by E. R. Frank
“Hi,” I go to Ashley. She’s standing next to this kid. He’s not little. He looks about twelve or thirteen. He’s pudgy, with wide-set eyes and a round mouth, and he’s sort of drooling.
“How are you?” Ashley goes. She’s wearing a down coat that flares at the bottom and leather shoes with an amazing heel.
“Fine,” I say, as if we actually know each other.
“How’s Jack?”
“He’s fine.” Seth squeezes my hand. Little squeezes, one after the other, in a rhythm. Like a heartbeat.
“Hi, Jase,” Ashley goes. “Thanks for sticking up for me in Gusty’s class. What an asshole.”
“Yeah,” Jason says. ‘You’re welcome.”
Seth keeps squeezing.
“Listen—,” Ashley goes, but then her brother interrupts her.
“Are you going to see Santa Claus?” He has a deep voice, sort of like Rob’s.
“No interrupting,” Ashley tells him. She puts her arm around his shoulders and looks back at me. “I’ve been wanting to tell you and Jack … and Ellen, too … that—”
“I’m going to see Santa Claus.”
“Excuse me,” Ashley reminds him. She sounds like a teacher. A nice teacher, but a teacher. Bizarre.
“Excuse me,” he goes. “Now can I talk?”
Ashley sighs. “This is Matt,” she tells me and Seth and Jason. Seth has stopped squeezing. His hand is still and warm in mine.
“Truck,” Matt says. “My name is Truck.”
We nod hello to him. The Santa line moves forward a little. We all move with it.
“Just …” Ashley wipes her perfectly polished index finger over Matt’s drool. I could pass out from shock. “Ash and I have been saying for months how awful that whole thing was … and …”
“Ash!” It’s Ashley Two. She’s walking fast, dressed in cute boots with fur trim at the top edges and a pink-and-gray knit hat, completely model-like.
“Lee!” Matt yells, and he breaks away from Ashley One and nearly tackles Ashley Two.
“Truck!” She hugs him back.
My face is hot, and the place between my heart and my stomach feels all lit up. It’s shame, I think. Because I’m sort of stunned to see them human, and really, that’s so unfair.
“Hi,” Ashley Two says to all of us. She throws Ashley One a look.
“I was in the middle of trying,” Ashley One says.
Ashley Two turns to us. To me. “Mostly, we’ve been wanting to tell you and your brother and Ellen how much we …” She blushes. I’ve never seen an Ashley blush.
“We just felt so bad for you,” Ashley One says.
Seth squeezes again. That’s almost exactly what he said to me that day on the L of my couch.
“Thanks,” I say. There’s this awkward pause. “Nice to meet you, Truck,” I tell Matt. Ashley One smiles at me. She has something that looks like a poppy seed stuck in her teeth.
“Nice to meet you, too,” Matt says.
Jason and Seth and I are quiet for a long time after we leave the Ashleys. We walk by a bunch of stores on the second floor, spacing out from the quiet sshuush sound of the massive wall waterfall in front of the toy store. We end up at the courtyard with fake palm trees near the glass elevators.
“So that was weird,” I finally say.
“I didn’t know she had a retarded brother.” Seth’s trying to chew the head off a gummy bear.
“Down’s syndrome,” Jason goes.
“Ellen knew that,” I tell them.
“Have you talked to her?” Jason asks.
“A few times. I need an earlobe massage.” He moves around to the back of me and starts. It really does feel good. It probably looks weird, but it’s incredibly relaxing. I have a flash of Cameron playing with her earlobe that day of the cake.
“Don’t get too comfy there, tough guy,” Seth tells Jason.
I take a deep breath. “Ellen doesn’t sound very good.”
“What do you mean?” Seth gives up on the head and pops the whole bear into his mouth.
“She’s drunk a lot when we talk.”
“Again?” Jason stops with my ears.
“Not drunk totally,” I go. “Just … um … like she’s been drinking.”
“That sounds drunk to me,” Seth says.
“Yeah.”
“She seems pretty down a lot.” Jason moves away. My whole neck is warm.
“I know,” I say. “Her leg and ribs. And all.”
“When does she get back?” Seth asks me.
“The twenty-eighth.”
“There’s your brother.” Jason points. Jack’s in the glass elevator with Rob, moving upward from the first floor. They’ve got a ton of bags.
“We just saw the Ashleys,” I tell them when they step out.
Rob blushes and looks around.
“What are you getting Mom and Dad?” Jack asks.
I have no idea what to get them. “What are you?”
“I was thinking about a cat.”
“A cat?” I say.
Jack nods. “Dogs are out, obviously, because of Dad.”
“My father hates them,” I tell everybody.
“Cats are pretty independent,” Jason says. “You don’t have to do a lot to take care of them.”
“Mom’s always wanted a cat,” Jack says.
“Really?” I didn’t know that. I make a mental note to ask her about it.
“I got my mother a gift certificate for a massage,” Seth says.
“That’s much better than a cat,” I go.
Jack and I buy our mom a gift certificate for two massages. Jack finds four books on Texas Hold ’Em that we don’t think my father owns.
Rob buys his mother a coffee mug with snowflakes all over it. He buys his father a mug with a bunch of cartoon bears. If you look really close, you can see the bears are in all these different sexual positions.
“What would your grandmother think of that?” I whisper to Jason. He raises his left eyebrow at me.
“You are so out there,” Jack tells Rob, who just shrugs.
We end up in the food court, eating quesadillas.
“You know, you two look alike,” Seth tells me and Jack.
“Shut up,” we say.
Uncle Buck and Aunt Jerry come over Christmas Day. They leave their dogs at home. They give me a silver pendant with an opal stone. They give Jack a year’s subscription to this Web site where you can mail-order DVDs for half price. They give my parents plane tickets and hotel reservations to go to Paris for a long weekend in the summer.
“We can’t accept this,” my mother goes.
“You have to,” Aunt Jerry says. “They’re nonrefundable.”
“It’s too much,” Mom argues.
My father stays quiet. I know what he’s thinking. He doesn’t want to miss a Friday and Monday of work.
I give Jack these new headphones that shut out the sound of ambient noise. He seems to like them. He gives me a professionally framed photo. The colors are bright and clear: yellows and whites and blues and grays. It’s of the ocean. Specifically, of a wave. Huge. Sparkling.
“How did you know?” I ask him, gaping.
Jack looks pleased but confused. “What do you mean?”
I stare, astonished.
Jack shrugs. “I just saw it in that gallery at the mall,” he says. “I thought you’d like it.”
Later, as I’m standing in the doorway of my room examining my walls to figure out where to hang it, I overhear my mom and Aunt Jerry walking up the stairs.
“I started last week,” my mom is saying.
“Do you like him?” Aunt Jerry asks.
“We’ll see,” my mom says.
Normally I’d mind my own business.
“Started what?” I call. I step back out of my room and into the hall. My mom and Jerry are at the landing. “Like who?”
Jerry looks at my mom. My mother sighs and looks at me. Normally she wouldn’t really answer. “My new therapist,”
she says.
“Does Dad know?” I ask.
“Of course,” Mom says.
“Oh.”
Seth has to spend all of Christmas Day with his family.
“I only have a minute,” he tells me at the edge of our lawn, by the street, next to his car.
“I know,” I say. We’re bundled up in hats and scarves and down and Gore-Tex.
“Merry Christmas.” He hands me a long white box. “Don’t open it out here,” he says. “It’s too cold.”
“Is it roses?” I ask. My father is allergic to roses. Seth kisses the tip of my nose and then my mouth. His lips are freezing. So is his mint breath. “See you,” he goes.
Inside I open the box, and my mom helps me find a vase and trim the stem bottoms underwater, on an angle.
“Oh my God.” I’m reading the card.
“What?” my mother asks.
“I’m getting a dozen roses on the first of each month for the next year,” I tell her.
“That’s a lot of money,” my mom says. “Where is Seth going to get all that money?”
“In the mail,” I say. She frowns. “It’s a long story.”
“It would have to be.” She sounds like Ellen’s mom a little when she says that. I kind of like her sounding that way.
“All I got him was a stupid gift basket.” With dozens of candy packages surrounding bubble bath, food coloring, and a sweater. Lame, lame, lame.
My mother hands me the vase. The roses smell sweet, and they’re this deep red and a little over the top. “You never told me he was your boyfriend,” she says. She glances at me and pulls a bottle of baby aspirin off the shelf next to the sink. She shakes out two pills and drops them into the vase. “It would be nice if you told me things every now and then.” Her voice sounds careful.
Suddenly I wonder about how popular she is with her students. All those excellent evaluations. Does she hang out with them on campus? Do they tell her things? I wonder what she thinks about when she’s in her office, up there on the third floor. Or reading her survival books.
“What?” she goes.
“Nothing,” I say. “What about Dad’s allergies?”
“We’ll see if they kick in,” my mom suggests. But then she doesn’t have any other ideas.
“What are the aspirin for?”
“They make flowers last longer.”
The carefulness of her voice, and the way she stepped between my father and me the other day, make me feel sort of formal for some reason. “Thank you.”
“What if we break up before the year is over?” I ask Seth over the phone.
“Oh,” he says. “Does that mean we’re going out now?”
“Funny,” I say.
“Don’t worry so much, Anna,” he goes.
“But that’s what I do,” I tell him.
“I know. But if we break up, I’ll just change the address with the florist and have them sent to my mother.”
“Seth!” I go.
“Okay. To your mother.”
“Seth!”
“Come on,” he goes. “Do you even like my present a little?”
“A lot,” I say. Why can’t I be nicer? “But that’s so much money. Ellen wouldn’t approve.” I’m not telling him about my dad’s allergies. I don’t have the heart.
“Ask her,” Seth says.
I hang up with him and dial Ellen. It’s their last day in Florida. It’s still early, and I’m hoping I won’t hear the sound of beer in her voice. I don’t, so I tell her about the roses.
“I think it’s the most romantic present I ever heard of,” Ellen says. “And it’s a total waste of money, and you’ll never get treated this well by anyone again, so you might as well enjoy it.”
I hang up on Ellen and dial Seth.
“See?” he goes. “Told you so.”
On top of the lemons and perfume, now Ellen’s house smells like pine needles. Her mother puts their tree up the day after Thanksgiving each year and takes it down the day after they get back from wherever they’ve vacationed.
Ellen’s moving a lot more smoothly with her crutches now. Her cast looks sort of beaten up, though. It’s dingy and the edges are grayish. She’s written stuff all over it. Not sentences. Just words. Panacea. Absinthe. Mired. Avuncular. Thrice.
“I think you should have a certain New Year’s resolution,” I tell her. We’re back in her old room. She can do stairs. She’s not nimble on them or anything. But she can do them.
“Like what?” she asks. She’s hanging up a bunch of new clothes onto wooden hangers. I’m pulling them all out of shopping bags, cutting off tags, and handing items to her.
“Like no more drinking in the daytime.”
She bangs a hanger onto her closet bar and then turns to frown at me. She has this way she can lean one armpit on a crutch and sort of balance like that.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That I think you have something weird going with alcohol.”
“Oh, please.” Ellen rolls her eyes. I try to hand her a pair of brown wool pants with cuffs at the bottom, but she won’t take them from me.
“You can be mad,” I say, and I feel strangely calm. “But that’s still what I think.”
“Right,” Ellen snorts. “Because drinking and all that intimidates you. You’re just scared of everything.”
It’s not only that I’m tired of hearing that. I mean, I consider it. I really do. But this time I know she’s wrong. I can feel it. “A little scared,” I admit. “About different things. But not the way I was before.” Something about my voice or my face gets her attention. She drops her sneer and flops down on her bed. Then she winces, but her face doesn’t grit itself the way it used to. Her chest tube sore is basically healed, and her ribs aren’t far behind.
“You seem so different lately,” she finally says.
“I am,” I say. “We all are.” She knows I mean her and me and Jack. “It’s bad,” I tell her. “Drinking a bunch of beers alone in the afternoon is bad.” She massages her neck. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that much.”
“It’s not a bunch of beers,” she tries. “And you’re no rocket scientist.”
“Obviously.”
“Wow,” she says. “One meeting with the Ashleys, and you can be a better bitch than me.”
“See?” I go. “You just called them the Ashleys.”
Ellen rolls her eyes. “Okay,” she says. “I won’t drink in the afternoon.”
“You better not,” I tell her. “I mean it.”
“I know.”
Christina Noonan throws a New Year’s party. We all go, which is different to begin with. Because, among other reasons, I’ve never once been to the same party as my brother. And the last party I made it to was Wayne’s.
Ellen gets a little drunk, but I can’t yell at her because it’s New Year’s and not in the afternoon.
“He’ll be here,” she keeps telling Jason every second. His boyfriend was supposed to show up. She’s trying to be supportive.
“When we want something, we always have to reckon with probabilities,” Jason goes.
“Absolutely.” Ellen takes another swig from her beer and then gets up to go pee for the eightieth time.
Jason plays with his right earlobe, and Seth pulls my curls and feeds me chocolate-covered pretzels between sips of beer. The truth is, I hate the taste of beer.
Right before midnight Ashley One and these two guys and these three other girls grab me.
“It’s your brother,” they say. “Come on.”
They lead me and everyone to Christina’s parents’ bedroom, which has an OFF-LIMITS—NO JOKE—STAY OUT OF THIS ROOM sign on it.
Jack’s inside sitting on the edge of a canopy bed. His arms are crossed over his gut, and his head is slumped over his arms, and he’s bawling.
“He’s really drunk,” Ashley One tells me. “Carl’s been trying to get him to throw up.”
“He never vomits,” I sa
y, the ink everywhere, heavy and ugly.
“Never?” somebody asks me.
“Not in his whole life,” I say Black and thick.
We hear people screaming outside the room. “Ten! Nine!”
“It’s the countdown,” I tell everyone.
“I’m finding Rob,” Ellen goes, and she leaves the room.
Jack is trying to suck in air between sobs. Seth and Jason stand by the door, their feet wedged against the bottom, making sure nobody else walks in.
“Jack.” I sit next to him, sinking with weight.
“Six! Five!”
Jack’s body is heaving. He’s moaning. My teeth start to chatter.
“Great party,” somebody mutters.
“Get the fuck out of here,” I hear Jason snarl, while Ashley’s going, “You asshole!” and there’s movement and the door is opening and closing, and I don’t even know who’s in this room anymore.
“Jack,” I go. I ball my hands into fists to keep them from trembling.
He tries to say something to me, but he’s crying so hard I can’t understand him.
“What?” I ask. “What?”
“Want it … stop.”
“What?” I say again. Sinking. Sinking.
“Make,” Jack gasps. “Time … stop.” Drowning. “Make … it stop.”
“Two! One!”
“I can’t,” I say, helpless. Seth is here, next to me, leaning down toward us, swallowing and swallowing.
“Make it stop,” Jack begs me.
“I can’t.”
Seth and Jason and Rob haul Jack into Rob’s car. Rob’s sober, thank you, God. He drives me and my brother home. We try to sneak Jack upstairs, but my parents are in the kitchen, just back from their own party, and they catch us.
“We’re drunk,” Jack tells them. And then he passes out.
26
MY FATHER DOESN’T TALK TO ANY OF US ALL THE NEXT DAY. HE can’t really talk to Jack because my brother keeps his door locked. My dad doesn’t even try to force him to open up.
I arrange myself on the L of the couch and watch TV and whisper on the phone to Ellen and to Seth.
My mother stays in her study in the corner of the third floor.
My father sits in the kitchen playing poker, swearing and humming, and getting up to pace the house every hour or so. I keep hearing him stand up, walk the stairs, creak around the third floor, then the second, then back down the steps, through the entryway and family room and living room, past me, and back to the kitchen.
