by Hadley Dyer
Dirty dishes and a large chartreuse feather on a key chain were all that remained of the cast party when I peered into the Grunt. I went inside, slipped into a booth, and ordered a coffee, leaving the keys on the table where Lisa had left them. Pushing my damp hair out of my eyes, I contemplated sugar, but the metal bowl with its flip-up lid was looking at me in a menacing way. I tapped it a couple of times, tried to provoke it into action, before deciding to drink my coffee plain.
And then she was there. The atmosphere of the Grunt was golden and luminous in my dilated eyes, making Lisa appear as though she were in the floodlights of some fancy Broadway show. “I love you,” I said.
It just slipped out.
“Why are you being gay?”
“People need to stop saying things like that. It’s the nineties.”
I started to cry.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“What is wrong with me is that I’m emoting a real emotion for once and I’m ruining it by being high and also having hands that don’t want to work at all.”
I flapped my hands at her until she grabbed them and held them on the table. “Right,” she said, sitting down. “You can put the cork back in the bottle.”
“Lise, listen to me.”
“I’m listening—”
“Shhhh. Listen to me. I loved your weirdo circus play. It was so you. I knew it would be good.”
“George, I know you tried to stop it.”
Now I was bawling.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“No, it’s not. You were right. I’m such a”—here I sprayed her ever so lightly with saliva— “bitch.”
“I never said you’re . . . I said that to Christina, not you.”
“You did?”
“For what it’s worth, she felt bad about it. She was trying to be funny.”
“Who would think that was funny?”
“She thought you would. She’s always tried to be like you. No, it’s true. Problem is, she doesn’t know the difference between being tough and just being mean.”
“I was mean to you. I said awful things.”
“Yeah. You did.”
“I was jealous of Keith. I guess I was scared because I didn’t have a plan if you weren’t in it. And I didn’t call you back because I didn’t think it was possible for us to be friends again, not because I didn’t want to.”
“Is that all?”
She knew it wasn’t. Of course she did.
I fell silent, transfixed by her hair. It was floating about her head in a halo of red spirals, completely untamed. Her face was thinner, her jaw stronger. There was a raised line winding around the freckles on the back of her left hand, a scar from some long-ago incident I’d missed. (It was wriggling, but I was pretty sure that was the drugs.) She had changed so much, probably all for the better. And I realized that she would never understand what had brought me to this place because it was an impossible thing to understand from the outside. Even on the inside it was nearly impossible.
“I know you don’t need an enforcer anymore.”
She turned the key chain over in her hands. “You say that like it was the only reason we were friends.”
A tap on the window. Keith was on the other side, motioning to Lisa to come out. “I gotta go,” she said. “Sorry. See you at school?”
“Okay. See you.”
She inched to the edge of the booth, but didn’t get out. “Maybe someday you’ll trust me enough to tell me the rest,” she said.
“It’s not that.”
“It is that. And I’m sorry too.”
Thirty-Eight
“First we should find out if she’s missing and if there’s a reward for her. Then we can call the police.”
“No, first we should find out if she’s dead.”
“She’s dead. Look—”
I felt something tap my heel.
I’m not entirely certain how I came to be facedown under my mother’s shrub and subsequently the object of an Encyclopedia Brown investigation. I recall stumbling home. I recall thinking that a little lie-down would be pleasant and that I could make the rest of the journey to my house after I’d rested up. I remember trying to stand and feeling dizzy and the ground coming up.
“I’ll take this leg; you and Russ do the other. One . . .” Hands around my ankles. “Two . . .”
“I’m not dead!” I shouted.
I shimmied out of the shrub to see three redheaded boys tearing down the sidewalk. “Dad! Dad!” they shrieked at a man who was power-walking with two small redheaded girls hanging off him like he was a set of monkey bars. The boys got distracted by the urgent need to pummel one another before they reached their father, but the father’s attention was fixed on me.
“I’ll leave this one to the Sergeant,” Mr. Humphreys said. “Be in my office at nine a.m. on Monday.”
He didn’t even break his stride.
Dad was standing in the doorway of our porch in his old robe, one leg of his jogging pants fluttering in the breeze under his stump. He didn’t say anything, and so I sat there, feeling the cold muck seep through my jeans. No excuses. For once I’d been doing exactly what my dad and Mr. Humphreys thought I was doing all the time and they’d caught me red-handed. I was getting grounded, two seconds after the thaw-out with my friends, and probably worse.
Then Dad’s face crumpled, and that was easily the most god-awful sight I’ve ever seen—my father crying, chin to his chest, looking disheveled and trapped and clutching the doorframe like it was the only thing keeping him from getting sucked into a world he no longer inhabited.
My mother was hogging the pay phone in the emergency room hallway, telling everyone she’d called regarding my whereabouts that I was alive in spite of all her deficiencies as a parent. I hadn’t been able to persuade her that I’d been asleep in the yard with a little bonus fainting, so now I waited behind a curtain for an emergency room doctor who was a dead ringer for my cousin Buster, down to the black goatee and minor mullet.
I sat on a bed in my wet jeans, Dad in a chair in the corner. He’d come in after my examination but hadn’t said a word since we’d gotten in the car to drive to the hospital. “I’m sorry,” I said for the tenth time. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“June called me last week,” he said. “She saw you driving like a maniac in Scotch County. Would have pulled you over but was on her way to a serious domestic call. She wanted to make sure you’d made it home.”
“I was just running late. I wasn’t drinking or—”
“I didn’t do anything about it.” He was blinking hard. “When you didn’t come home last night . . .”
Oh geez.
“I checked your room. All your toys and keepsakes were gone. That’s often a sign, giving these things away.”
“A sign of what?”
“That someone is planning to hurt themselves.”
As badly as I felt that I’d given my parents such a scare, this was truly terrible detective work. The book from Francis was in my nightstand drawer, the cigarettes that now hurt my chest to smoke in various pockets. A condom or two could have been turned up, and I wouldn’t blame a person if he made a false connection between them and the half-dead rose in the bud vase. All my kid stuff was under the bed. It was almost farcical how much my dad had lost his grip since last summer.
“Dad, I’m not planning to do myself in. I went to a play. I got high.”
“We’re in a hospital.”
There was that.
“Your mother and I, we know you’re having a rough time. And I know when you’re young it seems like rough times will never end, but they do. So I’m asking you, please, I’m asking you to live with it, whatever it is. Even if it hurts sometimes to be alive.”
He was clutching his knee with his good hand, tobacco-stained fingers against his blue jogging pants. Something snapped inside me. Because he wasn’t wrong; I did go to the brink. It was very nearly death by rabbit. I didn’t know who I w
as anymore, and maybe he didn’t know who he was either, now that he wasn’t the Sergeant, but only one of us was trying to put things right again. Every morning, putting on my pants. This was one of the few times I’d seen him beyond the boundaries of our yard since last summer.
“Why?” I said. “So I can watch you fall apart? What are you going to lose next? Your kidneys? Your eyesight? You can’t give up buttered donuts for us, but I’m supposed to do what it takes to stay alive for you?”
Was it tough or was it mean?
I meant it, anyway, every word of it thrumming through my body as I looked again at those yellow fingers.
The doctor pulled back the curtain. “Everything okay, Frances?”
“George,” my dad said quietly. “She goes by her middle name.”
“It doesn’t matter, Dad,” I said.
“I don’t mind calling you by your actual name,” the doctor said. “You comfortable having your old man here?”
“I don’t know, is it anything embarrassing?”
“No pregnancy, STDs, or drugs he doesn’t already know about.”
“He can stay.” Now was not the time to tell my dad he was being overly parental.
“Then first things first. That’s acid burbling around your stomach and up your esophagus. Because you’re not eating enough, probably because of the acid, you should be tested for low iron, low potassium, low magnesium, low a lot of things. You been feeling lethargic? Dizzy?”
“Yeah.”
“No shit.”
Were doctors allowed to say that?
“You said you have pain when you eat,” the doctor continued, “and when you’re lying down. We can fix that. But tell me this: Why didn’t you get yourself checked out sooner? Were you scared?”
“I thought—I thought it was my heart. Pretty dumb.”
He consulted my chart. “Sounded okay, blood pressure’s good. Does it feel like it’s squeezing?”
“No.”
“Palpitations? Fast heartbeat? Shortness of breath?”
“No, just that burning feeling. When I eat, when I don’t eat, even when I’m not thinking about it.”
“Even when you’re not thinking about what?”
“What?”
“That’s what I’m asking you. Even when you aren’t thinking about what do you feel the acid shooting up? Something stressing you out?”
“Um . . .”
My dad was now sitting forward in his chair. “Maybe you should excuse us, big guy,” the doctor said.
“No, it’s nothing,” I said. “School stress, you know?” Wait a second. “Though it’s been hard to stay focused. Because I’ve been feeling tired. And dizzy. So dizzy. To be honest, my grades have been suffering. . . .”
The doctor had been making notes on my chart as I talked. Now he looked up and his expression said, Not buying it, but tell you what, I respect the effort.
“Well! We’d better get you a note for school, then, since this has been going on for a while. Your regular doctor should run the bloodwork to check for the deficiencies, and I’ll write you a prescription to help with that acid reflux, which you can start taking now.”
“That’ll make it stop hurting?”
“That’ll stop you from burning a hole in your gut.”
“So it’s definitely not my heart.”
“Your heart is fine, George, but you’re on your way to an ulcer. You think you’re handling something, but you ain’t handling it. That’s what your body’s telling you.” The doctor put his hand on my dad’s shoulder. “You’ll make sure she takes her prescription.”
Dad nodded.
“And, George? Eat some frigging food.”
Thirty-Nine
I was so stupid. I actually believed that if I did what the doctor ordered, I’d get over Francis. Take my medicine, do my schoolwork, practice my chords, eat some frigging food, ask for forgiveness, forgive. Like launching a skiff into the water: a push and a push and a push and a sudden release. That’s not how it works.
But it did get easier. One day, when I was working alone in the computer room at lunchtime, I pressed my hand to my heart. Well, my esophagus. The humming was barely there. I pressed harder, knowing that I was losing something painful but also dear.
Someone sat opposite me and unwrapped a sandwich. I peered around the computer terminal. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Nat said.
“Yeah, hi.”
“Are you working on your English essay?”
“News report on Crimea. It’s an extra-credit thing for Gifford and Aker.”
“Cool.”
I pretended to work while I listened to her chew.
“Nat?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for stopping me at the play,” I said. “Even though I know you did it for Lisa.”
“Not just Lisa. If it weren’t for you, I probably would have started going with Doug before he sobered up. But I kept thinking about how you’d never settle for a guy who wasn’t perfect. Perfect enough.”
That wasn’t true, of course, so I just nodded and breathed the familiar lemon scent of her hair.
The next day she turned up again. On the third day Bill was with her, and on the fifth day, Lisa. We didn’t say too much. Stuff like, “The quiz is on Friday, right?” or “Have my apple.” Mostly we studied and ate, and when the buzzer went, we’d go back to our own sides of the classroom. But it went like that day after day, week after week, and slowly the space between us was closing.
Maybe it was the poetry books on the shelf behind Mr. Humphreys’ desk—Auden, Lowell, Rich, Yeats, Pound—or as my nan used to say, I could have pulled it out of my pancreas.
“Did you write that poem we read in class?” I asked. “About the two boys who used to be friends? Miss Aker said it was by a local poet, and everyone figured it was her, but now I’m thinking . . .”
Mr. Humphreys kept reading my Crimea report. It’d taken him ten minutes of staring in disbelief at my doctor’s note and an interminably long meeting with my parents and he’d insisted that I turn in my extra-credit assignments to him directly, but I had to hand it to him. He and Dr. Buster had really saved my bacon, so to speak.
“Did you hear me? I was asking if you wrote—”
“No.”
He wasn’t a good liar.
“I liked that line near the end: ‘We buried the reason’ . . . That’s not it. ‘The reason was buried like . . .’”
“‘The reason buried like a bone,’” he finished, shaking his head.
“It’s so sad that you can’t remember what made you stop being friends.”
“We were thirteen. The reason was probably stupid.”
“Do you have any idea when I can expect to stop being stupid?”
“Thirty-six. If you’re lucky.”
I slipped the book—the book—out of my bag. I’d been thinking about asking Miss Aker about the poem that Francis may or may not have bookmarked, which was probably not what the doctor ordered, as far as getting on with things, but not understanding it had been an itch I couldn’t scratch.
“Thought you were done with poetry for the year,” Mr. Humphreys said.
“Not reading it for school. Do you know her stuff?”
“I do.”
“Do you happen to know the poem ‘One Art’?”
“‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master.’”
“Right—oh, good. What does that mean exactly? She can’t really be saying that you get better at losing things. Places. People.”
“I think the point is she isn’t fooling anybody, not even herself. But I’d have to read it again.”
I slid the book across the desk to him.
“An oldie.” He turned the pages. Frowned. Flipped to the front, then back to the middle. “Where did you get it?”
“It was a gift.”
“A first edition. You’ve seen this, I assume.”
The poem was called “The End of March,” and below the title was
a dedication: For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury. Beside the dedication, in the margin, was an inscription scribbled in looped handwriting: For J.M.B., with affection and bottomless gratitude. E.B.
“That’s her?”
“Seems likely, though odd not to have signed the title page,” Mr. Humphreys said. “Perhaps she intended to surprise him.” He carefully slipped the book back into its plastic wrapper. “George, this could be worth a lot of money. Who did you say gave it to you? They might not have known its value.”
A ticket.
“I think he did,” I said.
Rupert was sitting on a park bench behind the nursing home, watching the river run.
I sat beside him and passed over a tin of cookies that Mum and Matthew had baked for me to bring. Oatmeal, Shaggy’s favorite.
“Hey, Rupert.”
“Oh, George. They said you were coming.”
His jacket parted and the ugliest creature in the world poked out its head and snarled at me. It might have been a dog.
“You got a new pet,” I said. “Don’t tell me something happened to Wilfred.”
“Wilfred is still alive, still a dick. This is Crystal. She belongs to my neighbor. Say thanks for the cookies, Crystal.”
Crystal disappeared into his jacket again.
“How are you feeling?”
“Old as hell. Sarah said I was out of my mind for a long while. Nice to be half back in it again.”
“You must miss Shaggy. And Francis. I’m so sorry.”
Rupert nodded, then gave me a sidelong look. “Never got used to you calling him that.”
How long had he known about Francis and me? Because he knew, didn’t he? Why else would he have hidden the book away?
I encouraged him. My god, I told him to go.
Still, I hoped there was another explanation. “Remember this?” I asked, taking Geography III out of my bag.
“Ah, an inheritance from the senior McAdams.”
“Francis left it for me. Sarah found it in your trunk.”
“Very good.”
Either he didn’t remember how it had ended up there or was an excellent poker player.
“It might be worth a lot of money.”
