When the Sky Fell on Splendor(18)
“—phenomenon!” Cheryl Kelly finished.
The camera cut to a prerecorded interview with Garrett St. James, a mostly bald man with a thin gray swipe of hair back-combed across his shiny forehead, and a gun cradled in his arms like it was a very long baby.
Sofía snorted. “Only in Splendor, Ohio, would someone be like, Hey, mind if I bring my gun to this interview? And then have the news station be like, Sure, you can make vague threats on our program! No big!”
“We’re gonna get to the bottom of this one way or another and bring him to justice!” St. James was saying, rattling his gun a bit for effect.
I thought about the bullet I’d found, the damp footprints along the Jenkins House. “Do you think he saw anything that night?” I asked.
Sofía shrugged. “Why would he go to all this effort if he’d seen what happened? If he was around, he obviously doesn’t remember what went down either.”
And if he’d seen us lurking around near his property beforehand, he would’ve turned us in by now. Sofía was right: There was no shortage of hunting guns in Splendor. That bullet could’ve belonged to my pediatrician as easily as it could have belonged to Garrett St. James.
Sofía turned to me and jutted her chin toward the marks on my hand. “How are you feeling, by the way? Do yours itch or anything?”
I shook my head. “Yours?”
She ran her teeth over her bottom lip. “It’s like they’re already healed, isn’t it?”
“You tell me,” I said. “You’re the smart one.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m the one who tries.”
I had tried once, right after the accident. Getting perfect grades that fall was just one more way I could prove I was okay, take the burden off Mom and Dad. I especially threw myself into my science class, thinking my wannabe-astronaut mother would find some hope in watching me take an interest in the things she’d shared only with Mark.
All I really wanted was to be outside, like I had all summer, running through woods, soaked in sweat, smelling honeysuckle and oleander on the sticky breeze. Instead I’d toiled at the kitchen table for hours on my unnecessarily elaborate model of the solar system, then left it sitting out for upwards of a week, waiting for the moment Mom would notice it.
When she finally did, she didn’t say anything, but I watched hurt creep into her eyes. Like it was a trap I’d laid for her. I guess it sort of was.
I pushed too hard.
Three weeks later, she left.
On TV, Cheryl Kelly was standing cozy-close to Sheriff Nakamura again, the disembodied hand splitting the umbrella over both of them.
“Until we can be certain of the cause of this, we are still treating this as a criminal investigation,” he confirmed.
“Great,” Sofía said over Cheryl’s breathy wrap-up. The channel cut to a commercial break, and Sofía eyed me once more. “I guess that pretty much puts the kibosh on today’s plans.”
I felt simultaneously relieved to have an excuse not to go back to the field and anxious about the necklace, imagining it sitting out there where so many rain boots were stomping around and shovels were stabbing the dirt.
“I guess I’ll tell my mom I can go shoe-shopping with her after all,” Sofía said, with the enthusiasm most people would muster when talking about a dentist appointment or a Pap smear. “Wanna come?”
When I’d first befriended Sofía, I’d treated visits to her house like field trips to an art museum. Her home was beautiful; her parents were beautiful and warm and funny and loving. They were both ob-gyns, which struck me as very sophisticated and meaningful. Her mother, Dr. Gloria Perez, lived in elegantly casual linen and wool and focused all her use of color and pizzazz on her shoe closet, which I’d regularly begged Sofía to give me tours of.
Sofía didn’t care much about shoes, or shopping. She spent half her life in athletic wear and the other half in dark jeans and cheap white T-shirts she bought in multipacks (and looked like a Gap model in), but every few weeks, she and her mom went shoe-shopping.
It was just their thing, she explained. I’d gone along a couple of times. The last time, I remembered watching them both dissolve into laugh-tears in the size 9 aisle of Nordstrom Rack when Sofía called a feathery pink heel something that belongs in Muppets porn. Later, Dr. Gloria had told us about her childhood in Mexico City and her first boyfriend. She’d told us the way Sofía and I interacted reminded her of her sister, and though a certain melancholy passed over her face, thinking of the sister she’d lost in the accident seemed to make her more happy than sad. She also asked us a zillion questions about the mockumentary and clapped her hands and laughed when we described our plans for upcoming episodes.
I had a great time.
When I got home, I went straight to my room and cried. I hadn’t been shopping with them since. In fact, I hadn’t even been to Sofía’s house again, and once, about a year ago, we’d come close to fighting about it, despite all my greatest efforts to avoid confrontation.
I couldn’t explain it: how being around her family—knowing I could never belong—hurt worse than being alone. Instead I’d just blurted out, “We’ve been spending too much time together.” After that, things between us were never the same.
“Fran? Shoes? Yes? No?”