Looking for Red

by Angela Johnson

  Do people think about how happy they are when they’re walking the dog or hanging with their friends?

  I didn’t when we used to sit under the World sign and not even talk for hours.

  I miss being, just being, with Red and everybody else. Now when I pass the sign, I can’t even stop. I guess I can’t really go back to the Center of the World ever again without my brother.

  Mona pulls up in our drive and sits there for about twenty minutes.

  I don’t go out, and nobody in the house goes out either. We all know better now.

  Because Mona hasn’t come to see any of us. She hasn’t come to pick anything up or drop anything off. She’s come to soak up Red. She’s been doing it since after the funeral. We got used to her sitting in the driveway looking up at Red’s bedroom window, mouthing some song from the radio.

  Jo, who always thinks something’s up at first, said she was waiting. When I asked waiting for what, she just shook her head like she hadn’t come up with that part yet. So I waited too.

  Other people on our street started noticing Mona’s red ‘65 Malibu parked in front of our house. Now they stop and talk to the sunglassed girl with her feet and red toenails hanging out the passenger window.

  Frank said Mona parked in front of the house was like most things in life: If you did something enough times—even if it seemed strange, but didn’t hurt anybody—everyone would just start to accept it. His real words were: “Eccentric behavior is the cornerstone of this country.”

  I watch Mona as her head bobs up and down in time to whatever music is on the radio. She never turns it up loud. She wouldn’t want to bother anybody.

  I watch for Red, too. He hasn’t been leaning against the back shed or anything else lately, and I’m starting to think I was imagining him. But it doesn’t matter if I did. The important thing is I got to see him.

  When I look back to Mona, she’s standing beside her Malibu, waving up at me in the window. And since she’s never done that in all the time she’s been sitting and waiting in the drive, I just stand there like a fool for a while. I guess it hits me that she’s waving for me to come on out.

  I do.

  “Hey, beautiful thing.”

  I lean on the car and smile at her.

  “Hey,” I say.

  Mona hops up on the hood of the car and looks off into the water, then smiles at me. “Wanna go for a ride?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wanna go for a fast ride with all the windows down and the radio blasting?”

  I walk beside the Malibu and look off into the water too.

  “I guess so,” I say.

  Mona is already in the car, revving the engine. Frank and Cassie are at the window that I looked out of a few minutes ago, and for a second, just a second, I think I see Red standing beside them looking off into the water.

  We fly along the coast road, singing to the radio. It’s bright today.

  Mona wouldn’t get caught without her sunglasses on. I never wear them, but I’m starting to think it might be a good idea, ‘cause as it is now, I’m just about blinded in the car.

  I miss Mona. Even though she’s been sitting in front of our house for a couple of months, I haven’t really talked to her that much.

  We talk more when we run into each other accidentally on the street. I think she looks different. She doesn’t float anymore. She used to float when she walked, just like she did when she did the vault in gymnastics. But now her neck is strained, and her whole body tenses to the beat of the music.

  “How’s it been going, beautiful? Am I asking you that too much?”

  “No, you’re not asking me it too much.”

  Mona pulls out a cigarette and smiles at me again. “I’ve been watching you at school, beautiful thing. I’ve been watching you when you think that you are alone.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes.”

  Mona inhales deep and long. “You walk through school like you are taking part in a play. Did you know you do that?”

  I stick my head out the window and let the air blow through me. I open my mouth and taste the ocean. I can’t get enough of the salt. When I was really little, Red had to keep me from drinking the salt water. I’d gulp a mouthful when he wasn’t looking. I used to think it was better than apple juice.

  Red used to say that meant I must have been some sort of fish or something. I think that he might have been right about that when I was little. Now the only thing I want to do as far as the water is concerned is look at it.

  “I see him, you know? I see Red everywhere and I think that I’m losing my mind.”

  I don’t say anything ’cause it’s too scary to think that maybe Red isn’t just in my imagination.

  “You know why I don’t do gymnastics anymore?”

  I knew I didn’t have to answer her.

  “Red wouldn’t leave the gym. He’d just stand there watching me. I never knew when he’d show up. I don’t think I would have minded so much if we had been alone. But he’d never show up when we were alone. It’s like he didn’t trust me or something. I finally had to stop gymnastics.”

  Mona pulls the car onto a beach that says PRIVATE—NO TRESPASSING. She never did understand how people could own the beach. So she made it a habit of crashing any beaches with No Trespassing signs on them.

  I’ve been kicked off a few beaches with Mona, so I don’t mind walking onto the dunes with her. We walk hand in hand to the edge of the shore and watch the tide come in.

  Mona lets go of my hand after a few minutes and runs into the water. I watch her kick and run in the water. I think it is the first time I’ve seen her happy in months. She acts like little kids do when they play in water.

  I wish I could play like her. Laugh like her.

  Mona is yelling something at me. I guess I was daydreaming again, ‘cause I didn’t hear her at all. She was like a silent movie—dancing in the water.

  I think I hear her say, “He’s out there!”

  I stand up and cup my hand to my ear and yell, “What?”

  Mona stands staring at me as the tide comes in around her, and doesn’t say anything else. She turns her back to me and lets the water throw her wherever it wants. Sometimes when she is twirled around toward me, I see a big smile on her face. A couple of times it’s almost like she’s talking to somebody. Then she laughs.

  I fall asleep in the sun with the water crashing against the sand and don’t seem to need Red’s blue beads to sleep.

  He’s close enough to me here, I guess.

  * * *

  Mona wakes me, dripping cold water and laughing.

  We run back to the car and watch the sun go down.

  “Do you know why they call this the Center of the World, beautiful thing?”

  I lean back against the sign and blink into the oncoming headlights. “I never did know why they called it that.”

  Mona leans against me and whispers, “It’s called the Center of the World because it is.”

  12

  I was on my way to school one minute, but the next I was throwing rocks off the Cape bridge and thinking about how I shouldn’t even try to get to school now because I’d missed first period anyway, and you know how it is when you come in in the middle of a class—you’re lost in it for the rest of the time.

  Caroline is sitting cross-legged on the dock with her back to me and her hands raised over her head.

  And I know she hears me—as usual—when she says, “No school today?”

  I take off my shoes and throw my backpack in the sand and hope my juice box hasn’t exploded all over my extra T-shirt and candy bars.

  I walk toward Caroline and have a flash of Red in my mind….

  We are standing on this dock and he’s holding my hand. But the strange part is I’m a little baby and he’s the age he was when he disappeared three months ago. I know it’s me, though. I know it in my stomach, and just as I’m beginning to wonder how I could have turned into a baby that fast the whole vision
is gone and I’m standing on the dock again, walking toward Caroline.

  I sit so close to my aunt I smell the ocean on her.

  A breeze blows across the Cape and makes me feel better about everything that I just imagined. I didn’t want to feel any worse about it all.

  Caroline asks again, “School canceled?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did it blow up, or fall into some kind of sinkhole?”

  “Sinkhole.”

  “Was there a tragic loss of lives?”

  “Not many. A few of the white mice in the biology lab who have been living on soda and chips got liberated. A few of the teachers who have been trying to retire for about twenty years were seen climbing out and faking injuries so they could get early retirement.”

  “Sounds like a nightmare.”

  “Not too much of one.”

  “Good thing you escaped without a scratch.”

  “It was a close call, but I’ve always been lucky that way.”

  Caroline gets up and turns toward me, smiling. “Oh yeah, baby, you have always been the lucky one.”

  And I don’t even feel bad that the other side of that is my brother ended up being the one who wasn’t lucky. The way Caroline says it, though, makes me feel warm and at the same time makes me want to give up my luck.

  ‘Cause I’d do anything, anything, to have Red back.

  Caroline puts her arm around me and we walk toward the house. Caroline leans down and picks off a piece of rosemary as we go through the garden gate. She inhales deeply and holds me closer because I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to spend the rest of the day with her.

  There are baby pictures of everybody in our family from the last 120 years on the tables in Caroline’s front room.

  They are dark, old faces that must have been looking up into the bright New England summer sun, because they all have squinting smiles. Most of the old pictures are serious ones.

  Our family was full-bodied women with babies on their hips and about eight or nine other kids around them with hoops and bare feet in the Cape sand. The men wore suspenders at play and thigh-high waders. They carried nets and had slickers on.

  Men of the sea.

  Frank says that the family has been in the water forever, and I like to think of their dark, long-ago faces standing on fishing boats, weathering the storms that came in from the north and gave the widow’s walk.

  I’ve been in Caroline’s house a lot, but I’ve never looked real close at the photos of the ones who were here before we were. That is probably why I haven’t ever seen the boy on the beach holding the little baby’s hand.

  I lean closer, and just as I realize the boy in the picture looks so much like Red, he could be his twin, I hear something hit the floor in the kitchen. It’s loud enough to make me jump.

  Caroline glides through the living room holding a broom.

  “Broom fell. Company’s coming,” she says.

  We both look at each other and think that the company probably has something to do with me and the school that in my dreams is sinking slowly into a hole.

  I listen on the stairs as Frank paces up and down the floor of Caroline’s front room.

  “You have to stop coddling her, Caroline.”

  Caroline isn’t talking, but is sitting with her arms crossed on the old cedar chest that my grandma left her.

  “How is she going to start dealing with this if you keep sheltering her against it all?”

  Caroline still isn’t talking to him.

  “She has to go to school.”

  Caroline shakes her head.

  “Well, she does. Kids go to school, Caroline. They go to school. They have friends. They do things. They keep on going.”

  Caroline gets up and walks across to the picture window looking out onto the ocean and says, “How is she supposed to get on with it, Frank? Is she supposed to snap her fingers and stop missing her brother? Is she supposed to make believe, or go through all of this in a timely fashion?”

  Frank looks at my aunt Caroline for a minute, then sinks right to the floor.

  I close my eyes ‘cause I don’t want to see him cry again. I don’t want to see his shoulders shake the way they did when we all stood on the boat in the bay, looking lonely and thinking about Red.

  So I close my eyes and don’t have to see Caroline leaning toward Frank and whispering something that I don’t hear.

  Everything is easier if you close your eyes.

  13

  I wake up crying.

  I do it a lot lately.

  I think that I will never get it all out of me. I think I will never be the person I was.

  I wonder if Mona and Mark wake up not knowing where they are or when it will ever be the same again.

  We are the only ones who saw him go.

  And what could be harder? What could be worse?

  14

  Jo is kneeling in her front garden, cussing.

  She’s good at it and even taught me a few words when I was about four. I saved them up for just the right time. It was worth it to share them with everybody at a neighborhood picnic. Cassie and Frank just stared at me when I shared my new words with the pastor of the Presbyterian church Jo fell on the ground laughing.

  I lean against her wooden front gate.

  “Weeds, Jo?”

  She stands up and smiles like it’s the best thing in the world to see me. It makes my shoulders go down, and my stomach stops hurting.

  “If I could live on a planet without a damned weed invading my space, I’d be the happiest thing there. It wouldn’t matter if it was a planet with just myself for company.”

  I smile and let her go on about the weeds. After a while she looks up again and laughs. “I haven’t even invited you in. Come on. We’ll have something cold to drink and something sweet and disgustingly bad for us to eat.”

  It’s another world in Jo’s house. She’s proud to tell anybody who’ll listen that none of the furniture has been moved in eighty-five years. Everything is just like her grandmother left it before she went off to live with a group of suffragettes in Philadelphia. Her grandfather raised her mother and uncle. Her grandmother was never welcome in the house after she left.

  Jo says her grandfather was an old bastard who made his kids miserable old people before they were even in their twenties.

  I like the way the silk feels on my legs as I sit in the high-backed chair by the front window. It swallows me, and I almost fall asleep before Jo comes back with the hot sweet tea and biscuits smothered in butter and blackberry preserves.

  I stuff my face and swig the tea.

  I don’t have to talk when I’m at Jo’s. She says people talk too much anyway. I relax and look out the window.

  Jo does the same, and we spend most of the Saturday afternoon watching the gulls steal food from the trash cans lining the beach.

  Jo gets up after a while and takes the dishes away. We’ve done everything but lick the plates clean of jam. I take the teapot and cups into the kitchen behind her. When I get there, she’s watching our backyard and shaking her head like she doesn’t believe what she sees.

  “What in the …”

  I walk up behind her quietly and touch her shoulder. “Do you see him?”

  Jo says nothing, only sucks in a bunch of air like she hasn’t breathed in years.

  I ask again, “Do you see him, Jo?”

  When she finally turns back to face me, her eyes are wide and her hands are shaking. I take the flowered plate that held the biscuits we just ate, ’cause it looks like she might drop it right there.

  Jo moves slow but finally sits down at the big, round kitchen table.

  “Did you see him?”

  She reaches across the table and holds my hand.

  “Yes, I saw him.” She looks at me, then lets go of my hand.

  “Was he leaning against the shed and smoking?”

  “He was.”

  “Was he staring up at the house or just looking off into space?
”

  “Staring at the house.”

  I pull my chair up next to Jo’s. I’ve never seen her scared. She screams at town meetings and points her finger at developers and maybe even destroys private property. I didn’t think anything could shake her.

  Her face finally relaxes.

  She goes over to the cupboard and pours something from a clear bottle into a juice glass. She takes three drinks and sighs, leans against the cabinet, and asks me, “Who else has seen him?”

  I say, “I don’t know.”

  She takes another drink and shakes her head slowly. “If I look out this window again, child, will he still be there?”

  I say, “Maybe.”

  I guess she decides against it.

  I walk over to the window, but Red is gone. I wonder where he goes to when he’s not leaning against the shed. I wonder all the time.

  “He’s gone. I figured he wouldn’t stay there long, since I’m not there.”

  Jo pours the rest of her drink out and walks over to me. She wraps her arms around me and puts her face next to mine. There’s a picture of us taken when I was three with her doing the same thing. She says I had just found some dead fish on the beach and started crying. A friend of hers snapped the picture.

  “Do you think your brother is haunting you, Mike?”

  I close my eyes ‘cause I know the truth but don’t want to see Jo’s face when I tell her.

  “His going away is haunting all of us.”

  “Who’s all?”

  “The three of us. Me, Mona, and Mark.”

  Jo whispers into my ear, “Why do you think that?”

  I pull away from Jo and head for her back door. She doesn’t come after me and I’m glad. I don’t go to my backyard but head out down the coast road. Away from why I think it is and why that might be.

  I walk only a few more minutes before I almost run headlong into Mark standing on the bridge. It doesn’t surprise me at all when he says, “I wondered when you’d get here.”

  And it’s even less of a surprise when Mona drives up and parks her car on the side of the road and walks toward us.

  Mark leans against the bridge, and I finally notice the cast under his jeans and on his hand. Sunglasses hide his eyes, like they do Mona’s. I should start wearing them, then I wouldn’t have to worry about everybody looking sympathetically into my eyes.