by Dan Chaon
She hadn’t thought that she was in love with him. Nevertheless, here he is again, a shadow leaning over her thoughts, a pang: Wayne Hill, sly-smiled wrestler boy who sat behind her in ninth-grade math. Younger than she was by almost nine months, not as tall as she was, unsophisticated. Why would she fall in love with Wayne Hill?
But she was in love with him, she thought. A little. At least it seemed so now, from this distance. Now, a hollow ache shudders through her as she thinks of him. It feels as if somehow he might have saved her, he might have saved her and their baby, if only she had told him.
——
She was not like her classmates, the other fifteen-year-old girls in her school who seemed to fall in love as if it were some sort of pastime, girls who spent hours and hours mooning over boys or photos of celebrities. She wasn’t the type, she told herself. For one thing, she wasn’t interested in the insular, clubby world of a small-town high school, with its after-school groups and cheerleaders and people “going steady”—all the fake rituals and social codes were vaguely repulsive to her; she preferred to remain outside such concerns, more interested in the lives of people she read about in books, more interested in art, in getting good grades, in the future—in which she might become an actress, or a painter, or a journalist. Each of these seemed like a real possibility, distanced from her only by hard work, and luck, and time. She had already begun to send away for information about various colleges, just so she could read their brochures and course catalogs.
Of course, she was outside of the world of high school whether she wanted it or not. Her life, her family, was too complicated—she and her father lived a few miles from town, and, since her mother’s death, he was depressed; she took care of him, and even if she’d wanted to, she couldn’t stay after school for the extracurricular activities. Her father came home from work and ate the supper she’d made for him. He was tired, and usually wanted only to drink his beers and sit in his room. He wasn’t going to drive her into town for a football game, or a meeting of the Art Club, or to the movies where many of her peers went on their dates.
In any case, she wasn’t entirely sure what boys she might have dated. She was the only person in their school who was mixed race, and she thought that this, too, put her outside of the main body of students. Indians and white people kept separate for the most part. They didn’t date one another, certainly, and so, while boys of both races looked at her, appraised her, flirted sometimes, no one had ever asked her out. They weren’t sure, she thought, what category she fit into.
——
The summer after she’d turned fifteen, the summer between ninth and tenth grade, she had persuaded her father to take her into town on his way to work so that she could go to the library, or the swimming pool. It was only one day a week. It was boring out in the country alone, and he hadn’t objected too much to the idea. “Just stay out of trouble,” he would always say, but he’d trusted her. “You’re such a responsible girl, Nora. If it wasn’t for you, I don’t think I’d still be alive. That’s the truth.”
That was the summer she started seeing Wayne Hill. She knew who he was, of course. They’d had classes together, they even rode the same bus to and from school—Wayne lived on a farm a few miles beyond her house—but they’d never really spoken before. He was an athlete, somewhat of a smart aleck. The only thing that surprised her was that his name consistently appeared on the honor roll, along with hers.
And she was surprised, that day in June of 1965, to encounter him at the library. He didn’t seem like the bookish type, but there he was, running his finger along the spines of books in the Fiction section, in the same concave of bookcases she was standing in. He looked at her curiously, and their eyes met for a moment before she glanced back to the shelves. After a minute, she was aware that he’d moved closer.
“You look like you could be dangerous,” Wayne said, under his breath. “Did anyone ever tell you that? Like maybe you’re a spy, or an assassin.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she shifted, irritably. “I just want to look at these books,” she said, and he grinned at her, a wolfish grin, his lips jutting out a little, hearty and cocky and tinged at the edges with a hint of sadness.
“No problem,” he said, and his eyes seemed to glint at her. “Have you ever read any Ray Bradbury?”
“No,” she said, stiffly.
“You should,” he said. And he reached down, right at the level below her waist, and pulled out a book. “Here,” he said. “A Medicine for Melancholy. I bet you’ll like it.”
She hesitated for a moment, and then took it from him.
“I didn’t mean anything negative when I said you looked like a spy,” he said. “I just meant . . . you look like an interesting person. You look mysterious.”
And she’d met his eyes, frowning. He was a compact, broad-shouldered, muscular boy. His eyes were a very strange pale, milky blue, like one of those Alaskan sled dogs.
——
For a few weeks they had met at the library, just to talk. Then they’d met at the swimming pool. Then they’d gone out, trailing their towels and street clothes, into the bushes just beyond the swimming pool fence. To kiss—to touch arms and brush their legs against each other—their skin still damp and warm and smelling of chlorine.
“I want to tell you something,” he said. “I’ve been in love with you for a long time.” And he laughed, beaming his grin at her. “Ever since we started riding the school bus together, I’ve been wanting to talk to you. You know? Every time you got on the bus, I would just get this . . . glow . . . in my heart. I know that sounds corny. You know, I meant it when I said you look mysterious. That’s what I always thought.”
In July he began walking to her house during the day. His family farm was six miles from the little yellow house where she and her father lived, and he would make excuses for his absence from chores that he was expected to perform. He would usually arrive in the early afternoon—trudging along the sides of gravel roads, crossing the long pasture behind her house.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Her father was still at work, and she was home alone with the puppy, Elizabeth. Nora had been trying to train the dog, to teach it tricks. She would bark furiously when Wayne came up the driveway, but then when Nora snapped her fingers Elizabeth would sit. And after a few times, Elizabeth didn’t bark anymore. She was used to Wayne.
He would sit there, stroking her fur. “She’s a beautiful animal,” Wayne said, and his eyes squinted as he smiled, cheerful half-moons. “You’re lucky,” he said. “I’ve never seen a dog like this.”
And Nora had joined him in petting. “She’s a Doberman pinscher. This man my father worked with gave her to him. They’re very smart, supposedly. They’re the smartest dogs—that’s what the man told my father.”
“Mm,” Wayne said. They’d been petting the dog together, and their hands met as they ran down the sleek muscles of Elizabeth’s back. The palm of Wayne’s hand ran across her knuckles, over her wrist, up her forearm.
He looked at her. They kissed.
Before long they were in her bedroom, in her cheap, girlish four-poster, and Elizabeth the puppy was sitting anxiously outside the closed door.
——
That was the first time. It was not gross, like she imagined when she thought of her classmates and their activities. It was . . . something else. Like a part of her brain she hadn’t known existed. Like discovering she could speak a foreign language that she had never heard before. She didn’t know why she’d done it—she had been curious, she guessed, and whatever part of her was awakening, whatever part of her was impulsive and insane, caught hold suddenly. Her hand shivered as it made contact—a warm, pins-and-needles thrum, and Wayne Hill lifted his eyes to stare at her. Sharp blue eyes. She felt her hand underneath his shirt, brushing against his small, hard nipple, and he closed his eyes. “Hey,” he said. His palms closed over her breasts, pressing against the cloth of her blouse.
——
The thing that surprised her the most was how easily she had become pregnant. In her mind, pregnancy had always seemed like a choice that people made, a switch that they might turn off and on. Birth control was a rumor that both of them had heard of, but they both believed the other things they’d heard as well—if she jumped up and down hard afterward, if she douched with Listerine, if she took a long hot bath that night—if she did that, if she didn’t want to become pregnant, everything would be all right.
She must have become pregnant in late August or early September.
By then, school had started, and things had begun to cool between them. Not purposefully. It was just that they were both suddenly aware of the problems—of what people would say.
In gym, a Sioux girl named Elizabeth Tall had bumped hard against her shoulder.
“I hear you like that little white wrestler boy,” she said, her eyes grim. “I guess you think you’re too good for Indian guys, huh?”
And he must have gotten some version of the same thing, some ribbing from his peers on the wrestling team, because they didn’t speak to each other in the hallway of the school.
In algebra, in late September, he passed her a note. It said: “We need to talk.”
But they never did.
——
This is something she thinks about more and more frequently as she sits in her room in Mrs. Glass House, waiting for her labor to commence. She is frightened, a little, though the nurses have tried to reassure them. They have explained what will happen, have told them about contractions, and about water breaking, and they say that there are tranquilizers, pain medications; it won’t hurt as much as they fear, they are told, and there is a slide show about a procedure called a spinal, in which women can be numbed from the waist down. They will still be able to push the baby out, but it won’t hurt as much.
Even as she listens to this, she finds herself wondering about Wayne Hill. Did he suspect that she was pregnant? She imagines him talking to her father, standing at the doorway of the house, wanting to know where she is. I love her, Wayne says, I demand to know where she has gone. They argue at first, Wayne and her father, but finally they come to an agreement. We’ve got to save her, they say. She closes her eyes, picturing the two of them, Wayne and her father, on their way to Mrs. Glass House, on their way to her rescue.
——
Years later, when she was incarcerated in the South Dakota Human Services Center as a mental patient, a young psychologist named Dave McNulty told her that this fantasy was probably the first manifestation of her illness. She had laughed at him.
“Manifestation,” she said, and her cigarette trembled as she brought it to her lips. It was funny. Physically, McNulty looked like a wimpy, brown-eyed version of Wayne himself, Wayne with longer, shaggier hair and a tweed jacket, leather-patch elbows.
“Let’s talk about the birth,” McNulty said. “Let’s talk about how you felt.”
“I don’t remember anything,” she said.
——
And she didn’t. She had a vague notion of the nurse saying to her: “This is Thorazine. It’s going to calm you down a little.” She had a vague notion of signing papers, and then asking to see the baby.
“Oh, honey,” the nurse said, “your baby is already gone. He’s already with his new family. Don’t you remember? You said you didn’t want to look at him.”
“Is that what I said?” Nora whispered, and the nurse noded.
“He’s gone?” Nora said.
And the nurse just stared at her.
26
June 4, 1997
Loomis wakes and it’s raining. He sees the droplets of water moving horizontally across the windshield, pulled unsteadily by the velocity, and he thinks of small fish moving through an aquarium tank, the aquarium that used to be in his father’s house, with the mollies, and angelfish, and swordtails, and silver dollars. They have been driving for a long time, he thinks.
He is stretched out in the backseat of Jonah’s car, covered by a blanket. It is okay not to wear a seat belt, Jonah had told him. He closes his eyes, and then opens them.
“Are we there yet?” he says, and he can see Jonah’s eyes in the rearview mirror, glancing back at him.
“I don’t think so,” Jonah says.
Loomis rolls his shoulders, yawns. “Is it still a long time?” he says, and he watches for a moment as Jonah gazes out the windshield at the interstate, his face framed against the blur of passing telephone poles.
“Actually,” Jonah says, “I think it might be a lot longer than I expected.”
27
December 18, 1996
This is the day that Loomis turns six, and Troy can’t stop thinking about it. He wakes up at four in the morning and sits in the living room, drinking coffee, listening to the radio, static-filled classic rock out of some faraway station in Denver. He wonders whether Loomis is going to have a birthday party. It is the last week before Christmas vacation, and perhaps the kindergarten teacher will lead the class in singing the birthday song to Loomis. Then Loomis will come home from school, and perhaps Judy will have decorated the house with streamers. Perhaps she will have baked a fancy cake in the shape of a dinosaur, or some other icon Loomis likes. Perhaps some of his friends from school will be invited over, to play games and watch Loomis open his presents. Troy imagines this; he doesn’t know anything for sure.
He’d sent his own batch of presents to Judy’s house three days ago. Mostly it was stuff that he’d ordered off the television: a special set of many-colored markers, and a set of books about animals, and a combination telescope-microscope, and some Batman figurines. He’d also sent a card he’d made himself: a grinning, cartoonish brontosaurus, with carefully inked letters that said: “Happy Birthday to Loomis. From: His Dad! With: Lots of Love!” He’d spent quite a few hours at the kitchen table working on that card, and as dawn light begins to filter in, he tries to decide whether Judy will give it to Loomis. He can imagine her just throwing it away. Maybe even tossing out the gifts, as well, before Loomis even sees them.
——
At eight in the morning, he dials Judy’s number.
He has been very patient about this, he thinks. When she asked him not to call, back in August, she’d said that it was just “until Loomis got settled in.” So he’d waited a month. But when he called in September, she’d been very curt with him. Loomis wasn’t available to talk, she said. She would prefer it if he waited until she called him.
“Jesus Christ!” Troy said. “When is that going to be? It’s been months since I talked to him,” he said, and she’d given him a long silence.
“It will be when I’m ready,” she said tightly, and the next day he’d gotten a call from his parole officer, Lisa Fix.
“Troy,” Lisa Fix said. “Why are you harassing your mother-in-law on the phone?”
“I’m not,” Troy said, but he felt himself blushing bitterly.
“Well,” Lisa said, “I just got a complaint from her, and if you really want to end up off parole and in jail, this is a good way to go about it. You need to get a handle on yourself, my angry friend.”
“What are you talking about?” Troy said. “I just called to try to talk to Loomis.”
“That’s not what she said,” Lisa Fix said, evenly, in the voice of a woman who was used to being lied to. “She told me that you swore at her, and were threatening toward her, and I don’t know or care what the actual truth of the conversation was. All I know is that this has absolutely got to stop. If you can’t get some self-control, she’s going to end up pressing charges against you, and then you’ll never see that kid again.”
——
Thinking of this, his hands shake when he hears her pick up the phone. It’s risky, but he still can’t believe that Judy would hate him that much. Surely, he thinks, she’s not completely without a heart, and when she says “Hello,” in her crisply friendly voice, he makes a conscious effort to sound as meek and gentle and repenta
nt as he can.
“Hello, Mrs. Keene?” he says softly. “This is Troy. Troy Timmens.” He hears her thin intake of breath and he squeezes his eyes shut, willing her not to hang up. “Mrs. Keene,” he says, “I’m really, really sorry to bother you, and I’m not trying to disrespect your wishes or invade your privacy or anything. It’s just that . . . I haven’t heard from you in a while and I was really hoping that I might be able to wish Loomis a happy birthday. I really don’t mean to harass you or anything. Honest to God. I just want to . . . open the lines of communication.”
There is a long pause. He doesn’t know what she is thinking, but he can sense that this is an unfriendly silence. The utter lack of sound is like a deep, toothy mouth that he is lowering his head into.
“So . . .” he says at last. “Did you get the presents? And the card?”
“Yes,” her voice says.
“And . . . you will give them to him, won’t you?”
He hears her throat clear, deliberately, and he can feel the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. She sighs. “No, I don’t think so.”
Her voice is firm and reasonable, reminding Troy of the years she’d spent teaching second-graders. “I want to be frank with you, Troy, and I’d like you to do me the courtesy of listening and trying to understand.” She pauses for a moment, in the way a teacher might pause to underline a word on the blackboard. “Loomis doesn’t need your gifts,” she says. “Or your cards. Or your phone calls. He needs a stable life. He’s happy in school, and he’s a bright, thoughtful, caring child. The last thing he needs is to have you trying to bribe him with cheap toys and getting him all riled up.”
Troy keeps his mouth shut, though he can feel the heat in his face. He is not crying, but his nose is running, and his chest feels tight and quivery when he tries to speak. “But . . .” he says, and then stops himself. He knows that it will do no good to argue with her, it will only make matters worse. He takes a breath.
