Sex & Violence

by Carrie Mesrobian

  I didn’t fucking shh until he pulled the necklace from his pocket. Then I laid back and closed my eyes.

  The last day in the hospital, I took a shower sitting on a stool because I was so wiped out from walking up and down the hallway plus the actual process of undressing that I couldn’t stand up. I locked the bathroom door, though the nurse told me not to, but there was no way I would have taken off the gown if just anyone could walk in. I had to be careful with my incision. It was about ten inches long and stapled together. The first time I saw it in the bathroom mirror I threw up in the sink.

  When your spleen is ruptured, it has to be removed. That was what the surgeon told me. A ruptured spleen will hemorrhage, and you will die of internal blood loss. It is better to have a spleen, of course. But if it is ruptured, say, while you are assaulted in a gang shower while wearing nothing but a towel and flip-flops, then living without this organ is the way to go. The doctor showed me a picture of a human spleen in a book that he said I could keep. It was large and purple and seemed too big and important to be dismissed so quickly.

  The spleen protects the immune system, is the body’s defensive army, the doctor explained. But it’s not very combat ready, I wanted to tell him, if a few punches from two pissed-off guys could demolish it. Later, flipping through the book from the surgeon, I learned that in ancient times, the spleen was thought to be the source of melancholy, that the bile it produced was believed to cause depression.

  This was funny to me in a fucked-up way. Because by Aristotle’s definition, without my spleen, I should now be happier than shit. Which might have made me laugh, but when I laughed my entire chest hurt; when I smiled the cuts on the corners of my mouth split open.

  Home was a condominium in Charlotte. My father loved to live in condos, because he didn’t have to mow or fix stuff or do anything but interface with his laptop. The Charlotte condo was like all the others: boring and beige. A couch. A kitchen table. A giant television that only I watched. In the kitchen there was nothing but takeout menus and clusters of power strips for all my dad’s computer gear. My dad said one of the bedrooms was mine, but I camped out on the couch in front of the television instead. Spent my days napping. Taking pain meds. Noting the different shades of beige and tan and taupe in the condo. Imagining inventive suicide methods. Going to follow-up appointments at the clinic. Avoiding the shower and reeking like hell, until one day my father told me we were moving. And so, with my dad’s Mercedes dragging a U-Haul trailer behind us, we left Charlotte and drove to Minnesota, where my father had grown up. I had been there when I was little but could barely remember it.

  The whole drive, my father talked. I knew that before I would have given anything if he’d just open his goddamn mouth and say something interesting that was not about Unix, Linux, the Conficker virus, algorithms, or Google’s market cap. But now the whole trip he wouldn’t stop jabbering about himself, and I couldn’t stand that, either. He talked about Pearl Lake, where he had spent his summers growing up. About Marchant Falls, the town nearby, where his family lived the rest of the year. About the Kiwanis Camp and swimming until dark and their dog Rusty who chased cars and got hit by a bus. About his older brother, Soren, who had made his own canoe out of a tree at age twelve.

  “Pearl Lake was Soren’s church,” my father said. “He loved it there. He hunted and set animal traps. He could stick his fishing pole in a goddamn puddle and catch something. He never came back from fishing without a full string. He camped and canoed and fished and swam—all of it. Lived like a savage all summer long.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know much about my family. Or my Uncle Soren. I had supposedly met him once, at my mother’s funeral, which was also in Minnesota because that’s where her family wanted her ashes spread. I don’t remember Soren much; except after the funeral, he climbed up into a tree with me and we talked about bugs. I was into bugs when I was eleven. After that, Soren left Minnesota, my dad said. He’d been in the military, but they didn’t talk. Soren traveled a lot, and no one had heard from him in years. He didn’t even come to his own mother’s funeral, my grandma, a lady I remember very little except that she made me cry once so I didn’t like her.

  My father had to talk loud, and with the radio off, because I couldn’t hear in my left ear anymore. The doctors didn’t know if my hearing would come back or if it was permanent. Also, it hurt my incision to sit up for long periods of time. Though the staples were removed, I still felt them, like phantoms. And the rest of me was similarly broken: the healing raw bit on my left ear where the cartilage was torn, my left hand sprained, my right hand covered in scabbed cuts that itched. Defensive wounds, the doctor called them. Though it seemed that I had put up very little defense.

  We arrived in Pearl Lake, Minnesota, on the first of April. I hadn’t slept well the whole trip. My father stopped at decent motels, but they all felt creepy to me because either the bathroom tile was that same industrial orange of the Connison gang shower or the doors didn’t have locks, so I continued my shower boycott and just wiped myself down with a washcloth. But still I reeked, which bugged my dad, who was the kind of guy who had his shirts dry-cleaned and cleaned out his fingernails with a Swiss Army knife while sitting in traffic.

  My father drove down a long gravel drive, checking the rearview often to make sure the trailer was holding up okay. He parked and we got out.

  “Here it is, son,” he said. “The ancestral family lake home. In all its glory.”

  There was no glory, but it wasn’t an anonymous condo. It was an old A-frame with cedar shakes and a big blue door. It looked like the kind of place that would have little plaques that said Gone Fishin’ on the walls. Cutesy shit that never was a part of any place we lived in because a) we were guys b) we didn’t live anywhere long enough to decorate. There was a front deck and a balcony on the second floor, enclosing a little window. The lawn was muddy and scrubby, and an old tire swing swayed from a yellow nylon rope hanging from a fat birch tree. The lake in front was choppy and gray. On a short dock, a green fishing boat banged along with the waves.

  “That boat ours?” I asked.

  “I had a guy pull it out of storage and clean it up for us,” he said. “We’ll go out on the lake once we get settled.”

  “How come I’ve never been here?” I asked. “If this is the family cabin?”

  “Melina didn’t like coming here,” he said.

  My father didn’t say my mother’s name often. It was odd to hear it now. He started unpacking the car. I helped a little, but he waved me off.

  “Go inside,” he said. “Get comfortable. We’re here all summer.”

  That long? I almost said. But I was too tired to even be a smart-ass.

  I took the room on the second floor, because the main floor bedroom didn’t face the morning sun and my father needed complete darkness when he slept. I didn’t mind, though my father worried about how I would get to the bathroom, which was on the first floor. I told him I could piss out the balcony window and then he laughed and so did I. Which was a little strange, because he didn’t laugh very much and never with me.

  I liked the second-floor room. It was huge and the bed was beside the window and I could crawl out on the tiny balcony and look at the lake. When it was windy, I didn’t stay out there long, but it was getting warmer each day, and the sun woke me up every morning.

  The rest of the cabin was small but clean. There was a big front room with a fireplace and brand-new furniture, which was all black. As if my father couldn’t decide on a color. (Which was probably true. He basically wore the same thing all the time—white shirt and khaki pants. He didn’t like thinking about inconsequential decisions, he always said.) The walls were knotty pine paneling, and there was nothing on them. There were built-in bookshelves full of yellowed paperbacks and jigsaw puzzles, which my father said he planned to throw out. There was a wooden pipe rack, with a brown glass canister in the center for the tobacco ringed with a dozen different pipes. I asked him if he’d throw
that out too, but he said no, because it had been hand carved by his brother. Which was cool—privately I thought they’d make good weed pipes.

  Every day my father and I went out on the lake. I got good at driving the boat and liked the feel and sound of moving on the water, and I liked my dad smiling at me when I remembered to do something he had taught me. He showed me how to start the motor, how to add gas to it, how to steer and stop and uncrank the anchor and dock properly. We never stopped to fish, though he kept saying we would. We went all over the lake, looking at the crappy little trailers and the deluxe mansions. He pointed out a restaurant that he said was a good place for steak, noted the biggest house on the lake, a towering thing that looked like it should have a moat and drawbridge around it.

  “That used to belong to Melina’s parents,” he said. “Up until a few years ago, actually.” I nodded. Talking about my mother wasn’t high on my list, either.

  One day we approached a huge island that was ringed with boulders and surrounded with No Trespassing and Wildlife Sanctuary signs from the Department of Natural Resources. We had skirted around it before but never approached it close.

  “That’s Story Island,” he said. “People like to fish around it, but you can’t go on it, because it’s a protected habitat for loons. Which are the state bird of Minnesota, by the way. When we were kids, it was a big dare to go out there. People said there was a haunted house on it. All the kids talked about going out there a lot. But the only one who ever did it was Soren.”

  Story Island, covered with trees and brush, looked completely wild and intimidating, fringed with dead reeds and cattails and boulders covered in a slippery-looking green scum. I’d done a little rock climbing in Tacoma, hiked around Mount Rainier a bit, but those boulders looked like a nightmare to scale. My Uncle Soren must have been a real badass kid to heave it up Story Island all by himself.

  “So was there a house?” I asked.

  “Soren said there was, but no one went with him, so no one believed him,” he said. “But my brother wasn’t a liar. He said we shouldn’t bother with it, though, because climbing up those rocks wasn’t easy and if we made it, we’d probably fall into quicksand and die. And that we’d just kill off all the loons if we messed around in their habitat. Obviously, he was kidding about the quicksand, but when you’re young you believe what your older brother says, you know.”

  Like I’d know.

  “Soren had a thing about the loons,” my father continued. “He beat up this kid Tyson Murphy once, who was two grades older, just for saying he was going out to Story Island with his BB gun to practice on the loons. Took Tyson’s BB gun too. Soren was very territorial about Pearl Lake—he loved it and knew everything about it, which I always thought was odd. But we never agreed on much, so I suppose the feeling was mutual.”

  There was something in his voice that made me worry he might cry. So I didn’t say anything, and a few minutes later we motored off.

  One Friday afternoon, my father came into my room where I was reading and said, “You’ve got an appointment in town.”

  Marchant Falls was what he meant by “town,” and it was about twenty miles south of Pearl Lake. It was small and dumpy and reminded me of Havford, the little shitty town near Remington Chase where kids would sneak off to buy cigarettes and alcohol. Everything about Marchant Falls was piddly and subpar. The grocery store was called Cub Foods and the high school mascot was a beaver and the sidewalks were covered in trash from the receding dirty snow. We passed the high school, where kids hung around the front doors, playing Frisbee and Hacky Sack. I pretended not to see them. I didn’t want my father to think about enrolling me back in school.

  He pulled up to a yellow house with a white door on a residential street.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Your appointment’s in five minutes,” he said.

  “But this is somebody’s house.”

  “It’s an office.”

  I had thought I was going to the clinic, like always. I had some damn checkup every week, it seemed. Hearing and blood work and my sprained wrist and other stuff you need checked when you suddenly have no spleen. So I looked awful. Deranged. I barely had any hair. Unable to shake the memory of Patrick Ramsey grabbing my hair, I kept it cut super short, which wasn’t hard as they’d shaved it off in the hospital to stitch up parts of my scalp. But with short hair, my ears stuck up, all pointy, like an elf, totally noticeable because of the big strip of scab on the left one. And I reeked too. The shower in the cabin was so tiny I could barely stand up straight in it and tended to have spiders crawling everywhere. Most importantly, the bathroom had a flimsy door with no lock. So I’d only washed my entire body a couple of times since coming to Minnesota, and that was in the freezing cold lake, at night and not for long, either, since the temperature made my nuts jump up my neck.

  My father knocked on the door, which had a row of brass bells lining the upper part of it. They jingled when the door opened, and a short red-haired woman appeared.

  “You must be Adrian Carter.” She shook my father’s hand. “I’m Dr. Janice Penny.”

  My father introduced me, and the red-haired woman shook my hand. Her hand was white and cool to the touch, like a seashell. I’ve never understood people whose handshakes are cool like that. I’m always a sweating ball of nerves.

  We went inside, and I looked around, trying not to seem as freaked as I was. The room was outfitted in white wicker furniture and paintings of flowers and smelled like dried roses. Dr. Penny handed my father some forms and told him to take a seat in one of the wicker chairs, which creaked when my father sat down.

  “Evan, please come into my office,” she said.

  I looked at my dad, but he was busy with the forms. I wanted to kill him. He hadn’t told me I was seeing a shrink, and I knew why. Because I wouldn’t have come.

  Dr. Penny sat in a white wooden chair and invited me to sit too. There were two options: a little pink sofa with poofy pillows and a rocking chair. The pink sofa was so … pink. Plus it was closer to her. I sat in the rocking chair, trying not to make it squeak and failing.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Evan,” Dr. Penny said. “How are you feeling today?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good,” she said. “I thought we’d start off by getting acquainted with one another.”

  “Yeah, but um, I’m not really sure I need to be here. I mean, I don’t really get why I’m here, exactly.

  “Your father is worried about you,” she said. “He knows how much you’re hurting.”

  “I’m healing up pretty good, actually,” I said. “My ribs are healed, and the doctors said that …”

  “I know physically you’re doing well,” she interrupted. “You’re a very strong young man. An athlete, your father said. But you’ve undergone something very traumatic. You have fears. And with good reason. Your father wishes to help you with these matters.”

  “Then why doesn’t he help me?” I asked, sounding whiny.

  “Maybe he doesn’t think he can,” she said.

  “And you think you can?” I asked. Which was dickish of me, but it just sort of came out.

  “I can help you with some ways to think about your life and choices,” she said. “It’s really your job to get better. I’m just offering some perspective on how you look at things.”

  I’d never had therapy. Even when my mother died. I’d never known my father to consider such a thing. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in psychological principles; he just didn’t seem to think about me that way at all. About emotional things. He treated stuff like that how I’d imagine a father would treat his daughter’s menstrual cycle—with caution and distance. Him talking to me about my feelings was like him buying a strange woman a box of tampons, I guess. Which I had actually done once, when we lived in San Diego. A girl I met at the mall asked me to give her some cash because she needed some tampons. Mandy was her name. She was cute and fit my left-of-normal profile. We later did mu
shrooms together at a movie theater, and I got so annihilated by the black-and-white tiled men’s room that Mandy had to pull me out of there by the wrist.

  Thinking of Mandy made me shiver. Because I had been a guy who just met girls like that. Like I’d met Collette. Though more often, I pursued them, looking for an angle to get what I wanted. It was something I was good at. At least I thought I was. I hadn’t known how close to danger I’d been that whole time. Oblivious of all the history of all these places. How many Tate Kerrigans and Patrick Ramseys had I almost missed?

  “Let’s get started,” Dr. Penny said.

  Therapy with Dr. Penny was either the weirdest thing in the world or I didn’t know anything about therapy. I expected her to ask me about sad things, my mother dying and all the places we’d lived and left, and how we never saw any of my relatives, because my father rarely mentioned them and my mother’s side fell away from us after she died. Or I thought she’d ask whether I drank or did drugs or looked at porn. But Dr. Penny just talked about Marchant Falls and how she grew up here and how her parents had a cabin on Pearl Lake too and how she’d gone there every summer, swimming and fishing until Labor Day. How Pearl Lake was one of the oldest lakes to have settled residents. How Marchant was the French word for “merchant,” because the town was a hub for French beaver fur traders, hence the high school mascot. How the high school had an amazing hockey team and offered AP courses. And there was a track team too, if I was interested.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to return to school for any reason. I wanted to take the damn GED. I was done walking into new buildings and seeing how things played out as the Fucking New Guy.

  But Dr. Penny didn’t care that I was silent. She just kept talking. She sounded like a brochure from a travel website.

  I was starting to wonder who exactly this therapy was for, when she asked me the first question.