Dead Man Waltzing

Chapter 12

Danielle lived in a block of apartments west of me, in a quiet area off of Taney Road. The complex was spread over several tree-lined streets and consisted of rectangular, yellowy-tan brick buildings so alike that Danielle had once tried to get into her apartment well after midnight and found herself confronting a pissed-off man holding a baseball bat. She’d been in the wrong building. She never admitted it, but I thought too many margaritas might have been a factor. Parking in the lot outside her building and double-checking to make sure it was her building, I trotted up the stairs to her second-floor apartment and rang the bell.

“Come in!”

I pushed open the door, saying, “Good grief, Dani, this is D.C. Don’t you keep your door locked?” I stood in the two-foot-square foyer delineated by faux-wood flooring to distinguish it from the attached living room, which had the kind of pale brown carpet apartment managers think won’t show dirt or damage. There was a gaping hole where the sofa had sat against the far wall, and the walls themselves were a deep aqua green that made me think of mermaids for some reason, instead of the boring taupe they’d been last time I visited.

“This is a safe neighborhood.” Her voice came from the kitchen and I tracked her down. She sat on the vinyl floor surrounded by images torn from various decorating magazines and looked up when I came in. With her red hair in a ponytail and no makeup, she looked about fourteen.

“I am not, not, not going through home fashion magazines,” I said. I’ve never been much of one for obsessing over fabric swatches or room layouts or the kind of makeovers they show in such magazines. Dani, though, has always loved poring over the pages, even as a teenager, when the most she could hope to talk Dad into on the redecorating front was a new bedspread for the room we shared.

“Just look at this…”

I scrunched my eyes closed as she held up a page with a jagged edge where she’d torn it out of some magazine.

“Fine.” She sounded disgruntled but not surprised. Rising from her cross-legged position, she preceded me back to the living room, nudging magazines out of her path as she went.

We spent forty-five minutes rearranging furniture and talking about possible color combinations before her phone rang and she trotted to the bedroom to answer it. I sat in the worn recliner I’d been urging her to get rid of so she didn’t have to match her new couch to its beige-and-maroon-striped upholstery-ick-and picked up an open photo album from the end table. It took me only a second to realize I was looking at pictures from our last family vacation to Jekyll Island. Mom’s invitation had obviously started Dani on a trek down memory lane.

Flipping through the pages, I paused at a photo of me and Dani and Nick crouched over a dead jellyfish on the beach, the backs of our legs covered with sand. We’d been arguing about whether the creature was dead or whether we should “rescue” it. Nick’s idea of rescuing it was to put it in the bucket and keep it forever, despite Mom telling him it would die in the car halfway home, and she wasn’t having a bucket of water sloshing around in the backseat, anyway. Dani wanted to return it to the ocean. I was convinced it was already dead and said so repeatedly. In the end, we scooped it up on a shovel and plopped it back in the water, on the off chance. As I looked at more photos, I saw signs of parental tension I hadn’t noticed at the time. In all the family photos, Mom and Dad were at opposite ends, with us three kids between them. We had plenty of photos of Dad reading on the beach or showing Nick how to snorkel, and Mom building sand castles with me or inspecting a butterfly with Dani, but no pictures of the two of them together. I hadn’t thought anything about it at the time, but Dad had slept in the hammock outside, saying he wanted to enjoy the stars, while Mom had the bedroom to herself.

I felt tears welling and sniffed them back. We’d gone through a couple of hard years after Mom left, but we were fine now. If this album proved anything, it proved that we weren’t by half as happy as I’d thought we were while Mom was still living with us.

“It was a great vacation, wasn’t it?” Dani said quietly from behind me.

“It was fun. I’m not sure it was as fun as we thought it was, though, at least not for Mom and Dad.”

“What do you mean?” Danielle bristled.

I pointed out what I’d seen in the photos, the tension between our folks, but Dani wasn’t buying it. She was annoyed with me for daring to suggest that the vacation she had convinced herself was perfect in every respect hadn’t been. Taking the album from me, she slapped it closed and slotted it onto a bookshelf. There was a moment of awkward silence before I said, “So, I think a white sofa would really look good against that aqua wall.”

“Are you insane?” Dani asked, reverting to normal. “White? Do you know how hard that would be to keep clean?”

We spent the rest of the evening drinking strawberry daiquiris from a frozen mix Dani had left over from a party several months back, and discussing her sofa options. I even broke down and looked at some sofa photos in her decorating magazines. Jekyll Island didn’t come up again.