Letting Loose

by Joanne Skerrett

  “Can I smoke?” he asked with a French accent. Whitney couldn’t take her eyes off him. I liked to watch her go all goo-goo over him; it made me want to laugh.

  Whitney pulled out a lighter and I wondered when she’d started carrying one; she sure didn’t smoke. Kelly blanched and Max began losing points immediately.

  “Sorry, dude. We don’t allow smoking in here,” James said, his mouth full of tortilla chips.

  Max nodded, expansively, as if to say: You sissy Americans and your silly hang-ups about secondhand smoke and lung cancer. You are such cowards, I say!

  What I was wondering was how could a Ph.D. student so “passionate” about finding a cure for a deadly disease like diabetes be a heavy smoker. I asked Whitney later and she said that his work was very stressful. Uh, okay, that explains everything.

  His work, Max told us, as we sat in the living room eating the hors d’oevres that Kelly had made—chips, salsa, and a rather sad imitation of those avocado egg rolls that the Cheesecake Factory makes—involved putting proteins under certain extreme conditions and then leaving them overnight in the lab. He apparently sometimes has to wake up at two or three in the morning to go to the lab to see how the proteins were doing. My eyes were glazing over. I mean, I was glad there were people like him who were willing to spend their lives studying molecules and babysitting proteins so the rest of us could live long, healthy lives. But why did I have to listen to all the gory details? The only person not pretending to be interested in Max’s oratory was Whitney. And I was 100 percent sure she’d heard all of it before. Is that what good sex does to people?

  I only grew more and more annoyed at dinner. The conversation turned to politics and James and Kelly were on fire.

  “Oh, it’s total treason what the Bush administration has done….”

  I had to tune out. What was Drew doing? Was he thinking about me? Would it be rude if I excused myself to go sneak a peek at my e-mail?

  “I don’t care if they deport me!” Max exclaimed, his fine nostrils flaring and his green eyes darkening. “The work I am doing here will benefit Americans more than any other people in the world. I will not report to their immigration bureau! How dare they?”

  Yeah, I thought, but you’d better be careful. You’ll be chilling in Guantánamo Bay in a hot minute if they ever catch you.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” Whitney said. And my mind jerked back to faking interest in the present.

  “Oh, just a little tired, that’s all.”

  “Have you decided on spring break yet?”

  Kelly and James looked on eagerly.

  “I’m leaning toward going. We’ll see.”

  “What is going on with the spring break?” Max asked.

  Whitney and Kelly filled him in and I sat there feeling a bit pathetic. I wasn’t sure that I wanted this guy knowing all the particulars of my relationship, er friendship, with Drew. Whom I’d never met.

  Max’s eyebrows kept going up and down and he kept smiling at me slyly.

  “You should go,” he said finally, slapping one hand on the table. “It sounds like an adventure. He might be your soul mate.”

  I could only laugh. I really hated that guy, I decided. It’s like he was just saying those things to move the conversation forward. Or backward, any which way that led to him. What in the world was Whitney doing with him? Oh, yeah. Green eyes. Good sex.

  “Let me tell you about the last time I was in the Caribbean…”

  Aha!!! He always had a story to tell.

  Later, after Max and Whitney had left and James had gone off to sit at his laptop, Kelly and I cleaned up the kitchen.

  “What do you think of him?”

  “Of Max?”

  She was stalling, so I elbowed her in the ribs.

  “Okay, Okay. He’s kinda…kinda stuck on himself. And phony. But he seems really smart. And sexy. And I know that’s a big thing for Whitney. They’re both eggheads. But…”

  “He’s an ass.”

  “Um…Yeah, definitely.”

  We laughed so hard James asked us what was so funny.

  “Think he’s gonna hang around long enough for Whitney to see through him?” Kelly giggled.

  “I don’t know,” I said, really wondering. “I’m hoping she’ll drop him in a couple of weeks. I think all it might take is one more conversation about the proteins.”

  We burst out laughing again. “Oh my God, Ames. I was like, what in the world is he talking about?”

  “Me, too! It was like I was in biology all over again. I was trying so hard not to yawn!”

  We laughed long and hard as Kelly mimicked Max’s accent. I’d miss her when I went away on spring break, I thought. What? What did my mind just say? Oh, my goodness. I was going. My mind had made itself up. I was going! I couldn’t wait to tell Drew.

  “Ames, you got mail!” James sang as I limped into the house, sore from spin class. They were sitting in the living room, both with laptops on their laps. The picture caused envy to boil up to my throat. I really needed to get out of this house if only just to give them their space. People who were so in love needed their own home. Besides, I just didn’t think I could make it another year being surrounded by all this love that didn’t belong to me.

  “You got a package today,” Kelly teased.

  Atop the pile of mail on the foyer table was a twenty-inch padded envelope. “Who’s it from?” I asked, knowing full well that it had to be from Drew since they’d made note of it.

  I looked at the thing, held it in my hands, and turned it over a couple of times.

  “Open it!” Kelly said impatiently.

  “Geez, give her a break, dude,” James admonished. I thought it was cute the way he called her dude sometimes. She hated that. She told him that it makes him sound like a teenage boy.

  Anyway, I didn’t want to open it with the two of them sitting there, but I did anyway. It was corny. Candy of some sort, guava something or the other. And a letter. I showed them and they did the requisite “awwws.”

  In my room, I sat on the bed and read the letter away from James’s and Kelly’s inquiring eyes.

  He’s a romantic, that Drew. His handwriting seemed as earnest as his words. A flash of doubt ran through me again and I worried that all of this seemed too easy. I needed to hold back a bit. He also sent me a book. An old hardback copy of Wide Sargasso Sea. It was old and dusty, a 1971 edition. Where did he find this? I hadn’t even been born yet when this was published. A note on it said he borrowed it from the Roseau Public Library: “Read it again and we’ll return it together when you get here.”

  I was melting. It was that easy.

  As I was near molten rereading Drew’s letter, the phone rang.

  “Hi, Ma.” I hoped the disappointment in my voice did not poison the conversation because I didn’t want to spoil my mood.

  “Amelia, you need to come over here right now.”

  “What’s wrong?” I assumed the worst. Gerard had been in an accident?

  “Just get over here now.” And she hung up.

  I dropped the letter and put my coat back on.

  “What’s up?” Kelly asked as I ran out the door, but I didn’t even stop to answer. I was afraid. What if something had happened to my baby brother? What if he was in the hospital? Lying smashed up somewhere? I drove through a red light on Columbia Road and a few horns blared. But I didn’t even look back to see what damage I might have caused.

  I pulled up in front of our house, my mother’s house, and a wave of depression weighed me down. I hated that house. I used to love it when my dad was around, but now every time I look at it I feel weary and sad. It’s a beautiful nineteenth-century Georgian house, like many others on the street. Except that ours had not been expensively renovated and sliced into condos. I’d suggested selling it, but Grace Wilson would not hear of it. The house belonged to her Jewish grandmother. And she was very proud of that fact. I’m not even sure she did have a Jewish grandmother. But Grace Wilson hold
s on to what she can when she wants to. She was standing at the door in a flannel robe.

  “Ma, what’s wrong?”

  “Look at this.” She shoved a sheet of paper into my hand.

  Inside, the house was steaming hot. She liked to turn the heat all the way up to eighty during the winter. My dad fought with her over this all the time when I was a kid. He’d turn it down to sixty-seven, and then she’d turn it right back up to eighty when he left for work. Then they would fight again when the bill came.

  I read the paper twice, three times. It was an order to appear in court. Apparently, my mother’s car had been involved in an accident. She had fled the scene of an accident. I looked at her.

  “You had an accident?”

  “No! Look at the date, Amelia.”

  I did and it meant nothing to me.

  “It’s the day I let Gerard use the car; the day he said he had a job interview!”

  Gerard had a job interview?

  “He told me he’d run into a wall. One of his friends fixed the car the next day. What am I going to do, Amelia?”

  I sank into the tattered couch. I had to take off my coat, it was too hot!

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “No, but I left him a message on his cell phone. He’s avoiding me.”

  She looked defeated and what could I say. They enabled each other’s behavior. This was not the first time she’d gotten in trouble because of my brother’s problems. He’d wrecked one car before. Had junkie friends come over and steal from her. Even had the police come to the house once looking for some friend of his who was wanted in a homicide.

  “What should I do?” she asked helplessly. There was a glass on the table and a bottle of Tanqueray, my father’s favorite drink, next to it.

  “You have to go to the police and tell them you weren’t driving the car.” I couldn’t believe Gerard had done this to her.

  “But…” She hesitated. “I’d have to tell them he did it.”

  “Yes, Ma. What? Did you want to take the blame for it?”

  “He’s still on parole…”

  “Yeah, and you don’t want to go to jail.”

  She sat down heavily. Was she crying? I couldn’t stand that. I didn’t want to see that today. I wanted to go back to my room. To Drew’s letter. To my sixty-seven-degree apartment with my anarchist roommates.

  “What am I going to do?”

  “Ma, you have to call the police and tell them what happened. Hopefully, this accident wasn’t too serious. And it couldn’t have been, else they would have been outside with guns waiting to pick you up. Just call the cops and get it straight. Your insurance is gonna go up and Gerard’s gonna get in trouble again. That’s all there is to it.”

  I was so angry with Gerard that I didn’t even want to think of how sad the idea of him going back to jail made me. How many times was he going to screw up?

  “I can’t do that to my son, Amelia. I can’t do that to him. He’s doing so well with his new job.”

  I sighed. “Fine, then. Take the blame. But you’re gonna have to go to court.”

  I truly didn’t know what would happen to her if she took the blame for Gerard’s screwup. What I did know was that she would do it. She loved him like that. Me, she could verbally abuse all the day long. But Gerard was her little man. She would coddle him till the day he died.

  I hugged her and told her that everything would be okay. Then I went into the kitchen to make sure she had enough food. There was one other bottle of liquor in the cabinet. I stuck it in my bag. She’d finish the Tanqueray, then she’d have no more unless she went to the store, and she certainly wouldn’t go out in this cold weather.

  “Bye, Ma. Call me and let me know what you want to do. I’ll come to the police station with you if you want.”

  She waved as I pulled away. Aaargh! Gerard, just grow up already, I thought. I tried calling his cell but he would not pick up. Fine, little brother, have it your way. I was so tired of my family!

  Chapter 11

  For some reason, I picked up the phone and dialed his number. His machine came on but he picked up halfway through the recording.

  “I knew it would be you,” he said, and my heart immediately warmed over like I’d just eaten a bowl of cream of wheat on a cold, cold morning.

  “I got your package. Now I’ll be up all night rereading Wide Sargasso Sea.”

  “That’s a really sexy book,” he said. “I read it in about a day and a half. I think Antoinette Cosway was kinda hot. Crazy, but still hot.”

  “I see. You like the crazy type.”

  “Not really. I like bookish types, with steamy chapters.”

  The minutes disappeared in a stream of revelations I had not planned. I told him about Ma and Gerard, their problems, my responsibilities in all of it. I never thought I could ever talk to anyone else about those things, except Whitney. Not even James and Kelly were aware of the extent of my family’s baggage. It was something that so shamed me that I engaged in my mother’s lies to my colleagues and casual friends. When Gerard had been locked away, I told everyone, along with my mother, that he was studying computer science at UNH.

  Lying was easy. It had started when my father began to drink heavily. I would call his work sometimes to tell them he wouldn’t be in because he was sick. Then when he really got sick, we told everyone that it was diabetes that was killing him and not drunk’s diseases or a busted-up liver. Lies, lies, lies. Then I started covering for my mother when she would screw up at her job, and then for Gerard when he’d done something to some neighbor’s property or some kid’s bike. I was always lying for my family. But here I was spilling embarrassing truths to Drew. Maybe it was easy to be honest because I’d never seen him before. Maybe that fact made him somehow less real to me. Maybe I was still lying in some sense.

  “Sometimes I wish I could just trade them in for a new family. Divorce them, you know?”

  “You don’t have to be so close to them if you don’t want to be,” he said. “You’re a big girl. You can move away. You cannot let their problems take over your life.”

  “I can’t do that, Drew. I’ve tried. But I always worry. It’s like the drama keeps pulling me back.”

  “Well, there’s your answer. You’re a loving, caring person and you don’t want to see your mother or your brother get hurt. What’s so bad about that?”

  “I don’t want to always have to be the one to save them.”

  “Then don’t be. Let them fall sometimes. They’ll learn to pick themselves up eventually.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I’m sure your family is perfect,” I said, wishing that he would have some major gripe that I could latch on to and feel somewhat better about my situation.

  “Not really. My dad was kind of a tyrant. I miss him now that he’s gone, but while he was alive we didn’t always get along.”

  “You mean he was a bad man? I thought he was loved and respected by everyone in your country.”

  “That was just for show. He had a public persona that he used to get votes and then there was the other side of him that only my mother and I got to see. It wasn’t pretty.”

  “What was it like?”

  He paused. “He did his best. He was just conflicted for the most part…You know, trying to be a good leader, a good father and husband. It was a lot for him to handle.”

  I sensed that he didn’t want to talk about it. “What about your mom, then?”

  “She’s great. She’s always been my champion. I think she spoiled me a bit. She’s my best friend, really.”

  “She sounds like a great person.” If she’d raised him to be what he is, then she must be a phenomenal sister!

  “I just wish things between my mom and me would just be normal. I’m tired of this up and down.”

  “You have a choice,” he said.

  Later, I looked out the window before settling into bed. It was snowing again and the windowpane was freezing. Drew’s voice was still echoing in my hea
d. I so wanted to be where he was. And not here. I didn’t want to have to think about going to court with Ma and about what would happen to Gerard if the cops found out he’d violated parole. Whitney had told me on numerous occasions: “Just let them screw their lives the hell up. Let Gerard go back to jail. Let your mom drink her nights and her days away in that old, dark house. Stop trying so hard.”

  But I couldn’t do that. It wasn’t as if things weren’t bad enough, despite my efforts. It would be worse for them if I weren’t here. But would it be worse for me? I wanted to find out. I picked up the phone, cringing as an image of my last phone bill flashed across my mental screen.

  “Drew, I’ve made up my mind,” I said. “I’m coming.”

  I thought I heard him gasp. “You won’t regret it, Amelia.”

  I’d better not, I thought after I’d hung up. I’m doing this just to get a taste of independence. Just a taste.

  Chapter 12

  “Ma, I’m going away.” We were on our way back from her court hearing about Gerard’s accident. Luckily, the damage to the other car was very minor. The “victim” was an older woman, as mean as an old dog. The lawyer I’d gotten for Ma tried to persuade the old lady to let us pay for the damage and to end it there, but the old coot wouldn’t hear of it. We had to go back to court. Ugh! I hated the thought of more of my mother’s savings being used for something Gerard was responsible for, so I’d offered to pay for it. I didn’t know why. I guess it was guilt. I’d treat myself once I got to Dominica and that would be my reward.

  “Where you going?” She sounded worried.

  “I’m going to the Caribbean for spring break.”

  She paused and shifted in the passenger seat. She always asked me each time I drove her somewhere: “Why do you drive this little car? All the young people these days are driving those big trucks and you driving this little car.”