What Happened to Lani Garver

  What Happened To Lani Garver

  Carol Plum-Ucci

  * * *

  Harcourt, Inc.

  Orlando Austin New York

  San Diego Toronto London

  * * *

  Copyright © 2002 by Carol Plum-Ucci

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be

  mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First Harcourt paperback edition 2004

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Plum-Ucci, Carol.

  What happened to Lani Garver/Carol Plum-Ucci.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Sixteen-year-old Claire is unable to face her fears about a

  recurrence of her leukemia, her eating disorder, her need to fit in with the

  popular crowd on Hackett Island, and her mother's alcoholism until the

  enigmatic Lani Garver helps her get control of her life at the risk of his own.

  [1. Emotional problems—Fiction. 2. Homosexuality—Fiction.

  3. Cancer—Patients—Fiction. 4. Prejudices—Fiction.

  5. Alcoholism—Fiction. 6. Islands—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P7323Wh 2002

  [Fic]—dc21 2002000051

  ISBN 0-15-216813-3

  ISBN 0-15-205088-4 pb

  Text set in Sabon

  Display set in Belucian

  Designed by Cathy Riggs

  A C E G H F D B

  Printed in the United States of America

  This is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, and events portrayed

  in this book are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance

  to any event or actual person, living or dead, is unintended.

  * * *

  To Harriet, C. S., Corrie,

  Sarah Ellen, and Rich.

  Thank you.

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks go to many people who took time from life's incessant business to lay some information on me:

  Thanks, Steve Hodsdon, flight paramedic of Virtual Health of South Jersey, for information (disgusting) on head wounds and emergency room procedures. (I've no stomach for the stuff, Steve; your stomach was appreciated.)

  Dr. Nina Stolzenberg, thanks much for giving me gritty, up-to-date research on post-traumatic stress disorder among juvenile cancer patients and their families. You gave me a lot to work with. Julie Still, Rutgers Camden librarian, thanks for guiding me through labyrinths of info on group hysteria, defense mechanisms, and convenient recollection as specifically pertains to preconceived prejudice. You guys are good friends and search-engine gurus extraordinaire.

  Thank you, Dr. Bill Whitlow, psychologist, Rutgers State University, for helping me understand your very intriguing research on the unreliable state of memory when faced with the unexpected. Thanks also for your helpful insights concerning convenient recollection and group hysteria. And you are, as the faculty warned, a truly nice guy!

  Thanks, Stephanie Ucci, my favorite high school "consultant," for accuracy in current high school buzz words (I would never have described a boy as a "hottie," and still don't like it, but ... vhat-ever you say, dahling). Thanks, Ellen Zolkos, for giving me your years from the Creative and Performing Arts High School of Philly in such grand, open-book format. You are a way-trusting daughter; I owe you many lunches. Thanks, Rodd Zolkos; you are a walking encyclopedia of rock 'n' roll trivia, and I hope you write the book someday.

  Thanks to my editor at Harcourt, Karen Grove, for driving a hard bargain and not letting my laziness get in the way of your perfection. I want to be you when I grow up.

  And finally, to my suspected angel, who wishes to remain unnamed ... thanks for opening the doors so I could hear the cries of anguish of so many people like Lani. I have enjoyed marveling with you how Lani turned out to be nothing like you. Maybe we can call ourselves Dr. Frankenstein and Igor, giggling over a subject who arose with a little more grace in his/her countenance.

  * * *

  I never bought into our island's superstitions about Indian summers being cursed. Not until last year, at any rate.

  Indian summer is a period from three to five days in the late fall when the weather turns hot like summer again. According to island legend, if an Indian summer falls in October, it brings good luck. If one falls in November, it brings a curse. I'm a Hackett native (meaning "born and raised here," as opposed to meaning "savage") and most of us natives have no use for legends or curses or stories requiring big imaginations. These stories get stirred up among the summer tourists, who think the island and all its fog are very romantic.

  Our parents cluck about the summer people having too much money and too much downtime, and how they need an excuse to close up their summer homes and stop doing weekends after mid-October. If they didn't find a good curse or legend, they would just stay, and then they couldn't make all their rich-people money back in Philadelphia.

  It is true that almost every year, during October or November, there comes a time when we can wear our shorts and Reefs and lay out in the front yards with a bunch of friends and get one final tan. And it's true that out of nowhere the wind will kick up, and everyone on the island will scramble for winter parkas. If ever we bought into the curse legend at all, it was because Indian summer days in November are followed by an outrageous ice storm lots of times, which is a pain in the ass because ice is a winter problem and all Hackett's money goes to fix summer problems, like beach erosion.

  I have heard a few islanders muttering about curses, though—when frozen pipes burst and sewers back up and the drawbridges to the mainland mall are closed on a Saturday. But it's what happened when Lani Garver showed up that made me look at the curse theory again. It was during an Indian summer spell in early November that Lani Garver first came to Hackett. And in the frosty, windy, fogless hours between Indian summer and an impending ice storm, I watched a bunch of guys try to drown him. I watched Lani sink in the murky waters of the harbor, and I never saw him resurface.

  Even after Indian summer passes, some nights are warm, and the fog rolls in thick. If it looks dense enough to hide me, I sneak my rusting pink bike off the porch and ride up the three-mile stretch of meadow grass to Fisherman's Wharf.

  At least five hundred tides have rolled in and out of Hackett since the night they tortured Lani, and any physical evidence of a drowning would be long gone. Yet I feel drawn to the place ... to search the surface of the water, the thick night fog rolling onto Hackett, and to wait. For what, I wish I knew.

  Some thirty feet past the last commercial trawler, the pier ends and there's a piling that stands higher than the rest. On foggy nights I lay my bike in the shadows between spotlights, hug on that piling, and stare through the deep blue haze.

  It plays tricks on your eyes. At first the fog seems motionless ... like a silk screen over an empty stage, lit in deep blue. You can see the silk screen starting to move ... up and down, or side to side. You can't tell which. The motion blurs what's forming beyond it ... but you strain your gaze, squinting until you're breathing through your eyeballs.

  A few times I've seen that fog swirl into a pattern, like a human body. Head, then shoulders appear with hazy white ribbons dancing around
them. One time, the body floated in close and hovered almost, until the ribbons around the shoulders took on more shape ... like wings folded neatly.

  I swayed away from the piling, watching the wings float so near I could almost see them plainly. I could make out the color of bone without density around the arms.

  "Lani, it's me ... It's Claire..."

  One arm reached through a mist of white ribbons toward me. If I reach for him, I'll fall... As if timed with my decision to freeze, the form dissolved slowly to mere mist again.

  I kept staring and waiting, and finally knocked my head against the piling once or twice. I'm not a lunatic. At least, I try hard to stay grounded. I gave myself a hundred reasons why it's understandable that I could go through bouts of hallucinations. Fishermen have this saying that the deep doesn't bother swallowing just anybody. "The sea takes the extraordinary and leaves the rest be." Any fisherman lost at sea earns that saying on his memorial stone. I believe it about Lani, despite that he will never have a stone.

  We don't talk about the drowning around the island. We don't really talk about what led up to it, either. If I hear Lani's name, it's usually in mentions of him having gone to our high school for only two days, and isn't that weird, as if the greater mysteries never existed. Maybe that's the way people need to remember it.

  Lani pronounced his name Lonny, and someone told me it had been spelled that way at one time. Sometime in the years before he came to Hackett Island, he had started to change or hide everything about himself that could somehow define him. Lonny is a boy's name. Who knows what Lani is? I had guessed his age to be around my own, sixteen, but the fact is, we never really knew. We never knew his birthplace. No one knew where he'd been in the years before his arrival on Hackett last fall. Truth be told, we were never completely sure he wasn't a she.

  We hadn't known any of the things that you normally find out when you're deciding whether someone is going to fit in or not. He was determined to be like that. No one really gets why. I know it turned a lot of normal high school kids into potential killers. No one can say why that is, either.

  I used to say my curiosity about him, my being drawn to him, cost me my friends. But I think it's more truthful to say it cost me my popularity. I hear stupidness floating around the bathroom at school, girls being all "pa-arty ha-ardy" and "toooooooo studly" and "soooooooo sloshed," and I'm all thinking, Claire, you were that shallow once. My biggest shudder comes from the fact that at one time I considered cheerleading the most important thing under the sun. School seems like the home of the walking dead these days.

  I'm spending my weekends with new musician friends in Philly, but Monday through Friday I'm stuck here. And the wharf feels kind of alive at night. It's not restful, in spite of the deadness in the air. It's one of the few places on Hackett that gives off any sort of energy. If that's not supernatural or mystical, it's still something. It probably has little to do with ghosts, because ghosts have to do with people who died. I think my problem is a part of me has never been able to accept that Lani Garver actually did die.

  I stare at the water and get a flash of his eyes, the last time I saw them, twenty feet under.... Neon whites blaring, circling black dots. Claire, you're leaving me down here, you're turning your back, where are you going, why...

  Lani, I can't save you and me, too, because I'm selfish, because I see air... I can never decide if I could still see his eyes below as I finally gulped in air, or if they had branded themselves in my brain so that even the sudden screams from above could never erase them....

  "—do something, this got way screwed up, we goddamn killed somebody, Jesus Christ, we goddamn killed somebody—"

  I've had days, weeks, to remember his flashing eyes, over and over. I've wondered if their wideness was not horror at all but, rather, laughter.

  The mind is like the fog. It's like the dark water ... sometimes it shows you what you want or need to see. I tell myself that.

  While I'm dissecting the fog, I'm searching what I know of his entire life for the answers to what happened, not just those last few minutes. Why did he really come to Hackett? Why was I drawn to him, and nobody else was? What was Lani Garver? Was he one of those super-kind gay boys that certain girls love to bare their souls to? Is his body caught under some sunken boat wreck that will prevent it from ever being found? Or did he escape? Are there other Claires out there, and is he busy making another basket case into a rational, useful member of the human race? Was Lani Garver an angel? If I knew the answers to who Lani was and what he was, I would have more peace accepting where he is.

  There are answers that I would love to have, but not so badly that I have ever asked the questions aloud—to anyone. There are certain types of wrong answers that could mess you up bad, make you doubt everything that gives you hope—especially about the big truths, like the realness of a supernatural and the existence of angels.

  What keeps me feeling most alive is not getting bonfireinduced, imagination-infested, beer-breath theology and spouting back, "Doyee, if that's what you believe, well, then, it must be the truth."

  As Lani used to say, "Truth and belief are a stallion and a mule." That still cracks me up sometimes.

  I get my biggest power rush not by searching for answers. The power comes, weirdly, from simply asking myself the questions....

  1

  How can some people's lives look so good when they're so foul underneath? That's the question I ask when I leaf through this photo album Macy gave me for my sixteenth birthday. I got it at my surprise party in October of sophomore year, three weeks to the day before Lani Garver showed up on Hackett.

  It's full of pictures of me and Macy and our other friends, and we've got some wild and happy parade of the teeth going on. And it's not like we were faking happiness for pictures. That's what terrifies me most. If anyone had asked, my friends and I would have said in a heartbeat, "We rule the cule," and would have believed ourselves.

  Macy scrawled titles by each picture in her pretty handwriting that slants backwards. The one most likely to rip our sides was "Uh-Oh, The Umbrella Ride," because of the disgusting story behind it, but like all "true brew stories," you find a place for it in your heart.

  The summer after freshman year, Macy's big sister, Mary Beth, decided it was time to introduce us to Oleander's whiskey, better known by Hackett's fishermen as Old Sweat Sock. She felt we were getting too cocky about our alcohol imbibement tales. Mary Beth was eighteen but had a fake ID. She bought a good-sized bottle of Old Sweat Sock at the Rod 'N' Reel. The six of us passed this bottle around in her car as she gunned it down Mariner Road to Fisherman's Wharf for some general goofing around.

  Myra Whitehall, who sat in the passenger seat, announced that she suddenly wasn't feeling so great. Mary Beth didn't want to slow down, because this Jeep full of Hackett's finest studs was bumper smooching her Mustang, and she didn't want them to see hurl flying out of her passenger window. She kept saying, "Deal with it, Myra!"

  Myra couldn't help rolling down the window, and to our disgust from the backseat, the ocean breeze was blowing in— way hard. Macy rooted through Mary Beth's stuff and came up with an umbrella. She snapped it open and shoved it up in front of the four of us in back. When Myra's stomach said, "No more," we screamed some combo victory chant/barnyard noises, completely protected from impending doom. The Jeep passed us with all-too-embarrassing curses and loud requests for car wash reimbursement. Geneva Graham snapped this picture on the wharf right after we got there.

  I was smiling so completely. Except for Myra—who had just been ruined socially for at least a week—we all were.

  Right next to that photo there's "Lesbian Hayride," which happened around Halloween of freshman year. I don't even remember how we lucked out so well, but Macy and I ended up in a hay wagon with about a dozen guys from the fish frat—that's the sons of Hackett's commercial fishermen, who are sometimes lifeguards and usually very hunky. We were trying not to act stupid, but also to act like we could care
less about these breathtaking studs. As Mary Beth had lectured us, the only way to catch a guy in the fish frat is to pretend you don't care.

  Macy and I were standing in the middle of this cart, baying at the moon, or something acceptably retarded, when the wagon jerked and I fell on my back. Macy fell on top of me—with my spider legs all sprawled and her in the middle of them. I tried to tell her to get off, but I was like a jellyfish—major embarrassment laughing fit in process. And I could hear her laughing just as hard in my ear. I didn't know this at the time, but supposedly watching lesbians is some hot thing for upper-classmen. And these hunks were joking, all "Go, ladies! Be ladies!" Macy loved the attention. I was paralyzed with shock, like I was every time my naiveness caught up with me.

  It wasn't exactly a big secret—just something we rarely talked about—but I had missed a year and a half of junior high school. My knowledge of sex was full of holes—everything you'd learn in seventh grade and the first half of eighth.

  In this bonfire picture, we're surrounded by upperclassmen fish frat, and my smile is plastered on due to information overload about lesbians. Two of these guys actually asked for our phone numbers, and I wasn't even upset when they never called. The fact that they even asked was, like, too amazing. I figured they probably heard we were a couple of freshmen convent queens in disguise. The picture was good enough for me.

  "March," "April," "June," "September" are four pictures on the same page. The first three were taken by my mom, of Macy teaching me a back handspring, each getting a little more graceful. "September" is my junior varsity cheerleading photo.

  Great stuff. "Not a cloud on the horizon," an outsider might say. I can see a few clouds in some pictures, but only because I know my own life.

  My mom, the former Coast Regional Homecoming Queen who never grew out of it, took a picture of me after my first day at Coast, all excited. She thought I was on my way to becoming her—I only had to add the cheerleading pom-poms and studly boyfriends. Macy called this picture "Claire Still Has No Friends But She's Getting There."