“Whoa. That’s crazy.”
“You’re absolutely right,” my father said. “Crazy. And effective. My father didn’t stop hitting us, but he definitely thought twice about it when Soren was around.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was like looking at a new person. A person who annoyed me and never said anything most of the time but who let women paint his toenails and bought clothes in colors and bent the rules so I could drink beer with him. Who grew up in violence, was saved by his brother. And then stole that brother’s girl, the only girl he’d ever had, and then she died. You’d think knowing such information would make me more sympathetic to him, more understanding of how he’d come to be the way he was. But as we drove home and I tried to reimagine him, a younger man, not bald, not nerdy, someone picked by my beautiful mother, and instead of some lightning bolt of clarity, the whole thing just gave me a splitting headache.
Dear Collette,
I’m supposed to imagine giving up my coping mechanisms and what would happen if I did. I don’t have to write this in a letter, but I’m used to doing that. Plus, I don’t want you to think that I am neglecting you.
I don’t really think I have coping mechanisms or that they are bad or that they need to be given up. So, I take baths in the lake. Because showers bother me. Especially ones in bathrooms without locks on the doors. Dr. Penny thinks I need to come to terms with this because you cannot bathe in a Minnesota lake during winter. But I told her we would probably be gone somewhere else by then, anyway, and it wouldn’t be her problem anymore, to which she said, Yes, Evan, but it would still be your problem.
I try to shower. Every morning. Just the noise of the water beating on the tile scares the shit out of me. And don’t even ask about putting a lock on the door. Let’s just say I had to pay my dad back to replace the entire door, and the replacement didn’t have a lock, either.
Then there’s my haircutting. I keep my hair cut really short, since it freaks me out to think it could be used against me, like it was that night in Connison. Did you know that this is why Alexander the Great prohibited beards for his soldiers, thus ushering in the modern concept of the clean-shaven, jarhead marine? Facial hair could be pulled or grabbed, making it a point of vulnerability. Which I tried to explain to Dr. Penny, but she wasn’t having it.
They shaved my head in the hospital, to deal with some of the contusions and stitches. And I liked it. Because it’s like being in disguise. So I still cut it. Every morning. Sometimes I cut it again at night. It’s kind of uneven, and little spots are always growing out.
If I quit cutting it, I would have approximately five minutes back each day. Which doesn’t seem like a lot. I could yank it a couple more times a week, which is not something I need to be doing more of, trust me. Or run a couple more miles. Though I run about ten miles a week, so that’s not really necessary, either.
The thing is, with longer hair, my elf ears wouldn’t be noticeable. And I wouldn’t look like a cancer patient. I realize I don’t look good. The demented-peach-fuzz pointy-ears look is pretty much the opposite of badass. But even if I grew my hair out again, I will never look or be as badass as my friend Layne or his brother, Tim. (You know, the ones who are teaching me to box.) Tim and Layne were probably taught to uppercut and jab in nursery school, while I was learning that Hands Are Not for Hitting. You should see the Beauchant brothers. They would have never let anyone touch you.
Later, Evan
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A week later, Tom and Kelly dropped Baker and me off at Story Island. Kelly, pointing out all the No Trespassing signs, was confused, but Tom told her he would take her to Northwood for lunch if she didn’t bug him about it. Northwood was the fancy steak place that my father had shown me our first weeks in Pearl Lake. As they boated away, we could hear Kelly asking Tom if she should go back and change her outfit.
“Poor Tom,” Baker said, as we started toward the Archardt House.
“He signs up for it,” I said. Having sex with Lana made me less sympathetic, I guess. I felt guilty about Lana sometimes— how we never kissed or went anywhere, how blatantly it was about getting down and nothing else—but at least I didn’t feel like chewing the plaster off the walls as much anymore.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love Kelly,” Baker said. “But I think she assumes Tom’s just going to put up with her shit forever.”
“Well, he might. Maybe they’ll get married.”
“Ugh, that’s so gross,” Baker said.
“I know. But it at least lets me imagine a happy ending for Tom.”
“Oh, he gets plenty of those,” Baker said. “Kelly basically blow jobs her way out of any argument.”
“Jesus. I can’t even imagine.”
“Oh, whatever. You’re a guy. I bet you can easily imagine.”
“All right, fine. But not with Kelly, at least. I mean, what’s with her hair?”
“The blond’s way better, though,” Baker said. “Before it was like she char-grilled it.”
I laughed. Though I was hardly one to criticize people’s hair.
“I wish I didn’t have to leave for college right now,” Baker said. “The Archardt House is so strange. I could write a kick-ass paper about it if I was still in school.”
“Dork,” I said.
“Oh, shut up. Don’t you think it’s weird how well-preserved the house is, though? You’d think there’d be more broken windows. And upstairs, there’s places where I swear the plaster’s been repaired.”
“Maybe the DNR looks after it.”
“But technically the DNR’s job is natural resources, of which the house is not one,” she said. “I mean, why else do you think that we haven’t been caught out here yet? The wildlife people have enough crap to do. Are you even listening?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Dick,” she said, and girl punched me.
Baker and I had been coming to Story Island more regularly in the last few weeks. But we never really planned out our trips there. Sometimes we hiked around. Sometimes we just snooped through the house, me usually in the library, because I got a kick out of all those old books. But Baker got more personal, liked to dig through cabinets and drawers. Sometimes she’d have weird requests for me, like have me move furniture so she could inspect the wallpaper pattern or hold the measuring tape while she plotted out the dimensions of each room. I didn’t really care what we did, actually. The whole island gave me a weird relaxing feeling that was so good it was almost embarrassing. Of course, if I had to pick my favorite room, it would have been the library. Which was weird, given that most books I had to read for school bored the shit out of me. But these old ones were cool. I even liked how they smelled. Kind of musty and burnt.
“I’ll be upstairs,” she said, as we stepped into the front entryway. “I want to take a few pictures of the lattice framework on the bed. And the columns on the patio are … Oh, shut up.” She headed up the stairs. “I know I’m a geek.”
After an hour of paging through books, I got sleepy. I stretched, listening for Baker’s movements. We were so casual, acting like the Archardt House belonged to us. Like we were just going in and out each other’s cabins like people on the east side did all summer long, and not trespassing illegally on a protected island.
I wandered to the piano room. That’s what I called it; Baker called it the drawing room. She had a technical name for everything. Through the window, I could see her in the side yard, crouching down and taking pictures of weeds coming out of the crumbled flagstones. I looked at her for a minute: the muscles in her legs, her ponytails swinging around her shoulders, the way she focused on each shot.
She turned toward the window, and I stepped back, though I doubted she could see me through the grimy glass. I didn’t want to bug her, so I went back to the library and sat on the giant tank of a desk and drank some water. Then, pausing to listen for Baker’s footsteps, I took my Uncle Soren’s blue cloth book from my backpack and started looking through it.
Drawings of river otters and different varieties of pondweed. Instructions on weaving a seine to capture minnows for bait. An explanation of the purpose and use of a Secchi disk. A floor plan of the Archardt House, and what looked like dates and notes about it. Stuff like Sealed hole in master bedroom and Replaced broken window in library.
“Hey, dumbass.”
I jumped, as if Soren himself had appeared. But it was Baker, sweaty from being outside. She pulled herself up on the desk beside me and gulped a bunch of water from my bottle. I leaned away, not wanting her sloppy drinking to get on the pages of the blue cloth book.
“What is that?” she asked.
“A book.”
“No kidding.” She edged closer to me. “Is that your man journal?”
“Yeah. It’s my man journal where I press leaves and draw pictures and tell all my private thoughts.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“Someone’s crabby today. Need your loadie girl to come give you more hickeys?”
She brought up my mystery loadie girl a lot, but I never admitted to anything, and her annoyance with me was kind of enjoyable, actually.
I shut the book and slid it into my pack.
“Why are you being so secretive? Did you find it here?”
“I found it in the summer kitchen,” I said, sighing, because, of course, then she wanted to go to the summer kitchen and look around. Which I normally wouldn’t have minded. But right now I wasn’t up for it. I didn’t want to have another meeting of the Dead Parents Club. And I didn’t want her assuming the book belonged to local history, either.
“Are you mad at me or something, Evan?”
“No, I’m fine,” I muttered. “Let’s go.”
Once in the summer kitchen, I pointed out where I’d found the book, and Baker began examining the corner cupboard. Gently laying the contents of the peanut butter jar on the floor. Running her fingertips over the fishing lures and lead weights. Holding up the BB gun to see if it would still shoot. I sat on the floor and opened the blue cloth book to a drawing of a loon’s head, the red eye creepy but somehow beautiful too. Below it, a list of loon calls—the hoot, wail, tremolo, and yodel—and all their various meanings and uses.
Just as I started to wonder if my dorky fondness for E. Church Westmore was a sort of throwback gene from my uncle, I turned the page. And then I was caught again, my throat getting hot and tight, sure signs of being Almost-Weepy. It was a drawing of my mother. Her head tilted to one side, not facing front directly, like she was looking toward another point on the horizon. Obviously, she was much younger in the drawing, but I could still recognize her. Her hair black as the diagram of the raven’s wing, black as mine. With a slight smile, and her name below the fading shadings of her neck: Melina. Written in fine, gentle script, as if the letters themselves were precious to him.
Beneath were these words:
Loons do not mate for life. This is wrong, and a persistent myth, though many would like it to be so. The importance of a nest site is the main factor of consequence in mating habits, and it is determined by the male. Fighting for a home is the province of the male alone. So it is the territory they protect and cherish above all, not a mate, not the young that they lose all too easily.
I stared at the drawing and the words, so dazed that I again didn’t realize that Baker had sat down by me. I quickly turned the page back to the red-eyed loon.
“That’s really beautiful,” she said.
“It’s my uncle’s book,” I said. “He’s the one that came here first. On a dare, my dad said. Soren. My father’s brother. They never speak. My dad doesn’t know where he is, even. They haven’t seen each other since my mom’s funeral.”
Quietly, we looked at the loon’s red eye. I was still feeling Almost-Weepy. Probably closer to Actual-Weepy. With Baker sitting beside me. I felt like dying because I was going to cry in front of her. Over my mother. Over loons. It felt like another occasion for an overly long German word.
Then Baker turned the page to the drawing of my mother. Which made me suck in my breath even more.
“Is that her?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s she doing in your uncle’s book?”
I didn’t want to say what I suspected. That my father was as big a dick about women as his son, though his count was admittedly much lower than mine. But the same principle remained. That Adrian Carter had somehow, in his silent, math-geek way, managed to steal away my mother from Soren. Maybe in the same way he was dancing with Brenda and drinking whiskey sours and not caring if his gas gauge broke.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you think they were together? Or was he just secretly in love with her?”
I shrugged, looking at the drawing. Maybe I was the least romantic guy on the planet, but I didn’t think you made a drawing like that if you didn’t feel something intense.
What happened next was horrible. Baker touched my mouth. My lips. With her fingers. Softly. Then she kissed me and I swear, I felt like I’d been shot. I shut my eyes and couldn’t move.
After all the time we’d spent together, on Story Island, on the docks and the diving platform, that night in the lake skinny-dipping, on her screen porch or the Tonneson’s deck, at the goddamn Dairy Queen with Tom and Kelly while she scarfed down a Peanut Buster Parfait (which she liked to call a Penis Buster Parfait, something that cracked her and Tom up, because it made Kelly shriek in embarrassment)—all the times I’d thought about her, naked or otherwise (okay, mostly naked) and how out of reach she was for me—I’d never considered she would do this. Because it was pointless, liking Baker. Because I was me and she was Baker and she was awesome and going to college, long jumping away from me and my stupid, tortured, late-night lake bathing, daily haircutting, scarred stomach and broken nose and elf ears and constant split-lip existence …
She pulled back, then. Before I could even open my mouth. Before I could even enjoy it. Our little moment of non-monogramy.
She said, “Your mouth is bleeding. I keep forgetting to get you that salve Keir makes.”
“It’s okay.” I sounded like a sick twelve-year-old.
“Sorry, Evan.” She stood.
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t know why I did that. I’m with Jim. Even if … Well. Sorry.”
I wanted to say that technically she could do whatever she wanted. But maybe things had changed since the big fight? Maybe they’d figured things out, ditched non-monogramy? I watched her silently collect up the bits from the peanut butter jar and the BB gun and put everything back into the cupboard. Then she started looking around the summer kitchen, like nothing had happened. So I did the same. Strapped the book shut with the belt and shoved it into my backpack. Stood up and tried to get a hold of myself.
She turned to me and checked her watch. “Tom should be here soon. Meet you at the drop-off point?”
I nodded. She had kissed me, and I sat there, frozen. She probably thought I was gay. Or lying about all my sex stories. Or maybe it was a pity kiss, because I was a sad orphan with a dead mother. Whatever it was, I wanted to die. Especially thinking about how she packed everything up afterwards, like the whole thing was too shameful for comment. Baker, who had a comment about everything.
Dear Collette,
Fear is our topic today. Dr. Penny says we cannot eradicate fear entirely, because it’s a biological response designed to keep us safe. She says we can dial back our fears should they overtake our life, though. Learn to balance them, especially if they complicate our lives. Like cutting one’s hair every morning. Like bathing in a lake instead of showering. Like sleeping with a girl you don’t really like but not being able to stop. Like wanting to get your GED instead of attending your senior year. Though I don’t understand why a GED is so crappy—isn’t it the same thing as the damn diploma?
I’m supposed to take an incident where I was recently afraid. Examine that incident and then inhabit the way I felt,
then pull back from the situation and rotate around it. Look at all the possible responses available; see all the other angles. Because that’s the thing about fear. It’s single-minded. It reduces your choices. And what’s the point of being alive if you don’t have choices?
But I can’t talk about the incident where I was recently afraid with you. It involves another girl, and I’m afraid (ha-ha) that it might hurt your feelings to know about it, because, though it has been months since we were together and our relationship was pretty new, I still feel warm and kind toward you. And after what they did to you—my fault—all I want is to sit beside you in bed and smooth your hair. (I imagine this with both of us fully clothed, by the way. Totally legit, Collette.) So, I’d smooth your hair, like my mother used to when she was trying to get me to fall asleep and I was too hyper. I’d tell you that you’re an amazing girl. I remember you in the Connison hallway, your legs in red socks, calling me a dummy and telling me to let you in my room so you wouldn’t get caught. Helping yourself to the guy your friend liked. No fear in that, Collette.
That is the angle I like to inhabit the most. I’m too chickenshit to inhabit any angles where I could have changed what happened in that unmentionable situation. So I just think of you, pushing yourself into my life, and me opening the door and both of us inside, the door locked, safe. I inhabit that angle just fine.
Later, Evan
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“My break’s over in fifteen minutes,” Lana said, hooking her fingers into my belt loops.
We were in the penned-in area enclosing the Dumpster and the recycling behind The Donut Co-op. There were people in this world who ate out of Dumpsters, and the owner of The Donut Co-op had spent extra money to enclose everything because he couldn’t stomach the idea of such desperation.
Speaking of desperation, there I was, at 10:17 on a Friday morning, condoms in my pocket and my hands under Lana’s Donut Co-op apron, pushing up her skirt. Far from the cover of darkness, breaking all of Layne’s rules about his half sister. Because both of us were desperate. Me, because I couldn’t stop thinking about Baker in the summer kitchen; Lana, because she had a big exam in her vet-tech class at the community college that afternoon. She called me on her way into her shift at The Donut Co-op saying she needed me to get her mind off it.
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