Island

by Patrick Downes

  My father showed up, finally, without warning, at dinner. He came through the front door to the table. He was a mess. His eyes red, his mouth bent, his face unshaven. Wild, dirty, and devastated. He wouldn’t sit down. He wouldn’t talk.

  My mother came alive, alert, exhausted as she was, and frightened. She waited for my father to say something, but Key spoke first.

  “Dad?” Key’s gentlest voice. “Do you want to eat with us?”

  Silence. I could hear my father’s teeth grinding.

  “John?” My mother.

  My father had been leaning on a chair, and he picked it up, smashed it down.

  “I’m,” he said and stopped.

  My mother, Key, and I waited. All of us silent. We couldn’t know what would come next.

  “I made a terrible mistake,” my father said. “And now I don’t know what to do.”

  My father had always claimed he would love my mother beyond the grave. He’d agreed to raise children. Twins! My father, who had been a painter before he turned to law, thought family life would agree with him. He got rid of his art, tossed out his paints and his brushes and whatever else. He wanted nothing more than to live as a husband and father. And he lied to himself about all of it, maybe even about loving my mother.

  No, not that.

  “I got everything wrong,” he whispered. “It’s all out of whack.”

  “Where have you been?” My mother, leaning on the dining-room table, maybe to hold herself up.

  “I don’t know,” my father said. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Why don’t you sit down and eat?” My mother approached and touched my father’s shoulder.

  He jolted.

  “Get away from me. Stay away from me.”

  I pushed out my chair, stood up, and my father looked at me, then at Key. Then back to me. I was eight.

  “Are you ready to fight your father?” His eyes on me, not exactly angry, not safe, though.

  “John.” My mother again. “Sit down.”

  She reached for my father, and he tolerated her hand.

  “Sit down, okay? No one wants trouble. You’re home. Eat.”

  My father sat. I sat. My mother sat. We ate.

  Not a word among us.

  Then my father put down his napkin, got up from the table, and came around to me.

  “Stand up,” he said. “Let’s go, Konrad. Stand up.”

  “John —” What could my mother do? “John, sit down. Or if you can’t, then —”

  “Then what, Diane? Not another word.”

  I put down my fork and stared into my plate. I was shaking with rage, with fear. Why didn’t I pee myself then?

  “Stand up, Rad. Now.”

  And I stood.

  I was eight, and my father was an angry, ruined god. Somehow our house disappeared, and my mother and my brother dissolved. Just the two of us, my dad and me alone, facing each other on some terrible ground, like the ground under our back porch, dirt and rocks and crabgrass, but it stretched in all directions. My father the god, a sudden giant, glowing with a bright black light.

  I couldn’t look at him, not directly. I might have burst into flames.

  My father hugged me. That’s how I remember it. He hugged me like a bear, without love. He meant to crush me, to suffocate me against his chest, and I had no choice. I had to fight.

  My father and I wrestled twice in my life. This was the first time.

  My father and I wrestled. And as we wrestled, I cried. I shouted. I kicked. I broke all my teeth. My bones exploded. My heart died. My tongue fell out. My hair turned white. I cried, and I begged him to let me go. To let us all go. To leave us alone.

  We wrestled through the night, hours and hours. And then he carried me, my whole shattered self, somewhere. I couldn’t make it out.

  And I slept.

  * * *

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  My father, John Schoe, simply gave up his life. He stopped being a husband and father. He stopped going to work. He stopped talking to Key and me, and he barely said anything at all to our mother, at least in front of my brother and me. He stopped dealing with the house, with repairs. He drove only when he left the house, and he left without telling anyone where he was going.

  What can you do with someone like that?

  My father took all of our attention. He took up almost all the air in our house for himself. All three of us ended up walking around him as if he were a rotting carcass or a sinkhole or a patch of quicksand. At the same time, we had to take care of him, get him food, persuade him to clean himself up, to stand, to eat.

  Key and I never understood what happened in my father. His unhappiness, invisible to the rest of us, must have grown in him like a cancer for years before he turned everything upside down. Maybe he was unhappy all along, his whole life, before Key and I were born, before he gave up painting for the law, before he met our mother. Who knows?

  His unhappiness must have gotten deeper even as the rest of us — my mother, Key, and I — thought we were happy, juggling, jumping up and down on the big bed, eating pie, walking a mile backward, on and on. We didn’t know anything. Not a thing.

  After my father left his job and abandoned his responsibilities, my mother filled the void. She’d always worked, even before my father turned off, saying it was good for her brain and heart to get out of the house, be productive. But she’d had to add a second job, and just before she died, about six months after my father gave up, she started going to school to get her college degree. I don’t think my mother could be sure what would happen with my father, whether or not he planned a permanent retirement from the world. She had herself, two children, and an adult — not a husband, not a third child, not a friend or boarder, someone unknowable — to feed and clothe. My mother had to work.

  Over seven months, my mother got exhausted, rundown, unhappy. Key and I couldn’t know for sure what happened when our parents disappeared into their bedroom at the end of the night. They spoke in whispers. Or my mother whispered, and our father growled.

  Our father seemed to save his energy until night, when he could keep our mother awake with his anger at the end of her long days. I imagined his murmured threats of violence if she made moves to get rid of him, divorce or move out, taking us with her. Our mother seemed to respond only with silence. As if she were caught out in the open by a hailstorm and could only hunker down, cover her head. At some point our father would finally leave her alone, finally allow her to sleep.

  I would sometimes come out of sleep when I felt the wake behind him, cold and hot at the same time as he passed my room and headed downstairs. He spent the nights doing, far as I knew, nothing at all.

  Our mother had had no choice but to become the sole earner to keep us all afloat. She cleaned offices after hours, cleaned houses during the days, and worked part-time at a dollar store. All this while trying to get a degree as quickly as she could in nursing. She couldn’t take time from work or studying to hang around with Key and me. When she did stay home, she would make dinner, and she would try hard to laugh with us, to catch up, to listen to our stories, but she would fall asleep early in her clothes, sometimes on the couch, sometimes in bed. Sometimes our father would wake her roughly, poking her shoulder or thigh to get her out of her clothes and into bed. And to talk at her, complain at her, rant at her.

  The night Key and I turned nine — I’ll never forget it. Her heartbreak and tiredness. And our father was nowhere to be found.

  “I miss being a mommy.”

  “But we have cake,” Key said. “And you made it.”

  She gave us a half-smile. “I’m tired, and I miss you both so much.”

  What could Key and I say to that?

  “We love you,” Key said.

  “We miss you every day,” I said. “We know what you have to do.”

  “But
this isn’t what being kids should be about. Looking after yourselves every day. Making dinner out of cans and boxes for you and your dad.”

  Key and I shrugged. We did look after ourselves. We learned to do our laundry and take care of the garbage, and we cleaned in our way. But we were eight, nine, and we couldn’t do enough.

  Key said, “We can’t make money.”

  “No,” my mother smiled. “But you two, with all those brains. You’ll be just fine.”

  Key and I had sometimes talked about running away, but that meant we would leave our father behind to torture our mother. So we’d talked about how much easier it would be for our mother if we’d never been born, if she could kick out our father and find her own way without us. I was ashamed for being alive. Key, too. Our poor, trapped, exhausted mother.

  And on the night of our ninth birthday, with our mother sad and tired, cleaning up our birthday cake, I said, “You must hate us because all the work’s for us.”

  My mother sat stunned for a minute or two, fidgeting with a candle in the shape of a number nine, her eyes darting back and forth between Key and me.

  “It’s true,” Key said. “If you didn’t have us, maybe you’d have a new, better husband. And a better life.”

  My mother pulled us both in. “Life doesn’t go like that,” she said. “It has its demands. We do what we have to for love. You can’t argue with love, and you can’t ask it why. It won’t answer. Love is the only answer to itself. Do you understand?”

  I don’t think Key and I understood at all, the idea, I mean, or its depth. But we could sense our mother was saying she would do whatever she could for us, including our father, because she had to, for love.

  After a few moments, we nodded, my twin brother and I, in unison.

  Four months later, a truck lost a wheel.

  FOUR

  I’m not the only kid whose grades drop through the floor with trouble at home. I think I peaked in third grade.

  I’m not good with school, not since my father gave up and my mother died. I’m not made for structure, rules, authority, or classmates. I’ve only ever enjoyed learning on my own. I’m really good at teaching myself. I love museums, encyclopedias, Project Gutenberg, and I —

  I’ll graduate from high school, but I won’t show up for graduation. I won’t have friends to miss, and you won’t find my picture in the yearbook. I’ll get my diploma in the mail, maybe, if anyone knows where to reach me.

  Eleven months from now, I’m going to enter a monastery. The Lérins Abbey, in France. To live in the world but not of the world.

  Wait. What?

  Constant rules, structure, authority, community? With my mind and moods? Totally ridiculous, right? Did I mention the men, the work, and the discipline?

  And does Key know about this?

  Key, of course, does not know. And this will be the hardest part of the plan, leaving my brother. Key will be somewhere like Princeton or Columbia or Berkeley, or wherever the scholarships let him go. That’s the truth of it. Between the two of us, my twin has a chance to light up the world. Key is a good person in almost every way, and I’m not. My light is black.

  So, with black light, I will serve God and Christ at a French monastery.

  ?!

  I’ve never been to church, and I don’t know if our parents had us baptized or christened. I don’t know anything about God or Christ or Catholicism. I’d have to read up on doctrine. But I have a year.

  You might not know where to find the monastery of Lérins.

  The monastery is on an island …

  a little island …

  the largest of a tiny archipelago …

  off the coast of the French Riviera ….

  What’s not to like?

  So, Rad, did it occur to you they might not want you, or that you might hate it? Don’t you realize you’ll commit to a celibate life among men living in relative silence? And how are you going to commit to Christ, someone you know only by name? Doesn’t sound like a plan.

  Yeah. Not a great plan, maybe not even a good plan. Still, right now, it’s a plan. It’s a plan to escape, a plan to hide myself from the world.

  * * *

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  I might not have considered Lérins if not for my colossal failure with Jacqui. A failure that began when we began — a long, slow failure that reached its final end this morning.

  Maybe. Maybe it’s totally dead, maybe it’s not.

  I should just tell the story. It’s a story of ways a person can become an island.

  Jacqui Pahk-Morris and I didn’t start out friends. We sat near each other in eighth-grade science, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I also couldn’t find a way to talk to her or be nice or even polite.

  Eighth grade was the fifth year of my father’s near total absence, though he never actually left. My mother had been dead almost four years. I didn’t have much motivation to do anything. I squeaked through all my classes except for math. I intuit math. It comes to me without thinking. Or at least it feels that way. Jacqui couldn’t compete with me in math. Don’t get me wrong. She was good, really good, but she had to work at it, and I didn’t.

  Science was different, at least what passed for science in eighth grade. I didn’t have the same instincts as with math, and I would have had to work to do well. I didn’t work, so I didn’t do well. Jacqui had me beat.

  This is boring. The history matters, though.

  Jacqui and I never spoke to each other, but I looked and looked when I thought she wouldn’t notice. And I have to admit, I don’t really know why I was looking. At fourteen, she was skinny. Her legs were too long, her face too small for her head, and her hands and feet might have belonged to someone twice as tall and even thinner. She was a collection of parts, not quite put together.

  Yeah, maybe, but I had some shadowy idea she was already modeling, which, I have to admit, I couldn’t understand. She was awkward. Or I thought she was, but what did I know? Nothing.

  What Jacqui had was unbelievable skin. Her skin still is luminous. That’s the word, good for a few points on the SAT. Luminous, as if she were lit from the inside by a hundred candles.

  And what about Jacqui’s eyes? Her eyes weren’t quite round or hooded, but not quite not-round or not-hooded, not quite black, not quite brown, not quite, in some light, deep blue.

  Now, at seventeen, Jacqui is spectacular in every way. Brains and beauty. She’ll go Ivy League like Key, if she really decides to give up the runway. That spectacular. But when she was in eighth grade, she was two inches taller than me, and she wasn’t quite —

  Her tongue. Her tongue had cracks in it. It wasn’t smooth. Weird, right? Like her tongue was the bed of a dried-up river. I never understood that. She can wear anything, cutting-edge fashion with feathers, fur, plastic, leather, silk, wool, yarn, probably bone, the skin of a unicorn, and headdresses you can’t even imagine. Or she can go half-naked. Let’s face it, though, she’ll never be a tongue model.

  The first time Jacqui spoke to me, I had just put my hand through the window of the door to our homeroom, which also served for English. Ms. Melonian was my homeroom and English teacher. She wanted to have it entered on my permanent record that I was hostile and volatile, dangerous. She wore red lipstick, red nail polish, red clothes. I called her the Blood Queen.

  I showed up late to English, and the Blood Queen confronted me in front of the class. She shouted. I shouted. She shouted some more, maybe even screeched, raised her arm in some kind of incantation, and then I left, but not before punching out a pane of glass in the door. I shouted obscenities in the hallway.

  I ended that day with a bandaged hand, detention, and a call to my absentee father, who never answered, but none of this happened before Jacqui Pahk-Morris spoke to me.

  Jacqui came out of the girls’ bathroom in time to watch me punch an ugly bulletin b
oard hanging in the hallway.

  “Ow.”

  That’s the first word Jacqui ever said to me.

  I stood in front of her, my fists clenched, oozing blood, snorting like a bull, wondering if I should throw her up in the air on my horns, gore her.

  “That must have hurt.” She crossed her arms on her chest, and for a second I stared at her hands, those long, long fingers. They were the fingers of a creature from a parallel world. “Did it hurt?”

  — heavy breathing, snorting —

  “Konrad?” And that one word, my full name, brought me crashing down from the height of anger.

  “What?” My first word to Jacqui. None of this was what anyone would call promising.

  “You just punched a bulletin board. Did it hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Your hand is bleeding.”

  At that point, the Blood Queen came out of the classroom. “Jacqui, come here. Leave him alone.”

  Jacqui stuck out her tongue, her cracked tongue, to wet her lips a little.

  “Go to the nurse,” she whispered. “For your hand. And then go to the office. Turn yourself in.”

  “Jacqui, leave him. Konrad, you have thirty seconds to get yourself to the office.”

  Jacqui and I looked at each other. I felt my sadness come over me, that heavy blanket.

  “First, go sit on the stairs,” Jacqui said. “Sit somewhere. Calm down. And then —”

  “The office,” I said. “I know.”

  “Jacqui?” The Blood Queen walked a few steps toward us and my anger flared again. I looked at her over Jacqui’s shoulder and she stopped.

  What chance did the Blood Queen have against an animal like me, spells or not?

  “You’ll be okay,” Jacqui said, and she put her hand on me. That touch was a long drink of warm milk, and all I wanted was to rest. How could I know she wouldn’t touch me again, not in any real way, for almost three years? “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  * * *

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