Trey and I wandered outside in our sports gear, and Dad told us he was going to the hardware store to have his lawn-mower blade sharpened. He took Mom’s car since it was parked behind his and she wouldn’t be needing it as she had walked to the hair salon to have her ends trimmed. We stood in the driveway after Dad drove away and had our usual Saturday conversation.
“What do you wanna do?”
“I dunno. What do you wanna do?”
“I dunno. We could go to the arcade.”
“Yeah.”
“Or we could watch MTV.”
I didn’t like MTV. It made me feel like I’d drunk too much Coke. “Or we could go to the grocery store and try their free samples.”
Trey and I weren’t very good at Saturdays. We could never decide what we were going to do—except when Dad had one of his fits. When that happened, life became predictable and manageable and we no longer had to plan our day or come to an agreement. We knew the drill. It took all the frustration out of Saturdays. But Dad had been in a pretty good mood so far, so we were left to our own devices.
Why Trey stayed home on weekends with little old me was a mystery. He had friends on the soccer team and at school, though he mostly just hung out with them between classes and during games and scrimmages. They never came over to the house, but I think that’s because it was too hard to explain my dad to them. And not just the neckties-on-Saturdays thing.
We were about to throw in the towel and head to the video arcade when the sport of basketball decided to turn our lives upside down. See, Trey had his Bulls cap on, and when he was wearing that, he tended to suffer from Michael Jordan delusions. I saw him eyeing the basketball hoop that hung above our garage door and concluded I’d have to find my own entertainment for the next hour or so while my usually fairly rational brother bounced a ball in rhythmic monotony and yelled, “Three-pointer!” at the top of his lungs. I did, however, see an impediment to his plans.
“Don’t you think Dad’s car is too close to the hoop?” I asked.
“I’ll shoot around it.”
“Trey . . .” Dad loved his car. The first deadly sin in our household was messing with Dad’s car. The second deadly sin was everything else.
“Don’t worry about it, Shell.” He was already bouncing the ball and lining up his first shot. “I’ve got all the precision of my man Jordan.”
He had neither the skin color nor the height, so I doubted he had the precision. The first shot went wide and bounced off the backboard directly onto the shiny hood of Dad’s Chevy. I cringed and covered my eyes like it would undo the hollow thunk that I knew must have left its mark on the finish.
“It’s okay,” Trey said a few seconds later, and I uncovered my eyes to find him polishing a blemish off the hood with his shirt. “It’s coming right off.”
“Maybe it’s a bad idea to pretend you’re a Bull while the car’s in the driveway,” I suggested. He got a look on his face that made me want to tie him to a tree with duct tape. It was a look that spelled mischief—only it spelled it d-a-n-g-e-r-o-u-s. “What are you thinking, Trey?” I really didn’t like the glint in his eyes.
He looked into the car and his smile broadened. “You know how I’ve been taking driver’s ed at school?”
“Trey . . .”
“I’m going to be sixteen in two and a half months.”
“Only if Dad doesn’t kill you before then.”
Trey leaned down and eyed the garage doorway like a golfer lines up his shot. “All I’ve got to do is put it in gear and let it coast into the garage.”
“Uh, Trey . . .” I was trying to figure out how to express my true feelings without resorting to nasty words.
Trey opened the driver’s-side door and got into the front seat. I was rooted to the spot with a combination of terror and reluctant admiration. My brother, the idiot, was truly a courageous guy.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” I yelled as the engine came to life and he put it in gear. The car inched forward and I could see how it was perfectly lined up with the garage. I think Trey and I were both so focused on that, neither of us realized he had left the car door open. I saw it just as it was about to make contact with the garage’s doorframe and yelled, “Trey! The door!” so loudly that I startled myself.
I apparently startled Trey, too, because he panicked. He didn’t know what I’d yelled, but he knew it had sounded urgent, and in his frantic attempt to bring the car to a halt, he hit the wrong pedal, just for a second, and jolted the Chevy into the workbench on the back wall of the garage.
I’ve heard it said that time stands still at critical moments in life, like when someone says they love you or you win the lottery or your brother plows your dad’s prize possession into the garage wall. But time didn’t actually stand still in the aftermath of what we would come to refer to as the Big Bang. Time actually took on a life of its own and started to rock and swirl around me, and I think the whole earth kinda bucked along in rhythm. It was a cataclysm of unimaginable consequences, and time was thrashing around in a desperate effort to reverse itself. It didn’t succeed. When the earth settled a little under my feet, I heard a lone wrench fall off its wall hook and land on the hood of the shiny black Chevy.
This was not good—a very bad, very scary, very irremediable version of not good.
When Dad returned, he found us sitting on the stoop at the front of the house. We’d passed the minutes trying to make light of the situation, but I could see from the sweat on Trey’s forehead and the wideness of his eyes—like the top lids were stuck on something—that we hadn’t succeeded. That was a little disappointing, because we’d tried so hard.
“So do you still feel like Michael Jordan?” I’d asked.
“This is the end of my life.”
“Maybe we should run away to Mexico and build a Huddle Hut on the beach.”
“He’s going to kill me, Shell.”
“We could make up a story. We could say some homeless guy jumped in the car and rammed it into the garage. Or maybe a druggie.”
“Or maybe the pope.”
“Yeah—the pope’s a good one too.”
“The damage isn’t too bad, right?”
I hesitated. I didn’t know much about cars. “Well, the door is . . . It just has a few scratches, but . . .”
“He’s going to kill me.”
“Maybe if you tell him how sorry you are, he’ll understand. Or maybe he’s one of those people who get all upset about stupid little things but don’t really worry about the big things.”
He gave me a my-sister-the-moron look. We were in deep doo-doo and both of us knew it.
“I hear Mexico’s really nice this time of year.”
That’s when my mom’s car, with my dad in it, pulled into the driveway. It took a while for him to open the door, and that was scarier than anything that came after.
Trey stood and waited. I could see he had dark spots on his back and under his arms where the sweat had soaked into his shirt. When Dad got out of the car, Trey took a step back. I stood and touched his arm, and then he stepped off the stoop and went to stand in front of the man whose lips had disappeared and whose neck was popping with veins and sinews and fury.
Dad didn’t take his eyes off the car and the mess of tools and paint cans on the floor around it.
“Dad, I—”
He backhanded Trey so quickly, like a lightning strike, that it was over before I’d seen it coming. Trey fell against Mom’s car so hard that his back curved over the hood. My dad kept him plastered there with his hand on his throat, pushing down on his neck like he wanted to crush it.
I felt like I was watching the scene through a wall of buzzing bees, so thick and seething was the air.
The sky lowered and added its weight to my dad’s. The trees in the yard bent forward, forcing more air out of my brother’s lungs.
“What have you done?” Dad raged, disgorging a crush of poison words. “What have you done to my car?” I could s
ee the spit flying out of his mouth, even at a distance, and the veins around his eyes were starting to stand out. He was red. Mottled. Rabid. His body taut and straining. His teeth bared in a snarl that belonged on a sick, caged animal—not on my dad. This was not my father. This was my worst nightmare in human form, my greatest, most horrendous fear choking the life out of my brother in Technicolor and surround sound. My legs wanted to buckle and my mind wanted to flee into insentience, but the only good part of me was being broken, that part that walked and talked and breathed as Trey, and I couldn’t let it happen. There was a bright-blue flash at the back of my mind and I launched off the porch, pushing through thick air toward my brother. My friend. My protector.
“I’ll kill you for this! I’ll kill you!” my dad was shrieking, his voice like broken glass. Then he ran out of words and just screamed and howled and thundered while I tried to pry his vicious hands from my brother’s neck. I pulled at his arm, pitting my full weight against his grip, but I was a moth throwing myself against a fortress, feeble and frantic and impotent.
In a desperate last effort fueled by the churning lava in my chest, I jumped onto Dad’s back and braced my feet against Mom’s car and tried to pull him away from the hood, away from Trey, away from the hell of seeing my brother, shattered and helpless, dying before me. And still, my efforts were in vain. I reached around to my dad’s face and started to claw. I clawed at his eyes, I clawed at his cheeks, I clawed at his mouth and ears and nose. I felt wet against my fingers, and I didn’t care whether it was spit or blood or tears. All I cared about was that he was staggering back and releasing his hold on my choking, convulsing brother.
And then he turned, his hands tearing mine from his face, and slammed backward into the car with me on his back, knocking the terror from my lungs, before throwing me over his shoulder like a wrestler onto the ground. I felt my wrist bend too far, but it was only the mechanics of the injury that registered, not the pain. I heard shrieking in the background that sounded like my mom. Then my face hit the pavement in a streak of fire-yellow and blood-pounding red and I passed out.
My first thought when I woke up on the living room couch was, Shoot, I didn’t kill him. I’d really hoped my clawing would have severed an artery somewhere in his face and made him bleed to death. But there he was, sitting off in the corner of the room in the chair that was so pretty that none of us ever used it. My eyes were seeing things a little blurry, so I couldn’t tell if it was blood or just scrapes crisscrossing his face. I hoped it was blood.
“Trey . . .” I croaked, turning my head to find Mom’s face above mine. She was holding my wrist like you hold a dead bird.
“It’s just a sprain,” she said, and I squinted a little to make sure it was really my mom. She didn’t sound like her.
“Trey,” I tried again. “Where’s Trey?” This time my voice sounded less like a bullfrog and more like a cricket. But Mom was so busy staring at my dad, all slumped over in the pretty flowered chair, that I don’t think she heard me. Her face looked stony, like those gargoyles we’d studied in art class. Except she was prettier—but not by much. Hate had turned her ugly just then. It suddenly dawned on my mushy brain that maybe she was ignoring my question because the answer was too horrible to say. I felt like the couch folded up beneath me and I fell through, butt first, and went spiraling into an endless, dark, suffocating hole where the absence of Trey would shred me.
There were weird pictures flashing through my head, like pages of a notebook being flipped so fast that they all blurred together. I saw bits and pieces of Rolos and basketballs and zucchini and Coke cans and the Huddle Hut and the arcade and all these fragile pieces of Trey I wanted to gather up and press into a ball and swallow so he would be a part of me—inside me—even if he wasn’t in the world anymore. The darkness of the hole was blackening my vision and snuffing out my thoughts.
Life without Trey. Life without Trey. Life without Trey. My heart tried to beat through my ribs so it could run away screaming into the attic and curl up in the Huddle Hut and just shriek.
“Is she okay?” The voice was raspy like the smell of burned toast, but it was Trey’s and it was alive and it came from somewhere down around my feet. So I pulled my head off the couch’s armrest and looked down my body through the spinning, rocking world . . . and there he was. He was sitting in Mom’s armchair, holding a bag of frozen peas against his throat. I could see there would be bruises there tomorrow. Tomorrow. Trey would be alive tomorrow. I laid my head back down on the armrest and heard a sob and thought, How embarrassing for whoever was making such a pathetic noise. And then Trey was beside me, his frozen-peas hands cold against my arm. He knelt by the couch and shushed me like a baby, stroking my arm, while Mom stood there and stared at the corner with the pretty chair.
I didn’t know what to do to stop sobbing, and I think I looked at Trey like, Help me! because all the crying was hurting my ribs and my head and my wrist. But Trey just kept on shushing me. And then his shushing got a little jagged. And then he put his face down next to my head, kind of burrowed it into the pillow under my neck, and I could feel his sobbing matching mine.
I couldn’t stop the tears. They had started when I’d gotten into Gus’s car, and they hadn’t abated during the fifteen-minute ride home. He had tried to console me as best he could, but his reassurances had been weightless on the scales by which I judged the good and bad of my life.
“You couldn’t have seen him coming,” Gus said. “It’s a blind intersection and you did everything you should, but he just came around that corner too fast to miss you.”
“He didn’t listen,” I said, swallowing the sobs that tried to overcome my self-control. I would not let them out in front of Gus. “I kept telling him that I don’t speak German and he just kept on yelling at me. I even told him in German—but he kept pointing at his car and at me and . . .” I had to pause because the exertion of trying to maintain my dignity was making it hard for me to catch my breath. “And I don’t have a cell phone!” I finally wailed.
“It all worked out,” Gus said in a soothing voice, reaching awkwardly to pat me on the shoulder as he drove. “That store owner let you call Bev, and she got ahold of me.”
I felt another wave of humiliation and horror rushing up from my stomach to my throat. “He just wouldn’t stop yelling, Gus!”
“The damage isn’t bad.” He was trying hard to drag my mind off the yelling, but it had apparently made quite an impression on my conversational skills. “I’ll go over this afternoon with someone else and drive your car home. We’ll have it back in shape in no time. And it probably won’t even cost that much.”
That launched another tears-versus-self-control battle. Money. Money had become more of an issue than it had ever been before. I did have the income from my dad and from my church, but every month still felt like a desperate countdown from one paycheck to the next.
“We can help you pay for the repairs,” Gus said, misinterpreting my increased crying for concern about the bodywork my car’s rear fender would require. He didn’t realize how much deeper and wider my anxiety was. This wasn’t about an accident. This wasn’t about another bill. This was about the utter foundationlessness I felt in every facet of my out-of-control life.
When we got home, Bev was waiting on the doorstep for me. She rushed over and helped me out of the car, while Gus took the keys from me and opened my door.
“Oh, Shelby, honey, I’m so, so sorry,” she said, wrapping me tightly and rubbing my shoulders as we walked. “Is the car badly damaged?”
“Just a scratch and a dent,” Gus said as we passed in front of him and entered my apartment. “I’ll keep your keys so I can get your car later, okay, Shelby? And I’ll pick Shayla up from kindergarten in an hour, so don’t you worry about that.”
“We’ll be okay,” Bev said, walking with me to the couch. Gus told her to call him if we needed anything, then left.
Now that I was in my own home and in the comfortable presence of
my friend, I had no command left over the torrent of emotions that had been months in building up. Bev went to my bedroom and came back with my pillow. “Here,” she said, “hang on to this. It’s no good to cry without something to hold on to.” And she sat down beside me on the couch and patted my back while I hugged the pillow to my stomach and let the torrent rage. The force of my crying was terrifying, so powerful that I pitched slowly sideways as I sobbed, my head finding the armrest and my legs curling up under me. Bev’s hand never ceased its movement on my back and shoulder. She just sat there quietly and let my anxiety flow.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” I sobbed, minutes later, when I couldn’t seem to get a grip on my emotions. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
Bev’s voice was gentle and laced with understanding. “It’s been a long time in coming, hasn’t it.”
I nodded, powerless to gain control.
“And it’s not just about your accident,” she said. “But you know that, too.”
“He wouldn’t understand me,” I cried. “I kept saying it over and over—‘I don’t speak German.’ But he kept on ranting. And when the cops came—” I buried my face in my pillow to stifle the sounds coming out of my throat—“they laughed, Bev.” I turned my head to look at her. “They laughed and said something about Americans.”
“Well, that was uncalled for.”
“I can’t do this,” I said, and the resolve of that statement relieved me somewhat. It also made me angry enough to sit up. “I can’t live here. I can’t keep trying to convince myself that everything’s fine. I can’t keep putting Shayla through this.”
In Broken Places Page 13
