Now & Then

by Jacqueline Sheehan

  “What happened? About the car, I mean. Whose car did you steal?” she asked as they crept along. For the last hour, anger had started to boil in her throat. Car theft? Drugs? Was this the beginning of the end of Joseph? Was he lost already?

  Joseph shrugged his shoulders and folded his arms across his chest. He tried to slouch, dipping his right shoulder slightly lower so that he pointed his body away from Anna. “I don’t know. Nothing,” he said.

  “I just sprung you out of jail. ‘I don’t know’ is the wrong answer. And when did you start taking drugs?”

  “We didn’t steal the car. It was Oscar’s grandmother’s car. He said she wouldn’t notice. He said she didn’t drive it anymore.” He spoke to the passenger side window.

  “And who is Oscar?”

  “A friend. He’s my friend.”

  The lawyer was seeping back into Anna. “But Oscar took the car without asking the owner? Is she going to press charges?”

  Shoulder shrug. “I don’t know. His parents came and got him right away. Isn’t there anything in the law about family members not pressing charges against other family members?”

  “No, there is absolutely nothing in the law that stops people from doing that. Lawyers live off the inclination of families to do bad things to each other and have each other arrested. What about the drugs?” Anna tapped her fingers on the steering wheel as she stared at the back end of a semi-trailer.

  “Two hits of X but we’d already taken them. I didn’t think Oscar had anything else in the car. When the cops stopped us, they tore the car apart and found something in the glove box. My father is going to kill me.”

  “Your father will be unable to kill you for some time. He’s going to have to get a lot better before you need to worry about that,” said Anna.

  The traffic started to move.

  Chapter 4

  “Why are we going to your house?” said Joseph. “You’re like three hours from Greenfield?”

  It was ten at night. They had steadily run the air conditioner since late afternoon, and the sudden silence in the car without the iced air startled her.

  “Because my house is closer to the hospital in Boston. Remember, he’s going to be airlifted there. Besides, I swore to keep you in my sight. The only reason I was able to get you out was that I promised to be responsible for you.” Anna rolled down her window after shutting off the AC, letting in the air that had finally softened under the fall of night.

  Joseph rolled his window down too. “My father’s truck has automatic windows. Did you have to special order these?”

  Anna overlooked his sarcasm. She shifted into third gear to drive up the abruptly steep road leading to her house. She turned at her mailbox, parking in front of the garage, which had developed an unfortunate tilt over the past year. A motion-detector device splashed light over the drive and the walkway to the house.

  “Let’s go call Grandma and let her know that we’re back.”

  She had had time to do little more than pop open some of her luggage and let the damp scent of Ireland and the ocean expand into her house before she’d gotten the disaster call from her mother. With a wince of sadness she remembered the smooth foam from a dark beer and the slick coolness from the stone walls. She let the strange combination of odors carry her on a reverie far from intensive-care units and monosyllabic nephews. If she could run away, that is where she would go, back to Ireland.

  “So where am I supposed to sleep?” said Joseph.

  It had been years since the boy had begged to sleep over at her house, to ice skate on her pond with his friends, to watch cartoons on Saturday morning. They did not even speak of these times. Anna thought his adolescent self was embarrassed that he had ever crawled on her lap, yanked on her hand or made cookies with her.

  “You know where the spare bedroom is. I’ll put a towel in the bathroom for you. We’ll leave around seven in the morning. I’ll wake you.” She paused, looking up at her nephew, who must have grown four inches over the summer. But he was riddled with anger. She saw it in the way he held his hands, tight and hard. And in the way he spoke to her without looking at her. Oh please, she thought, not Joseph, don’t let this happen to him too. God damn Patrick, God damn her father. She refused to think about her father; there was only so much room for catastrophe in her brain.

  Joseph had not cut his hair in the nearly shaven style so popular with the athletes at his school. She had popped into his wrestling matches when she’d been in the area. In fact, his hair was longer, rolling into curls, swishing along his collar and hanging in his eyes. He had the same dark hair as his father, as if his mother’s genes, with her golden hair, had not been added to the mix at all. But if the ability to be hurt, to feel crushed by sharp words, could be genetically traced, then he clearly had the sensitivity of his mother.

  Losing his mother had been devastating for a boy of four. She prayed that Joseph was not going to lose again.

  “Goodnight, Joey.” She let his boy name slip out, and for a moment he brushed his hair from his eyes and let his glance fall on Anna. He remembered, she knew he remembered the old days, when he’d smelled like Milky Way bars and boy sweat and she had kept a special supply of toys for him at her house.

  Anna reached back in time to when she had last slept. Maybe an hour or two when she’d first arrived from Europe, before her mother had rung her into the mouth of Patrick’s hospital room. She had stayed awake for the entire flight from Ireland. And she had slept badly on the last night of her trip; she always did before a major flight. She tossed a towel into the bathroom in hopes of encouraging Joseph to shower, either now or in the morning. Why didn’t teenage boys bathe more often? When Patrick had been a teenager, and she’d been an admiring kid in grade school, her mother had given Patrick gentle yet consistent prods about showering, yet never when their father had been home. Their mother had been vigilant about never pointing out anything that could have been construed as Patrick’s shortcomings when their father had been around. For as long as Anna could remember, their father had seemed to wait for any failing in the boy, and then he’d pounced and shamed him with taunts of “Stupid!” “Idiot!” “Useless!” Anna had watched in horror as her father had turned on Patrick like a relentless hyena, hanging onto his prey with iron jaws. Every bit of the horror show had poured into Anna and she vowed to protect herself from wanting to be loved as much as Patrick did.

  Joseph closed the bedroom door before she could say anything else to him. She turned out the light in the kitchen, took one desperate look at her upended luggage in the living room, and turned off that lamp too. Wrapped parcels, gifts for family and friends, poked their heads out of her large suitcase. She could not imagine finding a moment to open any of them. She went into her bedroom and closed her door. She dropped her pants and blouse to the floor, stepped out of her underwear, and unhooked her bra. Anna needed one caress of comfort, and she didn’t care where it came from. She pulled open the bottom drawer of her dresser and pulled out her ex-husband’s large T-shirt and a pair of his silky boxers that she had once teased him about. The brand—Man Silk—had been good for months of ribbing. She took a breath of safety from his underclothing.

  When she had first learned of the affair, her friend Jasper had told her, “He wasn’t right for you. He was never enough for you, believe me. Come to California.” But right now, she had never felt more alone and she longed for the shreds of relationship that she and Steve had. The bed was damp with late summer humidity, as if even the sheets had been weeping. As soon as her head hit the pillow, she plummeted into sleep.

  Chapter 5

  Joseph lay on top of the bedcovers. This was the worst day of his life, and he didn’t know how he could possibly survive one more minute, one more hour. But he had to be strong for his father, he had to help his father get better. Then he would take any punishment that his father would dole out; he just wanted him back again, well again.

  He’d never seen his father sick or hurt, not really hu
rt. His father’s hands were constantly raw and calloused from the stonework that he did, but now that he had hired a fulltime crew, his father was free to do more design work, and his hands didn’t even look so bad anymore. He pictured his father the last time he had seen him, two days ago, when they had both been eating cereal in the morning. His dad, absorbed in thought, had wrapped his hands around a cup of coffee, and the morning sun had hit his hands for a moment, illuminating the dark hairs that sprouted along the fingers, the cracked fingernails. Joseph had looked down at his own hands, thin and as yet unmarked by labor. Would his hands be the same as his father’s? Was that how it went?

  He pulled the pillow over his face and wept. He did not want Anna to hear him or try to comfort him. And it was not like Anna was all that great to be around anymore. Why did people freak out when they went through divorces? Anna used to be fun when he was a little kid. She was the one person who knew how tough his dad could be, and he’d been able to talk to her. Then Uncle Steve and Anna had gotten divorced a year ago and she’d left her job and she was just miserable to be around. Or maybe Anna didn’t like him anymore; he was sure that his father didn’t like him half the time. He wiped his face on his soiled shirt.

  Joseph slid off his jeans and shirt and pulled the sheet up. His feet hung off the end of the bed, forcing him to fold up on his side. How had everything gone so wrong so quickly? He had been too afraid to sleep at the detention center, and he fell asleep within minutes in Anna’s spare bedroom.

  Joseph dreamed that he was a tourniquet around his father’s leg. “Doctors,” he said to his medical dream characters, “we’ve got to slow down the artery.” When he woke up, sweating in his aunt’s house, it took him a full minute before he understood where he was. He felt suspended in air with no familiar objects in view. Then the realization of his father’s accident crashed in on him. The long car ride with Anna back to Rockport, and the terror of Juvie Hall, where they had taken away his shoelaces, trickled in last. He closed his eyes again; sleep had to be better than his real life.

  He dropped immediately into the dream again, fell through the floor of his waking life, back into the dream with his father and the doctors. This time he stood by his father’s bed and he offered his father a blue vase to hold all his blood, but his father, oddly uninjured, refused to take it. Instead, his father held out a math book to Joseph, and it flew open to a chapter on Absolute Values. His father became his true self, his absolute value, without anger or hate, cruel words or open-fisted slaps. His father’s eyes were warm brown marbles, softer than Joseph had ever seen. His father pointed to something in the book, a photo of something fluttering like a moth, and Joseph wished he could see it better. “Open it for Anna, Buddy. We all need it now,” said his father.

  Joseph broke through to wakefulness with a gasp, like a fish desperate for water again. He woke with the belief that something could save his father, and he let himself be led to it without thinking.

  Chapter 6

  The noise scratched her eyelids and her soft brain. Sleep had sucked her deep into the crevice of exhausted, motionless sleep, muscles paralyzed, and brain flitting uncensored. The noise lassoed her ears and pulled her up and up, dragging her reluctant consciousness along. She heard, then recognized, the sound of the plastic zipper on her suitcases being opened slowly. She had left the door ajar, unlatched, and a long knife of dim light pierced her room.

  Joseph; why was he awake? The sun wasn’t up yet. She rolled to her side and with her left arm pushed up and slid her legs around. Anna’s feet hit the cool wood floor. She stood up, and the floppy shirt flowed to her thighs. She considered the jeans on the floor but decided against them. The sound of paper crumpling and expanding came from the living room. A glance at the clock radio revealed the ghastly hour of 3:48, still hours from daylight. Every sound in the house was amplified at this hour: the hum of the refrigerator, the creaking floorboards, and crushing paper. She stepped into the doorway, looked out, and saw that the beam of light came from the hallway to the left leading to the living room.

  What was he doing? He probably couldn’t sleep. She could let him wander the house, no danger there. So why was she afraid; what was wrong? She had to be careful, as first responses were deceptive, based on not enough information. Yet the charge of alarm was already racing through her blood. She heard paper rustling again, and the inability to picture what he was doing, what the boy was wrapping or unwrapping, finally pushed her down the hall. She followed the glow of light and there was Joseph, his hair askew from being slept on and pushed up on one side. He was bent over her suitcase, rear end pointed up in Anna’s direction, white underpants beaming. Anna stopped; he hadn’t heard her yet because he was totally engrossed in his task. He stood up with a small brown package in his hands, one of many such packages, neatly wrapped, secured with tape.

  Anna walked soundlessly toward her nephew, watched his shirtless back, not yet broad but with promises of muscles making triangles from the points of his shoulders to the protrusion of his shoulder blades. Joseph had grown so suddenly. Should she wear only a T-shirt and underwear; would she embarrass one or both of them? But this was a crisis, a time on the brink of death. Patrick hovered in time, touching death and life, tethered by a respirator forcing in breath. She felt her place between her brother and this sprouting nephew, and saw memories of Patrick in the untapped strength of the boy’s back, the grinding fear for his father that no doubt kept the boy from sleeping.

  “Joey,” she said, in a moment of tenderness, saying his toddler name and at the same moment reaching out and touching his shoulder. He leaped and jerked away, gawking at Anna, looking like a trapped animal. Anna jumped back.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Are you OK?” she asked and then stopped short.

  He had whirled around, and in his hands he held the half-opened package with a bit of fabric erupting from the confines of paper. What was he doing? Not Joseph, not the boy she’d taken swimming in the summer, the one who’d presented her with his first art project from day camp. Had the world shifted and he had become lost, popping Ecstasy in stolen cars in New Jersey?

  “What are you doing?”

  “I woke up and I knew I had to find something. My father told me to look for something in my dream and I just came out here. I was dreaming…” Joseph suddenly looked shocked, glanced down at his own hands as he stood in the sea of Anna’s sprawled luggage. “It’s not what you think, Anna…”

  The days of sleeplessness met with the nausea she had swallowed upon seeing her brother in the ICU and driving to New Jersey to retrieve Joseph from the detention center. The collision of all these points was cataclysmic. Thunderclouds exploded across Anna’s brain, lightning crackled in her skull. She grabbed the boy by the arm.

  “Why are you going through my luggage? Have you lost your mind?” She couldn’t stop. “What’s wrong with you!” From a distance she saw his eyes grow large and young. He had something of hers in his hands, a piece of cloth that flowed like water; she grabbed at it and they both held tight. As soon as both of them held the cloth, Anna heard a roaring sound and something immense extracted the air from her lungs. Tidal wave, tornado, terrorist bomb attack all ran through her head for the three seconds before complete darkness and speed overcame all other sensations.

  Chapter 7

  When Anna imagined what dying would feel like, or more to the point, the moment after dying, she pictured flinging from one time to another, shooting outward, going past the arc of the earth’s atmosphere, becoming a tendril along time, rippling and snapping until she plunged into the circumspect future of existence without form. She had taken Ecstasy in college once—well, twice—and maybe not just Ecstasy, because she had truly felt the moorings come loose from her body, which is exactly why she didn’t want her nephew taking drugs. You could come apart and never return again. You could feel like you were dying, and Anna didn’t want that to happen to Joseph. During her voyage with drugs, something had li
fted off her and taken flight, ricocheting off harmonic lights. So maybe it hadn’t been just Ecstasy alone; she’d never found out what the drug had been that had temporarily fragmented her into particles. But she had thought that dying would be like that.

  She’d never expected the fish, the way she could breathe under water, that it was water, not air, but sound and water that were the transport system. Clever, very clever.

  She tried to look at her body to see if it was still there, and with the greatest effort, with supreme concentration, she turned her eyes down and to the left, where her hand should be, and very far away, she saw a persistent memory of a hand tangling with an aspiring hand. The effort was exhausting and worked against everything that was happening, against the schools of fish, the operatic whales, and the suddenly obedient sharks. If she was dead, why could she still see her body? This was something else.

  Was she skimming the bottom of the ocean? From somewhere in between the small spaces of her ribs, she let go and went forward, outward, and down. I’m dispersing, she thought, like the pellets from a shotgun blast. But she had not come alone. She and Joseph had been plucked together; for one moment she had seen him as he had whipped past her. She was not shooting down this hole alone. They had been at her house and had struggled. And before her thoughts flew away from her, she reached as far in one direction as she could to find the boy and felt nothing.

  This is time travel, she thought. She recognized it not because she’d ever experienced it before, or knew anyone who had slid down the corridors of time. It was the fish and because there was no other explanation.