I smile but don’t get it.
Mark smiles back but doesn’t try to explain it to me.
We sit in the cool quiet and don’t talk for a while.
“Do you still cry for Red?”
I look at Mark real close and wonder how he knows I cry at all.
I say nothing.
Mark closes his eyes and starts humming (again) a song Red used to sing all the time, and it makes me want to start crying right there. I can’t, though, ‘cause no matter how close Mark and my brother were, I’m embarrassed to cry alone with Mark Hollywood.
Mark soon stops humming. “They towed my car to Vedders. I guess it’s a total loss.”
“I guess so,” I say.
“It’s not mine anymore, Mike.”
“I guess not.”
“I think that takes care of my part, don’t you think?”
I drink the last of my orange soda and look off at the pictures of Mark, his traveling father, and long-dead mother and wonder if he cries for them anymore.
Mark leans closer to me and asks again, “Don’t you think?”
I lean closer to him and still don’t answer, ’cause it’s hard to admit when you don’t know.
20
Mona is waiting after school for me.
Radio blasting.
“Get in,” she screams at me over the bass. Everybody looks at me. They want to be me, with a high schooler picking them up, blasting music and smoking so much I cough as I slide across the leather seat.
Mona takes off and I’m just me again—somebody no one in their right mind would want to be.
“What you been doing, beautiful thing?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing’s good,” Mona says as she passes a pickup truck along the Cape road.
“I saw Mark yesterday.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” I say, rolling my window down and putting my arm out to feel the air.
“How’s he doing?”
I watch everything blow by so fast I realize that Mona must be doing about ninety. I must get real big eyed staring at the speedometer, ’cause she starts slowing down.
“Sorry, beautiful thing.”
“Mark says that he thinks his part might be done. His car’s a wreck at Vedders and doesn’t belong to him anymore.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mona says as she lights up another cigarette. “What do you think?”
I cross my arms against my chest. “Why are you two asking me?”
Mona looks at me and slows down even more. It’s only when you’re sitting real close to her that you can see she’s lost a lot of weight. Cassie thinks she’s probably down to eighty-five pounds and worries about her.
Mona’s face gets crinkled and she fights crying. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I guess we shouldn’t be asking you at all.”
I know she means it and feel bad for acting like a baby. “Sorry.”
“Me, too.” She says, and keeps on driving. After we’ve gone about twenty miles, Mona really starts to slow up. We are in the deep woods; or at least it seems that way to me. Mona drives in what looks like circles, but in the end we come up on a building. The Milliet Institute. Mona takes one last drag of her cigarette, puts it out in the ashtray, and says, “Let’s do it.”
It’s cool and dark when we walk through the wooden doors of the institute, and for a minute I don’t know what the place is.
I hear “institute” in my mind and I think, Whoa! Not me. Not yet. I’m not there yet. But in smaller writing on the door it says, OCEANOGRAPHY RESEARCH. I feel better about it, but I still don’t know why Mona has brought me here, even though the lines in her face have smoothed.
Ernie Moffet wears a white coat and smiles at us when we walk into his office, so I guess he’s expecting us.
He says, “Hi, I’m Ernie, and I’ll be taking you on a sea adventure.”
I start to giggle because he sounds so funny, like one of those people on kid science programs. He even looks like one.
Mona cuts her eyes at me and shakes her head real hard behind Ernie’s back. I stop. And I still don’t know why we’re here. Ernie keeps talking about the wonders of the sea. He talks about how if the oceans die, that’s the end of everything. On and on.
Ernie walks out of his office talking, with Mona at his side. I follow them for a couple of minutes through the halls of the institute. There are fish mounted in cases. Rare and beautiful. Rare and ugly. Extinct. Everything in the dark, curving halls is backlit with yellow spotlights. It’s like going into the gigantic Cineplex with fifteen theaters.
I’m hypnotized and don’t keep up with Mona and Ernie. I wander off into another hall and go deeper into the building—downhill—until I find myself in a long hall that’s nothing but an aquarium that looks like it stretches for miles.
Even living on the water doesn’t prepare me for how much I love the aquarium. I’d always managed to miss every school trip to Mystic Seaport’s aquarium and every aquarium in Massachusetts.
It is magic. As magic as all the different kinds of fish and things that swim, flow, and move all over the seafloor. It takes me a few minutes to realize it isn’t an aquarium, but the ocean.
The magic leaves and out of nowhere I start crying harder than I have since I threw flowers in the ocean for my brother three months ago.
When I was little, I used to throw this red-and-yellow ball out into the surf. It always came back. Mostly everything that got taken away with the waves came back. I expected it. I knew it to be true.
Red didn’t come back.
He’s still out there.
When Mona finds me, I am curled up on the cool stone floor, crying and hating that I ever let her bring me to this place.
“Beautiful thing?”
I don’t want to talk, so I close my eyes and think of Red floating past the fish. Sailing past the seaweed and jellyfish. Drifting into the currents that took him far from here, maybe. Maybe.
Or just maybe all of a sudden right in front of me. Right here, right now. Any minute he could slowly appear in front of the smooth, cold glass. Any minute he could wave and grin at me—“It’s all been one big-ass joke, Mike. I’ve been down here all the time, just fine. Taking a few months off from things. I was going to tell you, tell everybody, but I just got busy learning to breathe underwater.”
When I look up, Mona’s face is pressed against the aquarium glass. Then her arms. Then her whole body.
I don’t see Ernie around. It feels like me and Mona are the only people in the whole place.
I stand up and walk closer to Mona.
“Mona?”
Like me a few minutes ago, she doesn’t want to talk. Maybe she doesn’t want to hear. I understand and watch a school of fish circling some rocks, searching….
I sit down right by Mona’s feet and think about how much I used to feel other stuff and didn’t think about aching.
21
Mona smokes and talks a mile a minute. She drives faster.
I guess we’re not ready for a sea adventure. Ernie smiled real nice at us as we almost dragged each other out of the institute.
Mona throws her cigarette butt out the window and a second later slams on the brakes. Me and the car sit in the middle of the Cape road while she searches along the shoulder for her cigarette filter. She always does this. Says that those filters never break down and she must have stepped on fifty-year-old ones at the beach.
She finds it. We go.
Mona says, “I thought it was time for us to look under the water, beautiful thing.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“I thought if we could see … I thought if we could know that it wasn’t so bad … that fish and life went on …”
I shake my head ‘cause I don’t want to hear that bull about how we all go on. The pastor said that when he held Cassie’s hand, then accidentally spilled his iced tea all over the coffee table.
Frank laughed and everybody stared at him like he was insane. Then the
ir looks changed to pity….
Hell. Everybody knows that life goes on. But what kind?
22
Red,
I have always kept my promises. It’s important, because what do you have if your word ain’t no good? My old man says respect is the most important thing, and you get it from people if you are truthful and trustworthy. Sounds stupid to most people, I guess.
But you understand, don’t you?
I miss you, man.
Your sister hurts. Mona hurts. I hurt. Can you feel our hurt?
Mona and Mike say they see you leaning against the back shed at your parents’ house. They say you just stand there waiting and leaning.
Why?
What do you need from us that makes you come back? I don’t want to think that you just don’t know you’re not supposed to be here and are hanging around waiting for something to happen. Are you?
I ran into your aunt Caroline the other night. She was walking alongside the road toward me. She was walking in the twilight with a flashlight and that long cape she wears to freak people out. When she got about ten feet from me, she stopped and shone the flashlight on my shoe and said, “How long you going to walk? When are you going to rest?”
How does she know?
Maybe she’s been watching or following me through town and along the water. I hurt) limping all over the place.
I walked to Vedders the other day just to make sure the car was gone, just like you wanted. Well, maybe not just like you wanted, but it’s not mine anymore.
If I could, I’d take it all back. Hand the keys over and say, “Screw it, it’s yours, man. You are my partner and you’d love it more than me….”
But I didn’t.
Are you swimming now? Out in the cold, dark water … Do you hear me when I scream and cry at night? Do you know that I can’t ever swim again? Not because I’m afraid of the water, but because I’m afraid of you.
You see, I don’t know that you won’t grab my legs and pull me down, down and under, forever. Would you? I wouldn’t blame you if you did.
Mark
23
I’ve been listening again to things not spoken.
I’ve been quiet the last few days ’cause I’m waiting to hear.
That morning, I slept in and wrapped myself so tight in my blankets that I thought I was going to have to call for help to get me out of them. Red must have heard me twisting and grunting a minute before I rolled off the bed and banged my head on my tennis shoes.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, laughing until he fell against my door and banged his elbow.
“What’s the matter with you that you think me almost suffering brain damage is funny?”
“No, the rolling off the bed like some kind of cartoon character was the funny part,” he said, and ducked as I threw a pillow at him.
We didn’t have many days when we got on each other’s nerves, but I thought that this might be one of them. No big reason. Just a day like any other one where somebody had to get the best of somebody else.
Brothers and sisters.
24
I had spent that day swinging in a hammock but decided after my mom looked like she was going to ask me to do some work, to hang out with Red. He wasn’t where he usually hung out (the park, Mark’s, Puma’s Diner). Nobody had seen him except Lyle Kramer, and who knows whether he was hallucinating or not. Lyle said he’d seen Red with Mark Hollywood, and they were hanging out at Nemo’s drinking sodas and waiting for clams.
I was coming out of the toy store when Mona pulled up to the sidewalk and blew.
“Get in, beautiful thing.”
I did, and we turned up the radio, singing at the top of our voices. I then drove off happy into the early summer sun, looking for Red.
* * *
We drove slowly down the Cape road until we came to the pier. Where we sat in Mona’s car and watched Red and Mark leaning against Mark’s sky blue ’65 Mustang and remembered how all of us had stood there and watched the tall ships last summer.
Now, I can say a cool wind blew through me, but I can’t say it meant anything to me then, ’cause I was standing at the edge of where I thought nothing could change.
When Red finally turned around and saw us, Mona stuck her tongue out at him. He laughed at her, then smiled at me.
moving on
25
I’m asleep and drooling on Mona’s shoulder in the city jail.
I couldn’t find Frank and Cassie to get Jo out, so I called Mona. We rifled through her desk (she screamed where she kept her cash as they put her in the police car) and found her bail money. Now we wait.
Malicious mischief and destruction of private property. That’s what they got her for.
“Whoa!” Jo screams as we tear out of the parking lot of the Justice Center and head for Nemo’s.
“Incarceration has made me hungry, girls,” Jo laughs.
“How was it otherwise?” Mona asks.
“Not bad at all, not bad at all. The walls were painted peach and my cellmate had smacked a clown at some kid’s party. I really liked her better than the woman who stole a bag of underwear.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Uh-huh,” Mona sighs.
“It’s not so bad going to jail. I can’t believe that they caught me this time. Last time I was just a suspect,” Jo says.
I lean my head out the window and take in the cool, salty breeze as we head for Nemo’s. I smell fall as we pull into the parking lot and inhale fried fish. All of a sudden I’m hungry.
When I’m done with all the stuff I think I want—like traveling, finding something I can do to make some bucks, and maybe having a family—I want to be just like Jo. Her eyes sparkle and her hands move to her face and hair when she laughs. Her skin is tan and weathered from too many days on the beach. I want to swear as well as her and read poetry on my roof when I’m not planning some kind of civil disobedience (as she calls her raid on the construction site).
We sit in the booth at Nemo’s with the mermaid overhead, and the lights are almost too bright as we stuff our faces with clams and lobster.
Mona and Jo laugh and eat.
I eat, watch them, and think about how easy it is to laugh. I read somewhere that it takes less muscles to laugh than to frown. I wonder if somebody’s put that on a greeting card yet.
Me and Jo sit in lawn chairs on her widow’s walk.
We watch the moonlight.
The light in our living room has just come on, and I watch Cassie drop bags on the kitchen table and floor. Frank goes behind her, picking things up that have fallen out of the bag.
Cassie must be saying something funny, ’cause Frank bends over laughing, then grabs her and dances her around. A few minutes later they’re kissing by the kitchen table. It makes me smile to see them kissing again. For a long time they’ve treated each other like brother and sister. I guess that’s easier than being parents. Or at least has been for the last few months.
“I used to watch your parents dance Red around the kitchen when he was a baby. It might be three in the morning and there they’d be. Dancing. Everybody looked exhausted except him; but they danced. I don’t know where they got the energy, but there they were in the middle of the night—”
“Did you ever see them dancing me?” I ask.
Jo laughs, “Honey, you were always a sleeper. It would have taken a bomb to wake you up.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
We listen to the ocean ’cause we can’t see it anymore now that the moon has gone behind the clouds. It smells like rain, but I don’t want to move off the walk. I want to hear more stories about my parents and Red. Mostly Red—but I don’t know how to ask.
“He said your name first, you know. That’s why you’re Mike. He could never get to the other part of your name.”
I smile as Jo talks through the night, telling me stories that I already know about my brother. The few I don’t know make me laugh and are like
secret gifts under a bed that you’ve been sleeping on forever and never knew anything was under.
I wake up on the lawn chaise on the widow’s walk, and Jo is smoking and staring at something off in the distance. She keeps staring at whatever it is, then stops, looks at me, and nods her head.
We watch the boy by the shed dance in a pale light, and it starts to rain.
26
There was a crash thirty years ago off the bay road. A bus went right into the ocean at high tide. I often wonder how did it get all the way through the brambles and over the ditch that separates the beach from the road? I’ll never know.
You can still find parts of the bus as it washes slowly, year by year, up on the beaches.
My aunt Caroline was the first person on the scene. She had watched the bus go over. She said it happened in slow motion. Like a dream.
She was seven, and she remembers it was windy the day twenty-eight people flew into beyond. And they found her standing on the edge, hair and coat blowing so wild around her that one man said she looked like some kind of witch standing there in the wind.
That’s where all that witch stuff started. Caroline says that instead of fighting it, she just accepted it. It was easier, and if she imagined that there was some magic or witchcraft within her, she could control whatever she wanted. Whatever she wanted.
If I’d been a witch as I stood on that dock three months ago, I would have flown over the rocks sticking out like daggers below. I would have just skimmed the waves. I would have dived deep down past the blue gray waves and grabbed hold of my brother’s hand ….
Now the only thing that makes me not jump in and try to grab his hand is the sure fact that—even though it would make it easier for me—I am not a witch.
I probably won’t grow rosemary at my garden gate or go walking the coast road at midnight. I won’t own three black cats and always know, without anybody telling me, that I’m going to have company or that somebody is sick.
Looking for Red Page 5
