“Okay, that is beautiful,” she said. “Happy?”
“Yes.”
And I was.
Joan’s grandfather called to tell her to come home, and I watched her cross the road and disappear down the wooden stairs. I stood with the front door open, feeling the invisible string between us pull everything tighter inside me again. My breath got shorter and my shoulders tensed up. A little of the brightness leached out of the world, but I was so used to that I barely noticed.
That happens every time Joan walks away from me.
That night, I did see Ray. I don’t have to wonder or guess or try to read between my memories to see whether it was him pissing in the dark under the trees. I know. Right after Joan disappeared down her front stairs, Ray came walking around the curve of Jensen Road.
“Hey, Daisy.” Then he just stood there in the middle of the driveway.
I can see him, with all his flesh on his bones and the blood pumping under his skin, holding him up. With the water still in his eyes and the breath still moving through his lungs. Whatever it is that makes people alive and real, it was there inside Ray that night, but I didn’t even stop to notice it. We never do, do we?
“What’s up, Ray?”
“Uh, I came to see your brother. I’m supposed to meet him here.”
I leaned in and yelled up for Robbie. He came down the stairs, sliding one shoulder along the wall and pushing his hair out of his eyes. At the front door he turned around and looked up at me.
“Stay inside, man.”
I guess I would have told Joan, eventually. It would have come out in the normal course of things that Ray and Robbie were hanging out. If things had stayed whole, if we’d remained who we were and the world made some kind of sense.
But they didn’t and we didn’t and now I’m in Rockaway, a hundred miles from the only place that will ever feel like home to me. Me and my aunt Regina try to be polite, smiling like seeing each other in the kitchen and on the stairs is normal. Like anything is normal anymore.
Daisy
ONE NIGHT AT the end of summer, we rowed out into the harbor, just to get away from the streetlights, the stereos, and the older brothers. Just for some silence. The water rippled up and then lay flat behind us as we went, familiar and then invisible. We were tracing that pattern for the last time, but we didn’t know it.
When we pushed the boat out that night, every move we made dovetailed, like it always had. I lay in the bottom and looked at Joan’s face against the sky while she rowed us over to Carter’s Bay. I looked at her arms rowing and her feet sticking out of her rolled-up jeans. From where I was looking, there was nothing but us, me and Joan and water and sky. I could feel the breeze coming from the harbor mouth, the lights on one side and the darker darkness of the woods past Carter’s Bay on the other. The arms of the world closing around us felt warm and safe.
Joan shipped the oars and pulled us in behind a willow root. I looked at her face with the constellations behind it, while she stretched out her arms and blew cigarette smoke at the stars.
“I don’t get the bear thing,” I said. “Or the archer thing, either. Seven Sisters, okay, it’s a metaphor or whatever, but no way that’s a bear.”
“Symbol,” Joan said.
“What?”
“It’s not a metaphor; it’s a symbol. They’re gonna ask you this on the English Regents. Get it straight. You can forget it later. Anyway, the Greeks could see loads more stars, before there were cities full of electricity and neon and crap. Stuff was probably more filled in.”
“That’s totally a boat. Look. See the prow and the oar sticking out?”
“You gonna take your turn and row us back, or are we going to stay here all night contemplating outer space?”
“It isn’t outer space right now, Joan. It’s a blanket for dreams. It’s a mirror. Look, there we are, reflected in the sky.”
She sighed and sat back in that way she does, waiting for me to catch up.
“I’m doing an essential job here,” I said. “I’m adding the beauty to this experience.”
I lit a cigarette too, then stretched my legs out into the warm small place between us. I thought about the world underneath the boat, the one Joan loved more than this one. The weird grace and the lungs that pumped water instead of air, gills and fins and moving by resistance. Joan reached a hand down and trailed it in the water, resting her head on the side of the boat. Things were jumping and falling back to the harbor with little splashes. We heard the owl that lives over by the quiet lady’s house. That was all the noise we needed.
“Okay, all right.” I pulled myself up and put the oars in the oarlocks, then took us across and under our own trees.
I rowed around to Main Street and into a place by the floating dock. Joan jumped out and tied us up, and we climbed up to the wooden playground. We looked through the gaps between the pillars, watching Highbone like a TV with the sound turned down at a party. A cop pulled up to the huddle of homeless guys standing around the bench by the harbor, gave them some halfhearted hassle, and went into the Harpoon for his free coffee. Robbie was behind the bandstand, but I was hoping Joan wouldn’t notice.
I pointed down at the top of the sewage pipe half full of water, trying to distract her. “A kid got lost in there.”
“What?”
“That kid who went missing last May. He walked in there at low tide and nobody knew where he went.”
“Daisy, isn’t that your brother?”
Robbie was holding both of his hands down and loose, squaring up to some guy in a jean jacket. The other guy was backed against the railing, shouting. The sound didn’t carry to us. It was just body language.
“Robbie has a knife!”
“You can’t see that from here, Joan.”
“You can! He’s standing just like that guy.”
“What guy?”
“The guy with the scalpel. Eugene. Robbie carries a knife now? What the hell?”
“You know he wouldn’t hurt anybody. Get a grip, Joan. He’s too high all the time to be threatening.”
“So why does he come home with freaking blood on his hands? And who’s the little girl?”
The girl was sitting on the grass watching Robbie, with a pocketbook on the ground next to her and a cigarette in her hand. She looked like a kid, but she moved like a grown-up.
“I don’t know, Joan. Why are you yelling at me about it? What am I supposed to do?”
“Okay, so you don’t care about me or Andre. Fine. What about yourself? Robbie’s dealing in your driveway. Also he’s totally incompetent, so he’s guaranteed to get in major trouble. You’ll be in the middle of it.”
“I do care about you! And Andre. Guys around here do all kinds of shit. You know that. What do you want me to do, go break it up?”
“No, Daisy. I want you to talk to me. When did you start lying?”
“I’m not lying!” But I was. “I’m sorry he freaked you out Joan, but it was just a bar fight.” A lie of omission. Those were the kind we started with.
“He didn’t freak me out. You’re freaking me out. You’re lying, and it scares me, Daisy. At least talk to him,” she said. “Or your mother. You need to tell her about it.”
“My mother has enough to worry about.”
“Your mother should be worrying about you, Daisy. But she can’t because she’s too out of it. She has a problem.”
“You don’t understand. She’s sad. She’s sort of . . . breakable.”
“So are you! She’s the mother. Why are you the one protecting everybody?”
I looked out at the water and away at the stars because I couldn’t look at her right then.
“Because I have to.” I whispered it at the sky.
“Well, I’m supposed to be your best friend. So let me help.”
That was maybe the first time Joan ever came close to saying she cared about me, and I was paralyzed. I didn’t answer because I couldn’t. I was caught in a trap made out of all the p
eople I loved.
“We both know it isn’t my mother you’re pissed off at. So stop taking it out on me.”
I shouldn’t have said that. Neither of us should have said any of it.
“Fine!” Joan kicked the sand and ducked out from under the playground. “You don’t want to know. You don’t want to tell me anything? I’ll find out myself.”
And she walked away.
Listen, we went home to bed every night. At school we took different classes. But most nights we snuck out again, and in between every class we met in the commons. She walked away from me every day, but she’d never done it on purpose before. Not because she was so fed up she couldn’t stand to be next to me. I looked through the pillars in the wooden playground, watching her get smaller and trying to keep on breathing, to stay standing up.
Then some guys blocked my view, walking through the park singing and pushing each other. For a minute I couldn’t see Joan, then when I looked again she was sitting next to that ageless girl on the grass.
So, I wasn’t really looking at those guys between us. I was trying to see around them to Joan. If I close my eyes right now, I can picture them walking up the path to the bandstand. One of them is Ray Velker, moving under the trees and passing a cigarette to the guy next to him. I can see his crappy haircut and the hole in the ass of his jeans. I can see the skinny arms coming out of his T-shirt sleeves. But I might be making it all up. He might not have been there at all.
Ray Velker keeps appearing in all my pictures of the past. Every time I try to think about last year, about the park or the football field or metal shop class, Ray walks like a ghost through my memories.
The truth is, I don’t know if he was there that night, because at the time I wouldn’t have noticed one way or the other. I wouldn’t have cared. Ray Velker wasn’t important until later. Now he’s the meaning of us.
From my new bedroom in Rockaway I can’t see the water at all, just two half-deflated gas storage tanks and a bunch of houses exactly like this one. Rockaway is made of straight lines and sky, more windows than trees. At night the world is just squares of yellow light with tunnels of darkness between them. This neighborhood stretches like a giant circuit board from the sea to the channel. It winks back at me with a thousand emotionless eyes.
Right now, Joan is on a train somewhere, moving away from me. I’m trying to piece together the story of how there came to be a hundred miles of Long Island between us. I went away from Highbone one day at low tide, and I’m still waiting for the water to flood in and bring the world back to me.
Joan
I LOOKED OVER at Daisy, slouched into a dark corner under the wooden playground. In the street light coming through the gaps, all I could see was one stripe of pale skin. One eye and a wisp of Daisy hair. One earring, which was all he had anyway. I turned my back and walked away.
I wasn’t walking away from Daisy; I was trying to get back to him. I was walking away from the sight of him lying to me, pretending he didn’t care about what was right in front of us. It scared me and I wanted to fix it, like when they rebreak your arm so they can set the bone right. That was pretty much how it felt, too. Like I told you, Daisy didn’t have the stomach for it. It was going to be up to me.
Two years of my mother pretending she hadn’t left us, and now Daisy was lying too. Both of our families were scattered around in broken pieces, and nobody would even look at the mess. I couldn’t breathe the air anymore, there was so much deception pressing in on me, so much fury inside. I let the anger hold me up while I put one foot in front of the other and walked away.
By the time I got to the bandstand the shouting had stopped, and Robbie was slouched against the railing next to the other guy. I sat down on the grass by the stranger girl and said hello.
“I’m Joan,” I said.
“I thought everybody here was white,” she said. Her voice sounded like she came from a house where everybody spoke Spanish. She had blond hair and black eyes.
I pointed at myself and then gave her a little wave. “Here I am. You gonna tell me your name?”
“Teresa.” She held out a Marlboro Menthol.
“No, thanks. You a friend of Robbie’s?”
“I know him from the Lagoon. He’s really nice. The only one who’s nice to me.”
I guess I was staring. She could have been eighteen from the shape of her, but if she was, she was the tiniest eighteen-year-old I’d ever seen.
“I don’t dance!” She laughed. “I clean there, with my cousin.”
“You want to take a walk?” I pointed at the rocks along the water. They’re full of rats, but at least you can’t see Main Street from there.
Teresa held up one foot. She had on four-inch heels.
“How about the pier, then?” I stood and gave her a hand up. “What was Robbie fighting about?”
She walked in those heels like they were sneakers. I’d never seen a woman with balance like that before. My mother thought heels were absurd, but Teresa made them look like the only thing a woman should ever wear. Her toenails were painted electric blue.
“That guy tried to touch me. Robbie said he had to ask first.”
“Wow. Robbie McNamara defending your right to your own body. Who’d have thought it?”
She laughed again. Seemed like everything I said was funny to her. “Not ask me! Ask him.”
“You’re going out with Robbie?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. He’s nice to me. He says we can help each other out.”
I couldn’t figure out whether Teresa was a ditz or really impressive. She was just this tiny girl who laughed all the time and walked like she was on a tightrope, but she seemed to be looking right through me too. I liked her right away, so of course I wanted to get her away from Robbie.
Maybe it was none of my business. Maybe I should have stopped right there and let her stay in the park with them. Let that creepy little ecosystem behind the bandstand find its own balance.
“You live in this town?” Her steps made little thunks on the pier.
“Yep.”
She looked around at the boats and the houses in Carter’s Bay.
“It’s so pretty!”
“Don’t be fooled. People here suck.”
“You don’t like it?” She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Maybe you should try living somewhere else for a while.”
“Never happen. Our family has been in our house forever. My gramps says we’ve been here longer than most of the trees and the white people.”
Of course she laughed again, right on cue, then she waved at the houses on Baywater Avenue. “How can you not like it?”
“It used to be cool. It used to be our own little world, at least that part.” I pointed at the water. “Lately, everything’s upside down and everyone’s pretending it isn’t.”
“You’re mad about something!” She said like she’d just turned the channel to a really exciting TV show.
“My best friend is turning into a dick.”
I sat down and put my legs under the railing so I could swing them out over the water.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He just is. He’s Robbie’s little brother.”
“Oh! You know Robbie?”
“Mostly I know his little brother. Well, I thought I did until lately. He’s supposed to be my best friend.”
“Sometimes when you’re mad it seems like you lost people, but later you find out you didn’t. It might be okay tomorrow, or in a few days, right?”
“Right. I guess. Where do you live?”
“Hicksville. Robbie said if I came down here with him he’d drive me home.”
“Look, it’s none of my business, but I don’t think you should hang around with him.”
She leaned against the railing and swung both of her feet out over the water. “You think I’m dumb.”
“No! It’s just— I’ve known Robbie my whole life. He’s not as nice as you think he is.”
“Well, my cous
in said he was okay. And I don’t have a way to get home. My mother will kill me if I stay out all night. She thinks I’m at work.”
I stood up. “Come with me. My brother can give you a ride.”
“I don’t even know you. How do I know you’re not lying about him just to lure me away to your evil den?”
“You don’t know this yet, but I am the only person in this town who doesn’t lie.”
“How old is your brother? Is he cute?”
“I don’t know because I’m not a weird pervert. He’s smart, though.”
“With glasses? Like a Poindexter? I like that—it’s sweet.”
“Nope. Sorry. Arthur’s got twenty-twenty vision. And he’s kind of the only cool one in our family. Definitely not a Poindexter.”
She snapped her fingers like aw shucks, and laughed. Again.
“You coming, or what? He won’t mind. He loves driving around. He says cars and trains are America’s poetry.”
Arthur did mind, but he was too polite to say so in front of Teresa. I was counting on that. I took her down the Abbates’ stairs and around under Arthur’s window. He leaned out and said, “Joan. Who’s your friend?”
“Hi. I’m Teresa.” She swayed back and forth like a Disney princess, I swear. Or maybe she was just trying to balance in the mud on those heels.
“We need a ride, Arthur. Teresa lives in Hicksville, and she doesn’t have a way home.”
He just stared down from the window, doing a perfect imitation of Gramps’s disapproving face.
“It’s an emergency. Otherwise I wouldn’t ask you. I told Teresa you were way chivalrous.”
“You’re cool, that’s what she said. I’m sorry we’re bothering you. I got kind of stuck.” No laugh. All of a sudden, Teresa was deadly serious.
When we got to Arthur’s car, she jumped straight in the front seat, then scooted over next to Arthur so I could squeeze in. I got in the back.
How We Learned to Lie Page 4
