The Stuff That Never Happened

by Maddie Dawson

“No,” I said, looking out the window.

  “Well, it’s four thirty. We should look soon.”

  “I don’t want to look.”

  “You don’t want to—Wait. Are you … crying?”

  “No. Yes.”

  “Holy shit. You are crying! What’s the matter? Wait. Are you unhappy?” We were nearing an exit just then, and to my surprise, he pulled off and stopped the truck. There was wheat, wheat everywhere. Maybe even some corn, who knew? Clouds of dust came up around the windows, and we sat there, both of us looking through the windshield. The engine ticked slowly in the sunlight.

  “Are you unhappy?” he said again.

  I started to cry harder. “Yes, I’m unhappy. I’m miserable.”

  He pursed his lips and cleared his throat and started tapping on the steering wheel, playing imaginary drums.

  Finally he said, “I guess this isn’t something to do with your not wanting to look in the Triple-A book, is it?”

  I stared at him.

  “No,” he said. “Is it because I said I was thinking about labor unions instead of marriage? Because if that’s all it is, I just don’t know yet how to think about marriage. I think I’ll learn, if—”

  “It’s everything,” I said. “We didn’t get a honeymoon, and we have to stay in the most ridiculous, sanitized, stupid campgrounds every single night—not even anywhere beautiful, not even places with lakes and flowers! And I’m sick of talk radio. I hate talk radio! And I don’t like it that you won’t ever let me drive, and I hate our tent!” I didn’t know until that moment that I had any particularly negative feelings toward the tent, but I was throwing in everything I could think of. I even dragged up the fact that my thighs were so sweaty they were sticking to the plastic seat—he jumped in to say that’s why he wore long pants—and I blew up and said we should just turn on the air conditioner, and he said that made the gas mileage too hideous to be believed, and I burst into fresh tears and said, “This is supposed to be our honeymoon! Who has a summer honeymoon in the middle of the country without goddamn air-conditioning?”

  He was quiet for a long time, and then he said, “Okay. I know what we have to do. This is one of those times when you have to regroup, go back to square one. Call in the reinforcements. We’re going to a motel. And then we’ll go out to dinner, to a great restaurant—”

  “Somewhere with tablecloths.”

  “Absolutely there will be tablecloths,” he said. “And flowers, fresh ones—”

  “And no red plastic ketchup bottles on the table.”

  “None! No ketchup even in the restaurant at all—that’s how fancy. And you can order anything you want. We won’t even think about money tonight. Okay? Tonight is all about us.”

  I put my head down and cried harder. I hadn’t expected such kindness and understanding.

  “And no more talk radio,” he said. “Music, even if it’s filled with static. Country music, even!”

  That night, after a dinner of lasagna in an Italian bistro in the middle of a town we called Cow Fart, Kansas, we stayed in an air-conditioned motel, in a real bed with clean sheets. We took a shower together in the white-tiled bathroom and soaped each other up. He shampooed my hair and washed my ears with the tips of his fingers. I told him I loved him, and later, in the middle of the room, stark naked, he actually clicked his heels in the air, like a cartoon character expressing joy. We turned on the radio and learned that Elvis had died that day, and in honor of him, we turned down the lights and danced in the hotel room to the Elvis songs they were playing on the radio. I danced with my feet on top of Grant’s.

  “You see?” he whispered to me. “We can be happy. We’ll be okay.”

  AND THEN—well, then my brother got shot in the head.

  He didn’t die. The bullet went through his skull, grazing a part of his brain, and then went out through the back of his head, knocking him unconscious. Some schoolchildren found him lying in a puddle of blood on the sidewalk.

  I found out the day after it happened, when I called my mother from a pay phone outside the diner where we’d eaten breakfast. I called her just to say hello, to check in. It was the first time I could trust myself to call home without crying or begging her to send a posse out across the country after me. There, standing in the dusty phone booth in the parking lot, with little pebbles gathering underneath my toes in my pink striped flip-flops and gnats swarming around my newly shampooed hair, I learned that my brother was in intensive care.

  “He’s alive—for now,” my mother said in a voice that sounded like it was packed in cotton batting. “They don’t know much else.”

  I twisted the cord of the pay phone around and around my index finger until it cut off the circulation. The little white numbers on the phone were raised, like bumps. I’d had sun poisoning once; my fingers thought these bumps were like the itchy rash I’d gotten and had scratched, even though I’d been told over and over not to touch it. Bumps and bumps. There wasn’t any air in the phone booth, not any that was suitable for breathing, so I kicked the door open and hurt my toe. Grant was standing far away with his hands in his pockets. He was staring across the street at a strip mall and grinding his toe in the dirt. For him, it was still just a regular day. He’d made his wife happy, and now he wanted to get back on the road.

  David was in the intensive care unit, with round-the-clock care, my mother said again. It was as if she was simply programmed to go through a list of things to tell people who called, and sometimes there was a glitch and she repeated herself. She talked in a high, thin, urgent voice, like a little girl’s, shaky and uncertain. She told me several things, and then repeated them: The bullet had missed all the really important, kill-you-outright places. He was on sedatives and pain medication now, so he just slept all the time and couldn’t talk, but he’d been conscious right after it happened. He’d joked with the ambulance driver, someone said, so there was that. His speech was still intact. But the joke had been about how the world had gone black and he was going to have to learn to see with his ears.

  “But who would shoot David?” I said.

  It was just one of those senseless things, she told me. A stranger did it. Just came up to him when he was in his car, stopped at a red light in South LA, and shot him in the face point-blank. Crime wave, she said. Terrible things happened that we didn’t even know about.

  “South LA?” I cried. “Oh my God. He shouldn’t have been there.”

  “You know David. He has friends from everywhere,” she said.

  But my heart sank. I knew that South LA meant it had been a drug deal. My brother had been buying drugs in South LA so that he could sell them to his friends in the Valley. He was such an idiot. Such a stupid idiot. But I had sat out there by the pool and smoked weed with him, so in a way I was a collaborator. And if you really want to know the truth, it had been me who had introduced him to marijuana in the first place, years before. I’d brought some home and for fun had put it in the spaghetti sauce, as though it was just any spice. Like oregano, I thought. I’d see what my family acted like when they were high. Wouldn’t that be fun, seeing my father get stoned unknowingly? Then, as it happened, my parents had gone out that night, and David, who was fourteen, had eaten plates and plates of the spaghetti and then had been so overwhelmed with giggles he’d fallen on the floor in a heap. We’d played Twister, laughing so hard we could barely breathe and falling all over ourselves. I’d told him, before he went to bed that night, “This is weed you’re experiencing—you’re high,” and watched as his eyes widened. A month later, he’d bought his own ounce of the stuff, and two months after that, he had a thriving dope business.

  God, I was a horrible sister.

  My mother said, in a low voice, “This happened to punish me. That’s the only thing your father and I know for sure. It’s karma, you know. For leaving like I did. I leave, and my son nearly gets killed.”

  “Oh, Mama, that’s not the way the world works,” I said. “Look around you at how many people do
terrible, terrible things and nothing bad ever happens to them. Karma is either the most faulty system ever, or else it’s just one big joke.”

  She started to cry. “Please, please don’t say that. We can’t ever argue with each other, not ever again. People should stand by each other, and that’s what I’m going to do. I was wrong to leave your father and think only of myself. And if David lives I am going to stand by everyone for the rest of my life and just tell you all every day how much I love you.”

  I cried, too. I was the worst, most guilty person in the whole story. And yet I knew that when I told Grant everything, he would defend me. He would say, Don’t be ridiculous. These things happen. Your brother would have discovered weed on his own, even if you hadn’t given him that first clobber of it in the spaghetti.

  That’s what he would say, and his eyes would be placid and gray and his voice wouldn’t go up or down in tone. He just accepted things, the good and the bad. I wanted to be back at home with my mother, to hold her hand and tell her that she didn’t have to tell me she loved me every day. I already knew it.

  I said that I would come back home, and she said, “But you’re on your honeymoon,” and I said, “That doesn’t matter.”

  She started to cry in earnest then and put my dad on the phone—I heard him protesting in the background that he didn’t see the point of talking, but she made him anyway. He was monosyllabic, like somebody who’d been awakened in the middle of the night. He didn’t seem even remotely well enough to have any opinions. I asked him if the two of them were eating, and he didn’t seem to know why I would ask a question like that.

  When I hung up, I went over to Grant, who was now in the truck, looking at the maps and whistling. I told him what had happened. A bead of sweat rolled down the inside of my tank top, tickling me all the way down to the waistband of my shorts. “I’m so sorry, but I need to go back home,” I said. I shielded my eyes from the sun and looked up at him in the truck. “I don’t think I can go with you to New York anymore.”

  I watched the color leave his face. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “We can turn around now and we’ll stay there a couple of days, until things settle down, and then we can set out again for New York.”

  “I don’t think things are going to be all right in a couple of days,” I said. I ran my hand along the inside of the truck’s open door, wondering what it would be like if the door were to slam on my fingers. Would that make the pain in my heart better or worse?

  “Well, then, as long as it takes,” he said. “Surely they’ll know more in a few days, at least. We can get things squared away there, and then go to New York.”

  “No,” I said. I knew I wasn’t going to be ready to go to New York in a few days. “Listen,” I said. “You have a job waiting for you, and you’re supposed to turn in the truck in New York City, and we’re already on such a tight deadline. You go on ahead and get settled, and I’ll go take care of my brother—”

  But didn’t marriage count for anything? He said we were married, damn it, and that’s what married people did: stand by each other in times of difficulty. Hadn’t that been what I agreed to when we got married? This was our first test. Didn’t I know what “for better or worse” even meant? He and I had made vows. This is how his parents had lasted so long. They stayed with each other. His father never would have let his mother go off alone. This is what you do.

  I told him I didn’t think that applied here. It was too soon, for one thing. And this was a situation that had nothing to do with our marriage, or him, or anything about the future. I pointed out that he’d lose the job that was waiting for him—the one with the man he’d most wanted to work with in his whole adult life, the guy we had taken to calling The Great Man Himself. Plus, there was the deposit he’d put on the truck. If we went back to California now and then to New York at some later time, we’d have more trouble finding an apartment later on. I really believed all this stuff I was saying.

  “Really,” I said. “I need to do this.”

  The truth was—and I didn’t know this until I got on the plane, until I’d clicked the seat belt closed and accepted a martini, my first ever, from the stewardess—the truth was, I didn’t want him with me. I wanted to have this experience all to myself. This was mine. Grant had no place in the tiny hierarchy of people who could know about my brother’s drug deals gone wrong, and my mother’s crazy theories about karma and her foray into feminism and all the rest of it, and the way my father closed his eyes when the world demanded even the slightest thing of him.

  These were my people—my flawed, crazy people—and they were in trouble and I needed to go back and stand with them. Grant would be fine. I had told him that: we’d be a married couple later on, I told him. I had some unfinished sister-and-daughter work to do. It was bad luck, is all.

  “I’ll call you,” I’d said to him in the coffee shop at the airport.

  “But will you ever really come to New York?” he asked. “I’m your husband, and I don’t want to be away from you.”

  “Of course I will!” I said. But as the plane took off and I took the first sips of the martini, what I was feeling was something else altogether: as sad as my brother’s trauma had been, there was something else flickering in the back of my mind, something I didn’t even want to admit to. And that was that I had received a reprieve, a pardon, a free pass out of marriage and another chance at being back in my home again, with my mother and father—and yes, a sick, injured little brother, all of whom I needed so desperately. I never should have left.

  I had gotten to run back into childhood just before the gate shut me out forever.

  GRANT TRAVELED the rest of the country to New York in record time, staying in concrete campgrounds and listening to talk radio to his heart’s content, I’m sure. And once he got there he discovered it was much harder than he’d imagined to find an apartment and set up housekeeping. It was one man against the whole unfathomable system of city landlords and rental agencies. Besides, he said on the phone, how could he possibly figure out what type of place I’d like? How could he be sure he’d pick just the right apartment? Perhaps I’d forgotten, in my absence, how inept he was at daily life. Instead, he told me in one of our late-night phone conversations, he’d accepted an invitation to live in the meantime with The Great Man Himself, of all people. What fantastic luck!

  The Great Man Himself had a wife and twin toddlers, and an apartment they were willing to share. Yes, they’d invited him! In fact, Grant had been given the wife’s study for his bedroom, which was just great because she was a dancer putting on a show and she needed to work at the studio now instead of at home. There was already a double bed in there anyway, along with a desk and boxes of family photos and Christmas decorations and all the paraphernalia of family life, boxes of old baby clothes and toys. It was sweet, he said. The toddlers came in and woke him up with kisses and pokes in the eye every morning. One of them insisted he wear the toilet plunger for a hat, which was apparently a great honor.

  It was a perfect arrangement, he said, because—well, because it gave him a chance to get acclimated to living in New York and to working for the university without being quite on his own. Had I been there, he told me, he probably wouldn’t have relied on others. And then he would have missed out on the greatest friendship of his life. He actually said that: the greatest friendship of his life. With good dinners and conversation and wine.

  “And they can’t wait to meet you,” he said. “Please, please come soon, whenever your family can do without you.”

  I told him I would. David had awakened from his sleep, but he was paralyzed from the waist down and had lost the sight in one eye and some of his hearing. He was going to be staying in rehab for a long time, it looked like. There wasn’t much more I would be able to do for him.

  Grant said, “Well … he’ll have people who can help him recover,” and I could hear glasses clinking and laughter in the background. I heard a man’s voice say, “Tell her we’re turning y
ou into a New Yorker, plying you with bagels and brioche. And tell her this—tell her we’re already half in love with her just from her picture, although we suspect that’s just a decoy photo you’re trying to impress people with!”

  “Wow, The Great Man Himself has a normal human voice,” I said. “He doesn’t boom like I thought God would sound when he talked.”

  Grant laughed. “I know! Did you hear him?” he said into the phone. “That was Jeremiah. I think he’s beginning to believe you’re not really real. So you see, you have to come and prove him wrong.”

  [nine]

  2005

  I love this, being back in New York. You know what it’s like? It’s like being young again. I feel anything is possible.

  Sophie and I settle into a nice, easy rhythm with each other, as I knew we would. I’m enough like her to know what cheers her up, and so we do plenty of it, as much as we want. We loll about in bed watching movies and napping and eating off and on, whenever we please. I get to play the part of Lady Bountiful, making chicken soup and homemade wheat bread, roasted vegetables, stir-fries. I bring in People magazine, romantic comedies on DVD, fragrant moisturizers, lip glosses, nail polish in a variety of colors. It’s as though we exist in a kind of bubble—an overheated, one-room, exclusively female bubble, surrounded by everything we could want. Outside, branches scrape against the windows of her apartment, the sun rises and sets, the wind blows, and car horns honk. Inside, we give each other manicures and pedicures, and I comb her hair into upswept hairdos with tendrils, and the radiator bathes us in plumes of warm air. We decide we should both wear bangs. I comb mine down and straight until I look like Chrissie Hynde, the lead singer of The Pretenders, which I have to explain to Sophie was a band from the years I lived here before. Sophie wears wispy bangs, combed to the side, that emphasize her wide gray eyes.

  We both are working, too. I’ve set up a makeshift drawing table in the corner of the bedroom, and I’m finishing up the Bobo pictures, concentrating on getting the expressions just right. How’s this for a distinction? My editor says I’m the queen of making animals look like they’re brimming with goodwill and human feelings. “One millimeter speck of brown paint in the wrong place, and people suddenly remember that squirrels are just rats with tails,” she said once, which made me laugh.