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My parents avoided talking about the twins, save for one particular conversation I overheard in early January, when my mother said, “Roger, did you hear that Rob McCray dropped out of college?”
I was doing some homework at the dining room table. My ears perked up.
“Who?” asked my father.
“Rob McCray. That boy Valencia used to go with. He was going to school in La Crosse too. I heard from Mary Kelter-Gurnsey that he dropped out last month.”
I looked down at my math problems, considering for the first time all the others who were missing Van and Valencia. Poor Rob McCray. He had lost the love of his life.
“That kid with the rough looking mom? Yeah, I remember him,” said my father. “I never understood why she wouldn’t wear a wig. She looked like a hag. Wouldn’t you wear a wig, Patricia? If you didn’t have hair. You wouldn’t go around like that, would you?”
“I guess not,” said my mother.
“Out in public…” He shook his head, disgusted.
“Yes Roger, I’d wear a wig.”
“I would hope so.” Then I heard the television get turned up louder. End of subject.
For some time our house was like a time capsule of Thanksgiving, with small turkey statues gathering dust on top of the television all the way into spring. On Easter Sunday I went into Valencia’s room and cleaned up the Barbie Thanksgiving feast. It occurred to me then that I hadn’t planned any kind of a surprise like that for Van and I began to cry, hating myself for being so thoughtless. I went down into his room and lay on his waterbed, looking around at his posters and his falling-apart dresser. It was always cooler in his room since it was in the basement. Right through the middle of his bedroom ran one of those support poles that holds up the house. I used to twirl and do tricks on it until one day a friend of his called me a pole-dancing slut. I was about seven or eight.
“What does that mean?” I’d asked Van, knowing it was something bad.
“Just get out of my room,” he’d said, and shoved me right out the door. I guess we were both trying to show off for his friend.
“Tell me!” I’d yelled through his door. “Tell me or I will kick the door in!” I was always such an embarrassment.
They climbed out his window to get away from me, but left the radio on. I sat outside the door for an hour, waiting for them, until I heard them upstairs playing Atari.
Now it was quiet and still.
There were senior pictures of his still-alive classmates stuck in the frame of his mirror. The girls were all so pretty and the boys were all so cute. Feathered hair and Trans Ams. Permed hair and Camaros. I went over to the mirror and pulled a few of the photos down, curious what I would find written on the backs. It turned out that people just signed their names on the back of senior pictures. I put the pictures back where they had been and stood at his dresser. I was quiet and still. I did not know what to do. The familiar semi-darkness, the slightly mildewy smell, the blue curtains, the brown bedspread. My surroundings began to overwhelm me. I felt like I was losing my breath. I did not know if it was the reality of his absence or the illusion of his presence that was permeating my soul, making me feel so broken. I sat down on the edge of his bed, pinpricks of light swirling around me. I thought I might faint. I stretched out on his bed with his yearbook before me, trying to calm down, trying to relax. Knowing if my mother found me I would be in trouble. She owned these memories, not me.
I ached for everything I had lost, and for the secret shame of having been a fraction of Van and Valencia’s thoughts, while they had been my entire world.
Chapter 29
My parents, in a strange move I had only heard about on television, sent me to camp the summer of 1987. It was just like I had heard it would be, with canoes, crafts, swim lessons, the works. There were big green bunkhouses for boys and girls. At night we sang songs around campfires. It lasted for six weeks and, until I met Adrian, stood out, gleaming pink and gold like a pirate ship of adventure and independ
ence, as the best six weeks of my life.
There I met my first boyfriend. A quiet, mousy little nerd by the name of Donny Hadbrack. We snuggled up by the campfire every night, and none of the counselors even noticed. If they did, they didn’t care. They may have even thought we were cute. There were other little couples at Clear Water Camp for Boys and Girls. Coupling up seemed to be an accepted part of the camp experience.
Donny knew nothing about me. I don’t know if he even knew my last name. I told him I was an only child, and because I had always wanted a dog, I told him I had a poodle named Mork. As far as everyone at camp was concerned, this was my story. I had never had any power over my own destiny before camp, and it was there, for the first time in my life, that I had a sliver of influence. I was telling them who I was, and they were accepting it. This was not the way it worked at school, or at home, or anyplace else. I wondered why it couldn’t always be so easy.
I wasn’t popular, but no one hated me. I felt normal, funny, sweet. I felt like I was finally experiencing what it should mean to be a girl. I was a spreader of laughter and cheer, a net-carrying chaser of butterflies, a screaming, giggling lake splasher. My shoulders burned red and peeled. My fingernails were black crescents of creativity and filth. I was someone else entirely, reborn and happy. Life at camp was one big Country Time Lemonade commercial come to life.
When I got home from camp, Valencia and Van’s rooms were cleared out. Valencia’s room had become a guest room and Van’s was nothing. Just an empty room with brown carpet smooshed down where furniture had been and a stained drop ceiling.
“Where is everything?” I asked.
“We donated it to St. Vincent de Paul,” my dad said. My mother was lying down in bed, resting. They had both picked me up from camp, but there had been a baseball game on the radio that my father had needed to listen to, and none of us had exchanged a word on the drive home.
I wandered through our house, feeling like I was visiting someone else’s home. The furniture in Valencia’s room had been rearranged so that now there was just a bed, a table beside it, and a dresser with a pale gold doily on top. It even smelled different: Pledge and Windex. The smell of Love’s Baby Soft was gone. I opened her closet door but there was nothing inside but a vacuum cleaner.
I went back into the living room where my dad had fallen asleep on the recliner.
“Dad?”
