And Sometimes Why Read online

  and sometimes why

  and sometimes why

  REBECCA JOHNSON

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  New York

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, En gland • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia • (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, En gland

  Copyright © 2008 by Rebecca Johnson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Johnson, Rebecca, date.

  And sometimes why/Rebecca Johnson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1390-2

  1. Traffic accident victims—Family relationships—Fiction. 2. Teenagers—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3610.O3727A84 2008 2007032608

  813'.6—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  To the Smiths—Andrew, Luke, Simon, Toby.

  And my first, best, teacher, MFJ.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  About the Author

  A Note on Type

  and sometimes why

  1

  breakfast together was mandatory in the McMartin family. Not the eating of it, though Sophia McMartin, mother of Miranda, eighteen, and Helen, sixteen, was glad for the opportunity to urge food on her daughters, now that they had grown into young women willing to eat rice cakes all day to keep their weight down. There were, however, mornings when the tedious machinations of the family wearied Sophia, who only wanted to read her newspaper in peace.

  “It’s my turn.”

  “You had it last night.”

  “You didn’t need it last night.”

  “Not relevant. Time used is time used.”

  The argument between the McMartin sisters centered on a third-hand silver-gray Honda Accord with 87,000 miles on it, a peeling “Visualize Whirled Peas” bumper sticker that now read “Visual Whirl P,” and a tendency to smell of cardamom on the rare humid Los Angeles day. Darius and Sophia McMartin had bought the car, believing (naively, it turned out) that their daughters could peaceably share, alternating days when each would get to use it. Neither had been given cars by their own parents and had long debated the ethics of such a gift. Were they spoiling their children needlessly, giving them too much while expecting too little? Would their daughters ever learn the value of a dollar if they were not forced to work for what they got? In the end, selfishness won. Los Angeles was a city built for cars, and they were sick of driving their children around. For the first year, while Helen had only a learner’s permit, things had gone smoothly. But ever since Helen got her driver ’s license three weeks earlier, there had been nothing but trouble.

  “Let’s see if we can work this out.” Darius McMartin put his paper down and regarded his two fuming daughters with bemused affection. Beloved English professor to thousands of freshmen and a lucky few seniors in his highly selective seminar on late Shakespeare, Darius loved the domestic cacophony of family life. He came from a family of nine. For him, the verbal hurly-burly, the jockeying for position, the thrust and parry as one child sought dominance over the other, was like the sound of twittering birds or a babbling brook. There but not there. Reassuring, soothing, a sign that life was as it should be and, therefore, easily ignored. Unless something caught his attention.

  “What do you need the car for?” he asked Miranda, who was paying suspiciously close attention to the blueberries in her muesli.

  “I want to go to freshman orientation,” she said without looking up. This was a lie. Miranda wanted to go shopping. In two days, she would be starting college at the university where her father taught. She would have preferred an East Coast school, a place where the windows were made of leaded glass and the students could take an afternoon train into New York City, meet under the big clock at Grand Central Station, wear camel hair coats and drink martinis (she’d heard that nobody in New York carded), but the tuition was free for a full professor’s daughter, and she saved even more by living at home. Everyone agreed it made financial sense to stay. Besides, she understood that her New York fantasies, cribbed as they were from old F. Scott Fitzgerald novels, probably had nothing to do with reality. Nevertheless, around the corner or across the country, college was a chance for reinvention. Having spent her high school years dressed as drably as possible in black Levi’s and white T-shirts, assiduously avoiding any gesture that could be seen as ostentatious or attention seeking in any way, Miranda decided to branch out sartorially. New clothes, new life. New Miranda. But the last people she wanted to admit this to were her family.

  “Really?” Her father’s face lit up. “I thought you said, ‘Freshman orientation is for losers.’”

  “I did.” Miranda nodded. “But then I realized it was wrong to be such a snob.”

  “‘Pride went before, ambition follows him.’”

  Miranda smiled at her father. It was a game they had played since childhood. He’d quote a play and she would have to guess which one. Helen, who found Shakespeare impenetrable and had the built-in disadvantage of being sixteen months younger, refused to play. Early on, Darius had chosen the easiest, most identifiable quotes. “A rose by any other name,” “To be or not to be,” “Hark! What light from yonder window, etc.” but lately, they had gotten much harder.

  “A Henry?” Miranda gue
ssed. Blindly.

  “Which one?”

  “The Fifth?” She had no idea.

  Darius sighed. “The Second.”

  Sophia scowled at her husband. Artistic daughter of a Greek restaurant owner in Pittsburgh, secret smoker of cigarettes, and head of membership at a prestigious local art museum, Sophia was resigned to a husband who used his photographic memory to seduce people. It was when he used it on their children that she seethed. More than anyone, she understood its allure. In college, she had begged him to recite long passages from the pastoral comedies as she lay on his naked chest, tracing invisible patterns on his skin as love fireworks exploded in her brain for her husband-to-be, son of an Irish stone mason, lover of poetry, possessor of a head of hair as black and lustrous as an oil slick, and the first man to see her completely naked. Not only could he recite the entire Shakespeare canon from memory, but after only a fleeting glance at the back of a cereal box, he could also tell you the number of riboflavins and percentage of protein based on a 2,000-calorie diet within a portion, as well as the last known location for Katy, a missing moon-faced twelve-year-old from Evansville, Indiana. As a young man, his memory had earned him a reputation for brilliance, so when Darius McMartin fell in love with skinny, moody Sophia Theofanides, who sat four rows behind him in astronomy for poets, she could hardly believe her luck. But in the intervening twenty-two years, Sophia had come to view her husband’s talent as something else. A cheap party trick. Mere mimicry. A thing that could win a Buick on a game show, but nothing more. Too late, she realized she had married a regurgitator, not a creator.

  “Must we?” she asked her husband.

  “Yeah,” Helen seconded the thought. “It’s a lot of pretentiousness before nine in the morning.”

  “‘What early tongue so sweet saluteth me?’”

  “Dad.”

  “Okay, honey, tell us why you need the car.”

  Helen opened her mouth and closed it.

  “Is it a boy?” Darius asked.

  “Is it ever anything else?” Miranda asked.

  “Why don’t you shut it?” Helen answered.

  “Why don’t you?” Miranda said.

  “Forget it,” Helen said. “I’ll take the bus. My needs are always secondary in this family.”

  Whenever the girls fought, a cold front rolled through Sophia’s heart. As children, the two had gotten along eerily well. Dolls, books, toys—every thing was cheerfully interchangeable, as if Miranda and Helen had created a utopian society free of jealousy or envy. When other parents complained about the violent bickering between their children, Sophia wondered if hers were even normal. At night, after putting them to sleep in separate cribs, she’d go back to check on them an hour later and find Miranda, the older and more mobile, curled up in her sister’s bed, their two small bellies rising and falling in sync. Sophia could watch them for hours. “It’s so animal,” she’d whisper to Darius as she crawled back into their bed. On the playgrounds where Sophia would bring the girls to while away the endless afternoon of motherhood, the girls were like a gated community with secret codes and passwords only they knew. If another child happened to wander into their orbit, they would turn watchful and quiet, wary of the intruder. Even Sophia sometimes felt locked out of their secrets. But when the wider world intervened, in the form of kindergarten, every thing changed. At first, Miranda would sob and weep every morning when she left her mother and sister, but after a few weeks, she began to look forward to school. When she came home, she became bossy and impatient with her younger sister. “That’s not how we do it in school,” she’d announce imperiously whenever Helen suggested they play in their old way. The parenting books Sophia dutifully bought at the university co-op claimed the dynamic was natural. But when Helen got to school and started making friends on her own, she never seemed to forgive her sister that early betrayal.

  In high school, the disparity in their social standing hardened. Technically, it would be wrong to say Miranda was unpopular. Nobody made the loser L behind her back or mooed like a cow when she passed. It was more that she was massively, mortifyingly ignored. She probably would have been welcome at the big keg parties thrown by the more popular kids when their parents were away, but nobody thought to invite her. Instead, she got by with one or two close friends: brainy, hardworking girls who nurtured their eccentricities to justify their isolation and waited for an age—twenty-eight, thirty-four, forty-nine—that suited them better. Helen, on the other hand, seemed born to be a teenager. The endless permutations of the social hierarchy; the obsession with clothes, cars, and boys absorbed all her attention. Especially boys. Helen’s father was right. She did want the car on account of a boy, but not for the reason every one assumed.

  “Are you sure?” Sophia asked Helen. She didn’t like the stricken look on her daughter’s face. Because Darius loved his daughters so completely, it never occurred to him that attention paid to one daughter might leave the other feeling slighted. It was up to Sophia to notice the hoarded hurts, the widening of the eyes as a blow, even an unintentional one, was absorbed. As the sister of a favored older brother, she was alive to the damage of love unequally parceled, and though she hated to admit it, when it came to the children, Helen was hers to protect, Miranda was his. Even in looks, Helen took after Sophia. They were both small, birdlike women with wide mouths, thick lips, and wrists so small that bracelets were always sliding off. They dressed alike, too, in sheer prints bought on sale from expensive boutiques on the west side of town. Miranda, on the other hand, was big boned and sturdy. “A peasant,” she would say of herself, “made to carry a plow.” People assumed sunny, bubbly Helen would be fine in the world, while moody, introspective Miranda would not. Sophia wasn’t so sure.

  “Never mind,” Helen answered her mother’s concern with a wan smile. “Maybe Siri can give me a ride.”

  2

  mile four of his daily six and no pain in the left knee. Harry Harlow felt good. The sun shone, as it did every morning, high in the hills of Los Angeles, with a specific brightness that always sent a thrill through him. He’d spent mornings in the valley. Plenty. He knew the light was different down there. Flatter. Deader. Up here, the air sparkled. Especially this early, when the pachysandra was still a dew-wet green and the freshly fallen jacaranda blossoms had yet to be crushed by the cars descending through the sidewalkless streets toward the flat land. Harry tried to hold on to the feeling, the way a shrink had once advised him to—“Own it, Harry. Live in it, it’s yours”—but every time he tried, he felt it slip away. The problem was, Harry didn’t really feel good. He felt lucky. He moved the word around in his head, like a mint in his mouth, the electric thrum of it followed by the familiar wash of dread. He wished he could feel that he deserved the things he had—the beautiful wife, the easy job, the ready money—instead, they seemed like a Fruit of the Month delivered to the wrong house but opened, nevertheless, and eaten. If luck could be so randomly bestowed, couldn’t it just as randomly be snatched away? When he got to that point in thinking, Harry’s pace slackened, as if he needed complete stillness to process the thought. But just then, Harry spotted the L.A. Times delivery truck he often passed at this hour in the morning.

  Harry watched the driver slow, reach into the cab of his truck, and heave the ad-bloated newspaper through the window so that it landed with a thud on the driveway of one of the multimillion-dollar houses that rose improbably out of the hills. He looked for a cul de sac to duck down, but it was too late, the driver had spotted him. Harry pressed on, his pace steady, like a sailor steering into a swell. When they crossed paths, the driver—gut, mustache, Hawaiian shirt, straight out of central casting for the role of “loser,” Harry thought unkindly—leaned out of the truck and said the same thing he always said when he saw Harry.

  “Hey! Harry!” the loser yelled, “I’d rather be in bed.”

  Harry, close enough to register the color of his teeth—abalone—forced a smile. “Me, too!” he yelled. The driver beamed. Th
rilled.

  Oh, Jesus, Harry thought, congratulating himself for making the loser’s day, how pathetic was that? Nevertheless, Harry’s pace quickened, his spirits lightened by the exchange. He might know deep in his bones that every thing that had come his way was the result of dumb luck, the random alignment of chromosomes that gave him that straight nose, thick hair, and right-angle jaw—looks that had been unremarkable until he hit seventeen, when suddenly girls fell silent around him. “Jesus, Harry,” his mother had said to him, as surprised as he was, “you’re a looker.” He might fear losing every thing, but whatever happened to Harry from this day forward, there was no getting around the fact that, for the time being, he was not driving a newspaper delivery truck. He was not a waiter. He was not mowing anyone’s lawn. He was not auditioning for jobs he never got. He was not cutting hair or counting a client’s sit-ups. He was Harry Harlow, the forty-five-year-old host of Would You Rather?, the most popular game show in America. He had been on the cover of magazines, both the self-important newsweeklies and the glossies. He made $5 million a year. Not including his bonus. He drove a BMW X5. He had a beautiful wife thirteen years younger than he. That morning, he had been awakened by the whir of the fax machine delivering the best overnight Nielsen numbers yet. Life was good. For now and the foreseeable future, Harry was lucky, and if he did not feel good about it, if he could not “own” the feeling, whatever that meant, it was nobody’s fault but his own.