Sean Griswold's Head

by Lindsey Leavitt

  “I’m a big fan of them, if you can’t tell. Mr. Nippers was mine after my divorce.”

  “Divorce?” I ask in a croaky gasp.

  “You’re looking at the former Mrs. Otis Bartisqua. You can see why I went back to the maiden name.”

  “Sure. But … wait. So you’re giving me your Focus Object’s Focus Object? I’m totally lost.”

  Ms. Callahan motions for me to take a seat. “Otis and I were best friends as kids, high school sweethearts, got married in college. He knew me inside and out. And then he didn’t. Somewhere along the line, we both let it go. I didn’t realize how much until he served me with divorce papers. So there I am, thirty-eight and without my Otis for the first time in my life. I took to watching quite a bit of Food Network, and was on my way to buy one of those sharp Japanese knives I saw on a commercial when I saw Mr. Nippers in a pet shop window.”

  She strokes the nearest picture of her beloved feline. “He was playing with that cat toy with such concentration, such focus. It’s what I remembered my life being, all in a direct line, all working for a goal, before Otis left. So I bought him. Took him home. Ditched the Food Network addiction and gave everything I had to Mr. Nippers. He became my Focus Object.

  “I would watch him for hours playing with that toy, swatting at it, hunting it. He never seemed to care that he couldn’t ever conquer it. It was the pursuit, the promise that kept him going. And by shifting all my energy onto Mr. Nippers, it gave me time to heal the Otis wound. We’re friends now. And I’ve involved myself in more things. But I still have Mr. Nippers. It wasn’t one or the other. I got both.”

  “But I’m not over my dad and I don’t have Sean—my Focus Object.”

  “While I do believe your apparent choice in a Focus Object was … unconventional, to say the least, I still think he might have helped. Mr. Nippers didn’t make everything with Otis go away. That’s not the point of a Focus Object. If it was, you wouldn’t be any different than a cutter or a bulimic, transferring your pain into something else. It’s not a permanent fix. But sometimes, Payton, you have to take the scenic route, even when there is a straight road ahead of you.”

  I jingle the mouse in the palm of my hand. One eyeball seems to wink at me. Mr. Nippers will find a new Focus Object. This race is mine. The fact that I might run into the former object of my affection, well … I’ll deal with that when I have to.

  Mom and Dad are set to call that night and give us the word from the almighty Specialist. The thing with MS is, there is no Plan A or Plan B. What applies today might not tomorrow. They might say my dad is all right, to stick with his meds, or maybe switch his meds and the flare-up should resolve itself. Or that he’s gone to the next level, that he will continue to deteriorate, that sensation will never return. And they might give him a big “Heck if we know” and send him along his uncertain way.

  Trent has finally faced his fears and asked Yessica out, and true to her name, she complied. He’s sitting at the kitchen counter, tapping his nails on the granite. They’re well-groomed, along with the rest of him—hair slicked back but not greasy, button-down blue shirt and designer jeans. His nervous energy shifts from staring at the phone to staring at the clock. Mom and Dad still haven’t called and it’s already seven. He’s set to pick up his workout goddess in thirty minutes. I plop down next to him and join in the fidgeting. Trent was supposed to drop me off at Jac’s a half an hour ago so we could go to the pre–bike ride bash put on for all the volunteers and cyclists. I don’t mention to Trent that we’re late. The phone call takes precedence.

  After hours, or minutes or seconds—time is lost at this point—the phone rings. We stare at each other, frozen, until Trent snaps out of it and grabs the phone on the third ring.

  “Dad? Oh.” He hands me the phone wordlessly.

  “Hello?”

  “Payt? I tried your cell. What’s going on?”

  “Jac. We’re waiting to hear from my dad. Do you want to just go and I’ll meet you there?”

  “Roger.”

  “Who’s Roger?” I ask.

  “It means ten-four.”

  “Huh?”

  “You are so not James Bond. Have Trent drop you off at the party. I’ll see you there.”

  I hang up and look again at the clock. A quarter to. Trent is going to be late. “Jac’s going to meet me at the party, so you can just drop me off there. Whenever we go.”

  Trent looks at the clock too and shakes his head. “I’m going to have to go now.”

  “What?”

  “Hey, whether it’s me or you picking up the phone, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to go get Yessica, we’ll come get you, and then we’ll drop you off at your thing.”

  “You’re leaving me here alone?” My palms begin to itch and I alternate scratching each hand. “Can’t Mom call your cell or something? I mean, you’re the one who knows what’s going on; if they tell me news, it might not even make sense. Don’t you think—”

  “I’m going to get Yessica. You’re the one that wanted to be included on all the family stuff, remember? The phone can’t bite.”

  Yes it can. At least, the info relayed by the phone can. Twelve minutes later it rings again. Each ring is like the hiss of a rattlesnake, warning me not to come any closer. But thanks to Trent’s sudden absence, I have no choice.

  “Hello?” I say in the faintest whisper of a voice.

  “Payton?” It’s Caleb. He sounds far away. Probably because he is. “Hey, is Trent around?”

  “No, he just left.”

  “Oh, can you have him call me? Or I’ll try his cell. I need to talk to him about something.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, oh … so you know all about that?”

  “Duh.” How does he not know that I know? He left the country, not the galaxy.

  “Mom said they talked to you, but she never told me everything they said. So how do you … how do you feel about it?”

  “How do you think I feel?”

  “Righto. How’s he doing?”

  “He had to go to a Specialist.”

  “Righto again.”

  “What’s with the righto?” I ask.

  “I think I picked it up from my roommates.”

  “So accents are contagious.”

  “Highly.” He pauses. “How about everyone else? You know, this may not be my place to say this because I’m not the one who is sick or even there but … I told them to tell you about Dad. Back when they first told Trent and me. I knew you could hack it. I knew you could help them.”

  I switch the receiver to my other ear, then switch it back. Honestly, I was like nine when he graduated high school. He always seemed so much older and so smart and I was just a kid. But he’s treating me like an adult.

  Caleb’s sigh stretches across the Atlantic. “Trent moving home and Mom quitting work … I don’t know if it’s really helping. That might be awful of me to say, but I thought about moving back and decided it wasn’t right. It’s supportive, don’t get me wrong, but I realized Dad isn’t on his deathbed. He can live with MS. I think he’d prefer that anyway, not feeling responsible for changing everyone else’s life. The thing now is, we—the family—all need to live with it. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah. It does.” The phone beeps. “Hey, I’ve got another call, can you hold on?”

  “I’ll let you go. Just tell them to call me. And hey, if you ever need to call too … I know we don’t usually talk but … it’s nice hearing a Yank accent every once in a while.”

  “Sure. Cool. Thanks.”

  He clicks off and the other line beeps again.

  I don’t even have time to think about what just happened, how there’s a sibling living on another continent who I hardly know who gets me better than anyone in this house. Having that conversation with Caleb, which might actually have been our first one as quasi-adults, gives me a little push to click over.

  “Hello?”

  “Sunshine?” Dad. Well, we’re just gett
ing right to the point here, aren’t we? No Mom to buffer the news. Almost three months spent not going THERE, to the unknown of MS and now we’re about to go THERE. And I only hope we can still go back.

  I swallow. “How’s San Fran?” I ask, artificially bright.

  “Well,” he begins slowly. “We haven’t seen much of it. We went straight from the airport to the hotel to the doctor.”

  Sirens wail in my brain. It’s coming. I can’t stop it. “Oh, well, is the weather nice?” I’m peeling the Band-Aid off hair by hair.

  “Rainy.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  My dad laughs. “What for?”

  “The rain. You hate rain.”

  “It didn’t bother me because I was inside. With the doctor. The Specialist.”

  Dun dun dun. The Specialist. I hold my breath. Years pass. Babies are born and grow into men. Empires rise and fall. And finally, after seventy eternities end, I exhale. “What did he say?” says a tiny voice I know is mine, although I’m so disconnected from my body I don’t feel like I actually asked it.

  “Well, there’s good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?”

  “I don’t want any news,” I answer automatically. Robotically. I’m a machine that’s just had a spontaneous system override. I explode. “Call Trent and tell him.”

  Then the system crashes and I hang up.

  I’m breathing like I just finished the first quarter of a game. I was ready, I was moving ahead but then talking to Caleb plus the idea of bad news has sent me reeling back to January. How does this Specialist dish out bad news all day when I can’t even face it once?

  I can’t.

  Sobs burst out of me. I reach my hand into my pocket and come out with Mr. Nippers’s drool toy. I sniff it, an act that only confirms my deeply rooted disgust of cats. What a stupid toy. What a stupid idea. A Focus Object.

  The phone rings again and again and again. We don’t have an answering machine, so the ringing never stops. I throw the mouse at it, knocking the receiver out of the cradle. This rodent has some sort of magical power, forcing me to answer against my will. Dad’s asking if I’m there, and I finally pick up the phone and say I am.

  “Payton?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t hang up,” he says softly. “Listen. I need you to listen. I have to make this right. Can you at least give me the chance to do that?”

  I pluck up the cat toy again and stroke it. It’s kind of cute, for a disease carrier. The one eyeball could almost pass for endearing if it wasn’t so creepy. “Okay.”

  “Sometimes parents do things, pretending they’re protecting their children, but they’re really just protecting themselves. It’s not that I didn’t trust you. It’s more … if I told you, it made it real. Irreversible. So I kept putting it off. That was a huge mistake. But it is real, honey. I can’t change that. I can’t change this. I’m sorry.”

  He pauses but I don’t answer. I dangle the mouse by its tail, watching it spin in a circle. Spinning and spinning until it hit me. Not the mouse. This: I wasn’t mad at my dad for lying. Not really. That wasn’t why I wasn’t talking to them and avoiding spring break plans and wearing his T-shirt and being generally horrible. I spun the mouse again. It was fear.

  Because a circle is endless. It goes on forever.

  My dad, however, will not.

  “So are you ready to hear the news?” he asks.

  It takes me a few attempts to answer. My voice has mysteriously disappeared. “I don’t think I can.”

  He chuckles dryly. “It’s really not that bad.”

  “All right. I understand but … can we take a break? For tonight? Maybe when you get home, after I’ve done the bike ride. That’s the right time. But right now, can we just not talk about it?”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Talk about … oh, you were …” Wow, can he be any more wonderful? “Yeah. Nothing.”

  “I would love to talk about nothing with you all night long. Just as long as we are finally talking.”

  So we do. Well, it’s not nothing—I tell him ridiculously specific details about the bike ride, and it’s not all night long, just twenty-five minutes until Dad hangs up to call Caleb. But those are twenty-five more minutes than we’ve talked in weeks, in months, and they are twenty-five minutes that communicate much more than the height of my handlebars. When we’re done, I go upstairs to lie down and wait for Trent. Dad’s T-shirt is still tucked under my pillow.

  Jac’s right. He’s here. No matter what the news might be, my dad is still here.

  I wad the shirt up into a ball, fake left, then slam-dunk it into the hamper.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The first thing I see when I walk into the volunteers and bikers Sub Bash is a sub sandwich piled high with every processed meat imaginable, spanning across an endless buffet table. I’m a big fan of deli meats, the farther from an actual animal the better, so I take this as a good sign. The next thing I see is Grady next to it, a piece of bologna dangling from his chin. This is not a good sign. This is a very bad sign. As far as signs go, this is the worst, like every demonic sign rolled into one.

  Jac’s next to me in a second, tapping me on my shoulder like a famished woodpecker. “Did you see how much prime meat there is here? And I don’t mean the sub. The paramedic table alone is enough to fill a shirtless calendar spread. I met this guy, Ryder—how cool is that? His name is RYDER—and he said I can help out at the booth. Me. Like Florence Nightingale over here.”

  “Jac. Look.” I nudge my head toward Grady.

  Jac snarls. “Tell me that isn’t Grady the Goth inhaling a slice of salami at a charity event.”

  “I think it’s bologna.”

  “I think it’s disgusting. Why would Grady be here, unless …”

  Her voice trails off as we see Sean punch Grady on the arm and shove a pickle into his mouth. It makes all the sense in the world and none at all. Of course Sean’s doing the bike ride. I’ll see him tomorrow. I can see him right now. Did he know I’d be here? Did he care either way?

  “Maybe we should go.” I turn to leave.

  Jac starts poking me again. “I’ve figured you out, you know. I’ve been reading all my mom’s self-help books. I should write one someday. And if I do, I’m going to write a whole chapter on this self-sabotage stunt you’re pulling.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Seriously. He’s right there. And you’re like, denying yourself of him. Torturing yourself. The only way to get out of it is to go talk to him.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I am? I mean … of course I am.” Jac pretends to swoon. “Eternal love! You’re going to talk to Sean!”

  “No. Grady.”

  “Uh, Grady. As in the not-cute one with a skull on his sweatshirt?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I meant Sean.”

  “I know you did. But I have to talk to Grady first.”

  Jack sighs. “Maybe I’ll write two chapters on you then. Self-sabotage and going after the wrong guy. All right. Do you want me to come along?”

  “Yes. But you can’t.”

  “I’ll pretend to understand. But, either way, you’ll need this.” Jac crosses me like she’s a priest.

  “What’s that for? You’re not Catholic. Isn’t that like, blasphemous?”

  She jerks her head toward Grady. “Saving your soul, potato. Can never be too cautious with that boy.”

  I cross the room and stop at the end of the mile-long sandwich. I busy myself with the condiments, spreading the hoagie with a mayonnaise-mustard combo. I watch them from the corner of my eye, waiting to be noticed so Sean can make up his mind whether he’ll stay or leave when he sees me.

  My sandwich is inches away from my mouth when I feel Sean’s penetrating gaze. Before, I would have dropped the sandwich and fled. But now, I take a small bite, chewing deliberately, and finally make eye contact.

  I don’t know why I ever thought his head was big. It’
s perfect, and so is he in every way possible. He’s wearing a fitted forest green shirt, one that shows off both his biceps and eyes in equally tantalizing ways. His hair looks white in the lighting—white and brilliant. The only thing that would make him better looking would be a smile, which is completely absent from his face. But he’s not frowning. His lips are a straight line, not committing either way. We’re staring at each other, and I lose the contest when I look down at my food. When I look up again, he’s gone.

  But Grady isn’t. And although I want so desperately to run after Sean, I have some beef to settle with Grady first.

  When he sees me, his eyes dart around the room, trying to find Sean. Or maybe a coffin he can hide in.

  “Hey, Grady. Great sub, huh?” I take a mammoth mouthful.

  Grady looks down at his sandwich, then up at mine. He follows my motion, shoving as much meat in his mouth as he can, then mumbles a “Mmph.”

  “I didn’t know you were a philanthropist. What brings you to this lovely event?”

  He continues to chew, focusing on his black Vans. Finally he swallows and says, “Sean wanted me to come with him. Free food, you know.”

  “I hope you choke on your bologna,” I say.

  Grady takes another bite, his expression more thoughtful this time. “Actually, I think it’s salami.”

  “Why did you tell Sean about my journal?”

  Grady chokes on his deli meat and coughs. I grab a water bottle from the cooler below and consider splashing him with it, but my curiosity drives me to hand it to him instead. He gulps it down in three seconds, and smears his face against his dingy gray sweatshirt. “So that’s why Sean and you aren’t talking?”

  “No.” That was my own doing. “But you didn’t help things.”

  Grady’s face is about the same color as his sweatshirt now, and he looks like he’s close to tears, which would not only smear his liner, but go against everything I thought I knew about him.

  “This is so jacked. I had no idea I screwed things up for you guys. That’s why Sean’s been so depressed. I can’t believe I did that to him. I’m such a freaking screwup!”

  “I don’t know if I’d say freaking—”

  “Typical. This is so typical.” He looks up at the ceiling. “Two hours ago my dad chucked a beer bottle at me because I forgot to take the trash out, now I’m mooching free food from people in wheelchairs and ruining Sean’s sad love life.”