Everything’s chaos. I’m homeless. Our family’s broken. My entire future is up in the air. And I’m missing Lennon desperately. Even though he made it home from Condor Peak just fine, and we text constantly and occasionally talk on the phone when I can get away from everyone, it’s not the same.
I miss him in a way I never have.
I miss his deep voice and his dark sense of humor. I miss his face and the feeling of security I have when he’s nearby. I miss the way he holds me, and the thrill of his fingers stroking down my back. I miss him so much, I feel physically ill.
I don’t want more food or a nap or to watch a movie. I just want to go home and see Lennon. Only, I don’t know where home is anymore. I think about how Lennon and I spent the last year avoiding each other, and what a waste that was. We didn’t know how good we had it, living so close. We were both stupid. I wish I could erase the entire year and start all over. Stop him from getting that hotel room. Stop my father from cheating and ruining the business and our credit, because now Grandma Esther is saying that he’s the reason my mom was having trouble with the bank before I left on the camping trip. He secretly spent all my parents’ savings and credit on his affairs. Trips. Hotel rooms. Expensive restaurants. Gifts. He was living large while my mom was trying to keep the business afloat.
My grandparents say they’re going to sue him for all the money they gave him to invest in the business. Grandma Esther is sure the judge will grant my mom full custody if my dad fights it. The good thing is that he won’t; the sad thing is that he won’t. I can’t decide how I feel about him, and I’m tired of trying to figure it out and weary of my life being in limbo. Something has to give.
And on Tuesday morning, it does.
Everything changes.
I’m restless and a little depressed, watching Andromeda lounge listlessly in a dog bed that’s too small for her while Grandma Esther’s energetic dogs unsuccessfully try to coax her into playing. Mom appears in the doorway, and I think it’s probably to check my hives again, because she’s been monitoring me like a doctor.
But Mom is not interested in my allergies. She has a strange look on her face. It’s like happiness, but a little angrier. Happy angry. Hapry.
“Get your stuff,” she says. “We’re going home.”
“To Dad?”
“Your father has moved in with one of his mistresses in San Francisco. You and I are going home, changing the locks, and I’m going to figure out how to keep the clinic running without him.”
It sounds too good to be true. “Can you do that?”
“Zorie, I can do anything I damn well want.” she says, sounding unexpectedly confident and positive. “And what I want is to go back to Mission Street and be the East Bay’s best acupuncturist while raising my future astrophysicist daughter. So that’s what I’m going to do, goddammit.”
“Maybe sound a little surer of yourself, while you’re at it,” I mumble, smiling.
And for the first time since all of this chaos exploded, she smiles too. Just for a second.
“I’m not sure,” she admits. “Not yet. But I have to have faith that I will be one day. We will be. We’ll make a plan and take action. And that’s how we start.”
Her words click into place inside my head, and I realize something.
Planning can’t save you from everything. Change is inevitable and uncertainty is a given. And if you plan so much that you can’t function without one, life’s no fun. All the calendars, journals, and lists in the world won’t save you when the sky falls. And maybe, just maybe, I’ve been using planning less as a coping mechanism and more as an excuse to avoid anything I couldn’t control.
But that doesn’t mean preparation is altogether bad. Planning can be useful when you’ve come out on the wrong side of a cave and need to figure out a new way to get back on route.
When all you can do is put one foot in front of the other and push forward.
“We’ll be okay,” Mom tells me, and I believe her.
“All right,” I say. “Let’s go make a plan.”
* * *
All I wanted was to go home and see Lennon. So of course the Mackenzies would pick now of all times to leave their assistant manager in charge of Toys in the Attic while they go visit friends in the city—some old punk musicians who knew Lennon’s father. I want to scream. I need to see Lennon. It’s not optional. Need. And I know we spent an entire year apart, so a couple of days should be nothing. But it’s not. It’s painful.
Lennon briefly considers taking the BART train across the Oakland Bay Bridge to meet up with me. But we decide it’s best to wait until he comes back on Thursday, when we can have an actual real, live date. Funny that we’ve never had one.
Meanwhile, he has tickets for a concert in San Francisco—some band that’s dark and despairing—and I’m insanely busy. Grandma Esther is staying with us for a couple of days to help with something she’s dubbed the Purge. It’s not the horror movie by that name, but it might as well be, because it’s endless hours of work that involves getting rid of everything that doesn’t help us move forward.
It’s as bad as it sounds. And as much as I love Grandma Esther, she’s starting to drive me nuts. Apparently, my mom feels the same way.
“I’m going to kill her,” she tells me privately.
“Please don’t,” I say. “Her body would be just one more thing we’d have to carry to the porch. She looks lightweight, but so did that box of shoes I just took downstairs.”
“Right. Good thinking. We’ll wait until she’s outside. You trip her, and I’ll push her into oncoming traffic.”
“Who will cook for us?”
“Dammit, Zorie. I’m trying to plan a murder!”
“I don’t think you can kill her. She has too much energy. It’s unnatural.”
“Imagine growing up with her,” she says. “It’s a wonder I’m not in jail.”
By the time we’re finished with the Purge, we’re pretty sure Melita Hills is going to charge us extra for excess garbage pickup, because the curb outside the apartment is overflowing with black plastic bags—and that’s not counting the stuff we gave away to a local charity. I never knew we had so much literal baggage. I even take down the old glow-in-the-dark stars from my ceiling, and Mom helps me paint my room a new color, a sunny yellow that contrasts nicely with all my night-sky photos.
All my homemade wall calendars? I threw them in the trash. But I’m not ready to give up on blueprints altogether. Instead of obsessively bulleting every detail of my schedule for every day of the year on multiple calendars, I use star-patterned washi tape to map out a single grid on a corkboard, and pin fun paper cutouts on major holidays and planetary events.
Baby steps.
Avani comes by on Wednesday with her mother. They bring hummus, homemade banana bread, and a tray filled with sandwiches. It feels like someone died, and when I point this out, my mom jokes that she should get divorced more often.
In her defense, it’s really good banana bread.
While our moms chat, Avani tells me in detail what happened after we left Condor Peak—and everything that happened the two days before we arrived. Apparently, I missed both everything and not that much, all that the same time. It’s only when she shows me some of her photos of the meteor shower that I feel a little envious. But there will be other meteor showers, other star parties. For the first time, it really hits me that if Lennon and I hadn’t stayed in the sequoia grove that second night, no one would have worried that we were missing, and we may not have set off the chain of events that led to all of this.