by Sara Shepard
‘I never liked this game,’ Steven said, but fired it up anyway. The gorilla pitched barrels down a plank, and Steven’s character, a Mario Brother, jumped them.
‘Sad!’ Stella sang when the barrel tripped up Mario. Then she looked at my father. ‘You know who I saw the other day? Georgette Mulvaney. That Kay girl’s mother.’
My father’s chin jutted up. I watched his eyes carefully.
‘I’m amazed they still live here.’ Stella gazed out the window. The wind was pushing the tire swing back and forth. ‘I thought they moved. I invited her to the funeral.’
My father stiffened. ‘What did she say? Is she going to come?’
His face was so splotchy. That name was so familiar, all the years he’d talked about the accident. But I’d always suspected-maybe wished-that he made the accident up, that it had never happened.
‘I doubt it,’ Stella answered. ‘She said she had something to do, I don’t know. She thanked me for inviting her, though. And she gives her condolences.’
‘Oh.’ My father let out a breath. He began running his fingers over the scar on his palm.
‘Does the guy still live here?’ I asked, searching for the boyfriend’s name. ‘Mark? The one who was in the accident, too?’
‘He lives in Colorado,’ my father said quickly. ‘Moved out there years ago.’ His face had tightened so drastically that I didn’t dare ask anything else.
My father shuffled his feet on the shabby burgundy carpet. Mario bleeped as he jumped the barrels on the screen. My father looked around and scratched his head. ‘I don’t get it. Did someone else use this room? I have no clue where this TV and the video games could have come from.’
‘Oh, Ruth bought them for you,’ Stella said. ‘She bought you all kinds of stuff. I guess she always thought you’d bring Summer and Steven here more often. She bought tons of crap from that space movie, too. It’s all in boxes in the closet. What was the name of one of the characters in that movie? The Nookie?’
‘The Wookie?’ Steven fished, after a pause. ‘You mean Star Wars? Chewbacca?’
Stella frowned, annoyed. ‘No. That’s not right.’
When Mario died, Steven turned off the game, bored. He wandered into a bedroom down the hall, and my father and Stella returned downstairs. But I stayed in the old room, looking at the posters on the wall. There was one of a Playboy girl, her bathing suit straps sliding down her arms. I couldn’t imagine my father looking at girls in that way, let alone taking the time to buy the poster and hang it up, neatly pushing tacks into each corner.
Slowly, I opened the drawers of his desk. In the very bottom drawer, I found a photo of a guy with shaggy, longish hair and sideburns. He wore a football jersey and held up a paper cup to toast. Next to him was a small, pale, freckled girl with a guarded, uncertain smile. Her long blonde hair was parted in the center. They stood in front of the eye-shaped Dairy Queen sign. I turned the picture over. Mark Jeffords and Kay Mulvaney, (secret!) engagement, 1970. The handwriting was neat and orderly, definitely not my father’s crabbed, crazy scrawl.
I looked at their faces for a long time, especially at her, dead now. Then I tucked the photo back under a bunch of papers and shut the drawer tight. ‘This place is really creepy,’ I whispered aloud, then went to find Steven to see if he thought so too.
Steven was in the next bedroom, which was done up in green and gold checkered wallpaper. I found him on the floor next to the bureau, his knees bent, his hands behind his head. His cheeks inflated then deflated, and he breathed out in puffs.
My chest knotted. Steven noticed me. His face reddened.
‘Why are you doing sit-ups?’ I burst out.
‘I’m in training.’ He lowered down.
‘In training for what?’
‘The Marines.’
I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Like from your GI Joe days?’
Steven’s forehead crinkled and his mouth became very small. After one more sit-up, he stood and swished by me for the bathroom, not answering my question.
6
My father and Stella sat around the kitchen table and drank cans of beer. Steven closed his bedroom door so I couldn’t barge in again. Samantha was smoking on the front porch-Stella just let her smoke-and was making a face that indicated she didn’t want me to come near her.
The sky was a dirt-brown color, as if it was about to storm. There were no shadows on the road, and the wind blew the leaves on the trees upside-down. I ran my hands over the rusty tin mailbox of my father’s old neighbors. The name stenciled on the box said Elkerson. I’d seen that name all over Cobalt on our drive in-Elkerson’s Grocery, Elkerson’s Auto Tag & Notary, Elkerson’s EZ Car Wash. In an ad circular on the kitchen counter was an ad for an Elkerson Used Auto dealership, specializing in Dodges and Fords.
The Elkerson house was as slumped and beaten-down as my grandmother’s. In the front yard was a large, plastic deer.
A smaller deer was next to it, tipped over. There was a rolledup, waterlogged bunch of newsprint on the gravel driveway. It wasn’t a real newspaper, though, just a fat booklet of coupons. On the front page was an ad for Unimart, the convenience store we’d passed on the way in; there was a two-for-one deal on packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes. I considered going down there and buying Claire Ryan a pack; she and her new friends smoked Lucky Strikes by the carton.
After our argument in Prospect Park the December my mom left, Claire and I didn’t speak for a while. In the months following, Claire lost some of the weight, settling into an apple shape: bigger boobs, fleshy stomach, flat ass and skinny legs. She befriended a band of outcasts and started dressing in fishnet stockings, short skirts, clunky boots and ripped t-shirts whose obscure band names stretched precariously across her chest. After some time passed, Claire began waving to me in the halls again. By the following school year, she was inviting me out with her and the rest of the freaks. All her new friends hung out at the Galaxy Diner, a greasy spoon on Seventh Avenue, and every time I trailed into the diner behind them I felt unoriginal and out of place. It wasn’t that I wanted to hang out with them, I just didn’t have anything better to do. Long gone were the days of thinking who I was friends with made any difference. It had been ages since I believed my mother was waiting around every corner, monitoring my every move.
Claire caught up on all the classes she’d failed when she was in France, taking courses over the summer, and graduated with her original grade a few weeks ago. She’d gotten into painting and was going to a summer art program in San Francisco to build up her portfolio. ‘I don’t like that it’s for the whole summer,’ she told me the last time I hung out with her. We were sitting in a booth at the diner, waiting for her other friends to show up. ‘So don’t go,’ I answered impassively, gently pushing the tines of a fork into my palm. ‘Will you write me?’ she asked. I laughed and told her that she should write to the corpses she was friends with instead. ‘They’re not the types who write letters.’ Claire lowered her eyes and tugged at her oversized t-shirt. It bore the name of one of the strange, toneless bands she now loved, Fugazi, and had the words you are not what you own printed in small, subliminal letters on the back.
Dear Claire, I don’t want to write you. I already told you I don’t want to talk to you. You should just leave me alone.
A slightly larger house loomed at the end of the road, a blue light flickering in the front window. As I got closer, I realized it was light from a television. I wasn’t sure why, but it comforted me. The main television in my now-dead grandmother’s house didn’t work, and I hadn’t braved the 1970s model in my father’s old room.
I stepped closer, gazing at the flickering screen. It was the OJ Simpson thing, yet another recap of the slow-speed car chase that had occurred a few days before. My father and I had sat slack-jawed on the couch, watching the whole thing unfold. I hadn’t been clear on why they were chasing OJ, and I still wasn’t, not exactly. I felt sorry for him, though, because I’d found him funny in the Naked Gun movie
s.
I had been staring at the screen for a good half-minute before I realized there was a boy on a brown, saggy couch. His posture was so bad that his butt was nearly off the cushions, and his feet stretched almost to the TV stand. He looked about my age, with messy dark hair and an oversized nose, in a baggy t-shirt and shorts.
Surprised, I took a step back, flattening an empty Coke can. The sound made the boy look up. His forehead creased.
I took another step back. He walked to the door and peered outside, scowling. The humid air felt toxic. He gaped at me, seemingly furious. ‘How many times are you guys going to do this?’ His voice was sharp, impatient.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘He’s not your enemy. It’s a completely different religion.’
I blinked rapidly. ‘What?’
The boy paused, moving his jaw from side to side. ‘Alan sent you, right?’ His tone was more uncertain.
‘Alan?’ My voice was high-pitched, weak. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ll go. I’m sorry.’
‘Wait.’ His expression softened. ‘If you’re not with Alan, who are you?’
‘I’m…’ I paused. ‘I’m Summer.’
‘Summer…?’
‘…Davis.’
He shifted his weight to one leg. ‘You don’t know Alan?’
‘No. I’m not from here.’
‘Davis.’ He pointed to my grandmother’s house. ‘You related to those old ladies down there?’
‘Yes. I guess.’
‘The woman that owns the house died.’
‘I know. She had a stroke.’
When he stepped into the light, I realized how good-looking he was. Not in a conventional way, but pleasant to look at. Sort of elfin, with huge eyes. Very messy hair. Perfect teeth. Very nice hands. I wasn’t sure I’d ever noticed this many details in a boy before. ‘Sorry I yelled at you.’
‘It’s all right,’ I answered.
‘I thought you were someone else.’ A mosquito landed on his arm, but he made no gesture to swat it off. ‘They your relatives?’
‘Yes. I said that.’
‘They’re all right. Who’s your dad?’
‘Um, Richard? Davis?’ I wanted to add that he was in a car crash twenty-four years ago, but instantly realized how absurd that would sound.
He thought for a moment. ‘Don’t know him.’
‘Do you know Kay Mulvaney?’
‘Is that your mom?’
The word mom startled me. ‘No. My mom’s not from here. She’s from…Pennsylvania.’
‘This is Pennsylvania.’
‘I mean Philadelphia.’
He was quiet again. ‘Is her name Karen?’
‘No, Meredith.’
‘Meredith.’ He repeated it to himself with such familiarity that suddenly I wondered if he knew what my mother had done. Wasn’t that the thing about small towns? Didn’t everyone know everything about everyone else?
‘She decided not to come,’ I said loudly. It was a lie I hadn’t told in a while. Honestly, I hadn’t explained it much in any way at all.
He looked at me with understanding. ‘She doesn’t like funerals, huh?’
‘Not really.’
The boy nodded, then glanced back at his television, which was still flickering. ‘So, guilty or not guilty?’
At first, I thought he was talking about my mom. Guilty, I decided. And then, not guilty. Then I realized he meant OJ. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Not guilty.’
He smirked. ‘Me too. But you’re the only white person in America who thinks that.’
It was strange that he said you’re, not we’re. He hadn’t included himself. I looked over his pale skin and dark eyebrows and nice, not-too-full but not-too-thin lips.
The boy held a finger up. ‘Hang on.’ He disappeared back inside the house. In seconds, I heard his footsteps again. A light beamed in my face. ‘Take this.’ He passed me a grayhandled flashlight. ‘You’ll need it. It gets dark on this road. Even during the day. All the trees.’
He was right-it was suddenly dark, as if someone had thrown a curtain over the sky. But with the flashlight, I saw all sorts of things on the walk back: two large eyes of a creature, probably a raccoon, huddling under the pickup truck. A big, spindly stick lying in the middle of the road. Someone had spray-painted Sand Niggers Go Home on a twenty-five mph speed limit sign. Did that word have to be everywhere here? I waved the beam of the flashlight back and forth across the road, then shut it off. Darkness seemed safer.
I thought about my mother. She wouldn’t have wanted to come to the funeral. She would’ve made excuses to get out of it-work, a party, a hair appointment. I used to imagine my mother in crazy places-Antarctica, Morocco, the moon. But lately, I was convinced she was still in New York. She was taking the same subways, seeing the same ridiculous subway ads and traveling around the same weekend trackwork schedules. Maybe she climbed aboard an uptown 2 train as the doors closed, just as I was passing through the turnstile, watching it pull away.
Sometimes I missed her so much I couldn’t sleep. I missed the way the house smelled of cinnamon candles and perfume. I missed how the phone used to ring. I missed how she’d rush into the house with dry cleaning and take-out and shopping bags. But when I tried to think harder about it, I just couldn’t-a buzzing noise in my head took over. For a time, I hung on to the story I’d been telling myself, that my mother was away on a trip and would eventually return, that the chemicals deep inside her would pull her back to us, the very thing Mr Rice told our biology class. That, because of science, whether she liked it or not, she was obligated to return-it was a scientific rule, as unflappable as the laws of thermodynamics and gravity. Mr Rice never wrote back, but I read everything I could about genetics, trying to find evidence for myself. I read about twins who, even when separated, felt pain at the same time. I read about people who had heart transplants and suddenly had a fondness for oysters, something the heart’s old owner loved. Surely this had something to do with DNA, shared or introduced? Our world wasn’t magical, after all-there was always a scientific theory to demystify what at first seemed amazing.
The last time I hung out with Claire Ryan was more than a year and a half after my mother left. When her friends finally arrived at the diner, they started one-upping each other on how much their families were Nazis-something they often did, even though most of their families were fine, intact, usually nothing more than just a little overprotective. I stood up and walked out, not able to handle them that day. Claire followed me to the street and asked what was wrong. I told her to leave me alone. She asked why. I told her I didn’t want to be her friend anymore.
Claire lowered her eyes. For a second, I thought I’d hurt her feelings, which maybe would’ve been for the best. But then I realized she was looking at me with patient sympathy. ‘You have to deal with things some time, Summer,’ she said, touching my arm.
For a moment, standing there on the sidewalk, I flirted with Claire’s advice. I decided to see what dealing would feel like. The world went silent, and the walls inside my head shifted and opened, revealing new passageways. A sob welled up from deep inside of me, as well as a fizzle of something hot and sharp-maybe loss, maybe anger.
I felt both feverish and chilly at the same time, like I’d instantly contracted a disease. I turned away from Claire, saying nothing, and flew home and ran up four flights of stairs, breathing hard. When I flung open the door, there was my father, lying on the couch as usual. His eyebrows lifted when he saw it was me.
‘This is your fault,’ I demanded, out of breath. It had to be his fault-if it wasn’t, it was mine.
His expression wilted. He sat up, the couch pillows tumbling to the floor. ‘What’s my fault?’
‘You drove her away.’ My voice shook nervously-I’d never said anything remotely accusatory to him before. ‘You never went to her Christmas parties. You never bought her jewelry-she had to pick it out herself. She wanted to go on that cruise but you refused. You sa
id you hated boats and organized meal times. You said you didn’t want to eat dinner with other people.’
My father sank into one hip. ‘I didn’t want to go on that cruise because it didn’t include you and Steven.’
‘You did something wrong.’ I pointed at him. ‘You didn’t try hard enough. And now you don’t even care. That’s the worst part-you’re not even looking for her.’
A thin, shaky noise emerged from the back of my father’s throat. I retreated to my bedroom and slammed the door. He was easy to blame because he was there. How could I get angry at my mother? It would be like getting angry at air. I could tear up pictures of her, I could burn the sweaters she’d left behind, but it wouldn’t give me much satisfaction.
But then, a few days later, the snow globe incident happened. So I couldn’t feel angry at him about any of it anymore, obviously. I just couldn’t.
When I returned to my grandmother’s, Samantha was still sitting on the porch. The ashtray next to her brimmed with cigarette butts. ‘Where were you?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. Just taking a walk.’
‘Were you down at Philip’s house?’
‘Who’s Philip?’
She licked her palm, then stubbed out the cigarette. It sizzled. The butt had blood-colored lipstick marks on it. ‘Just this asshole. He doesn’t talk to people. He thinks he’s too good for everyone. Just hangs out with his family. I hear they’re religious freaks.’ She stretched her long, denim legs out and considered me out of the corner of her eye, as cagey as the Smitty dog. ‘How old are you?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘So am I. I had sex this spring. With two guys. How many guys have you slept with?’
I looked away.
Samantha’s laugh was a bitter, horrid snort. ‘You haven’t slept with anyone, right? My first time was with this guy David. He’s twenty-four. Drives an F-150. We used to fuck in it a lot. A big deer stepped out one time when we were doing it. Stared straight at us. It was awesome.’
