“My mother taught me.”
“What were you, a savant?”
“She taught me in absentia.” I look at her. “You’d be surprised how much you can learn from someone who’s completely disappointed you.”
“How’s your eye?” Serenity asks, and I almost laugh, it’s such a perfect transition.
“Hurts.” I take the finished elephant and prop it in the little nook that has the radio controls. Then I shrink down in my seat, pressing my shoes against the dashboard. Serenity has a fuzzy blue steering wheel cover meant to look like a monster, and an ornate cross hanging from her rearview mirror. They seem about as far apart on the belief scale as humanly possible, and it gets me thinking: Can a person hold tightly to two thoughts that look, at first sight, as if they’d cancel each other out?
Could my mother and my father both be blamed for what happened ten years ago?
Could my mom leave me behind but still love me?
I glance at Serenity, with her violently pink hair, and the too-tight leopard-print jacket, which makes her look like a human sausage. She is singing a Nicki Minaj song, and getting all the lyrics wrong, and the radio isn’t even on. It’s easy to make fun of someone like her, but I love that she doesn’t apologize for herself: not when she curses in front of me; not when people in elevators stare at her makeup style (which I’d say is pretty much geisha-meets-clown); not even when—it should be noted—she made a colossal mistake that cost her a career. She may not be very happy, but she is happy to be. It’s more than I can say about myself. “Can I ask you a question?” I say.
“Sure, sugar.”
“What’s the meaning of life?”
“Well, Christ on a cracker, girl. That’s not a question. That’s a philosophy. A question is, Hey, Serenity, can we swing through a McDonald’s?”
I’m not letting her off the hook that easily. I mean, someone who talks to spirits all the time can’t just chat about the weather and baseball. “Didn’t you ever ask?”
She sighs. “Desmond and Lucinda, my spirit guides, said all the universe wants from us is two things: Don’t do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and get happy. They told me humans make it more complicated than it needs to be. I thought for sure they were feeding me a line. I mean, there’s got to be more to it than that. But if there is, I guess I’m not supposed to know it yet.”
“What if the meaning of my life is to find out what happened to hers?” I ask. “What if that’s the only thing that will make me happy?”
“Are you so sure it will?”
Because I don’t want to answer, I turn on the radio. By now, we’re on the outskirts of town, anyway, and Serenity drops me off at the rack where I’ve locked up my bike. “You want dinner, Jenna? I make a mean Chinese take-out order.”
“Thanks but no thanks,” I say. “My grandmother’s expecting me.”
I wait for her to drive off, so she can’t see that I’m not going home.
It takes another half hour to bike to the sanctuary, and twenty minutes to hike through the uneven brush to the spot with the purple mushrooms. My cheekbone is still throbbing as I lie back on the lush grass and listen to the wind play through the branches overhead. It’s the hour that’s the seam between day and night.
Probably I have a concussion, because I fall asleep for a while. It’s dark when I wake up, and I don’t have a light on my bike, and I’ll probably be grounded for missing dinner. But it’s worth it, because I have been dreaming about my mother.
In my dream, I was really little, in nursery school. My mother had insisted that I go because it wasn’t normal for a three-year-old to be socialized only with adult animal behaviorists and a bevy of elephants. My class had taken a field trip to meet Maura; afterward, the other kids painted strangely shaped animals that the teachers enthused about no matter how biologically inaccurate they were: It’s so gray! How creative to make two trunks! Well done! My elephant paintings were not only precise but detailed—I put the notch in Maura’s ear, the same way my mother did when she sketched the elephant; I made the hair on her tail kinky, when every other kid in my class had completely overlooked its presence. I knew exactly how many toenails she had on each foot (three on the back foot, four on the front). My teachers, Miss Kate and Miss Harriet, said I was like a tiny little Audubon, although I had no idea what that meant at the time.
Other than that, I was a mystery to them: I didn’t watch television, so I had no idea who the Wiggles were. I couldn’t tell the Disney princesses apart. Most of the time the teachers took the quirks of my upbringing in stride—I mean, this was nursery school, not SAT prep. But one day, in preparation for the holidays, we were given sheets of fancy white paper and told to draw a picture of our family. We were then going to make a macaroni frame, spray it with gold paint, and put this inside as a gift.