by Jason Gurley
I returned to his page, intent on rescinding this new “friendship.” The page loaded slowly, and when it finally did, I saw a fresh red badge pinned to the MESSAGES icon.
Fuck.
33
Zach
So. Back to school.
Derek worked his magic. The entire administrative staff adored him. School had been harder for him than other kids, so he’d just worked harder, endearing himself to a whole bunch of teachers along the way. They did what they could to help him, and, by extension, me. Ms. Grace arranged for me to make up the missing credit after school. At Derek’s insistence, I quit both of my jobs and spent every spare hour bent over my books, trying to gain back lost ground. By late April, I’d salvaged my GPA. It wasn’t anything special—but at least it wasn’t a charred heap of fail.
I’d become well practiced at the art of avoiding Vanessa. She wasn’t happy with the arrangement, I knew; she tried catching my eye frequently, and once a note wound its way back to me during our shared health class. I left the note on my desk, unopened, when class ended. Was I angry at her? I didn’t know. What I did know was that I couldn’t figure a way to let her actions slide. All along, she’d known about her stepfather. Known what he and his employer meant to my family. And she’d kept that from me. What had she thought would happen?
When I told Derek, he was surprisingly unruffled. In fact, he took Vanessa’s side. “The girl loved you, Z,” he said. “And come on. You’re both kids. You don’t know how to handle the hard shit yet.” I protested, but he shut me down. “You get a few years behind you. You’ll see what I mean.”
“The daughter of my enemy is my enemy,” I said. Then, frustrated by the bemusement on his face, I exiled myself to the bathroom since I didn’t have a bedroom door to slam. I turned the sink on to drown out my brother’s laughter—but only for a moment. Water costs money.
I glared at my own reflection in the mirror, trying to remember the last time I’d been so angry. He just does what he’s told, Vanessa had said, but that didn’t change anything. She might as well have said it wasn’t personal. But how could it not be personal? Our dad was gone.
The spring after Dad’s death. My first week back at school.
That was the last time I’d been this angry.
My classmates had kept their distance, as if tragedy were contagious. During exams, I’d catch my teachers studying me intently. Are you okay? they asked with their eyes. They’d pull me aside after class: If you need to talk …
Bobby Longdale witnessed one such exchange with a teacher and made a sign with Magic Marker. He held it up during class for everyone to see:
IS WIDDLE ZACHAWY OKAY?
DOES WIDDLE ZACHAWY NEED TO TALK?
Nervous laughter, stifled giggles, from our classmates. Encouraged, he scribbled another one and held it up, too.
DOES WIDDLE ZACHAWY MISS HIS DADDY?
Until that day, I hadn’t really known what it meant to see red. Had I gotten across the room before Mr. Ballard looped his arms around my chest, I think I might have broken Bobby’s jaw. Instead, Bobby went to the principal’s office, and I spent the day with the nurse, lying quietly on a cot in the dark. I felt as if I were a kid again, replaying the events of that long-ago day when Bobby had poured milk on my artwork, and I’d wallpapered him with lasagna. Remembering that day brought back Dad’s gentle lecture about love and anger.
That anger, I sometimes thought, had maybe never really left. It was always there, simmering under a thick skin of regret. And I thought if I just allowed myself to really feel it, maybe things wouldn’t be so hard. Maybe I just needed to let it out. But at who? At the names on the law-firm letterhead? At Vanessa’s stepfather? At Derek, for not being Dad?
At Dad, for being gone?
Suddenly I was just tired. Tired of being angry, of feeling like a victim. Holding this lit fuse inside me that only ever scorched me. For a moment, I saw what Derek had meant. The accident wasn’t Aaron Bartlett’s fault. If it hadn’t been him writing those letters, it would have been someone else. Vanessa wasn’t a player in this story. What was she supposed to say to me? And when? That night on the boat, when we were so close? When I’d told her about Dad?
That’s real sad, she could have said. Um—by the way, I live with the man who’s twisting the knife. Oops! Sorry!
Derek was right. It wasn’t her fault.
But it still hurt to look at her.
So at school I held my tongue. When I recalled the fleeting intimacy between us, I pushed it from my mind. I carved a narrative, like a mantra: We’re finished. We’re done. I was finished with her, and she with me. That was it. I had other things to look forward to. Like college, where maybe things would be different. Where maybe I could be different.
So I threw myself into the work of graduating. It didn’t matter how much money Derek thought he could set aside. It would never make a dent in tuition. So each night, after homework, he and I filled out applications for grants and financial aid. April tumbled into May; prom came and went, and I didn’t go. By year’s end, I really wasn’t mad at Vanessa anymore. There were no more notes; she didn’t try to catch my eye in the hall. She’d accepted it, too. And I stopped thinking about her.
Until the day I saw her mother on the front page of the local paper in a group photograph. The headline loomed large above her face:
CITY COUNCIL CONTROVERSY
Council members gamble on resort, go bust
So that was what Vanessa had meant. It wasn’t up to me. The writer of the piece described it as “a folly of magnificent proportions” and quoted the anonymous spouse of another council member, who said, “I want to kill him, and then I want to divorce him, and then I want to kill him again.”
Even with how things had turned out between us, I felt awful about our argument, about not being there for her. But I turned to my mantra. We were finished; her happiness had never been my responsibility, and being there for her—well, that wasn’t on me, either. Not anymore. Remember what you get for letting someone in, I reminded myself. It feels good for a little while. It hurts for a hell of a lot longer.
I’d had enough of hurting. So I left her alone.
* * *
And just like that, my senior year ended. No more homework or spending my days in class. With a couple months before I departed, I considered returning to Dot’s. I could ask for my job back. Might as well work as much as I could before I left, stow as much as I could in the family account.
I mean, that was one option.
Another one kept tickling me, lodged somewhere in a corner of my mind.
When the girls had gone to bed, Derek and I celebrated quietly. He opened a bottle of beer, then passed another to me. “To doing things right,” he said, raising the bottle.
“Doing it right,” I agreed.
We sat on old lawn chairs in the strip of grass that passed for our backyard. Mama’s window was open, the whir and rattle of her electric fan audible on the breeze. A trawler clanged somewhere in the bay.
While Derek slid down in his chair, heaving a gust of relief, I propped my sketchbook on one knee, idly sketching by the light of the kitchen window behind me. I could hear him swallow, smack his lips lightly.
“I’ve been thinking,” I began slowly.
“Uh-oh.”
“I’ve been thinking that I should leave … sooner.”
Derek rolled his head onto his shoulder, searching my eyes with his own. He drummed his fingertips on his bottle. “Like how ‘sooner’ you thinking?”
“I’ve been thinking about, like … tomorrow.”
He frowned. “Why so fast?”
“It’s like this,” I said, straightening up, putting the sketchbook aside. “I leave tomorrow. I get down there with, what, a couple months till the semester begins? I have some time to get to know the town. Get my sea legs.”
“Start to make it your own,” Derek mused. He wasn’t disagreeing; it sounded as if he were just ordering his thoughts,
rearranging them to get himself on board with the idea. “Get a head start on the other kids.”
“Know my way around from day one,” I pointed out. “No getting lost in the halls. None of that.”
“They even open the dorms that early?” He cocked his head at me, then pointed the bottle my way. “I don’t know why I ask. You wouldn’t have planned all this in secret without doing your research.”
“It’s called presemester work,” I said. “They give you work on campus, like groundskeeping or cafeteria prep or whatever, and in exchange you get your pick of the dorm rooms, and you get to live there rent-free until classes start.”
“So you get some money in your pocket, or just a bed?”
“They pay, a little.”
He sighed, sounding resigned. “You leave tomorrow, I don’t get to see you walk at graduation.”
“That’s the thing. And I feel bad about it. I feel like you should see me do it. Like you’ve earned that much.”
“Z, come now.” But he thought it over, and then he said, “You’re ready to get started, aren’t you?”
I nodded. “I think I am.”
“Well, I suppose they can mail your diploma,” he said finally. “I kinda like the thought of it,” he went on. “All those kids on the stage, prancing and posing in their robes, and meanwhile you’re down the road ahead of them.”
“I mean, it’s not a competition—”
He waved his beer at me. “Yes, yes, I know, I know. Still.” He drained the bottle, then went inside for another. When he returned, he said, “You sort things out with the girl? With Vanessa?”
I stared at my feet, which seemed like answer enough.
“That part of the reason you want to leave early?”
I shrugged.
“You know,” Derek said, sinking back into his chair, “me and Leah, we tried keeping it together when I went away to school. It didn’t work out. You throw a young guy into a school with a bunch of interesting strangers, things just happen. Home seems awful far away.”
“It’s not that,” I said, and it wasn’t. I didn’t like the idea of bumping into her at graduation, or around town all summer. Whatever had been there just wasn’t anymore. Which made us no better or worse than your average high school fling. We weren’t special.
“Something else, then?” Derek asked. He studied me, then sighed. “You always were good at putting that load on yourself, Z. Even when nobody else put it there, you’d do it on your own.”
“I’m excited. I wasn’t, but now I am. Except…” I hesitated. “Except I don’t know if I can—”
“Don’t,” he interrupted. Then he handed me his beer. “Hold this. Hold up.” Once again, he disappeared into the house. When he came back, a moment later, he was holding an envelope.
“What, you want me to mail the bills before I go? One last errand?”
That made him laugh. His voice had gone rich and low recently, and I wondered if the deeper saturation dives were somehow responsible. Maybe the higher pressure, the gas mixtures he had to breathe, did a number on his vocal cords. I tried to recall if Dad’s voice had dropped like that, but Dad had always sounded like a foghorn, sonorous and deep.
“This’ll ease you a bit,” Derek said, passing me the envelope.
The envelope was marked with his employer’s logo. I glanced at him, then opened it to find his paycheck. This wasn’t anything new; we’d sat at the table together many nights, tallying our earnings for the week. Partners of a sort, each of us throwing ballast out of the boat, trying to keep the family afloat.
“Go on.”
I pulled out the pay stub and nearly choked when I saw the number there.
He howled. “Your face, Z. Oh, god, your face.”
I coughed, hammering my chest with one fist. My eyes watered. “This real?”
He took his dive card from his shirt pocket and handed it to me. It was crisp and new, printed on stiff, shiny stock. I spotted the new certification immediately.
“You qualified,” I said, struck stupid.
“Just Level Two.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t want to jinx it,” he said. “Now you know.”
I turned the card over in my hands. As an air diver, he’d been at sixty-foot depths for the past year. They’d started sending him deep enough to require a gas mixture in his tanks. Level II, though, that was where you started to get into the real depths. Eventually, if Derek kept ranking up, he’d wind up working underwater for weeks on end, living in a little tin can.
“So how deep do they let you go now?” I asked. “Hundred?”
He shook his head.
“One-twenty?” I waited, but he just looked smug. “One-fifty?”
“One-eighty,” he said. “And boy, that’s where you start seeing Dad’s weird-ass sea monster shit.” He took the dive card back, then said, “My point, Z: Clear your damn head. This is good money. Maybe I can hire someone to help with Mama and the girls. Even send you a little scratch sometimes.”
We sipped our beers. The moon floated above as though tethered to our lawn chairs.
After a while, I said, “He’d be proud, you know. He’d throw you a party.”
Derek knocked his bottle against mine. “Wouldn’t be a good party,” he said.
I laughed, remembering how inept Dad had been at pulling things together. “That time we went to the beach, and we both swam in our underwear because he forgot to bring anything resembling swim trunks,” I said.
“He’d be proud of you, too,” Derek said. “First college boy in the family. Well,” he said, reconsidering, “first to graduate, at least.”
“Fancy-ass painting college,” I said.
“Still college, though.”
“Still college,” I agreed.
* * *
In the morning, Derek told me he’d gotten his orders. Six days on the rig. I felt uncomfortable leaving home while he’d be away, but Leah reassured me that she’d be staying there with the girls, and with Mama.
Mama.
I didn’t tell her I was going away. I sat beside her, hoping she might swim up from that fog to see me. But she lay still, eyes only slightly open. She didn’t make a sound when I rested my hand upon her cheek, when I smoothed her hair. I told her I loved her, then kissed her cheek, as I always did.
In the driveway, Derek put his arms around Leah. “You’re sure you’re good?” he asked her. “I’ll bring the girls back in a few hours, but then I’m due at the rig, and—”
“We’re good,” Leah said. “We’re always good.” Then she turned to me. “Z, be good to the ladies you meet. And don’t blush, now. Your whole head turns red.”
As Derek steered onto the highway, I half turned in my seat. Orilly receded behind us. I could see the hilltop neighborhood where Vanessa lived, and I wondered if she was looking at us through her telescope. I waved, just in case. There would be time to kill on the bus ride south. Maybe I’d write a letter. Maybe I wouldn’t.
The cheapest Greyhound station was in San Luis Obispo. Along the way, I taught Robin and Rachael to play punch buggy. Two miles outside of Orilly, Robin spotted an orange Beetle and belted Rachael hard enough to make her cry. I explained the rules of moderation, and Rachael anxiously awaited the next Volkswagen sighting so she could slug back.
It quickly became clear that there just weren’t enough Beetles on the road to play the game, so we agreed to expand the roster of vehicles. We were thirty miles out of Orilly by then.
“PT Cruisers,” Derek suggested. “Those things look about as dumb as Beetles.”
“Beetles are cool,” Rachael protested.
“Hummers,” Robin said. “They’re kind of rare, but not too rare.”
“Hey, do bug vans count?” Derek asked. He pointed at the opposite side of the highway, where a Volkswagen bus, robin’s-egg blue, puttered north, toward Orilly.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
My brother slugged me in the s
houlder. “Punch buggy, then.”
We had an hour to kill in SLO, so Derek treated us all to burritos at Chili Peppers. Afterward, we walked to Meadow Park and watched a pickup game of volleyball in the sandpits. When it was time, I wrapped the girls in a shared hug, kissed their cheeks, offered advice. Derek locked me in a tight grip next, pounded his hand on my back. “Do me proud,” he said.
I wished I had something comforting or eloquent to say, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I just waved good-bye as the bus pulled away. I knelt on the seat, watching until they receded into silhouettes against the glow of the Greyhound station, glad they couldn’t see my eyes.
34
Vanessa
I’d never met my father’s parents, and he’d never talked about them. Mom would only say, vaguely, that they’d had a poor relationship. After my father had left, when Mom was certain he wasn’t coming back, we began boxing his things into cartons that she stacked in the garage. For what purpose, I didn’t know; he certainly never returned for them. As we worked, I happened across an unfamiliar key and showed it to her. “Goodness,” she said, and led me to the small closet beneath our staircase. From a crawl space I hadn’t known existed, she lugged a fireproof safe into the open.
Inside the safe were artifacts from another life, another time: a scarred Zippo lighter; a dented sheriff’s deputy badge; a Southwest Football Officials Association card, softened with age. The name stamped on the card was PHILIP EMERSON DRAKE.
“Your grandfather,” Mom said.
In a folder stuffed with yellowed documents, we found a marriage certificate in the names of Philip E. Drake and Haley Rose Sanders and a decree of divorce from the California courts, dated twenty-one years before.
“Your father never liked to talk about it,” Mom said, but she recounted a story he’d shared, reluctantly, about a family vacation. A road trip through the Midwest. My grandfather abandoned his family at a highway rest stop. “Nobody knew he was gone for half an hour, when he didn’t return from the bathroom,” Mom explained. “Your father was ten. And he never saw your grandfather again.”
