Ray opens his mouth to answer, but Nicole speaks first. “Why don’t you leave them here—that way you’ll have something to play with next time we visit.”
Next time. Ray catches it, too, and his head snaps up from where he’s hung it low. Nicole gives him a half-smile and nods.
“I’ll walk you out,” Ray says and leads them through the door.
It’s funny how you can see things clearly from the outside. When you have no real stake in an issue, it all makes perfect sense what each party should say and do, but from inside the thicket, it’s hard to see a way out that doesn’t result in briars and scrapes and a lot of tears.
Ray comes back upstairs and raises his eyebrows at me.
“It went well,” I confirm.
“I thought so,” he says. “Better than I expected.”
I wonder what that was.
“Next time,” I say, “try it without me.”
“A little weird for you?”
“A smidge third-wheelish.”
But really, I’m glad that he asked me to stay. My big brother wants me around. My big, tattooed, ex-con, tortured and somehow still lovable big brother wants me around.
16
At work, there has been more whispering around the watercooler, as it were, about mergers and shutdowns, and I try to ignore the gossip and keep taking pictures of citrus drinks and condensation on fancy glasses. I think about that bowl of lemons Lola referred to.
Oliver and I have not seen each other since the night he told me about Cricket. I know he says he wants to be with me, but something stands between us, and since I can’t see what it is, I don’t know how to deal with it. I think about calling him, but I don’t. I guess he must need time, too, because he hasn’t dialed my number in days either.
When my phone does finally ring, it’s Lola doing fish face.
“Can you come help me, Sissy?”
I don’t even have to ask if she means now. It’s the deep dark of night, and she’s breathing too heavy and trying too hard to hold herself together.
When I get to Lola’s house, the front door is open. There’s a light on in the kitchen, and I walk through the familiar house not expecting to trip over a piece of broken furniture. So when I do, I curse at it. As my eyes become more accustomed to the dark, I see that Lola’s house is in shambles. Ransacked.
“Lola,” I scream out. “Where are you?”
She steps out from the kitchen into a beam of light. “Here,” she says.
I rush to her, stumbling over things that aren’t where they should be. I fold her into my arms when I reach her.
“What happened?” I ask.
“A break-in, we’re assuming,” she says.
While Lola was at the airport picking up Chris someone broke into her house and tore it to shreds. Isn’t that the way it goes? As soon as you think you’re on the right track, you leap over a burning log and run smack into a monkey with a sledgehammer.
“Where’s Chris?” I ask.
“He’s on the back porch on the phone with the police,” she says.
“Are you ok?” I ask the dumb question.
“The gallery just delivered my remaining unsold paintings yesterday,” Lola says after a minute. “Whoever broke in slashed them up pretty bad. Threw paint all over the ones I was working on.”
“Lola,” I say. It’s all I can manage in that sort of desperate shock that makes it possible for you to only utter someone’s name and nothing more.
“Well,” she says, “the gallery kept a couple for display, so it’s not a total loss.”
I think about all her work, her art, her effort—gone. “I don’t understand why someone would do that. Did they take anything?”
“Not much that we can tell,” she says. “The usual—television, laptop—but mostly I think they were just having fun busting things up. Or maybe they were mad that I didn’t have more stuff they could pawn. The paintings are the worst loss.”
“I guess you could repaint them,” I say, searching in vain for something that will make it better.
“That’s not showing very much faith in myself, is it?” she says. Her bizarre ability for insight makes me jealous. “To think that the best I can do is what I’ve already done. No, something different, I think. Something new.”
She says it with a wistfulness in her voice that speaks of something to which I’m not privy. As if she’s already rising up from some other loss than this. Like this is a clearing out, a preparation for something better. Lola breaks down and then rises back up every time.
The braces she wore on her ankles gave her superpowers. I had always seen them as a cage, a bright and shiny binding to the reality of what life could do to knock you down. I think she saw them like that, too, at first. But she learned how to manipulate them, to trick them. She triumphed over them. Even the memory loss was a gift. Without the recollection of what life was, she was free to make it into anything she wanted. Even now, she uses her memory frailty not as an infirmity but as a many-windowed escape.
Nights like this, I see her the way God must see her—her light and soul. I envy both of them.
“Is Cassie still at Jack’s?” she asks me, more concerned with everyone else around her than she is with herself. True Lola fashion.
“Yeah,” I say, thinking for a moment that I should try to spin my response so that it seems like a good thing. But it isn’t, so I don’t. “Everything is awful.”
“Sugar and water, Nina,” Lola says. “It’s not too late.”
◆ ◆ ◆
A few days later, I meet Lola at the landfill. That’s what we’ve taken to calling what’s left of her house. The punks had busted out most of the overhead lights so Lola didn’t see the whole of the disaster until the light of day. Everything was broken, the walls were covered in
