The Lightness of Hands

by Jeff Garvin

  “What’s wrong?” I yelled over the sound of the storm.

  “It won’t take my code,” he replied, typing it in again. The LED indicator flashed red, and he grunted with frustration.

  “Hang on,” I said, trying to hide my irritation; the man was allergic to technology. I pulled up my hood, climbed out of the RV, and came around to the keypad. Dad stepped aside, clearly annoyed that I was doubting him. I punched in the numbers, my fingers trembling against the cold metal buttons, but the light still flashed red.

  “You see?” Dad said.

  I reached for my cell to call the manager, then remembered I didn’t have any minutes left and pushed the Call button on the security gate’s keypad instead. A low electronic burble issued from the crappy speaker. After four or five rings, Julius, the site supervisor, finally picked up.

  “The office is closed.” He sounded like I had woken him up.

  “Julius, it’s Ellie. The gate’s not working.”

  I heard rustling as if he was moving the phone to his other ear. “Ellie who?”

  “Elias Dante. Space Twenty-Two.”

  Long pause.

  “Julius, can you please open the gate? It’s raining cats and dogs out here.”

  “No, I can’t open the gate.”

  I glanced at Dad, ready to share a look of annoyance—but his expression had frozen. He looked scared, or maybe guilty. I frowned at him and spoke into the talk box again.

  “Well, the keypad’s not working. Is there a manual override or something?”

  “No,” Julius said. “I can’t open the gate because you aren’t residents here anymore. You haven’t paid in months.”

  My mouth suddenly felt dry. “What? No,” I said. “We’re on autopay.”

  “Your card got declined three months in a row. Look, talk to your dad about this. I’m going back to sleep.”

  There was a click, and the speaker went silent. I looked at Dad, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. I felt a rush of nausea; he had known this was going to happen.

  We climbed into the RV soaking wet and toweled off in silence. He hadn’t paid our fucking rent in three months. I was so angry, my whole body was trembling. Why hadn’t he told me? I considered asking him, but what was the point?

  When we were back in our seats, Dad put the bus in gear and pulled onto the highway.

  “Walmart?” I asked, trying to keep the contempt out of my voice. He nodded. “Okay. But let’s go to the one on Twenty-Seven.”

  “Coldwater is closer.”

  “Dad, please.”

  “We need to conserve fuel.”

  “It’s Friday night. People from Eastside will be hanging out at the one on Coldwater.”

  “We don’t need to go inside.”

  I tried to sound calm. “What if they recognize the RV?”

  “Ellie, we—”

  “I don’t want to see anybody right now!” My voice was a squeak.

  Dad fell silent, gripping the wheel with both hands. Finally, he said, “All right.” It was almost a whisper.

  When we reached State Route 27, Dad turned south, but it didn’t ease the tension in my chest. I looked over at him. His grip on the wheel was white knuckled.

  “How bad is it?” I asked.

  “Well. The cards are maxed, obviously.”

  I blew out a breath.

  “But we still have cash.”

  “How much?”

  He hesitated. “About four hundred dollars.”

  “But that’s—I thought the gig tonight was supposed to pay eight?”

  Dad stiffened. “They called back after the initial booking, and I . . . I had to renegotiate.”

  “You can’t just do that!” I said, my fists tight and white. “It lowers our quote for the next one!”

  “No one will find out.”

  “Yes, they will!” I was shouting at him now. “People talk! On Facebook, on Yelp. Once you drop your price, it’s impossible to raise it again. We’ve talked about this!” Dad said nothing, only adjusted his grip on the wheel and stared out into the storm. “I was going to use some of that eight hundred for Facebook ads! I haven’t placed one in months. We’re . . .” My voice had risen to a shriek. “How will we get gas? How will we buy groceries? You just—”

  “We still have half a tank of diesel.”

  I wanted to cry. To scream. Instead, I closed my eyes and put my head back against the headrest. A heaviness threatened to settle in on me. I sank into the seat and let it.

  “An opportunity will present itself,” Dad said. “It always does.”

  I didn’t respond, just turned to stare out at the flat Indiana darkness and tried to hope he was right.

  After a long time, Dad cleared his throat. It was one of his tells; it meant he was about to broach a tender subject.

  “Are you feeling all right, Ellie?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It’s just . . . Your moods have been a bit darker lately. I wonder—”

  “Forgive me if I’m having trouble adjusting to being homeless.”

  The words flew out like spit, and I couldn’t take them back. Dad was silent for the rest of the ride.

  By the time we parked in the far corner of the Walmart lot, the rain had stopped. Dad cut the engine and hit the switch to expand the RV’s pop-outs. I watched as our narrow living room widened by two feet on each side. Once, the extra space had felt luxurious. Now it just felt like a bigger coffin. While I went in back to wash my face, Dad folded out the couch and closed his eyes.

  I lay awake in bed, staring at the sagging fabric on the ceiling, the chorus of that goddamned Rihanna song playing over and over in my head. Sometimes it was like Dad was the child and I was the parent. Except I didn’t get to make any decisions; I just had to bear the consequences. He danced through life, chasing his dream of performing, never realizing the cost to the people around him. The cost to me.

  I turned over and buried my face in the pillow. He’d said my moods had been darker lately, and he was right. Was I being too hard on him? Maybe the encroaching gray was distorting my perceptions, making everything seem worse than it was. But we’d just been evicted; how could it get worse than that?

  Still, my conscience nagged. I hated this feeling, hated never knowing if I was right or if I was just being crazy. Maybe I shouldn’t have snapped at Dad. Maybe he had just been trying to protect me from bad news. And if he’d told me we were behind on rent, was there anything I could’ve done about it? I didn’t know. But we only had each other now, and we couldn’t afford to fight.

  Reluctantly, I got up and opened the accordion door, thinking I might apologize, or at least try to make peace—but the old man was passed out, snoring like a lumberjack. I guessed I couldn’t have hurt his feelings too badly.

  The rain had stopped, so I pulled on a hoodie, snagged two hundred-dollar bills from the cash box under the driver’s seat, and stepped out into the cool October air.

  I had practically grown up at Walmart. Most locations allowed RV parking, and I’d spent the night in hundreds of them from San Diego to Hartford. At night, every Walmart parking lot looked the same—an asphalt sea illuminated by moth-riddled, flickering arc sodiums mounted high on corroding masts. And, as you neared the building, the windows glowed with an eerie fluorescence like something from a horror movie. On this particular occasion, the effect was amplified by the garish display of Halloween decorations in the window: fake spiderwebs, black and orange streamers, a toilet-paper mummy.

  I grabbed a cart and headed for the canned-food aisle. Tuna. Peas. Fruit cocktail. I wanted to load up on fresh fruit and leafy greens for Dad’s heart—but they wouldn’t keep, and I wasn’t sure how long this food would have to last. On the pet aisle, I threw in a bag of birdseed for the doves. I hit the dry-goods section and grabbed a box of spaghetti, two pounds of coffee, and a canister of generic instant oats. I found the magical bread Liam had used for the ultimate PB&J, but it cost six dollars a loaf, so I settled for the st
ore brand instead. I did splurge on fancy peanut butter, though. I would probably regret it.

  On my way toward the front of the store, I passed a guy wearing three sweatshirts and a filthy beanie. He reeked like old shoes and muttered to himself as he shuffled down the aisle. Walmart at two a.m. contains no moms with infants or dads towing toddlers; it’s mostly the poor and the homeless, and I guessed I belonged with them. The realization weighed on me like a lead X-ray vest. Would I ever have a normal life? Shop at a normal store with a credit card and buy whatever I wanted?

  I found the prepaid phone kiosk and reached for a ten-dollar card but hesitated with my hand halfway to the rack. My account was completely empty—the prank caller had burned up my last minute. Also, we had zero bookings on the horizon, so I didn’t know when we’d get paid again. Should I spend the money now, or save it for food and diesel? I considered: recharge cards had to be activated at the register, so they couldn’t be stolen, whereas gas and groceries could.

  As I stood at the kiosk trying to decide, an overly cheerful man’s voice came over the PA:

  “Got the sniffles? Stop by our twenty-four-hour pharmacy today and pick up some homeopathic remedies, or get your prescription filled!”

  I left the phone card hanging on its rack and headed toward the back of the store.

  The graveyard-shift pharmacist blinked down at me. “Date of birth?”

  “February twenty-second, 2004.”

  “Prescription number and insurance card?”

  I slid my card across the counter. The Rx number was written on the back so I wouldn’t forget it.

  She typed at the register, frowned. “Just a moment.” She went into the back and came out two minutes later with a bearded man whose name tag read: Greg Fredericks, Assistant Manager. He typed, glanced at the screen, looked up.

  “I’m sorry, miss. It looks like your coverage has lapsed.”

  The weight that had settled on me seemed to multiply, hanging on me like a backpack full of gravel. Dad hadn’t paid our insurance bill. Of course he hadn’t. What would he have paid it with? And how long had it been since he got a refill on his heart pills?

  The assistant manager gave me a patronizing smile. “Do you still want your prescription?”

  I put my hand in my pocket and felt the two hundred-dollar bills. “How much is it?”

  He pushed more keys. “Without insurance, it comes to . . . one hundred ninety-seven dollars and eighty-eight cents.”

  I closed my eyes and held in a scream. Food, gas, phone, meds: pick two.

  “That’s okay,” I said, backing away from the counter.

  “Would you like to apply for a Walmart Visa?” the assistant manager asked. The pharmacist shot him a look.

  “No, that’s okay. It’s okay.”

  Stop saying okay. Ella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh . . .

  My face went numb as I pushed the cart toward the register.

  There was another rack of prepaid phone cards at the checkout line. Fuck it. I grabbed a hundred-dollar card and tossed it onto the conveyor.

  CHAPTER 4

  I COULDN’T STAND THE THOUGHT of returning to my shoe-box bedroom in the RV, so I stepped out of Walmart and into the cool Indiana autumn. I punched the recharge code into my phone, and once the credits were activated, text messages started coming in.

  The first was from the prankster in Vegas: Disconnected. Call back.

  Sure, jerkoff. I’ll get right on that. The next was from Ripley: Sorry I missed you. Drama ensued. Call when you get this.

  Ripley and I had met on Bloglr sophomore year after a week of constantly reposting each other’s Firefly GIFs. Our short DM exchange quickly morphed into daily texts. Ripley had become my best friend—but we’d never met face-to-face. We’d never even seen pictures of each other; we had made a sacred vow not to pollute the purity of our online friendship with anything tangible from the real world. All we had were words and voices—and I liked it that way.

  Three and a half semesters of public high school had taught me just how bad I was at keeping friends in real life. During my sophomore year, I’d gotten close with a couple of girls, Hailey and Emma, when our biology teacher assigned us to the same group. They were nice to me at first, inviting me over for study groups, movie nights, and finally to a spring break pool party when Emma’s parents went out of town.

  It was the last high school party I ever attended.

  I didn’t black out; I remembered everything. But as I watched the videos that circulated the next day, the experience seemed distant. Hazy. As if I’d been drunk or high when it happened, even though I’d been stone-cold sober the whole night.

  It’s nighttime in Emma’s parents’ backyard. I’m sitting in some guy’s lap on a pool chair, making out with him hard.

  It’s later. I’m standing by the pool, talking to a fully dressed Hailey—and then, unprovoked, I push her into the pool, sending her red Solo cup flying. I laugh wildly as she paddles to the far edge and gets out, her clothes dripping. She looks miserable and furious, but I’m doubled over like it’s the most hilarious thing ever. I’m the only one laughing.

  Now it’s later and I’m with a different guy, straddling him on a white leather sofa. My shirt is off. A few people stand around, watching and whispering and taking pictures with their phones. I don’t seem to care.

  After the party, I went home and stayed up all night doing our bio project, start to finish, by myself. We got an A.

  Hailey and Emma were cold to me at school that Monday. People shot me sideways glances and whispered as they passed me in the hall. Some guy I didn’t even know grabbed my ass and asked for my number. I gaped at him as he walked away, laughing with his friends. Over the span of one weekend, I had ceased to be an unknown theater nerd and become “that crazy chick” instead.

  Two weeks later, I dropped out of Eastside and started looking for online programs.

  It took months of therapy and reading before I understood that I’d had my first episode of hypomania. It was supposed to be the “upside” of the bipolar experience—but it was worse than any depression I’d ever suffered.

  I was terrified that Liam had seen those videos. He’d been a senior on his way out—but he was popular, and the link had more or less gone viral at Eastside. If he had seen them, though, why had he bothered to talk to me tonight? Why had he asked me out?

  I hated wondering, hated worrying who knew what about me. It was why I’d left Eastside, and it was why the idea of a phone-and-text-only friendship with Ripley appealed to me on a deep level. From a distance, I could filter out the worst parts of myself.

  I tapped Ripley’s number, and it only rang twice before he picked up.

  “She lives!”

  The sound of his voice sent a wave of relief through me; I hadn’t realized how stressed out I had been. Or how lonely.

  “Hello? Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry. It’s been a long day.”

  “Tell me about it.” He paused. “No, seriously. Actually tell me about it. Distract me from the napalm-and-raccoon-hair trash fire that is my life.”

  I laughed. “Well, to start with, we got evicted from our trailer park.”

  Ripley gasped. “Are you being serious right now? Or is this some weird Indiana country music reference I’m not getting?”

  I snorted. “Serious. Apparently, we haven’t paid rent for like three months.”

  “Holy shit. Where are you?”

  “Walmart.”

  “At ten thirty at night?”

  I looked at my phone. “It’s one thirty-two a.m. where I . . . Oh, shit!”

  “What is it?”

  “I forgot my US History test. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “I thought your school was flexible about tests. You can’t just take it now?”

  I slapped my hand against my forehead. “I can—it’s just . . . I lose a full a letter grade. And I have to maintain a three point oh to get into Harrison.”

 
; “Right. Nursing school. Shit. What are you going to do?”

  I wound a lock of hair around my finger and yanked. “I don’t know.”

  I heard a scraping noise on the other end of the line, then some ominous thumps. Ripley liked to talk to me from the privacy of the little roof outside his window; I assumed he was crawling out there right now. I felt a sudden rush of envy that Ripley lived in an actual house.

  “What about you?” I said, forcing myself to reengage. “What’s your existential crisis?”

  “Oh, that. Dad and Heather had an epic fight, but it’s over now.”

  I closed my eyes and yanked on my hair again. I was the worst kind of friend: always needy but never available when it was my turn to listen.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.” My voice sounded small.

  “Don’t even. Your timing is perfect. The aftermath was worse than the fight; they made up loudly for like two hours. I think I’m permanently traumatized.”

  I laughed. “That’s nasty.”

  “Oh, and I caught Jude vaping. Only twelve, and already a delinquent. So yeah, things are basically falling apart here. At least my mother hasn’t turned up. That would fuck everything worse.”

  “Yeah.” I tried to sound sympathetic, but a splinter of resentment stuck in my throat. If my mom were still alive, I’d want to see her, no matter what.

  “But back to you. What are you going to do about money?”

  I leaned back against the stucco exterior of the Walmart. “I don’t know. We’ve never been this hard up before.”

  Immediately, I wanted to take it back. I didn’t think I could look myself in the mirror if I heard a single note of pity in Ripley’s voice. He was an optimist, a problem solver. That’s what I loved about him.