I throw it back at her, and she holds up her finger. She reaches under her bed and pulls out the album cover. She puts it over her face like Dad used to do, and I want to burst into tears and laughter at the same time.
This is Lola’s gift. To take what hurts and make it better.
“I love you,” I say.
“I know,” she says and puts the album cover under my pillow.
Lola goes back to her side of the room and fidgets for a while, looking lost. She gets under her covers and tosses back and forth. I know she’s uncomfortable here without her lists. If a hole opens up in her head, she has nothing to close it with. At home, she has everything mapped out. An amnesiac’s guide to her ever-changing universe.
I wonder what would happen if her system fell away beneath her. I see her like one of the fireworks from the night everything changed—launched into the sky on its way to nowhere but up. No course of action but to exploded into a million bits of color and fizzle out. I can still hear the boom of those fireworks. When I close my eyes, I see their light etched on the back of my lids. My mouth gets dry from the heat, and my heart races.
I look over to Lola, all these years later. There is nothing I can do about what has already been done.
Without Lola, there may very well be nothing. She might be one of a handful of people who holds the world together. She’s one of those people without whom it doesn’t really make any sense for God to have gone to so much trouble.
I’m grateful for Chris and hope that he and my sister will fare better than Jack and I did. I wonder about fate and the way people meet. How God must work it all out, just so. Who else could get past that stupid jingle except for the girl who can’t remember ever having heard it? Who else could put up with Swiss-cheese brain but the guy who wishes everyone would forget who he is?
Well played, God. Well played.
But about all this other business, I say to Him, I’m not so sure you’re on the right track.
“Ray came, you know,” Lola says from under her covers, breaking my thoughts.
“Yeah,” I say, not really listening as I check Facebook, Twitter, and everything else I can think of, looking for Cassie. “It’s nice that he’s here.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she says and sits up in bed. “He came to the hospital, that first time. When Dad first got sick.”
“Really?” I say, letting my grip loosen on the phone, my attention turn to the past. “I didn’t see him. Nobody said anything.”
“Nobody knew,” Lola says. “I saw him in the parking lot. Remember when I went to get some sodas and you complained about how long it took me to get back?”
“I remember,” I say, my voice giving away the disappointment of being left out.
“I saw him through the window,” she says. “I ran outside. I was yelling out to him, afraid that he’d get back in his car before I got there.”
I place the phone down and scoot to the edge of the bed.
“What happened?” I ask.
“He smiled,” Lola says, and her face lights at the memory of him. “I hadn’t seen him since he left the night of the gallery showing a few weeks after he got out of jail.”
She’s lost for a second in a secret part of a memory that doesn’t include me. I’m jealous of Ray. He gets a part of Lola that I sometimes think he doesn’t deserve, but that, nonetheless, I know is what keeps him alive.
“Did he come in?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “He had been in North Dakota. Drove all the way. Did you know that’s where he was?”
“No.”
I rarely knew anything about Ray. When Dad died, it took a lot of message passing from one old friend to the next to find Ray. Knowing about Michael now stands out as even more odd.
“I tried to get him to come see Dad,” Lola says. “But he said he couldn’t go in. He said he’d seen me and that was all he really came for.”
I’m jealous of Lola, too. She gets a part of Ray that no one else does.
“I wish he had come in,” I say.
“Me too,” Lola says. “I think he wishes it now.”
I’m not ready to try to understand his reasons. “Well, he’ll just have to live with that.”
“Don’t be mad at Ray,” Lola says. “He came. It’s hard for him.”
“Poor Ray,” I say. “It’s hard for the rest of us, too.”
I’m sorry Lola is taking the brunt of my sudden anger. I get up from the bed and wander the room aimlessly. I need to move before I shatter.
“I’m sorry, Nina. I know what this means for you. I’m sorry I brought it up.”
I know she is. She knows how close Dad and I were.
“Don’t be sorry,” I say and feel guilty that I’m making her feel responsible for my grief. “It is important that Ray came. I told him as much today. Although not as kindly as I could have.”
“You spoke to him,” she says, trying to smooth it over. “That means more to him than I’m sure he let on.”
There she goes again, weaving it together. Her cell phone lights up and plays the insurance jingle. I tilt my head at her in a question.
“Just to remind me.” She smiles hugely at her own cleverness. “It was on a ringtone app on my phone.”
While Lola talks to Chris, I pull the album cover out from under my pillow and look longingly at the photo. I pick up my phone, but set it down without checking anything.
The process of grieving is exhausting. I feel it in my arms like I’ve been carrying around an anvil, looking for somewhere to set it down and not even understanding how
