20
Love Has Not Necessarily Won
Booker does not call Nanette’s iPhone, which greatly disappoints her, because she calls him several times, leaving detailed messages and her phone number just in case he has misplaced it.
When she knocks, Booker does not answer.
His exterior doors are locked; she knows because she tried the knobs of all three.
He is inside.
She hears him walk quickly away from the windows.
His hardwood floors squeak.
His lights turn on and off at night.
Oliver calls many times, but Nanette doesn’t answer.
She does not return the boy’s messages.
She realizes that she is now Oliver’s Booker.
Nanette is a hypocrite, as she expects Booker to be there when she wants him to be there, yet she resents young Oliver for wanting the same thing from her.
June says it’s okay for Nanette to take care of herself before she begins taking care of other people again. She also suggests that Booker might be doing the same. Everyone needs to take care of him- or herself first. Nanette needs to work on not only taking care of herself but also allowing others to do the same. June suggests that Nanette’s parents need to work on this, too, and that maybe the behavior is learned, or passed down.
Her father moves back into their home and resumes sleeping in the same room as her mother, which seems like a good sign if only because it is one less thing that’s different. Stability. It’s certainly ironic how much this rebel loves that word right now. Nanette knows it doesn’t mean her mother and father love each other again—love has not necessarily won—but she likes having her father home. He no longer asks her about college or soccer or the stock market, and Nanette is grateful for that. However, Nanette wonders if this means her father is not taking care of himself, but sacrificing his own mental health for his daughter. Isn’t that what good parents do? Nanette wonders, but she cannot completely convince herself that this is okay. If her father were a true rebel, he’d be long gone.
Nanette asks if the three of them could play a nightly game of Scrabble, and to her great surprise, her parents agree.
They play every night for weeks—spelling words, adding up points, finding ways to reach the colored squares that boost their scores, teaching one another by example the good two-letter words to play, words in the Scrabble dictionary that no one ever uses in real life but come in handy when trying to fit letters onto the board, such as za, jo, xi, qi, ka, li, and so forth.
Nanette wonders if she is the real-life equivalent of such a word.
She comes in handy when her mom and dad want to feel like they are part of a family, but Nanette can’t find her use outside their metaphorical Scrabble board, which is sort of falling apart lately anyway and would surely have called it quits if it weren’t for her breakdown.
Nanette wonders about the timing.
Since Alex used to attend a different high school, no one at Nanette’s school knows anything about what Alex did. And since she already alienated herself from the soccer team and everyone else at her school, she mostly floats through the hallways unnoticed, like a ghost.
If the boys are coughing into their hands and saying “muff diver” whenever she walks by, Nanette no longer hears them.
June says that detachment can be healthy.
That’s what she calls the ghostlike feeling: detachment.
With wide eyes and hopeful voices, Nanette’s mother and father ask her a lot of questions every night.
What happened in school today? How do you feel? Would you like to discuss anything? What time would you like to play Scrabble? Is there anything you’d like us to help you with? Have you thought about next year at all? Not that we’re trying to rush you, because we aren’t. We don’t necessarily mean college, we just mean the future in general. We’d like to talk about that whenever you are ready. But you have time.
Nanette answers these questions as vaguely as possible, well, except for the Scrabble one—the family always plays at 8:00 PM, which is the best part of her day—but she honestly is glad that her parents are asking questions. Mom and Dad are being gentle again, which is pleasant. They seem genuinely interested and much less manipulative. June has impressed upon them the seriousness of Nanette’s situation. She wishes that her family had found June a long time ago.
Nanette also wishes her family began playing Scrabble on a regular basis years ago.
She likes arranging letters on a board, crossing words with her parents, reaching into the velvety letter bag and wondering what she will pull out—each grab is a fresh chance and makes her feel like a spelling wizard reaching into a magic hat.
Scrabble.
It’s what the O’Hares now have.
Sometimes Nanette volunteers to put the game away, but when her parents leave the room, she just stares at the crossword puzzle that her family has made and thinks of snowflakes, wondering if any two finished Scrabble boards are ever exactly the same.
Nanette appreciates the visual representation of her family and the time they spent together, the words that they each picked—nouns and verbs and prepositions and adjectives and conjunctions and adverbs and pronouns—that only they, the O’Hares, would have chosen. She takes a long mental time-exposure and then drops the letters back into the pouch, folds the board, returns the box to the closet, and begins to look forward to the next night’s round.
21
What Put Her in the Rocket Ship Headed to Wherever She Is Now
After six or so weeks of ghost-floating through school, ten therapy sessions, and approximately forty-two games of Scrabble, Nanette finally feels well enough to visit Oliver. She does this in mid-December. There is a thin layer of crunchy snow on the ground when she knocks on Oliver’s bedroom window.