Of course by the following Monday this episode was widely spread, often in combination with the news that earlier that evening, Peyton and Emily had locked themselves in the master bedroom for over an hour. With this final fact in mind, over the next two weeks the St. Pius community divided itself into camps based on their beliefs concerning Emily’s habitually referenced purity. Meanwhile, Peyton spent most of that time chasing her from classroom to classroom arguing his integrity. His pleas were met with oblivious silence and an eventual suspension when he finally quit begging and stomped across the school lawn shouting, “You’re sick! You’re really sick!” before dive tackling a young birch tree dedicated to a sophomore who’d rolled his Jeep on a ski trip to Fun Valley. Emily pretended not to care about the situation, and perhaps she didn’t care. While she neither confirmed nor denied the rumors of her lost innocence, she did surprise everyone by resigning as editor of the school newspaper, a rash decision that in the fallacious mind of the St. Pius community closed the debate. As for my own estimation, while I may have arrived at the same conclusion as my classmates, my opinion was based less on Emily quitting the newspaper than on the fact that in all the time we spent together, she never once mentioned Peyton’s name.
Six
I first met Katie Schell in mid-October at the Whitfield Preparatory Academy, the most expensive school in Des Moines and the only nondenominational private school in the city. The academy was brand-new (as was everything else in Clive, at that time the west ernmost suburb of the city), but built in the old tradition with a long, snaking driveway that arrived at a gardened roundabout designed for mothers of the nouveaux riches to vie for prime idling spots, encouraging them to arrive earlier and earlier in order to prove to teachers and fellow parents their superior nurturing intellect. But on the day in question Mrs. Schell had a USTA doubles match with a rival team from Ankeny who Emily explained were known to feign minor third-set injuries (1) as a technique of rhythm-breaking, (2) to exploit their opponents’ sympathy, and (3) as a preemptive justification for losing. Emily and I arrived at around four in the afternoon when only a few students remained, wandering in circular self-reflection, practicing card tricks, kicking at their backpacks, etc. Katie was sprawled out on the squared sod next to a glimmering metallic crutch, sulking in the sun, staring daggers into Emily’s tires as we curved into view. “Looks like her engine’s running a little hot,” Emily said. “Left all alone with the future drug addicts and whores.”
In an attempt to prove myself conscientious and gentlemanly (everything that Peyton Chambeau and his doggish cohorts were not), I stepped out of the car to give Katie the front seat. At this point she paused in reaching for her crutch, a combination of curiosity and accusation crossing her brow when she realized that Emily wasn’t alone. I had the feeling Katie was counting to herself a moment later as she made the transition from two knees to one knee and one crutch, then one knee, one crutch, and one foot, and so on as she pushed herself awkwardly upright. She made a slow and deliberate path across the lawn with her school bag swinging from her shoulder, her back erect and head high, now and then sidestepping to protect her bright white tennis shoes from the occasional pool of week-old rainwater or thicket of fallen leaves.
While I would likely never have marked the Schell girls as siblings, whatever resemblance there was between them was clearly evidenced in their nobly heightened foreheads and the grave angle of their eyebrows when they squinted. Katie was at least Emily’s height with feathery brown hair, bright boyish cheeks, and a prominent adult nose she had yet to make her own. As she neared the sidewalk she brusquely tucked her crutch under her armpit, lending the impression of an athlete making the showy case for her full recovery. Becoming aware of my ornithologist-like attention, I turned to the schoolyard fence and beyond it to the Clive water tower and the harvested cornfield littered with shredded stalks. I was just glancing back to the sidewalk when Katie’s right leg quit, buckling at the knee and tipping her upper frame sideways. I shouted and threw my hands out like a crossing guard, unable to jump forward quickly enough to catch her. She crumpled hard to the pavement. By the time Emily ran around the front of the car, Katie was rocking and gripping her elbow. Two hive splotches blossomed on each side of her neck. A thin strip of blood began its course from her knee down along her shin.
“You moron,” Katie mumbled, tossing her crutch into the grass like it hadn’t done its job. There was something unintentionally funny about the comment that added an extra uneasiness to the situation. Emily took no more time than necessary checking the damage. “I don’t like blood,” she said, rolling her eyes and grimacing in the face of her rising nausea. I felt foolish just staring at Katie and almost made the mistake of treating her like a child by bending her elbows and knees as a way of assuring her that nothing was broken. She was embarrassed and wouldn’t face me. I ended up retrieving her school bag from the curb. Katie grunted with all the lassitude of an overworked field hand as Emily helped her to her feet.
“That crutch has been trouble since day one,” Katie said. “The little bitch.”
“Oh lovely,” Emily said. “You kiss your mom with that mouth?”
Katie flicked her head in my direction in a way that seemed to relate her impression that I was the reason Emily was late, and that Emily being late deserved even more blame for her fall than the crutch. “Profanity’s good for your circulation,” she said. “Who’s he?”
“He is the new guy from Davenport, and his name is George Flynn. You can stop pretending you don’t know all about him.”
“George Flynn?” Katie repeated, still wincing but also trying to appear quite certain that she’d never heard of any new guy from Davenport named George Flynn. When she finally faced me, she jutted her chin out and threw me a fast nod, which I took as an instruction to hand over her school bag and get hopping into the backseat. During our ride through West Des Moines she communicated her remaining frustrations by incessantly fidgeting with the armrest power buttons. For ten minutes it was all groaning windows and changing winds, the electronic clap of doors locking and unlocking. Despite that, Katie’s stubbornness reminded me of Emily in her dealings with Peyton the week after the dance; I was sure she’d tapped into a much deeper and more hostile source.
“Katie’s working on a comic book,” Emily said, half-shouting into the wind in an attempt at congeniality that, however unintentionally, came off as akin to the third-person praise often showered on shy toddlers. “It’s all about a dysfunctional high school. Recently Katie’s been dropping a lot of pianos on people, but when Katie drops a piano on someone, it’s usually a player piano that kills them and then plays the most perfect farewell song.” Emily turned to Katie, thinking for some reason that she might take over from there. But Katie only opened the glove compartment and started rifling through it, like she wasn’t hearing a word. “Anyway, she’s got this mean math teacher character, and in one scene he yells at his students about how math is the most important subject, and how mathematicians have to be more responsible than regular people because mathematicians who make mistakes can accidentally blow up the world. Then all of a sudden a piano comes flying down and kills him and starts playing ‘One Is the Loneliest Number.’ ”
“It’s not funny if you don’t know the song,” Katie protested, barely loud enough for me to hear.
“I know the song,” I said, sliding to the center of the seat. “It’s Three Dog Night. My dad used to play their albums all the time, especially on the drive to my uncle’s place in Cedar Falls.”
“You don’t keep any Band-Aids in your car?” Katie said, slapping the glove compartment shut. I noticed that the splotch marks on her neck had almost cleared.
“Saa-haar-reee,” Emily said, heading south down 128th Street, obviously deciding it best to drop her sister off before me. But as soon as we reached University Avenue Katie started explaining what little homework she had, and how she thought she remembered running out of skin repair lotion, “the stuff th
at works like a miracle and that you’ll never find on your own because it comes in a small tube they usually hide in those big Walmart bins filled with a bunch of non- skin care products [deep peasant sigh], and the bottom line is that you might as well keep driving, I’m sure there’s a Walmart nearby wherever George Flynn lives.” Emily didn’t argue, even if she wasn’t exactly with us anymore when Katie started flipping through radio stations at a pace just slow enough to leave me believing that each turn of the dial was her last. After scanning the entire FM selection she turned it off, opening the glove compartment and dedicating the following minutes to tender compact disc massage, invoking a frozen quietness that she commanded like a general’s silence for his mutilated soldiers. After adjusting the bass, treble, and volume controls, she chose her track and was already lounging and perfectly relaxed when we heard the first twinkling notes of “Riders on the Storm,” in my opinion the greatest road tune of all time. Emily changed lanes, looking over her shoulder and meeting my eyes just long enough to let me know everything was all right. She reached over and pinched her sister’s thigh.
“You sure aloe is the best thing for a cut like that?”
Katie didn’t answer. She was busy feeling it with her eyes closed and the wind in her hair, playing Ray Manzarek on the keyboards, the bony fingers of her right hand dancing over the dashboard where I could see them perfectly timed, tapping the notes just right. I caught her checking my reaction in the side mirror, peering out behind thinned eyes and draped lashes. I had the feeling if I proved myself to Katie Schell, I’d never have to prove myself to anyone ever again.
Seven
In the face of such an authorial tag team of feminine artists, armed with respective Old Soul wisdom and modern savagery, my first reaction was to eschew all sentimentalities in order to reinvent myself as an avant-garde realist, or at least a scientific-minded critic, both of which assumed a departure from my past as a quixotic bush leaguer always swinging for the fences. But I already sensed Emily’s faith in me—a gift uncommonly bestowed, especially in light of her recently battered sense of male trust—and yearning to bring me into the fold of her privacy, which at this point I imagined was real estate well lorded over by her younger sister. While I had little intention of according Katie more power than she already possessed, I admit a brief attempt to prove myself the sort of radical, older friend who’d never pull a punch for the sake of courtesy, the kind of guy who understood that people who described themselves as “physically challenged” were just gimps surrounded by obtuse, run-of-the-mill optimists. I spent a good deal of the following month attempting to arrange three-way dates for such edgy entertainments as underground thrash concerts, irate poetry readings, or midnight cult films at Billy Joe’s Picture Show where you could smoke, eat, and drink, and where half the nights ended with waitresses posting themselves at the emergency exits to prevent underage drunks from ditching their bills. But every time I informed Emily of these plans Katie was always resting, or catching up on homework, or “booked today from dawn to dusk.” While I took these excuses as my hint that Katie had no intention of playing the romantic middleman, the real story was that she was much sicker than I knew, and Emily more worried than she ever admitted. She finally told me the truth one Saturday morning after spotting me along Sixtieth Street on the way back from a roller hockey game. I was hobbling along with my blades slung over my shoulder, looking like a hobo jock who didn’t realize that anyone with skating skills would take to the ice like a real man. Emily was puttering along at about ten miles an hour in a no-passing zone, characteristically unconcerned by the delay she was causing the three or four cars lined up behind her. She suddenly hit the brakes and leaned over the passenger seat, mildly hydroplaning as the car following her swerved over the yellow lines.
“Hey, Big Red,” she shouted. “You trying out for a Gatorade commercial?”
I bent down into the window, exaggerating the pain of my bruised hip, already detecting a note of self-perceived failure in Emily’s attempt to lighten her own mood. My first impression was that her patience had stretched beyond its limit, that in reaction to the dwindling gossip related to her big night with Peyton Chambeau, the reality of his betrayal had now rushed forth to lean on her with its full weight. She waved me into the car. The rain was warmer now, so light that if I didn’t see it bouncing off the windows I might’ve thought it quit. We were hardly up to speed before there were tears dripping from her jaw-line and it all came pouring out.
“It’s not like I want to talk about it all the time, because at home, it’s practically the only thing we talk about. But Ashley and Lauren, sometimes I think they don’t even care. I mean, they were sooo concerned for those first few weeks after Katie got diagnosed. We were taking her out for ice cream, bringing her movies, playing board games. Then all of a sudden it was old news. Like when they realized there wasn’t a cure, they decided all their efforts to cheer her up were just a waste of time. I’m not saying this to make you feel bad. You at least make an effort, even if you always come up with events at places that would probably never admit us, let alone my sister. Anyway, you weren’t here when it first happened, and you don’t know my family the way Ashley and Lauren do. I’ve got photos with them every first day of school all the way back to kindergarten. They’ve known Katie forever, but it’s like they don’t have enough time just to ask, Hey, what’s up with your little sister? How’s she doing these days? Ever since Katie got this stupid disease, it’s like she’s a fucking ghost to them. And it’s really starting to piss me off.”
The tears had mostly stopped by now. They were replaced by anger and frustration, not only at Ashley and Lauren, but at her parents and the doctors and nurses and everyone else who promised Katie would beat this disease that was in fact having its fickle way.
“She was in a wheelchair last week,” she said. “Katie’s missed so much school, there’s no way she’ll catch up. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s gonna be doing seventh grade again next year. Jesus, I can’t wait for her to get the news about that.”
Emily’s breath signaled its last stutter of self-pity. She must’ve known how beautiful she was to me, but I don’t know if that made things easier or more difficult. She drove past the hockey arena and my house, gripping the wheel at ten and two, checking all mirrors, trying her best to control her emotions. I swore I could hear every drop of rain and palpitation of the engine, even the hum of the seams in the concrete.
“Let’s pick Katie up,” I said. “We can head over to Gordo’s Mexican and eat for half price. Zach’s working until four.”
Emily was already shaking her head and reaching for the radio, tuning it to the AM sports channel. It was only the first quarter and the Hawkeyes were already down by ten.
“Did you see Zach made the Sports Extra?” she asked.
“Was it in color or black and white? If it was in color, he’s probably already found a frame for it.”
“It was more like a reference. Some Valley players were complaining about a St. Pius linebacker singing Johnny Cash before the snaps and in the pileups.”
“We don’t have to hang out with him. We can just order burritos and a bunch of virgin Margaritas and ignore him. I’ll make sure we get the discount.”
“He’s not that bad,” she said. “He might be strange, but so what? He finds his own way to win, and it works. If he’s more creative than the other guys, why should he have to play the game the same way as them?”
“I’ve heard complaints that he bites people in the pileups.”
Emily laughed and slapped the steering wheel. She must’ve thought I was joking. A minute later she was murmuring inaudibly, tilting her head and biting her fingertips (a perfect example of a vacillating aside, when everything about her body language made me swear she was a closet smoker).
“Katie’s stuck at Mercy Frederick for a bunch of tests. But if you really want to see her, I guess we could work it out. It’s been a while since anyone good dropped in. You
really want to go?”
“Of course. She won’t mind me showing up unannounced?”
“You never know,” she said, making a sudden turn onto Hickman. A long, whining honk sounded from a truck still cruising down Merle Hay. Somehow this seemed to relax Emily, and soon she was steering again with one loose hand flopped over the top of the wheel.
“I don’t want to piss her off,” I said.
Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter Page 4
