He sat cross-legged on the boards. “You really messed him up,” he said. “You broke his nose, and then he broke his arm when he fell.”
“I bet he ratted me out, too.”
“No. He told his parents he just fell. But he told a couple of the guys at school. So now the word is out. So now you're pretty much poison. I don't think anybody's gonna hang out with you now. Not even the guys.”
I was liking people less and less, so I didn't take the news all that hard. “Fine,” I said. “Who needs 'em?” It was kind of better, when you didn't even pretend to have friends. When you just made up your mind not to. It was easier.
We were quiet for a minute, thinking how life gets real dark and heavy all of a sudden, and then you go back and look for that moment when it changed, but it's too late to undo it.
At least, I was thinking that. I don't really know what Snake was thinking.
When I looked up he was staring at me. I could tell he wasn't mad or anything, but something about his face made my stomach feel weird. Just for a minute I thought I sort of liked him, because he looked at me like I was really there. I couldn't think of one other person who looked at me like I was really there.
I looked at his eyes and thought maybe I'd never really noticed how cool they were. Kind of light blue, clear, like ice.
“I'll still hang out with you,” he said.
“But then you won't have any friends, either.”
He looked down at the board floor. Shrugged. “Even so. I'll hang out here if you want.”
“No,” I said. “Don't do that just for me. Just wait. Things'll blow over. I'll be fine on my own.”
He shrugged again. Then he got up and climbed down the ladder and disappeared. He never said anything, not even “bye.”
What his problem was, I didn't know.
After a few weeks alone Zack came to my rescue. He took me for a ride on the back of his motorcycle, probably because he felt sorry for me.
He had on a black leather jacket, and that was cool, but it was the only thing about him that was, the way I had it pegged. Well, okay, his boots were cool. I wanted ones just like them, but I knew Mom would have a fit, because she thought I didn't dress enough like a girl. I mean, who would want to?
Anyway, I wouldn't hold on to Zack, because that's too creepy. It's not like I was his girlfriend or anything. I held that strap that goes across the seat, but there was nothing behind me to lean on, and when he put on the gas, I felt like I was going to blow right off the back.
And boy, could he put on the gas.
Once I got a peek at the speedometer and we were doing eighty-five. Just at that moment I think I might have understood what Mom saw in Zack. What Zack saw in Mom, now that's another story altogether.
He took me out the old reservoir road, and the leaves on the pavement did this little whoosh thing as we came by, kind of turned a spiral and ran away. When we came around curves the bike leaned over until I thought our knees would scrape the pavement. At first I was afraid to lean with him, because I thought the bike would dump right over, but it didn't, and I started to get into it. Scary, but cool.
Just for a minute I was ashamed of myself for feeling good. I'd been so careful not to lately. But then I decided Bill wouldn't mind.
I got to watch black and white cows hanging out in front yards and barns that looked like a good wind would take them down. Old combines and tractors rusting right where they had broken, and avocado trees, and persimmon trees, and the fence posts seemed to rush by like they were under their own steam.
Not that I hadn't seen all this before, but these things don't really come through the car window. Like that old saying about how things suffer in the translation.
All of a sudden I had this thought about perspective. But I'm not sure how to say it so it makes sense. Like, what if there was a farmer in the field and I could talk to him somehow, like by cell phone. And I said the fence posts were racing by and he said no, they were standing still. Wouldn't that be a stupid thing to argue about? But we do that all the time, argue with each other about what things are or what we think we see, and maybe that's the problem all along. Like we're not standing in the same place, or at least we're not moving at the same speed, so maybe it's all about perspective. I'm probably not explaining it right at all. I just decided that life was like a farmer standing in a field and a kid racing down the road on a Kawasaki, arguing about whether the fence posts are rushing by or standing still. Each thinking the other is crazy or blind or both, neither willing to give up until the other sees the light.
We got off by the reservoir, which was good, because my butt hurt. I wouldn't have said so. By that time I was thinking this Zack was a pretty cool guy, but then he took off his helmet and it was back to geek city. What do you expect of a guy who just got kicked out of the Air Force? I don't know what he did wrong, but it sure wasn't refusing to cut his hair. It was, like, a quarter-inch long, with little ridges where the helmet had squashed it down, and his face was sort of shiny. If he hadn't been six foot four, he wouldn't have looked much older than me.
Actually, I think he was only about ten years older than me, which made him about the same age as Kiki. That was the age of the three kids in our family: twenty-three, thirteen, and three. Mom used to say, “Yeah, well, once every ten years whether I need one or not.” Everybody thought that was funny. Except me.
Zack lit a cigarette.
I said, “Hey, don't I get one?” Richie used to let me have one of his cigarettes now and then. Back when I thought we were friends. I didn't expect Zack to be that cool, but it was worth a try.
“Aren't you too young?”
“Fine. Then I'll just get one later, from somebody else.”
“Wouldn't your momma mind?”
“Only if you told her.”
He looked at me kind of crosswise for a minute, but then he gave me one, like I was beginning to figure he would, because he wanted me to like him. He even lit it for me. I took a couple of drags and inhaled the first one to impress him. I knew better than to do that all the way down.
“So, how come you're such a tomboy?” he asked.
I'd gotten the question a lot, but I kept that to myself. “I don't know what you mean,” I said.
“How come you always wear those baggy black sweatshirts and those jeans all ripped out in the knee?”
I shrugged and started skimming stones on the reservoir.
I never answered. He probably only asked because my mom was always squawking about it. I was wishing he'd get to the speech. He got to it soon enough.
“I know how you feel, Cynnie, but it might be the best thing for Bill—for everybody.”
Yeah, sure, I thought. Just leave me out of your everybody. And while you're at it, leave Bill out of it, too. “I guess I'm taking my life in my hands, saying that to you.” I just skipped stones. I didn't even tell him how much. I figured he knew. “I know it's a little hard for you to accept me,” he said. “Me being so much younger than your mom and all.” I shrugged and skipped another one. She'd done worse, I was thinking. I was dizzy from the cigarette but it wouldn't do to let on. “I know you don't like me,” he said. I shrugged and let fire another stone. Good one. Five skips and then that nice little plunk. “But I love your mother very much.”
I took a drag on the cigarette and looked him dead on. I didn't doubt him for a minute. “She won't let you.” I'd been watching my mom real carefully, and I'd finally figured this out. She said she wanted love, but she made sure she never got any.
“Meaning what?”
“Mom doesn't want a man to be happy with. Because Mom doesn't want to be happy.”
He screwed up his face and said, “That doesn't sound like something for a thirteen-year-old to say.”
I said, “Well, I'm thirteen. And I just said it.”
He laughed the way grown-ups do when they say they're laughing with you. Only I'm never laughing.
Then he pulled a flask out of his jacket poc
ket and took a snort of something.
“I'd take some of that,” I said. I'm not exactly sure what “that” was. But on him it looked like a good idea, and I wanted to give it a try.
“Bad enough I gave you the cigarette.”
I opened my mouth to try the old wheedle and whine, but he didn't even give me that much time.
“This one's not negotiable,” he said.
That pissed me off a little, so I turned my back on him. Like only rocks existed in the universe.
“You know what it reminds me of,” he said, “when I see you up in that tree?” I shrugged and braced for the worst. “It reminds me of a story I wrote in high school. Haven't thought about it for years, but I think about it all the time now. It was about these hordes of little kids who just sort of … packed up and split. The girls launched out to sea on boats, and the boys climbed up in trees. The Coast Guard went out looking for the girls but they were gone. And the fire department put ladders up in the trees but they were empty.”
I dropped my cigarette and completely forgot to look cool. “Gone? Like, for good?” It seemed almost too good to be true, even in somebody's imagination.
“Yup. Forever. Teacher didn't like it, though.”
“Figures.”
“She said she didn't understand it. Where did I think these thousands of kids had gone? I said, ‘Well, someplace that's really a whole different world. They just went somewhere different.’ Know what she said?”
I shook my head in a way that must've looked stupid.
“ ‘What's wrong with this world?’”
“But she was kidding, though. Right?”
“Don't know. To this very day I haven't figured that out.”
“She must have been kidding.”
“She only gave me a C-plus.”
I shrugged and skipped another stone, the spell broken. “Grown-ups,” I said.
“Yeah. Grown-ups.”
I held on to Zack on the way home.
Later that night I was sitting up in my tree house, to get away from the fighting. Mom had locked Zack out of the bedroom and he was pounding on the door and shouting. That went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then beautiful silence for an hour or so.
I saw Zack come out and sit on the back stoop. He looked up like he was trying to see if I was up there watching or not, but it was too dark to really see. All of a sudden I knew I'd been waiting and watching for exactly this, but I didn't know it until it happened. Isn't it weird that you can be thinking things and feeling things and not even know it?
I climbed down.
“Hey,” Zack said when I sat on the porch next to him. He was acting like he wasn't still upset but I could tell he was. I could hear it in his voice, even just that one word.
I said, “Hey.”
Then we sat like that in the dark for a while, and I knew I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn't figure what it was supposed to be. Once I even opened my mouth, thinking it would say itself as I went along, but nothing came out.
Zack was drinking a beer out of the bottle, a longneck. When he took out a cigarette I reached my hand out and he gave me one. And neither one of us even had to say a word.
The smoke felt hot and burny going down into my lungs, but I didn't mind.
“Do you still have that story somewhere?” I asked, and my voice sounded really jarring to me after all that quiet.
“What story?”
“The one about the kids who disappeared.”
“Oh. That one. Oh, hell, that was so long ago. I've moved probably thirty times since then. And once when I was in jail my roommate threw out all my stuff.” His words sounded squishy, not hard at the edges. Like my mom when she drinks too much.
I reached for his beer bottle and pulled it out of his hand. My hand brushed his just a little bit while I did it, but I didn't do that on purpose. I don't think. I didn't answer because I didn't want him to hear that it had been important. I just took a long swig of beer.
Zack said, “I had a feeling that story would mean something to you.”
“How did you know?”
“Because we're alike, you and me.”
Then, before I could even ask how, he got up and walked back into the kitchen. But I knew he was coming back, because he left half his beer, and a cigarette burning on the edge of the porch. I snagged another couple of gulps of his beer. All of a sudden I realized I could hear crickets. And that I'd been hearing them all along. Maybe I always heard them. Maybe that's why I never really heard them anymore.
Zack came back with two beers, with the tops already off, and handed one to me. The bottle was cold and wet and sweaty in my hand, and just for a split second I thought I liked being alive. I mean, it was okay. Maybe this is what people meant when they used that word. “Happy.”
“How are we alike?” I said, even though I knew he was right.
“Because we're broken people,” he said. “We walk and we talk and we act like we know what to do, but deep down we know it's different with us. That's why we do crazy shit sometimes. Make sure we feel alive. Like we're whole, just for a minute. You know?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” I thought on that for a bit. “But I think the world is full of broken people. Way I see it, anyway. I look around and practically everybody I see is.”
“Yeah, but they don't know it. We know what we are. They think they're okay.”
I thought about my mom. Wondered if she thought she was okay.
We sat in the dark and the quiet a while longer, and the beer was making my muscles unkink. I was probably drinking it too fast, but I was thinking if I finished it right up he might get me another. I wondered if he was listening to the crickets, too.
“What makes you feel whole for just a minute?” I asked him. “Driving my motorcycle really fast. A good beer buzz.” He paused like he was thinking. Not like he was trying to think of another one. More like he was trying to decide whether to say it. “Love. What about you?”
“Bill,” I said, and almost blew it by crying.
“Oh. Sorry.” He got up to go. Like he thought the right thing to do was to leave me alone to feel this thing, and that was the last thing I wanted. But I couldn't think what to say to stop him.
He slid his unfinished beer over to me. “See you in the morning.”
And I couldn't even say good night. I couldn't say anything.
After he left I picked up his beer instead of mine and put it up to my mouth, right where his mouth had just been. I wasn't that anxious to go back inside, so I just sat.
When I finally went to bed I found Zack out cold on the floor in front of my mom's bedroom door. Next to his head were two neat rows of beer bottles. Thirteen. I counted.
I think it was the next morning that I got it in my head about the pictures. I started looking around the house at all the pictures. There was Kiki as a little kid, and graduating high school. There was one of me on Trudy, my uncle Jim's horse, and a wedding picture of my mom and dad. A picture of my dad with a big bass he caught, about a month before he died.
But no Bill.
My mom was in the kitchen making coffee. Squinting, like her head hurt. Zack was already at work, I guess. Anyway, he was gone.
“Why are there no pictures of Bill?”
“We have pictures of Bill.”
“Where?”
“Um … on the refrigerator.”
“That's just a picture I drew of him.”
“Well, that's a picture.”
“I meant a photograph.”
“Oh. Well, why doesn't a drawing count? It's such a nice picture.”
“It is not. It sucks. And it doesn't count because you put it up on the refrigerator because you were proud of me for drawing it. Not because you're proud of Bill. It could've been a drawing of a tree for all you care.”
She looked at me like I had asked her to do a complicated math problem in her head. I waited. But she just kept opening her mouth and not saying anything.
“No! Of course not.”
“Then why didn't you ever take his picture?”
“Well, honey, it's just that …” Another long wait. Another minute of my life I'd never get back.
“What? It's just what, Mom? Spit it out.”
“Well, it's just that those are all special occasion pictures. You know. We took pictures of the family when one of us was doing something special.”
“And Bill never did anything? Is that it?”
“You're blowing this all out of proportion,” she said. You could see her make that shift in her head, where she decided to act defensive to make me go away.
“You're unbelievable,” I said.
Then I went into the kitchen and took my drawing of Bill off the refrigerator. It wasn't really that good. I took it into the living room and tore it up right in front of her.
“There. Now we have no pictures of Bill. What are we going to do about it?”
She just rolled her eyes and lit a cigarette. She never answered. Like, what's new?
I threw the pieces up into the air, and we both watched them flutter down onto the rug like confetti. Then I went away, which I'm sure is what she'd wanted all along.
After school that day I wrote a letter to Nanny and Grampop. It said, “Please take a picture of Bill and send it to me. So I have something to remember him by.”
Otherwise you could look around this house and think maybe he was just a dream I had. Maybe he really never existed at all.
The night after that Mom and Zack had a fight. A big one. And then, the next night, they had another.
I spent about six whole days up in that tree, alone, pretending I might wake up in a whole different world. And that's all it was, too. Pretending. All the time I knew it was stupid, and that I was too old for that junk, but something about it being Zack's idea made it seem a tiny bit less than impossible.
The night he left I woke up when his motorcycle kicked over. I climbed down fast, but he was out the driveway and headed down the street. I ran after him for almost two blocks, yelling his name as loud as I could, even though I knew he couldn't hear me.
My throat hurt and my lungs were ready to burst, and besides, the neighbors were turning on their porch lights and coming out to see. So I just waved my arms in case he looked in his rearview mirror, but I should have known he had no cause to look back. I kept thinking if I could get on the back of that bike, I could disappear with him. Forever. Then he turned a corner and he was gone.
The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance Page 3
