Crystal Grader by Tag Cavello (read my book txt) 📕

But that didn’t tally with other things she’d anticipated over the years that turned out to be disappointing upon achievement. Her first cell phone (boring). Y2K (a hilarious let-down). Hell, even her first period, which had graced itself of a very messy introduction at the age of nine, turned out to be more of a hair shirt than a happy milestone. Jarett, however, had delivered. Like the best postman in all the world.

“Well?” he asked.

Her eyes fluttered. Had he spoken just now?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”

“I said what would miss sugar and spice like for her birthday.”

“Oh! Oh. Goodness, Jarett, I hadn’t thought about it. You can surprise me.”

“Really?”

“Sure. You’re good at that, too.”

Before falling asleep she began composition on a poem. This was another first, and all Jarett’s idea. He put forth that if she could write about how she felt regarding last autumn, she would at the very least have a representation of her pain to ball up and stuff into the garbage. As a kind of springboard for the piece (after she’d told him that she’d never written a poem before in her life and didn’t know where to start), he’d asked her a question, simple and direct.

“How do you feel every day at school?” he’d wanted to know, his arms stroking her under the covers.

“Like a fish that got moved from a very large aquarium to a very small bowl. As a punishment. Because—“

“Because one of the other fish died and you got blamed for it.”

“Right.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m waiting for my sentence to end.”

“Good,” he said, sounding satisfied. “You can start there.”

She was quiet for a long time, content to lie in the heat of his embrace while the world outside froze. Yet like it or no, her reluctance towards writing a poem slowly returned. In that arena of literature there was only one thing she could see herself doing: writing cheap rhymes with an uncultivated message. In the end she capitulated, under terms that she voiced before he could fall asleep.

“I’ll tell you how I feel, Jarett, but only if you do the same for me.”

“You want to know how I feel? About what?”

“Are you still afraid of me?”

“Yes,” he answered, in shockingly short order.

“Then why did you let me in?”

“Oooh.”

She peered up at him from the depths of the quilt. “Come on. Do you love me?”

“Crystal.”

“Yes? No? Maybe?”

“Crystal.”

She glared at him for a moment longer…and then smiled. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist teasing you a little. But Jarett? I remind you of somebody, don’t I?”

“No,” he answered—again, quick and clipped.

“Yes I do.”

Here was where he’d at last fallen silent. Ever the one for biding her time, Crystal let the matter be. For now. Yet the knowledge that there was another girl in the room could not be ignored. She lived in the closet, hidden at the bottom of a pink shoebox. Her name had come up in Crystal’s mind not long after Jarett’s hiding isn’t healing remark…because Jarett didn’t seem to be following his own wisdom here.

On a lonely, windy day during one of his lecture tours, Crystal had stumbled upon a box of love letters to a girl named Vicky. They’d been written by Jarett in the early 1980s, while he was still in high school. The dates he’d put on them showed that. They also showed that his feelings were those of a man committed to spend the rest of his life by her side.

Had she reciprocated? And if not, how had Jarett coped?

Perhaps he was still coping. That was the fear that went along with winning his love. Did he see Crystal as nothing more than a chance to redeem some lost wonderland from his youth? If so, she would not cope. Oh no. Sharing Jarett’s love with a memory had never been part of the plan. The very idea was as insulting as it was ridiculous.

Thus, some further detective work would need to commence. And if her fears turned out to be true, Crystal would throw the letters in Jarett’s face and demand he burn them. Burn them or be burned, painfully and permanently.

PART FOUR: The Secret Flown

18

Lady, Crystal thought, if you tell me my luggage is missing one more time I’m gonna give that wrinkled face of yours a mud mask with Luke’s diaper.

“You’ll need to fill out a Property Irregularity Report,” the lady, who looked old enough to have worked for the Wright Brothers, said from behind the counter. “Submit it to me. Then you can monitor the airline’s tracing progress. If after twenty-one days—“

“Don’t spew jargon at me,” Crystal said, shifting Luke to her other arm. “I want my luggage.”

“Ma’am, the airline apologizes for any inconvenience you’ve had, but this is standard procedure.” Here she took a moment to peek at Crystal’s boarding pass. “You’re here from Vanilla Ice Cream?”

“Yes,” Crystal hissed. “I’ve been at thirty-seven thousand feet for twenty-four hours. Finally making it to Cleveland was supposed to make me happy.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you really need to start with a PIR. From there we can find out what happened and recover your bag.”

“Bags, lady, bags. There are two missing.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the lady repeated.

At almost the same time a man standing behind Crystal let out a cough that was too loud. She whirled on him, scarcely noticing the long line that had formed over the past few minutes.

“Got a cold?” she demanded to know.

Now the man looked stunned. Blinking, he gave the line a glace over his shoulder.

“Nope,” Crystal told him, “I’m talking to you.”

His eyes went to Luke next. But of course the baby wasn’t going to help.

“No,” he said with a tiny, relenting shrug. “I don’t have a cold. It’s the middle of August—“

“You are still creating chaos every place you go,” a voice suddenly broke in.

Crystal turned in its direction and met the eyes of a woman with short, black hair wearing a low-cut, V-necked blouse. She wasn’t as old as the woman behind the counter, but her youth, whether she cared to admit it or not, had long flown. Her blue eyes, once deep and warm as an island lagoon, had frosted over, and at some point since Crystal’s departure from Ohio, her jewelry had gotten clunky.

“You garage sale gypsy,” Crystal said.

“What?”

“Mom!”

And less than a second later they had their arms around each other, with Luke trapped somewhere in between.

***

“Five years!” Lucretia bellowed as she drove them down route two towards Monroeville. “Five years since you last saw me, and the first thing pops out of your mouth is garage sale gypsy!”

“It was spoken with undying affection,” Crystal insisted.

“Yeah, yeah. You’re still sarcastic, too. Did you bring anything new back from the Philippines?”

“Luke.”

Lucretia gave a quick glance back at the car seat, where the baby was still looking around with eyes so wide Crystal felt pretty sure the kid believed he’d landed on another planet. It was exactly the way she’d felt after landing in Manila five years ago.

“My grandson,” Lucretia said proudly.

“Yes.”

“Fair warning: I intend to spoil that boy. I’m doing a fine job of it with Joey and Eva so far.”

“He’s already spoiled.”

“But what I meant was: What did you bring back with you on the inside?”

Crystal thought about how to answer that for a few moments. When nothing useful came to the surface she was forced to give up. “I’m too jet-lagged to answer deep questions right now, Mom.”

“All right,” Lucretia said, “I’ll stick with the easy ones. For now.”

“Can I ask you a question first?” Crystal said.

“Of course.”

“Did you change into this gypsy after we stopped using the iPad? Because you sure looked different across ten thousand miles—“

“Oh be quiet!”

***

But Lucretia was aging gracefully and Crystal knew it. So was everything else in this part of Ohio, it seemed. Twilight had fallen by the time they reached Monroeville, yet there was still enough light for Crystal to see that nothing here had changed. She saw neither growth nor shrinkage amidst the quiet streets. There was the hardware store at the corner of Main and Milan. There was the post office right next to it. The police station, the furniture store. And of course, the high school.

“My God,” Crystal said as they stopped in front of the house on Eagle View Drive. “I feel like I just left here ten minutes ago. Everything looks so…fixed.”

“You’ve been gone five years, dear, not fifty. And anyway, Monroeville doesn’t change. It watches the trucks pass by on route 20 and thinks about what change is like.”

Change is always change for the worse, Crystal thought.

It was an old line she remembered from a book about ghosts, and the wisdom of it had been taught to her the hard way. But then her life wasn’t all regret. The tide she’d rode out on from this place had given back at least one thing in return.

“Luke,” she said, leaning into the back seat, “you awake?”

“Da ba-ba!”

“I’m on it. Let’s just get you out of that car seat first.”

Lucretia insisted on carrying the baby inside while Crystal handled the bags. There was a playpen already set up in the living room, and balloons taped to the walls. One press from Lucretia on the TV remote put Disney Junior on the screen, and Luke, after being put in the playpen, got right to work on a number of new toys. Lucretia then asked about the plane ride while Crystal fixed up a bottle of milk.

“Did it bother Luke much?”

“No,” Crystal said. “He barely cried at all. Isn’t that weird?”

“Maybe he was afraid the TSA would throw him out the window. What about you?”

Crystal began shaking the bottle over the kitchen sink, her fingers pinched around the nipple.

“Oh I cried pretty much the whole way.”

“Didn’t that turn a few heads?”

“Nah. I’m still a quiet weeper, Mom.”

Dinner came in over the phone an hour later—Hawaiian style pizza, a meal Lucretia chose purposefully out of an assumption that Crystal would be exasperated with anything that included rice. In fact, a lot of assumptions she had about Manila turned out to be wrong, this despite their many long distance conversations over the years. As they set the table Crystal ticked off a number of first world amenities that the Philippines’ third world city possessed. Bad cable TV (Crystal sometimes thought that Disney Junior really was the best thing going on the dial these days); dubious internet service; corrupt politicians; corrupt police officers; video games (Miko spent far more time with these than Crystal); cheap beer; expensive beer; extended holidays; bad drivers; terrible drivers; and indeed, a fast food joint on practically every corner there was to get on a bus at. The west had nothing on Manila, unless you counted snowy winters and grouchy meat butchers, and who needed either of those?

“It’s mostly McDonald’s and KFC,” Crystal said, pertaining to restaurants, “but Subways are pretty easy to find, too. And Luke is going to miss the hell out of Jollibee if I can’t find one here.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Now that will make him cry.”

They ate their meal with an Italian red wine that Lucretia had, once again, purchased in advance specifically for the occasion, and for the first time it occurred to Crystal that her mother had something in common with Jarett: They both liked to be prepared, even if it meant doing research on the side. Of course, that it wouldn’t do to bring this fact up to her was a no-brainer, though Crystal