The next day, as soon as school was out, I hurried back to the bungalow. I was in sixth grade, in the elementary school, and Liz was a freshman in the high school, so I always got home first. Mom had told us Mark drove a yellow Triumph TR3 with wire wheels but the only car parked in front of the bungalow that afternoon was our old brown Dart, and when I got inside, I found Mom sitting on the floor, surrounded by a mess of books, records, and sheet music that had been pulled from the shelves. She looked like she’d been crying.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He’s gone,” Mom said.
“But what happened?”
“We got into a fight. I told you he’s moody.” To lure Mark to Lost Lake, Mom explained, she had told him that Liz and I would be spending the night with friends. Once he’d arrived, she’d told him there had been a slight change of plans, and Liz and I were coming home after school. Mark exploded. He said he felt tricked and entrapped, and he stormed out.
“What a jerk,” I said.
“He’s not a jerk. He’s passionate. He’s Byronic. And he’s obsessed with me.”
“Then he’ll be back.”
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “It’s pretty serious. He said he was leaving for his villa in Italy.”
“Mark has a villa in Italy?”
“It’s not really his. A movie-producer friend owns it, but he lets Mark use it.”
“Wow,” I said. Mom had always wanted to spend time in Italy, and here was a guy who could jet over there whenever he felt like it. Except for the fact that he didn’t want to meet me and Liz, Mark Parker was everything Mom had ever wanted in a man. “I wish he liked us,” I said, “because other than that, he’s too good to be true.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom pulled up her shoulders and stared at me. “Do you think I’m making it all up?”
“Oh, not for a second,” I said. “Making up a boyfriend would be just too kooky.” But as soon as the words came out of my mouth, it occurred to me that Mom was, in fact, making it all up. My face suddenly felt hot, like I was seeing Mom naked. Mom and I were looking at each other, and I realized she could tell that I knew she had made it up.
“Screw you!” Mom shouted. She was on her feet and started yelling about everything she’d done for me and Liz, how hard she’d struggled, how much she’d sacrificed, what an ungrateful couple of parasites we were. I tried to calm Mom down, but that made her angrier. She never should have had kids, she went on, especially me. I was a mistake. She’d thrown away her life and her career for us, run through her inheritance for us, and we didn’t even appreciate it.
“I can’t stand being here!” she screamed. “I’ve got to get away.”
I was wondering what I could say to smooth things over when Mom grabbed her big handbag off the couch and stormed out, slamming the door behind her. I heard her gun the Dart, then she drove away, and except for the gentle clinking of the wind chimes, the bungalow was silent.
I fed Fido, the little turtle Mom had bought me at Woolworth’s when she wouldn’t let me get a dog. Then I curled up in Mom’s purple butterfly chair—the one she liked to sit in when she was writing music—staring out the picture window with my feet tucked up beside me, stroking Fido’s little head with my forefinger and waiting for Liz to get home from school.
Truth be told, Mom had a temper and was given to her share of tantrums and meltdowns when things got overwhelming. The fits usually passed quickly, and then we all moved on as if nothing had happened. This one was different. Mom had said things that she’d never said before, like about me being a mistake. And the whole business about Mark Parker was epically weird. I needed Liz to help sort it all out.
Liz could make sense of anything. Her brain worked that way. Liz was talented and beautiful and funny and, most of all, incredibly smart. I’m not saying all that just because she was my sister. If you met her, you’d agree. She was tall and slender with pale skin and long, wavy reddish-gold hair. Mom was always calling her a pre-Raphaelite beauty, which made Liz roll her eyes and say it was too bad she didn’t live over one hundred years ago, in pre-Raphaelite days.
Liz was one of those people who always made grown-ups, particularly teachers, go slack-jawed and use words like “prodigy” and “precocious” and “gifted.” Liz knew all these things that other people didn’t know—like who the pre-Raphaelites were—because she was always reading, usually more than one book at a time. She also figured out a lot on her own. She could do complicated math calculations without pencil and paper. She could answer really tricky brainteaser-type riddles and loved saying words backward—like calling Mark Parker “Kram Rekrap.” She loved anagrams, where you rearranged the letters of words to make different words, turning “deliver” into “reviled” and “funeral” into “real fun.” And she loved spoonerisms, like when you mean to say “dear old queen” but instead say “queer old dean,” or when “bad money” comes out as “mad bunny” and “smart feller” turns into “fart smeller.” She was also a killer Scrabble player.