“And you know this how, exactly?” she asks.
Again, I didn’t really plan this out, so I haven’t scripted the best possible way to tell her that not only have I been hearing a voice in my head for as long as I can remember, but that I also believe everything it says. After a moment’s pause, though, something comes to me. “Okay,” I say, pulling myself up to sit facing her. “Okay, listen. You know how I’m always spacing out, and you get pissed off because you’ve just asked me a question, or else say the cashier at Wendy’s is waiting for me to order, but I’m just standing there like Lot’s wife, and my eye does that thing where it goes slightly cocked?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” I say, and stop cold. I’m performing some sort of gesticulation with my hands that I don’t seem to have any control over. It goes on for a good half minute.
“What’s that your hands are doing?” Amy asks.
“Not really sure,” I tell her.
“Okay, enough,” she says, putting her hands over mine to still them. “What are you talking about, Junior? Out with it.”
I clear my throat. “Okay,” I say. “So. When I go all cockeyed.”
“Yes,” Amy says.
“What’s actually happening during those times is, I’m hearing a voice.”
“In your head, you mean,” Amy says. “Not, say, Wilford Brimley’s voice on the TV.”
“In my head.”
She’s pulled her hands back to rest in her lap. “And the voice says what.”
“It tells me things.”
“About . . .”
“The future. And the present. And the past, too, sometimes.”
“And it told you that the world is going to end.”
“On June 15, 2010, at 3:44 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. A comet from the Kuiper Belt will hit the Earth with the explosive energy of 283,824,000 Hiroshima bombs. Which will be unfortunate for a number of reasons, including that here in New England it will be ruining a postcard summer day.”
Amy stares at me for a long moment, then leans over to grab a cigarette from the pack of Camels on the floor. She lights it, breathes deep, exhales a cloud of gray-blue smoke. “This is some sort of joke, right?” she says.
“Would that it were so.”
“Like the time you thought it would be funny to let me believe, for three days, that you thought you might be gay?”
“Sadly, no.”
She hands the cigarette over. “So what you’re telling me, then, basically,” she says, “is that you’re fucking crackers.”
“No.” I reach for her, but she pulls her arm away and rises from the bed. “Amy. Listen to me, please. I’m not crazy. This is real.”
She takes two steps toward the staircase, then turns to face me again. “I’m sure that it’s very real to you. Which is the part that makes you crazy, see?”
“Everything it tells me is true. I know things I couldn’t possibly have found out otherwise.”
“You’ve got about ten seconds to convince me.”
And of course I draw a blank. Everything that comes to mind is either something I know but can’t prove—how my father lost his fingers, for example—or something I knew about in advance but which has already come to pass, like the revelation of Rodney’s cocaine addiction. Amy’s standing there, cross-armed and wet-eyed, seven seconds removed from going up the stairs, getting into her little red pickup truck, and driving away from her own house just to be shut of me, and I can’t think of anything to keep her from leaving.
Then something rises. Something awful that only three people on Earth know about, including me. It is perfect, ironclad proof that what I’m saying is true, and it is too terrible to speak of.
Amy is already on her way up the steps. She brushes a lock of hair away from her face with an angry swipe of one hand, careful not to let her eyes stray in my direction. I watch her rapid ascent, weigh my two options, judge them to be bad and worse, and make my decision.
“I know something,” I call out. At this she stops dead near the top of the stairs. Only her feet and ankles are visible. “Something only three people on Earth know about. Two of those three people are in this room right now. It is perfect, ironclad proof that what I’m saying is true.”
But it is too terrible to speak of.
Because when Amy turns and descends the steps again, stopping halfway up, and stares at me, her eyes shimmering in the light from the bare bulb in the overhead fixture, I realize I can’t say it. For all I know she’s willfully forgotten, or else blocked it out, isolated it in the solitary confinement cell that comes as standard equipment in all our minds for use on just such a memory. Am I going to open the door? One look at her face and I have my answer.
“Well?” she says, still staring.
In a nutshell, sparing the easily imagined details: Camp Kennebec, on Salmon Lake. Summer 1981. Amy is seven years old. A counselor from Vermont named McDermott. Amy stayed just four days, pretended to be sick so she could go home. Actually made herself throw up several times. The next summer she played Little League baseball just so her father wouldn’t send her back to Kennebec. The year after that, to her relief, he didn’t mention camp at all. She never saw McDermott again, and she never told anyone.
She’s glaringly expectant.
I say nothing.
She does a smart turn on her heel and climbs the steps again. “That’s what I thought,” she says as she disappears in increments. “You know Junior, this is really, really fucked up. Not funny at all. You should go home.”
She vanishes.
“And I’m not giving you a ride, either.”
Amy
I turn off the water and step out of the shower and by the time I’m halfway through combing and braiding my hair in the way Junior likes the heat is all over me again. It’s only eight in the morning and already so sticky it’s as though I didn’t even bathe. I wipe the fog from the mirror and see, on the inside of my upper arm, the bruise, an exact imprint of my mother’s hand. It’s turned the sick-green color of a prison tattoo.
When he saw the bruise a few days ago, Junior as usual wanted to confront my mother, but I convinced him not to. It’s way too late to fix this. When I was eight, maybe, but not now. All I want is to last the summer, because I know when I leave for college and don’t come back my mother’s real punishment will begin. My father long gone, my brother long gone, me gone, and she’ll be trapped with herself.
I’m hoping it will destroy her.
But I worry about what it’ll do to Junior. He takes everything too hard. Every time I turn around he’s talking about some animal he saw broken and dying somewhere. It happens so often I’m beginning to wonder if he’s making it up. Most recently it was a bat he found lying facedown in the police station parking lot. He was out wandering around, like he does at night when he can’t sleep. He said at first he thought the bat was dead, but when he poked it with the toe of his shoe it picked up its head and shrieked at him. All it could do was move its head. The rest of its body wouldn’t work.
“It wasn’t any bigger than a mouse,” Junior said, holding his thumb and finger apart to illustrate. His eyes were all teary talking about it. This was a bat, understand.
And I thought, How am I going to say goodbye to him when summer’s over?
He told me he picked the bat up to move it into the grass, so it wouldn’t get run over by a police cruiser, and it bit him.
“You’re going to end up with rabies,” I said.
He shrugged, like What does it matter? He’s always doing that. It pisses me off. He hasn’t earned the right to be so world-weary. A little light brooding is okay, even nice sometimes if it’s that kind of day, if you’re in the mood to listen to the gloomier tracks on White Light/White Heat and spend a good chunk of time feeling cool about how superior you are to the rest of the world, what with its shallowness and insincerity and Spuds MacKenzie beach towels. An occasional indulgence, fine. But with him it’s nonstop, and when I ask him wh
at’s wrong he brushes it off. Nothing, he says, nothing’s wrong, what makes you think there’s something wrong? The fact that you look like you’re ready to draw a warm bath and bust out the straight razor, I want to say. I know what the problem is, and why he won’t talk about it. He doesn’t want me to think he’s crazy. But it’s really too late for that. Things aren’t getting any better. Just because he’s been smart enough not to bring it up again doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten. He still spaces out all the time. He sits around brooding about roadkill. These aren’t things I can help him with.
Before the bat it was a bird he found on some old man’s lawn, when we were on our way back from picking apples at the orchard in Smithfield. The bird wasn’t hurt, but it was too young to fly, and Junior really went weird on that one, climbing around in the trees, looking for a nest to put the thing in. I thought the old man would have us arrested. Junior broke a branch in a willow and didn’t even notice. Finally he just scooped the bird up in his T-shirt and had me drive to the vet’s office.
I don’t know what he expected them to do.
He acted strange that night, hardly talking at all, just pressed the whole length of his body against me like he was afraid I’d disappear. I looked back at one point and saw he had his eyes closed, wasn’t watching the movie. I wasn’t really watching it, either. I was thinking about the card in the bottom drawer of my dresser, the card I’d spent an hour picking out, moving slowly up and down the stacks of Happy Birthday, Grandpa and On Your Anniversary until I found just the right one.
On the front of the card is a hobo-type figure with a stick-and-handkerchief slung over his shoulder. He’s stopped at a fork in the road, considering. Each way has a sign. The first reads, “Your Future.” The other reads, “No Longer an Option.”
I’m hoping Junior will get the message, if and when I finally get up the courage to give it to him.
There’s a part of me that wants to believe everything will work out, that we’ll go away to school and talk on the phone every other night and get together on breaks and come out the other side of four years not having done or said anything that can’t be repaired. I love him, and there’s no way around that. But there’s the other part of me, the stronger, stubborn part, the part that checks the scars every day to see if they’ve faded, and remembers the pain of a broken nose. That part says no. That part has the patience to spend an hour in a Hallmark store.
I was ready to give him the card the day after we brought the bird to the vet’s. I’d imagined the conversation to follow, rehearsed my lines, and made a deal with myself that prohibited crying. The card was in my bag, signed and sealed, with nothing left except the delivery. But that afternoon Junior asked me to take him back to the vet’s, to check on the bird, and when he came out his face was dark as a thundercloud.
“They said they tried to feed it with an eyedropper,” he said. “I think they’re full of shit.”
When I got home that night, I put the card back in the dresser.
So I’m standing here now, and every time I wipe steam from the mirror I lose a braid and have to start over. A little maddening, but it’s the least I can do for Junior. I think about him for a while, and then I think about time, how it’s August already, and pretty soon I’m thinking in pictures, imagining California in autumn, Fisherman’s Wharf and breakers on the beach, my legs tan through Christmas, and I know this heat can’t last forever and whatever I decide to do, it’s got to be soon.
PART TWO
Junior
Though she’s hoping to slip in and out of town without me finding out, of course I know when Amy comes back for the first time since she left for Stanford. I also know why she’s here, and the why is as disappointing as it is inexplicable: she’s here to visit her mother, the Joan Crawford of Temple Street, fists of stone and a heart to match. She’s softened on her mother, somehow, but not on me.
I know, too, when Amy decides to meet with a few old high school friends at You Know Whose Pub. It’s a calculated risk on her part. When Kerry Raymond called her earlier today Amy balked, worried she might run into me, but then she figured on a Tuesday night the chances I’d be out drinking were minimal. She doesn’t realize, of course, that these days I’m out drinking every night.
Pathetic as it is, I’m glad she’s thinking of me at all, even if it’s only because she wants desperately to avoid me.
At first I resolve not to go. I’m not sure why. Some misplaced sense of pride, maybe. There’s an element, too, of wanting to punish Amy by denying her my company, as if that’s not exactly what she’s hoping for. I sit in my bedroom, drinking beer from the little cube fridge and brooding and watching the Red Sox lose. I stare through the television, concentrating on Amy in spite of myself, hoping the contents of her heart will rise and I’ll find a section still reserved for me, no matter how small. Nothing comes. I take the Captain Morgan from under the bed and drink straight from the bottle, making ever-angrier resolutions not to leave the house tonight, or if I leave, not to go downtown, or if I go downtown, certainly not to set foot near You Know Whose Pub.
These days, I’m finding, my powers of self-delusion are sort of epic.
I’m fully drunk by the time I walk into the place, but even so my breath catches in my throat as though I didn’t expect to see Amy sitting there, drinking mojitos with Kerry and a girl I don’t recognize. She’s heartbreak ingly beautiful, her cheeks and shoulders freckled with California sun, her hair longer by a year and straight now, an auburn fantasy falling halfway down her back. The longer hair is just one of a dozen small ways in which she’s different from how I remember—new bracelet, new green tank top, fingernails elegantly manicured rather than gnawed to the quick—and the sense of having been left behind, always nagging in the back of my head, rises on a wave of fresh anger. I walk up to the table and interrupt their laughter without caring about how it makes me look. I’m going to have my say. I’m going to get some satisfaction. Except that beneath the paper-thin layer of righteous indignation, all I really want is to spend a couple of hours in her company. I’m aware, distantly, that this makes me pathetic, that I ought to have enough self-regard to turn on my heel and walk out of here. But when you’re bereft of all dignity there’s no sense in faking it. So instead of venting my anger, which is really just hurt dressed up for a night on the town, I ask if anyone needs a drink.
Silence from the three of them. Amy’s face is a plaster mask of studied indifference, but under that there’s a shimmer of surprise and fear.
I wait a few seconds for one of them to respond, then say, “What, you’re approached by young men offering free drinks so often that you just can’t stand it anymore?”
Kerry and the girl I don’t recognize exchange an uncomfortable look, but Amy smiles a little in spite of herself. She lifts her glass, tilts it back and forth. “I’m getting a little low,” she says.
Several minutes later I return to the table with three fresh mojitos and take the empty seat to Amy’s right. By now she’s gotten over the shock of my sudden appearance and seems almost glad I’m here. She leans close and shouts over the jukebox: “You look like shit, kid.”
I look down at the tabletop, nod, say nothing. This time has been as hard on me as it’s been good to her, and I know the evidence is all over my face. I’ve got no explanation to offer. I used to wonder why my mother and Rodney were compelled to hurt themselves, and though I understand now, it’s an understanding that defies articulation. The thing I always think of is a trip we took as kids to Old Orchard Beach, where Rodney and I bodysurfed in the frigid shallows, lifted and carried along over and over by the rhythmic swells. I remember being awed and somewhat frightened by the ocean’s effortless power, by how once I’d been picked up in a wave any effort to escape was futile. That’s what the past year has felt like.
“Talk to me,” Amy says. She leans closer still, and I catch a whiff of coconut as her hair brushes my face. I have to fight the urge to put a finger on her bare arm and play a
slow, lingering game of connect-the-dots with her freckles. “How are things going?”
I lie and say, “Not bad.” I tell her I’m thinking about moving to Chicago to live with Rodney. She talks about Stanford, how at first she felt overwhelmed but now couldn’t be happier. The two of us laugh often and talk without pause, the easy, intuitive way we always shared returning instantly. Kerry and the other girl run out of things to say to each other and gaze absently around the room, excluded and bored. I lose track of how many times I return to the bar for fresh drinks. It seems like only half an hour has passed when suddenly the bartender whacks the bell for last call.
Outside the day’s heat and stickiness have barely abated despite the late hour. Bugs swarm the light under the awning. Amy says goodbye to Kerry and the girl whose name I still haven’t gotten. Then it’s just her and me. I thought this was what I wanted all along, but somehow, here under the fluorescent, there’s a sudden, powerful awkwardness between us. I look at my feet for a bit. She stands with her hands clasped behind her back, jingling her keys.
“You’re okay to drive?” I ask finally.
“I’m fine,” she says.
“You’re sure.”
“Junior ...”
“Okay then.”
We stand there a minute longer. I keep willing myself to say something, or else to put my arms around her. But I’m afraid to move, convinced that everything going forward hinges on this moment, that whatever we become, or fail to become, is entirely dependent on what happens in the next few seconds. And I’m paralyzed by the fear that I’ll screw it up.
Then the moment is gone. Amy puts her hand on my arm briefly, says “See you,” and walks away. I have all I can do not to follow her like a puppy and beg her to take me home. She gets halfway to her truck, pauses in the middle of the parking lot, and turns back, and for a moment I let myself believe she’s changed her mind, that her love for me has won out and we’ll be reunited in a desperate, twirling Hollywood hug right here outside the pub. But instead she reaches in her purse, rips off the corner of a page in her address book, scribbles something, and presses it into my hand.
Everything Matters! Page 11
