Phoenix Rising

by Grant, Cynthia D.

  “Jessie? Jessie Castle?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Smith?”

  Startled, I lift my head, realizing that I’m supposed to have been reading the textbook on my desk.

  Everyone in class is smiling at me. I’m the resident comedian. Poor Jessie, they say, she’s had it pretty tough, but it’s amazing how she’s pulled her act together.

  “Jessie, would you please tell us what you consider to be the gravest threat to public health?”

  “Life,” I say promptly. “Closely followed by death.”

  Everybody laughs. Then the bell rings and we all file out.

  3

  January 3

  The beginning of a brand new journal. The beginning of a brand new year. All those days and pages to fill!

  I wonder who I’m writing to when I write in here.

  When I was a kid I wrote KEEP OUT! in the front of all those little, fat diaries; the ones with a key you lose right away. Now I write ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK, which is more like saying: Come In If You Must, But Watch Your Step.

  Who is the You I’m speaking to? Me, I guess, so that later on I’ll be able to remember what I was thinking about now; and to help me figure stuff out. That’s partly it. I know what I’m thinking when I see it in print. But I must believe that someone else will read it, too; otherwise, why would I say Enter? (Years from now, when I’m a famous author, my biographer will say: “Helen Castle ate an ice-cream cone and washed her hair that day.”)

  Dream on.

  Today Ms. Tormey read “The End” to the class; my story about the world blowing up in a nuclear blast. It’s sappy but I love the last paragraph: “A quick flash and the sky was filled with orange light. It was almost like the sunset. Then it reached out its long, fiery fingers and stroked the fur of the kitten he held in his lap.”

  Nobody said a word when she was done. At times like that I can tell (dare I say it) that I’m a real writer; by the way the people listen and the way their faces change; as if the words had carried them to another, realer world inside their heads.

  I really want to be published someday. Because when you write a story it’s like talking to someone with your mind, and when somebody reads it, the two of you connect. Otherwise, it’s like talking to yourself, or throwing a ball that nobody catches.

  Blah blah blah. I’m so profound.

  The other day Bambi told me the most amazing thing. When she was thirteen she got really depressed one night when her parents were out and she was all by herself. Totally down, like life was too awful to bear, and like she couldn’t do anything right and never would.

  So she rode her bike to the drugstore and bought a box of SleepEze and went home and took all of them, then lay down on her bed.

  After awhile she got scared and she didn’t want to die anymore, but she didn’t know what to do. Her parents came home and she was afraid to tell them because she knew they’d hit the roof. So she just went to sleep and hoped for the best.

  I’m the first person she’s ever told, she said, because it sounds so stupid.

  No it doesn’t. It sounds sad.

  Bloomfield came by tonight.

  After he left, Mom said: “Doesn’t Richard ever smile?”

  At first I didn’t know who she meant. Everybody except the teachers calls him by his last name.

  Yeah, he smiles sometimes, I said. Usually when something’s not funny. He’s not the kind of guy who goes around grinning. Mostly he just smirks.

  I don’t know why I like him. We argue all the time. It’s stupid, but we keep on doing it, like it’s some kind of game we have to keep playing.

  I don’t know. He’s not even good-looking. Well, yes he is, in a way. He has a good face (when he’s not sneering) and all that curly hair. Too bad he’s such a jerk.

  Tonight he said: “Want to go out on Friday?”

  Me: (surprised) “With you?”

  Him: “No, with my father. Mom’s out of town.”

  Why can’t he just be nice? He’s so sarcastic I end up being that way too, in self-defense. We’ve always got our dukes up.

  I think I love him.

  But I’m not sure because I don’t know what that kind of love feels like. If it feels like wanting to kiss and sock him, wanting to hug him and push him down the stairs, sweet and prickly and happy and sad—

  Then I love him.

  He’d sure be thrilled to hear that.

  Lucas keeps practicing the same song in his room, but it sounds like he’s under this bed. It’s a Beatles’ song; I forget which one. He’d flip if I said that.

  Too bad he wasn’t a teenager in the sixties. That’s when it was all happening, he says. It’s like he got to the party after the band left. In my opinion, he’ll never be happy. He’s a perfectionist and the world is too screwed up. Nobody he knows takes music as seriously as he does. He’s so good at it, he’s always alone; he’s out on the edge by himself. Maybe someday he’ll find people who share that special place. Unless Dad kills him first. He’d better turn down that amp.

  Jessie thinks Lucas is smoking dope, but he always acts so strange it’s hard to tell.

  I really like that big orange cat at the clinic. His name is Chemo and he’s such a ham! The patients and staff stuff him with goodies so he’s enormous, though lots of it is fluff. He’s some kind of exotic breed; part pig, according to Dr. Yee.

  I was telling Jess how much I like that cat, and she said, “Oh, they just have him there so the patients will forget what kind of place it is.”

  So? Anyway, that’s not Chemo’s fault. Jessie’s in a bad mood lately. I try to talk with her, but she won’t talk. Things get so tense around this house sometimes, it’s crazy.

  Part of it’s me, I guess. But I’m feeling pretty good these days. I wish they wouldn’t worry.

  I forgot to mention that Bloomfield brought me a present: a can of smoked oysters. They tasted blue-gray. Some boys bring you flowers; Bloomfield brings fish.

  Jessie says he’s a pain in the drain.

  4

  In a spontaneous display of brotherly affection (no doubt brought on by my mother’s tearful pleas), Lucas has agreed to Spend Time With Jessie.

  The folks are concerned about me.

  “You’re too thin,” my father says. “Too pale. You spend too much time in your room.”

  If I went out more, he’d say I was never home. My mother tries to feed me.

  “Honey, wouldn’t you like more steak?”

  “No thanks. I’m stuffed.”

  “You’ve hardly touched your plate.”

  “It’s too tough.”

  “The steak?” Tears brim in her eyes.

  “The plate, I mean! Mom, I’m kidding!”

  They want to take me on a trip over Christmas vacation. They’ve offered to buy me clothes. My dad’s even talked about getting me a car. One tiny drawback: I don’t know how to drive.

  “It’s easy, honey. I’ll teach you.”

  He taught Helen and it almost drove her crazy: Watch out for that kid! That bus! That bike! There’s a rumor going around that my brother will teach me, but when Lucas heard it, he just rolled his eyes.

  He appeared in my bedroom doorway one night, after a long, loud discussion with my folks downstairs, in which my name came up repeatedly.

  If I were a painter I’d frame Lucas in a doorway; always on the threshold, ready to leave.

  “Want to go to a concert with me?” he asked.

  I’d been sitting at my desk, pretending to study. I removed the pen from my mouth. “Who’s playing?”

  “B. B. King, at the Circle Star. I got tickets.”

  My father bought them. He knew Lucas would bite. The hook: He has to take me with him.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  So we drove up there on Saturday night, in Lucas’s old white Impala, which he’d kind of fixed. The motor sounded like crazed chipmunks. Lucas’s door won’t open, so he climbed in the window.

&n
bsp; It was cold but he kept his window unrolled and the night blew into the car. With anyone else you could say: Please close it—but Lucas makes the words freeze in my mouth. His moods shift so swiftly, from bad to worse, that we tend to treat him like a volatile mixture that could explode if it’s not handled right.

  Helen wasn’t afraid of Lucas. She called him a spoiled brat.

  He snapped on the radio, twirling the dial until he found Chuck Berry. He jacked up the volume till the speakers boomed, beating rhythm on the steering wheel with his wrists.

  I sneaked looks at Lucas to see what girls see in him. He’s tall and skinny with pale, crazy hair that would curl if it weren’t so long. He has a soft, white mustache and a tiny beard. Now Dad can’t say that Lucas looks like a girl. He flipped when Lucas pierced his ear with a tiny gold stud.

  “What’s the matter with you?” my father shouted. “Do you want people to think you’re gay?”

  “Hey!” Lucas said. “I don’t care what people think! Including you!”

  “That’s obvious, from the way you dress!”

  “At least I’m not a grayman like you!” “Grayman” is Lucas’s word for anyone who, like our architect father, wears a suit to work.

  They fight a lot more than they used to. Since Helen died, it’s as if my father thinks that he won’t cry as long as he keeps shouting. And my brother thinks—who knows what Lucas thinks? Sometimes I feel like I don’t know him at all.

  He finally noticed my hair blowing and rolled up the window halfway.

  “Thanks.”

  “I hope we’re not late,” he said.

  Suddenly I felt far from home, and alone. I wanted to feel close to my brother.

  “I found Helen’s diary,” I said.

  “Oh?” He stiffened like he always does at the mention of her name.

  “I’ve been reading it.”

  “Why? You shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s private.”

  “At the front it says it’s okay.”

  “It says it’s okay to read her diary?”

  “It says ‘Enter At Your Own Risk.’”

  Lucas shook his head. “If she’d wanted you to read it, she wouldn’t have hidden it.”

  “It wasn’t exactly hidden.” I felt like crying. It would be so good to talk about Helen. But Lucas won’t talk; he acts disgusted.

  “It makes me feel close to her,” I said. “She’s talking about her thoughts.”

  “You know what she thought.”

  “Not about everything. Helen was kind of a private person.”

  “Maybe she’d like to stay that way,” he said.

  We passed a highway sign with a fork painted on it, indicating an exit to a restaurant. A long time ago Lucas told Helen those signs meant we were coming to a fork in the road.

  “Look at the traffic,” he growled, taking the Circle Star exit. Isn’t he part of it? Does he expect his own lane? He likes to preach about the psychedelic sixties; how groovy they were, peace, love, and flowers. But behind the steering wheel, he acts just like Dad. Life’s no joy ride; it’s a trip to the dentist.

  Lucas looked strange when he got out of the car; not only because he climbed out the window. He was dressed in black, plus a scarlet silk-lined cape, and midnight-colored shades. He looked like a cross between a hippie and a hit man. Most of the people looked elegant, and I wished I’d worn something special. I could’ve borrowed one of Helen’s dresses.

  We had really good seats, down front, on the aisle. The place filled up fast.

  “I’ve always wanted to see B. B. He’s the best,” Lucas said. “And the opening act is good, too.”

  They played rhythm and blues. The music moved Lucas. As soon as it started he couldn’t sit still. He drummed his fingers, tapped his toes.

  “All right!” He applauded, his face shining in the dark, happier than I’d seen him in ages. I imagined the two of us going to other places, hearing music, seeing movies. The cold stone in my stomach dissolved.

  Then it was time for B. B. King’s band. We were close enough to really see their faces. They were older than the warm-up act and dressed in slick suits. They cruised through the intro, giving B. B. a big buildup.

  The great man burst onstage. The crowd, including Lucas, roared, giving him a standing ovation. He smiled and waved and began to play—then everything went wrong.

  Instead of just playing and singing the blues, he hammed it up, he told jokes, he broke into fake sobs in the middle of one song until the audience howled with laughter.

  Beside me, I could feel my brother burning.

  “What is this, some Vegas revue?” he muttered. “I do not believe this.”

  B. B. waltzed around the stage, leading the audience in a round. “First the girls. Sing out,” he said. “Now you boys.”

  As if that were a cue, Lucas leaped up. “Let’s go.” He flew up the dark aisle, me running to keep up with him, past the happy faces, through the brightly lit lobby, out into the parking lot—

  “Lucas, why are we leaving?”

  He looked at me as though he’d never heard such a stupid question in his life. “Where’s the car?” he shouted.

  “How should I know?”

  When we found it, we didn’t head home. Lucas drove toward San Francisco, raving.

  “The man is dead but the show goes on! He’s just going through the motions! Did you see that band? The zombie patrol! I’d be a junkie, too, if I had to listen to those jokes!”

  “I thought he sounded good, Lucas.”

  “He’s sold out the blues! The man is betraying everything that’s made him great!”

  We drove into the section of the city my father’s warned me against: bars, topless clubs, liquor stores, and knots of people standing on street corners, as if they were waiting for an accident to watch.

  “Where are we going?”

  “This club I know,” Lucas said. Parking the Impala was like landing a whale.

  The sign outside the club said you had to be twenty-one to enter, but nobody stopped us. The tiny, dark room was jammed with tables and faces, mostly black, and a thick layer of blue cigarette smoke.

  Lucas moved toward the makeshift stage, where a band was playing, me trailing him like a shadow. He leaned against the wall next to a man with yellow eyes. The man looked Lucas over leisurely, lingering on his protest button. It’s from the sixties. It says STOP THE WAR.

  “Which war?” the man asked.

  “All of them,” Lucas said.

  “Right on, brother.” The man smiled, then turned his attention back to the stage.

  There were four guys in the band; three black, one white, playing music like B. B. King’s. But different, too, full of heart and juice. The walls were shaking. The whole audience was moving like one big multilimbed creature. I was moving too, because it feels so good when the music’s right and you can hear how much the musicians love to do it. I understood Lucas better than I ever had before. Music moves through Lucas like currents through water. Water through water. Music through Lucas.

  “What do you think?” he shouted in my ear.

  “I like it!”

  “What?”

  “I like it!”

  The band members recognized Lucas and asked him to sit in. As he strapped on the guitar, I went tight with fear. What if the crowd didn’t like him? What if they turned away and left him naked onstage, Lucas stripped bare to the bone?

  They loved him. They loved the place he took them. He played a liquid lead, the notes as clear as water; no show-off stuff, no ruffles, no extras, because you only need to do it right.

  He was so good I forgot he was my brother.

  I wondered what my parents would think if they could see him. It would probably make them sad and proud. Sad because Lucas was so into the music, he wasn’t in this world anymore. And proud because he’d found someplace better.

  When he finished the audience clapped and shouted, “All right! All right!” until Lucas couldn’t help himself—h
e smiled.

  Driving home, he even put on the heater. It smelled funny but it warmed my toes.

  “Lucas.” We were almost home.

  “What?”

  “You were fantastic.”

  He grunted but I knew he was pleased.

  My father was waiting up for us, pretending he wasn’t, watching “The Tonight Show,” which he hates.

  “How was the concert?”

  “Terrible,” my brother said. “The man’s sold out. But we went to this blues club—”

  “Where?”

  “In the city.”

  “Where in the city?”

  “Down around Tenth.”

  “You took your sister to a black blues club?”

  “No, Dad! I took her to the Black and Blue Club! It’s an S and M bar! What do you think?”

  “Can we all please stop shouting?” I said. “We had a wonderful time and now we’re home safe. So everything’s fine. We had a great time, Dad.”

  “But not at the concert,” he sighed. My father never gives Lucas what he wants, no matter how hard he tries.

  “That’s not your fault,” Lucas said. “The warm-up band was good.”

  I left them watching TV and went into the kitchen. Then we all drank tea and watched some red-haired comedian. She was screaming, “What a world we live in! Rush, rush, rush! If I died right now—which apparently I am!—it’d be a week before I had a chance to lie down! My schedule! I’ve got more irons in the fire than an arsonist at a golf club! But seriously!”

  Dad conked out. Lucas and I kept sitting there. I didn’t want the evening to end. And I didn’t want to fall asleep.

  “You should go to bed. You look tired,” he said.

  “I am.”

  “You still having those dreams?”

  Lucas looked at me and I understood why all those girls like him. When you have his attention, it’s one hundred percent. His eyes are like spotlights.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Scary ones?”

  I shook my head. I hate to talk about the dreams. It makes them real.

  I said, “They’re mostly about Helen.”