The Honest Truth

by Dan Gemeinhart

  “What do you mean?”

  “My daddy. I’m not gonna say one word the whole entire time.”

  “Why not?”

  Her chin stuck out. Her green eyes started to water.

  “ ’Cause I’m mad. I’m mad. I’m so mad.” Her voice got a little broken around the edges.

  Her fingers were tight in her lap. I could see her anger in her lips. In the red of her cheeks. In her flaring nostrils.

  I knew all about anger. That’s the truth.

  “Wanna take a picture?” I asked.

  She blinked. “Huh?”

  I pulled my camera out from inside my jacket and held it up. Her fingers relaxed a little. Her eyebrows unscrunched.

  “Here,” I said. “Smile. I’ll take your picture first.”

  She bit at her bottom lip and squinted at me. I could tell she didn’t want to let go of her anger.

  “Smile,” I said again, and stuck my tongue out at her.

  A reluctant smile broke through her frown. I snapped a picture.

  “Perfect,” I said, and her smile stuck around. “Your turn.” I pulled the strap over my head and handed her the camera. She turned it around in her hands and looked at it. Her face screwed up in confusion.

  “Where’s the screen?” she asked.

  I laughed.

  “It’s not a digital camera. It’s an old-fashioned camera, with actual film you have to put in and take out. It was my grandpa’s. Just look through the eyehole there and push the button on the top.”

  She shrugged, then squinted through the camera at me.

  “You have to smile,” she said, one eye squinched shut as she lined up the picture. I smiled with half my mouth. “And take off your hat.”

  “No.”

  She unsquinched her eye at the hardness in my voice. Her smile started to fall down.

  “I mean, I don’t want to. Go ahead.” I smiled with all my face and she smiled back and took the picture.

  She stared at the camera for a second.

  “How do you see the picture?”

  “You don’t. Not until you go to the store and get the film developed. It’s old school. But it’s in there.”

  “Huh. Do you take a lot of pictures?”

  “Yeah. I like it.”

  “How come?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I like … I like … the feeling of catching something. Of saving something.” I looked out the window at the trees and signs and the warm houses of strangers zipping past. “It’s like, I don’t know, grabbing a little piece of life. All this stuff happens, all these little moments go flying past, and then they’re gone. And then you’re gone.” I took one long, big breath, and let it out slow to cloud the bus window. “But when you take a picture, that one moment isn’t gone. You caught it. It’s yours. And you get to keep it.”

  I looked back at Shelby. She blinked blankly at me.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I smiled and held out my hand. She yawned a big little-kid yawn and gave me back the camera. The bus’s tires thumped on the highway like a heartbeat. She dropped her head back against the seat. I unzipped the duffel a couple of inches and felt Beau’s sniffing nose poke wetly out. I rested my hand on the duffel, right where his ears were, and let my head fall back against the seat, too. Out the window it was gray and dark. It looked cold.

  Shelby yawned again and her head rocked over against my shoulder. I let it stay there. I thought about my mom and dad. A sudden sharp stab of love drilled down into my heart. It was followed by a cold splash of sorry. Sorry for all that I was doing to them. As if I hadn’t put them through enough. They’d always done nothing but the best for me. And now I was doing the absolute worst to them. I had to do it. But I didn’t have to feel good about it.

  “You shouldn’t be mad at your dad,” I said to Shelby.

  “Why not?” Her voice was sleepy.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I think it’s just better not to be.”

  She didn’t say anything back. My eyes blinked slower with every car we passed. I swallowed a yawn and let my eyes close. The headache was gnawing on my brain with rusty razor teeth. I thought of the pills in my backpack. But I didn’t reach for them.

  “Jesse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said you’re not going to see your daddy. Where are you going?”

  We zoomed past a green sign on the side of the highway. It said, Paradise — 110 Miles.

  My stomach twisted around a little red knot of fear.

  “I’m going to climb a mountain,” I answered.

  Box of old pictures.

  Little notes with counted words.

  Paper memories.

  Jess lay on her bed and looked through the shoe box of memories she kept on the top shelf of her closet. They were mostly pictures of her and Mark, pictures they’d taken together with his old camera. There were the notes, too; the notes they’d passed back and forth in school since kindergarten, the notes he’d left behind the brick under her window. As she looked through them she rubbed at her cheeks and chin from time to time so that her tears wouldn’t fall and stain the pictures or blur the words.

  There they were, on her first day of kindergarten. Backpack almost bigger than her body. They were in Mark’s room. He was lying in bed. He had to start kindergarten at home, with his mom. He’d been too sick to go to school for most of that year. But they’d still celebrated their first day together. And he’d still wanted a picture of the first day. Like all the other kids got.

  A picture of them at the water slides, the summer after first grade. He’d been doing great, then. They thought he might even be better for good. He’d gone to school for the whole year. His smile, with their skinny arms around each other’s shoulders, was big and healthy. Just like hers. She liked that their skin looked different — his white, hers brown — but their smiles looked the same. Just happy kids.

  Third grade. A party at school, to welcome him back. He’d gotten sick again and had to miss three months. The whole class had made him cards. Mrs. Wilson had them all write him a haiku, because Mark loved haiku so much. In the picture, he looked tired but happy. All the other kids were crowded around him. He had on a baseball hat that was way too big for his head. He was the only kid allowed to wear a hat in school.

  Fourth grade. Posing in their soccer uniforms before their first game. They both looked so excited. It had been Mark’s best year. He hadn’t been sick at all. It was almost like the whole thing had just been some awful, four-year nightmare they’d left behind. There was a note, too, that he’d left in their secret spot at the beginning of that year. Doc said tests look good! his messy handwriting said. Pizza feast to celebrate. Do you want to come? Jess sniffed and looked back and forth between the picture and the note.

  Next was a postcard, one he’d given her the summer before fifth grade. Mark had gotten so into mountain climbing that summer. His grandpa had been a big-time climber, and he’d given Mark a book about it. Mark had read it over and over. He’d learned everything he could on the subject. Mountain climbing became his secret passion. He didn’t tell his parents. They were too overprotective, he said. He didn’t tell other kids, because they wouldn’t get it; he was too small, too sickly to climb mountains. But he told Jess. He told Jess everything. The picture on the postcard was of a mountain, blue and rocky and capped with a white cone of snow. It looked about a hundred miles high. Under the picture in fancy purple words it said Mt. Rainier. Jess turned the card over, to read the one word Mark had written on the back. Someday.

  The last note — other than the one still stuffed in her pocket — was from only a few weeks before. It was short and sloppy. Absent tomorrow. Bad headaches are back again. Doctor wants more tests.

  She should have known. Really, she had known. She just wouldn’t admit it.

  Her eyes burned to a blur she couldn’t blink away. But she didn’t need to look at the pictures to see Mark’s face. She didn’t need to read the n
otes to hear his voice.

  She knew, with terrible sureness, what he was doing. But there’s lots of kinds of terrible in the world. What he was planning to do was only one kind. And maybe not the worst.

  She hated doctors sometimes.

  She’d waited at Mark’s that morning, waited with his parents for the next call, which they were sure would be the police saying that they’d found Mark at the restaurant and that he’d be home soon. She’d been so relieved.

  But then the phone call had come. Mark’s mom took the call and then told them both about how the police had found nothing but an empty office and some ladies working in the kitchen. Yes, they’d seen Mark. But they didn’t know where he’d gone. There were bloody paper towels in the bathroom.

  Mark’s dad had shaken his head and closed his eyes. It didn’t make sense. Mark was sick, but not the kind of sick that makes you bleed.

  His parents had looked so lost and confused and sad. “Where could he be?” they kept asking.

  Jess had sat and bitten down on everything she knew. She’d clenched her jaw to hold it all inside her mouth.

  Mark had known she would figure it out. He trusted her. It was in her hands.

  Should she bring him back, and save him? Or save him, and let him go?

  It wasn’t fair. To be so sad and so confused at the same time. She had too much to decide, and too much to feel. She was lost.

  What should a friend do?

  How to help, when helping and

  hurting are the same?

  The bus rumbled to a stop in a gravel parking lot just off the road.

  “Elbe,” the driver announced through hissy static over the speakers. “Five-minute smoke break.”

  The door at the front creaked open, and the driver and a couple of other people got out and lit cigarettes.

  It was raining. Clouds covered the world from one edge of the sky to the other and they were so dark gray they were almost black. Wind pushed and pulled at the trees.

  Shelby was still asleep against my shoulder. But this was my stop. Mine and Beau’s.

  The last few miles, while she was sleeping, I’d written her a little note. It was in three lines of five syllables, then seven, then five. It was mostly about being mad. Well, about not being mad. I slipped it into her hand. She licked her lips and her fingers closed around it and her head rolled back against the seat and off my shoulder. I stood up, grabbed the handles of Beau’s duffel, and slid past her and out into the aisle.

  Her brother was sitting, looking out the window. Muffled sounds of angry music seeped out from his earphones. I reached over and yanked the closest one out of his ear. His gaze snapped over to me.

  “Pay attention to her, you stupid jerk,” I said. His mouth stayed open in an O of surprise. I walked off the bus.

  The town of Elbe wasn’t much. A curve in the two-lane highway. Some wet-looking houses. A crappy motel next to a gas station. An old train car, off the tracks, had been turned into a restaurant. My stomach went back and forth between starving and pukey. I had to try and eat.

  Rain drizzled around me, poking at the puddles in the gravel. My head was a broken drum that was still getting pounded with a mallet. I kept one eye closed, my head hurt so bad. While Beau ran around in the shadows of the trees, sniffing and going to the bathroom, I fished the pills out of my coat pocket. The bottle rattled in my hand, promising me a break from my headache. But I knew the pills would make me sick again. Another meal lost down a toilet. And I needed to eat. I needed to be strong.

  I chewed on my tongue, then pressed and twisted the lid off the bottle. Before I could change my mind, I flipped the bottle over and dumped it out. The round little white pills dropped like hard, heavy snowflakes. They almost glowed they were so bright in the dark world of the parking lot.

  They fell with little splashes into a muddy puddle at my feet.

  I’d have to take the pain from here on out. It wouldn’t kill me. Well, it would, but that was kind of the point. That’s the truth.

  The waitress in the railroad car was too busy to ask too many questions. I told her my mom was sleeping in the motel across the street, and she pulled a pen out of her hair and asked me what I wanted to eat.

  The food was good and I kept it down, chewing through my headache. Beau sat still like a saint in the duffel at my feet. The meal was salty and hot, and I slipped him as many bites as I could.

  While I waited for my change, I looked out the train car window through the rain to the gas station. One car was filling up at the pump. A couple of people with big hiking backpacks stood against the wall, just out of the rain. In a little while a shuttle bus would pull up to take people to the mountain. It was the last part of my trip that I wouldn’t be walking. According to my plan, anyway. But in my plan I had the fifty bucks for the shuttle ride.

  I could ask the hikers to give me some money. But I didn’t want to. I was doing this thing, all the way. I didn’t need anybody’s help. I didn’t want anybody’s help. And they’d be suspicious, anyway. Why would a kid want to go up a mountain all by himself? You could die up there.

  I grabbed my change when the waitress brought it and walked across the street to the gas station. I didn’t really have much of a plan. But I knew where I was going. And I knew how to get there. That was my plan.

  I leaned against the wall a little ways down from the hikers. They were a younger couple, like in their twenties. They both had long hair and bandannas around their necks.

  The guy looked over at me.

  “You going to Paradise?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. I waited for his next question and wondered what lie I’d come up with.

  But the guy just nodded.

  “Cool, man,” he said. “Shuttle should be here any minute.”

  While we waited in the gloomy afternoon, several more people showed up and joined us. An older couple with no climbing gear but three cameras and a pair of binoculars. A family with two little kids that ran around and screamed. An old guy with a walking stick who was so lean and healthy looking he looked like he could walk a thousand miles without hardly noticing.

  I got lost in the crowd. I liked it. I sat down on the ground against the wall and petted Beau through the duffel.

  When the shuttle bus pulled up, there was a flurry of activity. Tickets and money were passed back and forth; backpacks were handed over and hoisted aboard. The driver walked around with a clipboard. He looked busy and grumpy.

  I picked my moment. He was around the back of the bus, muscling a heavy backpack into the trunk. I grabbed my duffel and slipped through the people still standing outside and up the steps onto the bus.

  I wanted to sit in the back, away from the driver, but it was only a little half-bus and the only spots with two seats still open were right near the front. I needed room for Beau in his duffel. I plopped down against the window with Beau on the aisle seat beside me and tried to look unimportant. The rest of the passengers filled the other seats around me.

  “All right,” the driver called out, climbing aboard and closing the door. “Off we go to Paradise Visitor’s Center in Mount Rainier National Park. Gateway to the mountain herself. Hope none of you was planning to climb her too soon. We’re at the front end of a nasty storm.” The bus engine thrummed to life and lurched into gear. We started moving. “A short stop at Ashford, and then we’ll be to Paradise in about an hour.”

  I’d made it. One little shuttle ride and I’d be at the mountain. I’d be at the mountain. And then …

  And then.

  My stomach knotted up again. I could feel my heartbeat pulsing in my neck. My mouth watered, then went dry. My breaths came short and fast.

  I shook my head and blinked hard two, three, four times. My fingernails dug into my palms.

  “Screw it,” I whispered through tight teeth. “Screw it.”

  Here’s what I don’t get: why everyone makes such a big deal out of dying.

  Dying and living. It’s all such a mess. T
hat’s the truth. It made me mad. A sad kind of angry.

  Tangled all up in my feelings was a memory. I closed my eyes and held the memory in my mind like a smooth river stone.

  I was sick, again. Jessie was visiting me, which was nice. I got so bored and lonely when I was sick. I was in bed, Beau curled up beside me like he always was. My mom, who was normally a total clean-freak about something like a dog in bed, never shooed him down. She let him stay with me, where he belonged.

  Jessie said something about me being too quiet.

  “Oh, he’s always quiet,” my mom said, rubbing my forehead with her soft fingers. She was beside me, too, like Beau; she always was. “He’s always been so quiet and thoughtful.”

  Jessie shook her head. We were just little kids still, seven years old. “No,” she said in that serious little kid way. “Not like that. More like scared.”

  Little kids are dumb. They’ll just say whatever stupid thing comes into their head, no matter how true it is. No matter how sad it’ll make someone’s mom.

  “Scared?” my mom said with a nervous laugh. Her fingers dropped to my shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “What would he be scared of?”

  Jessie’s voice got hushed and whispery. “Maybe he’s afraid of dying,” she said, her eyes solemn and teary.

  She wasn’t being mean, or rude. She just didn’t know any better.

  But I heard my mom swallow, saw her head jerk a little. I knew that if I looked up, her eyes would be teary, too.

  I didn’t look up.

  My mom started to speak. “Oh, Jess, that’s a silly thing to say, that’s just —”

  But I interrupted her.

  “I am,” I said. “I am afraid of dying.”

  My mom’s cool fingers rubbed softly on my hot forehead. I could hear her breathing through her nose. I could almost hear words rising into her mouth and then being swallowed back down as she waited for the right ones.

  “Being afraid is no way to be, honey,” she said at last. “I … I know it’s hard, baby, but there’s no use in being afraid.” Her eyes dropped down to Beau in my lap, his ribs rising and falling in his sleep. “Look at Beau,” she said. “Do you think he’d let anything happen to you? Do you think he’d ever let you be by yourself or fight something alone?”