Wish You Were Here

by Barbara Shoup

  Dad says, “Yo, Jackson, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

  “Oh, this is Stephanie,” I mumble, and she gushes, “It is so groovy to meet you, Mr. Watt. God, on the subject of Brady—he used to talk about you all the time. Really. He thought you were, well—you know—” She pauses, groping for exactly the right phrase and, as usual, comes up with, “really far out. He’d be so bummed if he knew you got hurt. I’m really, really glad you didn’t, like, die.”

  Layla laughs. “Me, too,” she says.

  “Hey, thanks,” Dad says, having recovered his cool. He grins at her. “I’m damned happy about that myself.”

  Stephanie beams back at him. Then she notices all the food. “Party?” she asks.

  “You got it,” Dad says. “Help yourself.”

  She works her way through five salads, all the while babbling about the politics of vegetarianism. When she finds out Mr. Belcher is a farmer, she says, “Wow, I bet it’s a real trip—like, really, really spiritual—communing with the land.”

  “It’s a lot of hard work,” Mrs. Belcher says.

  Stephanie regards her curiously. On the television screen, IU goes on a fast break and gets a layup, which seems to remind her why she’s here. “Jax, there’s a home game tonight, you know? Want to come with me?”

  When I don’t answer instantly, she turns to Dad and Layla. “He should come, don’t you think? I mean, don’t you think it would be good for Jax to go out?”

  “Absolutely,” Layla says.

  Dad raises his broken arm, gestures toward his legs in the sling. “I’d go out myself if I weren’t—”

  “A cripple?” Mr. Belcher guffaws.

  No way I’m going to get out of going. I see that. When Steph says, “Well? Do you, Jackson?” I say yes.

  She takes off then, after presenting Dad with one of her most cherished crystals, a hunk of pinkish rock. Not long after, I walk Layla to the elevator.

  “You, mister,” she says. “You call me if there’s anything you need.”

  When I get back, Dad’s pulled the yellow privacy curtain and cranked the bed to a different position. His eyes are closed; the Playboy Layla brought is open, facedown, on his chest. I can see that his jaw is clenched. This is the kind of thing that kills me, suddenly seeing his pain. I see it in his eyes sometimes, in the way he winces when he tries to move the few movable parts of his body or when a nurse touches him the wrong way. He doesn’t complain. But once, when he thought I was dozing, he made his free hand into a fist and held it for a long time against the bridge of his nose.

  Now he opens his eyes, smiles weakly at the sight of me. “Those two are a trip, aren’t they? Christ, they wore me out. Hey, why don’t you take off, too, pal? I’m about to rack out here. Gotta rest up for when Kim gets here later. No need for you to hang around.”

  He holds out his hand, palm up. I slap it the way he taught me to do before I could even talk.

  thirty–three

  When we walk into the gym, Stephanie grabs my hand and pulls me over to the section of the bleachers where our friends are sitting. “Look who I kidnapped,” she says.

  “Hoo, buddy,” Tom Best says, wiggling his eyebrows at me.

  Putz, I think.

  Still, I’m not sorry I came. I love basketball: the constant sound of dribbling, the squeak of shoes, the wonderful whoosh the ball makes going cleanly through the net. We’re winning, which makes the game even more fun to watch. We count down the last ten seconds, then we all pour out of the hot, steamy gym—jubilant, as if winning a basketball game really means something. It’s a dark night, cold and starless. The first flakes of a promised snowfall are already coming down hard.

  “Pray for a blizzard,” Stephanie shouts, walking beside me. “No school Monday. Hey, aren’t you glad I talked you into getting a life, Jax? Isn’t this way cool?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Great.”

  We climb into the bus and join the procession of cars threading through the parking lot toward the street.

  “Want to go to my house?” she asks.

  Now’s the time to tell her about Amanda, to make sure she understands that we can just be friends. She needs a friend, anyone can see that. The way she’s looking at me, “please” written all over her face.

  “Jax?” she says.

  I get this weird idea that Amanda would want me to try to help her. She’d say to me, “Jackson, you know it’s going to hurt her feelings. You can’t just tell her here, in the car, and then let her go inside all alone.”

  “Yeah, I can come,” I say. “For a little while.”

  The house is dark. Her parents are gone for the weekend, Steph tells me, leading me downstairs to the rec room. No one to bug us. She turns on the gas logs in the fireplace, puts Simon and Garfunkel on the stereo. She throws some big pillows on the floor, and we stretch out there to listen. Stephanie’s calm for a change. She just lies beside me, chatting about this and that, like she’s the happiest person in America.

  Then out of the blue, she says, “Jackson, don’t you think it’s bizarre that Brady hasn’t even written to his own mom—hasn’t even called her? I mean, it’s not like she’s the kind of asshole parent who hassled him all the time. And if he doesn’t even care about his own mom, maybe he doesn’t care about us, either. Maybe we should just forget him. Really, Jax, do we need him? If he did care about us, wouldn’t we have heard from him by now?

  “Okay. I miss him, you know? I can’t exactly stop missing him just because I decide to. But what I’ve been thinking is maybe I’m missing somebody that never was. Do you ever think that? Like maybe Brady wasn’t who we thought he was at all?”

  I think of the two postcards he sent me and how they don’t say anything real, how they don’t mean anything. How they’ve only made me feel worse about his leaving. “Yeah, sometimes I think that,” I say. “You can make mistakes about a lot of things, you know? About people. Plus, sometimes they just change. Like me. Listen, Steph, there’s something I—”

  “No, not you, Jax,” she interrupts. “No way.” She runs her fingers along the triangle my arm makes pillowing my head. She brushes them across my chest, and I remember suddenly the way her tongue felt inside my mouth that night, the shock of it, the burning.

  “You look better maybe.” She smiles at me. “But you don’t change. Not inside. You know who you are. You know what you want.”

  “I don’t know shit,” I say. “I mean it. Don’t count on me for knowing anything at all.”

  She rolls over toward me, props her head on her hand. “You know where you’re going to school next year, don’t you? I haven’t even filled out the first college application. My mom’s ready to kill me. But the truth is, I don’t want to go to college, Jax. I don’t want to go anywhere. It’s really stupid, but it seems so depressing to me to go away when there’s no place in the world that seems like home to me to think about while I’m gone. No place to be homesick for. Am I crazy, or what? Do you have any idea what I mean?”

  “Maybe that you have to have a home to leave home?” I say. “This isn’t exactly the same thing, but those first couple of days when I stayed at the hospital—when my dad was really bad off—it was my room in our old house I wanted to go hole up in. I had to remind myself I didn’t live there anymore. I don’t think it’s so weird what you’re saying.”

  “But, see, I don’t even have a decent memory of home,” Stephanie says. “A bunch of crappy apartments. That’s all we had before we moved to this house. Those places, I wish I could forget. I swear to God, Jackson, my mom thinks starting your life over is just like clearing the Monopoly board and starting a new game. The other day, she goes, ‘Look at me, honey. Look at what a mess I was before I met Robert, and now I’m totally happy. Now it’s time for you to get your act together, start rebuilding your life.’
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br />   “That bitch,” Stephanie says. “I said, ‘Get a clue, Mom. As long as you and Daddy are divorced, parts of me are going to be all over the place. You tell me, what am I supposed to build this new life with?’ You know what she said? ‘Stephanie, you are so negative. You got that from your father.’

  “I do miss Brady,” she says, blinking back tears. “Whoever he was, he could get me laughing, you know?” Stephanie moves closer to me. “Jackson, would you just hold me?” she whispers. “Brady used to do that. Sometimes I get so scared. It’s like I’m nobody. Like I’m not even here.”

  I put my arms around her; it would be mean not to—even though doing it, I feel the farthest away from Amanda I’ve felt since the plane lifted off the runway and I watched Jamaica grow smaller and smaller and finally disappear. Stephanie holds on tight, patting my shoulder from time to time, as if I’m the one who wanted to be comforted, and I have to smile. Amy did that when I picked her up to hug her good-bye the day they left the hospital. She means well, Stephanie. She’s a good person, a good friend. She cares about me. She’ll understand when I tell her about Amanda; she’ll be happy for me. But I can’t tell her now, when she’s so upset. I lie there with my eyes closed and pretend that it’s Amanda I’m holding. I pretend it’s that last night, on the beach. I make my breathing slow and regular, like the waves.

  I must fall asleep. I have to have fallen asleep because that’s the only way to explain how, suddenly, Stephanie is pressing against me, whispering my name, and I am pressing back, feeling myself harden against her. I open my eyes, and she smiles a sleepy smile. She takes my hand and places it on one of her breasts. Then she outlines it there with her finger, the way we used to outline our hands when we were children.

  “Steph,” I say. “Wait. I—”

  “Shh.” She pulls my shirt out from my jeans, runs one finger along the inside of the waistband, just touching my bare skin, and I shudder.

  “No. Steph—” But it comes out a moan.

  She does that thing with her finger again. Then again. Each time slipping farther and farther inside. I let her unzip my jeans, let her touch me, stroke me. “This is good for you, Jax. It’s good. You need this. We both do.” Somehow she undresses herself; from somewhere appears a foil package. Jesus, I think I will die when she slowly rolls the condom onto me. My whole body sings toward her, as if my head and heart have nothing to do with who I am or why I came here.

  thirty–four

  Forget writing to Amanda; what I did with Stephanie made that impossible. I can’t tell Amanda about it. She’d be disgusted by who I really am. I can’t lie, either—and not telling her would be the same as lying.

  I lie on my bed, thinking about how I felt when Amanda and I were together under the stars—large, as if the whole world wasn’t big enough to hold me. It was nothing like the way I felt with Stephanie. The best thing I can say about last night is that for a while it was as if I didn’t exist. It was stupid what I did. I felt lost doing it, and I feel lost now. I am lost. I know because when Steph calls and invites me to come over, I go, knowing full well that I’m going to let it happen again. And again and again.

  I tell myself it’s all right that we don’t love each other. I’m being kind to her, making her feel less lonely. She’s being kind to me, obliterating the real world for a little while. We’re just two pathetic people helping each other through a bad time. It’s only sex; what’s the big deal? I might as well do it, now that I’ve lost Amanda. As time passes, I half believe all this is true. Everyone at school comments on how Stephanie seems better since we’ve been spending time together. She doesn’t drink or smoke pot when she’s with me. I make her study, and she actually gets a B on a Western Civ test. Kate Levin says, “Jackson, do you realize she hasn’t gotten a B since junior high?” I tell myself it’s not such a bad deal. I devote myself to Stephanie, and in return she invites me to her house every day after school, we go up to her room and screw, and for a little while I forget everything I’ve lost.

  Mom’s so out of it she thinks it’s nice I’ve got a life. Once she asks me if I ever heard from Amanda—I say no. That’s as close as she comes to suggesting that Steph is a weird person for me to have chosen. I figure it’s a relief to her that I have someone to be with, anyone, so she can quit worrying about me. So she and Ted can enjoy the new house and each other.

  Dad knows what I’m up to, though. He’s not dumb enough to say so, but I can tell by the way he looks at me when Stephanie’s around—which is most of the time, since she’s taken to dropping in at the hospital most evenings. Dad gets a kick out of her. She brings him candy, then eats most of it herself while she reads to us from the National Enquirer or the Star.

  “Listen to this one,” she’ll say, wiping at the chocolate dribbling out of her mouth. “‘Man Sees the Hand of God as Elevator He’s Riding in Snaps from Its Cables and Plummets to the Ground!’ Or ‘Husband and Wife Both Get Sex-Change Operations.’ Jeez, can you believe that? I mean, what about their poor kids? Like, suddenly, your mom’s your dad?”

  Dad cracks up.

  “That girl is good for you,” he says one night when we’re alone. “She’ll set you free.”

  It’s no use telling him about Amanda. That I was stupid choosing Stephanie when it’s Amanda that I love.

  “Jax,” he’d say. “Love the one you’re with.”

  Love. The very word scares me. Mom and Dad loved each other, and look what happened. I love Amanda, and all I can do is hurt her. I think of her in that school she hates, checking the mail every day, looking for a letter from me. She’s probably sorry she told me how she felt about me; by now, she probably thinks I lied when I said I felt the same way. I could make her feel better. All I’d have to do is write to her and tell her the one thing in my life that I know is true: I love her. But then I’d have to explain how the rest of my life has become an ugly lie, and I can’t bring myself to do that. I’m too ashamed. I think of Mom and Dad, and for the first time I understand that it wasn’t what Dad did to Mom that made it impossible for them to stay married; it was what he didn’t do. It wasn’t who he was; it was who he wasn’t. So he loved Mom. So what? If there’s something wrecked inside you, real love just won’t work.

  And I’m made of him, partly of him. The thought fills me with a greater dread than I have ever known. Dad’s just Dad: that’s how Mom and I have rationalized so many things over the years. He loves us, but he’s a flake. What if I’m like him?

  Yeah, “Love the one you’re with” is without a doubt what he’d say if I told him about Amanda. It pisses me off just to think of it, which is pretty ironic considering it’s exactly what I’m doing.

  So I love Amanda. But doesn’t what I’m doing with Steph prove that there’s something wrecked inside me, too—just like Dad? And if that’s true, if I’m going to turn out like him, then loving Amanda won’t be enough. I should let go now, before I hurt her the way Dad hurt Mom.

  With Steph, what I can’t be doesn’t matter. She’s even more wrecked than I am, so just about anything I do is bound to make her life better. Maybe I even love her a little. After all, there are a lot of different kinds of love. Still, I stand in the card shop for an hour, looking for a Valentine’s Day card for her without that word in it or any combination of words that might imply a commitment. I settle for one that has a bunch of cats holding balloons that spell out “Happy Valentine’s Day.” I buy her a pair of dangly earrings made of little mirrors.

  She adores them, she says when I give them to her Valentine’s Day morning. She takes off the earrings she’s wearing and puts them on. She peers into the rearview mirror to see how they look. “Cool, Jax,” she says, leaning over to give me a kiss. She hands me an envelope, but I don’t open it until we get to the parking lot.

  I hate the card inside. There’s a picture of two cartoon characters kissing on it, and above them it says “May this V
alentine’s Day lead you through the steamy jungles of passion, then plunge you to the depths of wild abandon—” I open it and, Jesus, a bunch of condoms fall out, weird ones, the kind that are supposed to cause strange and wonderful sensations.

  “If you like that kind of thing,” Steph says, speaking what the card says inside. I guess I must look really stupid because she laughs and wiggles her eyebrows. “Later,” she says, and skips off to catch up with a bunch of girls to show them her new earrings.

  I stash the card and the condoms in my locker, under a pile of junk. I feel half sick all morning, just thinking of them there. “Later,” Steph said. But I don’t want to go to her house after school. I want to go home and rack out or maybe go back to the gym and try to pump my body clean.

  I think of the valentines I got yesterday from Amy and Kristin—those funny little ones kids give in grade school. My Little Pony from Amy, 101 Dalmatians from Kristin. I remember how Mom would take me shopping and I’d pick the package of cards with the pictures I liked best. At school we’d decorate shoe boxes with cut-out hearts, and there’d be a party, everyone going up and down the aisles, dropping envelopes in every box. There’d be heart-shaped cookies and cupcakes decorated with red hots. It’s depressing to think about how in junior high, Valentine’s Day became just one more thing to be embarrassed by. It was awful if I got a valentine from a girl, even more awful if I didn’t.

  “It’s just girls, Jax,” Brady would say. “Get a grip.”

  But I was hopeless. He tried to coach me, but he never really understood the way I felt. For him, girls were easy. They were always calling him about this and that; he always got loads of valentines—even though he’d come right out and say no way did he want a relationship. Girls were trouble in the long run, he said, always telling you what to do. Dating was a bore, a throwback to the fifties. It was Neanderthal the way the boy had to pay. Still, there was never any shortage of girls willing to put up with him. Stephanie, for one.