They tell me the details of the meet: Eric took first in the 200 meter. Hamilton didn’t place in the 100 meter. That was Gabe’s specialty.
“We’d have won the relay, too, except Tyler dropped the goods on the pass.”
Tyler groans.
“As soon as you get back, you’ve got to practice handing off the baton with Tyler. Remember how Gabe used to always drop it until you guys practiced together a billion times?” Eric says.
We laugh, remembering our frustration with Gabe. “I’m fast,” he’d say. “I use my feet, not my hands.” But once he got good at passing and receiving the baton, we almost never lost a relay.
“Remember how he’d smile that ‘eat my dust’ smile when he was running?” Eric says.
“Yeah,” Tyler says, “and Coach would tell him people can’t run and smile at the same time. And Gabe would say he couldn’t help it.”
It’s like, for a minute, Gabe is back with us, and then the conversation stops and there doesn’t seem to be anything else to say.
“They oughta kill that drunk son of a bitch that ran into you guys,” Tyler says.
“A guy like that doesn’t deserve to live,” John says.
Everybody nods in agreement. Then, after a long, awkward silence, Eric asks me, “When can you come back to school?”
“I don’t know. Next week I’ll get started with a home teacher.”
“Cool,” Manny says. “I’d like that a lot better than school. Kick back at home, watch a little TV, and once each day have school brought to your door.”
“That’s stupid,” Ken says. “You’d be so bored—no girls, no track.”
“Girls could come to my house like the home teacher,” Manny says.
I try to stay with the conversation, say something now and then, but it’s meaningless to me.
My ex-girlfriend, Desiree, stops by with flowers and a card that’s signed “love.” Two weeks ago I would have been all excited about that. It doesn’t do much for me today.
I still hurt all over, and if I turn my head fast, or get up out of bed quickly, it feels like thousands of sharp needles poking inside my skull. Mostly, I want to be left alone. I want to sleep. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to remember.
My mom and grandma think I should never be alone in the house. Mom says, “What if something would happen when we’re both gone?” I hate to tell you, Mom, I think, but something has already happened.
Anyway, my grandma has switched to the night shift at the convalescent home so she can be home with me all day, until my mom gets home from work. My grandma’s answer to everything is to make menúdo. I hate menúdo, but she wants me to eat it every day.
“Can’t I just have canned chicken noodle, Abuelita?” I whine, wondering why I’m acting like a six-year-old but doing it anyway.
“Menúdo will make you strong,” she says.
The good news is I can walk to the bathroom on my own now, so I can dump my menúdo down the toilet when my Grandma leaves the room. The bad news is I stay hungry until dinner time.
Gabe’s fourteen-year-old sister comes over on Saturday with a bunch of pictures to show me.
“Here’s one at the carwash,” she says. “Kids from the track team made over four hundred dollars to help with expenses. That was so nice.”
Sometimes Monique looks like she’s still ten, and sometimes she looks like she’s about twenty. Right now she looks ten.
“Here’s one outside the church, before the funeral. There were so many people—there wasn’t even room for everyone inside. I’m sorry you couldn’t be there.”
“Why?”
She looks shocked. “Because you were Gabe’s best friend. Because it was our last good-bye.”
“I’ve never been to a funeral,” I say.
“Mom says we were sending Gabe’s soul to God . . . Look, this is at the cemetery,” she says, pointing to a fresh mound of dirt. “He’s next to my tia, so he won’t be lonely.”
Lonely?
“When you’re better we can go visit him together,” she says.
Nothing is making sense to me. “Monique,” I say, “I’m so tired. I’ve got to go back to bed for a while.”
I walk out of the den where we’ve been sitting and down the hall to the bedroom. I pause at my dresser and pick up the baton Gabe and I used to practice with. It’s sticky with old sweat, mine and Gabe’s. I set it back down and ease into bed. It’s cool and dark in my room—like where Gabe is, surrounded by cool and dark. I wait for the fog.
Hector, Gabe’s older brother, comes over Sunday morning. “Looks like you’re getting around better,” he says as he watches me walk into the kitchen and get a soda for him. We talk for a while, about the engine he’s rebuilding in his garage, about the Lakers, about nothing. Then he says, “Mom wants me to remind you to come for dinner Wednesday night.”
How can I do that, I wonder. Back when I was ten years old, I started eating dinner at Gabe’s house on Wednesday nights because my mom had an evening class and my grandma was working an evening shift. And then it became a habit. I liked the bustle of the big family, everyone talking at once around the table, the shifts between Spanish and English, the fights and the laughter. I loved my mom and my grandma, but things were very dull at our house in comparison to the Sandovals. But I don’t think I want to sit at that table and not see Gabe between his dad and Monique, teasing his mom about too many tamales on her thighs.
“I don’t know if I’m ready to do that or not,” I tell Hector.
He looks me in the eye in a challenging sort of way. “I think it would be good for my mom,” he says.
How many lives have changed with that one accident? I don’t want to count.
Ms. Woods, my Peer Counseling teacher, comes to see me Monday afternoon. I really like Woodsy. Everybody does. But I’d rather not see her today.
“I hear you’re depressed,” she says.
“I guess.”
“It’s not your fault,” she says, just like everyone else keeps saying.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“Paul, stop torturing yourself. You were broadsided by a drunk driver who went through a red light traveling sixty miles an hour. You and Gabe were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“’Specially Gabe,” I say.
“I worry about you, Paul,” Woodsy says.
“Don’t,” I say.
After she leaves, I take another codeine tablet and go back to my bedroom. I try for sleep, but instead I lie staring at the ceiling, pushing thoughts out of my head, longing for the fog that came so often in the hospital but not often enough now.
Distant traffic sounds, birds chirping outside my window, my grandma’s Spanish soap opera, Hector whistling in his garage as he tinkers with the engine, the codeine—then sleep.
Bam! I am startled awake by the loud clash of metal on cement. Hector yells, “Oh, shit!”
Only it’s not Hector I hear in my mind, it’s Gabe. And it’s not Hector’s engine hitting the garage floor, it’s the clash of metals as the car from nowhere rams into us, spinning, spinning, rolling, rolling, everything yanked, jarred, crushed. Something presses hard against my head. I struggle to get free. Reach for Gabe beside me and find only space. Sirens, flashing lights, and then the fog.
I try not to think of it, but it comes again. Gabe’s voice, screaming, “Oh, shit!” and the replay. And then it comes to me, the whole night. The night I don’t want to remember. The details that scare me to think about.
It was el abuelo Sandoval’s birthday party. Gabe and I were sitting out back watching his cousin do card tricks for Monique and some of the younger kids. It was around ten, but still warm out.
The small white lights we’d strung up earlier made everything look prettier than it ever looked in the daytime. I was on about my third plate of ribs. No one cooks ribs like Mr. Sandoval does. Gabe and I each had a beer while we were working in the yard before the party, and I had one with my ribs. Maybe
two. No big deal.
“Hey, Paul,” Hector yelled at me. “Mom wants me to go get more ice cream and your car’s in the way.”
“How come you always park in my driveway?” I yelled back.
“’Cause my driveway’s always full,” he laughed.
“I’ll move my car,” I said, putting my plate down and reaching into my pocket for the keys.
“While you’re in the car, you might as well drive on up to the store and get the ice cream—two gallons of vanilla,” he said, walking over to me and handing me a ten dollar bill. “And she wants the change. That’s why I’m giving it to you and not to my brother,” he laughed.
“C’mon,” I said to Gabe.
We got in my car with Monique tagging along behind. “I want to go with you,” she said.
“Nah,” I said. “We’ll be right back.” I drove off, leaving her standing in the driveway.
“She’s in love with you, you know,” Gabe told me with a laugh. “She carries a picture of you in her wallet.”
“At least someone does,” I said. “But I’m no cradle robber. Besides, she’s like my sister.”
“She’ll get over you,” Gabe said. “Everybody else does,” he laughed.
“Hey, that’s cold,” I said, laughing along with him. I don’t have a reputation for being lucky in love.
“Do you want to go with me to Angie’s after awhile? She’s got a friend staying with her tonight,” he said.
Ever since Desiree and I broke up, Gabe was always trying to set me up with someone.
“Is her friend twelve years old, like the last one?” I ask.
“So, now and then I make a mistake,” he said with a laugh. Then— “Oh shit!” and next—crash, spin, roll, sirens, lights, fog.
It’d been kind of a game with Gabe. He’d get in my car and sit there, waiting for me to start. “Buckle up,” I’d say.
“Lighten up,” he’d say back.
We’d sit and joke around, and then finally he’d buckle up and we’d take off. That’s how we were even from a long time ago. I was more cautious and he was freer. That’s why he was a sprinter. He liked the thrill of top speed, not having to pace himself, just running full out. Me, I like a long race, where I have more control, where I can run with a strategy.
“Don’t be so serious,” he’d tell me. “Take it as it comes.”
“Like the baton?” I’d say sarcastically, reminding him of how many times he dropped it and lost relays for us until he got serious about learning the pass.
I used to wish I could be more light-hearted, like Gabe. So it surprised me when he told me that he wished he was more of a planner, like me. Maybe that’s why we were such good friends. We each supplied something the other person was missing.
Anyway, it was like my job to make him wear his seatbelt, and it was his job to make a big joke out of it. But I was serious about the seatbelt thing because once, just before I got my driver’s license, we saw this really gory film in health and safety. It showed all of these terrible accidents in which people had died or been messed up for life. And it showed crash tests with dummies with seatbelts and without seatbelts, and the seatbelts made a huge difference. Right then I decided I’d always wear a seatbelt and anyone riding with me would, too. I never, before the night of the accident, took Gabe anywhere if he wasn’t buckled up.
Here’s the thing, though. The worst thing of all that I try never to think about. Was it because I’d had two beers, maybe three, that I forgot to make him buckle up—that I forgot our game? Would he be alive today if he’d been wearing a seatbelt to keep him in the car instead of flying out onto the street?
I don’t care how many times I hear “It wasn’t your fault—it was a drunk driver,” I’ll always wonder if there was more than one drinking driver that killed my friend. What if I’m as much to blame as the guy who ran the red light? The guy who’s in jail for what he did?
***
“Dolores Sandoval called last night, after you were in bed,” Mom says, standing in the doorway of my bedroom, buttoning her coat, ready to leave for work. “She said they missed you last Wednesday night at dinnertime and hope they’ll see you tonight.”
I turn over, facing away from my mom.
“Paul, I think you’re well enough to go over there now, aren’t you?”
“I still get really tired,” I say.
“Well, the doctor says you should be doing more now. Did you go for a walk yesterday, like he told you?”
“No. I just didn’t feel like it.”
“Try it today, will you?” she says.
“Yeah,” I say, but I’m not sure I mean it.
“Is there anything you want me to bring home from the market?”
“No.”
She stands quietly in the doorway for a while, looking at my back, I guess, then I hear her walking down the hall. I feel like such a hypocrite. People are being so nice to me, and in my heart I know I’m as bad as the guy everybody hates. The guy who’s in jail. The guy who doesn’t deserve to live.
I put on clean jeans and a fresh T-shirt. I’ve never been fat, but I’m really skinny now. And weak. Before the accident I’d get surges of energy, like I could leap tall buildings or some other kind of Superman crap. Now I barely have the energy to put one foot in front of the other, even though the doctor says I’m physically able to do anything I want but run track.
Between my mom and my grandma they’ve practically pushed me out the door to go to the Sandoval’s house tonight. I don’t want to go, but I don’t have the energy to fight it, either. When I walk in and get a whiff of beans cooking in the big pot on the stove, it’s as if nothing has happened. Mrs. Sandoval turns from the sink where she’s cutting up tomatoes, wipes her hands on her apron and gives me a long, tight hug.
“We miss you,” she says, looking at me in a questioning way. “Go look at Gabriel’s cards,” she says, leading me to the living room and pointing to a display of cards on the mantel, like a Christmas display, except these are all in light pastel colors, not the bright colors of Christmas. She scoops them up and hands them to me, then pulls me down next to her on the couch.
“Read them to me,” she says, sitting back and closing her eyes.
The cards say things like, “Our prayers are with you in your time of loss,” and “Deepest Sympathy,” and there are lots of Bible verse cards.
“It helps to know so many people loved Gabriel. They did, didn’t they?”
“Everybody liked Gabe,” I say, remembering the time Gabe and I were hit up by some guys from Eighth Street—gangbangers. They’d asked us where we were from and Gabe made some smart remark that I thought would get us killed. But they laughed, shook hands around, and Gabe and I went on our way.
Mrs. Sandoval sighs. “Every day I go to early mass. I pray for him. I know his soul is already with God, but I pray for him anyway. It helps me keep him close.”
When I ask about Gabe’s grandparents, his mom tells me they’ve gone home to Mexico for a visit.
“It’s been hard for them, too,” she says.
Hector comes in from the garage, wiping his greasy hands on a rag. He starts to sit down next to his mom but she puts both hands on his butt and gives him a shove. “Not until you clean up,” she says. They laugh and he goes into the bathroom to shower.
Monique yells from the kitchen, “Papa’s home.” Mrs. Sandoval goes to the door to greet her husband. Gabe used to say his family was the poorer Mexican equivalent to the Cosbys.
I’m beginning to relax, but when I sit down at the table with the family I’m faced with what’s missing. I want to run away.
Hector starts talking about how the guy who hit us is due to be sentenced in a few days. “I hope they throw away the key,” he says. “I’m gonna go down there and sit in on that session. When I see him in the courtroom I’m going to remind him that he murdered my brother.”
Mr. Sandoval looks at him, sadly. “Spreading misery won’t bring Gabriel back,” he say
s.
“No. But I want justice!” Hector says.
“No, you want vengeance,” his father says. “It’s not the same.”
“Shhh,” Mrs. Sandoval says. “Dinner is a happy time.”
Everyone is quiet for a while, then Mr. Sandoval turns to me and asks, “Are you getting your strength back, Paul?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You look a lot better than the last time I saw you, except you’re nothing but skin and bones. You need more beans,” he says, heaping another big spoonful onto my plate.
“My grandma keeps trying to feed me menúdo,” I say, wrinkling my nose. I don’t tell them what I do with the menúdo, though.
“Ai, M’ijo, la abuela knows what’s good for you!” Mrs. Sandoval says.
Monique keeps watching me at dinner, and I remember what Gabe said about her being in love with me. I don’t think she is
anymore, though. How could she be? Not that I want her to be.
“Remember Mrs. Walker?” she asks Hector.
“How could I forget? I had to take freshman English twice because of her.”
She does an imitation of Mrs. Walker, standing at the board, tight lipped, pigeon toed, demonstrating comma usage. That makes us all laugh. I can see she thinks it’s a big deal that I’m laughing. Come to think of it, it is.
It’s strange. Gabe was the one to clown around whenever there was any tension at dinner. Now Monique is being the clown, filling a small comer of the big empty space at this table.
After dinner Mrs. Sandoval asks me to come with her into Gabe’s room.
“I sit in here sometimes,” she says. “I feel him here, do you?”
I don’t know what to say. How am I supposed to feel someone’s presence when they’re already dead? It’s not like I believe in ghosts or anything.
“Ai, M’ijo, I pray for you every morning, too. I see some of the life has gone from you. I know your body was hurt very bad, but I pray for your heart.”
“I hurt all over,” I tell her. “I don’t know what hurts the most.”
I look around at Gabe’s room, pretty much the way it was the last time I saw it, minus dirty clothes strewn all over. There’s a prom picture of him and Angie on his dresser, and posters of practically every Salsa group that’s ever made a record tacked all over the walls. There’s even a poster on the ceiling. His track medals are stuck into a cork board, and there’s a picture from the school newspaper showing me crossing the line in a state competition. His walkman is on the bed, like he’s just tossed it there. I reach for it, to see what tape is in it, check out what the last song was that he ever heard, but then I pull away, preferring not to know.
Beyond Dreams Page 7
