It’s not even dark yet when he pulls into the parking garage of an outdoor shopping center. The bucket of pennies is so full that he has to struggle to get it out of the truck without spilling it. He picks up the handle with one hand and slides the other underneath for support so it won’t snap off and then kicks the door shut with his foot. The sun is just starting to set and the plaza lights have kicked on. It’s one of those high class places with stores no real person ever shops at and restaurants with overpriced food you’d never want to eat anyway. But the fountain is amazing. Right in the middle of all of the pretense, it’s an even more pretentious spectacle. Every few minutes, the spray pattern shifts and the lights change color from below. There’s a walkway that forms a bridge across it and the fountain spray arcs overhead, splitting in two on either side so you can pass underneath it without getting wet. It feels like magic and I’m a little girl. I wish I had my mother’s camera.
I follow Josh halfway through the walkway where he stops and curses under his breath at the pennies when he sets them down at his feet. The fountain obscures us and I don’t think anyone from school would be out here anyway, but I still worry about being seen, or more problematically, heard in public. It’s one of the reasons I never go anywhere, but it’s not the only one.
“Have at it,” he says.
“What?”
“Wishes. You only get one with a cake and even that you only get if you blow out all the candles, which is kind of shitty because it’s your birthday and there shouldn’t be a contingency on a wish. Pennies are a sure thing and you can have as many as you want.”
I stare down at the pail. “I don’t think I can think of that many things to wish for.” There’s only one thing I really want.
“Sure you can. It’s easy. Watch.” He leans over and grabs a handful of pennies in his left hand and picks one up with his right. He thinks for a second and then tosses it into the fountain. “See? You don’t even need good aim.” He turns to me expectantly.
“Here.” I can smell the sawdust on him as he takes my left hand and pours a fistful of pennies into it. My hand stutters and he steadies it with his, for a moment, before letting go. “Your turn.”
I look at the pennies and up to the fountain and wonder if there is such a thing as magic or miracles. Josh is watching me as I make the same wish I always do. It’s the one that won’t come true, but I wish it anyway, so maybe I haven’t totally given up after all. I toss the penny into the air and watch it fall into the water while the lights below switch from pink to purple.
“What’d you wish?”
“I can’t tell you that!” I say indignantly.
“Why not?”
“Because it won’t come true.” Do I really need to say this? I’m pretty sure it’s a given in wish situations.
“Bullshit.”
“It’s the rule,” I insist.
“It’s only the rule with birthday cakes and shooting stars, not pennies in fountains.”
“Who says?” I ask, sounding like a first grader.
“My mom.”
That shuts me up quick. I look at the pennies and the fountain and anywhere but at him because I don’t want to scare him away, and I’m hoping he’ll say something else. Then he does, and I wish he hadn’t.
“Then again, I doubt many of her wishes actually came true, so maybe she didn’t know what she was talking about after all.”
For just one moment, I see an eight year-old boy glued to a television set, waiting for his mother to come home.
“Maybe she just made the wrong one,” I say quietly.
“Maybe.”
“You talk about your mom more than your dad.”
“My dad was around longer. I remember him. I remember what he was like. I’ve forgotten almost everything about my mom so I try to make myself think about her more. Otherwise, I’m afraid one day I’ll wake up and I won’t remember her at all.” He tosses a penny into the fountain and I watch it sink. “If you asked me now about my sister, the only word I’d be able to come up with is annoying. I remember that she bugged the hell out of me and that’s about it. If I didn’t have pictures, I don’t even think I could tell you what she looked like.” He looks at me. “Your turn.”
I’m not sure if he’s referring to the wishing or the confessions, but I go with the pennies. I don’t even wish. I just throw one.
“I’m sorry.” The two easiest and emptiest words to say and I say them.
“Because I don’t remember my mom or because you asked?”
“Both. But mostly the asking.”
“No one ever asks. Like they think they’re doing me a favor. That if they don’t bring it up, I won’t have to think about it. I never stop thinking about it. Just because I don’t talk about it, doesn’t mean I forget. I don’t talk about it because no one ever asks.” He stops and looks at me again and I wonder if I’m supposed to say something, but I don’t want to, because if I say something, I’m afraid I might say everything. He turns back to the fountain so his eyes aren’t on me anymore, but I think he’s still watching. “I’d ask you, you know. If I was allowed. I’d ask you a thousand times until you’d tell me. But you won’t let me ask.”
We manage to find the laughter in the evening again, and we wish ourselves through most of the bucket of pennies. At one point, a mother with two little girls passes through and Josh gives them each a handful of pennies and begs them to help us because we’re running out of things to wish for. They take the affair very seriously as if each wish is so precious that they can’t afford to waste it. They squeeze their eyes shut and concentrate, making sure they do it just right. And I wish for every one of their wishes to come true.
Towards the end, we start making mega-wishes and fortifying them with handfuls of pennies. One of those wishes results in the clasp of my bracelet coming undone, causing it to fly off into the fountain along with my wish-imbued pennies. Josh rolls up the bottoms of his jeans and pulls off his boots. I just have to take off my shoes because I’m still in the skirt I wore to school and it’s plenty short. We scan around, hoping there aren’t any security guards in the area before we step in. Thankfully the water is shallow, because it’s freakishly cold and my legs are ice the second I get in.
“Where did it go?” he asks. I point off in the direction I threw the pennies. I don’t think it could have gotten very far. We head off in that direction but it’s impossible to see anything because the entire fountain floor is carpeted with coins. Half of them probably came from us. It’s a tapestry of silver and copper and colored light. Every time I see something I think might be my bracelet, I have to reach down and submerge my arm into the water, which is what I’m doing when Josh decides to push my leg with his foot just enough to knock me off balance and send me face first into the ice cold water. The splash is followed by laughter from him and a death glare from me. I plan to grab him and pull him in after me, but I don’t have to, because he tries to step away from my grasp too quickly and falls in all on his own.
“Karma’s a bitch, Bennett.”
His pants and half of his shirt are soaked, but he managed to keep his head out of the water unlike the drowned rat that is me. When he looks at me, he starts laughing all over again and I finally dissolve in it, too. “Don’t do the last name bullshit. I hate it,” he says.
“Not really caring what you hate right now,” I say, trying to force some venom into my voice, but it’s hard when I’m fighting what I am quite certain are the early stages of hypothermia. I feel like one of those insane polar bear people who jump in the freezing cold ocean every year and I mentally put that on my list of things I will never do.
“Screw the bracelet. It’s not worth it,” I say, climbing out of the water with Josh right behind me. He doesn’t argue.
We split up the rest of the pennies between the two little girls whose mother gives us a dirty look because I think she’s had enough wishing for the night. Or maybe because we’re soaking wet and just climbed out of the fountain. I pick up the empty pail and swing it back and forth between us while we walk to the parking garage, leaving the fountain, my bracelet, eighteen dollars in pennies and two giggling girls behind us. Josh reaches over to take the pail from me. He stops my hand and opens my fingers, retrieving the handle with his left hand and holding mine open with his right. His hand is no warmer than my own, but it feels good anyway, and I wait for him to let go, but he doesn’t.
When we reach his truck in the parking garage, he tosses the bucket into the back and then reaches up and cradles my face in his hands the way he did that day on the Leightons’ front porch.
“Black shit,” he says, letting one side of his mouth turn up as he wipes the streaks away with his thumbs. Then, he moves away and opens my door. “Happy birthday, Sunshine.”
“I wished that my hand would work again,” I tell him when he climbs in after me. It was my first wish and the only one that mattered.
“I wished my mother was here tonight, which is stupid, because it’s an impossible wish.” He shrugs and turns to me, drowning the smile that cracks me every time.
“It’s not stupid to want to see her again.”
“It wasn’t so much that I wanted to see her again,” he says, looking at me with the depth of more than seventeen years in his eyes. “I wanted her to see you.”
CHAPTER 33
Josh
“There are clean towels in the guest bathroom. I’m going to shower in the master.”
“I hope you have a big hot water heater, because I may never come out,” Sunshine yells from the hall. She’s still shivering because she has almost no body fat on her and I kind of feel like shit for the whole fountain thing.
“I’m going to put water on for tea. You want some?” I call from the kitchen where I’m filling the tea kettle.
“You drink hot tea?”
“So?”
“So, you’re not old. Or British. I can count on one finger the number of teenage boys who drink hot tea.”
“I used to make it for my grandfather. I got used to it. Shut up.” I finish filling the kettle and put it on top of the stove before I head into the bathroom. “You want it or not?”
“Not. Tea sucks. I’ll be out in an hour. Maybe two.” The bathroom door slams.
I’m out of the shower ten minutes later and the water is still running in the guest bathroom so I guess she wasn’t lying. I throw my wet clothes in the empty washer then head into the kitchen to turn the stove burner on. Maybe tea does suck, but I heat the water anyway. She won’t turn down hot chocolate.
The doorbell rings and I figure it has to be Drew, because other than the girl using all the hot water in my bathroom, he’s the only person who would come over here. He’s got a key so I don’t know why he doesn’t just come in.
“What?” I open the door, ready to hear about whatever minor irritation has sent him fleeing from his house this time, but it isn’t Drew. It’s a kid I’ve never seen before and he’s staring at me so intensely that I feel like he’s checking me out. Not like he wants me, but like he wants to know who the hell I am, except that he’s the one knocking on my door.
“Can I help you?” I finally ask because the kid isn’t talking.
“Is my sister here?” Sister? “Margot said she’d probably be here. Nastya.” He spits out her name like it tastes bad in his mouth.
“She’s your sister?” There’s not much of a resemblance unless you really, really look. He actually looks a lot like Margot.