, and that’s when I see Zeena. I really want to toss the ice cream aside and run out of the store before she spots me. Right now she’s busy ringing up this lady who apparently does all of her grocery shopping at one in the morning. Zeena looks miserable as she throws the woman’s frozen meals into the bags.
“Seventy-four dollars and sixty-three cents,” Zeena says. The woman slides her card through the machine as Zeena picks at her nail polish and waits for the receipt to finish printing out. She gives it to the woman who grabs it and then leaves. Colin and I move up in line. After she scans the Cherry Garcia ice cream, she looks up and sees me. For a second, she looks scared.
“Oh . . . hey,” she says. I wave. She scans the Cherries Jubilee.
“Eight fifty-six,” she says.
Colin pays her with a ten. She gives him back the change and we leave.
We’re almost out the door when I exhale and realize I’d been holding my breath since we were at the register.
“You know that girl?” Colin asks as he crumples the receipt.
“Kind of,” I say. And then I hear “Frenchie?” I turn around. There’s Zeena looking at me, hands crossed over her chest as if she’s cold. “You’re Frenchie, right? Your name is Frenchie?”
I nod as my stomach lurches. Is that Frenchie? Is that girl’s name Frenchie?
She bites her lip. “Do you think . . . maybe we can talk for a second?” she asks.
“Uh, sure . . . ,” I say. She looks over at Colin who stands there looking back and forth between us before he gets the hint.
“Wait for you in the car?” he asks me.
I nod and Colin goes out through the automatic doors, leaving Zeena and me alone.
She stands awkwardly in her khaki pants and blue Wal-Mart shirt. She uncrosses her arms, smooths her hair back, and tucks it behind her ears. She looks from the Redbox movie kiosk to the missing person fliers on a bulletin board, to the dirty floor, before crossing her arms across her chest again and finally making eye contact with me.
“I’m Zeena. I don’t think we’ve ever really met before. . . .” Her voice trails off.
“No, I know who you are,” I offer.
She winces slightly, but then nods.
“Uh, right. Well . . . I know you were . . . hanging out with Andy that last night . . . ,” she says. When she says his name, she looks at me carefully. This time I’m the one who winces because Zeena Fuller is the only person in the world who knows that, and her saying it out loud scares me.
I don’t know how to answer her. I suddenly worry I’m being set up. The thought that Zeena might be wearing a wire and the police are staking out the place crosses my mind even though I know it’s ridiculous. I didn’t do anything illegal by hanging out with Andy that night. Even if the cops come charging in and throw me to the ground, I’ll . . . but then I remember the pills in my pocket. Shit.
“It was you, right?”
I stare at her. I don’t say anything. What does she mean it was me? Like it was me that killed him? It was me that didn’t stop him? It was me who should have?
She waits and looks down at her olive green Toms shoes, the shoes that help people around the world. I look down at my own beat-up shoes. They look like hell.
“I’m sorry,” she says and shakes her head like she’s confused. “I thought—”
She sighs. I don’t know if it means she’s relieved or if that’s the cue for officers to rush in. “Oh, okay. I thought so.” She smiles nervously and I wonder if that’s it. If that’s all Zeena had to say to me because now she’s the one standing there saying nothing. She’s studying the Redbox kiosk next to me. “Those movies suck,” she says. “We watched almost all of them.”
I turn and look at the movies and I know she means Andy when she says “we.”
“He’d come here every night, you know. Rent a movie and we’d watch it at my place because he said . . . he said being alone was sad.” She says the last part so softly I barely catch it. “He always liked the most depressing ones.” Zeena doesn’t look at me when she says this, she just keeps looking at the kiosk. I watch her eyes scanning the titles. “Like ones about the Holocaust, or about some gross social injustice. Movies about things that made you sick or cry over ‘mankind’s capacity and capability for cruelty.’” She doesn’t look at me and it seems like she’s talking to herself. “He was always going on and on about our ability to be cruel, our disgrace. He’d even . . . he’d cry. I never knew what to do, how to handle that, you know?” she asks, like I might have the answer. “I mean, he’d sob and I’d just . . .” She shakes her head. “He could drag you down.”
Zeena stands there, and I don’t know what to say to her. She looks glued to that spot, looking down at the floor, unwilling or unable to move. For a moment, the image of Andy’s mom, the way she sat there unmoving by his grave that night, flashes through my head.
“That last night,” Zeena says, “he said to me, ‘I’m going to be okay.’ Out there.” She looks out of the smudged automatic doors, to the parking lot, to that night. “Can you believe he came by to tell me that? And he looked happy and I thought maybe he was with you.” She looks at me and I realize she must think Andy and I were more than what we were.
“We weren’t—” I explain, but she interrupts.
“I was happy for him. I thought, good, because more than anything, I wanted Andy to be happy, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know what he meant. And it wasn’t my fault,” she says firmly. She watches my face and I can tell she’s checking for my reaction. “I just need you to know that. I don’t know what he told you, but . . .”
“No, I know,” I say. “He never said anything.”
“Not that there was anything to say. I mean it was what it was,” she says. “I’m not even sure I know what it was.” She looks at me again, like I might be able to tell her. I shake my head because I can’t. “He wouldn’t let anyone in,” she says. “Not really. Not ever.”
“I know,” I say, not because I actually do know but just because I’m not sure what else to say. But what I say makes a pained expression flutter across Zeena’s face.
“I mean, not really,” I say. “We never hung out before. Not until that night. I didn’t really know him at all.”
The revelation hangs there in the air with the smell of produce and lingering bleach. This somehow doesn’t help and I suddenly worry that Zeena will interpret this as me and Andy having some kind of one-night stand.
“It wasn’t anything more than just hanging out. I saw him at this show and he said he wanted to go on this”—I say with a shrug—“on this, adventure, and it was . . . I don’t even know what or why we did it.” I tell her trying to explain something I don’t know how to explain.
“Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry.” And I wonder why Zeena is apologizing to me.
“Don’t be,” I say.
“I wish I could say it wasn’t like him,” she says, “but it’s typical Andy.”
Her tone makes it seem like she’s knocking him somehow, which I don’t think is fair since he’s not even here to defend himself.
“Anyway, I just wanted to say that to you. I mean, he was great.” She smiles, remembering. “He could be so great. But he could also get so weighed down with . . . life.” She struggles to find words. “At first, I thought he was, I don’t know, romantically tortured or something? I think that was what drew me to him.” She looks at her hands and continues. “But that kind of person can be exhausting. They can drain you. Especially when he didn’t want to be any other way. I don’t think he liked it when you tried to show him anything different than what he saw or thought. He was just so . . . consumed.” Her voice trails off.
I don’t know what to think of what Zeena is saying to me. Somehow it doesn’t match with the Andy I barely knew and somehow it seems to describe him so perfectly. It makes me more confused. Because this incessant part of me thinks, Me! I could have saved him. I should have saved him.
She rubs her arms like she’s trying to warm them up. She takes a deep breath and lets it out. “Well,” she says. “I don’t know,” and she shrugs.
“Yeah,” I say. I feel like I should say more to her. Because I think I’ve been wanting to talk to Zeena for a while now too, but I didn’t really know it until now. What is there to say though? Thanks? It’s cool we have a dead guy in common? Now have a good life?
She turns and heads back toward the cashier lanes. But I can’t leave. She’s back at her register, leaning back against the counter, and looking out at the empty grocery store. I wonder if after all these nights Zeena has been here, working in an almost empty grocery store, if there’s a part of her that always hopes he will show up with a movie from the Redbox. I walk over to her.
“Does he haunt you?”
And she doesn’t even look confused. She doesn’t even hesitate. She stares at me with her gray eyes and says, “All the time.”