Breathless

by Jessica Warman

  “I tried to call you,” he says.

  I nod. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m so busy there, I leave really early for school and you didn’t leave a number or anything, so”—I pause—“well, you didn’t call back. If I’d been there when you called, I would have talked to you.”

  He shrugs. “It wasn’t important or nothing. Just wanted to, you know, shoot the shit. See if you were homesick.” He tries to smile. His teeth are yellow and more crooked than ever, the braces gone. “A big brother has to look out for his little sister, you know?”

  I nod. “Sure. It’s okay.” We stare at each other in the smoke-filled room, the music coming from his headphones like a fly in the room that’s driving me nuts. It doesn’t seem to bother him.

  “Hey”—he’s excited all of a sudden—“didja see what I did to the picture down there?”

  I nod, forcing a smile. “Great work.”

  “Mom just had it reframed and everything.” He claps his hands, downright giddy. “She’s gonna cry. Oh God, I can’t wait.”

  “She just had it reframed?”

  “Yes.” He elbows me, fist to his mouth, snickering. “The Ghost is gonna soil his tightie-whities, Katie.”

  Watching him, I feel the annoyance spread into a mixture of anger and pity. It’s an odd feeling to have. I feel the same way about my parents as Will does, for sure. But he’s twenty-one. He’s a grown-up. And our mom cries all the time already. Why would he want to make things worse?

  “Katie, you know what we should do? We should give him cloven hooves, too. Damn, I should have thought of that before. Hey—what the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “I missed you,” I say. My eyes are filling with tears. He looks away. “I was homesick for you.” I reach for his bad arm but he pulls away quick, like a reflex. I wonder if it still hurts.

  “Shut up, Katie.”

  “I was worried about you.”

  “You shoulda been there when I called. What were you doing—out riding ponies? At a polo match? Out playing tennis with someone named Bunny?”

  “I couldn’t help it, Will.”

  “Okay.” He nods. “Okay, then, I’ll call you more. Okay?”

  But that’s not what I want, either.

  His voice is weaker than I’ve ever heard it. He says, “Don’t be homesick, all right? No good home to be sick for, that’s what I say.”

  Even though I sleep late, Will always sleeps later. It’s not unusual for him to sleep eighteen hours a day. He’s been up at least once already, and is now asleep in the basement, the TV blaring so loud that I can’t imagine how it’s not keeping him awake. His whole body is covered, right up to his chin, in a thick white comforter. I stand close to him for a moment, listening to the sound of his breath, before I go back upstairs.

  On the kitchen counter, there’s a note from my mom.

  Katie,

  Good morning, sleepyhead! Gone to a watercolor workshop for the day. Empty the dishwasher if you get the chance. Call me when you wake up. No car today—we want to actually see you for once!

  —Mom

  I pick up the phone. There’s only one person I can think to call. Candy Huzak was my friend before I went to Woodsdale, and I know she’ll want to see me. Besides, I’m dying to get out of the house; I don’t know what I’ll say to Will when he wakes up.

  “Katie freakin’ Kitrell!” Candy’s voice has its familiar, impoverished twang. “Hell yeah, come on up! Just give me a while, okay? I’ve gotta do a few things.” She giggles. “Gotta give my girl a proper homecoming, you know?”

  My mom is sloppy, too trusting for her own good. The Ghost would have thought to pocket the car keys on his way out, but my keys are right where I left them the night before, on top of the micro wave, next to a carton of the Ghost’s cigarettes. Not that it matters; I can walk to almost anywhere I’d want to go from here. Hillsburg doesn’t even have a traffic light. Yet they’ve got a historical society that keeps its members busy trying to get government grants for improvement; I know because my parents are devoted members. All that’s happened so far is that the vendors for the annual historical festival have switched to deep-frying in vegetable oil instead of peanut oil.

  Regardless, it’s cold outside—too cold to walk anywhere without my nose going numb. And I know that my mother won’t be back for hours, that the Ghost is working God knows where—it isn’t like they’ll even know if I take the car. I don’t bother with the dishwasher. When we were younger and our mom would ask us for help around the house, Will and I both used to get a kick out of saying, “That’s okay, Mom. You go ahead and do it.” Eventually we got a house keeper, but I guess she’s not here today.

  I wander around the empty house for a while in my pj’s, tinkle a few notes on the piano in the living room, go nose-to-nose in a staring contest with my parents’ cat, Priscilla, and smoke a few cigarettes while catching the end of the midday news. I go up to my room and get back into bed for an hour or so and spend the whole time debating whether or not to fall back asleep. I reread my favorite scenes from Wuthering Heights, especially the part where Heathcliff bribes the gravedigger to let him sleep on Catherine’s grave. I go into Will’s empty room and poke around for anything interesting, listening to a Phish bootleg with headphones, paging through a copy of Playboy from his closet.

  I’ve been taking a gender studies class at Woodsdale; students are encouraged to take it every year. Our professor is a man, a great-looking guy in his early thirties, on loan from the local university. They do that sometimes—recruit local college professors to teach advanced courses.

  During our last class before winter break, we had a long discussion about what he called the “normalization” of pornography in our society. This professor—his name is Dr. George, but he tells everyone to call him Evan—is really cute, married, and is deeply concerned with our self-esteem. All the girls have crushes on him.

  “Pornography,” he told us, “is a way of anesthetizing ourselves to our own humanity. I’m sure all you girls have been told by many of the boys you know—maybe even by many of the adults you know—that it’s something men look at out of necessity. That it isn’t a big deal. Am I right?”

  Sitting in class that day, he took a moment to look each of us in the eye as he spoke. “I’m here to tell you, as a heterosexual man, that it isn’t something you have to tolerate. It isn’t something a man can’t live without. You girls all deserve to be treated in a way that makes you feel valued and comfortable. Please, girls”—he seemed almost ready to cry for us—“please don’t let anybody tell you differently.”

  I bury the magazine under the newspaper in the kitchen compactor and replace its spot in the closet with my dog-eared copy of The Yellow Wallpaper, then head off to the shower. It’s two thirty in the afternoon, and I’m not even dressed yet.

  When I knock on Candy Huzak’s door, she’s holding her two-year-old daughter in one arm and smoking a Kool cigarette with her free hand. Her apartment, which she shares with her older sister, is low-income housing. It’s the kind of place where you don’t even want to sit down on the furniture because you start thinking about what kind of fluids might be dried onto the upholstery. I’ve known Candy since elementary school. We were in the gifted class together. It’s funny, you never stop along the way to think about who will end up pregnant at fifteen or dropping out of college or dying in the river, like Greg Phillips did last summer.

  Candy is a single mom now, and she thinks she’s got it made with her own place. The rooms in the apartment are sectioned off with piles of dirty clothes, baby toys, and clusters of empty beer bottles whose labels she’s peeled away as she’s watched her afternoon soaps.

  We plant Holly, her daughter, on the carpet in front of The Little Mermaid while we talk and go through a stack of old Cosmopolitan magazines, ripping out the perfume samples so we can tape them up around her bathroom mirror later on. I feel embarrassed just thinking about what my friends from Woodsdale would say if they could see me.
I don’t think there’s an actual book in this whole apartment.

  I sink back into the sofa, imagining what kinds of microorganisms are leaping onto my body while Candy gives me the update on Hillsburg’s happenings.

  “You know Kelly Lang—she’s pregnant with her second kid. And Keith Mitchell is supposed to be the dad, even though she married my cousin Tim right after high school. You know Tim? He graduated from the Triangle Tech in Grotto Falls last year?” She digs through her purse for a pack of cigarettes, which she opens and holds toward my face. The smell of marijuana wafts between us. “See that? I got this dope from Tim a few months ago, right?” She lights up a Kool. Her fingernails are all different lengths, ridged and jagged and covered in dull, chipped polish. I look at her and can’t understand for a second what she’s thinking—I can’t believe she’s smoking around her child. I would never tell any of my friends at Woodsdale that the Ghost still smokes in our house. It’s just so . . . second-class.

  Even the air in her apartment feels dirty. I don’t want to get high around her daughter; the idea makes me feel sick to my stomach. So I’m relieved when Candy says, “We can smoke up after Holly goes down for her nap.”

  Even so, there’s just no way. “I can’t smoke anymore,” I lie. “They give us random drug tests at school.”

  “No kidding? God, that sucks. Katie, we all told you you shoulda failed that admissions test. Even my mom told you so.”

  The silence in the room would be more than awkward if Candy and I hadn’t known each other for so long. But it stretches on, all the way to the end of The Little Mermaid. I can’t stop noticing all the patches of filth in her apartment: the kitchen sink overflowing with dirty dishes; the toilet in dire need of a good scrubbing; even the television screen is covered in sticky fingerprints so noticeable that they almost make it hard to see what’s happening on the TV.

  Remembering my mom’s note from this morning, I ask, “Hey, can I use your phone?”

  My mother’s voice sounds far away, distracted, like she always is when she’s painting. “Candy and I are going to do some Christmas shopping today. What do you want for Christmas, Mom?”

  “Do you want to make cookies with me when I get home tonight?” she asks. She doesn’t remember that I wasn’t supposed to take the car.

  “What time?”

  “Around eight.”

  Christmas cookies with my mom? What’s next, mother-daughter basket weaving classes?

  But her voice is so hopeful, so genuine and distant, that I feel terrible disappointing her. “Whatever. Sure, that sounds great.”

  When I get back to the living room, I notice it’s already dark outside. I wish I hadn’t even come here—the whole day is wasted. I never realized what trash Candy was until I got to Woodsdale. I can’t imagine Lindsey or Estella, or even Mazzie, ever meeting her, and what they might think of me if they did.

  Smoking a cigarette, she says, “Someday I’ll be sitting in my high-rise office, drinking champagne with my feet up while my assistant does all my work for me.”

  All I want to do is leave. But I don’t want to go home, either. I just want to go back to school.

  “What do you want to do?” I ask her.

  She shrugs. “I’m thinking about becoming one of them, uh, radiologers?”

  “You mean a radiologist?”

  “Uh-huh.” She doesn’t even have a high school education. “One of them people who takes X-rays at hospitals.”

  “Oh. You mean an X-ray technician?”

  She shakes her head. “No, I mean a radiologer—radiologist—whatever you called it. You know how much money they make?”

  I shake my head. “How much?”

  “They make, like, thirty grand! Can you imagine making that much money? I’m telling you, once I get back to school, it’s all gonna happen for me, Katie.”

  Sure it is, I think. You’re really on your way.

  At ten o’clock that night, I let the car idle in the driveway. Before I go anywhere, I sit with my eyes closed for a few moments, taking deep breaths, trying to brace myself for whatever’s waiting for me inside. It’s always a crapshoot with my mom. There’s a chance she doesn’t even remember the plans we made. And then, of course, there’s Will. Who knows what kind of mood he’s in? He might be furious that I went to see Candy instead of spending time with him, or he might have slept all day.

  Our house is always too dark at night because my parents refuse to use overhead lights. The Ghost tells me it reminds him of how poor he was as a kid, growing up in railroad housing with bare lightbulbs glaring overhead. In the evenings, my parents rely on candles and table lamps. It makes the whole place feel kind of haunted.

  My mother stands before the blender in the kitchen, holding a margarita glass in one hand, a half-empty bottle of tequila in the other. I think it’s the good stuff—at least, it’s the same kind that Lindsey’s parents buy. She’s probably drunk. The rest of the house is dark, almost silent except for light, faraway sounds of the cat pattering around the foyer.

  “Hey, Mom. I’m so sorry I’m late.”

  I’m used to seeing her drunk, but I can’t help but picture her waiting for me in the kitchen, measuring and sorting the ingredients for cookies, then getting all sad as the evening dragged on and I didn’t show, eventually tapping the bar for company and getting started on the cookies by herself.

  I feel dizzy. It occurs to me that I haven’t eaten all day.

  I look around the kitchen. “Oh—did you start baking cookies already?” I pretend to be surprised, as though our plans were for, like, 9:55 p.m.

  My mother sniffles a little bit, shaking her head, staring at me. “Fuck you,” she mouths, without making any sound.

  Under normal circumstances, my parents do not swear. The rare times when I’ve heard them say “fuck” have been burned into my brain forever. And my own mother—my mommy, for godsakes—does not say “fuck you” to her daughter. The words feel like a punch in the stomach. Worse than that, even, because I know I deserve it.

  I take a step backward. “What did you say, Mom?”

  But she only stares at the floor. And then she says out loud, without looking up, “Go to bed, Katie.” She turns her back to me and resumes folding flour into the dough, sipping her margarita.

  I look around, awestruck. The kitchen is all marble countertops and track lighting and sleek appliances. When I was younger, before my parents had any money, it was dark and dingy. Half the time, the stove didn’t even work. Still, my mom and Will and I would spend entire afternoons in here, pureeing fruit to make homemade sugar-free fruit leather in the dehydrator. Or else we’d bake loaves of wheat bread, turning it into a little science experiment as we watched the yeast bubble to life in water.

  But that was when we first moved to Hillsburg, before people had a chance to get to know us, to decide they hated us. Will and I had to go to school and listen to everyone call us rich kids all the time. For a while, it was okay—but then the teachers started doing it, too.

  Will was smart—he is smart. He used to get good grades, so good that he skipped the fourth grade, and they were thinking about letting him skip fifth, too. One day, in eighth grade, he got caught playing with a Game Boy during class. Back then nobody else had them yet, at least not in Hillsburg. The teacher took it away and let everyone else in the class play with it. “Since you’re so rich, your parents can just buy you a new one,” he said.

  But that wasn’t all. For a few months after that, from the beginning of the year until Christmas break, the teacher put Will’s desk in the corner of the room, facing a wall, away from everyone else. When my parents found out—at their parent-teacher conference, just before the holidays—the Ghost went apeshit. I can still remember him on the phone with the superintendent. That was one time I heard him swear a lot.

  I don’t fit in my bed anymore. When I sprawl out on my back my arms and legs hang off the sides. It’s hot in here. I get up and strip down to my underpants, hear voi
ces downstairs, winding through the rooms and up the stairwell. The Ghost must be home. He and my mother speak in low voices to each other. I picture them in the kitchen, him hunched over and her on tiptoes to kiss. He probably won’t even come upstairs to say hello to me. They’ll stay down there all night and drink wine together. I don’t know why they even bothered having kids, if they’re so obsessed with each other.

  The shelves in my bedroom are filled with all the books I’ve ever read and rows of swimming trophies and ribbons and medals. Nothing has been touched since I left for school. Above my little bed is an oil painting my mother did of me as an infant, sleeping on my back. I know she loves the way it hangs above me while I sleep in real life: Katie sleeping above Katie sleeping. Sometimes when I’m home, I wake up to find her standing in my doorway, looking at us. I wonder if she does the same thing when I’m not here. Probably not—there used to be a similar painting of Will above his bed, but it disappeared the first time he left.

  As I’m lying in bed, the phone rings. It’s past eleven; most likely it’s some kind of psychiatric emergency for the Ghost.

  A few seconds after it stops ringing, my dad taps lightly at my door, holding out the phone. “It’s for you,” he says.

  “Am I calling too late?” Drew’s voice is almost a whisper. My stomach does a somersault.

  “How did you get my number?”

  “I stopped by your dorm earlier today, since you mentioned you might be staying for Christmas. Mrs. Martin gave it to me.”

  I don’t want to risk anyone in the house overhearing my conversation, so I throw on my terry-cloth robe and go outside to the backyard. I stand in ankle-deep snow, wearing only my sneakers, while we talk.

  “I was going to see if you wanted to come to Christmas Eve mass with me if you were still on campus,” he says.

  The whole God situation with Drew makes me more than a little uncomfortable. He’s just so genuine about the whole thing. I’ve been to church with him a couple of times, and it’s starting to irritate me that Drew—who seems to have had an easy life with lots of friends and love and nothing to make him question whether or not there’s a God—is so devout. Will always says that agnosticism is the only true religion, and most of the time I think he’s right. After everything I’ve seen from this town and the people in it, after how they treated Will and our family, and what happened to Will because of them, I can’t imagine feeling anything but doubt about something as big as God. It’s a great idea, and I hope it’s all true . . . but that’s the best I can do for now.