Looking for Red

by Angela Johnson

  It’s bad shit, and they say everybody just has to go through it.

  I used to watch Frank and Cassie.

  I wanted to learn how they did it. But they weren’t any better than me at it, and I didn’t like them for a long damned time because of it. They should have known something. A secret. A password. A potion against the broken glass.

  My aunt Caroline lives way out on the Point. Alone.

  Everybody calls her a witch, and they may be right. They may be right.

  I walk down the road past the blue gray houses and the lighthouse on the hill. We used to walk to her house every morning in the summer, shoeless, carrying our bait pails.

  That’s why I’ll miss the summer.

  Me, Red, Caroline, and no shoes.

  I could miss the summer for a lot of reasons, but it all comes down to this.

  She’s waiting for me in her garden of sage and peppermint and some plant she keeps by the front gate that she says keeps out evil. She smiles when I pull a leaf of peppermint.

  “Hot day, Mike.”

  “Yep,” I say.

  “Got some new gear.”

  I smile and walk into the house, which is cool and reminds me. Everything’s been reminding me. I drop to the floor and start looking over the fishing pole. Caroline goes into the kitchen and comes out with iced tea and peppermint, and starts talking about where she got the fishing pole and how long it took her to pick it.

  She looks like Frank, even though they have different moms.

  And she is the only one who knows all about me.

  Cassie and Frank don’t say so, but they don’t want me coming to Caroline’s so much. It never used to be that way. They never cared before.

  Now they watch me with big eyes when I go out the door and head off toward the lighthouse, and offer me rides downtown, or ask if I want to go hang out with my partners, Mark and Mona. Or do I want to go swimming, ’cause they’re packing a lunch.

  The water is almost warm on my feet when it comes over the dock. I cast my line into the gray green water. The ocean thunders, then is quiet. Caroline uses her old pole and I use the new one.

  Lately it’s only this and being surrounded by beads that makes me feel good.

  Caroline’s hat covers her eyes, and her long cotton dress is soaked up to her knees. The fish just come to her. Like magic. One after the other, forty in two hours.

  I get a few and that makes me happy.

  We keep on fishing, though, way into the day and well past afternoon, until Caroline says, “Hot day, Mike.”

  “Yep,” I say.

  “Some gear, baby.”

  I nod, and we pick up our fish and put our poles over our shoulders to walk back to the house that reminds me.

  8

  The first time I knew my brother, Red, was still around was the day Frank and Cassie broke down outside Boston with two flat tires. It’s only now that I think that it was all Red’s doing. He needed time to let me know that he is … Just us again.

  Two flat tires. One after the other, and me at home waiting for them.

  People see missing persons all the time and don’t know that they are. They sit beside them at movies and shop beside them in stores and pass them on the street. You don’t know these people, so how could you recognize that someone, somewhere, is missing them?

  So I’m telling Caroline all about it now, ’cause who else would believe me?

  Caroline says that her and Frank used to tell each other stories that scared them so bad that they had to sleep with the light on.

  The winter stories were scarier than the summer ones because of the quiet of the falling snow. Not a sound sometimes. Not one. And no kids running around late through the projects where they lived, ignoring their parents yelling for them to come into too-hot apartments for the night.

  Caroline says that what my dad believed in then was no indication of what a doubting old man he’d turn into.

  She said it real sad, like it was the worst thing in the world. She said—and let me get this right—that Frank used to suspend disbelief. Now he was just a disbeliever.

  Caroline says that sometimes being old has to be just about the most boring thing in the world to be.

  Now.

  Now it’s the beads and fishing with Caroline and not being home enough to be reminded.

  Now it’s sitting in the window looking out at the water, feeling Red within the waves, hearing him in the surf. Now is me not wanting to be anywhere or with anybody, or to know anything about what is going on in the world.

  Before now was all the times with me and Red. Like the day before he disappeared, when I didn’t know a damned thing about how life without him would be.

  That day Red smoked a cigarette behind the garden shed and blew smoke rings at me while I tried to inhale them. When he saw me trying to inhale, he put the cig out with heel of his boot and shook his head, smiling that Red smile at me.

  I saw him again today, leaning against the garden shed. No cigarette, though. Red leaned against the north wall and looked relaxed. I sat on the back of the couch in the living room and looked down at him and knocked at the window to get his attention. I knocked for about ten minutes, until Cassie screamed that she would go out of her natural mind if I didn’t stop that noise.

  I wanted to tell her that Red was down there, standing against the shed.

  Not smoking, like the last time I saw him there.

  Not smiling, like the last time I saw him.

  And not alive, like the last time I saw him there.

  But he was gone.

  9

  Red’s girlfriend, Mona, has big brown eyes and always puts her arms around me when I get close enough. She smells like powdered sugar and strawberry licorice.

  “Sweet,” Red used to call her. He said she was and always would be.

  And he was the only one Mona said she would ever love, and she knew it once he was gone.

  “Hey, beautiful thing,” she calls to me as I am walking past the Ice Kreem Kastle over by the Tides Motel. She sits underneath a table umbrella sipping something and waving away flies.

  “Come on over here and give me a hug.”

  I do.

  “How you been, beautiful?” Then she puts her fingers down into her cup and flicks whatever it is at me.

  I smile.

  Mona stretches way back and closes her eyes.

  “You should come around more, beautiful. I miss you. Just when I think that I’ll never get over him, I see you. Then I know I’ll never get over him.”

  I nod.

  “What have you been doing lately?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Me, too,” Mona says. Then she starts to cry. “I’ve been thinking about leaving this place. Going someplace where the air is dirty and the people are gray and depressed.”

  I watch her.

  “It might help to be with people like me, feeling like me.”

  I say, “Maybe,” and she hugs me again before I can get away. She keeps on crying, though, and I’ve gone a block before I remember to say, “Take me with you.”

  I go out on the boat with Frank, and he drinks beers and fishes all day long. I don’t know if he goes out onto the water to fish or to drink his beer, ’cause he doesn’t drink in the house or anywhere else.

  Just on the water.

  I wonder if I’ll be like him, quiet and kind—drinking beer on a boat and remembering to smile at my daughter even when she doesn’t catch any fish.

  Tomorrow school starts. I will walk down the halls like everyone else, not knowing where I’m going.

  Pritchard Howard (everybody calls him Nick) will lock a sixth grader from the middle school in his locker and leave him. I will walk past, listening to the kid scream—but I won’t laugh like almost everybody else. But I won’t let him out, either. (Later I’ll probably cry, alone, about it.)

  In homeroom Ms. Wallace (who has been on leave and out of the country for two years) will say to me, “I had your bro
ther, how’s he doing?”

  Everybody will get quiet and there will be no movement in the room.

  I will say, “He’s doing fine, Ms. Wallace. Just fine.”

  And when I get to the cafeteria, there will be six empty tables. I will sit at the one farthest from the kitchen.

  If I were in the Group, about ten kids would push past everybody to sit down beside me, talk real loud, and laugh at stupid-ass stuff that doesn’t mean anything. I’d laugh with them, probably.

  But instead, all the quiet kids and nontalking cybergeeks (with a seat between one another) will sit down at my table. We will look up from our food, books, laptops, or comics only to ask someone to pass the salt.

  And I’ll be fine there.

  I will watch the gymnastics team sail through the air during independent study, with about twenty other people who have nothing to do.

  Mona used to be a gymnast, but now she won’t ever go to practice or even talk to her old teammates. I know this ’cause Meadow Sofer will tell me when she sees me in the library later.

  “Talk to her, Mike. Tell her she should come back.”

  And all I will think is, Why does this girl even think I know Mona? But then I will remember that everybody knew Red, and I seemed to have stood in his light, so I must have reflected at some time.

  Then she will go on about how Mona needs to take her mind off things and get back to normal.

  It will be then that I remember the sixth grader in the locker, but I won’t say what I want to say; which is none of us should want to be normal.

  * * *

  Caroline picks me up after school. She doesn’t have to ask me anything about the first day. She doesn’t say anything and it’s probably a good thing, ’cause I cry all the way to her house.

  I sail along, quiet on the skiff, and watch everybody on shore.

  The summer people are gone and everything is back to normal. Sometimes I wonder how we can stand the wait. Waiting for the people to leave and the sunblock to leave the air. We’re used to it, though.

  Sorry to say, I am.

  Sometimes I even miss them, the summer people. They were watchable and happy to be here. That’s something, I guess.

  Cassie is waving from the widow’s walk.

  I wave back, then close my eyes in case she wants me to sail in and isn’t just saying hi. And I don’t feel bad about it at all ’cause it’s an I-don’t-want-to-be-in-the-house day. That’s what her and Frank call it.

  I drift along, getting real close to the Vineyard, then decide to start back. I’ll sit on the beach and eat dinner on the sand, knowing Cassie and Frank will join me. We’ll all sit there sharing a sad family picnic. And maybe someone will watch us from the ocean and think we are happy late-summer people.

  Sorry to say, they’d be wrong.

  looking

  10

  Mark Hollywood crashed his car into the side of Nemo’s Fresh Seafood last night. He broke his arm and left leg. Somebody said he purposely aimed for the center of the restaurant. I didn’t believe it till I heard Mark say so himself.

  I stood and watched while a bunch of people in orange tried to pry the car out of the Nemo’s kitchen.

  Mark ended up at Mercy Hospital in suicide watch.

  I could have told them all that it wouldn’t do any good to watch him. I could have saved them all the time and energy that it was going to take them to keep an eye on him while he lay there in pain. Mark wouldn’t ever try it again.

  I’d bet anything that I cared about.

  * * *

  Mark and Red used to jump off the pier into the bay. I used to hide behind the tall, whooshing willows and close my eyes until I heard the splash below them, then the whooping and screaming after they had made it back up out of the water—still alive.

  I used to get this sick feeling all over as they flew off into the water. I was still a little scared of everything I couldn’t see. And that included everything underneath the waves. They never asked me to come with them. Never.

  Red said that it wasn’t that he thought I’d be too scared. (I was.) He said it was something him and Mark always did together.

  It was okay by me. I didn’t really want to watch my brother jump off into nothing so far below.

  Mark Hollywood wasn’t afraid of anything. He used to jump off the pier faster than Red and scream louder when he came up. I thought he was something bigger than life. I didn’t think anyone or anything could knock him down.

  I guess I was wrong.

  He looked pale and miserable in the hospital bed.

  Caroline gave me a ride to see him at Mercy, and since she knew the nurse on duty, she talked to her while I went in to see him. Maybe he wasn’t on suicide watch after all. He wasn’t in the psych ward. That was something.

  Mark smiled at me when I walked in.

  “Hey, Mike.”

  I walked toward the bed real slow, like if I moved too fast, I might break another one of his bones.

  “You okay, Mark?”

  He nodded with his face all black and blue, then turned away and looked toward the window.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Just fine. Hell—I’ve never been better. How about you? How you doing?”

  He looked me straight in the eye when he asked how I was doing, like I couldn’t have been better than his broken, bruised self. I sat down in the chair beside him and grabbed hold of his hand. It felt rough in mine. It was bruised like the rest of him—even worse with the IV sticking out of him.

  He squeezed my hand tighter when it looked like I might answer and held on to it like he was hanging on to a life raft. When I laid my head on the pillow beside him and inhaled so deep I thought I would pass out, he started to cry. Low and deep at first—then so fast and loud that it scared me.

  I held my breath, waiting for him not to need to be that sad anymore.

  Everybody knew Mark Hollywood had lived by himself for the last three years. Everybody knew he had a dad who nobody ever really saw and who always managed to be out of town selling something in another state since Mark s mom died.

  The school never said anything.

  The neighbors never said anything.

  And there was no way any of the kids Mark hung out with would ever say anything, ’cause they were too busy having a good time hanging out in Mark’s house, where no adult person had told anybody to do anything in the last three years.

  But because Mark got good grades and never got caught doing anything that would get him put in juvie hall, everybody just closed their eyes to the boy who used to grocery shop with coupons and change the lightbulb over his garage when it blew out.

  “He’s a good kid,” I guess they said.

  I wonder if they would have worried more about him if they had known he would eventually crash his car into a restaurant?

  Would they have talked to his old man and told him that he shouldn’t be punishing his own kid because his wife was gone?

  Would they have cussed him out and told him he might as well just move out and leave Mark, for as much good as he did? But nobody ever did. And when Mark ended up in the hospital, nobody knew who or where to call for him.

  Out of nowhere, though, Cassie was up at the hospital with phone numbers and insurance forms. Just like that. She shook her head at me as I stood beside her and almost asked her a question in front of the man admitting Mark to the hospital.

  They wouldn’t let me see him that night, so I went back home when Frank came to get me. Cassie sat up by Mark all night long. I didn’t even think she liked Mark that much. I can’t remember her saying more than a few sentences to Mark the whole time him and Red hung out together.

  It went like this:

  “Have dinner with us, Mark?” Yep.

  “Want some lunch, Mark?” Yep.

  “Bad weather out, Mark, stay over.” Okay.

  “Breakfast, Mark?” Yep.

  But there she was, sitting up all night beside him.

  When Cassie got back from the ho
spital the next morning, she almost looked worse than she did the night Red didn’t come home.

  She brushed past Frank before he could say or ask anything about Mark and went to her bedroom and slammed the door. Frank kissed me and walked out the door backward like he was waiting for Cassie to fly out of the room and drag him back to talk.

  She didn’t.

  But she did cry hard. She cried so hard that I went to my room and surrounded myself with Red’s beads ’cause I figured Mark Hollywood was dead.

  When I asked Cassie a while later if he was dead, she only shook her head, then said, “No, girlfriend. Not yet.”

  That’s when I decided that I had to see him. I remembered it all then. I knew that Mark hadn’t crashed into Nemo’s to kill himself and be with Red, like everybody but a few people thought.

  The nurse woke me.

  “Mark’s downstairs getting tests. Do you want something to drink?”

  I nodded and she brought me a ginger ale. I sipped it and waited for Mark to come back. Just when I had really woken up, the phone rang. I picked it up.

  Before I could say hello, a voice said, “Mark; be alive.” It was Mona.

  I whispered into the phone, “Mona—he is …” Then I hugged the phone to my chest and listened as the only other person in the world who knew that Mark wasn’t trying to join Red cried hard into the phone while I listened for it all to go quiet.

  It would have been easier to tell it all, to anybody, right then. It should have been.

  11

  We used to sit at the Center of the World and throw pinecones into the ditch on the side of the road. Red, Mona, Mark, and me would sit by the side of the road fighting off ants and swigging down cold sodas—no beers when I was around.

  Nothing like sitting at the Center of the World and watching it all go by.

  The tourists were always stopping to take pictures at the Center of the World sign. So if you looked in photo albums all across the country, you’d see us sitting under the sign, smiling and waving like we were the happiest people in the world.

  Maybe we were. Maybe.

  It’s not something you really go around thinking about.